Yew hedges and gate, Uffington House, detail, Country Life, Dec. 31st, 1904

It takes some patience and skill, but one can eventually find, courtesy of Google Earth, what's left of Uffington House, the noble mansion which burned to the ground in 1904.  [See previous entry, "Nothing, & etc." below].  A stately hedge is quite plainly evident from above, two dark rigid fingers of green, perpendicular to the winding road and pointing to an open patch of park land and what might be the ghostly rectangular imprint of the foundations of the house itself, or else an unmowed patch of ground, or possibly a large garden plot gone untended; aerial photography can be so deceiving.

Of course we in Los Angeles are accustomed to stately hedges and gates and no sign of a house; young entrepreneurial urchins here do a brisk trade in maps to these gates and hedges on the weekends, luring the unsuspecting tourist into rather wild goose chases in search of the Doris Day or Rock Hudson or Jayne Mansfield parapet of wrought iron and brick and inpenetrable greeenery.  One almost never gets to see a house, of course, but this detail is of little real signficance, since frequently the original structure is long gone anyway, razed and replaced by something else, even more grand and imposing but still obscured by a wall of defense against prying eyes.

A friend has just started a blog of nothing but pretty and odd and novel pictures -- we all long to see something, don't we, whether it's a piece of the past or the curious and startling present -- and his visitor numbers are already triple mine.  I'm glad for him.  I really must make a note to myself to provide you with the link as soon as possible, for I would be very surprised indeed if you did not find it as entertaining as the many hundreds of other visitors to its constantly updated entries have already discovered. 

Meanwhile I am getting caught up on my reading.  I recently finished a very interesting article in the Evening Standard on the son of the Aga Khan, who sounds like quite the playboy ("The Playboy Prince," ES magazine, 11 April 2008), and I have also nearly gotten current on the latest passings and obituaries, with a fine tribute to Joan Wyndham in The Guardian (April 16, 2007).  So I think I can be said to have put paid to the notion that I am somehow hopelessly out of step with the times or stuck in the past.  

It's about staying current, you know, and staying connected.  As I learned just last night, a mutual friend of ours who moved to the desert has now gone missing, apparently for some weeks.  A great shock, of course, except that drugs may be involved, so upon reflection the situation is a good deal more explicable than anyone would like it to be. One naturally wants to be stunned by the unexpected; one longs to find the world as it reveals itself too horribly complicated and impossible to explain or understand.  How could this happen?  How could this be?  But if you wait long enough, quite often you realize there was something you couldn't see at first; there was something more to be revealed, some other part of the story that eluded you.