Tuesday, January 31, 2023

encounters with students


There were plenty of planned encounters today - much though I enjoyed being on leave, it's great to have my office filled with grad students again (and, not being Chair, I actually have time to talk to them properly, without an undertow of anxiety about everything else that's piling up).  But I had two completely random encounters of note with undergrads ...

... one, when leaving Taper Hall, held the door open for me.  I thanked her - she paused a moment, and said "Oh! I love your eyeshadow!  It's really cute!"  This, of course, had me worried - did I look like a panda that had been experimenting, or what?  I doubt my eyeshadowing techniques have changed all that much since my first little palettes of Biba eyeshadow - in greys and purples and mid-browns - over fifty years ago.  Well, maybe that's not true - I had a brief patch in my second year as an undergrad when I bought some bright turquoise blue eyeliner in emulation of a woman whom I fancied madly at St Hugh's, which neither improved my chances with her, nor the appearance of my eyes.  In any case, I spent the rest of the day wondering whether my barely modified techniques had rendered me suddenly, fashionably retro.

It was, indeed, such a busy day that I feared I'd actually forget to take a photo of anything, so grabbed an utterly stock shot of campus - I was just shuffling around to get the fountain's best profile, and another undergrad helpfully said "I can take your photo with it, if you like!"  That wasn't quite the point ... so I thanked him profusely, of course, and went on my way musing on the welcome friendliness of our students.

 

Monday, January 30, 2023

off to work


... and after a lot of rain, so everything was looking damp and fresh - so damp, indeed, that we were without workmen today.  Campus was covered in huge puddles.  And it was a very long day's work, too - job visit season is upon us, which is both exhilarating (and yes - we are so lucky to be hiring) and exhausting ...

 

Sunday, January 29, 2023

Tell Her You Love Her


I do, and I will ... Not quite Valentine's Day yet, but what does that matter?  Glad to be back in the land of Los Feliz stenciled graffiti: this was a timely reminder on the way from brunch at the Alcove to mail some letters at the Post Office on Vermont.  

 

Saturday, January 28, 2023

1st update


Believe me, there's something rather scary about having committed ourselves to a backyard update of this size - it's as though we've embarked on the hanging gardens of Babylon, or Tivoli without the water features.  Admittedly, it would be even more scary if there'd been an earthquake and all the collapsing terrace, with its 1929 concrete, had tumbled down the slope (It's something of a relief to find that what's under that ancient concrete looks far more stable than we'd anticipated).  But after one week's enthusiastic demolition, things are definitely happening ...

 

Friday, January 27, 2023

a strange paper cat


walking across campus today - to get some books from the Fine Arts library - I looked up to see that someone hadn't yet taken down their Christmas decorations (it's only late January, after all ...).  Among the snowflakes was the strangeist little cat - with hearts for eyes, perhaps it's an early Valentine gesture.


 

besuteria


Besuteria: here's a new word for my vocabulary.  I was coming home on the bus - in impossibly slow-to-stationary traffic because of a large fire a couple of streets over - and enjoying the views of the little botegas - and then - "besuetria"?  I could guess the general field, because of bijouterie, but "besuteria" is something else yet again.  Rather than signifying "jewellery" - or jeweller - this is, precisely, somewhere that sells mock jewellery, made from fake precious stones snd the like.  Who knew?

 

Wednesday, January 25, 2023

Gramsci the Needy


Poor Grammy.  As if it wasn't bad enough that I went away for five whole weeks, there are people with pneumatic drills tearing up the terrace outside his house.  So he finds it hard to stay away from my shoulders for long - except, as here, when he moves to hug Alice's neck for a few moments so that I can take his picture.  He has a very particular "I want to get on your shoulder - NOW" miaow - distinct from the "I want kibble" one (although that's pretty preremptory, too) - and then he lands.  Even Moth responded to his being upset, today: we saw her licking him in a surprisingly maternal way.

 

Tuesday, January 24, 2023

an incomprehensible water feature


Decidedly weird.  This bed/planter at USC - about two feet off the ground - has a couple of inches of water on top of the soil (hence the reflections).  Is this still the rain from last week, draining lethargically?  Is the sprinkler coming on and not draining? - no, that surely can't be.  It shouldn't be like this, surely.

How grateful I am, after the last five weeks, to be taking photos and writing about miscellaneous corners of USC that just happen to take my fancy, and have no emotional weight to them ...

 

Monday, January 23, 2023

a little yard work


So maybe the timing hasn't been brilliant, and maybe the noise of a pneumatic drill breaking up concrete isn't exactly conducive to work, but today saw the beginning of work on our back yard that's been in the planning stages for years.  I don't think we ever genuinely believed this would happen.  The back terrace has been slowly sinking since well before we bought the house; the cracks in the concrete slowly widening - or not so slowly recently: the heavy rains have made the subsidence even more obvious.  We're now looking at ten weeks' worth of construction - and then landscaping work after that, but this is exciting ... 

As you can see, the crew made extraordinary progress today.  The netting rather prevents us going down the garden, so one would have to take a circuitous route to reach the area in which I've temporarily rehomed some plants, but I rather like this little reading oasis.




 

Sunday, January 22, 2023

drained


Yes, that's a metaphor for how I feel ... thanks to the smaller of the two Silver Lake lakes for providing it.  What should have been a quiet day of re-entry and re-assimilation was a marathon of clearing the whole back terrace of plants in heavy pots, and garden furniture, and the barbecue (happily on wheels, but heavy) ready for demolition and re-construction work to start tomorrow - and then more clearing of a whole chunk of the garage (luckily nothing like the one at 20 ...) so that they can store a generator in it.  Somewhere in all of this I realised that I'd left my US wallet (with such minor things as my driver's license in it) back in a Safe Place in Wimbledon.  Could I start the last 36 hours over again, please?  But at least it was good to go for a lake walk, this morning ...

 

Saturday, January 21, 2023

both ends


It's been a long, long day, and bow I keep falling asleep even as I'm writing this .. But ... home.


 

Friday, January 20, 2023

snowdrops


A little frost-bedraggled, but unmistakably harbingers of spring.  Snowdrops were always my mother's flower - even in Cumberland one could be pretty certain that they'd be out by her birthday, February 3rd, and these stuck their white heads up through the earth last week. I find it hard, and not very comfortable, to think that this is almost certainly the last year that I'll see these particular snowdrops blooming: I wish it wasn't illegal to import them into the US, at least as a private individual.  It seems hard to get my head around the fact that I'll be leaving tomorrow, at all, even if I'll be back in seven weeks ...

 

Thursday, January 19, 2023

another frosted morning


The air was so chill this morning that not only were roofs and pavements thick with hoar frost - it was slippery; one had to watch where one walked - but chimneys and vents down the hill were steaming as if they belonged to some Pissarro painting of suburban south London in the late nineteenth century.  As it was, I was heading down Spencer Hill to drop off paper work at the solicitors, and to drop off a bag of food debris into the rubbish bin by the bus stop - a small bag, but a lady standing there gave me a glare surely reserved for people who she suspected hadn't paid their Council Tax.  But how else to get it off the premises, when I won't be back for a while?

 

Wednesday, January 18, 2023

the mysteries of garages


Much clearing out of the garage today: my cousin Jon valiantly came with his car, and, among other things, we took a whole load of elderly electronics to the tip.  I am quite sure that Ray was keeping many of them in case they Came in Useful - endless cords and leads, of course; electric fires dating back to the 1960s; a floor polisher from the 1970s; a portable TV from 1976 - some of these items had reached the status of being held on to by him because he thought that they might have museum value.  I felt as though I was murdering them, tossing them into a huge metal waste bin - although there was also a cruel satisfaction in seeing them smash (not all of them ... TVs and computers and cell phones clearly had a more sophisticated form of dissection awaiting them).

But it was easy, if somewhat sad, to see why he might have kept all of this - and much more besides, that's still to be re-homed or rejected.  Less comprehensible was this full, unopened packet of cereal with an expiration date of April 2018.  I mean ... this was hardly something, one imagines, that he was going to feed the foxes.  Maybe the squirrels ... but then, surely one would go right away and toss little handfuls out to them?  He was never a cereal eater - my mother was, but this packet surely predates her death.  And it was tucked away at the dusty back of a shelf.  I'm truly flummoxed.

 

Tuesday, January 17, 2023

a chilly morning


It was cold when I left, this morning: frost on the grass, and thick condensation on the window (mind you, that probably reveals rather too much about the state of this house's insulation.  Round the corner, as I headed to the station, it was dark and wintry - and coming back, this evening, hoar frost on all the grass and leaves and car windshields. After the past few weeks of strange mildness, this crackling dry cold was very welcome.



 

Monday, January 16, 2023

anticipatory nostalgia


Just a few more days - until Spring Break - in the house, which was looking especially fine today in the half hour or so of sunshine that suddenly appeared.  I think it's the dining room extension, with those long colonial-style doors, that gives it a little bit of distinction - when my parents built it out, in 1994, it certainly made inside seem much larger, too.  Of course, if one takes a close-up look, all the wood on it is now rotting and splitting.  I don't have any illusion about what the house's fate will probably be: on a good-sized plot of land in what's thought of, these days, as a highly desirable cul-de-sac, it's almost certainly someone's dream site on which to build something twice its size.  This is, without doubt, its best angle, too - as the guy who came to evaluate it for probate purposes said the other day, on entering, "it's not exactly a looker from the road, is it?"  I bristled with defensiveness on its behalf.  Admittedly, much of it hasn't been touched since 1961 - "oooh, vintage!" said someone else of the taps in the downstairs cloakroom, recently - but, without question, it's still - just - home.

 

Sunday, January 15, 2023

cotton


To the local flower shop to buy lots of flowers to cheer up the house - that is, Alice - who is leaving in the morning - wonderfully set me up with lots of cheerful blooms - tulips, and lilies, and freesias - all the things we can't have at home in Los Angeles because they're toxic to cats.  Actually, I find, freesias aren't poisonous to cats, but the others certainly are.  We did not buy cotton.  I mean - pretty though the little fluffy bolls may be, it seems a little ideologically over-determined when it comes to interior decoration.


Winslow Homer, The Cotton Pickers, 1876



 

Saturday, January 14, 2023

cleft in the clouds


A sudden rift in the clouds, this afternoon ... not exactly blue sky, but it wasn't exactly raining, either.  I'm sure there's plenty of symbolism to be derived from this: for now, I'm just happy to - still - enjoy the view from my old bedroom window.

 

Friday, January 13, 2023

out to dinner!


Ray was not - emphatically not - a man who enjoyed going out to dinner, in his later decades.  I think he believed it to be a profound waste of money - sitting in a noisy environment eating ... well, why?  (To be fair, or at least honest, I don't think - as he himself would admit - had anything resembling a decent sense of taste - eighty-five years of smoking rather deadened his palate - so he didn't enjoy that rather essential part of a meal, and one could have a drink in a pub).  Indeed, the last time I went out to dinner with him was in 2003, for his 80th birthday, and that was a pretty dire occasion, with him arguing with the poor wait staff and insisting that the (quiet) music was turned off.  So we never went to The Lighthouse, the restaurant that's been at the top of the road since 1999 (no, he didn't want to go there in 2003 ...).  For Alice and me to go there this evening felt, at least to me, like a major transgression, a defiant gesture of grown-up-ness - and we had an excellent, non-pretentious, and, er, non-noisy meal, and an excellent bottle of Chablis.  

 

Thursday, January 12, 2023

A good send off (and a eulogy for Ray)


Beforehand, in the front hall: the spray of flowers (with rosemary from the garden) that Alice and I placed on Ray's coffin, together with his naval cap (which he carried on wearing, forever), and the bag containing the Order of Service.  You'll note the fox.  It's also a bag that one can cut up into little pieces, and plant, and then the wild flowers seeds with which it's impregnated will grow.  Wildflower seeds for planting were given out after the funeral, too ...

And: when we came out, after the service, the sun was, very briefly, shining: that was nothing short of a small miracle.


Here's the eulogy that I delivered for Ray: it followed a spirited rendition of "For All the Saints".

Ray always liked a good sing. He’d have enjoyed that.
How to sum up someone who lived into their hundredth year? – a fact that both delighted and amazed Ray.  The details can be set out clearly enough.  Ray was born in 1923 in Beeston, Leeds: long enough ago for him to remember the first motorized vehicle coming to their cobbled street.  His father Joe died when Ray was four, and he and his older brother Don were brought up by their mother Gladys.  There was hardly any money – Gladys had to go out cleaning houses, and throughout his life, Ray had admiration and compassion for those who soldier on through tough circumstances. But his was a loving family, and Ray, Don and their mother ended up living with her parents and sister in Kings Heath, Birmingham.
Ray’s life would not have taken the direction it did without World War Two. A family friend told him that Birmingham University was offering an accelerated, two-year engineering degree for those who would then take their skills into the armed services, and Ray was assigned to the Fleet Air Arm, on the aircraft carrier HMS Vengeance, helping look after the Corsairs. Many of you will have heard the story that speaks to his enterprise and resilience as a twenty-two year old, chasing the ship he had to join from England, to Malta, round the North African part of the Mediterranean to Egypt to India’s west coast, across India to what was then Ceylon, and then back to Madras.  On board Vengeance, at last, he sailed to Australia, back up to Japan, and then to Hong Kong – always, happily, just behind the action.
While still a student at Birmingham, Ray met my mother, Joy, at a dance in the Student Union.  Her studies at Oxford were interrupted by the war: she resumed them in 1947, the year in which they married. By this time, Ray had been accepted to read for a second degree, in Law, at St Catherine’s, Oxford – something that he financed through his full-time job (unrevealed to the College) working for the City’s planning department. After a few short-term positions, he joined the big construction firm George Wimpey as an engineering estimator in 1956; moved up the hierarchy to become managing quantity surveyor, and eventually a Director of the Mechanical, Engineering, and Chemical Division.  Retiring from Wimpey in his early sixties, he worked as an independent consultant.  
But less important to Ray than the work itself, I think, were the opportunities it gave him, especially for travel and for meeting people.  When I was born, in 1954, we lived in a flat at the top of Copse Hill.  Three years later, when Ray was sent to Wimpey’s site at Spadeadam – situated in a wild part of northern Cumberland, where the rockets that would launch Britain’s Polaris missiles were being built – and he looked for somewhere reasonably priced to rent.  My mother and I joined him, late in 1957, in the Morpeth Tower of Naworth Castle – an extraordinary and wonderful place to spend three and a bit years, and somewhere that offered endless opportunities for his practical inventiveness.  How do you sweep the chimney in a castle?  Ray went and cut down a very spiky gorse bush, and he pulled it down into the fireplace on a thin rope. He and my mother scoured O’Hara’s, the junk shop in Brampton, the local town, for cheap antique furniture that he then lovingly restored; he bought old clocks there and in auctions – he had a passion for clocks, and making them work again; we went off exploring on Sundays in his beloved Triumph Mayflower, to Hadrian’s Wall or down roads designated “Unpassable to Motor Vehicles” – a sign that was like catnip to him. 
And he also worked on his architectural plans for 20 Hillside. Back in 1957, he bought the plot of land that had been part of Allenho’s orchard, and then, when we knew that we’d be moving back to London in early 1961, he hired a firm of builders to put up the house, carefully supervising their work: I remember climbing all over it with him while he explained the importance of load-bearing walls, and mortise and tenon wood joints. Over the years, he continued working on the house: installing the central heating; having the dining room built out into the increasingly lovely garden in the 1990s.  This was the base to which he returned from his work travels, which included a long period in Bucharest supervising the construction of a hydro-electric dam that the Romanians tried to pay for in tomatoes; plenty of trips to the Middle East - woe betide you if you couldn’t name all seven Emirates that make up the UAE.  After he left Wimpey in 1986, he had spells working in Texas, and master-minding a charity drive round the States to raise money for Esther Rantzen’s Child Line.
       But the outline of Ray’s life events hardly begins to convey his essence. He was intimidatingly multi-talented: he could have made a career as a commercial artist (indeed, he was heading in that direction before the war), and he was as expert in watercolour as in wood engraving; in oil painting as in calligraphy – indeed, he made extra income, in Oxford, doing the lettering and scrolls on all those formal college photographs. He made furniture out of discarded wood and other materials – no skip was safe from him. He had a rich and lovely singing voice, and all his life could remember all the words to songs that he used to sing round the family piano in Birmingham, or in the Navy.  He hugely enjoyed the opportunity to perform in an amateur production of La Traviata at Covent Garden.  Ray could also recite verses and verses of poetry – Hardy, and Housman, and Kipling – and yes, he wrote it, too.  And he also was proud of his letters that were published in The Times, from a definitive explanation of why bicycles stay upright when you pedal, to his inquiry: “if the Euro achieves parity with the dollar, will it then be called the ‘douleur’?”  Ray loved puns.  He loved collecting coincidences in his life, which formed part of his extensive repertoire of anecdotes.  And annually, he took pride in his pots of homemade marmalade – he produced jars of chutney, as well; froze gallons of blackberries from the garden; and when we lived in Cumberland, made blackberry, gooseberry, elderflower, and some disastrously explosive rhubarb wine.
     Ray was a man who felt passionately about things – not all of them positive.  He loathed bureaucrats in Brussels, electronically amplified music, and inefficiency, rudeness, and poor workmanship. But he put enormous stock in happiness, and cherished things that made him happy: finding a bargain; certain pieces of art work; visits from small children; a succession of cats – Rama, Sam, Hal, and Simba; Paddington Bear meeting the Queen; and above all, the garden, with its magnolia tree, its rose bushes, its poppies, the climbing plants that grew up the house’s back wall, the pots full of bulbs, and its animals and birds, too.  In summer, he would take his pint and his pipe and a book out there – either Victorian fiction or a whodunnit; in winter, the space for his quiet time was the garage, which he’d recently learned to call his man hut.  He particularly enjoyed Dickens: I bet he’s quizzing him right now about how Edwin Drood was going to end.
     Very many of you here today helped to celebrate Ray’s 99th birthday with him just a few weeks ago. In the speech that he gave, he emphasized two things in particular: how lucky he had been throughout his life; and the importance of friendship to him.  Some of those most important relationships were with those who have gone before: in order of their parting, his good schoolfriend and best man, Jim Hull; his beloved brother, Don; his dear friend Marion O’Brien, and my mother, Joy.  But he also loved his Hillside neighbours, and I’ve been so touched by the reminiscences that you’ve been sharing.  There can hardly have been a house in the street for whom he hasn’t been a keyholder at one time or another – or whose gate he hasn’t mended. And he loved to share a drink with you, and to come to parties: as you know, he was always among the last to leave.  I look forward to continuing his true enjoyment in conviviality when we come together to celebrate his life after this service.


 

Wednesday, January 11, 2023

ghosts of Christmas past


I promise you ... one of these days very soon, I'll have something more interesting to post and write about than pictures that I've unearthed in the course of - well, I'd say Tidying, only Alice's (very welcome) arrival today has brought home what a huge, huge amount there still is to do.  Here. my mother looks with something like indulgent scorn at Rama having his Christmas dinner: she seems very concerned that he's washed his pretty little Siamese paws properly, and that he's not going to drop anything on the best tablecloth.

 

Tuesday, January 10, 2023

more encounters with the past


From the nether - the very nether - regions of the garage, this contour gauge emerged.  I don't recollect ever hearing of a contour gauge, which looks like a very, very fine toothed flea comb.  So having watched a video or two, I understand - one presses it up against an object - like a door frame, say, which allows one to trace round the indentation made so that one can then cut a precise - well, contour in the shape that one wants.  They're now made of plastic, which might scratch things less - but how useful!  I never knew!  And whenever were Readers Digest in the business of making useful tools?


And this is the small boy (aged eight) who grew up to keep a metal Contour Gauge for all the times in which he might find it handy;


and in turn, his daughter.  I hope he's not teaching me a Nazi salute - maybe a regal wave?  Maybe how to hold a Contour Gauge?  You will note the stuffed cat - I was trained, young.  And ... sorry, Jon: I think this must be you, on the right, and it's not your best angle ...

 

Monday, January 9, 2023

family history, photo history


Ray was extremely proud of this photograph, which shows him and his grandmother reading in the main downstairs room at 29 All Saints Road, Birmingham.  He lost his father when he was four, and after a few years, he, his elder brother Don (that's a portrait of him in his Air Force uniform on the wall), and my grandmother ended up with her parents in Kings Heath, B'ham. I think his grandfather would fairly recently have died, at the point that he took this photo - probably around 1938.

This is a self-portrait.  Ray fixed up the camera (I think it would have been a Vest Pocket Kodak Model B - at least, that's the only one I've unearthed of the right vintage) so that he could operate a self-designed lens cap from afar.  So he put it all in place, and then pulled a string to make the exposure (did he also manage to darken everything again, at that point? - this is so frustrating - I know he described the process to me in the last couple of years, and I can't quite remember ...), whilst he and Grandma Barber stayed very, very still.  I'm not sure what the illumination would have been - maybe it was daylight?  Certainly it's not flash.  And they didn't yet have electric light - Ray recollected the excitement in the Barber/Flint household when they were connected to mains power, and then the horror, after the electric light was at last turned on, of realising how dusty and dirty everything was.

 

Sunday, January 8, 2023

the fate of Christmas trees

 


It's two days after Epiphany: the streets are full of sad, denuded Christmas trees.  Presumably some Merton Council truck will pick them up, sooner or later.  It was always brought home to me by my mother how it was terribly, terribly bad luck to leave Christmas decorations up after Twelfth Night - a conviction that now causes me to scratch my head.  Will the ghost of  Caspar, Balthazar or Melchior come and hit me over the head with a frankincense smelling censer? There's nothing in the Bible that says one shouldn't leave one's artificial stars hanging up for an extra day or so, and yet somehow I internalized that this was akin to blasphemy.  A bit of googling provides as explanation ... "in days past, people believed that the tree spirits (who sought shelter in the festive greenery used to decorate our homes) needed to be released back into the wild, or else the crops and greenery would not grow in the coming year."  And more ... "others believe that Christmas trees must be taken down before the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve, or else you’ll be stuck carrying your baggage from last year into the new one."  No one seems to be taking any risks around here.


Saturday, January 7, 2023

a surprising pond


When I was small - between 0 and 3 - we lived at Top Flat, 3 Copse Hill (about eight streets from where I am now).  There were two major excitements, so far as I was concerned.  One was the regular appearance of helicopters: the Atkinson Morley Hospital was further down Copse Hill, and, as the major specialist in neurological issues and brain surgery in London, had seriously injured patients being flown in all the time (it opened in 1863 as a convalescent hospital, and closed in 2003 - or rather, the Atkinson Morley Wing is now part of St George's).  The other excitement - processions of horses from the stables that use to be at the top of Hillside who were going down to the riding ring and jumping course behind the Atkinson Morley.  

Then, when we we came back to Wimbledon in 1961, these same horse facilities had become the Pony Club paddocks - I rode in the occasional horse show there, and went to the occasional horseback meeting, until the paddocks themselves moved, because the Atkinson Morley was building some nurses' housing on part of them. Indeed, the site has had a fascinating longer history: it was the site of Prospect Place, built in 1753, and then in the early C19th, Humphrey Repton laid out some magnificent gardens there - before it was demolished to build the hospital.  Then after 2003, a very upmarket town house and apartment development has occupied the hospital buildings and replaced that nurses' accommodation.  What I'd never known - well, actually, I'd never known about the history of Prospect Park, either - what I'd never known before today was that part of the paddocks still remains, and is now Morley Park. I saw a little footpath on my way to fetch the Order of Service pamphlets from the printers, and went exploring. It's a tiny park, to be sure, but a real wildlife refuge - indeed, the wooded part of it makes one understand the copse part of Copse Hill.  And it has this little pond - which apparently only fills up with water when it's rained a lot - which explains why it's so full now ...

 

Friday, January 6, 2023

the abandoned chairs of West Wimbledon


Very, very long-term readers of this blog will remember, I'm sure, my series of Abandoned Chairs of Highland Park.  That was back when I was fascinated by series photos, from Bernd and Hilla Becher's recordings of utilitarian industrial structures, to people who take family pictures in the same place year after year, to images of the same bus stop at the same time every day.  Here, let me introduce you to the Abandoned Chairs of West Wimbledon.  In pretty good condition, they sit here damply at the bottom of Copse Hill, waiting for - for somebody who needs a set of cheap chairs for their kitchen?  For people to sit in them?  They may be semi-permanent fixtures, rather than freebies, because they are just by an electronic vehicle charging station - but there was no helpful sign saying Please Sit or Please Take (or Don't Take, for that matter).

I was on my way - a very wet way - to take the Order of Service for Ray's funeral to the printers.  The image I shared yesterday will go on the back page of the actual text; here's the one that will go inside the front cover.  I've always loved this.






 

Thursday, January 5, 2023

still intimidating


My father was always pestering me to draw more.  He didn't think much of my photography - no, that's not fair, he came to appreciate some of my photos, but he didn't find it interesting, because, to his mind, it was the work of a machine, not of hand/eye co-ordination (very Ruskinian, there).  What he completely failed to take on board was how intimidating his own skills were - as a draftsman (he did, after all, design the house that I'm sitting in); calligrapher; water colorist; painter in oils; and, as here, wood engraver.  This was my parents' Christmas card in - maybe 1956? Maybe a little earlier?  There is something of a Festival of Britain flourish to it.  But honestly - it's impressive, and, well, something that's hard to live up to. I'm thinking this may find its way as a decoration into the funeral Order of Service: I certainly want to include some example of his art.

 

Wednesday, January 4, 2023

between the streets


What my father would have called a ginnel, and my mother a snicket - and to think, that's the difference that 13 miles or so makes to Yorkshire dialect.  After a day of deeply frustrating interactions with hospital and registrar offialdom (although, at last, there's now a medical certificate, I can't actually register Ray's death till next Tuesday, which is running it very close when the funeral is on Thursday - etc.  But the funeral directors have been, as I keep reiterating, terrific) - after a frustrating and anxious day, I decided to walk down Wimbledon Hill to buy some essentials, like luggage labels to tie onto the handles of bags so that I have some vague idea of what might be inside them.  

This particular snicket is between Ridgway Place and Sunnyside - on the right hand side, once upon a time, were some ruins of bombed houses, thick with rosebay willowherb, where my friend Vivien and I used to play at being WW2 soldiers.  They were thought to be dangerous - full of things like unguarded cellars and rusty nails - so of course we disobeyed instructions, and moved stealthily around the collapsed brick and tangled weeds and brambles, and then crept back to her garden as invisibly as possible to dine on our "rations" - a filched Knorr's Chicken Stock cube, usually, dissolved in hot water from the tap.

 

Tuesday, January 3, 2023

the last baubles of Christmas


Floating prettily in the London plane trees by Embankment station - some discreet festive embellishments to their branches.  I love Christmas decorations: I don't think I have ever been so much looking forward to their removal as I am this year.  Roll on the Epiphanic deadline of the 6th ...

 

Monday, January 2, 2023

onwards and upwards


A long and - well, not winding, but curving - road, with some atmospheric early morning mist hovering above the ground.  An evening out of London with very old (in the sense of long-standing - and I mean it - in the case of one of them, about sixty years ...) friends was just what I needed.  And in the kindest, and most appreciated gesture, I found this vase in the room where I was spending the night: a little offering from a dear friend who - a devoted reader of this blog! - remembered the miniature garden bouquet that my mother always used to have waiting for me when I visited.  I can't begin to say how moved I was by this.


 

Sunday, January 1, 2023

the challenge ahead


Ray really hated clutter - and this means that in the four years since my mother died, he's purged the house of a fair number of cluttery things.  This means that we're down to - say - two wooden spoons; no little hand held machine to mince parsley; no mixing bowl; only a couple of flower vases, and so on.  The fact that I might have been attached to that mixing bowl, say - didn't matter.  Clutter.

On the other hand - this is not clutter.  This is a garage full of Things That Might Come in Useful.  This is most definitely a - even he came to call it a Man Hut - it's where he used to smoke his pipe and read his book in the evening, wrapped up in his 60 year old duffel coat (a garment that maybe explains his fondness for Paddington Bear).  I made a start on it today.  Does anyone want a lifetime collection of nails, screws, screwdrivers (I've appropriated the ones I remember learning to use as a kid), pieces of wire, clock parts (so many clock parts), picture frames found in dumpsters; pieces of wood (short); pieces of wood (long); bamboo canes; umbrellas; old pieces of plastic; an old percolator labelled "doesn't work, save for parts;" dried up cans of paint, of varnish, of oil; dried up paint brushes; old tooth brushes; shoe horns; gardening gloves; rags; garden tools; packets of seed; plastic bowls ... ? 

What to do with the moth-eaten duffel coat, though?  That will be the hard goodbye.