Good gracious another week has passed and I've added nothing to my journal here. If I had a computer in the shop that would be a whole different story. The sad fact is that by the time I get upstairs after my stint in the shop all I want to do is nothing, which means I eat too much and watch 'Murder She Wrote.' Shameful. I'm trying to beat myself into some discipline here, gear up to writing first thing in the morning since I wake so early anyway, or at least go for a healthy walk. So far the bad twin is winning.
Little of note has happened this week apart from removals quotes, and the annoying absence of quotes for essential work like putting in wooden floors - so much easier to clean up than the white carpet now lining the living space in the next house. The french windows into the garden make egress and ingress of mud-spattered grandchildren almost inevitable.
Out in the world the plight of the poor Chilean miners gives me the claustrophobic horrors and certainly pales the artificial Big Brother situation into insignificance as an opportunity for observing human beings trapped together under duress. No prizes except their lives for these men. Although I hope they all live to sell their stories for millions..
The world is running out of helium. Now there's a thing. I'd been wondering why it has become so difficult to get helium-filled party balloons, had no idea that it's an unsustainable - un-replaceable - resource which took millions of years to accumulate and which we have squandered over the last 100 years. Divers breath it in their mix of gases to prevent the 'bends.' It's used for cooling superconducting magnets in MRI scanners and the Large Hadron Collider, for neon signs, arc welding, advertising and weather balloons, also for growing silicon wafers (eh?) It's the second most abundant gas in the universe but almost the rarest on earth now because once puffed into a balloon and let loose it eventually evaporates and disappears for ever.
What else caught my eye in the daily trawl through the Independent? The obituary of the piper who wheezed and skurled away on the order of Lord Lovat as their ship ploughed across the Channel to land in Normandy. After the event a German gunner claimed he only refrained from shooting him because he thought the poor fellow had lost his marbles. Once they landed he was asked to keep playing and did so, marching up and down the beach in the customary fashion as well as he could through the shells and over the fallen. Some said he raised their spirits, some were less complimentary in the moment.
They don't make'em like that any more! The aristocracy don't dare to be so outrageous either, or don't have the opportunity to be without incurring almost puritanical judgement and dislike. Life has gone from black and white to colour in film and TV, but in reality I think it has gone a bit grey.
And finally, my own judgemental nature reared and bolted when told about the latest conceit of the founder of the local Art Centre, who I had been disposed to admire for getting such a huge project off the ground and making a success of it thus far. Now, I'm sorry to report, he is talking of changing its name to 'The International Institute for Research into Beauty' or something equally fatuous. When I heard this I remembered selling off the art books from the shop to him, via a mutual friend. As she sorted through what she would and would not take for inclusion in the Art Centre library I noticed she had left a couple of large books, one of them photos of a performance artist Franko B who chained himself naked in a small room in the - Tate? - and had folk visit him one at a time to ask him questions or watch him cut himself and syphon take blood from himself. Not pretty but - he was making a point about AIDS and my daughter, who met him, tells me he is a gentle, warm genuinne sort of chap. She really felt he had something to say. When I asked my friend why these books where being left behind I was told R wouldn't like them because they weren't 'beautiful' and therefore not real art. Oh my! That sort of thinking eliminates Francis Bacon from the galleries immediately. And others. I might gripe about Tracey Emin but I wouldn't deny her her place in the art world, as it goes through turns of the wheel and experimentation, without which it would stagnate and die.
Does this mean that chocolate box scenes are 'real art'? I shall await education.
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