For your viewing pleasure

Found yesterday while looking for pictures of lilypads (and therefore work related, which amuses me): artist Robin Barcus Slonina and her 'States of Dress' project. I think of jewellery as sculpture you can wear, but Barcus-Slonina has an ongoing plan to create a wearable "dress" sculpture in - and representing - each of the fifty states of the USA. Her web site is here, and here is her blog in which she describes the process of constructing some of the dresses. But this 'WhyNot?' blog post assembles the most stunning pictures (and the blog has some other interesting links as well.

One of the reasons why I refuse to throw out my stacks of ten-year-old copies of the Guardian until each one has been scrutinised is that every now and then the process turns up a strip by David Shenton, who used in those days to cover when Steve Bell was on holiday. And when I find one, I add it to the pile to be pasted into a scrap book, alongside those of his strips that my sister used to clip for me from the Pink Paper. There are one or two examples on his web site, and the collection, Bananas are not the only fruit sneaks in among the book illustrations, but it does look as if his work centres more on illustration these days. Some of these are rather fine (there's a burning synagogue which takes a terrible theme and makes it glow with the rich colours of a Russian lacquer painting), but I slightly regret the loss to sequential art.

Happy birthday, vschanoes!

Thinking of you...

Twenty-four hours in Belgium...

...is not the same as Belgium in twenty-four hours.I would have liked longer to explore - after all, the idea of spending a holiday following the Meuse had its origin in the Ardennes, the wooded area shared between France and Belgium. We might have used our day in Monthermé to visit Bouillon, if we hadn't gone walking instead - ah, well, another time!

So we followed the river out of France and into Belgium, and came to Dinant, where we spent the night at a B & B called "Au Fil de l'eau", right next to the Meuse and just along from the tourist office. THe town is stretches out along the narrow space between the river and the rocks, with the citadel perched up above it. There's a church with an extraordinary bulbous spire, there are interesting shops and old houses, there's the birthplace of Adolphe Sax (inventor of the saxophone) and we wandered about exploring until the light was completely gone.

More photos of Dinant.

The next day was grey; there was no sunshine on the Meuse at breakfast-time, though we had a fine view over the river from the upstairs room, and a good breakfast too, with the first home-made jam of the trip (on our previous visit to France, a year earlier, home-made preserves, some more successful than others, had been a recurring theme; this year, though, we didn't see any until we left France for Belgium).

Back on the road, industry gradually became a larger and larger part of the landscape. The river ran between dramatic walls of rock, and equally dramatic quarries. A blanket of grey dust relected back the grey of the sky.

We stopped to look round Huy, a town I'd never heard of, but which evidently has quite a history: according to Wikipedia, it's the birthplace of both Peter the Hermit, whose preaching did so much to launch the First Crusade and Jean-Joseph Merlin, inventor of the roller skate. Brass scallop shells set into the cobbles suggest it's on one of the pilgrim routes to Compostella. We enjoyed our walk around the old town and the market, but crossing the river was a mistake, leaving us tired and hungry and looking for lunch in the wrong place, We became fractious, and failed to find the post office...

Pictures of Huy.

Along the road into Liège we began to wonder how much further it would be practical to follow the river. The huge industrial buildings were not beautiful, but there was a pleasure in seeing the Meuse as a working river, busy with barges. Eventually, though, we tired of continually adjusting our course, threw in the towel and took the motorway to Valkenburg. Even so, we arrived late and weary. I had not realised quite what a tourist centre it is - but this had one benefit, that there is a dense agglomeration of pavement cafés (all offering slight variations on the same menu) the like of which I had not seen since Budapest. We opted for the tapas.