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Judged by almost any standard you choose, Barcelona’s Basílica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família is extraordinary. Such are the legends surrounding it, that one feels as if one knows what to expect when visiting it for the first time. Currently some 135 years into its...
A web page usually has a menu link that gets you there, as does this blog post with its menu link in the vertical menu of blog posts, listed chronologically, newest at the top. When you are reading this post, that menu link will be styled bold. That bit is easy.
But there is a...
This won’t be new but the detail might be sufficiently interesting to make you do something about it.
There’s no need to re-explain the context in detail. In brief: the passwords we use for our on-line accounts need to be strong. A strong password is one...
I usually build websites that my clients can work with themselves, enabling them to add, edit and delete content without their needing to come back to me for all of this sort of micro-management. Some of my clients like this facility and some don’t, preferring instead to have me work with...
This post is not just about a place. It is about an event. The event and where it took place are inseparable so to that extent this event can be located on a map although, if you went there today, there’d be no evidence that what I’m going to describe ever took place....
Software evolves, updates are released and we all tread the moving pavement. So it is even with open-source software projects, such as Drupal and Wordpress. There are few exemptions. To Benjamin Franklin’s death and taxes, we should these days add software updates. And why not? Software...
Some of my worst reading habits include adding marginalia and/or scribbling page-numbered notes in a book’s end leaves. As a student, I did this in ink, sometimes slavishly underlining entire passages. Now, not just because there’s an excellent second-hand bookshop just a stone...
Standen House near East Grinstead was the home of a successful Birmingham solicitor and his family. It was their country retreat from the end of the 19th century after they had moved to the hustle and bustle of London. Today it is preserved and managed by the National Trust and we saw it...
With my fellow Brits voting collectively to leave the EU, these words written in 1624 come to mind:
No man is an island, Entire of itself, Every man is a piece of the continent, A part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. As well as if a promontory...
But 10 miles away from Montacute House, Barrington Court is another fine Somerset manor house. Older than Montacute, it survived until the mid 1700s before falling into disrepair. Gloriously restored and extended by two different families in the late 19th and early 20th...
If you saw the BBC 2 serial Wolf Hall, you will have seen a little of the inside of Montacute House in Somerset. If you didn’t see it, then visiting Montacute will help seed your imagination with Elizabethan plots and intrigues. It’s the windows and their...
East Coker, a small village on the border of Somerset and Dorset, placed its mark on my mental map when I first read T.S. Eliot’s long poem Four Quartets. I had read around the poem to better understand its complexity and discovered - in outline - that the village was important to...
Our nearest big town is Auch and, although Auch Cathedral is not spectacular, is has some truly spectacular stained-glass windows and choir stalls. It’s a gothic cathedral which was begun in 1489 and completed towards the end of the 17th century. Above all it is the 18 windows of Arnaud de...
There’s a finger of land that stretches out from Trapeharde and continues on through the woods, emerging in a valley on the other side of the trees. It’s an old farm track, cut in the hillside many years ago, giving level access to the fields beyond.
Just at the entrance...
This book is about a Clock, a Library and a way of thinking. Stewart Brand quotes Danny Hillis, who conceived the Clock: “I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes...
Written in 1984, In The Rainforest had the effect on me that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had on the previous generation. Here, in shocking detail, was an account of the beauty of the tropical rain forests of the world together with a catalogue of their ecological ...
Some of our visitors have heard of the English seaside city of Brighton (where we lived before we moved to France in 1998). South of London, in the county of East Sussex, Brighton is a vibrant place known, amongst other things, for its two piers, its Royal Pavilion palace and...
Not far from us here in the Gers is a monument that marks a battle that took place between a group of French Resistance fighters and a battalion of German soldiers on the night of July 6th and 7th 1944. The Maquis de Meilhan commemorates the bravery and eventual death of 76...
The Isle of Lewis is the most northerly island in the Outer Hebrides and therefore lies in the path of the wild Atlantic Ocean. Over centuries a style of habitation has evolved which provides optimum protection against the elements. The blackhouse or longhouse is a long...
Scotland’s Outer Hebrides - where we recently took a few days’ break - are a long distance away so a night-stop in the fascinating city of Glasgow is well worth it.
One of the major attractions of the city is The Glasgow School of Art. Built...
My workstation here in the Gers overlooks a magnificant horse-chestnut tree, aesculus hippocastanum (the conker variety, not the sweet chestnut one). It provides shade from the blasting sun and in April it transforms itself with countless bunches of pink-tinged white blossom. Bit by bit...