Maybe you've noticed that there's been a bit of work going on at the back of Llainfadyn Cottage recently. Well all that digging is part of photographer Betina Skovbro's fantastic new project where she will be creating an allotment with a bit of a difference!
To follow her progress, have a read of her blog allotmentkeeper.wordpress.com and i'll put a few updates on this blog too.
The Allotment Keeper Photography Project is just one of many events dealing with biodiversity this summer. Check our events pages for more details.
I was just visiting the St Fagans library, looking to do a little reading up before the Easter tours of St Teilo's Church. A chance encounter and a fleeting chain of thoughts later, I'm here on the blog.
It begins when I bump into a colleague clutching a hefty old book, in the reference section of our research library. Rather cryptically, he tells me "It exists! And it's in here!". Taking the book to one side, he lets it fall open - and rightly it does, on the very page he was looking for.
In my experience, old dictionaries and manuscripts that fall open like that usually contain something very juicy. Finding a page in this way always makes me think of the people who read the book before me. I feel almost as if I am joining a secret club, where generations of readers have sought out and read the same pages carefully. My old art history professor had a story about illuminated Biblical manuscripts, painstakingly drawn and handled by monks. Almost without fail, they will all fall open at the same page: where Bathsheba is described in the bath. Thankfully, I wasn't confronted with anything as lascivious - but certainly something scandalous.
"WALES, see ENGLAND", Encyclopaedia Britannica.
The near-apocryphal entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica: 'Wales, See England'. I had always thought of it as an idiom, muttered under my breath at Jeremy Clarkson's use of 'us'; defensively invoked on seeing corporate maps which leave out Anglesey, and, most recently, when Google decided to celebrate St David's day by putting one of Kind Edward's castles on their homepage. I suppose it isa lot of history to squeeze into so few words.
That's just my reaction, of course. Debates about Britishness, Welshness, and other -nesses will continue as long as there are people on this island, and in the darker corners of the internet. Whatever your take on the matter, whichever 'ness'-ness you subscribe to, the museum's job is to take a reading every now and then; keep an eye on what makes us, inexplicably, 'us'.
I optimistically dropped by the updated Encyclopaedia Britannica. I was hoping to tie up this post with a point about Wales' growing confidence and international profile using a pithy, concise definition. By now, britannica.com, as it's known, refers to Wales as a 'constituent unit'. I must admit I was disappointed. Over a 150 years since the phrase "Wales: see England" was first published, even as new law-making powers are invested to our Assembly Government: it's strange that 'Country' still does not describe what some people see, when they look at Wales.
Having filmed, unwrapped and admired the thurible I mentioned in my last post, it's time now to edit the video!
While you wait (with baited breath, I hope), I'd like to share some new pictures with you.
The Chancel of St Teilo's Church, as it looks today.
Angels, shown playing the Crwth and Harp. Painted by Fleur Kelly.
Verdigris pigment, used to make green paint in St Teilo's Church
If you feel inspired after seeing those, why not hop over to the events page to book a place on our Tudor Guided Walk. The walk, lasting around an hour, will take place next weekend, the 20th of March. As well as a tour of our Tudor buildings, you'll get a chance to handle replica objects, and explore Tudor smells - good and bad! Places are limited, so booking is essential.
Well, the iPad now has a release date for the US - early April, not mid-March as first expected. It will probably arrive in the UK late April. In the meantime we seem to have exhausted ourselves trying to decide whether or not it's a good thing - let alone a necessary thing. But then not being needed didn't make the iPod or iPhone any less desirable.
Apple's marketing for the iPad has taken a turn for the interesting, as their key words are "revolutionary" - possibly true - and "magical" - what?! Of course it's slick, sexy, a thing of beauty; there might well be something revolutionary about it; but - magical? Now using that concept to describe a piece of digital equipment, that's revolutionary! It's a piece of kit that lets us use our email and the web, look at our pics and videos and play with all our digital toys (150,000 of them apparently). Eventually we'll be able to use it to read e-books.
Previously Apple were promoting the iPad's similarity with the iPhone in terms of functionality, so that we'd all feel at home right away. Now, however, the iPad is revolutionary, magical and value for money. It sounds as though somewhere in the flurry of attention since its announcement, Apple have abandoned the "third category" concept that so many people questionned, and instead are positioning the iPad as a gem of a product, something lovely and affordable and just so much fun. A must-have accessory, perhaps. In which case, where does that leave the e-reading function? It was never primarily an e-book reader, more for all-round media consumption, but publishers were desperately looking forward to the healthy, straightforward supply deal offered by Apple, and any further delay in launching iBook in the UK is surely going to be a major cause for concern.
