Silver

Ailz's birthday's coming up and so is our wedding anniversary and we both like silver- so I found a specialist jeweller in the area and we went and had a browse and bought these-


A manta ray bangle by Nova of Norwich

and



A bracelet by Shrieking Violet of Potter's Bar- which uses real flower heads

We'd taken a pic-nic with us and couldn't find anywhere pretty to eat it- so eventually we pulled into a lay-by near Ticehurst, unpacked our folding table and chairs and ate by the road side as our parents would have done...

The Tales Of Red Hanrahan: W.B. Yeats

The Tales of Red Hanrahan are imitation folk stories marinated in pre-Raphaelitism and self pity. There were a lot of writers turning out this sort of thing in the 1890s but only Yeats went on to become a major 20th century poet. The Hanrahan stories have charm,  but are mostly of interest because of Hanrahan's appearance as a semi-mythical figure in Yeats' great mid-life crisis poem "The Tower". The Hanrahan of The Tower is an earthier, more dynamic figure than his earlier incarnation- but then "old lecher" wasn't a phrase that existed in the lexicon of the Rhymer's Club.