About Banno

About There's a bush outside the window. It's a Correa alba, about two metres wide by one and a half high.

Its leaves are more rounded than most Correa leaves, a grey-green that compliments the almost sepia stems. It has white open four petalled flowers, unlike other Coreas these do not resemble the cylindrical form of Fuchsia flowers, but are open. Its procumbent habit works perfectly as a screen, and I think it a rather large specimen from my own observations. It is one of the few things I prune, keeping it clear of the path on two sides and shaping it around a statue on the third. It is often home to the nests of small birds.

But some idiot philosopher will say that we cannot know about the bush, only about how it seems to us; as if that meant something.
Location Dow Nunder
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Favourite philosophers Terry Pratchett
Favourite quotations First, words are our tools, and, as a minimum, we should use clean tools: we should know what we mean and what we do not, and we must forearm ourselves against the traps that language sets us. Secondly, words are not (except in their own little corner) facts or things: we need therefore to prise them off the world, to hold them apart from and against it, so that we can realize their inadequacies and arbitrariness, and can re-look at the world without blinkers. Thirdly, and more hopefully, our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connexions they have found worth making, in the lifetimes of many generations: these surely are likely to be more sound, since they have stood up to the long test of the survival of the fittest, and more subtle, at least in all ordinary and reasonably practical matters, than any that you or I are likely to think up in our arm-chairs of an afternoon—the most favoured alternative method. (Austin, J. L. “A Plea for Excuses: The Presidential Address”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1957: 181–182)