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The Fields of Gold

The picture is Bouterwek's Meeting at the Field of the Cloth of Gold 7th June 1520, after Holbein. I never liked the Tudors, but the story of their gang is inseparable from that of England, which for all its faults and half its people I do love. I think that the visual panorama here, and the business, do exactly what a painting should do, and it makes me think.


Once, sitting beneath a tree in Wales years ago, a friend who has had her troubles and who is now very happy sent me this song. I know where she was because she recorded her thoughts and observations to me on a tape, which she used to carry with her. I thought that I would put a link to it up, though I notice that Eva Cassidy's beautiful rendition from a night in Washington years ago continues my unwitting tendency to link to haunting songs from lovely women who turn out to have died prematurely. I honestly don't check the bios when I listen to the songs.

Despite the evidence of this blog, I am not that weird, so I guess it is more the fact that we are in an odd period which has seen the first century of the modern moment pass, and which has a recording technology which means that we can bring voices and images back.

I got chills when I found a film of Bismarck last year, for instance; what other generations have been able to look back, not at a painting, but at a moving image or to recall a voice not in the telling but by listening, long gone?

None. Life has become very strange, when weighed against our history of remembering.

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