I WAS UNCERTAIN about visiting the current exhibition at Kettles Yard in Cambridge. Called “Handpicked: Painting Flowers from 1900 to Today”, it is showing until 6 September 2026. Having seen its name, I assumed that the show would have little to interest me. How wrong I was.
The exhibition is a collection of images of flowers, mostly paintings. But they are not any old floral paintings but works by great artists, for example: Vanessa Bell, Chris Ofili, Eric Ravilious, Henri Rousseau, David Bomberg, Eduoard Vuillard, Lubaina Hamid, … and many more. In addition to works by well-known artists, there were many competently executed, attractive works by amateur local artists.
Each of the works by the professional artists were well labelled with short explanatory notes. The pictures were beautifully displayed. It was interesting to read what had inspired the artists to choose flowers as subject matter. In many cases, it was not simply the beauty of the flora, but some deeper messages that the artists wanted to convey.
I am very glad I viewed this exhibition, which I was at first hesitant about visiting because of its title. If you are in Cambridge or nearby, this is a show not to be missed.
FRANK BOWLING WAS born in Guyana (formerly British Guiana) in 1934. He came to England in 1953. He studied art at Chelsea College of Art, then at The Royal College of Art. He is the first ‘black’ artist to have been made a member of the Royal Academy of Arts (in 2005). Until 17 January 2027, there is a small exhibition of Bowling’s work at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
Displayed in a circular room, there are about 10 works to be seen. Almost all of them are large images tending towards abstraction, but some with figurative details. Some of the images have patches of three-dimensional accumulation of paint, sometimes with fragments of material attached. All the works are gloriously colourful. One of them is an impressionist map of the continent where Bowling was born: South America.
The little exhibition is a good example of the idea that ‘small is beautiful’, but most of the exhibits are far from being small. I am pleased that I have seen this show.
NEAR OUR HOME, we are spoiled for choice as afar as purchasing food is concerned.
In a few days time, a branch of the Whole Foods retailing chain is opening in our neighbourhood. As I understand it, the company believes that it is promoting ‘healthy eating’.
The new store is next door to a branch of a ‘fast food’ chain , which offers quite different fare from that which is sold by Whole Foods.
In which store would you choose to spend your money? The choice is yours. It is a question of taste.
THE SCOTTISH FOUGHT the English at the Battle of Flodden Field on 9 September 1513. If you want to know all about it, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Flodden . In brief, the Scots were defeated. At least 10000 Scottish men and about 1600 English were killed.
The battle was fought close to the village of Branxton in Northumberland. A stone cross on the top of a grassy hill commemorates “The Brave of Both Nations”. This monument was erected in 1910. Visitors to the battlefield can follow marked trails to explore the area in which the battle was fought. Every now and then, there are informative noticeboards that help visitors to understand the course and locations of the fighting.
Within the village of Branxton, there is a telephone box/kiosk. It is the standard design that has existed for many decades, but it no longer contains a telephone. This small edifice has been repurposed to become a Visitor Centre. It contains an information panel and a few leaflets. It claims to be “The World’s smallest Visitor Centre”. I would not be surprised if that were the case.
Although visiting the battlefield was surprisingly moving, seeing the minute visitor centre was quite intriguing.
JULIA MARGARET CAMERON (née Pattle) lived from 1815 to 1879. She was a pioneer in artistic photography. She used photography not to produce exact likenesses of her subjects, but to create works of art that captured the essence of the people who posed for her, and by doing so, to create images that she hoped would move those who saw them. She wanted to produce images which, like those of painters, created an impression of the personalities of her sitters. To do this, she employed techniques that were way ahead of other photographers working at the same time.
10 Chesham Place
Julia was born in Kolkata (Calcutta), daughter of a senior British colonial administrator. She married Charles Hay Cameron in 1838. After he retired, he brought Julia and her children to England. They lived in various places before moving to the Isle of Wight in 1860 (next door to the home of her friend the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson), where in about 1863, she was given her first camera. From then onwards, she produced many photographs. Most of which are still recognised as masterpieces today.
Recent research has revealed that Julia and her family lived at 10 Chesham Place (near Belgrave Square) between 1848 and 1850. To commemorate this, English Heritage has placed a commemorative plaque on the house. Today, 12 May 2026, we attended the official unveiling of the plaque. After several interesting speeches had been given, Julia Cameron, the great-great-great-granddaughter of Julia Margaret Cameron pulled a cord which opened the red curtains covering the new memorial, and the plaque was revealed. After the unveiling, a photographer created collodion plate photographs using the type of camera that Julia Margaret Cameron would have used during the 1860s an after.
We had been invited to attend the unveiling ceremony because the organisers were aware that I had written a book about the interesting life of the photographer. Called “Between Two Islands: Julia Margaret Cameron and her Circle”, it is available from Amazon (https://www.amazon.co.uk/BETWEEN-TWO-ISLANDS-MARGARET-CAMERON/dp/B0BZFCVLX9). The two islands in the title refer to the Isle of Wight and Sri Lanka, where the Camerons had coffee plantations and where the photographer spent the last years of her life. My book is partly biographical. It is also a travelogue because (unwittingly) travels we have made over the years cover much of the same territory through which Julia Margaret Cameron travelled and lived at various periods in her life.
THERE WERE APPLES on sale in the Saturday street market in the Lincolnshire town of Grantham. It is extremely unlikely that they came from the tree (or one of its descendants) that dropped an apple on Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727), and as is popularly believed, stimulated his ideas about the nature of gravitation.
Kings School Hall in Grantham
Newton was born at Wilsthorpe Manor, which is about 9 miles south of Grantham. Between the ages of 12 and 17, he attended the King’s School in Grantham. There, he was educated in Latin, Ancient Greek, and probably also in mathematics. In 1661, Newton was admitted to Trinity College in Cambridge, and the rest is history.
The King’s School in Grantham still exists, and is fully functional. It is close to the wonderful St Wulfram church, whose spire is the third tallest in England. The school’s hall, in which Newton was taught, is still used by the school. On its outer walls facing the church, there are two plaques commemorating the fact that Newton was taught within it.
Elsewhere in the centre of Grantham there is another commemorative plaque. It is attached to a building that had not existed in Newton’s time. It records that on this plot of land, there was a house owned by Mr Clak, the apothecary. It was in this gentleman’s house that young Isaac Newton lodged while attending the King’s School.
We had never visited Grantham before, and found its historic centre to be delightful. Newton is not the only person of note who was associated with the town. I hope to write about the other noteworthy people in the future.
THE AMERICANS HAVE shifted their embassy away from Grosvenor Square, but the building that housed it still remains, now beautifully restored. I was pleased to see that the edifice has not lost the huge sculpture of an eagle that was on top of it. This eagle is attached to the building by means of an attachment designed by my uncle WS Rindl, a structural engineer.
Outside the former embassy, there are a couple of statues, including one depicting Ronald Reagan, who was President of the USA from 1981 to1989. It was during his presidency that in 1987 he gave a speech demanding that Russian President Gorbachev bring down the Berlin Wall. His words, spoken at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate were:
“Mr Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall”
And less than two years later, the gate was opened, and the wall came down. His words are on a memorial next to his statue on Grosvenor Square. The memorial contains a fragment of the Berlin Wall, whose demise Reagan encouraged.
On a lighter note, it is said that when you met Margaret Thatcher, you came away thinking she was the cleverest person in the world, but when you met Ronald Reagan, you left him feeling that you were the cleverest person in the world. Reagan had a way of flattering others in the best possible way.
HADRIANS WALL WAS constructed by the Romans in about 122 AD. Its purpose was to separate Roman Britain to the south of it from the ‘barbarians’ who lived north of it. Before it was built, they built a fort at a point where Dere Street, a major Roman road that ran in a north-south direction met Stane Road, a road that before the construction of Hadrian’s Wall marked the northernmost boundary of Roman Britain. This fort, established in the 80s AD, was called Coria, for short, and its full name might have been Corstopitum or Corie Lopocarium or, even, Coriosopitum, Corsopitum or Corsobetum. The site where they built the fort is near the town of Corbridge in Northumberland. Archaeological evidence suggests that the site of Coria had been occupied in the Iron Age, long before the Romans arrived.
After the construction of Hadrian’s Wall and its forts, Coria ceased to be a military centre, and began to be developed as a Roman town for civilians. It is believed from archaeological investigations that the town had temples, granaries, a fountain house, and a civic forum. Additionally, the place had residential buildings, both grand and modest. The town served as a supply centre for the military as well as being a market place for the lead, iron, and coal mined in the neighbourhood. After the Romans left Britain, their town fell into decline. Nearby Corbridge was founded by the Anglo-Saxons sometime after the Romans had cleared out of England.
It was not until 1861 that the first excavations that revealed remains of the town were discovered by Mr Coulson. Between 1906 and 1914, more extensive archaeological work was carried out by Francis J Haverfield (1860-1919) and Leonard Woolley (1880-1960). After working at Coria, Woolley travelled to the Middle East, where his excavations in Mesopotamia were to make him famous. Later, the site of the Roman town became Britain’s first training site for young archaeologists.
Today, the remains of the town, mostly stonework, are in the care of English Heritage. The site is well-cared for and labelled with useful information panels, without which one might have little idea about the nature of what one can see. Next to the sight, there is a small museum filled with beautiful artefacts found in and near the town. Most of them are stone carvings, and all of them are well displayed. Whereas a visit to Coria does not give one as much of an impression of Roman architecture, as does, say Ostia near Rome, it is a pleasant place to visit and quite thrilling to consider that you are in what was once the northermost part of the Roman Empire.
yamey 