I adore ugly green.
A gorgeously colourful Welsh home.
Iceland has their Christmas book flood, apparently Norway has an Easter version specifically with crime novels. Wild.
The fifty most underappreciated movies of the 21st Century.
The story behind needlepoint’s modern day renaissance.
Just (re)watched: The English Patient. This 1997 Best Picture winner remains an utterly breathtaking piece of cinema, less watched than drifted through like a dream. It begins in the vast emptiness of the Sahara Desert with a plane gliding silently over the dunes before being shot down by German forces. And this too, is where it ends. In between is a story set partly in war-torn Italy, where Juliette Binoche plays Hana, a weary young WWII nurse caring for a horribly burned and unidentifiable man known only as “the English patient,” played by Ralph Fiennes. During transport north, Hana discovers a bombed-out but beautiful Italian monastery and decides to remain there with her patient rather than subject him to the agony of further travel. In the stillness of that crumbling sanctuary, surrounded by candlelight, silence, and the lingering scars of war, the patient slowly begins to tell his story. Through a series of flashbacks, we are taken to North Africa before the war, where Count László de Almásy is part of a team mapping the desert through aerial surveys and exploration. It is there, amid endless dunes and sun-bleached landscapes, that a sweeping and ultimately devastating love affair begins to unfold. An excruciatingly beautiful story of four people whose lives intersect with crushing ramifications. Diaphanous and ethereal, deeply romantic and yet laced with so much tragedy and loss. Exquisite.
Just read: People Of the Book Geraldine Brooks In the spring of 1996, Hanna Heath—an Australian rare book expert—arrives in war-scarred Sarajevo to examine the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, a Jewish manuscript that has resurfaced after disappearing during the Bosnian War. Its survival alone is nothing short of miraculous, having been smuggled to safety during heavy shelling by the Muslim head of the museum library, who risked his life to preserve it. It is an act of quiet bravery that sets the tone for everything that follows. As Hanna dives into the examination of the Jewish text, she discovers a butterfly wing in the binding and in the subsequent chapter, we are whisked back to the Sarajevo of 1940 to learn its provenance. The mystery of a beautiful clasp, which has become unattached, is solved by a story set in 19th-century Vienna, and a perplexing wine stain is eventually explained by a trip to Renaissance Venice. Each fragment becomes a doorway into the past and with every new discovery, the narrative slips further back in time, gradually revealing the Haggadah’s extraordinary journey across centuries and continents. And threaded through these journeys is Hanna’s present-day story, as she pieces together the manuscript’s past while navigating her own personal challenges. Her investigation becomes not just an academic exercise, but an emotional and intellectual unraveling—of history, of herself, of the fragile threads that connect people across time. It is a richly detailed, meticulously researched novel, which weaves a complex tapestry of intolerance and persecution and yet again and again, those from different backgrounds and faiths risk everything to protect this book, leaving us with two powerful truths: that the preservation of beauty and knowledge can transcend religious and cultural divides and that love and compassion can outshine even the darkest chapters of history.