25 Sept 2011




It's almost as good having a friend to stay as going on holiday oneself, you get to see places you haven't seen before and revisit some that you wish you saw more often. Jillian flew up from Cambridgeshire to be here for a few days. It was the first time we had met for 25 years and as we compared notes we discovered we had both been through difficult times after the Brussels era, both gravitating to 'spiritual' centres though of very different natures. She spent time with the Little Gidding community and T.S. Eliot's work formed a backdrop to her search for wholeness after a bruising marriage break-up.

We had a lot of catching up to get through Happily for me she stayed in touch with many of the people we both knew so I also got to hear about their lives since I left. Between visiting the local beauty spots we looked for J's ancestors who, most amazingly, emigrated to New Zealand from this area in the late 19th century. We found the very farmhouse, not much bigger than a croft with sturdy stone outbuildings . They owned considerable acres but it must still have been hard making a living. We also found the tombstone of an earlier ancestor in the churchyard, the inscription still perfectly clear . After that the Family History facility was really helpful in providing even more details.

It seems so strange that Jillian now lives in the county where, since at least the 1500's, most of my ancestors lived out their lives as farmers, whilst I live where HER ancestors tilled the soil until they bravely set out to a newly opening continent with more exciting prospects.

We went to Johnson's woollen mill where J bought a skirt and we ate huge fluffy scones; we called in at the nearest distillery - two miles up the road from my house but I have never visited it before. We checked out the monks at Pluscarden who were at their mid-day worship, then when we picked up Sandy for his leave-out weekend he took us up to the Michael Kirk, built as a mausoleum for the Wizard of Gordonstoun.

We also ate and drank well. A time of abstinence is called for!

19 Sept 2011

Night terrors.

After a brief run of Peter Robinson, who falls into my 'not bad but don't think I'll want to re-read' (nbnrr) category, on the basis of Chillsider's words I bought  Sophie Hannah, 'Lasting Damage,' currently on the shelves of Tesco. I suspect she may also be designated a place on the shelves I reserve for books the Cornish family might like because they're easy and fairly relaxing, with enough intrigue to hold the overwrought minds of  parents looking for a me-moment. 

Sophie certainly presents a convoluted plot which wasn't too obvious so gave some pleasure to unravel before the end. Too few crime writers bother with the tedious business of leaving clues, red herrings and surprises these days. They rely, lazily IMO, on shocking scenes of rape, torture, mutilation, decay and autopsy. It's getting boring.

She did also, less enjoyably, manage to frighten me in a way that gave me an asthma-fuelled, sweat-soaked nightmare. Different things upset us; for some it's sexually violence, for some the intruder in the house, for some it's madness. The last mentioned  is my personal terror button - not the madness of the killer but my own. For me the truly throat-gripping fear- raiser is the one  in which the main protagonist is being made to feel she is losing her mind because nothing she is experiencing can be believed by the people closest to her, or by those who should be able to help her.

Therein lies one of my problems I suppose. Bleurk!

16 Sept 2011

Random thoughts.

Post boxes are getting hard to find here; dog poo bins on the other hand are becoming ubiquitous. The dpb's are red and shiney. I just know what I am going to do one dim, misty morning....

I liked the columnist who criticised her daughter's school sex education tutor for raising unrealistic hopes - the pupils were given condoms to practice putting on cucumbers!

Grandson had a taste of the essential differences between people's lives when one of his mates tried to get sanders to lend him his savings he could buy a pony. The friend assured him he was good for it: 'I can pay you back OK . I'm getting five and a half million when I'm 18.'

He's the grandson of a hard working couple who built up a local business into a huge food production company. The grandfather, I have reason to know, was a nice, kindly and generous man so it's impossible to feel annoyed or self-righteously outraged. Even so........

14 Sept 2011





First meeting of the season of the local branch of NADFAS today and a notable first for me because I was there too! I finally joined something! The fact deserves another exclamation mark - !!

So the grand kick-off was a lecture (with slides of course) on Charles Rennie Mackintosh. I have never quite been a fan of CRM. firstly because over the last couple of decades he has suffered from overexposure and his designs copied onto tea-trays, tea towels, headscarves, mugs, bookmarks, jewellery, calendars etc. etc. Secondly because the examples I've seen of his furniture and architecture all feature his signature, uncompromisingly straight lines and the repetitive rose emblem and not nearly enough of his romantic stuff (considered 'spooky' by London critics in his day) the flights of imagination that often bring Aubrey Beardsley to mind. They get very little coverage which is a shame. Today I learned that those flights were most probably the work of his wife Margaret. Charles often signed her work - the reason for that is sadly obvious. Women artists weren’t taken seriously in those days.
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The lecturer wasn't the best, with a monotone voice and pacing which failed to hold my monkey mind, but fortunately (for me) he was very repetitive (my friend told me that - she HAD been listening...) so I picked up the main points the third or fourth time round. When I got home I found that I could have read most of them on Wikkipaedia. Not that I'm grumbling. I enjoyed the slides very much and learned that although Charles was born Glasgow his ancestry was in the Highlands of Scotland and he loved the hills and lochs and tried to incorporate the Celtic heritage into his art so the straight lines I somewhat dislike are symbolic of trees, the seeds and leaves are important to him for the same reasons. The other art he loved and allowed to influence him from the Japan, and that is visible in the simplicity of line and grace (now it’s been pointed out to me).

His wife Margaret was responsible for more than just back-up with the twiddlybits, she was an artist in her own right, also trained at the Glasgow School of Art, and is probably to thank for some of the 'spooky' designs that are so beautiful (almost but not quite pre-Raphaelite) also the lovely curvy features that surmount architectural works and pieces of furniture. She was one of the 'Glasgow Girls' of whom we hear little or nothing. She also have influenced Gustav Klimt (he acknowledged this) and other notable artists of the time.

The other sad fact I learned was that, like so many artists and poets, the Mackintoshes were ahead of their time and unappreciated in the parochial society of Glasgow though very popular in the rest of Europe, especially Vienna. Architectural commissions dwindled, the furniture didn’t sell so much and the tea rooms they were responsible for furnishing was considered something of a joke. It was opened to offer an alternative to the many public houses. The tea room looks to have been a beautiful place and I would love to have had tea there. The high-backed chairs almost screened the tea-takers. I can imagine having a highly enjoyable gossip at the tables.

Finding times hard they moved to Suffolk, unfortunately the moment they chose was 1914, and with the outbreak of war no-one was investing in building. The locals seem to regard him and his Scottish accent with mistrust for whilst the couple where out walking one day their house was raided and Charles was briefly arrested on suspicion of spying because so much correspondence was found with people in Vienna!

The moved to London where things went better but they still didn’t get commissions so they tried living in France but, though he painted some fine landscapes, that didn't work out either and eventually in ill health, they returned to London where Charles died, almost insolvent. Only 8 people showed up at the crematorium.

He may have been a difficult man to work with suffering as he did from a form of dyslexia often associated with high intelligence but difficulty in communication - or, perhaps, it was Aspergers Syndrome. It would have made communications with the people who wanted him to build for them very difficult and he was renowned for always going over budget! He also became, again like so many other artists, an alcoholic.

The thought that struck me was that certain artists these days who become millionaires are very, very good self-publicists, behave outrageously, attracting attention to themselves and making them rich. My guess is their work will fade quickly into obscurity so they are remembered by a line or two in a history of art coffee table book.

4 Sept 2011

A Perfect Day.

The new Phil Rickman: 'The Secrets of Pain' arrived Friday, earlier than predicted when I preordered it from Amazon. Bit of a blow to the local economy but nevertheless VERY welcome. I read from the time I awoke this morning until now (1pm) and finished it. For me his books are the perfect blend of Mysticism, the mundanely mysterious and the more frighteningly inexplicaple, folk tales, legends - and crime. He slaloms through the conflicts of the quiet crumbling of the Church in the face of rationalism and cynicism whilst, through Merrily Watson and her Pagan daughter Jane, he touches on the deeper roots of the Sacred and the ineffable, which have very little to do with organised religion. Corruption in the Church and in local politics, the desecration of the countryside and the depredations of the money-makers who see the fields, forests, hills and villages of Herefordshire as a commodity, thinking nothing of destroying the archaeological presences that remain of our heritage, all this is witnessed and mourned by a few enjoyably human characters who by now have become almost as real to me as my own family.


The last day of summer? This was at least ten days ago when I sat in the sunshine, with coffee and cake, getting slighly burned around the glasses, watching Sandy trying to master the little Topaz (very slightly larger than a Topper but still with the open stern design that does away with the need for bailing.) Moments like this give me time-warp sensations as I feel myself watching my son doing much the same slightly frantic manoeuvres when he was learning to sail single-handed. Weird.

In the first photo (from the bottom up) he was trying to rescue - and then hold onto - another Topaz that one of the younger idiots hadn't beached high enough so it escaped.
Sanders got some impressive rope burns and no thanks from the YI's for his pains.

Since then the weather has been worse than autumn - autumn without the colours; grey, dreich and dismally wet. It hs picked up a bit this weekend but I've been too busy reading to notice.