Ham Sandwich.

More watery stuff: thinking of La Grande Jatte, I thought I’d show you this picture of Richmond Hill taken from the Thames (it’s worth clicking on it to enlarge the image).  There’s a magnificent sweeping view of the river from the top, but I didn’t go up there. I took these photographs last week while I was visiting my mother at Ham, in Surrey.  If you walk down past Ham House

you can take a tiny boat called Hammerton’s Ferry

across the river.  Because it’s to the west of London the Thames is still quite narrow,

 and is sandwiched at that point – (that was a lot of work to get a title) – between Ham on the southern or Surrey side of the river and Twickenham on the north or Middlesex side.  So small and close to the city, Middlesex is a county that no longer exists.  It was absorbed into London in the 1970s, but I like to use the name as much as I can because I was born in Middlesex.

When you alight from the boat in Twickenham, first there’s a sign on the gangway floor written in weld:

and then, facing across the river towards Ham House is an eighteenth-century Palladian villa, called Marble Hill House:

Marble Hill House was built for the girlfriend of George II, Henrietta Howard.  Apparently west London stately-home lover Alexander Pope used to spend a lot of time here, Dean Swift too.  Here’s a Wikipedia photo that shows the lawn sloping down to the towpath and the river:

There’s an unsubstantiated story that the two houses are linked by a tunnel, but what would be the point of it?  I like the ferry.  It cost £1, each way.

Then we turned around, took the ferry back and went home.  But on the way we looked in at a plant nursery that is taking advantage of global warming:

This huge old olive tree below could be yours for £3,999.  I don’t think that included freight.  You could probably make your money back over time.

We passed a pair of gatehouses to Ham House that looked like Hansel & Gretel gingerbread cottages:

This is my mother’s cat, Domino.  He grew up in Brooklyn.  He’s a VERY nice cat.

These two robins live in the back garden:

What I Did On My Day Off.

Two of my current favourite pictures: the top one a photograph by Thomas Hoepker, taken in Brooklyn on 11 September 2001, the other is Seurat’s La Grande Jatte on a Sunday afternoon, painted in 1884.

They are 117 years apart, but it just struck me how similar they are in both composition and subject: urban middle class groups enjoying the sunshine, albeit a little passively in the Brooklyn picture.

Goats On Bikes.

My wife found these pictures, she was vague about where.  She says they are African.

Julia sent me this cartoon because of our discussion, a couple of posts back, of odd & even numbers.  According to Julia, the man says something like: “And now I have to be odd all the rest of the day”.Julia currently has some pretty great pictures at her blog.