Only a rose ...

This rose was the only thing I photographed today, and it's plunged me into a mini-nostalgia wave. The first memory is of my mother, from when I was young, singing  "Only a rose I bring you, blushing as roses do ..." (I've only now realised through the magic of YouTube that it's from The Vagabond King, in the mid-50s). The second is more recent, from that summer when we moved into this house after 18 months in a council house that belonged to the Education Department and was used to facilitate the movement of teachers to Dunoon Grammar. Once we'd acquired the keys, in May, I think, I used to walk down here with the pram and sit in the garden marvelling that I owned a garden that had roses and hydrangeas in it. This was clearly an old rose now, and it still appears every summer without my having done anything to help it - largely because I don't know where its roots are, so surrounded by other plants is it. This is the only flowering it has, and I welcome it back. The garden is changing from its May scents as the wisteria blooms fall and the first flush of the golden roses fades; soon it will be the turn of the philadelphus and the stinking lilies (Yellow turks cap lilies - smell like ammonia!) as well as the rosa rugosa that fill every vacant space - but first the warm weather needs to return rather than this miserable damp chill that has descended on us!

I spent the morning annotating the six poems I'm using for my seminar, having decided to approach it like a school lesson this time rather than a lecture. It is designed to be interactive, and as I worked I found the old magic growing - delving deep into a poem tends to give more and more every time - and wondered why I ever gave up teaching. (Silly, of course - ancient people don't work in schools!)

Talking of schools, Dunoon Grammar has reached the final ten in an international "Best Schools" competition - I believe you'll be able to read about it in tomorrow's Scotsman. It was also mentioned in Westminster today. It's got quite a roll-call, our local school - FPs include (apart from the editor of the aforementioned newspaper) John Smith, Lord George Robertson, Brian Wilson, Sylvester McCoy ... 

Meanwhile, in Edinburgh, the Scottish Episcopal Church is holding its first in-person General Synod in three years. For about ten years I was a member of this - I must look back over my blips and see if I ever recorded one. I don't know that I could sit through another one.