Dirty hands and rocket

We have created and planted a raised vegetable bed outside the kitchen door with rocket, various salad leaf, herbs, and tomatoes.  It was my idea but not entirely my own work.  My wife designed the bed and did most of the detailed planning.  She also bought the wood and built it. I provided the heavy labour: digging, turning the sod, driving the wheelbarrow, hefting this and that, hewing where required, etc.  The finished bed looks good, everything is growing fast in the warm, wet weather, and we can of course eat the results.  Rocket salad with shaved Parmesan is a particular favourite. However, I have been reminded again that I would not have enjoyed being a peasant farmer regardless of the satisfaction to be gained from 'growing my own food'.  Son of the soil I am not.  I was impressed too with the quantity of compost the raised bed took to fill, the huge number of stones sifted from the soil, the variety of bugs and creepy crawlies to be found in a few square metres of ground, and the length of time it took to scrub my hands and fingernails clean.  If time suddenly reversed back to the Middle Ages, I would definitely want to be a monk in the scriptorium.  Or, failing that, a handmaid for Hildegard of Bingen.

Prague in Easter with Carmen

Prague in April.  A great city and great fun.  This Easter it was swarming with tourists, mostly in groups and entirely well-behaved despite the city's reputation for occasional loutish behaviour. (On my return to work a colleague professed herself equally in love with the city and determined to return, but with more people, her own 'group' because, she felt, 'Prague was a city that would be more enjoyable with more people around you'.  Having experienced both ways of seeing Prague, I'm not sure I agree.)  The weather was glorious, the food filling, the beer tasty, the wine from Moldavia a pleasant surprise.  Our hotel overlooked the Vltava river towards the Charles Bridge and allowed us to enjoy a morning walk along the riverside and downstream to the cafe Phoenix for our breakfast.   For a week or so we happily tramped the streets of Prague doing nothing very much of anything, although we did go to the state opera to see Carmen.  It turned out to be an exciting evening.  We thought a man had died in the row in front of us, just before the end of Act One. Turned out that he was comatose through drinking too much.  After he had thrown up over the row in front of him, he was carried out into the corridor and we never saw him  again.  Carmen was also notable for an excellent production, wonderful playing from the pit band, a very good chorus, and equally fine principals -- with the exception of the toreador who was execrable in the first half and only slightly better in the second.  I almost booed but glanced at my wife and thought better of it, but refused to clap when he appeared onstage for his curtain call. Stories about the Cafe Kafka, outrageous pricing in popular tourist spots, begging, breakfast, Prague restaurants, prostitutes, art galleries, city walks, trams, taxis and beer to follow.

Strange, isn't it, how the most seemingly banal of lyrics can strike a chord.  This from a song by Elena Ledda called Della Mia Vita: 'Of my life the sweetest moments / Are those I spend, my love, adoring you'.  Not so profound, less cerebral perhaps than the lines from the 'vain and narcissistic' German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (not my opinion, never having read more than just the occasional poem quoted elsewhere) that also caught my eye this week: 'To love is also good, for love is hard.  Love between one person and another: that is perhaps the hardest thing it is laid on us to do, the utmost, the ultimate trial and test, the work for which all other work is preparation'.  But both appeal to the sentimental side of my nature, the soft spot that allows me to cry when I hear 'sad music': mostly opera, mostly Puccini. For I do have a soft inner core, a lack of ruthlessness that allows me to resist the lure of seeking promotion in the workplace. And my experience has been that those who mostly occupy positions of middle and senior management possess a hard edge, a coldness that allows them to reprimand error and pretend to a professional superiority that is more shadow than substance.  Or is my lack of ambition an unwillingness  to 'put myself out there' and be judged wanting by my peers?  Perhaps. Certainly, ever since reading the Hornblower novels of C. S Forester, I have sided with his introverted hero and actively dislike the idea of telling people what to do.  Nagging my wife and family, now that's something else entirely.