That was one of the first ones. They come to rest in gullies, ditches, gorges.

For a few excited moments they roll and bounce, watched maybe, then they’re still for ever.

Just come across this, a draft from several years ago. The first picture is from a rocky valley in the Peleponnese, the second on Kaimakcalan, near the border between Greek Macedonia and the republic of North Macedonia. There’s a lovely moment in Wim Wenders’ brilliant film Lisbon Story when the sound recordist, played by the lovely, melancholic, amiable Rudiger Vogler, driving to Lisbon from Berlin, having been sumoned by his friend, a film director, has a blow out. He gets the spare wheel out and rests it on a low wall. It falls off and takes a short, lively journey down a steep bank into a reservoir.

A few days after walking the cold slopes of Kaimakcalan and wondering at the extraordinary variety of flowers there, I was driving south on a motorway, much faster than I felt comfortable with, and I thought about Icarus flying high before the crash.

All this while rummaging in the past while moving house, and realising that I’m trying both to let go and to hold on, and remembering all the old people I’ve met in Greece over the last fifteen years or so, most of whom are now dead, or gone to the city to live with their children. And now I see that I’ve lost half of my subscribers! Is this because I’m no longer writing garden notes? I do mean to get back to garden notes.