Making the Garden at Old Swan House 2013

The new area for grasses, the yew hedge and the lower terrace and paths (as yet ungravelled)

The garden at Old Swan House has been landscaped over the past two weeks by Brian Dibley, and is now almost finished. The plan was to update the pleasant but rather 80s garden to create distinct rooms including a gravel area in which to grow grasses, wall off the parking area with yew hedges, provide new paths and paving and create an orchard. Most of that has now been done, apart from planting and sowing the orchard and turfing part of the remaining lawn. And it has been too wet to gravel some of the new paths and the lower terrace. More photos will be put up when these are completed.

The urn contrasting with summerhouse

The urn and the borrowed landscape

A new path to the house using paving taken from elsewhere in the garden

Update: The planting begins!

Grasses being placed before being planted. The box are there just to stop the unplanted pots being blown over in the wind

Favourite Poems - Ithaca

Ithaca

When you set out on your journey to Ithaca,
pray that the road is long, full of adventure, 
full of knowledge.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclop,
the angry Poseidon -- do not fear them:
You will never find such as these on your path,
if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine emotion touches your spirit and your body.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the fierce Poseidon you will never encounter,
if you do not carry them within your soul,
if your soul does not set them up before you.

Pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many, when, with such pleasure, with such joy
you will enter ports seen for the first time;
stop at Phoenician markets, and purchase fine merchandise, 
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and sensual perfumes of all kinds,as many sensual perfumes as you can;
visit many Egyptian cities, to learn and learn from scholars.

Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years;
and to anchor at the island when you are old, rich with all you have gained on the way; 
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.
Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would have never set out on the road.
She has nothing more to give you.
And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, with so much experience, 
you must already have understood what Ithacas mean.

Constantine P. Cavafy (1911) 

For more Cavafy, see here 

Richard Shaw 1940 - 2013

Richard Shaw at Southampton University

My old friend Richard Shaw died peacefully on 16th October 2013, having suffered from a brain tumour since March.  A warm and kindly man,  he was one of the City's finest maritime lawyers and a specialist in Admiralty cases. He was a scholar at Bancrofts and read law at Oxford before signing on as an AB on a cargo ship for a voyage to Australia.  After a stint of teaching in Adelaide, he began his City career with Richards Butler and became a well-known admiralty specialist at Elborne Mitchell before leaving in 1979 to start his own firm, Shaw and Croft, with Roger Croft in 1980. He was especially useful dealing with cases that involved French, as he was fluent, his father having been the manager of Barclays in Bordeaux. His first case at Shaw & Croft was one of the world's largest collisions - the VLCCs Atlantic Empress and Aegean Captain which collided fully laden in a tropical rainstorm off Tobago, leading to a spillage of oil that is still listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the largest from ships. We handled the Atlantic Empress side of the case together and I learned a great deal from him. Later he was involved with the Piper Alpha oil rig explosion, the Aegean Sea oil spill, the Tricolor collision and sinking and in advising underwriters and the police in tracing the proceeds of the Brinks Mat robbery. 

Richard retired from Shaw and Croft in 1995 and went on to teach maritime law at the Southampton Institute of Maritime Law, specialising in marine insurance and salvage (he was the editor of Kennedy on Salvage). He was also active in the British Maritime Law Association and the Comite Internationale Maritime, where he was elected Member Honoris Causa in 2012.

Richard loved sailing, keeping a boat at Lymington near his country home and hill walking, in the company of his fellow lawyers Stuart Beare and Patrick Griggs. Richard leaves his wife Avril, who supported him throughout his long career and looked after him wonderfully during his illness, two sons and a daughter. His ashes have been scatted at Newtown Creek, on the north coast of the Isle of Wight, a place he loved. 

Favourite Gardens - Knoll Gardens

Following a new enthusiasm for garden grasses, inspired by the beautiful garden created by Gillian Pugh at The Buildings, Broughton, I have determined to create a small area for them at Stockbridge as part of the landscaping now being undertaken by Brian Dibley. One of the best collections of grasses to see displayed and also for stock is Neil Lucas's Knoll Gardens, near Wimborne. Click here for some more photos.

15th February 2014: Sadly Knoll Gardens has lost two great trees in the storm - a pine and the huge eucalyptus both of which you can see in the linked album.

Harvest Festival at Litchfield

                  Parishioners arrive for Harvest Festival in Litchfield on a fine early autumn day 

Harvest Festival at Litchfield is especially important as the community is entirely based on the Litchfield Estate. We celebrate the end of harvest and the start of autumn in traditional fashion, and the church is decorated with vegetables, fruit and flowers as well as sheaves of corn and a woven loaf of bread in the shape of a stook. The foods are auctioned off afterwards in the village hall.

In 2020, because of the pandemic, we held the Harvest Festival on the village green

Padre Mark Christian taking the service flanked by farm machinery. 

. 

Ibrahim El-Salahi at the Tate Modern

A fine exhibition of Ibrahim El-Salahi's work at the Tate Modern. Click here for some more photos

Favourite Gardens - The Buildings, Broughton

A lovely garden on the downs overlooking Broughton, where the owners have used grasses to beautiful effect. For more photos, click here

Favourite Poems - Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

'Kindness' by Naomi Shihab Nye

I have thought how wise and complete Jewish saying is:  'Kindness shall be the whole of the law'

Everest: The First Ascent. The Untold Story of Griffith Pugh, the Man Who Made it Possible

The title page of Harriet Tuckey's book shown at her Royal Geographic Society Lecture on 21st May 2013

Griffith Pugh was a first cousin of my mother's


Mail Online article

The Curious Case of the Middle Lane

Does anyone else think that the recent increased penalisation of drivers driving in the middle lane of a motorway is very odd - and even, from the point of view of safety, perverse?

Motorways are the safest of our roads with only 5% of accidents occurring on them*, and it's difficult to believe that driving in the middle lane makes them less safe.

Furthermore, moving regularly into the inner lane (when there are three or four lanes) creates a number of potentially dangerous scenarios. The majority of the risk in motorway driving is in changing lanes or failing to spot the slowing of traffic ahead of you.

Assuming you drive at about the official speed limit of 70mph* you are usually travelling close to the speed of others using the middle lane and can stay there safely for long distances. Those going faster use the outside overtaking lane before eventually moving back into the middle lane. Those going more slowly - often lorries - use the inner lane which has an average speed of about 50-60mph.

If you move into the inner lane, you will very soon encounter the slower-moving traffic and have to slow down or move out again to overtake. Quite often you can't move back to the middle lane due to the flow of cars and have to wait for a sometimes inadequate gap to open up, causing frustration and a possibly risky manoeuvre.

Moving to the inner lane continuously after overtaking in the middle lane leads to a more stressful and risky journey as each change of lane contains dangerous moments and requires careful study of the mirrors to ensure that a car or motorcycle isn't closing quickly on the gap you have selected. Looking often in your mirrors mean that you are more likely for a critical second or two to miss the fact that the cars in front of you have suddenly slowed.

I prefer to remain as safe as possible on motorways and use the middle lane unless there is very little traffic. Why should this attract a penalty?

It is even more odd when the manoeuvre that I find most alarming - undertaking (which when I was taught to drive, was treated as 'dangerous') - is no longer sanctioned.

*At a Speed Awareness Course I attended, the instructors quoted the 5% figure for the safely of motorways and also said that the 'usual' speed of cars in the outside lane was 82mph - which they thought perfectly safe, hence the continuing discussion about raising the speed limit to 80mph.