Marmalade, German chocolate cake, trips to London. Spring must be on its way! Click HERE for spring 2023, HERE for spring 2022, HERE for 2021, and HERE and HERE for photos from Spring 2020, including our trips to Paris and the Isle of Wight.
This year's batch organic marmalade and some photos from London, always a treat.
In London, we visited the Victoria and Albert Museum, where we saw Art Deco, an exhibition of costumes from musicals, interesting jewellery, and more. Note the detail of Elphaba's costume in the panel, above.
Costumes from The Lion King, Six, and Moulin Rouge, along with Elaine Paige's Grizzabella shoes and Julie Andrews' Eliza Doolittle gown.
We found exquisite exhibits in the V&A's glass section. Afterwards, we visited the dinosaur wing of the Natural History Museum, a childhood dream come true!
Splendours of the Natural History Museum, including the meteorite that landed in Winchcombe, where Nick's mother used to live.
We enjoyed wandering through Delight: a media art exhibition about Seoul in London. The slowly setting moon was my favourite part.
The highlight of our weekend away was seeing Sondheim's Pacific Overtures at the Menier Chocolate Factory. The next morning, we had brunch at Lantana, including Nutella-stuffed French toast with hazelnut cream and sesame crumble and Turkish eggs with flatbread.
Hooray! We discovered three Invaders, restored or reactivated on this trip to London.
Invader and Cute Dad near Blackfriars
Antony Gormley's artwork always enchants and provokes thought. The White Cube gallery was filled with hundreds of his brick and metal human sculptures.
In addition to Gormley's work, we also spotted one of Mark Wallinger's underground labyrinths. .
I braved the February cold and took a group of 44 school kids to New York for a week. We performed my Sicily composition in three churches and did a whole lot of sightseeing and activities.
We performed at Grace Church, a historic building where much of the stained glass was designed by women.
We did a great song and dance workshop led by one of the Queens from Six, and the pianst from Hadestown. The building was full of professionals auditioning for their Next Big Show.
I couldn't believe our luck, getting tickets to see Merrily We Roll Along, starring Daniel Radcliffe. I had no idea who Jonathan Groff was, but many of the kids were more excited about him than about Daniel. We waited an hour for them after the show, but they didn't "stage door" on Tuesdays.
Photos of the adorable cast, plus a few shots from our upper East Side neighbourhood
The staff spent some time together, posing on Marilyn Monroe's Some Like It Hot subway grate.
We also visited Grand Central Station, where Fiona and I discovered Track 17 (as mentioned in Copacabana and we had our photos taken in the long shadows.
More photos in and around Grand Central.
It's a tradition for me to buy new underwear at Macy's, hence the photo. In half an hour, I shopped, grabbed a Reuben sandwich for lunch, bought cupcakes and cheesecake at Magnolia Bakery, and made my way to Rockefeller Center, where I enjoyed an al fresco lunch in the sunshine.
Lunch at Rockefeller Center, which has some amazing Art Deco reliefs. The camera was at NBC studios gift shop.
It was both Ash Wednesday and Valentine's Day, and I spotted the man in the checked coat leaving Saks Fifth Avenue with an armload of flowers. Also shown is a Swarovski crystal Spider-Man.
We had our second concert at St Malachy's "The Actor's Church", followed by a film locations tour that drove us past the Ghostbusters fire station.
Our busy day took us to the Friends apartment building, Dallas Barbecue, and The Empire State Building. Oh, and I had time to get New York cheesecake at Junior's.
Since my last trip to New York in 2019, a wonderful new mini series was produced, Only Murders in the Building. Our group located the Belnord apartment building, which serves as the Ancona in the series. We sang Meryl Streep's lullaby from season 3, Look for the Light, in each of our concerts. It was our group's favourite song.
Always special to me is Manhattan School of Music, where I did my master's degree. The kids loved it, and we sat in on a strings competion as part of our tour. Shown above are the recital hall, where I had music history classes with Dr. noon, and a manuscript of George Crumb's Agnus Dei. After our tour, we performed our final concert at Riverside Church, which is modelled after Chartres cathedral in France.
We had an improvisation workshop with an actor famed for playing Elphaba on the Broadway stage. The next day, we walked around Lincoln Center, visitng the Metropolitan Opera and Juilliard.
We walked from Lincoln Center through snowy Central Park, past an enormous snowman with its own Instagram account, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Met is stuffed full of the best of its kind examples of wonderful artwork. I recognised Antoine Bourdelle's archer from Paris. Perseus was obviously a favourite.
Chagall, Art Nouveau and Art Deco, and Fabergé egg with the guilloché finish that I learned about in Norway, the Met really does seem to have it all.
Some of my favourite artwork from this trip.
The Met has its own floral master, Remco van Vliet, a third-generation florist. I sat and contemplated for a while on the banks of the Temple of Dendur before returning to Perseus's backside.
A wood-inlay chamber from Gubbio, imported to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, like the one we saw in Urbino, plus anicent Greek portraits and sculpture in the American wing.
Tiffany glass and more Art Nouveau and Art Deco
Final shots from New York. We will be back!
Nick was support for Pete Astor at the Stage Door in Southampton.
Pellicci’s Café was just like being in Italy (with a strong East London accent). We queued for over an hour, but the gregarious staff offered hot chips with homemade pesto as we waited. The tiny restaurant was packed – we had to squeeze past diners to visit the toilets, which were behind the Art Deco stained glass panel. We had heaping helpings of lasagne and cannelloni, topped with ragú. Dessert was crostata made by the 83-year-old nonna, tiramisú, and strong, hot espresso. Every member of staff was shoulder-nudgingly friendly, with stories of Tuscany and tales of family history. No wonder this has been so popular for 124 years.
Scenes from South London.
We briefly visited Whitechapel Gallery (top and bottom left) before taking a but to The Wallace Collection, with its splendid range of artwork by Gainsborough, Turner, Canaletto, Rembrandt, and more.
Highlights from The Wallace Collection, including Canaletto's Venice (bottom right) and Rembrandt's Good Samaritan.
In addition to owing paintings such as the chaotic Rubens (bottom right), William Wallace gifted 103 iconic fountains, designed by Charles-Auguste Lebourg, to the city of Paris. We love spotting them there, and it was a treat seeing this one in London. Click HERE to see our most recent trip to Paris.
We visited Daunt Books and dined on Waitrose poke bowl and fruit in Trafalgar Square before going to the Duke of York theatre to see Matt Smith in An Enemy of the People. After the show, we got his autograph and took lots of photos. Sadly, we missed the scene-stealing dog.
Paint-spattered Matt Smith in An Enemy of the People
On Sunday morning, we went to The Design Museum, which was filled with things both new and familiar to admire.
Your Favourite Things at the Design Museum features a diverse selection of more than 200 objects from 25 countries that demonstrate the intimate relationships that we have with the everyday objects that shape our lives.
The glass sculpture is made from porcelain waste and otherwise unusable borosilicate glass. The 'User' sign swiveled to say 'Maker'.
The Sir John Soane's Museum is another free treasure trove in London, filled with amazing art.
We went to The John Soane’s Museum specifically to see Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress. As we waited for the paintings to come on view, we spent over an hour looking at and learning about the artist’s other series, The Humours of an Election, (1754-55). It comprises four paintings and is widely thought to be the most finely painted of Hogarth’s series of ‘Modern Moral Subjects’. The canvases are full of symbolism and political satire. We probably would have rushed past them without a glance had we not been confined to the room for such a long time.
The tragic tale of Tom Rakewell. This was a rare opportunity to see Hogarth’s original series of paintings, The Rake’s Progress.The paintings are only on show for ten minutes each day, and the museum staff are cagey and deflective about when the secret panels will be opened. We found the room and stood in it for over an hour, waiting for the Big Reveal. At two o’clock, they draw a cord across the doorway and gave a private viewing to the ten people allowed in the space. I studied Stravinsky’s opera based on the paintings and was keen to see the originals.
Shown above are a cornucopia, plundered from Tivoli, wacky haberdashery, lunch at The Cheese Bar (think Yo! Sushi, but with artisan cheeses), Mark Wallinger's Labyrinths, and a final look at Sir John Soane's house.
We spent a lovely Easter break in southern Ireland. It was a delayed trip cancelled due to Covid, which we finally got to enjoy in 2024. We stayed in a rural dairy, just outside Cobh, where we enjoyed making evening meals together. Click HERE to see what we got up to during lockdown and HERE to see our last trip to Ireland.
Colourful Cobh,known from 1849 until 1920 as Queenstown, was the final port of call for the Titanic before it set out across the Atlantic on the last leg of its maiden voyage. St Colman's, cathedral is one of the tallest buildings in Ireland, standing at 300 feet.
Sonia O’Sullivan is an Olympic athlete born in Cobh. She was one of the world’s leading female 5000 m runners for most of the 1990s and early first decade of the 21st century. She won a gold medal in the 5000 m at the 1995 World Athletics Championships.
It was exciting to find our Sheep’s family still living in gift shops throughout southern Ireland. Click HERE to see the relative we discovered at the Raspail market in Paris.
Annie Moore and her two brothers, the first emigrants ever to be processed at Ellis Island on 1 January 1892.
A memorial to the Lusitania, which was sunk just outside Kinsale, Nick wih a Presentation Brothers plaque, and Cobh harbour.
The Number 1 attraction in Cork, apparently, is the Butter Museum, where we saw this cask of bog butter, dating back to 1000 AD.
I was probably the only person who rang the Bells of Shandon at St. Anne's Church in Cork that day. There was some kind of ceremony involving lots of dignitaries in uniform and they closed off the area after I played Immaculate Mary (the tune that I used to begin my Sicily composition, Voices from the Past).
Shown above, lunch of pulled pork Benedict, Blackrock Castle Observatory, and the golden tree at Belvelly Castle
The lovely, waterlogged, seaside town of Kensale, including Desmond Castle from the 1500s
The saint in the Carmelite Friary, Kinsale, resembles Robert Redford as Jerimiah Johnson. We found more Irish Softie sheep and bought asparagus and rhubarb jam at the country store.
Timoleague Friary, also known as Timoleague Abbey, is a ruined medieval Franciscan friary in Timoleague. We learned that the entire nature of the estuary was changed by the tsunami that resulted from an earthquake in Lisbon in 1755.
Clonakilty was once known for lace but is now famous for its black pudding. It is also the home of Michael Collins, as portrayed by Liam Neeson.
Drombeg stone circle dates to the late bronze age. We visited during a rare moment of sunshine.
We spotted a rainbow over Graham Norton's home town of Bandon. The next day, we visited the iconic Blarney Castle, arriving before the hordes of tourists.
We each decided to give the real Blarney Stone a miss, but we made up for it by kissing a nearby castle wall. The background shows a lush field of wild garlic.
The actual Blarney Stone is shown bottom left. We returned to Cork on a much sunnier weekday and enjoyed shopping in the English Market, where we bought delicious steak pies, carrot cake, bread, and chocolates.
The baker was proud of his carrot cakes and stood on a stool to photograph them. There was wonderful and thought-provoking art to be seen at the Crawford Gallery.
This series of photos by Yinka Shonibare, called Diary of a Victorian Dandy, places a black protagonist in the middle of the same Hogarthian world that we discovered recently in London, when seeing The Rake’s Progress (scroll up to see these).
Most of these works were part of A Matter of Time exhibition. Rebecca Horn's Take Me to the Other Side of the Ocean is a reaction to her suffering lung damage from toxic materials as an art student. On the street, we spotted an Art Nouveau-inspired lamp post that is part of an outdoor art trail.
Several of the arresting casts on display at the Crawford Gallery originated in Rome, where they had been made under the supervision of the great Italian sculptor Antonio Canova. They were taken from works in the Vatican Collection and were chosen from the classical masterpieces and gifted to Galway.
Amanda Dunsmore’s The People’s Portraits 1899 – 1918 shows 100 black and white archival photos, mainly taken of prisoners at Armagh prison. I thought the photos normalised the prisoners and make them look like approachable, everyday citizens. Nick thought they still looked sinister.
After enjoying our English Market pie, we went to Ryan's Pub in Cobh, where Nick got to play his Food Romance for a local crowd, who sang along. The next day, we left the area and headed north, stopping off at historic ruins along the way.
Clare Museum in Ennis held interesting antiquities and we stopped for lunch there before moving to the Cliffs of Moher.
We were lucky to see the Cliffs of Moher in the sunshine, just before another rainfall hit. Interestingly, the cliffs were used to film a scene in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.
En route to our second accommodation, we stopped off in Kilfenora to see the Doorty Cross and other well-preserved 12th century stone crosses, including one standing in a field. We bought prosecco and bacon in the local corner shop.
Galway was our favourite town, where we saw Lynch's Castle, the Oscar Wilde statue, a resonant busker, and another basket of Sheep Brothers.
Saint Nicholas' Collegiate Church was filled with antiquities, including banners of the Connaught Rangers, nicknamed “The Devil’s Own,” who had lost their lives in World War I and many medieval carvings that had been defaced by Cromwell's troops. Outside, the street art was more optimistic.
Some favourite photos. We'd seen the bookshop featured on a travel programme and we had a drink outside the King's Head. The river was raging full from all the recent rain.
The Claddagh ring is a symbol of love and friendship originating in the 17th century and a popular souvenir from Galway. The Spanish Arch was right outside the museum.
The museum held stone carvings of a dog and a bagpiper, as well as some musical polyphony. We had lunch at Dough Bros, ranked Number 1 pizzeria in Ireland and Number 19 in all of Europe (presumably including Italy). Our wood-fired pizza included chorizo from Cork, drizzled with hot honey.
One of the best desserts I've ever had came from Kai's, a pistachio and rhubarb tart. We ate it on the banks of the river before visiting the modern cathedral. We'd seen the medieval tower, enclosed in a shopping mall, on two separate programmes about Galway and spotted it on the way back to our car.
Our lovely accommodation was outside historic Athenry, whose Market Cross was unusual in Ireland. On the way back to Dublin, we stopped in Athlone on Good Friday, where a procession was taking place.
The oldest pub in Ireland is in Athlone. We enjoyed the exhibits at Luan Gallery. My favourite work was top right, the permanence of banal tweets and texts when rendered in stone. We stopped off at Kilbeggan distillery to buy some whiskey on our way to Dublin.
Irish whimsy
An early morning visit to the beach
Even though we've been to the town many times, there's always something new to see.
The day a marathon came to our town
Vintage cars everywhere at the Stockbridge gathering
We met up with friends at the Mayfly pub, where I went with my father in 2007.
On another weekend, we returned to Hinton Ampner, taking Tiny Cow along for the ride.
Although we'd been in this room many times, this was the first time I noticed a painting of the waterfall we saw in Umbria in 2014.
