Deck the halls with indecision

Hola mis bellezas, mis peanut sellers and usherettes,

Firstly, a slight digression if I may (if indeed it’s possible to digress from what you haven’t yet begun).  A visit to my stats page recently revealed that someone arrived at this blog via, of all things in this vast and crazy universe, a search for “in my country we smoke lion fur”.  Not once, I hasten to add, but twice.  The mind fair boggles, so it does.  And to compound the mystery further, I could not see how that got them here because when I also typed the same thing into google it didn’t lead me home.  In fact it didn’t lead me anywhere in particular.  Which actually was a shame, because stress is currently so great on the house (and several other) fronts that I was hoping to find a bit of a ‘how to’ on smoking lion fur.  Maybe even a u tube video or two – you know, a sort of wildlife Mrs Beeton.  “Firstly,  trim the manes of two dozen lions…”   But maybe it’s not quite as strange as it first appears because we did, after all, as undergraduates, used to hang our old banana skins over radiators in the vain hope that they might produce datura-esque effects.  Alas, all it ever did was add to the squalor.  And what can I say in our defence?  – nothing, other than that we were all lost to Mr Ginsberg at the time.  Khaddish and all that.  I even used to wear an old 50s leather jacket which moaned and split every time I moved.

So anyway.  Let us begin. Recently we had a demand from the builder for all of the ceiling colours.  All of them! A bit of a surprise, I can tell you, because some rooms don’t even have ceilings.   But I hopped to it and by the skin of my teeth (and a leaking paint pot which erupted all over my hands as I was transporting it to the house) I made the delivery on time.  Cue scenes of builder and painters at the front door tapping their waiting toes, consulting their time pieces – you get the gist, minus a bit of hyperbole if you’re feeling pedantic.   All of which has served as a warning that wall colours might also be demanded with menaces at any unpredictable time and that I must, to put it bluntly, shift my arse accordingly.

Now I love colour.  Love it with a pash.  But my usual MO when choosing it is to take forever, pottering and pondering, doing little pigment mixings, taking note of how the light falls on it,  thinking for a month or two, having a crisis or three, and then finally deciding.  It ain’t gonna happen like that in this house.  We’ve paid for the house to be painted, and painted it will damned well be. But oh!  I deflate like an elderly balloon at the prospect of having to specify all that colour!  And all at once!  Because in so doing we’re back to that great imponderable – what ‘mood’ does the RW want to be captured in?  A rather plain and sober mood that shows off its beautiful classical proportions?  Something a little more Rococo and playful?   Something feminine?  Masculine? Eclectic?  Contemporary? Moody and dark?  Light and airy?  Egads, Sirrah, you do tax me most unfair.

A friend and I were talking recently and one thing we felt was that the house would not look good dressed all in unadorned white.  Not unless we had a vast collection of vast artworks, which, alas, we do not.  Without the vast artwork, we felt, it would be a little boring. Like someone left standing in their petticoats, awaiting the maid to dress them. So colour it must be!  But what?  And where? And how?  My friend suggested I gather together a palette of colours that I like, which all harmonise well. She is right, of course.  I know she is absolutely right, but I am dragging my little hooves to the task like that proverbial horse…  Instead I find myself concentrating on individual areas, hoping they will somehow all end up speaking to one another. Willy nilly and without any help from me. Never ask me to match-make your aunty, or do the seating arrangements for dinner parties. (Did you know, bee tee dubs, that some people do colour boards for their seasonal entertaining? I discovered this quite by chance recently and was aghast but unrepentant about my own failings).

So anyway anyway.  Back to business. My area du jour is the hallway and staircases.  Which are built to a large scale, but which, because we have the extra ‘wing’ at the back, lack light at the ground floor (though it is bright above). I have been playing housey dress-up and fished a few things out of the box.

Firstly, this is the hallway, to remind you.  Or rather, this is the hallway as was, before the builder set about it.  It now sports a bath, a mountain of wood and a very racy (actually mind bogglingly depressing) earlier colour scheme in death-by-yew green and dried blood:

and

Now then.  The sober mood. I have a great love for Farrow and Ball’s Elephant Breath, not only because of the name (and I must say that when in Zimbabwe and surrounded by elephants I didn’t so much notice the colour of their breath as their propensity to tiptoe.  Have you noticed that about them?):

In this sober mode, I’ve wondered about  adding a bit of Grisaille on the right hand wall as you come in, just up to the arch.  I’ve been out and about (digitally) visiting Zuber and de Gournay and the like, but a conversation about money yesterday (conversation would be the polite word for it anyway)  has seen me scuttling from their front doors like a mouse in plain worsted.  This, though, is a manageable version from G&W:

Or this from Cole and Son, but mucho more coconuts:

So that’s one option, and quite sober it is too.

However, my pink furnace is still burning away and I’m thinking possibly this, on the same wall:

but in this colour way, with splashes of a similar hue on various landings:

But having tipped my cap at pink,  I also have to say that a certain blue persistently tugs at me.  Tugs and tugs and won’t leave me alone. There is this, by Axel Vervoordt (stolen from a waiting room mag – you can still see the fold lines):

I like the broken quality of the colour and the way it wraps onto the ceilings.  There is also this:

and even this:

or a pale and interesting version (on seeing this was a pub in London I thought to hasten me back to Blighty where I could sit lose hours (weeks!) with my G&T in a narcotic blue haze):

On other days, however,  a bit of pattern seems to float the boat:

or this (but probs not):

and I positively love this, but wouldn’t do it (or would I?):

This one I pledged my troth to some years ago:

So how to choose?  Sober? Pink? Patterned? Blue?  All or none of the above?

And here are a few more miscellaneous hallways, just for good measure (and further confusion):

 

And before I go,  let me just slide in one last digression, which is slightly more admissible on a housey blog than lion fur and banana skins – I’ve had a few requests for progress shots of the Regency Wreck and they are imminent (honest),  but I am rusticating at the farm for a few days and hope (hope!  what an expensive commodity!) that vast swathes of tiling await my return, photos of which I will then plaster liberally all over t’t blog.

Toodlepip.

Up close and fairly personal.

You know,  I want to thank everyone who takes the time to leave a comment on this blog.  A big arm flinging sort of a thank you.  Sometimes it can get to feeling  like I’m wittering away to myself in a corner.  But then  someone’ll pop up and suddenly it’s more like a conversation and all is well.  So thank you, those what does.  Especially those what does regularly.

So anyway and anyway, while the rest of the world is sliding into all that mist and mellow fruitfulness ( please can I come and stay? in about a month?  for about three months?), we in the antipodes are enjoying a brief and lovely seasonal interregnum before we hit the glass wall of  Summer.  When the sun will press the days into flat, metallic discs and the heat will stretch and shimmer as far as the mind can see.  Further, even.

I have been getting up close and personal with the beasts of the land recently – and I must tell you, it’s better than a shot of vitamin B, or a night at the disco.  It fair plumps up the old membranes with cross-species joy. Indeedy.

At the farm the other week, the weather had started to warm up and  so we had the annual procession of the reptiles into the sun. All very stately and solemn it was.  Our resident Carpet Python, a very suave McLaddy, staked a place in the purple herbaceous baxon to sun himself.  Until, that is, the Herberts and all the birds took great umbrage and wapped him with a crescendo of barking and claxoning until he slithered off in search of a quieter life. (His parents, you know, used to over-winter wrapped around the hot water tank in the roof, until the plumber came across them one day, two pairs of yellow eyes regarding him in the dark.  The neighbour was called (we being away), who summarily stuffed them into a hessian sack and dumped them in the Strawberry Field.  Whereupon they went off in a state of high dudgeon, never to be seen again.  They did, though, leave us their offspring; he of the buttery yellow belly and lazy ways. This is not his picture – he is too camera shy and I am too camera slow, but it is a relative of his.

There were also sightings of the Lace Monitor who has taken up residence under the house and is the cause of great canine clamour every evening, the dogs seeming to believe that obsessive licking of the floorboards will deliver him to them. He emerged one afternoon for a stroll and  was promptly chased up a tree by, once again, the Herberts, fearless defenders of the ancestral acres they, whence he stayed for the best part of the afternoon, motionless, pretending to be a branch.  At dusk, when I had distracted them, he gingerly inched his way down, only to be mobbed by a parent magpie as he  trundled with utter dignity and as fast as his stumpy little legs would carry him until he was only a speck at the far edge of the field.  I did photograph him, but the sun was in the lens and he looks nothing more than a very large twig in a very large tree, so here is his cousin who lives somewhere on the internet.  You can see how beautiful he is:

 There were delights of a somewhat more ambivalent nature when I emerged from the house one afternoon to find two tiny red and green finches sitting on the verandah.  I spoke to them politely, as one does, and they seemed to regard me with little surprise or alarm and so I got down at their level and conversed a little more.  Their beaks opened and shut, red little beaks, but no sound came and it finally dawned on me that they had flown into the window and stunned themselves. They allowed me to place them in my hand (oh!) and from there I transferred them to a bush for safety (the tireless Herbs being just around the corner, lounging, but not for long).   Later they were gone. Flown off to safety.  You know that somewhat mawkish sticker ‘Magic Happens’?  Well, apparently it doth. In the garden.  When you least expect it.  And are wearing your scruffiest wellies.

But wait, there is more!

When we arrived we found the dams perilously close to dry and the cows up to their knees in mud, drinking from the puddles still left at the centre.  There followed much unhilarity with ancient and new pumps and finally  a hose spurting fresh, clean river water was taken up to them.  I’ll wager a bet that when you think of water fun, your mind doesn’t turn automatically to frolicking with Belted Galloways in the mud, but I am here to testify that you’re  missing out.   Afterwards I felt as good as if I’d been to the seaside for a day with old friends. You know, buckets and spades, sandy sammies and feeling sick in the car afterwards.  Joy!  They’re excellent sports, cows.  Gawd love ’em.

Other than that, there was the usual Spring parade of floriferous glories and olfactory delights:

And at the end of it all, there was honey still for tea.  Because the farm’s that sort of place.

Weekend salvation

Hello hello! Lawdy, it’s been longer than I thought. Thank you very much for the ahemings and nudgings – it’s lovely and reassuring to know that I’m not blithering away entirely to myself.  Truly.  And actually I’ve thought about posting umpteen times recently, but the landscape around here has been too stress-sodden, too desolate to be worth relaying.  Any post I might have written would have been a litany of despondencies,  unspooling in long ribbons from here to the moon and half way back again.  Though actually, to talk in terms of ribbons is too smooth and silky-sounding when the texture of time has more resembled a mountain of rusty nuts and bolts –  a mountain that must be ascended, one bolt and one knee-breaking nut at a time.

But fear not! I do not come Ancient Marinerishly – I shall uphold (sort of) the fifth law of blogodynamics and not pin you to the wall with my litany of woes.  In any case, for anyone outside the tiny circle of involvement it’s all rather so whatish.  It’s the usual stuff – you know – builder being difficult, plumber being difficult, the contract that we get pressured to re-negotiate, the other contract that seems to have a large sum missing from it.  It’s being expected to pay for scaffolding when we no longer need it.  It’s the giant hoohaa-ery about exterior colours.  You know – that manner of thing. The kind of thing which wakes you in the middle of the night, which causes you to vow ‘never again’, which looms suddenly at you while you’re eating your breakfast and has you in a lather.  Stress!  And the trouble with stress, in my experience anyway,  is that it shrinks one’s world to a tiny claustrophobic chamber in which tap fittings and floor tiles loom vastly, and you become some distracted Alice in her not-so-wondrous-wonderland, tussling to get them back to size, the buggers.

And stress makes you behave badly.  Or at least rudely.  And sleep like a lunatic. And become tired.  And therefore behave even more badly.  Or at least rudely.  And maybe turn to drink or other noxious solutions. (Having just picked out all the good nuts from the nut packet, I suggested to Mr Pimp that we had peanuts and G&Ts for supper.  He thought I was joking. But you mark my words – tomorrow he’ll suggest his own variant).

So anyway, to upkeep my undertaking to the fifth law of etceteras, I give you some things which are keeping the boat semi-sane and bobbing at the moment.

I give you the fifty hyacinth bulbs Mr Pimperwonderful bought and planted in staggered lots so they could bloom over us all through our Period of Need.  I should confess that I  completely  and utterly adore hyacinths.  The colour of them.  The smell.  I could live in a hyacinth-induced swoon all my days.

I give you the dining room floor, now (almost) dressed once more with its sandstone flooring.

I give you these glass mosaics, with which I am having a delirious, shiny interlude.

I give you Hans Coper with whom (or with pictures of whose pots) I spent a surprisingly ecstatic morning.  Simplification of form – I am convinced it’s where it’s at.

But mostly, dear Ladles and Jellyspoons, I give you Salvation by Calf. And this is how it happened.  We were stressed.   We were unhappy.  We did what we always do at such times.  We went to the farm for a spot of rustication, a top up of chlorophyll. A little rose pruning is what we envisaged, a little bad-potting. A lot of nothing very much at all.  And what did we do instead?  Life saving is what!   Think, if you would, tiny calf with paralysis ticks. Think sleepless nights with a sick baby. Think nail baiting will-he-or-won’t-he suspense. Think injections, dried colostrum and conflicting advice. Think midnight trysts by lamplight on straw bales with bottles of milk. Think anxious mother hovering, shiver-me-timbers cold, plumes of huff.  Think flooding relief when finally, FINALLY! the teat is chewed and then sucked, noisily, by the hairy little beast, streams of milk flooding down his coat.  Think Mr Pimp holding  a bib of straw beneath his determined little chin so that the spilled milk doesn’t freeze on him over night. Think the first thought you have in the morning being the calf, the last before you drop off.  Think jealous Remingtons and anxious Miss Elsies bellowing at you over the fields. And then you’d have the gist of our weekend.

We found him like this, almost dead, on his way to total paralysis:

 Mr P scooped him up to take him where we could look after him, bringing on the wrath of his mother Molly and the Grand Matriarch of the herd, Miss Black (a scary thing):

The vet shaved his neck to check for more ticks.  He looked somewhat like a ponderous tortoise thereafter:

Finally, finally on his tottering feet again:

On the last morning, a day later than we were planning to leave, we were able to open the gate and let them both out, Molly to show off her baby (for the second time) and he, to his second shot at life as a tenured lawn mower.  I hope they don’t tease him about his neck.

A little sumsing for the weekend

My sentiments exactly.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we interrupt our regular programming (regular?  I hear you say, to which I reply Sshhh!)…we interrupt our regular programming with breaking news of the Sydney Biennale.  In fact breaking news and exhortations.  Exhortations and great windmilling arms of enthusiasm.  Gestures of ushering, words of encouragement, promises of wonderment if you will only consent to shift your harrises out into the parky winter air and get on over.  Sydneysiders, just do it!  Srsly.  Everyone else, they tell me the aeroplane is a fine invention. Come for a visit!  We can offer you afternoon tea at the Regency Wreck cosily nestled between the termites’ nests… cucumber sarnies served with great gravitas by Remington Rem the First.  Miss Elsie in her french maid’s pinny on the samovar…then off on a ferry to see the sights and a bit of a shiver…what do you think?  Can you be tempted?

So anyway, on Tuesday El Pimpo and I were air-lifted from our lavatory-seeking rut by some lovely friends, and whisked over to Cockatoo Island on a ferry.   And oh, OH I tell you, just get thee hence. Or thence. Just get thee.

And if you do I can, hand on heart, promise you enchantment.  A veritable winter wonderland of delight.  I know I might sound like bad advertising copy but srsly peoples,  it’s the shiz.  In fact, the  hoots mon shiz and a half. With a cherry on the top.

I can’t tell you much about the exhibits, other than there’s a lot of big and a lot of white and a lot of sheer magic.  It’s my personal preference to go to these things knowing nothing, to have a passionate encounter with each piece and then move on to the next, no strings attached.  A form of aesthetic cottaging, if you will.

For once I shan’t drown you in the verbals, but instead garland you with pictures, strew you with images, so you get a bit of an idea (bad pics mine, good pics said lovely friend’s).

A carpet-lined meander in the woods, down to the enchanted cabin

 

And this, whole other universe of light and tiny sound by Philip Beesley.

There is an entire warehouse dedicated entirely to the sexual organs of the insect kingdom, and very lovely were too.  Behold, the love dart of the garden snail:

And many, many other delights.

And when you are sated with installations, there’s Cockatoo Island itself, with its abandoned-industrial aesthetic and slightly melancholic charms:

(above – an example of what I am told is called fibro tudor)

I hope you’ll forgive me my proselytising.  I’ve been good since Marrakesh. And in our next episode – bathroom madness.  Ah, see, now you’re on tenterhooks.  Can you contain the excitement?  Not sure that I can.

I’m leaving, on a jet plane…

I thought I’d be spending New Year’s Eve at the Regency Wreck, watching the fireworks over Sydney Harbour Bridge.  Maybe even camping there overnight on a mattress.  Instead I’ll be on an airplane, somewhere over the Indian Ocean without so much as a sparkler.   I’m off for five weeks – back to the Dorset countryside and to London. I shall go stamping all over, and spend a day pottering in Spitalfields (where the streets are paved with iconoclasts); a few days in Marrakesh  (where the streets are paved with Berber rugs); and a few more in Venice (where there are no streets).

(And if you don’t believe me about Spitalfields, take a look at http://spitalfieldslife.com/, which is a true delight).

Right now I should be packing, stuffing things willy nilly into my bag.  Piles of clothes mushroom at the periphery of my vision but here I am instead, at my machine.  Odd – when I have time draped in folds around my feet I can’t get a post together but when I’m on my way out of the door it becomes The-thing-which-cannot-be-put-off.

The highlight of this last year was buying the Regency Wreck.  This time next year I want to be living there (oh, dangerous thingses, these predictions).  The rest of this year has been one of drudgery – an attempt to cobble together the right conditions for health and recovering still (STILL!) from the psychoanalytic training – my sense of humour is not yet inflated, my sense of joy still fugitive. At the end of it all I feel a little colourless, a little pressed flat.    These last few days a poem by Denise Riley has been blowing around inside my head.

As iron sharpens iron

I sharpen the face of my friend

so hard he sings out

in high delicate notes.

A struggle for mastery to most speak

powerful beauty would run any

attention or kindness clean out

of town in angry rags.

Ringed by darkness the heat pulsates.

And power comes in like lightning.

A lion in the room, fair and flowing

twists with unsparing eyes.

Whitely the glance runs

to it and away.  But let it

talk its golden talk if we

don’t understand it.

Grabbed by remote music

I’m frightening myself.  Speak

steadily as is needed to

stare down beauty.  That calms it.

Denise Riley

In this coming year I hope for a lion in the room.  A pulsating heart. Some powerful beauty to try and speak.  For you I wish whatever it is you need and much of what you want. Happy New Year!

Fenella Elms.

I’ve been enamoured of Fenella Elms’ ceramics for a while now.  They induce in me a yearning to float away, to eat them, to possess them, to squeeze the living daylights out of them. Really.

And when I discovered today that she too has done a psychoanalytical training and moved on from it, something made sense.  But not in a wordy way.  In the way of a door opening where there was only wall. 

This is what she says: “I undertook a psychoanalytical training and noticed that artists use the same language when describing the process.  There is a similar mindfulness; attending to the underneath and enabling what is hidden to emerge; forming new patterns in the apparent.  I worked in particular with groups in which the interaction of several awakened the individual: I notice that I cannot make something with just one part.” And I notice she takes the best of psychoanalysis and makes of it something luminous and fluid and alive.  It gives an old troglodyte who is still rolling in the mud a splash of hope to take in her tea!

And of her work: “I don’t take inspiration as literally as I think some do: I don’t sit down to make something that has a fixed link.  For example, even if I were given a brief, I would let it settle in my mind, consciously reminding myself of it and letting it influence my experiences for a few weeks and then when I go to make, I put the preparation away and try to act as a conduit for those experiences to emerge: I am alive to the possibilities but try not to interfere.  I am always interested in the resulting work but not surprised – it has a fresh familiarity; a new look at something very known.”

Oh, and I learned last week that The Architect is also taking a ceramics course.  So there you are.  Where?  There, of course.

I think of death it calms me down.

I have just returned from a day’s potting, and I am bent over like Quasimodo.  Over the last eight weeks, on a Monday night, I have struggled and laboured to make eight mugs of similar size and shape.  They are done and they resemble elephant’s feet with jug-ears. Maybe I had in mind something more along the lines of Rachel Kneebone’s exquisite grotesqueries, like Meissen confections of death and sadness and sex.  The titles are like short poems.  Almost enough in themselves.

The Descent

I know beauty through fear.

Eyes that look closely at wounds themselves are wounded.

I think of death it calms me down.

I will console myself with the fact that you can’t drink coffee out of them.

A momentary meander away from bricks.

A comment yesterday from Hermine about the wearing of  bracelets up to the elbows inspired me to mention the incomparable Nancy Cunard.  A postcard version of this photograph by Man Ray has travelled around with me for decades, propped on one mantlepiece or other. I have not been Nancyless for a very long time.

There are many other pictures – she is hardly hard to find.

 I must admit I have always loved her for her bracelets  (of course) and her fierce iconoclasm – a confession she would have used those very bracelets to beat me over the pate for.  And she would be right, because she was far more than the sum of her parts, or the number of her bracelets. 

Her name should give  a clue – she was great-granddaughter of the founder of the Cunard Line and child of an American beauty and a British aristocrat.  She was a publisher, a poet in her own right, a muse to and lover of countless literary luminaries including Pound, Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis. She was associated with Neruda, Beckett and Breton’s surrealists.  

She was ever restless, insecure, ceaseless in her assault on injustice.  In 1928 she became an activist, campaining on racial politics and civil rights in the USA.  In the 30s she took up the fight against anti-fascism.  Together with Auden and Spender she sent a questionnaire to 200 writers, asking “Are you for, or against, the legal government and people of Republican Spain? Are you for, or against, Franco and Fascism? For it is impossible any longer to take no side.” George Orwell responded  “Will you please stop sending me this bloody rubbish. This is the second or third time I have had it. I am not one of your fashionable pansies like Auden or Spender, I was six months in Spain, most of the time fighting, I have a bullet hole in me at present and I am not going to write blah about defending democracy or gallant little anybody…”

Henri Cartier Bresson

She drank too much, ate too little, and after a fight with London police, was eventually hospitalised for “mental illness”. I sometimes wonder whether lives that have not been squeezed into some sort of shape by the necessity to work  tend to run to un-checked extremes that resemble (and maybe become) madness.  Of course, an excess of wealth and intelligence don’t always help.  After her release from hospital, her health went downhill further and she weighed only sixty pounds when she was found on the streets of Paris and taken to hospital.   She died two days later. Her body was returned to London and the remains sent back to France.

But enough.  I can’t begin to do her justice here.  She’s written about everywhere, known about (almost) nowhere.   And there’s at least one book about her.

I haven’t been able to find any of her poetry so far, but I shall. 

…The vermilion wall

receding as a sin

beyond your moonstone whiteness,

Your chiffon voice.

(part of ‘Nancy Cunard’ by her friend Mina Loy).