Sage bees and words

As usual, I am behind with everything. I have promised, I realise, four articles to various newspapers, websites and blogs. I am grateful to have the opportunity, but today they have been preying on me, and because of this I have only done one of them. Instead I talked to Hodmandod Senior, cooked an elaborate meal and took photographs of bees wriggling into sage flowers. They reminded me of effete waiters at an expensive restaurant, constantly fussing and rearranging, with a low-level busy hum.


It impressed me how well the bees fitted into the trumpets of the flowers, no doubt ensuring they were covered with pollen and that pollen is distributed from one flower to the next. Also I have started reading Owen Sheers's 'White Ravens'. There is another 'fitting' here, which is just as impressive. This time it is how the just the right words fit so aptly - and (or so it seems to me) make the sentences blossom.