Juliet Blues
So, the battle to get going with the Juliet jacket. I decided on the blue Moda Vera Portsea Cotton and made one sleeve and some of the flowery bits. I ordered the rest of the yarn which I needed from Spotlight online. Well, their online service is as bad as their in-store service and it didn’t happen. So….I decided on the colour which they call “green”, but which I call “aqua” because I wouldn’t make it in green. I found one of the very few people In Adelaide Spotlight who is helpful and knows where stuff is and managed to get…
Continue Reading →Il Trovatore
Ken Howard's photo of the Met production
(Giuseppe Verdi) (1853) (The Met, October 2015) The story of this opera can be summed-up in this little ditty: “Yes, Sir, that’s my baby, No Sir, I do mean maybe, Yes Sir, baby’s on the stove. What, Sir, why say ‘maybe’? Well, see, ‘cos that baby May be from another trove.” (With apologies to Gus Kahn and Walter Donaldson) Sorry to trivialise Verdi’s lovely opera with the doggerel written above, but the plot of Il Trovatore, such as it is, is quite ridiculous. A gypsy hurls her own tot on the bonfire by mistake and closes the circle in conning a lascivious Duke…
Continue Reading →Galaxy of Change Crochet Rug
Here are pictures of the finished Galaxy of Change rug which I started here. I did about 50 of the 103 rows in the pattern, plus 3 of a border which I made up. I wanted to have points around the edge. Sadly, I am not a good enough photographer to capture the vibrancy of the colours of Bouvardia yarn in Lollypop. I’s really weird and lovely. As I mentioned here, I was inspired to use Bouvardia by the beautiful work of Julie Salter of this Facebook group. Look at her unfinished Galaxy of Change in Bouvardia Tokyo. But somehow mine…
Continue Reading →Agincourt
"These wounds I had on Crispin's Day" (Image from Chroniques d’Enguerrand de Monstrelet)
(Fought 25 October 1415) (Play by William Shakespeare, 1599) (Dir. Laurence Olivier, 1944) (Dir. Kenneth Branagh, 1989) On St Crispin’s Day, King Henry V of England gained a brilliant, against-all-odds and in ultimate strategic terms, futile victory. Henry and his army were pinned near the castle Agincourt, far from the coast and outnumbered at least 3 to 1. Henry made offers of concessions, but the enemy insisted he renounce the French Crown and get out of town. A combination of weather, topography and the English long-bow turned the tide in what proved to be a very nasty battle, a fight to the finish…
Continue Reading →Landscape and Memory
(by Simon Schama) (1995) This is an art history, but written from the psychiatrist’s couch. It is a cultural – that is to say, a psychological – sociology of the product of human minds under stimulus from our ‘natural’ environment – wood, water, stone – primarily judged from the perspective of the visual arts. Schama observes that even landscapes we consider unspoilt bear our imprint, largely due to our own awareness, but maintains that the natural environment can be both celebrated and cosseted through the machinery of our cultural memory. It is a perverse argument, Freudian almost, but what makes the book worthwhile is the extraordinary magpie-mind of…
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