Moving Home

Well, long time, no see!  I hope you are all well.  I have to say that I have had an interesting summer and we all know what that means, don’t we!

However, one good thing that has come about is that my eyes have stabilised and I have become used to dealing with the resulting changes.  I am reading more, and intend to be writing more….

….but not here.

There have been other changes in my life, most particularly my involvement with a local art gallery who at peril, I would have thought, to their own reputation, asked me to take on the role of guide.  My first question on being approached was, “Do you not have to know something about art?”  I tell you now, what I knew could have been written large on the back of the proverbial stamp.  It appeared that what they wanted me for was not my non-existent artistic proficiency, but rather my ability to set the works in context.  Apparently, no one had pointed out to them before that Shakespeare and Caravaggio had been active over almost exactly the same twenty year period.  (That still blows my mind!)  So, for the past year, that is what I have been doing, bouncing round the gallery and frightening the visitors by regaling them with stories about what was going on in the world when the works of art they are viewing were first painted.  And, I like making those connections and as a result I find that I no longer want to think in fragments; I want to join the dots.

So please come and join me at Café Society where there will still be endless book talk but also, I hope, discussion of how all the arts and history and philosophy and anything else that seems to be even remotely relevant, inter-relate.  It’s time I picked up the threads.