recapping
Okay. So I notice that the blog text has been a little thin on the ground for a couple of weeks. So here’s what I’ve been doing, if the photos aren’t sufficiently explanatory…. I went to Svalbard. There were puffins, polar foxes, skuas, kittiwakes, glacial ice, abandoned mining towns, non-abandoned mining towns, stubby-legged raindeer, ptarmigans, neverending dim sunlight, and blond people. Then I went to my conference in Liverpool. It was a conference. Then up to the Lake District for a few days—very rainy, so not quite as long as intended, but still really absorbing and, in a funny way, exotic. The Lake DIstrict is full of towering, treeless, scree-sided cliffs that happen to be covered in sheep and have villages with quaint pubs at the bottom of every valley. It’s the most dramatic combination of wild and homey I’ve ever seen. Wild, homey, and sheepey. I’m getting better at drawing sheep. It was wet. I was wet. But then the sun would come out and light up one hillock at a time in a dramatic, nineteenth century sort of way. There was good local cider.
Then I went to London. I’m in London. I like London. I took a walk through the Bengali part of town today and got snacks at a deli/sweet shop. These included a paneer roll that was fried and contained paneer and I don’t know what else, because it was so good I ate it in a sort of dreamy haze right there on the street through which I could identify the paneer but nothing else, so that the rest is just a sort of blur of red, brown, and Bengaliness. I spent five hours yesterday getting to know the Italian Renaissance at the National Gallery and eating snacks in the cafe. There was a (packed) gallery talk on Titian. I like Titian.
Now I’m off to Brussels for 36 hours! This wasn’t in the original plan, but hey. I’m going to visit my college friend Margaret, who some of you may know. I’ve been told there’s good pizza, and a park with ducks and geese. And really what else do you need.
