The week in review

How can the days pass quickly and slowly at the same time? Current wisdom is that the increased speed of time passing as you get older is because you do fewer new things - it's the deviation from routine that seems to make time pass more slowly. So, find some new things to do!

But there's the matter of the comfort zone. I find that instead of doing something entirely different, I'm doing different (new?) aspects of the same thing. For instance, taking some new classes turns out to be another ceramics class where I'm continuing with the same-old technique, and the new art history class is hardly a departure from the aspects of art that I know I "like".

What's been out of my comfort zone recently is the extraordinary task of house clearing. In the final stages, it involves finding ways to get the remaining furniture, the bits no-one in the family wants, out of the house. Finding people to remove these items. So the past week has been a lot of posting on Freecycle and scheduling pick-up times, and being at the house for them, and over the weekend that rather wore me out - quite apart from all the bagging up of books and other small items to take to charity shops.

Sitting in empty rooms

Some of the rooms are not entirely empty

"Esmerelda" still needs a home

The final bags of books etc have now gone to charity shops (thanks, Ruth!)

The micro-sorting of files and folders involved a lot of decisions. It felt like sacrilege to have to throw away all this "family history", but really, what importance is it now? It's had its use - let it go -

Record books from the teaching years

All those students, all those school trips

Tony kept Edith's job applications in 1978, shortly after they moved to the house

It was a brief pleasure to escape for a quick look at the Knitting & Stitching Show -

Delighted by the work of Louise Baldwin and Jeanette Appleton -
drawing and painting, but with stitch, fabric, fibre

Tempted by deliciously-coloured boiled wood (but resisted)

With still no news of a completion date ("don't worry" say the estate agent and the lawyer - hah!), I am having "time off", and saw two stimulating exhibitions after Tuesday's drawing session at Museum of Docklands. 

Trompe l'oeil building near Moorfields eye hospital,
on the way to Wharf Road galleries

Sculpting with cloth - Do Ho Suh at Victoria Miro (till 18 March)

Painting with fabric and thread - Tschabalala Self at Parasol Unit (till 12 March)

Those "new" courses - ceramics on Monday evenings for a few weeks -

Pots ready to dip

Medieval art and architecture - terminology, reading lists, etc

This talk took place in the previous week, but I wanted to add some pictures - 

"The minds of whales" - Philip Hoare and Luke Rendell
at the Forum for European Philosophy, LSE
(podcasts available here)

Drawings from their images, notes of what they said

1930s illustration to Moby Dick by Rockwell Kent (via)

Sculpture in the foyer 

CQ London met at London Quilters' exhibition at Swiss Cottage Library (on till ) and considered the works on display, of which these are a few -

Janet B's quilt comes into view as you come up the stairs

 There was an unhappy accident during the week -

... and I got locked out and had a nice long sit on the steps in the sunshine, contemplating the garden -

Tiny tulips

As well as Tuesday Drawing Day, there were lunches and coffees with friends, and a walk on Hampstead Heath -

Very muddy!

 More items went onto Freecycle -

Tomorrow, with any luck, the people who said they wanted them will actually come and pick them up!

All along I've been putting Vol 4 No 10 of the CQ newsletter together - with any luck it will leave for the printers on Monday. And is it asking for just too much luck ... or dare I even say ... with any luck the house sale will be finalised next week. (In any case, there is a Plan B.)

I am wondering what my new "normal" life might be like, with the house "gone" and, in the shorter term, the newsletter put to bed - possibly it will be a bit tooooo quiet? Oh no, there's the sorting out of the storeroom (former studio) in the flat, and those bookshelves being built, and such excitements.

When it comes to the succession of days, it's not that they're passing more quickly, or even more slowly - time doesn't keep itself, you have to keep checking up on it, like with a baby - making sure it's comfortable, feeding it (with "events"), recording its progress ...

While I was out...

... some minor rearrangements happened -

Shelves up, light moved

... £270 of wood was delivered ...

... and work started on the bookshelves -

Taking up the only available floor space

I was gallivanting at the war museum, discovering that the cushions in the coffee shop were made of those ribbons they hang medals from, sewn on to a backing -

and seeing the current exhibitions, especially Visions of War Above and Below (till 12 March), in which these were two of my favourites -

The stealth bomber absorbs radar and "creates a grid of control in its wake"

Reflections on war by an exile

Also closing soon (19 March) is Mahwish Chisty's work  -

Drone warfare

Inspired by traditional folk art

It's the first UK exhibition by this Pakistan-born, US-based artist. Her work combines silhouettes of military drones with decorative Pakistani folk art patterns to highlight the way in which the presence of foreign drones over Pakistan has become a feature of the physical, psychological and cultural environment of the country.

On the way home, art-grafitti on Stroud Green Road -

(What do Klee, Richter, Morris, Eames, Manzoni, and Thek have in common, then?)

Poetry Thursday - "Yours" by Leo Marks

The life that I have

Is all that I have

And the life that I have

Is yours.

The love that I have

Of the life that I have

Is yours and yours and yours.

A sleep I shall have

A rest I shall have

Yet death will be but a pause.

For the peace of my years

In the long green grass

Will be yours and yours and yours.

Of this poem, the radio programme on which I heard it ("Between the lines") said only:

In World War II, poems used to be sent to secret agents in Naxi-occupied Europe as ciphers for coded messages. One such poem was The Life That I Have by Leo Marks, himself an English cryptographer.

Wikipedia has more information:

In the war, famous poems were used to encrypt messages. This was, however, found to be insecure because enemy cryptanalysts were able to locate the original from published sources. Marks countered this by using his own written creations. The Life That I Have was an original poem composed on Christmas Eve 1943 and was originally written by Marks in memory of his girlfriend Ruth, who had just died in a plane crash in Canada. On 24 March 1944, the poem was issued by Marks to Violette Szabo, a French agent of Special Operations Executive who was eventually captured, tortured and killed by the Nazis. 

and

In 1998, towards the end of his life, Marks published a personal history of his experiences during the war, Between Silk and Cyanide, 

Leo Marks (1920-2001) was linked, as a child, to the bookshop on which the novel 84, Charing Cross Road is based. After the war he went on to write plays and films.

Act quickly if you'd like to hear more stories about information hidden "between the lines", including pop-up theatres in heavily-censored Russia and a theory about Shakespeare's Catholic connections -

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08dmjzb

Perhaps because of the high proportion of music, the programme is available on the BBC iPlayer for only 28 days. It airs early (6am!) on Sunday mornings.

Wordless Wednesday (not)

Calgary, 1979. The child is three years old; we have lived in a basement apartment in a 1950s house in Calgary for a year, and his father has another postdoc, in Halifax, so we'll be driving to Nova Scotia, which will take at least four days. The child will be as good as gold in the car, and will grow up to have a physique and beard just like his dad - who has luxuriant hair under the green hat that he's been wearing since Cambridge days. The child, it turns out, has hair genes from the other side of the family, but his hat phase is mercifully short.

The man will surprise everyone by getting a perm (it's the 70s!) and give up wearing the hat. His next postdoc will be in Oxford, but his wife and child will stay in Halifax while she studies to become a librarian. And that will change everything ... or had something changed already?


Thanks to Shauna, neighbour and friend in those Cambridge days, for sending the photos. She too was in Alberta at that time, living in Lethbridge - here we are together in that garden -

Drawing Tuesday - Horniman Museum

The natural history section was crowded with schoolchildren, young adults with learning difficulties and cameras, and even some tiny tots in checked gingham smocks. And it had skeletons -

Female and male gorilla

Their appendages

My drawing

The natural history section also had some vibrantly-coloured display cases, which Janet B's attire matched rather well -

 And come to think of it, the dragonfly (among her many drawings) would wear those colours too -

Najlaa's Great Northern Diver provoked discussion of Canadian loons; both are Gavia immer - 

 Janet K was in the music section, enjoying the colours and structure of an Ethiopian harp -

 Judith filled a spread with lively creatures -

Sue didn't stop after drawing the African mask but quickly went on to a very strange musical instrument -

Tip of the week

Janet K reports that "one line can make all the difference". I hope you can see the line she added to the right-hand page, about a quarter of the way up. "I wanted them to look monumental, so I added a horizon line." Its low position does the trick -

Domestic details

With The House looking emptier and emptier (only a few more bits of furniture still to Freecycle), and The Flat getting rather fuller with smaller things, I'm using the camera to "see" what's around me.

Photos are useful not just for documenting former possessions, but for making decisions on which objects go and which stay. It can be difficult ... everything has its story, its history, its past life. Our things go on to a future life of which we know nothing. (Along with the furniture leaving the house, the new owners get a potted history of its story, whether they're interested or not!)

Seeing our surroundings in 2D helps us be more objective about them, I think. We can't overlook the reality in the photo, the way we can ignore the objects that "have always been there". 

Everything has a story, often a long one, but I'll try to keep it brief.

New cup hooks for all 16 mugs on display. Spotty red is Tom's favourite, and I often
use the orange fox. The spotty sugar jar came from Hidden Art Hackney in
the 1990s, and I live in fear of its accidental demise. The dog pic came from
Tony, early on - he found it in a charity shop, and the water glasses just seem to
have gathered ... it's right by the sink

The cupboards are simply too full. Must get the little black cupboard back
on the wall, that's where the wineglasses usually live

The bowl population seems to have exploded, time for a rethink,
or at least a relocation

Many small items have migrated from The House - objects in
transition, waiting to nest in still-unfinished drawers

The two soup spoons from Morocco had been used to raise the light above
the dining table; the plants have come from friends, over the years

 Peace still reigns on the desk. It was "interesting" to come across a photo of it in 2006 (here).

One of the pen-jars - Tom rescued it from the dump - and our
Cardboard Clock, which we missed during its respite in "a safe place"

On the other side of the desk, fairy lights and a cactus candle-holder, also a
menagerie - the Message Mule, the Crumb-Brush Creature, and the Wireless Mouse

Seen from my window

It's Sunday, it's five minutes to 11 - Tesco is about to open - the crowds are gathering -

... more and more people ...

(Shame about the way the windows are covered with posters now - that barricaded feeling. We used to be able to see how busy it was and decide whether to pop across now, or wait till it was less busy.)

What Saturday brings

One of my current projects is to get back to "proper walking" - in hiking boots and the rest of the gear. This was put on hold after a swollen foot incident, which I blamed on the boots. After a rest of a good six weeks, the foot is perfectly ok and the boots are getting a second chance, worn for short walks which will soon get longer. 

Today I set off early along the Parkland Walk, heading for that "free" coffee at Crouch End Waitrose, and determined not to stop and take photos. But then there were these -

 ... part of the clearing to keep the walkway from getting overgrown. Obviously it had been neglected for some years, long enough for saplings to expand, only slightly restricted by the bars.

Parkland Walk attracts diligent and ever-changing grafitti, no need to photograph that really - unless it's a byproduct of something else. Here you can see several of those sapling-truncations -

 ... and while the camera was to hand, I needed to capture this considered piece of art -

Off the walk and heading down the hill, how delightful to see spring flowers ready to be distributed among the tables of a pub -

Another project continues to be the house clearance. It's almost done - the last few bits of furniture have gone onto Freecycle, fingers crossed they can be collected by Monday, which is also scheduled for the final run(s) to charity shops with the remaining bags of books. But when will the house change hands? We are waiting for the buyers to get the final details of their mortgage sorted out....

Much more has come from the house to my flat than I thought possible.

Just a few more things to squeeze in, once you get past the
carpentry tools in the hall

And what to do with it all, now? Bit by bit, bag by bag, it will get sorted, but not this week or this month ... maybe this year. Meanwhile my studio has become a storeroom, which is sort of ok. I'm not bursting to get on with any creative projects that need tools&materials gathering, or space for working on them.

Rare sighting of floor in studio/storeroom!

That doesn't mean that there's nothing happening in the art department. A short course of ceramics classes has started - some cloth pots are ready to dip, and more will be made as the weeks go by, and next week the art history course (medieval) starts. I'm looking forward to sitting and absorbing information. And seeing lovely slides.

The week offered two chances to sit&absorb&look. One was a talk by Martin Gayford about his (and David Hockney's) book, A History of Pictures. Pictures of all sorts, not just paintings - photos and movies too, going way back to the cave art that, in the flickering light of torches, must have seemed to be moving. The other, Philip Hoare (author of Leviathan) and biologist Luke Rendell on the minds of whales - how we are learning about their social groups. And not to forget the discussion on Sunday about the role of national libraries in a digital age (very well attended) - Roly Keating from the BL and Aviad Stollman from the National Library of Israel.

I popped in to the Spring Knitting & Stitching Show (hello Yvonne!), on the way to the house on Friday - it was the day that, thanks to a WWII bomb being discovered near the Overground, that convenient train wasn't running. Never mind, it was good to see my "On the Edge" piece on display. I had to wait quite a while for the crowds to clear to get a good shot -

My "plain beige" piece was the one that people hardly glanced at. And why would they? The exhibition had much more to offer, a lot of interesting, colourful, thoughtful work. Well done, CQ.

Next week the CQ newsletter/magazine goes to the printer, come hell or high water, and in between trips to the house and sorties to save my soul I've done some work on it at last - a great relief to have it underway, and thanks to its contributors, it's shaping up well.

Thanks to a job finishing early, the Domestic Carpenter has been designing my bookshelves.

 We went through a morning of "what would happen if..." and "did we try putting the sofa there" and "but where will DanHayes [large framed print] go?" and came up with this, roughly -

Start small - first part to be built will be the unit on the left, and we'll see how it looks and reassess. 

World Book Day

Yesterday was World Book Day. I read about it in the bath, catching up with the Review section of last week's Guardian, in a little piece by Francesca Simon, author of the Horrible Henry books - she wrote a book specially for the event, as did nine other authors. The books sell for £1, and millions of children can choose, at no cost, which of the books to take home. For some children, this is the first book of their very own.

She wrote, in the article, about an experience she had:

I once did an author event in a bookshop, and a child came up to me afterwards. “Are we allowed to touch the books?” he asked. I realised he’d never been inside a bookshop, and this strange environment was as alien to him as stepping into a betting shop would be for me. A book token is a passport: the 15m tokens that will be distributed among all school pupils in the UK and Ireland will enable them to go to any bookshop to choose a free book. For many, this will be their very first book – around 15% of UK children have no books of their own. It’s a shocking and depressing statistic.

It's an important initiative. And a chance to dress up as a character from a book!

The science department of Camborne Science and International Academy do Lord of the Rings (via)

Poetry Thursday - Miracle on St David's Day, by Gillian Clarke

Miracle on St David's Day

        They flash upon that inward eye
        Which is the bliss of solitude
                     - The Daffodils - William Worsworth

An afternoon yellow and open-mouthed
with daffodils. The sun treads the path
among cedars and enormous oaks.
It might be a country house, guests strolling,
the rumps of gardeners between nursery shrubs.

I am reading poetry to the insane.
An old woman, interrupting, offers
as many buckets of coals as I need.
A beautiful chestnut-haired boy listens
entirely absorbed. A schizophrenic

on a good day, they tell me later.
In a cage of first March sun a woman
sits not listening, not seeing, not feeling.
In her neat clothes, the woman is absent.
A big mild man is tenderly led

to his chair. He has never spoken.
His labourer's hands of his knees, he rocks
gently to the rhythyms of the poems.
I read to their prescences, absences,
to the big, dumb labouring man as he rocks.

He is suddenly standing, silently,
huge and mild, but I feel afraid. Like slow
movement of spring water or the first bird
of the year in the breaking darkness,
the labourer's voice recites The Daffodils .


The nurses are frozen, alert; the patients
seem to listen. He is hoarse but word-perfect.
Outside the daffodils are still as wax,
a thousand, ten thousand, their syllables
unspoken, their creams and yellows still.

Forty years ago, in a Valleys school,
the class recited poetry by rote.
Since the dumbness of misery fell
he has remembered there was a music
of speech and that once he had something to say.

When he's done, before the applause, we observe
the flowers' silence. A thrush sings
and the daffodils are aflame.

Reprinted from :-
Gillian Clarke:Collected Poems, Carcanet 1997
Originally from 'Letter from a far Country; 1982

(via)

Yesterday, 1st March, was St David's Day. Thanks to Maxine for bringing this poem to my attention - she sent this link (soundings issue 11 Spring 1999), which has this afterword:

This poem by Gillian Clarke demonstrates how there are ways other than professional encounters to communicate with patients, even or especially the 'insane'. I heard the poem by chance. It was indeed St David's Day and the poem was part of a radio broadcast to mark the event. I too was frozen, like the nurses, as I heard the description of the labourer dumbed by misery suddenly connecting with 'a music of speech' in the poetry of his childhood. We do not know whether this was a temporary or permanent reprieve, but we do know that an emotional connection was made through the power of poetry. I also wondered about why the man had been silenced for so long and, because it was Wales, I thought it might have been because of the dual deaths of his livelihood as a miner, and of his community. Pam Smith

Sparky still life

A lot of lightbulbs were found in a rarely-opened cupboard -

I took them home and laid them out...

 ... and during processing the photo revealed its subconscious self -

 Makes a jolly table centrepiece -