Absence makes the heart depart to a tiny room and sit gently in the corner. Possibly rocking.

In my head there is a area which is specifically occupied with loving those whom I love. I do not need to command it, it just carries on, everyday, everynight, functioning efficently in order to be sure that the love continues. It's a little bit like a W.I. group. It's very good at making things remain pretty. It always changes the flowers and sweeps up and makes cakes and there are lovely smells and interesting talks and thoughtful ideas and general all round niceness.

Within that area there are rooms specifically occupied by the presence of the people I love. They exist only so that I may visit when the people who occupy them are not physically near me. In there are the best memories; the best smells, the smiles, my favourite images. All the things I would not need if the person I wanted was near to me.

Usually when a person goes at first I just keep the door of their room shut; things are easier that way. But the other day I opened it just a tiny little bit, and was somehow sucked in. And now, increasingly, I find myself spending my waking and sleeping hours there.

On animals that know things

Part Three.

If you take a Queen Bee away from her hive, the bees that are left find one of her larvae and turn it into a new Queen. They do this by feeding the larvae royal jelly until they hatch. When this new Queen hatches she looks around for all the other larvae that could potentially become Queens and eats them all up.

So the bees can make a Queen. presumably, when she hatches they are bow to her in beely submission and say in tiny bee voices, "You are are new Queen." But she's not all that special really, to me. They are much more special for making her as a replacement for the one they lost.

On Animals That Know Things

Part One:

Guinea Pigs are afraid of aeroplanes. This is possibly because if you are a Guinea Pig an aeroplane looks very much like a Condor and a Condor to a Guinea Pig is a very scary thing indeed, owing in part to its tendency to be rather partial to Guinea Pig meat and in part to it's expert flying ability.

My Mum's Guinea Pigs have never met a Condor, nor lived in a place that Condors frequent. But if an aeroplane flies overhead or the shadow of a thing passes over their heads they run for cover. How do they know to do that? Is there a gene in Guinea Pigs which can identify large flying things looking for food? Is the shape of a Condor somehow passed down from generation to generation?

Part Two:

In the Lake District the sheep are forgetting.

They have forgotten the little paths to the high grass and they have forgotten how to get back down from the high pastures when they are up there. This is because the sheep that have died from disease have not been replaced with local, or knowledgeable sheep, but instead new foreign sheep have been brought in and they do not know the way. This sounds silly, but if there is a little tiny footpath up to high pastures the sheep pass the route down from generation to generation. Without that Sheepy, local knowledge the farmers are finding their sheep are getting stuck. But what fascinates me is not the poor stuck sheep, but how they were passing down the information in the first place.