ono no komachi

I think I can say, without fear of exaggeration, that it has been an eventful week. Having been for weeks eagerly anticipating meeting up with ‘Internet People’ (those nice people from Palimpsest), it seems I was determined to compound the adrenaline rush that this was generating by finally agreeing a sale on my house on Monday. Fortuitously, this also meant that we were in a position to make an offer on a house we’d seen (and liked, obviously) the previous weekend. The offer was made, and accepted, on Tuesday. ‘Course, now it feels like it should be ‘all systems go’ but is oddly anti-climactic, waiting for estate agents and solicitors now to get the paperwork together and suchlike (plus, I suppose, we should get our finances sorted out so that monies are in place when they need to be).

Anyway, onto the fair city of York. Such a great day out! Overall, I suspect more time was spent in pubs than admiring the sights, but the Minster and the City Walls were, I think, done justice to.

It was superb meeting up with Palimpsest members, some of whom I had met once before; but honestly, for a group of people who are essentially strangers to one another, there was great conversation and warmth and friendliness. Paying personal tribute to people has always left me a bit tongue-tied, so I will just say I had a great day and that I don’t have the words to say how impressed I was with everyone’s enthusiasm and amiability.

And I’m so pleased I got the chance to show the folks the book of 41 Places, kindly sent to me by William Shaw after he made such a roaring success of this unique project in Brighton. I hope it results in a few book orders!

Back to our Adventures in Real Estate. There’s a long way to go yet before we know if all will go through without too many hitches, but the Aged Parent and I couldn’t resist pootling up to the area of the new house. It’s only a few miles from where the SO and I currently live. That’s yet another thing it has to recommend it – some of the areas we’d been considering would have had us commuting for at least an extra half-hour every day. We had of course asked the owners if we could visit; sadly they had said they wouldn’t be home, so we were only able to look from the outside.

Having said that, one of the pre-requisites of the new house was to be a large garden, so, this being a major consideration, getting a second look at the outside space was A Good Thing. There are some great specimen plants, including one of the biggest cherry trees I’ve ever seen, and a tree I’ve always wanted, but which may need to be kept in check lest it gets too big, a gingko biloba.

It’s a great garden, a fair bit of interest there already but plenty of scope for doing new things.

(A great contrast with one other that we saw recently which had been overplanted and overmanicured to the point where you’d despair of ever being able to do your own thing with it.)

I suspect the new location will have all we could want in the way of peace and quiet, tucked away as it is down a little country lane, opposite a tiny stone barn of a local church.

I have done my grumbling about no longer being within walking distance of Chepstow mere months after the town finally got a decent Fairtrade coffee-shop. Really, if that’s the single only drawback I can see in the move, we’re doing OK, I reckon!

Property! Property! Let us extend
Soul and body without end:
A box to live in, with airs and graces,
A box on wheels that shows its paces

(Louis MacNeice, Jigsaws II)

I’m property-obsessed at the moment. Following the Aged Parent’s realisation that her dream of retiring to NZ might result in her living many miles from civilisation and never, ever seeing anyone she knows (with the possible exception of the only family member who happens already to live over there), she has succumbed to the suggestion of my Significant Other (believe me, I am as surprised as you are, Dear Reader) that the three of us pool resources and find ourselves a House in the Country.

I find myself being sucked into the vortex of estate-agent-speak. I catch myself thinking that ‘this property has delightful gardens’ or that something else ‘offers versatile living accommodation’. I’m in a kind of mental fug where all I can think about is en-suite bathrooms, conservatories and strip-wood flooring. Normally I’m not one to give two hoots about such things but now I find myself demanding things that ten years ago, I probably wouldn’t have known existed. I’m becoming horribly bourgeois in my pursuit of two receps, 3 beds and extensive garden.

I should make clear that the extensive garden is not my own specification. I would style myself a keen and happy gardener – however, it is not my preference to come home from eight hours at the office and spend the remaining hours of daylight digging, weeding and watering. Having a G&T whilst admiring the flowerbeds, yes. Strictly weekend gardening for me, which makes tending to ¾ of an acre a bit of a daunting prospect. Not so the AP and SO, who are both more horticulturally ambitious than I. She wants ‘space for projects’ and he wants a veggie patch. (Actually I think she wants a field with goats and chickens and doesn’t care if she has to live in a shed but that’s a separate issue.)

And then there’s the issue of moving in with a parent. Admittedly this is not the ‘grown-up child finds adult life too hard and moves back in with mum’ scenario (which I have also done) but I can conceive that not everybody would welcome the idea of making a permanent move in which they share house space with an immediate relative whom they are more used to seeing perhaps once or twice a month. Hence my enthusiasm for properties which ‘lend themselves to dual occupancy’ or have ‘separate living space with potential use as granny annexe’.

Clearly, the properties we would most like are the ones we can’t afford. And I feel bad even saying that, because I know full well there are many many people who would give their eye teeth to be in the position we are find ourselves in, looking at (and sometimes rejecting) perfectly good houses in dinky little country villages. So now I have property guilt. Guilt for being so tied up with materialistic considerations and guilt for thinking about putting so much money into property when I should be grateful simply to have a roof over my head. Simultaneously as I’m thinking ‘I want that very expensive house that I can’t afford’, I’m thinking ‘I should darn well consider myself lucky to be this far up the property ladder’.

Since I began this blog entry I have noticed an open thread on the Guardian website discussing stamp duty. Frankly, if our little three-person conglomerate can afford the type of property that demands a 3% stamp duty charge, we should pay it with glad hearts. Some commenters seem to be calling it a ‘stealth tax’. How ridiculous! You know how much it’s going to be in advance and can adjust your budget accordingly. Stamp duty is not the problem with the housing market. But to be frank, this entry started out as an attempt by me to get my current specific property obsession out of my head, and I don’t want to digress into the general state of the housing market.

The attempt hasn’t worked, by the way. And clearly, this is just the beginning…

Well, it’s Christmas Eve, and I proved myself incapable of sleeping beyond about 6 am, which just goes to show I get more overexcited this time of year than anyone over 12 has a right to be. It’s too early for the heating to have kicked in yet, which is why I am writing this in fleecy pyjamas with fluffy robe over the top, bedsocks and slippers. It’s good preparation, really: around this time tomorrow I’ll be up stuffing the turkey and preparing it for the oven.

We’ve already had one family Christmas dinner: My Aged Parent did herself proud and stuffed us all not wisely but too well a week ago. ‘Us’ being me, the Significant Other, the Dippy Aunt and the Long-Suffering Uncle. (“Were there Uncles like in our house?” “There are always Uncles at Christmas.”) Aunt & Uncle are the second-most-Welsh branch of the family, the Welshest still live somewhere unpronounceable in the Rhymney Valley.

Of course, when we were all more than replete with far too much good food and drink, the family photos came out. Pictures of kids in flares with cowslicked hair and dumb grins or I-don’t-want-to-have-my-photo-taken pouts, Morris 1000s and Hillman Imps in the background.

“Who’s that holding my cousin?” said I.

“That’s Linda Death,” said Aunt.

“Ah yes, I remember going to the Deaths’ house when I was a kid. Was their name really Death, D-E-A-T-H? Or was there supposed to be an apostrophe in there somewhere?”

“I had someone come to reception the other day with the same name, and they had an apostrophe in the middle, D-E-apostrophe-A-T-H, and they pronounced it ‘Dee-arth’ but the Deaths were always just the Deaths, no apostrophe or anything.”

The Aged Parent chimed in, “They were related to the Fears.” I must have made a comedy I-don’t-believe-you face because she nodded earnestly. “Sandra Fear used to be Sandra Death before she got married, and they had cousins called the Paynes.”

“That’s fantastic! Payne, Fear and Death.”

I guess my Welsh childhood prepared me for pretty much anything.

For a little bit of Welsh Christmas nostalgia, you can’t do better than this.

…is a dead cat, my dear departed father used to say. (Sorry Dad, but it wasn’t one of your more amusing witticisms.)

I’m a cat-apologist. I know they are a nuisance, and that they are given to killing small helpless creatures in the most antisocial fashion, and strictly speaking, if the world is divided into cat people and dog people I’d have to put myself in the latter category. But dogs need more human company than I’m in a position to provide, so I have two cats, and I love them to bits.

Chloe:

Sophie:

Last Saturday was the eve of Bonfire Night, and we’d planned on visiting friends and overnighting at my mother’s house but didn’t want to leave our cats home alone cowering from the sound of pyrotechnic explosions. So, we stuffed two protesting cats into their carriers and took them to our overnight destination, in the hope that the loudness of the aged parent’s TV would at least slightly mask the noise of the fireworks, and that having a human presence would alleviate the scariness for them.

So, off to our friends’ place for pre-dinner drinks. As we walked up the drive it was fairly evident that there was firework fun going on in the environs. By the front door my Significant Other noticed a pale cowering bundle. A white cat with black patches and huge green eyes. I bent to stroke it and it miaowed loudly. Poor thing must be terrified, I thought. The SO picked it up, and our greeting to our friends more or less consisted of asking them if they had somewhere quiet for the cat to curl up. An old towel was found and put in a corner of the entrance hall. The cat, when deposited, was worryingly limp and appeared to be drooling.

Our host was not optimistic about the cat’s condition. ‘That cat’s not just scared. That looks like an about-to-be-dead cat.’ We were somewhat disconcerted. Still, we left the cat lying in the corner for a while in an effort to be sociable. A few minutes later it wandered unsteadily into the dining room, gave a yowl, and flopped to the floor. It miaowed pitifully a few times.

We collectively decided we should have to find somewhere to take the cat. Many many phone calls and some slightly sharp exchanges between our host and hostess later, we were directed to an out-of-hours vet ten miles away. What to transport the cat in? There was a frustration in knowing we had two cat carriers within easy driving distance, but having taxied out to see our friends, no easy way of going to get one. Finally a big enough cardboard box was discovered and we bundled the cat into it pretty easily, using the towel as a kind of cat hammock.

The SO & I balanced the box on our knees in the back of our friends’ car. Finally we reached our destination and rang the out-of-hours buzzer, and were admitted by a slightly frazzled-looking chap with a worried, yet somehow infinitely compassionate expression and a slightly incongruously elaborate spiky bleached-blond quiff that must have required quite some attention in advance of his evening attending to sick animals. He pronounced the cat to be in a pretty bad way, but promised it would be assessed by the vet and given pain relief before a treatment was decided upon. If they couldn’t trace the owners, it would be paid for by the RSPCA. Our hostess left some contact details, and we headed off a little belatedly for our evening out.

Things looked a little more positive later that evening when we found out that the cat had been microchipped, the vet had been able to contact the owners, and was continuing to treat it. Later in the week, the owner got in touch with our friend to thank her for taking it to the vet. The cat’s name was Alfie, and he had died a couple of days later. RIP Alfie.

The joy of this blog being all shiny and new is that I can visit tons of topics that are really old news. This time, moral outrage that Britain is the fattest country in Europe.

First an aside: may I register my distaste for those headlines which ascribe personal characteristics to what is clearly an inanimate entity? What kind of image do they expect to conjure up? An horrifically bloated John Bull pointing his finger accusingly at the nation, or a grossly overweight bulldog, panting and drooling while it looks at us with sad brown eyes?

Ahem. Sorry. To continue: I’ve been appalled by some of the comments I’ve seen on the Internet and heard on the radio since this story “broke”. (Excuse the unnecessary quotation marks, I just find it hard to believe that this was news to anyone who lives in Britain, probably the second most consumption-driven nation in the world.) “Obese people, in the main, are not very bright.” (Guardian Unlimited, Comment Is Free.) On R4, PM, Eddie Mair quoted Anne Diamond as saying that anyone who was obese was likely to suffer from depression. There also seems to be a fairly prevalent view that obese people should pay more for the NHS, since they are likely to require more of its resources.

The definition of obesity is a BMI (Body Mass Index) above 30. I fit into this category.

I take regular (if relatively gentle) exercise, I eat plenty of fresh fruit & veg, and would run a mile (if I were capable of doing so, of course!) at the sight of a Big Mac. I have a reasonably comprehensive set of neuroses, but no more than anyone else you would care to choose at random from the general population. My physical health is generally excellent, apart from an intermittent skin condition which flares up from time to time and for which I may seek advice from my GP perhaps once every two years.

I eat too much. I freely admit it. I often opt for the less healthy option. This morning, for example, I could have had fresh fruit and black coffee for breakfast. Instead I had a frothy latte and hot buttered toasted teacake.

For the last six weeks or so I have attempted to always pick the healthy option, in a bid to lose a few pounds. As my tendency has been in the past, so it is now - once I have started to see a result, instead of capitalising on the achievement and going further, I begin to relax and so any results are, if not reversed, certainly not continued sufficiently to make any real difference.

I am sure this represents a personality flaw in me. Unfortunately this is a flaw which is visible to the whole world, and so it seems the whole world feels justified in casting judgement on it. Such seems to be the public disapproval at times that I feel that it’s seen to be a form of immorality. Perhaps if some obese people suffer from depression, it’s partly to do with feeling they are perceived to be thick, lazy and immoral? I suspect if you could measure those characteristics in the general population, they’d be found in equal measure in everyone of all shapes and sizes. But hey, if someone is obese, their deficiency is there for all to see, so it’s easy to point and pass judgement.

No doubt I’ll continue to attempt to balance my wish to be thinner, to get closer to the perceived notion of physical acceptability, with my predilection to eat good food and lots of it. I evidently place too much importance on the latter and not enough on the former. But if I take full responsibility for that, what right does anyone else have to pass judgement on my choice? And then to make assumptions about my intelligence, level of motivation and moral standards is just plain wrong.

Well, even though we’re well in advance of this year’s Turner Prize, let’s have a go at that old chestnut: what makes good art?

I’m not going to go round the mulberry bushes of what should be called art, that’s for a braver, more argumentative soul than I. Frankly, I think that if enough people consider something to be art, it’s not for me to argue with them. I can certainly have an opinion of whether it’s any good or not, though.

Of course it’s fortuitous for me that I have some photos of a recent exhibition of twentieth century sculpture, Beyond Limits at Chatsworth House to provoke some ideas on the subject. And the consequent thoughts on the same by an aged parent. I may be doing the aged parent a disservice by inferring that she feels that all art should be visually appealing, not a view I subscribe to, but I do think that good art should have a visual impact, and one that does not show all it has to the viewer at first glance.

One other thing I think that ‘good’ art should do is to give the viewer something to ponder. This might be an emotional or purely intellectual response, but if its impact is purely visual, then while I might admire it for its visual appeal, and for the work that has gone into it, I’ll be hard pressed to consider it sufficiently meaningful to have a lasting effect.

So, to attempt some specifics, some illustrations from the Chatsworth exhibition.

Firstly, words as art:

I was amazed to discover that the Love sculpture has been around since 1969. I confess it has only appeared in my consciousness in the last couple of years. I applaud the sentiment and I can see why people like it, but I’m afraid I just don’t see the appeal. A three-dimensional representation of a heavily weighted, often-abused, certainly over-used, word. I can’t see where the artistic merit lies. I know this is not a very good photo of it (see the Chatsworth Group at Flickr for some much better ones) but I tend towards the aged parent’s view that it looks like graffiti in the Cascade. I also think it looks like a solitary bookend, and where’s the point in that?

I appreciate the tribute to the great jazz musician that constitutes George Condo’s Miles Davies. I think its placement by the reflecting pool shows it off nicely. But it is a one-trick pony. A shiny name, no more. But maybe it is worth something if it only raises the question that I heard a Chatsworth buggy driver patiently answer for what must have been the nth time: “Who’s Miles Davies?”

Nextly, the pretty things. I enjoyed the sparkly attractiveness of both Nikki de Saint Phalle’s Nana:

and Dale Chiluly’s Sunset Boat:

They were nice to look at, and beautifully crafted, but they left me nothing to think about. Perhaps that’s a deficiency in me; maybe I didn’t ‘get’ what they were about, but I didn’t feel there was anything more to them than visual attractiveness.

Now we get to the ones I really liked. Oddly enough, all bronzes. One has completely converted me to the cult of Damien Hirst. It is entitled: St Bartholomew: Exquisite Pain.

The aged parent (who thinks it shocking and unattractive) would probably be appalled to know that I think it beautiful. I could gaze at it for hours. And it seems to have plenty to say; about humanity, mortality and the nature of martyrdom. I’m sure I haven’t yet thought through all the echoes of the things this sculpture could say to me – and that’s part of its appeal.

Raymond Duchamp-Villon’s Cheval Majeur:

I didn’t catch this at its best angle, and the pic suffers from overexposure and lens flare. But I still like it. Viewing this at the end of the afternoon, it was hard to give it the consideration I felt it deserved. I didn’t look at it for long enough, but still came away with an impression of strength and beauty. Difficult to put into words, but plenty to ponder.

And, saving my favourite till last, Dali’s Newton de Gala.

I must have walked slowly round it at least four times. It was fascinating from every angle. It made me think about man’s quest to discover the origins of the universe, about how imperfect science must remain while it is in the hands of fallible humanity, but how vast the creativity is that goes into scientific endeavour.

Plus, I have a bit of a Dali fetish, so I was bound to like it.

Finally I should come out with all the usual disclaimers about how I’m no expert (“I don’t know art, but I know what I like”). Which of course is true, I never studied art history or theory (is there even such a thing as theory of art?) - I have a smattering of general knowledge picked up through books, magazine articles, exhibition reviews etc. And the above is just a small impression of one exhibition (and by no means all works in that exhibition). But I like talking about art. It’s one of life’s entirely unnecessary enrichments.

Oooh, my first blog entry. I suppose this is where I should introduce myself, assuming that someone other than me might eventually read this. Now we come to the tricky part – what are the significant facts about someone that define who they are? Their personality, their likes & dislikes, their occupation, education, what their friends and family think of them – all those and more, I guess. My real name is not ono no komachi, of course. My real name is dull and prosaic and will not serve me well should I ever become famous (which, we can all be thankful, is highly unlikely). I suspect anyone reading this pretty much already knows who I am, anyhow.

This is me. I’d be happier if there were no images of me, anywhere, but in this image-hungry world I suspect most people like to have a visual idea of a virtual acquaintance. So, I select one that gives as little away as possible. That must tell you something. See how transparent I am?

This is a representation of the poet whose name I have chosen to represent me in virtual form. It could be that my choice was influenced by an adolescent fondness for melancholy poetry. Or maybe I was attracted by the voluminous robes.

So, some salient facts. Born 1970 in the Rhymney Valley, of Welsh parents. Educated in South Wales and Oxford. Reluctant for this to turn into a CV, but Jobs I Have Had (and there aren’t that many) have included retail work for Boots the Chemist, and B&Q; and QA for a software manufacturer. Private life consists of cohabiting with a Significant Other and two cats, occasional gardening, long walks, as much reading as I can find time for, and spending too much time on the Internet (particular culprits being Palimpsest and Flickr).

That’s enough for now, I think – the text is definitely verging towards tedium. Note to self: Try and keep it lively.