Thursday, April 22, 2010

It will soon be payday

I may yet get that pink guitar.  Or a handyman to mend my windows, create a hatch for my loft, squirt nasty stuff into the woodworm bored holes and build me some monster shelves.

My garden I have finally tackled although it took some doing.   It's like a mini rainforest.   I had to wear gloves, skinny jeans tucked into thick socks, a jacket zipped to the top, a beanie pulled right down over my hair and glasses for long range warning - late last summer the garden was full of albino spiders, they didn't need to hold up any huge signs with 'prohibited' emblazoned across - it was clearly a no-go area.  Now though it looks lovely, not the least bit threatening and soon there will be a bank of bluebells* blossoming.  There is something that tries to grow that reminds me of a triffid so I stamp on it whenever I see it - it is tall and thin and dark red - yuk.  I've got two small raised beds that have who knows what growing in them, they are going to be attacked and used for something recognizable, possibly edible, in the near future, before the albinos colonize them - there are plenty of rocks elsewhere for them to hide under.   At the back, behind the bluebells*, there is a very steep incline - part of the cliff-face - with tall trees, one has a long, long stringy bit hanging all the way down to the ground and I expect Tarzan to come swinging and yodelling through on it any minute.   It's all rather mystifying.  *As indeed is the plant that isn't a bluebell at all.  After all that - it WAS a bluebell, or lots of them - mixed in with Comfrey, so now I know and next year can look back at this and be reminded.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Bedlam

Life has been rather mad, sad and bad recently and I have been reluctant to write anything longer than a very short tweet, however the habit of writing stuff does still continue even if it goes no further than myself.  

...

If it was possible to really articulate the utter insanity of some of the things we have to do and/or are faced with then I am sure it has been done by someone more qualified than me.  There are days when I think that life is totally mad.

Am about to travel back.  I don't mean back, as in time, but back to the location I travelled from just a few days ago.  Back and forth, it offers many possibilities and I am collecting hundreds of them each time.

Travelling through London now has become a terrible chore.   The sheer weight of people that flock towards you is gruesome.  Why are they always going in the opposite direction or is that just an illusion?

However, that is not what I was planning to tell here. 

Is it through comparison that we shrivel at times, inhibiting our progress, because we feel it might not measure up?

One of my favourite books of the moment is Iris Murdoch's 'The Black Prince'.  

A few years ago one of the areas I started to explore was the reduction of the photograph.   Until it almost didn't exist, of course it might be more successful to not take any but that didn't seem to be the point, or the point was lost.  And it wasn't just to do with erasure.   The lasting resonance of colour and sound are what interested me.

Today I found a bright white bri-nylon shirt, size 15 and a half, still in its packaging.  It's been lying there sealed in that cellophane wrapper for probably bang on 50 years, the cuffs untouched by human hands after they were clipped to the cardboard body around which the shirt was folded.   I wonder who bought it and why it was never worn (having experienced wearing a nylon shirt to school it's not really that much of a mystery) nor given to, say, a jumble sale 49 years ago?  Since regretting not getting the crimplene housecoat earlier this year I was not going to let the shirt get away and paid my money - a pound.