Month: July 2024

Yesterday before Mass at Our Lady of the Victories (at Sablon), Margaret and I went to the Musée Magritte. It was a great visit — I knew many of the images, but the presentation (in conjunction with works of Jean-Michel Folon) worked effectively to contextualise his works and to set them in their biographical, historical, and sequential settings. Likewise the quotations inscribed on the walls constantly hark back to the intricacy of imagination and expression, cumulatively making a compelling case for his importance as a theoretician of imagination.

Most of all, though, I was unprepared for the intensity of his colour palette. Reproduction belies the vivid luminance of many of the canvases; at the risk of cliché, you simply have to see them to appreciate this element of Magritte’s oeuvre.

The exhibition also did well in depicting Magritte’s marriage to Georgette Beyer, a challenging, enduring relationship. There’s a good film to be made there (but made in Europe, please, not in the USA).

Best of all, for me, was the physical evidence that the Magritte curators think that ‘Les mots et les images’ stands as an especially illuminating instance of his understanding of signification, of painting, and of how it all works. Let’s normalise Magritte as semiologist and hermeneutician worthy of thoughtful consideration.

Yesterday morning I visited the Musée des Bandes Déssinée, then Margaret and I met up and walked to the Église de Notre-Dame de Bon Secours, then to the Église Saint Jean Baptiste au Béguinage, and last to Ste Cathérine d’Alexandrie. We would also have stopped in at the Église Notre-Dame aux Riches Claires but it was closed. (I didn’t even know there were Rich Clares, but there you are.)
Pizza for dinner back at base camp.

Steve and Melinda are gone, Si and Laura, Thomas and Lydia are gone, and Margaret and I woke up to a very warm day, with a hotel breakfast. I’ve been reading and chasing hares and remembering how good it feels to work (in the Foucauldian sense of ‘trying to think something different from what one thought before’). Maybe one or two forays into the outside world, but we’re committed to the premise that this holiday will not be hyperactive. We will seee a sight or two, but the highest priority here will be rest and renewal.

The days passed so rapidly, and so intensely! I will post some pictures shortly, but tomorrow the Harris-Adams return to Indiana, and Margaret and I will begin a full-on, only-the-two-of-us holiday for a week.

I hear those are really good things.

We’ve been all over the place for the past few days. I have run my two miles every morning, but very little else has been regular or normal. Laura, Si, Thomas and Lydia have been an inexpressible delight.

Two miles each of the past two days, pleasant weather, yesterday to the Didcot Railway Centre, this morning probably to the Abbey Grounds in Abingdon, much to do, all is lovely and well. Fantastic to spend some time with Laura, Si, Thomas, and Lydia — and that’s just after two days!

Ollie Watkins’s strike at the end was so magnificent — sudden, sharp, angled, outmaneuvering the defender, perfectly placed — the Netherlands’s goalkeeper didn’t really have a chance.

Squeezed in two miles this morning despite the weather forecast’s confidence that it was actually raining on me while I ran, cup of coffee with smaller dog curled up in my lap, will shower shortly and prepare the bid farewell to Steve and Melinda and Welcome! to Si, Laura, Thomas, and Lydia. Once the Harris-Adams get here, all bets are off; we’ll be responding to people’s food and sleep and entertainment needs 24/7….

The rain has decided to back off for a while, so I ran my two miles, had a cup of coffee and a banana, cleaned up and dressed, and will shortly head to town for more coffee and perhaps Morning Prayer with the clergy staff.

Two miles, this morning, for the first time in days, and quite possibly for the last time in days due toa protracted rainy spell from last Friday till… possibly Sunday next?

Busy days preparing the house for Steve and Melinda, then Si, Laura, Thomas, and (recently bipedal) Lydia. Much going on…

Prayers and solemn memories on this nineteenth year since the terrorist attacks on London, the Tube and the buses. May we learn someday to banish terror with generosity, violence with peace, fear and power-lust with grace and steadfast faith.

A second day of rain, so again no morning run. Hot breakfast, sermon work, cleaning-up and reordering in anticipation to Steve and Melinda’s visit. More sermon work.

I suppose my favourite moment from Labour’s electoral victory so far (apart from so many Tory front-benchers losing their seats, or just giving up) came when Sir James Timpson was appointed Minister of State for Prisons, Parole and Probation. Prison reform need not mean teeth-grinding threats of making prisoners of His Majesty more miserable; here’s hoping Labour gives him enough latitude to work as effectively in government as he has done as an employer.

So, I didn’t run this morning because it was raining. I had my fruit and coffee breakfast, then went to Morning Prayer; but a school assembly was on-going in the church (no one told me!), so we prayed in the parish office. Then home, odds and ends involving utility tables, lunch, a trip to Waitrose to pick up special ice cream for Margarita (it rained), home again, puzzling over Sunday’s sermon, out to check messages at the parish centre (it rained yet again), and home for the evening.