Butterfly

“I stood / Among them, but not of them; in a shroud / Of thoughts which were not their thoughts.”

Lord Byron

The Indian Lion

“Gone! And you and I quite crestfallen. It’s always like that, you can’t keep him; it’s not as if he were a tame lion.” 
― C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Amballa City

In Punjab ( India )

Punjab means the Land of the Five Rivers.

The Colosseum

The Coppersmith and His Wife

This print was based on Schleisner's painting 'In the Coppersmiths'

'Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.' - Jonathan Swift

The engraving twists the woman's features. She is given a very pointy chin and nose which intrude further into her husband's personal space. See how a gentlewoman has been rendered witch-like. 

Perhaps the engraver felt that women ought not interfere with men's work. Her assistance seemed suspicious him, or maybe he just didn't like women much. 

He has only made small changes but they change the feeling of the whole image. 

An Amateur Concert in the Countryside

A Street Lamp

Crocodile

Chinese Magpies at London Zoo

In China the magpie is a symbol of luck.

Here are some lucky magpies on a plum tree.

The Cotton Crisis

In 1861 Manchester used to make 98% of the worlds cotton. 

90% of the people in Manchester worked in the cotton industry. Then the slave trade started to take off and cotton was being sold much cheaper elsewhere. Everyone in Manchester got together at The Free Trade Hall to protest.

They wished to abolish slavery to protect their cotton industry. They expressed support of Abraham Lincoln who also wanted to see an end to slavery. 

This caused a conflict with the Southern States, who provided Manchester with the raw cotton. They stopped selling the raw cotton to Manchester because they had expressed support for Lincoln. 

Then 90% of the people in Manchester had no income. Soup kitchens were set up so that people didn't starve. 

To begin with they wanted to abolish slavery to protect their business, but though the extreme hardships they then directly empathised with the slaves as well. 

Records from 1851 say that 51% of children died before reaching the age of 14. The children would work in the 'dark, satanic mills' and without their parents to protect them they were treated very badly. 

After their hardships many oppressed workers loved the idea of going to America. Some of them made it and when they did they called their towns Manchester. 

They had an extremely difficult time in Manchester but they loved what people had stood for there and wanted to remember their old home. Or maybe they just couldn't think of a new name. 

Anyway 35 new towns called Manchester appeared at this time. 

Pancakes

The family is distracted by the spectacle of pancake flipping. The cat has one paw up on the small table. The table is guarded only by a doll, and the milk and the mix have been placed upon it.

Opportunism is a survival skill!

Le Taureau Sauvage (The Wild Bull)

'Hunting with a lasso a wild bull in Mexico'

Fragments