Sometimes it’s OK to see the world in blocks of colour and shapes.
Bluebells in Surrey
Imagine the sound of a bluebell wood.
If the bluebells were bells.
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Back to Oxford
A few weeks ago I went to Oxford (again!) for the day to see the Oxford Literary Festival in full swing.
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Constable Exhibition at The Lightbox
‘Painting is with me but another word for feeling’.
So John Constable told Archdeacon John Fisher in a letter in October 1821. If you visit the latest exhibition at The Lightbox in Woking, you will be able to see Constable’s innermost clandestine feelings expressed on the walls of the gallery.
Constable was one of the first artists of the Romantic Movement to view landscapes for their own beauty, rather than as a backdrop for a historical scene. He created his art directly from nature rather than from his imagination and he resisted the fashion of the day to piece together elements taken from nature to form a classical landscape.
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Legoland by Gerard Woodward
Literature is full of ‘doubles’: characters who seem to move in tandem; or twins, whose familial bond and similarities are frequently employed for farcical effect. In Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night’, for example, the sense of a clear identity becomes a tangled mess as Viola, in disguise as a boy called Cesario, falls in love with Duke Orsino, who loves Olivia; Viola has to deliver Orsino’s love letters to Olivia, who quickly falls in love with her as Cesario. Sebastian, Viola’s twin brother who she thought had died, enters on stage, and Olivia is soon smitten with him.
Where was I?
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Bunny Biscuits
Because, Easter.
To make 20 large biscuits, you will need:
7 oz slightly salted butter
5 oz caster sugar
12 oz plain flour
1 medium free range egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 pinch of salt
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Oxford on a Sunday Morning
I spent a free Sunday morning in fascinated wandering through the city of Oxford.
Thankfully the sun came out too!
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Spring at RHS Wisley
A walk round RHS Wisley has the unerring ability to fill me with the hope that spring is the season du jour.
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A Day in the Bath
The High Mountains of Portugal
The High Mountains of Portugal is comprised of three stories whose connection become clear throughout the book: the first, and strongest in my opinion, features Tomás in 1904 who discovers a journal, untouched since it was written by a Father Ulisses in the mid-seventeenth century, which details an object that he has made. Tomás makes it his mission to find the object. It chronicles his journey (in one of the very first Renault cars) through the high mountains of Portugal.
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