Having worked fairly hard on the new book in recent days, focusing on ways to slow, stop and reverse what I am calling the Extinction Express, I suddenly thought that it would be a useful antidote to visit Kew Gardens – which I have always seen as an Ark, a counterforce to extinction.
We drove across and found the gardens relatively uncrowded. On a whim, I suggested we walk down to the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art, where we stumbled on the exhibition of ceramic works by Felicity Aylieff. We were completely blown aways. After walking through the Temperate House and environs, we headed across to The Botanical Brasserie and had a delightful lunch, a a celebration of the year gone and the year yet to come.
Other than that, and the work on the long introduction to the book, including laying out the structure of the work in piles in the front room, I have been tidying up, attending to my filing backlog in the studio today.
Among the books I had read to date over the holiday period have been The Scapegoat (a life of the Duke of Buckingham), by Lucy Hughes Hallett, Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Future of War by Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhhoff, Revenge of Rome by Simon Scarrow, various books by Agatha Christie (inspired by the research for my new book), including The Mystery of the Blue Train and Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly, Kevin Barry’s utterly stunning The Heart in Winter, and, now, Earth To Moon, by Moon Unit Zappa.
On TV, we have watched number of series, including the last part of the Wolf Hall series, The Mirror and the Light, The Diplomat, The Day of the Jackal, and Black Doves.
Apart from all of that, I have been fairly carefully nursing the foot that I damaged before travelling to Brazil, several months ago, which has been a considerable brake on my movements, and which I have had treated a couple of times with acupuncture – which seems to be working.
And so into 2025, Trump and all, with fireworks already bursting across the London skies…
Leave a Reply