Hi guys. IMPORTANT NEWS:

There's a new page of Clematis up.

Do you know that Clematis has been going now for about 5 years? Maybe you didn't catch that. Let me tell you again. Clematis has been going for five whole years. Can you believe it? I certainly can't. Although, at the snail's pace I seem to be taking at the moment, it's not that surprising. I think that when I finally get a job and don't have to think about coursework and dissertations any more, I'm going to have to up the pace on Clematis in a big way. I doubt I can do a page a day like I did in the crazy heyday of 2003, but maybe at least a page a week? Roll on September!

In other news, I've just come back from a weekend at home with my parents. And in a case of real life imitating fiction, we went to see a big old country house, or more specifically, the landscaped gardens of a big old country house.

Hello phone photos and cloudy English summertime:

The gardens had lots of small temples and follies and statues and monuments scattered amongst valleys and lakes and trees. The location of the monuments and the planting was quite clever, so that if you stood in certain places, there were pleasing vistas of distant monuments framed by the trees:

See also: Venus in the Rotunda:

And posing like the famous Grecians in the Temple of Ancient Virtue:

I couldn't go inside the Temple of Ancient Virtue without shouting "Baachu" multiple times. There didn't seem to be a Temple of Nadleeh anywhere however (haha, lame joke is LAME).

Anyway, the gardens seem all pretty and nice, and then you go and read the guidebook and realise how political it all is. No, really. The owner was expressing his political views through garden design (I'm still not sure why he decided to do this, but there you go).

As time went on we started making up our own monuments.

Me: I'm just off to the Toilets of Gentle Charity
Parents: Ok, we'll wait here by the Cafe of Providence, and maybe go have a look in the Gift Shop of Temperance and Wisdom.

And then we went home and watched Alien.

Right, ok. I have to sleep now, and then I have to do this dissertation work for my tutor, and later I'll do everything else, including checking my emails and taking the rubbish out (the whole flat smells of bin, ohgod).