-
“Blind children playing hide-and-seek among arcade pillars” at the Overbrook School in Philadelphia ca. 1912.
Categories
Month: July 2007
Categories
A frivolous distinction
An exercise in the subtle art of assembling an outfit. I went to a friend’s wedding in Saffron Walden yesterday; I decided that for once it would be nice to go to a formal summer event and not be roastingly hot, so I bought a creamy off-white blazer. The intention was to find a shirt in a nice cheerful colour—salmon, egg-yolk, maybe teal—so the overall effect would be summery: Ascot, Pimms, champagne and strawberries.
But despite a lot of trawling through the sales, I couldn’t find one that was right (not too light, not too dark, in a colour I liked and which suited my skin tone), so I ended up wearing the jacket over a very dark brown shirt. I felt the result, especially with sunglasses, was Italian disco circa 1982; my friends’ suggestions were ‘Colombian drug lord’ and ‘Cuban gigolo’.
Not that I have a problem with that as a look; better to look like a Cuban gigolo than, say, a German software engineer. It was a smidge out of place at an English summer country wedding, though.
Categories
More ephemera
More from the British Library’s Evanion Collection of Ephemera.
Categories
Links
-
‘More than 650 extracts from the Survey of English Dialects and the Millennium Memory Bank document how we spoke and lived in the 20th century.’
-
Take a look at Victorian Britain as captured in almost 1,500 original early photographic prints, including works by distinguished pioneers of the medium.
-
from the British library accent archive: ‘Richard and Harry describe their work at the Surrey Docks from the 1950s to the 1970s.’
-
‘Eric talks with pride about the Norfolk Broads, his work as a reed-cutter and the importance of continuing to work the marshes. Turf Fen and How Hill are features on the Norfolk Broads, an area of low-lying land to the east of Lyng.’
-
via core77: ‘As well as installation and moving image work, Steppan is also exhibiting these fantastic images of her personal belongings that she grouped by colour.’
Categories
The British Library online collections
The BL’s online collections are very pleasing, because there’s such a mix of stuff: English accent samples, Victorian newspapers, illuminated manuscripts, sheet music, photographs, watercolours, maps, wildlife recordings.
So when you put something into the search box, you never know what might turn up in the results.
Categories
Links
-
Very expensive novelty fruit and veg.
-
You might have to be British to appreciate this one.
-
London’s sinking. But apparently we also bob up and down with the tides.