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 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 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 …
Newsletter 37 (8 February 2018) 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 …
Newsletter 36 (11 October 2017) 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 …
Newsletter 35 (27 March 2017) 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 …
Newsletter 34 (27 December 2016) My grandchildren move through Units of Enquiry. They start with a ‘provocation’ in which the teacher finds out what they already think and know. Nia’s unit was ‘Sameness and Difference’. She came home and set about her own self-provocation: a picture, a debate and a meditation. There are two …
