Halfway up the sky

The young moon
Halfway up the sky
Tangled in the branches
Of a tall old elm
Illuminates the world.

Thanks to William Morris for the first four lines, pinched from his utopian novel News from Nowhere. This beautiful, illuminated version, published in 1893, is on display at the William Morris Museum in Walthamstow. Morris thought many of the books published in Victorian Britain were very poor quality. During the last decade of his life he established his own private press to reintroduce some of the beauty he admired in medieval books and manuscripts.

I used to live just round the corner from the museum and was in Walthamstow today for a very enjoyable lunch with an old friend and his wife, who are moving out of London. Mike and I then mooched around the revamped museum and Lloyd Park before taking a quick look at my old flat. A day of looking backward and forwards - so the Morris blip seemed appropriate.