lemons in the rain

It has been wonderful to see it raining today - a slow, soaking rain (who knows what Biblical apocalypse will fall from the skies tomorrow - it's threatening an inch).  It cleared enough this afternoon for us to go for a walk: there's not much that doesn't look damply special when there are raindrops clinging to it.

15 years!

Fifteen years ago - or, more precisely, fifteen years and three days - we first set eyes on each other ... so tonight was by way of an anniversary dinner at Cliff's Edge, where we've been for important dates and occasions ever since early in 2005.  Remarkably, though it's had some gastronomically rocky patches, it's still a magical place, and the food is back on form.  And it's been a wonderful decade and a half!

dawn to dusk

I don't expect for a minute that anyone will realize how intensely poignant for me is this particular arrangement of New Mexican mat, William Morris willow-leaf napkin, Wedgewood plate, silver-plated knife, and marmalade pot shaped like a lemon: this is how the breakfast table is always laid in my father's house, before he heads off to bed - and this place-setting-for-one is what I said goodbye to early this morning.  An age later, a Los Angeles evening has palm trees and the Goodyear Blimp.  I'm not sure how two such incompatible scenes can be called "home," but so it goes.

The Horniman Museum, and gardens

Shockingly, I'd never been to the Horniman Museum before!  I went there because there was an art exhibit by Project Pressure called MELTDOWN: Visualizing Climate Change - which amounted to How Many Different Ways can one show a shrinking glacier? - some of which were terrific, especially a large series by Norfolk + Thymann (a Nigerian and a Dane) entitled Shroud, which shows a wrapped bit of a glacier - wrapped to preserve it as a tourist attraction - but deliberately shot to look like funereal drapery carved for a tomb from Carrara marble.  The museum itself is extraordinarily lively (for which: read full, very full of lively kids) - but it also caters to them in a very imaginative way.  Here are some hopping around on a projected fantasy of a map (periodically large fish swam across the blue).

Outside, the gardens were simply stunning in their rich but bleak winter glory.

They include a dye garden - with skeins of wool dyed from the plants that are grown there.

And then there's a farmer's market on Sundays, too.  A stall like this suggests that one's not in California any more - though I don't know which local horticulturalist grew the clementines ...😊

a view, some lichen and cobbles, some moss and cobbles, and Amy the Sheep

a dull grey dank day in Cambridge, but this view is good in any weather, and I'm sure the moisture did a lot to help both the lichen and the moss on the St John's College cobbles.

And then, back in Wimbledon, I got to pet Amy the Sheep (collecting, or at least her person was), for the Royal Marsden Cancer Hospital, and very woolly.

bits of Cambridge

A view from the Bridge of Sighs, St John's - a few steps from my room;

a winter flower bed at St John's;

my incredulity that either I didn't realize before that Lloyds Bank is in a magnificent Waterhouse building - or (which might be equally shocking) that I'd entirely forgotten the fact;

and a view over Cambridge market - decidedly more cheerful-looking than when I first visited it - ouch - about forty-nine years ago - when visiting from school - and in the company of an undergraduate who was trying to track down the new Deep Purple album.  That was a long time ago.

some pre-raphaelite corners and bits

To the Pre Raphaelite Sisters exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery today: here are (with a couple of exceptions coming up later) some details.  I saw no lichen - or very little to speak of; no snails; only vaguely delineated dandelions - but plenty of other flowers;

cats very much needing to be fed;

musicians of various ethnicities;

plants wilting in their pots;

and a rather mischievous looking owl.

One of the real treats of the show are the number of pictures for which the Jamaica-born Fanny Eaton was the model, and the catalogue has an essay on her based on family history research.

And then quite the saddest thing was the register/log from the County Asylum in West Sussex, which is where Fanny Cornforth passed the last couple of years of her life, suffering from dementia: the model for Rossetti's Found and The Blue Bower; Spencer Stanhope's Thoughts of the Past; Burne-Jones's Sidonia von Bork 1560, and much more.

Just after the Cornforth room I overheard:

"They had very open relationships, you know.  But they were artists, of course."