Stay At Home

I have a few days of enforced staying-in after a minor operation has left me unable to speak or eat. In some ways this is horrible, but in other ways not. There is a total lack of pressure to do anything (I can't) and I stocked up on crime novels on the way back from the hospital yesterday.
Also, the day before a new song just popped up in all its imperfection and every so often I pick it up and change bits of the lyrics and think about how the chorus might go. It is about nature.
Porto is an inspiring place and probably the best bit (after the conference, that is), is the beautiful Crystal Palace Garden, up there on the hillside and bustling with greenery. Gardens are joyous places: Kew, Cluny in Perthshire, and Drummond Castle just outside Crieff.
And Gaudi's Garden in Barcelona; I wrote a song about that garden and I should probably post it online again after it was deleted a couple of years ago.
McDad was a keen gardener, and also competitive: he could never grow Ivy-Leafed Toadflax, which grows as a weed here in London, but he could grow Tropaeolum, which grows almost as a weed in Perthshire and which he finally persuaded to grow in the garden they had in Edinburgh. I tried it here but it's too hot and dry, and the slugs gobbled it up as soon as the shoots appeared. McDad thought that was very funny, until he remembered being unable to grow Ivy-Leafed Toadflax.
Almost the whole of Tuscany seems to be a garden: those tall, slim, dark green trees striping the landscape just as they did in ancient paintings.
The best gardens of all are British railway lines: ox-eye daisies, yellow toadflax, poppies, ragwort, rosebay willowherb: drifts of beautiful wild flowers colonising the oil-soaked iron and stone routeways. Sometimes, I daydream about making degradable paper darts and shooting little packets of wild flower seeds into desolate areas to plant more wildness in the industrial vacuums that humans create en route to destructive 'greatness'. My friend used to cycle round London throwing handfuls of seeds over the hoardings into bomb sites.