Jan's Journal

Tea, Dolly's Wax and what becomes of the Broken Hearted

2010-05-16T04:20:00.000-07:00

We’ve had an interesting week of poetry events this week. Normally we go on Tuesdays to the Poetry Café and Thursdays to the Roebuck in Great Dover Street, to read our poems, but this week we had booked tickets for the British Poetry Society’s Annual Lecture at the London University Institute in Mallet Street, instead of Poetry Unplugged on Tuesday, and on Friday we fitted in a first visit to the Tea Box in Richmond, Surrey.

The lecture was by Les Murray, an Australian poet who is also one of the people editing the Macquarie Australian dictionary. (http://www.macquariedictionary.com.au/anonymous@9c9B365973255/-/p/dict/index.html)

The dictionary’s Word of the Week this week is full up to dolly's wax:
satiated after a fine meal; replete with food; stonkered. I couldn't eat another crumb, I'm full up to dolly's wax. Referring to an old type of child's doll which had a cloth body and a head made of wax. You can also be full up to pussy's bow or ribbon.
Bibliography: Macquarie Best Aussie Slang. © 2008. James Lambert, editor. Macquarie Dictionary Publishers Pty Ltd (online edition 2010).

Les began hesitantly, saying he hadn’t written any prose for so long he’d almost forgotten how to do it, but as he warmed up the lecture became very entertaining. He collects words – and makes some up, too. He’s from Scottish immigrant and Aboriginal stock, brought up an only child on a farm in a remote part of New South Wales. His account of his education in philology, languages and literature made fascinating listening. His poetry is sharply observational and the poems he read to us were full of his love of nature and his awareness of the impact of human activity on the environment. Some were very short, wry observations or puns, while others were longer meditations and stories.

We ran into a couple of friends and the social part of the evening was good fun, too.

Bang Said the Gun at the Roebuck was great entertainment as usual. One of the guest acts, Inua Ellams, was particularly good. I hadn’t seen him before but he’s well known here in London for his lyrical storytelling poetry, delivered with engaging modesty.

Friday’s outing was to the Tea Box where a friend of ours called Julie Mullen (the same Julie who interviewed us on her hospital radio show the other week) was hosting an evening of poetry.

The event was free and it’s held every second Friday of the month. We each read for about five minutes and met and listened to a number of new and old friends.

In the second half of the evening, Donall became quite bold and gave one of his best renditions to date of his poem "Och Aye, but Noooo". I hope Julie didn't mind - her Vegetarian Erotica is perhaps more subtly expressed!

The Tea Box is a delightful venue, a café/bar that specializes in different kinds of tea, as well as stronger drinks. The food is also very good. It’s at number 7, Paradise Road, Richmond – what a lovely address! They have a Facebook group at
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=42800909421

Next week we’ll show our faces back at the Poetry Café on Tuesday, hoping that no-one else has bagged the sofa on which we like to lounge there – it’s first come, first served, so we’ll have to show up early! On Wednesday Donall is doing a guest spot at “Blank Verse” in Guildford and on Thursday another at “Utter” at the Cross Keys in Kings Cross, so it’s another week of poems, performances and open mics for Donall and me.

Cornwall in April 2010

2010-04-26T12:16:00.000-07:00

The weekend after Easter, we drove down to the church of St Juliot on the single track lane that leads from the Boscastle road, off the main coast road, the A39. The roads were almost empty, the sky a luminous blue. A sunny April must be one of the most pleasant times of year for a visit to North Cornwall, I thought. We trundled down the little track with the sun slanting over the ancient hedgerows and through the wind-sculpted trees that had been allowed to grow from them.

St Juliot is perched in a hollow in the hillside, its gravestones leaning under trees that were not yet in leaf, so that we could see the square Norman tower and the picturesque conical “ears” at each corner of the square tower that were added to Norman church towers in North Cornwall in the nineteenth century.

The longest side of its little graveyard overlooks a wide green valley, sheep and horses grazing across on the far side. What we already knew about St Juliot’s was that it is one of the oldest churches in the area and that Thomas Hardy’s first wife was from the parish. She is buried in her family’s plot in St. Juliot’s Church.

Emma met Thomas Hardy when he was in charge of the restoration of St Juliot’s church. She was the churchwarden’s daughter and they fell in love and married. She is buried with her family there and Hardy is buried in Westminster Abbey, but a plaque commemorates his link to the church. A beautiful engraved glass window is dedicated to Hardy. There are also copies of drawings that Hardy made of the church.

Donall was enraptured by the details of the ancient stones and their inscriptions and took charge of the camera to take pictures of everything, inside and out.

This tomb is dated 1685

Too late, we realised that we should have recharged the camera’s battery overnight, but before it totally ran down we explored the possibilities quite thoroughly.

We drove back to Lower Tresmourn Farm, our B&B, to put the camera battery on charge. Lunch at the Wainhouse Inn, on the A39 about a mile away, was an unexpected success. The restaurant has recently changed hands and it was bright and welcoming, the service was friendly and quick and the food was really delicious. We had baked haddock on a bed of potatoes, spinach and chorizo – absolutely perfect.

With the battery charged up, we set off again, this time to see the church of St Genny’s, a hamlet near Crackington Haven. Tresmourn's address is Crackington Haven, though it stands outside the village itself, high on the cliff above.

St Genny’s is on a lane leading northwards along the cliff, only a mile or two away by road. The church stands on the top of the cliff, separated from its edge by a broad field and the churchyard wall, with a steep incline to one side of the churchyard. Below the church, in the dip, is the rectory. The sea was a blue mist to the horizon.

Originally the focus for Christian worship here was the Holy Well which can still be seen near the gate to the churchyard, a spring of pure water that still supplied domestic water for the village up to the 19^th century.

In 650AD the Augustine monks would baptise and preach there, in the open air, a stone cross set up nearby. There may have been a Saxon church built here in the late 900’s, of which nothing substantial remains.

In Henry I’s reign, between 1100 and 1135, the “new” Norman church was begun. Originally the square tower had a pyramidical tower, but in 1910 this was replaced by the present upper storey, with the characteristic four “ears" at the corners.

We placed £3.50 in the trust-box inside the church, for the excellent little account of the history of St Genny’s church by a local historian, Christopher Berry, from which I’ve gathered the snippets of information I’m including here.

St Genny’s name seems to derive from a saint local to Llandough, in Glamorgan, Wales, from where Augustine monks travelled by boat to found the Holy Well on the present site. When the Normans recorded their possessions in the Domesday Book after 1066, the saint was not recognised by the Holy Roman establishment and the name was ascribed to St Genesius of Arles instead. The modern name is the Celtic, St Genny’s.

Inside the church we found evidence of the rich creative life of the modern parish and a nave flanked by a Norman arcade of Polyphant Stone, a soft stone which allows rich carving. (Polyphant is a village near Launceston, further inland). This northern aisle was added to the earlier Norman building in 1350, when the parish was owned by the diocese of Launceston, about fifteen miles away.

This is the Baptismal Holy Stoop (the font) inside the church, which was removed from the church in about 1500 and only only rediscovered and replaced here in 1906 when the Church Warden found it on a stone heap about three miles from the church. He brought it back and had it examined by an architect who thought it was Norman. Plaster was removed from the northeast corner of the church and the font was found to fit the gap exactly!

For the rest of St. Genny’s chequered architectural, social and ecclesiastical history (for instance its active role in the rise of Wesleyanism in the area) I’d thoroughly recommend Christopher Berry’s little book, which was published in 2002 by the St Genny’s Gazette. Its ISBN is: 0 9536919 1 8.

The gravestones in and outside the church record the families who are the players in the colourful past of St Genny’s. Crackington Haven with its jagged black rocks and cliffs and fierce Atlantic storms was frequently the setting for shipwrecks – there are traditional tales of evil men luring cargo ships on to the rocks with lights, to salvage their cargoes.

One family of scoundrels that Berry records from his research were William, Simon and Thomas de Gennys who on 27^th December 1357 burst into Poundstock Church, while Mass was being held, and “with swords and cudgels brutally slew William Penfound clerk” [that is, the local priest}. This seems to have been part of an ongoing feud, because in 1350 Roland Penfound had been pardoned for the murder of a member of the St Gennys “gang”, Nicholas de Beer. The de Gennys seem to have been involved in piracy and wrecking activities in 1342 and 1346. They also vandalised the lands of the Black Prince at nearby Swannacote in 1348. Yet this same William de Gennys was also Collector of the King’s Subsidies in 1349!

The oldest gravestone in the church is that of Benet Mill who died in 1593. Benet’s son-in-law, Christopher Bligh, is also buried here, at his own request. He died in 1605, the wealthiest man in the parish. Berry speculates that Bligh may have been the ancestor of Captain Bligh of the Bounty, who came from St Tudy, not far away.

Tales of heroism are recorded among the tombstones of the church. On January 11th 1894, the Swedish brigantine “William” was wrecked at Crackington Haven and only one crew member, the mate. was rescued, by the bravery of local men, Mr Jewell, Mr Brendon and Mr Hugill among others, who “in blinding showers of hail and rain searched the cliffs and beach for some distance in hope of others of the crew.” (Devon & Cornish Post, 3^rd February 1894, quoted by Berry on page 78 of the second printing). Seven more bodies were later washed up. A cross in St Genny’s churchyard records the incident.

Berry also reproduces this photograph which is probably of the figurehead of the “William” set up over the grave of Captain Richardson and his crew, originally published in “Sea Breezes” magazine in 1929, which may have been taken by Thomas Hardy at the turn of the 20^th Century and is captioned, “A curious custom of Cornwall graveyards was the setting up of the Figurehead of a wrecked vessel over the grave of her drowned sailors. Photo by Thomas Hardy”. Berry speculates that this picture may have been taken thirty years before, by the writer, who was then living nearby at St Juliot.

The tombstones record other tragedies – for example, the deaths of a family of young children, in 1693, recorded on a stone plaque on the wall of St Gregory’s chapel (now half hidden by the recently installed organ). A stone cross stands in the churchyard over the bodies of sailors washed up after the wreck of the SS City of Vienna in November 1900.

We were only in Cornwall for a couple of full days but we got to know the area better than I ever had before. We had three meals at the Cobweb Inn in Boscastle, including their excellent Sunday lunchtime carvery, where we overate at very little cost. We optimistically entered the pub’s Grand National sweepstake – even went back next evening to check if we had won (we hadn’t and nor had any of the pub customers, there are so many runners in that race)

Boscastle, the site of the devastating flood in 2003, enchanted Donall – it would have done so even without its restored Witchcraft Museum.

The village is a sparkling little place, its fishing cottages newly painted and the fishing boats at the quayside unbelievably picturesque. I sat for a while in the sunshine and drew the view of the quay from the cliff, while Donall set off up the other side of the steep cliff-path with the camera. Then at the quayside I watched a fishing boat, the Industrious, unloading lobster pots, and drew the scene as fast as I could – the boat left before I’d got much done, but Donall took some good photos of the same lobster pots.

We tried the beach at Crackington Haven but the weather, though bright, had turned breezy and cool. Even in Bude, where the beach offers more shelter in the lee of the rocks, it was too cold for the sunning we’d hoped for.

We went back to St Genny’s for a few hours, the morning we left Cornwall - I wanted to try a drawing of the church and its setting in the hillside, so Donall took the camera while I sat on a flat gravestone and tried to draw the long nave and the eared tower, the ancient salt-worn tombstones and the primrose- strewn bank which half hid the building. My attempt was so inept that I shall not post it here. Donall’s record of the place is enough. Like any dedicated photojournalist, he risked life and limb to capture some of his best shots and was injured by a thorny branch that he’d pushed aside to angle his lens up to the lichen-rough cross over the porch.

We ended up at Stratton Hospital outpatients’ department, seeing a very kind and efficient nurse, my namesake, Jan, who applied salves and antibiotics to the eye – happily there was no lasting damage done and we drove the 230 miles back to Surrey with no further adventures......

PS ....... Before we left Tresmorn Farm, where we’d had a very comfortable three nights (and three excellent breakfasts too) I decided to leave Rachel and Chris Crocker a memento of our stay there – a painting that I made a few years ago of Hartland Quay, further up the coast in North Devon. We spotted a perfect place for it, where another picture had fallen down and not yet been replaced. So there it hangs...

Drawing in the Topolski Memoirs Gallery

2010-03-27T09:26:00.000-07:00

Last Wednesday I decided to take myself up to London after work, to do some drawing. Several months ago Donall and I had wandered into the newly reopened Topolski Gallery, where Memoir of the Century by Feliks Topolski is on display to the public. This huge series of drawings, paintings and magazine layouts used to be viewable free, in a series of dark, dingy cavern-like spaces under one of the railway arches at Waterloo Station, London. The atmosphere in the old gallery used to be a part of the exhibition's allure - Topolski recorded, often at first hand, most of the important events of the twentieth century, in his strongly expressionistic way. The high grimy walls wore his (often large-scale) images like tattered posters from the past. Walking through rooms that faded at the corners into pitch black, viewing the crowded scenes at Hitler's rallies, celebrations of the coming of peace or the signing of world-altering treaties was very moving. There's a lot on the Internet about the old galleries, if you Google Topolski's name. I've been trying to add links to it but can't seem to find anything that will make a link.

Anyway, the gallery under the arches was closed for a couple of years, and then reopened in the same place, after a revamping by the local Council (to whom Topolski had given all the work before he died) funded by the National Heritage Fund. Now there's an entrance fee and considerably less of an atmosphere of danger and doom, and some people (including me) wonder if it is an improvement. However, one new development I do like - one of the rooms is now used as a life-drawing studio on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings. Donall and I had discussed going along there but never done so. (Poetry Cafe on Tuesdays and Bang on Thursdays used up all my time, energy and money for travelling up to London midweek in term time)

So since I haven't the heart to go to Poetry Unplugged and Bang said the Gun on my own while Donall is in Ireland, I thought I would try the class out. And it was great - a very good model and a calm atmosphere, with music playing softly in the background, and about ten different poses in three hours! The longest pose was half an hour - most were much shorter, including a lot of two minute drawings. It certainly made you look and draw fast! By the end I felt like an athlete must, after a heavy training session following a long lay-off!

I shall probably go again before Donall gets home here again, and maybe we'll both have a couple of sessions after Easter....

Here's a half-hour drawing in brush-pen (a drawing brush with an ink cartridge) from Wednesday's session.... Rather paltry when you look at Feliks Topolski's life's work ...

New York at Christmas 2009

2009-12-29T19:08:00.000-08:00

New York 21st to 27th December 2009

I didn’t start writing this blog until 26th December, the fourth day of our stay in New York. This was partly because we were so busy going round the sights, museums and theatres of the city that I seldom sat in front of the laptop we brought with us, but also because I still have the after-effects of that poets’-artists’-swine-flu that hit me before Christmas. Energy levels depleted, coughing levels highly enhanced, I’ve spent a lot of my time fighting for breath! But it hasn’t stopped me using what’s left of both breath and energy to enjoy everything here.

When we got here in the early afternoon of 21st December the sun was glittering off snow and glass as we inched our way into Manhattan in the hotel shuttle car. It was the day after a big blizzard that hit the city from the Midwest, where we heard that conditions were extreme. In New York the snow was amazingly picturesque and Christmassy. The snow-covered porches of the board-faced houses in Queens reminded me of “About a Boy” and other movies set here.

The sunny weather continued for the next three days. We went for a long walk on the morning of our first full day, through Central Park to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The snow was deep and the paths were very slippery – I fell flat on my back twice – but it was very pretty, with the skyscrapers fringing the park looking ethereal and transparent in the sun, the skating rink and frozen lake crowded with cheerful people and all the sculptures dotted among the trees.

We found the big sculpture of Alice in Wonderland which Dónall was keen to photograph though I found the depiction of Alice herself quite ugly (I thought she looked at least twenty-seven, not seven years old). We duly photographed the group and went on, finding a witch, Will Shakespeare and a horseman in bronze among other things.

The horse-drawn carriages that line up outside the park gates were trotting through the park with picturesquely decorated coachwork and passengers snuggled under red blankets. We found a squirrel on a tree next to the park, which posed obligingly with nuts in its paws though we were not quick enough to get a photo of it.

The Met, on a street at the farther end of Central Park, was an amazing museum. We especially enjoyed the Oceanic section and the Egyptian sculpture.

The Rodin sculptures were fantastic too, including a copy of the Burgers of Calais. I didn’t have time to do any drawings, except when we were queuing for lunch near the Burgers (no pun intended!) and I did a sketch of part of that complex group sculpture using a pen-brush. The Modern Art section was packed with paintings and sculpures that have iconic status, too.

Found Gallagher’s Steak House just across the road from the hotel, on the first evening, and dined there, hugely and expensively – loved it and booked to eat there on Christmas Day too.

We wore ourselves out on the second full day, another brilliantly sunny one. We spent the day walking in Manhattan, admiring the Chrysler building,

with its art deco lobby and ceiling painting of modern marvels of the early twentieth century

the gothic style churches of St Bartholomew (St Barts), St. Patrick and St Thomas

St Thomas was our favourite, with its beautiful carved reredos inside and its rows of saints outside on the facade. By 4pm we had a camera full of art deco detail from the Rockefeller Center. I thought the gold sculpture that was the most photographed was by no means a masterpiece but Donall photographed me in front of it anyway.

There were lots of other Egyptian and Deco inspired motifs over doors and windows that deserved and got our attention. The ephemeral Christmas decorations at the Rockefeller Centre were lovely, angels and stars made of what looked like woven willow branches sprayed silver-white.

Christmas Eve we devoted to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) which was just round the corner from our hotel. There we saw Orozco's huge whale skeleton installation, Mobile Matrix (I wrote a poem and made a drawing of it)

and every European modern master I've ever seen in a book, it seemed.

and then at Radio City, also nearby, we went to a late afternoon performance of the Christmas Spectacular – it was brilliantly staged kitsch and we loved every moment of it. The chorus girls (Rockettes) were faultless, the three-D laser effects wonderful – we came out feeling that we’d definitely not avoided Christmas, and were glad of it.

Christmas Day was overcast and later wet. We had lunch at Gallagher’s and then went to the theatre – amazed that a performance was staged on 25th December of West Side Story, which I had never seen. (British theatres are normally closed on Sundays and never open on Christmas Day). We were right up “in the gods” and certainly walked off our lunch. The action was a little distant from us, but still very enjoyable. The lead male singer had a beautiful voice and the dancing was great too. We were less impressed by Maria, whose voice became a little harsh in top range, than by the second female lead, Anita.

After Christmas Day we caught up with the other main museums – the Whitney which has an important collection of modern American art, and a special exhibition of Georgia O'Keefe's abstract paintings.

We queued for a long time in the rain to go into the Guggenheim which was disappointing because the whole gallery was turned over to Kandinsky, with a couple of modern installations which we found frankly dull. I like Kandinsky’s work and it was interesting to see his evolution towards pure abstraction but we’d been looking forward to seeing some of the surrealists’ work that Guggenheim famously collected (she was married for a time to Max Ernst). We found the staff at the Guggenheim fairly unhelpful – OK, it was a horrible wet day and the queue was very long – but their attitude was rude and officious, especially when people asked to use the (totally inadequate) restrooms, after standing in the line for an hour or so.

December 26 was extremely wet. The skyscrapers were wrapped in a mist of rain and all their lovely reflective surfaces were opaque and grey. We got a Metro card and braved the subway. Of course we found it difficult at first – the interconnecting lines, in particular, which are not named as in London and Paris, but numbered, were confusing to us, but Dónall did a brilliant job of navigation

and we began to feel like old hands by the end of the day. We collected a lot of images from the walls of the stations, which have mosaic motifs and numbers that must date from the system’s opening at the beginning of the last century. I was charmed by the rows of wooden seats that stand on the platforms, too – basic, sturdy and rather comfortable, they look like relics from the past and are still doing the job they’re designed for. In general, the tunnels’ unadorned and peeling girders looked forbidding and we felt we’d rather not be found travelling alone on the less frequented stations at night.

Finding ourselves at the Lincoln Center that wet Boxing Night, we bought excellent seats at the performance of “South Pacific” by Rogers and Hammerstein that evening. I’d never seen it on the stage before. It was a lively, colourful performance with a beautifully deep set. And the following evening we already had balcony seats for “Song and Dance” by Sondheim, which we saw in London earlier this year. It was the same Trevor Nunn production but this time starred Angela Lansbury as the Countess and Catherin Zeta Jones as Desirée. Angela Lansbury, especially, was brilliant.

The weather changed back to sunny after 26th. It was milder, too. We found the Frick Museum on 27th – a lovely place created by a man who seems to have been far from charming himself. The paintings he collected by Whistler (elegant society portraits), Holbein (a searing virtuoso portrait of Sir Thomas Moore is unforgettable), Rembrandt (his last and greatest self portrait and “The Polish Rider” stick in my memory above all) Van Eycks, Vermeers and Impressionists – housed in an elegant mansion off Fifth Avenue.

Finally, on 27th, we even managed some retail therapy and dived into Macy’s instead of joining the two-hour queue to go up the Empire State building – that experience will have to wait until we go back to New York at a less crowded season.

But we do fancy New Year in New York, next year.

Myspace blog post - Interesting objects

2008-06-24T10:28:00.000-07:00

I intended to focus on finishing a half-finished painting today but when the sun came out properly I stopped pretending and went into the garden to do some summer pruning.

The painting I was going to continue is a study of the chapel that was designed and built by the wife of the celebrated English Victorian artist, George Watts. (You can find information about George watts at http://www.npg.org.uk/live/search/person.asp?LinkID=mp04730&role=art.) Mary Watts was also an artist and designer but as often happened in those days (the end of the 19th century) she was overshadowed by the reputation of her famous husband. George did large melodramatic mythological subject paintings and sculptures, but Mary was into Art Nouveau design. They lived and worked in a picturesque rambling house not far from where I live, which has now been turned into a gallery and memorial to George Watts' work.

More interesting to me than the heavy symbolism of the George Watts collection is a little memorial chapel in the cemetery down the road, in the grounds of the house. This chapel was a project that Mary took on, which her husband seems to have regarded as a little hobby to keep Mary from getting too bored. She organised its design and building from first foundation stone to final decorated tile.

It's Italianate in many ways, but it is absolutely Art Nouveau in its character, tall and narrow, and highly decorated in a combination of Italian, Celtic and Romanesque styles. Mary used local craftsman throughout. Compton is a tiny village, and she mobilised most of the work force, including women, to help with the building project.. The bricks and carvings, mouldings and tiles, were locally made. The interior, in particular, is a dreamlike creation, which some people I've spoken to find "creepy", spooky, and claustrophobic.

I began a painting of the exterior last summer but I got rained off, so now I'm going to finish it from the photos. Yesterday I went back to Compton to take some.

Not today, though. I got into cleaning mode. I began polishing up my ship's lamp. This dented copper object stands in the corner of my garden. It's not been converted at all - it's still a paraffin lamp, with a very battered inscription on it: STARBOARD. It also shows the place where it was made - HULL (that's in the northeast of England) and a date, which has lost one of its figures but from the marks left behind is either 1751 or 1731.

I bought this lamp in a breaker's yard in Bangaladesh, in 1984. I wanted a brass one, but that day the only one that the scavengers had left was this copper one, in terrible condition. The setting where I bought it was incredibly sad - a forlorn mudflat, the horizon studded with broken shps of all ages. Wiry thin muddy men at work among the scrap, dismantling the ships that had been brought there to die, haggling over the prices they wanted from the expats who had come to pick over the remains. I felt even more out of place than usual on that beach.

We brought it all the way home to England in 1985 when we were posted back here. Then it sat in our loft for 20 years, still in its crate, because we never did move to the palatial house where it might have been converted to electricity, a chic curiosity to show off to visitors.

When I set up house on my own, I unwrapped my old lamp and cleaned it up. I’ve kept it as a paraffin lamp - it shines with a green starboard glow if you keep the filter inside it and light the wick. As I cleaned it this morning ( my avoidance activity for the morning's painting) I thought about the places it must have been to, the men who must have cleaned it before me, and the storms it had been through.

It needed a lot of work to clean it this morning. I'd neglected it all winter. I ran out of Brasso and remembered what I learned from my bearer in Bangladesh, Ashok. He cleaned all the brass and copper with citrus juice. I had some fresh limes in the fridge so I cut them in half and rubbed them over the surface, left the juice there for a while and then scrubbed and polished. I remembered Ashok's smiling face, his intelligence and his infectious laugh. I remembered his fierce quarrels with the old cook, who was a veteran of the Raj and cooked better Yorkshire puddings than I've tasted anywhere including in England.

Some objects are so valuable for their associations that they really are priceless. I wonder if any of my friends have an object that is valuable for its interest - forget its monetary value. I thought of tagging some of my friends to challenge them to show the most interesting object they own, and explaining why.

I'm choosing five people to tag - I hope they'll write a little blog about their most interesting possession - interesting, remember, not expensive! – and pass the tag on. I’ll look forward to reading them.

New Year's Eve in the Pub (31st December 2007)

2008-01-01T10:22:00.000-08:00

New Year's Eve and I was spending it with a new friend, whom I'd only just met. Dinner went well. I cooked it at home because we hadn't booked anywhere - this was a last minute arrangement. Then we had time to kill before midnight - staying in didn't seem to be an option. Television was solid repeats of shows and documentaries shown in the last few days. We didn't know each other well enough to go to bed and occupy each other in more interesting ways. I didn't have any cheerful DVD's to put us in a good mood for midnight. We didn't want to drink and drive so the party that I been invited to was not a good choice. So, he said, I don't go to pubs much, but where's your local?

I didn't think I had a local. Though I live within walking distance of the town centre, all the pubs there look alien and uninviting to me. My "local" was a five-mile drive away.

"There's a pub about five minutes' walk away," I said doubtfully. "I've never been inside and it has boards outside about Quiz Nights and Karaoke." We shuddered in unison. This man and I could make music together, I thought, observing the distaste on his face for such plebeian pursuits.

"OK, we could just take a walk down there and if it looks too bad at least we'll have had some air," he suggested.

It was a fine night, not cold. The decorous streets where I live were deserted. No sign of revelry, no parties. We turned into the street where the pub lurked on the corner. An Edwardian dive, probably a riotous gin palace in its heyday, I thought prissily, as we began to pick up the strains of loud music. When we arrived outside the opaque glazed doors we could see over the wall a small outdoor smoking area, packed with cheerful people laughing and shouting to each other. The smoke from their cigarettes drifted over to us.

Neither of us are smokers. We exchanged disapproving glances but soldiered bravely on. The first entrance we tried was locked.

Probably a private party, we agreed, but went round the corner and gingerly pushed the door. It was stiff to open, perhaps because of the crush of revellers inside, I thought.

The door gave and I stumbled in. And did a double-take. The place was almost empty! Two miserable looking elderly ladies were sipping port at the bar, on high stools. An even more miserable looking man sat a couple of stools down from them. He was clearly on his own and regretting it. In the corner was a group of four twenty-somethings and a dog. One of the girls was rather hopelessly trying to get the men to dance to the music that now assaulted us full blast.

My friend was hovering on the threshold. The music was deafening and he still had the impression that he would have to shoulder his way to the bar, through wildly inebriated revellers, and was summoning up his strength.

"It's OK," I said. "Look."

Even the decor was a surprise. The warm old brick outside led me to expect flock wallpaper, chipped cream dados of Edwardian lincrusta, bentwood kitchen chairs. I hadn't remembered that now we are in the twenty-first century all that is reserved for really chic places in the centre of London. Here, they'd swept it all away and replaced it with whitewashed naked brick walls, exposed steel beams also painted white, black chandeliers, They'd kept (or more likely bought new) small round marble-topped tables. The seating was a combination of white wicker armchairs and leather ones. Very tasteful. I had to admit, it was nice.

We paid a small fortune for a small glass of house red and a cider, and found a seat near the exit to the smoking area. This was still obviously where the action was. When the door opened, we experienced a powerful episode of secondary smoking and made sure it was shut again. Round the corner, in the almost deserted bar area, a large TV was showing Graham Norton's antics leading up to the midnight countdown.

In the same way that your eyes become accustomed to the dark and you begin to see again, our ears gradually began to make sense of the conversation we were trying to have, over the huge decibels of the seventies music that was pounding out. We began to relax. We pointed out the chic details of the decor to each other. We speculated on the possible need of the landlord for some more paintings for the walls (the black-and-white theme made this unlikely, I thought). We exchanged reminiscences about past New Years. We began to enjoy ourselves. We agreed that I did have a local, even though I didn't know anyone in it.

When the countdown to midnight began we were surprised how fast the time had slipped by. Everyone - even the smokers - crowded into the bar in front of the TV screen. We still didn't make a big crowd but there was a big crowd with us on the screen, all packed into Trafalgar Square. The cameras picked out some tiny children, some elderly faces, all colours, all races, all looking up, as we were.

The fireworks on the screen were wonderful. I thought I'd love to have the job that the men in lit up overalls did, cruising back and forth on the river in front of the London Eye, activating the cascades and waterfalls of fireworks, fluid walls of coloured light, painting on the sky on a vast scale so that the Eye became a gigantic catherine wheel, the river a stream of flashing, flowing colours. It went on and on.

The little crowd in the pub around us had suddenly come to life. We were seized and hugged and kissed by girls and men, and seized them in our turn, wishing Happy New Year! Happy New Year! over and over again. It was a night to remember, after all.

I'd forgotten to bring my camera or my mobile phone. Everyone around us was texting and receiving messages. My friend was doing the same and complaining that the network was jammed as usual and he wasn't sure what he'd sent to whom. I didn't mind not having my camera. My mind's eye was enough.

And now I know that I do have a local.

New Painting in Progress

2007-12-30T14:50:00.000-08:00

I thought I'd post my present work in progress though it's at a very early stage and it will certainly change a lot before it's finished. The people in the foreground will need some redrawing as I fill in the surrounding areas, I realise. Now that I see the photo of it on the screen I can appreciate the composition in a different way.

My art dealer friend in Sorrento warned me firmly against including people in paintings but for this subject - Positano Beach - I don't see how I can avoid including bathers. Perhaps I should give the painting artistic respectability by entitlng it "Bathers" following the example of Picasso, Cezanne and Renoir (to name but a few.)

I'll let you see it again after New Year's Eve when I hope there will be more to see.

Happy New Year to all my readers, and roll on summer time!

Stage 2

This is after another couple of hours during which I realised that I'd drawn the left hand side of the beach on a different scale and level from the right. This affected the lowest level of the town buildings too, of course. Moral: check that your drawing is accurate before you start to paint, unless you want to do a lot od time-consuning repainting!

I am encouraged by my friends' comments to put in planty of people on the beach, which I'll enjoy doing!

Onwards and upwards then!

Positano Beach - Work in Progress Stage 3

Now the painting is getting very complicated. The distant parts of the beach are very indistinct in the photos I'm using so most of the people are my own invention. The perspective isn't easy and this won't be a very "realistic" picture. But I hope it will have the colour and atmosphere of an Italian beach. Still a long way to go, though.

Positano Beach, Stage 4

Here is the last picture of this composition before I finish it today. I've been photographing it in electric light, at the end of each session of work, and the colours look very yellow as a result. For interest, here is a version that I photographed today in daylight, though still with a flash. The truth about the colour is somewhere in between the two versions. The flash tends to flatten nuances of colour, too. especially in the daylit version (below). I have to paint the detail on the rocks behind the town, the sky, the last section of the town and the far left part of the beach in the fore-and middle-ground. I may add a few more people, too.

Positano Beach - finished (Gouache on Amalfi paper, 45cm x 45cm)

Here is the finished painting. I photographed it using a flash but no yellow light. There is a possiblity that I shall work into the rocks and the far left hand side a little more, but for tonight I'm done!

PS Here is the finished finished painting. I've reworked the left hand side of the beach a little.) Now I shall go on to the next one.

Work in Progress (3)

2007-11-30T14:56:00.000-08:00

Here's the last stage of "Positano from the East No2" before I finish it this weekend. I'm not sure about the clouds - they need more shadow I think - and of course I keep seeing windows Ive left out and adjusting the proportions especially in the foreground. There's sill quite a lot to do, even where the buildings look finished.And I still have the last few houses, the sea and the shore to paint. Maybe four more hours will do it.

Work in Progress (2)

2007-11-28T07:44:00.000-08:00

Here is another image of my unfinished painting "Positano from the East No 2" in gouache on A2 watercolour paper. I've worked on it for about 4 hours in total today, since the last photo in this series. It needs at least another 8 hours' work, I estimate. I'm not sure whether to include so much sea and sky in the composition and whether to paint some clouds in if I do keep so much sky. The sea is nowhere near finished, nor is the town, and there will be a flotilla of little boats on the water, of course.

Today is the anniversary of William Blake's birth in 1757. He was one of my heroes as a student, for his visionary poems ("Albion" for example) and his illustrations to them. Nowadays I prefer his more lyrical poems, the "Songs of Innocence and Experience". My favourite is still that famous one, "The Tyger".

Work in progress

2007-11-27T07:44:00.000-08:00

This is "Positano from the East no 2" in designer's gouache on A2 heavy watercolour paper. The intention is to achieve the jewel-like effect of a mediaeval or Indian painting, and so effects of light and shade ar subordinated to shapes and colours. It was begun two days ago and will take at least two more full days to complete.

My birthday

2007-11-22T07:43:00.000-08:00

I had a birthday yesterday - not a big one, or at least only one digit bigger than last year's - and I meant to put some effort into marking it somehow. I seldom have done anything much on my birthday because it's usually raining and I'm usually working (in fact one birthday I had to take a public exam, and another I had to go to a Parents' Evening as a member of staff, till 9pm). Also I usually have a cold on my birthday because it's that time of year.

Well, this year I had the option of not working (in fact I didn't have the option of working as it happened becauseI didn't get a call from the agency). The rain cleared up the night before. And I didn't quite have a cold. Just a tickly throat and a bit of a lazy feeling which might or might not have been down to some virus fighting with my white blood corpuscles.

I was going to drive down to see my daughter in Southampton for a meal, then come back and go to the theatre with Olwen in Guildford. To see a play that looked excellent but maybe esoteric enough for us to get last minute stand-by tickets.

By 9am everything seemed to be out of my control and spiralling down into the usual bad news birthday syndrome, apart from the fact that I wasn't expected to go to work. To start with, Alice phoned and said she wanted to come to Guildford instead of me going there. OK, I said, we'll all three go to the theatre. Boyfriend Mark was coming too, she said. Good, I said (I like Mark) I would cook instead of taking them out to eat, and try to get four tickets for the theatre.

Next, I phoned the theatre to see how bookings were going. Sold out for the whole week, they said. Immensely popular. Served me right for being an intellectual snob. Of course everyone in Guildford would want to go and see a modernised version of Philip Marlowe's "Faustus".

My sore throat began to make itself felt, helpfully, so that I could say to myself, "Just as well, I'm going to need an early night and a hot toddy by six o'clock." I broke the news to Olwen that our evening's theatre trip was a non-starter.

I popped out to get some salad and dry pasta, took a couple of photos of the trees along the road (brilliant blue sky again after all the darkness earlier this week), and as there was still an hour or two to go before Alice and Mark would be here I started cutting down the hedge that grows much too fast all year round, outside the front door. The weather was perfect, still and cloudless.

When Alice and Mark came in they were carrying a huge heart-shaped carrot cake with candles lit in my honour:

and a present that was very heavy, about two feet long, and roughly cylindrical. When I unwrapped it, I found this:

It's an extraordinary pot. I couldn't help exclaiming that it reminded me of someone I used to know. Mark found this very funny and said he was impressed, did size really count? No, I said, it's not the size that jogs my memory, it's the shape.

It's a lovely lustre glaze and will look beautiful with dangly grasses in it. Alice told me off a bit and then offered to get the lunch ready. The cake was delicious. Luckily they hadn't put as many candles on it as the years of my birthday. I did that on my fiftieth and the cake caught fire and nearly destroyed the curtains next to the table.

We had a very pleasant afternoon, talking over the dinner table. Alice had work to catch up on at uni and they went off in the early evening. I was glad I wasn't going out after all because the cold that had been hovering all week was making itself felt and I was starting to sneeze a bit. I went for a rest, intending to have the early night that I very seldom achieve.

But I woke up at nine and went down to see what had been happening on Myspace. When I turned on the computer I was overwhelmed by all the messages and comments that friends had sent and were still sending. It was great to exchange messages with so many people, some of whom I didn't know remembered me at all! So thanks everyone, whether you sent me a message or not - you are all so different, unique, all (or almost all, I suppose I should say, because you never know!) real living people with whom I'm grateful and proud to be in contact.

It rained in the evening, but for once it didn't rain on my parade.

Saturday in London - 19th May 2007

2007-05-22T05:53:00.000-07:00

I don't often go into London these days, especially when I have a project to prepare for, as I do now. But last Saturday was an exception. My friend Joseph, who is breaking into the world of entertainment, had an audition early in the morning in Tavistock Place near Euston and he suggested that we drive up there together and spend the rest of Saturday doing other things in town. No congestion charge and easy, even free parking at weekends made this an attractive proposition.

As is usual with such auditions, and as my friend had warned me, the applicants had been told to arrive at 8 am but then spent two hours queueing outside before anything much happened. The whole thing was finished before 1pm but I had lots of time to spend while he was auditioning. I had a coffee and read a book for an hour and then strolled along Southampton Row towards the British Museum. I remembered that I had a black biro in my bag and bought a pad of plain paper on the way.

The Egyptian Sculpture hall, which is the first you come to from the main entrance, had not changed at all since I was last there, when my daughter was researching for a school project - still monumental, lovely textures of marble and stone and those impassive archaic faces gazing across at each other. I went on through the ages and across the ancient world to the Early Greek Geometric rooms. Bellied pots, lovingly pieced together by archaeological restorers, with fine geometric patterns circling them. And a bench, placed behind the statue of a young athlete with a beautiful bottom. He is poised as if to throw a discus and his body twists in a lovely tense arabesque. The bench is behind him so it was natural for me to sit down with my pad and biro and try to draw his back.

I heard a little laugh behind me and there was a smiling Japanese lady, jabbing excitedly towards the sculptured buttocks. Yes, I mimed, I'm drawing it. She looked even more gleeful, sat down on the next bench and pulled out a sketch pad and a little box of watercolour paints. We worked alongside each other, occasionally holding up the work to show each other and compliment each other in our own language (she began this). I was still trying to capture the tension and dynamism of the athletic back in my sketches when she put her book away and went on to the next gallery.

The statue was attracting a lot of competitive posing from people of all genders, ages and nationalities by now. Most of those flexing their biceps next to him were boys and men, but some girls were doing the same. The urge of many of the female visitors to stroke those lovely buttocks was obvious by their mimes. (The same urge was restrained by convention in most of the male visitors, but not all!) It is a lovely work and I found it difficult to do it justice in my drawing.

I walked on into the section about Molossian culture. This was based where modern Iran lies, in the Persian region, about 350BC. Here I found another bench, my Japanese friend, and a huge marble statue of Mausolus, a Persian satrap (governor) in damaged marble. I sat down and we drew companionably for a while. She introduced herself and offered me a sweet, and I wished that I could speak Japanese.

The satrap was a powerful figure in every sense. His heavy head and strong neck reminded me of Joseph, who was still in the audition. Mausolus’ robe was draped in complex marble folds and creases round his ample stomach. He was a great figure to draw and I found I was really enjoying myself. I had finished and was just beginning a sketch of a gigantic marble horse's head in the same gallery when a message came from Joseph - the audition was over, he had met up with someone he knew and what about lunch together? Of course, I said.

Sarah, whom Joseph had met, writes a controversial blog on Myspace and her ambition is to publish her work. She is a sweet girl from Philadelphia who has been based in New York and now lives in London. We all went to Mr. Wu's, an "all you can eat" Chinese restaurant in Chinatown, which Joseph and I had been to before. The food there is good, plentiful and cheap and we had a good chat over our noodles, sweet and sour and rice dishes. Afterwards, we walked back towards the car with Sarah and said goodbye, but Joseph was in a "What shall we do now" mood so I took advantage of that to suggest the Anthony Gormley exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. Having written about it after seeing a Channel 4 programme about it last week, I felt I must see the real thing.

We drove over to Waterloo and parked on the bridge, a stone's throw from the Hayward. It was after four in the afternoon and getting chilly. we found a queue for tickets, joined it and got in for the 5 o'clock slot. While we waited, we viewed what in Joseph's opinion was the only good part of the exhibition: "Event Horizon", which is free because it consists of replicas of Gormley's standing figure, installed on roofs and high points all over London. It's a simple idea with an amazing impact. You look up and spot one of the figures, then another, then another, until you find that scores of them have swum into your conscious perception. Why the installation is so impressive is hard to put into words. It's perhaps partly because they give scale to the buildings and skyline and also perhaps they excite a kind of empathetic feeling of being up there yourself, looking down and across London. Their collective gaze makes a kind of intangible network across the city, too.

The Channel 4 programme had predisposed Joseph and me towards the exhibition in diametrically opposed ways. I was prepared to love it. Joseph was prepared to dislike it. In the event I found Joseph's position was not unreasonable, but we both enjoyed the "Blind Light" installation - a glass cube full of dense white fog, where visitors wander unable to see each other or the sides of the box until they approach to within a few inches of them. The atmosphere in the cube is warm and damp and you are blinded, yet in light, not darkness. Joseph said it reminded him of when he flew helicopters through clouds. It reminded me of the "pea-souper" fogs we used to have in London when I was a child, in the days when coal was the main source of heat and power. It made me cough a little and I thought about the germs that might be enjoying the damp heat that we were all breathing in and out!

The other room that I enjoyed was called "Matrices and Expansions". In about ten hanging sculptures, Gormley has made three dimensional "drawings" in wires and rods of male figures (based on hs own body) and extended the lines through and around the enclosed figures. Each sculpture has a different character that comes from the spacing and thickness of the "lines" used to make them. I found these beautiful. Joseph didn't agree.

We couldn't face any more queuing so we didn't go inside "Hatch", another walk-in installation.

Joseph was somewhat scathing about the exhibition and pointed out that the only part worth seeing was visible free, so we shouldn't have paid to see the rest (£8 and I was disappointed that the senior concession rate was only £1 less at £7) I was glad I'd seen it, though -having written about the publicity for it, it was only honest to see the reality!

We were still in the mood to do more and so we decided to go to Leicester Square to get some discounted tickets for Blue Man Group, who are showing at the New English Theatre in Drury lane until 24th June. Joseph had seen them before, in Las Vegas, but was keen to do so again. We caught the tube this time and managed to get tickets for the 9pm show.

We then made our tired and rather tetchy way on foot to check where the theatre was, before having a drink and a snack. It turned out that Joseph and I have opposite views on finding the way in cities if you've left your A-Z in the car (as I had). Joseph won't ask the way because he maintains that this leads to misinformation if not to a complete blank. I reckon that you are likely to get the information you need if you pick someone to ask who works in the area. We got as far as Covent Garden and I spotted a newspaper seller – I ‘ve never met one who doesn’t know every road in a half mile radius or who isn’t glad to tell you how to get there. It worked. It wasn’t until we sat down outside the “Freemason’s Arms” near Drury Lane (having found the theatre) that Joseph looked at the back of the flier he had thoughtfully picked up at the ticket office and discovered the map of theatreland on it.

We were intrigued by a constant coming and going of men in black suits carrying identical black cases, in and out of the building opposite where we sat. We were tired – it shouldn’t have taken us so long to realise why the pub where we sat was so named. The identical ties and lapel pins were our final clue. There must have been quite a major pow-wow going on that evening.

The Blue Man Group show was absolutely the highlight of the day. As Joseph said, “This is real art” (I won’t repeat all his comments about Anthony Gormley here). He is right – this is stimulating, exciting, sensitive, funny, visual, musical, vibrant, cross cultural, honest, interactive performance art of the highest quality. I will say no more but will advise anyone who asks – go and see for yourself.

After the performance the group and their backstage crew come out into the foyer to pose for photos and sign programmes. So they are non-elitist and approachable as well. A great performance!

It’s a long time since I’ve had such a busy and enjoyable Saturday. Now I’m saving up for the next one!