Davy's view

A ragbag of thoughts and images

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Less is more.  This means just one thing - if you read Greek - ψομη

bread.

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This means only one thing - bread - if you read Greek

“Αρτοποιο”  Paxos Greece

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Bakery - like it says, just bread

Corfu, Greece

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A little bit of the world beyond the reach of Starbucks - coffee shop, Paxi, Greece 

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SACRED SPACE

  The shinto temple of Itsukushima on the island of Miyajima in Japan is one of the holiest places in the country - and the most attractive to tourists.  It floats above the water and above the material world. That is, it is build on stilts in the bay which fills each high tide.  Approach is from the sea, through a torri gate.  No one may be born here nor die here.  Of course in reality it swarms with day-trippers who only pass through torri gates for the ride, if they feel like it, donning straw has so as not to spoil the tourist snaps.  It does not occur to anyone to take off shoes or show the least awe.  Yet this place links us to the past, to eternity and the unknowable like a spiritual Hadron Collider.

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Wooden piles rise from the water at the London Wetland Centre.  It is almost incredible that such a place is in the middle of a huge metropolis - so tranquil and so natural in the midst of frenzied activity a just a few miles from Piccadilly Circus.

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Now where did I put the sugar?  Tastefully laid out shelves in a log cabin at the London Wetland Centre.  This is supposed to make the collection of North American ducks swimming round the cabin of some nineteenth century mountain man.  

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Stairway to Modernist Heaven

Going up in the English south coast resort of Bexhill, the staircase to the de la Warr Pavillion built before the war by Sergei Chermedaev, a Jewish refugee from Soviet Russia with his partner Erich Medalsohn, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany.   It was one of the first modern buildings in Britain when it was built before the war..  Before long it was a makeshift fortification maned by the likes of Spike Milliigan when Bexhills pebble beach became Britain's front line.  After the war it gently decayes until its merits were belatedly recognised by a lottery grant and a lick of paint.

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Архитектор будущего

    В 1910 году Сергей Исааков приехал в Англию закончить свое образование.  Он хотел быть архитектором и где ешё лучше это сделать чем в Лондоне.  Его родители были из старой еврейской семьи, которая уехала из Испании на турецкую территорию после запада Гранади.  Семья была богатой, у неё нефтегазовая компания  в Грозном на Кавказе и его родители послали его в Лондон стать человеком мира. Но семь лет спустя они потеряли всё в революции.  Сергей был в безопасности в Англии, но без денег.  Он стал архитектором после несколких лет в восточной Америке, где он нашёл работу дизaйнера интерьёра.  

  Он вернулся в Англию в 1930х годах и создал архитектурную фирму с знаменитым немецкиым архитектором Эрихом Менделсоном, который бежал из нацисткой  Германии из-за антисемитизма.  Сергей сменил свою фамилию Чемадаев по этой самой причине. Вместе они разработали первое модерднистское здание в Англие - Делауор Павильон в английском курорте Бексхилле.

  Это здание cтало большим успехом - начало новой эры современной архитектуры. Но когда война началась недолго раньше не было больше возможности для фирмы и оба уехали в Америку, где Чермаев стал успешным профессором архитектуры в университете.

  Павильон пережил живал войну когда он был крепостью против немецких атак.  Но сегодня уже пригласит современый.

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                          BAD GIRL GOES TO CHURCH

If you're going in for a bit of transgressive stone carving where better than a lost valley in between England and Wales and overlooked by both for centuries.  This is Kilpeck in the district of Archenfield, once the Celtic kingdom of Ergyng and taken over by Norman barons in the middle ages who put up the little church of Kilpeck next to their castle.   Nobody ever explained all the carvings of green men, wield creatures, bunny rabbits, and Little Miss Naughty.  It escaped the Puritans, who did not approve of anything very much simply because it was so far out of the way.    So now we can enjoy ourselves by inventing reasons why they did it.

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The Punch Bowl - Mayfair

Punch and Judy more like.  The venerable Punch Bowl Public House is presumably not the first bar to feature in an acrimonious divorce but while other couples fight over the kids and the CD collection Madonna and Guy Ritchie fought over this place, and he kept it - well pubs are a man thing after all.  And if the demon drink get too much for you - and who can afford it these days - it's a few yards from the spiritual uplift of the Jesuits' British HQ - the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Farm Street - the acme of Gothic Revival for Hammer film fans.

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Taking the Scots Guards to the cleaners - hanging around a shop front in Olympia for the Horse Show.

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Postcard perfect.  I wish I was there.  This Little Italy is on the island of Proscida in the Bay of Naples.  Capri it's not - that's one of its many good points.  Ciao Bella!

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There's Buckingham, Versailles, Alhambra, Winter and

Fulham Palace.  But you can't get scratch cards at Versailles.

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Summer’s promise

  Half moon of water, earth and air awaits life’s flame

When flighty swallow finds his dame

From Africa’s plain to homely eaves, to the rhythm of the skies

This timeless errand runs for ever unbroken by ice or sand

Nature’s command never falters, never dies

  Our whirling dance spins dizzy in the clouds

We cannot but soar and dive and soar again

I the cock and you the hen

This frenzy is all there is or can ever be

For this we crossed the shiftless dunes, the restless sea

  Clamouring brood draws frantic pair with steel sprung  lure

Attentive to every shrill demand from blind unthinking need

Weariness and famine defied while strength endure

To make a picture of ourselves that shall not dim

Affection’s ties never loosen, ever sure

  Young take flight with frightened glee,

Uncertain away on steady newfledged wings

No ocean, no desert can set a bound

To irresistible destiny

With inevitable emptiness their parting gift

   ©2010  David  Brocklesby

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Step right in Madam.   Barbados is open for business,

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Man alone.....

meet me on thebeach