about

The title of this blog comes from ‘Hearing Secret Harmonies’ by Anthony Powell, the twelfth and final volume in his sequence ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’. The narrator refers to an old book which describes a valley on the moon. All things lost on Earth can be found there:

“…lost kingdoms: lost riches: lost reputations: lost vows: lost hours: lost love. Only foolishness was missing from this vast stratospheric Lost Property Office, where by far the largest accretion was lost sense.”

This is the third incarnation of this blog. The first was an accumulation of anything that caught my attention as I searched idly through the valley, but I also picked up a dose of viruses and spam.

The second incarnation, with the strapline ‘Creativity through illness’, focused on trying to recover my creative juices while I recuperated from many spells in hospital. I finally resumed work in March 2009, but this was followed almost immediately by the death of my partner from cancer. The blog was hosted on her webspace, so I had to transfer it, but I was unable to upload the backup to the new database.

On both occasions, I could have tried harder to preserve the existing blog posts, but each time I felt it better to start afresh, a decision I do not regret.

I’d hoped by now that my skills would be honed, and that I would be producing more advanced work, but I’ve still got a lot to learn. It may be too early to choose a theme for this incarnation, but it might turn out to be the continuing experiments of a novice tinkerer.

Update 14 November 2013:

As it turns out, this blog became a repository, as I’d hoped for a few snippets I considered interesting, whether I’d created them i some medium or merely found them lurking on the web.  I’d started concentrating more on the former than the latter when I had a stroke in 2011, but I’ve missed sharing my tentative experiments with the world.