Christopher Howse

Shephard Taylor sketched this coal plate in Gerrard Street in 1863. The same pattern is still to be seen in Belgrave Road, London SW1. #opercula No 74

No enemy can overwhelm a cat with cuirass, greaves and helm; but when it comes to suits of mail, what do they do about his tail...?

@TheFrameBlogX Manxmail.

Two small houses in Faro, Portugal (with storks' nest in tall aerial behind). Two generations ago very many people in Portugal and Spain lived in small houses like these.

@policy_uk @cusackandrew There's one down the Botley Road, past the station earthworks.

@cusackandrew Make a perfect Waitrose

Soon to be a Mountain Warehouse.

@william_whyte Mole? Oh... Digging the dirt!

@richmondie @william_whyte The Mitford shield is: Argent a fess between three moles Sable.

Nancy Mitford

@GordonDComstock Ask Sir Keir.

@BeardyHowse Do cabinet makers still exist ?

Turning the corner from Broad Street to the Cornmarket in Oxford – William Baker House, once a cabinetmaker, rebuilt 1915, recently Waterstones, now empty.

@BeardyHowse Oxford city is a mess of broken pavements, empty shops, and tourist tat-peddlers. It’s shameful for one of the great European cities to be like this. Imagine Bruges or Milan in this state.

@JamesMunro5 J F Bentley intended a marble floor – as in St Andrew's chapel, with its inlaid fishes. Money was tight and the marble was bought instead by the architect of Norwich Union's Surrey House, Norwich.

@BeardyHowse With time and enough cash they could lay a mosaic floor there. That would look rather good. Anyway, just saying 😀

Westminster Cathedral has been moving clumps of chairs to varnish the floor and it produces a temporary sense of space.

An 1895 photo showing ships leaving the port of Swansea at high tide. There was a local pub named "The Cape Horner" until quite recently... Image: RD Rhodes (copy).

Nice early 19th-century inner porch to keep the draughts out. Church of Our Lady of Carmel, Faro, Portugal.

St Anthony of Padua (or of LISBON as he's known in these parts) – detail of an exuberant side altar in the church of Our Lady of Carmel in Faro, Portugal.

A cloudy day but magnolias blooming gloriously in Notting Hill.

@ArmandDAngour @BeardyHowse If you use unspaced em-dashes as standard dash (as at OUP), you need longer dashes, typically 2ems, in fiction to show interrupted speech. 2em dashes are also used (but should be spaced) to indicate when an entire word is missing, as in the parish of —— .

Churrascaria, Largo do Carmo, Faro, Portugal.

@XchekaSnowball Asperges syndrome.

@BeardyHowse Cock-a-stoup

Lovely lavabo: cold and cold taps on this Baroque basin in the sacristy of the church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Faro, Portugal.

@pjbryant It's: 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089

@BeardyHowse Blimey! Is the pavement one that wide!!

It's Pi Day every day at Faro, where, behind the immensely long old Custom House, they laid, in traditional stone calçada, Pi to – how many places? It ends in 89...