A Woman In Bundi

The marks of life are evident in this woman in Bundi in Rajasthan in India, and her poverty is evident in the small stall of vegetables set out by the roadside.

Were she to turn around, would her face enthral and entrance? There is a beauty in old age, isn’t there.

Never. He will not.
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety. Other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies, for vilest things
Become themselves in her, that the holy priests
Bless her when she is riggish.

This is said by the character Domitius Enobarbus in Act 2, scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra.

Enobarbus is speaking about Cleopatra and explaining why it is that although Anthony should leave Cleopatra, he never will.

The reason he says, is that unlike the case with many relationships, familiarity makes Cleopatra all the more desirable. And even when she is promiscuous, even the priests are so entranced that they bless her.

Weathered And Weatherbeaten

These are the doors to a building in Bundi. You will find the photo in the Windows and Doors range of images in our ecards here at Quillcards. Click the link to take a look.

Like a lot of photographers, perhaps like a lot of us, I am drawn to structures that have settled in over time.

Wood sawn to size, iron beaten into shape, clay daubed on a lattice of wooden sticks tied together with knotted rope. And then yellow paint with spatters of it on the door.

When things like this grow old we can see the marks, but they don’t destroy the authenticity of the materials. They don’t show the materials up as being fake. They show the beauty, don’t they. Or as they say… beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

We took this photo a few years ago when we lived in the south of England.

And you will find it in the English Cottages section of Quillcards and you can use it in one of your ecards.

There’s a free trial that allows you to use any of the images in Quillcards, so you can definitely use the photo, just click here to get started.

Gold Hill

The photo shows a view of the steep cobbled street named Gold Hill in the town of Shaftesbury. If you look past the cottages you can see how the hill tumbles down to the plain below.

It’s quite a surprise to enter Shaftesbury from one direction and then suddenly find yourself at the top of Gold Hill looking down over the Blackmore Vale in the distance.

Gold Hill is famous as the setting for a television advertisement for Hovis bread that was shown in the UK in the 1970s. Made by the film director Ridley Scott, you can see it here in this YouTube clip.

You might catch a reference to ‘doorsteps’ in the narrator’s voiceover to the advertisement, which is a way of describing particularly thick slices of bread.

Shaftesbury In Context

The town of Shaftesbury is in the county of Dorset, which is in the south west of England.

You can see its location on this map:

Dorset has a rich history. You can get a flavour of that rural history from Thomas Hardy’s novels. And although his later novels took in other surrounding counties, Dorset was always at the heart of his work, fictionalised and based on the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex.

And it is on the Dorset coast, on the beach at Lyme Regis, that young Joseph Anning found a part of a fossil of an ichthyosaur in 1811 and where his sister Mary found the remainder of the skeleton in 1812.

The fossil was several feet long and the find was seen to some Victorians as a threat to the creationist vision of history and was highly controversial.

Because of the number of fossils found along the coast of Dorset, it is fondly known as the Jurassic coast and the home of the modern science of palaeontology.

This is a sign to tell visitors that they are entering Bedlam.

No, it is not Bedlam as in a scene of uproar and mass confusion or madness.

And it is not Bedlam as in the world’s oldest hospital (Bethlem Royal Hospital in London) that specialises in the treatment of the mentally ill… although it is from the name of that hospital that the word ‘bedlam’ is derived.

And indeed it is not the small hamlet of Bedlam in Shropshire in England.

It is in fact as the entrance to the small village of Bedlam in the county of North Yorkshire in England.

Take the road out of Harrogate and travel north, deep into the countryside and you will find it.

The name probably comes from Old English or Norse and means ‘at the buildings’.

So no bedlam in Bedlam, but the ‘Please drive carefully’ beneath the name on the road sign always makes us smile when we pass through the village.

Bedlam As An Ecard

Follow this link and you will find this sign as an image for an ecard in Quillcards.