17 March 2021 Breakfast time. I am battling with some under-set marmalade (made by me) that slurps everywhere; I am using a tea-spoon. Katie is having similar trouble with honey. When bought in Siena, it had looked non-runny, denso in Italian, but on opening months later it turned out to be sloppy. So I ask …
(December 2020) The Bird of Time has but a little way To fly — and lo! The Bird is on the Wing The colours of autumn were at first brilliant on the trees and then for a couple of days just as bright on the ground, till they turned dark brown and dry. Now those …
Newsletter 46: Can it really be Thursday already? Read More »
Crack! I wake in a drench of adrenalin and fear. What was that? Something dropped from a plane? But apart from wind in the trees it is darkly silent outside. No plane is manoeuvring over Cumnor Hill on its way to Brize Norton, common enough at three-ish in the morning hereabouts. There is a more …
Newsletter 44 (14 June 2020) In our bathroom, at about 8:30 in the morning, the sun streams in the roof window, hits the bevelled edges of a mirror, and showers small rainbows over the white tiles and the bath. Not exactly rainbows, as they are all straight, but if there is a word for these …
Newsletter 43 (17 April 2020) This morning on the short walk to my office there was a beer bottle on the grass verge (interestingly it was an Italian beer called Moretti). I picked it up. I carried the bottle carefully in my left hand, put it in the green bin at the back of the …
Newsletter 42 (7 January 2020) The angry red clock on the oven tells me that it’s 3 am. Sipping a glass of water I look out on the garden. It is bathed in steely grey moonlight. The roof opposite, usually black, is white with frost. I think of Coleridge’s lines: ‘The Frost performs its secret …
With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb’st the skies Read More »
Newsletter 41 (18 September 2019) Ekphrasis is a term for the vivid description of an object, often a work of art. Often it is a verbal representation of a visual representation. Images and objects, however powerfully they appear to express an idea, are mute and unknowable. Words can make them speak in many voices, attach …
Newsletter 40 (26 April 2019) Waking in Camigliano I can hear buzz-saws snarling down in the valley. A team of woodcutters, probably Albanian, is at work thinning down the trees of the macchia, mostly the tough Mediterranean holm-oaks, Quercus ilex. The logs will be left to mature and then piled up in huge lorry-loads, to …
Newsletter 39 (25 January 2019) In a former newsletter I wrote of the particular pleasure in leaving behind rooms in an art gallery full of religious paintings, however wonderful, to come across portraits of ‘real’ people. Such an experience has been recently available at the National Gallery. The exhibition exploring the relationship between Giovanni Bellini …
Newsletter 38 (9 July 2018) Waking at the dawn of an early summer day, I committed myself to trying to get back to sleep, with little hope. There was a Cuckoo calling, and a Hoopoe, and I don’t remember ever hearing them call at the same time before. A deer was barking a long way …
