The Ashmolean, Oxford

This museum is the oldest in the country and it certainly has plenty of interesting artifacts in it. It was re-built and re-opened in 2009 and now it's rather difficult to navigate but very good looking with bright, glassy spaces as well as the old "palace" style. I enjoyed revising the Anglo Saxon finds that illustrate that part of our history, but most of all I was surprised by the art gallery. Good quality stuff from the Italian renaissance - some really beautiful altarpieces. On the third floor - European art - mainly French and Dutch and modern British, but really lovely things, including some great pre-Raphaelites I had never seen before.

destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah after Patenir

Samuel Palmer

Lucien Pisarro

Singer Sargent

Camille Pisarro

Henri de Toulouse Lautrec

However, the cafe is over-priced, even for a cup of tea. There are plenty of better places to snack in Oxford. There are some great shops too, and there is much of interest to see.

Malcolm Morley

I have never seen work by this artist before. He works in the USA and was the first winner of the Turner prize. His pictures are super-realistic and include pictures of photos of racehorses and cruise ships, and planes blowing up. But here is one that illustrates his skill and humanity. It's great, isn't it?

Malcolm Morley

Interested in soil? BBC programme on new research.

strange illustration, great programme

I hope someone goes to the website and tells me what that nasty looking brown shape is.

I have thin pink worms in the compost bin - not good burrowers apparently.

this is a regular earthworm

Jeremy Paxman and Russell Brand

Jeremy P is often a very lazy interviewer, using his arrogant personality against the weak and hapless, and repeating the same question over and over again, as though the answer to his one question were all-important, when often it isn't. He can be very embarrassing. This week he interviewed Russell Brand and got rather more than he bargained for. Russell Brand is very fearless and articulate. It's quite refreshing to watch (takes 10 minutes) but it makes me wonder what happened afterwards? What was Paxman's response to RB's impassioned tirade? Will we ever know?

Russell Brand on Newsnight

Flight Behaviour

I am really enjoying this book. However, it doesn't seem, yet, to be about climate change and butterflies, and you would think the writer was a sociologist for the way she so carefully places Dellarobia, the heroine, between two worldviews, like a middle class mind in a working class life, subtly judging everyone around her. The character gives the writer (Barbara Kingsolver) such a prime opportunity to look into the business of the poorer end of her neighbourhood and examine it with the exactitude of a dissecting biologist, that I feel slightly squirmy about it. It feels snobby, but it is very well done.

The situation on the Appalachian mountain, where it has been too warm and they have had too much rain, is just like here. In the book, the worry is that the rain is going to cause a landslide. But there are other problems too, the hay the farmers cut goes mouldy, for example, and they have to buy some in from another state, adding to their cash-flow problems. (Here, there are just too many pathogens: mould, growths and fungus. The country won't look the same without the ash trees, but they are not the only plants suffering die back. My brother showed me some old laurels that he had to saw down. the Wisley website reports a list of pathogens which is enough to make your hair curl, there are so many new ones.)

As the story develops there is more to the climate change angle, and one of the characters, a professor from the Caribbean, becomes a mouthpiece for the climate change scientists, and there are whole pages of his explanations of the signs and consequences of climate change. He rather loses his personality and becomes a talking book, in my opinion. But never mind. There is a lovely scene where he is brought face to face with a journalist and lambasts her for not giving priority to the story that is important, the story that will change the world, and instead going for the feelgood story, the soft story, the story they can sex up a bit. Distractions, in other words.

 There is also a cultural rift between the ordinary folk and the scientists that we don't have in the UK. The Appalachian folk believe that God is good and will sort things out for them, and they really have no tradition of a scientific approach to anything. Science goes with expensive things like Goretex jackets and a university education.

The butterflies are extraordinary. They need to hibernate on a cool mountain, in Mexico, but if it's too cool they freeze and die. They wake up in the spring and mate. The female has to lay her eggs on some milkweed. That's the only thing the caterpillars eat. So that's in Texas or somewhere like that. Then that generation of butterflies goes north again. They go to Canada eventually I think they breed again and another generation flies south to Mexico. So the question is, how do they know when to fly and how far, 2,000 miles to a Mexican mountain?

Here is a lovely video showing the problems the butterflies face

The Fifth Estate

We went to see this film last night and it was just as good as I hoped it would be. It refuses to make a villain out of Julian Assange, but it does show that he is a very strange and isolated person, a brilliant and charismatic and damaged person. And a lot of this is down to Benedict Cumberbatch, who not only acted the part with great fidelity, but also asked that information about Assange's background be allowed to come out in dialogue in the film.

 When Cumberbatch first read the script, he worried that it cast Assange as some kind of cartoon baddie. "I think I may get my head bitten off by Disney for saying so, but everyone agreed with that." He immersed himself in research, reading endlessly and interviewing people who knew Assange, and gradually the script evolved into a more nuanced portrayal. His performance draws heavily on his research into Assange's childhood. "I know it's a Freudian cliche to go, 'Oh well, when I was a kid…', but, to be honest, it's so profoundly true with Julian. To have been a child in a single-mother relationship, being pursued around the country by an abusive stepfather who was part of a cult – to be taken out of any context where he could discover who he was in relation to other people – well, to then become a teenage hacktivist, and evolve into a cyber-journalist, to me makes perfect sense. And he's still a runaway today. I find that profoundly moving." Interview here


Other critics have disliked the film because it didn't have a point of view. But for me, that was brilliant. It tried to show more than one point of view by giving scenes of stress and sadness to the government employees who usually have jurisdiction over secrets, in Washington, and it showed how the Wikileaks revelations affected them. It allowed the audience to see that some people are trained and paid to take care of secret material and to be responsible for it and for their fellows. Assange is not responsible enough to do what he has done. Between the actions of the very young and sensitive Chelsea Manning and the furore-loving Wikileaks leader, toxic intelligence was allowed to escape like untreated sewage from a storm drain.


But I also liked the relationship between the two techno-geeks. I could see exactly how they had become obsessed with what they were doing and the cleverness of their encoding. I could see how Assange had his friend Daniel on a string because their joint enterprise was so bold and so successful. They travelled from country to country setting up servers for their connections, and must have sealed their friendship on those long ordinary road journeys. The ups and downs of the relationship were eloquently conveyed and were at the heart of the film - a bromance, if you like the term. I enjoyed this film and I found it gripping, but if you are expecting something in the style of the Bourne films, you will be disappointed, because this is a much more complex film.There is really no hero and no baddie, because that all depends on your attitude to the idea of transparent government.

here for more information

It is a mast year

which means that the oak trees have produced acorns. They land on our roof all night. However, although I am glad for the tree, which I feared had become sterile, I miss the squirrels. They used to go quite mad when there were acorns. All the squirrels have vanished from this corner of the cul-de-sacs. I have looked for news about this and not found any.

lingua franca - another misconception

Lingua franca means a shared language of communication used by people whose main languages are different ; and I always thought the original lingua franca was Latin. But this phrase originally referred to a common language - Frank - consisting of Italian mixed with French, Spanish, Greek, and Arabic that was formerly spoken in Mediterranean ports.

I was a star in a reasonably-priced bra

Yesterday we had a family wedding and I was asked to read a poem - the most personal part of the ceremony - to the congregation. It was not a poem that read well on the page (it's lame, frankly) and it needed some expression and timing (also some editing), but I can report it went down really well, and I was very pleased. (If only the nation was short of people who can read poetry to an audience!! I could be a professional.) In this case, I was glad for my brother and new sister-in-law, because they had given us a lovely party and I helped to make their day a success.

The title is an allusion to Top Gear, a TV programme in which a celebrity drives a car around a track as fast as they can. They seem to love doing this. The feature is called "Star in a reasonably-priced car". I was not just wearing underwear; in fact, I bought a new reasonably-priced dress for the occasion.