
see more Epic Fails
Disorganization personified, music, and faith and computing - but zero attention spa..
Advent is lack. Emptiness. The time before. It is a compound of dark and cold, mourning and desire. It is bereavement, yearning, bafflement. It is interrogation, silence; it is a hand pressed to the chest.from Paula's House of Toast but go and look at the link for the stunning pictures and then stop.

My previous brief glance from the high window hadn't prepared me for instant intoxication. Lashed into the black soil were several species of rose-bush and tree: soaring loose-limbed ramblers bowed under white ruffs that deepened through blush to rhodamine at the edges; raspberry-pink damasks, bushy and sleek-leaved; antique chiffon cultivars with tight pale eyes whose scent must have once caressed the skin of the Medicis; a fibrillar mass trussed in feathery foliage that spread from rhubarb red to buffed pewter and bedded itself down among the gilt wands of gigantic nettles in a perfumed, jewelled haze.A 'Secret Garden' moment, I'm still in the midst of last week's book - Lowry's The Bellini Madonna and as last week's extract was a bit spare this is a bit(!) more luxuriant!!

Liebfraumlich... possesses the rare capacity to dissolve a mouthful of pasta without the inconvenience of chewing


Which part of the house had I come to? I searched for the top of the chestnut under which we had sat that morning, but couldn't see itFrom Elizabeth Lowry's The Bellini Madonna - 'convergence of high art and the low skulduggery' when I picked this book up in the library I wasn't aware it was going to be a conjunction of Ireland and Italy again - as with the Last Train from Liguria which I read a few weeks ago.