Katie

Thought I'd try my hand at portraiture today (still playing with my Christmas present) - luckily I had a willing, if somewhat self-conscious, model to hand...

In other news: a brisk morning at the Library, took the Christmas tree down, Lidl, a big pot of chilli for tea, listened to Darren Hayman* - a typical, pleasant, Saturday...

*Amazingly enough, DH's fine new album, which I discovered this week, has been out for a month without me knowing, which is symptomatic of our new self-promoted, bandcamp, cottage-industry music biz or something, but a pleasant surprise nontheless. Curiously enough, whilst the first two parts of the 'Essex Trilogy' were about new towns and rural petty crime, 'The Violence' is about the persecution of the Essex witches in the Seventeenth Century and the wider context of the English Civil Wars. A bit of a leap thematically, then, but the music is still recognisably in the vein of English indie, albeit with a folkier bent; curiously uplifting, and, dare I say it, a lot more 'southern' than Maxine Peak and co.'s recent 'Red Riding' take on similar themes. Good stuff (and if I were to assay another ill-considered stab at an end-of-year chart come December, God-forbid, I'd definitely have to consider this a 2013 release for the sake of inclusion!)