Photographs 1-5
Ireland, July 2004
Kilkenny Castle, Butler House, Clonmacnoise, Birr Castle, Butler House
Photograph 6
Nea Kameni, Thira
Greece, March 2004
"The really interesting question is always the particular one; but it's only the general one that it's possible to discuss .... Who are they to decide such subtle questions as the propriety of groping or the principles of an embrace? That, of course, is the business of the Society. Otherwise all that we have to guide us are the dimmest and most conventional traditions -- such as that, so long as one's in a conservatory, one may always kiss a woman, and, unless one's dying, after having won the battle of Trafalgar, one may never kiss a man.
....
But first, as to the facts. I have a vision of the world of persons in its ordinary intercourse as a plain with Gothic castles built upon it, far apart from one another, strongly fortified, with high walls and narrow windows and alarming moats. The inhabitants of one castle peer out from behind their fortifications, and from time to time catch sight of some dim motion in a neighbouring castle -- some fluttering behind a rampart, or a hand from an arrow-slit waving a handkerchief, or a flag waving from a tower, or once a year or once a lifetime -- an armed figure appearing on a parapet, with his vizor down. And that is all the castles ever get to know of each other.
....
No doubt there are outbursts, no doubt there is a continual subtle something or other of intimacy -- which makes a difference. But that only comes to the pulling down of a wall or two, and the widening of the windows; the dreadful castles themselves remain ... And then to think that those other castles I watch so eagerly have themselves perhaps -- almost certainly -- their excited enthusiastic inhabitants, bursting with wild curiosities and extraordinary communications -- and all so silent there, so dark and mysterious, behind their walls .... I see the advantages of the castle system -- even at its most rigid.
....
What a world, what a life, passing in these dimnesses! I see once more the bleak and barren plain, and the dreadful solitary castles, with their blinds drawn down."
20 May 1911
Cambridge University
Lytton Strachey
 by Meg Butler
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