End of Year

Only four more days of the Sublime Landscapes exhibition to run. Mixed feelings; it's a wonderful show, and a joy to spend time surrounded by such enriching work and so will be a shame to take it down next week, but I'm also looking forward to some family time with the gallery closed for Christmas.

With Debbie painting, running the gallery and looking after Finn, and with me working, the moments we can spend together are few, but precious. The next few weeks will be spent reflecting on an busy year, 2009, and looking forward to 2010.

And an important part of this is news that warmed our hearts - a holiday cottage on the Northumberalnd coastline that we have stayed in several times before has been refurbished and after several years off the market, is now back open for business. We usually stay in January or February to enjoy the empty but usually sunlit beach. Debbie takes paint and brush, and many of her larger seascapes have been painted on the cottage's kitchen table looking out over the epic panorama... Fingers crossed our booking has been accepted for Jan...

We visited a new gallery in York on Sunday - The New School House near the Black Swan pub. It's great to see new galleries in the area (for some reason York seems to have few considering what a beautiful city it is and how many visitors it attracts each year). The New School House is carrying some of the finest ceramics we have seen in the area - and we wish them all the success for the future...

In Deep

This is our first year living here at the Lund, and now, moving from Autumn through to the beginning of winter, we are learning some more new things...

Like the fact that, when it rains a lot after the leaves have just fallen from the trees, then the pond outlet gets blocked, it floods. Then the water starts to back up the inlets to the pond - which includes our sewage biodigester. So I spent much of last night, in the dark with a big stick trying to unblock the pond outflow. But it was worth the effort - when I finally found it and cleared it it was like a huge gurgling bath emptying for a couple of hours... fantastic noise!

And with the leaves falling, the colours change in the garden. The bark on the beach trees has finally turned bright white, showing up the contrast with the red dogwood...


But mainly, at the moment, it is just the gray and brown of rain and mud!