Happy Christmas to all my readers, wherever you are, and best wishes for 2023.

The RC church in Benllech was built in 1967, an outpost of the church in Beaumaris for summer visitors. Vatican moderne:-

We went on a Christmas Eve expedition to see St. Eugrad, a tiny church set to the edge of surviving eighteenth-century parkland, still active, but closed:-

There is a dovecot to the side of a nearby field:-

There are compensations for being in Wales at the time of the winter solstice: the fierceness of the sun when it emerges in the midst of rain; the emptiness at this time of year, exaggerated by the closure of the Menai Bridge, so that Anglesey feels a proper island:-

I feel slightly sorry for Laurie Magnus taking on the role of this government’s ethics advisor.

Where to start ?

Some of the current accusations against Dominic Raab ? Or the increasing evidence of high-level corruption in the awarding of COVID contacts ? Or the way the honours system has been corroded and the House of Lords packed with Tory donors ?

How does one clean up the Augean stables when one is given extremely limited powers to do so ?

I look forward to his first report.

https://goodlawproject.org/revealed-the-names-of-those-who-referred-covid-testing-firms-into-the-vip-lane/?s=09

I’m pleased to see that Canada is resurrecting the idea of establishing a National Portrait Gallery which, I think, got further than is implied in the attached article (if you can open it). There was a Director, Lilly Koltun, who pursued the project with admirable energy (she died last year) and a building project, designed by Edward Jones.

The obvious precedent ought probably to be not so much the National Portrait Gallery in London, with over 150 years behind it, or Washington, a product of the 1960s, but Canberra, which emerged in the 1990s as a combination of private initiative – established through effective campaigning by Gordon and Marilyn Darling – and state funding: it has been very successful in combining photography and portraiture, starting with a broad remit and an adventurous exhibition programme. The risk is that the older established portrait galleries look too traditionalist, although both have radically reinvented themselves.

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/12/22/canadas-national-portrait-gallery-has-no-collection-or-physical-spacebut-it-does-have-ambitious-plans

Reading Christopher Woodward’s choice of people who have made an impact on gardening in 2022 (see below) made me feel that he should have included himself: for his amazing and creative energy in running the Garden Museum; for having saved it from an adjacent tower block and campaigning for rights to daylight; for launching a competition to design the area next to the Garden Museum; for overseeing the acquisition of Benton End; for a constantly imaginative exhibition programme, including the current exhibition of Lucian Freud’s plants; for saving it during COVID by swimming to Tresco; not to forget its café, always a pleasure; and the annual festival which I missed this year.

I’m a bit prejudiced because I am one of his trustees, but I am amazed by how much is achieved.

https://www.gardensillustrated.com/gardens/gardeners/gardeners-impact-2022/?s=09

I was very pleased to be stopped in the mop section of my favourite hardwear shop in Menai Bridge by someone who reads my blog. I sometimes forget that people read it, but was particularly glad to be told that it lifts the spirits – it is indeed maybe a way of lifting mine.

Here anyway are the mops:-