The past intrudes

In my front "garden" the gravel and ornamental shrubs are buried under the weeds and self seeded trees of several years neglect. These ephemeral dandelion clocks - gone with a swish of Jake's tail a moment after I took this picture - stand beside the orphans of a past even older than the days before my crippledom, the dark stalks of onions still pushing up through the later archaeological layers of membrane, gravel and weed, from the buried soil of the onion fields that were here before my house.

Tomorrow, a few miles away in Burford, the past will intrude in the form of "Levellers' Day" when old lefties like me (and the new crop) will celebrate the great great grandfathers of the movement - the Leveller ringleaders shot against the wall of Burford Church on 17th May 1649 for daring to think they could build a society something like the one we are currently losing.