Belinda Hollyer

We decided to spend a night in Parma last week, on our drive from London down to Umbria. (Yup! It’s holiday time again, lucky us, and we’re back on the same little organic farm: our third visit, and loving it as much as ever.)

We’d never been to Parma before but we love the cheese and we love the ham, so honouring those with a visit seemed absolutely right. I even like Parma violets, despite their slightly sickly taste, although I know those haven’t been made in Parma for centuries. Anyway, what’s not to like?

And as it turned out we were spot-on about that – but only because of something we didn’t know about: the Baptistery of the Duomo in the old town. It took my breath away it’s so beautiful – and this in a country filled with astounding beauty of every kind.  The city had the good sense to commission an architect called Benedetti Antelami to build it in 1196, and the octagonal building is covered in pale pink marble from Verona. There’s a lovely statue of Solomon and Sheba outside, which you can just see in the photo above (I took it with my iPhone which doesn’t seem to be as good at focal length as it is at closeups.)

And inside there are 16 alcoves and an astonishing domed ceiling, all decorated with paintings and sculptures. Like this one.

The Michelin guides don’t rate the Baptistery worth the journey (which would give it three stars): it gets only two stars, which means it’s worth a look if you happen to be passing. I think the Tyre Man is mistaken.

Parmigiano is a truly great cheese with complex flavours, and that slightly salty, slightly granular texture has a lot going for it.  And Prosciutto di Parma is the king of hams – a silky, tender, melting jewel in the crown of Italian cuisine.

But the Baptistery! I promise you, seeing the Baptistery will make you forget about food. And in Italy that’s a tough call.

It’s not only the words in the blogroll, it’s also the names of the categories under which I log posts. But it’s kind of pretty, isn’t it? Like an incidental artwork.

Mary McCallum’s blog has given me this lovely present of an idea, as well as an entertaining time-filler (you note that I have avoided the use of the terms ‘time-waster’ or ‘writing-avoidance’). Its origin is wordle and if you have a look at the site you’ll get the idea. To create the design above I just entered the url of my blog, but you could play with a poem, or the names of things you love, or even a whole novel.

Love it!

We’ve had a rush of graffiti in our area of North London. The usual kind are mostly tags, but the new ones are Banksy-style graffiiti. They look a lot like Banksy’s offerings, and when the first one arrived in the back garden of a local pub a few weeks back the pub owners were rather pleased. Well, you would be – a genuine Banksy is worth a lot of money, and the whole question of how you get one off a pub garden wall and into an auction house is beside the point, as well as beyond my understanding. (On the other hand I know you can take frescoes off walls; why not a graffito?)

Anyway. This one has been officially rejected as a Banksy by Banksy’s agents, but the real joy of it isn’t its own fame or inherent fortune. Its joy resides in the fact that it’s an exact portrait of our locally beloved June – the Queen of Primrose Hill – who recently retired from the local shop she and her late husband ran for about fifty years.

It makes me smile every time I walk past, and I hear that June herself is delighted. So thanks, whomever. Thanks a lot.

Look! Vuvuselas drove people crazy in 1660 as well!

Question: How often in life do you visit a town and discover that something delightful is going to happen the day you have to leave, or happened just before you arrived?

Answer: all too often.

But happily, when we visited Lyme Regis for the first weekend of May we coincided with a Fossil Festival which we hadn’t heard of before we arrived (the festival, I mean; not Lyme Regis). Lyme Regis is a great choice for this festival – it’s on the Jurassic Coast, which is a World Heritage Site, and the surrounding beaches yield large numbers of fossils. Even on an ordinary day the town is filled with fossil shops and tours and the town celebrates its fossil fame with pride; even its elegant lamp posts are shaped like ammonites.

I loved the festival and spent hours learning about fossils and yet more hours walking the beaches, where I saw this amazing stone. (It’s on Monmouth Beach, about a third of the way along, if anyone else wants to look for it.)

It’s about the size of our dinner table and probably twice as heavy so all I could do was take this photograph. And sadly, I have no idea what it’s a fossil of – I can recognise ammonites and trilobytes, and those little things known as the Devil’s Toenails, and that’s about it.

Looking at images of fossils on Google it seems this might possibly be a coral fossil, although the frilly bit on the left might not meet the criteria. Has anyone got any other ideas?

Anyway, whatever it was millions of years ago, it’s very beautiful now.

I’ve been thinking about Judith Scott’s fibre art sculptures since I saw some in a new exhibition space that’s opened in London, called ‘The Museum of Everything’. (The Museum space is an intriguing mixture of large and small semi-derelict rooms hidden behind the Chalk Farm library. You have to hope that the Camden’s health and safety officers aren’t going to visit any time soon.)

The Museum shows the work of artists who live outside the conventions of modern society as well as outside the art business, and you might think that the idea of a gallery dedicated to ‘outsider art’ is ironic: this category is defined by its segregation from the mainstream art world. Its works were never intended for public display, and its practitioners haven’t often thought what they made to be art at all. But James Brett, whose invention the Museum is, says he wants “to assert the sheer beauty of the best outsider art, to reclaim it as a distinct aesthetic category – one in which you have a whole world being conjured up by the artist.”

I found that the exhibition had a curiously liberating effect on my own imagination, and the film about the work of key artists – and especially of Judith Scott – was enthralling. I feel deeply moved by the metaphors her fibre art suggests; the wrapping and weaving, the twisting and tying of fabric around objects: tying and untying a life story of confinement and freedom, of concealment and revelation. It’s made me think a lot about the things we try to mask or display about our lives, and the things we reveal by attempting that.

In Judith Scott’s work the things she wrapped are mysteriously transformed and yet still somehow visible (or able to be imagined) beneath the fabrics and fibres – just as our hidden selves are sometimes made visible by our very attempts to conceal them. The sculptures are beautiful and compelling, and her work has taken up a permanent place in my mind. And somehow, it makes me feel very happy.