Happy St Paddy's Day of yesterday! This is the cake I made for a party of some of the other Irish around here. We talked of Irish things, like which is the best island to visit off West Cork, and which is your favourite RTE fails collection on Youtube (this is mine) Little K suggested sprinkling gold around the leprechaun and giving him a bottle by his side, a suggestion which suited him very well. Her dad talked of a road sign he had spotted on a road trip across the country to Dublin, which flashed past his car window on a dark and rainy road. It said : "DON'T DRINK AND DRIVE EXCEPT - "
I can't help wondering what the final word was - do you?
But for me the late Spike Milligan has the most typically Irish approach to comedy; it's quirky, unexpected and iconoclastic, as well as just plain mad.
Spike had always fancied having the words "I told you I was ill" carved on his tombstone. But he died in Winchelsea, in East Sussex, just south of London, where jokes on tombstones were frowned upon. And this is what happened.
I know I've been quiet for a while. In fact, my last post was just before Christmas, and around that time I had a mysterious and crippling bout of pain which seems to have been arthritis. I've known I had arthritis for decades; it came on when I was quite young. But it had never hurt much. Then an awful pain came like a bolt from the blue and I even had to eat my meals standing up because it hurt my hip so much to sit down, although thankfully I could lie down to sleep. The only thing that helped was exercise, but it certainly was painful and needed some strong painkillers.
The pain gradually went off and now I'm able to sleep without pain medication again. And I hope it doesn't come back.
Like many other parts of the world, England has had a wet and warm spring. When we went to Suffolk a couple of weeks ago, quite a bit of the landscape was under water. We still had a good time - we nearly always do - and I took this photo on a typical bike ride as evening came on. And yes, that's a very large puddle, not a lake.
We also visited one of our favourite Suffolk ponds, which has been created in the shape of a huge eye that stares out into the heavens. It is usually a wonderful sight, and normally you see the outline and the iris quite clearly as you peep across through the hedge. But this time the rainwater had blurred the eye, and its tears had flowed out so far that you'd hardly have known it was an eye at all. We will be back to see it again in dryer weather!
Still, our trip coincided with more sun than they'd had all month, and so we also took the chance to visit Holton Pits. This was until recently an abandoned quarry which was all set to be snapped up for light industrial warehouses. But then the local community decided to take a hand. Read their story here. I contributed to their appeal, so of course I went to look at the place. I was delighted with it and its twenty acres will be a place to return to as the seasons change. Overgrown quarries can be almost magical sometimes, and this one was no exception. Even at midday in bright sun, this corner seemed full of suggestions and shadows.
And as usual there were strange old cottages to see as we cycled along the narrow lanes and through rather deserted old towns. I wonder what it's like in that room above the archway, don't you? Perhaps you have to crawl through on your hands and knees...?
And it was grand coming across Framlingham Castle, such a surprising thing to see through a gap in the hedge when cycling down a quiet lane.
And now it's nearly Easter. I can't believe a quarter of the year is gone already. What have you done in 2024 so far?
Thank you all for your New Year wishes, and let's hope that 2018 is a good year for us all. I've started it with viral bronchitis, picked up from one of several folk I know who are suffering from this, so I haven't been out much. Apart from the discomfort of the illness, I've been happy enough. I've begun reading Helen Dunmore's "Birdcage Walk," and look forward to reading more every time I take it up.
I don't know how it ends yet but it's about a young woman in 18th century Bristol who is married to a seemingly respectable man - but the reader (though not the young woman) can see he is becoming increasingly dangerous and desperate. A very interesting situation!
Dunmore is a wonderful writer in a literary sense - I admire her use of words, her writing technique, the quality of her research and the elegant way she uses that research to bring her period to life. She is also a master of plot. Or, at least, to be more precise, the other books I've read of hers have had terrific plots. I'll let you know if this also the case at the end of my reading of "Birdcage Walk"!
I've also been enjoying blogs. One of my favourites is "The Gentle Author," an anonymous resident of Spitalfields, a once-neglected, now trendy part of London. Her (or his) mission is to reveal as much about this area, past and present, as possible. Because London is such an old city, there is history everywhere once you start looking and the blog is varied and full of treasures. Today the author shows some of the many wood and stone carvings that used to grace East and central London, as seen in local photographic archives. I am glad a photo survived of this physician tending his patients, and particularly the matter of fact way he is sawing off the patient's leg in the second picture down on the left. What do you think is happening in the lower right picture?
These days, one of the best ways to discover ancient carvings of everyday life is to check in old cathedral choirs. Many of them contain special tip-up seats called misericords. These often show scenes of medieval daily life, and may be humorous and touching. Others feature the fearsome demons which occur very often on old churches of all sizes throughout England. I have never known exactly why these demons live in old churches. My theory is that they're imprisoned there so they can be kept under control by God. Here are a nasty couple of creatures on an archway at Ilkesthall St Andrews, Suffolk. The one on the right with its sharp teeth appears to be muzzled. Let's hope so.
Many pubs also have artistic and interesting signs. This "World's End" is near Taunton, Somerset has a nice picture of a punter escaping from the world's cares, but the surround is also interesting.
The badger's a symbol of the brewery, "Hall & Woodhouse" which owns the pub. You can get a better view of the badger here on Street View.
Talking of pubs, do you know the Lidl and Aldi song? (In case you are living in a parallel universe, Lidl and Aldi are discount supermarkets which sell a limited range of very nice food at very good prices plus loads of "special buys" which can be anything from fitness mats to drinks fridges, or embroidery kits, or cheese graters,or even the very nice jacket which T. impulsively bought for £15 in Lidl in Belfast when the weather turned cold.)
This Irish pub song explains how you simply can't go into either store without buying loads of random stuff you never knew you wanted, because the price is so insanely low. Yes, yes.
The composer and performer is Mick McConnell, and the pub's John B. Keane's in Listowel, Co. Kerry.
A friend from Japan stayed with us a couple of days ago - hope I haven't given him my bug. We've had some wonderful New Year and Christmas presents from Japan. Here are two charming small boxes of sweets from friends in Hiroshima. Each box, made from papier-mache, is a little work of art. I think they depict characters from Japanese folklore: the Seven Lucky Gods and Hyottoko.
I've got tickets to something tonight, but I'm not sure I'll be well enough to go. I hope so. My neighbour's invited us to her Twelfth Night party later this evening so I'd like to go to that too but don't want to infect others. Perhaps I'd better do some more research into bronchitis and see if I can figure out what to do!
So that's what I have been up to. I hope you have enjoyed the first week of 2018
Why haven't I been blogging in the last month or so? I think it's because I've been enjoying the outdoors as much as I can - this is my favourite time of year. Here are a few snapshots of what I've been up to while getting out and about.
Everyone has been posting photos of bluebells this year, it must be a good year for them. Mine was taken in beechwoods near Henley on Thames, Oxfordshire. Got up very early and so those long shadows are early ones. It was wonderful to be out at the start of a promising new day.
We had the chance to stay at a friend's cottage in Suffolk for a week, and collected stones on the beach at Dunwich. The stones on the shore are always interesting and I have collected a few eye catching ones in my time. I live in hope of finding one whose markings look exactly like Elvis's face, so I can sell it for a fortune on eBay.
Dunwich is very interesting because most of it has been swallowed up by the sea. If you ever go, there is a first rate little museum which gives the curious history of the place. Here's a picture of what it used to look like. At the bottom is an aerial view of Dunwich today. Above that is the beach, and above that is medieval Dunwich, before it was consumed I suspect that some of the stones we now find on the beach are originally part of medieval houses, worn into smoothness by the sea.
Just across the border in Norfolk I came across one of the fascinating stained glass windows I ever saw, made of fragments of glass of different ages and styles. Assembling the glass was a kind of hobby for the original owner, an eighteenth century archdeacon, and the result is in the local church.. Here is just a part of the window, and if you can enlarge you'll see the detail. If you are a glass buff, you might notice just from the look of it that some of the class is many centuries old.
Back in London a beautiful cycle ride through Hyde Park took us to the V & A Museum. They're having an Art and Engineering season, and this surprisingly beautiful canopy was in fact created entirely by a robot, which is stored in the plastic enclosure in the centre. The project is called the Elytra Filament Pavilion, and you can see the robot building more filaments on 17th and 18th June - just check out the V & A's website.
We also saw their show about Botticelli, which had some arresting images, particularly those by Andy Warhol. You can see one in the background of the picture below, with a dress fabric in the foreground and an Asian style Venus further away.
Thankfully it is now nice weather for cycling, so we headed along the Grand Union Canal and saw this house extension (below). I love the idea of a glass extension, but everyone passing on the towpath could see everything inside, except in the rooms where the owner had completely pulled down the blinds. I was tempted to take a closer picture, actually, but didn't because he was sitting at his desk, looking out of the window right at me.. A charming location, though.
A little further along the canal I spotted some horses drinking, I thought what a peaceful scene it was, the like of which you could probably have seen centuries ago.
Always fun looking at the residential canal boats, which are often occupied by individualists, artists and craftsmen.. How is this for a guard dog? Although actually it looks quite friendly to me.
I had a lovely birthday picnic
But we lost our teapot when someone decided to see what happens when you throw teapots over the edge of the balcony.
Out and about in London, I passed a shiny golden Maserati parked in the street. What I specially like are the L plates. When the kid has passed his driving test in this old thing, he can graduate to something more expensive, I suppose.....
I even went to the theatre. We're lucky to have the Tricycle Theatre near us in Kilburn. Although it is only small it punches way above its weight and I've seen so many good plays there. The current one is called "The Invisible Hand" which at first I thought sounded like a Sherlock Holmes story, full of London fogs and middle class Victorians. It couldn't have been more different. It was an astonishingly gripping and well acted look at how a talented banker held hostage by Pakistani militants offers to invest his way to amassing a $10 million ransom. You could watch the play on several levels. It was extremely gripping, and I had no idea how it would work out, but it was full of twists, turns and shocks, and ended up making me think very hard. The play's writer, Ayad Akhtar, has won a Pulitzer Prize and you can see why.
At home, I have spent too much time obsessing about the Brexit debate. This will probably be of most interest to UK readers, although Americans (and the rest of us) also have to think about the big political decisions in the US before too many months have passed. Recently many countries have swung to what would once have been seen as extreme views. I've found this disturbing, and I think it is dangerous, so I've been wondering why.
I'll spare you my thoughts on this, though, and instead will finish this post with a hopeful picture.
Yes! I found the end of the rainbow! Please keep your fingers crossed that a pot of gold will now appear in my life - in fact, if the picture is correct, there might be two pots of gold. If it does, I'll share it with everyone who has commented on my posts so far this year. Maybe it's a sign I should go and buy a lottery ticket.....
I saw this huge oak tree the other evening in the grounds of an old country house in Suffolk, with late may-blossom in the background.
England can be so beautiful at this time of year.
I'm off to Sheffield to see a relative who is featured in a documentary film. (PS Here is the link, forgot to put it in before). I'm told that it is quite thought provoking. Not quite sure what to expect but it's years since I went to Sheffield, so at least I will be able to compare it as it is today with the way it was when I was a teenager in nearby Chesterfield. I think it's fair to say that Shef will now be very different from the grimy yet characterful old place it was in those days!
As for the film, I will just have to wait and see..... "thought provoking" - what can that mean???
A friend let us use her family's cottage in Suffolk so we took the chance to go for a few days, and a very good idea it was. I've been getting all wound up about various things that aren't worth getting wound up about... and then feeling annoyed with myself because I know it's all really trivial YET I KEEP FUSSING ABOUT IT. As I expected, a few days without phone or internet blew it all away!
I will download the photos soon, but first.... I still have a few images of Japan in my file, mostly about food. You might remember I was a bit iffy about Japanese food before I went, but now I'm a fan. I hope you enjoy looking at these aspects of food. I start with a picture of how it feels to come into Tokyo in the evening. We were arriving from Kyoto and had a dinner date within about an hour of arriving, so this picture recalls that feeling. To be honest, Japanese cities do not present a very pretty appearance from the train but the light gave it a strange charm.
At the station, before each trip, we usually bought snacks to eat on the train, and I was always attracted by the variety of brightly colourful bento boxes. They look as if they are full of sweets, but most of the food is savoury.
Before setting out we had had a Western style breakfast, with persimmon, salad, mini frankfurters and omlette and mashed potatoes. Western style food, but far from the fry-ups you will get at the average British b&b.
Some of the restaurants presented food in the most elaborate ways. This was seafood - almost too amazing to eat.
I considered going to MacDonalds and sampling their "take" on Japanese food (it wasn't all hamburgers). But in the end I didn't.
This tiny model of an old fashioned cake shop stood on a table in the real cake shop we visited in Kanazawa with our friend Rie. I thought how trusting it was of the owners to leave this little model here unprotected on the table with us.We admired the little display counter full of sweets, and the sweet boxes in the shelves behind. There is a low table so you can sit down, and that is a very interesting green mask hanging on the door.
Here is the real shop,
This is an autumn cake, with an autumn leaf and autumn colours and the autumn taste of chestnut, most beautifully presented in a tea house in Kanazawa.
Also in Kanazawa we admired a particularly large sake shop. Bottles of all sizes from tiny to truly huge, ranged along shelves that reached from floor to ceiling. I am afraid I couldn't tell the difference between different types of sake at all.
Don't know what these bottles are supposed to hold - look a bit scary actually - but they are some kind of a drink.
I think this little boy is dressed up for Shichi-Go-San, when little girls of 3 or 7 and little boys of 5 dress up in traditional costume. I was told that the children are given sticks of red and white candy on this day, but if this little lad had had any candy, he'd already eaten it.
I think he might have liked some of the pancakes and waffles in Tokyo's Takashita Street. It is where teenagers congregate to see and be seen. Sadly for boys, sweet waffles seem to be considered a bit girly. Certainly it seemed to be only the girls who were buying.
On the whole, people didn't eat the great bags of sweets and snacks that they do here. Perhaps that is why nearly everyone we saw was slim.
And oh yes, I'll be restricting calories tomorrow. There is also some excellent food to be had in Suffolk and I feel as if I ate too much of it. Those Womens Institute cake sales have a lot to answer for!
So, here in London, daily life has been going on... It's been busy (mostly about Lewis Carroll) and I'm getting cabin fever stuck inside. I also need to stop listening to the radio all about the horrible things going on in the world, but thank goodness I have got out sometimes, to the gym, the shops and of course, to see family.
And, a bonus - our friend's cottage in Suffolk just became empty and she's offered us the chance to go for a few days soon. East Anglia in winter is not the warmest or most exotic of places but we willl go eagerly. I've been missing Suffolk, which has been an important part of my life for years with its beautiful big skies. Here's a picture I took there a few winters ago.
Well, back to work. I just wanted to check in. I'll post about Japan again in a few days. It's nice to revisit it in my mind.
Bah! No sooner do I start crowing about having got 400 followers when one drops off. Oh well, I've got 399 followers, then. :)
It's been quite a social week, doing more than usual with family and friends. It's lovely but some of them don't like being featured on blogs so I can't write much about it. I've also been doing a bit of work and lots of boring stuff - you know, renewing insurance, trying to sort out the computer, trying to get the filthy marks the decorators left off the BRAND NEW WHITE curtains, juggling finances, removing thick layers of dust from the builders, nope, you don't need to hear more....
Just as well then, that my photo editing program decided to reshuffle all my photos into alphabetical rather than date order, so it's thrown up several interesting ones of windows, which I enjoyed looking at and thought you might like to see too.
Some of the pictures, I must confess, well, I've forgotten where I took them now. I think the one below was in Herefordshire, in a cottage belonging to an artist, I assume it was one of his sculptures. If you recognise it, let me know!
The reflections in this window seemed wonderfully muddled and multi layered to me. Two brass deer, and a street scene intermingled.
A windscreen counts as a window, right?
When I passed this Suffolk caravan park last year I felt that this window display must be telling SOME kind of a story - a funny one, I think.
Here's another window scene in Suffolk. (What's with Suffolk and weird windows?) A little more emotion in this one, perhaps the black rat is the Mama trying to persuade her son not to go off to fire that cannon in the war?
Here are graffiti and classical reflections from my recent trip to Hamburg. We stayed in an area full of marvellously varied old houses, covered in graffiti and/or painted up in odd ways. The area seemed to be populated by a mixture of hippies and yuppies. Anyway this house was covered in classical statues, and painted black. Hence the window reflection. And the graffiti? Well, what do you think?
Fascinating naive-art pargeting in Northern France. This is a forgotten little corner not far from the Northern coast. Once again I've forgotten exactly where - but I think it's near Honfleur. Pargeting is the art of decorating plasterwork. I've seen a lot of it in East Anglia, but only rarely noticed coloured examples like these. Someone is keeping it very well painted up.
Disorientated in Southern Spain... yes, this is a real street, below, and it did look like that. The crooked windows are a version of what will eventually be built (or which was there before). The design is printed on a huge netting hoarding, designed to conceal building work going on, but someone has had the bright idea of making it interesting and eye catching. It certainly is that, as you walk along the street, specially since the pavement is paved in eye dazzling grey and white zigzags.
Some feathery lampshades and velvet curtains glimpsed through a window in Oscar Wilde's old house in Tite Street, Chelsea. I am sure Oscar would have liked pheasant feather lampshades.
I thought the fronds of these palms somehow echoed the closely spaced glazing bars of the window
And here is a distinctly child-sized window which I spotted at this little greengrocer in Shere, Surrey, recently (no fruit and veg in the window because it was Sunday). Look at Daddy towering up there! But then, undernourished poor people a few hundred years ago could be very small indeed, so doors and windows were often low. And it was cheaper to build small.
The scene below was taken by moonlight from one of our windows, in the snow. It reminds me a bit of one of those very old French photos of the 1840s. I lightened it, otherwise didn't process the image at all.
Another night scene, chugging down the Nile towards sunset, just us and the boatman.
!
These abstract reflections are the windows of a Disney hotel reflected in the water. The hotel looked ugly in the day, but came into its own at night.
And this is not a window, but a reflection, somewhere in the Middle East, where a huge mirror reflects the enormous inner courtyard of an old mansion. Reminds me of an old fifties art movie. What is that woman thinking?
My next job is to get round to visiting some blogs - and peep through the windows into other peoples' worlds.
