Tuesday, March 12, 2024

12th March 2024

Well I should write something. My daughter is back home eager to get back to work.  They had been to Cadiz for a few days and loved it, it looked all blue sky and blue sea but it was rather hot.  They stay at airbnbs and do their own cooking.  My Mother's Day present wasn't a meal for me to cook them but was in fact a box of bits and pieces for me to snack on. She bought me back some local honey with a picture of the Virgin Mary on it. Blessed honey ;)

She has a weird taste for prints of Mary and Jesus, he is even in the bathroom, she is not religious but just likes them around, also my  least favourite artist Frida Kahlo.  I think I must be biased against eyebrows that join in the middle.

Sunday my son phoned he was walking back from the park, so described his walk as he came up Weston Park, through the village and then up the hill.  He is becoming quite a gardener and has already ordered plants this year.  Never in a million years did I think that my son would enjoy gardening or that my daughter would go on long walks with Andrew.

Though she refused to go up the final stretch of Arthur's Seat in  Edinburgh with Andrew's family.  I watched "The Push" yesterday, a Scottish trial of an Asian man who had pushed his wife over the sharp vertical cliff of Arthur's Seat to her death.  Or had he?  For there was no factual evidence of 'The Push' only that as she lay dying she had said it. So in the end the prosecution said that it was extremely probable the husband had done it given the evidence of the wife, who was a solicitor, and seemed to have kept all evidence of the husband's bad behaviour recorded.  The jury found the husband guilty and he was given a life sentence.

But returning to religious depictions she hasn't got this one, perhaps my favourite - Light of the World' by William Holman Hunt.  Years ago I was in love with the Pre-Raphaelites.  Not so now, though I still admire William Morris.





9 comments:

  1. Oh, a fellow traveller who finds Frida's art so boring even if her life was 'interesting'.

    Justice doesn't always happen, but it seems it did in the case you mention.

    It must be quite nice to have a daughter and son to call their mother and to tell mum about what they are doing. Being childless, yes, it must be quite nice. I'm sure you put in hard yards when your children were young, but what rewards you reap in your later life.

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    1. My son lives in Bath and walks every day, either down to the park or up to Beckford Tower. He works from home so needs the exercise. I miss Bath, as a city it thrives and much warmer than Up North. Yes children are hard from the beginning some argue it is better not to have them anyway but they are richly rewarding in old age. At least you don't have the worry of grandchildren ;)

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  2. A friend of mine was pushed off a cliff by her husband. She fell on a ledge and survived. When she looked up she saw him looking down, grinning. She did not tell anyone about it for years after they split up. I hear that it is more common than we previously suspected. I used to find Holman Hunt's 'The Scapegoat' a pretty depressing picture.

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    1. P.S. I know what you mean about eyebrows that meet in the middle, but it is illegal to dislike Frida Kahlo these days.

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    2. I still find 'The Scapegoat' a miserable picture, poor creature. Wafting your sins onto an innocent being. Also illegal to photoshop photos if you are Princess of Wales. The world and the young are in very bad shape at the moment, the young haven't lived long enough to have sensible opinions but neither have the old people!

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  3. Interesting Thelma - I like Frida Kahlo's work and do not care for the Pre Raphaelites. Funny how folk differ so much in their choice of paintings. My son reminded me the other day that I once (with his father) completed a large jig saw of Richard Dadd's 'The Fairy Fellers Master Stroke'. I had completely forgotten it and now would have no desire to hang it in my home. Perhaps a gentle Manet would be my choice now.

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  4. I think I liked the fairy tale element of the Pre-Raphaelites Pat, grown up a bit since then. They were talking about Van Gogh on the radio this morning and it reminded me that my first MIL had done a copy of one of his paintings which hung on the sitting room wall. I have a feeling modern art in all its variation does not appeal to me, though weirdly enough I like Kandinsky which is completely abstract.

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  5. I think that Frida Kahlo was alright, but I will always be a fan of Andrew Wyeth, and the way that he captured light and the wind. I saw his Helga series when it came to Washington DC.

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  6. We all have our favourites Debby, I saw a most beautiful painting this morning from the 17th century painted by a woman, an illustrator of flowers. I'll put it up one day, it counterbalances what I describe as the 'brown' paintings.

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