Rosa 'Robin Hood' - 6 September 2026

Rosa 'Robin Hood' is a reliable, repeat-blooming hybrid musk shrub rose bred by Reverend J.H. Pemberton before 1927.

Today, September 6, 2026 I have one bloom of my reliable Rosa  A Shropshire Lad’ in my back lane garden. I notice another, Rosa ‘Robin Hood’. This rose brings me many memories, some involving my father and another, my going to Nottingham in 2006.

In these pages I cannot stop writing on how I miss my Rosemary who died   6 years ago on 9 December 2020. It is impossible for me to look at this rose a hybrid musk rose without thinking of all the others hybridized by the Reverend J.H. Pemberton. Rosemary would have smiled had I showed her this scan or brought her to the lane garden to gaze on this little rose.

I am now 84 and it is impossible for me to explain that in a life without obligations except to feed myself and my female cat Niña, that thought in my head are all about the fact that I am waiting for my inevitable oblivion.

People, including my two daughters tell me thought stoppers, “Papi you have to find distractions to keep you busy.”

But I lie on my bed with my cuddly Niña and I feel I am in a doctor’s waiting room (I do have some magazines to read) expecting to be called in any minute.

Because I lived in Mexico for many years and with my Rosemary for 8 years the thoughts of death are familiar to anybody who has ever gone there.

One of my concerns is that I am surrounded by many mementos on the walls, my bed, framed portraits of Rosemary, my daughters, granddaughters and family. Most of these portraits stare at me without smiles. Any one of them, all, if I might say, are superb portraits. None are snapshots. I am unable to escape any of them or look at them without being transported to moments before I pressed the shutter of my camera.

When we lived in Kerrisdale, one day, Rosemary and I drove away to visit our Lillooet daughter, Alexandra. I told Rosemary, “Perhaps we might hire an arsonist to burn our house down while we are away.” Her answer, “That is not a bad idea. All would be gone and we could begin again without any tactile memories.”

But I remember what my abuelita told me, “Niños que juegan con fuego se mean en la cama.” Or “Children who play with fire piss in bed.”    

Rosa 'A Shropshire Lad''  & Peter Trower -  3 September 2026

With Rue My Heart is Laden – A Shropshire Lad - A.E. Housman With rue my heart is laden

For golden friends I had,

For many a rose-lipt maiden

And many a lightfoot lad.

By brooks too broad for leaping

The lightfoot boys are laid;

The rose-lipt girls are sleeping

In fields where roses fade.

In the 80s and early 90s a group of us (writers, editors, photographers, artists,  poets, strippers, novelists, etc) would meet for lunch at the Railway Club every Thursday. Such was for me the importance of this gathering that I tried to avoid accepting free-lance jobs that would interfere.

We had four poets that often attended; they were Peter Trower, Gerry Gilbert, Evelyn Lau and Jamie Reid. Reid affirmed he was a member of the Canadian Communist Party.

Peter Trower was often called our Logging Poet. It was he who introduced me to A.E. Housman and particularly his A Shropshire Lad.

In my rose garden in today’s date, 3 September, 2026 only one rose is in bloom. It is in my back lane garden. It is an English Rose, thus it is remontant. This means that it blooms more than once. In many respects it is one of two or three of my best roses. It is fragrant and one of its lovely characteristics is that its new leaves are bright dark red.

Rosemary Elizabeth Healey Waterhouse-Hayward

 

In the July 6-13 The New Yorker I read an essay Regression to the Mein – How Mirrors, selfies, and surveillance what we make of our faces by Cal Reverly-Calder.

This paragraph caught my eye:

Only with the Renaissance would it break again, with the fifteenth-cenutury blossoming of the naturalistic portrait: van Eyck, Campin, Piero della Francesca. The archetype of painted interiority may still be the good old “Mona Lisaa,” known in Italian as “La Gioconda”- the face that launched a thousand conjectures. Bound –Alberti brings her in dutifully, to say how “enigmatic” her smile is, though Wigginstein, again, made more of the cliché. “When we speak of the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa, that may well mean that we ask ourselves: In what situation, in what story, might one smile like that?” To talk of stories, he means, is to talk of time; you need the before and the after, the rounded sense of life. After all, some people laugh in anger and weep with joy. If I read your smile, as happiness, I’m drawing on a fluid sense of the character I know, and on our place in an emotional culture. One reason Leonardo’s painting has endured in the popular imagination is straightforward: we want to ask questions of her – how she feels, what she’s thinking – and though we don’t believe she’s alive anymore that we believe Hamlet or James Bond to be alive, we can’t help responding to her face as if she were.

My Gioconda will always be my Gioconda. One of the images of the four here (the one on the right) stares at me enigmatically from the framed photograph on the opposite wall from my bed. She stares at me and keeps on when I put out the lights.

I never did ask her why she often had those sad eyes when she posed for my camera. I had plenty of time to do so as I took these photographs (she was nude, they were my first nudes) in Mexico City sometime in 1969.

Nobody will know why the Mona Lisa smiled and I will never know of her sad eyes.

These photographs are the result of putting a strip of two pictures on top of the other and then I scanned them with my Epson V700. I then  joined them by using Photoshop layers.

No AI.