Location
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Dunster Yarn Market
Just down the hill from Dunster Castle is the village, which contains a very fine 17th century Yarn Market. Given the weather that we had when we first arrived in Dunster I can only imagine this building was erected primarily to keep the cloth in the market dry! The angles of this building seemed well…
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Dunster – Entrance
A stone archway can often be relied upon to make a good frame for a picture, as long as there is something interesting visible through the arch. In the case of the entrance into Dunster Castle (or more precisely the exit as this is the vista as one leaves the castle!) the view through the…
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Girona – at High Speed
Girona is a beautiful old city. It is a place apparently well known as the backdrop to a series of “Game of Thrones” – a popular drama series that I have never seen, but which apparently many others have enthusiastically watched. Girona is also on a high speed train line from Barcelona, with an ultramodern…
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Stained Glass – Christ Church
A while ago we showed some American friends around Oxford. Their reaction to all the old buildings was of course quite predictable, but what I hadn’t expected was that their awe would also make me appreciate again buildings that had become all too familiar. One of these, the cathedral in Christ Church, was an oasis…
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Stained Glass – Sagrada Familia
I can’t quite decide whether this painting is okay or not! On the one hand it definitely doesn’t capture the vibrant colours in the glass that my eyes saw at the time and that my camera captured for posterity. On the other hand, it is quite a pleasant picture to look at, and it does…
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Bruges – Heilige Geeststraat
I don’t recall ever seeing a road in the UK named “Holy Ghost Street” – nor indeed anywhere else in my travels. However, rather than declare this to be an unusual name for a road and assume that this is a particularly Belgian thing, I am quite willing to admit that perhaps I just have…
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Flamenco – Sacromonte
There appears to be a debate – heated at times – as to where flamenco music and dance originated. One of the early places where flamenco was to be found in the caves of Sacramonte near Granada, where the gypsies lived. These days those caves have been sanitised and host nightly flamenco shows for tourists,…
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Wild Flowers – Wisley
The Royal Horticultural Society Garden at Wisley seems to have gone big on wild flowers this year. Of course there are still lots of formal gardens, exotic plants, hard-to-keep-alive plants in rude health and immaculate lawns, but here and there a riot of multicoloured mayhem has been encouraged to happen, kept in order only by…
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Sundial
Sundials work better on some days than others. This one in the gardens at Polesden Lacey was working on the day that we saw it, for the simple reason that the sun was shining. Curiously however it was not quite showing the correct time – even after making allowance for the fact that our watches…
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Monte dei Paschi di Siena
Around about a decade ago, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena was attracting more publicity than the bank probably wanted, mainly due to problems they were having at the time with bad loans and losses. This general view of the bank’s historic headquarters accompanied many of the press articles at the time, but in the…
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BMW Graffiti
This is my first attempt at graffiti, albeit a piece of socially responsible virtual graffiti on the photo of a wall! The car that I have drawn is in the BMW Museum in Munich, and to my somewhat aged eyes is the absolute classic BMW design – the way that I remember BMW cars looking…
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Siding – Shenfield Station
Shenfield is a commuter town on the train line out of Liverpool Street in London, and happens to be where I grew up. Today the town has become one the the endpoints for the shiny new Elizabeth Line, but not so long ago this decrepit guard’s van was also to be seen in a siding…
Doodling ... 