A funny thing happened...

Last week I had some time to spare before my bus was due and I drifted into the  bookshop to look at the remainder shelves. I spotted a  book, Pilgrimage by Annie Leibovitz., a collection of photographs she'd taken in the homes of significant people - Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Georgia O'Keefe, Pete Seeger etc. It appealed to me because the images tended to the dark and obscure (not artificially lit) and because she often trained her lens on small details: a glove, a book, a page of writing. But I put it back because I'm trying not to acquire more books, and certainly not impulse buys. However I went back a few days later and  allowed myself to be tempted... I'd just about convinced myself to walk away again when I recalled that The Old Man would, at this time of the year, invite me to go and chose a book for my birthday.  "Get something really nice, I'll pay for it" I almost heard him say.  Well, that made my mind up - it could be a present  from him.
At that point I opened the book at random... and my heart gave a lurch, because there was a photograph of a dim room with books, random objets, and pictures on the wall - one of which was the  same reproduction of a painting  as had hung for so many years in The Old Man's  living space,  and in the exact same position above an open doorway. For an instant I thought it was his room but it was the farmhouse called Charleston, the home of Virginia Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell and her arty  menage.

The painting, the original of which hangs in the National Gallery,  was fomerly called The Death of Procris by Piero di Cosimo but now the subject is referred to  simply as A Satyr Mourning Over a Nymph. The Old Man's version is here in the house waiting to be collected by my younger son who has inherited it. I've taken a picture of it alongside the page in the book although you can barely make it there.
 The coincidence was so remarkable as to be almost uncanny although I would hesitate to call it so.