Tuesday 30th August

When I was speaking to my sister on the 'phone the other day, my niece and sparkly nephew-out-law came in (to her house in England, not mine). Sparkly N-o-l insisted he wanted to talk to me as he had something important to tell me.  This turned out to be that whilst working at the Royal Opera House the other day, as he does, he found himself caught short and availed himself of the facilities of the Royal Toilets!  He knew how this news would delight me, as I was privileged to visit this illustrious petit coin myself during a guided visit that he kindly took me on, as documented in this post, with photos.

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At last, a new painting on Glenn's blog! And such a lovely one.  I'll post it here very small here as a taster.

There, and I did it using a URL link, so it's not like I've nicked it or anything....  It's called Winter garden, Pembrokeshire.   There's a handful of paintings on-line there now, all beautiful, though  I still think perhaps Muggy weather, Newport Bay might be my favourite.

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Made a phone call to sign myself up for a life-drawing class in Lamballe, once a month for 10 months.  I've never done real life-drawing before, only clothed figure drawing.  The idea of commiting myself to going somewhere doing some art with other people around, and to using some of the poor neglected materials I have lying around is exciting. But I'm also interested in the idea of moving towards the human form, going against my resistance and tendency to stay safely with natural and abstract things. 

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Make stock, take stock

I tell myself I'd stay right here
live on pea soup, burn cones and prunings,
sweep floors, take notes about the Duino Elegies
(which I still read like listening to music),
resist all efforts to make or give away
anything of my own, let the dregs settle
render the fat, and this way set aside
an uncomplicated life time.

~

Also set about reserving a hotel in Pontorson, near Mt St Michel for my birthday in December.  It's my half-antique one, and while I'm not bothered about it from the ageing point of view - if ageing bothers me, and I can't say it doesn't, one day doesn't make a huge difference one way or another - I had a strong impulse that it was better to get right out of town for it.  I have to admit, after years (getting on for 50 of them in fact) of being Pollyanna-ish about it, a birthday just before Christmas is, and always has been, very largely a short straw, and the last couple of years the elements have conspired to make it particularly unfavourable. 

But actually a dark winter night on the Mont might be rather a wonderful way to celebrate, weather permitting - if we can get out of the village and onto the main roads out there we should be OK.  The return e-mail from the hotel, which does good wines and a very good pré-salé lamb, and an excellent deal on half-board, was warm and friendly, carefully translated into English after the French, though I'd written to them in French, with a 'PS - the dog is welcome for free'.

It's good to have things to look forward to, even, or perhaps especially, if it's a leap of hope to do so. 

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Photos: pond stuff again.

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I think that's probably enough of Three Beautiful Things for now.  I find it hard to keep to daily posting, hard to keep with the beautiful, in the sense of the positive, the shapely and the life affirming, and hard to keep concise.  Feast or famine seems to suit me better.  Still, 3BT is a fabulous idea, thanks Clare. 

Monday 29th August

The Quiet American promises home-made trout paté (with a deliciously softened t and a nicely accented e-acute) when we come tomorrow evening, and I promise the tarte tatin we didn't have the other night when  dinner was cancelled owing to bad news.  We feel cheered and a little defiant, but not inappropriately. 

(Now there's a mish-mash,  tarte tatin italicised, 'paté' not, at what point can Anglicisation be said to have taken place, I wonder?) 

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I have cut the grass, which makes everything in the garden look better, and puts a layer of cuttings over the apple waste on the compost heap that was drawing the wasps.

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Photo: Sun through sumac.

Saturday 27th August - double ration again

A parcel arrived from my sister.  It contained fabric samples, in every kind of red and a few more colours besides, of shot silks and velvets and chenilles, tapestries and brocades and even a Morris print (Brer Rabbit, in red and hemp).  We ran our fingers over the textures and drank in the colours, a perfusion of joy.

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Red silk and velvet notwithstanding, we struggled with difficult things through the morning.  At lunchtime we ate slice after slice of good white bread and butter, and some chocolate spread, and felt much better.

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A warm blade of sunshine falls on an especially deeply coloured lemon in the fruit basket on the windowsill, making it glow, and scent the air with a perfume of lemon oil. Kennst du das Land …?

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A perfect spotted cow under a small, top-lit, cumulus cloud.

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 Rilke on Rodin:

I realised immediately that his house meant nothing to him ... it concerned him not in the least and placed no burden on his loneliness and composure.  Deep inside himself he carried the darkness, refuge and peace of a house over which he himself became the sky and the surrounding forest, the vast expanses and the mighty stream that always overflowed.

( From Lou Andreas Salome's memoir, translated by Andrea von der Lippe)

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Photo: in the laundry.

I liked the way the sun through the laundry room window passed through Molly's old striped bed cover and lit up the plastic laundry basket.  The photo was much crisper and more literal than I saw it, so I played with the editing until it looked more like I remembered.

Thursday 25th August

There must be some special law of entropy governing the plastic food containers that I seem to be constitutionally unable to throw away, despite the fact that more of them accumulate than I can possibly ever re-use. They gather in unruly, chaotic heaps, bottoms without lids, lids without bottoms, in the kitchen cupboard amongst the cast iron casseroles, ceramic baking dishes, mixing bowls, funnels and colanders.  Their propensity to disorder must be partly a result how light they are, and the number of different shapes they come in.  However, today I tidy them up into matching stacks, with their matching lids, and at least manage to reduce the volume of cupboard space they take up.  It can't last, I know, it's just not in their nature to behave, but it is, for the moment, a pleasure to behold.

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I rather like this calm, patient, autumnal rain.  Just now it suits me.

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Photo:

 [shield] bug on a [potentilla] flower [I think]

Wednesday 24th August

A wasps' nest in an old mole gallery at the bottom of the garden which we have been leaving alone has been getting to be a worry.  I phoned around and found the cheapest professional to do it in Loudeac.  He was well equipped, and trudged down the garden in an all-over green body suit with matching face covering, powder gun and pickaxe, and came back with a large soggy papery mess in a bin bag, which he took away with him.  Killing anything is not beautiful, but the relief that it is done and we can sit out in the evening without being harassed, and that that our Charmless Bulb-growing Neighbour's small children can pick up their windfall apples in the autumn without being stung to bits, is a good feeling.  

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A Hercules transport plane, which I could hear before I saw it, flew so low over the garden that is seemed scarcely higher than the treetops, and the reflective glass in the cockpit windows was so clearly visible that I waved at it, even though I'd no way of knowing if anyone on it saw me.  Near as it was, the deep thrum of its engines was astonishingly gentle and soft, and it had the ponderous, grey dignity of an unexpected large mammal moving through a landscape.

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The prospect of reading the last section of David Lodge's Therapy before bed.  It's the first Lodge novel I've read, and I'm enjoying it very much.  Not least because I think of one or two people I've known who are great enthusiasts for him, and the new insight it seems to give me into their characters.  These include a shy but very quietly clever French woman of my acquaintance, whose eyes twinkle a little when she mentions him, and who reads the novels in translation.  I wonder how on earth some of it can successfully be translated, as his writing seems so very British, but I'm glad they are appreciated.  Comic novelists seem to inspire a particular kind of affection and sense of ownership, it seems to me.

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Photo: garden collage,

  

 Tom was bemoaning the scruffiness of the poppy seed heads, and they do look somewhat sere and dingy, but I do like the form of them, and the fact that some of the poppies are still only just coming into flower.  The sedum are just beginning to flush red with flowers, and already the bees are trying to feed from them.  I know it's ridiculously late to have tomatoes just flowering, but these are self-seeded things, which are rompsing away all over the place in the beds; they are so lush and lusty I've not had the heart to get rid of them, and who knows, we may get a few late fruit from them yet. 

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Failed to post yesterday, owing to busy-ness, no excuse really as busier folk than me manage it, but not to worry.  An extra one for today anyway.  Not sure how long to go on with this, a bit longer perhaps.

Monday 22nd August

The rest of the cauliflower, a big one, after Tom's pickling activities, made into curry, using this recipe.  It really is as good as it's cooked up to be.  Instead of boiling the eggs. though, I followed one commenter's advice and simply poached the eggs in the sauce at the last minute.  It reminds me a bit of the way R used to do it, only she sort of scrambled them into it.

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The cough/cold virus I have more or less shaken off now, but one of its symptoms (I assume) was blocked ears, tinnitus and earache, which the introduction of a warmed-up mix of olive and tea tree oil followed by self-syringing with a poire effilée , normally quite a satisfying experience (yes, I know, I must be weird), only made worse.  It has more or less subsided now, except for a strange echo effect in the upper frequencies of my hearing, so that Molly barking, announcements over the supermarket tannoy and excited female newsreaders and reporters bringing us the latest on the situation in Libya produce an effect that is distorted, broken and generally irritating inside my ear canal.  

Not much good to be said of this really, though it is clearly not life threatening and will no doubt pass in due course.  However, when the opening to the 2nd movement of Dvorak's New World symphony was played on a music starter question on University Challenge this evening, those plangent, cliché cor anglais notes echoed complete and whole and perfect, so it was in fact not unpleasant, beguiling almost ...

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Photo: collage

Chestnut woods late in May.  Not so fresh and light now, but still cool and pleasant, a green thought in a green shade.

Sunday 21st August

The button tin was old before I was born, as are some of its contents, like these splendid cover-your-own buttons, which true to their word have not rusted, and are endorsed by the strangely bisected face of one of those Ideal Homes-type post-war ladies ubiquitous in the imagery of my childhood who all looked Janet's and John's mummy.

I went to the tin looking for a missing button from a shirt I haven't worn for ages because every time I get it out to wear, I am reminded that it's missing a button, and then I found the button somewhere quite recently, and now I can't recall where it was, but wherever it was it wasn't in the old button tin, or its environs.  But plenty of other interesting things were, and by the end of the morning I had lined up a good strong dog-lead swivel clip, so I can mend Mol's extending lead, a long piece  of bright gold velvet and some blue ceramic beads to sew onto it for a table runner, and three large, round maroon, Bakerlite buttons, rather art deco in style, which I'm fairly sure came off an old coat of my mum's, and which will just go nicely with the sleeveless thing I knitted from some thick soft yarn I bought in Lidl.  The pattern was designed by moi using a piece of squared paper and I'm afraid it rather shows, so I probably won't wear it out of the house, but it is the most delightful sunsetty colours, and will be very warm, and the buttons will give it the added values of nostalgia and continuity.

My make and mend ethic is something of a silly conceit: the things I make I often don't need, or cost more to make than they would to buy anyway, and the things I mend I have often replaced already, or they are just as wearable holey as darned, or the repairs will only hasten their falling apart.  I strain thriftily at gnats and swallow wasteful camels.  But it makes me feel wholesome, and I do enjoy it, I really do.

I decided to move the buttons round on the shirt, replacing the missing one with a lower one, whose absence will be less visible. This is a sure way to make the stray button reappear.

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Lining drawers with a roll of red tissue paper.

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The evening air through the window upstairs is cooling at last.

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Saturday 20th August

A couple of videos for Saturday night

~ Snail, the best I could find to explain how they move so as to deposit a line of blobs of slime:

In fact I think I've got to add this next one too, which doesn't show the slime thing quite as well but just for the really cool millipede that keeps trying to get into shot:

~ And while we're about how creatures do things we'd never thought about in ways we didn't expect, here's one forwarded to me by the rather good company, Canine Concepts, who supplied dear Mol's waterproof coat ( a useful creator god in the shape of interfering dog-genetic buggering human breeders having failed to do so).  This is how dogs drink. 

Well, who'd have thought?

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Finally, just caught a bit of a Radio 4 tribute to Robert Robinson, who died lately.  A quote from him:  

There's no such thing as a good listener, just someone waiting for their chance to talk.

 As I remember it.  I don't think it's necessarily true, but it doesn't do one any harm to think on it.

Friday 19th August - six, no less than six, beautiful things.

 The pretty new checkout girl at Ecomarché looks puzzled when we ask for our Radio Times.  Her colleague at the next till grins and goes and fetches it - she doesn't know the routine, I say.  Then we go to the fish van in the car park, and buy sleek and fresh lemon sole fillets; no, no winkles today, I say.  

The lemon sole, dusted in flour and fried in oil and butter mixed (I'm too lazy to clarify butter) is perfect, firm and golden. I enjoy our Friday morning shop in Quessoy.

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Our friend D is weak and dehydrated with radiotherapy, and of course with what it is treating.  His wife J is more desperate and tearful than we have ever seen her.  The taxi/ambulance driver, Vèronique, when she takes him into the clinic, insists he sees the duty doctor, who admits him straight away, fearing that a hot weekend at home might be the last straw, and then requests a consultation with the chief oncologist, and by this evening he is settled in, on a drip, and already more comfortable .  J is high with relief.  These back-up, ancillary/para - medical people - taxi-ambulance, pharmacists etc - who are not afraid to issue directives and insist with the medics (who, in their turn, are not too proud to listen) are one of the things that make the health system good here, I think.  

J and I arrange to go and pick sloes in the arboretum tomorrow, and then I'll take her on to visit D at the clinic.

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Tom makes a very handsome jar of pickled vegetables: cauliflower, carrots, and shallots - to go with a meal next week.  The recipe called for small pickling onions, but shallots were what was available, and they are much prettier, with their soft mauve-pink tint, and I'm sure a better flavour.  There is honey in the pickling liquor, and tarragon, fennel and bay leaves.  I snitch a very small floret of cauliflower as it is cooling, but don't say.

Then he goes and does final battle with a flatpack chest of  drawers, which the leaflet said would take 30 minutes, but which has been ongoing since yesterday, and Tom is no slouch when it comes to assembling flatpack furniture, believe me.  The drawers don't line up, and need re-jigging, it is heavy and awkward, and by the end some slightly off-colour remarks are being made about the manufacturing credentials of the PRC, but by tonight we have a completed chest whose drawers open and close properly. Then he sets about rubbing down the gesso on a canvas for a still life.

I say I don't believe anyone else has a husband who is so Good At Jobs.  He shrugs modestly, and says perhaps M does, and he's sure P does...  

Pshaw - I snort - they can keep them!

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An on-line friend sends me a link to a beautiful short story she has written.

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I weed the whole azalea bed.  The camellia (sorry Dumas) we put in this year has plenty of strong green shoots on it, but also a tight ligature of bindweed. We don't - touchwood - get enormous amounts of bindweed in the garden, and I am reminded of not only its strangulating ruthlessness, but also the satisfaction of carefully unwinding its spiral from the host plant and, with a final sharp tug, removing it.

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Photo: collage

- best of the webs, and a Japanese anemone (might be worth a click or two to enlarge.  B/W shows up line, as well as form).

Thursday 18th August

~ A misty, dewy morning and for the first time for ages I wandered around the garden with the camera before breakfast.  The swallows, I counted twenty-two at one sitting, were lined up preening and chuntering on the wires, and the garden was festooned with beaded spiders' webs, which an hour later had all but disappeared, evaporated with the mist.

~ Molly and I went out a little later in the morning to pick blackberries.  We didn't get too many, but I came back with a few scratches and nettle stings, and my sandals (not good footwear for foraging really) and the bottom of my trousers wet and seedy, so something of the job description of blackberrying was fulfilled.

~ Photo:

Snailtrack, also early this morning.