In the attic of the artist’s quarters at the Petit Theatre is a Dickensian dream of a room with layers of sagging wallpaper, terra cotta tiled floors and the remains of a graceful bird who came in through the skylight to stay forever. The corners are too dark to photograph properly without a flash yet it seems a place more suited to these soft, slightly out of focus existing light images. I would love to make a short film here.

Outside in the larger attic space there is a strange sucking whine that filters through the door. Miss Haversham has strange company---a robotic octopus straining through the spider silk to reach the skylight and escape to his craft on the roof?

The gardens are sweet with the coming spring, although there is little green to see yet besides the faded remains of winter battered leeks and cabbages. But I feel it coming. It is a mystery one can sense in the softening air and changing light. Here and there papery skinned onion sets in neat rows await the rain. Villagers work the soil in their allotments under the protective walls of the castle or along the narrow river running through the edge of town. It is a book of hours page from the Limbourg Brothers. In the ground the promise sleeps as it has for all the linked, unfolding years of seasons past and yet to come…