Our house faces east-south-east, so that as the sun's journey starts to swing further north (yes, yes, I do know that it's us moving...

Writing a blog is in many respects not unlike writing a newspaper column. Although that, admittedly, is rather like saying that cooking dinn...

One of my son Tom's excellent linocuts I subscribe to the TLS (the Times Literary Supplement), a weekly review of what books are appear...

I'm sure you know the (in)famous work of art by Damien Hirst, "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living...

The Enkindled Spring This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green, Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes, Thorn-blos...

So, in the end I did succumb to the temptation to buy a copy of the Topaz Gigapixel "uprezzing" software, which has inevitably cau...

I recently had cause to invoke Oscar Wilde's exculpatory quip concerning the artist Whistler's apparent self-contradiction: "co...

Enough with the words for once: let's have a little break from my baseless bloviation and shameless over-sharing. So-called "meteor...

Man with a  mission (plus more hair and a red beard) When I was writing the post Ships in the Night last year, it occurred to me that it wa...

May 2024 Like (I presume) many people entering old age, I keep getting ambushed by sudden collapses in the internal mental timeline of my li...

Cathedral Close, Winchester We had a family meal in Winchester's Brasserie Blanc on Sunday, in anticipation of my birthday this week (I ...

Self portrait (one of many similar), by Celia Paul I noticed this forthcoming item from MACK books, from which the dreary smeary painting ab...