Ninety-eight: shades

Ninety-eight: shades, originally uploaded by meganknight.

Prescription sunglasses are one of the things I really can't do without. I hate bright light, and even in England the sun is too much for me. I can't function very well without glasses of some kind, so prescription sunglasses it is.

These are new, I left my old ones in restaurant in Liverpool a few months back, and couldn't get them back. They were old, though, and the script gave me a headache, so new ones it is. These are pretty funky - they're purple on the inside of the frame, and unfortunately, have a bit of bling on the arms, but less than most frames these days. Why does everyone assume that all women want to wear rhinestones on their glasses, anyway?

Ninety-seven: Moomin

Ninety-seven: Moomin, originally uploaded by meganknight.

We grew up reading Tove Jansson, who my mother absolutely loved. It was years and years before I ever met anyone who had ever heard of the Moomins, but recently, they seem to have undergone something of a retro-revival. This is a coaster from a funky scandinavian shop in Bath (I also bought a moose for my key chain), and one of my favourite drawings from the books.

Ninety-six: Roman

Ninety-six: Roman, originally uploaded by meganknight.

This is a sculpture of some Roman emperor on the rebuilt walls of the old baths in Bath. It was sculpted by an Englishman in the late nineteenth century, almost certainly using a local model, because that is an English profile if ever I saw one.

Ninety-five: abstract

Ninety-five: abstract, originally uploaded by meganknight.

Ninety-four: perspective

Ninety-four: perspective, originally uploaded by meganknight.

The royal crescent. With seagull. The Georgians loved symmetry, and everything had to be symmetrical. I feel rather subversive taking this sweep of the crescent from one side, with the grass looking a bit lopsided, as though the seagull might slide down to the right.

Ninety-three: Shelter

Ninety-three: Shelter, originally uploaded by meganknight.

Bath is obsessed with Romans. It was once a Roman town, and when the fashionistas of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rediscovered it, they brought with them their obsession with classical culture and architecture. So Bath is a classical Roman town, rebuilt by English people out of local limestone. There's a lot of angular pediments and sculpture, like this one, slowly crumbling away, because limestone is not marble.

Ninety-two: garden

Ninety-two: garden, originally uploaded by meganknight.

We have a handkerchief-sized garden, and it doesn't get a lot of sun. It's also very windy.

So, Martin uses the kitchen windowsill as a kind of greenhouse, and then moves everything outside to sit in the sun when we get it. So this is a patch of garden with all the currently-growing juvenile plants, and the ancient watering can that Martin collects rainwater in.

Among the seedlings here is catnip. I have my doubts about its long-term survival, personally, but Martin doesn't seem worried that he'll look outisde one day to discover Oliver has torn up everything to get at the 'nip.