solomon guggenheim meets ned kelly 

travellers' tales

who dares to say the basques have no humour ?

street furniture outside the bilbao fine arts museum 

typical bilbao shop window 

i said open the door, cloth ears ! 

pre-guggenheim 

bilbao viscaya

we'll be catching a bus to stansted airport in the early hours on monday and then flying to bilbao

will a deputation of swooning marxist feminists be waiting to greet me when we land ?

will our hotel be nearly posh enough ?

can there possibly be enough alcohol in the city for both of our thirsts ?

will they sell me a half-price ticket for the train to san sebastian if i shave and approach the ticket office on my knees ?

if you really really care, then watch this space ...

i was going for the last swim of the summer but the tide was out 

wooden ducks and fevvered ducks at the garage by the village pond at four elms in kent

in memoriam at mereworth, gor blimey ! 

too early for confession ...

mereworth church, clumsily ostentatious, proto-gothic-revival ?

the cheese man pauses at mereworth church in kent

1831 Topographical DictionaryMEREWORTH, a parish in the hundred of LITTLEFIELD, lathe of AYLESFORD, county of KENT, 5 miles (S.E.) from Wrotham, containing 711 inhabitants. The church, dedicated to St. Lawrence, was rebuilt by John, Earl of Westmorland: it is a very handsome structure, with a fine Corinthian portico, and surmounted by a lofty spire: the whole edifice is constructed of different sorts of stone, and the eastern window is of painted glass, collected for the purpose by that nobleman. The grazing land in this parish is supposed to breed the largest oxen in England, some of them having exceeded three hundred stone. This parish is bounded on the north by the Hurst woods.

chocolate cake with ganache icing and piping - a public announcement

it's no use begging; the cake in yesterdays blog has all gone !

boord street gas works in greenwich; the pillars are of uniform thickness, as are the concentric rings, but the diagonal ties or reinforcements get thinner towards the top ! weren't the engineers clever ?

sheila evans, linda crabb, and roy hewish, not in the least bit hung-over ! 

sheila's cake for tristan ... i know what you're thinking ... and you're right again ! 

one of wandsworth's many cormorants 

sunken boats and a wary heron in wandsworth's river wandle

wandsworth's river wandle

george and lea, two very sharp madrillenos

the red cranes are in at battersea power station 

an unsignposted diversion

sometimes chance provokes what i like to call "an unsignposted diversion"

having set out unusually early for kent, and seen the sky colouring up quite psychedelically, instinct commanded that i drive half a mile away from my regular route to the waterside at greenwich

alright, i know pink skies are two a penny on the internet, but i was very happy !

dawn at greenwich 

looking over towards canary wharf from greenwich 

a surprise just inside the m25 to the north of reigate 

no need to photoshop, some workaholic has hand-painted it ! 

a daily glimpse on my way home 

pub tiles in wandsworth 

in the sunday silences between jumbos

i really don't mind being right on the noisy centre line with the two parallel heathrow runways because i love the grace and precision of airplanes/aeroplanes and will always marvel as they circle and swoop down after their ten-thousand mile leaps of faith

so in the early light i stand at our window in my posh blue pyjamas and admire three identical british airways giants crossing the space above us in succession

outside our window is a lush triangular green lawn about sixty yards by fifty by forty with nineteen trees where fifteen wood pigeons are foraging in the short grass, a squirrel scavenging in a rubbish bin at the far side, and the most elegant and athletic young black cat who pads lightly across the green from left to right and through the trees with his sharp eyes already on the squirrel who sits on top of a steel door munching a large piece of stale bread

the cat instinctively hides in a shadow beneath a car for a minute, possibly hoping the squirrel has a short attention span, and then moves to another shadow beneath a wheely-bin only about ten feet from the squirrel's perch where he crouches for another minute

the squirrel chews thoughtfully until the cat trots towards the door and then the squirrel launches himself out into neutral territory, at right angles to the cat's approach, the bread still in his mouth, and races in a tight curve around the back of another car and then makes a straight line towards the trees which the cat came from two minutes ago

there are twenty yards to go and the cat catches up fast and the gap between them shrinks from fifteen feet to five in about two seconds but then the squirrel makes a wonderful leap about four feet up the tree trunk and scrabbles up into the branches leaving one disappointed cat sitting ten feet underneath, back arched, tail swishing and twitching, but then calming down and sitting and waiting

the squirrel finishes his bread at leisure and then climbs higher to the outermost branch, steadies himself while it sways and bends before leaping far away into the next tree

game over

later, as the loved one emerges slowly from her dreamland, i suggest that if she really loved those fluffy little squirrels then she'd already be knitting their socks and mittens for the coming winter

no coherent or printable reply is forthcoming

unpridicktible wever

when i woke, at three-thirty, the rain was rattling down mercilessly, but it eased off as i began to pedal to work and, a half an hour later the roads in nine elms were dry and the night-lads had come out of their refrigerated warehouse to snatch a few minutes sleep on the comparitively warm pavement

on the way down to worthing i passed through a couple of squalls but it was only after my first drop at the cheeseman's quayside warehouse on shoreham harbour that the sky began to lively up

by the time i drove by the promenade at hove, people were stopping to gape at the colours and i leapt from the van just in time to take this view of the approaching storm ...

the storm approaching hove actually 

eric ravilious looking up ... 

eric ravilious looking down ... 

eric ravilious serendipity

one of the best birthday cards that i had yesterday came from the loved one, showing a painting by eric ravilious of a third class train carriage interior with a view towards the westbury white horse.

a most appropriate choice for me because i'm a wiltshire lad,
because i have happy though vague early memories of travelling in similar carriages during the early nineteen-fifties,
and because train journeys still occupy a significant portion of my dreamspace

this morning i went image searching on the net and the first ravilious painting that i found was the "corresponding" view from "up on top" of the white horse, looking down on the train!

when you've finished looking at eric's work, do go and find some of the images by james, his son, a most wonderful photographer