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 spectral bars, then I have …
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 flats (of which …
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 ministry, Unhelped by …
With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb’st the skies Read More »
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 opinions and ideas to them, …
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 make perfect firewood for pizza …
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 and his brother-in-law Mantegna will …
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 off. Camigliano’s three roosters …
Some time after conducting a rather sudden parking manoeuvre outside our house, I discovered I had flattened a rat in the gravel. I reported this to Katie: “What are you going to do about it?” she asked, with the ‘you’ heavily underlined. What indeed does one do with such an object? Not compost, obviously. Black, …
Feeling myself sometimes (indeed, often) groping around for names or words, I came upon this analysis of the process in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (Volume IV Cities of the Plain).A lady… came to greet me, addressing me by my name… I tried to recall her own name as I talked to her; I …
Forty or so years ago seeing a Buzzard used to be a special thrill, only to be experienced in mountainous areas of Britain, but now these birds are ubiquitous. I see them frequently flying over my home, two miles from Oxford city centre. Even more common are Red Kites from the Chilterns, and I’ve seen …
