framed by flowers

Of course, I intended today's post to be the ritualistic ones of garden flowers on my bedroom windowsill - and here they are, below, offering a fair sample of some of the delights of the back garden itself: roses and two kinds of daisies and lavender.   The weather had even cleared up enough by this evening for my father to sit outside with his pipe and book (Michael Dibdin thriller, almost certainly from the Oxfam shop), though I was sitting inside, mostly, with my mother, watching tennis, and marvelling at the phenomenon by which one finds oneself passionately, passionately rooting for a player that one's never heard of before.   Baghdatis?   From Cyprus?   I even had to check how to spell his name, just now.   But I (and the Wimbledon crowd - one could almost hear them from where I was sitting) desperately and futilely wanted him to carry it off.