Good night

I ought to show you how the Night-Scented Stock seedlings are faring since I took your advice about feeding them. They are going to be a little stunted, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. If they grow tall they tend to flop backwards over the ledge in a swoon and the scent gets carried away to some other lucky person's nostrils.

This year I have put the kebab sticks pointing upwards because the gulls and pigeons they are supposed to fend off have become a lot more pushy since their food source has been cut down by increasingly efficient rubbish collection. They will only land on them once, but I do believe they recognise a pointy stick from a distance when they see one.

Funny I should use kebab sticks. The gulls' main food source these days is the discarded kebab refuse strewn around the streets by drunks at 3.00 a.m. I don't mind the odd doner kebab - so long as I know who the doner was.

Up North they have a good name for those huge lumps of revolving, pre-cast, salty, mechanically reclaimed meat by-products dripping with grease: 'Pensioner's Leg'.

A good kebab can be very good, but not in this country. Near the university at one gate of the huge market in old Istanbul there is a little street kebab seller who does good trade. H.I. and I had one pretty much every lunchtime. One day I decided to choose the type favoured by the rough-looking, moustachioed locals. It turned out to be 100% intestines, presumably from sheep. I had two bites and the feral cats had the rest.

Recently, during this good weather, I have been yearning to get up very early and wander around in the imediately post-dawn countryside, but my nightlife is always too enjoyable to curtail by going to bed at 10.00.

The wonderful scent of newly woken vegetation; the fresh air before it has passed through the lungs of countless others; the optimism in the voices of birds before they face the daily grind of finding something to eat...