Caroline has rightly banned a recent offering – on the witch hunt where any man, alive or dead, who touched a woman 'against her will' is to be pilloried. She said it might be provocative!

For the first three months after Mr G went into a care home my 'freedom' was not that easy to assume. The sight of him was harrowing – at night I read stuff I knew – Dick Francis, Wilbur Smith, Jilly Cooper – don't know if I even noticed, just dull the pain until the sleeping pills kicked in.

Now I've gone 'serious' reading in French, new books to me. The morality issues are worse than current ones. First book was the life of the Mountbattens in India – she would seem a total nymphomaniac – yet admired by Ghandi, life-long friend (lover?) of Pandit Nehru, and a tower of strength in the partition struggles. I Re-watched the film 'Portrait of a Marriage' (triangle Vita Sackville-West, Harold Nicholson, Violet Trefussis). Vita was born to luxury, absolutely wild, yet she and Harold produced the Sissinghurst garden. He was a diplomat, and homosexual, what a risk to take. Poor Violet seemed totally amoral, even called 'evil', yet, born to Alice Keppel, mistress of Edward VII, what moral basis could she get?

I am struggling with a fantastic book by a French writer, Dominic Lapierre, about the race between high-level medical researchers to find the cause of AIDS – which came from the sexual explosion of the 1970's.

Thinks came to a head this morning with the news that workers for Oxfam have been taking advantage of their position and abusing girls, in Haiti in particular. New outrage. They are living in an area of corruption and misery – temptation is there all the time – 'abuse' could sometimes be mutual comfort. What nobody will admit that there is an important side to even the horror of sexual tourism. In very poor countries (we have some experience of this) a pretty girl who works as a prostitute in Bangkok can buy her starving parents a cow and send her brothers to school. The 'business' (un-documented) is a vital part of some third-world country economies.

My 'silver lining' allusion comes from struggling with my great mass of pictures and not seeing the underlying problems. The worst is my favourite breakfast location, the garden of friends in Adelaide. Now, their son-in-law has early onset dementia – they have adopted Indian brothers, now teen-agers, that poor family. I now have to train myself to see my pictures as 'snapshots' taken at the flash of a second of time. Otherwise, every lovely memory will carry its own cloud, even to the rice-fields of Ubud, in Bali, now being a virtual housing estate – like prostitution, the families could not live on the production of a tiny field of rice, but they can on the burgeoning tourism.

Lesson learned, do not live in the past.

And you?

The Gardener

A Moodscope member.