Professor Hedgehog's Journal

St Helena

Posted on 06/10/2015 by carolinemmurray

I say St Helena, you say Napoleon, or possibly vice versa. It’s undoubtedly the case that this tiny and remote island is most famous because of its reluctant and ex-imperial guest between 1815 and his death in 1821. Large numbers of books have been written about Buonaparte’s time on the island, from reminiscences by people (included a young girl, Betsy Balcombe) who were there, to later speculations on the cause of his death: poisoning by arsenic in the wallpaper got a mention, I seem to remember. Continue reading →

Posted in Botany, Cambridge, Gardens, History, Uncategorized | Tagged Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles Darwin, East India Company, extinctions, island ecosystems, St Helena | Leave a comment

My Favourite Potholes

Posted on 02/10/2015 by carolinemmurray

To survive on a bike in Cambridge, ‘Cycle City’ of the Fens, it is essential to assume that all fellow road users – drivers, pedestrians and (especially) cyclists – are rude, unpredictable, illiterate and terminally stupid. (The last of course encompasses the first three.) How else to explain the selfishness and lunacy that I witness every day? I am reluctant to designate myself as a ‘cyclist’, because this is the preferred term of a class of persons who have adopted ‘two wheels good, four wheels bad’ as their mantra to a level of narrow-mindedness that would have impressed George Orwell, and who (usually clad in Lycra, with helmet and wrap-round glasses in place and earphones in) simply ignore all traffic lights, zebra crossings and one-way streets, sweep up onto (not shared-use) pavements to dodge stationary traffic, and generally believe that the moral high ground achieved by their non-pollution of the environment gives them the right to ignore both laws and pedestrians. Continue reading →

Posted in Cambridge | Tagged Cambridge, cycling, roads | 6 Comments

Manila

Posted on 30/09/2015 by carolinemmurray

I was reading a novel the other day in which mention was made of ‘a blue manila folder’. This brought me up short, because surely manila is (a) an envelope and (b) the substance for which the adjective ‘buff-coloured’ was invented? Investigation was clearly required… Continue reading →

Posted in Botany, History | Tagged economic botany, fibres, manila paper | 2 Comments

Plant of the Month: September

Posted on 26/09/2015 by carolinemmurray

Decisions, decisions: the autumn equinox is producing such wonderful sights that I’m spoiled for choice for September’s plant of the month. Sedums, rudbeckias, penstemons, cyclamen, colchicums, and of course Michaelmas daisies – which I’m alarmed to see are undergoing a taxonomic revision … However, still not willing to slough off the memories of Italy, I’m going for the pomegranate. Continue reading →

Posted in Botany, Cambridge, Gardens, History, Museums and Galleries | Tagged art, botany, pomegranate, superfoods, Venice | 8 Comments

Object of the Month: September

Posted on 21/09/2015 by carolinemmurray

I’m not yet done with Venice (how could one ever be?), and this month’s highlighted object can currently be seen there, in the wonderful Ca’ Rezzonico (left), which, after a chequered history, is now the museum of eighteenth-century Venice. The palazzo was designed by the great Baldassarre Longhena for the patrician Filippo Bon, but (as with the Palazzetto Bru Zane), was not completed in Longhena’s lifetime. The Bon family money ran out, and the half-built edifice was bought by the nouveau-très-riche Giambattista Rezzonico (who had paid for his ennoblement, and one of whose sons became Pope Clement XIII). Continue reading →

Posted in Art, History, Museums and Galleries | Tagged Ca' Rezzonico, Pisani Moretta family, Venice | 1 Comment

We Close in Venice (Part 3: Why Venice AGAIN?)

Posted on 14/09/2015 by carolinemmurray

As our holiday draws to an end, and we contemplate our return – to autumn, to cleansing of the liver, to new challenges, and to a totally pissed-off Max the Cat, who started getting antsy when we brought out the suitcases, and has probably by now moved down the road to the kind neighbours who feed him while we’re away, and really understand his sterling qualities, unlike us. (I’ve just spotted a boat on the Riva called ‘Conte Max’ – he’d like that.) Continue reading →

Posted in Art, Gardens, History, Museums and Galleries | Tagged art, food, holidays, Venice | 4 Comments

How Not to Go to the Venice Biennale

Posted on 13/09/2015 by carolinemmurray

Unless you really go for the sort of art for which you need an A4-sized explanatory label containing phrases such as ‘multiple discourses’, ‘time and transience’, ‘viscerally visual’, ‘expressive dynamism’, ‘atemporal incongruence’ or ‘axis of displacements’, ‘sonorous light of introspective dialogue’ (I could go on…), you will probably want to avoid the Venice Biennale, because (a) it is very expensive, and (b) the urge to throw the ‘artworks’ into the nearest canal may well be uncontrollable. The only advantages of going once are (a) that you can say you’ve been, and (b) that you get to go inside the Arsenale, which is an amazing place, even when full of art, but which (being still a military zone) is normally difficult of access. Continue reading →

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

We Close in Venice (Part 2: Mantua me genuit)

Posted on 10/09/2015 by carolinemmurray

I would assert that there is unlikely to be any greater, more playful or more evocative epitaph in any language than the one (dubiously) ascribed to Virgil: Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc Parthenope; cecini pascua, rura, duces, with its echo of the envoi of Georgics IV:

Illo Vergilium me tempore dulcis alebat/Parthenope studiis florentem ignobilis oti,/Carmina qui lusi pastorum audaxque iuventa,/Tityre, te patulae cecini sub tegmine fagi. Continue reading →

Posted in Art, Gardens, History, Museums and Galleries | Tagged Andrea Mantegna, Gonzaga family, Mantua, Palazzo Tè, Virgil | 9 Comments

We Close in Venice (Part 1)

Posted on 08/09/2015 by carolinemmurray

Unlike Cole Porter’s troupe of strolling players, we did not open in Venice: we go there last, having spent two very hot days in Ferrara, and having arrived in Mantua, to the twin delights of wifi and a terrific thunderstorm (see below), for another two. I didn’t have many preconceptions about Ferrara, which first impressed me as rather grim – though this was probably due as much to my mood than to any inherent grimness in the place itself. Continue reading →

Posted in Art, History, Museums and Galleries | Tagged art, Este family, Ferrara, Italy | 7 Comments

Sister of the More Famous Maria

Posted on 02/09/2015 by carolinemmurray

You could have knocked me down with something between a feather and a dumbbell, when, while mooching round Mill Road Cemetery in Cambridge, I came across the grave of Lucy, wife of the Rev. John Robinson, of the Armagh Observatory, and youngest daughter (21^st out of 22 children) of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, of Edgeworthstown, Ireland. Her mother, Frances Anne Beaufort, was Edgeworth’s fourth wife, and was born the year after his eldest daughter, Maria. But how had Lucy, born in 1805, and dying in 1898, ended up in the section of the cemetery reserved for parishioners of St Paul’s (my own parish, as it happens)? Continue reading →

Posted in Archaeology, Cambridge, History, Literature | Tagged Cambridge, George Gabriel Stokes, Maria Edgeworth, Mill Road Cemetery, Richard Lovell Edgeworth | 4 Comments