Thursday 28 January 2016



Landscape and light


The English light, so brilliantly captured by the great Romanticist painters - from Turner on - is something I revel in and even seven years on, I cannot help but stop and photograph what I see, everywhere I go - much to the annoyance of my family.


The other morning, I looked out the bathroom window just before dawn and had a moment of deja vu. I took a look in my art books and found what had sparked it - Sir George Clausen's 'In the early hours'.


I adore this vignette as I pretty much live it every single day.




Pre sunrise is always a magical time of day for me and remains one of the few upsides of being an insomniac who also happens to work as a journalist for a time zone some 11 hours ahead of her body clock!

Can you see why this painting strikes me so?




















Saturday 9 January 2016









The thing I love most about living in Europe is the change of seasons and the way nature signals where we are in the yearly cycle around the sun.





This year however, even here in London where the parks and gardens change dramatically, from fragrant, leafy, flower heavy oases to ice coated, skeletal wastelands, there is confusion.






Trees and flowers are perplexed, teased out of their hibernation by a seductively warm December, diluvial rain and Spring like temperatures.




And so, for the first time in our eight winters in London, December and January look and feel more like March and April.



Climate change? What climate change?