Last day in Manchester, certainly, for 33 days. Off tomorrow, on my most significant journey of 2019. So time for this year’s ‘cherry blossom in the Ellen Wilkinson Building’s secret courtyard’, then. I doubt it’ll still be there when I get back.
They’re very pink, but very ephemeral, the cherry blossoms. Maybe that’s why the Japanese like them so much, it matches their general aesthetic.
Back to cold, rainy weather. But if I keep posting pictures of spring perhaps when I look back I will remember this as a warm April morning. The blossom is out in ‘my’ courtyard at work, at least, but back in 2014 (for example) it looked like this in February. A sign of the lateness of the weather patterns this year.
Is he engaging in some Japanese-style blossom worship? (You see Japan — we have blossom too….) Or just clambering along a precarious wall, as small boys do to entertain themselves and worry their parents?
Last full day in Japan. A couple of free hours this morning were spent in Shinjuku-gyoen park, along with several thousand other people, most of whom seemed to be cooing over the blossoming cherry trees (sakura), with dozens of Japanese engaging in what I could only perceive as a form of fundamental nature worship beneath each one. A total stranger asked me in the hotel elevator this evening whether I had seen the blossoms. They even have national news announcements, blossom forecasts if you like, stating where the best displays are to be found. I don’t dispute these plants’ beauty, but I can’t help thinking — you know, we have cherry blossoms in England too. They’re just there. But clearly I’m missing something.
More avifauna. And a pic that shows we are at least a couple of weeks ahead with various signs of the seasons this year, to compare with last (see 29/5/13).
I’d rather the bright red cooler wasn’t there but otherwise I think this is a reasonable summation of this event, which Clare & I stopped off in for breakfast after our night out in London (* not depicted on this blog). The queue for the tea stand was interminable. I like the blossoms too, which up north have faded rather, but in London remain in full flower.
Now I said back in December that I thought I had seen very, very early blossom on the University of Manchester campus, but it turned out to be a winter flowering cherry. However, this, definitively, is traditional, spring cherry blossom in flower on 19th February; they are in the courtyard within my office building on the campus. Well, I said it’d been a very mild winter — unlike in North America where the Great Lakes are almost fully frozen, and very unlike last year here.
On the return home,
Fallen blossoms. I’m sure there’s
A haiku in it.
a.k.a. ‘Lament for a Lost Spring’… Sorry to wax lyrical, it’s probably just the result of spending the day in a church selling piles of 2nd hand books to bargain-hungry pensioners.
