One of the best things about writing the book about Carroll is that I've met so many interesting people who are also Carroll fans. One of them is Susan Sanford, whose work I've mentioned before in this blog. Susan lives in California but was over in Britain for a while, and we met up last week at the Victoria and Albert Museum in Kensington. We visited the Medieval Gallery and the Costume court, and the funny thing is that I thought I'd visited both of them recently, yet both were entirely different from how I'd remembered.

I was glad that Susan and I finally had a chance to chat in real life rather than via a keyboard. She has an interesting and individual outlook on life, as you'd expect from her site. And, I was so pleased when she gave me one of her artworks to go on my wall.

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She had brought along some other originals of the pictures on her blog including a number of "doctored" Victorian cabinet photographs - beautiful objects in their own right. My favourite one of these was Deranged Domesticity. As a tangible (as opposed to a virtual object) he had a curiously compelling presence...

(I've just scrolled back through her site to find this, and am intrigued again by the consistently curious quality of her vision. )