written in festivity notebook

When you get butter it's in a block, but unwrap it straight from the fridge and give it a squeeze with your fingertips (as it might be, when you're making a batch of shortcrust) it shears into curly splits of churn-spiral. NB this is how you carefully crush something.

Esther Williams was a swimming-musical-star of MGM. She was talent-spotted modelling in a department store in LA. "venus rising from the waves".

The snowdrops have shown. On bare earth in the woods you can find patches of stubby grey shoots, all about an inch high. One or two have a flash of white already, first glimpse of a bud cowering between its elbows. If you are so poverty-stricken that your only chance of having snowdrops in your garden is to get them out of a wood, then this is a good moment to do it. I also saw plantlets of lesser celandine, each with a brace of dainty little leaves. For some reason they made me laugh.