Cherry Blossom Days.

I've spent a birthday in Hamburg, with Hümmel figurines around my breakfast plate. I've spent a birthday in San Gimignano, where I had pistachio gelato in the rain.

I am a spring baby, and it just felt wrong.

So last week we ambled off to Ceres and overnighted in a

three-little-bears cottage on a cherry farm.

The doorways are like tiny keyholes and to avoid the champagne cork effect, a tall man had to enter sideways in a bit of a crouch.

Did I mention that it was cold?

Heater, electric blankets and a roaring fire.

Oxtail and polenta for supper.

We awoke side by side, tucked into our little bear beds. Presents to unwrap, cherry blossoms and the calls of the coots on the lake. The nearest mountain was covered in snow.

Every time I went out - bejacketed/gloved/hatted, I vowed to bring long johns next time. The weaver nests caught my eye - such beautifully woven things they are. I tried to catch the yellow birds in flight, but my fingertips grew numb.

On the road there and back the mountainsides were covered in lichens so thick you could barely see the rock. Water gushes and trickles. 

The nitidas are covered in huge waxen flowers, soos bruide...

Fields of long creamy throated arum lilies.

Fields of yellow, fields of purple.

Fields of soft velvety green.

And a lost aquatic traveller, helped across the road...

There's an eye in the sky...

I've spent the past week working on a film featuring Helen Mirren. I was employed to add a final layer onto her character's bedroom. It's something I really like doing - that final layer. It's what makes a film habitat believable.

An early start in town means rush hour traffic - something I will do anything to avoid, so I decided to take the coastal road. One pays a toll, but you rarely see other cars and the views are spectacular. There's a rocky overhang with a rush of water droplets that never fails to delight me when they spatter onto my windscreen. One evening there was an old man flying ahead of me on a bicycle, wavy grey hair streaming as he pedalled furiously down the hill.

The rising sun over the city was torridly red. The sunsets apricotine. And the harvest moon, the moon, the moon...

I'm bound contractually not to publish photographs of the film sets I work on, so behold: our gooseberry bushes are full of fruit! And Fancy has a new haircut:

We had a young runner on the job and one day, watching me, she asked me how I knew where to put stuff. I told her that I'd learnt by watching others, and by moving things again and again
until they feel right.
 But how do you know when it feels right?
But that is not a question I can answer, because I just know.
I feel it in my bones.