Bad news, good news

The bad news is that Jean Redpath has died. I associate her with the early days of the folk revival, and with the Burns project; but it seems that she had not faded away altogether, she had simply moved to America. YouTube tries to distract me with her collaborations with Garrison Keillor, but Burns is the better poet. This is over-arranged for my taste, but there's nothing wrong with the voice, the melody, the words:

Watch on YouTube

The good news is that archaeologists have found a wooden Roman toilet seat - at Vindolanda, where else?

San Francisco uphill and down

Continuing my attempt to complete writing up our last visit to the States before we set off on the next one, I was encouraged by finding the notebook: no, I don't write these posts completely from memory, I have a notebook and a camera.

The notebook tells me that we spent St. George's day in San Francisco, but all it has to say about it is that Russian Hill smells of jasmine, and that a sudden thicket of rosemary comes as a relief. So this will be a picture-heavy post. Think of it as a sequence of postcards. ( Behind a cut, because pictures. And heavy. )