we headed south

The view from the kitchen/living roo of our VRBO in Wimbledon - which already seems a long way away - followed by a long train ride down to Cornwall through beautiful green countryside (it would have been even better in sunlight, but at least it wasn't raining), to St Ives.

Here's the beautiful view over Porthminster Beach from our comfortable (but tiny) hotel room: so wonderful to have waves breaking outside;

and here's our post-prandial walk through the quiet town. 

 

spring at Kew (and a final farewell to the Old Homestead)

Blossoms, everywhere, in Kew Gardens; and daffodils;

and more blossoms, with The Hive in the spidery background.

Waving at two of my cousins from up aloft in The Hive;

which happily this time that Alice visited, was playing bee-driven music;

which as ever I found magical.

Gunnera unfurling into leaf;

more blossom;

and then round to Hillside to have tea with friends/old neighbors who live opposite 20.  I never thought I'd see it standing again - but there have been delays with builders and quantity surveyors and all the rest of it, so here it is, still hanging on for a few more sad grey weeks.  I find the photo of it more melancholy than seeing it in person, for some reason that I haven't processed yet.  The trees out front have gone, of course - and maybe if I'm looking for that Barthean piercing punctum it would be the old curtains still hanging in the upstairs hall windows.  Anyway, today's really was the final, and unexpected wave goodbye.

 

spring in Wimbledon

We didn't stray out of Wimbledon today - a lot of walking, on the Common and, especially, in Cannizaro, where they've cleared out the pond (returning it to something like I remember it in 1957, or whenever - when I used to go and feed the ancestors of the current ducks), and full, absolutely full, of daffodils.  I went there very briefly this morning, and then back with Alice and old friends and neighbors plus their new dog this afternoon.

Here's blossom, on Southside - just along from where we are staying -

and a goose on Rushmere.  As you can see, it was an absolutely perfect spring day.

 

exhibitions

Into central London - first to see Cathy Opie's show at the NPG, which was excellent in and of itself - and of course good to find the face of a good and dear friend there (hi, Connie!) even if she is wearing a moustache (which reminded me forcibly of being in a cab going through the streets on Bandung many years ago, and suddenly being surrounded by men blowing whistles and wearing and selling fake moustaches).

Good though the show was, in some ways I appreciated even more how the gallery had hung a whole range of Cathy's works so that they are in dialogue with other older portraits - I especially loved Guillermo & Joaquin, which was hanging on one wall of a room devoted to Victorian photographic family portraits.

Then had a good look at some hands: Millicent Garrett Fawcett and Henry Fawcett, collaborating on a letter to a newspaper (he was blind); 

and in another Ford Madox Brown, these are the hands of John Osborne Riches, commercial manager of the Ocean Steam Coal Collieries in South Wales (there's a great deal to be said about FMB's portraits);

and I'd never previously notice how Queen Victoria's bracelet - showing Albert - in Barker's The Secret of England's Greatness is looking out to the world and not back up at her.

Lunch in the restaurant - amazing view -

and then to Turner and Constable at the Tate: Turner's rain-spattered sketchbook;

Hannibal crossing the Alps - the leader diminished to a tiny, tiny form atop an elephant in the far distance;

and the griminess of Dudley.  It was terrific, and telling, seeing the two hung side by side, and in dialogue with one another (admittedly my sense was made stronger by having just read Nicola Moorby's Turner and Constable: Art, Life, Landscape).  But - be warned - this was the most packed Tate exhibition I've been to in years.

Then for me, the ritualistic celebration of a sunset on Putney Bridge on the way home.

 

we got here!

Like homing pigeons, to Wimbledon, and to a very comfortable (to which, in this grey, damp, and blustery weather, I above all mean warm) VRBO apartment on the right hand side of this old Victorian 1887 Grande Dame house (and yes, we have all three floors: one room above another).  The top floor skylight looks over the pond: I went and walked ritualistically round it a few times and noted how full it is from all the rain.  And then we headed out for dinner.  We're only in London for a packed weekend, so it's good, if faintly weird, to be on familiar ground.

 

kitchen still life

This might be/have been the only moment of tranquility in an unbelievably hectic scramble-round to be ready to leave to get to LAX to get to LHR ... any moment now, we'll start finding out what we've forgotten ...

 

unsettling students for forty years

This is Leo, who I've moved from one academic office to another for forty years - writing that is, in itself, a bit shocking, but he's certainly been a fixture.  He's apparently from Thailand, originally; made of papier mâché, and I bought him in shop next to The Nosebag café in St Michael's Street, Oxford (the name of which is on the tip of my tongue ... I tried to hunt it down online, and all I found was that, sadly, The Nosebag closed in 2022, having been open since 1971).

I'm completely used to his friendly roar, but I hosted a next-year graduate student in my office today, and she was ... distracted by him.  I've only ever had one student who was genuinely frightened by him, way back in Oxford, and she's now Senior Curator of Historic and Modern Paintings at the Fitzwilliam, so the damage can't have been long-lasting.  All the same, I forget that he might make an impact ...