Nulla dies sine linea

The artefact illustrated turned up during a clearing out session, being the badge removed from a school blazer and then preserved, in fact the blazer which BH wore to Teignmouth Grammar School more than forty years ago.

Once again impressed by the camera in the new mobile phone, perhaps helped along by reading the instructions and discovering that half pressing the button tells the thing to try a bit of focusing after which you fully press the button. It must also fiddle with exposure, this snap being taken in a poor, unnatural light. Certainly not organic.

The scroll at the bottom contains the motto, scarcely legible in the flesh (perhaps one should say in the cloth), so not a surprise that it is not legible here. But it is, it seems from Wikipedia, a quote from a painter called Apelles via a chap called Pliny and originally meant never a day without a line drawn - that is to say, an exhortation to practise one's drawing. I suppose now that line means a line of text in a book and it is an exhortation to learn. Having got this far I then wondered whether line and learn had the same root, but if they do it must be a good way back as line is Latin while learn is Old English. A line in Latin the sense of a piece of string, then a line in the sense of geometry, then a line in the sense of a line of type. By extension a line of poetry. So what with one thing and another, back to the mental doodlings of 12th September.

We then took an interest in the black cloth which appeared to be some kind of knitted material rather than woven, backed with what looked like a bit of fine linen to provide a proper foundation for the embroidered coat of arms. We think that the body of the jacket must have been made of something else but is no longer available for inspection.