Fuchsias were never my favourites ...

... and yet they do well here and the flowers dangle like whole populations of puppets dancing to the tune of the wind, though there has been little wind, the blue but cloudy sky has been a kind of miracle and I have sat drinking wine and reading beneath a fuchsia bush on a warm sunny evening sheltered by a lichened drystone wall, and thinking also about work, the nature of writing, the ethical demands it makes on honesty and integrity, at every moment, standards that sit quietly there in the form of some particular imagined audience, grave, listening with attention ... ghosts of old teachers, one's peers, one's opponents ... not quite superego, because every challenge and question has to be considered ...