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 ...