The Fires

The local rag today reports that the vicar is resigning.  Readers between the lines may enjoy speculating on the quote from the bishop.  We are trimming our antennae - not that we have so much as darkened the door of his church, one should add.  Scandal in the leafy outskirts of Disgustedville?  Surely not.  Watch this space.

Having gained much of a day today after the collapse of a trial that ought not to have been prosecuted, I've had a moment to add a teaser to  the Historia web site.  Kate has finished writing Fire and Phoenix on the subject of the Great Fire of London 350 years ago this year, and it sounds very promising.

Regulars will be glad to read that Sainsburys are at it again.  200 tea bags: £2.50.  400 of the same tea bags: £8.  Still, Sainsburys have the last laugh: neither of us announced to the other our plan to go and buy tea, so we have a stock of 1000 tea bags in the cupboard...

Sunset at Rockholm, Kovalam

I'm in danger, I suppose of becoming typecast, since much of my recent output has been of sunrise and sunset seascapes.  Miss having set a project topic about India, I'd dug out my photo albums, and couldn't resist banging out this 45-minute sketch.  Kovalam is near what we Brits call Trivandrum where, incidentally, my cousin Anne was born.  Like so many places at the southern end of the sub-continent, its present name runs to many syllables, and I can't remember all of them.  I spent a week or so there during a three-week holiday over Christmas and New Year 1988/89.  The beach tendency were in their element.  My room had a big shady balcony where, after a swim in the warm Arabian Sea at crack of dawn, I sat and read Midnight's Children, supervised for much of the time by a solitary house crow.  That's what probably kept me sane towards the end of a two-year stint in a job I hated.  The trip had started life as a cricket tour for the Berne cricket club, but absent sufficient players, degenerated into a holiday, with friends such as yr obed servt being invited to fill pre-booked rooms.  My first and probably last visit to India, it was a terrific experience, and I've enjoyed going back through the photographs 27 years later.  It was an abiding influence on the way I look on the world, but a rather predominant memory is of several episodes of digestive urgency, and consequently of returning with, as the late Vic so elegantly put it, an arse like a well-sucked blood orange.