Experiment with cutting right back, not poems as such, just ideas

Cutting too much leaves a heap of sawdust. An online friend and I are choppers, we laughed that my poem would be a haiku by lunchtime during one morning of editing. It's happened here.

F ..  Just 3 lines

1986 - print was made
1987 - I bought it
1988 - year of marriage

E .. Now 3 words per line

playing with blutac
suddenly tearful again
feeling my heartbeat

needing to understand
how our complexity
arose back then
...

Now go further, what would have never emerged without this pressure, D:

D ..

If I stand and look from the side I see the indentation of the printing process

This is all physical, transitory: the print, vases, knowledge of eras could all go

The knowledge would be rediscovered; new vases created; new museums built

All this knowledge is to comfort us, carriers of one combination of dna

My dna is merely a collection of many fragments, they are all out there in others

I think culture is a quirk which seems to help transmission of the dna

...

The piece A below is very long. Regard it as preparation. What did I really get from thinking about this picture of mine? First I got to B, then left that behind and got to C.

C .. I reacted to the even colours by thinking of the shadows left of the people incinerated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then I thought of a phrase in a book I was reading at the JR this afternoon, about the ghosts of knowledge left behind when someone dies. The book was 'Al Mutannabi Street Starts Here'.

B .. Calm, stillness, peace, contentment. Differences of design, but a permanent acceptance of each other. A space between them which is also beautiful, allowing each to breathe. A symbolic representation of a relationship.

...

A .. I spent a weekend at a family house after some weekends at hotels. The difference was that all the items in the house would have had a story behind them, even the strip of decorative edging along the top of the wall in the downstairs bathroom! Each of these stories would have involved people and particular events. What a thing, a household of stories.

I could take photos of things which have a story behind them, then tell the story.

(Imagine the photo)

This picture is of 2 vases or ewers - print by Betty Schlesinger

I bought it already framed for about £50, which was a bargain considering its size

I was the first person outside her family to buy a picture from her, so this was a significant sale

I knew her because I was renting a room in her parents' house in Durham

I had the money to buy a picture direct from the artist because I didn't drink, smoke, eat out, buy clothes...

I clearly wanted to spend what small amount I had on art and books even then and not on anything transitory

One day I happened to be in the V and A Museum and saw them in a cabinet in exactly the same relationship to each other as in my picture, so I realised that Betty must have stood there, just like me, and appreciated them enough to make such a large version of the cabinet. The cabinet was in the centre of that dark room.

The picture used to hang above our bed in the house in Hackney

I took a lovely photo of S sitting on the bed under it

It was above our bed in the house in Shillingford too, so T would have rolled on the bed as a baby under it

There is a lot of glass in a picture that big, now I wouldn't want so much glass anywhere near my head

Strangely my side of the bed was under the right hand side of the picture in both houses, even though the window was on opposite sides. Given that I prefer to be beside the open window at night I don't understand that, perhaps I needed to be by the door so I could get up and go to see to T in the night as a baby and toddler. We moved before he got any older. That overrides any need for fresh air doesn't it?

For many years the vases were not on display at the V and A. All I had was the print and the memory of them

Then the picture spent some years not being loved until I decided to rehang the hall way and up it went again

I happened to go to the V and A in London recently and spotted the 2 small ewers in exactly the same formation, but by the back wall of the Islamic Room this time around. Someone must have remembered how they were set out before and decided to recreate it. Or perhaps it is an instinctively correct and beautiful arrangement. Maybe they only have those 2 vases, so are not likely to do anything else with them.

Apparently they come from the 2 main empires, Ummayad and Abbasid. The U came first, then the A. Mind you, which vase came from which? More of my endless questions.

Since I have visited various places since then I now know they might be water jugs for the loo. That didn't get mentioned in the captions in the museum. I viewed a flat and saw exactly the same jug there on the floor in their bathroom :)

Counting

I have been writing down things I am grateful for each night for a while now. It took time to get started and to find a pattern which suited me. Now it is one column per day in a big diary S gets given each New Year at work.

If I miss a day I just put a dash there, when I come back to it. I don't try to fill up the space. It's usually because of illness or some disruption to my life. That's ok and evidence of the changing nature of life at home, sometimes regular and relaxed, at other times fretful and confused. If I don't have my notebooks in the right place beside me and a pen nothing happens!

Any day now I will get the book Ann Voskamp has written about this. Before I get it I will have a think about how this practice has been helping me. Lots of helpful things in life are deadly simple.

Tidied up and thoroughly lost

Over Christmas so many crucial and favourite items have been tidied away by me. I am still refinding and rearranging my stuff so that I can function normally again. Even the table itself was switched round by 90 degrees.

H doesn't have many items downstairs, so he has been able to live his life as usual, although he has been ill for over 2 weeks with a bad cold/lurgy.

T has mislaid practically everything, but not all at once. He likes to have his many favourite things all over what used to be my desk in the kitchen, plus quite a bit of other space there. I move them around which doesn't help!

S is the only one who keeps his stuff in a drawer and well out of range upstairs. Hmm, maybe he has an evolutionary advantage over the rest of us?

I think I will decorate light fittings and the exit doors next year and keep our living space as it is.

Decorations

I took down the last stars and snowflakes from my windows and dresser yesterday. I thought it might help me get past the current stuckness I have.

It didn't, but it was a good feeling to take some decorations upstairs each time I climbed the stairs for other reasons.

My dresser hooks are now freed up to hold all my many mugs, including the seaside ones my mother brought us for our Serbian Xmas/joint H and S birthday celebration on Sunday.

Tinsel

Now the snow has gone it is time for me to look appreciatively at our tinsel and all the other twinkly decorations. They won't be here for long now and we only do up the house once a year in such a special way.

Yuletide is still happening here, the surfaces are covered with presents and cards. So much is out of place. S has been on holiday from work for ages. The house has been full of coming and going. We got into synch with each other quickly. I think the snow arriving helped by cutting out external pressures and allowing us to attend to whatever we felt we wanted to do.

Because of the cold we really were in one room for lots of the time. Luckily M lives next door so T and H only have to walk through 2 door ways to visit and eat her sweets!

Half

T and S are now in Venice to take photos. Our household here at home has been halved! It's pretty quiet, and more tidy than usual.

It is H's 13th birthday today. He asked me for a fire in the drawing room, so I'll lay a fire and we can play with his train set :)

How not to do it

I made fudge today, but it didn't work at all. So there is learning how to do things and learning how *not* to do things.

Earlier in the day we sat round the table and played cards. We take turns being dealer. We play vingt et un without betting. We just count the number of tricks each player wins as we go through the pack each time.

I haven't been out in the car since Friday. S has been doing all the errands in the snow. This is the most non-adventurous I have ever been. T and H have been even more house bound in a good way than me. I rush out with my broom to sweep away new flecks of snow from my paths. Every envelope with a stamp on it is an excuse for me to walk carefully along our snowy footpaths to the post box.

The chat time in the kitchen is just starting between T and H. It's good that they have a similar chat cycle.

A perfect day

I hadn't thought that H had really enjoyed most of Saturday, but then he told me with such a smile that it had been a perfect day.

We went out to our favourite cafe for his favourite food;
got a gaming/swivel chair for him from Argos;
put it together together on the kitchen floor;
went out to a party at the house of one of his friends from primary school,
and then he and T had a happy evening playing together at their side-by-side desks in the kitchen!

I stayed out til 11pm at the party, but S, T and H came home after about half an hour, so everyone was content. I walked home because the mulled wine was stronger than I had thought!

Saudi Arabia

S went to a camel market and was driven into the desert, not a drive for the faint-hearted! He had coffee and dates in a tented enclosure.

The News From Beijing

..is that the pool at the hotel has, wait for it...... tropical islands in it. How amazing!!

The water is pretty cool though so the swimmers can't just loll about.

Photo of the day

Evening moments

"I hate you!.... Thank you' as I fish crumpled, but salvageable English notes out of the fireplace, wiping the dust off on my dressing gown.

Now to find a phone which has gone walkabout.

S came into the darkened kitchen, 'Why are all the lights off?' Well, I thought that having them off might equal night time and therefore sleeping time to T. 'Does it work?' Of course not, but it's a harmless occupation and keeps me sane.

That's why there are no lights on for the stairs and I keep on switching everything off as I wander around the house putting away laundry. I do try not to fall down stairs, so I hold onto the bannisters carefully.

With any luck T might have found his own phone before I get round to actually putting any effort into looking for it properly...No point in being too effective at finding children's stuff for them.

We have big heads

S has gone halfway round the world for *one* meeting.

T won first prize for photography at the Village Show and saw it get a lovely high value after deciding to donate it for the charity auction at the end.

H was surrounded by younger boys quietly watching him play a computer game in the cafe area of the show.

I got first prize for my 2lb loaf!!!! How pleased am I?