Grey Granite has lately returned from a week spent in London a city of contrasts. Her impression is of hustle and bustle, claustrophobic numbers of people, unrelenting traffic and aircraft noise. She clearly is no longer suited to urban life but brings home images of long tailed tits by the Thames at Chiswick, a male yellow brimstone butterfly in the grounds of the National Archives at Kew, camellias and magnolias in Kew Gardens, where there were also screeching flocks of wild green parakeets. Walking by the Thames she came upon the Kew Riverside Two Lipped Door Snail Reserve and thought this to be quintessentially English. In the graveyard of St Anne's Church on Kew Green, where she was vainly searching for the grave of Joseph Hooker, Grey Granite found huge patches of strongly scented sweet violet (Viola odorata) and clumps of dog's mercury (Mercurialis perennis). Grey Granite was greatly disturbed by the contrast between a bundle of dirty rags by an old pram in a side porch which turned out to be a human being living rough and a notice in the main porch appealling for help towards the £1500 cost of maintaining the church for a week.
Returning to Buchan, breathing fresh clean air, and hearing great skeins of geese pass over head and seeing the buzzards circling over Cairnbulg Castle woods Grey Granite felt that she had been restored to her true habitat.
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