Wall photos

It's one of Europe's biggest walled parks. More than 13 kilometers of wall encircle about 1700 acres of wood and meadow, not to mention the golf course, the Royal palaces, and the Grand Prix circuit. 

Walled, with gatekeepers in gatekeeper's cottages, who lock up at 8.30 at night. Promptly, and with no mercy.

Walls like trees; dappled, layered, and barked.

Wet walls around the motor circuit, soft and green, hosting races of their own.

Some of the beasts are a little more permanent.

All those miles of plain white plaster, it's hard to resist the temptation to make a statement. 

Something private, from the heart,

or a public invitation to spread the loving...

But there are two sides to every wall. graffiti on the inside has a different character.

Even the Ultras have to contend with ivy and saplings. It's pretty clear who's winning.

Drawing the Heat

 Back to the park, paper, brushes, pencils, and that damn little water pot, that has a passion for falling on marble floors and making an obscene amount of noise, without even having the decency either to smash into a million pieces, which would justify the explosion of sound, or - I don't know - use its superpower to make the earth open up and swallow me?
But out here, it's demure and silent. You can just make it out, to the right of the paper. Bastard.

The park is gently steaming. Let's not go there about the bike today, but that saddle owes me dinner and a movie. I have come back to my place, looking towards Mirabellino. It's not got the structure and the interest of Mirabellino, the other summer palace that faces it across the great field of the Hippodrome. But Mirabello is busy with people and cars, and offers no shade, no perch for passers by. This is a photo op, not a painting place.

French Maze

I bet you've never been to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris.
Why would you. It's just South of the Seine, like the Eiffel Tower, and the two green spaces are like opposite bookends, framing the historic city center. But while the Tower is unique, tall, sexy, and instantly recognizable, the Jardin des Plantes is not. It's big, sure, and not unfrequented - by students, escaping from the hustle of the Quartier Latin, and by families, letting steam off in the gravel walks and in the unremarkable and overpriced zoo - but it's one of those places that doesn't scream Paris. It could be anywhere.
The people walking here are locals. Not a tour bus or a phrase book in sight, for a kilometre or more. grandparents pushing strollers and holding small hands, triptychs of women, showing the three ages of one face. Dads with grubby nails taking a professional interest in a herbaceous border.
There isn't a lot of what you might call real gloire to the Histoire of the botanical garden, and a small museum spreads a paltry range of exhibits through three or four showrooms. There's a painted giraffe that's rather fetching, and one of those big models in a glaring glass case. You pay to go in, really just so's you can use their clean and spacious loo, which in Paris is always a big deal.

Dawn

Jet lagged.
I can't seem to beat it. It is four am and I am awake as if it were noon. That makes no sense, it should be ten pm for my brain, but it isn't. A few more days, I think to myself, stalking around the attic rooms. Few more days before I finally click into European mode. For now, everything is fine at four, and I am ready to die by lunch time. This is for the birds, this half-life.
On the upside, there is this.

Half an hour from the Paris, and it's like being immersed in England. The birds own the streets at this time of morning, between the trucks and the trains. They sit on the fat power lines and pour noise into the cool blue air. Among others, I hear blackbirds. I had missed their sound. Not that there's anything wrong with Cardinals and warblers, but this is different, older, like a remembered heartsong.
 It's beautiful.

A piece of the Poe

It's hard to know where to begin with Poe. On the face of it, he was a small man who lived a financially cramped life and who came to a mysterious, painful death. Over 150 yers after his death, his stories still raise not only the hairs on the back of your neck, but questions like - is this supposed to be frightening or funny? More than that, it remains unclear even where Poe belongs, in biographical terms he is hard to pin down. He was born in Boston, lived in New York, London, and Baltimore, but he styled himself a 'Southern gentleman' rather than a New Englander or even a 19th century cosmopolitan, like Nathaniel Hawthorne. 

Maybe it is that ambiguity, and nebulousness that makes his so open to appropriation by artists as diverse as Sylvester Stallone,whose movie of Poe's life comes out in 2012; Maya Angelou, who as a girl thought of him as her 'own personal EAP', and Baudelaire, who translated him into French. 

 The city of Richmond gets in on the act with its Poe House. It's on a dusty, neglected street in the industrial part of town, nothing like the clustered houses clinging to shuttered, faded glory along the lines of the rue Morgue. It's not a sinister mansion, either, although St John's, on the hill above it, is a bit creepy. 
Perhaps Poe got some inspiration from the chateau-like railway station about 5 minutes walk from the house - it certainly seems a likely place to hear strange banging and ticking - all those attic windows could host an army of mad women.

The Richmond museum was never Poe's residence; he stayed here with his mother's relatives from time to time, he slept, we're told, in this tiny bed.

Savannah

Savannah is faking it, but that's OK. It's what you'd expect; a generous, kindly, hospitable sort of fakery.  You only have to look at the drooping trees to know this place swelters, in normal times. Everywhere is built for shade, but right now, it is deep midwinter, and we need no shade.

We have come from the grim grey of the northern Southern winter in search of a bit of sun, and here it is. no lattes, though; they don't know how to make lattes. But thinking of the heat, that sort of makes sense.

You cannot see all Savannah's charms in a day. The Historical District, glorying first in the riverbank, and then expanding to a surprisingly large area around Forsyth Park, makes even Charleston feel like a small, hard, lumpish town, exposed to the unmannerly bay. It's not like that here. The water is always on your mind, sure. But it is different.

One block from the waterfront, and you're in a world of foot bridges spanning the paved canyon of Factor's Walk, designed  for cut-purses, costume dramas, and delivery vans. There is something sly and sliding here, something I'm missing, walking in the cool dawn shadows. These stones are English, you know; ballast from ships heading back to Britain laden with tobacco, and tar, and I don't know what else. Although it's probably written on the sign I'm standing under. I think I'd fit right in, here.

Three roses

Don't waste time. 

Say yes. 

The space between bloom and gone is less than you think.