Now is the summer of our rich content, not only in the middle of the year but in the middle of the Aldeburgh Festival e.g. have just come in from marvellous concert of chamber music in the beautiful Blythburgh church which was, of course, packed. Yesterday, similar fare was created in Aldeburgh church – which was, of course also packed. And it was the same last weekend when a concert in the concert hall at Snape Maltings, which seats over 800, was also packed out. My theory is that the large and largely elderly audience which turns out, apparently from nowhere, for any occasion provided by Aldeburgh Music lives in rather well-appointed burrows somewhere in a remote part of mid-Suffolk and is ethereally magicked into ‘Britten country’ as the occasion requires.

 

This note, however, is really to record that on the 19th I sent out a bulk e-mailing to some 200 addresses informing recipients that I now have a web page. About 30 messages came back as undeliverable for one reason or another, which is, I suppose, not bad for a list which has accumulated over several years and never been consciously ‘managed’. Anyway, now that I have theoretically broadened the range of potential viewers, I shall start changing images in The Gallery again, beginning towards the end of this coming week.

 

Meanwhile, I have run into stiff challenges in trying to finish ‘Becker Country’ and ‘Sizewell A and B’, the two big pictures on my easels at the moment. I have sought ideas to get round the blockages by revisiting Sizewell yesterday, after one concert, and driving round ‘Becker country’ today after the concert. Sizewell was doing what it does so well: a cold wind blowing off the North Sea across the dunes and as many as a dozen fishing boats drawn up in ordered disarray upon the shingle beach. Plenty of images and ideas there – I took over 100 photographs! Today I visited Old Hall Farm near Wenhaston where the Becker family lived for a time – it has helped to see, if only from the outside, the two fine brick buildings – a hall and a farm building of c1600?? – which provided Becker with his everyday surroundings early in the 20th century.