Self-Winding · A Sort of Progression

War mood
- This line-up of post-1945 British military conflicts is largely derived from personal testimonies of military personnel involved. It is depressing, but worth spending some time on. I've just read through the Mau Mau chapter and realise how much I have forgotten of world affairs in my own lifetime.

- I am in a war mood at the moment anyway - reading Pat Barker's harrowing Regeneration Trilogy.

- While checking up on some war artists I also chanced on this interesting little piece about a frustrated cubist.

Written in pencil
I found a letter carefully folded in my mother?s old medical dictionary. I wrote it home to London from my grandparents? house in Norfolk sometime in the early fifties. It's not strong on content, but contains just one spelling mistake and pretty good punctuation - including well-placed apostrophes. And, for heaven?s sake, ? ?we confined ourselves?!
We were obviously having a fun time, scrubbing graves and not going to the rose garden. As I remember, one of the highlights of our day was to go and watch the pigs wee. Actually, it was paradise; my sister and I ran wild on a dying old country estate. Nowadays it?s me hobbling with my bad knee, me still watching the birds and me still stuffing chocolate.

Yummyfun
I've always liked a good old fishcake

The Red Exercise Book again

West Coast Train

Midnight twenty, Memphis Central Station,
Cicada song outside.
Music from busy bars back down the road
Drifts through the booking hall.
Holding hands, waiting to begin
We listen for the train.
Suddenly it comes, all hiss and thrill,
Past the platform door, throbbing, full of heat.

Tickets in our teeth, we hand the luggage up
To quick, black hands.
The train attendant lifts us to adventure.
We pass into his world
Of cool green seats and shaded lights.
Dulled by the sound of wheels we sleep,
Leaning together, Arizona bound.

Days later, the Canyon left behind,
We board another train,
?Illinois Central Railroad? in gold along its side.
In the hot evening we pull away from Flagstaff
Whistling, chasing tumbleweeds.

An orange sunset burns, hazed with dust.
Talk dies down, our sleeper waits,
A tiny space - mighty small for loving.
We close the door and the magic night begins.

Speeding to the City of the Angels
America unfolds across our private screen,
Empty desert, fields, small towns and animals
Running beside us in the dark.

We were never again happier than that night.
That is why, when conversation turns
To journeys, I forget the redness of rocks,
The opal river, the bustling cities and Pacific sea
And think, invariably, of trains.

Cross of Shame
A disturbing investigation of a local relic - the Bury St Edmunds cross. 'Beneath its pious beauty, it is inscribed with fiery anti-Semitic invective. As Hoving puts it: "It's as if Hitler and Michelangelo collaborated to make a masterpiece'.

Where can you...
? walk around a dear old house and garden quite free of supervision
? inhale a ginger cat warm from the deep grass
? come upon a lamb asleep in a walled garden
? find apple trees garlanded with mistletoe and blossom both
? stroke sun-sweet pots of camomile
? shadow a proud peacock
? hear a log fire crackling in an empty room
? see a pig lost in a trance?

Why, here.

You are more beautiful than a bouquet of fossils.
Make your compliments a bit more interesting.

Bit of a do
Andy?s birthday party Saturday night. Good people.
One couple had just returned from 8 years teaching in Bogota, Colombia. Citing Michael Palin?s visit there which showed it as terrifyingly violent I drew this - "That damned programme! In fact the journalist who showed Palin round was subsequently moved on. OK, one must be careful , but the political position is more stable now, no problem.?

They were adapting to teaching in English secondary schools. Uncontrolled, uninterested kids were quite a shock after the motivated midle class students they had become used to in S. America. But they are enjoying the change, not lily-livered.

Talked a lot to Maria?s husband for the first time - complex chap , Viva Zapata moustache and myriad interests - an engineer and a good artist. Told me about his managers buying expensive plant in Italy - crap machinery, with red levers and gleaming stainless steel hinges that seduced them by its looks. On the strength of that error he persuaded them to let him do an industrial design course and revamped all their own production modules to great advantage.

I had been thinking about a dual function of visual art and we talked it through. Painting can be used for a very practical information function at the same time as being a real aesthetic experience. For example, the Science Museum uses a large Lowry picture of a manufacturing town to illustrate industrial evolution. In the National Portrait Gallery the faces are there for a biographical purpose but they are also an experience of painting. The way you react to these ?placed? canvases is different to the way you feel when you view them solely as works of art. I think we agreed that the duality could prove the more intense experience.

A great evening which will be followed up by another session there on Wednesday (with Pat & Dennis too) to finish up the cheese!

Unwelcome
We visited G in hospital today, relieved to find him, post heart attack, looking wiry and full of laughs. As usual, he knows people there, several clients and two chaps from the village are on his ward - so he is busy networking.

His wife doesn't drive but has voluntary chauffeurs. A man who works for the local undertaker drove her to Bury yesterday and popped up to see G - causing consternation on the ward. "Bugger orf, Bill we hent ready yit" "Brought your tape measure, Bill?" and " Bleedin' ambulance chaser." were three of the reported comments from the floor.

Hangman
I just solved six words on the trot.

Handy hemp
If you are a horny handed tiller of the soil like me, may I highly recommend Body Shop Hemp Hand Protector (dry to very dry skin). It's sooooo comforting - and you will get used to the rather strange smell!

Arty bits
Kate Muir wrote an interesting piece in The Times Mag' on Saturday about the Glasgow conceptual artists selected for the Beck's Futures competition. The work was 'proof that Glaswegians....have not lost their ability to take both the mickey and the dosh'. OK, some of it is easily mocked - viz. a guy sewing balsawood to his feet, but there are some engaging ideas. I like the concept of Lucy Kaer's public 'intervention' of smuggling butterfly chrysalises into the Old Bailey, in a 'critique of the controlled rituals of the space'. I twig that somehow. Can't you just imagine the frivolity of their sudden hatching in that grave place?

I'm not into science fiction, but the graphics on Austrian artist Peter Gric's site are intriguing

My windows obsession was fed today. The great Hopper painting was echoed by a marvellous photograph by Meg Pickard.

City of Sound
Enjoyed this vignette of Norfolk. The blog looks interesting too, must return later and read more.

Karaoke Soul
Tom McRae's single is released - two versions with some attractive extras. Buy it and help to get him in the top 40! Apparently he has been getting air time on Radio 2 - Steve Wright in the Afternoon. I'm convinced that he'll make the big time eventually, I still haven't tired of the first two albums after endless playing.

Minnie Driver expanded on the context of this misquote in an interview today; she saw Judi Dench play Cleopatra, finding her sexy, vital and youthful. The following day she met her out shopping and was perplexed to observe a ?small round middle aged woman?.

It reminded me of standing next to a man in the bar at the Old Vic years ago. I recognized the voice first, then the actor: dark suited, spectacled, shorter than I imagined, he looked weary and old, drinking whisky. Three weeks later I saw him on that stage, tall, sexy,electric, powerful, muscled, all action and passion. Unbelievable that this man could be one and the same. How the hell do they create such illusions?

It's just past midnight, the moon is up. I walked out to the car to fetch my mobile and heard them.
NIGHTINGALES singing
I am so happy. They have come back. In the neigbouring wood. Jacket on. I'm going out to listen to the concert right now.

Shots from Scotland
New pictures are available here

How's your geography?
I filched this map test from Stumbling Tongue. It's difficult, but handily germane to current world activity.

Baker's Bun (?)
I had a fun birthday, with visits from my Skinny & Philip and lots of friends dropping in. Louise, Sean and the girls came for a drink, Jim brought cakes and flowers. There was a long-distance call featuring ?Happy Birthday? played on the mouth organ. Great presents (a thong (!), a crystal cat and Chanel Cristalle, six books, Mahler symphonies, MJQ CD, wine, a trowel, a bonsai, some garden candles. There was a lot of foolishness and a deferred dinner due to Paul?s sudden attack of vertigo. We will catch up with it, but I enjoyed my birthday lunch of Fish & Chips and a knickerbocker glory at dear old Collins' in Brandon!
My present from Mark included Robert Frost?s ?Collected Poems? which has been devoured. One on a theme that I know all about........

The Sound of the Trees
I wonder about the trees.
Why do we wish to bear
Forever the noise of these
More than another noise
So close to our dwelling place?
We suffer them by the day
Till we lose all measure of pace,
And fixity in our joys,
And acquire a listening air.
They are that that talks of going
But never gets away;
And that talks no less for knowing,
As it grows wiser and older,
That now it means to stay.
My feet tug at the floor
And my head sways to my shoulder
Sometimes when I watch trees sway,
From the window or the door.
I shall set forth for somewhere,
I shall make the reckless choice
Some day when they are in voice
And tossing so as to scare
The white clouds over them on.
I shall have less to say,
But I shall be gone.

Snoozing not musing
The desire to write sometimes goes away. Or is subsumed by practicalities and work. I have been so tired at night, craving bed after really hard graft in the garden. Grass cutting, pruning, carting, weeding packed into these marvellous, sun-filled days. To the annoyance of four mallard residents, I cleared the stream of fallen branches, mud and waterweed and now great smelly black piles are drying out on the banks ? they will leave a fertile silt in which ferns will flourish. The rest will be spirited over the fence with my compliments to Forest Enterprise. It is a mess over there - full of criss-crossed, wind-felled pines, their giant root boles upturned and colonised by plants. I have heard that it is uneconomical to clear that plantation for timber and it will probably be left to do its own thing. I don?t care what it looks like, it offers cover to the house and shelters our wildlife.

Cordon Insanitaire
Again this year I have resisted the urge to tidy up the wide strip of rough grass scrub, dotted with wild broom and nettles that runs along the left side of the ground. So untidy until the new grass grows up through the tussocks and covers the old bleached stalks, it has not been interfered with at all for 15 years. I had my reward as sitting quietly on the log bench I saw a field mouse and her miniscule babies come out of a hole in a large tussock and play tag. They were only the size of my little fingernail and moved so fast that I couldn?t count them. Awful to think that they are partly the reason why we hear the tawny owl around there most nights now.

Day off
We went to London yesterday on our new enterprise - visit a museum/gallery at least once a month. Gordon had the first pick, so we finished up at the Science Museum for most of the day. While he ogled plane engines and clock innards, I sidled off to Digitopolis - a brilliantly presented series of computer wizardries, hands-on experiments, literary allusions, beeps, flashing lights, cartoons?I had a great hour and a half in there. We both fell under the spell of the working steam engines, oily steel gleaming, with their pistons thrusting away in the Power gallery, and gazed in wonder at Stephenson?s ?Rocket?.
I have heard purists grumble about the trivialisation of museum collections, at the introduction of unconventionally themed groupings, of exhibits that stray from an historical timeline etc. All I can say is, just walk from the Science Museum's Materials Gallery with its exquisite design and challenging ideas into the Agricultural stuff next door, still in dusty tableau format and see which tunes up your intellectual curiosity.
We took sandwiches and bananas with us (£3 for a cheese & plastic effort in the museum caff) and ate them on a bench in the sun. Walking the white tiled tunnel to South Kensington Station, we popped up the steps to view this stunning outdoor exhibition at the Natural History Museum, it was packed! Great e-cards here that give an idea of the quality and impact of the huge photographs. With half an hour to go before our departure, we sat outside a pub by Victoria coach station, drank a glass of cold white wine and enjoyed watching streams of people pass by. You miss the visual stimulation of crowds and faces when you live in the countryside.