Monday miscellany

A reading nook? It's by Gathered Together (via)

Pots-I-like - this is by Gordon Baldwin, at the V&A
(in the wonderful ceramics galleries, 6th floor)

A glimpse of sun in London - photo by Metropolitan Police helicopter crew, via instagram

"Script moth" via pinterest

The title grabs me ... "script moth" (is it voracious?) ... can script, handwriting, be "holey" - maybe if you think of something flowing through the holes, eg communication...  Also, what would the moths be getting out of eating away at ink?  (Thinking about this could be a good cure for insomnia.)

... quilt-I-like ...

"Rim Fire 2013" by Gayle Simpson (from SAQA e-newsletter) - currently on show at Yosemite Museum
I'm guessing the orange is bleach discharge - excellent use of it!

100% - that's the score needed for a pass mark on the drug calculation exam that nurses take. Good thing too - with drug doses the decimal definitely has to be in the right place.


Even in high-up bits of London, it's been wet -

Queens Park, London NW

Medieval fragments -

from St Paul's, the one that burnt down in the Great Fire of 1666. They're stored in a room somewhere in Christopher Wren's newbuild. Other behind-the-scenes pix are here. Which gives me an excuse to reminisce about how, in the mid-70s or maybe it was the mid-80s, I climbed with a friend to the very top, up stone stairs and then, between the domes (for St Pauls has an inner, shallower dome inside the lovely steep outer dome), and even further, up see-through metal-grille stairs, quite a few of them, into the cupola at the very top - which was invigilated by a verger(?) who was clearly bored out of his mind, smoking a cigarette and listening to Radio 3. Classical music at the top of St Paul's - brilliant! And the view... just about visible from those round, high-up windows. But then, the journey back down those staircases. You can't go that far these days, only to the Golden Gallery ... 528 steps.

Round about 1800, when there was scaffolding round the dome, an artist climbed to the top before dawn every morning (it must have been summer) to continue work on his panorama of London. The early start was needed so he could get a clear view before people woke up and lit their fires and the smoke filled the air. This was part of the Panoramania! exhibition at Barbican Art Gallery in 1988, and the artist might have been Thomas Hornor. A marvellous undertaking ... with a tough journey to work every day.

(Info on history of panoramas, and modern photographic panoramas, is here. And elsewhere.)