mardi 14 février 2006

Missing ... but in action The episode called 'A Rat's Tail' and other entries posted before a month's writing disappeared are no more lost than the musicians whose 'Voices' vanished at the weekend, but I've decided to sit on them for a while. I don't know how to reinstate them where they belong in the diary of The Orchard without the risk of again messing up the link between log files on my machine and their counterparts the other side of the Atlantic. So I'll either wait for a new "peg" -- that's newsroom jargon for non-feature stories that need one in the chronicling of world and personal events -- or rewrite them to be "timeless", which in essence they are. February has brought its new mood, anyway. It usually takes me a little while to know how to title the monthly archive. For this one, 'The Janus month' seems more appropriate to me than it did to the Romans. True, the turn of the year is a period when people look back on the past one, make resolutions and express wishes, hopes and sometimes fears for the coming one. In Paris, however, when you study faces, watch body language and hear what friends and acquaintances say when you greet them and ask after their well-being, I really think Lee summed it up: "February is brutal." The same sullen weariness must affect lots of northern cities, where any talk of spring seems to concern a season that's still such a long way away. Yet on balconies and in parks and window-boxes like mine, something's happening. We town-dwellers may not always feel it, but the plants do, you can see it. My geraniums produced lots of buds last week. They're just small ones, but in them I naturally find an analogy for what goes on in our heads and hearts: decisions in the making, ideas new to us and life choices. That's why I've called it 'the Janus month'. 8:47:22 PM    your views? []

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