In the dry spring of last year, like nearly everyone, we tried out new walks in our neighbourhood. On one such walk we came across a field completely and gorgeously yellow with buttercups. So this year we set off at the right kind of time to repeat the experience, and certainly we found the same …
I’m pleased to report that no potatoes have recently leapt inappropriately into breakfast-time exchanges, though sometimes the air is thick with whatsisname and thingummyjig as names drift in and out of availability while the brain-box starts to fire up. Someone ingeniously suggested that ‘potato’ was nearly an anagram of ‘teaspoon’, but perhaps that person spends …
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 …
