
The National Portrait Gallery has a wonderful selection of postcards for sale. Here’s a selection of ones I bought the other day. Clockwise from top left: Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Oscar Wilde, John Taverner and J.K. Rowling.

The National Portrait Gallery has a wonderful selection of postcards for sale. Here’s a selection of ones I bought the other day. Clockwise from top left: Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Oscar Wilde, John Taverner and J.K. Rowling.


Not quite sharp enough. Sigh. Back to drawing board.

“Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds…”
Charles Dickens, Bleak House.
It’s been a bit like that in East Anglia recently.

…He’s with the Woolwich!
A street preacher and a potential believer (or perhaps a sceptic), photographed in Cambridge, on Christmas Eve.

I hate shopping. Which is why I stopped in Starbucks the other morning to review (non-existent) progress on my ‘list’.

Disconsolate punt-chauffeurs on the river Cam this morning.

Sacre Bleu! A British bank paying attention to its customers. Whatever next?
Photographed in Cambridge this (Saturday) morning.

In a comfortable armchair, surrounded by all those books that Amazon delivered but one hasn’t yet had time to read.

… can sometimes be creative. Er, or just plain embarrassing?