*****

"The first storey of the façade was broken in the centre by the great Puerta del Perdon, an enormous and very deeply-recessed Gothic arch, which narrowed as it receded by the gradations of its mouldings, adorned by statues of apostles, under open-worked canopies, and by shields emblazoned with lions and castles. On the pillar dividing the doorway stood Jesus in kingly crown and mantle, thin and drawn out, with the look of emaciation and misery that the imagination of the Middle Ages conceived necessary for the expression of Divine sublimity. In the tympanum a relievo represented the Virgin surrounded by angels, robed in the habit of St. Ildefonso, a pious legend repeated in various parts of the building as though it were one of its chief glories.

On one side was the doorway called "de la Torre," on the other side that called "de los Escribanos," for by it entered in former days the guardians of public religion to take the oath to fulfil the duties of their office. Both were enriched with stone statues on the jambs, and by wreaths of little figures, foliage, and emblems that unrolled themselves among the mouldings till they met at the summit of the arch."

"The riches of the Church, thought Luna, were a misfortune for art; in a poorer church the uniformity of the ancient front would have been preserved. But, then, the Archbishop of Toledo had eleven millions of yearly revenue, and the Chapter as many more; they did not know what to do with their money, so started works and made reconstructions, and the decadent art produced monstrosities like that one of the Last Supper."

"At last he decided to follow them, and slowly descended the same steps leading down into the cloister, for the Cathedral, being built in a hollow, is much lower than the adjacent streets.
Everything appeared the same. There on the walls were the great frescoes of Bayan y Maella, representing the works and great deeds of Saint Eulogio, his preaching in the land of the Moors, and the cruelties of the infidels, who, with big turbans and enormous whiskers, were beating the saint."

"The garden in the midst of the cloister showed even in midwinter its southern vegetation of tall laurels and cypresses, stretching their branches through the grating of the arches that, five on each side, surrounded the square, and rising to the capitals of the pillars. Gabriel looked a long time at the garden, which was higher than the cloister; his face was on a level with the ground on which his father had laboured so many years ago; at last he saw again that charming corner of verdure—the Jews' market converted into a garden by the canons centuries before. The remembrance of it had followed him everywhere—in the Bois de Boulogne, in Hyde Park; for him the garden of the Toledan Cathedral was the most beautiful of all gardens, for it was the first he had even known in his life."

"They crossed the gallery covered by the archbishop's archway and entered the upper cloister called "the Claverias": four arcades of equal length to those of the lower cloister, but quite bare of decoration, and with a poverty-stricken aspect. The pavement was chipped and broken, the four sides had a balustrade running round between the flat pillars that supported the old beams of the roof. It had been a provisional work three hundred years ago, and had always remained in the same state. All along the whitewashed walls, the doors and windows belonging to the "habitacions" of the Cathedral servants opened without order or symmetry. These were transmitted with the office from father to son. The cloister, with its low arcade, looked like a street having houses on one side only; opposite was the flat colonnade with its balustrade, against which the pointed branches of the cypresses in the garden rested. Above the roof of the cloister could be seen the windows of another row of "habitacions," for nearly all the dwellings in the Claverias had two stories."

"His little floral world did not change, its sombre verdure was like the twilight that had enveloped the gardener's soul. It had not the brilliant gaiety, overflowing with colours and scents of a garden in the open, bathed in full sunlight, but it had the shady and melancholy beauty of a conventual garden between four walls, with no more light than what came through the eaves and the arcades, and no other birds but those flying above, who looked with wonder at this little paradise at the bottom of a well. The vegetation was the same as that of the Greek landscapes, and of the idylls of the Greek poets—laurels, cypress and roses, but the arches that surrounded it, with their alleys paved with great slabs of granite in whose interstices wreaths of grass grew, the cross of its central arbour, the mouldy smell of the old iron railings, and the damp of the stone buttresses coloured a soft green by the rain, gave the garden an atmosphere of reverend age and a character of its own."

"He would stop before the chapel of Santiago, admiring through the railings of its three pointed arches the legendary saint, dressed as a pilgrim, holding his sword on high, and tramping on Mahomedans with his war-horse. Great shells and red shields with a silver moon adorned the white walls, rising up to the vaulting, and this chapel his father, the gardener, regarded as his own peculiar property. It was that of the Lunas, and though some people laughed at the relationship, there lay his illustrious progenitors, Don Alvaro and his wife, on their monumental tombs."

""Look well at that image, uncle. Is there another like it in all the world? She is a courtezan, a siren who would drive men mad if she only fluttered her eyelids."

For Gabriel this was no new discovery; from his childhood he had known that beautiful and sensual figure, with its worldly smile, its rounded outlines, and its eyes with their expression of wanton gaiety as though she were just going to dance.

The child in her arms was also laughing and placing his hand on the bosom of the beautiful woman, as though he intended to tear the covering from her breast. The image of painted stone, stuffed and gilt, wore a blue mantle strewn with stars, from whence its name."

"These vaultings caused Gabriel a strange impression; no one could guess the existence of such a place in the upper regions of the building. He would walk through the forest of worm-eaten posts which supported the roof, through narrow passages between the cupolas of the vaulting that arose from the flooring like white and dusty tumours; sometimes there would be a shaft through which he could see down into the Cathedral, the depth of which made him giddy. These shafts were like narrow well-mouths at the bottom of which could be seen people walking like ants on the tile flooring of the church. Through these shafts were lowered the ropes of the great chandeliers, and the golden chains that supported the figure of Christ above the railing of the high altar."

*****

Interestingly, we asked a knowleadgeable Cathedral guard about this bit below and he very dismissively said "We have nothing of the kind in here". It turned out to be a badly damaged fresco on both sides of the Puerta del Mollete.

"In the interior of the Mollete doorway was represented the horrible martyrdom of the Child de la Guardia; that legend born at the same time in so many Catholic towns during the heat of anti-Semitic hatred, the sacrifice of the Christian child, stolen from his home by Jews of grim countenance, who crucified him in order to tear out his heart and drink his blood."

*****

Looked for Sancho of Portugal's grave - my mother's main excuse to go visit Toledo thoroughly - but it seems to be either unmarked of one of the 342 Sanchos buried inside the Cathedral. We took pictures of most of Sancho effigies wearing crowns. More research needs to be done...

*****

The readings have been half academic and half trashy and I blame Fernando Pessoa for this state of affairs. I went through the catalog of his private library to find out what sort of mystery writers he was reading (he was a failed mystery writer himself and rated the genre highly) and ended up with a collection of books which can only be classified as easy reading time wasters. Very enjoyable time wasters. Which lead to other time wasters Pessoa might have enjoyed too.

- Algernon Blackwood's Weird Tales. I thought I would be the first one to notice that the source for Murakami's city of cats tale in 1Q84 is one of Blackwood's John Silence stories but the critic at the New Statesman beat me to it. I wouldn't think it was my sort of thing, but the stories are well written and strangely engrossing.

- Baroness Orczy's mystery tales. Fun lateral thinking sort of mysteries.

- E. C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case. It was actually a very good mystery with a very decent solution.

- M. R. James's Ghost stories of an Antiquary. So up my alley.

- R. Austin Freeman's mystery novels. Very medicine oriented solutions. But I learned what a Pott's fracture is.

- Mary Roberts Rhinehart's The Circular Staircase. Probably the best of the bunch and very funny too.

- Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu novels which Pessoa probably didn't read but which gave me a terribly guilty, political incorrect, silly pleasure.

*****

With no "modernist poet used to read this so it's ok" excuse this time, I am moving on to french trash. What the hell, it's the summer and, fittingly, I am planning to spend some time in France so I might as well start the immersion early.

- I'm going back to my beloved Arsène Lupin, gentleman thief, inducer of my childhood nightmares. Well, alternatively I can blame my mother for letting me stay up late watching people's fingers being severed on the TV version of the Leblanc novels while waiting for my dad to come home.

- I could almost cry with joy when another vague childhood TV memory turned out to be, after some googling, a version of a trashy turn of the century sci-fi novelist's tale of a mad evil scientist. Yes, I have found Gustave Le Rouge and his Le Mystérieux Docteur Cornelius series. I have a vivid memory of somebody's face being burned by sulfuric acid and Docteur Cornelius using the opportunity to show off his plastic surgery skills with some evil goal in mind. Blaise Cendrars approved of Le Rouge. That is quite something.

- Téophile Gautier's Le Roman de la Momie. I'm guessing this egyptomania novel had something to do with Gautier's friendship with Maxime du Camp who was one of the first people to write Egypt travel books featuring photographs.

- Some of Villiers de L'Isle-Adam's short stories. Trash admired by intellectuals.

- Maurice Renard's Monsieur d'Outremort. We'll see.

Actually, they're good for a myriad of reasons. I am a reluctant gadget adopter as I tend to only buy them when I have no way out anymore or, obviously, if they seem useful - which is very rare. I still don't understand why people use a GPS when on road trip holidays. The best part is when you get lost! Or why would I like to connect to the internet anywhere so I can look up something quickly rather than wonder, speculate or try to recall - it's bad enough I don't know any phone number by heart anymore.

When ereaders first came out I scoffed at the possibility of having 10000 books at my fingertips. I still do. I wish there were 10000 books I want to read but there aren't. It's like having 300 TV channels. Useless. But I ended up getting an ereader because there were a number of books on gutenberg.org I wanted to read, books which weren't available at my library and that I had no wish to own. In fact, I want to get rid of most books I own as it is - all these boxes we have to schlep around whenever we move. And I just can't read these pdf's and whatnots on a laptop screen. I find myself not attached to the idea of books as objects unless they're gorgeously bound, have beautiful pictures or are signed. Nevertheless, I don't plan on buying any books for my kindle. It's exclusively dedicated to either out of print, extremely expensive antique editions or discardable out of copyright classics - I still love bookshops and have no wish to contribute to their disappearance.

At first it was Fernando Pessoa's fault. He was into crime novels and on his personal library there are all these old fashioned books by writers nobody reads anymore - and there it was, Austin Freeman's The Eye of Osiris at Gutenberg, looking at me and begging to be read. Then it was Eric Rohmer who loved Sax Rohmer's thrillers so much as a boy that he adopted his hero's name. I definitely didn't want a Fu-Manchu adventure sitting on my shelf but I just needed to read it. And then there are all these wonderful retro science books... Centuries year old, inaccurate when not just plainly wrong, non-fiction is the best social history document there is. I've been having a grand time reading psychiatric reports from turn of the century Portugal.

Other than trash literature and faulty science, I managed to get my hands on classics of spanish and french literature I always meant to read and which I would have to order from their native countries and would have to keep even after being disappointed by them.

And lots of John Ruskin. So I can disagree with every line the man writes but not have to see his name on the bookshelf.

Anyway, I'm an addicted semi-luddite and I have no shame.

******

Edinburgh has brilliant cemeteries. The 18th century graves at St. Dunstan's are the best ones. Memento Mori galore.

*****

The National Galleries of Art exceeded expectations. The only downside was that the shop had run out of the Companion Guide to the Collection - surprising, to say the least, considering how well stocked they were on every other type of souvenir. On top of that, they don't allow photography in the galleries, the online collection isn't complete and the images available are very small. And I obviously had to fall in love with a minor renaissance painting by an unknown master which isn't mentioned anywhere. I probably will never see it again.

Also, they had a cassone which is further proof for my "Quit romanticizing them, Renaissance Italians were just crass" theory. It's decorated with a painting based on a cuckold/female abuse themed Decameron story. Exactly what you want your virgin daughter/bride to see when she puts away her bridal linen in her wedding chest by the conjugal bed.

*****

In the National Museum of Scotland, looking at the "national heroes" section:

C: Here's Robert the Bruce. Oh, he was defeated by Edward I. Took him a while to get anywhere. He did get Scottish independence. But that sort of ended, didn't it? Last thing he did: defeated by the Irish. William Wallace. Captured and hanged by the English. Mary. Beheaded. James I. Took off to London to be king of the island and only came back to Scotland once. So much for a Scottish king of Britain. Rob Roy. Wounded by the English, defaulted on his loans, imprisoned as outlaw. Bonnie Prince Charlie. Fled from Scotland, defeated by the English. So, all Scottish national heroes are either losers or they didn't care enough?
R: Shhh. Quiet. Yes.

We agreed the Scottish would be better off commemorating all the amazing scientists, philosophers and writers the country has produced rather than these characters of dubious loyalty and accomplishments. They could start by putting J. M. Barrie's striking portrait by William Nicholson in a proper place rather than on one of the walls of the back room of the cafeteria in the National Portrait Gallery.

*****

Like many other things in my life, I'm afraid, I first heard of haggis on a Scrooge McDuck comic book. Inducks.org is failing me but I vividly remember Donald Duck feeling nauseous when a Scottish character carves open a sheep's stomach and an aroma comes out, toxic cloud-like. Being an offal loving person and having had much weirder things to eat in the North of Portugal, I'd say the childhood haggis Disney induced trauma exists no more. I love it.

Marcel Proust. Or Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust. His father was the one who went to register Marcel: "Achille Proust, aged thirthy seven, aggregate at the University of Medicine, doctor of the Paris Hospitals, Knight of the Legion of Honor...". I'm pretty sure all they needed was his profession but it turned out that he had his CV on the tip of his tongue. The witnesses were his uncle Louis Weil and grandfather Nathe Weil.

Carlos Gardel, born in Toulouse as Charles Gardes which is probably why Uruguay still claims him as their own despite the evidence.

André Breton's is a mess. That's because the french add marriages to the record and they ran out of space.

Apollinaire's Death notice. "Type of Death: War wounds".

Utrillo's is a fun one as his paternity was only recognized when he was 8. So, they just crossed out his previous family name, Valadon.

Misericords. I noticed them in Ludlow one of these last weekends for the first time and I only haven't found them earlier because I've been sitting on them. Misericords are narrow ledges on the underside of tip-up seats, offering support when standing through interminable religious functions. The carved ones are obviously more interesting. Although they exist throughout Northern Europe, only the English ones seem to have, in almost every instance, supporters on both sides of the central carving. I read that, probably because of the part of the anatomy which the misericords were supposed to provide support for, only a small proportion of the carvings are about biblical or overtly religious themes. The majority of the carvings are said to embody some sort of vernacular theology by illustrating moral tales of folkloric origin with models taken from now lost frescoes, bestiaries and popular epics and mystery plays.

There are a variety of themes for the carvings but the "Beware of Women" sexist satire ones seem to be well documented. The mermaid holding a looking glass and a comb (destroyed) - meaning a seductress - above is a later development over the early medieval mermaid holding a fish symbolizing a soul.

The story of the Cheating Ale Wife - the woman who used a false bottomed measuring tankard to cheat clients out of their beer - seemed to have been a rich source probably because not only it proves how wicked women are but also because it deals with a very serious issue - alcohol. The devil on the left is the recording devil, Tutivillus, whose job it is to note down idle chatter by churchgoers or negligently recited prayers. The center has a devil carrying the Cheating Ale Wife (plus tankard) over his shoulder while another one plays some kind of wind instrument. The carving on the right has the wicked women being thrown in the gaping jaws of hell (see Hellmouth) .

The woman with the horned headdress (and how men should protect against them - see the man on the side holding a shield) is another common theme. This aversion probably derives from St Jerome's diatribes against women's fashions. The Bishop of Paris wrote a poem about it in the 14th century which says>

If we do not take care of ourselves
from the women we shall be slain.
They have horns to kill the men;
they carry great masses of other people's hair
upon their heads.

The reason why I signed up is twofold: I've never left Mr. B's without thinking to myself how marvelously knowledgeable the staff is over there and, mostly, because I am aware of how terribly prejudiced I am.

There are authors whose nationalities put me off - it's not xenophobia, I promise, just a conditioned reflex which is the fruit of a string of bad experiences fueled by a tendency for pessimistic forecasting. Yes, profiling it is. A pink cover will send me running. The book with too many national newspaper endorsements on its back cover will get scoffed at. Book club endorsements likewise. I end up avoiding any "feminine take" because I'm a woman and I don't really see how having a vagina fundamentally changes my metaphysics. In fact, there is an infinite array of other irrational prejudices for which I can't find even marginally defensible reasons. At least I'm aware of it, no?

Also, I love surprises. These surprises arrive by mail wrapped, sealed and with a little note explaining why my bibliotherapist thinks I might enjoy the book they're sending.

And I got for my first monthly installment... Ismail Kadare. Which is fabulous because I have an irrational prejudice against him and I didn't even mention my prejudices to Nic or my goal to exterminate them - that would be embarrassing in a way that exposing then on a blog post is not, for some unfathomable reason. In fact, I am very aware of having irrational prejudices in general against writers from behind the iron curtain.

I am so aware of this that I made an unnatural effort to read Solzhenitsyn, for example. I'm thinking Kundera was easier because I can read his politics as a backdrop to his more philosophically interesting plots. I think I end up liking the allegorical novel as long as it's not too partisan, too much against communism per se but against totalitarianism in general.

I gave it a little bit of thought and I can only imagine that communism has a different meaning to me which is a personal, emotional meaning with no political connotation. Communism was all pervasive in my childhood. It was the exact opposite reaction to the fascist dictatorship that had disappeared just before I was born. My childhood was one long succession of left wing rallies, red carnations and singing protest songs. One of my first memories is of queuing with my mother for her first opportunity to vote - she obviously voted for the communist candidate. The word communism was some abstract ideal that many people couldn't define but that naively sounded like just something everybody must want - a more equal and just society. The last thing on anybody's minds was stalinism, gulags or that what looked like the exact opposite of the right wing regime would inevitably go down the same path. And so these cautionary tales about the perils of communist totalitarianism always sounded to me as cynical remarks by people who love deflating everybody's balloons. It's not they are not correct. It's just that I refuse to connect "my" communism, my first years of life in an exhilarating time of hope of renewal, with those atrocities. A bit like how the Obama voters must feel when somebody points out to them on whose mandate a major terrorist was murdered without even the pretense of a trial.

In any case, The Palace of Dreams was an enjoyable read even if it felt like it was written by the product of a crossing between Salman Rushdie and Bohumil Hrabal - the Rushdiesque vaguely mystical fantasy with the inventiveness of the oppressed Hrabal. Paradoxically, I ended up finding the novel not daring enough in its subversiveness. It made me realize I'm glad I saved some Hrabal for a rainy day. This means I will definitely choose the Czech over the Albanian whenever I feel the need to smother my prejudice a little bit further. But before reading Kadare like a good schoolgirl on an assignment how could I have known?

--George Steiner, Paris Review Interview

"It has, I believe, been said that Britain possesses no climate, only weather. The weather of this country has been much abused (...) by ourselves, with no justice at all, (...) for our weather is our character and has made us what we are. (...)

The whole aim of the British weather is to make everything difficult and nothing impossible."

*****

This last sentence has been much quoted in this household. When we first moved to London, we lived in a Georgian building overlooking a leafy square where, at the first ray of sunlight, lawns would be covered with pasty white bodies lounging like lizards.

The pair of us, having been brought up 5000km away from each other but sharing the experience of a permanently sunny childhood - R. even more so, living the T-shirt and Shorts Californian life - were unprepared for the whims of the British weather. We'd lazily wake up on a Saturday morning and notice, after weeks of what seemed exceptionally low, dark grey clouds hovering over the city, that it was a sunny day. Cheered up by the prospect of a walk in a sunny park, we'd calmly get ready, shower, cook breakfast, eat and, by the time we were ready to leave the apartment, it would be raining.

So we learned to hastily join the pasty white bodies downstairs in the square at the first glimpse of sunlight but, conversely, we have learned that if you let the weather stop you from whatever you feel like doing, you'll never do anything at all. And so we've come to understand that stoicism is not about sacrifice but about freeing yourself from external hindrances and therefore, if we want to go hiking, there is no rain or wind that will stop us. Because we are free. And also because if we put it off until the day after, the weather may be even worse anyway.

Sussex in July. See what I mean?

The most startling thing is that we've grown fond of the weather. Last Christmas in Portugal we found ourselves commenting how sunny and cloudless it was and realized we were bored by the immutability of it all. Portuguese weather would make for a very uneventful stop motion movie. Sitting back home at my perch over the Frome valley, I find myself making a sport out of figuring out whether I can see the Welsh Black Mountains in the distance or if the tops of the hills around us are dusted with snow or if the cows are lying down -that is always a sure sign of rain to come - or if that gap in the clouds will bring a few rays of sun in a short while. It is truly exciting and suddenly Turner makes sense, in an anthropological way.

****

(We're having a private Jim Jarmusch festival.)

****

Night on Earth, Jim Jarmusch. I first saw it when it came out. I was a teenager and I loved it. I've never stopped listening to the Tom Waits soundtrack ever since. But what did I love about it? It would have been impossible for me to understand it - there are too many cultural references, socially significant accents and national stereotyping in-jokes. I'm assuming a polyglot teenager stuck in a provincial backwater in pre-internet days must have been dazzled by the cosmopolitanism of it. I still am.

****

High Heels, Pedro Almodóvar. Another one I watched when it first came out. Teenagerhood must have limited my attention span and all I could remember from it was both Miguel Bosé in drag and Miguel Bosé practically naked. Teenagerhood, or rather, the lack of critical sense that comes from inexperience, must have prevented me from noticing how flabby Bosé's buttocks are. Not that it matters but it comes as a good excuse to my teenage self to say that I fear that is all I'll remember in the future from this non remarkable standard Almodóvar plot with a brilliant kitsch soundtrack. (I also failed to identify the Mexican interior decoration in Marisa Paredes apartment the first time around.)

****

Ghost Dog, The way of the samurai, Jim Jarmusch. It combines two of my favorite things: it nods to Asian mafia gang war movies and winks at cheap philosophy. Thanks to Ghost Dog, my quite belated new favorite thing is the Wu Tang clan, much to R's chagrin. He has been trying to convince me of the artistic significance of vintage rap or hip hop or whatever it is for years. Well, he should have played The Rza to me a long time ago.

****

Coffee and Cigarettes, Jim Jarmusch. After a while you start noticing black and white checkered patterns everywhere. It feels a lot like an intimate production done with friends which you are allowed to peep in to try and discover the recurrent themes in the vignettes. And it features the underground icon Taylor Mead who starred in Andy Warhol movies. To turn this post into a homage to C&C's structure of inter-vignette hints and imagining Almodóvar will read this:

Taylor Mead's Ass (1964) is a film by Andy Warhol featuring Taylor Mead, consisting entirely of a shot of Mead's buttocks, and filmed at The Factory. Warhol came up with the idea for the film after reading a review in The Village Voice which said of his previous film "Tarzan and Jane Regained... Sort of" that "... people don't want to see an hour and a half of Taylor Mead's ass."

Llyn Cau. It's in a protected area and there was no one in sight. Other than sheep. If it weren't so cold out I would have skinny dipped. They need to install a finnish sauna up there, although soaking in a beautiful free standing tub afterwards at the isolated Old Rectory on the Lake (yet another lake, Tal y Llyn) made up for it. Watching Mynnyd Rugog from our window.

(as a recently arrived expat excited to find out more about the city where I was living, I went into Foyles on Charing Cross Road and tried to describe these series of books I had seen elsewhere to the bookshop assistant: "Their covers have a black background; they're about the architecture of the different counties; published by a university press, I think". She looked at me as if I were an alien - which was figuratively correct - and said "You mean the Pevsner Guides? Of course we have them!". Now I can't live without them.)

The Pevsner guide describes the smallest architectural features in great detail but often fails to mention signficant places of cultural or literary significance. One of such is the house, Widcombe Lodge, where Henry Fielding wrote most of Tom Jones while staying with his sister. The book "A Henry Fielding Companion" says this story of his stay is a tradition which should be a polite way of saying there is no documentary evidence for it. Tradition also has it that he might have written books while staying next door's at Bennett's Widcombe Manor.

And so, right next to Fielding's Lodge sits Widcombe Manor which, other than the obviously impressive façade, has a late 16th century bronze fountain said to have been taken from one of the Grimani palaces in Venice. The fountain was added by one of the previous owners of the manor, Sir John Roper Wright - a steel tycoon - in the 1920's. Authentic or not (and I suspect that zoologically correct seahorse gives it away), it looks rather exotic in the middle of the English countryside.

	At the top there is a putto riding a seahorse.
	Baby satyrs sitting on the rim of the bowl on the second level.
	Tritons around the Medici family coat of arms and turtles at the base.

The next owner of Widcombe Manor, Horace Annesley Vachell, a prolific novelist and playwright, wrote a family saga entitled "The Golden House, a romance of Bath" using the Manor as a model. Vachell writes in one of his books that Fielding wrote Tom Jones in the lobby of his "Golden House".

Jeremy Fry, the "British inventor, engineer, entrepreneur, adventurer and arts patron" and friend of James Dyson also owned Widcombe Manor from 1955 to 1967 and held memorable parties there - or else, any party attended by Princess Margaret seems to have been memorable judging by the frequency by which mentions of the princess and the phrase "memorable party" appear together in English memoirs.

From there we walked to Priory Park Gardens - built by Ralph Allen with advice by Pope and, unsurprisingly, later coveted by William Beckford - to see one of four surviving Palladian bridges (three are in England and another one is in Russia).

19th century graffitti. So elegant probably because good penmanship was something to be proud of and pocket knives were popular.

William Beckford in a letter: "I take airings everyday like an old Dowager".

Double happiness: it snowed and my favorite spot - I always have one wherever I am, like a cat - will be spared the ignominy of fake beautification (also known as "development" or "progress"). The spot being the ruins of Capel's mill by the river Frome pictured above and "development" being the potential destruction of said ruins by the very retro project of making a 19th century canal navigable once again.

*******

Watching or rewatching Hitchcock's 30's thrillers - The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes. They're a cross between Tintin's adventures and Agatha Christie's novels. A lot happens on trains. Also, Shadow of a Doubt. Trains again.

Billy Wilder's The Apartment. A story about doormats. Nonetheless, I will be using a quote from it:
''Twas the night before Christmas
And all through the house
Not a creature was stirring --
Nothing --
No action --
Dullsville!"

Marcel Carné's Les Enfants du Paradis. Jacques Prévert's witty dialogue.

Max Ophul's Lola Montez. I have a feeling he just wanted an excuse to design Bavarian rococo sets.

The Thin Man and its sequels. Highly entertaining; like watching cartoons. Period value too: great jackets with wide lapels, 30's style outlaws and their jargon, gags with pet dogs, beautiful old cars, and general pre war merriment.