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If you thought life wasn't fair......

February 19, 2012

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Saint Francis of Assisi at The National Gallery

This is a free exhibition, but you do need to buy a timed ticket for general admission. This will save you a lot of time as the queue for unbooked tickets was long. I got straight in. If I identify with one saint, it's this one. I was pleasantly surprised by the exhibition. There was so much to it. Saint Francis was born into a wealthy family in Umbria in Italy around 1181. He lived a privileged life, but when captured in 1202 he began to reassess his life. On a pilgrimage to Rome he joined the poor begging. He had a vision of Christ while in a chapel and then hid from his father in a cave. When he returned home his father beat him and locked him up in a storeroom. His mother freed him. Later he disowned his father and gave him back his clothes. Antony Gormley's St Francis receiving the stigmata St Francis receives the stigmata and the death of St Francis St Francis went on to found the Franciscans for men and the Poor Clares for women. A third order was later formed for tho

Reading to Goring & Streatley (Thames Path Walk)

Reading Bridge On one of the hottest days of the year, and one of the most humid, my friend and I set out on the Thames Path at Reading . This is where we left off last year. But a couple of nights before we left we were texting one another. The weather forecast was predicting storms with heavy rain on Monday. What should we take in the way of wet-weather gear? Should we do the route a different way (we had a hotel booked for an overnight stay at Pangbourne). Should we be going at all? Maybe we over thought it. Yes, I think we did, but we had every reason to. In the end, we decided to just go for it. We arrived at Reading station from London. Already it was just gone eleven o'clock and hot. We bought food and extra drink and set off down to the Thames. The bridge (above) was what we first saw. I'd walked this stretch of the Thames Path before to Pangbourne with my husband and remembered how it seemed to go on and on. I called it a bit of bugger! My guide book says it is six/s

Aftermath Exhibition at Tate Britain

This was one exhibition I did not want to miss and I'm so glad I didn't. This is a sobering but brilliant exhibition covering the years 1916-1932 and features artists not only from England but Germany and France and others. What struck me was for all those artists the impact of being on the front was the same. It was interesting to see these picture alongside each other. What they saw and experienced came out through their art work, sometimes quite disturbingly. A few could never get over those experiences. At least one committed suicide. Some of my favourite painters had work here - Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer and Christopher Nevinson but I found others I admired, especially William Orpen. These paintings really brought home the destruction of war. Eight rooms made up the exhibition - the first was Remembrance: Battlefields and Ruins where the real cost cries out from the bodies of soldiers to the stark landscape of wire and burned stunted trees and graveyards. The second

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Poems/stories by Heather Walker

If you thought life wasn't fair......

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