Japanese artist and jeweller Shinji Nakaba specialises in making tiny wearable sculptures. The pieces come in all shapes and sizes, but his most prolific series involves human and animal skulls carved from oyster pearls and attached to rings, necklaces and brooches.
Protect Your Cat With a Suit of Armour
Give your moggy the upper hand in any fight, by buying it its own suit of protective armour. Asking price? A lot…
This week I’m going to cheat a bit for my weekly photograph. What I give you is a scan of one of my mother’s watercolours: one painted during the war when she was Warden of Leatherhead YHA. It’s interesting to compare this with her later work, as shown in my earlier post about Dora’s funeral, and see how her technique and style changed over the years.
This week’s photograph is one I took on Saturday. It shows the commemorative plaque to General Sikorski who was leader of the exiled Polish forces in WWII. The plaque is on the (astonishingly expensive) Rubens Hotel, right opposite the entrance to Buckingham Palace Mews, which was the Polish forces GHQ for most of the War. This is not just a piece of history for it will resonate with Anthony Powell fans. Powell spent most of his war years as Military Intelligence (Liaison) and for much of that time was the officer responsible for liason with the Polish Allies — so he would have known the Rubens Hotel well.
[George] Borrow was a walker of awesome stamina and a linguist of almost inconceivable talent, who is said to have been able to speak twelve languages by the time he was eighteen and to have been competently acquainted with more than forty — including Nahuatl, Tibetan, Armenian and Malo-Russian — over the course of his life. In the winter of 1832—3 the British and Foreign Bible Society invited him at short notice to an interview in London, wanting to see if he could translate the Bible into a number of difficult languages. The society liked what they saw and commissioned Borrow to translate the New Testament into Manchu. What Borrow hadn’t told them was that he did not have any Manchu. No problem. Once the job was landed, he acquired ‘several books in the Manchu-Tartar dialect’, and Amyot’s Manchu-French (French!) dictionary. Then he travelled home (by coach, understandably) and shut himself up with the books. Three weeks later he could ‘translate Manchu with no great difficulty’, and fulfilled the society’s commission.
From Robert Macfarlane; The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot
So here you go with my answer to question three of the Five Questions in Series 5 that I posed at the beginning of the month.
Some of these are absolutely brilliant …
Yes, this week’s photograph is late. That’s because I have been trying to recover, and tidy up from, the Anthony Powell Conference at Eton College over the weekend — just cashing up the takings and getting everything to reconcile took near a full day.
Anyway the conference swan song was to take a group of the delegates (about a quarter of them) to Dorney Court, near Eton. The house dates from the mid-16th-century and is about as unspoilt as it is possible for it to be and still be a family home. The first image is the obligatory group photo prior to our tour of the house.
Piping Live! is the Glasgow International Piping Festival which, in this their 10th year, is being held from 11-18 August.
The bagpipe is an ancient instrument which is found in many parts of the world — not just in Scotland but in various forms right across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. And of course more recently introduced to wherever there is a Scottish influence.