Two portrait flash designs with rose and banners

The strip light over bay four has been dying since Tuesday, so I've spent the small hours labelling tubes by the glow of my phone and a borrowed desk lamp. Mo from porters brought me a flask of tea at three and said I looked like the last thing the cat had dragged in. I told him that was the standard look on nights. He didn't laugh. He just pointed at the window, where the sky over the car park had gone the colour of weak lemonade, and said the morning would be here soon enough.

I found Grandad's notebook when I cleared the spare room, the one with the cracked red cover. Most of it is sums and seed catalogues, but on the inside front page he had written BASIC CHEMISTRY in capitals, underlined twice, and drawn a little arrow pointing at a column of recipes for growing crystals in jam jars. Alum, sugar, a thread of string, patience. He never let us touch the jars. Under the last recipe was a pressed flower, brown at the edges, the petals still a faint pink, and beside it he had written CHEROKEE ROSE and the name of the lane where the bush grew over his fence.

I took the flower to work in an envelope and pinned it above my bench, next to the rota. Between samples tonight I dropped a single sugar crystal into a saucer of warm water and watched it grow its small sharp faces, slowly, the way he'd said it would. By the time the window turned grey it had doubled in size. I left it to finish. Come Sunday, I'll bring you the saucer, if it hasn't dried out.