SOME THINGS I LIKE

I seem to write so much of things of which I disapprove or which annoy
me so this is a list of those things that, for me, make life worth living:    

The perfume of balsam poplar in the spring.
Electric light shining on snow at night, from a window or an open door.
A cock pheasant in the morning on February frost.
Frederick Warne’s 'Wayside and Woodland' series of nature books.
Bare black twigs against an evening sky.
The glossy green of a lapwing’s back.
The slate grey-green of a moorhen.
The oxygenated perfume of falling water in a sluice.
A mistle thrush singing on high branches before a storm.
Looking to the sky through large flakes of falling snow. The way they move. And
    wondering why they are grey.
Those snowflakes on my face.
The silence that new snow brings.
The mystery of broomrape.
The mystery and the beauty of mathematics.
The curve of a breast which is more beautiful than mathematics.
Leadbelly and the Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet singing 'Midnight Special'.
The pale green of a cowslip stem and the tiny hairs that cover it.
The perfume of surgical spirit.
Keats' imagery in 'Endymion', lines 34 to 63.
Dickens' imagery in chapter two, 'The Mail' of A Tale of Two Cities.
Rain falling in a cemetery.
A cemetery full of Queen Anne's lace.
Rain falling on my face.
Mist hanging low on flat fields by a still river in autumn.
Saltmarsh.
White stockings.
The sound of tawny owls by night and of sheep by day.
Remote churches without electricity.
New rain falling on dry earth after a drought. The vapour and the perfume.
Jean Bosco Mwenda.
Spenser — 'The Fairie Queene'.
A washing line of white linen blowing in the spring sunshine against a blue sky with
    white clouds.
The sound of grasshoppers.
Swimming in the sea.
A rookery full of rooks in early spring.
Spring sunshine bright on the blades of new grass in a field.
A spring breeze waving new barley in a field.
The original Gossard Wonderbra, 32B, white.
An empty railway station on a hot and silent afternoon.
Tadpoles among green weed at the edge of a pond.
Sticklebacks in a jam jar with a handle of string.
Water avens.
Copper rivets in a wooden boat.
Children playing.
A rookery on high branches above a graveyard.
A rookery on high branches above a pond.
A turtle dove calling on the warm air.
The perfume of cow muck that has dried hard on a summer road.
A flock of house sparrows dust bathing at the edge of the same road.
A flint wall around a neglected stock yard. Coarse nettles growing through a tangle
    of galvanised wire.
The foaming blossom of elder against a high flint wall.
Valerian growing from a stone wall. Perhaps the sea is not far away.
The smell of salt as you approach an empty beach after a long walk over dry fields.
A cold church on a hot afternoon.
A skylark unseen in an empty blue sky.
The sound of shears cutting a hedge on a summer evening.
Arthur Rimbaud.
Alain-Fournier.
The leaves of willows by a canal. They shine white against a grey sky in spring.
Slow roach in deep green water in the same canal.
A blonde or auburn pony tail in the style of Sylvette David.
Elena Ledda — 'Our Lady of the War'.
Long summer grasses at the edge of a path, drooping after a summer shower.
The reassuring clicking of a Sturmey-Archer 3-speed on a country lane.
Black stockings.
White cumulous clouds against a clear blue sky. They are as bright as
    snow-covered mountains in spring.
Hedge sparrows.
Constable’s tiny sketchbooks of pencil drawings.
His studies of clouds.
Seeing someone you love walking towards you across empty fields.
The cry of a high buzzard.
A single bluebell. Its drooping head reminds you of Christ on the cross.
Nurses.
Marjoram and scabious growing on a chalk hillside in August.
The perfume of wood-smoke on a starry night.
The taste of salt on your lips after swimming in the sea.
Rain beating on the window. Far below the sea is breaking on the rocks and, out to
    sea, there are gannets fishing. You can hardly see them through the rain.
A new horse chestnut seen through the split in the spiny shell.
The softness that you feel inside the pod after shelling broad beans.
A robin singing his autumn song. The mist is full of spiders' silk.
The perfume of couch grass burning on a slow fire at the edge of a field.
A flock of dunlins on a winter shore at the edge of the grey water.
Palestrina — 'Missa Assumpta est Maria, Agnus Dei 1 & 2'.
Sophie Marceau.
Iona and the soft sands that surround it.
W. B. Yeats, especially 'The Wind Among the Reeds'.
Godfrey Reggio, Philip Glass and Ron Fricke – Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi.