About

Hi there. I’m a scientist by trade, artist and musician by hobby, Catholic by creed, British by passport, currently resident in central Europe and trying to learn one of the Slavic tongues.

This is mostly a sketch blog, with pictures of some kind posted every Sunday. Other comments, and reviews of various forms of kulturgut (books, comics, movies), may also make an appearance, often behind a cut if they’re too long. Popular posts are in a sidebar on the right (“popularity” defined by likes, rather than views).

I blogged previously at There Are Real Things and Notes from the Scriptorium.

The name of the blog is taken from the Czesław Miłosz poem, “Nonadaptation”.

I was not made to live anywhere except in Paradise.

Such, simply, was my genetic inadaptation.

Here on earth every prick of a rose-thorn changed into a wound.
whenever the sun hid behind a cloud, I grieved.

I pretended to work like others from morning to evening,
but I was absent, dedicated to invisible countries.

For solace I escaped to city parks, there to observe
and faithfully describe flowers and trees, but they changed,
under my hand, into the gardens of Paradise.

I have not loved a woman with my five senses.
I only wanted from her my sister, from before the banishment.

And I respected religion, for on this earth of pain
it was a funereal and a propitiatory song.

My blogging name is taken from Godescalc (or Gottschalk) of Orbaïs, 9th century predestinarian heretic. (My real name is more mundane.)