Suddenly Summer

Sunday's wildflower walk took in the countryside east of the village. My walk yesterday covered the western side. In fact it was the same walk I did here and here. But what a difference three months make. The countryside had been completely transformed by the green burgeoning of summer. It was like walking through an utterly different landscape. In the middle of May I'd left a cold, drab England for Sicily. Returning to England a few weeks later I'd been ambushed by the loveliness, the luxuriance of a late springtime. There'd been buckets of rain and big dollops of sunshine in my absence, which had spurred the season into sudden, flowering growth. This all-sensory shock remained with me. From nowhere it was suddenly summer.

When I'd walked this way in April I'd practised a Zen exercise by rotating my five senses - sight, sound, smell, touch, taste - and focusing hyper-consciously on each one in turn. This time it struck me that my wildflower experiment was simply a more refined variation on this: I was concentrating on one object of vision only - looking exclusively at the wildflower channel, you might say. And what riches this narrowed, concentrated vison brought! It's extraordinary how much we miss without this kind of conscious, focused gaze. I'd never have guessed I would have found a staggering 75 different species of wildflower before taking Sunday's dedicated stroll.

Yesterday's walk added a further six flowers to the list: wild carrot, common knapweed, common sorel, self-heal, ground-ivy, shepherd's purse. But there weren't as many wildflowers here compared with Sunday - for I was crossing farmed fields and cultivated ground. It demonstrated to me quite clearly how the roadside verges and hedged backcountry lanes to the east were a much safer haven for a wide variety of wildflowers than this monocultured farmland. It wasn't until I reached the untouched grassland around the old gravel-pit lakes that the flowers became more abundant: bird's-foot-trefoil, ox-eye daisy, hogweed, hemlock, tufted vetch, dog rose, creeping thistle, meadow buttercup, poppy, clover, mallow.

By the lakes I stopped, relaxed and looked about, shifting my intense mono-vision to a broader field of view. A goldfinch trilled its liquid, silvery song from the top of a bush. A yellowhammer - a common bird hereabouts - repeated its 'little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese' mantra and flew from the hedge, a blaze of yellow amid the green. Iridescent blue damselflies darted among the docks and sorels. And a large emperor dragonfly rested motionless in the grass at my feet, its abdomen electric blue with a dark, central stripe, its thorax apple-green.

Gradually I became aware of more birdlife all around me - a grasshopper warbler whirring out its montone song, sounding for all the world like an angler's ratcheted fishing reel, a pheasant sqawking in the undergrowth, a crow caw-cawing in the distance...

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

EDWARD THOMAS Adlestrop

June Wildflower Survey

Yesterday I made a brief botanical survey of the wildflowers growing in and around our village. The location is the Trent valley flood plain in Nottinghamshire, and the geology is mudstone and clay, sand and gravel. I noted all the wildflowers I saw on an hour's circular walk alongside roadside verges and ditches, down hedgebanked lanes, past a pond, and across farmland and some uncultivated ground. It's ordinary English countryside and I didn't expect to find any rarities. However I was surprised at the variety of species I did discover - 75 in all. This was my list (including any native wildflowers I found growing in gardens):

Mugwort, marsh-marigold, meadow buttercup, creeping buttercup, greater spearwort, common poppy, opium poppy, gold-of-pleasure, garlic mustard, red campion, bladder campion, common chickweed, pineapple weed, good King Henry, common mallow, meadow crane's-bill, dove's-foot crane's-bill, white clover, red clover, common bird's-foot-trefoil, common vetch, tufted vetch, ox-eye daisy, bramble, germander speedwell, dog rose, white bryony, great willowherb, rosebay willowherb, ivy, black mustard, ground elder, curled dock, common nettle, bogbean, green alkanet, bindweed, hedge bindweed, ivy-leaved toadflax, foxglove, bulrush, creeping tormentil, herb-robert, black medick, common comfrey, wild radish, white dead-nettle, ribwort plantain, cleavers, lady's bedstraw, red valerian, common groundsel, common ragwort, daisy, yarrow, feverfew, sea mayweed, lesser burdock, prickly sow-thistle, smooth sow-thistle, common dandelion, lily-of-the-valley, nipplewort, creeping thistle, purple-loosetrife, hawkweed, smooth hawk's-beard, bugloss, meadowsweet, cow parsley, hemlock, hogweed, upright hedge-parsley, meadow vetchling, black horehound.

Not bad considering the unexceptional nature of the habitat.

Wild Creatures

Wilderness without wildlife is just scenery. Quoted of an American wilderness expert by REBECCA SOLNIT in her book Wanderlust: A History Of Walking

So few wild creatures, relatively, remain in Britain and Ireland: so few, relatively, in the world. Pursuing our project of civilisation, we have pushed thousands of species towards the brink of disappearance, and many thousands more over that edge. The loss, after it is theirs, is ours. Wild animals, like wild places, are invaluable to us precisely because they are not us. They are uncompromisingly different. The paths they follow, the impulses that guide them, are of other orders. The seal's holding gaze, before it flukes to push another tunnel through the sea, the hare's run, the hawk's high gyres: such things are wild. Seeing them, you are made briefly aware of a world at work around and beside our own, a world operating in patterns and purposes that you do not share. These are creatures, you realise, that live by voices inaudible to you. ROBERT MACFARLANE The Wild Places

Summer Quiz

Anyone know what Ovid, DH Lawrence, Truman Capote, André Gide, Guy de Maupassant, Oscar Wilde, Alexander Dumas, Luigi Pirandello, John Steinbeck, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Paul Klee, Gustav Klimt, Richard Wagner, Johannes Brahms, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Elizabeth Taylor, Cary Grant, Tyrone Power, Marcello Mastroianni, Gregory Peck, Ingmar Bergman, Frederico Fellini, Francis Ford Coppola and Woody Allen have in common?

Wildness

There is wildness everywhere, if we only stop in our tracks and look around us. ROGER DEAKIN

He [Roger Deakin] was an explorer of the undiscovered country of the nearby. ROBERT MACFARLANE

Throughout the course of his book, The Wild Places, and throughout the course of his ramblings in the British wild, Macfarlane comes to appreciate more and more that 'wildness' exists not only in the grand, majestic, panoramic places, such as Sutherland or the Cairngorms, but also in the close-at-hand, often-ignored topographies of small canvas, such as the plant-rich cracks and crevices in the Burren's limestone pavement, or the ancient, sunken holloways of the Dorset chalkhills. If you look carefully, these unseen landscapes can be found in the bend of a stream valley, in the undercut of a river bank, in copses and peat hags, hedgerows and quicksand pools ... in the margins, interzones and rough cusps of the country: quarry rim, derelict factory and motorway verge.

He also realises that you don't necessarily have to travel big distances from human habitation - to the Arctic tundra or the Siberian taiga for example - to encounter 'wildness'. It exists right there alongside human activity, bound up with human presence - such as in the 'cleared' valleys of the Scottish Highlands, which are haunted by the ghosts of former shielings and settlements; and in the earthworks and burial mounds, and tree rings and stone circles you find all over the British Isles, which speak eloquently of past human ritual and ceremonial.

He concludes that the uneasy opposition between culture and nature, between garden and wilderness, need not be the hard-to-reconcile division we may at first imagine. We can recognise and fulfil ourselves in both apparent polarities. But we do need them both. This is essential both for us and the planet. This is what it is to be properly human: to know what to cultivate and what to leave alone. I fear we have a lot to learn (or relearn) - before it is too late.

(My posts on Edward Abbey, and his book Desert Solitaire, also touch on this subject - if you are interested, click on 'Edward Abbey' under the LABELS widget on the right hand side of my blog.)

The photo was taken on Mount Etna in Sicily.

Emptiness Is The Track On Which The Centred Person Moves

Unborn emptiness has let go of the extremes of being and non-being. Thus it is both the centre itself and the central path. Emptiness is the track on which the centred person moves. JE TSONGKHAPA (1357-1419)

Reading this quotation from the Tibetan Buddhist Je Tsongkhapa (aka Je Rinpoche) just now in Stephen Batchelor's excellent book Buddhism Without Beliefs (1997), it struck me that it had some affinity with the poem I wrote a few days ago, Sweet Nothing.

The photo was taken on Mount Etna in Sicily.

A Felt Relationship With The Natural World

In this modern age, very little remains that is real. GASTON REBUFFAT

Talk of mysteries! - Think of our life in nature, - daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, - rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we? THOREAU

I've finally got round to reading Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places and I'm entranced. I share so many of the same sentiments of this author that it's uncanny. I loved his first book, Mountains Of The Mind, and I can't think why I haven't read this, his second book, until now. Macfarlane is one of our finest writers on landscape. He blends the scientific, the poetic and the philosophical so beautifully, and his use of language is compelling and original.

That winter hour, though, up on the summit ridge with the stars falling plainly far above, it seemd to me that our estrangement from the dark was a great and serious loss. We are, as a species, finding it increasingly hard to imagine that we are part of something which is larger than our own capacity. We have come to accept a heresy of aloofness, a humanist belief in human difference, and we suppress wherever possible the checks and balances on us - the reminders that the world is greater than us or that we are contained within it. On almost every front, we have begun a turning away from a felt relationship with the natural world.

The blinding of the stars is only one aspect of this retreat from the real. In so many ways, there has been a prising away of life from place, an abstraction of experience into different kinds of touchlessness. We experience, as no historical period has done before, disembodiment and dematerialisation. The almost infinite connectivity of the technological world, for all the benefits that it has brought, has exacted a toll in the coin of contact. We have in many ways forgotten what the world feels like. And so new maladies of the soul have emerged, unhappinesses which are complicated products of the distance we have set between ourselves and the world. We have come increasingly to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world - it spaces, textures, sounds, smells and habits - as well as by genetic traits we inherit amd ideologies we absorb. A constant and formidably defining exchange occurs between the physical forms of the world around us, and the cast of our inner world of imagination. The feel of a hot dry wind on the face, the smell of distant rain carried as a scent stream in the air, the touch of a bird's sharp foot on one's outstretched palm: such encounters shape our beings and our imaginations in ways which are beyond analysis, but also beyond doubt. There is something uncomplicatedly true in the sensation of laying hands upon sun-warmed rock, or watching a dense mutating flock of birds, or seeing snow fall irrefutably upon one's upturned palm.

(Read my other posts on Robert Macfarlane by clicking on 'Robert Macfarlane' under the LABELS widget on the right hand side of my blog.)

Football, Frocks And Fiscal Matters

In this world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Although England is hardly shining in the World Cup first round (without a win against Slovenia tomorrow we are almost certainly out of the competition), to the mean-minded person it must give a small morsel of comfort to know that the French team is performing even more badly.

France has had a difficult few days. First there's the total disarray within the French football squad. Next there's David Cameron's wife, Samantha, upstaging Carla Bruni, wife of the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, in the haute couture stakes. A case of glam Sam Cam? Finally the fact's been unearthed that it was the French who, in 1954, invented dreaded VAT (Value Added Tax). So we've the French to blame for this unpopular tax which affects all social and economic sectors equally, regardless of wealth or income - the tax which has of course been raised from 17.5% to 20% in today's emergency Budget!

So, whether it's in football, frocks or fiscal matters, the French have scored litle higher than a resounding nul points this week. And if they don't do something about tackling their budget deficit very soon - out of all the European nations they're the ones who seem to be pretending it doesn't exist - the merde will most definitely hit the ventilateur.

Two Interesting Facts About Cefalù

First interesting fact about Cefalù: it was the place where Giuseppe Tornatore shot the 1988 film Cinema Paradiso. I watched this film again recently on DVD and still found it utterly charming. It's a nostalgic celebration of films and filmmaking, and its critical and public success helped revive the Italian film industry at the time.

Second interesting fact about Cefalù: the mountaineer, chess player, poet, playwright, occultist, alleged British spy, and practising black and white magician Aleister Crowley lived here from April 1920 until Mussolini expelled him from Italy in April 1923. Crowley was a very bad boy. Known as 'the wickedest man in the world' and 'The Great Beast', he travelled the world on inherited money with a string of impressionable, slightly screwball women in tow - most of whom he impregnated and/or persuaded to cooperate in esoteric 'sex magic' rituals. He was also vain, arrogant, bullying, ruthlessly ambitious, racist, antisemitic, misogynistic, and one of the most thoroughly unpleasant charlatans ever to have been born on English soil.

In Cefalù he founded the Abbey of Thelema - inspired by the eponymous abbey in that rollicking series of novels The Lives Of Garagantua And Pantagruel by François Rabelais. The abbey's motto was 'Do What Thou Wilt', a precept to which Crowley irreligiously adhered throughout his whole life. A habitual experimenter with drugs - including opium, cocaine, hashish, cannabis, alcohol, ether (ethyl oxide), mescaline and morphine, he died a heroin addict in 1947 at the age of 72. A lot of people who should have known better were influenced by his pseudo-mystical, drug-fuelled antics - including Timothy Leary, David Bowie, heavy metal bands Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden, Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, the avant garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger, and the spooky founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard. A final interesting fact: Crowley was also one of the figures on the cover sleeve of the Beatles' 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Sweet Nothing

Unpack the vine
Uncurl unwind
Unpack the mind

Sweet nothing

Was waiting for you
All the time
Nothing to find

Suck on the grape
Puncture its skin
Juice of the moment
Sweet but thin

Unpack the world
There's space within
Between the sky
And the ocean's rim

Unpack the vine
Uncurl unwind
Unfold the dream
Unfurl the sign

Sweet nothing

Was waiting for you
All the time
And you didn't even notice

Sweet nothing

Easy when there's
Nothing to find

Sweet sweet nothing

I woke just now at dawn with this poem half-created in my head, so I thought I'd better write it down before I lost it. I haven't been inspired to write any poems for many weeks, probably since the time I wrote this poem about my sister in March - which was also mostly formed in my unconscious mind while asleep.

A Walk On The Rock

A brick and stone path zigzags from Cefalù's old quarter up the western crag of La Rocca, or The Rock. This view's looking back over the new town and its crescent-shaped beach lapped by the Tyrrhenian sea...

The path takes you past prickly pear and giant fennel, and through swathes of purple and yellow wildflowers...

... to the Temple of Diana, an ancient megalith which had been 'done up' by the Greeks...

A steeper, rougher track climbs to the ruins of an old fort at the summit. Near the top a black snake hurtles across the path in front of me - a viper possibly, but, in view of its speed, more likely a western whip snake. Everywhere there are black and yellow lizards, about 5 to 6 inches long. They freeze, dart along the warm rocks, then freeze again. It's a hot, sunny morning - maybe 26 or 27 degrees C - and, on the way down, the cooling shade of a small pinewood is very welcome. A jay perches fearlessly on the lowest branch of a pine tree a mere arm's length away.

Here's the view from the Rock's northern edge overlooking the intricate warren of Cefalù's old town, wedged between sea and cliff...

Blue On Gold

Cefalù's cathedral is one of the most impressive Norman churches in Sicily and I liked it very much. My first sudden view of it - from the train window just before entering Cefalù station - made me catch my breath. It commands a slightly elevated position overlooking the huddled terracotta roofs of Cefalù's old quarter. Behind it rears the sheer-sided limestone cliff of La Rocca. Its situation is quite superb.

Building began in 1131 (the Normans conquered Sicily in 1091) after Roger II, King of Sicily, vowed to God he would build a cathedral here - having survived a severe storm and been washed up on Cefalù's beach. The photo above shows the cathedral's western façade with its triple-arched 15th century portico set between two square towers, each surmounted by a small spire. The tree in front of the cathedral is a date palm. This is the interior with its pink granite columns and astonishing Byzantine mosaics:

Master craftsmen from Constantinople created these wonderful blue and gold and red and green mosaics. They are exceptionally fine and are considered the best examples of Byzantine mosaic work in all Italy. The main image is of Jesus Christ as Pantocrator, meaning 'Almighty' or 'All-Powerful Ruler'. Christ's right hand is raised in benediction, and in his left he holds a Bible open at this verse from St John's Gospel (which you can read in both Greek and Latin): I am the light of the world. Who follows me will not wander in darkness but will have the light of life. Beneath Christ is the Virgin Mary flanked by four archangels, and further below are the apostles and the evangelists. Christ as Pantocrator is the very first representation we have of Christ in early Christianity, and it's an iconic image of the Eastern Orthodox church:

Tourists And Travellers

I'm not very fond of tourists and tourism. I like to think of myself as a traveller - or at times a pilgrim - rather than a tourist. Although we flirted a little with tourism and rubbed shoulders with tourists on our trip round Sicily, we didn't generally share their habits, and viewed them as a kind of alien species. On my recent winter walk from Seville to Santiago I don't think I saw a single tourist. Even world-important sites - such as the Roman theatre in Mérida - had very few visitors.

I know I'm simplifying, but tourists on the whole seek the familiar in the strange, want instant gratification, don't like staying too long outside their comfort zone. They enjoy ticking off the places they visit like items on a shopping list. They want things mapped out. They prefer the hedonistic delights of the beach or the boulevard to the secret, more subtle, less secure worlds of the bayou or the back streets...

Luckily tourists behave in lumpen and predictable ways. They tend to tread the same, well-worn tracks - usually in groups and following a guide - so that, while certain places become tourist hotspots, most places remain relatively tourist-free. We found this in Sicily and along the Amalfi Coast. The Corso Umberto in Taormina, for instance, was awash with tourists from dawn till dusk. But you only had to divert away from the designer shops and trendy boutiques and you were on your own.

In Amalfi tourists kept arriving by the coachload. We noted their behaviour like amateur anthropologists. They would surge into the little square before the duomo, cameras and camcorders thrust aloft like arm extensions. Snap, snap, click, snap. An overpriced cup of coffee and cake at the café in the piazza. A quick browse round the gift shops and a frenzied purchase of ceramic lemons and sun hats. Another surge up and down the short main street. Then they were gone.

To be replaced by another lot. But that was fine. For just off the main street, in a labyrinth of narrow alleyways and stone staircases, and in the lush valley of vines and lemon trees and derelict paper mills which climbed into the hills above town, and in the mountains higher up where huge limestone crags blocked the sun and high thin waterfalls plunged into tiny pools - there was no one. It was amazing. We had these places completely to ourselves...

All the photos are of Cefalù, the next place we stopped on our clockwise journey round Sicily. We tended to stay a couple of nights in each place and then move on. We travelled by local transport - mainly by train, which is fairly cheap in Italy. We had no accommodation booked in advance and no return flight organised. We wanted to travel as freely as possible.

It was quite easy to escape the tourists in Cefalù, though there were not big crowds of them in May. One evening we took a splendid walk along the rocks between the Arabic defensive wall of the historic centre and the sea, and we met not a soul...

Knowing Not-Knowing/Uncontrollable Journey

Knowing someone well enough to know you know them not at all is what keeps them interesting. Life would be pretty boring otherwise. GRACEFUL SIMPLICITY

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it. JOHN STEINBECK

...Making the familiar strange and the strange familiar... NOVALIS

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless. PHILIP LARKIN

So it's farewell to Palermo with its doors...

... and high windows...

... its shutters and balconies, shrines and statues...

... and narrow, crumbling back streets...

... and its photographers taking photos of photographers. This person looks strangely familiar... Surely it's the same woman we saw earlier, she of the calm concentration and focused gaze..?

Farewell Palermo. We are leaving you on this uncontrollable journey for the deep, blue air and the turquoise waters of Cefalù further along the coast, Cefalù with its fortress-like cathedral, its Temple of Diana on the Rock, and its Black Magic...

Nothing... nowhere... endless...

The Churches Of Palermo

Two of Palermo's most interesting churches are the Church of Santa Maria dell'Ammiraglio (known as La Martorana) - which is on the left in my pic - and the Church of San Cataldo - which is on the right. (Note the three strange red 'golf balls' on San Cataldo's roof.) In both churches you can see a mixture of Greek (Byzantine), Norman and Arabic influences. They overlook Piazza Bellini - a square named after the composer Vincenzo Bellini (1801-1835), Sicily's most famous musical son (not to be confused with the Bellinis of Venice, who were all painters.) You find references to Bellini all over Sicily. There's even a pasta dish - Pasta Norma - named after his most well-known opera.

In La Martorana the blue and gold mosaics decorating arch and ceiling are simply breathtaking...

As is the more austere but equally beautiful interior of San Cataldo...

Palermo's cathedral is a bizarre hybrid of the medieval and the Baroque - I'm not sure that central Baroque cupola harmonizes very well with those Gothic bell towers...

However its 15th century south portico is a masterpiece...

The church of Santa Caterina stands opposite La Martorana and San Cataldo on the other side of Piazza Bellini. Its extravagant, over-ornate, wedding-cake style did not do a lot for me, I must admit...

Though, as ever, if you looked carefully, there were some fascinating cameos of great charm and craftsmanship among the Baroque excesses, such as this relief marble panel depicting the story of Jonah and the whale...

Palermo

It may not have the beguiling charm of Florence, or the elegance of Bologna, or the sophistication of Milan, or the dazzling, decadent grandeur of Venice, or the monumental magnificence of Rome, but the Italian city of Palermo is unfailingly interesting. It's an essential port of call on any trip to Sicily. We spent a couple of days and nights there. I didn't fall in love with it, but I liked it a lot.

Palermo was once Europe's greatest and wealthiest city - both an important trade-centre and a seat of learning. The Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Arabs and Normans all settled here. Around 100 years ago decline set in. During WWII the harbour was heavily bombed. 70 churches were destroyed. Thankfully many churches were also left standing - such as the over-the-top Baroque confection of Santa Caterina, which straddles Piazza Pretoria and Piazza Bellini...

If you look behind the grid of 17th and 18th century, straight-as-a-die main thoroughfares, you can trace a sinuous network of narrow medieval streets, tiny squares with fountains, curving alleyways squeezed by tall, decaying, balconied and shuttered apartments. For me what makes Palermo so appealing are ordinary, back-street corners such as these in the city's ancient heart...

The best approach to Palermo is definitely from the sea - that way you can really appreciate how the huge limestone bulk of Monte Pellegrino dominates the place. But we arrived by coach from Trápani airport, emerging from the bus in hot sunshine, blinking and without bearings. After asking directions we pulled our cases in a daze to Hotel Joli, unaccustomed to the heat and the avalanche of anarchic traffic...

Boblo Picasso: Two Teachers In One

For a post which blends photography, Bob Dylan, Pablo Picasso, the personal, the subliminal - and fish trucks (!) - in such a satisfying way, and all within the context of a walk, try reading this from the blog Talking 37th Dream With Rainbow (Rumors Of Peace). I've been following this blog of Amanda Wald Rachie's for a long time now - indeed it's one of my favourites - and I rarely find anything in there that's not illuminating or of value. I'd like to write further about this blog - and a few others I read regularly - in more detail in a later post.

Art is a lie that tells the truth. PICASSO

It takes a long time to become young. PICASSO

Ah, but I was so much older then
I'm younger than that now. BOB DYLAN

Sicilian Theatrical

Tu connais cette maladie fiévreuse qui s'empare de nous dans les froides misères, cette nostalgie du pays qu'on ignore, cette angoisse de la curiosité? (Do you know that fever which grips us in moments of chill distress, that nostalgia for some land we have never seen, that anguish of curiosity?) BAUDELAIRE L'Invitation Au Voyage

We are all a little strange, and we are all strangers to each other to a greater or lesser degree, and we can also sometimes be strangers to ourselves. Even our nearest and dearest, those intimate friends and family members, those husbands, wives and partners, those children who change in quantum leaps from one day to the next at a certain age - all guard a close mystery at their core.

Desiring to discover each other anew - after all, we'd been separated for months, she in one part of Spain, I in another - my wife and I took off for Sicily in the middle of May. She'd always wanted to go there, and so had I. We were desperate for some warmth, some sunshine, some long, jasmine-scented evenings. We pictured looking out over the Mediterranean and doing nothing very much at all. We'd come through a lot over the past few years, and perhaps it was time to take stock and reevaluate, to put things in perspective and count our blessings.

We traded a chilly England - drab under cloud and rain - for a world of vibrant colour, balmy heat and intense blue light. In Palermo, Sicily's capital, the prickly pear cactus was in flower...

... and in the theatrical street-markets traders shouted their wares and sang quick bursts of operatic arias. Fishes were piled high - gaping heads of tuna and swordfish, bright-eyed and glistening-fresh - and the fruit and vegetable stalls were a seductive riot of red and green, orange and yellow...

Flower shop displays flaunted themselves with gaudy panache...


The glory days of this old theatre were set firmly in the past...

The figure in the picture seems camera-shy, but actually she's studying intently the graffiti and faded paintwork with great absorption. Anyone who knows her (and I know her as well as anyone, but that may not be very well at all) will recognise this slow concentration of hers on small details as characteristic...

Though Fabrizio in The Godfather said that in Sicily women are more dangerous than shotguns, this woman seems quite benign...

And, since I mention The Godfather, these are the steps up to Palermo's Teatro Mássimo (an opera house renowned for its perfect acoustics) where that climactic bloody scene of The Godfather Part 3 was shot...

700th Post

S - andwood Bay

E - ngland

V - erlats

E - dward Thomas

N - egative Capability


H - itch-hiking

U - ltreia

N - orfolk

D - avid Constantine

R - ebecca Solnit

E - mily Dickinson

D - emeter

T - homas Hardy

H - eptonstall


P - ontcysyllte

O - 'Cebreiro

S - tac Pollaidh

T - S Eliot