Friday 22nd July 22
Yesterday we went to visit Cliveden House near Maidenhead. National Trust, so good coffee, even decaff! It was the home of Lady Aster and was the centre of the Profumo scandal. For me it was just the size of the place. Everything was designed to be looked at from afar. The photograph is taken from the end of the back/front garden. The purple flowers viewed from the house, as a semicircle of bright colour. Simple, yet quite breathtaking. (That would have been the right photograph!) A house of magnificent vistas, symmetry and opulence.
Now and again it’s good to stand back and look to the horizon. Most of the time we don’t. Most of the time we are up close and personal, getting our hands dirty, becoming mired in the immediate. I was going to say that standing back is a good thing, but then I decided, not all the time. Life is a mixture of both. I would neither want to miss the open sky and the distant horizon, nor the delicate veins on a rose, or the mud ingrained cracks of my hands after a session in the garden. Or to understand the shortsightedness of pain, or the need to now and again look inwards so that there is renewed strength for looking outwards again, to see that the world and the precious people around you are still there and still wonderfully complex and amazing.
