Walking on Crete

These days it is hard to get off the beaten track but if that’s your kind of thing (it’s mine) Western Crete is for you. Olive trees out-number inhabitants by sixty to one; the scenery is spectacular; there is an abundance of churches and, at this time of year, lovely wild flowers. 

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On Crete

Thank you for happy birthdays in Comments and e mails. Margaret and Pam sifted the facts and correctly deduced that we are in Crete, scene of fierce fighting in 1941 (The Battle of Crete) and subsequent resistance. The Greek Orthodox Easter Sunday, this year, falls on Sunday next. And the musical birthday clue was When… Continue reading On Crete

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Pastoral

Pastoral appeared in Punch on 8th April, 1903. It is inappropriate this cold, rainy Eastertide. The weather (in the past Emphatically bitter), Seems to have changed at last. The birds begin to twitter.

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Fox, Food, Fops

It was raining much too hard to take a photograph of this fine bronze of Charles James Fox erected in 1816. I was walking across the north side of Bloomsbury Square on my way to the British Museum and their Charmed Lives in Greece exhibition.

Trexit

This is not an April Fool – I wish it were. Today is the first day of Trexit when Hammersmith and Fulham leaves the tri-borough of H&F, Kensington and Chelsea and Westminster.

Blythe Spirit

This is the entrance to a building used by the V&A, the Science Museum and the British Museum for storage since 1979 but, maybe, not for much longer.

Charmed Lives

There is a beguiling exhibition at the British Museum, Charmed Lives in Greece, about Niko Ghika, John Craxton and Patrick Leigh Fermor.

Antikythera

At the belated St Patrick’s Day dinner I attended last week there was an interesting guest: Michael Wright, a mechanical engineer, although that hardly does him justice. We have to go back some way to understand his achievement, in fact to Antikythera in the Aegean in about 80 BC where a cargo vessel carrying booty… Continue reading Antikythera

Death on the Bosphorus

I struggled at first with Dance to the Music of Time. It is otiose to allude to Powell’s circumlocutory style making Henry James’s prolix, copia verborum seem exiguous. However, I persisted and now I am hooked.

Two Architects in Kensington

This is the parliament building in Wellington, New Zealand, designed by Sir Basil Spence in the 1960s; one of his better efforts. I don’t have to look far to see one of his less successful civic buildings, Kensington and Chelsea Town Hall on Phillimore Walk.