Listened to this while shredding holly on Saturday afternoon, very good. Also about my part of the world.
Comments closedTag: Essex
In 1415, the practice of artificially “multiplying” precious metals was illegal in England and Wales. The prohibition did not prevent one alchemist from setting up his furnace at the priory of Hatfield, near the town of Chelmsford in Essex, a subordinate priory of the great Benedictine abbey of St. Albans. The alchemist, William Morton, was not a member of the religious community, but a “wooleman” from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, who had established a collaborative relationship with the former prior. Morton and his business partners, who included both religious and laymen, used the priory not only as a site for alchemical practice, but also as a platform for more ambitious bids for patronage. Their goal was to make two alchemical powders, or elixirs: one for transmuting “red” metals, such as copper and brass, into gold; the other for turning “white” metals, including lead and tin, into silver.
Just up the road from me there was once a working alchemist. Closer by, there was once a cunning man.
Comments closedThe sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.
The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light; the very mist on the Essex marsh was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds.
HEART OF DARKNESS, Joseph Conrad
Essex and the Thames Delta, my life.
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