A trying week at Hepworth Towers

It has been a trying week at Hepworth Towers.

It’s been a bad tempered week - not Dave, but me.

It’s been a dark week - not just the interminable rain, or the horizon to horizon wet grey murk out there, but it’s been like that in my head. I’ve been miserable and bad tempered, and only because I am feeling a little better this morning, am I able to tell you. This long wet winter, coupled with the interminable dreadful news, brought me down so I was intolerable to live with.

Meanwhile Dave has been a patient saint. He knows what it’s like to have wall to wall blackness inside your head, and he couldn’t have been kinder. 

I have not been enthused about painting for weeks and weeks, and I have had no inspiration. That’s why I painted that sickly sweet painting called Cheerfulness. I thought it expressed Cheerfulness perfectly, but I hated it aesthetically.

Yesterday, I did this to it and felt temporarily better.

One of the reasons I’ve been so fed up is that I have had no inspiration for painting. Another is feeling guilty in top of the despair because I have nothing to complain about…I am very fortunate. 

Yesterday Liz came for a coffee and a long walk and she broke the spell of my gloom. After she’d gone I lit the fire, played my sax, tweaked the current, so far unsuccessful, painting, and then lay on the sofa and read my poetry anthology Staying Human.

Dave came home with a bag of my favourite samosas, and we watched The Repair Shop, did a crossword together, and then looked on Google Maps for a photo of the place where we lived when we first got married. Our daughter had asked for the address - I think she is going to look for it (she was a baby there). It looked very different - actually unrecognisable, really - and I had wanted it to look just the same. What does that mean?

Whatever…I think this poem by Mary Oliver fits the bill this morning:

(It’s not in the anthology I mentioned, btw.)