Mish mash

This is a blog post of several parts. 

One

A young man in Gaza followed me on Instagram yesterday. I looked at his posts and the last few were photographs of people injured by Israeli bombs. 

I am on Instagram solely to show my paintings and to view other people’s art. I don’t use it socially or politically. It’s been a safe space from everything ‘out there.’ However, I did recently follow a protest group called Youth Demand, after I heard about them. They’ve been protesting about the genocide in London in the last month. I guess this is why the Gaza man has found me. You know how I feel about Gaza, but even with normal news I don’t want to look at mutilated bodies. At the same time I want to show support to Gazans. There’s the dilemma. 

Two

A few days ago there was an accident in our kitchen. Here Dave describes it:

Ours is not a house for the timid, or for those startled by a sudden hello. The days are punctuated by the clattering and shattering of falling objects, some of which then ricochet in pieces round your ankles before coming to rest under cupboards, only to be discovered very much later.

 

After a while you get inured to this cacophony of crashing cutlery, crockery and colliding kitchen bric a brac. As long as you are not trying to work on the innards of a clock at the time, or removing a speck from your eye, it doesn’t matter.

 

Why does gravity have such a strong pull here? Are we at some invisible warp in the space-time continuum that grabs things from the tightest grasp and hurls them to the floor?

 

No, no. Sue has always been not so much absent minded as present minded somewhere else, and she has refined this vagueness by cultivating clumsiness and honing it to an art form.

 

This week, she upped the game.

 

I was loading the dishwasher last thing at night – half-past eight, Hepworth time – and everything was going smoothly, and I paid no attention to Sue coming in. There was a sudden discordant clang as her iPad hit the bottom shelf of the dishwasher, and I was hit by a cold tsunami as Sue emptied an entire pint glass of water over my back. The falling iPad might have escaped attention but not the water, and I let out a shocked expletive and possibly a sharp gasp.

 

Hmm. This is a whole new technique. I may be wearing waterproofs around the house in future.

Three

The spring leaves are emerging shyly from their shoots. I LOVE this time of year. The new leaves are so beautiful, like newborns’ fingers - tiny and tender. I’ve taken so many photos of tiny leaves on different trees over the last two weeks, and now I’m attempting a painting on the theme. Here are twiglets on one of our silver birches:

And look at these darling tiny cones on the self seeded larch tree in our back garden (Dave’s hand is to show the scale):

Four