I love having plants in my room, it's like having a bit of the outside world always inside with you. They have wiggly shapes too, which is a nice contrast to all the straight lines and corners. I've planted some of them myself but most I've bought, the two biggest ones I got from Tescos, the superstore, for £5 each, a total bargain as they were both at least 4 footers. Unfortunately, one of them got ill, its lower stems went manky, the soil went white and it died. However, I didn't throw it out straight away and after a while I realised that it was actually two plants in one pot and that only one of them had died leaving a smaller, healthier one behind. This smaller one didn't look too great though, it had lost a lot of leaves and looked as if it could easily go the same way, but then, just the other day, I saw a tiny little stem-bud poking from the top of the plant -- it's alive!

I've been watching this young shoot-bud very closely and it grows extremely slowly, but grows it does. It reminded me of how the speed of growth can be no reflection on the ultimate significance of the fruits of that growth. Just because change might occur extremely slowly, almost imperceptibly even, doesn't mean that it's not happening, nor does it mean that it will never amount to anything.

In an area of Bristol called Clifton there is a famous tourist attraction called the rock slide. On a steep slope of flattish rock, hundreds of years and thousands of bums have polished a perfectly smooth slide out of the stone such that you can quite happily enjoy a swift 15m decent!