26 – 31 October 2026

Last weekend was a full moon, the Hunter’s Moon. Bright enough to take note, both at its fullest and for several days later. There were storms too, wind hurling trees and water. Homes without power and more of Brighton’s West Pier gone. When I was a teenager we used to have parties on the beach opposite the West Pier. A friend took photographs inside it for his degree show final project – even then, it was a dangerous mission (and illegal). Now there is no inside, and it’s gone from a full skeleton to a skull. — Last Sunday I went to Kentwell Hall in Suffolk, a moated Tudor house. “The earliest recorded reference to Kentwell is in the Domesday Book of 1086, which states that the manor of Kentwell (along with six others) formed part of the property of Frodo, brother of Abbot Baldwin, of the Abbey of St. Edmund’s.” For Frodo, then. It was a bright day but windy, and the thrashing trees sounded even more like the sea. The house is wonderful, privately owned now but open to the public in…