At 6.30 sharp, we listened to a piece by Messiaen which was due to be played as part of a concert by Melvyn Tan at Charleston tomorrow evening. There was something both wonderful, but tragic, about listening to live music on YouTube, which was due to have been held at Charleston where not only tomorrow’s concert, but its annual literary Festival, have had to be cancelled:-

I’ve been asked about the slate fence on which the horses scratch their bottoms. The answer is that it’s a fairly normal form of fencing round Snowdonia, presumably made in the past, as now, from offcuts from the slate industry, not necessarily used, as we have, semi-ornamentally. Ours was made by the wonderful Andy Kehoe of Kehoe Countryside (www.kehoecountryside.com), who is a wonderful source of expertise on traditional Welsh planting and rural skills and who advertises slate fencing on his website:-

Not much to report on today’s constitutional, a walk down the lane:-

Good clouds:-

Then we watched the sun go down:-

The horses in the adjacent field have discovered that our slate fence is the perfect thing on which to scratch their itches, so we have a good view of them all day long:-

Today’s constitutional consisted of nothing more than a short walk to the end of the lane to deposit our rubbish bins (Anglesey takes recycling very seriously). But on the way back I made a short detour to see if I could spot the local egrets:-

I walked the other side of the river, along a rough path:-

You come out into the Estuary, with distant views of the mountains:-

Then back across the fields:-

I have just handed in my book on museums, due to be delivered today. I had been resisting the encouragement of my editor to refer to Coronavirus on the grounds that the book is about the recent history of museums, not about their present, let alone the future. But in the middle of the night I thought that it might be odd not to make any reference to what the effects of Coronavirus might be, so added the following two sentences.

It will be interesting to find out what validity these thoughts have, if any, in a year’s time when the book is due to be published:-

Once the Coronavirus pandemic has ended, museums will need to review their role, the circumstances of their funding, and may retrench;  they may have to reduce the number of exhibitions which are so dependent on international travel;  they may migrate more of their activities online;  they may have discovered new ways of communicating to their audiences during the period of closure.   There is likely to be a reduction in what Adrian Ellis has described as ‘a decades-long, “physical infrastructure” binge’.[1]

[1] Adrian Ellis, ‘Not a Pretty Picture’, Wall Street Journal, 24 March 2020.

In response to my request for information about the impact of digitalisation on museums, I have been sent the link to an article in the New York Times no less about the twitter account of the Royal Academy. I am re-posting it as food for thought:-

I’m just reviewing the photographs taken on today’s constitutional, which was slightly longer than usual, taking in the churchyard of St. Ceinwen, Llangeinwen with its slate tombs:-

Walking up the lane behind the church, there were Peacock butterflies frolicking:-

And we saw the mountains from a slightly different perspective:-