Bulbs

To my surprise there are fat green bulb-tips -- at least three of them -- emerging in the wildflower trough alongside the garlic. So evidently the tulips are actually coming up, having survived the winter; we shall see if they do any better than the narcissi, which were last seen in March 2024 at the end of a steady decline, and never did flower at all.

To my surprise, the mystery bulb also appears to be showing a tiny shoot, though I had more or less assumed that had rotted away.... The grape hyacinths are currently fine, having at one point last year been very overcrowded, at which point either a lot of them died off or else I thinned them out manually -- I forget which :-p

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Whoever composed the translation exercise for Lesson 6 of the Penguin Russian Course evidently had a sense of humour, or was busy channelling my mental reactions ;-p ( I don't know how to learn words )

The Queen's Necklace

I found the missing new season of Marie Antoinette on the BBC catch-up service (with five months left to run); unfortunately it looks as though this season is based around the same events as Antal Szerb's The Queen's Necklace, which I have literally just finished reading. So whereas the first series benefited from the fact that I knew very little about events at the French court at that end of Marie Antoinette's life and had no idea which characters were going to be significant, how events would turn out for the protagonists, or what to hope for, in this case I'm immediately recognising the whole set-up with foreknowledge of how it is going to end in advance. The annoying thing being that I knew nothing about the entire necklace affair (vaguely associating it with Anne of Austria and the Duke of Buckingham) until this week, and indeed would have avoided reading the book if I'd had any idea the TV series was going to re-emerge...