Gardening

I made use of one of the new freedoms today, with a facially-masked trip to the garden centre, to begin assembling what I need to make 12 hanging baskets and a similar number of colourful pots of bedding plants. 

In today's paper I read the obituary of pianist Henry Gray, who died in February at the age of 95.  He was one of the greats of Chicago Blues music from the 1950s, having played with both Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, as well as many others. I listened for the first time to his album with Clarence Edwards and Short Fuse - Thibodeaux Cafe - on which my favourite track was Wang Dang Doodle.

A 20th century painting today, by German Expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, a startling view of people in 1914 crossing Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. In a dramatic change in style from both the gentle, softness of Impressionism and the romantic, mystical rural scenes of 19th Century German painting, this presents people, in strange poses, against an angular and eccentrically coloured urban setting.  I particularly liked the image of the two women at the front of the painting, walking respectively towards and at right-angles away from the viewer. They are severely beautiful.