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Dunster – Entrance
Read more: Dunster – EntranceA 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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Treeangle
Read more: TreeangleWith apologies for the dreadful pun in the title – here is a further development of the technique that was used for the Trencadís(h) post. Here it is used to depict a type of “tree of life” image. In keeping with the style of trencadis, this picture is composed of triangles representing ceramic shards, and…
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Girona – at High Speed
Read more: Girona – at High SpeedGirona 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
Read more: Stained Glass – Christ ChurchA 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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Trencadís(h)
Read more: Trencadís(h)Here is something slightly different, inspired by a recent visit to the Park Güell and various modernist buildings in Barcelona, where Gaudi created a lot of mosaics using ceramic shards. This drawing is not exactly a piece of “trencadís” however, as no physical shards of glazed ceramic were used. Rather it was simply drawn as…
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Bruges – Heilige Geeststraat
Read more: Bruges – Heilige GeeststraatI 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
Read more: Flamenco – SacromonteThere 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
Read more: Wild Flowers – WisleyThe 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
Read more: SundialSundials 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
Read more: Monte dei Paschi di SienaAround 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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Mondrian-esque Family Tree
Read more: Mondrian-esque Family TreeAnother activity with which I while away my hours is genealogy. So it is that, during a moment when my mind was idling (there are of course many such moments!), I came up with the idea of a colour based family tree – that is a relationship chart where the colour of a child would…











