‘I picked this flower for you on the hilltop. /In the steep scarp that overhangs the tide…’*

NO TALKING SHOP, NO DAILY GRIND… (06/10). Paris, 2 rue Vivienne, Institut national d’histoire de l’art. The Oval Room, seat 82. Thursday 20 February 2014, fifty-three minutes past ten. The twenty-fourth poem of the fifth book of Victor Hugo’s  Contemplations, ‘I picked this flower’ was inspired by Juliette Drouet. It is said that the author even sent it to his beloved in an envelope. Accompanied, it seems – as I learnt from Google – by a dried flower whose roots, I hope, no longer smelt of ‘acrid effluent’, as in the poem. One question still divides Hugo’s fans : where the flower was picked. Jersey or the island of Sark? Choose your camp and… KEEP WALKING!  PS. April will see the start of a diary where I describe my difficult life as a maker of photo books!