It’s one of those cold misty afternoons, bare willow branches brushing softly against the grey cloudless sky. I am listening to One Sided Love Affair by Trespassers W serenading the city of Berlin: how she cries and how she laughs. It’s the kind of blue, undisturbed time that Cor Gout writes about in Korenblauw. As a sensitive soul, I love his beautifully composed, old-style stories, which take me beyond the crudeness of the world. Where a sympathetic weasel urges you to uncover the rites of your past as the hedgehog gingerly replies, while he puts up his quills, that some things are to be left unsaid (“Albino Spreeuw”). Where empty hours fill the space of your being with creativity, if you are patient enough to wait (“De Lege Tijd”). Where something can be both the case and not the case without leaving you unsettled (“Ja en Nee”). Where what you write isn’t just made up, where even fiction is about truth (“Schrijverschap”). Where little mice dance nose to nose on your raspberry-red Phoni recordplayer (Vian 1920-1959; illustrated by Hélène Penninga). I guess I’d better join them now!

Every once in a while you read a book that speaks to your heart. For me, Sarah Salway’s books always do. Her latest, Digging Up Paradise: Potatoes, People and Poetry in the Garden of England, is another gem. Salway takes us along on her visits to twenty-six public gardens in Kent. Together we find seashells, wildflowers, vegetable patches, magical trees, eccentric hedges, ancestral woods, the loveliest castle in the world… all the while, feeling the grass under our feet as we listen to ‘strawberry-shaped words’, peculiar tales and enchanted histories. Her poem “Night Grass” (about Doddington Place) is so beautiful, I want to hang it on my wall as a gatha that I can come back to again and again. And then there’s her “Letter to a Stranger”, which whispers to me like the wind: ‘not every day needs a destination, or to make sense’.