Jackdaws, Postal Poetry, Saved Nut # 7

Up in Tall girl's spare room, you are up among the hill tops and chimney pots, the abode of jackdaws. I stood on a chair and stuck my head out of the velux, and communed with them. They are probably my favourites among the crow tribe.

~~~

The overspill from Anna's and my qarrtsiluni contribution went to the excellent Postal Poetry site. It's here, with notes.

~~~

Saved Nut # 7.

'Purple'. I like to get a bit rapturous sometimes, when I get the chance. Sometimes alcohol and a good meal brings it on, not exclusively, and taking a digestif is quite unusual these days. Slightly tweaked. I still miss Richard Lawrence Cohen...

I think I'll go on doing these for a bit; it's clearly still winter, so saved nuts are still in order.

Hebden, plotted and pieced.

Still pondering the conundrum of on the one hand embracing Hopkins' all-encompassing aesthetic of accepting all the works of man and their trappings and paraphernalia, 'their gear and tackle and trim', all the bits-and-pieces nature of the way things are, and on the other the desire to erase and eliminate all the electricity cables, cars, traffic cones, wheely bins and other lumps of contemporary tat that get in the way of a nice view.

This was never more brought home than in editing these photos of Hebden Bridge.

Hebden is saved form being the Totnes-of-the-North by its industrial heritage, the workaday, sooty-edged grittiness that remains from that. (We lived near Totnes in Devon for a year or so, couldn't stand it, but that's another story...).

It's up-and-down hilliness and old stones,

its vertical stepping and terracing and consequent confounding of the laws of perspective

the ruggedness of the surrounding hills and old farms and parishes,

and the flow of water, natural and channelled, through it, the many and varied structures that span it,

all make it picturesque, for sure. Yet , despite its apparently largely incoming population of more middle class outsiders, artists, professionals, creative and adventurous people seeking a somewhat alternative lifestyle - overused to the point of redundant though that expression is -there are many ways inwhich it retains the appearance of a hard-edged northern town, rather down on its post-industrial luck.


Which is also picturesque, in its own way. Which brings one to the question of retro charm.

I was aware when I put together the first 'gear and tackle' post, that there was a distinction between the preserved and cherished artefacts of former working days, in this case from Sidney's Powerhouse museum or the Star ferries in Hongkong, and the more unconscious patterns and interest found in the conteporary trappings of work and trade. Once something becomes old, or exotic (the stencilled Chinese characters beside the pliers immediately created a strangeness for me which caught the eye and imagination), it is on its way to being a thing of beauty. So in old sepia photos of towns and buildings, as someone pointed out, the untidy old wires and posts are part of the charm. This is at odds, of course, with our equation of youth with beauty in human beings, and our desire for acquisition of ever newer objects of technology. I'm sure there's much more to be said on this subject, and it probably has been, how the past acquires beauty in its passing, while the messy, garish, broken and piecemeal reminder of living, contemporary humanity wearies our spirits.

Part of the problem too seems to lie in not mixng your aesthetics. You could make a good picture of an interlacing cat's cradle of wires, the weathered wood of the post, the blue glass resisters, or of the patterns and motifs and colours of a car park full of cars, or the shiny reflecting surfaces of new cars in a showroom. You could quite possibly find interest in a hypnotic repeating rhythms of an arrangement of traffic cones. (I defy anyone to find beauty, pied or otherwise, in wheely bins; the cylindrical older fashioned plastic bins in the alley picture above are beginning to take on retro charm by comparison, though better if they were galvanised metal, with the heavy lids, that gave the dustmen hernias...) But if you're trying to take pictures of a pretty, quaint or otherwise attractive town or village, replete with a charming consistency of vernacular architecture, those lumps and lines of plastic and metal just jarr.

That's partly why I don't do many postcard pictures. I've no objection at all to the postcard/chocolate box aesthetic, after all, however one chooses to make a picture, one is always framing, selecting, editing, making something artificial, but I think perhaps it works better using paint, where one can colour and soften and delete and rearrange to one's heart's content, or at least the kind of skillful photo-editing software I don't have the brains or patience to master.

Tall Girl and I sometimes recall the time when the Town Architect (the father of another schoolfriend) came to talk to us at school. He exhorted us to look up, above the people and cars, the garish uniformity of the chainstore shop fronts and take in the building line, which should, if it is a good one, above all contain variety, different angles, unevenness, assymetry.

So that's what I've tried to do. I've cropped these pictures quite drastically to pick out the points of interest, and exclude the clutter, as you can see below, though now I look at it, I rather like the old man and the 'no entry' sign...

I rather hope by doing so, by making pictures of odd and uneven shape which ignore all the Golden Means and Rules of Thirds and the rest, I've done something to offset the loss of integrity and denial of truth involved, and made something counter, spare and strange in itself.

Saltaire # 2.

I hadn't realised quite how good the Salt's Mill website was when posted the link. The Hockneys are very largely quite modestly displayed among other articles of curiosity,

and attractive merchandise, stationery, art materials and the like.

So although I did look at them, it wasn't with the same concentration that one would in a gallery solely dedicated to them. There were windows to look out of too.

And yes, Bee and RB, the food in the diner was very good! My disappointment at there being no steak and kidney pie left was almost non-existent, as I was hovering between that and the sausage and mash with onion gravy and chutney anyway. There were probably some rather more exotic things on offer, but you must understand how much I crave this kind of BritNosh. (On which subject, the liquorice allsorts were Tom's present; I don't care for them, and Molly's not allowed. Oddly, Tom doesn't really care much for liquorice per se either, but they are nevertheless among his favourite sweets for the coconutty and fondanty outside bits. You can get something resembling them here, but they are often a horribly lurid imitation, or very expensive or both, not good old Bertie Bassett, Britain's greatest asset. Non-British readers talk amongst yourselves.)

On the way home to Tall Girl's and L's, I took pictures out of the car window. It's very wuthering up there, don't you know.

Heartening.

A walk in the arboretum.

Tête-à-tête. How is it that looking at sunlight through yellow flowers can actually give you energy?

Zing up the fruit bowl like a traffic light. But don't forget to eat the stuff. If it goes off uneaten it's just plain disheartening. The pomegranate is a bowl of rubies in the fridge already, dipped into to bejewel a salad. The lime was dressing.

Get a jar of Moroccan preserved lemons from your friend as a thank you for watering her plants while she hiked in the desert. Even though it was your husband that did the good deed, and he probably isn't interested in preserved lemons, though he'll get fed them anyway. Somewhat surprisingly, since they are one of the exotic ingredients that are available here, I've never cooked with these, and am eager to do so. There's an interesting recipe here. ( In fact I rather like Gastronomy Domine's blog, I might link to it, after all, I need yet another talented person's beautiful, mouthwatering envy-inspiring blog to keep up with... ).

Listen to more music. Get some stuff on Flickr. Do some yoga occasionally without having to get together with E. to make me. Think about Sunday morning swimming if the Monday evening before work on Tuesday just seems too much.

A chat with said friend E, led me to the realisation that, while feeling much happier here and now, I still quail at making any firm plans about anything, as I feel I have some generalised sword of Damocles hanging over me, and any such decisions will be bound to bring it crashing down. We concluded one simply had to make plans, or become a prisoner to fear, and the best thing to do was pay the minimum in deposits, and the worst thing that could happen would be having to cancel them. If I dither about booking the trip we were planning in May to Chartres, until perhaps the end of a month to see if Molly's antibiotics have worked or not, the chances are the accommodation won't be available, Molly could be well then but get ill later anyway, or anything. As a wise person said, it never does any harm to hope for the best. So I'll get on and arrange it. Tomorrow.

The vet's (barely) 7 year old son is my new pupil. I had forgotten quite how very lacking in concentration even the brightest children of that age are, and wonder how well equipped I am to impart any English to him. Also how it is that the nicer specimens of very small boys only really want to construct things out of any given object or material (the nastier ones only want to break and inflict damage with them), so the chief potential and attraction of the box of coloured felt pens I took with me was as rods to build pyramids with. Little girls, I am convinced, would be far more likely to seize upon pens and pretty colours and want to make pictures and write things, like the words for the colours in English. Tom tells me I am quite wrong in this crass gender stereotyping, but I'm not so sure, and I suspect the child may be colourblind, as he's fumbling over the reds and greens. But most males of the species can go through life totally without a sense of colour without even noticing anyway, with exceptions like Matisse and Kaffe Fassett, and maybe one or two more. Actually, I find many small boys are fab, and I think this one and I will get on all right.

As you may have gathered, this is a quite formless, unpremeditated and undrafted blog post, so I'd best bring it to a halt. I'll get back to pictures and chat about my trip tomorrow, and do the blog rounds too.

Be seeing you.

Saltaire #1

Saltaire is quite as good as Tall Girl's always said it was.

It is full of the sheen of majolica, and the scent of white lilies.

An Essex idyll; things in Thaxted; Molly's reprieve; Saved Nut 6.

In my sister's house, many things, not only the cats, are pale and shining with loveliness. Except of course the things which are deep and lustrous with loveliness, or bright and vivid with loveliness. Sigh. Oh that my life were so lambently lovely. Still, she deserves it.

I shall not waste my energy on envy, however, but simply luxuriate in such delights being open to me. And I did, drinking tea of a morning from a pale turquoise mug in pale turquoise sheets. Though my watch says 8, my body clock was still considering it to be 9, so this felt especially sybaritic.

My sister has been good enough to set up this luxury billet close to Stansted airport. I didn't really know Essex at all before. Growing up in west Hertfordshire, we knew Dorset well from holidays, Cornwall and Wales likewise, visited Yorkshire and the Pennines, Herefordshire and Shropshire, London and Brighton were popular and frequent daytrip destinations, but we never ventured into the next county, nor even really to the east side of our own.

It's something of a revelation. There's more thatch and clay-tile and half-timbering and pargetting and generally pleasant vernacular architecture than you can shake a stick at, and from what I've seen the people seem rather fun, sleek and cheerful, somewhat cheeky and chatty and gregarious.

I took plenty of photos of houses and other buildings, but more for Tom to use for drawing from; alas, the ubiquitous cars, electricity cables, roadsigns and wheely bins, which the eye often edits out of real life, squat as ugly eyesores once they appear in photos. Plus they were generally unremarkable photos. (I am aware I can't really complain about the presence of cars in pretty places when that's how I came to be in them myself.)

One day we went to Thaxted, which has a king-sized windmill, and an enormous, cathedral-like parish church which feels all threadbare and lacy and delicate with age and atmosphere. And a lot of pink buildings, and a lot of aircraft flying over. Rather than postcard shots, which others do much better, for instance here, a collage of some odd bits and pieces.

~~~

Molly just went for her check-up with the surgical vet after 28 days of injections. He thinks it should be OK to stop now, thank goodness. Even her no-nonsense Dutch lady vet was finding it hard; as she said, she's in it to relieve suffering, not inflict it. Both she and the surgeon vet are inclined to think that the gastric virus she picked up about six weeks ago might have weakened her immune system so that she then wasn't able to hold at bay the infection that attacked her ear. So they've prescribed some homeopathic stuff that might help to boost her immunities. Both vets and doctors regularly use homeopathy alongside conventional treatment here. It can't do any harm and it doesn't cost much, so must be worth a try. Then the surgeon vet roped me in to give him English conversation lessons for an exam he's got at the end of the week.

We said how painful and stressful the injections were, and he said she might become aggressive if she had to put up with much more, which made me realise -even more - how bloody marvellous she's been about it; though she's told them off and barked at them, she's never growled and certainly never snapped or had to be muzzled, and she's always stayed cheerful and jumped in and out of the car with vigour, never skulked or cowered. I feel I want to give her something for a reward, but the best reward is our love and company, and not having to have more injections. I just hope and hope it stays away this time.

~~~

Saved nut # 6.

Two posts, one mostly photos, one writing, Gear and tackle and trim 1, and GTT 2, which explain the tag. It strikes me how I always used to upload photos only medium sized. I'm more in yer face about them now. Somewhat edited and tidied up, it's a bit of fairly low-key, intellectually unpretentious I hope, commentary on an aspect of a poem that interested me.

~~~

Faces to love.

Overwhelmed with happiness, to have been away and to have returned. And with gratitude and delight at all your wonderful comments, thank you so much.

So much to enjoy, review, share, where to start. So, to be going on with, a collage of faces, shuffled until an arrangement came up I was vaguely happy with. Left to right from top left, and of course it will blow up bigger.

1. Tall Girl and L. 'You always do that funny thing thing with your chin in photographs, don't you Polly?' said L, helpfully. I don't think she's doing it here though. First time I've seen them at home in Yorkshire. Marvellous. More to come on that I think.

2. Kiwi nephew, otherwise known as Elf and Cherub to his indulgent aunties, he doesn't seem to mind. Currently en route from India to Spanish Galicia, doing his doctorate in hippy studies. 'Tis a pretty sprig.

3. Carved wooden green mannish ornament on a house wall, Thaxted.

4. Lovely Sister and Zig.

5. Blue, Cat of Mystery.

6. Statuary, Somerset House, London. Wandering about trying not to be too early to meet Joe, who was also wandering about somewhere in the vicinity.

7. Ziggy, Cat of Very Little Mystery.

8. Roof boss, Thaxted church.

9. Lovely Sister and Kiwi Nephew, former wearing false ears belonging to the latter. He carries them about while doing travelling, as an aid to communication.

10. Darling Tall Girl. I've known her since I was just a little bitty thing, and she was quite a tall bitty thing. I really love her.

11. Lovely Sister being mugged by Zig.

12. L, thriving on retirement. I really love her too.

13. Joe. He said he'd frankly rather visit the dentist than have his photo taken, so I made it quick while he wasn't looking. I said I thought if I'd seen him in the street outside (while we were both wandering about separately trying not to be too early) I probably wouldn't have known him. But then there was that feeling of 'well, of course it's you.' Now his appearance, even with the photo, is breaking up in my memory again, yet there are aspects of our meeting, moments, which are still very much there on a quite other level. He's said it better here.

14. Angel, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, more on which later too. I met quite a few angelic beings, but this one wasn't flesh and blood.

15. Statuary, Somerset House. Looks a bit like I felt before I went away.

16. As 4 and 11.

I stocked up on liquorice allsorts, Harvey's Bristol Cream in the blue bottle and paperbacks at the airport. Molly gave me a good slurp at when she saw me again then stuck her nose straight in the bag with the liquorice allsorts. Her ordeal is, we hope, nearly over now. Tom took me out to dinner in Lamballe on the way home, and, nearly as good, had cleaned the fridge and taken the recyclables to the Ecopoint.

My cup runneth over. It quite often does.

Day of departure

I'm on my way to England for a week. I shall see my lovely sister, and my lovely niece and her partner, and I shall see Tall Girl and L., whose wedding I missed last year because of a Molly health crisis, and when I postponed the visit to TG's birthday I had to cancel that because of a Tom health crisis, so this really has to be the third strike or I'm out. And I shall meet up with Lady Penelope, and Plutarch (historic moment never before seen...), and doubtless the company of these bright, strong, brave souls will make my spirit thrive. (Though Lady P. will not have time to teach me how to turn a heel, so my education in this regard will still be incomplete...)

However, as we all know, brothers and sisters, no joy is unalloyed. I travel rarely on my own these days, and get anxious about it at the best of times, and this isn't the best of times. I am aware I am leaving them to cope alone during this fairly gruelling period, while Mol's still having to have painful injections every day, and we don't really know how it's going to be longer term. Tom endured every kind of piqûre, injections, blood tests drips, to say nothing of oher invasive, uncomfortable and undignified procedures during his own treatment with stoicism and equanimity, but Molly having jabs is nothing but a horror for him. But they are both being so brave, and so without reproach, it wrings my heart.

So please, if you've the time, leave them encouraging words, and hold them in your thought, prayers, whatever you believe in. It all helps.

The video is a bit of shameless uxorious soppiness, so if displays of such things offend you, look away now. It's jumpy and scratchy again; Picasa don't seem to have this programme very well sorted yet. If, when I come back, the creative juices and energies are flowing better, I'll try to get to grips with the proper Movie Maker for better results.

See you all soon.

(Tom - don't forget to have the mute off and the volume turned up.)

Wheel at the watermill. Sometimes. Q. Saved Nut # 5

Unlike the millwheel, still turning.

I am not unfortunate. I am not broken, not beaten, not worn out, not depressed nor depressive. I am blessed and I know it and I count the ways. Sometimes things hurt, sometimes they strain and crack and fray, but they can be repaired, put back together. Being, in general, one of the stupid spoiled and happy ones, I pull myself together. Just sometimes, the effort of doing so leaves me tired, is all.

~~~

Process notes for the poems are up at Qarrtsiluni. Rather long, but we enjoyed ourselves.

~~~

Saved Nut #5

Waldo. The kind of rather confessional, from-the-heart narrative I have ended up not doing much of, mostly because I quickly realised I didn't have that much of interest to confess. But it was one of those times when I felt I had said just what I wanted to say in the way I wanted to say it, without being too long about it. Only edited for a bit of punctuation and grammar. Cutting this old stuff is harder than I thought, largely because it's difficult for the person writing now to intervene with the person writing then. The act of writing in itself changes one. Sometimes.

Another possibly unintelligible abstract image, something to be very pleased about, Molly in pink.

The collection of pictures of the watermill in various guises of snow, ice and flood is growing, but I am struggling to find an original and appealing way of presenting them, and as my other half has found compelling reasons to be on the computer a lot of the time (which, overall, as he was quick to out point out, amounts to probably a blink of the eye in comparison with the hogging of it on my part over its lifetime), I decided to add to the series of, I hope, puzzling abstract images instead.
~

Further, lest it seem that I have been rather drearily miserable of late, here is something that is causing me to dance a little dance of joy. Over at Qarrtsiluni, a collaboration with marvellous, talented, inspired and inspiring Anna the Apprentice. Trouble was, we got so carried away with our enthusiasm that we wrote extensive, digressive and even illustrated process notes, which the editors, rather than telling us not to be daft and go away and cut them right down, decided to publish separately. So the poems and pics are over there now, but if you want to know how we did it, you'll have to wait till Monday. But you can hear Anna's lovely melodious Scottish tones, and myself sounding like a petulant five-year-old, reading the poems aloud.
~

And finally, specially for darling Hliza, Molly in pink lampshade, which actually looks rather more red, but matches quite nicely the pompoms on the shawl in which she was luxuriating. We've been doing quite a lot of that lately. Not quite as photogenically gorgeous as Hliza's own sleeping cherub, but rather cute...
~