Niguliste

Posted on 10/07/2019 by carolinemmurray

Five years ago, and in another life, I wrote about Laulupidu, the Estonian music festival held every five years, and guess what, we’ve just returned from the 2019 celebration in Tallinn – even more significant than normal as it is the 150th anniversary of the first ever festival in 1869, put together by a group of intellectuals who (along with their counterparts all over Europe) had begun to reclaim the minority or ‘peasant’ languages of their own countries. Continue reading →

Posted in Art, History, Museums and Galleries | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Sedgwick’s Boots

Posted on 20/06/2019 by carolinemmurray

I begin with an appalling confession, made because of my reasonable confidence that nobody (least of all @TheMuseumOfLiz) actually reads this stuff … Here goes: although the Golden Jubilee of my arrival in Cambridge is only just below the horizon, I have never, before today, visited the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences. Feel free to gasp in horror. Continue reading →

Posted in Biography, Cambridge, Exploration, History, Museums and Galleries, Natural history | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

The Stepney Meeting

Posted on 07/06/2019 by carolinemmurray

A stone’s throw away from the back of Stepney’s enormous churchyard, where the parakeets and pigeons own the sky, and even closer to Lady Mico’s almshouses, is a much smaller cemetery, its gravestones broken, eroded or obscured by the black, sooty pollution of old London. This is the burial ground of the Stepney Meeting, on a small corner plot which once housed almshouses and a school as well.

Continue reading →

Posted in Biography, Gardens, History, London | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Plant of the Month: June 2019

Posted on 04/06/2019 by carolinemmurray

This seems to be an amazing spring/summer for roses – even mine are looking good (or were until it just started raining), and they are by no means my most successful plants. And it’s not just locally, either. We’ve just been to Amsterdam and Leiden for a few days, in beautiful weather, and roses are burgeoning everywhere from the botanic gardens to the pavements in fronts of the houses. Continue reading →

Posted in Art, Botany, Gardens, Museums and Galleries, Natural history | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

The Blackbird

Posted on 30/05/2019 by carolinemmurray

Has there ever been a spring/summer like this for blackbird song? (Except, obviously, the year in which, in late June, Edward Thomas’s train stopped unexpectedly at Adlestrop?) I’m especially fortunate in that I have two competing to outdo each other in the back garden, one often perched on our television aerial (what a quaint old device, I hear you cry) and the other in the trees nearby. Continue reading →

Posted in Art, History, Literature, Museums and Galleries, Natural history | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

In Deepest Limehouse

Posted on 26/05/2019 by carolinemmurray

I imagine that ‘Play it again, Sam’ is the most famous line from a film which was not actually spoken in the film, but ‘We don’t like strangers in these parts, Mr ‘Olmes’ may run it close among aficionados of the Rathbone/Bruce Sherlock Holmes films: nobody in ‘the dark and sinister alleys of Limehouse’ actually says that. The words of the dark and sinister stranger, in Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror, are actually: ‘I wouldn’t come down here if I was you. This is Limehouse, and we don’t fancy your sort of bloke in these parts.’ To which Holmes stoutly replies: ‘This is still a free country. A man may walk where he pleases.’ Continue reading →

Posted in Gardens, History, London, Natural history | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

The Loss of the ‘Royal George’

Posted on 09/05/2019 by carolinemmurray

Was Proust the first or merely the best to describe the extraordinary moment when a completely forgotten incident in your life rises fully formed in your memory? In my most recent incident, it was a phone call at work about a piece of Victorian furniture what did it. The chair, it was claimed, had been made from timbers from the Royal George – and I was transported back to my primary school, close to the walls of Portsmouth dockyard. Continue reading →

Posted in Biography, Exploration, France, History, London, Museums and Galleries, Printing and Publishing | Tagged , , , , , , , | 16 Comments

Allegorical Tombs

Posted on 06/05/2019 by carolinemmurray

… are apparently a Thing, and one which I have come across twice in as many days in Venice, though they seem to owe their origin to one Owen Swiny (MacSwiny, McSweeny, MacSwiney, McSwiny, and other variants), of Enniscorthy in Ireland. The spelling of Swiny’s name (I am going with the version used by the ODNB) is but one of the confusing elements in this story … Continue reading →

Posted in Art, Biography, Cambridge, History, Italy, London, Museums and Galleries, Venice | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Sant’ Eufemia Revealed!

Posted on 03/05/2019 by carolinemmurray

Nearly two years ago, I wrote about the church of Santa Eufemia on Giudecca, noting my frustration that it never seemed to be open. But yesterday, strolling down the fondamenta after lunch for a quick look, we were riveted to see that the small door under the portico was open – and not only that, but another small door on the far wall was also open, and apparently led to a small garden. We couldn’t used this canal-facing door for access, however, as it was blocked not only by an anti-acqua-alta board but also a range of rails on the inside. So it was with some excitement that we rounded the corner to find that the main west door was open too … Continue reading →

Posted in Art, Gardens, History, Italy, Venice | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Rome In Three Days

Posted on 30/04/2019 by carolinemmurray

I am sitting in an apartment in Venice with a glorious view which encompasses the towers of San Stefano (looking worrisomely more lop-sided then usual), San Marco, San Francesco della Vigna, and even, in the most extreme distance, the three icing-sugar pinnacles of the façade of Madonna del’ Orto, and I have a glass of wine at hand. The downsides are that it is cold, windy and rainy, and I have a wracking cough which I am inclined to blame on the person two seats behind me on the Stansted–Fiumicino flight five days ago, who liberally sprayed his germs into the re-circulating air with a remarkably wide repertoire of sneezing, nose-blowing and (by the sound of it) spitting. Continue reading →

Posted in Archaeology, Art, Botany, Classics, Gardens, History, Italy, Museums and Galleries | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments