6.00 pm I like this decaying leaf, the way it stretches into holes like outworn tights, the windows it creates into the leaves behind it, the gradations of colour and the balance of browns, greens and yellows with the touches of grey. I wonder if colours 'go together' in some absolute sense; whether there's some mathematical symmetry about the shades and intensities that make them 'work', in the same way that, in music, notes 'go together' because of the proportion of hertz between one and another. Do colours clash in the way that musical notes can clash? Or are our brains conditioned to think that colours go together because we see them together in nature, and so we feel comfortable with them and 'know' they look right?

I have two new books today through the post, both by John Berger: 'Ways of Seeing', and 'and our faces, my heart, brief as photos'. I am in love with them already.

Plane tree bark