Seedlings. Flowers. Books and bookshops and bats.

 We’ve cut the grass in the back garden and the side garden. Well, when I say WE have cut the grass, I really mean that Phil has done so. He has got rid of the “forest” of sycamore seedlings (my clumsy fingers first typed “seedlings” as “weedlings”, which on balance seems like quite an appropriate term) which had sprung up everywhere. The sycamore tree at our end of the pub carpark next door has always been there for as long as I can remember but never before have I seen so many seedlings spring up all over the garden! 

I’ve already gone on about the gutterman removing another such “forest” from the gutters, front and back of the house, and my having to remove from the front garden huge clumps of grass and seedling gunk that he had thrown down. I found another load yesterday. But checking the flowerbeds for progress I am finding even more seedlings/weedlings that I cannot blame on the gutterman. They have simply planted themselves in every bit of land they could find. So I have been pulling them as I find them taking care not to pull up the soon-to-be-flowering plants that are meant to be there. 

There are two developmental aspects to this problem:- 

1. The weedlings are getting bigger by the day, producing the first really recognisable sycamore leaves and substantially longer roots.
2. My aquilegia plants are also growing taller, making it harder to spot the mini-trees.

In a few weeks the front garden will come into its own with a mass of aquilegia in a range of colours and small yellow and orange poppies - but never any red ones for some reason. The bluebells in the corner are coming into bloom nicely and now that I have somewhat belatedly removed the debris from last year’s ferns I am hoping that the London pride will add its flowers to the mix. There are a few dandelions at the moment but I am not pulling them up as the bees appreciate them. But I really don’t want a host of young sycamores rooting themselves in nicely under cover of my rather wild garden. 

I learnt a new word this morning: tsundoku - the practice of surrounding ourselves with unread books. The ‘unread’ aspect is important as it reminds us of all the stuff we still don’t know. A statistician called Nassim Nicholas Taleb says that these unread volumes represent what he calls an “antilibrary”. I think I prefer the Japanese name. I have passed the new word on to Granddaughter Number Two who is totally incapable of going into a bookshop and coming put again without a bag full of books. She has stacks of books “waiting to be read” and always has a book on the go.

I try not to buy more books these days, unless I buy them straight to kindle. Kindle is an inferior way to read books, in my opinion, but it does make reading in bed a lot easier. And if I fall asleep reading the kindle falling on my head is a lot less painful than a hardback book doing the same thing. 

Nassim Nicholas Taleb also talks about his delight in the smell of books, another think you don’t get with the kindle. Granddaughter Number Two would certainly agree with him about the smell. I have seem her go into raptures about the ‘new book smell’ and indeed the ‘old book smell’. Indeed, she delights in just about every aspect of books: embossed front covers on some (she covets our hardback copy of Lord of the Rings, with its beautiful front cover and its flimsy ‘bible’ paper pages!) and the coloured edge of pages on others. 

 I also make regular use of the library, which is why many of the books I read are in hardback. 

Now, I would like to know of there is a specific term for the list of books you have already read but would like to read again. I have a list of those as well. 

Apparently writer Umberto Eco had a personal library of 30,000 books, not because he had read all of them buy because he wanted to read an know more. I thought we had a lot of books but Umberto Eco makes our collection look small.

I read that there is a library in Portugal called the Mafra Palace Library. Completed in 1755, it is regarded as a national treasure of Portuguese architecture, and holds 36,000 leather-bound volumes dating from the 14th to the 19th centuries. Ot is also home to a colony of small bats which sleeps behind the shelves or outside in the trees during the daytime and flies around at night eating bookworms, moths, and other insects can wreak havoc on their delicate pages. A much more eco-friendly way of controlling things than spraying everywhere with chemicals! The staff cover the furniture with dustcloths at the end of the day and clean the bat poo off the marble floor every morning. That’s the price! 

Portugal is clearly a good place for book lovers. It also has the beautiful Livraria Lello in Porto, a bookshop well worth visiting. The last time I visited they were charging for entry to the shop as so many people were just going in to stare and to take photos (most probably here-I-am-in-this-fancy-bookshop selfies) that it was hard for real purchasers to see the books. If you bought a book they deducted the entry fee from the price of the book - all good! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well everyone!