Landscape

[This is a guest post by Louise Brown]

When we booked our holiday to Wales, the first thing on the to-do list was a visit to the Oriel Ynys Môn on Anglesey, to see the collection of works by Kyffin Williams.

I'd first seen Williams's paintings on Antiques Roadshow and was immediately struck by his style, similar in some ways to some of my favourite 20th century artists, such as Paul Nash, Robert Bevan and Walter Sickert.

Hills Above Nant Peris by Kyffin Williams

Skip forward to the holiday and on a gorgeous, sunny day we headed to Portmeirion. As the tide went out, I looked out over the estuary and couldn't help but think about how perfect the view would be for a print by artist Ian Mitchell. Ian's distinctive landscapes have stayed with me ever since a friend posted a link on Facebook. I would love to own one but have been waiting to see one of a place that meant something to me.

Welsh prints by Ian Mitchell

I would love to have a Portmeirion view as an Ian Mitchell print.

Portmeirion by Simon Cope

When we got back to our cottage I had a look at Ian's website to see if he had already done any prints of the estuary at Portmeirion, only to see a front-page update about his current exhibition at Oriel Ynys Môn.

When we went to the gallery later in the week we got to see both Kyffin and Ian's works in the flesh. Lovely.

Plate. Shrimp. Plate of shrimp.

Beggars belief

(It's been a while. Anyway...)

Today I booked tickets to see Trembling Bells at 229 The Venue on 29 July. The support act for the show is a band from Kent called Galley Beggar.

I work at Merton College, Oxford, and manage their Twitter account.

Yesterday evening @CatTullyFOH mentioned @MertonCollege in a tweet, which was later favourited by @samjordison.

Sam Jordison is co-director of Galley Beggar Press.

Epitaph

During the latter half of January I read Arthur & George, the 2005 novel by Julian Barnes that has Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as one of its two main protagonists. In it I discovered that Conan Doyle's epitaph is "Steel True, Blade Straight".

This information proved useful a week or so later, when the Spring 2013 issue of the Campaign for Real Ale's quarterly magazine Beer arrived - question 5 in this issue's 'get QUIZZIC-ALE' general knowledge competition was:

Whose epitaph was "Steel True, Blade Straight"?

Then yesterday my good friend Lance Dann shared a link on Facebook to thisisnthappiness.com - scrolling through some of the recent posts, I stopped when I came to this:

http://thisisnthappiness.com/post/41792095521/doyle-fitzgerald-and-shakespeare-chip-kidd

Island

I volunteer for the Buckinghamshire Home Library Service, visiting two older women who are unable to get to their local library and taking them a choice of books and recordings to select from. They've each filled out a form indicating their tastes in literature. One of them, whilst always glad to see me each month, is never very forthcoming with feedback on the books she has had from me. Ordinarily these are very much in the Catherine Cookson/Maeve Binchy line - 'family sagas', sometimes contemporary, sometimes historical.

This month I decided to try and widen the scope, so I took out Selina Scott's A Long Walk In The High Hills, her account of time spent renovating a house in the Tramuntana hills of Mallorca.

Having left this with her, I went on to visit my other customer, who returned a number of books she had finished with. Whilst waiting at the library to hand these back in, I idly flicked through the pages of one of them, where I found this bookmark, left there by a previous borrower:

and here is the reverse:

The following day I took part in the Ride & Stride event, raising money for the Buckinghamshire Historic Churches Trust and my local parish church, St Lawrence, West Wycombe. This year I was joined by my father-in-law. On his bike, I noticed he was carrying two water bottles. One of these, well used and slightly battered, bore the name of a place he'd visited in Mallorca.
I rather wish I'd taken a photograph.

Sunken Cathedrals

On honeymoon in May, I read Philip K. Dick's Galactic Pot-Healer - not one of his best, but that still leaves it head & shoulders above a lot of other authors' work. A central motif in the story, indeed it might even be called a character, is the sunken cathedral of Heldscalla, which the pot-healer (ceramicist) of the title is sent to try and raise.

This year* marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of the French composer Claude Debussy, and to celebrate this the BBC Proms season features a number of his works, including a prelude he wrote in 1910 called La cathédrale engloutie - The Sunken Cathedral**.

I am currently reading Atlantic Britain by Adam Nicolson, the story of his adventures in a small boat around the western coast of the British Isles. In chapter three, entitled 'Islands', Nicolson describes his visit to The Skelligs, off the Irish mainland. He describes them thus:

"... they seemed to be a pair of cathedrals, a black double Chartres ... with their naves and chancels sunk beneath the sea ..."

*I find I am writing this on the exact day of his birth, August 22.

**just before writing this, I went downstairs where my wife was listening to Joanna Newsom's album Ys; Debussy's work is based on an ancient Breton myth in which a cathedral, submerged underwater off the coast of the island of Ys, rises up from the sea on clear mornings when the water is transparent.