St. Ephraim

So, the only parts of my UK visit I haven't gone into here are the short trips within Scotland to Glasgow and Edinburgh. I've been meaning to say that in Glasgow I went to the Burrell Collection twice, and once to Kelvingrove; and in Edinburgh I went thrice, though briefly, to the National Museum of Scotland, and twice to the National Gallery. The reason I mention these is just to point out that entry to all of these museums and galleries is free. It seems such a wonderful and civilized thing.

My trips to the National Gallery were to look at my favourite picture, and to drag other people along and point at it. If you go in to the Gallery by the old entrance just opposite the back of the Royal Scottish Academy, and not the beautiful new entrance that has joined the two together, walk straight in (dodging carefully around the collection box, of course, because you wouldn't want to be asked to leave before you have even got your foot properly in the door) and up the first oval flight of stairs you meet, then from the top of the stairs move towards the right hand side of the facing wall, you will find now rather too high up on the wall a small painting which is a fragment cut from a much larger work. It is entitled "The Burial of St. Ephraim." Actually, I could have sworn that when it was in its better position on the wall on the left at the top of the stairs it was called "The Death of St. Ephraim," which makes more sense to me since there's no sign of anyone digging a hole, and the ground looks too frozen for it to be possible anyway. Yes, St. Ephraim will have to lie there through the long and desolate winter, with that hooded woman draped like a drift of snow at his feet. Except that St. Ephraim is St. Ephraim the Syrian, and the setting is desert, not snow.

The woman too may not be a woman. I've always assumed that she is, but she is dressed in the same flowing robes as the small gathering of men who stand behind the bier, many of them talking or disputing in an unexpectedly animated fashion. In front of them St. Ephraim lies with his head towards the right, and with his feet in the direction of a hut of sorts. In the background is a mountain range with three figures following a path over it, one of whom appears to be the Saint himself - arriving there in earlier days? - crossing now to the afterlife? If you look toward the bottom foreground the land suddenly ends as if the funeral crowd is standing on a fragment of the earth's crust which has broken off and floated away, something which is oddly appropriate for a piece of painting cut from a larger work.

When you get back to your house after a long trip you can find that everything looks subtly different, somehow strangely dimensioned, or as if someone has knocked the house down while you were away and built an exact reproduction. Whenever I come back to this painting it's like that too. Even now, I can't be sure if much of the above is true, or whether it is a description of a picture which exists only in my imagination. I don't know, for instance, which way those three figures (three figures?) crossing the mountains are walking. If to the left, the direction in which the dead man's feet are pointing, which will take them up and behind the hut, then I'd say they have to be leaving. If to the right, in the direction indicated by the dead man's head, they could curve down and arrive at the space which holds the crowd. Sadly (or perhaps not so sadly, since it gives me ample opportunity to wander in a picture of my own making) this isn't one of the works that the National Gallery has seen fit to put into their online collection, though they do have another St. Ephraim picture there.

They do, however, have there a picture which I hadn't seen (hadn't noticed?) before this visit, "Scenes from the Lives of the Hermits and from the Passion of Christ," which if I remember rightly from reading the notice in the gallery, is also a representation of the burial of St. Ephraim - see the right foreground. Around the rest of the picture are strange little scenes of people behaving in all kinds of suspect ways you wouldn't expect of hermits - see the haloed man in a robe chasing the naked haloed man near the top left, for instance - as well as a selection of odd animals and demons. It's a shame that they haven't made it possible to zoom much closer for this painting - there could be hours of fun in looking at the bizarre goings-on.

Gold dust

Today I found gold dust in my apartment.

Or to be more accurate, gold fluff.

In the corner of each room there is an old-fashioned radiator. Since I moved in I've been trying not to look too hard at these corners. The floorboards underneath the radiators are grey and bare, either from age or from leak-damage. The hard-to-reach inner ridges of the radiators themselves, as well as the areas around the pipes which lead out of them, are filled with matted dust and fluff. I did a lot of cleaning when I moved in, but these spaces were beyond what I could stomach at the time. Today, as part of my ongoing project to make my house pleasant to live in, I tried to tackle them. I discovered that when the radiators were spray-painted gold, it was done on top of the existing fluff. Bleugh! How many years of other people's dead skin and hair am I living with?

All I have done today is clean and clean. When I moved in I asked for the filthy windows to be washed on the outside, but two and a half months later not even the simple repairs I requested have been dealt with, so I know that the window cleaning will certainly never happen. I thought today, if New Caledonian crows can find a way to get at the snacks scientists hide for them, then surely I can find a way to clean the outsides of my windows. And I did manage some of them, by a mixture of lying on my back with the windows closed onto my shoulders and reaching up as far as I could (which is quite far, if you have arms as long and skinny as mine), and pushing wads of wet cloth down between the gaps between the windows when open and retreiving them at the bottom. Some panes I had to leave in the interests of not knocking the screens onto unsuspecting passers-by, and others in the interests of not falling out myself.

My apartment looks unusually shining and well-ordered, though, if I don't look hard in the direction of the radiators.

Doncaster from Denver

I've just been looking on the website of the Denver Post, because I remembered hearing even more sirens than usual yesterday when I was sitting at home. It appears that someone working in a shop on 16th Street Mall got shot. While I was away someone got themselves shot in the Capitol building too. It's not comforting to be in a place where the law entrusts any old maniac with your life. That could be said for drivers' licensing too, of course, as you would know if you were one of we foreign people who have to go and sit around in the DMV once a year to renew our licenses.

But what really struck me on the Denver Post site tonight was the "Post Poll" at the top of their "Denver and the West" page. It reads:

Will you watch tonight's pre-season game between the Broncos and the 49ers?

o Yes
o I might
o No
o Don't know

Vote now!

The Denver Post - taking civic engagement and democracy to new heights.

Well, since I am already in a complaining mode, it is time to talk of Doncaster.

Doncaster

- is in Yorkshire, but is sadly far removed from the hilly stone-walled sheep-dotted landscape many of us might associate with the name, being in the South.
- is a town of many similar looking houses all built of strangely smooth-faced deep red bricks.
- was once prosperous and thriving, or so I've been told.
- has numbers of my relatives living in and around it.

From childhood I've been going to Doncaster from Scotland on a fairly regular basis and have always felt oppressed by all that red brick. As I have got older, though, I've begun to wonder - do people who grow up in Doncaster and visit Scotland have a similar reaction to all those grey buildings that I think are so stately? Do they find them cold, where I find them elegantly cool?

Anyway, the trip wasn't to look at red brick, but to visit my 92 year old grandmother, and so I should be less ungracious. It was, again, a family trip, and on our full day there we all went out to the village of Epworth, which was red brick and pretty. We visited The Old Rectory, the childhood home of John and Charles Wesley, founders of Methodism. There wasn't a great deal to see inside the house - though looking round houses is always fun if you're not engaged in trying to rent one - but the physic garden outside was interesting. I like kitchen gardens and physic gardens. I can imagine putting in the effort if the plants are going to enhance my dinner. Otherwise, I feel somewhat the same about flowers as I do about fireworks. In the one garden I've ever had, in Japan, I successfully grew hordes of caterpillars which ate my neighbours' trees. My ambition for my future house in the U.S. is to have a yard full of prairie dogs.

In the physic garden I saw licorice in its natural form for the first time. It looks like this:

Back in town in the evening we went to Eating Whole, a tiny vegetarian restaurant that serves a great organic cider (the British alcoholic sort, not the American soda) and a deep-fried blue cheese appetizer, both of which have the power to make me suddenly warm to Doncaster.

Goodbye, mossy green shade

I have returned to Denver. It is always nice to get back to my own house (yes, even this one) and my own life, such as it is. On my first day back I went for an early breakfast to the Watercourse restaurant, and walking home in the morning sunshine I found myself happy to be here and looking forward to the coming months. It's a shame that at the moment it's too hot to stir from my house between the hours of 10 and 6, though. It's forecast to reach 37 ˚C on Monday. Glasgow is to be 17. I'd settle for something in between, but if it has to be one or the other I like the one which leaves me comfortable in my clothes.

I'd intended writing entries for the last month as I went along, but there was too much to do: getting the new visa, all that sorting and packing, seeing relatives and friends. So, here is the lengthy retrospective version.

Ireland

I took the car ferry from Troon to Larne with my parents. It takes around two hours, or somewhat longer if one of the engines isn't working. It's the only ferry I've ever been on that doesn't have proper external decks for passengers. You have to sit inside, or go up to the tiny walled in sheep-pen of an observation deck and hook your chin over the rail.

We drove down to Dublin, stopping for lunch in Armagh. The trip to the border took in lots of small towns with an unsettling number of flags and displays of red, white and blue bunting, making it look like America on Independence Day - only in this case it is clearly aimed at an opposing team, and not just for the day. Who would have thought that something so colourful could be so depressing?

Armagh was rainy and grey.

Dublin was rainy too, but interesting, and it became suddenly beautiful on our last evening when the sun came out. While there we walked for miles, usually in circles. We saw the famous bits in the middle - The Liffey, Temple Bar, Grafton Street, O'Connel Street. We visited St Patrick's Cathedral, the National Gallery, Trinity College and the Book of Kells exhibition.

Of all things, what I like most was Dublin's crossing signals:

Their compact little short-armed people are much nicer than the standard red and green men of British cities. I noticed a new crossing of a similar model in the centre of Glasgow last week, though.

Back in the north and on the way to Belfast we drove for some way along the coast of County Down to visit two historic houses, Castle Ward and Mount Stewart. The area from midway up the Lecale Peninsula and up the Ards peninsula was beautiful, with tunnels of trees and fuchsia hedges and nice little towns which seemed to be getting by without partisan display (or perhaps I was just distracted from it by the fuchsia and the sunshine). We saw the inside and outside of Castle Ward, a house built in two styles for a husband and wife with conflicting tastes, and then we took the ferry over Strangford Lough and arrived at Mount Stewart in time to see the formal gardens. The only gardens I've liked as much are those at Versailles, which are full of strange passages and unexpected objects. The Mount Stewart gardens are smaller, but they are pleasingly idiosyncratic. The terrace in front of the house is surrounded by statues of odd animals.


We drove on into Belfast, the partisan display taking a nasty turn for the worse as we hit the edges of the city. I was filled with the desire to leave before we arrived, but I'm happy to say that it all looked much better after a walk around the university area, a good pizza, and a bottle of beer.

The following day I went to the American Consulate to get my visa, an experience so entirely unlike going to the embassy in London that I am reluctant to mention it in case it becomes so popular with U.K. applicants that I can't get an appointment there in future.

And here ends the Ireland trip.

I think I had better make the rest into a new entry. However, I have already uploaded my favourite Edinburgh photo. So, I will end with it, and with the comment that when I first arrived back in Edinburgh I felt oddly indifferent - just a nice place I used to live long ago - and then, travelling on a bus through Tollcross, I was suddenly hit by the returning force of all my love for this city which still feels like my chosen home.