Garden Joy

 

Outside my kitchen window this lovely climber has been gradually intermingling with the ivy. As it started to turn with the autumn I just thought what a lovely contrast they make, the dark evergreen and the pink tinged pale green that will soon be just bare stalks.

Also Han Kang won the Nobel Prize for Literature, that gives me joy too.

We had some family excitement yesterday as my son Lewis made the news after giving Angela Rayner a fork lift truck driving lesson.

Stay safe. Be kind. Enjoy the simple things.

Cold Crematorium

'Cold Crematorium' by József Debreczeni was first published in 1950 and has only recently been translated into English. It describes the author's period of internment in Auschwitz by the Nazis. I am finding it hard to get to grips with writing about the book given the current world situation. I think (but what do I know) that understanding the depths of the Holocaust can't help but inform your understanding of current events. The Nazis tried to erase the Jewish people. The life that Debreczeni describes encapsulates absolutely Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil'. This article in the New Statesman describes how survivor testimony was not admitted at the Nuremberg Trials because they thought people would not be believed. 

As a young healthy man he was sent to a work camp, as were a constant stream of people, who were quite simply worked to death. He describes the day to day struggle for survival and how accustomed they become to death and suffering. Although the worst of the guards are talked about it is the life amongst the other prisoners that he gives in detail. The system undermined them still further from common or garden dehumanisation by setting them in a hierarchy, giving some privileges over others, control over food distribution and the allocation of sleeping space, designed presumably to create hatred amongst the inmates, to divide them from each other. It sometimes seems amazing that the people are alive at all. The cold and hunger and random violence. The book is very immediate, immersing the reader in the situation. It feels very detailed, and you wonder as his powers of recall, because how could he have possibly written anything down at the time. It is the individual incidents that make it so graphic. 

"'Schon [Nice]. Who is your best worker?'

'46514!' the kapo exclaims without hesitation.

46514 is unarguably the group's best worker. Back home he'd been a logger. Twenty-six years old. Nothing of his round sunburnt peasant's face suggests Jewish ancestry. Not at all the spindly, bookish type more familiar back home. |That variation that even Jews themselves hardly recognise. In the Carpathian Mountains, there's a healthier degree of occupational diversity among the Jews. Those doing work do it for the sake of the work itself. It's obvious from the way they hold their tools.

46514 is a premium häftling. Premiums are rare; to be recognised as one is a big deal. A premium gets a weekly bonus with two marks, which he can trade in for special jam and makhorka cigarettes.

46514 jumps out of the pit and snatches off his cap.

Half Arm casts him a glance but asks him nothing, and then steps to the side. He reaches lazily for his holster, pulls out the revolver, and presses the barrel to 46514's temple. A shot rings out. The man, who'd been standing straight as a flagpole, now teeters before crashing facedown into the pit.

The lifeless body plops with a dull thud. The officer with the Leica puts the camera into a pocket, while Half Arm smiles silently, absentmindedly.

'A little demonstration,' he says. 'An example of how even the best Jew must croak.'

Kitsch. Horror is always kitsch Even when it's real." (p.98-99)

They live for cigarettes and news of the war. They are moved to other camps, sometimes volunteering to do so since people reason that it can't possibly get worse. It is towards the end of the war so the Nazis are withdrawing the prisoners, food gets more scarce and typhoid runs rampant, until the point where they awake one day to find themselves free, the guards having abandoned them in the night fearing the advancing Soviet army. 

"Night in Dornhau

Six hundred men are pressed tightly against each other. Every third one is writhing, whimpering, groaning, gurgling, raving. Every third person is dying.

Some are whining for doctors deliriously, stubbornly - more to themselves than to anyone else. The thin tailor above me thinks he is at home, talking to his little boy. By tomorrow, he won't be around, knitting caps in exchange for soup from well-heeled bigwigs.

Above me, under me, all around me, this army of people ready to depart are crying out for God and water. Eyes turning glassy are soaking in the darkness of Hades or the foolish pinkness of heaven. Death is stepping between the bunks like a learned, confident young professor feeling quite at home.

The wailing is contagious. Like dogs howling at the moon, all six hundred of us are aimlessly whining away. A choir of raving flagellants.

The icy granary with the broken windows resounds with eerie voices and shrieks of despair, horror, and fear.

This concert of outcasts lasts until the wee small hours of the morning, when the first grey filters in. Then, silence. Without warning, without reason, just as the uproar started earlier.

Two hundred die in one block that night.

As daybreak takes hold, the bunks fall silent. The dead and the living alike doze off." (p.161)

There are moments of humanity where people offer some care to others but you sense that mostly each person is alone in his own living hell. József himself lurches between fatalism and despair, and a burning desire to survive. Human beings are capable of such terrible things and you find yourself crushed by the soul destroying inhumanity and reminded of the urgency of the message that the Holocaust must not be forgotten. 

Post script: Thinking more about what I was trying to articulate about my response to the book. The recent resurgence of far right political parties and ideology across Europe (including Germany) and coming out of the mouth of a US presidential candidate, is enough to make any normal person's blood run cold, but for Jewish people must evoke a very visceral level of threat. What is currently happening in Israel/Gaza/Lebanon is clearly not a solution to the security of the region, when all of the shooting is over the human beings still have to live alongside each other. I am left wondering what we can do. My heart cries out for the people dying on both sides, whose lives are being destroyed by ideologues.

A History Lesson

For National Poetry Day, which I would have missed had Bookshop not emailed to try and sell me poetry books, I give you Miroslav Holub (from the Czech):

A History Lesson

Kings
like golden gleams
made with a mirror on the wall.

A non-alcoholic pope,
knights without arms,
arms without knights.

The dead like so many strained noodles,
a pound of those fallen in battle,
two ounces of those who were executed,

several heads
like so many potatoes
shaken into a cap - 

Geniuses conceived
by the mating of dates
are soaked up by the ceiling into infinity

to the sound of tinny thunder,
the rumble of bellies,
shouts of hurrah,

empire rise and fall
at a wave of the pointer,
the blood is blotted out - 

And only one small boy,
who was not paying the least attention,
will ask
between two victorious wars:

and did it hurt in those days too?

(Taken from 'The Rattle Bag' edited by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney)

Highbrow and Lowbrow

'Winter' by Ali Smith is one of a quartet of 'seasonal' novels. Art is going home for Christmas, but has broken up with his girlfriend Charlotte and does not want to admit this to his mother, so he meets a random girl and offers to pay her to pretend to be Charlotte. It made me think somewhat of 'The Accidental', where a young woman invades a family holiday, really gets under their skin and causes all sorts of bother. It is quite an interesting literary device to put an outsider into a family situation to disrupt it, they are free to say and observe things without the tensions that exists between people who have a long history. I enjoyed reading it but it didn't leave a strong impression on me as when I picked it up to review I could not recall anything much about it.

I'm not sure if this is how you get to be taken seriously as a writer but putting weird stuff in your novels certain seems to work for some people. Here is Sophia (Art's mother) interacting with the disembodied head that has been floating around with her for a few days (no explanation given) (and the notion of a 'handkerchief drawer' is so wonderful, I know my parents had one in their dressing table):

"Then it had given her a singular thank-you glance, after which it removed, as if by magic, all expression whatsoever from itself, dimmed into a colourless statue like the blank-eyes face of an ancient stone Roman.

More of its hair had come loose on the pillow in a semicircle around it. She'd gathered up the hair and put it in its substantial clumps on the bedside table. The newly visible top of the head's head, which the hair had covered till now, was very pale, fragile looking as a child's fontanelle. So she'd got up and found a large handkerchief at the back of the handkerchief drawer. She wrapped it round the top of the head in case the head was cold without its hair. She got back into bed and put the bedside light out. The near-bald head had smiled at her and glowed in the dark in its new turban as if lit by Rembrandt, as if Rembrandt had painted the child Simone de Beauvoir." (p.108)

'The Husbands' by Holly Gramazio (who naturally has her own website) was surreal in a totally different way. Lauren does not seem that interested in being married, but her attic has other ideas. She comes home from her friend's hen night to find a 'husband' in her flat. All the photographic evidence on her phone seems to indicate that she is indeed married to this person. But when he pops up into the attic a different husband comes back down. And so it goes... Men arrive, if she doesn't like the look of them, or they have an annoying habit, she sends them back up. Then she gets attached to one ... only for him to go hunting for wedding photographs and get swapped out. As opposed to the notion of there being one special person out there who will complete you, the book is trying to make the case for the idea that actually there are endless people who you could potentially fall in love with and spend your life with, but I ended up feeling that the magic attic dehumanised the potential husbands, and Lauren treated them as disposable. In some alternate universes other people's lives were different too and she was often more upset about that than the person who she was with. So, then she goes in search of the one who got away (the men all exist in real life and have their own lives apart from her), only to be rebuffed. Then ... one of them breaks his ankle climbing down the ladder and she is stuck with him. Not only that he is not keen on going back up. Lauren is forced to take drastic action. I read this book in about three sittings and enjoyed it immensely, it was so silly. 

"She wants Carter back.

She sends Pete away and gets a husband with weird-shaped elbows. The one after that has an accent that reminds her of Carter's and that seems like a bad idea. Then a man who is red-eyed and hung over and attempting to resolve the issue by having two different beers at once. Then a man who is maybe ten years older than her and the house is too clean, honestly, and the shelves are empty, where are her books? Where's the little cactus pot she made with Elena?

She is aware she's being unfair.

Okay. She tells the too clean husband that she's going out for a walk, and heads away from the railway station and up the hill to the park, where she dodges happy families and dog-walkers, heads to the lake, looks at ducks. She's vague on the details of duck mating but she knows it's unpleasant and involves a corkscrew-shapes penis, so arguably things could be worse.

Under a tree, out of the drizzle, she tries to talk herself out of feeling bad: she barely knew Carter, this isn't a divorce, this is like a third date with someone who never replies to your message. But even if she didn't know him well they were still married, the third date became a thirtieth and a three hundredth, became a life." (p.110)

Stay safe. Be kind. Read for fun sometimes.

More Japan ...

Tish and Jun have had a packed fortnight of doing a lot of very Japanese stuff ... and some not necessarily very Japanese stuff.

Below ... the 'Otter Café':

Meeting Kanoshizu, who is a Maiko or trainee Geisha, to learn about that tradition:

Becoming Samurai:

Of course, the Studio Ghibli museum:

And at last, some capybara, in their own onsen:

A disturbing encounter with an ostrich (at the zoo not just wandering randomly):

And, more worryingly, walking a suspension bridge with an a typhoon on the way:

Looking down from the Tokyo Skytree:

Monkey had to go back to work yesterday and Tish and Jun come home tomorrow.

It has been an amazing adventure for them.

Books in Devon

Claire and I did a leisurely charity shop trawl round Paignton this morning and I came home with a lovely little haul, mainly people I had not previously encountered apart from Julian Barnes, having watched the film of 'Sense of an Ending' on Netflix the other day.

'The Magician's Assistant' by Ann Patchett was picked up from the pile the day Dunk and I went to Edinburgh, because I knew he wouldn't particularly want to chat on the train for four hours (there and back again), and what a delight it was. Sabine is in love with Parsifal, who is in love with Phan. Sadly both Phan and Parsifal are dead, and the bereft Sabine finds that what she thought she knew about her magician's life was not the case after all. Enter the fray, Dot, Kitty and Bertie, Parsifal's mother and sisters, and they draw Sabine into their lives and their world, from sunny Los Angeles to snowy Nebraska. They bond over their devotion to him and their shared devastation. She thinks she is going to try and understand better this man she spent her life with, but finds that she comes to love these women who welcome her into their family without reserve. The story is punctuated by a series of vivid dreams that Sabine has, which brings to life the love and life she shared with Parsifal and Phan.

So many scenes I could quote. Here she is arriving in Nebraska:

"Even when the plane was parked, Sabine still felt the ground moving. A man in blue zip-up coveralls held her hand as she walked down the movable staircase into the snow. Immediately snow blew down the neck of her sweater and dampened the bare skin of her wrists between the ends of her coat sleeves and the tops of her gloves. Snow filled her pockets and pressed into her mouth. She had to stop and lean against the jumpsuited man.

'Not much farther,' he yelled over the wind, and put his hand beneath her arm in a professional manner. As they walked across the tarmac, sheets of snow pooled and vanished beneath her feet. It was like walking on something boiling. In every direction the snow was banked into high hills. Plows worked on either side, nervously rearranging what could not be made right. the flat, smooth place they were walking across now had been carved out like a swimming pool. The man worked hard to open the heavy metal door, and the wind made a sucking and then howling sound when it, with Sabine, was let into the warm building.

Dot and Bertie Fetters were waiting.

They looked different in Nebraska. Even at the first sight of them in the hallway, Sabine could tell they looked better here. Instead of seeming merely bulky, the heavy coats with toggles made them look confident, prepared. Sabine wondered if she too could buy high boots with rubber covering the feet. When they saw her, they called her name with a kind of joyful wonder that she had never heard in the word Sabine before. They threw themselves together onto her neck. What was lost is now found." (p.143-44)

And here, just thinking about Parsifal's childhood:

"In Dot Fetter's tiny ranch house, which in this blanket of heavy snow, and probably without it as well, appeared to be exactly like every other tiny ranch house in every direction, Sabine was finding a part of the husband she had lost. Guy the alter ego, the younger self. She imagined him flying down the street in the bracing cold, stomach to sled. She saw him at the kitchen table spooning through a bowl of cereal before school, his eyes fixed to the back of the box. Guy, who would some day be Parsifal, lying on the floor in the living room, reading library books on magic, frustrating books that never gave the information you needed to have. She imagined him popular, tight with the neighbourhood boys, good to his sister. At night she saw him asleep in the bed next to her bed, not the man he would be later on, the one that was gone, but this slighter, very present version of himself. She saw him in Kitty and Bertie, sometimes in Dot and How and Guy. She saw him at six years old and nine and twelve, because she needed to, every minute. Missing him was the dark and endless space she had stumbled into." (p.217-18)

And this, Sabine waking from a dream to find she has fallen asleep with Kitty:

"Sabine closed her eyes and tried to slip back. She had been dreaming, it had left a taste in her mouth. Her pillow was damp from crying. She wanted not to remember but to sleep, to be inside again. Where was she now? Nebraska. Parsifal's room. This should be the dream. The place she had been a minute ago was more familiar. She dug herself into the pillow and took the regular breaths of sleep, but there was no going back. Bit by bit the real world surrounded her. Dot and Bertie were home now, and the boys? She could hear their faint noise down the hall. Dot was laughing. They would wonder what she was doing sleeping in the middle of the day. Sabine felt guilty whenever she was caught napping. Not like Parsifal, who flaunted his naps, stretching out over the sofa in the middle of the day, the ringer on the phone turned off in anticipation of a long voyage. Sabine shifted her weight slightly, rolled forward on her hip, and that was when she noticed the warm breathing on the back of her neck, the weight of an arm across her waist. She was in Parsifal's bed. She had fallen asleep. Kitty had been telling a story, another horrible story. Kitty was in the twin bed, both of them on their sides, Sabine facing the window, Kitty facing Sabine. Of course she could hear her now, the nearly undetectable sounds another person makes when she is at her quietest. She could feel the warmth on her back, warm enough to fall asleep without a blanket. Though she would have been embarrassed if Kitty was awake, for this one minute she was grateful for the luxury of having someone to lie next to. Sabine tried to remember the last time she had slept with another person." (247-48)

As you might imagine, I loved this book. It was so full of warmth and love. It was like a blanket on a cold evening. 

The jasmine and the passion flower are still looking lovely at Claire's house. 

Stay safe. Be kind. Relish the end of the summer.

Meanwhile in Japan ...

 

After months of planning and antici...pation, Tish and Jun made it to Japan yesterday. They have two weeks to explore the country with Monkey Sensei. 

So they jumped right in and had fugu (puffer fish sushi) for dinner:

Then ice cream for breakfast on the Shinkansen to Hiroshima:

I commented on the silly faces so of course they now pull silly faces in all the photos.

I wish I was there too, but now I only have seven months to plan and anticipate till it's my trip.

Stay safe. Be kind. Enjoy other people's holidays vicariously.

Peregrinations

I have spent the last couple of weeks trying to get a grip on my house: books to the charity shop, lots of stuff in the bin, and quite a few things sold on Vinted. All it seems to have achieved is a few gaps on the bookcase. I will plod on with it.

'Four Seasons in Japan' by Nick Bradley was a graduation gift for Monkey sensei, that I don't think she read. It is a story within a story, of Flo, working as a translator in Japan, who finds a book on the subway and decides to make it her next project, and has to track down the somewhat elusive author for permission. It is also the book she is translating, a quiet tale of the relationship between a young man and his grandmother, both struggling to make sense of the death of his father. Lovely book, read it for some peace of mind.

I read about Kathleen Jamie a few weeks ago when she was featured on the 'Poem of the Week' in the Guardian and the library had 'Findings', which I have hugely enjoyed. It is a selection of writings about her observations and experiences of the natural world, all happening as part of her everyday life of caring for her family and ill husband. I particularly liked the one concerning Skara Brae on Orkney, having visited it myself about 40 years ago, but here is a little bit about peregrine falcons:

"By Easter Sunday, the run of hot weather had broken. A bitter east wind blew from the sea. As is the custom, we hard-boiled some eggs and the youngsters painted them and we went to the park to roll the eggs downhill. Few people were there, though, and we soon dispersed. I saw the male peregrine in the afternoon being pursued around the cliff by a single crow. The crow veered off and went to sit in a tree, but it must have left the peregrine piqued, because he circled alone two or three times more, stooping as though in scorn at whatever happened to be flying beneath him. A jackdaw jinked away with its life. Then the peregrine flew up and away over the hill, and was silhouetted for a long moment against the misty sunlight. An hour later he was back. On another ledge, six feet below, was what looked like a burst cushion pigeon-pink-grey." (p.37)

'The Authority Gap' by Mary Ann Sieghart was another of those books that is so depressing because you get laid out for you the systematically misogynistic structures and attitudes that exist within society that we are literally just scratching the surface of. I sometimes wonder if the suffragettes had any idea what they started by simply asking for the vote, and if they knew how long the road was going to be. Here we are 100 years later ... and the fight goes on. I skim read some of it, both because it was depressing, but also because it got a bit repetitive; seemingly endless examples of women being demeaned, belittled and ignored, even when occupying the most senior positions in business and government. Plucked at random, the experience of Laura Bates (Everyday Sexism Project):

"Bates was once invited to give a presentation to a group of MPs, who were meeting specifically to deal with gender equality, and therefore, you might assume would all take the issue seriously. 'I'd been invited to give evidence to them because of the fact that I had curated the largest dataset of its kind that had ever existed of women's experiences of gender inequality. I spoke at length about various forms of harassment, of abuse and sexual violence. And at the end of this meeting, an MP in a very important position came up to me and quietly told me that he felt that I was very "glass half empty", that I had a very negative approach. And that if I really wanted to make change, I should think carefully about ways to make my message more appealing to men. And he felt I sounded quite haranguing.'" (p.56-7)

We all so enjoyed 'Convenience Store Woman' (my goodness, six years ago!) so I found 'Earthlings' by Sayaka Murata ... and kind of wish I hadn't. Monkey Sensei did warn me that it was going to be weird. That was quite an understatement. I am not sure if I would even recommend it. Natsuke, a seemingly ordinary girl,  comes to believe she is an alien, but that was not the worrying part. The horrible treatment by her family and abuse by a teacher was much more distressing. The close bond she forms with her cousin on the annual family trip to her grandparents turns her life upside down, and even the means by which she copes with societies demands of her can't save her. It's like watching a car crash in slow motion.

"My town is a factory for the production of human babies. People live in nests packed closely together. It's just like the silkworm room at Granny's house. The nests are lined up neatly in rows, and each contains a breeding pair of male and female humans and their babies. I live in one of these nests too." (p.35)

Let me end with a poem by Kathleen Jamie (taken from 'Other Ways to Leave the Room', a small collection containing poems by Kathleen, Don Patterson and Nick Laird)

The Green Woman

Until we're restored to ourselves

by weaning, the skin jade

only where it's hidden

under jewellery, the areoles still tinged,

- there's a word for women like us

It's suggestive of the lush

ditch, or even an ordeal,

- as though we'd risen,

tied to a ducking-stool,

gasping, weed-smeared, proven.

Stay safe. Be kind. Take your overdue books back to the library.

Slugs and Worms

I have not been out in the garden much this summer. My neglect makes me sad. I did a big chunk of sorting out on Sunday, removing all the dead stuff and moving things around. Then I treated myself to some late summer flowering things from Rosybee. While cutting back shoots on the bay tree stump that refuses to die I came across a couple of slugs having a fun time ... yes, the interweb says this is what slug sex looks like. We've previously had bee sex and beetle sex on this blog so why not.

Having emptied the garden waste compost at the weekend I decided to tackle the worm house.

This is the worms' magic trick ... now you see them ...

 ... now you don't ...

Birds-eye view of the yard for 2024 (previous view 2021 and 2022)

Stay safe. Be kind. Water those pots, even if it's raining.

Outline

Another book where I am very late to the party; Rachel Cusk's 'Outline' was published a decade ago. I picked it up in Waterstones recently because of one of those employee recommendations that they have around the shelves, thinking I should find out what the fuss was all about. I was not disappointed. It is one of those books that sneaks up on you quietly. Nothing much happens in it, just a woman having conversations with people, but you are left with the feeling of having understood her. It is an intense period of observation, like a fly-on-the-wall documentary. 

Here she is having dinner with a friend, but they are discussing a previous dinner, so you get this sense of history to their relationship:

"And indeed, being so immersed, I did not notice that Paniotis went away from our encounter feeling that his life had been a failure, any more than a mountain notices a climber that loses his footing and falls down one of its ravines. Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forges one's own destiny by what one doesn't notice or feel compassion for; that what you don't know and don't make the effort to understand will become the very thing that you are forced into knowledge of. While I spoke Paniotis looked more and more aghast. That is a terrible notion that only a Catholic could have come up with, he said. Though I can't say there aren't quite a few people I would like to see punished in so delightfully cruel a fashion. Those are the ones, however, who are certain to remain unenlightened by suffering to the end of their days. They make sure of it, he said, picking up the menu and turning with a lifted finger to the waiter, an immense grey-bearded man clad in a long white apron, who all this time had been entrenched so absolutely motionless in the corner of the almost empty room that I hadn't noticed him." (p.94)

Later in the conversation they are joined by another woman, Angeliki, who becomes the focus of the conversation. I was particularly taken by this passage about women's shoes, the comments about being disbarred from 'womanhood' because of what they represent:

" 'I myself,' she continued extending her silvered foot out from beneath the table, 'developed a weakness for delicate shoes when we returned to Greece. Perhaps it was because I had begun to see the virtues of standing still. And for the character in my novel, shoes like these represent something forbidden. They are the sort of shoes she would never wear. Moreover, when she does see women wearing such shoes, it makes her feel sad. She has believed, until now, that this was because she found such women pitiful, but in fact when she things about it honestly it is because she feels excluded or disbarred from the concept of womanhood the shoes represent. She feels, almost, as if she isn't a woman at all. But is she isn't a woman, what is she?'" (p.113-4)

It had something existential about it. The book it makes me think of is Albert Camus' 'The Outsider', that I read for French A level soooo long ago. In talking it's as if the woman is watching herself, examining her own reactions. It's hard to pin down why I liked the book, but when I finished it I decided I was looking forward to the next part of the trilogy to see where she takes the 'narrative' and the 'character'.

The Summer Exhibition

Some years ago Dunk and I watched a programme, probably on Sky Arts, about the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. The notion that anybody can submit a work of art for this exhibition is enchanting. Some 30,000 people do every year. The 'List of Works' tells me there are 1710 works in the exhibition. Of course many are works by members of the Royal Academy, but they are mixed up on the walls and you can't tell professional from amateur until you consult the listing in the book (the price is usually a clue). I was so pleased that it wasn't at all crowded, plenty of room to stand around looking at the art and not feel like you were in anyone's way. Some rooms were more sparse but many were like this, pictures all the way up, somewhat above a good height to see them well, which must be disappointing for people with their work up the top. A huge range of styles and subject matter and formats. In the end my eyes felt tired ... just from looking so much.

Following are a few of the ones I particularly noticed. No sense of scale here, some were quite small, others huge. I forgot to note down the numbers when I photographed so cant necessarily tell you who they are.

This lovely dandelion. 'The great survivor' Kaye Maahs

Back gardens (no artist name):

'Orlando' by Georgia Green, a friend of Monkey's, one of two that she has in the exhibition.

'Homebase' Jock McFadyen, one of my favourites, but out of my price range.

In the first room, but not sure, possibly (because that's what it looks like) 'Spinney with startled birds' by Anthony Wishaw

'Across the River' Christopher Thompson

Have tea-towel ... make art. 

My favourite, already sold or this would have been the one. 'Strutting' Lisa Badau

And one of multiple cat paintings that I sent to the girls while I was looking around. Monkey said she loved it the best, and so did lots of other people judging by the dots (indicating print purchases)

We got lost on the way, but next time we'll know it's quicker to just take the tube to Green Park. The cake was a bit overpriced but the cafe wasn't crowded either. All round a most enjoyable visit. Next year beckons.

Stay safe. Be kind. See some art.

The Magic of Democracy

 

After the terrifying judgement by the United States Supreme Court last week the election results that arrived overnight bring a welcome feeling of relief. I was struck by the brief acceptance speech by Jeremy Hunt when he reflected on the peaceful transfer of power that has happened here compared to elsewhere in the world where violence can sometimes be a more common method. I feel proud to live in a country where we mark our crosses and accept the decision of the majority, and nobody cries foul. I can only hope that the same will be true in November when the Americans go to vote.

Stay safe. Be kind. Celebrate the wins.

30 Days Wild

 

I signed up for 30 Days Wild, and they emailed me every day, but did pretty much nothing wild the entire of June. I constantly wish I spent more time out of doors but then slump at home after work. Yesterday bought me some wild delight however when I came across this Swallow-tailed moth (Ourapteryx sambucaria) sitting by the postboxes at 17 Mauldeth Road. It was still there today, which was nice because I had forgotten all about it. Moths are a much under-appreciated species as they are often not a beautiful as butterflies but they are just as important as pollinators. 

Stay safe. Be kind. Appreciate the moths.

Ministry of Time

There's been a bit of buzz around 'The Ministry of Time' by Kaliane Bradley (who strangely doesn't have a website), and as soon as I searched I find that the BBC has already commissioned a drama. It will make excellent telly I'm sure. I like books that emerge from clever ideas, but sometimes come to feel that the clever idea becomes its defining feature, characters and style becoming secondary. Not true of this book as the people are all wonderfully drawn and the relationships between them strong and believable.

A secret government project has acquired a time door, through which they have bought several people from the past into the 21st century. It is never clear why these particular people have been chosen, nor what they are supposed to do now there are here. The current world is a disaster, falling into a climate change driven chaos. The focus of the story is Graham Gore, a member of an arctic expedition from 1847 and his unnamed 'bridge' (who tells the story), whose job is to help him acclimatise to the modern world. He is a real person from history (as opposed to an invented character) and the story is interspersed with extracts about the progress of the expedition, which consists of two trapped ships struggling to survive the winter, starving and freezing, and hoping for warmer weather to free them from the ice. 

This first quote from 1847; Gore has shot an Esquimaux, mistaking the shape of the person stooping in the snow for a seal when out hunting for food, and the tribe and his widow, come to the ship:

"'I'm sorry,' he says, in English, because he forgot to ask Crozier how to say it in her language. She looks at him.

He should get to his knees. Offer his throat to the edge of her palm. Or maybe he should offer her his hand, to replace the hands of her husband. Brief wildness beats at his skull. Perhaps, after a manhood with no final home, fixing makeshift families in multiple wardrooms, killing and pinning land to maps, God has cast him on the shore by this woman. Years of his finger on the trigger  to make sense of her expression.

'I'm sorry,' he repeats. She looks at him. After the group leave, taking their gifts, the stare will linger on his body. When he washes up in his cabin that night, he feels it slip under his shirt, growing into his skin." (p.185)

Of course an extended period of close companionship forges their relationship into something more intense; 

"I blinked at him, and then I looked up. It was true. Away from the grubby muslin of London's light pollution, in the fresh March night, the sky was full of stars. I turned back to him. As I adjusted to the dark, I could see he was staring upwards.

'I can't manage it exactly without a sextant,' he said. 'But I want to be able to orientate myself.'

'So that, in the event of London flooding when the ice caps melt, you can sail to safer waters?'

'So that I will know where I was when I met you.'

I has always thought of joy as a shouting, flamboyant thing, that tossed breath into the sky like a ball. Instead it robbed me of my speech and my air. I was pinned in place by joy and I didn't know what to do.

'Come here,' he said softly, and pulled me into his arms.

I pressed my face against his neck. My body sparked and I couldn't move it, except to lean into him. I was filled with happiness, so enormous and terrifying it was as if I'd committed a crime to get it. No one had given me permission to feel this way, and I thought I might not be allowed it. He combed his fingers through my hair and I was frightened with happiness, harrowed by it. There was no way anyone could feel this much without also knowing they were going to lose it." (p.258-9)

People arrive from the future, with a weapon, and the refugees from the past are forced to flee for their lives. And things just got more complicated from there, and I'm still not sure what was going on. Will definitely be watching the series when it materialises.

Stay safe. Be kind. Be wary of that job that seem too good to be true.

Painting and Painting

Since we arrived in Moss Side five years ago the inside of the house has been well decorated. I have had my eye on the tatty entrance porch for quite some time and a week off with some sunshine was the perfect moment. The front door and front window have been re-caulked and the step painted brick red.

I used the blue that I bought for the yard to do the porch walls, and I am delighted by how the colour brightens the entrance, and dare I say it, the whole street. Several neighbours stopped by as I was working and commented how lovely it is.

Of course as soon as I painted the surrounding brickwork I realised I would have to do the whole front of the house as it showed up how faded the old paint was. Fortunately it had only been previously painted to the top of the downstairs window and so I could reach it all from the stepladder. 

Saturday I took myself to a Japanese Painting Workshop with Floating Art , spent an enjoyable couple of hours that flew by and was surprisingly satisfied with the results.

Stay safe. Be kind. Try something new.