Brian Sibley's Blog

This curious buildingis a raised granary, or 'hórreo', in the northern Spanish town of Avilés, which we recently visited. Among the most characteristic buildingsin the region the 'hórreo asturiano' was usually square and built of wood, itsmost striking feature being that each wooden piece perfectly fits with the nextwithout the need for screws, bolts or clamps.

The 'hórreo' issupported by four characteristic 'pegollos' or pillars made from wood orlimestone, and was a safe storehouse providing the Asturian farmer, with ananswer to a disagreeable climate by providing a relatively simple solution forprotecting the harvest from the region’s characteristically damp weather. Thiselevated building would hold food for the year, corn for livestock and grainfor next year’s crop, keeping it safe from fungi, rodents and bugs. Betweeneach pillar and the wooden base of the granary is a flat circular or squarestone called a 'muela' that prevents vermin from getting inside. Today it is commonfor the supporting pillars to sit on concrete bases.

The Principality of Asturias is thought to have around 20,000 'hórreos' usuallysitting next to rural houses across the region. Although the 'hórreo' inAvilés now sits in anurban setting, close to houses, restaurants, bars and other buildings, it wouldhave once been on the outskirts of the town among fields and orchards. Thesurvival of Avilés' 'hórreo' is due to region’s respect for its heritage and a nostalgia for theconcept of rural Arcadias.

 

[For the above informationI am indebted to my friend, Jose Maria Miranda Boto and this post on 'Barceló Experiences': https://www.barcelo.com/guia-turismo/en/spain/asturias/things-to-do/granaries-asturias/]

 

[Photo: David Weeks]

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A SUMMERTIME ODE

At this time of year, I yearn to forage

For mint and thyme and a sprig of borage,

The latter required if your summertime whims

Includes a few glasses of over-priced Pimms.

 

 

BS, August 2025

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Farewell Tom Lehrer (1928-2025) brilliant parodist and consummate performer of his own sharp, smart, witty – often wicked – songs like 'Poisoning Pigeons in the Park', 'We'll All Go Together When We Go', 'The Vatican Rag' and the incomparable 'Elements' song.

Tom Lehrer spent his brief, yet remarkable music career writing and performing parody songs that entertained millions. Biting, intelligent and socially conscious, his songs were intimate commentaries on society and politics in the 1960s.  I salute this genius word-and-tunesmith and his legacy of songs that chart the social mores and neuroses of the psychotic sixties...

One hundred and sixty-three years ago, today, the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and an Oxford colleague, the Reverend Robinson Duckworth, took the three daughters of the Dean of Christ Church – Lorina, Alice and Edith Liddell – on a boating trip.

As they rowed along on that 'golden afternoon', Dodgson improvised a fantasy about the curious adventures of a little girl named (like one of the girls on the trip) 'Alice', who followed a White Rabbit in a waistcoat with a watch down a rabbit-hole and found herself in a true land of wonders...

At Alice’s request, Dodgson wrote out the story – first calling it Alice’s Adventures Under Ground – and added his own distinctively idiosyncratic illustrations.



By 1865, it had grown (like someone who had nibbled an EAT ME cake) into Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and was published under the authorship of 'Lewis Carroll' with illustrations by the legendary Punch cartoonist, Sir John Tenniel.


The book was made Mr Dodgson’s alter ego one of the most famous men in Victorian England. It also revolutionised children’s literature by abandoning, at a stroke, the long and piously-held tradition of moral-and-improving tales for the young in favour of zany, witty nonsense that had no underlying message other than fun...

Across the succeeding years, Alice has been endlessly reinterpreted by illustrators and filmmakers...

Mervyn Peake (1946)
Tove Jansson (1966)
Salvador Dali (1969)
 Ralph Steadman (1973)
 Walt Disney (1951)
Walt Disney & Tim Burton (2010)
July the 4th is also, of course, American Independence Day and – apart from over fifty years of Disney influence – it is interesting to note how many true literary successors to Lewis Carroll have sprung up in America, among them: L Frank Baum, James Thurber, Ogden Nash and Maurice Sendak.

But then perhaps this shouldn’t really surprise us, since the Americans have always shown themselves to be far greater lovers and defenders of Wonderland (and Looking-glass World) than the English have ever been…

Maybe there are reasons for this affinity between the American sensibility and Carroll’s nonsense realm: for one thing, Alice is a highly independent and self-determining individual (a truly revolutionary notion for a child’s book of the 1800s); for another, the Wonderlanders with whom she mixes are a wildly disparate conglomeration of diverse species – animals, humans, animals-dressed-as-humans and humans-with-animal-masks – all of whom (for the most part) rub along together but who are, together, fiercely territorial!


I find it fascinating – and humbling – that, in 1948 (by which time the original manuscript of
Alice’s Adventures Under Ground had been sold and was in the possession of an American collector), a group of US well-wishers, led by the Librarian of Congress, should have started a fund to raise the considerable sum of money required to buy back the manuscript and send it home to us!



That first foray into Carroll's underground wonderworld now resides in the British Library and maybe we should remember the American act of selfless generosity which made that possible the next time we look at, say, the Elgin Marbles…

The death, today, of  author Edmund White, aged 85, weirdly happensto coincide with my reading of the final chapter of his recently published lastnovel The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir, an unabashed account of hisrelationships and dalliances with (he brazenly claims) over 3000 men.

Starkly frank, occasionallytender but more often rough and fleeting, many of these encounters are lessromantic than raunchy. But White was a gay man who lived his life across theyears when a love that dare not speak its name became one that could kill theone you love and beyond into the present age when for many (but certainly notall) the issue of sexual orientation is barely an issue at all.

 

White’s true literary legacyrests not on the curtain-call that is The Loves of My Life, but on hisground-breaking novel, A Boy’s Own Story (for my younger self a kind ofapotheosis) and its candid, semi-autobiographical sequels, The BeautifulRoom is Empty and The Farewell Symphony. Other noted volumes includehis first novel Forgetting Elena, City Boy, States of Desire,My Lives and his incisive biographies of fellow gay novelists, MarcelProust and Jean Genet.

 

Edmund White unflinchingly spokeof his times to his times about living and loving, desiring and dying.

 

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Design by Maurice Sendak (1928–2012) – and famous for Where the Wild Things Are for a theatre scrim for Mozart's The Magic Flute, 1979–1980. Created watercolor and graphite pencil on paper on board. 

© The Maurice Sendak Foundation. The Morgan Library and Museum, Bequest of Maurice Sendak, 2013.104:120. Photo: Janny Chiu.

 

My first real outing – and with an out-door lunch – since my discharge from hospital on New Year's Eve: Espresso Eggs Benedict with extra bacon at Flotsam & Jetsam, Dulwich Art Gallery...

 

 

An astonishing, unprecedented,bravura achievement by the brilliant Chris Riddell.

On 15 December 2019 –realising he was living in, as they say, 'interesting times' – Chris decided he would startchronicling those times with daily political cartoon sketches, week-in-month-out forthe next five years. 

 

With the publication this month of FIVE YEARS, Volume 5:  A Sketchbook of Political Drawings,he completes that amazing self-commissioned assignment.

 

The result is further proof (wereit needed) of Chris' mastery of penmanship with which to provide a trenchantcommentary on the follies, foibles and failings of those aspiring to be themovers and shakers of the national and international political scene. 

 

It's all here: the UKleaving the EU; the Covid pandemic; Boris, Corbyn, Party-gate and Cummings; Global Warming, refugees crossing the Channel in small boats and the invasion of Ukraine; Sleepy Joe, Harry and Megan, Prince Andrew and Pizza Express;, the passing of HM Queen Elizabeth II, Truss outlived by a lettuce and the long-awaited accession of KingCharles III; Trump, Sunak and Starmer –– all human life and death, triumphs anddisasters as witnessed across five years and 38,369 cartoons.

 

Chris Riddell's FIVE YEARS is ahistoric document of social importance and enduring record.

 

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I have been in love with 'Peanuts' for so many years – at least 60, possibly more – that I'm rarely stopped in my tracks by the strip's recurrent moments of the bizarre, such as Snoopy pounding his typewriter or zooming into aerial combat on his Sopwith Camel doghouse, and then I run up against one of those zany sequences in which Charlie Brown's little sister, Sally, has a conversation with her school building and I realise that Charles Schulz's should be properly remembered not as a brilliant cartoonist but as one of the truly great surrealists of the twentieth century...

 

A seemingly simple but stunning artwork by Lee Everett Blair (1911-1993). A piece of concept art created for the live-action silhouetted orchestra shots leading iinto the opening, abstract sequence of Fantasia (1940) featuring Bach's 'Toccata and Fugue in D minor' as orchestrated and conducted by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Blair was an American artist, born in Los Angeles and died in Soquel, California, and was the younger brother of Preston Blair and husband of Mary Blair.