Talkative Ginger cat, Canareggio, Venice

Last cat till home. Leaving for the airport now. Will get home on
Sunday.

Our feet in Venice

Taken at about three pm, just before they began to ache and throb in
earnest.

Renaissance cat on lead (to stop it falling in water), Accademica, Venice

Stray cat, Arsenale, Venice

Stuffed cat in German pavillion exhibit, Giardini, Venice Biennale

I have not been able to find out how this poor creature met its end.
The only thing in Venice I do not like.

Briefly interrupting world tour of cat features to acknowledge existence of other interesting items

Kittun poster on the Rialto, Venice

Sinister surrealist cat, Musee d'Orsay, Paris

Poor orphaned cat in Pere Lachaise cemetery, Paris

Seriose cat locked up alone overnight in icecream and waffle shop, Jordaan, Amsterdam

they love the tuxedo cats here.

There was also a cat locked in the basement of our hotel - I could see it through the little window at footpath level.

I'm not sure it's a good idea to have cats in a place where they are in constant danger of falling in the canal.

17th century arseholes picking on cat, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Cross cat in Amsterdam wine bar

Somewhat happier cat, victoria and Albert museum

Another unhappy cat in Bloomsbury

Morrissey in Mile End on Saturday night

Old stuff

As you can see Stonehenge is actually only twelve inches high, so Spinal Tap were not as far off the mark as has previously been supposed.

Special "screen out the forty thousand other people there" camera was used in the taking of this photograph.

You are given an audio tour thing to listen to as you walk around (which is good because then you stay for more than the five seconds necessary to take in a heap of old rocks standing in a field) and they kept speculating on what Stonehenge was for. Obviously, it was for the same thing 'then' as it is for now, which is staring at and wondering what it's for, and paying six pounds for the privilege.

Did You Know: Grand Designs has a whole magazine? I read the July issue from cover to cover and am hoping to see the August one before we leave Britain. It's great. At the conference whenever I got a chance I asked English people about housing and heritage stuff. One thing I liked was what a nice woman from Edinburgh told me about making repairs to listed buildings. There is a rule of thumb you must observe that repairs should blend in from four feet away, but from two feet away it should be clear what is old and what is new.

Although the definition of 'old' and 'new' here is something I'm yet to fathom or feel I understand.


I took this picture at the Roman Baths, at Bath. Bath Abbey on the left there was founded in the 7th century, put up in the 12th century and tizzed in the 16th; there's a nice piece of Georgian building on the right, I was standing on a rather kitschy nineteenth century mezzanine around the excavated Roman pool below, which was constructed in the first century. The hot, sulphur-smelling water from the springs fell as rain ten thousand years ago. And it tastes like it too.

I doubt I will grasp how to think about age before we go on to places where it's just the same only considerably more so.

Pebbles

Pebbles lives in Bath.


We're in London now (Bethnal Green, great place) and staying here until Tuesday. Have been doing Londony kinds of things, going to galleries etc. The pub on the corner used to be owned by the Kray twins. People are very friendly and polite. I wish I had taken more of an interest in cricket. It's been raining buckets and buckets, and not specially warm - topping out at about 23c - but I can actually see why 28 and over is considered a heatwave. PT seems to have heating that can't be turned off and windows don't open.

Effy

Effy lives in the house we're staying in in London.

Banksy show at Bristol museum yesterday

Outside the house the austens lived at in Bath

The conference is over

It’s a quarter past six on Sunday morning and I’m sitting up in my bed at the halls. In a while I’ll get up and perform a series of complicated manouevres to find the wireless network, get breakfast, put my laundry into a washing machine (I’m going to wash my clothes with soap flakes shaved off my bathroom soap using the edge of my drivers’ licence, do you think that will be alright?), put it into a dryer, clean my teeth, pack my bag and get it down the seven hundred stairs. And then I’ll wait around until Dorian gets here from London, in a car, hooray! No more public transport! (Which is actually incredibly excellent here, but I’m sick of it.)
Did I say this already? The conference was at Chawton House Library and while the conference bit was good in all sorts of ways, the location was definitely something out of the ordinary, both because of the present beauty of the place and its past, for which I can’t seem to summon up an adequate comment.




It’s the manor house – built in the 13th century (?) but with plenty of additions and alterations since) owned by Jane Austen’s brother Edward Knight (he was adopted by a rich cousin when he was a kid), and he didn’t live there permanently. I don’t seem to have taken any pictures of the inside of the house, which is not inhumanly big (the room called the Great Hall is about the size of our rumpus room) but what it irresistibly reminded me of is the house in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe – there’s that exact magical quality of corridors and staircases that wind and turn and lead you to rooms you weren’t expecting and which don’t seem to relate spatially to the other rooms you were in before. It’s been very simply renovated – the floors are mainly bare oak boards or stone flags, the fireplaces are stone as are the window frames, walls are dark oak panelling to just above head height and the plaster is off white. At different times in the nineteenth and twentieth century the plaster walls were decorated variously with red and gold Spanish leather, with green William Morris wallpaper, with trompe murals, and with bright pink paint. I’d have liked to see it when it was a lived-in house. But by all accounts it was on the point of falling over before it entered the current phase of its existence.
It’s just as nice outside. On either side of the gravel drive up to the house are paddocks full of sheep, edged with big oaks, limes, yews and damson hedges.




There’s a converted stables building on the left and a thirteenth century church on the right.




Behind the house is an Elizabethan terrace and herb garden, a group of outbuildings, another big rolling lawn, then right up the back is a fantastic walled kitchen garden (again, very C.S. Lewis with the flint walls and iron gates) and a Wilderness.





Jane Austen’s own house is ten minutes’ walk away in the village itself (which is like everything else around here – so strictly regulated that there are no signs, no big developments, no shops really, nothing newer or flashier than about 1800. Even the private houses either are or look about four hundred years old. It’s weird glancing at the little leadlight windows of a thatched cottage and seeing a huge plasma screen telly inside. The house itself is a bit underwhelming – so museumy that there is not really any sense of it having been where the Austen women lived or Austen wrote. I saw the alleged table, the patchwork quilt, the bit of George Austen’s hair etc – boring. (Well, actually the quilt was pretty nice, much better than it looks in pictures.)



Well I have lots to say about the conference itself but I had better get on with soap-flake-shaving etc now.

No wireless in the airport at Dubai

Ok, so here I am in Winchester. The first day of the conference was yesterday and it was very good. Chawton House is amazingly lovely although I am having difficulty mentally separating it from Grand Designs when I look at the stonework, flagstones etc (it was recently restored.) The papers yesterday were good and it's a very friendly meeting, plus whenever the attention wanders (as its its wont when sessions start at 9am and finish at 6.30pm. Today goes to 10.30pm.) you can look around the dark oak panelled room you're sitting in and think that Jane Austen used to have dinner in here or whatever. I even enjoyed tripping over the uneven stairs yesterday because the Austens would have tripped over them before me. Dorian and I have swapped phones temporarily (he's gone to a jazz festival in Lyon) so I'm taking pictures with his phone and I don't know how to get them onto this computer. But there will be photos soon. Also, I have finished my paper, you will be pleased to learn. It's on tomorrow morning, the last day, which is a bit sad because I'd much rather get it over and done with.

It's Friday now and we got to England on Tuesday afternoon. Being dutiful Australians we headed straight to Earls Court, spent a night in a hotel there, and sorted out the rest of our train tickets and suchlike. The next day we wandered around looking at english things, Trafalgarsquarenelsonscolumnhydeparkwestminsterabbeycoventgardenstjamessparkbuckinghampalace etc etc etc, then went our separate ways for more good long doses of public transportation. By the time I arrived here at the halls of residence where I'm staying I couldn't do more than dump my bags and stumble across the road to the pub for a "meal" and a read of The News of the World, which was still all about Michael Jackson. (I appear to have missed MJ's funeral, was it good?)

Dorian is coming to get me on Sunday and were going to some other English places. I shall blog again soon. Flying business class is the best thing ever.

Here we go

Well we finally got the house clean, bags packed, conference papers half written, and now I'm sitting in the gate lounge at the airport. Dorian has wandered off and I don't know whether he'll be back in time to get on the plane. But it doesn't matter because WE GOT UPGRADED yaaaay.!!!

See you in London. Or possibly in Dubai if they have wireless in the airport.