I'm a bit behind in my work...

As of today, Thursday 22 March I am one day behind myself. The online catalogue should have been updated yesterday. I am in the process of doing that now and it should up up within the hour.

And no orders were processed yesterday. I took a day off and spent the day in Norfolk, seeing friends in Cromer and visiting one of my favourite shops, Larners in Holt. (Larners sell wonderful food, but they are also a general department store for what is a small but very affluent retirement town).

Funnily enough I was in my other favourite shop, Barnitts in York, on Saturday. They are a magical warren which sells hardware and tools.

Apart from the travelling all my spare time, which includes time I would normally spend cataloguing new stock, has been taken up with building some flatpack wardrobes. I've just got to the point where I am cutting mitres on the corners of the cornice, not my favourite job. So if you are wondering why the Recently Catalogued section is a bit thin this week, the wardrobe building is the reason.

The Nuclear Arms Debate

This week's update of the website is a day late. Since January we've been having our main bedroom refurbished - new ceiling, floor stripped and sanded, new double glazed sash windows. And yesterday the wardrobes came, three of them, in huge boxes which I have to unpack and check before attempting to put them up. So the catalogue went out of the window while I toiled at the bedroom front.

The picture on the home page, reproduced here, is one we took of Dubrovnik when we had a holiday there thirty years ago. The Minceta Tower from which it was taken is high up on the walls which go way above the town. The bit of the town where you see the church (whose name I now forget) was originally an island just off the coast where the first settlement of Ragusa (as it was then called) began. The town spread to the mainland and eventually the channel between the two parts was filled in and became the main street. Ragusa's great rival was Venice, at the head of the same Adriatic Sea. Dubrovnik and the islands near it were a lovely place to visit.

Disgracefully, but perhaps not surprisingly, the Tory Party voted in last night's Commons debate with Tony Blair's government to renew our nuclear option. Nuclear weapons are immoral and anyway our small and relatively insignificant country should not try and bolster its position in the world by playing the great nation. I am glad a hundred Labour MPs had the sense and decency to vote against the bill. As for the Tories, their vote shows that despite their much vaunted new green and sensitive face they are still the same beneath it all.

Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem

Looking through some old photos recently I came across this collection of pictures of a model of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. For some reason it appeared for a week or so in 1983 at the home of relations. It was probably on the way to some museum - I forget the story.

Anyway, there it was made of polished wood and mother of pearl. The fascinating thing was that it was all slotted together and could be taken apart, as in the last photo where all the roofs are sitting separate on the little table. In size it must have been 15-18" square.


I have a feeling these models were made as gifts for important people, or perhaps they were just souvenirs. A great deal of work must have gone into this one. I have seen pictures of other similar models. I'm glad I took the pictures, but rather wish somehow I could see it again, with a better camera in my hand.