Picture window.

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.

WHAT IS LEFT

As the tide goes out revealing waterbreaks
As the fall of leaves discloses a tree
As a crowd resolves into a recognised face

So the passage of youth and youthful beauty
from your contemporaries
Throws into greater prominence
Your strong bones
Your blue eyes
Your soft skin
Your untampered body

As you drop your clothes at night
I am privileged to see
Your full bosom
Your startling figure
Your warm colour

As you are stifled by care and exhaustion
I promise to set them aside
and feed you happiness
knowing what is underneath

One day these bodies will rot away
to reveal the bones
and then the bones rot
to leave nothing
but who we were
- who we really were.

Image reblogged from oldbookillustrations: Adaptation of figures to space. Walter Crane, from The magazine of art, London, 1893. Via archive.org.

My partner found some peahen, peacock and pheasant feathers in the boot of our car and arranged them like this.

Click to enlarge

As you get older you have to wear clothes of better quality - better material, better cut, better everything.  When you are very young, clothes are pointless and the only thing that matters is showing your body.  As this loses its beauty, your clothes have to take over the job of making you look good.

Elegant older women know this.  Well dressed older men are fewer, but they know it too.

Picture (of David Niven at the age of 55) reblogged from i12bent:

Dapper gentleman actor, David Niven: Mar. 1, 1910 - 1983

Photo Gjon Mili, 1965, LIFE

Werner Bischof - Zebra Woman, 1942

[Reblogged from kvetchlandia: lushlight: yama-bato: liquidnight:]

On top of the North Downs

From seconddrawerdown: rendan: alabaster1: myaloysius: beautiful-portals: debushka:

Door handle by Franz von Stuck on the entrance to the Council Room at the Bremen City Hall, Germany. 

bohemea:

Naomi Watts - Vanity Fair by Norman Jean Roy, January 2006

How to get a six-pack - and is it worth it? by Robert Crampton

“…a six-pack betrays vanity, and vanity is more of a turn-off than ripped abs (as we call them in the abdominals community) are a turn-on. The ends do not justify the means. The effort that goes into creating a six-pack puts women off. That’s if, I might add, they notice in the first place. Women see weight loss, I find. But they are fairly blind to muscle gain…

Even through the narcissistic Eighties, six-packs were unfashionable, something naff sported by Arnie and Sly rather than by anyone you might want to emulate. Then in 1991 Brad took his shirt off and all was lost…

Brad Pitt’s body-fat percentage when he filmed Fight Club was 5 per cent: not only unsustainable, for Brad or anyone else, but unhealthy, verging on the dangerous. And yet, any man who’s seen that film probably at some level thinks he ought to look like Tyler Durden. A pack mentality, if you will.

We’ve had two trends coming together in the last decade or so, both of them conducive to the current prominence of the six-pack. One is an increasing admission of what was previously an underground gay sensibility into heterosexual culture, best personified, of course, by David Beckham. To generalise, if women aren’t that fussed about abs, and straight men aren’t that fussed about abs, gay men traditionally are fussed about abs.”

The thing about the Duchess of Windsor was that she was quite ugly, wasn’t she?

I suppose that’s why she had to work so hard at being stylish.  It was her life’s work.

You wouldn’t have thought it was worth it, and certainly she did not have a happy life.  But it is odd how she has nevertheless achieved a sort of lasting fame with it.