Suspend Your Disbelief

Suspend Your Disbelief

Whenever my husband and I watch movies with a plot relating to a commercial airplane – Sully and Air Force One are favourites – he can’t help whispering in my ear during the movie: “They can’t do that in real life.” Commercial pilots will be the first to tell you...
Small Details

Small Details

One of my favourite pastimes is to visit art museums and focus on the small details in a painting. A pearl bracelet dangling from a wrist. A lace ruffle on a sleeve. A jewel-encrusted ring. Thick impasto paint to suggest stiff brocade. Daubs of white to indicate...
The Scattergun Approach

The Scattergun Approach

I’ve been jumping around like a jackrabbit when it comes to reading during the past year. One week I’m delving into The Europeans by Henry James then I’m switching centuries to read about modern-day émigrés in Janice Lee’s The Expatriates. I burrow into Renaissance...
Architectural Gems: Past and Present

Architectural Gems: Past and Present

…the tarnished nameplate fixed to the wall: Begijnhof Sint-Catharine. Passing a gatehouse, they emerge into a large courtyard. Brick buildings on all sides rise three-storeys high, each façade decorated with crow-stepped gables, typical of sixteenth-century houses of...

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