SMILE

dragging heavy suitcases up the hill from the station with a grumpy tired 13 year-old my mind was way ahead of us and thinking about what to post here ...

but rather than thinking about the good holiday i've just had, i found myself thinking of all the work i have to trudge through this week.....


So I apologise to you, gentle blog folk, for very nearly posting something a bit moany and miserable. I'm ashamed of myself and have given myself a good talking to. How many times will i need to learn and relearn that whole living in the moment and being grateful and gracious and appreciating good things lesson?


It was a relaxing holiday which included baby-nuzzling, dog-wrangling, teenager-baiting, good eats, beach-combing, boot fairs and actually a surprising amount of sunshine between the rain and clouds and hail.


I am being proactive about the work anxiety and will go for an early swim tomorrow morning before I get started.

Furthermore, this SMILE will be my mottosloganimagefocus of the week.

Stop the war

Photographs by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad



You can see details and more of Ghaith Abdul-Ahad's photographs from Iraq here.





Augustine - writing about 1,500 years ago - says things which seem outrageous, outdated, ludicrous, bizarre and even damaging or dangerous. He also says things which suggest sharp insight into human nature and the operations of societies and governments, things which might have been written yesterday, and with specific reference to current global politics.

"The city of man...is a single community. The simple truth is that the bond of a common nature makes all human beings one. Nevertheless, each individual in this community is driven by his passions to pursue his private purposes. Unfortunately the objects of these purposes are such that no one person (let alone the world community) can ever be wholly satisfied. The reason for this is that nothing but Absolute Being can satisfy human nature. The result is that the city of men remains in a chronic condition of civil war in which those who win oppress those who lose." (Augustine, The City of God 18,2)

"Thus it is that all men want peace in their own society, and they all want it on their own terms. When they go to war, what they want is to make, if they can, their enemies their own, and to impose on them the victim's will, and call it a peace. Even when wicked men go to war they want peace for their own society and would like, if possible, to make all men members of that society, so that everyone and everything might be at the service of one head. O course, the only means such a conqueror knows is to have all men so fear or love him that they will accept the peace which he imposes. For, so does pride perversely copy God. Sinful man hates the equality of all men under God, and, as though he were God, loves to impose his own sovereignty upon his fellow man." (Augustine, The City of God 19,12)



.... plus ca change....





Blogswarm in protest against the war, more details here.

Break

We're away from home today for 10 days, visiting the in-laws - including new nephew. So I shall be in Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands - a curious mix of English seasideness, some vestiges of old Frenchness, small-island insularity, privileged wealth for some but ordinariness for more, good living and excellent pubs and restaurants, winding country roads, beaches but probably not the weather to make the most of them.....

I'm hoping for lots of sleeping, reading, walking, photography and will probably be popping into your blogs, but absent here.


Wishing you all a peaceful festival season

wordless weekend

i've been still feeling, of late, the lack of inspiration i talked about in my last post....

.... and had decided to do a Wordless Weekend post, with just one or two photos.
No words.




As soon as I resolved on this excellent plan, I began thinking not only about which photos to post, but also of Words to accompany them....


i imagined myself on Monday or Tuesday, in a consecutive post, writing in wry and witty tones, about how hard I had found it to resist adding words to my Wordless post....


... and then my mind began to fill with words




words about my weekend

about words
and about wordlessness

about weariness
and feeling worn-down, washed-out
weepy

about the wordiness of my week - wordiness at work, words hiding - or not revealing - hidden agendas

about wandering and walking
and wondering

weeding
(and weediness)

wine

about wild and wet (and wintry) weather
and wonderful waking wild wanton spring

wistfulness, wisteria

(and warmth! finally!!!!!!!!)


whither wordlessness?

winging its wishful wondering way around the world.





I would so love to also have something wise to say about weasels but.....



... anyone?

muse

wondering what to blog about (i have some ideas in mind but they don't really engage my enthusiasm)

i sat down to start writing, thinking i might say something about inspiration

as its something i seem to be lacking.


i think i hoped that thinking about inspiration might inspire me...


...nope, nothing here though.



I was reading something yesterday about John Milton who named a specific muse, Urania, as the heavenly source or inspiration of Paradise Lost. Urania, like a brooding dove with mighty wings.

Blake also claimed divine inspiration for his creativity and imagination - especially the angels who visited him.

I wonder if their poetry came easily to them, or if they had to work hard at it.
Is it less inspired if it takes a lot of effort?

"inspiration" suggests a sort of "gifting" - ideas, words, connections, images - simply there, available and waiting to be captured, written, expressed.

Which seems not too demanding a process - sounds appealing, a bit like unwrapping a gift.



Poor LG is finding school extremely uninspirational at the moment. Even in the subjects she most loves it doesn't seem that she is being encouraged to explore or express herself. Her Engish class began well this year with some classes on Shakespeare (Much Ado) which she thoroughly enjoyed. But now they are "doing" Jane Eyre.

Reading around the class.

I couldn't quite believe that english literature is still being "taught" like this. I was thoroughly put off reading Dickens at school by lessons where we took it in turns to read aloud from Great Expectations. I've not read him since, though he's on my "to read" list...

It seems to me that young people who enjoy reading will gain little from this tedious process, and those who don't aren't likely to have their minds changed.

I wonder who the muse of educational inspiration is? I think she's needed in England.

If something is "inspired" i think that is (partly) a way of saying something about its effect and impact, whatever its source.




I thought this was fairly inspired. (just click where it says PLAY)

Also this, which i saw last night.

and here is some Muse, one of LG's favourite groups, and i like them a lot too.


And these are inspired - vintage chocolate buttons.


Really good quality chocolate, in the shape of vintage buttons.
An inspired product and an inspired gift from my sister and nieces.

bananas and ducks

This morning I managed to get up, dressed and out of the house before I had time to think myself out of my plan to start swimming again.

Before I'd reached the end of the road the effort was justified by the discovery of this delightful local artefact:



Its one way to communicate, I suppose.

I was in the pool by 8.30, did more lengths than I'd told myself would justify the effort, and felt great. I always know that I'll find it energising and relaxing - so why do I put it off for so long?

I did then have to walk through town and shop with the haggard-googley goggle eyes. Which is the greater vanity: being too aware of the goggle eye effect, or not being able to bring myself to wear sunglasses to hide it, despite the bright sunshine, because its only just March for goodness sake?


And its exceedingly chilly, despite the sunshine. The ducks are all keeping their beaks well tucked in.





At least, I assume they do this for warmth?
Either that, or its some form of duck yoga.

Unless they too, of course, are trying to hide googley goggle eyes.

Auntie Queen

Today is my Auntie Queen's birthday.

She's the only person I've known with a leap year birthday.


I'm not sure how old she would have been this year - she was actually a great-Aunt and I suppose would have been well over a hundred (or i guess in her early 30's in leap years).



Her "real" name was Ivy, but only Uncle Stan ever called her that.



This is her wedding photo.


She was my (paternal) grandfather's sister and always seemed great fun - as was Stan, who was nearly as wide as he was tall (by the time I knew him) and who was very like Johnny Morris, who used to talk with the animals on childrens' TV.

When I was growing up they seemed fairly like other "old" people in some ways, but also somehow more fun and even a little racey. Queen was a wonderful dressmaker and always very stylish.

They had an almost nude art deco lady holding a globe lamp which I was slightly in awe of (which was stolen from my parents' house some time ago).

I remember my mother commenting on how rather shocking this lamp was. Neither side of the family was particularly bohemian or daring.

They played table tennis competitively, and cards, and laughed a lot. They were party people.

My parents had always got on well with them, they had a very good friendship and used to spend holidays together.

Just once my auntie showed me a little of the sadness she'd also had.

They had had a baby boy who died fairly young - at round about 18 months, I think. Mum said that Uncle Stan had then decided they shouldn't have any more children as he didn't want any risk of such suffering for her in the future. Queen had a difficult relationship with my Gran - her sister-in-law - who was not an "easy" person and who could be nasty and manipulative. On one family occasion we found ourselves sitting in my sister's bedroom - I have no recollection of how we came to be there, or what had led up to it - but she was in tears, and told me how my Gran would cross the street to avoid her when they were young, and how she would make comments to the effect that "people with no children of their own shouldn't try and steal other peoples' children."

I was young at the time - early teens perhaps - and can't remember what I said or did, but I wish I'd had the maturity and confidence to talk and listen more, to be a comfort and get to know her better. She never mentioned or alluded to any of this, ever again.

She was of a generation where such things weren't talked about.

I have a small blue beautifully knitted jacket and a rattle which Auntie Queen made for her son which was about all, I think, that she kept of him.

I've not thought of her for some time, but I'm in tears writing this - and there is more. I learned from my mum - after Auntie Queen had died (which was about 13 years ago) - that although she loved and was happy with Uncle Stan, he was not her first love. She'd fallen deeply in love with someone else, but he was considered unsuitable by her family.




This photo of her young man is, touchingly, far more faded than the matching photo of her - i've already considerably darkened it.

So, that relationship was forbidden and/or ended, and she met and married Stan. I wonder if he knew? I wonder what became of that first young suitor.

What heartache and regret she'd known.

I think Auntie Queen always had a soft spot for me: mainly because I've always been very like my mother who she loved so much; also because I was married for over 10 years before we had a child, and I then had 2 miscarriages before LG was born. I always thought that she must have wondered why we waited so long, though she would never have asked, and would have felt some affinity for me in my childlessness, while my brother and sister were producing beautiful bouncing babies.

Auntie Queen and Uncle Stan moved frequently and were ruthless about turning out things they didn't want or need any more. She sold most of her jewellery and mum persuaded her not to sell her exquisitely embroidered and lace-edged tablecloths only by saying, very directly, that she would love to have them and would be more than happy to pay her for them. Needless to say, Quntie Queen gave them to mum and I now have and treasure one of them.

But she kept the little jacket and rattle, and she gave me a couple of pieces of jewellery - a cross and chain which her father gave her for her 21st birthday, and an exquisitely delicate little pendant with seed pearls and tiny sapphires which she said was given to her by a "special friend".


they are all treasures.
Happy birthday Auntie Queen.

charlton

Neighbourhood tour continued:

This is the Assembly Halls (sort of community hall/function rooms, and used as a church on Sundays) in the "Village" - and I say "Village" to disabuse you of any notions of rusticity.

It would have been a village once, surrounded by fields and woodlands and no doubt considering itself some distance from the Big City, but now its a stretch of roads and shops, merging into all the other roads and shops and part of the greater London sprawl.



It has a church - the oldest parts of which are C17th -


and public toilets which have been closed for at least the last 15 years.


Newer houses and roads - some of them are post-war in-fill: filling in gaps left by bombed-out houses.


Some of them are more recent estates. Embellished as you can see in the style of 'south London eclectic'.

neighbourhood

Here i am on my way to work - see, we have had some sunshine lately



But on the whole its been pretty cold - bright, sharp sunshine with knife-edge shadows. The sort of weather I love on a good day, but weather that somehow requires energy.

This is my road, mid-late Victorian terrace houses


like most of the streets around my part of south london.
Nice details.


Our front door isn't half so lovely as this one and I have no idea who lives here at No. 135.


or here at No. 89, but I like the curly bits.


These houses - below - are just at the end of our road. They are much bigger (basements and attic rooms) and also older, I think.



I think these buildings below might also be older than our Victorian terraces but I have no evidence to support that assertion, nor any idea where it comes from. Its just an uninformed instinct on my part.

Anyway, I like them. The ground-floor level is a row of shops including an optician called "Ray Small Optometrist", which always makes me smile. I wonder if he is?


I pass all of these buildings frequently, on my journey to work - and i'm thinking of posting pictures of other aspects of my route before long in a "look - this is my neighbourhood" sort of way.

More often, recently, the buildings have been shrouded in fog, which sometimes lasts pretty much all day. Less demanding weather and better for concentrating just one or two footsteps ahead.

Blahs

Well
i've had a fit of the blahs lately, but here i am back again.

i've had a nastily compacted bottleneck of work to find my way through, with not really enough time for anything much.
i've had some other moody "Stuff" on my mind.
i've been missing sunshine and friends and my mother.
i've not blogged much at all for a couple of weeks, but it feels like much longer.

I have kept going and am nearly ready to splurge out in an exhausted heap.
I have mostly managed by just keeping on putting one foot in front of the other, not looking too far ahead, but pausing now and then to take notice of sparkly cobwebs and interesting shadows on the pavement.
I have felt out of touch with you and your blogs, but hope to catch up with you soon.
I have noticed and appreciated snowdrops, crocus, daffodils everywhere and green- and goldfinches in my garden.


some of which is sort of related to my last instalment on the exhibition I saw at the Victoria & Albert museum which I need to post in any case before it is completely past its sell-by date.



V & A Part V (the end)
"Better days" and "Why we dream" by Susan Collins.

Along with the glass etched blocks by Annie Cattrell, I think these were my favourite pieces in this exhibition.

An installation which looks like the remains of a decorating job is hardly new.
but...



the paint stains and splatters on the dust-sheet in the corner have been embroidered onto the cloth by hand in silver and gold threads. This is 'Better days', and it made me smile.



'Why we dream' is the table, which I loved and wanted to bring home and use every day.

The wood is inlaid with precious and semi-precious stone, shell, gems, seed pearls - even some diamonds i think - in replication of the kinds of patterns which might be spilled or splattered by painting or baking.



This "paint ring" is inlaid mother of pearl (or something similar) and the large splotch in the picture below is opal.



"I have always wanted my work to bring together two different opposing terms, like tidy and untidy, clean and dirty - to bring them together and see what happens. I think this ties into my feelings about craft. Craft in my mind, has that 'good' label and that's what draw me to it. To make something look bad, dirty or stained using these processes that are usually deemed to be good and worthy, to jumble up the two." Susan Collis




I just loved this, the way it brought together the precious and the ordinary, the extraordinary and the everyday, the random and accidental with the painstakingly crafted and carefully executed.

How wonderful would it be to have a table like this upon which to write or bake, to eat your breakfast?

730 days

blog-versary

two years today
and 250 posts (not counting this one)

here it all started
(blimus)

and i've travelled a long long way since then


and thats all i have to say about it just now.





oh, except sorry i'm not returning your visits much at the moment,
busy tired blah blah blah - not for too long i hope.

silent poem

Moments of Grace
by carol ann duffy


I dream through a familiar, wordless place.
The small boat of the day sails into morning,
past the postman with his modest haul, the full trees
which sound like the sea, leaving my hands free
to remember. Moments of grace. Like this.

Shaken by first love and kissing a wall. Of course.
The dried ink on the palms then ran suddenly wet,
a glistening blue name in each fist. I sit now
in a kind of sly trance, hoping I will not feel me
breathing too close across time. A face to the name. Gone.

The chimes of mothers calling in children
at dusk. Yes. It seems we live in those staggering years
only to haunt them; the vanishing scents
and colours of infinite hours like a melting balloon
in earlier hands. The boredom since.

Memory's caged bird won't fly. These days
we are adjectives, nouns. In moments of grace
we were verbs, the secret of poems, talented.
A thin skin lies on the language. We stare
deep in the eyes of strangers, look for the doing words.

Now I smell you peeling an orange in the other room.
Now I take off my watch, let a minute unravel
in my hands, listen and look as I do so,
and mild loss opens my lips like No.
Passing, you kiss the back of my neck. A blessing.


carol ann duffy
new selected poems 1984-2004, Picador 2004

lift and separate

I spent some happy hours on Saturday lifting and separating.

This has nothing to do with cross-your-heart bra's, or any other kind of foundation garment. I don't have the sort of dimensions which require any such cantileverage.

But on a day of clear blue skies and surprisingly warm sun I wandered out into the garden and found myself managing to forget about the worky workwork waiting inside.

I weeded and cut back and discovered a few spring-like shoots and moved around slabs of slate and peered from a distance at the domestic tunnels in the compost bin and found a couple of furtive little frogs under a brick and moved a rose and lifted and separated perennials.

and was happy happy for a few hours.

My approach to gardening tends towards the permissive and disorderly.
Randomness and a little bit of careful tending. But not too much of the latter.

Which made me think of this photo I took about a week ago in the park around the corner.


I couldn't really quite make out what they were trying to do, it looked like hoovering but I think they were just trying to blow the leaves into neater piles.

Which raises a number of questions, not least of which is the question "Why?"



and piles of leaves and landscapes and care and randomness lead rather nicely into Part IV of the V&A Exhibition I recently went to, a work called 'Topographies' by Anne Wilson.



topographies which consisted of various kinds of textile assembled dropped arranged constructed scattered onto a blank white surface...




This was an artwork which combined the (seemingly) random and hasty with the meticulously constructed - into a fabulous and fascinating environment of intricate detail and careful complexity, white negative space and inbetweenness.




There was also a great video of animated threads and pins dancing and weaving themselves into patterns mimicking those which were pinned to the board like frozen space spiders and miniature forests.



"In my art work the concept and content direct the use of material and process. I move from weaving to sound, to glass, to video and collaborative practices very liberally, rather than being defined by a specific way of making. More constant is my interest in material histories and issues that come out of the everyday as they relate to our human condition." Anne Wilson




There was something very Victorian and lavish about some of these lacy heaps but it was also very contemporary and minimal.



Just as I used to lie in bed as a child and imagine walking around upside down on the ceiling, I could imagine my miniature self picking a journey through, into and around this fantasy landscape.

V & A Part III

Naomi Filmer's piece, 'Ball Lenses" - i regret not getting a photo which shows all of this piece, which encloses casts of parts of the body in glass spheres. There were a couple more globes at the bottom containing bits of heel and toes.



In this piece, and in photos and video, she presents the ordinary for attention in a new way.



"The work I have made focuses on ordinary parts of the body that we never really celebrate, but actually there is nothing ordinary about them at all, they are unique to every individual. By isolating them, and making a spectacle out of them, they are made extraordinary." Naomi Filmer.




This piece really reminded me of the post I wrote about words, and about Suzette Elgin's book Native Tongue. In this book the power of language is explained like this:

"consider this, please: to make something 'appear' is called magic, is it not? Well ... when you look at another person, what do you see? Two arms, two legs, a face, an assortment of parts. Am I right? Now, there is a continuous surface of the body, a space that begins with the inside flesh of the fingers and continues over the palm of the hand and up the inner side of the arm to the bend of the elbow. Everyone has that surface; in fact, everyone has two of them.

I will name that the 'athad' of the person. Imagine the athad, please. See it clearly in your mind - perceive, here are my own two athads, the left one and the right one. And there are both of your athads, very nice ones.

Where there was no athad before, there will always be one now, because you will perceive the athad of every person you look at, as you perceive their nose and their hair. From now on. And I have made the athad appear ... now it exists.

Magic, you perceive, is not something mysterious, not something for witches and sorcerors ... magic is quite ordinary and simple. It is simply language.

And I look at you now, and I can say, as I could not say three minutes ago - 'What lovely athads you have, grandmother!' "

S. Elgin, Native Tongue, The Women's Press 1985, p.242.

I can't honestly claim that I have gone around noticing athads since I read this book, but I do think she is making a valid point about the naming and making visible of realities which have been unnoticed and invisible - and it casts another beguiling light for me on Filmer's work.