Something simply pearl-fect about these teeth, and a neat simile to describe the darting in and out of an endlessly worked toothpick. … the seed-pearl teeth, where a tooth-pick ran ceaselessly in and out, in and back again, like a mouse in a cage. Source: Louis...
Unusual word and usage, ‘raddled’, and particularly as a simile for hard, grey, hole-riddled bread. God protect one’s teeth. Some went on nibbling at lumps of bread hard and grey like sea-raddled limestone. Source: Louis Golding, Good-bye to Ithaca...
What a wonderful scene, a simple lunch washed down with a local wine the colour of molten amber, and intriguingly, ‘pumice-bedded’. Savour another such moment, celebrated by Zorba the Joyous. Then we stepped out to a terrace hung out over the blue chasm,...
I re-discover this triologism as we emerge from days of rain-drenched wind, waking up to a lush-verdant garden and landscape.  I also like the ‘lopped-off wave-tops’. But the air was almost as full of sea-drenched wind and lopped-off wave-tops as it had...
A lovely mix of visual and aural, with the shrillness of light and colour also evoking a parrot’s cry.  We landed in the usual parrot-bright shrillness of light and colour. Source: Louis Golding, Good-bye to Ithaca (London: Hutchinson, 1955), p....
Wish you as many doses of such sweetness as you need. And what a stark contrast to another marrow-related triologism, from Jane Eyre. How sweet it all was, marrow-meltingly sweet!  Source: Louis Golding, Good-bye to Ithaca (London: Hutchinson, 1955), p....
As the logos on this website testify, I’m an ink-geek, and love inky similes. Here is another one, about the sky rather than the sea.  A small breeze sent up a flurry over all the ink-blue water. Source: Louis Golding, Good-bye to Ithaca (London: Hutchinson,...
A lyrical description of the Greek island of Thera, bursting with flowers and trees, and all sloping down to a soft lilac-tinged blue sea. But there is a delicate order, too, imposed by tracery of asphodel and grape-hyacinth, purple mallow and coppery dandelion, by...
I like the ‘brandy-ball’ amber of this clever chap’s gaze, and his space-butting arrangements. Enjoy another rather original description of a goat’s eyes, this one by Gavin Maxwell, or yet another, by Russell Hoban.  Do brandy-balls still...
Golding discovers ancient graffitti carved in the rocks of a Greek island, by long gone lovers. Wishing you, as we move into late summer, many bee-buzzing hours. Having planted swathes of lavender and sun-shine gaillardia, we are enjoying clouds of humming. Their...
From Nicolson’s superb book on Sissinghurst and his family’s relationship with it, including its transition to more public ownership. He raises a wider concern, how to preserve beautiful places and buildings without losing their lived-in soul. While we...
A striking triologism for a phrase which arrests and compresses time, as indeed, Heaney’s does.  ‘… monsters that stalk the night, in Seamus Heaney’s time-shrinking phrase, ‘as a kind of dog-breath in the dark’. Source: Adam...
