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...
A surprising dimension to flat lands in winter – that they appear all the more horizontal when swathed in mist. Also like that alliterative ‘mist-mired’. … the bleak, mist-mired horizontality of the Low Countries.Source: Justin Marozzi, The Man...
We’ve had a few rain-dousing days of storminess, and yesterday evening I enjoyed a sky-show of shifting banks of chiaroscuro cloud and light, as seen here in the Taygetus mountains. From the sludgy skies and twisting valleys of Thrace to the sky-cracking...
Describing the shower of arrows at Thermopylae falling so thick and fast that they blot out the sun’s light. Leonidas, the Spartan king, fell with his men after a path around the pass they were defending was betrayed to the Persians. But for that betrayal it...
From a marvelous history of a garden, the idea of lakes made by man simply to reflect the sky. Would Capability Brown have been brought in to dam the Hammer Brook and make a sky-reflecting lake in the valley? Source: Adam Nicolson, Sissinghurst: An unfinished history...
