After a couple of weeks doing nothing but cleaning and thinking about a new kitchen, I need to do something else. Like work, for example. It was just thinking about a new kitchen, mind you. Actually getting my backside in gear to do anything about it is another matter entirely. I have a bad habit of procrastination – one good reason to be working again, where the mountain of mounted up stuff has a nice manageable order to it. I make a list, work my way through it and there’s no space for procrastinating or looking at Dr. Who fansites on the web. I still prefer Jon Pertwee to anyone else, although David Tennant comes close. They say the regeneration will be Bill Nighy, which would be a glorious riff on Pertwee and might be my favourite yet.

It was a lovely weekend, even if it was stifling hot in Dublin on Saturday and poured with rain all the next day. I went to a party where the French windows opened out into the garden of my childhood summer memories, all tumbling red roses and high hedges and the canopied seat where we swang and laughed and imagined all sorts of worlds fuelled by Gallifreyan timetravellers and the Starship Enterprise. We imagined ourselves in all sorts of adventures and scenarios, except the one where we ended up as grownups with sorrows and joys and kitchens to procrastinate over.

"Dog Destroys Elvis Teddy" ? This is news?

Bread

Bread

Hunger was loneliness, betrayed

By the pitiless candour of the stars’

Talk, in an old byre he prayed

Not for food: to pray was to know

Waking from a dark dream to find

The white loaf on the white snow;

Not for warmth, warmth brought the rain’s

Blurring of the essential point

Of ice probing his raw pain.

He prayed for love, love that would share

His rags’ secret; rising he broke

Like sun crumbling the gold air

The live bread for the starved folk.

-- R.S. Thomas

Romance and Art

This is my favourite painting.

I don't pretend to know very much about art, but I loved this the moment I saw it. Friedrich was a Swedish-German romantic painter of the 19th century whose work is either stunning or risible and rarely anything in between. It makes me a bit uncomfortable -- there is a smack of the Wagner Tutonic Aryan master race about a lot of his work -- or perhaps that is just historical hindsight. And much of his work references Christian beliefs -- although I actually think there is a profound pagan sensibility about almost all of it, almost as if he didn't notice, but couldn't help it.

I am not sure why I love this particular painting -- perhaps it is the gothic romanticism of the work, the heroic male figure with his back to the viewer (seen yet not revealed, something of a motif in his work) or even just the beautiful image of the traveller high above the mountains, which makes you wonder who he is and where he has been. Whatever the reason, it is wonderful, inspiring, beautiful work, cinematic enough to be (deliberately?) referenced in Rob Roy (which is a better movie than the critics thought it was). I have deep reservations about the sensibilities the artist's work seems to inspire and reference, but I still love this painting more than any other.

Maybe that's what good art is about -- making you love it whilst making you uncomfortable about loving it.

Teenage Dreams, So Hard to Beat.

Oh, how I wanted to be Debbie Harry. She was my teenage hero -- I am just old enough to have seen Blondie first at an impressionable age. The combination of the music and the look and I was hooked. Nor had we ever seen the like of it and we all aspired, quietly, but very obviously, to be her. Not that many of us had the legs for it, frankly. But we could all manage the lipgloss and hanker for a platinum bob just like hers.

The first time I saw them, on video with Denis Denis on TOTP, with her hair like a halo, is one of the abiding memories of my teenage years (that, Geldof’s checkered jacket and the opening riff of ‘My Best Friend’s Girl’). But the music was brilliant and even though it wasn’t supposed to last and some of it was dreadful (Rapture, which I hated, marked the descent into oblivion) but Parallel Lines remains one of the great albums of all time and the songs stand up nearly thirty years on. I have it on cd, tape and original vinyl, but tragically none of them are worth very much on ebay. Not that I'd sell, of course. I love every song on that album far too much. It’s the alchemy of her voice (so clear, so sweet), those lyrics (‘incense and peppermints’) and the irrefutable catchiness of the tunes -- the riff from ‘I Know But I Don’t Know’ alone is worthy of theme tune status. 

Blondie were so hot it hurt for about two years and then crashed and burned, lost in the usual rawknroll tale of drugs, poverty and infighting. But I remained true to the cause, even in the wilderness years when people looked at you as if you were missing a crucial gene when you listed Blondie as one of your favourite bands. Thanks to Debbie I always wanted to be a blonde and even managed it for some time, but only when I was far too old to be told off by my parents. She’s now a rather unfetching shade of red, but their rebirth with Maria was marked by Herself in full Blondie mode and it was pretty glorious. I will live and die a Blondie fan and my headstone will be a glittery one, which plays Fade Away and Radiate.

Cold. No, Really.

It appears that I have a cold. In the hottest July on record. This may be more to do with the use of a fan for an hour last night and all the upstairs windows being open all night, but the cough I have been sporting for the last two weeks is much worse and I don't even smoke.

On an entirely different note, I am thinking of spear-heading a revivial in Romanticism and not just because wikipedia have put my favourite painting front and centre of their entry. At least I have the consumptive cough to go with it.

Swelter.

It’s almost too hot to be outside during the day. Sultry, sweltering, stifling: the sky is barely disturbed by a cloud and there’s hardly a breeze in the air. Everything is sluggish, torpid. Even the hovering insects in my garden, carefully nurtured by years of chemical avoidance, are still. I try to read my book, but it’s too warm. All I can do is to lean back in my seat, close my eyes and feel the sun on my face. I try to memorise the feeling for the dark cold days that are to come. I can hear the twinkle of the wind chimes, disturbed by the gentlest of breezes: the soft whisper of the air on my flesh is intense. The heat and the sun and the stillness seem to intensify the senses. 

At night, especially tonight, it is Mediterranean – airless and still. It is not like a night I will sleep much, I think, as I turn on the hose outside. The steps of the house are covered with pots, a jumble of them, stuffed with flowering plants – purple verbena, red geraniums, lilac lobelia. I love watering the plants at dusk on a hot summer's night, as the stars open overhead and the warm air wafts the scent of honeysuckle and nicotiana through the garden, wrapping like a stole around the house. The air is especially thick with perfume tonight and the house is too warm to be in, especially upstairs where the heat has settled, no matter that all the windows are open. It’s a night for sitting out under the stars, with candles flickering and a glass of red wine in my fist and the stillness of the summer settling around me.