Brian Boyd: "This makes me so happy! It's wonderful having read Ada and thought about it for forty-four years, to find such a lovely surprise in it, hiding under my nose, that I'd never have found by myself. This would be the sort of play Véra would have recognised at once (she was a great orchid-lover, as well as a Clare Bishop)..."

 

Jansy Mello: The juxtposition of "gaping nestlings" and orchids made me happy, too. I look forward to reaching more such "visual puns" that make one laugh.  VN's discreet visual richness is an almost inexhaustible source of wonder, but I'd been focusing only on the strictly verbal effects of his similes and metaphors and missing (in a way) their often precise connection to the objective world.