I started wearing a headscarf in church —and kept it up once I’d started— mainly because I wanted to have a visible, tangible sign that church was different from the world outside it. Altar folk have their vestments, and I could have something too. I could think of oodles of reasons not to have it, most of which I will refute in a moment, but the thing that most kept me from just going ahead and covering my head was that I didn’t want to be seen as a wannabe Russian.

Read more ...

(No pictures, because I lent the camera to Tertia. Two other people in her study group also had cameras. Next time it will be in my pocket.)

The second year had fieldwork day— divide into study groups of four to six people with ideally an adult supervisor, go to a designated place along the little stream that runs along the north side of town, take samples of water and soil, catch the fauna, observe the flora, draw the landscape, interview people about Nature Development, etcetera; all of this for double geography and biology credit.

Read more ...

The bottle of natural rose water that we bought in Haarlem years ago was finally empty, and our quest to get it locally was unsuccessful (though now that I know the brand, I know where to try: the pharmacy section of the organic-food store). Also, we were out of Darjeeling and almost out of Oolong. And I wanted to go to the convent in The Hague and show the sisters the Life and Travels of Father Adrian web page to see if they agreed that it was ready to put online.

Read more ...

There’s currently an exhibition in The Hague (which we won’t be able to go to for various reasons, but we bought the book) of paintings by the twin brothers David and Pieter Oyens, born in 1842 and active in the latter part of the 19th century. Our paper had a scathing review: the critic said more or less that the brothers’ work was hardly worth mentioning, and certainly not worth a whole exhibition, because they were conservative in their choice of subject matter and not interested in political or social commentary like the “great” painters of their time, for instance Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec. For this critic, a painting that doesn’t bring something “real” (read: negative) to the viewer’s attention is of necessity a bad painting. Like lit-critters who insist on “realistic” fiction, meaning fiction that emphasises only the gritty dark sides of human nature.

I say, piffle.

Read more ...