In the house, tidy now apart from my working corner, the fog's cleared.
The damned accounts remain undone, but can wait until tomorrow.
The e-mail brings the usual dose of shabby porn offers, mortgages, lotteries, and a couple of unpaid bills, which couldn't wait.
Not a word from Ursula, but then I wrote to her only a week ago, she's 75, as fertile as ever, and knows she doesn't have to say anything to me unless she wants to reply.
From you, not a peep either. I'm not surprised.
Do you have company this weekend after all? I ask because today, Whitetail brought a friend along, waiting on the window rail for me to haul myself out of sleep...
 Well, I did consult the book. Last night was indeed the right time and I felt ready to be told things I might not want to "hear".
It was tough though, the consultation, as hard as one I needed once in the Factory, the evening before having to address a pre-strike assemblée générale by microphone in the Engine Room and 'phone link to the gals and guys out in the bureaus round the world.
I asked the 'I Ching' about that because I knew that what I had to say was a minority view, at odds with all the other "union leaders" due to speak about what should be done. So it was scary and hairy, but the book told me how to set about it. For what it was worth, I "won" and so did the workers. Another cowboy PDG bit the dust.
I'm glad those nervewire-wracking days are over.
But all that is boring "log house" business.
Ω Ω Ω
Later, I'll tell you what the I Ching said. Meantime, I guess you've grabbed that metaphor: the "log house" isn't just the other side, or my den or your own unvisited nest; it's what people call the real world, outside the gardens we have, each and every one of us.
My Grandpa spent as much time as he could in gardens. When I was eight or nine, we were at the bottom of the long one behind the house where I was born, our knees on newspaper as we did the rockery and chucked the weeds on to the compost heap and the bad stuff into the barrow for the bonfire.
 It was getting dark when my mum's mother, not a bright woman but a firm and practical little one, came down and planted herself under a huge acacia, hands on hips.
"Nicholas," she said. "Your mum says supper's ready. So is yours, Teddy. Didn't you hear me calling?"
"I'm sorry pet, I didn't."
"Didn't you hear your telephone either? It rang three times." She never answered the 'phone in his study, that was his work. We'd heard it, the window was wide open, but he'd just winked at me.
"Yes, I heard that, but it could wait."
"It might have been important, Ted."
"Tomorrow it'll be important, Winnie," he replied. "Not today."
"I wish you wouldn't say that."
"I know, pet, but I know who it was. I'll know what to tell them tomorrow."
I knew little then about his journalist's job, but I understood the irritation in the way his wife looked at him, only too well.
"Hey Gran, do you know what we saw? We saw a Red Admiral!"
"That's right, lad. So we did, over by the peas."
She sighed. "Your supper will be getting cold."
Such episodes were frequent. Wouldn't you treasure an old photograph of a man like him? That picture's in the log house too, but I can't send you directly there, because if I did, it would turn on a "trackback" and that's a bad idea.
His books about the genesis of the frozen food industry were dull, but the job took him and my grandmother round the world, including America, at other people's expense.
When they retired to an estate built for hacks put out to pasture, in a town called Dorking, he spent many days walking the old straight paths on which the Romans later built their roads and filling his notebooks with archaeological scribblings.
Never financially wealthy, he left almost nothing in his will, but I, who often went on those walks with him in the hills, got some of the notepads. Ribblesdale, the Newspaper Press Fund's estate (where I could also retire one day if ever I was mad enough to live in England again), got one of the finest gardens in Dorking.
When he and my gran arrived, it was a huge, very ordinary garden tended once a week, if that, by outside contractors who worked around the pretty bungalows and the two big apartment buildings for those too old for homes of their own.
Grandpa took one look.
"There's no love here," he told himself. Single-handed, until others realised what he was doing, he dug up the whole place! He replanted it, built rockeries, fabulous flowerbeds, turned a pool into a proper pond, brought in the birds and the other wildlife.
They never paid him for the work, he would have been as cross as a gentle man can be if they'd offered, but everybody loved him for it. Over the years, he acquired a handful of willing helpers.
When he was dead and a while later my gran moved from bungalow to apartment, she always kept it full of flowers.
"That garden was his life," she said.
Ω Ω Ω
I know, Ellie. I know what you're going to say.
"Hey Nick, it's not for me you're writing this! It's getting kind of like the blog."
Is it?
"Hey Nick," you'll tell me again. "I think you should write a book."
 Wrong, darling. 101% wrong.
If white-tailed eagles could bark, you'd be barking up the wrong tree.
As for me, I'm prowling, sometimes howling, round the right one, that's for sure.
This is for you.
You know so much about life and love in the world out there, probably more than me, but my Grandpa knew more about gardens than any man I've met.
He knew something else too. As Ursula does, he knew about really important open secrets like the Grove.
That, and the I Ching, can wait. I have a lunch date with a zany musician and friend, possibly an interview.
And I have a "literary lion" to tease, more mercilessly than ever.
Ω Ω Ω
Later.
I was kind. Only for about seven minutes into doing the above did I torment Baudier, before revealing that I'd already heard a radio interview he was so proud of giving on Monday.
 "L'art brut et l'art raffiné" indeed! Honestly. It was once I compared his literary "matière première" and his "oeuvre travaillée" to the working of an oil refinery that he began to catch on.
Now that I can do it, I derive a perverse pleasure from churning out the kind of bullshit they talk at 8:30 am on France Culture...
We only managed to agree on one thing related to his latest book, that nobody knows where pornography stops and eroticism begins. Sam had his own view on this, but once he looked set to do a poll of the Canteen's clients on the subject, I hit him over the head with a magazine.
My own interview went well enough.
But yours, Ellie, are much better, lass.
I mean, wow. The "resourceful son of a Hungarian immigrant" in a Shakespearean power struggle? Great stuff.
Sarkozy is "committing regicide"?
I love it. All things considered, I have but one quibble. You might have let De Gaulle get the key word in before starting the voice-over.
As for the rest,
well,
let's just say,
do I have a surprise for you!
Baby, I've got you ... taped.
Ω Ω Ω
Much, much later.
And soaked. I wasn't expecting that.
Nor did I expect the I Ching to be so direct.
I messed it up twice, let ideas get in the way first time round after I'd only thrown the lower trigram. Second time, I didn't get beyond the bottom line. It didn't matter because the third time it flowed as it should after a breathing exercise.
Then I got the very same results for the lower trigram, with every line on the point of change.
It was the same all the way up for the first time I can recall. Not one of the six lines was stable, yin or yang, each was about to "turn".
The next surprise came with the clarity of the first hexagram.
My question, remember, was "What does the wise man do when his dream (i.e. Ellie) catches up with his life?"
I used three books to make my notes; not Legge, whose version remains the most famous -- and among the most erratic.
First, Mêng (or Mong) told me that you, love, are my "youthful folly".
Quite so.
That much you knew already.
Where the interest lay was in the mistakes I've made and the ones I didn't, which got better still with the "commentaries".
 If you want to see this "young fool's" notes, you may.
"To know how to take women
Brings good fortune.
The son is capable of taking charge of the household."
It's a pity I never knew "how to take women" until you walked into my life, but then I never had my "childlike folly" back before!
"Take not a maiden who, when she sees a man of bronze,
Loses possession of herself.
Nothing furthers,"
is better rendered in the French version.
It's first a warning to stay clear of women who are too young.
Secondly, it says that women after your money ("bronze") are like the light at the end of the tunnel that means an oncoming train.
As for the "humiliation" and the "punishment", I've had my share of that, like the rest of us. Good teachers too, especially in the past year.
Of the "commentaries", the parts that worked on my mind the most during the night were bits relevant to the two trigrams, speaking of a "double life", "secret loves", "the stone collector" (I'm an inveterate hoarder), "coyotes" and the "monk" I've been.
Which bits are about me and which parts speak of you I'm not yet sure, but won't ask, since lines two and five work together, suggesting I not only be "chivalrous" but keep my questions to myself.
So much for that idea!
No more questions.
Maybe that's what "love learning" is all about.
Yes. But the 'I Ching' or 'Yi King' is the 'Book of Changes'.
So where does all that leave the "young rebel" and his moving lines?
Here, Ellie:
"Fire in the lake: the image of 'Revolution' ('Ko').
Thus the superior man
Sets the calendar in order
And makes the seasons clear."
With the second hexagram, you ignore the lines. You focus only on the "image" and its meanings.
To find myself at the "turning point" is unsurprising.
'Li' (fire), wit and affection, the sun's warmth penetrating 'Touei' (the lake), which is also mystery, sorcery and lightness of heart, is a very "fortunate" hexagram.
But in this one, I also see a warning.
The wise man, it says, notices the change of seasons, the "shedding of skin and scale". And leaves?
And lives with it.
I think 'Ko' is telling me that now that the heart-springs are flowing free again, the "moon" inside the "mountain" of the first hexagram, I've yet to learn to love the winter.
That will not be easy.
If you've got this far, you might want to know which colours are related to these four trigrams. In order: dark blue, warm violet, orange and golden yellow.
Can I do the 'I Ching' for you?
No, I can't.
That never works.
Neither, in my view, can doing it on the Internet, though lots of people try, because fiddling with the computer must get in the way. On the other hand, the Web does provide some great links.
But if you want to try the 'I Ching' yourself, I can endeavour to tell you what it says. You don't even have to tell me what the question is.
Ω Ω Ω
That book lives in the sacred grove.
 What I like about the sacred grove is that everybody who has heard of it, as the four pictures here show you, has their own idea of what it's like. Just as they make their gods.
For me, it's like the 'I Ching', eternally the same and always changing: the "perfect contradiction".
Better still, Ellie.
You never know quite where you're going to find it.
Ω Ω Ω
One of the photos I stole from Line Chatelain, who has plenty to say about gardens. And there's a painting by Charles Frizell, whose is as interested in the Native American as me.
I'm particularly interested in one native American.
She may not be old, far from it, but she sure is wise and destined to become more and more beautiful the older she gets.
10:45:20 PM 
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