Pictures

Time for some pictures - so far I have managed to have the most boring looking blog on the internet, due to my limited DTP skills.   So a few pictures will occasionally enliven this.

This is my back garden, taken last year 1st May.   Looking at it I am wondering what has happened to some of those plants - a cold winter and the terrible way that tulips seem to disappear after a year or so, and the sad fact that my favourite narcissus, pheasant's eye - and all its variants, don't seem to like my garden - that clump has come up blind this year.

And this is my front door - the peeling pillars are an inheritance from the former owners, who painted the red brick pink and the stone top of the pillars gold - nice for 70's Copenhagen, or 60's California, or Islington, but  not for Ramsgate in the late 90's.  One day I will manage to remove that paint... there's a product specially for getting paint off brickwork.

A view of Ramsgate beach.... too many flints for totally relaxed entry to the sea, but it's lovely once you get in,  and usually lovely throughout July, August and September: take one bottle of chilled wine, a pile of olives, some tomato foccacia and some reading material and you have a perfect day on the beach.   On leaving the beach you may stop at the Belgian Bar for a drink - or anywhere else along the Harbour... a few more olives a bit more wine... then toddle home, a ten minute walk... why I love living here.   However, it begs the question, what does one do in the other 9 months?

And here is a lovely thing... a metal sculpture of a boar - rootling around the spring flowers at the Salutation gardens in Sandwich... a wonderful combination of nature and culture, which I suppose is what gardening is all about.

That's enough pics for the present I think.

Haircut

I went to have my hair cut at Toni and Guy's in Canterbury, because my brother Ben gave me vouchers for it for Christmas.  Very loud salon - white, MTV on, nice hairdresser - interested in antiques and vintage stuff - had extraordinary 70s looking hair and sideburns... quite a nice hair cut, but all the interesting features (curls around the edge, disappeared by lunch time).   When I came home Mark admired it.   Finn came in and said "is that your hair cut?" and  "How much did it cost?" "£52 - it just looks like someone's tampered with it."

Maybe I'd better return to the bosom of Marcello - in a while...

Cats and birds

As long as there are cats and birds in the world I can never be completely bored.  I was sitting here when I saw two collar doves mobbing a magpie - the magpie settled in our crab apple tree - then a second one joined.  They hopped around avoiding the collar doves, who after a while returned to their nest in the roof.  The magpies jigged up and down in the tree, hopping about, one sitting in the sun, with the light catching the iridescent feathers in the tail... they stayed there for a while, squawking and clucking - until I saw some violent movement, and saw that Tac - a local cat was storming up the tree towards them.   He was halfway up but they moved to the top branches, and he clambered about looking for a way of getting up to the top level.  The magpies taunted him, until he made the leap up to the next section - one flew off, the other moved to the thinnest outermost branches of the tree.  From there he seemed to be teasing Tac, daring him out to the branches that would not bear him.   Tac boldly advanced, benefiting from all the crossing branches to make his way across to the magpie, but couldn't quite reach him - he flashed his tail furiously until the magpie flew off.  Tac then began to retreat gingerly, he could easily have fallen between the twigs - and was dithering about how to take his next step, when he noticed another cat at the foot of the tree.   Furious to see "his" territory encroached on, he found a renewed celerity and sped down the tree, leaping from branch to branch to see off the usurper.

I should be grateful to our neighbour Julian for feeding cats in his front garden, it provides an endless cat circus - not always this exciting, but there is usually some cat life to be observed.

This is not a blog

I don't know what a blog is - I am sometimes invited to write one, sometimes there are conferences where you pay money to be told how to write them.  I write what I like, there isn't a theme, if you see the opening blog last year, you can see that there was an agenda of sorts.  It was never intended to form the basis of anything.  In someways it was just a useful place to hide my diary.

Now, due to my somewhat belated understanding of "how it works" , and of course the fact that the last place to "hide your diary" is on-line I know better.  In fact it is now eternal, until they run out of energy to run the archives, or the space required to archive this stuff runs out... So what I have noticed, looking back over the year is that it provides me with a useful aide-memoire for what I've been doing.   And of course when an astrologer says "some of the themes that were playing out in June will return to haunt you" I can now check what I was considering last June... and see if that's true.

But this is basically a censored diary - I could just start keeping a proper diary again, but I've got out of the habit -so is it worth it?  One writes in the hope of engaging - but no-one is engaged with this - it's read, but not engaged with.   Perhaps people who read blogs don't write comments - just as those who write them don't usually read other blogs much (or perhaps they do).

I've had a very idle day today - I tried to find something I wanted to do, but I really couldn't.  What is wrong with me?  My brain is absolutely dead.  It has come to a full stop.  I think I dreamed about dying last night.  I am in a flux over the book - I ought to be pleased I've got this far, but instead I'm feeling angst and dread of what the Agent will say.  Not that she'll be seeing it until the next edition has been prepared...at least.

I ought to be feeling very good: the sun is shining, a miraculous pay ment of £4,000 has appeared in our bank account, courtesy of HMRC (yes, it must be a mistake - but it's a very timely one) which means we can make a lot of payments and not panic about money we owe... and I have a novel... but instead I am feel scrunched up inside and very anxious indeed.  I have been through a period of very major change in the last few months, I thought I knew where I was going, but now I am having a crisis.  yes, I know I can write, but I'm feeling so frustrated with what I've written.  Tomorrow I will get a hard copy of the novel from the printer and then I can read it properly.  Maybe that will make me feel better.

TV Rubbish

Ach, the horror of ailments - I now officially have gastro-enteritis - the labyrinthitis is linked with it, in other words another virus... I have felt bored all day - tried to edit TRF a bit but uninspired to improve it much, then tried to read, no concentration, dozed a bit, got woken up - stayed awake, v.v. bored, so I have turned on the TV - and found a slightly higher level Friday night offering - it's Sport Relief - on of those charity fundraising nights - weird items, interspersed with appeals.  Currently - underwater ball room dancing...

I have found it difficult to latch on to a book, but finally found Smollet's A Journey through France and Italy provides just the right level of stimulation and familiarity... it mentions the Boulogne lighthouse (the lost Roman one), for example.  Sometimes it's really hard to find a book to read.  Perhaps I have become a history buff without meaning too - it seems so much easier to read history sometimes than anything else.  

Underwater ballroom dancing is rather boring, slower than the regular kind... but probably of great interest to afficionados.

Before I die

There's been such a wave of 1000 things to do/eat/read/see books in the last few years, and I have rather disdained them.

When I was in my 20s I was going to go up the Amazon and visit the Far East etc.etc.  but I realised a few years ago that all that flying about was bad for the planet, and that really I didn't want to go all over the world.   I realise Australia and New Zealand have spectacular scenery but I'm not that interested in going there.

I developed the principle that I would only visit places in the Roman Empire or Alexander's Empire, by train.  Since then I have pretty much stuck to that by not going anywhere except Madrid - only the trains were booked up so we had to go by plane (we returned by coach thanks to the volcano).  However there are still a couple of places I would like to go to outside that category - namely Costa Rica, the Galapagos, bits of Africa that aren't accessible by train, even for Michael Palin.

Although I love the natural world I don't need it to be big and astounding - I get just as much pleasure watching a couple of sparrows squabbling on a station platform, or a colony of lizards living in Roman ruins.  The progress of the quince and apple buds in the garden is just as engaging as anything tropical might be.

I think the reason I'm not that interested in seeing "the rest of the world" - the places beyond the Eurasian/Mediterranean limits are simply lack of understanding of their culture and iconography - there is so much pleasure in seeing buildings and pictures in Europe - because of understanding them and reading them... the Near East and India (can't seriously imagine getting there by train somehow) also have historical connections that engage me, but when it comes to other places I'm less interested.  I don't think I really care so much about novelty - just making connections.  Only connect...

Africa!

I realise sometimes how extremely narrow my life is - I know that writing the book has made it worse, having to endlessly focus on a particular topic has made me live in a sort of fuge state some of the time, where my intellect and other bits don't seem to be engaged.  My most frequent utterance in the day time is something like "Mmm" in different tones of voice "yes, quite, now go away" "I'd like to respond nicely but you're interrupting my train of thought" "Shut up" "please go!"   My external life - when I go out and socialise (or stay in an socialise usually) is also a bit limited.  I wonder how I would cope with someone saying something challenging or interesting... sometimes I feel like I am living in a latter day edition of Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Attitudes - safe, predictable, bourgeois...

Last night I retired early as my stomach was unbearably painful - and oh joy! there was the perfect tv programme on - a wildlife documentary about the Zambezi.  It had the most brilliant photography - and I had that almost hallucinatory sense of ephiphany.  Hey man, the colours! as Mark would say.  I don't know when I have enjoyed anything so much.  I am utterly starved of such things.  There were sensational aerial shots - I especially liked one of a vast group of hippos stretched out along the stream in the last deep places available as the river dried up.  A sinister shot of crocodiles gathering to feast on a dead hippo.  There were some wonderful scenes of carmine bee-eaters making nests in the river banks, and a fish eagle coming among them to prey on them.  Lots of shots of the Victoria falls, but most interesting was a brief shot of the VF dried up - I didn't realise they did that.  Important to ensure one goes at the right time of year obviously.    What I found odd was very little sign of human life - apart from a tribe who lived on the river (impressive feats of catfish spearing) - were there no towns? no farms, no cattle?  It gave the impression that Zambia and Mozambique were just giant wildlife reserves, with more elephants and buffalo than humans. And of course it made we went to go there with a fierce desperation, that all thoughts of large flying insects and snakes could not shift.  I should explain that as a teenager I was alarmed by a very large flying insect in South Africa.

Thinking about that trip to SA it seems hard to connect it with what happened before.  I think the new experiences drove all the old misery out of my mind - and it only returned when I got back to England.  Nevertheless, I slightly wonder whether I may have exaggerated some of the misery and longing I felt in the novel... I mean, I've picked out the bad bits I remember, but forgotten the most satisfactory and enjoyable parts of my life at that time.

I suppose wildlife documentaries fuel the safari tourism business - people go to see baby elephants snorkelling across rivers, not to see urban squalor and have power cuts.  But I expect things are better now, there seems to be a feeling that many African countries are beginning to get their act together.  I would really like to go to Africa again, just for the smell and the colours. It's not something I think of much because it is well beyond the  possibility of planning, but something like that programme makes me feel I would be sorry not to go to Africa again before I die (whereas I could happily leave other places out).   New entry for that I think.