Archive for ‘October, 2019’

Destination Moon

“If you want to write a song about the human race / Write a song about the Moon” sang Paul Simon, a decade after Neil Armstrong became the first human being to set foot on land beyond the Earth, and so begins the National Maritime Museum’s ‘Moon’ exhibition. Despite having much sympathy with Gil Scott Heron’s more contemporaneous lyrical critique (“I can’t pay no doctor’s bill / But whitey’s on the Moon”), I can’t help continuing a life-long fascination with the Moon and the 1960s Space Race, and so a trip to this exhibition was somewhat inevitable. And it was worth it…

Green-robed senators of mighty woods

This week has been all about oaks, Keats’ “green-robed senators of mighty woods”. In Richard Powers’ extraordinary novel, ‘The Overstory’, the collaborative endurance of the quercus genus is counterposed to the transient destruction of homo sapiens. I had been eking the book so that I could finish it on holiday surrounded by trees, rather than tower blocks, and so yesterday I allowed myself to turn the last page after a wonderful autumnal stroll around the Glanusk Estate in the Brecon Beacons, made all the more magical by being able to enjoy it with my parents.

Colours of the hills and fields in Hamburg

I have become a regular visitor to Hamburg this year, as it is a convenient stopping off point on the train journey from London through to Copenhagen, Stockholm and Oslo, where work takes me frequently. Usually I arrive late and leave early, but recently I discovered what I had been missing, after an early doors trip to the Hamburger Kuntshalle gallery. Most exciting were the landscapes of Caspar Friederich, an artist I had never previously encountered, but whose ‘Hill and Ploughed Field Near Dresden’ now lights up my soul every time I turn on my iPad.