"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."

― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

2020 Advent Calendar [19] – Mountain and Molehill

Mountain and Molehill is the nickname of an artist using Victorian and Edwardian animals to make decorations. Instagram here, website here and website shop here. The shop is already closed, as you might expect giving that we’re approaching Day X, but I particularly love these Christmas decorations (specific section here), from the Partrige and Pear (of course) to the Penguin, from the Polar Bear to the Reindeer. She also does prints of illustrations and I’m particularly in love with the Red Riding Hood one, perfectly suitable for when she’ll be back after Christmas. Bookmark, people, bookmark.

I warned you I would try and do a sort of Advent Calendar recommending you an indipendent artist and illustrator each day till Christmas: I’m not making any promises, let’s see if I can keep this up.
Summertime

Omeros in the Caribbeans

Derek Walcott was a Saint Lucian poet, playwright, and painter, and one of the major voices of Caribbean literature. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, and his work often explores Caribbean history, identity, colonial inheritance, and the meeting of European and African

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August 9, 2026 6:00 am
books and literature

Ioanna Papadopoulou’s The Castaway and the Witch

I had a genuine “oh shit” moment when I read the author’s preface saying this was darker than “Winter Harvest” because – and I absolutely ADORED “Winter Harvest” – that was pitch-black dark. I thought “we’re all going to die”. This maybe has something to

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August 8, 2026 9:00 am
Summertime

The Path You Have to Sing

Alexis Wright‘s Carpentaria, an epic work set in a fictional town called Desperance, opens before there are any people in it at all: an ancestral serpent, “a creature larger than storm clouds,” descends from the stars and drags itself across the wet clay of the

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August 8, 2026 6:00 am
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Omeros in the Caribbeans

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Derek Walcott was a Saint Lucian poet, playwright, and painter, and one of the major voices of Caribbean literature. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, and his work often explores Caribbean history, identity, colonial inheritance, and the meeting of European and African

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