Walking after midnight

The Patsy Cline song of the post title popped up in the book I last read in my current series (Mark Billingham Detective Tom Thorne). The main character is into country & western, but not the smooth sappy stuff (queue up Johnny Cash doing Hurt). Patsy Cline may sound sweet but she really isn’t and Walking after midnight really makes that clear.

The only time I was a great sleeper was on hiking trips as a teenager. Physical activity all day seemed to be my Nytol. Now, even if I yoga in the morning, work, do a solo walk, work in the garden and walk with the dog twice it can still sometimes takes ages to drift off. I find it really hard to get my brain to shut down – and sometimes that makes me panic. On those occasions I just stop trying and let my thoughts roam. Eventually I fall asleep.

If it were a reasonable thing to do I think I might be walking round here after midnight. But it’s not.

Anyway, during one of my brain’s late-night roamings I got to thinking about the sort of conglomeration of smells in the descriptive matcha, which popped up in one of the comments last week. The matcha I looked up refers to the smell conglomeration found in different places in the Mediterranean. Tanja in her comment last week was referring to Tuscany; I read about matcha in a book in Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon series referencing an assassin who lived in Sardinia.

The only place I personally experienced it was in the hills of Crete decades ago. Lavender, thyme, rosemary, sandy soil, hot dry air. If I think really hard I can reach the fragrance. You don’t get it here – way too wet and humid.

It’s not a comforting smell, but it is incredibly attracting. It makes you want to get out of the bus or car, walk into the scrub and just lose yourself. Which makes thinking about it appropriate for a brain’s late night roaming.

I can’t imagine it as a perfume because it’s so incredibly dry and perfume by it’s nature has some moist aspect to it. I wonder if it would work in a solid perfume.

The weather predictors are promising our rain will stop by Tuesday. Then, the sun will come out consistently and the temperature will rise. Please.

In the meantime I’ve put in a bleeding heart, a strawberry plant, and a second (I’d already planted the first) salvia. My garden is full of self-seeded poppies (see pic below) probably rucked up due to the builders stamping around and my digging over things to fix the mess they left. Poppies are ubiquitous around here: on verges, in fields, cultivated in gardens.

I’ve also put slug pellets in the two pots with dahlias and coffee grounds around the dahlia in the ground. Please, someone tell me why of everything I’ve planted the pests have gone for the dahlias? The peony is fine.

I’m thinking that by next week I might have something useful to say about something. Assuming the rain has stopped.