Echinacea Time
19 August

Those purple daisy-like flowers with the bulbous orange centres which are the Echinaceas are with us yet again and it's a sign that we're moving on towards the end of summer.

Ross is away again. He's off staying with his sister helping with the preparations for her wedding next year to Andy.

Before he went off, we took in Madonna's Re-Invention tour in Manchester. This was entirely Ross's idea; he is a big Madge fan and it was the Girlie tour which prompted his coming out in the early 90s. In the event, the evening was late starting and, to my taste, only fitfully satisfying.

I wasn't convinced by many of the re-workings of early and current hit songs. I felt as though I was in the presence of a major star who it was difficult not to admire but who it was difficult to love. I kept thinking that she was putting on a very good show for a forty year old and, in that, lay the rub; here was a middle aged woman who was still offering up the image of a teen idol. Ross felt that this was five star occasion; I don't feel that I can offer more than three stars.

By a quirk of irony, I have been reading Alone of all her sex - the myth and cult of the Virgin Mary by Marina Warner. I bought this book in the mid 1980s, when it had a high degree of status among the chattering classes. Then, I read something like 20 pages before putting it down as indigestible. Now, I find it a reasonable read. I guess that my understanding of the framework of religious belief has expanded enormously over the past few years and so I am much less at a loss to comprehend the intellectual movements which it describes.

As a consequence, inspired by the chapters on the Troubadour movement, I bought a CD of music from that age of chivalry. Frankly, it was completely enticing. It has all of the lyricism that I expected with a dash of Moorish exoticism that was a complete revelation. The fact that it is a Naxos CD and cost me less that a fiver is even more to be applauded. I don't think that any CD has given me more simple pleasure this year. Four stars and no mistake.

Linda and Mary have been visiting my parents. I popped over to see them briefly. Mary is about to start her second year at school. This hardly seemed possible as we played Pooh Sticks at the bottom of Albert and Grace's road in the culvert that becomes the Arrowe Brook.

Then Ross left. He can't be having the best of weather to help with his endeavours. We've been experiencing local rain combined with the tail end of a hurricane that hit Florida some days back. The cumulative effect has been some flash flooding, notably in Scotland where a road got swept away and in Bocastle, Cornwall where a river burst its banks and deluged the town in a way that I've only previously seen on news footage of Italian Alpine villages.

Elsewhere in the British Isles, Rod and Dale have arrived in London and have been complaining about the lack of air-conditioning in a sweltering London and the design of British toilets. I have remonstrated with them on both counts.

Air-conditioning is, after all, for wimps. They forget that we are the race who would go hunting in tweeds whether we were on the grouse moors of Scotland or on the game-rich expanses of the Serengetti in Africa. Furthermore, with regards to toilet designs, the phrase "to take a dump" is a particularly North American expression. In the UK, we "go to the toilet" which is a much more decorous affair and precludes the douching effect which they deprecate.

The time to myself has been a useful period for reflection. When I saw the doctor a couple of weeks ago, I said that I was feeling much better in myself. I'm not sure that this is entirely true. I feel as though I am two distinct people; I am a public person and a domestic person. In the public field, I am an achiever; I organise matters; I get things done; I am competent and efficient; I am engaged and I communicate with a wide variety of people; I am a leader; I have ideas and practical suggestions to improve the general lot. In the domestic sphere, I am reticent; I shirk from communicating; I prefer quietism and passivity; I prevaricate; I am bounded by a shell that feels impenetrable; I await direction from others and hesitate about stating my case; I quail under the burden of the tasks I have left incomplete.

I suspect that part of my journey over the next few months is to do with integrating these two discrete parts of myself.