January 3rd. Wet and warm. Rains every day. Since I have had my cataracts lasered off I can actually see! And drops do not dribble down or mist up my specs because I don’t wear them. Best, I can see the row of hellebores among emergent bluebells along the narrow path to the gate – already out at the end of December. Most are still pearls hugging the earth, but one is fully out, petals with coarse maroon flecks and, another, most precious of all because it is self-sown and therefore like nothing else and totally mine, is one which is palest shell pink with a delicate dusting of freckles. ...

I went to London to see the late Turner exhibition. Oh I loved it, the way he stayed by the sea and saw the waves rushing one way and dissolved into spray by the wind the other way. He saw the energy and life in all things, in the sea, and in the scudding clouds, and in the fires as the House of Lords burnt down. This energy, this change, is History (had to give it an H). I took off my glasses, and the crowds melded together, like a misty Turner crowd, without individuality, just this rushing presence. Then there was the death of Actaeon. I knew the same subject by Titian – he sees Diana...

In the British Museum I saw, in an exhibition on the Celts, the Gundelstrup Cauldron, from Denmark. Silver, with great panels inside and out. Of god faces, a god with horns, animals of all kinds, hybrid animals, a man riding a fish, a girl plaiting the hair of a goddess – all stern and staring. What ritual drink did the cauldron contain? Wine? Mead? The blood of sacrificial victims? And weaving through it all in the background, the leaves of a linden, here the primal tree of the forest. All creation merged and was the other....

https://www.fix.com/blog/dandelion-health-benefits/

22 Still raining, so nice proprietor of Mythos b & b drives us to bus centre to get next bus to Delphi. Long wait, but we have our ipads. Off through the mountains, and a change of buses and a wait at Amfissa. But we arrive! Rain has stopped for a few hours. Bus snakes up from Itea on the Gulf of Corinth to Delphi, and we head straight to the Hermes hotel, where we have stayed before. Room and balcony looking down on the gulf, the mountains, distant Itea and the soft grey green of the largest olive grove in Greece. So welcoming here. 23 B fell over coming back from restaurant in the rain...