learning from Mr Turner

I was going out this morning, so thought I'd set an alarm to be on the safe side.  I woke up a quarter of an hour before it was due to go off, but when I tried to cancel it so that it wouldn't disturb the Systems Administrator I couldn't find any such option on the menu.  With the minutes ticking away until it was due to start bleeping I dug the instruction booklet out of the bedside drawer, and searched for the section on cancelling the alarm, but there didn't seem to be one.  Several of the buttons would make the noise stop once it had started, turning the alarm off in the process, but the idea that you might no longer want an alarm at all didn't seem to have occurred to the designers. In exasperation I resorted to unplugging the clock radio at the wall.

Much later I got rid of the alarm during my Pilates practice by setting the time to ten minutes hence, and getting up and pressing one of the turn-off-the-alarm buttons when it duly bleeped, but I still have no idea how to kill the alarm before the event, even after consulting the booklet again at my leisure instead of operating under time pressure.  There might be somebody on the planet less temperamentally and intellectually suited to becoming a bomb disposal expert than I would be, but I wouldn't count on it.

The conversation during the morning's outing turned to the way that Turner and Constable and before them Rubens used a splash of red in the foreground of their paintings to give the composition some zing.  Red marker buoy, waistcoat, petticoat, whatever.  In our garden it was some red anemones that had turned up in a pot of what were supposed to be blue ones, the bulb merchant's error rather than mine since when dormant you can't tell them apart (or at least I certainly can't.  I have heard that real daffodil experts can identify any variety just from the bulbs).  These red flowers caught my eye whenever I looked at that part of the garden, only rather than giving the composition zing they disrupted it.  You couldn't help seeing them, and they were annoying.

My mother suggested pragmatically that I could simply pick them and stick them in water.  It seemed an easy solution. but when I got home I looked at the red anemones again and thought I couldn't be bothered to commit myself to always rushing over to pick them.  With my most pointed trowel I levered the group up, and traced the stems of the red flowers back down to their source. There was not one rogue plant, but two.  I teased them out, replanted the rest of the clump, and watered them in.  The disturbance may have cut short their flowering for this spring, but the effect on the garden scene was remarkable.  Suddenly the different shades of blue and pale pink flowed into each other, no focal point, no eye catcher.  I should have done it weeks ago, as soon as I discovered the mistake.

I found a home for the two rejected plants by the front door, where their red flowers could echo the smaller red flowers of the Chaenomeles under the kitchen window.  Red is a good colour, but you have to be careful where you put it.