i always wanted to take a picture of murielle valette, ockenden manor's fab baker AND patissier AND chocolatier ... in the end, she wrote a book and it is beautifully photographed by lisa devlin, and murielle's given me my very own copy for which i am joyously grateful

http://muriellevalette.com/

hey, nonny no ! only six monthe 'til summer !

germans taking the moral high ground whilst you're still lolling depravedly in your leopardskin onesies ...

http://panocam.skiline.cc/lauberhorn

morning in the kitchen

3BT

in the sunlit "bare ruined choir" of the sycamore tree outside the kitchen window at mid-day ...

1.  four fluffy squirrels chasing one another in the "heart" of the tree

2.  five velvety jackdaws having a quiet chat whilst they explore the topmost branches

3.  four resting parakeets, brilliant as jewels, quietly contemplating the prospect of their journey north to the thames

pratchett minus the jacket ...

job done !

out of the high deserts, the navajo times is one of my favourite newspapers ... it's weekly police blotter section is an horrifically mesmeric catalogue of human disasters

http://www.navajotimes.com/

http://www.navajotimes.com/news/2013/1213/122613blotter.php#.Urvf3fRdV8E

and the distribution network is a geography lesson in itself

http://www.navajotimes.com/contact/locations.php

light at the end of the tunnel ...

a little light reading while you're all watching the queen's speech ...

readers' kompetition ... guess which presents were packed by santa's favourite elf, and which by the fat elf with the prosecco befuddled fingers

i wasn't going to open this bottle, but then i learned that heidi, joe hyam's missus, had also died ...

lolita sevilla RIP

http://cultura.elpais.com/cultura/2013/12/16/actualidad/1387206129_336555.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJXiQSj_shY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHnDQf5d1JQ

despite every intention of getting up early, the loved one had to wake me, shake me from a complicated dream about being late ...

... much too complicated to explain such a dream here, multiple levels of visual metaphors, mistaken and transformed identities, metamorphoses, changing agendas not just hidden but well and almost truly buried, etc, etc ...

i rushed off to the flaming 14 bus at flipping quarter to seven instead of farting quarter to six ... and blinking well forgot the absolutely bloomin' necessary bleedin' tripod

so here are some sub-standard hand-held pics of fortnum and mason's windows, somewhat lacking in designer's wit or exuberance compared with previous years, i'm sorry to say

life on the ( oh my god, just look at the dust ! ) shelf ...

censorship and habeus corpus re-visited perennially ( part 99 )

http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/12/why-russell-brand-banned-gitmo

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/nov/15/clive-stafford-smith-my-family-values-law

the white sheep of the family ...

touch screen calligraphy

on the bus, going home, a lady from the orient brushed her forefinger across the screen of her phone and a character of her native script appeared, in bright red on a white page, as if painted by a skilled calligrapher

she sent it, and it was replaced a few seconds later by the reply

it looked as if their way of communicating is a lot easier than typing

she might have been using this app ...

http://www.appszoom.com/android_applications/entertainment/shodoroid-japanese-calligraphy_csyjn.html

i got home and googled "ideograms and pictograms"

the surprise was that i knew next to nothing of heterograms and logograms, etc, etc

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterogram_(linguistics)

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

how many cognitive biases do you recognize ... in your self ?

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cognitive_biases

on reflection, there isn't a mirror that's big enough ...

A little less conversation ...

At Casa Yustas, a wonderful hat shop in Madrid's Plaza Mayor, the languorous young Spanish woman ...

... not unlike the young lolita sevilla ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpz5kbaeOLA

... who couldn’t find a cap that was large enough for me ... ( “Mas grande ! Mas Alto !” I begged her in badly broken Spanish) ... was joined behind the counter by her boss … a young Chinaman !

He said, “I’m sorry I don’t speak very much English ! Can you speak Chinese ?”

Placing the tip of my middle finger between my eyebrows and tapping gently, I said, “No, but I can think Chinese !”

a spaniard sleeps beneath his portrait

whenever i hear the word kultur, then i reach for my gun ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-5ata4jDyk

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

posthumous thanks to graham carey, who lent the record to my mother in ?1964?

lost in toledo ... again, as usual ... i found this huge print pasted on the wall of the archivo municipal de toledo near the plaza de san salvador ... and when i got home i went to the AFT website ...

and discovered that they had made a little fillum ....

http://www.afotoledo.com/?start=9

what i missed because of the air traffic control fiasco ... well, the describable part ... minus the booze and the food frenzy and the party hysteria

the spanish lady at the barajas airport check-in desk said "do you know your flight has been cancelled ?"

i pretended to be nonchalant instead of bilious

and then she said,

"another aircraft that should have departed an hour ago is still at the gate !"

all well and good ! however, landing at heathrow a little earlier than i had expected, there was nowhere for our plane to park

and eventually the two hundred and something passengers found ourselves in the bowels of the earth, waiting helplessly for a transit train that never arrived, even though the automatic announcer told us thirty times it would be along in just one minute,

so we walked what felt like a mile through an even deeper tunnel which has been started for such contingencies, but not completed ... it was effectively a mile-long building site with bare cement floors, machinery and equipment everywhere, and lifts at the far end that only worked intermittently

having already walked about ten miles around madrid in the morning, i was frazzled

and after two hours sleep, followed by yet another twelve hour working day, i still am !

domes ... in madrid and in the alcarria

and what are YOU doing on saturday night ?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHXzuZ1AfJU

in jack's cafe at devizes, which has a bay window looking down on the market place, and a log fire ... we found two prints of paintings by david inshaw, signed by the artist, in real pencil ! ...

... though not these two ... three !

http://www.davidinshaw.net/

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

a nice bit of 150 year old signwriting ...

good wine needs no bush

aesculapius in devizes market place, above what was once a surgeon's front door