Catch-up

  ‘What can I do to cheer you up?’ Dave said at teatime yesterday.

‘Get rid of Trump, replace Starmer with Corbyn, clear my head of snot,’ I said. ‘Make me feel better.’

I’ve been feeling sorry for myself. I’m on day 9 of a cold and although my head is still full of it, and I have no energy, I am only blowing my nose once an hour. For this relief much thanks. 

And now I feel bad for complaining when there are people all over the world without shelter, without food and in mortal danger. How dare I complain? How dare I?

So what’s been happening at Hepworth Towers besides the depletion of 5 full boxes of Kleenex in a week?

1    I’ve been too ill/fed up to paint.

2    I’ve watched too many reruns of Downton Abbey. For some strange reason this seems to be my go-to telly when I’m ill.

3.    I’ve been trying and failing to write a piece on the subject of “When the world feels very dark, where do you find hope?” for our Quaker newsletter. I set the question and we’re all trying to answer it. 

3    I went to London with my daughter MsZ (name withheld at her request…she’s not a show off like me) to see an exhibition called ‘From Goya to Impressionism’ at the Courtauld, but mainly to go to the last night of Ballet Shoes at the National Theatre. It’s a dramatisation of the Noel Streatfeild children’s book, if you’re unfortunate enough not to have heard of it, and she and I both loved it as children.

I’d been looking forward to it for two months, ever since I got the invitation, so I went, even feeling like death on a biscuit. I wore a mask in enclosed spaces with MsZ, including the theatre, so she didn’t succumb. 

I loved the production for which we had the best seats I’ve ever had at the theatre, but I loved spending the weekend with MsZ even more.  It was very special, as it always is being with an adult child on a solo trip, and I’m glad I went even feeling awful, because she is so busy these days that although she lives just half an hour away, I rarely see her. I talk more to Cece (12) who lives 5000 miles away.  The exhibition went by in a blur and I couldn’t finish my delicious dinner on the Saturday night, and I had no energy to take photographs so I’m glad Z did.  

4.    On Tuesday morning I walked into the sitting room to get my glasses and heard a ruffling in the log burning stove. We’ve had birds come down the chimney before, and my first thought was to leave it there for Dave to rescue when he got back from his bike ride. He’s unfazed by that kind of job. But then I remembered I am trying to learn how to do all the things that Dave usually does, because he might die before me and I don’t want to be stuck. I have even started writing instructions down in a little black book. e.g. how to wind the grandfather clock and how often, and the same for the clock in the hall. 

So…I put on protective gear (my painting clothes plus rubber gloves), opened the window and shut the door, and gently opened the stove door just a crack, to see what I was dealing with. It wasn’t a bird. It was a squirrel. OMG. I was not going to tackle a squirrel. 

When Dave got back and peeped in the door, the squirrel had vanished. He thought it was probably sitting on the plate at the top of the stove. What to do? How could it climb back up the slippery stainless steel chimney? 

We had to go out together, so we left the stove door shut, but removed the ash door on the chimney outside, in the hopes that the squirrel would smell the fresh air and be able to make it out at least that far.

When we got home there was no evidence of anything at all, but we assumed he’d escaped, and when we lit the stove last night we couldn’t smell roasted squirrel so… 

And now it’s time to get up and steam my head with olbas oil.

A Real Pain

Do you have a to-do list?

I usually send myself an email last thing at night with the next day’s to-do list as the subject title.

But when I wake up on these cold, grey, dismal, February mornings, I have been looking at the list and thinking “Can’t be bothered!” 

Then I go into my studio and light the fire and because I’m between paintings right now, having just finished this one

I wonder what to paint. And because I’m in a blue February funk, there’s nothing that inspires me, especially with the wider world veering dangerously towards an abyss of fascism.

Being in this kind of mood, it’s been hard to blog.

I will just say that Chrissie and I went to see A Real Pain, which is supposed to be funny, as well as a lot of other good things, and has wall to wall 5 star reviews, and a 96% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes. 

We, however, would both have turned it off after 15 minutes if we’d been watching it at home, because we both found the central character, Benji, so incredibly irritating. Why would we want to spend 90 minutes with him? 

Also, neither of us found the film in the least bit funny. We’d have given it three stars and said it was mildly thought provoking.

I need to emphasise that Chrissie and I do not have identical taste in cinema, television or books.

What’s going on? Are we outside the film’s audience demographic?

Lastly I have to ask those of you who have seen the film, what did that scene mean where the two guys place their large pebbles right in the middle of a doorstep in memory of their grandmother who used to live there? I know why they wanted to leave the pebbles, but why right in the middle of the doorstep, where an old person walking out could stumble on them and fall over and break their hip? Was it to show they were thoughtless? Or entitled? And why, when they were told by a neighbour to move them, did they pocket the stones? Why didn’t they just move them to the side, where they should have placed them in the first place?

This has been bugging me ever since I saw the film. I’d love to ask Jesse Eisenberg, who wrote the screenplay, what was in is head?

OK. Rant over.

My to do list this morning has two things on it - varnish my last three paintings, and go to a planning meeting for this year’s refugee hospitality days. That’s fine.

I haven’t drawn the blinds yet so I don’t know if it’s grey, but the weather forecast gives rain and a temperature that feels like minus 2 degrees F. And so it continues. 

Mary died ten years ago on February 13th, and I blogged the following February, that I would never moan about February again, because I was here to enjoy* so much and she wasn’t, her life was cut short. But here I am, moaning again. What can I say? I think the winter gets harder to endure the older you get.

*Talking of things I enjoy…last week I was playing shop with 2 years 3 month old MsX, and when I said I’d like to buy some cheese, she said “We have some Jarlsberg, but we’ve run out of Brie.” 

And last week I played a video game called Dress to Impress with 12 year old Cece- she in Colorado and me here at home. Amazing and hilarious.

Letter from home

I turned 75 last year but I haven’t got to grips with it yet. What I mean is this: I am fairly fit, but I walked 10,000 steps yesterday on a fabulous sunshine walk 

(Don’t you just love hilltop hawthorn trees - their flat wind-blown shapes and their spiky sturdiness?)

and when I got home I was too tired to do the vacuuming, even though there were visible and accusing wood chips on the stair carpet. Is that normal? 

I mean…how much exercise and how much energy is a fit and healthy 75 year old supposed to have? 

I sat on the sofa by the fire (it was cold here), did some admin and some painting, had lunch, more painting, talked to Lux over her Boulder breakfast on FaceTime, and then because Dave was out all day, decided to watch a film that I know Dave would hate. It was 4 o clock by this time, but I still felt faintly guilty about watching telly in the daytime. (Thank my wonderful mother for this.)

I watched Moonstruck which I think is a ridiculous film but I love it anyway. I especially love this bit of dialogue:

As I texted to Het, Nicholas Cage is not my type but after this injunction I’d get in his bed!

And here I am now, still sitting in my bed at five to eight in the morning 

with no desire to get up. Is that OK? I mean…I am 75. But then I am gainfully occupied, talking to you. (Notice my justifying myself again?) 

Second question…how much money would you spend on a 176 page novel by your favourite author? Here’s why I want to know…

I had decided to buy a new small cafetière and when I got to the checkout on Amazon they wouldn’t give me free postage so I thought - as I am bored stiff with the winter - ooh, maybe Anne Tyler has a new novel out, and she did. It’s out next week in hardback but it is very short and costs £12.99. If I bought it I’d get free postage for that and the cafetière. £12.99 is a lot to pay for a short novel but on the other hand if I bought a toastie and a coffee at Hassop Station it would cost about the same and I wouldn’t think twice about it. And I am soooooo bored with the winter, so why not treat myself?

This is a lot of wittering, but it raises the question of how much you would pay for things in various categories…

Enough wittering.

The other thing that has been occupying my downtime is watching lots of films about David Hockney on YouTube. Hockney is a hero of mine. One thing he said, which I will remember, is a Chinese saying…”you need three things for painting, eye, hand and heart. Two won’t do.” 

I so agree. This is why I won’t do commissions. My heart would not be in a commission and I would not have sufficient motivation to complete it. My heart was certainly in the painting of our mug rack, which is now finished. As you can see, I chose pink for that top left mug. (See last post but one.)

Oh, and with reference to the mystery of the flashes of sunlight at the top, and the tumblers I missed off because they were too hard to paint, who knows what the sun is bouncing off before it reaches the wall? I had thought it was coming straight through the front room window and then through the stained glass window between that room and the kitchen, but now I am wondering if it was bouncing off the glass table in the front room before it came through the window. It’s a mystery, and it won’t be solved until December 30 this year, when the sun will be in the exact same position. I shall have to remember to check.

 

And will our Prime Minister protest? Don’t hold your breath.

I take it back. 

The art of the possible

I have found January weather so gloomy and so depressing that I decided to paint something that would cheer me up.

At the end of December I saw the just-past-solstice streak of bright sunshine in the kitchen which came through the stained glass window above the kettle. It lit up the top shelf of mugs, the tumblers and the wall, and I took a photo of it.

I thought it would make a terrific painting, and then thought…what would a painting add to it? Why paint it when I have a photograph?

But I wanted to paint something bright and colourful and cheerful, so I launched in.

 I love our colourful kitchen that I painted last January…

This time I have enjoyed the bright colours of the painting and the challenge of painting different shaped mugs with different handles pointing in different directions, and also trying to get the sunshine reflections glinting in just the right places.

I had almost reached the end, but had been leaving the tumblers on the top shelf to the very end, because I knew they were going to be so difficult.

I dithered. Should I miss them out? I didn’t want to ruin the painting and have to paint that whole top section again. 

I texted Het and asked what she thought? Would it still be good if I missed the tumblers off?

“You said it was your job,” she said.

“Pig!” I said.

Then I texted Tate, my eldest grandchild, who is artistic and has a good eye for design. He told me to practice painting them on another board. Good plan. I did, and it did not go well. It convinced me to miss them off. 

I had also left this mug to the end because I knew it was going to be hard to get the lettering right, as it disappears round the curve. I bottled out of that one too.

This meant I had to paint it a different colour because that white mug, top left, looked awful with no writing and deep shade on each side. But what colour should I paint it?

Blue didn’t work

Orange didn’t please me

So what should it be?

I have decided on pink, which ties in with that tin mug with pink and red flowers on the bottom shelf.

When it’s done, I will show you.

That is what has been occupying my week. That, and helping out with MsX because neither of her parents was in the pink. 

I loved it!

She is such fun to play with and her language is so advanced for a two year old, and I have just realised what makes toddlers so enchanting - they are straightforward about what pleases them, and they are not in the least bit self conscious. I like straightforward people who say what they mean and don’t shilly shally, who are enthusiastic and go all in. I suppose this makes sense when I love colour so much.