Goodnight friends! More overnight snow and another searingly clear, brief blue day. Grass much more smoothly smothered, and the extra layer of snow over half-melted ice made for even more treacherous going underfoot, seemingly clear pavement carbuncled with translucent, slippery humps. Just barely above freezing while the sun was up, plummeting swiftly to -2°c after the aqueous, dreamlike sunset at just past 4 PM.
A friend’s birthday outing to some small museums of industrial history, preserving the ghostly impressions of cramped, chaotic speed and meanness and terror of Victorian workshops. A ventilation fan with its blades gnawed by the fumes of sulfuric jewellers pickle, thump, thump, thumping hand presses stamping out pen nibs that had to be worked once a second to earn a living wage and could sever a finger joint faster than the blink of an eye.
May we listen to our passion and anger, and allow them to galvanise rather that paralyse us today!
Image ID: Photo of the low wintery sun, just cresting a silhouetted Victorian terrace below a brilliant stark azure sky, with deep shadows and golden light on red brick walls in the foreground.
Photo of diffuse light filtering in through the large windows and glass roof of a 19th century jewellery workshop, a row of dark iron fly presses on benches surrounded by metal scraps, industrial tools and a ramshackle shelf of steel dies.
