All Activity

Madeleine: the Cathedral is spectacular!

I would love to see those murals! Sounds like no one thought it through when they chose him to be the artist. I've heard the cathedral is spectacular.

France: yes she was a fascinating character and I enjoyed the biography. The Duncan Grant Murals in Lincoln Cathedral by Edward Mayor In 1952 an advertisement in The Times requested proposals for murals for thirty significant religious buildings. Duncan Grant put his name forward. He was a notorious member of the Bloomsbury Group and was unrepentantly bisexual. So it was perhaps a surprise that he was chosen to create the mural for Lincoln Cathedral which was to go into the Russell Chantry. It was to be focussed around St Blaise, the patron saint of the wool industry. Lincoln was a centre of the wool industry in medieval times and was an inland port. It was also a collection and taxation point. Work began in 1956. On one wall there is a depiction of dock workers moving bales of wool onto a boat with Lincoln and the Cathedral in the background. The dock workers are all pretty muscular and not wearing a great deal. The opposite wall caused some controversy as well. It was of Jesus as the good shepherd, surrounded by Sheep and carrying one around his neck. Some have been shorn, some still had wool. Grant had portrayed Jesus once before in a church; at that time he had been asked if he could make the Jesus figure more “spiritual” and less “physical”. The Jesus depicted in the mural has no beard and is bare chested, a distinctly good looking physical specimen. Grant used people he knew as models. Vanessa Bell and Angelica Garnett are in the Murals. The Jesus figure is Paul Roche, a friend of Grant’s. The murals are a great work of art and well worth a visit. Looking at them there is no getting away from the fact that they are well …painted by a gay man. This also seems to have occurred to the Cathedral authorities because the Russell Chantry quickly became a storage room and broom cupboard. The murals were pretty much unseen until the early 1990s when they were restored and opened to the public again. Even today if you take the official guided tour you aren’t shown the murals. However they are worth a visit and the local Usher gallery has a number of the preliminary sketches that Grant did. 9 out of 10 Starting The Long Affray by Harry Hopkins

How is Adrian faring now?

reveries of Dostoyevsky tomes,

peaceful nights, slipper clad

Good Morning Starshine ~ Oliver

Stay safe and warm, Muggle! Have you got back up if you lose power? They must think it's going to be serious if that much help is arriving 😢

North Carolina is forecasting a huge ice storm tonight thru Sunday and into Monday morning. there will be power outages that last days. Workers and equipment are being brought in from 27 different States plus Canada to assist. The temperatures will stay in the low 20's and mid teen's(F).

Nearly finished The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde. For the third time.

Morning Has Broken - Nana Mouskouri

I read the very first book recently and was surprised at how obnoxious Havers was, a real chip on her shoulder and despite a difficult background there's now way her attitude or behaviour would be tolerated now, or maybe even back when the book was written. They have kept a bit of that in the new series but they've certainly toned her attitude down! The new series is Ok but a bit wooden.

The new series is ok nothing great .BBC .

Touch me in the Morning - Diana Ross

The Flight of the Falcon Daphne du Maurier It’s very difficult to summarise this book, especially without giving away the plot. However, The Flight of the Falcon does play a large part in the story. It’s set in the fictional town of Ruffano, somewhere in Italy, around 20 years after the Second World War – people have telephones and drive cars, and the war is mentioned slightly. The main character is a courier, what we would call a tour guide, and his life is bowling along as such until a crime takes place. Some of the tourists that he is escorting insist that he reports said crime to the police, and he does so, but goes on the run immediately afterward because he thinks that the police will find him guilty, as he had a brief but innocent contact with the victim (he believes, at first, that it was this contact that caused the crime). He goes back to his hometown of Ruffano, and the story unfolds from there. The more he finds out, the worse he thinks it will be for him. Until the very end, when all is explained. I didn’t guess any of the story except the very last bit, and was gripped throughout. Recommended

to men who love

fraught with perils unknown

Some Velvet Morning ~ Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood

liaison of dangerous dimensions,

International Velvet - Catatonia

I'm sorry to hear that Adrian hasn't been very well, Kev! Poor thing . It's nowhere near on the same level, but Olle had a little cough and stuffy nose last month and I bought this Vicks Cool Mist thing for him: Vicks Mini Cool Mist Ultrasonic Humidifier (compact, quiet, for better sleep, cough and cold, comfort, essential oils, humidity, rooms up to 15m2) VUL525 : Amazon.co.uk: Home & Kitchen I wonder if it might help a little bit when Adrian is home? I had the same cold and it actually helped me too 😅

Blue Velvet - Bobby Vinton

Poor big fella, he can't believe it 😯

femme fatale, risking a

Tangled Up In Blue ~ Bob Dylan