Archive for 2013
The strange death of the male necktie
I’ve been looking through my ties lately, as part of a more general, quasi-Buddhist ‘do I really need these any longer?’ investigation. It’s a heterogeneous collection of the long and the short, the dark and the light, the sober and the ‘look at me’, the narrow and the absurdly wide. Reviewing them set me thinking […]
Clerestory
Blackletter rules: Hymns. Propers. Pages. He is risen. R (red). But below From the cellist’s dark S (secretum) Four notes lift, Clear chancel’s arch Disaggregate Get caught By the high window Quiver a second, Rupture.
Edgar Degas and the art of ironing
Ironing clothes is one of the small but rewarding pleasures of life. I tend to do it in the kitchen on a Sunday morning, when the sun falls on the ironing board and good music comes from the radio. Smoothing creases in cotton always has a calming effect on the mind. Occasionally the regular passage […]
Wales Coast Path: day 42: Whitesands to Portgain
Friday is hotter still. There’s almost no breeze. We decide to head south-north for a change, starting from Whitesands Bay and repeating a little of our mini-walk in May. It’s so oppressive that Ca. turns back at St David’s Head to join us later. The rest of us sweat onwards, through the rough gorse and […]
Wales Coast Path: day 43: Porthgain from Aber Mawr
We’re back in north Pembrokeshire, with H. and Ca., to fill in the ‘gap’ in the coast path left when we were rained off in May. This time there’s no complaint about being damp: we’re half way through the hottest and driest spell for seven years. We resume at Aber Mawr, almost immediately accompanied by […]
Cyngerdd Tŷ
Ar noson grasboeth arall dyma ni’n dau’n cerdded ar hyd pafin ein stryd dan gario cadair blygu’r un, ar ein ffordd i ‘gyngerdd tŷ’. Daeth y gwahoddiad oddi wrth Delyth Jenkins a’i merch Angharad – ‘DnA’ yw eu henw proffesiynol – sy newydd ryddhau albwm newydd o awelon Cymreig traddodiadol a newydd, Adnabod (Fflach). Chlywais […]
Lester Young and ‘Oh! Lady be Good’
At 10 o’clock in the morning of Monday 9 November 1936 – an unlikely day and an even unlikelier hour for jazz musicians – five people assembled in the studios of the American Record Corporation in Chicago. They played just four short pieces. Two of them, the first appearance of Lester Young on record, constitute […]
Archives, libraries and the Heritage Lottery Fund
As government funding for memory institutions has declined – catastrophically in the case of regular capital finance for buildings, ICT infrastructure and collections purchase – the importance of the Lottery, and especially the Heritage Lottery Fund, as a funding source to those bodies has risen. What is the relationship between the HLF and those memory […]
Tri rhyfeddod Cymru
Ychydig wythnosau yn ôl daeth gwahoddiad i siarad ar Radio Wales am dri agwedd ar Gymru sydd â lle arbennig yn fy mywyd: tri rhyfeddod Cymru. I wneud pethau’n waeth doedd bron dim terfynau ar ystyr y gair ‘rhyfeddod’: gallai fod yn lle, yn berson, yn ddigwyddiad, neu unrhyw beth arall. Panig yw’r ymateb cyntaf […]
Peter Lord: iconographer / iconoclast
On 23 May in the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea Peter Lord gave an illustrated talk as part of the launch of his new book Relationships with pictures: an oblique autobiography (Parthian, 2013). It was a remarkable performance. As ever with Peter you couldn’t fail to be aware of the depth of feeling underlying his […]
