Champions of Europe
A peal board.
The Serpentine at night.
The Reverend Dr William Spooner, Warden of New College, Oxford (1844-1930), was an eminent scholar, examining chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury, the distinguished head of a leading Oxford college, and a gentle, kind and popular man.
In appearance, he was an albino, with strikingly pale hair and skin.
He is now mostly remembered for his habitual and accidental mixing up of the initial consonants of words when he spoke, which is called, after him, “Spoonerism”.
Here is an example of a deliberate modern Spoonerism from the West Bank Gallery in London.
The exciting moment when the bookshelves are about to be filled.
A London street at night.
The door in the wall.
A walled garden in England.
Hyde Park Corner Underground Station.
Wembley Stadium during the 2012 FA Cup Final match between Chelsea Football Club and Liverpool Football Club on Saturday 5 May 2012.
Physical Energy by G F Watts, in Hyde Park in London.
This statute of a man on horseback, executed with deliberate coarseness and vigour, and cast in bronze, exists in three versions: one in London (pictured), one in Cape Town (South Africa) and one in Harare (Zimbabwe). The original plaster also survives, and is on display at the Watts Gallery in Compton, Surrey.
My photograph doesn’t show the detail of the statute, but I love the way the rising ground behind it in this view makes it appear to stand in countryside, although it is only moments away from the London traffic in the Bayswater Road and Knightsbridge.
Picture window.
A HAND OF GLORY FROM WHITBY MUSEUM
A Hand of Glory was supposedly the carefully prepared and “pickled” right hand of a felon, cut off while the body still hung from the gallows and used by burglars to send sleepers in a house into a coma from which they were unable to wake. In one version the clenched hand is used as a candleholder for a candle incorporating human fat, but in another (consistent with the Whitby hand) the outstretched hand has its own fingers lit.
From http://www.whitbymuseum.org.uk/collections/hogg.htm
The ruins of Whitby Abbey, Yorkshire.
At the Synod of Whitby, the rules for fixing the date of Easter were agreed in England. At that date, in the 7th century AD, the leader of the local church was a woman, St Hilda, who presided over a religious community of both sexes.