A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard

Home › Glossary › Letter R

Ridgway

Ceramics
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Ridgway is a Staffordshire pottery family known for transferware and decorative earthenware.

Detailed Definition
In the category of ceramics, Ridgway produced accessible, patterned wares for Victorian homes. In poetry, it symbolizes everyday narrative and commercial abundance. Poets use Ridgway to depict social rituals and printed stories on plates. It adds relatable texture to domestic imagery.
Example
Example in poetry:
Ridgway — the Staffordshire pottery family whose factories produced blue-printed earthenware and fine porcelain through the nineteenth century — appears in poems about English domestic life as a reliable presence on the sideboard; A poem about a Victorian household's china might describe Ridgway's blue-printed patterns: "the Indian Tree, the Coaching Days, the Humphrey's Clock — a dozen different stories available for the price of a dinner service"; Ridgway's American market — the factory produced blue-printed earthenware depicting American scenes for the United States export trade — gives poems about transatlantic culture a ceramic example; In a poem about a provincial auction, Ridgway china is the most common lot: "twelve pieces of Ridgway, blue and white, pattern uncertain — the estimate modest, the bidding indifferent, the quality undeniable"; The Ridgway family's involvement in Staffordshire pottery over several generations gives poems about dynasty and craft continuity a specific example; A poem about a Sunday dinner in a Victorian rectory might describe the Ridgway service: "the tureen large enough for both clergy and occasion — the pattern a scene of coaching that bore no relation to anyone's life and was loved for that."
Additional Notes
The Ridgway family of potters — working at Cauldon Place and other Hanley and Shelton sites in Staffordshire from the late eighteenth century through the nineteenth — produced a very wide range of wares including blue-transfer-printed earthenware (particularly the celebrated "Cathedrals" and topographical series), stone china, and fine bone china. Ridgway blue transferware was extensively exported to America and remains widely collected as a record of the early nineteenth-century British and American landscape. For the student of ceramic history, the Ridgway name stands for the high quality and cultural ambition possible within the commercial pottery tradition.
Also Known As
Staffordshire pottery transferware English earthenware
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