Azalea Time
26 April

The first of the azaleas has blossomed into life. Its canopy of frothy, pink, bell-like flowers heralds a month of colour as the three bushes flower one after the other.

And with it we have had the first hot weekend of the year with temperatures over 20°C. The garden table and its parasol have come out of the garden shed; the candlewick bedspread has gone back into the cupboard; the shorts and teeshirts have come out of their chest of drawers; the central heating has been more off than on; the windows have been open overnight; the first butterfly (probably a common blue) has been spotted; the flying ants are beginning to come up out of the ground; the twilight bat has made its first fly past.

I've also had my first al fresco refreshments - a 6am coffee on Thursday morning (couldn't sleep, just me and the coffee and the dawn chorus), a chilled Budwar on Saturday afternoon underneath the garden parasol whilst watching James (see below) stripped to the waist shifting concrete slabs and breakfast on Sunday morning (two slices of gammon and a couple of fried eggs). It's good to have the extra, outside room available once more.

The garden has been drying out in the sunshine so I have been out with the hose every night - I love the smell of damp earth. And the greening continues with lilies, lupins and astilibe all returning bigger and better than last year. Driving to Quaker meeting on Sunday morning I was struck by the quality of the light as it smashed through the translucent, new green leaves. Nature is burgeoning.

And Nature is, of course, red in tooth and claw. Nutkin proved this to us on Sunday afternoon when the Sabbath quiet was interrupted by the arrival of himself with a nearly fledged blackbird in his mouth. Ross and I feared for the worst but we got the shrieking bird away from him. There was no point in shouting at Nutkin as he was only doing what cats have done for millenia.

So, we rallied in true middle class fashion and took the infant off to Freshfield Animal Rescue where s/he was pronounced well but shaken and with just once puncture wound and nothing broken. We left him/her with the lovely Gavin who told us that survival was most likely.

However, the look of sheer terror in the fledgling's eyes stays with me still. As Jeremy Bentham said about slavery. "It matters not whether the slave reasons; it matters whether he can suffer". The same applies to animals.

There's been movement among the neighbours. I reported that Jamie had moved out of the ground floor flat next door. A replacement has arrived but is much lower down the totty scale.

However, James from the corner house has moved back home having split up with his girlfriend in Chester. At 20-ish, he has a certain scally charm with big nipples, big buns and a big wad of money in his trouser pocket. The warm weather has encouraged him to throw teeshirts to the wind (see above). Ross got nowhere with getting Jamie to model for him. I think he should make a bee-line for James before he gets a beer belly.

Ross has spent much of this weekend locked in his atelier sorting out his portfolio. He has a meeting at Tate Liverpool on Tuesday from which may come some work in the form of workshops. No doubt his disability will count in his favour. ("Oh, yes, we have this wonderful young artist in a wheelchair who comes in and does workshops for us.") However, I doubt that his will get the work if they don't like his work. so, it's good that he has taken the bit between his teeth to sort out his presentation.

Pleasing as well was the fact that he explained to me on Friday that he would need time to himself over the weekend to do the work. Such assertiveness was not within his compass in former times. I am very proud of him.

Immediately, my sense of filling time sprang into action and I realised that I could do lots of things on my own. I considered New Zealand Ballet's Romeo and Juliet at the Lowry, Yellowman at the Everyman, Mahler 5 at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Six Degrees of Separation at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, Mother Courage at the Liverpool Playhouse, an orchestral concert at St Faith's Church in Crosby and various films.

In the event, I have done none of these. Instead, I have given myself the gift of time and have spent time around the house. I have gardened, I have read and I have listened to music. I am very proud of myself.

The music has been splendid. On Saturday morning, in the newsagent's, I discovered that there is a new partwork out that offers DVDs of operas at £10.95. The first edition had two for the price of one with the Royal Opera production of La Traviata which I saw in December 1994 and July 1996 and Il barbiere di Siviglia with a very young Cecilia Bartoli. I've dipped and skipped through them with great enjoyment. We may well sign up for future issues.

I've also been listening to recently purchased CDs. Following up Ross's liking for the Baroque, we've been sampling a cut price edition of eighteenth century operas conducted by René Jacobs. There are some sensational things in the list.

Handel's Giulio Cesare is complimented by Graun's Cleopatra e Cesare composed for Frederick the Great in Berlin in 1742. Monteverdi's Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in patria has some astonishingly modern passages as has John Blow's court masque Venus and Adonis (written for Charles II as was Purcell's Dido and Æneas). Most surprising of all has been Telemann's Orpheus, first performed in Hamburg in 1726, which includes arias in Italian, French and German and completely reworks the Orpheus myth as a love triangle.

I'm not sure that I could sit through three hours of any of these (apart from the Handel) in the opera house but they make very good listening at home.

Monday took us on little trip to North Wales. When I started this four day week malarky, I said to Ross that we must use the Mondays to do things for us. Well, so far, we've simply been adjusting to the new circumstances. Anyhow, a couple of weeks ago I noticed in the Guardian Weekly Guide an exhibition being held in Rhyl Library. I said nothing about it. It's usually my rôle to spot these things and so I have the control over what we see and do. Anyhow, Ross spotted it too. Not only did he spot it but he assertively suggested that we might make a trip out to see it. I was only too happy to oblige.

So, we set off on the 60 mile journey and spent a pleasant hour in Rhyl looking at works of art by Eduardo Paolozzi from the Arts Council's collection. This small touring exhibition is part of a scheme to sent items from the collection around the country so that they can been seen in places which do not have great civic collections.

I have to say that I am not a great admirer of Paolozzi. The sculpture that I had seen so far does not speak at all to my condition and nothing in the exhibition changed that view. What was revelatory were the screenprints which, executed in the late 1960s, anticipated many of the forms and tropes of digital art by a clear thirty years. Combining the popular cultural references of Pop Art and Post-Modernism with the fresh experiments in colour of a Bridget Riley with the pixilated distortions and reductions of current digital art and the draftsmanship of a true master of composition, they were vivid and arresting. I loved them and will give this small show a clear three stars.

On the way back, we stopped in on my parents and had a fish and chip lunch with them. Then I helped them erect their sun canopy in the back garden and took possession of a present for my 50th birthday which is coming up in less than four weeks now.

The afternoon comprised this writing, a couple of bottles of Budwar and some sitting out in the sun. This evening, there's a recording of last night's episode of BBC2's He Knew He Was Right and a bath to look forward to. All in all, I would say that it has been a splendid way to use my day off.