Jem Bloomfield

"Paths in the Snow", my book on Narnia is available for pre-order now (and out next month). It has been tremendous fun to write and research, and I really hope people enjoy it. I've written a bit about it here - shares much appreciated! quiteirregular.wordpress.com/2023/09/12/pat…

The Sixth Sunday after Trinity | The Collect #BCP

When my Grandma was a pupil teacher in Nottinghamshire she taught a small boy to bowl overarm. His name was Bill Voce. He featured later in the Bodyline tour (Harold Larwood was friends with my great uncles, her brothers. Who taught her to bowl...)

Cancelled again for being Jewish and failing the purity test

It wasn't until the mid 1920s that Augustus John began painting flowers as an alternative to portraiture; this Begonia (1928) would have been grown in the garden at Fryern Court, John's home on the edge of the New Forest.

Sufficiently hot and summery this afternoon for an absolute deckchair of a jacket.

Today is the feast of St Anne, mother of the Virgin Mary. In medieval art, she is often depicted teaching her little daughter to read. Medieval stained glass from Marsh Baldon, Haddon Hall in Derbyshire, All Souls, Oxford, and Kidlington, Oxfordshire.

'St Ives.' Christopher Wood’s trip to Cornwall in 1926 was vital to the development and emergence of his distinctive simplistic and deliberately naïve style, these and the work he completed in Brittany rank among the greatest paintings in his oeuvre.

Tune in to @BBCRadio4 at 7.15am tomorrow (if you’re mad enough to be up that early on a Sunday) to hear me talking about ‘Silence of the Gods’ and the persistence of pre-Christian religion on Europe’s geographical margins 📻 bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00…

I’m in a cafe where customers are welcomed by a (female) cat in a box called ‘Shiny Dave’

I probably only notice it because hymns taken at (what feels to me) too slow a tempo is an absolute bugbear. Grandeur, reverence and poise are all tremendous things, but they can sometimes be confused with just singing slowly.

I'm no expert on this sort of thing, but you can almost hear them singing "chorally" rather than as a hymn. That sense of free space between lines, a chance for audience to let the previous phrase sink in, gathering for drama of the next line, etc.

Minor gripe: album of choirs singing hymns beautifully, but at dragging tempo with pauses between lines, thus wrecking them as songs. I suspect it's to do with the practical issues of large choirs, clarity, pace, etc. Maybe also they're used to singing anthems.

The first time I visited Chanctonbury Ring a dead pigeon fell on me from the trees as I entered the temple precinct

That's the fourth downy light feather that has fluttered down next to me, sitting under this shady tree on a nicely drizzly Saturday morning, and that's one feather closer to me facing the possibility that there's a dead pigeon wedged up there or something similar.

A local memorial mason just posted that they made the stone for this grave, where some bodies found in a parish not far away from us were reburied. Rather moving.

Sherborne’s Lewiston chapel this evening as the sun passed through its west window

Your late summer warning, ahead of time. When someone says "Ah, season of mists and mellow fruitfulness", it is no longer safe to instantly reply "Fuck me, I love Keats." That film was longer ago than we think. This warning to be repeated as autumn approaches.

Bridget was sunbathing in the kitchen courtyard, and now she smells strongly of wild marjoram