Monday 28 October 2013

"I was going as fast as anyone's ever gone on a bike"


"The magic of a good atlas is that you can scan its pages and conjure up in your mind images of distant landscapes. Mere travel will not do this: a knowledge of history is more vital. It is one of the most dangerous myths that travel broadens the mind. If the mind is not broad in the first place, mere tripping and junketing will make no difference."
Paul Johnson, The Spectator 20 September 2008
Cy Twombley/Apollo













"I was going as fast as anyone's ever gone on a bike."
Marcus, after falling off 
September 2008

"The wire was cut in four places. I mended it with my bare hands."
Mitch, after finding barbed wire fence cut in the fields at Bolankan

September 2008
Cy Twombley/Poems to the Sea
"The problem about writing directly of recent experiences is  - the memory is simply too unfinished. The feelings are still too engaged in the real situation. They are too painful and unresolved to say anything about." Ted Hughes, advising his daughter Frieda

"I had quantities of little germinal notes, all suddenly obselete."
Ted Hughes

"You have lovers all over Manhattan
They don't do you much good it is true
You seduce everyone but it isn't much fun
For little old lovemaker you."
Fran Landesman, The Thorny Side of Love


Reading and watching

  • Foot by Foot to Santiago de Compostela/Judy Foot
  • The Testament of Mary with Fiona Shaw at the Barbican
  • The Testament of Mary/Colm Toibin
  • Schwanengesang/Schubert - Tony Spence
  • Journals/Robert Falcon Scott
  • Fugitive Pieces/Ann Michaels
  • Unless/Carol Shields
  • Faust/Royal Opera House
  • The Art of Travel/Alain de Botton
  • Mad Men Series 6
  • A Week at The Airport/Alain de Botton
  • The Railway Man/Eric Lomax
  • Bright Lights, Big City/Jay McInerney
  • Stones of Venice/John Ruskin
  • The Sea, the Sea/Iris Murdoch
  • Childe Harold/Lord Byron
  • All The Pretty Horses/Cormac McCarthy
  • Extreme Rambling/Mark Thomas
  • Story of my Life/Jay McInerney
  • Venice Observed/Mary McCarthy