Sleep mode

This blog is taking a kip at the moment. Gem is estimated to wake up at the beginning of next week.

Bricks or trees

I have always wanted to live in a tree house, ever since I was a child. Yet now, when I am all grown up and able to choose freely, I go and buy a house made of bricks. A very solid house this new house is, not at all suited to hang from a tree.
There is something immensely monumental about bricks. The word itself belongs to the world of letters where phrases such as "down to earth" prosper best.
I know this little girl who dreams, right now, of a little tree shelter. She couldn't understand at all, why we are so excited about buying this house. "It's not like it's a tree house, you know! It's just a house," she sighed.
And she's right, of course. It is just a house. The third house. The one made of bricks. The one that cannot be broken into by the wolf.

Elevated hanging houses

This is Andrew Maynard's plan for the second generation Styx Valley shelter for Greenpeace activists. The Styx Valley Forest is a forest of old in Tasmania, with 400 years old trees that are now at average higher than 80 metres. The survival of the Styx forest is being threatened by the logging companies. A large group of activists formed human barricades to halt the entry of bulldozers and log trucks. The activists were to date living in the first generation elevated tree houses. The second generation tree houses developed by Andrew Maynard are hugely improved and enable a more permanent living.

Living with fairies

Welcome

There goes Terunobu

A 'takasugi-an' ('a teahouse [built] too high') is a tea-house on high stilts built by Terunobu Fujimori, a professor of architecture at the University of Tokyo (2004). Fujimori chose to implement his dream tree house on the garden of his father who, upon seeing his son's creation, sighed: 'There goes Terunobu, making something wacky again.'

The little dressmaker

The story is too valuable to be found online, too long to transcribe, too marvelous to miss. 'The Little Dressmaker', a little tale from a collection by Eleanor Farjeon titled 'The Little Bookroom' (1955).
'Seven maids with seven brooms,' wrote Farjeon in the preface, 'sweeping for half-a-hundred years, have never managed to clear my mind of its dust, of vanished tamples and flowers and kings, the curls of ladies, the sighing of poets, the laughter of lads and girls: those golden ones who, like chimney-sweepers, must all come to dust in some little bookroom or other - and sometimes, by luck, come again for a moment to light.'