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Michael and I went to a wine tasting at Cambridge Wine Merchants on King’s Parade—Rolly Gassmann wines from Alsace.

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Travelled down to Olympia Exhibition Centre to go to London Online for the first time. The exhibition was big and I stopped by a few interesting stands for information on ‘enterprise search’. (I’m not sure I’m much the wiser about this).

Today marks the start of my second year of blogging: I’m enjoying the photo-diary format and making the effort to take more photographs and capture events, large and small. My blog is getting roughly 250 hits a day from 50 distinct hosts: a lot of these are from search engine and from me!

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Cycled out to Adsa for an early Sunday morning shop and came back with most of the ingredients for making Linda McCartney’s Christmas Pudding: which is gorgeous. It contains brazil nuts, almonds and pine kernels which is fun. This year I’ve added a handful of dates. It took about 30 mins to put all the things together (most time was making the breadcrumbs) and stopping the spice mill from eating it’s (second) rubber seal in the grinder blades.

While the puddings were steaming Michael and I nipped out for a walk and ended up at the Free Press for a half-pint, which was lovely.

“ZoneTag Photo Sunday 2:09 pm 11/26/06 Cambridge, England” by GrahamMcCannCAM

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They arrived on Friday about 9pm, after a long day in the office for David and a drive from central London for Heiko. Michael spent the day in bed having a relapse from his cold: still we mustered some champagne and pizza and had a jolly time.

Nipped out to the pub for last orders: David knows quite a few of the Free Press regulars through a friend who is an ex-regular (Ben). Drank too much beer too quickly and came home to annoy the cats with too much attention.

This morning David went back for a day at work and Heiko and I nipped out to the Fitzwilliam Museum. Heiko spent most of the day there (I think) but I just stayed for the exhibition Literary Circles: Artist, author, word and image in Britain 1800–1920. This used the museum’s impressive collection to illustrate the community of literary artists who were a great force in 1800–1920 and also their inspirations: it covered work by John Everett Millais, Elizabeth Siddal, Sir Edward Burne-Jones, William Blake, Samuel Palmer, George du Maurier, Max Beerbohm, John Keats, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Robert Browning, Algernon Swinburne, Burne-Jones, Thomas Hardy, Augustus John and Siegfried Sassoon. It was a fascinating exhibition: Sasson’s and Blake’s original works were a highlight as were the originals of Punch cartoons. I was particularly impressed with Edward Burne-Jones’ and William Morris‘ Chaucer published by The Kelmscott Press.

It was really bucketing with rain and the forecast is for stormy winds of up to 75mph. We got soaked on blown about on our way to the Fitzwilliam Museum and it was still raining, more gently, on my way back home

“Rainy Day in Cambridge” by GrahamMcCannCAM

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Finished all I can read of De Profundis. ‘De Profundis’ itself is very impassioned and wonderfully written—

Hate blinds people. You were not aware of that. Love can read the writing on the remotest star; but hate so blinded you that you could see no further than the narrow walled-in and already lust-withered garden of your common desires. Your terrible lack of imagination, the one really fatal defect of your character, was entirely the result of the hate that lived in you. Subtly, silently, and in secret, hate gnawed at your nature, as the lichen bites at the root of some sallow plant, till you grew to see nothing but the most meagre interests and petty aims. That faculty in you which love would have fostered, hate poisoned and paralysed.

It’s the letter that Wilde wrote to Bosie when he was in prison and It’s well worth reading, as is The Ballad of reading Goal, which is a very moving and bleak experience of prison life—

The vilest deeds like poison weeds

Bloom well in prison-air:

It is only what is good in Man

That wastes and withers there:

Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,

And the warder is Despair.

There are some other selected poems in the collected writing in this book: I didn’t enjoy these. Nor the essays. I quite liked the concept of the ‘The Decay of Lying’ but found it too hard work.

“De Profundis and Other Writings (English Library)” (Oscar Wilde)

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