We had been once before to see St. Eilian in the far north-east of the island, a church with a beautifully elementary Romanesque west tower and surrounded by slate tombs:-

We walked down to the bay opposite Middle Mouse island where there is an old derelict brickworks surrounded by reed beds:-

And back up the grassy path:-

I could not ask for a more thoughtful or more considered review of my book than has appeared in The New Criterion, weighing up each of my individual accounts of museums, sometimes disagreeing with my praise, as in my admiration for Lina Bo Bardi, but always attentive to the nuance of my approach. It’s just what a writer wants.

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2021/5/measuring-the-modern-museum

I called in at the new church at Brysiencyn (new because the old church at Llanidan had fallen into a ruin) to admire the wild flowers in the churchyard which can be half glimpsed from the road.

The church itself is orthodox, but early Gothic Revival by John Welch, an architect based in Douglas on the Isle of Man, who was hired by the then Lord Boston, a local landowner, who was presumably patron of the parish:-

It’s a very still, clear morning down by the river today:-

I have been reading Edmund de Waal’s Letters to Camondo in the morning, each letter constructed as a thimbleful of ideas, issues, visual sensations, thoughts, memories, about pre-war Paris, the community of art, hunting, food, relations. When I have visited the Musèe Nissim de Camondo, I remember it as too claustrophobic, too preserved; but de Waal re-animates, revitalises the impressions of its world.

Two years ago to the day, we discovered the bluebell wood in Vaynol Park: a magical landscape in the care of the National Trust, south of the Menai Straits, chopped off from an old eighteenth-century landscape of woods and fields, with once-upon-a-time fine trees:-

Lots of lambs:-

And bluebells:-