I can't tear down what I've built

At Christmas a friend gave a "rescue fern"she'd potted up from her back garden. I've looked through my books and think it's a male fern... or maybe a buckler fern. It's hard for me to tell them apart in the illustrations. Anyway, after a few brittle, ailing weeks it's started to put out new fronds. There is (I think) something else growing in the pot as well; the baby fronds are in the usual scrolled-up shape, and there are half a dozen little green spears poking up through the soil. I wonder if some tiny bulbs may've got embedded in the fern's roots. Think a repotting may be due...

Also, this can only be illusion but I look at my terrarium ring and it seems at times the lichen in it is growing too. Unless I inadvertently bought a Ring of Power for flowerless plants. Do these things end up on EBay?

At the weekend I walked a way along the Stratford-on-Avon/Worcester to Birmingham canals. There's a great boatyard along the way: narrowboats with names like Inuksuk, Evenstar (Grey Havens), Our Aud, the improbably-titled Dambusters, and Loki (which looked like a garden shed, being towed behind a proper vessel. Someone had painted a leaping hare over the letter O). We found the Brandwood Tunnel; I don't know how many yards it runs underground but we had to take a bit of a detour to get back on the towpath. Both mouths of the tunnel are handsome to look at, with little alcoves and bas-reliefs of Shakespeare, one of which is pretty much a cameo of moss now. A bridge and "guillotine lock" down the way, painted in bullfinch colours: rose-pink and black. Closer to Bournville, dredgers were using magnets to bring ginger-furred scrap metal off the canal bed. A factory with a concrete chimney like a Martello tower or gun-emplacement. Tomorrow's destination will be a bit closer to home: the fords at Barston, which I haven't seen in maybe twenty-five years.

I seem to be writing again. And not hating what's coming out. That pleases me.