All work to be finished before Christmas now complete. Drove to Oxford to deliver a mosaic at 7.00 in the morning. At one point the car slid on the ice and was entirely out of my control. I realised death was imminent, and felt sorry I was leaving the world quite so soon. Fortunately it [...]
If we are watching a film, and an attractive female starts to take her clothes off my husband always says ‘This film is very well directed’. I thought about this as I was looking at pictures of Venus today, as research for the book.
Mosaics of Venus generally show her rising from the water, naked, with [...]
The phone rang. A voice said ‘Hello. It’s Lucas’. This was a surprise. Lucas was a lovely Australian guy who worked at the workshop over ten years ago. Eventually his visa expired and he left.
At the most, there were never more than about twelve people who worked at the workshop. The team undertook a variety [...]
My assistant Sandra agreed it was a good idea to publish my list of funeral songs. They were slightly obscure, she thought. This way my wishes might be remembered. We discussed it as we travelled by train to York. Gloom, exhaustion and snow made driving seem a bad idea. As we sped through the Fens [...]
The flight manager announced at the onset of our flight ‘The cabin crew call me the Duchess.’ The Duchess was busy all night, as we had a medical emergency in economy class. I couldn’t sleep, and exhaustion gave me morbid thoughts. When I got home I gave my daughter a list of songs required for [...]
Spent last day setting deadlines for the last stages of the book. We have over 900 images, and they take a lot of managing. Captioning is a momentous task we still face. All the images had to be resized several times – large versions for publication, and smaller ones to consult when writing. We both [...]
As a reward for hard work Sonia took me to Heath Ceramics yesterday – a factory producing tiles and ceramic tableware, founded fifty years ago by Edith Heath. Edith was a fascinating woman. She found a source of clay, developed glazes, and made forms so elegant and practical that many of her originals are still [...]
Up late last night talking to Harvey, as Sonia worked downstairs. We compared recordings of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. I recently bought the Susan Graham version, very rich and operatic in comparison with the more familiar Emma Kirkby one. Harvey played Purcell songs, performed by Drew Minter. ‘Some people think he overdoes the intensity, but [...]
Last day teaching in Oakland. We spent some time puzzling over the relationship between an instinctive approach to the creative process and an intellectual one. Does insisting on the idea of rules informing effective visual communication come across as English and uptight I wonder? Maybe, but the more I teach, and the more time I [...]
After the class finished today I went to a concert by the San Francisco Early Music Society held in a Congregational Church in Berkeley, the Nuclear Free City. Before the concert began, we went to a music shop and had dinner. The tables were full of exotic types; bearded, intense and bohemian, a casting director’s [...]