New addition to the front garden

Considering reviving this blog...

for one of its original purposes - as visual record of the garden.  Can't decide...might be easier to start afresh with a new blog?

If Winter come, can Spring be far behind?

Hiding behind our front gate for the past few days:

Our back field

Seen from our bathroom window on Friday morning last. One of our two Barn Owls, sitting on one of the posts of the chicken run. It was about 30 metres away, so the quality isn't too good - would have been better with a tripod - or with more light!

Steve Bell right on form this week

He is just brilliant!

The South Downs

Tony Rawlings, a very great friend of both Linda and myself died, much too young, in 1994. He was 50. We had known him for more than 25 years. When we first became friends we were students in Brighton and he was living in Plumpton Green, just north of the Downs and about 5 miles west of Lewes. It was the sort of friendship based on a wealth of common culture and experience, and inevitably developed its own shorthand of catch-phrases, cliches and gestures, one of which was that whenever any one of us was depressed, mildly fed-up, or just having a moan about something, one of us would sweep an arm round the horizon, usually ending by pointing at the Downs and say, facetiously:

"But the eternal things remain . . . "

A week ago, in Sussex, I took this photo as research for a painting I'm doing. Now I have looked at it again I want to say Tony, this one's for you.

Birthday Treat

Let no-one say I don't know how to show a girl a good time. This is Linda and her twin sister Pam's 60th birthday treat - a panini in a paper bag and a coffee in a plastic cup.



Oh, all right, it was at Versailles:

More Quilts than you can shake a stick at

This may be the most pictures Blogger has ever put on a site at once. All these were at the exhibition in Birmingham which Linda and Naomi visited a few weeks ago. As well as quilts there were bags and items of clothing, including a rather saucy, if ticklish, basque (and we're not talking ETA here!)