Michelle Charles (c.1960- )

More here.

Su Blackwell (1975- )

More here.

Zoophilia

These should all be fairly self-explanatory: the indeterminate russet blob in the first picture is a camera-shy red panda.

Jardin Botánico

We went to the Botanical Gardens on Sunday afternoon, and saw:
fungi;

gourds;

brassicae;

capisci;

and part of ex-President Felipe Gonzalez's collection of bonsai trees, before we were thrown out at closing time.

Sightseeing

We got the electricity back soon enough, after only a day or so of lighting candles, ordering in Chinese food, and snuggling early to bed. The internet's still a problem, so I haven't been as good at updating things here as I have wanted to be. So: My parents came to visit us last weekend. Michael had to go back on Sunday; Joanna was here till Tuesday. Saturday we walked around Madrid, a walk that included Calle Cervantes:


I wonder if Lope de Vega would be annoyed that Cervantes has given his name to the street they both lived on. After all, Lope wrote over 1500 plays, and Cervantes only one lousy novel. Productivity, it seems, isn't everything. We went to the Rembrandt exhibition in the Prado, queued for an hour or so and quite enjoyed it. In the queue we saw: sparrows eating the salt between the cracks in the bricks of the museum (which two Oxford colleges try to destroy each other by picking away at the mortar each time they visit? Merton and New?)

Also, the purveyors of tat.