Katherine Keenum

In his introduction to a collection of Talking Heads (Series 1), Alan Bennett writes that a television monologue is a "stripped down version of a short story, the style of its telling necessarily austere. 'Said' or 'says' is generally all that is required to introduce reported speech, because whereas the novelist or short story writer has a battery of expressions to chose from ('exclaimed', 'retorted', 'groaned' lisped'), in live narration such terms seem literary and self-conscious."

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Website alert: An article in the Guardian, Tate Britain acquires first painting by pioneering English female artist overlooked for a century, brought to my attention Louise Jopling again. As an artist and suffragist, she is definitely someone my Palmer characters, Jeanette and Mattie, would know about! And wouldn't the show at the Tate gratify them? For more of Jopling's work, click here.

Image in the Public Domain via Wikipedia

Website alert: A news item, Face of 75,000-year-old Neanderthal woman revealed, alerted me to a BBC documentary. If you subscribe to Netlfix and are interested in how paleo-archeologists work, it is well worth watching. I loved a reenactment near the end in which a fearful young Neanderthal woman in need of help approaches an equally wary group of Homo sapiens. Instead of the expected story of violence, it shows how the two species could have interacted peacefully—a happier thought than abduction and rape as the source of the Neanderthal DNA in most of us! A shortcut to the findings is a summary article at Science Direct: Archaeologists unveil face of Neanderthal woman.

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This photograph of a Flying Golden Fleece ram fresco found in Pompeii seems to me emblematic of all the excavations in the ash-and-rubble-buried city. Treasures keep emerging from darkness into the light. It can also create the optical illusion of a rough gravel road running back into a cave entrance. Lilliputians? Moles? A case where misreading may prompt new creativity!