Year: 2020

Blue up above and blue below and in between hues of green.  Look at the colour of this tree – a cadaghi eucalypt with Chlorophyll in its trunk according to my friend Verity.   And the girth of this one fig which is taller and wider then the houses behind it.  Our footpath impassable in the…

I look up and it is a solid covering of cloud cover slipping into gun metal grey for the whole week. Not a crack of blue in the sky. The rain is coming down as if someone up there realised that not enough had been released and decided to chuck it all down in one.…

The garden has loved the rain and I have been very excited to see the first bloom on our Tibouchina tree after we had it cut back. It is so very beautiful you will agree. And the sky is Blue. The rain has made a difference of course and the weeds have sprung up, so I…

I have been away in Europe for three weeks and in that time it rained in Brisbane.What a blessing, what a change to the whole landscape. Dougall and I set off today to explore our hood and its paths and to record some of what was going on. A black and white symphony of cockatoos…

A short train ride up the valley and through the forest took us to the Glacier – Mer de Glace. We walked some 530 steps down to the caverns and of course 530 steps back up. The stark message on the way down was pinned onto the rocks giving the height of the glacier at…

A few days en famille, a rarer occurrence these days as the kids grow into their own busy lives. So we moved from the Majesty of Granny to the Majesty of the Mountains – and they have brought a flood of memories, tastes, sensations and thrills back for us all. Waking up to the view…

We have just had a big weekend. Granny, great granny, Ma, Nancy Gilks turned 100 on the 18th. The letter from the Queen arrived in an envelope from Buckingham Palace signed by the other Queen. We ask her what it feels like and she smiles. “I don’t really know. I have not been here before.”…

A beautifully curated exhibition at the Wallace Collection on prints and paintings for the East India Company, (many never seen before,) which were commissioned by the Company from Indian artists between the 1770s and the 1850s. The detail of the artwork is exquisite and definitely worth seeing. Each paint stroke on this sloth is so…

My phone told me that I was not my usual active self. I looked at the screen with some incredulity but the graph of my activity flatlined in a most embarrassing way. So I put my trainers on and went out looking for Dougall on our first adventure of the new Decade.  Our first stop,…