Tuesday 26 January 2021
MUŻA is the Maltese word for muse. It is also the name of the National Community Art Museum located in Valletta and housed in Auberge d'Italie - a late 16th century building that used to be the official residence of the Italian Knights of the Order of St John.
Paintings of Malta's iconic Grand Harbour depicted by William Turner, Edward Lear and Louis Ducros are also on display.
Esprit Barthet, Isabelle Borg and Emvin Cremona are among the Maltese artists whose work is exhibited at MUŻA. During a visit last September, I was really drawn to the vibrant colours and strong lines of Barthet's portrait of Mari tal-Bajd (Mari the Egg Seller). Barthet is amongst Malta's foremost portrait artists and I have also been lucky to see some of his works in private collections.
A few beautiful pieces of antique Maltese furniture that have exquisite workmanship are also on show at MUŻA.
MUŻA is a compact museum and a visit should not take longer than 2 to 3 hours but this is sufficient time for anyone with an interest in Art to learn a little bit about the artistic heritage of Malta.
MUŻA is open from Thursdays to Sundays, between 10:00hrs and 16:30hrs.
Tuesday 19 January 2021
This coming Thursday is my 50th birthday. There, I've said it. Somehow that makes it seem more real. Because I cannot quite believe that I am going to be half a century old. Of course, age is just a number, and all that. But still, I can't help feeling a little bit...well...old. I still remember my 25th birthday quite clearly. I was waiting for my friends outside a club called Coconut Grove, looking forward to an evening of fun, when I suddenly wondered what it would be like to be fifty years old. But I quickly brushed the thought away. There were another 25 years left until that day came around and it felt like a long, long way away. And as my friends turned up, with their bright, hopeful faces and without a wrinkle or a grey hair between the lot of us, it sure felt great to be young. We felt on top of the world and relegated any thoughts of middle-age to the backs of our minds. But here we are.
Canton (MO) 2011. This is probably one of my favourite photos ever.
So much has happened in the intervening years. At twenty-five our lives and careers were in front of us and everything seemed to be just ripe for the taking. Until, like Icarus, we flew too close to the sun and had to settle for lower ground. I suppose it's the story of all our lives. The bright mornings of youth are followed by the more mellow light of late afternoon and early evening. And so it goes. For everyone that lives.
But I don't want to get too melodramatic and carried away with my silly thoughts on youth and middle-age. Instead I thought it would be fun to share some highlights of each decade of my life and I hope it will be a way for you, my dear readers, to get to know me better. So here goes.
The seventies
The eighties
The nineties
The noughties
The in-betweenies and the teenies
Tuesday 12 January 2021
Just as I did last year, I thought it would be fun to share a few insights and statistics from the Goodreads Year In Books feature that is available for Goodreads members. During 2020 I pledged to read 25 books but, due to all the sheltering in place we had to do, I ended up reading 40 books. I will not make this post longer than necessary so I am not going to list all the books that I read here. Instead you can find them in the individual posts that I wrote approximately every 3 months and which you can find here, here, here and here. Now let's move on to to the fun stuff.
My year in books 2020
- Number of books read: 40
- Total number of pages read: 13 977
- Average book length: 349 pages
- Shortest book: Night by Elie Wiesel at 115 pages
- Longest book: Three Sisters, Three Queens by Philippa Gregory at 560 pages
- Most popular (i.e. most read): The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (which was shelved an incredible 5 367 820 times)
- Least popular: A Brief History of British King and Queens by Mike Ashley (shelved 915 times)
- Highest rated by Goodreads readers: The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah with a 4.40 star average
- My average rating for 2020: 3.7 stars (this is just a little higher from last year's 3.5 stars - I suppose I'm still difficult to please when compared to some other readers)
- The book that has been published longest: Tess Of The D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy in 1891
- The most recently published book: Eli's Promise by Ronald Balson in September 2020
- My 5 star reads: The Strawberry Thief by Joanne Harris, All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr and Night by Elie Wiesel
- My favourite book: All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. You may read my review here.
- The book I liked least: The House I Loved by Tatiana de Rosnay
- Most disappointing book: The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah (this book had such rave reviews and such a high rating on Goodreads that I expected it to be so much better than it was. It's a fast paced book and the plot is intriguing enough but some glaring errors and inconsistencies really marred my enjoyment of it).
- Best suited for a book club: History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund. There are so many layers to this strange book and so many themes for discussion that I think it's perfect for a book club.
- Number of non-fiction books: 10 (which is equivalent to 25% of the books I read. That's not bad, especially since it takes me much longer to finish a non-fiction book.)
- Month in which I read most: May (6 books)
- Month in which I read least: October (1 book)
Monday 4 January 2021
Here we are in the first week of January. The memories of another Christmas have been packed away and the dust has settled on another year. And what a year it's been! It has changed us, challenged us, frustrated us and really made us question the status quo. In some ways, it has forced us to seek new friendships, find different ways of doing things and connect with our inner selves.
In my first post of the year I would usually share the highlights of the previous year with you but there's nothing worth mentioning about 2020. It was a year of cancelled trips, thwarted plans, isolation and introspection. But it was not all bad. So many people had it so much worse. We kept our jobs and our sanity, our son was able to follow lessons from school and the quiet time meant that I was able to break my personal reading record.
2020: the positives
- we went from working from the office to working from home literally overnight
- our employers realised that work still got done even if we were not physically present in the office
- using MS Teams became a daily occurrence and we were able to see some our overseas colleagues 'face to face' for the first time
- a large number of local business finally bit the bullet and went online
- we focussed on the things that mattered
- with nowhere to go, I spent most of my vacation days at the beach and managed to get a nice tan for the first time in years
- I kept the promise I made to myself at the start of the year to decrease my time on Facebook. It was hard, at first, as I was quite addicted to it, but, by March I decreased the time I spent on it to 5 minutes twice daily. I am glad to say that I have stuck to that regimen.
My most read blogposts of 2020
Goals for 2021
- Improve my photography: after years of talking about it and trying to understand the intricacies of modern digital cameras by myself, my husband has enrolled me in in an online course taught by professional travel and street photographer Mark Hemmings. The course is called Digital Camera Mastery and it's perfect for beginners like me. Thankfully, you learn at your own pace so I won't have to face deadlines I can't keep.
- Get out of my comfort zone and do something new on the blog: now that I have upgraded my blog and am excited about blogging again, I would like to bring my readers something new and was thinking of occasionally interviewing fellow bloggers or interesting people I know in 'real life'. Watch this space.
- Continue making baby steps towards greener living: this is something very close to my heart and, although I made a few switches last year to reduce the amount of plastic that we use in our home, there is still a lot more that I can do.
- Worry less and live in the moment more: if 2020 has taught me one thing it's that life is unpredictable, that we cannot take what we have for granted and that we can usually get by with a little help from our family and friends. I'll try to keep that in mind in the coming months.