by the roadside at rectory farm in lower benefield ... 'twas obviously marie-antoinette's secret summer hideaway, ennit ? ... the curved wall is shelved so that the milk churns could be left there for collection

an ickle bit of poetry springs to mind ...

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/schools/teachers/offbyheart/the_kings_breakfast_milne.pdf

May Day

By the pond which heads two valleys at Turners Hill … the first swallow.

By a quarry near Betchworth, momentarily quiet at lunchtime, only the sounds of falling rain and a skylark.

Just about everywhere … the scents of cow parsley, hawthorn, and freshly mown grass.

3BT

Emerging victorious from a winding race against imagined rivals, my truck flies up through the damp and shivery bluebelled woods on the western side of Ashdown Forest to encounter a cheering throng of about a zillion fluffy dandelion seed heads dewily bejewelled and backlit by the rising sun.

At breakfast time, four hours in to my working day, Barb the wise coffee woman at Waitrose in Crowborough is sliding my best coffee in town across the counter before I can open my mouth to order it.

Much later, as I wash the dishes after supper, a huge thundery cloud edged with silver darkens the western horizon where we look out across the Thames Valley from Putney Heath towards Kew and Northolt and the very distant Chalfonts.  By a trick of light and perspective, a solitary late sunbeam finds a gap and slopes up from left to right, and for a few minutes a succession of gleaming jets flying out of Heathrow seem to climb that beam as if it were a Freeway to Heaven.

art and politics ( part 99 ) thomas hobbes' leviathan ... first and second version frontispieces ... look at the little figures that "constitute" the big one

i'll be more than happy to sell you the franchise on alvi's artistic output for one million dollars ... cash !

you never told me your granny had been an artist's model ...

supper at emmaus ... veronese's version is just a little bit like hello magazine for the late 1550's, i'm assuming most of the figures are the unknown patron's family

titian ... 1530














tintoretto ... 1542

veronese ... 1559

caravaggio ... 1601

and caravaggio again ... 1605

and velasquez ... 1620

waiting for the veronese exhibition to open on saturday morning ... why? oh why didn't i bring my snorkel and flippers ?

I apologize ...

if you have received an inappropriate e-mail from me ... i appear to have been hacked ... i'll lay low for a few days and change my password, etc etc

20 years ago, or more ! sandi blake ran up three plain canvas panels to cover the lower part of a bay window in a basement flat in hove ... and asked me to decorate them ... NOW !!!, she said ... expediency led me to steal, shamelessly, from other people's ideas ... so, apologies to matisse and duncan grant are long overdue ... and then she moved out, so i took 'em back !

one of my favourite fillums ...

... and one of my favourite paintings

saturday morning bliss after a physically and mentally exhausting week ... sitting in a sunny window to write in peace, perfect peace !

i may have to travel some distance to get a decent game of polo ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSxHZK2pruA

feeding time in the primates' enclosure

... many thanx to janet for the lovely picture

in highgate cemetery

joe hyam, late of tunbridge wells ... i'll never meet a sweeter man

chancing on the derveni krater's very existence, i was so impressed by this writer that i went online & bought the book ... it was quite hard to find, and very easy for the shippers to lose, but i've just rescued it from the local sorting office ... battered but invitingly readable

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

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

i couldn't find or obtain the book in my local library and was interested in avoiding paying money to amazon ... i found a link that went via waterstones to a book store in pennsylvania, but when the book finally did arrive it had come from the great alibris warehouse, improbably situated in the remote town of Sparks in nevada

an aesthete rampages through the national portrait gallery

i cannot subdue my sporting instincts ... please, please, please will someone lend me an elephant ? or a pony ? on second thoughts ... it had better be the elephant