An old postcard, found in a second-hand book and now a framed reminder on my desk of the meaning of study and rest as idealised in a different age. Notice the lack of a laptop, and I don't think he's holding his mobile phone to his ear, and it's a book not a Kindle or an Ipad.
It's a photo in sepia of Isaac Walton's commemorative stain glass window at Winchester cathedral. The author of The Compleat Angler, he is one of the celebrated writers in English prose and his book a vade mecum of fishing folklore, human observation and the detailed descriptions of fish and fauna which in an earlier age substituted for David Attenborough.
I have no interest in sitting beneath trees in the country reading a book on fishing, beside still waters and green pastures - but just now and then, in our very different unrelenting world, I do have a hankering to rediscover the virtues of slowness, and to do so without feeling guilty:) Takes lots of practice though, and I suspect a I would need a temperament adjustment, slowness not being one of my more obvious characteristics.
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