My dad came to visit us this morning. It was great to see him, talk a bit, and eat lunch together. While he was here, he read to me a few pages from Pomerance’s The Horse Who Drank The Sky. Dad has a fine reading voice. He only read a page or two to me, but in a way it would have been quite hilarious if he had read a page or two more. I read on to myself after he had left, and got to a passage concerning the filming of Antonioni’s ‘Bow up’ (1966). As shown here, there’s quite a famous scene in the film set in a park – a park not a stones throw from where we were sitting. Blow up was filmed in Maryon park, and in fact pomerance describes walking there himself in 2005. I could have taken dad there myself, shown him the very scene described in the book. But, nevermind, that walk will have to wait; I’ll just have to go myself, if only to celebrate finishing a great book. Interestingly, though, pomerance describes a spooky aesthetic to these scenes: what he did not mention, possibly because he did not know, was that this was part of the ‘hanging wood’, where highwaymen were put to death in the nineteenth century. What a place to set a film about a murder. To those who do know, I personally think this fact adds another eery dimension to the scenes in question, and certainly complements what Pomerance was suggesting, although that might just be an historic irony.