Thursday, May 1, 2014

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.

Wednesday, April 30, 2014

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.

Monday, April 21, 2014

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


Monday, March 31, 2014

feeding time in the primates' enclosure

















... many thanx to janet for the lovely picture

Thursday, March 27, 2014

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