Start the week

When you get up at 6am and the sky looks like this -

it seems a good idea to turn on the the background lighting, rather than the computer ...

The  temporary standing desk has been in place for over a year;
it has led to much less computer time

The weekend had been full of art and family and food -

but no gardening (too cold!)  ...  and given the (over)growth here -

April 2019

April 2018

a little TLC and pruning wouldn't go amiss. That's on the schedule for this week.

Unusually, I started the week not just with hard-copy magazine reading in the bath

which is informative about Georgian cuisine and made me look up Barbare Jorjadze (1833-1895), author of a comprehensive cookbook and Georgia's first feminist.

... but also (to further ease myself into the week) an hour of sitting on the sofa with a big mugof coffee and the Guardian's Art Weekly email, reading story after story....

... thinking about going to Wakefield to see a new garden ... and the Hepworth, and the Sculpture Park

... intrigued by Edmund de Waal's latest installation(s), in Venice ("studying the language of exile")

... fence-sitting in regard to Helvetica, which needed a redesign for legibility on small screens

... loving the video about the windmill, and the Ukranian Easter egg designs, and the pix of Cuban cinemas

Best article was the one arguing that British painting originated in the drawing of a flea; it was possibly a bit more complicated than that, but there's a lot to be said about the intersection of science and art. And it was news to me that Robert Hooke (1635-1703) started his working life as an apprentice to Peter Lely (1618-1680), and "his talent for drawing never left him". Truly, looking down a primitive microscope and rendering something never seen before must have been extraordinary, even for a polymath in an age of scientific ferment.