The Museum of Roof Tiles Comes Out Tops - Ritsurin Gardens Part 1

Ritsurin Gardens in Takamatsu, in Spring exceeds superlatives, but leaving aside, or really leaving outside, for a few moments, it has two charming folk craft museums, and the one for roof tiles and roof finials is a gem, or perhaps a perfect netsuke of a museum: small, elegant, composed, all of one piece. Roof finials in Japanese castles and period houses are frustratingly hard to view,  but here they are a cast of wonders at an elevation that ensures every detail can be scrutinised. There is no supersaturation by surfeit of finials, no tiring of tiles. Go, the goblins wont thank you but you will. 

 

The Wind in the Sea Glass Wave

Some days are sea glass days, the harbour delivers up these tumbled shards of lost and discarded bottles, mares and pots, some still showing their former state, others just the former shade.  Why is a brown ridged  corner of a perhaps a bottle of cough medicine, with its suggestion of laudanum, like a fragment of story you want to know?  Then the pieces can be set out,momentarily, to suggest, a wave of icy sea green, or grasses blowing in a field plowed and winnowed a hundred or more years ago. 
 

For Your Walls Only and the Gingko Gold Stamp

Idling about with my two new rubber stamps from Kyoto, there is a pleasing field of colour with text arcs decontextualised and bits of seaweed, an edge of reeds, all of which could be read as wallpaper in the repeat of pattern and pretty palette, though for my walls, one piece of A4 sized paper would be enough to do the trick.