Dear reader, I am just back from a 2-week trip to Australia, aware that I have not posted in a while -but my internet time was short and infrequent. En route I had to lay over in Frankfurt Germany for about 36 hours. I went prepared for it to be cold – and my goodness was it cold !, Much of the time it was on the verge of snowing and did so just a few minutes after an obliging fellow tourist took this snap of me on one of the bridges over the river Main (LL) All of a sudden we were almost in whiteout, well, blurred-out, anyway, and the hard little balls made soft crisp sounds as they landed on my jacket and the leaves (LR)

Despite the freezing cold I took my hands out of my gloves to snap these stele (UL & UR) in the grounds of the ethnological museum which was my destination. These fabulous. fascoinating objects are from, um, I think it was Ethiopia. I couldn’t read the German well enough to give you a clear accurate description, but to me they say something spiritual with some watching or guardian function. Although you may think otherwise, I really took the photo because of their incised markings: the same primal patterns of groups of lines and other small marks that appear in lots of other places and objects from around the world.

I enjoyed my full day there as the flight to Singapore didn’t leave until almost midnight, so I had a lot of walking around time, which was good in between long haul flights. An art museum in central Frankfurt was showing Moreau, Turner and Hugo and the rise of abstract impressionism, a very interesting exhibition which I thoroughly enjoyed. I visited several other museums and galleries, learned a bit about the ancient history of the city from the earliest times to the present, and found time to do a little unscheduled shopping there, but found nothing of note specifically textile related despite asking around.