The Orange Tips Are Flying

I've been spending the day walking and enjoying the sunshine and fresh air, restoring my spirits ahead of my return to the bosom of NigeCorp tomorrow. The orange tips are flying (that's one on its food plant, Jack by the Hedge, which tastes like garlic). Mind strangely blank, but this passage from Geoffrey Hill has been bombinating around in my head, so I'll pass it on. It seems somehow topical:

'Whatever may be meant by moral landscape,
it is for me increasingly a terrain
seen in cross-section: igneous, sedimentary,
conglomerate, metamorphic rock-
strata, in which particular grace,
individual love, decency, endurance
are traceable across the faults.

Admittedly at times this moral landscape
to my exasperated ear emits
archaic burrings, like a small, high-fenced
electricity sub-station of uncertain age
in a field corner where the flies
gather and old horses shake their sides.

But leave it now, leave it; as you left
a washed-out day at Stourport or the Lickey,
improvised rainhats mulch for papier-mache,
and the chips floating.
Leave it now, leave it; give it over
to that all-gathering general English light,
in which each separate bead
of drizzle at its own thorn-tip stands
as revelation.'