April 1?

I read today that the Royal Horticultural Society will hold auditions tomorrow to find voices to read Shakespeare to plants to see if talking to them makes any difference to the way they grow.

I think that the plants chez Tardis need a good talking too right now and if they don't buck their ideas up before the return of Teapot yours truly will be spoken to as well!

Yet I digress. Inspired by the RHS I offer to donate a tomato plant to the six best ideas for scientific research which reach me here in the Tardis over the next week.

Tiger the cat has already offered regular purring in his summer house. Contrast that with ball by ball commentary from the last one day international W Indies v England folllowed by the forthcoming summer of Tests including the Ashes! What size tomatoes might that bring? Or a continuous reading of the works of Jane Austen? Perhaps some U2 or Jamie Cullum?

Any better ideas?

Let me know. But if you're name is Charles don't bother!

Home Alone (1)....

........Timelord has been called away from the Tardis these last two weekends. Teapot is looking after the Godfather so he has been to see them oop north wherever that is.

I knew the Godfather wasn't well at Christmas when he let me sit on his knee.

I bet Timelord didn't know that I am a dab paw with the sonic screwdriver he left behind. So it was easy peasy and before you could say whiskas here I am standing in for him so to purr.

Teapot may think I all I have up top as they say in those northern parts is thoughts of food, chasing mice and sitting on Timelord's knee and that I walk across the laptop keyboard just for exercise. All the time though I am really practising my paw touch typing for such a time as this.

I have to say though that things are not the same without Teapot. Lousy grub last week. And I have to wait for the lid of my dish to spring open before I can stick my nose in. Some days I am shut in all the time. Some days I am shut out all the time. I am hopelessly out of touch. No Home and Away or Neighbours for a whole week. Perhaps if Timelord leaves the TV switched on tomorrow I can see if I can get playback TV.

At least if I am out and the sun shines I can go in my summerhouse. My favourite spot.

The chasm of the Lion's Den

One evening in 1847 just by the lighthouse at Lizard Point

"the whole surface of the down above the cliff was smooth to the eye, and firm to the foot - in the morning it had opened into an enormous hole. The men who kept watch at the Lighthouse, heard no sounds beyond the moaning of the sea - felt no shock - looked out on the night, and saw that, all was apparently still and quiet. Nature suffered her convulsion and effected her change in silence. Hundreds on hundreds of tons of soil had sunk down into depths beneath them, none knew in how long, or how short a time; but there the Lion's Den was in the morning, where the firm earth had been the evening before"

So wrote Wilke Collins the writer of the first English crime novel "The Moonstone" in 1851 on his visit to the Lizard.

You can see the chasm today. On the picture it is just below the point where the horizon meets the cliff. 1847 is a long time ago and the chasm has blended into the scenery but go closer and you can imagine what a stir must have been caused all those years ago. It must have been as if the earth was about to fall into the sea and who would know where it would all end. But to many of the thousands who go to the most southerly point of England in 2009 it will be just another part of the cliff walk.

The Lion's Den is a special place because it is close to the rocks where we scattered FLN's ashes two years ago. As I look at the chasm I think of the events of 10 September 2006 and the chasm which appeared in our lives and is still there. Like the Lion's Den it has blended into the landscape as time has gone on but it will never be filled in.

You can go close to the chasm and peer over the edge. And from time to time that's what we do. We do that with the chasm which is the loss of FLN and all the events of September 2006 and the months that followed. We may go there consciously and deliberately. We can go there with our friends who will look over the edge with us. And sometimes we are taken there by surprise because of an unrelated incident which stirs our memories.

It has become part of the scenery of our lives. More and more people will engage with us understandably without a sense of the shattering events which have made us what we are.

But we will always go there.