Blast from the past - April 2007

Today has been a very strange day, starting with dashing out of the house to catch a train, and then realising the ticket would be £62 or more, and changing my plans. (Lesson: think ahead, book ahead - or travel by coach.)

Which left me at Paddington at 8.05 am, wondering how to fill the day, and reluctant to simply return home immediately as it was rush hour.

I went on to Hammersmith, wandered down King Street to Chiswick, had a coffee and a conversation with the blind man who was pointed to my small table as one of the only seats available, then went on to the nearest bookshop to browse for at least an hour, reading bits of Jan Morris's Spain, first published during the Franco years (I lived in Menorca in 1972-3) and ...uh-oh... buying How to Read Water, which I've been eyeing for a while (it's got info on polynesian "maps"). On to Chiswick House for a spot of lunch and to make a start on reading water, well the book anyway, and home about 3, avoiding rush hour, to tackle sundry chores from the little list I compiled earlier in the week.

So it was a slightly "different" day: unexpected, and not really satisfying because of the abandoned plan lurking in the back of my mind. Another time this unsettling sort of thing happens is when an appointment suddenly falls through, and you have an hour or two of empty time - nothing particular to do, and you're in a place where it's hard to decide what you "should" be doing instead. And isn't that the problem - the "should"-ness of the everyday, the need to accomplish some planned thing ... today it was great to be able to just wander down a new-to-me street and look at shops and people and divert down sideroads and decide which coffee shop might be congenial - though you do take your chances there! - and simply to divest yourself of should-ness and do some open-ended "living" instead.

Right, that's an everyday everyday, so let's find something from 10 years ago, exactly 10 years ago. We'd been to Burnham Beeches - " An ancient woodland, with a moated area, Hardicanute's (Harding's) Moat, surrounding an ancient settlement (12th-14th century)" -

We went back a few more times, in later years and different seasons - a lovely place for short walks, but there was no cafe....

Ten years ago we went to car boot sales regularly - finding strange pictures and amusing objects for the "conservatory collection" and photographing some of the interesting ones that had to be left behind, like this bit of wildlife -

(via)

2007 was the first year of CQ's journal quilt project - I liked the A4 size and spent Sunday afternoons making extra pieces, including some intensely machine-stitched ones based on kilims -

(via)

This year I'm very far behind with journal quilts, and the deadline for posting the first batch is about a week away. Will it happen?? At least the sewing machine is now accessible, so there's a chance.

Poetry Thursday - The Library of T-shirts by joanne burns

(this is a red herring) (via)

This is a poem best heard, with revelation succeeding revelation as the story unrolls, no chance to flick your eyes ahead...

Listen here. It takes three minutes. I hope you'll find it "poignant, perspicacious, [and] pithy" - it made me smile and, here and there, quietly guffaw.

You can read the poem on that page too.


joanne burns was born in 1945 in Sydney, Australia. After graduating from the University of Sydney in 1966 she taught English in London and New South Wales. She writes monologues and short fiction, exploring the boundaries of genre in her work and frequently writes in prose poem form. Surreal and ironic, her work observes and comments on contemporary society and mores. burns is the author of a dozen collections of poetry, one of which is called an illustrated history of diaries.

(and this is another red herring) (via)

Wednesday workday

This is a sight rarely seen at 136A -

The ironing board is out, and the table has no cloth on it. In fact the "new" spotty tablecloth is rolled up, sprayed to moisten, awaiting the touch of the iron after its first washing left it very very creased (jolly dots but cheap fabric).

I have a little list for things that need doing before I leave the house in 2-1/2 hours. It's good to have a deadline!

Not on the list is a clean sweep of the desk area. Its lovely emptiness has been rather compromised by having to move books around and possibly also by the purchase of as many of the about-to-be-discontinued A6 Rymans sketchbooks as I can get my hands on, kept in plain sight till I can find a safe place for them.

The bit of tape on the left wall indicates how low the intended bookcase will come - to match the case on the other side of the room, it will come to forehead height. The original plan was for the desk to be right against the wall, ie 20cm in, once those books have been removed. There's got to be a rethink on this - it will be psychologically uncomfortable to sit with a solid shelf 15cm from my forehead.

The "final" layout of the room is still in flux. Everything is getting very solidly and beautifully built, but even with trying to build in flexibility, there hasn't been enough planning - or time to reconsider some of the basics. For instance, when deciding on a shelf width of 20cm under the window (for plants), I didn't consider how big - or rather, small - the drawers underneath it would be, or how it would affect the desk drawers, once the desk was back in its former position.

The little inconveniences become great grievances, and it's hard to know where to start to unravel those.

Today, though, the sun is shining, and I have a little list. The tablecloth will be moistened by now and hopefully those deep creases will flatten out somewhat. The laundry is churning away, there is soup to be made from parsnips roasted last night and - let me check the list - it's high time to send the final meter readings to the utility companies. Where, though, is that list?

Drawing Tuesday - RAF Museum

There's something for everyone at the RAF Museum -

 Even Spitfire biscuits -

I'm fascinated by the Lancaster bomber - 

and started at the tail end, from which the four giant engines looked very tiny, and the vertical stabilisers at each end of the tail looked very large indeed. They hid the ends of the wings. The back wheel had been lifted up on a plinth, which made the view even stranger - but at least the four rear guns are visible -

Then it was on to look closely at some parts of the plane, and finally a tiny sketch of the wing in relation to the tail -

And now the rest -

Janet K's Messerschmidt BF109E

Sue's Spitfire propellor and Fiat CR42 Falco

Judith used a toned ground first, then went on to use watersoluble pencil on cartridge paper

Jo's view of the Lancaster bomber, and the big bomb displayed underneath it

From a banner about which there was no information, Najlaa added the hedgehogs
and eagle in gold pen - clearly visible at certain angles, but not to my camera

Coloured pencils, specifically Inktense pencils, have been much in evidence lately. Janet K took inspiration from Carol's case and made this lovely pencil roll -

Puzzle of the week - same watersoluble pencil, different papers - 

Judith found that the "watercolour effect" that worked so well on the shoe she'd drawn at home was quite different in the larger sketchbook. We thought that it must be due to the paper, and not all cartridge papers are the same.

From the Ajanta Caves

A plate painted with geese round the rim, each one different, in the V&A's Lockwood Kipling exhibition (museum number 15.2855.1883; photo not available) that sent me looking for its inspiration - perhaps it was inspired by these geese in a ceiling panel -

The ceiling paintings (via) in the Ajanta Caves are amazing, but good photos of them are hard to find -

The caves, east of Mumbai, were chiselled out of the rock, starting as early as the 2nd century BC; they were abandoned by about 500AD, and rediscovered by English officers during a tiger hunt in 1819. They are over 60 miles from the nearest towns, and it wasn't until 1983 that Unesco declared them a world heritage site. A brief introduction to the painting is here.

And the wall sculptures are amazing. A good selection is here. 

This one caught my eye -

Conjoined quadruplets?

The stamp was issued in 1949 -

 (via)

Greetings from the easter bunny

At last

Last weekend, waiting for "imminent completion" of the house sale and for the last of the furniture to be collected via Freecycle, Tom and I sat in the sunshine enjoying a final coffee from one of the many local cafes - 

 In the back, the garden has been blooming in its usual way, but there was no time to cut the grass -

I still can't believe it's actually, finally, sold. Tony lived there for 39 years, and I spent quite a lot of the past 22 years there.

The keys were dropped off late Thursday afternoon.

One door closes -

And another door opens -

Left to my own devices?

The new computer arrived in a lovely box, nearly two weeks ago.

The new phone was a mothers' day present - it has "dash charging" (very fast!)

and the camera can be turned on quickly: you draw a circle on the dark screen and hey presto, it's a camera -

On the phone, I'm having issues with the "improved" keyboard, especially the autocorrect, and with minor things like being able to answer the phone before it cuts over to voicemail, but that's a matter of getting the In-House Tech Trainer to please patiently explain it again, slowly ... and having a chance to practice.

A major change is the way that photos taken on the phone appear, without downloading, in google photos, on my old computer as well as the new one.

Hurrah no cord needed for downloading: select a photo and use Shift+D to download - it takes a while to open in Photoshop, individually. Downloading a group puts them in a zip file and how to deal with that will take some investigating. Mr Google, when asked in words of few syllables, did not find a comprehensible answer to what I thought I was asking; perhaps the In-House Tech Trainer will be easier to communicate with, if I choose my words carefully and the moment of asking equally carefully.

My new computer is remarkably similar to the one the IHTT has had for some months, and is happy with. My new phone is identical to his. Strange, that? No: "if it works, do it some more" - my thinking is "it's going to be easier to get an explanation from someone who's used the product than to try to look it up and fluff about all the time"; his thinking might well be is along the lines of "this is an easy device to use, she'll be able to figure it out herself". In fact he said, "This is exactly like your old phone, Mum, except this button is on the other side and that button is here and the one that was there is a slider here"; and he also said, "what's really good is you draw a circle and that opens the camera right away" - which makes all the difference to me. Then we were into setting up fingerprint identification (which works about 33.3% of the time for me) and instructions like "just play with it, there's nothing you can break".

But I'm still using the old computer almost entirely - because it has Photoshop and because I still use the camera most of the time, rather than the phone; because I have a routine with downloading and processing the photos; because I have files set up (by month, and for a couple of dozen subjects) for organising the photos. Because the old computer still works (despite fears to the contrary) and it's still sitting on the desk, and I like the feel of the keyboard, and it's my friend ... whereas the new one is an interloper, to be dealt with warily, even though it aims to please and lets you stroke its [smooth, shiny, and rather repulsive] screen. The pen that you point and click, instead of the nice fat red mouse that's on the desk, attaches itself magnetically so as not to get lost. The new computer weighs about the same as my ipad and thus could travel easily ... and fits into my/our not-large backpack -

Hers ... and his ... "if it works, do it some more"

It's "just" a matter of getting used to doing the same old things in a slightly different way on a new device. It hurts at first! In a little while I hope to be wondering why there was a problem. But not just yet.

Blast from the past - 1993, 1994, 2009

Just before moving a stack of books in front of the mule chest (thereby preventing access to its drawer), so that Carpentry and Painting of nascent bookshelves can happen in situ, I wondered what might be in the drawer.

Oh! -

The small sketchbooks (they soon mount up)

I started keeping sketchbooks in 1987, so there are rather a lot of them, of various sizes (the larger ones live elsewhere). Picking a small one at random, I found memories from September 2009 -

Train journey to Scotland ...

...with a quick sketch at every stop

Drawn while in Huntley, north of Aberdeen

"Travel lines" on the return journey

 Other pages that speak to me across the years -

Saul Steinberg's drawings of shoes, from the exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery

On the left, a view from a pub ... on the right, something rather mysterious

Of course it was tempting to look at a few more of the notebooks ...

This was a most enjoyable, most informative course

As well as taking a few notes, I did a quick sketch from almost every slide

Towards the end of the course - figures from the murals

I had no idea that in June 1994 I would find myself in Greece with my sister-in-law: Athens, Nauplio, Poros - with excursions to Olympia and, oh bliss, to Mycenae by taxi, early in the freshness and quiet of the morning, before the tourist buses arrived. It was wonderful,  the Lion Gate and the view down to Argos and the sea, and the Bronze Age ruins, and the mystery of the disappearance of the civilisation ... my best bit was sloping off to the Treasury of Atreus, a beehive-shaped tomb (tholos) with a side chamber that was SO dark, so veryvery dark; and I was alone in it to take my time adjusting to the lack of light and "soaking up the atmosphere".

On that trip I had forgotten to pack my sketchbook and all I could find in the airport before our midnight flight was a book of blank postcards, which I filled during the week we were there.

Statues from Mycenaean times (1400-1250 BC)

The view from our room in Poros, on a fresh morning after it rained mightily