The Dead Christ, mimosa and purple orchids

"Among many things at Milan, one pleased me particularly, viz., the correspondence in the prettiest love letters in the world) of Lucretia Borgia with Cardinal Bembbo... and a lock of her haif, and some Spanish verses of hers, - the lock very fair and beautiful. I took one single hair of it as a relic, and wished sorely to get a copy of one or two of the letters; but it is prohibited: that I don't mind; but it was impracticable; and so I only got some of them by heart."
November 8th 1816/Lord Byron letter to Thomas Moore

Sunday morning and the Pinoteca Ambrosiana is almost empty. Could the lock of hair still be here in a manuscript? But the library is closed. My Blue Guide (1950) says there is also a Virgil palimpest 'with marginal notes by the hand of Petrarch'.
Instead - in an empty mansion - creaking wood floors and glimpses of sunlight outside - the facial expressions of those looking at suffering, or the new-born, fill the space. Botticelli's Madonna del Padiglione with its wonderful tented pavilion .... (an asset to any garden - am thinking of my own....)
And Titian's Adoration of the Magi with its wonderful horses.

The gaze and the thinnest gauze of Ambrogio Bergognone's Madonna del Velo....

Back to yesterday's theme of circles. (Perhaps life inevitably involves circles or cycles). Downstairs in a dimly lit library smelling of old paper is the Codex Atlantico - pages and pages of Leonardo's geometrical drawings. The lack of light seems to stop understanding - why this fascination? Then I tried. So you can square a circle.

Raphael's sketch for the Vatican (The School of Athens) is astonishing - armchairs in front of it - too vast to absorb. A Sunday could be spent looking at this.

Bright sunshine outside. After such genius - lunch seems to effervesce and the scores cut in the lemon rind seem an act of grace almost. Such a generous attention to detail.

The trees lining the street to the Brera are black, and look dead. Their roots are close to the surface, veining the asphalt of the pavements. Could they break through?
Mantegna's The Dead Christ has been rehung and relit by a fllm director. Almost missed it.
Veins, and foreshortening.

As in Bellini's Pieta. Such suffering.
Later mimosa and purple orchids in a cafe sparkling as the day outside.

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View of the lakes and Carnival in Milan

A forlorn tube map at Hounslow East ... but in the shuddering gloom of the Piccadilly line it is always exciting to set off early in the morning on a journey. Something else lies ahead.

The train to Heathrow is full of tired people - people who got up early to travel and those who look as if they have worked through the night. Opposite is a weary Asian woman who has several carrier bags filled with bundles of wrapped things, not new purchases - one from W Hotel, Leicester Square. A boy - man? - stands by the door, eating donuts, one after another - three in all - then wipes the sugar from his hands and starts to chant/mimic the train announcements.

As ever, the most spectacular sights are seen from above.

Byron travelled over these with Hobhouse (great friend and best man at his wedding).

"Rose at five. Crossed the mountains to Montbovon on horseback, and on mules, and by dint of scrambling on foot also; the whole route as beautiful as a dream, and now to me almost as indistinct."

September 19th 1816

On the plane read of a virus that is infecting computer networks in the Ukraine. The standoff with Russia continues. This is a new kind of warfare, a digital beachhead. It is known as the Snake virus, or Ouroboros - the snake in Greek mythology that devours its own head. (Perhaps the most vicious form of destruction - destruction of the self ....)

Milan is celebrating: it's the city's Mardi Gras. Excited children in fancy dress and streets crowded with party people. Italians seem happy (though when you say that to Italians they throw up their hands. Happy? We are always complaining). But who wouldn't be happy with such sunshine, and so much mimosa? Light-headed to leave grey London - could be emerging from a dark tunnel into the light.

Odd that days have accidental visual themes. It's entirely a coincidence that the circles in Galleria Vittorio Emanuele mirror the image of Ouroboros. (Perhaps a traveller needs themes - an incidental structure to a visit).

On the streets of gold are similarly giddying visions. Promising a transformation of self, perhaps.

The Versace sequinned dress is like armour: I want one. And love the mauve silk against the jewelled mohair. The heather reminds me of home (in a good way).

(As does this man - talking of contemporary mythology. A god bestriding the Via Spiga. Is there anyone who does not recognise David Beckham?)

.

In an Italian world I would like to be this woman. Love the studded boots.

Later....as ever... the huge white cathedral dominates the square.

The party's over. (In the tradition of the best parties - no one is clearing up yet.) Heaps of confetti everywhere. Much of it is cut from recycled paper, snippets with fragments of phrases.

What do they mean? Like so many fortune cookie messages tossed willy nilly into the world. (In the office before I left a colleague threw away stale fortune cookies, left over from the Chinese New Year. Aren't you throwing away good luck? I said. I don't care, he said. No superstition there.)

Try to piece them together but of course there is no obvious sense. Is there in anything? Could there be a message in the Hermes scarf? Such intricacy. (And lost when worn - whatever it says then is known only to the wearer. In other words - you can't see the pattern when it's folded. Maybe there is a message for life here, too.)

"Milan is striking - the cathedral superb. The city altogether reminds me of Seville, but a little inferior. We had heard divers bruits, and took precautions on the road, near the frontier, against some 'many worthy fellows (i.e. felons) that were out', and had ransacked some preceding travellers a few weeks earlier near Sesto."
Milan, October 5th 1816/Lord Byron letter to his publisher John Murray

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Spring, ecclesiastical decoration and Extreme Rambling

Early start at Penponds Church yesterday - 'gem of Cornish churches' (John Betjeman) - enhanced and adorned by Canon Carah, who died in 1935. He brought back marble from Italy, comissioned ornate carving for the pews, a copy of a medieval tryptich from Belgium for the pulpit. Much of this paid for from his own pocket.

Camellias fading outside the door - pink and white - blossoms sodden and browning. There is a whiff of spring in the air though no sign of sun today.
Start to think of gardens - secret gardens and walled gardens.  Andrew Marvell/The Garden:
"No white nor red was ever seen
So am'rous as this lovely green."
Gardens a state of mind.









Walking too a state of mind. Finally finish Extreme Rambling/Mark Thomas with a sigh of relief. This is a book that describe his walk along the Wall built by Israel around the Palestinian Territories. The most interesting parts when he talks about the experience of walking.

"Anyone with any taste knows that predictability is the woodworm of joy. And joy is what I was after. The joy unlike any other in finding a good walk, is genuine bliss. It comes from a combination of the landscpe, the route, the company and exposure to the elements that stays on the right side of exposure. Most of all, what makes a 'perfect walk' is losing your self in a sense of freedom."

The walk along the wall was too stop/start or alarming or frightening for that.
But was it Forster (E.M.) who says that good writing should reveal, not tell? Thomas just tells us -  on and on and on - the jokes really seem like tagged on afterthoughts (mainly four-letter) when the story telling gets tough.
Plenty of detail of the Palestinians he met whose livelihoods have been destroyed by the war. Also interesting meetings with settlers - lovely vignette of a British diplomat...
But would anyone who hadn't seen the Wall really have sensed what it looked like, or what it felt like.  Maybe it was so overwhelming that it was simply too hard to write about.... Very interesting that the most convincing - and heartfelt - passages seem to come close to the end when he's back in London at parents' quiz night at his children's school. Then some real - not mediated - emotion comes through.

AND ....as far as we can gather - he didn't meet many, if any, Jews who were not settlers, or doing their military service, or extreme Zionists. Would have been interesting had he done so.

Lunch

Cheese on toast and gin and tonic. An odd but good meal for any traveller almost in any mood.
Like one of the strange meals in Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea.
Dessert would be tinned peaches if I were in that novel. With shortbread, probably. Have neither

Merchants of Venice and the jewels of fairy tales

"She looks a sea Cybele, fresh from ocean,
Rising with her tiara of proud towers
At airy distance, with majestic motion,
A ruler of the waters and their powers:
And such she was: - her daughters had their dowers
From spoils of nations, and the exhaustless East
Pour'd in her lap all gems in sparkling showers...."
Byron/Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

Mary McCarthy asks how merchants, commercial people, the inhabitants of Venice, managed to create such a fairy tale city. Because  - perhaps - images of richness are at the heart of fairy tales (is she right? Fairy tales lift the spirits - I have kept my Fairy Liquid bottle from 2011 and the Royal Wedding. Aren't - mainly  - fairy tales about dreams coming true? Kate Middleton
got her balding prince.... But there are also such scary, weird and sinister fairy tales  - Sleeping Beauty in her glass coffin amidst a dense thicket of brambles, pricking a finger and living/dying ....Bluebeard and his murdered wives....)

"Gold, caskets of gold, caskets of silver, the miller's daughter spinning gold all night long, thanks to Rumpelstiltskin, the cave of Ali Baba stored with stolen gold and silver, the underground garden in which Aladdin found jewels growing on trees, so that he could gather them in his hands, rubies and diamonds and emeralds, the Queen's lovely daughter whose hair is black as ebony and lips are red as rubies..."

Just look at the way those Madonnas dress.

"Florentine madonnas wear transparent veils and genteel 'old stuff' = faded blue and old roses with dulled gold trim- that have been handed down for generations in a miserly Tuscan family. This will not do for the Venetians.... No Venetian saint or secular figures is permitted to dress drably."

Lucretia Borgia and rad as tits

It is quite hard to think of many Byron poems that people quote today ... he's thought to be a bit out of fashion.... full-blown.... rather literary....dated... not relevant today.  No one reads him!

But don't think that any other poet was quoted by (the extremely irritating) BAFTA host Stephen Fry last night. Not bad for someone who died nearly 200 years previously. Though - I had to think - am not at all sure what Byron would have made of the BAFTAS.

So defining an age/sensibility/literary movement and lifestyle counts for something. It's fairly hard core as Alison in Story of My Life might say - or as might anyone who mastered that kind of junky punchy American prose/slang.

"Even if you weren't a trilingual doctor of arts and such with a badass resume and a dope setta skills you'd still  be rad as tits."

Byron liked Milan.

"I have been to the Ambrosian library (founded in 1609 by Cardinal Federigo Borromeo)..... I have been most delighted with a correspondence of letters, all original and amatory, between Lucretia Borgia and Cardinal Bembo preserved there. I have pored over them and a lock of her hair, the prettiest and fairest imaginable -  I never saw fairer - and shall go repeatedly to read the epistles over and over; and if I can obtain some of the hair by fair means, I shall try. I have already the librarian to promise me copies of the letters, and I hope that he will not disappoint me. They are short, but very simply, sweet, and to the purpose....

Abraham casting out Hagar and Ismael/Guercino

 The Brera gallery of paintings has some fine pictures, but nothing of a collection. Of paintings I know nothing; but I like a Guercino -a picture of Abraham putting away Hagar and Ismael - which seems to me natural and goodly. The Flemish school, such as I saw it in Flanders, I utterly detested, despised and abhorred; it might be painting but it was not nature; the Italian is pleasing,and their ideal very noble."

Letter to John Murray. 15 October 1816, Milan 

A long journey.... news from another blog

This blog is about journeys - and Kemal Pervanic's has certainly been a long one.
So brilliant to hear that Pretty Village is finally nearing completion.

White House: notorious torture chamber at Omarska concentration camp, Bosnia

 

Story of My Life

Maybe Alison - sex, cocaine and parties -  in Story of My Life/Jay McInerney is a latter day Childe Harold.  On a journey to find something.... Though cannot imagine her sitting still on a train journey.

 

"So, okay, maybe I dreamed it. I was in bed after all, and he woke me up. Not for the first time. But just now, with these tranks they've got me on, I feel like I'm sleepwalking anyway and I can almost believe it never happened. Maybe I dreamed a lot of stuff. Stuff that I thought happened in my life. Stuff I thought I did. Stuff that was done to me. Wouldn't that be great? I'd love to think that ninety percent of it was just dreaming."

Train journeys still - to me - seem the most significant journeys.

Difficult journeys and music for a noisy pub

Difficult journeys today because of the tube strike. This morning very early there is relative silence in my bedroom. Trains start around five usually -  dull thuds in the distance nearly a mile away in Shepherds Bush, but not today.

On Radio 3 as I get ready early for a long journey into town for a concert there is talk of music 'for solitude' or being alone.  They play Knockin' on heaven's door - Bob Dylan's  soundtrack for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid one of my favourite films -  love the music - but why is this music - in particular - for solitude? (Is this a trend? Music for something.... music for prayer.... music for solitude... Why not just - music?  Why am I tired of labelling, packaging, bundles, people's 'top tens', what's in and what's out?)

(On solitude: one thing  about travelling on your own: you are never alone. There is always someone to talk to - companions along the way. In the best sense like Chaucer's crew of travellers in The Canterbury Tales. At the very least someone to chat to on a bus. A journey itself has a trajectory which means engagement - a start and an end, even if the path is unplanned. )

Later on the Wigmore Hall at lunchtime hear two new songs composed by the baritone Roderick Williams (performed by him with the Britten Sinfonia Voices). Intrigued by the programme note by R.W. which suggests that one of the songs In his cups takes place against extraneous and distracting background noise '(of a loud pub for example)'.

So this is the opposite of music for solitude: music for a noisy place.

Alas no recordings yet of this - it is too new.

For the second time in a week an amazing Schumann song (among others brilliantly delivered) - Auf einer Burg  - '.... and the fair bride, she weeps'.

And .... a difficult journey home. It's raining so the walk through Kensington Gardens is quite poetic.

A continent and a world view away spot romance in Chevrolet's Super Bowl ad - featuring cowboys and a pick up truck - back to the Wild West and its mythologies.  The punchline: 'Find new roads."

Passion, life's journey and a robust Biblical quote

I Look Into My Glass

I look into my glass,

And view my wasting skin,
And say, "Would God it came to pass
My heart had shrunk as thin!" 


For then I, undistrest
By hearts grown cold to me,
Could lonely wait my endless rest
With equanimity. 

But Time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide. 

Thomas Hardy

Andrew Motion reading his work last night said this poem struck through to his heart as a schoolboy - and made him want to be a poet.

Odd to think of a poem written near the end of  a life (Hardy's) to inspire a trajectory through life - a journey. (The Lloyds discocerting slogan 'For the journey' and its intimations of the journey's end).

Motion was poet laureate and I cannot bring to mind a single poem of his. He is soft spoken and his hands are shaking. He says at the end of the ten years he committed to, he could not write. The poems dried up. He is writing again now and looks full of life, tanned, healthy, just flown in from a Caribbean beach.

New poems with Images of the Baltic Sea and  a fight in a neighbouring hotel room - poems for the dead.  Emotion muted and hidden.

On the way out a stout elderly woman in a mauve sweater holds open the Ladies' Powder Room door for many to file past. Quite a task as it is on a heavy spring. Thank you, thank you, everyone mutters.

"I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of The Lord than to dwell in the tents of the heathen,"

she says robustly.

Commendable passion from the Psalms. Songs of fervour and longing: music for prayer and life eternal.

In the chaos of ice and polar night - and music for prayer

"Les caravanes partirent. Et le Splendide-Hotel fut bati dans le chaos de glaces and de nuit du pole."
Rimbaud/Illuminations

And the Hotel Splendide was built in the chaos of ice and polar night.

Iceberg hit by the Titanic

Reflections about the Chelsea Hotel in the London Review of Books by Jeremy Harding.

My only experience of the Chelsea Hotel is through Leonard Cohen.

On Radio 3 the Sunday morning programme is dedicated to music for prayer: choral evensongs and masses.Wonder why this - in particular - is music for prayer.

What is music for prayer? Later - go to a recital - Benjamin Appl singing Schumann's Dichterliebe.

Depends what you are praying for, and to whom or what, I guess.

Note to follow up:  Jeremy Harding mentions Gilbert Sorrentino's Splendide-Hotel (1973) - 27 meditations from A-Z with one extra.

 The entry for Z: "Z. Everyone is asleep in the Splendide-Hotel."

Alphabets are like lists - of endless fascination. An attempt to organise the chaos perhaps.

On the shortness of life

Appointments

In their fifties, in their forties
some of them; the small ailments
for which there are now cures
carried them off. Were they conscious
their days were rationed? They took
wives, begot children, fiddled
in a local quartet. Did they sit
under a dwindling candle over
a dead book? Where did they get
their knowledge from? Were there servants
for that as there are now
computers? I think of Wordsworth
boiling his eggs, Coleridge wearing
his shoes out under a Stowey
moon. These had time, both
of them. What of the others,
those who 'in a short time fulfilled
long years'? Did Shelley between
long poems fit in his longer
travels? And what of Marlowe and Keats?
'A free man thinks of nothing less
than of death.' These drove their pen
daily under its lowering
sky. Were they, then, not free?
The distance between one place and
another was like time spent on their knees,
gathering treasure. Between one
hour and the next the cupped mind
did not upset itself, but remained
full, still and deep as the firmament
it reflected. We have shortened
our journeys but have nothing to do
with our time. Hurrying between
one place and the next we make our plans
of what we will do, when we have saved
enough of it to retire on.

R.S. Thomas

When a station is more than a place to catch a train

"Railway stations have always attracted me, not just because trains are there, but because they are also ambivalent places, echoing with completed journeys and still with the melancholy noises of departures."
Eric Lomax/The Railway Man

"There is something illusionistic and illusionary about the relationship of time and space as we experience it in travelling."
W.G. Sebald/Austerlitz

Austerlitz/W G Sebald: opening scenes are at Antwerp station, designed by Delacenserie

"...which was inspired by the Pantheon in Rome, in such stupendous fashion that even today, said Austerlitz, exactly as the architect intended, when we step into the entrance hall we are seized by a sense of being beyond the profane, in a cathedral consecrated to international traffic and trade. Delacenserie borrowed the main elements of his monumental structure from the palaces of the Italian Renaissance, but he also struck Byzantine and Moorish notes, and perhaps when I arrived, said Austerlitz, I myself had noticed the round grey and white granite turrets, the sole purpose of which was to arouse medieval associations in the minds of railway passengers. ....it was also appropriate, he continued, that in Antwerp Station the elevated level from which the gods looked down on visitors to the Roman Pantheon should display, in hierarchical order, the deities of the nineteenth century - mining, industry, transport, trade and capital."

There are stone escutcheons with sheaves of corn, crossed hammers, winged wheels - a beehive - and a huge clock surveying all.

Antwerp Station

NOTES:
The clock dominates in Milan Centrale too: also signs of industry: a temple built at the height of the Fascist era.
The clock at Waterloo: a good meeting place.

Notes on escape, ennui and the failure of love

"L'univers est une espece de livre, dont on n'a lu que la premiere page quand on n'a vu que son pays. J'en ai feuillete un assez grand nombre, que j'ai trouve egalement mauvaises. Cet examen ne m'a point ete infructueux. Je haissais ma patrie. Toutes les impertinence des peuples divers, parmi lesquels ja'i vecue, m'ont reconcilie avec elle. Quand je n'aurai tire d'autre benefice de mes voyages que celui-la, je n'en regretterais ni les frais ni les fatigues."
Le Cosmopolite, ou, le Citoyen du Monde, par Fougeret de Monbron. Londres, 1753

May 1. Weigh anchor from off Cape Janissary, anchor eight miles from Dardanelles
May 2. Anchor off Castle Chanak Kalessia (Kale i Sultaniye)
May 3. Byron and Mr Ekenhead swim across the Hellespont (lines "Written after swimming," etc)

'His house, his home, his heritage, his lands,
The laughing dames in whom he did delight,
Whose large blue eyes, fair locks, and snowy hands,
Might shake the saintship of an Anchorite,
And long had fed his youthful appetite;
His goblets brimmed with every costly wine,
And all that mote to luxury invite,
Without a sigh he left, to cross, the brine,
And traverse Paynim shores, and pass Earth's central line."
Byron, Childe Harole's Pilgrimage, stanza xi

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Ten thousand worlds for the choosing and the American sublime

"They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and cased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing."

Wonderful sentence about a start of a journey in All the Pretty Horses /Cormac McCarthy.... a start of an adventure into a landscape that's mythical as much as real.... all part of the American dream - early 19th century American landscape painters and their vision of the sublime (anything possible in this grand and awesome new world - as indeed it was.

Frederick Church/Twilight in the Wilderness

The nape of a neck and emotion

Very intrigued by portraiture and emotion: why do we care about the sitter?  Brilliant letter in the London Review of Books on a recent article on Lucien Freud. Remember - but will never re-find it - a line in a Iris Murdoch novel about a man's wrists- and the sight of them moving the protagonist deeply. Two points - what it is like to occupy a certain body at a specific moment and time, but also one's feelings towards that body.

 In my view the essential thing to say is that Freud’s good paintings are not really there to be ‘read’. They are not that kind of painting. They gain their charge more from what is unknown – including personality and what (Julian) Barnes calls ‘moral likeness’ – than what is known. They are moving in the way that the nape of a neck can be. (How much moral character is there in a neck?) And they really are, as Freud kept on insisting, concerned with biology, with physical sensation. They try to get at what it is like for a person at a particular age to occupy a body over a certain duration in a specific setting. And so they pay unusually close attention to body parts in ways that few artists before Freud ever attempted. In paying this kind of close and un-neurotic attention, Freud’s naked portraits ‘bypass decorum’, as Robert Hughes once put it, ‘while fiercely preserving respect’.     Sebastian Smee/LRB 23 January 2014

'Details' and a day when an umbrella is essential

"Why pile up a jumble of 'details'? When you start really imagining something you have to forget the details anyhow, they just get in the way. Art isn't the reproduction of details of oddments out of life."  The Black Prince/Iris Murdoch

Large atlas of Bible Lands on the table in the library: the tribes of Israel. Judah. Ancient delineations.
A discussion about the wall at St James's. "Apathy creates walls. Was that the message?"

People are translating the Old Testament by the fire, tentatively reading from the Greek. "I always thought that Christ came from a poor background."

Earlier: The Adoration of the Kings (Jan Gossaert) is impossibly bright and pristine. Stop to look at it in the National Gallery during my lunch half hour.

The pest control man visiting the office in the morning says that he collected 50 dead rats in total this week from the University of Westminster on Regent's Street, just down from Portland Place. "Some get caught in the traps.... but you never find them... you see a leg, or a piece of fur. Because once they're trapped, the other rats eat them alive."

It is a wet, cold day. Forget an umbrella at your peril. The tubes are crowded even quite late. An aura of bad temper post holidays.

The first daffodil leaves are emerging in the flowerpots by the front door.

Dismantling a wall and diversions on Uxbridge Road

They are dismantling the Wall at St James's Piccadilly - pass by on my way to NatWest at lunchtime to pay in a cheque. Am sorry that I missed this but also sorry somehow that it happened. Cannot believe that presenting such a visual symbol of conflict in such a way can result in any good.
Lucy Winkett (Rector of St James's) is a role model of mine but she seems defensive in the Guardian.

"When we have been challenged about "taking sides" and "politicising the church" – which is a fair discussion to have – we are clear that we are not "pro" one side or another but we are instead campaigning for equal human rights for all people regardless of ethnicity or background. Sometimes the church will speak on issues seen as political in order to advocate for people who are suffering. We are supporting the ordinary people of Bethlehem at Christmas because we believe it would be wrong to sing about the town and meditate on its importance to our faith without acknowledging the grievous situation its citizens find themselves in today."

Later get far too strident with an old friend in the National Gallery bar. He has been to Israel/Palestine more times than I have had hot dinners and is genuinely shocked by my suggestion that he might be too overtly pro-Palestinian. "They are the poor and oppressed. What else are we do do?"
(On the table next to us someone I have not seen for years is chatting up a blonde girl with a transparent green Louis Vuitton bag. The last time I saw him was four years ago at a seminar in Swansea. He is absorbed in his conquest and buys glass after glass of champagne - takes out his Mac to show his photographs.)
A reading list from my friend: Anne Michael Fugitive Pieces and The Skin Divers.
Paul Celan's poetry - especially that set to music by Harrison Birtwistle (which I know will be far too challenging for me).
Driving rain outside. A deaf homeless man in the damp tiled tunnel in Charing Cross tube station - mouthing and gesturing to a comrade in a blanket a few yards away.
On Uxbridge Road there is a crowd at the bus stop. A ginger headed man wearing high vis trousers, covered in mud, and some kind of jerkin over a short sleeved shirt strides down to us and gestures. "It's no use waiting here - there's no bus coming. The buses are coming out of that road there see...." pointing towards a side road "you'll have to walk down to the next bus stop." What had he been doing? Lying in the road? Digging? Physically diverting the buses? His forearms are covered with tattoos and short ginger hairs. Why is he not cold?
He turns and walks a few steps beside me. "It's not very far," he says, nodding, encouraging.

Defining terms: what is a blog?

The storms continue.

An interesting discussion on the nature of a blog: what is a blog? What is this blog? It is not quite a diary as it makes no attempt to be comprehensive i.e. systematically log what happened, when and how. Instead it's highly selective. It's certainly not a private diary as it's published on the internet. 

Decide that it's more of a column on a theme - if a definition has to be found.
However it does, of course, have an element of a diary - hence the title.

What makes a good diary? John Bayley, reviewingVirginia Woolf's diary 1936-41 (published in 1984) in the London Review of Books, says hers was a thin and self centred narrative....

"Katherine Mansfield writes in her journal what Virginia Woolf’s Diary continually implies: ‘I must not forget that.’ She must not forget the way the hens looked, and how the rain soaked her thin shoes. A few days before her death Virginia Woolf recorded the haddock and sausage meat. ‘I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.’"

Good diarists: Pepys (of course), Chateaubriand,  Rousseau, Anthony Burgess, Barbara Pym (Bayley's list).

I like primitive diaries: basic logs.

Like faces in a crucifixion crowd

"I saw the two faces very clearly, like faces in a crucifixion crowd who represent the painter and his friend." The Black Prince/Iris Murdoch

Airing cupboard door half open, revealing too much, shelves piled haphazardly with clothes, towels and other folded items, stuffed in at angles.

Heavy wood polished floor. "I think it came from a gym somewhere."

Black and white photo of a wedding, in the 60s, she half hidden behind her parents, beautifully dressed in a coat and dress, large lapels, brooch on the lapel. He in profile, holding out his hands, talking, gesturing, more handsome than any Hollywood star.

"I don't look bad, do I?" he says, a bruise on his forehead, a beard as he has not shaved or let anyone shave him.

The rugby coach from Hayle clips the skin flaking from his swollen red feet and his thick yellow nails, curving in age and diabetes.

He holds up the bottle, silently, then says. "I'd like to share this with Susan." It is 1030am. "We thought you'd forgotten us.... Never forget your roots."

"The room had the rather sinister tedium which some bedrooms have, a sort of weary banality which is a reminder of death. A dressing table can be a terrible thing." The Black Prince/Iris Murdoch