We visited Wrightwick (pron WIT-ick) Manor…

… twice yesterday, one to pay homage to the gardens and art collection, and again in the evening for an outdoor production of Love’s Labour’s Lost. First, here are some views of the gardens.

Now a few more of William De Morgan’s creatures.

Could this be the Ancient Mariner taking aim at a ornithologically questionable albatross? With a sea serpent ready to gobble up the carcass of the soon to be impaled avian?

Here we wee the hedghuahua, part hedgehog and part chihuahua.

Fortunately the species found it impossible to mate without severe abrasions, and died out after three generations.

First let’s graft wings onto a snake. Then let’s graft its tongue onto the tongue of a bulldog, and give the bulldog and eagle’s legs.

Perfectly adapted for survival in post Brexit Britain.

Two happy fish swimming in a sea of holly leaves.

What I don’t understand is, why does one of the fish have teeth, and the other does not? Are they two different species, or is this a case of sexual dimorphism. If so, is it the female with teeth or the male? Which brings us, I suppose to the De Morgan’s marriage. I’ve mentioned before that Evelyn De Morgan has a taste for painting nude women. She also appears to have had a thing for bondage.

Evelyn De Morgan’s favorite model was her lifelong servant, friend, and muse, Jane Hales. Evelyn is buried between Jane Hales and William De Morgan. It’s not clear which of them she was having sex with, but my guess is Jane got laid more often than William did.

One little detail that I had not noticed before is that Evelyn De Morgan’s painting of Cassandra…

… actually has real time coverage of the Greeks exiting the Trojan Horse.

Silly me, I always assumed they would put the trapdoor under the tail as nobody would look too closely at a horse’s arse.

Which brings me to Wrightwick’s fine collection of bedpans.

Collecting bedpans may seem strange to you, but remember this is the country that invented train spotting.

I could talk about the exhibition of art by Lizzie Siddal, the wife of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but quite frankly the bedpans were better. When she died of an laudanum overdose at the age of thirty two it was a terrible human tragedy, but no great loss to art. (That’s not entirely fair. She did model for a number of significant Pre-Raphaelite paintings, including Millais’ Ophelia which involved floating fully clothed in a bathtub and looking dead. Goodness knows how much laudanum that took.)

We had tickets for a show in Wrightwick’s grounds at 7pm. A heavy band of rain passed over an hour before the show, but by careful study of the weather radar, we were able to time our arrival after the rain had passed, and it stayed away for the rest of the evening. The clouds cleared away, leaving the night bitterly cold. At one point one of the cast wandered into the audience and borrowed the rain jacket I had been using to keep my legs warm.

I’m sure Shakespeare didn’t mention fashion disasters.

Of course, trying to do a play that contains four pairs of lovers, one lovers’ triangle, and sundry other comic characters with a cast of six involved a certain amount of creativity with the script and gender fluidity in the casting. The script suffered further when a noisy helicopter circled over the venue about four times, almost drowning out the cast, who were performing without any amplification. Every use of the words speak or say became shout, and We have had pastimes here and pleasant game became We have had pastimes here and helicopters. The Princess of France was laughing so hard she was having difficulty getting her lines out. One of these days I’m going to have to see Love’s Labour’s Lost as Shakespeare intended (without helicopters) but it probably won’t be as funny.