“I don’t know much about art….”

When I went around the sculpture in the garden exhibition, I went round with a colleague, his wife and the one I go round sculpture exhibitions with. Interestingly, they all claimed to have parents who were artists, but their approach to the exhibition was very different.

My approach to this sort of stuff is a rather breathy enthusiasm - “Oh, wow, doesn’t it look like a spaceship?” or “Oh, look, blown glass bubbles in a tree, how coo-oo-ool is that?” My valley-girl inarticulateness in the light of the candy battle of Helm’s Deep is a case in point. I get terribly excited about this sort of stuff and go off at a dozen or so tangents, like a pack of hounds in a fun-fair.

The one I go round exhibitions with engages at a more knowledgeable and academic level. This is a kid who was taken to the Tate before he could walk and who refers to holiday snaps as “images”. He talks intelligently about what he is seeing - perhaps he’ll comment on the references the artist is making to the work of other artists, perhaps he’ll think about the artist’s intentions. Not only does he ‘get’ art, he gets the context too.

But the other two were much more passive. “Oh, yes, it’s a garment made out of glass hanging on a steel coat-hanger in a tree - it’s very pretty”. MMmmmm. “Kingfishers above the water. That’s nice.” I was left gasping like a trout on a riverbank at their lack of engagement. Nothing touched them. They saw it, but only seemed to see what was in front of their eyes. I am not sure whether or not they were deliberately holding back. The exhibition was my idea, not theirs.

But how can anyone walk through a woodland glade where someone has planted hundreds of fabric flowers and have a reaction which is limited to “oh, look, hundreds of fabric flowers in a woodland glade”?

I may not know much about art, but it seems that I know even less about people.

Calvinist Weather

I loathe and dislike the darkness and storm-lashed bad temper of winter, and I’m not too fond of the coldness of it either. I loathe them to the point, sadly, where I can’t always enjoy the summer the way I should because it will be followed by winter. ‘Ah yes’, I say to myself as the sun set fades at 10:30 on a downy summer’s evening, ‘but it’s all downhill from here; it’ll be gales and dark by 4.00 before I know it’.

How Calvinist. You’ll be punished for enjoying the good things god gave you. How much better to be miserable all of the time.

Then it struck me that the hard-line protestant religions, including Calvinism, are all either from the mountains or the north. They are from places with seasons, anyway; places where the winter is a dangerous endurance-test, rather than a mild interlude.

How much nicer to be an easy-going Catholic where it doesn’t really matter what you do, because the next day’ll be mild or warm or pleasant or wonderfully hot, and all you need to do to enjoy it is confess and get absolution. No bitter frosts, week-long gales, dead plants, damp houses, pneumonia, chilblains or frostbite for you. Just a couple of hail marys and go in peace and have a nice day.

Summer flowers, winter mornings

One summer’s day eighty, ninety, maybe a hundred years ago my grandmother’s sister filled a green bowl with poppies and cornflowers and great white peonies.

Every morning, the first thing I see when I wake is that green bowl of summer flowers which she painted all those years ago.

I like that.

Cock-crow

Early morning mist.
Cocks launching their challenges
across the valley.

New Phone

It wasn’t my fault, ok.Well, the being in Bristol on the wrong day was my fault, I guess. But the upgrading the mobile phone wasn’t. Really it wasn’t. I’d left at 7.00am. It was now 9.30. It was, as I said, the wrong day. Who would turn round and go hammering straight back along the motorway again on such a hot morning? A nice cup of tea and maybe a little window-shopping - where’s the harm in that? Flicking through the papers and drinking a Chai Latte, perhaps.

If they must put large signs in the street advertising the new Sony Ericsson with the 3.2 megapixel camera, what am I going to do about it?

Quite.

So here are some of the pictures I took. For a camera, it’s a bloody cool phone.

I really like living in the future.

Sun-kissed

sun and breeze touch skin
stroking the boundary between
me and the summer

Puss in Boots

The cats are noticeably less neurotic since I fitted the cat-flap. Hardly a surprise, really: they can come and go as they please, sleep the afternoon away, get up for a light snack, saunter out, take the air, indulge in some elegant exercise, look splendid, out-stare their rivals, kill birds, and come in again and complain bitterly when they get bored of the outside world.

A charmed life, being a cat. Rather like being an 18th century aristocrat, if you think about it. Or a member of the Waffen SS.

Primaeval

Green ferns and fir trees.
Murmuring woods remember
ghosts of dinosaurs.

Catflaps

I’ve finally given in and agreed to fit a cat-flap. This is not so much to let the cats out, as to let them in again. The weather has been so fine recently that I let them out at 8.00am and I’ve had to call them in after midnight. They come in occasionally and demand food, though why they cannot feed themselves on rabbit-flavoured rabbit and mouse-flavoured mouse is beyond me. They require tuna-and-cod-flavoured horse, it seems.

Who would have thought buying a catflap took so much time? The door is varnished wood. It is too nice to cut up to install a cat-flap, but see above. So I need a brown cat-flap. The weather is benign now, but the wind wuthers around in the lane in the winter, so I need one which is weather-proof, possibly with magnetic strips to hold it shut in the wind. The panel I’ll be installing it in is half and inch thick, so I need one which has a tunnel or a sleeve which I can adjust to fit.

Three catflaps later, I finally found one in the market which purports to be what I need. So I will be making-it with the drill, the pencil, the saw, and the screw-driver.

And then the demanding little bastards can come and go as they please.

Ahhhh…. Bless…..

The egg

The egg is smooth, round, perfect,
speckled brown and green,
heavy with the bird inside -
An astonishing thing to find
by the bathroom door.

On my bed,
the serial-killer purrs.