10th May 2024

 All is well in this quiet spot of the world.  The geese have flown over to their daytime home on the canal.  Someone even suggested a simple solution to the problem of the water leak at the garden centre which has blocked the road there.  Catch the 590 bus up to it, walk the 100 feet or so round the problem and then catch the next 590 bus to Rochdale.  But I am sure there will be grumbles anyway, I call that slow living.

Yesterday my books came through from WOB (World of Books). Four to be precise, one was free, but it cleverly balanced the parcel up nicely.  You pay about £3.50 for paperbacks, often in a very good condition and you can return them and get some of your money back.  A bit like the leaving of books on public benches started up a few years back.

I have collected books  for years, and over the last few years have had major clear outs.  At one stage in my 20s had a love affair with Victorian writers.  Carlyle and Ruskin come to mind though William Morris wrote plenty.

You will see in the rather bad photo that three are by Horatio Claire, he is an excellent writer.  His lyrical prose flows so easily, especially in the book I have started to read 'The Light in the Dark - a Winter Journal' catching that terrible gray coldness in this part of the Yorkshire landscape.  For someone who is used to the soft creamy tones of Bath's building, the grey round here brings the soul to a sad place. Three books by him and another by Olivia Laing.

On top of the books is one I could not give away, 'Aesop's Fables' by Samuel Croxall.  A small book of silly tales dated 1847.  The other old books kept back were the six small volumes of the Illiad, probably for those word that appears somewhere in them - "his words fell like snow upon the ground".  Melting away into one's consciousness I think.

A painting by John William Inchbold, A study, in March 1855 taken from Christa Zaat compilation of artists that runs through her F/B site. She gives a detailed account of this artist.  I see he is moved by the Pre-Raphaelites style but develops his own in the end.  I am not snobby about the Pre-Raphaelites;) I know words like 'drippy females' are given to the paintings but they were painting, and writing very dire poetry, in a time when there was a breakaway from the 'brown studies' of the earlier painters.

  

The following words taken from  Christa Zaat site.

"Inchbold was one of several young landscape artists to be inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites. The praise and patronage of Ruskin launched him on his career in 1855, but by the late 1850s he had moved away from the tenets of strict observation towards a more personal style and a looser, more experimental technique. Like the painter AW Hunt, he was also a poet, and he found it hard to make a living by his watercolours. In 1886–7 he made his last long painting tour, exploring the Mediterranean coast from the south of France to Naples; "

And now for coffee.

Edit: I had forgotten to write about the roses Lillie brought back from Aldi last night. Three bunches, pink, yellow and a deep red. They are for you granny she said and to make the house nice. So as I record the roses I love through F/B has she understood that one can love flowers for their own sake. She is a very giving child and hardworking as well. As she goes off to Beavers or Scouts a couple of evenings a week. Then working at the cafe over the weekend, though she has her full grant for uni.