December in Pictures.
December was a strange and wonderful month - four weeks spent rushing about and at the same time, being extremely still. It was a month full of the very new and different and also the very old and familiar.
Read MoreRain, Cakes and Captain America: A Weekend in Whitby
By the time I get to Whitby on Friday night, my parents, who arrived the day before, have a new obsession.
‘Look at this!’ my mother says, ushering me into the kitchen of our rented cottage and pointing to a treacly cake sitting in the middle of the table. ‘Isn’t it beautiful?!’ I admire the cake and notice a number of paper bags lined up on the sideboard, with the same blue and gold branding.
‘There were biscuits too,’ Mum says with a touch of smugness, ‘but we’ve already eaten them.’ My parents have discovered Botham’s Bakery. The wonder of Botham’s, in fact, turns out to be just the first of several unexpected and marvellous discoveries we made during a weekend in Whitby this past November.
Read MoreBodies of Light: A Morning Swim at Sant' Alvise.
Whenever my mother goes away, she always tries to find a local pool to swim in. Even if there’s a pool at the hotel, perhaps especially if there’s a pool at the hotel, she’ll always try and find a nearby place to have a swim. My dad finds the spirit of new places by taking photographs and I go grocery shopping, but my mother finds her way into a new location by doing a mile in the local swimming pool. As a family, we’ve swum in Greek water parks, Italian lidos, French lakes and, memorably, in 1997, found out about the death of Princess Diana whilst swimming in a gorgeous Danish municipal pool. When she visits Venice, once or twice a year, my mother always makes sure she fits in a swim at her favourite spots and, on our last trip, I went with her to the pool at Sant’ Alvise, in the Canareggio district.
Read MoreNeutralising Stendhal Syndrome? : Thoughts on taking Pictures in Venice.
n his book ‘Venice is a Fish,’ Tiziano Scarpa writes at length on the potentially lethal effects of being continually surrounded by the beauty of this city:
‘In the historic centre, the aesthetic radioactivity is extremely high. Every angle radiates beauty….you are face-butted, slapped, abused by beauty, Andrea Palladio topples you over…Mauro Codussi and Jacopo Sansovino finish you off. You feel terrible. It’s the famous illness of Monsieur Henri Beyle, a disorder known to history as Stendhal syndrome.’
‘the tourists are lucky: the moment they find themselves confronted by a splendid piece of architecture, the neutralize the aesthetic radioactivity by boxing it away in a camera.’
[Tiziano Scarpa, Venice is a Fish: A Cultural Guide, Serpent’s Tail, 2010]
Read MoreFairytales, Feminism and Far Too Many Dogs: A Day at Polesden Lacey.
Polesden Lacey seems to appear out of nowhere. One moment, you’re pootling the tree-lined, semi-suburban streets of Great Bookham in Surrey. The very next, you’re abruptly turning in under the low, lemon-and-white-painted arch of the lodge and sailing down a long drive towards what Elizabeth, the Queen Mother once described as a ‘delicious house,’ with parkland rolling away to either side of you. Perhaps it was the effects of the low January sunlight, shining straight into our eyes on the day of our visit, perhaps it was the fairytale feeling of the landscaped gardens, but the feeling of having suddenly slipped into another world never quite left us…..
Read More