Late afternoon light near Montserratt, Stroud

Late yesterday evening, I checked once again to see if I could see any computers on eBay that would suit my friend Michael and I saw a good buy. I have been advising him for some years on his admittedly slender computer needs, but now he had decided to get up to date. I recognised that he would have to act swiftly as the computer seemed a very good buy, and rather surprisingly it was sited only about thirteen miles away, near Cirencester.

This morning after various calls, we agreed to get the iMac, bid the money, won and thus I will hopefully pick it up on Monday. We will drop it off at Michael's home in London when we go there on Good Friday. So a surprisingly busy start to an otherwise lazy day for us both.

The sun has shone, but without the temperature being as high as last week. I have been feeling rather rough for some days now, and only marginally better to day. I tried a bit of digging, but without much energy, and later ended up pottering about the garden, while Helena read a good book in her hammock, which had its first airing of the year.

Bomble and his kitten friend were out and about at various times, sometimes accompanying me, at other times playing with each other, chasing up and down the garden, before resting together in the shade of the washing hanging on the clothes line.

After I had made a second pot of tea, accompanied by Helena's home-made barabrith cake, I spotted the outline of a hot air balloon ascending very slowly away in the distance behind the ridge of Rodborough Common, shrouded behind outlines of still leafless trees on the hilltop. The balloon rose and fell, then rose and fell again as it drifted slowly southwards along the line of the Nailsworth valley. I waited patiently for its passage to clear the foreground of the silhouetted trees but to no avail.

While I waited, my eye slipped down the hillside below Rodborough to an area known as Montserratt, near Butterow, where I saw this line of terraced cottages illuminated by the setting sun. In my immediate foreground, the rich rosy colour of the ribes plant in our garden shone vividly and I knew this would be my blip, despite the many other reasonable options of a lovely sunny day in the garden.

I like the strange shapes of the field boundaries now left stranded on the hillside, and in the middle distance the shape of the houses at the bottom of the valley, just this side of the railway, the canal and the River Frome. Nearly all the trees are still bare, except for our ribes and a couple of other garden trees nearby. The sycamore at the end of our garden had tiny buds appearing this morning, but by evening their first leaves had broken free from the buds to start the eventual green carpeting of this landscape.