Lovely sunny day. Temperature close to 20, but as usual much warmer in the sun as we sit reading on the patio looking down at the Mediterranean. Love the way it changes mood. Sometimes a smooth deep sapphire, other times a stormy grey. Sometimes streaked blue and green tones. Or a grainy off-white, looking like roughly graded snow. Or whitecaps on dark blue. Today it’s a deep blue but not smooth, reminding me of Tennyson’s line about “the wrinkled sea”.
J reading from the poetry anthology we picked up at the market on Saturday. I’m reading William Dalrymple’s From the Holy Mountain, a book in which he recounts his journey in the late nineties tracing the travels through the Middle East of a monk called John Moschos in the late sixth and early seventh centuries. The book is also recording the very last of many Christian orthodox communities as the monasteries have crumbled and villagers have left hostile surroundings. In a couple of places Dalrymple’s travels have overlapped with our own as he recalls staying at the Baron Hotel in Aleppo, Syria - more famous for playing host to the likes of Lawrence of Arabia and Kemal Ataturk. And there are also Damascus and Jerusalem and Alexandria. Dalrymple is a brilliant historical writer - lucid, informed, with an eye for quirky detail. And a super podcaster as well.
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