Thoughts from the Garden

I often go to sit in or wander around my garden when I want to think about things. Although we're near a busy road I automatically filter out the sounds of the traffic nowadays, and the sounds and smells of the garden come through in sharp focus. It must be this that helps me focus my thoughts.

I was thinking about something that one or two of us had mentioned on the EDM forum in the last couple of days which was about the fear of doing art. It seems I'm not the only one who spends a lot of time thinking about what I'm going to put onto paper, reading about the various methods available to me, deciding which medium would be best and generally prevaricating. I now know prevarication for its real name - fear.

Once I've decided what I'm going to sketch or paint, I spend a lot of time visualizing it in my mind's eye. I can see every nuance of every hue I'll use, each mark I'll place on the paper to form the composition, and exactly what the finished piece will look like. Naturally, it's beautiful, colourful, perfect in every way. And all the time I know that it will never look as good as my imagination has painted it. So I put off starting, think of something else I should be doing; clean the cooker, tidy up my painting materials and put all my drawing pads in a neat pile, take Misty for a walk. Anything that will put off having to put that first mark on the paper. Because if that first mark isn't absolutely perfect the whole thing will be a disappointment; no good, rubbish, fit only for the recycling bag.

And that is what my fear is. I recognize it for what it is and I know, without a doubt, that if I get rid of all that angst and just get out a pen, pencil, paintbrush, marker pen - whatever - and go for it without thinking about it, then even if I do consider it to be rubbish at the end it will have been a step towards being able to produce something worthwhile one day.

But how to get rid of the fear? The answer lies in the garden somewhere, I just know it.

Misty, my Irish Wolfhound

This is Misty, my beloved Irish Wolfhound. She's just over 7 years old and still acts like a kid at times although you wouldn't think so from this picture. She is a true gentle giant with the most beautiful, kind nature and she puts up with me regardless of what sort of mood I'm in.

Very little fazes her although she regards squirrels as having been put on this earth solely in order to goad her, which means she spends a lot of time at the bottom of trees looking up into the branches.

This is Misty's haiku:

Low sun stroking fur
Shades of grey and gold mingle
Deep and peaceful breaths

Chimneys and Broadband

I’m sitting in my kitchen with the laptop, no broadband and no phone and my house is over-run by strange people and loud noises.

We’re having the chimney lined after all sorts of scare stories about the risk of chimney fires, the chance that the interior brick lining of the chimney’s going to crumble away etc. etc. A couple of months ago when we had the chimney swept I had a good look at the stuff that came down – huge chunks of black, vitreous stuff, the product of too many pine logs burned in the wood burner. It’s quite possible apparently for this stuff to catch fire in the chimney so I put a ban on use of the wood burner until we had it done – much to the disgust of my husband who was convinced it wasn’t really necessary but just a ploy of the chimney sweeping company to make a sale. But he does love his wood burner when the days get cold so eventually, with winter just over the horizon and the thought of another exciting delivery of logs, he gave in. How many people like stacking humungous amounts of logs tidily in the wood shed? Must be a guy thing!

It’s pretty well a whole day’s job and the room where the woodburner’s located is in the middle of the house so I get stuck either on the side where my study, bedroom and loo is, or in the kitchen. Accepting the fact that I’d be spending most of the day making cups of tea and coffee for the workmen, I decided to de-camp to the kitchen with my laptop.

The young guy is up the ladder on the roof, feeding a bloody great silver tube down the chimney while the boss of the operation’s in the sitting room yelling up the chimney to his mate and guiding the silver snake round the inevitable bends (why do they always put bends in chimneys?). While the young guy’s on the roof I get him to dig up the pine tree that’s decided to take root in the brickwork at the top of the chimney. My husband’s been threatening to do that for nearly a year now, since it was just a little tiny treelet, but the pitch of the roof and the fear of heights seemed to put him off. They tell me that if we’d left it there it would eventually have become a full-grown Scots pine growing out of the middle of our house (or what little would be left of it). Actually, thinking about it, it sounds quite fun.

While all this is going on the BT man turns up to try and sort out my broadband which has decided it doesn’t want to share a line with the telephone thank you very much and huffily switches itself off every time someone picks up the ‘phone. That and being abysmally slow (half a megabyte would you believe due to the distance we are from the exchange!) has been thoroughly tweeking my nerves of late.

Now I have broadband back and the phone works too. The chimney’s lined, the roof tree’s been removed and everything’s back where it oughta be. I’m off for a walk with Misty!!

Sea Bass

My hands leaning on the bench either side of the wooden board, I looked down at it. It looked back at me, its single, bright, black eye unblinking.

Rounded nose, a good 18 inches long; this was undoubtedly a wild fish - a wolf of the sea - grown long and sleek, powered by its voracious appetite for young and smaller fish in the warm water around the shoreline. Greenish-black and silver scales clothed the once-powerful body that had spent its days prowling the surf, forcing through the breaking waves, riding the currents, hunting food to provide fuel for energy.

I picked up my filleting knife and started work on the line-caught sea bass, one of a boxful that had just been delivered from Cornwall, all of them tagged so they could be traced to the fisherman who caught them. I took my time, not wanting to give anything but my best work to this beautiful fish. As the flesh came away from the bone the aroma of ozone-laden sea air wafted upwards, a promise of the intense flavour that would reward the diner who had just ordered this simple but exquisite dish of pan fried sea bass fillet served on a bed of sliced tomatoes from Spain, sweet and drenched in sun-ripened flavour.

Spectacles, schmectacles

You would think, wouldn't you, that buying a pair of specs would be the easiest thing in the world. The amount of choice available in most large opticians is massive - every shape, colour, style you can imagine. I thought, 'Hmm - I'll just pop in and choose a couple of frames and get them made up to my prescription - shouldn't take more than half an hour.'

Half a day more like! By the time an assistant came over to me I had about eight pairs I liked clutched in one hand, another three stuck in the neck of my T-shirt and was trying on a twelfth.

'Can I help you, madam?' She glanced with barely disguised horror at all these expensive frames (I assumed they were expensive - I don't like tat!) hanging off different parts of me.

She led me over to the back of the shop where she offloaded the frames onto the relative safety of a table and sat me down. Then she unclipped the security tags from all twelve pairs so I could try them on properly. After trying them all on at least twice, some of them more, I settled on my favourite couple of frames and she called up my prescription on the computer.

'Oh dear,' she said. 'You can't have either of those with your prescription. This one,' and she pointed to a beautiful fuchsia pink beauty with a thin, oblong frame and slightly blingy arms, 'is far two shallow. Your varifocal requirement won't suit that at all. And this one,' an electric blue half-frame with arms that faded from blue to purple, 'won't do either. You need a full frame for your prescription.'

'So which of all these would work for me?' I asked her, pointing to the rejected pile of ten frames and thinking I would have to settle for second best.

But no, none of them were any good. They were either too shallow, too narrow, not enough frame etc. etc.

So back we went to the rows of frames to start over. We looked at Prada, RayBan, Oakley, Dior, Armani, D&G... We even looked at some cheap ones! And nothing, absolutely nothing I liked would work with my prescription.

By this time there was a fairly healthy queue forming at the reception desk and most of the rest of the staff had gone off on their lunch break. My assistant's voice had gone up an octave or two - definitely the first signs of panic setting in.

So we turned to the problem of the lenses. Should I have extra thin lenses? Aspheric? High index? Glass or plastic? Arghhhhhh - my head was spinning from all these options. All I want is some colourful, blingy specs so I can ditch my contact lenses before the bags under my eyes get big enough to hold the entire English Channel because they're being pulled around so much.

What on earth is a Chaffinch to do?

I need proof...

I need proof. Without it my life is snagged in a time stutter like a stuck record, constantly going over and over the same thoughts, worries and conjectures. Why is it that you are so unable to be straight with me? How easy would it be if you just showed me what I need to see, told me what I need to hear? Once that's out of the way we could go on - go forward - go anywhere at all that we wanted to.

But no - you won't keep the faith with me so I am unable to do so with you. You ask for my love, my commitment, my support, all of which I am aching to give you, but you offer nothing in return. It's like a bad pulp fiction story; so predictable and corny, yet so incomplete and unexpected. My life was not supposed to be like this - my life was supposed to be exciting, yes; radical, yes; driven by chance and fortune, not by planning and organizing. And I'm almost there - teetering on the edge of a great world of new sights and sounds, new cultures and customs, new colours and textures.

But you're stopping me - you've put a concrete block across my tracks that I can't go around however I may try. And all for the sake of one sentence; twenty words max; the opening or closing of the rest of my life.

Watermelons and Zen Students

Watermelons and Zen students grow pretty much the same way.
Long periods of sitting till they ripen and grow all juicy inside, but when you knock them on the head to see if they're ready— sounds like nothing's going on.

Peter Levitt, from 'Essential Zen'

This quote came to me courtesy of Tricycle.com and I thought how nice it would be to post it on my blog and find a really great picture of watermelons to go with it. It's a great example of the power that both the written word and visual images have to make your mouth water.

Plenty going on in my head today though. I spent an hour taking photographs of a couple of a couple of camera lenses I wanted to sell on Ebay, another hour filling in the forms for each of them and they both sold immediately! Wow - what's going on? Did I happen upon a collector of camera lenses? Needless to say I'm a very happy bunny and I promise (honest) not to go and spend the proceeds immediately.

I'll wait til the weekend!

Requiem for a Horse

A horse was killed just down the road from my house today.

I came home from work and the traffic was backed up. When I got near I saw what I first thought was a large white dog lying beside the road, but as I got up to it I saw that it was a white horse. Next to it stood a man sobbing his heart out; I don't know if he was the owner of the horse or the driver whose vehicle had hit it. The horse had no saddle on so maybe it got loose and ran out into the busy road.

I don't know any of the detail - I just know that a beautiful creature was lying by the road, possibly dead, certainly with very little time left to live.

I do know that I was grief stricken for the poor animal and that it made the sun go in on my day. I also know that my grief was probably more for this animal than it would have been had a person been lying there. Why is this? I think most people would consider it to be wrong, but it is certainly the truth. I believe it's to do with the innocence of animals.

Knitting!

Yesterday I had a sudden urge to take up knitting. How peaceful and soothing it would be to sit in the garden on a warm, sunny day, knitting and meditating. Aahh - I'm relaxing just thinking about it.

The last time I had one of these urges was about two years ago and I have the piles of knitting books, needles, balls of wool and other strange-looking bits and pieces whose purpose is a bit of a mystery to prove it. I think buying all the accoutrements was probably a whole lot more fun than getting down to it and knitting something. I found a half-made, holey woollen object hanging off a knitting needle in one cupboard but I can't honestly say I remember what it was going to be.

So... what to knit? I have two problems here; first, I absolutely hate handknitted clothes - almost without exception you can spot them from 50 yards and almost without exception they're a sludgy green colour! Second, I haven't got a clue what all those weird knitting terms mean; "yarn over" or "slip" or "pass slipped stich over". I know "knit" and I think I know "purl" and I can "cast on" although I haven't a clue how to "cast off".

After several re-thinks and frantic searching through the knitting books I found the perfect answer. It's a cushion. It's knitted entirely in knit stitch. It's all in one piece. Sounds like my sort of cushion cover. As long as I can find out how to cast off in time (if I can't it's going to end up as a helluva long, wide scarf!) it sounds pretty easy.

Only one problem. How many rows of boring old knit stitch can I actually get done before I get fed up with the whole thing and take up fishing. Or gardening. Or cooking. Or...

Google Weather

Lately I've become addicted to checking out my local weather by putting it onto my Google homepage - well I'm a Brit! It's allowed.

I've noticed that it changes with alarming frequency, sometimes several times a day. It can start off with black clouds, white rain and a grey background, changing to white clouds, white rain and a blue background. A few hours later there'll be half a yellow sun shouldering its way between the white clouds and white rain. Then, just as I think the next development will be a whole sun with no clouds and a blue sky the damn sun gets pushed aside again by the white clouds, white rain and grey sky.

That's British weather for you...

Trying to Write

I'm looking out of my study window, through the two wolfhound sculptures that sit on the window sill, and out into the garden. The view from my seated position is of trees and shrubs and the colours I see are almost entirely shades of green, backed by a pale blue sky.
The rhododendron is still only in bud but will shortly break out into vivid pink flowers. For some reason the rhododendrons in my garden are always behind those of everyone else. This may sound paranoid, but my poor old backward shrubs are weeks behind everyone else's and are in flower long after all the others have died. I'm living in a rhododendron challenged space - a parallel world.

There's a slight wind creating movement in the foliage. An occasional pigeon visits the ivy that has been winding itself round one of the pine trees since long before we moved here so that its trunk is almost as thick as that of the tree itself.

The sun has just come out, completely changing the colours and accentuating the difference between the different leaves. Some are golden, some silvery; the pine needles are the same dull, blueish green as they are all year round. The pines stand like sentinels in the garden, watching the other trees change from pale green to deep green to yellow, then red, and finally brown, but barely changing colour themselves.

It won't be long now before the roses are out. There are three rose bushes just behind the wooden table and bench, the tops of which I can just see from my position. When the roses come out I'll move my chair a little to the right and put the wolfhounds on another window sill so I can watch them while I'm trying to write.

In the background is the hum of traffic on the road outside, reminding me of how near to the busy main road my house stands. But I've got used to it over the years, and though I'd dearly love to live somewhere quieter I also dearly love living in this house, surrounded by its beautiful garden. So I switch off the sound of the traffic and try to write.

Scents of an Early Summer

A warm day. At the bottom of the field where I walk Misty at lunchtime the scents of summer are all around. Like ephemera they dance away from me just as I think I've caught them. Tantalizing scents from my youth waft by, laughing as I reach out towards them - nature's perfumes - my inbreath longer and longer in its search until I have to let go, still just missing the memory.

But the joy of reaching allows me to truly take in and ponder on the scents; herby, grassy, warm with the merest hint of sweet - maybe from the falling May blossom, maybe the foliage itself, newly grown and stealing the blossoms' grip on the branch.

And all the while, on the breeze float tiny seed spores, their white, delicate parachutes carrying them away to begin again the joyous cycle of life.

My new best friend!

A diamond came to live with me today. The most beautiful diamond I've ever seen - or at least that I've ever seen close up. It's a brilliant cut solitaire on a platinum ring with a plain, modern claw mounting. It's almost colourless and sparkles like moonlight on water.

As I type it throws multicoloured flashes of light through the air and if that's not an incentive to keep writing I don't know what is!

I learned a lot about diamonds after we first spoke with our jeweller; about the four Cs, Carat, Cut, Colour and Clarity. I learned how colour is notated for diamonds - D is the most colourless and therefore most valuable; mine is a G. Carat is, as everyone knows, the size of the diamond - 1 carat is 0.2 grams; mine is 1.39 carat. Cut is what gives the diamond its brilliance; the facets that are cut on the surface of the diamond reflect the light back and forth within the gem. Finally, clarity of the stone is determined by the amount of faults or marks there are within the stone, called inclusions. Almost all diamonds have some sort of mark within them, many not able to be seen by the naked eye; the fewer there are, the more valuable the diamond.

My diamond has a very few small inclusions, but to balance that, the colour is at the top end of the scale. It's a good balance I think.

Never in a million years would I have been able to afford a diamond such as the one that's come to live with me. To just try something like it on in a jeweller's store would have been something I'd never have considered.

So to those thieves who burgled our home a couple of months ago and took every single piece of jewellery I had, including the rings my mother left me when she died last year, I say don't bother coming back; you won't find anything there.

My Word for 2009

After reading Christine Kane's blog on a Resolution Revolution I decided that it was silly to, yet again, make the same old resolutions that are forgotten within days. So I thought long and hard about choosing a single word to keep by me for 2009 and finally decided on "Connect".

This is to remind me to connect with:

• My friends and colleagues - making sure I both listen to, and hear, what they say
• My spiritual core - making sure to regularly stop, be quiet, breathe and try to connect with my inner self
• My environment - studying it, watching how I interact with it, taking care of it
• My world - resolving to try and shop locally whenever possible, recycle everything I can and reduce my carbon footprint

But above all, it's to remind me that everything I do impacts on all of the above - we all interconnect with each other and our environments.

What now?

I've changed the picture at the top of my blog again today. Paul Nash is a favourite of mine - I love the sparseness of line in this painting - sort of minimalist.

Well, I got the story off for the competition in plenty of time. Frankly I got fed up with reading and re-reading it so thought 'what the hell' and posted it. Unfortunately they had to have a recent picture of me to go with it so I had to send the photo I used to renew my passport last year! White background, grumpy face, you know the sort. God help me if I get the story published!

Problem is I haven't a clue what to do next writing-wise. Don't have the incentive of the course any more and ideas seem to be drying up fast. Time to just start freewriting for a bit I guess which is what this is really. I'm off for a long weekend in Florence next week so maybe there'll be some inspiration there. How could there not be!

Just in time too - the skies are grey again today and it feels almost like winter again. Summer in April and winter in late May! Must stop putting exclamation marks everywhere - I seem to remember my tutor saying it's a no no.

Writing Competition

I'm scribbling away, fast as I can, to meet a 27 May deadline for a writing competition. 3,000 words long with the theme 'feel good'. Concentration keeps drifting - dogs barking at one another and racing round the house, veggies that need to be planted out, watering to be done, prevaricate, prevaricate... Sounds a bit like a Dalek - exterminate, exterminate!!

Well, I've got about another 1,000 words to go to get the bones down then it's edit, edit, edit. Having read all about how to plan the plot and the scenes and write bios of the characters (!) before starting to write I've ignored all of that and am just writing straight from my head onto the page. I think that's OK for a really short story like this but I'm not sure it would work for a full-length novel (like the one I'm writing!). As it is, I keep forgetting my characters' names.

Think I'll have a coffee...

Chapter One?

It was a late March day when Fiona Harland made the decision that would change her life forever.

She was sitting on a bench by the Serpentine, wondering why she was still wracked with grief after nine months. She was strong, had always been so. She got over things. So why was there still this feeling of emptiness, this feeling of things being not quite right?

She tried to divert her thoughts by watching the activity around her. It was six o'clock in the evening and still light thanks to the recent change to British Summer Time. The silhouettes of the trees were beginning to blur with their nascent summer greenery and the park was busy with people, rushing through on their way home, strolling along watching the wildlife on the lake or skimming along the walkways on roller blades. Two businessmen in dark suits walked past, one of them glancing at her as he drew level.

Her thoughts drifted backwards as they always did when she wasn't immersing herself in work. Back to that June day when her mobile belted out its electronic rendering of Beethoven's Fifth, a piece of music she hadn't been able to listen to since. And the voice on the other end said could she come down to Barnes Hospital urgently as her parents had been in a car accident. By the time her cab had fought its way through the traffic out to Barnes it was too late. Her father had died at the scene of the accident they said, and despite their attempts to save her mother she died an hour after getting to the hospital.

How quickly and brutally life can change.

Someone had sat down at the other end of her bench, drawing her back to the present. She glanced idly sideways and recognized the dark-suited man she'd seen earlier. He'd opened a copy of the Evening Standard and seemed to be having some difficulty keeping it straight in the slight breeze that had blown up. Without really thinking about it she looked around to see if his companion was nearby. He was leaning against the railings bordering the car park looking rather out of place in his smart suit; as if he should really be going somewhere rather than just hanging around.

Turquoise

My name’s Turquoise Malibu.

If I hadn’t got up that day, like I’d intended, it would never have happened, but some time during the early hours the effects of the booze and cigarettes must have worn off and I was wide awake. No amount of sheep were going to get me back to sleep again so I hit the refrigerator by way of a cold shower to find the usual empty space. My stomach was rolling around and desperately in need of stabilization so I threw on my pink fox fur and staggered down to the corner deli.

Well I’m sure not dim and I can certainly tell the time, but me and my watch must have parted company either accidentally or feloniously during the big bourbon haze that was most of yesterday. So I’m standing outside Banje’s Bagels at five in the morning wondering where the hell I’m gonna get a New York Skyscraper to shovel in on top of the booze when all hell lets loose around me.

Believe me, squealing tyres, police sirens and a load of high decibel yelling are absolutely not a cure for an abused liver. The need to hang on to something that wasn’t spinning became extremely pressing which is why, I guess, they invented parking meters. Having attached myself to one reasonably securely, I managed to get my head into a position where I could at least winch it round a few inches either way, although the next problem, focussing, took a while longer.

Why in God’s name were all these people suddenly in the street? At least five front doors were being remodelled by police enforcers while what seemed like a whole army looked on. Number eight gave first, followed swiftly by number twelve and then the rest of them, bang, bang, bang, and in the blink of an eye (although it probably took me longer to blink than you might imagine) every single person had disappeared off the street and into the houses.

A thick silence descended on the street, creeping around looking for the action. I have to say I’ve had some hangovers in my time, and I know I may have hallucinated more than once or twice, but I’m sure I didn’t just dream all of that.

A weird hissing noise from somewhere nearby began to ripple the soup that was my brain and I looked round to see Banje standing just inside the door of his shop frantically psssting at me.

‘WHAT?’ Oh oh – bad mistake. Yelling is no cure for the sort of state that I was in, believe me. The parking meter came in handy again.

When things had steadied down a bit I turned back to Banje, who was still making strange signs and noises at me, and said again, a little less stridently, ‘What in God’s name’s up with you?’ It was only then that I noticed the dark shapes moving behind him.

Disintegration

It disintegrated as soon as it hit the floor. I honestly didn’t let it go on purpose; one of those unavoidable accidents.

I stood there, looking at the hundreds of pieces, thinking that I could imagine them back into a whole. How stupid; how sad.

I remember when I first saw it; it was in the window of a bric a brac shop in Rye, almost invisible among the load of dross surrounding it. But the colour caught my eye, setting it apart from the ordinary. It’s always colour that draws me.

It seemed to fit in immediately when I got it home – comfortable, as if it had been made for me and the house; made it complete somehow.

To start with, I put it in the living room and kept glancing at it with a slightly smug expression. How clever was I to have found something so beautiful and exotic. Next, I put it in my bedroom so I could lie in bed and gaze at it, following its sinuous lines with my eyes until I drifted off to sleep.

Then, later, I put it in the kitchen where so many of my favourite things are. I’m afraid it got a bit buried behind the other bits and pieces that seem to accumulate in that busiest of areas. But every now and then I’d come across it and it never failed to brighten my day.

So now it’s lying there, shattered, and I can’t help feeling a bit sad. I really should have taken more care of it…