Blossom Time
20 April

Cherry blossoms are appearing throughout the city in great clouds of pink and white on the trees.

The tree in the garden next door has just erupted into a froth of white. It's already coming adrift in the winds and the rain that have featured strongly this weekend. This morning looking down into our back garden from Ross's studio, it looked as though large white polka dots had been spread haphazardly all over the show.

In the programme for the Noël Coward double bill which I saw at the Liverpool Playhouse last week, they mentioned that the twilight hour from sunset through to darkness was known in the inter-war years by the sophisticated set as l'heure bleu - the blue hour. And it's true. The light has an increasing blue tint through that time. The white blossoms on the tree next door become almost sky blue for those few minutes.

Ross tells me that, because there is less of the other colours of the spectrum at this time, there is a proportional increase in the amount of ultra violet around which causes all of the flowers to fairly throb with colour.

I've been continuing to give myself, consciously, the gift of time that Janet suggested at my last Reiki session. This is sometimes difficult and sometimes emotionally painful. I'm not used to putting myself first.

It also means that I have been challenging the ways that I do things. It would be very easy to go back to the old ways using nicotine or caffeine or sexual activity to give me an adrenaline shot when my energies are low or to put things off until there is a crisis to get the juices flowing or to simply change everything to force myself to cope.

For that reason, I've decided not to attend an interview which I have been offered for a job with Liverpool City Council. I have decided to give myself the gift of time and to take the opportunity to spend the summer making use of my four day week and my other holidays to have a more relaxed and gentle time of it than I had last year.

The work week passed well. Dave and I completed our first full training unit together and put the group through the assignment on Friday. Despite the tailored coaching that they received, some of them still managed to make a bish of the practicals and one failed to complete everything. However, none of them can complain that the training did not try to lead them in the right direction.

Anyhow I was ready for the weekend.

Friday night I settled down with Ross, a glass of Vouvray, my current favourite white wine, and a DVD of Master and Commander. This is a superior entertainment set on the high seas. It has the tang of authenticity even if some of the historical details were lacking. (I read on Internet Movie Database that the original stories on which the movie is based pit the English against Americans in the War of Independence. Presumably because of the current political situation the enemy was changed to be the French and some of the infelicities stem from this.)

My main problem with the film was that it didn't really have any development. It remained a series of action sequences. And so, whilst it was a superior example of this genre, I can't really offer it more than three stars.

Saturday passed with some food shopping and a little relaxation before heading off to the Lowry in the evening for Matthew Bourne's Play Without Words. I had high hopes of this given the quality of the reviews but was left somewhat dissatisfied by the experience. It was technically excellent, the performances were outstandingly good, the live music blended well and the setting was cleverly adaptable.

I liked the idea of having multiple performers play the main characters. As well as justifying the choreographic element, it also enabled a cinematic approach to the plot development as you could see the same event from different angles simultaneously or different events as though in a split screen effect.

But, ultimately, the event left me stone cold because I never cared for any of the people on stage. It was difficult to know who they were, where they came from and how they developed. I guess that only the words would have given you that sort of detail. so, I put this down as an interesting failure worth three stars for the hard work.

Sunday was a day of leisure which included Quaker meeting, lunch at Stamps in Crosby with The Observer and a pint of wheat beer and the first part of a new BBC classic serial, Trollope's He Knew He Was Right, which, on a first encounter, is likely to prove to be a pleasant enough Sunday treat for the next three weeks.

We also watched another in the fascinating series called The Private Life of a Masterpiece which takes a single work of art and explains its background, inception, creation and subsequent place in art history. Previous shows have unravelled Rodin's The Kiss, Goya's May 3rd 1808, Rembrandt's The Night Watch and Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights. This one was about Katsushika Hokusai's The Great Wave. I was particularly taken with the idea of the wave breaking into fractals.

The following day, Ross and I spent some time on the waterfront at Crosby. It was high tide. The mountains of Wales were clearly visible, the highest snowcapped. Waves pounded in on the sea wall. And yes, they did break up into fractals if you stared at the image hard enough and tried to freeze it in your brain.