Crocuses spring from the grave. A picture composed at Ayot St Lawrence in Hertfordshire, where the neo-classical church upsets the landscape and the crumbling ruins of the older village church romantically satisfies the visitor. The Palladian stretch of the more modern church separates one Lord Brocket from his erstwhile wife, with the legend that what the church united in life it will separate in death....
Here in a moody self-portrait, I muse on a picture of my parents and brother, taken in France a lifetime away, while my father lies close to death in hospital. I rehears funerary thoughts with the paradox of life reviving in spring in a place of death.....
