The end of the holidays has snuck up on us.  Things speeding up towards the end, with significant birthdays and grandparents visiting.  We made one last summer holiday day trip today just over the border to the Hill of Crosses in Lithuania.  Never get tired of this tourist destination  - first time we visited was around 20 years ago.  To make a long story short, the hill is covered in hundreds of thousands of crucifixes, which local Catholic Lithuanians and other...

Summer has been all about castles lately.  I suspect this is because Jem and I have downloaded and watched the whole first season of "Game of Thrones" in the last couple of weeks - I walk around during the day inventing new tribes of peoples that could emerge from beyond The Wall and proceed to attack the Winterfell stronghold...  that's probably why I was totally enchanted by the 2500-year-old tattoos on this Siberian ice-maiden mummy when she turned up in my news feed.  She...

I first heard the advice Andy Warhol's mother gave him, on an album by Lou Reed and John Cale: "The way to make friends, Andy, is invite them up for tea".  So simple, no? I saw Mrs Warhol's principle in action when Jem and I had moved to Melbourne from Brivegas and I started studying museology - everything was so new and I was very alone - and was stunned by a dinner invitation out of the blue, on my first week in class, from my totally intimidating classmate, who had the grooviest haircut...

Things are bowling along at their use pace of summer intensity round here. I have to give credit to my mother's vision and optimism - I swear it was only a few years ago when she planted three cherry trees, refusing to plant any more because "when they grow, we'll have too many cherries, and we won't know what to do with them all".  At the time her statement seemed a bit "pie in the sky" (cherry pie, that is), and almost laughable after our hired help mowed down one of the trees...