I wander'd lonely...

I love springtime. This year has really opened my eyes to how much I love spring. It was snowy one week and then the next we were sitting outside a pub at 8pm without the need for scarves, hats and gloves.

The sun has a really special quality in springtime, it creeps across, bathing you in warmth and light with a soft ochre feeling rather than the intense brilliance of summer sunshine. Life bustles around you, birds fight, build and procreate & flowers burst from their winter sleep and come alive with the most radiant shades of yellow, pink and purple.

My favourite of these are the daffodils which appear everywhere from formal gardens to woodland paths to urban wastelands. A daffodil will always make me smile with their silly lion like heads turned upwards in praise towards the sun. There is a walk near the cathedral in Norwich which is planted with as many types of daffodil and narcissus that you can imagine. You can stroll by the river and each corner offers a vaste display of yellow, white and orange. There are huge double-headed ones tall and bold, fried eggs (orange on white) , the dainty narcissus with many heads drooping daintily from one stem and of course the classic, yellow, large single head, simple but elegant.

I felt very ill at work today and had to come home, but now I feel fine. I bought a handful of local daffs from our grocer, fed the very greedy blackbirdsin our garden with ham rind and settled down to a book by the window and it reinforced to me the fact that humans were not meant to be herded together in large concrete blocks lit by sickly fluorescent lights and forced to make meaningless inputs into computers for an abstract financial system that nobody really understands or cares about. We should be out, experiencing every minute beautiful change that spring offers, giving worship to an all-powerful, altruistic authority which brings us this yearly wonder (and I don't mean any of our so-called Gods of modern religion).

We've all lost the plot and I for one intend to find it again no matter how thinly spread the threads in this inhospitable, spiritually empty desert.