A few shots of the sea outside our windows this morning….
Monthly Archives: September 2015
Streamers in the Sky
The wind, the sun, the clouds, two dogs and a few startled pheasants danced over Rosie’s farm this afternoon and I was there to relish it, and to take some photographs to share with you…
At My Leisure
Leisure – Poem by William Henry Davies
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this is if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
End of Summer
There’s a sense of summer passing as I walk about the farm and fields. The sun shines but there’s a coolness in the air, a crispness from the north. The barley in the field up on the hill (I think it’s barley,) once so shiny and vibrant in a breeze, now looks white and brittle as if a stiff wind might break the etiolated stalks in half. The thistles and dandelions, formerly so colourful, are dying down to brown with tufts of seed heads ready to fly off in a gust of wind. The mushrooms have come and gone once but the fairy circles are still evident on the grass and may well burst into life again when weather conditions are right.
Yet the end of summer is also harvest time. There are sloes and rose hips in the hedges, along with the elder berries and blackberries. The orchard is full of heavily laden apple trees. I’ve eased the burden on one bough, almost breaking, as it touched the ground…. There is an apple crumble – one small corner missing – waiting on the Aga for Lily when she comes home from work. And there are some blackberries, washed and now frozen, waiting in my freezer for some time hence when it will be cold outside and I’ll remember there are blackberries waiting to be baked in a pie; and I’ll think fondly of the day that I took Inca and Malachi with me up the hill to the blackberry bushes. I daresay I will remember it as a warm day but one of the last days of summer nonetheless.
It’s a Dog’s Life
Needless to say, I spent the day at the farm… with four beautiful and loyal girls!
Two More Panels Painted
Sometimes other things get in the way of commissions but I hope Jess and Jim will be heartened to see that I haven’t forgotten them. The last two are works in progress. Meanwhile here are the boxing hares and the stoats and beehive…
Get Smart and Leave the Phone at Home Alone
I succumbed. I may have been one of the last in my age group to do so but, finally, I succumbed to peer pressure. I had intended to go, like a dinosaur, to my grave ignorant of the capabilities of smart phones. Hitherto, I had not considered myself important enough to warrant owning such modern paraphernalia but I couldn’t fight it and now I am one of the zombies. Unwillingly at first, I responded to every strange sound that emanated from my new (but superseded) Samsung Galaxy 4.
“What’s that? An email, a text, my Whatsapp…?” I used to ask myself inside my head.
“It’s not mine,” Chris used to interrupt my thoughts as if he was a mind-reader, “mine sounds like a cuckoo and a wolf-whistle.”
“Well mine is a sheep and a type-writer bell, not a door bell!” I used to say time after time but occasionally the sound would be something else, like a waterfall, a woodpecker or a bicycle bell (and sometimes it really was just my bicycle bell making a funny noise as I went over bumps whilst out cycling).
Nowadays, willingly, Chris and I both respond to all the sounds simultaneously. We are more important and worldly now. Like robots, we stretch out our hands and check, after all, it could be something very important… Oh, just a spam email? Yes, but it might have been crucial – what if we hadn’t checked? I guess that our worlds might have fallen apart.
Hold Your Horses!
Chris was raring to go and dear old Mum, aged ninety-two, was getting carried away… You could say that she was nearly off her trolley. Well, maybe you had to be there.
-
- And don’t spare the horses!
Look (Pronounced in the Scottish Way) Night-Walker
It’s a long time since I walked out of the house in a bad mood – so long I can’t remember – but I was over-tired and fed-up. I needed to go out and get some air. I took a look behind me, to see if Chris had followed but he hadn’t so I turned off on the little path that leads down to the sea wall. In case you’re wondering I left Chris at home to watch his Formula One race in peace (I haven’t been following my hero Fernando Alonso recently).
It wasn’t exactly dark when I set out but night was falling quickly. I tested the night setting on my mobile camera and before long I realised it was quite dark, and there are no lights along the sea wall… except, of course, for the lights in the windows and the torches of the fishermen.
I wasn’t alarmed by Steve and Phil, the nice fishermen from Exeter. You can tell when people are normal, can’t you? They must have thought me a bit strange though – walking along the sea wall in the dark – but they didn’t show their surprise and chatted to me as if it was nothing out of the ordinary. They showed me photographs of the fish they caught the night before and even let me take photos of them. Looking at the photos now, I think they must be twins or at least brothers; I couldn’t really see them properly in the dark. Steve shone the torch to light the way for me as I headed towards the Rockstone Bridge (where I was going to leave the wall) but the light went off before I reached there – he understood that I could see alright and, more importantly, that I might feel like I was being surveyed. Nice chaps! I always get on well with fisher-folk – I enjoy a spot of fishing myself, especially in Australia, and more especially on a boat!
Funnily enough, I met another fisherman coming down to the bridge just as I was walking up from it.
“Another fisherman,” I said as we passed, “there are two others on the sea wall.”
“Have they caught anything?” he asked, pleased.
“Well, they caught a lot last night,” I answered.
“What did they catch?” he was thrilled (I must look like a woman who would know about fishing matters).
“Oh, a couple of rays, a couple of dogfish and some others – I think one was a flounder,” I said like a woman in the know.
He thanked me profusely and wished me an excellent evening before rushing on down to the wall. Nice fellow – fishermen tend to be good men.
Ten minutes later I walked through our door and Chris greeted me.
“I was worried,” he said, “I was looking for you everywhere – down at Coryton Cove and down the town.”
“Oh sorry, I went along the seawall past our house,” I said nonchalantly.
But inside I was pleased that Chris had cared enough to go looking for me. In truth, I had been in a bit of a mood.
Do you know what? I felt so much better for my little night-walk.
Clean as a Whistle
Perhaps you’ll think it odd that I became rather nostalgic yesterday as I was dipping a mop into a bucket of soapy water and sloshing it over the windows and outside walls of my old studio. It hasn’t been my studio and gallery for about sixteen or seventeen years but the building has belonged to members of my family for around twenty-eight years. My youngest brother Robert owned it first and he used the downstairs area as his piano workshop while I had the flat and gallery upstairs; then later our mum bought it and moved in upstairs, and I moved my studio/gallery downstairs. (Later still, I worked from home, and more recently Chris built me my current studio.)
The building, which still bears the “Porch Galleries” sign, is on the busy main road so, invariably, over time black dust from the traffic settles on the walls, and particularly on all the things that jut out from the wall like ledges, windowsills and door frames. Every so often, when I thought it needed a spruce up, a younger me used to put on an old top and pair of shorts and take a bucket of water and a mop… When you lift a sopping wet mop above your head to reach the high point of a wall the water runs down your arms…
The downstairs studio/gallery was renovated and turned into a flat many years ago; it has been a bolt-hole, a stop-gap or a first foray into living independently for various family members since its transformation.
So yesterday, as I was swishing the mop above my head and enjoying the feeling of power in my arms, and remembering that same sensation of water dripping down my arms, I smiled wryly to myself. It hadn’t been a good day and already I felt a little sad.
“There were times,” I thought to myself, “when I couldn’t stand out here doing this for more than a few minutes before some passing motorists would slow down and wolf-whistle. Ah, but you have to remember that you’re older now and you can’t expect to get whistled at at your age.”
Instead of shorts I was wearing three-quarter length bright pink pants and, over them, an apron that Mum had made for me.
“Who would whistle at me now?” I laughed to myself.
A few minutes later, as I was bending and sloshing with the mop, I heard a long loud wolf whistle. I turned around – it had to be for me – and a handsome man smiled at me from his car.
“Thank you!” I called back with a wave.
It was one of my old admirers from twenty-eight years ago. I continued my work with renewed vigour and half an hour later I received a nice little beep for good measure. Things are never quite as bad as they seem.