b e d r o o m

After our ceiling fell in last October, the re-plastering has at last dried out and we've had the room repainted. This was an opportunity to notice how nothing really looked good together in that room, so to make some changes. The top picture is of our chest of drawers as it looked for the last few years, courtesy of Ikea (see here). I painted the frame of it with some pretty good multi-surface black paint, which has a nice matt finish, and then wallpapered the drawer fronts and side panels in this monkey-and-pomegranate paper. The paper was quite expensive, but as that was our main expense, that was okay. Now it looks more inkeeping with the dressing table and the warm, gold lights. And the monkeys are very cheering.

s e a f a r i n g

I recently finished Moby Dick, a book I was a bit ashamed of never having read. It coincided appropriately with our Amsterdam visit, since the Dutch are such seafarers. The whole city has a feel of the sea about it, not least because lots of it is below sea level. The houses are so tightly fitted together, and within them the space used so economically that it puts you in mind of things being 'ship shape'. The brown cafes' creaky charm, with old wooden chairs and tables, also feels like being in the captain's quarters dunking ship's biscuits. This is what Moby Dick delivers in spades -- fantastic passages all about how the ship does things. It gives you great detail on how they prepare for the journey, all the supplies, all the spatial arrangements. And then on the seas, exactly how they deal with the poor captured whales, utilising every last bit of the creature, so as to honour its massive glory. I really loved it, and felt quite overwhelmed at the end. There is an incredible quiet when it's all finished and you're just left with it, a bit like after you've read A Prayer for Owen Meany. Some of my favourite bits:

• Queequeg's arm across the patchwork quilt
• the chowder
• the hum of the old Quakeress' knitting-needles 
• the fact that 'however recklessly the whale may sometimes serve us… he can never truly be said to handle us without mittens'
• The captain's hands in his trowsers' pockets for ballast
• the boggy, soggy squitchy picture in the Spouter-Inn
• How 'out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs'
• The slick oil around the tun (terrifying chapter)
• the 'incommunicable contemplations, … glorified by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his thoughts'.

All of these things were beautifully evoked by the exquisite pen and ink drawings in the Rijksmuseum, and the replica boat itself.