Threads

Think of something that mesmerises you. It might be a moment visualised vertically instead of part of a horizontal continuum, one that probes and reveals. Time passing might be visualised like a weft of horizontal threads weaving through the taut, upright threads of...

Amazed!

  Spring is here! The snowdrops have faded but daffodils are on road verges, roundabout and in woodlands, with celandine. Hedgerows are just tipped with green and every day I see the sticky buds on the chestnut tree across the road getting fatter, about to burst. So...

Historical Character Assassination

We climbed up the side of a hill, and it was hot. Rock tombs this time, not tumuli like the ones we had seen at Tarquinia. Then, in the Etruscan necropolis near Pitigliano, we came upon the temple front carved out of tufa, columns only stumps sticking out of the...

Lost Children

We’ve climbed the tower which the eccentric William Beckford built so he could escape from the social whirl of early 19th-century Bath to contemplate, in solitary brooding, the hills around the city, the Mendip hills of the Neolithic inhabitants long before the...