Author: englishthatgrows

My Human has been changing things around in our house. She's taken down an awful picture of a very depressed-looking woman that looks like a younger version of herself and put up a rather beautiful Buddha picture, he's lying down in bliss . It's bad for humans to be depressed; they have no real understanding… Continue reading Wicca’s Diary 2

helper Well Dickens and the Victorians* invented it (as we know it) so I guess we can just as soon dismantle it. With a little help from our politicians who want to keep us in a small safety bubble. But I wasn't actually talking about that. I took the decorations down yesterday, the 3 Wise… Continue reading Dismantling Christmas

Apparently my name is Wicca, although I don't really know what I have to do with Celtic medicine women as I come from Basilicata after all. But there you have it, humans are difficult to understand for us cats and even worse, my human actually speaks another language, I was used to u putenzese. The… Continue reading Wicca’s diary

9 November 1918 " In New York City, a middle-aged spinster hurried to her gloomy basement office at Columbia university. Grey clouds scudded overhead and rain threatened. A spectacular future beckoned to the forty-nine- year- old schoolteacher. She would dedicate the rest of her life to healing the wounds.....within the hour she would invent one… Continue reading Poppies (Part 3)

War and pain, grief and remembrance had always been with us but the field and opium poppies had not yet been turned into the potent symbol of the Remembrance poppy. But it would, in the obscene horror of the first World War. The trenches which we are so familiar with from documentaries and films were… Continue reading Poppies (part 2)

The corn poppy re-christened Flanders poppy and immortalised by John McCrae, has a weight of symbolism which seems too heavy for such a fragile dainty flower to bear. Anyone who has tried to make a poppy lady will attest to its delicacy. But as with its cousin, the opium poppy, they are both flowers of… Continue reading Poppies (Part 1)

I already told you how much I love the cinema. It's a bit like a book I suppose, living other lives. I've always found it so impressive though frightening, how filmmakers can manoeuvre us. Probably because it works on emotion. Tolstoy told me that. Do you remember the passage? He related that as a boy… Continue reading Back to the cinema…

I appear to have been adopted by a kitten who certainly knows which side his bread's buttered on. He chose the only person staying at home all August, at a loose end, getting fed up with Netflix, kept out of the garden by the extremely debilitating heat and the sheer amount of things to do.… Continue reading In Praise of Laziness

I do love the cinema! and especially cinema under the stars. It's really a case of"force is no choice" because I spend my weekday evenings during the year teaching, so there's really only the weekend left .I don't really like those mega-cinemas, though the seats are comfy. I found a small cinema near me with… Continue reading Cinema under the stars….