24 Hrs of Flickr

Each person can post one photo to Flickr to make a composite image of the world on 5th May 2007. Mine wasn't a very exciting day.....

Brilliant Ad in the City

How many of these great buildings have you been in?

A Study of History

My favourite historian, Arnold Toynbee, holds that civilizations are ruled by charm (of the 'creative minority') as the result of which the people 'suspend disbelief' in their government and allow themselves to be guided without rebellion. He argues that the breakdown of civilizations is not caused by attacks from outside. Rather, it comes from the deterioration of the 'creative minority', which eventually ceases to be creative and degenerates into merely a 'dominant minority' (who force the majority to obey without meriting obedience). He argues that creative minorities deteriorate due to a worship of their 'former selves' as the result of which they become proud - and lose their ability to 'charm'.

2016: I have come across this marvellous quote in the context of the Referendum disaster: “As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too,” he wrote. “Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action . . . Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.” Gore Vidal’s 1992 The Decline and Fall of the American Empire:

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Nooooooooo!

Nooooooooo!, originally uploaded by Wolfiewolf.

The History of Intimacy

'I see humanity as a family that has hardly met. I see the meeting of people, bodies, thoughts, emotions or actions as the start of most change. Each link created by a meeting is like a filament, which, if they were all visible, would make the world look as though it is covered with gossamer. Every individual is connected to others, loosely or closely, by a unique combination of filaments which stretch across the frontiers of space and time...To feel isolated, is to be unaware of the filaments which link one to the past and to parts of the globe one may never have seen.

The age of discovery has hardly begun. So far individuals have spent more time trying to understand themselves than discovering others. But now curiosity is expanding as never before...To know someone in every country in the world, and someone in every walk of life, may soon be the minimum demand of people who want to experience fully what is means to be alive. The gossamer world of intimate relations is in varying degrees separate from the territorial world in which people are identified by where they live and work, by whom they have to obey, by their passports and bank balances... but the art of encounter is in its infancy.'

Theodore Zeldin - An Intimate History of Humanity

Favourite Wines - the Whites

One of my favourite wines - a 'Far Niente' from California. It probably has the most beautiful label of all. I had it for my birthday supper...


A slightly different wine but if of similar quality - Devil's Lair from the Margaret River area of Australia, where others that I also love - such as Cullen and Vasse Felix also live. Roll on summer! And - while we're about it, come and have a drink in the garden!
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The Tale of the Heike

The sound of the Gion Shōja bells echoes the impermanence of all things;
the color of the sāla flowers reveals the truth that the prosperous must decline.
The proud do not endure, they are like a dream on a spring night;
the mighty fall at last, they are as dust before the wind.

Spring in London

More images of spring in London; one of the sunniest on record. This Banksian is the first to flower in the garden and the lilacs are spreading their scent far and wide

Shankara - I Am Shiva

Om. I am neither the mind,
Intelligence, ego nor ‘chitta’
Neither the ears, nor the tongue,
Nor the senses of smell and sight,
Neither ether, nor air,
I am Eternal Bliss and Awareness.
I am Shiva! I am Shiva!

I am neither the ‘prana’,
Nor the five vital breaths,
Neither the seven elements of the body,
Nor its five sheaths,
Nor the hands, nor the feet, nor tongue,
Nor other organs of action.
I am Eternal Bliss and awareness.
I am Shiva! I am Shiva!

Neither fear, greed, nor delusion,
Loathing, nor liking have I,
Nothing of pride, of ego,
Of ‘dharma’ or Liberation,
Neither desire of the mind,
Nor the object for its desiring.
I am Eternal Bliss and Awareness.
I am Shiva! I am Shiva!

Nothing of pleasure and pain,
Of virtue and vice, do I know,
Of mantra, of sacred place,
Of Vedas or Sacrifice,
Neither I am the eater,
The food or the act of eating.
I am Eternal Bliss and Awareness.
I am Shiva! I am Shiva!

Death or fear, I have none,
Nor any distinction of ‘caste’,
Neither father, nor Mother,
Nor even a birth, have I,
Neither friend, nor comrade,
Neither disciple, nor Guru.
I am Eternal Bliss and Awareness.
I am Shiva! I am Shiva!

I have no form or fancy,
The All-pervading am I,
Everywhere I exist,
And yet I am beyond the senses,
Neither salvation am I,
Nor anything to be known.
I am Eternal Bliss and Awareness.
I am Shiva! I am Shiva!

Spring Coming Early in the Country

A fine old wisteria struggling with the evening chill on the terrace of Danesfield House, Marlow

The City

My office stands in the shadow of the Gherkin (Swiss Re) but our building is being redeveloped and is being let to run down. Millers will move about 100 yards to their new office in 2008.

The top photo shows current rebuilding in the area.



Waiting for friends in The Sterling, the pub under the Gherkin, my 'local' in the City.

The Stanzas of Dzyan

The Eternal Parent [the great Matrix], wrapped in her ever-invisible Robes, had slumbered once again for seven eternities.

Time was not, for it lay asleep in the infinite bosom of duration.

Universal Mind was not, for there were no Ah-Hi [the serpents of limitation] to contain it.

The seven ways to bliss were not. The great causes of misery were not, for there was no one to produce or get ensnared in them.

Darkness alone filled the boundless all, for Father, Mother and Son were once more one, and the Son had not yet awakened for the new wheel and his pilgrimage theron.

The seven sublime Lords [levels of consciousness] and the seven Truths [the structure of the universe] had ceased to be, and the universe, the son of Necessity, was immersed in Paranish-panna [the highest truth], to be outbreathed by that which is and yet is not. Naught was.

The causes of existence had been done away with, and the invisible that was, and the invisible that is rested in eternal non-being - the one being.

Alone, the one form of existence stretched boundless, infinite, causeless in a dreamless sleep; and life pulsated unconscious in universal space, throughout that All-Presence which is sensed by the opened eye of Dangma [the perfected seer].

But where was the Dangma when the Alaya [the eternal parent - the matrix] of the Universe was in Paramartha [state of supreme reality] and the great wheel was Anupagaka [without parents]?

The Stanzas of Dzyan - the first of seven

See also The Scientist and the Universe

See also Hilma af Klint

St Peter's Eaton Square

View of St Peter's across Eaton Square gardens. My parents were married here in 1944

Drapers' Company Dinner

A dinner at Drapers' Hall with guests

The View from Old Winchester Hill

The view from the hill over Stocks south towards the coast, in summer after harvest

Aspects of this view appear several times in this Journal, as I grew up here. Click the links for some of them.

Stocks History from the Archive

View from Old Winchester Hill (Country Life)
Views from Old Winchester Hill (Flickr)
Kei running up Old Winchester Hill

Old Winchester Hill

The iron-age earthworks on Old Winchester Hill are clearly visible on this hazy spring morning.

The view of the hill from the south shows Fauld's new house built where the cottages once stood

1 Corinthians 13

Though I speak with tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not love, it profiteth me nothing.


Love suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself; is not puffed up; doth not behave itself unseemly; seeketh not her own; is not easily provoked; thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.


Love never faileth; but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part and we prophecy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away.


When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then, face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope and love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

1 Corinthians 13

Click on the heading to hear the Winchester cathedral organ

Drapers' Almshouse Teaparty 2007

Tea for the residents of the Drapers' Almshouses at Drapers Hall. Click on the heading to hear us singing 'Daisy Daisy'

The House of the Rising Sun

Photo Jim Goldsmith
Back in 1967 again - driving home from the White Horse in Droxford took exactly 4.5 minutes - the time taken for Eric Burdon to sing The House of the Rising Sun on a primitive battery-powered disc player on the back seat of my car....

Click on the heading for a Google Map of the route - though I actually took Watton Lane to avoid the rozzers...not because I'd been drinking because in those days I only drank coke!

Click on the link below to hear Eric Burdon again...

Spring in London

London's magnolias spell spring as do the exuberant double petal plums that seem to colour the air around them. But the fallen camellia flowers show that they can flower earlier - some even in winter.

Japan in Spring

The plum blossom comes out about a month before the more famous cherry blosom, but many Japanese prefer its more restrained beauty. This was at Kitano Tenmangu

Cliveden

Another favourite place. Click on the heading for the story of the Profumo affair which began here...

Favourite Food

Beautiful Japanese food! I had already eaten the cod (in the yellow bowl) and was starting on the rest. Tofu came later on a brazier, but my favourite tofu skin - 'yuba' - can be seen here bottom right. Delicious!

Favourite Music

Thomas Tallis - Spem in Alium

This was one of wolfiewolf's earliest favourites, which he used to play with his brother Piers on an old gramophone. With thanks to a friend, Nigel of the Thomas Tallis Society and to Zenera for showing me where to find this amazing music site

A Good Year

A favourite film

A similar place - lunch in Sausse

The Snow Country

The first line of this marvellous book is perfect:

'The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country'.

Yasunari Kawabata

Favourite Places - Hotel Bristol

Another of my favourite places. The Hotel Bristol in Paris

The Summer of 1967

Herry's family and friends having tea in the bottom of the swimming pool at Stocks in October 1967

Left to right: Tim Handcock, Belinda Martin, Cilla Clempson, unknown, Annette (with Justin in her arms), Mike Lawford (probably - back to the camera), Annie Skipwith, Patrick, Belinda Luxmoore (kneeling), Jess (in chair), Nick Duke, Ricky Skipwith, Piers

I guess I was the photographer even then - but where is Fuff?

Click on the link below to hear what we were listening to in those far-off days

Favourite Places - The East Banqueting House

The East Banqueting House, Chipping Campden

Wadwick House

Wadwick was where my grandmother Nina Herbert lived for the last ten years of her life. It's at St Mary Bourne, near Whitchurch in Hampshire. Click the heading for more detail and family history

Richmond

A spectacular day to drive to Hampshire across the Thames below Richmond.

Earth Hour 2007

The World at Night

A 'lights out' will take place in Europe for five minutes at 18.55 on Thursday 1st February to encourage people and governments to take global warming more seriously.





The second image by Anna Stahlberg is of skiing in Are, Sweden in the same week, where fortunately it was -22C. London however has just experienced its warmest January for a century (see the third image taken in St James' Park on 31st January where even at 5pm it felt as warm as spring).



Lights Out at the Orangery. We didn't want to go back to electric light...

Ruth

Ruth Howard (nee Pugh, later Stevens) at her nursing home in Lexden, Essex near her daughter Auriol. My mother's first cousin, they played and rode together as children as described in this fragment. She lived near us in Hampshire and was always close - and known as 'Aunt' Ruth. After my mother died she became father's companion. Still beautiful now at 96.

Friends

That life may be more comfortable yet,
And all my joys refined, sincere and great,
I'd choose two friends, whose company would be
A great advance to my felicity:
Well-born, of humours suited to my own;
Discreet, and men, as well as books, have known.
Brave, generous, witty, and exactly free
From loose behavior or formality.
Airy and prudent, merry, but not light;
Quick in discerning, and in judging right.
Secret they should be, faithful to their trust;
In reasoning cool, strong, temperate and just;
Obliging, open, without huffing, brave,
Brisk in gay talking, and in sober, grave;
Close in dispute, but not tenacious, tried
By solid reason, and let that decide;
Not prone to lust, revenge, or envious hate,
Nor busy meddlers with intrigues of state;
Strangers to slander, and sworn foes to spite:
Not quarrelsome, but stout enough to fight
Loyal and pious, friends to Caesar, true
As dying martyrs to their Maker too.
In their society, I could not miss
A permanent, sincere, substantial bliss.

From The Choice by John Pomfret

The Orangery in Winter

I wish the garden looked like this; it's been horribly mild so far. This was taken in 2001. Roll on a decent winter snowstorm!

The morning after I posted this, we woke to snow. This is the garden in the early morning

Stunning New Zealand

Lucky enough to fit in a quick trip to New Zealand after Christmas and New Year in Sydney. Managed to visit Taupo, Christchurch and Queenstown - with an overnight visit to Milford Sound. The photos speak for themselves - this is one of the most spectacular places on earth