Self-Winding · A Sort of Progression

- I'm extremely fond of this image from Liverpool, taken at 'le moment juste', the shadows are fabulous.

- All You Can Read - what a treasure-house. Dear Lord, I wish I could spare more time.

- I always do a double-take at the credits on 'Gardeners' Question Time' when they announce that the Assistant Producer is joking.

- Google Scholar brings new dimensions.

- The new BBC Style Guide - informative, witty, compulsive. Provokes many a mea culpa.

I have learnt to be a more sluttish gardener, allowing dead foliage and seed heads to remain as home to insects, to take the beauty of the frost. Rather than imposing design on things it is best sometimes to let the garden evolve by itself, give surprises. Wonderful effects arise when plants are allowed to do what they will, seed freely, mingle, blur edges.

When I cleared away an old rockery three years ago we piled up soil and small stones at the fringe of the wood. I meant to go back and tidy up, now I see it is covered in young foxgloves and ferns, a golden hop has seeded there and will climb to the pines. The mound rises behind a screen of bramble and broom and will look sensational in June - I'd never have planned it that way. Laziness pays.

Wandering along a backstreet in Aldeburgh last spring I saw, tucked beyond a dark cobbled passageway, a bright glimpse of sky and a small statue. I crept down to have a look.
The place was a mess, littered with broken bricks, its masonry and steps broken. Minimal gardening, but how charming it was; narcissus blooming, bluebells pushing up, bronze and green mosses creeping over broken stone, the old wall colonised by small plants. And at its centre the tiny, elegant figure drawing the pattern together. I have thought of it often, more than of many splendid settings that have faded from memory.

Reading of the latest Diana Memorial fiasco I conclude that there should be a petition or maybe a sit-in (?) to urge closure of a gaunt and costly white elephant. Charmless and irrelevant to its intended purpose, even the people who guard it at vast expense look embarrassed to be there. I wasn't a particular fan of Diana but I think I'll write a complaining letter, because for some reason this crass affair gets right up my nose. Apparently the Fountain was selected by a Committee chaired by Gordon Brown and is the responsibility of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. It is not part of the work of the Memorial Fund

Your soul is bound to the Second Totem, Luna:
The Wolf.

Luna appears as a pair of coral colored wolves.
She embodies empathy, nurturing, insight,
and warmth. She is associated with the
color coral, the season of spring, and the
element of wind. Her downfall is pathos.

You are most compatible with Doves and Ravens.


Which Animal Spirit Totem Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

(via feral)

Events are keeping me from writing at the moment. Not least that Blogger takes an infinity to publish a post.

Here is "Leaving" another window painting by Michael Sowa.

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh.......

Tom Dyckhoff's fine article in yesterday's Times (great headline) introduces the V&A/RIBA's new Architecture Gallery. An early visit is indicated. I suffer from the 'isolationist' way we were taught about each major cultural discipline and still have difficulty with tying up chronologies of literature/art/architecture etc. for any given date. So any evolutionary display like this pleases me.

It will, of course, make the Museum yet more agonising - a week's worth of wonders and only half a day to play among them. It brings to mind Byron's observation that "a man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress." And they are all in there.

I must find a cheap B & B up smoke, I can't keep counting on my (now diminishing) list of available spare rooms in Sarf London.

Photo number 2000 to be published on Mark's blog is a suitably great shot. Both my Neece and Neffe have been taking the train, he in the early morning in Switzerland and she making a thankful evening escape from London

Guess who just got Photoshop.

After eight weeks a ginger plant emerged from a bulb I had picked up ready to grate into a stir-fry; noticing a green knobble, I stuck the whole thing into compost and watched it do a triffid act. I was wondering what to expect next - exotic blooms perhaps? Do the leaves taste gingery? What's happening under the soil? I know a bit more now since reading about Robert Brady's crop, though my pride in my weedy specimen is dashed. I should do a bit more research to see if I might manage to grow enough to make that lemony pickle.

"Well, on your own head be it. You are so stubborn and naughty, after all that care, to muck it all up for a few damned leaves." Thus G, prising me in from the garden yesterday.

I did sit patiently, walk sedately for a week, then I saw a morning with an ice-blue sky, clouds winding past pine tops in continuous panorama and a thousand small creatures burrowing, burying,beckoning me to come outside. Boots on, rake, clippers and gloves in the wheelbarrow, I breathed the freedom of work. Round my head the oaks released dancing yellow confetti, tiny quarrelsome squirrels swore and chased in the bare ash trees, somewhere in dead alders over by the river a woodpecker drilled, two wormwise robins shadowed me at once.

With fallen apples stored, cones, birch twigs, sawdust and shattered branches gathered, I sat on a new-cut log scented with resin and let waves of sheer happiness take me. To have again a cold nose with resident dewdrop, bits of bark in my hair and the smell of woodsmoke in my clothes was very heaven. I stole three hours before the guardian of my welfare took me by the ear and led me back to my books.

Michael Sowa A summer night's melancholy

It is the time of year to find a run of novels to read by the fire on grey afternoons. I'm starting re-acquaintance with eight treasures bought long ago - the Virago editions of Molly Keane - first published under a protective pseudonym, M. J. Farrell, gleaned from the name above a public house near her wealthy home in County Wexford, Ireland. Molly had mad success as a young writer in the twenties and thirties with novels of mature wit and insight on the lives of the Anglo-Irish upper class. This elite enjoyed great houses, money and privilege while perched on a wafer thin platform above political turmoil and struggle for Home Rule.

Molly then vanished into the vagaries of her own life, only to emerge in 1981 to publish the wonderful black comedy "Good Behaviour" and a tender final novel "Time After Time". After this joyous return to creativity and acclaim, she died in 1996. I love her work, her feisty character and ease of writing; I did the sketch of her, as an old lady, above to illustrate an article.

Here she is on life for Edwardian girls:

'We almost forget how deeply youth was influenced and prescribed for in a way we can't know about. So much and such nearly complete power was in those elder hands. Over the trivialities or fatalities of life our cousins and aunts accepted so much and really managed it with admirable smoothness and dignity.
Pain they endured and accepted.
Endless chaperonage.
Supervision of their correspondence.
The fact that Mother Knew Best.
That Father Says so.
That there is no more to be said on the subject, they accepted.
They accepted their leisure without boredom.
They accepted trivialities and treated them with that carefulness and detail which rounds such perfect smallness and makes it an acceptable part of life.
This outward smoothness of Life which at all costs they struggled to achieve was a politeness of living which we may envy them.' (Rising Tide)

I found her abandoned in a waste-paper basket years ago. Each night her blue silko eyes smile a message over the duvet edge - 'Safe at last'.

A quotation that seems perfectly to sum up the way I conduct my life:

Video meliora, proboque; deteriora sequor
I see the right way, approve it and do the opposite - Ovid

Boris Johnson's blog (always worth a look to keep the hackles exercised) picked up on the unsexy topic of decline in public library borrowing. We are now spending an all-time record £1 billion on libraries and yet according to the 'Bookseller':

'The Library charity Libri has published figures to show that 19 of the largest 20 councils have seen a double-digit decline in the number of books issued over five years. A fall of at least 35% hit the most affected local authorities in Vale of Glamorgan, Edinburgh, Merton, Torfaen, Redbridge and Aberdeen between 1998 and 2003. The figures are based on statistics from the Chartered Institute of Public Finance Accountants (CIPFA). The average decrease in books issued was 22%. Seven out of 208 library authorities increased lending, with Liverpool up 41% and Lambeth recording an 8% rise. But Lambeth lent fewer books than any other council at 2,551 books per 1,000 residents in 2002/3. Only 7.5% of library funding is currently spent on books, compared to 14% in 1995. Figures from CIPFA showed an across-the-board decline in visitor numbers of 6% in five years, despite a 1.6% increase in 2004. Libri said new visitors were attracted to libraries for their IT facilities, rather than for their books.' (22 October 2004)

A 'Reading the Situation' survey found in 2000
'... that the biggest threat to book reading is not the Internet but the increasing lack of leisure time. It also found the long-heralded death of the book is fictional. Britain remains a nation of book lovers with novels and non-fiction books read in 90% of homes. On average, adults read books for five hours per week. 15% read for at least 11 hours. It showed that despite competition from the Internet and increasing pressure on leisure time, 80% of respondents claimed to be reading for about the same amount of time or more than they were five years ago. Almost all parents say they read to their children or encourage them to read.

About a fifth of people say that they would read more books if they were able to afford to buy more, while about half as many again would read more if there were better books available in the library.' (National Reading Campaign).

After a lifetime spent in the defence and promotion of free reading (much threatened by the Tories in the eighties) this makes me sad; what are these 'better books' that libraries do not have? The new library standards urge wider market sampling to ensure relevant stocks. But frankly we have been doing that stuff forever. I have by now a good idea of what books people want; but are libraries able to offer them via the diminishing purchasing percentage of that cool billion - as more resources go to technology, a/v media, staff and premises?

I guess that 'better' means a bottomless supply of popular, bestseller-list material available rapidly and provided by buying thousands of copies of titles that become quickly obsolete. Then, coverage of the whole spectrum of current books on lifestyle, interests and self-improvement bought in their multi-thousands to feed demand to saturation point. Add vast quantities of educational materials for ever-changing curricula over all disciplines, all levels; subtract (evidently) reference books now being overtaken by the Internet, but don't forget the researchers and academics and their more esoterically expensive needs. Shake all together and repeat the formula annually to keep the stock updated.

As Boris observes, libraries also react to what people don't want any more - older, plainer, classical and difficult reading that sits tight and never issues. Then the purists moan about philistinism.

So, what's the answer? Would it be easier for the government to bung every household £250 a year and tell them to get what they want? Buy your own 'better' books and leave the libraries to become techno-centres and repositories of old writing. Is it always the libraries that must cry 'mea culpa' as the borrowing falls? I find most of them to be rich cornucopias of interesting possibilities. Maybe our cultural habits are moving away from the old serendipity of browsing a library, towards more individually tailored reading requirements for a fast lifestyle?

POSY SIMMONDS SUMS IT UP

Addendum: Just came across this germane article on the state of reading in America

Pictures of windows have attracted me for years and I have quite a collection. It's an obsession that is certainly psychologically motivated by being a bit claustrophobic; I crave air, dislike curtains and am notorious for throwing open windows. Window images that most draw me are from the inside looking out - the pull to freedom.

Light is the stuff of painting and the play of it in rooms is a constant theme; windows are devices for so many effects. They dramatise the emotion of a situation, throw characters into relief, or are simply the whole soul of the thing.

I thought I'd start a regular window spot; it will give me some enjoyable digging around in my references and files.



Here is number one - 'La Reverie (Les Poissons Rouges)' by Elizabeth Nourse.

I won't go on about it, promise, but there were a couple of moments...

Bedside:
German Surgeon: "Ah, Mrs Scott, I introduce my anaesthetist, Gunther. Now, let's see, ve are doing your left leg, ja?"
Me: "No, actually, it's my right leg."
Surgeon: "Exactly so, I mark it with my signature. I see you in one hour. Do not vorry.
Gunther: "I tink ve do a spinal, it is better for dese procedures - no chest, no womiting after. Ja?"
Me: "Ja, or rather, no. Gulp. Will it hurt?"
Gunther: "Nein, of course not, I give you only a small prick."


Theatre:
Me: "God, I can't move a thing, it's weird. Now I know what paraplegia must be like. Are my knees bent up?"
Nurse: "No, they're flat. You raised them as the spinal injection went in and your brain will still register them in that position. Would you like some music? There's a cassette loaded over there, don't know what it is."
Me: "Fine."

Gloria Gaynor sings 'I will survive' - "First I was afraid, I was petrified, kept thinking I could never live....." The tape is switched off after a few bars by Gunther seated behind my head, his English is good enough to see the joke. How tactful, but I hear laughter around the table.
______________________________________________________________________________

I'm mobile, if uncomfortable, and looking rather peculiar in my tight white pressure stockings. Everything seems to have gone well. The stitches come out on Friday. Thanks to everyone who sent good wishes.

Outside the leaves are piling up, the oaks and the big chestnut are vivid yellow and holding on. Dennis came today to saw up the old Scots Pine that split in two in the gale. It has left a gap, but more light is getting through to the apple trees beyond. I have decided to fill in with a big cluster of Mahonia Grandiflora, which will be shorter, but will make a dense evergreen cover for the fencing behind. It is going to drive me mad that I can't get on with this sort of project for several weeks yet. I'll have to start a novel.