Self-Winding · A Sort of Progression

I'll be up at 5.30 a.m. tomorrow to catch an early flight to Paris with my friend Sandra, we are staying until Friday evening. I found a 3 star hotel on the Rue des Ecoles, in Saint Germain, just across the Seine from Notre-Dame. It may not be luxury but, by gum, it's slap bang in the centre. I have an enormous list of things I want to see and S. has the same - but we may just cope with the heat by quite a lot of table sitting at pavement cafes and wandering in the evenings. I haven't been for twenty-five years, so there will be massive changes - whole areas developed, like Le Marais for example.

I have been musing about my very first visit when I was sixteen which has coloured my view of Paris ever after; Mum was somehow persuaded to let me go on my own because I stayed at one of my school's twin convents in the Rue de Vaugirard with its virtues of cheapness and safety. That was quite a big thing for a teenager to be allowed then. I had a wonderful time - totally innocent and dead lucky. The convent was deserted for the holidays, I had a whole dormitory to myself; there was a huge quiet garden - with a swing - right in the centre of town. I used to take my tartine and chocolat outside and swing in the cool morning air, happy, with the whole day ahead. The only downside was that the nuns economised by cutting last term's school exercise books into squares for the lavatory - very rough and the ink used to run disastrously.

I had a series of magic days. I suppose I must have been quite appealing then, pretending I was Juliette Greco, in black, with my ballet slipper shoes, long pony tail and carrying a Mauriac novel or somesuch, just for effect. Poseuse intellectuelle, how ridiculous now. Anyway, people would talk to me. Sitting in the Tuileries gardens I struck up a conversation with a South African and his small son. We looked round the Louvre together and he invited me for dinner at - wait for it - the Tour D'Argent, steak au poivre and wine. It turned out that he was a rich farmer (no troubling conscience arose back then), in Paris to deliver the boy to stay with his ex-wife. He behaved perfectly and I had an extraordinary evening.

On other days I met two sisters who took me shopping for (their) expensive clothes; a gallery owner gave me a miniscule Picasso etching of a dove; the nuns made a special goodbye dinner, escalope, in their refectory - with wine. My Lord, it was hard to come back to earth when the week was over. I guess I won't repeat the atmosphere this trip, youth is a great enhancer of cities. But I'll take a run at it for old times' sake.

I took this rather engaging photo of beach-hut folk at Mudeford, Dorset, it says something of English eccentricity. You might also have noticed a few photos on my Flickr site taken last week-end when we walked along the prom past the beach huts in Southwold. Attractive and desirable as both they and the resort are, this outlay on a bid for one of them seems a tad expensive. They do command amazingly high prices - Keith Richards bought one at West Wittering, Sussex for sixty grand a few years ago to the consternation of other tenants who foresaw, I seem to remember, some inappropriate behaviour.

Then there was a famous one that illustrated the folly of trendiness; 'When Charles Saatchi, the multi-millionaire champion of Britart, paid £75,000 for Tracey Emin's beach hut in 2000, the beach-front structures officially became art. Emin had bought her hut eight years earlier with the artist Sarah Lucas, at a fraction of Saatchi's price. The badly weathered blue hut was entitled The Last Thing I Said To You Is Don't Leave Me Here and was removed from its seafront home to become a permanent part of the Saatchi collection. Its disappearance came as a surprise to the owner of the hut next door who, in a neighbourly gesture, had shored up the building with a plank as it looked to be in danger of falling down. It vanished forever in 2004 when it was destroyed in a fire at an art warehouse......... Emin was distraught when she heard her work had gone. She said: "When I heard the beach hut had been destroyed I was like, my cosy little hut! I can't replace them."' (The Independent)

British huts are a small world on their own and have a dedicated website where I came across one for hire up on the North Norfolk coast that is rather tempting for a weekend; 'Table and chairs, parasol, deckchairs, windbreak, picnic basket and a good wine selection (Wines price listed) with cooler bag are all available when hiring.' Might think of a dayful of that.

I guess their appeal is something the same as that of the garden shed, an intimate space within a wider environment, totally dedicated to personal preference and convenience.

Sometimes a voice stops you dead; from the first moment you hear it you are hooked. The cause might be timbre, phrasing, mannerism, sweetness or roughness; whatever the quality, it fits the template of your emotional taste. It becomes a voice immediately recognizable among a hundred others. My special ones have been ridiculously diverse; Schwarzkopf, Aznavour, Scott Walker, Tom McRae, Tracy Chapman, Andreas Scholl, Matt Monro, Blossom Dearie, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Judy Collins, Bjork and Stipe. And Nick Drake, a lost boy, a withdrawn depressive, who died at the age of twenty-six in 1974. I have played to death seven songs of his that a friend recorded for me many years ago and I have just acquired several more. The voice was gentle, mellow, sometimes husky, he was a fine guitarist.

I became absorbed by a five part documentary about him on YouTube - "A Skin Too Few". It's journalism - the well-known actress sister, the classic upper middle class family returned from India, large country house, a beautiful, talented mother, privilege, Cambridge University, eccentricity, drugs, pain, overdose and, finally, the steady journey to a quiet post mortem fame.

It happens to me now, at start of spring,
As April's birthday counts the seasons of my life,
A new refraction makes my eye more keen,
Intensifying greeness to a greener green.

I touch the tissue leaves, moist from their buds,
Hanging like filo or small scarves of silk.
Their infancy is precious as their beauty's brief,
I marvel at the lemon light of each new leaf.

So spring becomes a gift, all springs distilled
Into an essence that informs pure joy.
I glimpse, through greeness and the filtered sun,
Impermanence, and strong desire to see another one.

At the British Museum recently we saw a strikingly original exhibit cum artwork that has stuck in my mind. In the past I've worked on the collection of oral history, in all I've taped and transcribed over forty interviews. What comes from such a range of individual testimonies is a broader social history of great immediacy & authenticity. I am endlessly fascinated by personal histories and first-hand accounts.



So "Cradle to Grave", which investigates the approach to healthcare in Britain by presenting the lifetime medical experience of one married couple, was really my thing. Enclosed in each of two huge lengths of fabric, in tiny pockets of filament, lie 14,000 drugs - the estimated average prescribed to every person in Britain in their lifetime.

Starting at one end, one walks along the unfolding history of the man and woman - immunisation, antibiotics and painkillers, contraceptives and childbirth medication, onward to HRT and to the eventual significant treatments for each of them in old age. The appropriate drugs are placed alongside each documented joy and trauma of their lives. The woman lives on well past her husband. The element that anchors the display to real life, its hook, is a series of carefully placed photographs of the two lives with family stories, funny moments, event and incident remembered by their children. The whole is a wonderful composite picture of an eighty year journey through healthcare in the welfare state.

Created by Pharmacopoeia - a GP, a textile artist & a video artist working together - it's a piece that's well worth seeing.

Paul-Albert Bartholomé, Artist/sculptor (1848-1928): Artist's Wife Reading.
There is a pleasing window painting of her too

I'm in the land of the living but not quite out of the woods, to mix a metaphor. Not to go into too much unwelcome detail, all symptoms point to a kidney stone at some point that either eluded the sieve or self-destructed. The Doc is not satisfied in view of some other problems, so I'm on my way to an ultrasound scan - possibly sometime before 2009? Always slightly worrying these waiting games; I feel much better but - as mum used to say -"I couldn't push a bus over". I did a couple of hours of gardening and that was more than enough, not like me at all. I have also been good about getting to bed early, not like me at all; as night is my usual time for blogging not much of that has been going on.

I have been re-reading my collection of Elizabeth Bowen, four novels and the short stories; when there's time, wallowing in an author for a couple of days is a memorable way of reading.

I'd found a lovely 1930's illustrated edition of "A Shropshire Lad" for my Ludlow friend's birthday, so on a spring afternoon I sped right through, moved by its simplicity. Oh, and I'd bought Gordon Ramsay's autobiog' at the charity shop for a pound and was quite compelled by his difficult journey. Watched The English Patient for the umpteenth time, Greta in Queen Christina and two of the Poliakoffs to round out a week of relative idleness. Mixed bag.

I bought the Evening Standard in London a couple of weeks ago, half of it was devoted to covering all the angles of the GLC election. It seems inconceivable that Boris could win in a sane world - well that's the answer. I fondly remember how, in the distant past, he handled a full frontal from Ian Hislop. As WS suggests - "Let me put in your mind what you have been ere this and what you are..." Indeed, but even so, one feels an annoying mixture of delight and disapproval, charm is a deadly weapon.

Because I looked a bit wan, I lathered myself all over with that Johnson's Holiday Sun stuff, whose effect was one of being tie-dyed with gravy browning and smelt repulsive - wan was better.

Had callers yesterday, bee-keepers bearing gift jars of marmalade, which I thought slightly funny. They arrived in full protective clothing having made a dash from a storm that caught them at their hives over the road. During coffee J asked me to look out some info' on two aircraft relevant to a memoir she is writing. I found the Tom Tit but have drawn a blank on the Side Serrand. While searching, I found this wonderful old film of the 1934 Mildenhall-Melbourne Air Race - such excruciating poshness of accent.

I'm getting used to Uggy the new cockerel, he's so utterly up himself that he's becoming a star turn - so I've forgiven the donor (secretly, as she has been plying me with placatory marzipan bars). Anyway, I won't strain your patience further, thanks for your messages, it's wonderful to know you come here still and take the time to comment, it really makes it worthwhile to apply fingers to keyboard.

I thought I knew what severe pain was until last Saturday when it became clear that there were whole new levels beyond. I'd been having a bit of a grumbling left side for a couple of days when suddenly a ball of sharp pointy knives started spinning in my lower abdomen. The spasm lasted for about 3 minutes then faded. "What on earth was that?" I, more or less, said, mopping my brow, relieved it was over - then it hit me again and continued to do so every 15 minutes for the next 20 hours.

I took paracetamol and spent a wakeful night. A couple of doctors looked me over on Sunday and Monday, sent off pee for test & forms for x-ray. Later, the pain became so acute that it was making me sick - ergo, no tablets would stay down. I finished up at the hospital where I sat for six hours without analgesia, occasionally creeping to the loo for yelling sessions; the agony went on until a kind soul in A & E jumped me past the (9 hour plus) queue to an emergency doctor elsewhere in the hospital. This divine creature whose feet I would willingly have kissed, gave me a prescription - suppositories that would stun a camel - and with them the pain subsided. He and my GP came up with same diagnosis - probably a kidney stone stuck in my pipework.

I am still on hold until my film comes back to prove that a stone it really is; the radiographer warned it might take up to ten days to get the results. Great. But now I am quite comfortable and have a very exciting new game to play - peeing through a sieve - every visit to the loo has become a treasure hunt.

Michael Sowa: A Summer Night's Melancholy