a [Sir William] Russell Flint

Cecelia Reclining

I could not speak for amazement at your beauty

As you came, down the Garrick stair,

Grey-green eyes like the turbulent

Atlantic And floppy schoolgirl hair.

I could see you in a Sussex teashop,

Dressed in peasant weave and brogues,

Turning over, as firelight shone on brassware,

Last year’s tea-stained Vogues.

I could see you as a large-eyed student,

Frowning as you tried to learn,

Or, head flung back, the confident girl prefect,

Thrillingly kind and stern.

I could not speak for amazement at your beauty;

Yet when you spoke to me,

You were calm and gentle as a rock pool

Waiting, warm, for the sea.

Wave on wave, I plunged in them to meet you -

In wave on wave I drown;

Calm rock pool, on the shore of my security

Hold me when the tide goes down.

Sir John Betjeman

Shall I tell you about life? Well, it's like the big wheel at Luna Park. You pay five francs and go into a room with tiers of seats all round, and in the centre the floor is made of a great disc of polished wood that revolves quickly. At first you sit down and watch the others. They are all trying to sit in the wheel, and they keep getting flung off, and that makes them laugh, and you laugh too. It's great fun. It is very much like life. You see, the nearer you can get to the hub of the wheel the slower it is moving and the easier it is to stay on. There's generally some one in the centre who stands up and sometimes does a sort of dance. Often he's paid by the management, though, or, at any rate, he's allowed in free. Of course at the very centre there's a point completely at rest, if one could only find it. I'm not sure I am not very near that point myself. Of course the professional men get in the way. Lots of people just enjoy scrambling on and being whisked off and scrambling on again. How they all shriek and giggle! Then there are others who sit as far out as they can and hold on for dear life and enjoy that. But the whole point about the wheel is that you needn't get on it at all, if you don't want to. People get hold of ideas about life, and that makes them think they've got to join in the game, even if they don't enjoy it. It doesn't suit every one.



in Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall


I am reading Scoop by a woman called Evelyn Waugh; Adrian Mole

illustration

Hilary Knight's Eloise (and skipperdee too)

Hilary Knight

Quentin Blake

some things are tremendously significant, some things are moot.

i do want to be an artist, and a poet, and sometimes i want to be an illustrator. i want to work in a library, or in a museum, or for a publishing company, but mostly i want to be a continuity announcer, just like Kathy Clugston. 

i adore Hilary Knight, Lugwig Bemelmans and Quentin Blake, and the sinister motivation of Joe Orton's defacement of sacristy. the pelicans i lay my hands on have led me to become a little obsessive and i found such a website that seems to be filled with gems.