This curious building is a raised granary, or 'hórreo', in the northern Spanish town of Avilés, which we recently visited. Among the most characteristic buildings in the region the 'hórreo asturiano' was usually square and built of wood, its most striking feature being that each wooden piece perfectly fits with the next without the need for screws, bolts or clamps.

The 'hórreo' is supported by four characteristic 'pegollos' or pillars made from wood or limestone, and was a safe storehouse providing the Asturian farmer, with an answer to a disagreeable climate by providing a relatively simple solution for protecting the harvest from the region’s characteristically damp weather. This elevated building would hold food for the year, corn for livestock and grain for next year’s crop, keeping it safe from fungi, rodents and bugs. Between each pillar and the wooden base of the granary is a flat circular or square stone called a 'muela' that prevents vermin from getting inside. Today it is common for the supporting pillars to sit on concrete bases.

The Principality of Asturias is thought to have around 20,000 'hórreos' usually sitting next to rural houses across the region. Although the 'hórreo' in Avilés now sits in an urban setting, close to houses, restaurants, bars and other buildings, it would have once been on the outskirts of the town among fields and orchards. The survival of Avilés' 'hórreo' is due to region’s respect for its heritage and a nostalgia for the concept of rural Arcadias.

 

[For the above information I am indebted to my friend, Jose Maria Miranda Boto and this post on 'Barceló Experiences': https://www.barcelo.com/guia-turismo/en/spain/asturias/things-to-do/granaries-asturias/ ]

 

[Photo: David Weeks]

A SUMMERTIME ODE

A SUMMERTIME ODE

At this time of year, I yearn to forage

For mint and thyme and a sprig of borage,

The latter required if your summertime whims

Includes a few glasses of over-priced Pimms.

 

 

BS, August 2025

TOM LEHRER

Farewell Tom Lehrer (1928-2025) brilliant parodist and consummate performer of his own sharp, smart, witty – often wicked – songs like 'Poisoning Pigeons in the Park', 'We'll All Go Together When We Go', 'The Vatican Rag' and the incomparable 'Elements' song.

Tom Lehrer spent his brief, yet remarkable music career writing and performing parody songs that entertained millions. Biting, intelligent and socially conscious, his songs were intimate commentaries on society and politics in the 1960s. 

 

I salute this genius word-and-tunesmith and his legacy of songs that chart the social mores and neuroses of the psychotic sixties...

INDEPENDENCE DAY IN WONDERLAND

One hundred and sixty-three years ago, today, the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and an Oxford colleague, the Reverend Robinson Duckworth, took the three daughters of the Dean of Christ Church – Lorina, Alice and Edith Liddell – on a boating trip.

As they rowed along on that 'golden afternoon', Dodgson improvised a fantasy about the curious adventures of a little girl named (like one of the girls on the trip) 'Alice', who followed a White Rabbit in a waistcoat with a watch down a rabbit-hole and found herself in a true land of wonders...

At Alice’s request, Dodgson wrote out the story – first calling it Alice’s Adventures Under Ground – and added his own distinctively idiosyncratic illustrations.

By 1865, it had grown (like someone who had nibbled an EAT ME cake) into Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and was published under the authorship of 'Lewis Carroll' with illustrations by the legendary Punch cartoonist, Sir John Tenniel.

The book was made Mr Dodgson’s alter ego one of the most famous men in Victorian England. It also revolutionised children’s literature by abandoning, at a stroke, the long and piously-held tradition of moral-and-improving tales for the young in favour of zany, witty nonsense that had no underlying message other than fun...

Across the succeeding years, Alice has been endlessly reinterpreted by illustrators and filmmakers...

Mervyn Peake (1946)

Tove Jansson (1966)

Salvador Dali (1969)

 Ralph Steadman (1973)

 Walt Disney (1951)

Walt Disney & Tim Burton (2010)

July the 4th is also, of course, American Independence Day and – apart from over fifty years of Disney influence – it is interesting to note how many true literary successors to Lewis Carroll have sprung up in America, among them: L Frank Baum, James Thurber, Ogden Nash and Maurice Sendak.

But then perhaps this shouldn’t really surprise us, since the Americans have always shown themselves to be far greater lovers and defenders of Wonderland (and Looking-glass World) than the English have ever been…

Maybe there are reasons for this affinity between the American sensibility and Carroll’s nonsense realm: for one thing, Alice is a highly independent and self-determining individual (a truly revolutionary notion for a child’s book of the 1800s); for another, the Wonderlanders with whom she mixes are a wildly disparate conglomeration of diverse species – animals, humans, animals-dressed-as-humans and humans-with-animal-masks – all of whom (for the most part) rub along together but who are, together, fiercely territorial!

I find it fascinating – and humbling – that, in 1948 (by which time the original manuscript of
Alice’s Adventures Under Ground had been sold and was in the possession of an American collector), a group of US well-wishers, led by the Librarian of Congress, should have started a fund to raise the considerable sum of money required to buy back the manuscript and send it home to us!



That first foray into Carroll's underground wonderworld now resides in the British Library and maybe we should remember the American act of selfless generosity which made that possible the next time we look at, say, the Elgin Marbles…

EDMUND WHITE (1940-2025)

The death, today, of  author Edmund White, aged 85, weirdly happens to coincide with my reading of the final chapter of his recently published last novel The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir, an unabashed account of his relationships and dalliances with (he brazenly claims) over 3000 men.

Starkly frank, occasionally tender but more often rough and fleeting, many of these encounters are less romantic than raunchy. But White was a gay man who lived his life across the years when a love that dare not speak its name became one that could kill the one you love and beyond into the present age when for many (but certainly not all) the issue of sexual orientation is barely an issue at all.

 

White’s true literary legacy rests not on the curtain-call that is The Loves of My Life, but on his ground-breaking novel, A Boy’s Own Story (for my younger self a kind of apotheosis) and its candid, semi-autobiographical sequels, The Beautiful Room is Empty and The Farewell Symphony. Other noted volumes include his first novel Forgetting Elena, City Boy, States of Desire, My Lives and his incisive biographies of fellow gay novelists, Marcel Proust and Jean Genet.

 

Edmund White unflinchingly spoke of his times to his times about living and loving, desiring and dying.

 

 

A NIGHT AT THE OPERA

Design by Maurice Sendak (1928–2012) – and famous for Where the Wild Things Are for a theatre scrim for Mozart's The Magic Flute, 1979–1980. Created watercolor and graphite pencil on paper on board. 

© The Maurice Sendak Foundation. The Morgan Library and Museum, Bequest of Maurice Sendak, 2013.104:120. Photo: Janny Chiu.

BREAKFAST BRIEFING

 

My first real outing – and with an out-door lunch – since my discharge from hospital on New Year's Eve: Espresso Eggs Benedict with extra bacon at Flotsam & Jetsam, Dulwich Art Gallery...

 

THE FIVE-YEAR RIDDELL

 

An astonishing, unprecedented, bravura achievement by the brilliant Chris Riddell.

On 15 December 2019 – realising he was living in, as they say, 'interesting times' – Chris decided he would start chronicling those times with daily political cartoon sketches, week-in-month-out for the next five years. 

 

With the publication this month of FIVE YEARS, Volume 5:  A Sketchbook of Political Drawings, he completes that amazing self-commissioned assignment.

 

The result is further proof (were it needed) of Chris' mastery of penmanship with which to provide a trenchant commentary on the follies, foibles and failings of those aspiring to be the movers and shakers of the national and international political scene. 

 

It's all here: the UK leaving the EU; the Covid pandemic; Boris, Corbyn, Party-gate and Cummings; Global Warming, refugees crossing the Channel in small boats and the invasion of Ukraine; Sleepy Joe, Harry and Megan, Prince Andrew and Pizza Express;, the passing of HM Queen Elizabeth II, Truss outlived by a lettuce and the long-awaited accession of King Charles III; Trump, Sunak and Starmer –– all human life and death, triumphs and disasters as witnessed across five years and 38,369 cartoons.

 

Chris Riddell's FIVE YEARS is a historic document of social importance and enduring record.

 

PEANUTTINESS

I have been in love with 'Peanuts' for so many years – at least 60, possibly more – that I'm rarely stopped in my tracks by the strip's recurrent moments of the bizarre, such as Snoopy pounding his typewriter or zooming into aerial combat on his Sopwith Camel doghouse, and then I run up against one of those zany sequences in which Charlie Brown's little sister, Sally, has a conversation with her school building and I realise that Charles Schulz's should be properly remembered not as a brilliant cartoonist but as one of the truly great surrealists of the twentieth century...

MOODY BLUES

 

A seemingly simple but stunning artwork by Lee Everett Blair (1911-1993). A piece of concept art created for the live-action silhouetted orchestra shots leading iinto the opening, abstract sequence of Fantasia (1940) featuring Bach's 'Toccata and Fugue in D minor' as orchestrated and conducted by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Blair was an American artist, born in Los Angeles and died in Soquel, California, and was the younger brother of Preston Blair and husband of Mary Blair.

THE ANTIBIOTICS FIGHT BACK...

Latest Sibley Health Update... 

 

I spent the entire weekend in discomfort, thinking I had shingles, only to find (on finally managing to see a doctor last evening) that I have an allergic reaction to the blitz of back-to-back antibiotics with which I've been bombarded over the last three months – and beyond. As a result, I'm now covered in a very painful rash that – pardon the pun – is itching to be scratched 24/7. Pre-assessment for operation (and the op itself) are, once again, up for rescheduling.

 

Oh, yes, and I've got thrush in the mouth, making it difficult to eat, swallow and speak.

 

As Edward Lear might have limericked...

 

 

There was an Old Man from the South

Who found he had thrush in the mouth;

He said, "It's absurd,

To be stuck with a bird,

But it often occurs in the South."

 

 

 

[Illustration: 'Mr Lear', obvs!]

LOVER'S TRYST

Valentine's Day lovers blissfully focused on each other and are, in that moment – as is only right – unconcerned by the woes beneath which our world groans on this day devoted to affairs of the heart!

 

And when they leave, only the heart-balloon knows the secrets of their enraptured conversation...

 

 

[Photos: David Weeks]

AUTHOR AT WORK!

From my Peanuts Calendar for today: a classic example of Schultz's Snoopy-as Author-working-on-his-latest-opus cartoon!

 

 

 

 

Does anyone (after all these years) ever look at these dog-and-typewriter gags and think:

 

"Eh? ... Er...? WHAT?"

 

CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER!

Totally astonishing, out-size, exterior house-decoration –– unless, of course, it's the White Rabbit's Incredible Shrinking House –– situated in that American wonderland that is New Orleans, Louisiana...

THE LABOURS OF GERALD SCARFE

 

For many years the work of the concept artist in animated filmmaking (and, indeed, in the of movies movies in general) was untold – or, more accurately, ignored. The focus was on the animators, the cartoon equivalent of the movie actors, and quite often (and pretty much always in the case of the Disney studio) on the Boss. 

 

Walt Disney was canny: early on in his business career he changed the studio name from The Disney Brothers Studio to Walt Disney Productions. He understood the important of personalising the films he produced by providing a single creative focus for all responses to the rapidly developing universe of mice, ducks, pigs and a fantastical pageant of fable and fairy-tale characters whose stories were brought to life in pen and ink.

 

I first became aware of ‘concept art’ in the pages of R. D. Field’s The Art of Walt Disney (1942) and in Bob Thomas’ Walt Disney: The Art of Animation (1958) and, then, again, in Christopher Finch’s The Art of Walt Disney from Mickey Mouse to the Magic Kingdoms (1973) and Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston’s The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation (1981). Since the publication of these progressively revealing volumes we are now able to access any number of books devoted to the masterworks of such prolific concept artists as Gustav Tenggren, Kay Nielsen, David Hall, Mary Blair and Eyvind Earle.

 

Books on the art and design of several of the more recent Disney films have mapped the progress of a film’s look from sketch to screen and now we have a huge and truly astonishing volume, Disney's HERCULES – The Art of Gerald Scarfe, Insight Editions (7 January 2025) £60.

 

The decision to engage perhaps the most savage and unforgiving of Britain’s political caricaturists and hand him the job of setting the style for a movie about an ancient Greek hero-figure can’t have been easily reached. Gerald Scarfe’s routinely brutal – often shocking and, as result, controversial – cartoons might not have been the obvious choice for a studio whose output has almost always favoured the comfortable rather than the challenging, but then one only has to look at Scarfe’s drawings of British and American politicians in the guise of monsters and grotesques to realise how suited he would be to illustrate such beings as Cerberus, Medusa, Hades, the Hydra, the Furies and the Minotaur; or how his keen sense of humour might amusingly interpret the congregation of Gods or Hercules’ sidekick, Philoctetes the satyr; and, again, how his elegant sweeping penmanship might give flight to the  hero's mighty steed, Pegasus.

 

 

 

Scarfe was no no stranger to film or animation: a passionate lover of Disney since childhood, he had created his own award-winning animated film, Long Drawn-Out Trip, in 1973 and, in 1982, he had contributed electrifying animations to Alan Parker’s film Pink Floyd: The Wall that provided some of the most iconic images of ‘80s pop culture which are no less arresting and provocative in a new century.

 

Despite those known credentials, this book is a revelation, not just in revealing how Scarfe developed, modified and, frequently, radically re-defined his various concepts as he worked with Disney’s artists, but also in showing the startling diversity of media in which he worked: pen and ink, full-bloodied watercolour paintings of creatures and landscapes whether Olympian or Underwordly; dramatic moments rendered in chalk or a limited palette of red or white on black.

 

 

 

 

The giant size of this book (a lectern would be a useful aid to reading!) allows Scarfe’s art to make the fullest dramatic impact, giving his winged horses space to fly and permitting his multi-headed creatures and tempestuous Titans to rage unrestrained.

Disney's HERCULES – The Art of Gerald Scarfe is witness to the willingness of the Disney Studio to, as its founder expressed it, ‘dream and diversify’, to experiment with art just as Walt himself had done with FANTASIA and several other visionary concepts that either made it to screen or were lost along the way. 

 

More than that, this book is a glorious testimony to the breadth and depth of Gerald Scarfe’s artistry: inspiring in its imaginative inspiration, dynamically dramatic in its realisation and, repeatedly, featuring a hint of his wicked wit that is as sharp as his often angular characterisations.

 

Anyone interested in Scarfe, Disney, film, the art of animation or the craft of the caricaturist needs to own this book. I can't put more plainly than that!