window shopping in elizabeth street whilst waiting for a bus to depart from victoria coach station

one of the best friends in the universe demonstrating the correct attitude

housemaid's knee ... one of a series of occasional rants brought on by the compulsory hoovering

two things actually, now that the recession is getting deeper and the prospect of affording domestic servants moves up the agenda for so many of us ...

first ... i'm trying not to feel or sound paranoid, but the thought crossed my mind that the loved one might just have moved some of that fluff jungle that was underneath the bed and piled it up behind the sofa as some kind of test, but she won't catch me out that easily

second ... if i maxed my credit card on an expensive vacuum cleaner then we might save water during the summer months by just hoovering the sheets

i had hoped to meet my sister v after she saw the ballet this afternoon, but i am sneezing so it has to be a "stay in and sniffle day", hence this domestic photography

damn ! damn ! damn ! on monday night i ordered a few of the guardian review's readers' recommendations, online from wandsworth libraries... by saturday morning six, no, seven of them were waiting at the counter ... how can i read them all ?

A book takes the chill out of winter.

I’ve been reading Giuseppi Tomasi di Lampedusa’s only published novel, The Leopard, written in Italian in the mid-1950s but only published in English in 1960, about three years after his death.  I’m enjoying it.  It isn’t difficult to read.  But I don’t really want to criticize it analytically, or discuss the text in more than a superficial way, because I’m only half-way through it, and because I’ve been overtaken and slightly surprised by another notion during my short time with this small book. 

I can remember that my mother read it as soon as it became available.  And she must have enjoyed it because it reappeared in the house once or twice.  The first time, she would have been anticipating its availability at the little public library in Malmesbury High Street after hearing it reviewed in the BBC Home Services programme, The Critics.  And I suppose she might have read about it in the Sunday Times as well.  Malmesbury’s tiny library was her lifeline and they supplied so many books that she couldn’t afford and which were her refuge; so many children and so little money having left her exhausted and uncertain about so much in life.  But she always seemed to have clear ideas about art and literature, and she accumulated a vast experience of reading.

As a child, I completely failed to understand or sympathize with her way of seeing and dealing with the world.  But whilst I’ve been reading this book, her dust has suddenly been re-assembled and her spirit re-kindled, before my very eyes so to speak.  Suddenly I discover the very sentences and images that must have amused and excited her and so, even whilst I am reading, sometimes it feels as if I were in the old living room where she rested between laundering marathons, and I can see her laughing from the corner of my mind’s eye.  What’s more, I can sometimes hear what might be her own “internal voice” reading the words to me whilst I stare at the pages, as if I were in her head and reading through her eyes.  This novelist’s powers of evocation are often startling and heart-warming, his dry wit creeps up on me.  But who might have guessed that fifty years later he would indirectly evoke her for me ?  Not I.

if you're going to the shops, will you bring me another jar of those pickled human hearts ?

i think i've discovered a new constellation

i've read every one of lindsey davis' falco novels

http://www.lindseydavis.co.uk/Premio%20Colosseo%20Thank%20You.pdf

do you remember that lurid fillum ? a genteel antipodean seaside romance ... "The Piano ?"

queueing at the V and A

wendy ramshaw

at the V and A, the excellence ...

... of every ...

... art ...

... must consist ...

... in the ...

... complete ...

... accomplishment ...

... of its ...

... purpose

... i've photographed them before but there was a fortuitous sunbeam this morning as we waited to cram in to the final weekend of the monumental diaghilev exhibition

how others see things ... easy when you know how

Sub-confluent, interphase Human Umbilical Vein Endothelial Cells (HUVECs) transfected with GFP-WT-MCAK (Mitotic Centromere Associated Kinesin) and grown in culture for 8 hours. 


Cells were fixed in PHEM buffer containing 4% paraformaldehyde, 0.05% gluteraldehyde, and 0.2% Triton X-100. Cells were then labeled with mouse anti-tubulin detected by goat anti-mouse Alexa 568 antibody. 


Cells were imaged on a spinning disk confocal microscope using a 60x 1.4 NA oil immersion objective lens on a Nikon Eclipse Ti equipped with Perfect Focus System and a Yokogawa CSU-X spinning disk confocal scan head equipped with a multi-bandpass dichromatic mirror (Semrock; Rochester, NY) and bandpass filters (Chroma; Rockingham, VT) in an electronic filterwheel for selection of GFP or Texas red emission. 


Excitation light provided by a custom-built laser combiner module (modification of LMM-3, Spectral Applied Research; Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada) containing 500mW solid state lasers (488 nm: Coherent; 561 nm: MPB Communications; Montreal, Quebec) that were shuttered with electronic shutters and attenuated and/or directed to a fiber-coupled output port with an AOTF (Neos Technologies, Melbourne, FL) and directed to the confocal scan-head via a single-mode optical fiber (Oz Optics, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada). 


A Coolsnap HQ2 camera captured images with 200ms exposure @ 488nm and 400ms exposure @ 560nm.


http://cellimagelibrary.org/home

designing her personalized karmic index

the news on radio and television, good or bad, is almost always followed with a brief summary of movements in the main financial markets around the world

perhaps those not even moderately wealthy in spiritual and intellectual capital needs must measure our human condition in similar ways

therefore, in an altruistic surge of activity destined to improve the happiness of the entire human race, i am prototyping and developing the loved one's karmic index

of course, in the life of an almost perfect woman, karmic index movements are generally upwards, but uncharacteristic glitches may occur

for instance, when i returned to the master bedroom after an unplanned visit to the loo before falling asleep last night, i was deeply disappointed to find that she had carried on reading her terry pratchett and had not even thought of plumping my pillows

i shall be posting frequent re-assessments using a simple logarithmic scale with the daily to-do lists that i like to leave around the flat for her

it is for her own good

shiny stuff in the back streets off wandsworth road

http://www.stonework.co.uk/

joined up thinking ...

... nicely crafted connectors.

good night sweet ladies ...

fluid mechanics ... the armitage shanks mystery

at the national gallery there's an astonishing exhibition of paintings by "canaletto and his rivals"

and there's a smaller exhibition of some paintings by bridget riley

each shows the power of the human imagination synergized by the precision of the artist's perceptions and dexterity

then some of us can go to the gents where precision and dexterity seem to be unimaginably difficult for the males of the species among the museum-going public and the floors are rarther slippery

i still haven't received a penny !

delicious but expensive

http://www.wagamama.com/food/item/orange+beet+down+%7C+new+juice/3715

insomniac photography ( part 999 )

history ... out with the old ! ...

although it took me a month to get to page 573,

i wish i could have read this wonderful book in 1984 when it was first published

and it is a mystery why the labour government never got around to honouring the lady

... even though there is no mention in the text of the saltonstall wives depicted on the cover

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonia_Fraser

... and in with the new - ish !

at the font, the suggested names of "lucifer parmentier" were greeted with perplexity

intolerable cruelty

Floating upwards from a night of dreams into voluptuous consciousness, just before dawn certain localized sharp movements and non-verbal vocalizations alert me to the loved one’s wakefulness, and so I venture to speak.

“I dreamed I woke up on my day off and someone made me a cup of tea.”

She whose given middle name is Sardonique, replies.

“That was only a dream.”

Chinese winter sports ... a mystery wrapped in a puzzle wrapped inside an enigma ...

Clearly, he thinks he's hard, but look at those nancy-boy gloves, and he's only playing against a bunch of women.

clearly modelled by the young george clooney

apropos de nuffinque a l'annee prochaine

oh, what a grey day !

there's no cure for my insomnia ...

all the world's a stage ...

a sunny sunday morning, and i'm refractorily olfactory and f-f-f-freezing !

Even on the coldest night, although they are blackened and are drooping up to their necks in deep frozen drifts of snow, you can still smell the lavender.

A shrunken old man, in freshly ironed clothes that are now two sizes larger than himself and wearing improbably shiny shoes, gets on to the bus … and he’s reeking of mothballs.

Hungry and returning from a freezing hour on the Common, walking through a wide empty space between some anonymous tenements, I am taunted by the smell of bacon being wantonly fried by invisible sociopathic housewives.

left out in the cold ... the car she forgot to buy me ...

let's get this party started

any resemblance between me and father christmas is purely superficial ..

brrr !

the last few weeks at work have been hectic and exhausting

and somehow, i failed to send a single christmas card

of course, each of you was top of my list ...

love and best wishes to you all xxx

from today's edition of the world's best newspaper ...

... had we known sooner, we might have sent one to each of our customers