The first leg of my ill-fated trip to Buxton last weekend was an early flight to Manchester, and I decided I should take the opportunity to sample its cultural delights. There is a lot to see in Manchester but I rapidly zeroed in on two particular possibilities: the John Rylands Library in the middle of the city, and the Imperial War Museum North, ( Read more... )

Second paragraph of third section (a quotation from the artist Winnifred J. Bastian) and one of her paintings (of the New Church in The Hague):‘One could philosophise about a common cause between these two apparently independent developments, but I prefer to take them at face value and create the provocative pictorials their combination evokes. For ( Read more... )

If you’re within reach of Leuven, and on the look-out for something a bit different to do this weekend, you could do worse than visiting the Abdij van Park, south of the city. We know it well - Anne actually volunteered in the museum for a few months, a couple of years ago. I started a videoblog entry about it last summer, but never completed it; ( Read more... )

Thank you all for your kind wishes for my birthday yesterday. One of the great things about the interconnected age is that we can easily reach out and let someone know that we are grateful for their continued existence. It did and does cheer me up, hearing from old and dear friends, and also from people where I was not terribly sure if they liked ( Read more... )

I was looking at my grandmother’s memoirs the other day and came across this interesting passage:Like so many Americans, I know much more about my mother's family than about my father's, and she in turn knew more about her own mother's family. Her mother was Frances Wyatt Belt, whose father was a homeopathic doctor practicing, I think, but I am not ( Read more... )

A few weeks ago I bit the bullet and sent a DNA sample off to Ancestry.com, having already done so for 23andMe a while back. The fact that it ties the DNA into the genealogy side of things makes for a snowstorm of new distant relatives of whom I have never heard. Most of them were people who were well enough off in their time and place for official ( Read more... )

A couple of months ago, Anne and I went to the Fondation Folon in La Hulpe to see the art of Jean-Michel Folon on display. Like all other indoor cultural attractions, the Fondation is closed at the moment; but if you're in central Belgium and you feel like sampling his work, you can see a number of his sculptures on display at Villers Abbey, no ( Read more... )

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A fascinating juxtaposition of public art can be seen in Ostende, which we visited briefly on Sunday. Notoriously, an equestrian statue of King Leopold II (1835-1909, ruled 1865-1909) dominates the Royal Galleries along the seafront.

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We've been to Bruges twice in the last few days, parking both times in the Zilverpand car park, which is nice and central. Overlooking the escalators between level -1 and level -2 of the car park are two rather interesting art works - one showing, er, people on an escalator, the other showing a rural local scene with a white bird in the foreground ( Read more... )