Self-Winding · A Sort of Progression

First the pleasure?.
As we went up to the coast in the brilliant golden morning, hares jumped the brown furrows, seagulls swirled above ploughs. Young birches flushed pink against the green forest belts, white blackthorn lace blossomed in dark copses.

Jean, and Katie the terrier, came with us, first to the market town for books and tenpenny junk; then to the cafe with its yellow oilcloth tables for good lentil soup in blue bowls and chunks of wicked buttery cake. Katie danced high on the sea-wall barking at geese grazing the mud flats. We three, pushed by the east wind, watched the water glittering. We came home slowly through the great deserted park of Holkham Hall, back to lazy tea, omelettes, kitchen-warmth and the unwrapping of books. Dozing sweetly until the telephone interrupts.

?Anna, my freezer?s broken down, there?s water all over the floor again.? The House Guest had gone home on Friday and all seemed secure. Ah, but no, still to come were six drawers crammed full of melted ice-cream, soggy sausages, squishy bags of gooseberries and seven joints of thawed meat. The whole mess topped with sheets of ice and an exploded packet of sweetcorn. Lovely jubbly! More jewels in the heavenly crown.

Jim Dine
Drawing is not an exercise.
Exercise is sitting on a stationary bicycle and going nowhere.
Drawing is being on a bicycle and taking a journey.
For me to succeed in drawing, I must go fast and arrive somewhere.
The quest is to keep the thing alive...
--Jim Dine, 2003

Words that are very germane to my recent fixation. My thanks to Marja-Leena Rathje for leading me deeper into the work of Jim Dine. The diversity of style and content in his drawing is amazing, as are the intriguing cocktails of mediums he sometimes uses - charcoal, graphite, watercolor, pastel, acrylic, shellac and screw heads and oil, acrylic and charcoal for example. I like especially his plants and flowers.

The other famous Potter
The plain, elderly woman with a celebrated life of creativity behind her is a type in which the British are particularly rich. Characters like Gertrude Jekyll, Margaret Rutherford and Agatha Christie are much treasured.
An ace example of the breed is the wonderful Beatrix Potter. I found on my shelves a lost cache of her books and sat on the hall floor reading Margaret Lane's biography, wondering at Potter's great drawing skill. Such was her delicacy of line and colour that she could bring off her anthropomorphic stories without crass sentimentality. I had good reason to feel grateful affection for her in July1978.

...Neglected Ones
After the mammoth task of springcleaning my books I have piles. Well, that's to say I found loads of books that I want to read again. Here's the current heap:

Elizabeth Bowen - The House in Paris and the rest of her currently forgotten novels and stories. What a fine head she had.

Lawrence Durrell - The Alexandria Quartet which might be just the bulky fodder to take to Cyprus. It starts in the right atmosphere - 'The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind'. I wish I owned it in this edition.

Martin Amis - Experience, followed by his Dad's very sharp Memoirs - a complex relationship seen from both sides. Honest, affecting writing: 'His (Kingsley's) death was very much like a death in a novel, in that it was the perfect mockery of his life. As he was dying his sense of humour, which was his essence, left him and so did the words. He was reduced to humourless tautologies and commonplaces. But he did the main thing, as Larkin says 'Being brave means not scaring others', and when he died he did achieve that.'

T. S. Eliot - complete poems but especially this just now

Alfred Noyes - Verse, much loved as a child.
' For he painted the things that matter,
The tints that we all pass by,
Like the little blue wreaths of incense
That the wild thyme breathes to the sky;
Or the first white bud of the hawthorn,
And the light in a blackbird's eye.

Beatrix Potter - of whom more in tomorrow's post.

Thaccent up T'Street
The contraction of the definite article in Lancashire/Yorkshire dialects is explained well here. It's a linguistic marker that produces endearing composite words.

Fred Elliott said tonight in Coronation St. "You've got a face like a heifer off to Thabbatoir." On a Paris jaunt with Audrey I remember him promising her a visit to Theiffel Tower.

To demonstrate the use of the two forms of contraction, John, a friend of mine from Manchester once quoted a teacher who shouted at a cheeky student - "Don't take T'piss you little turd or I'll boot you up Tharse".

"I couldn't believe what I was looking at,"
...... said Nansi Creer, 48, a housewife from Egham. Blimey, this is pure Monty Python - featuring a set of lithographs that I would pay good money not to see. The mental image alone gives me the shudders.

Exploitation
The mini-vans set off in the dark morning, taking workers to a day of cold, hard labour in the fields of Norfolk. Many of these are "the illegals" who are being used to supply cheap food derived from cheap agricultural labour.

"The Home Office also announced that a new Immigration Office would open in Swaffham, Norfolk, this week ? more than doubling the capacity of IS to tackle illegal working in the King?s Lynn area and northern East Anglia. "

At last the problem of the abuse of foreign workers in this locality is getting some attention. The gangmasters are a nasty bunch who profit hugely from the exploitation of "illegals". They rule by fear, keep workers in bad conditions and pay slave wages. This bill looks set fair to try to tackle them at last.

Confiteor

"In spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing."
Vincent van Gogh. Letter 136. 24 September 1880

Unlike Vincent I'm a quitter - a few bodged jobs and I chuck the pencil at the wall and walk away. I don't like to unpick mistakes. If at third attempt I don't succeed, then forget it. Mediocrity disgusts and there is no enjoyment in producing clumsy work. I have little application, no patience. Bad, bad, bad.

Finesse is earned by practice. Persistence is everything. I can draw a bit and improvement would come if I worked. I have a brand new sketchbook and this and this for immediate inspiration

PLEP inspired this self-examination via a link to the wonderful Van Gogh Gallery site.

Shall I, shan't I?
The village can now receive broadband; the Marquis de Bungalow down the drive has signed up for the AOL package and is nudging me to follow suit. After all his Speedy Gonzales showing-off I have said I'll certainly sign up if I can raise his rent. That quietened him. But I'm very, very tempted.

Porch
How wonderfully Swiss to have such supremely orderly clutter!

G n' B anyone?
- The Houseguest insisted on buying the groceries at Tesco - "I'll pay for this lot," she said "except for the gin and bleach."

- I've been signwriting for the kid next door - a huge double-sided board advertising his plants. It took me five hours to lay out and paint the huge lettering. Halfway down the second side I rubbed out a mistake and the whole blasted lot came off on the cloth. He'd glossed up a laminated board, any pressure removed the paint surface. He's relining it with MDF now, so I'll have at least two more hours sweating at it tomorrow. Large G n' B, please.

- The Houseguest is very deaf, also forgetful. I am repeating my every sentence, however trivial, at least three times. After ten minutes the topic is forgotten and recurs to be repeated three times. This happens ad nauseam. I have a tight band of iron around my head that has not been caused by gin or bleach.

MOBA
I guess I like bad art, a lot of this stuff is terrific, especially the portraits - I crave No.13. The annotations are wry and the provenance of some of the work is fascinating. Imagine donating your daughter's picture to a Museum of Bad Art!

Came the flood
The 'phone rang at 7.30 am, "Anna please come quick, I've got water pouring through from the loft." Unwashed we ran, me with my tee shirt on backwards, Gordon in yesterday's painting clothes.

The elderly lady was crying, looking aghast at a kitchen ceiling half collapsed, plaster all over the carpet and a large bulge full of water in the centre just about to burst. Mains were shut off, plumbers and insurers implored, tea and sympathy brought by neighbours.

The linen cupboard took a direct hit and every towel and sheet inside was soaked with yellow water. We are still putting loads through the washer tonight.

It will take weeks to put right. Formalities with assessors and builders start tomorrow. For tonight and for the forseeable we have a very tired old gal asleep in the spare room. At ten she said "I'll get off to bed now, I had such a nice evening" - (steak and mash, a shared jigsaw, Coronation Street and six cups of tea!) "It makes a real change to be among folks."

Walking with...
I went for a walk with a friend's ferret this afternoon, or rather a ferret/polecat cross. Blonde, fluffy and wearing a red leather harness (the ferret that is), she looked too exotic for an English wood. She went mad with freedom, digging long furrows in the soft leaf mould, rolling in it in ecstasy. I plucked up the courage to hold her, waiting for teeth, but she was loving. She was also very smelly.

Dusting
I find a face on the top shelf.

Charles Lamb
..... was tone deaf, disliked music. This was found among his unpublished papers:

Some cry up Haydn, some Mozart,
Just as the whim bites. For my part,
I do not care a farthing candle
For either of them, nor for Handel.

Boids
I have been very generous with the black sunflower seeds recently and got my reward today when about a dozen of these beautiful little fellows queued up on the hawthorn by the bird table. More females than males present, their brilliant yellow heads and stunning chestnut bodies are a pleasant sight.

The crow couple are coming in closer again, they have been about in the top of the oaks all winter. I chuck bread into the wood for them and they are down before I've reached the house. They'll build nearby and hatch another couple of nutters to keep us amused.

But we have too many of these larger predacious birds in the garden, jays and magpies. I read somewhere that even the greater spotted woodpecker pinches eggs. I rely on the "shoo" technique (open and shut a large black umbrella), but some of the locals add a 't' to that.

Mugshot
This is a very good picture of my nephew, looks like the Yashica is going to be a sound investment.

A dream of singing moths, radar chorus.
Moonlight eyes shining,
Wing-eyed flying silk, beige dust falling.
Moth songs, odes to flame,
Carry far on sighing summer winds.

Bits from Broadcasting

Openers
First lines quiz from the BBC. I did rather well, only dropped one.

Little Britain
An interesting interview with the most original comedy writers of the moment. David Walliams (Sic - was the registrar dyslexic?) is fantastic as the trannie.

Flo sings
The latest of the BBC Three Blobs sings with the appalling voice of Florence Foster Jenkins and a wonderfully funny thirty seconds it is. I've a disk with a track of her singing The Queen of the Night's Aria and sometimes sit guests down with a large gin before dinner, put it on and retire to the kitchen to eavesdrop on the effect - reactions vary between polite incredulity and shrieks of laughter. Have a listen here.

Win a PocketDAB
Just support and define your favourite word.

Starving
We are all worried here by this mystery. According to The Times the same thing is happening on the coasts in France and Denmark.

A piece of earth
I moved into my first house in deepest winter. Built on a hill in Norwood, its neglected garden descended in intriguing small terraces to the street below. I was frantic to get my hands on it after years of garden deprivation in flats.

There came a blizzard; chewed by impatience to make a start I just brushed away the snow and with my new trowel spent a morning banging and stabbing the hard earth - making my first mark on frozen London clay. This began my local reputation for eccentricity, later consolidated by gardening at 4 a.m. on summer mornings in my nightie and setting a large privet hedge on fire with a perched cigarette. My gardening life started there and has consumed me ever since.

Reading Alice Sebold's 'The Lovely Bones', an oddly consoling story of a murdered child speaking from heaven, I came upon this passage today about her young brother. The boy reclaims an old garden. It describes well what we do as we start - that is to allow passion to overtake sense, to transcend sensible advice with optimism.

"He didn't like what he read in books. He saw no reason to keep flowers separated from tomatoes and herbs segregated in a corner. He had slowly planted the whole garden with a spade, daily begging my father to bring him seeds and taking trips to the grocery with Grandman Lynne, where the price of his extreme helpfulness would be a quick stop at the greenhouse for a small flowering plant. He was now awaiting his tomatoes, his blue daisies, his petunias and pansies and salvias of all kinds.

But my grandmother was preparing for the moment when he realized that they couldn't grow all together and that some seeds would not come up at certain times, that the fine downy tendrils of a cucumber may be abruptly stopped by the thickening underground bosses of carrot and potato....but she was waiting patiently. She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything. At seventy she had come to believe in time alone."

PMOS and Snow
Downing Street Says is a website with a nobby take on the lobby which I shall check regularly (courtesy Big n juicy.) The comments are priceless. Another finger on the pulse that you might like to try is Jon Snow's Snowmail - a witty, relaxed view of the news delivered direct to your In Box every day.

Overheard
Waiting for my appointment at the hairdresser my ears flapped at a conversation about a woman's two daughters. One was fourteen apparently, they regularly go to a nail bar to have extensions - at sixty quid a time. "They cost me, those two," she said, "Melanie had lowlights, so the other one had to have it done. Mind you they look really lovely."
Escalating obsession with appearance requires the sort of high-maintenance extras that are well outside the pocket money league. It is all being slowly derived from sources such as the New York extreme grooming scene where no self-respecting female can leave the house unless she's had her nostrils depilated. Ah, those lost, inexpensive days of pigtails and freckles!

Inside Stories

One of the most interesting work things I ever did was to put together a whole library from scratch. We were given several thousand pounds and pretty much carte blanche. Fun enough but, even more intriguing, this was to be the new library of a big London prison. The Home Office suddenly got the education bug and invested in culture for the first time in years. We were the experts buying the whole shebang, let loose with all those smackers to browse in vast library-supply warehouses, in Soho?s Chinese and South London?s Asian bookshops. A magic game.

The old stock was binned - products of the then prevailing philosophy of ?This is boring/worn-out so send it to the prison?. (In the Midlands I once came across a whole prison library mended with mucky Elastoplast). The half a dozen keen ?trusties? assigned to our project shared their ideas. Remand prisoners tend to be banged up for long periods and reading is important to them.

Buying, we went all out for the popular. Having laid in a properly deep seedbed of excellent educational stuff, we topped it off with the beautiful, the entertaining, the coffee-table ? classy books for captive men, not the worthy, not the old crap that was once deemed sufficient. We bought comic formats, teenage novels, condensed books and easy adult readers. When it all finally sat on the new shelves it looked simply wonderful and went like a bomb (unfortunate analogy, actually, with an IRA high security wing in there).

The books were positively loved. A beautiful collection of Walt Disney artwork was rumoured to change hands in the cells for large amounts of snout. Agatha Christie in Chinese was waiting for the sudden influx of Tong type drug boys. ?The Art of the Pinup? always fell open at page sixty three and ?Marilyn Monroe? had deep tracing grooves round her top half. We had to buy six copies of "Teach Yourself Letter Writing". It was all spot on for its audience and its impact lasted, informing later good library provision. Very rewarding.

What prompted me to write this was Lynn Truss? article today about new designs for Brighton Library. She posits that ambience is less important than content ? get the materials right first. Looking at library plans she asked one architect ?How many books will this one hold?" And guess what? He didn?t know. Neither of the others could answer that question. One of them looked quite panicky. I think he had neglected to allow for books at all.?