Falling Blossom
17 April

The skies have been grey and leaden and a soft and sometimes gentle rain has been falling for some days now.

The large tree in next door's garden has been covered with white blossoms for a while and has just begun to shed them. Every slight gust of winds brings a flurry of white petals tumbling through the air showering the ground with white polkadots. Jemima doesn't know where to turn in her quest to chase and capture them.

Our plum tree which, last year, produced only a dozen or so blossoms has been veritably festooned this year. We may even get enough plums to bake a pie. And the display of wallflowers continues to be a constant, colourful, perfumed delight.

It's the sort of weather that must have the farmers hugging themselves for joy - it's wet just at the time when seeds are germinating and pushing up their first shoots and spreading out their roots for the summer. Now all they need is a bit of intermittent sunshine and the crops will be well on their way.

We've finished our work on the trellis in the back garden. One of the benefits of the lighter evenings is having time after I return from work and before evening meal to do things like that. Now we are faced with the pleasurable job of buying some more climbing plants to grace those green geometries. My parents have suggested they give me some money for my birthday as a contribution towards this. I say, all monies gratefully received.

Ross has had a busy week of it. He was actually at work for all five working days on different projects in Woodchurch, Crosby, Tate Liverpool and Liverpool Play Action Council. Frankly, it's taken its toll but, from here on in, the amount of work will begin to diminish and he can get on with some of his own work. However, he's very buoyed up by the fact that he's pretty much hit his yearly target for income in the first four months of the year.

Thursday evening, I went for my last session of reiki for the time being. I don't think that the work is over or that this is the last that I shall see of Janet. But I do want a break and I have my yoga and my Quaker meetings for me to keep working on the same sets of energy centres.

Nevertheless, it was a sadness. Janet and I have grown towards being fellow travellers since I first met her some two and a half years ago. We spent some time reflecting upon all of this and the reiki session itself had a very deep resolving quality to it.

On Friday night, Ross and I watched The Assassination of Richard Nixon. I was profoundly upset by it. If Sean Penn's performance hadn't been so good or the film hadn't been so well crafted, I would have been less upset. Basically, it's the (based on real life) story of a man who, having had a bad time of things, decided to have a go at hijacking a plane to crash it into the white House and kill Richard Nixon. Obviously, he failed.

What I disliked so tremendously about the film was that any sense of how this person came to a point in their lives when they believed that this was the next logical step was side-stepped. By the time we met him, he was already divorced (why we were never told) and had had a falling out with his family (why was only partly hinted at). What the film seemed to say was that, if bad things happen to you, then it's perfectly natural to decide to kill the President.

I just don't buy into that at all. I'm quite happy to try and understand the man but not to condone him. And, frankly, his life wasn't that bad. And there were plenty of other decisions he could have taken to do other things that would have improved things for himself. So, despite thinking that this was a very well made film with an astonishingly good central performance, I'm giving it just one star because I think that it let itself and the audience down.