Diminutive...

I've been out surveying all day, and can scarcely keep my eyes open... No visits from the police today, but the high temperatures made the work quite exhausting. I spent much of my time recording very tiny plants like this wall speedwell Veronica arvensis, which a spring annual of dry habitats, and especially likes brownfield sites. It looks quite large in the photograph, but each bloom is only about 2mm across!

My sixth track is a Leonard Cohen song. Pete first introduced me to his music, and he has been a constant favourite for coming up to thirty years. I never tire of his songs - the lyrics are pure poetry, with many layers of meaning, and the tunes are excellent to sing along to! It was very hard to choose a favourite track but in the end I decided upon Dance Me to the End of Love. I have always interpreted the lyrics as a celebration of the indomitability of love but I recently discovered that the song had much darker origins than I'd realised. Leonard Cohen himself explained what inspired him to write this:

'Dance Me to the End Of Love' ... it's curious how songs begin because the origin of the song, every song, has a kind of grain or seed that somebody hands you or the world hands you and that's why the process is so mysterious about writing a song. But that came from just hearing or reading or knowing that in the death camps, beside the crematoria, in certain of the death camps, a string quartet was pressed into performance while this horror was going on, those were the people whose fate was this horror also. And they would be playing classical music while their fellow prisoners were being killed and burnt. So, that music, "Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin," meaning the beauty there of being the consummation of life, the end of this existence and of the passionate element in that consummation. But, it is the same language that we use for surrender to the beloved, so that the song - it's not important that anybody knows the genesis of it, because if the language comes from that passionate resource, it will be able to embrace all passionate activity.