Blog - People In Mind
Wild West Wind.
‘O wild west wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being, Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing’ Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red ...’ Last weekend I stood silently on the crest of a hill surveying the sun...
read moreWhat Colour is Peace?
In all the fevered debates shadowing the UK’s departure from the European Union one word is rarely mentioned – peace. The historian Winston Churchill behind the better-known politician passionately supported the formation of the 1951 European Coal and Steel Community....
read moreWoodlands
Not many years ago a young couple in our family received a present from Iran. It came in two special postal deliveries and created quite a stir in the small flat where they were living at the time. The wife is a British Iranian, so it was no surprise that her Iranian...
read moreSerendipity
Not long ago UK voters chose ‘serendipity’ to be their favourite word though it only entered the English language about 270 years ago. It was invented by Horace Walpole – son of the first British prime minister, Robert Walpole – in 1754 from the Persian story of The...
read moreThe Lumber Room
One of the most powerful of many memorable sequences in the Visconti film of Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) is when the hero and heroine – Tancredi and Angelica (acted by Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale) – run, frolicking, through the attic rooms of an immense and...
read moreLeonardo da Vinci’s Valley
The Etruscans from 800 BC onwards drained and cultivated this fertile valley and held their Olympic games to the west of Cortona where the great burial tumuli still stand. The Romans took over the Etruscan canal network until it fell into disuse after the decline of...
read moreAt the Flick of a Finger
When we first arrived in this Tuscan valley there were only a few electricity poles strung up from the main road below. Our neighbour Renato, who had been born in the valley, was thrilled because he could have light ‘at the flick of a finger’. The current was so...
read moreTopsy Turvy
Some years ago young summer travellers to Scotland returned tanned on a late summer ferry from Dover to Calais. We were returning from a rainy Tuscan summer and looked at them enviously. One vivid memory was of a visit to Perugia. A host of umbrellas hurried along the...
read moreThe Pattern of Centuries
A few years ago I went to the archives of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence to find out when the Tuscan mountainsides were first terraced. I had already walked through every room in the famous picture collection, hoping to find landscape replacing the gold of heaven in...
read moreCastles A>D
The Lombards moved south from modern-day Hungary in the 7th century A.D. to set up their kingdoms of Benevento and Spoleto. They passed by the Etruscan and later Roman hilltop city of Cortona to rule from a network of castles. Suspicious of cities, they chose to...
read moreTopsy Turvy
Some years ago young summer travellers to Scotland returned tanned on a late summer ferry from Dover to Calais. We were returning from a rainy Tuscan summer and looked at them enviously. One vivid memory was of a visit to Perugia. A host of umbrellas hurried along the...
read moreCharred Earth
No rain for nearly six weeks. Occasionally clouds, but light and carefree. Or they pile up on the horizon like mountains shimmering behind a grey haze, and then disperse to leave the sun to reign by day and the moon by night. At dusk this Friday Britain will witness a...
read moreGhosts
The very word – ghost – evokes fear and fascination. It conjures up, literally, a host of images from will o’ the wisps dancing in cemeteries to Anne Boleyn running along a corridor in Hampton Court clasping her head under her arm. A country...
read moreBeached
Not far away is Spurn Head, a wobbly tip of land that sticks out into the North Sea. Much of the land around it is below sea level and prone to flooding. The Greenwich meridian passes through it and whales swim around it. They sometimes are swept on to the beaches and...
read moreThrills
It was thrilling, an excitement that bound you in its own terms. Powerless, you are in thrall to a group of men chasing a ball! Enthralled once meant ‘enslaved’, a thrall meant a slave. Now we are willingly enslaved by our emotions, in thrall to excitement. We need an...
read moreIceberg in Heatwave
Visitors to the Minster stop and gaze at our June glory – two standard rose bushes smothered in blossom, as they have done ever since I planted them over 15 years ago. I had long forgotten their name, though I could see them on my closed eyelids wherever I happened to...
read moreChance
Some years ago I was having dinner in a handsome brick townhouse built in the early 1700s when a small soft piece of leather with a ribbon in a bow was passed around - a tiny child’s shoe. It had just been found under centuries-old plaster, recently removed to...
read moreTale of a City
If we define a city as a town with a cathedral, then Lichfield is a city. Its grubby cathedral standing proud in its walled precinct would ‘lose its face’, I was told, if cleaned because the local reddish stone crumbles under jets of water. Inside there was a buzz of...
read moreExotic
Some time ago I travelled through Asia on a British Council lecture tour. It started in Jakarta where I stayed with friends. I was overwhelmed by the exotic colours, vivacity, chatter and humdrum chaos, but fascinated too. Banana bushes – or trees? – seemed to grow...
read moreMayflowers
Here in Yorkshire white-flecked hedges mark out meadows, pastures and wheat fields. There are even mayflower woods clinging to hillsides. Where the hawthorn hasn’t been trimmed beside the roads, it grows into low trees waving bouquets of tiny-petalled flowers. When...
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