Tuesday 10th, 6.15am. Walking with Baggins

Feel the rain of an English summer

Trees heavy with rain. Roads damp and not yet glistening. Mist not yet lifted. Droplets fall steadily from awakening leaves onto the lane, and "A Stream with Bright Fish" begins to form in the morning's first hours. You can the effects of a stream in the background, subtley introduced by Eno behind the pianist's melody line. Birdsong shivers in the woodland beside the road, and just for a moment its as if we've been sleeping in the garden. That garden.
Looking down from the wooden gate beside the track, that leads to a sleeping house, I have come across a lake. Almost surreal in the dim light. A large pond, with a freshly painted boathouse and a small wooden boat tied up in the reeds on the bank.
In the still water, silent fish glide among the lily pads, and the figure of a young woman floats just below the surface. White skin like a fallen statue, graceful and serene with fragments of water weed caught in her spectral hair. Radiates like living weed itself from her beautiful porcelain face. There are foxgloves on the other side.
I recognise her now, vaguely, from an earlier story. It is the girl who descended the staircase, stripped of her batchelors, and walked into the carpet. The one who dropped that book, whose pages dissolved when she tried to pick it up. I wondered what became of her once she disappeared beneath the water in that room and went wandering around between the rusted cars parked in that submerged cathedral.
She's dead now of course, but that is of no significance. Her preserved body has become living art. A garden ornament for us to gaze upon. Floating like that, in the lake, gives her, and the garden, a sense of movement and growth. There is and will be no sign of decay. Those who pass this way will see her there, admiring the idea, but take no more notice of her presence than they would a large fish.