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'I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free'
About Me
Posts
Heroes
- Axel Leijonhufvud
- E.E.Evans-Pritchard
- Edmund Leach
- Francois Couperin
- Joan Robinson
- John Maynard Keynes
- Louis de Soissons
- Mario Draghi
- Noam Chomsky
- Pablo Picasso
- Paul Klee
- Pietro Porcinai
- The Earl of Onslow
- Umberto Boccioni
- Wassily Kandinski
- Wilhelm von Humboldt
Blog Archive
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2008
(473)
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September
(50)
- Fight, Fight, and Fight Again to Save the Party Th...
- Half Time Score
- Jonah Brown Strikes Again
- New Labour is an Island of Madness in a Sea of Sanity
- Birthday Girl
- Out In the Open. What Brown Might Be Organising
- Breaking a Butterfly on a Wheel
- Baleful Influence Destroys Bail-Out
- The United Kingdom Should Not Join the Euro
- We Have Given
- Losing International Face As Well
- Universities Discriminate in Favour of the Brighte...
- Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know
- Brown In a Spin
- What's the Matter With Russia?
- Bell Ringing 600 Years Later
- European and United States Objectives Again Divided
- A Solution to Knifing in the Public Street
- Identity and Its Destruction
- Evening All
- Labour Shamed Publicly By the Betrayal of its Bel...
- Inflation, Inflation, Inflation
- Banking by Brown
- The United Kingdom is No Longer a Market Economy
- If Only
- The State We Are In
- Another Day, Another Run
- European Union Competition Regulation and Mergi...
- Trotskyoid Dreams Come True
- Is Your Money Deposited in a Safe Place?
- Now We See Him For What He Is
- De-Coupling From Global Disaster
- Brown Must Be Defeated in Parliament Not By Labou...
- Each to His Own
- Juvenile Adventurism Led to the First World War
- A Russian Teddy Bear
- Conspiracy Theorist, Me?
- Brown's Generalissimo Moment
- Choosing Who You Like
- Angels and Ministers of Grace Defend Us
- The Nastiest Man on Earth
- Post-Imperial Blues
- What Will You Put On Your Census Form?
- The Third Sector is a Labour Front
- So Where Do You Stand On Heath, Powell and UDI?
- Who is Running the Shop?
- Abolishing Council Tax
- Newmania is Right of Centre (but less than some)
- Location,Location
- Brown Announces Housing Policy for England From Br...
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September
(50)
Fallen Angels
- David Cameron (for risking the disorderly dissolution of the Euro)
- Giorgio Napolitano (for stance on Budapest 1956: Prague 1968: Italy 2013)
- Mervyn King (for bailing-out Northern Rock)
- Nicholas Kaldor (for inventing VAT)
17 comments:
Sicily - one euro. See articles in Guardian or Telegraph. I was tempted...
If the definition of "house" includes cardbox-sized studios, then a lot of places...
Try Frome :-)
What would the service charges be though, S? And the cost of local security. And local taxes to various state and non-state bodies.
There's lots of comment on how wrong it is to tempt the young and, by definition, almost always poor into a falling market which is still passing the middle floors of the skyscraper it jumped from. Dot is right too -ticky-tacky, not proper houses. It will be Frome, with its lovely gardens and neighbours (apart from Mr Board Fence next to Lilith. When you can, might we have some autumnal garden pics, L? Mr HG was wandering about in the middle of the night looking at the animals that come to drink from the automatic watering that comes on at 2.30am. He got his camera but the flash was turned off still because of taking pictures in the Pushkin and by the time it was switched on again they had all left - humans make a lot of noise even when trying to be very quiet. There was an entire family of boar, four piglets, deer, and smaller fluffy creatures with long furry tails which I think are stoats or weasels, and sometimes there are porcupines and even hare, though those have only left paw prints.).
It shall be done, HG.
You live in a kind of paradise, don't you :-D
Thank you, L. You can do gardens. It's a class thing. Mine go either jungly and impossibly shady, or municipal park. Fortunately Mr HG steps in on the more inappropriate choices - yes to the tiny irises and special tulips, no to the alternated alyssum (sp?) and lobelias. He gave way on how hard to cut down the lime trees and now the entire village garden is in deep shadow with midges. As soon as the leaves fall the word 'pleach' will be realised (how was I to know what it meant until I saw Sanssouci?).
Sackerson is debating whether humanism can be next to godliness (bit like cleanliness really, there was always something bracingly cold showers about humanism - sandals in the city in winter kind of thing) and quotes the head humanist as declaring the end of the fear of death.
I am not a humanist. What if I die before I have learned? Never mind understood. You should see, L, see the turquoise Picassos, the essence of joy that is the Matisses, the serene mothers of God staring unknowingly into space as the child on their knee contemplates the future, expression infinitely knowing and accepting. The Bonnards glowing with feeling in every sense, with 'the ultimate cat' (I didn't realise he had sat for his portrait by Bonnard) delicious in rainbow glory at the corner of a painting. I envy you your intellectual training, not running behind the painters and sculptors crying 'Wait, wait' like a small child. And so many old friends gaze out at us all from those walls. 'Why, there you are' we think. So much bigger, more vivid, laden with meaning. I went back twice to gulp at the spring of understanding.
I had thought to pop my head round the door to Lenin but even though there was no queue the Police said I must walk back 150 metres to the proper entrance, not step over the little railings (well, I think that's what they said, it's hard to hear when people are shouting and blowing whistles).
Is Lenin worth the walk? No. I crossed Red Square to GUM and had tea instead. Bet he wished he could join us. But he was fearlessly dead and nothing left to illuminate the world from his worthless life.
I have renamed my tortoises.
HG,
Frome. Funny article on its splendour by the late Miles Kington. Indy website down at the moment, but try
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/columnists/miles-kington/miles-kington-you-can-take-the-boy-out-of-notting-hill-463983.html
later.
I was in the old USSR in the summer of '68. School trip. Pravda headline when the tanks rolled in (though we were not to find this out until we left)
"Great victory for Soviet diplomacy".
That's one way of putting it.
We popped into Chechnya on the way, without permission, and our guide then had us all arrested, for "subverting the five year plan". Brown and his thugs would have been so very much at home in the old USSR.
We left the USSR via Georgia. Loved it; street society, edible food, good wine, a mediterranean feel to it which cut through thr dust and drear we had spent the previous 5 or 6 weeks in (tho' not culturally dusty or dreary; the Hermitage and the Pushkin museums saw to that, and any number of fine old churches and cathedrals). Georgia meant we left the USSR with a smile on our faces.
Sad the see the place in such a mess.
HG: I did warn you that the Lenin item was not recommended. Glad you enjoyed your visit to the art gallery(ies) and tea in GUM. Do they still serve champagne on the ground floor at about 10 kopeks a glass there? Did you treat yourself to one of those lovely fluffy fur hats with the flaps to keep your ears warm? I had one but lost it to some light-fingered passer-by one extremely cold evening in Geneva some time later. Welcome home.
You give me too much credit on the garden front, HG. All hit and miss, I am just mad about flowers :-) As many plants have died as have thrived.
I remember seeing Napoleon's tomb as a young child. It made me feel a bit queasy. Blood clot coloured marble.
What have you called the tortoises?
Nomad, you warned me. And after the whistling and shouting, and Mr HG doing Russian calming remarks, I knew you were right. There is no more cheap champagne but I have a furry hat. The feeling (I hardly dare type the word) that power has left that extraordinary Square is strong, though. Wherever matters are being settled it is no longer in the Kremlin and its environs. There, we are in Venice - beautiful, but deader than Lenin. Mr Putin has been far to the East throughout the Georgian crisis. Moscow is a vast building site which reminded me irresistibly of Birmingham; the crumbling white stucco mansions interspersed with lowering council blocks. All very different underground of course, that was cathedral style.
I wanted to buy valenkis but was greeted with niet in every shoe shop. They will wish they had valenki supplies soon, mark my words.
Very fine food - but elk steaks? Eek. Or bear patties? I'd rather pat bears.
Russians are nice but a bit brusque. Men offer their seat at once to tottery exhausted foreign ladies high on too much walking and art. The vodka was in short supply; mostly it was German or Chilean wine (Gergia being miffed at the time).
Goodness knows what happened to Le Carre's world; Lubianka is just an underground station.
The tortoises are called Philip and Elizabeth now, L.
Fantastic. Most Regal.
o/t I was listening to Radio 4 today about Cromwell's severed head and how it hung about, embalmed and on a spike, till 1960, when it was laid to rest at his Cambridge College.
A propos the tortoises, it seemed right particularly as there is discussion about who is doing what to whom.
Cromwell's head's whereabouts is beyond me. After all, often I am unsure of my own head's whereabouts.
PS Cromwell's head isn't in my college. We only have girls. Even men's bits won't do.
A nice postcard HG, thanks. Shame about the shoes - you will just have to muddle through with Lilith's sandals for the moment....
GUM! Full of shops with nothing on the shelves in 1968. Truly. Any that did have stock had huge queues, as did some that had no stock.
Nearly everywhere except London, and you would still have change to buy some cake. The median house price in the UK has probably never risen above £175k
The Lubianka is not just an underground station. The KGB's sucessors still occupy the building and have not given up any of their valuable office (or other) space. Most western firms now employ FSB operatives on commercial terms.
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