Diaries, 28th April 2024, Winter in April, I ❤️ the Barbican, Art Matters

I see it’s sunny in Belfast but a wintry 4c. In London it’s warmer, but rained all night and still hasn’t stopped. Climate crisis, what climate crisis? This one. We were warm in February, warm earlier this month. Now I’m back in winter pyjamas, wearing jumpers (sweaters if you are across the pond and thinking I mean something I call a pinafore) which usually only appear in the depths of winter, reluctantly turning the heating on, and making hot soups.

I’m glad I made it to the Barbican yesterday to see the 2 Tone exhibition in the music library. I looked in vain for the first edition of The Face which had a photo of Jerry Dammers on the front cover. I used to have a copy until someone stole it from a flat I shared. I’d bought it on my birthday back in 1980. I still have the next 23 issues.

I love the Barbican. I don’t know why but it makes me happy just being there. It’s so complete, such a maze. I find corners I didn’t know existed just by taking a different route through the walkways. I’d love to win the lottery and live there. Next visit I mean to go to Unravel, The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art. It looks fabulous. Like 2 Tone there’s a lot of politics involved. The arts so often express things we find difficult to get across in everyday speech, maybe that’s why the current government is so keen to denigrate it and underfund it. If art does anything, it challenges us. That can include representations of flowers and animals. What do we value, what do we understand, what do we see? How do these things make us feel? Our responses to art are a window onto our feelings and sensibilities.

Diaries, 9th April 2024, Food, Books, Podcasts, Multiculturalism

It’s been quite some time since I last put up a post, so I think this is probably going to be something of a mishmash. Spoiler alert, I do not have a plan.

I was given a large turnip and decided to use it to make a risotto. Then I was given some leeks, so the plan changed to a turnip and leek risotto. I looked online ad saw several recipes, but the one which appealed most had fresh parsley added at the end. Bingo! Still, I wasn’t very sure it would be a success. Beans on toast if it turned out to be inedible. But it was delicious, very creamy, and due to the leeks and particularly the parsley, very green. The same person who gave me the turnip also gave me some parsnips. I’m not fond of parsnips, but I thought I’d use them to make soup. Defrosting the freezer compartment, I found some forgotten yellow split peas. They went into the pan too, plus an onion, some garlic, a potato, a carrot. Maybe some celery, I forget. It was lovely. I finished it a couple of days later and thought it would make a very nice chilled soup in summer. Next week I am going to be pretty busy, so if I make double quantities of meals this week and can squeeze them into the limited space in the freezer I shall be ahead of the game.

Diaries, 25th February 2024, Stand up for the Arts, and other necessities of life

For a day that started with sunshine, it’s been very cold, and now I see slashes of rain win the windows. Fortunately I brought my washing in an hour ago, washing dried by the strong winds. There’s has to be silver lining when it’s 9C but feels like 3C. Hard to think a week ago I had the heating turned off. What hell it must be to be homeless in this weather.

Anyway. It’s not the first rain we’ve had over the last few days. Wednesday and Thursday saw biblical rain. Then on Friday morning the sun came out and it was gorgeous. Ditto yesterday until sunset when the temperatures plummeted.

I met up with Fiona and Robbie on Wednesday to see Standing at the Sky’s Edge, a piece of musical theatre suggested by Fiona. Good call. The played back recordings of Margaret Thatcher’s voice were, as Fiona said, a bit triggering. Near where I live were two iconic council estates, the Heygate and the Ayelsbury. The Heygate has gone and so have bits of the Aylesbury. Both estates, built in the currently unfashionable brutalist style, were vilified in the press, much to the distress of residents and local people, and the Heygate was sold by the council to developers at a huge loss, and few of those who lived there now have an address nearby. It generated a great deal of bad feeling. Some of the themes in the musical echoed these experiences. The main difference being that the estate that inspired the musical, Park Hill, still stands and is Grade II listed. Meanwhile remaining Aylesbury residents are fighting for their homes.

After the musical we repaired to a nearby pub. Robbie is a Spurs fan. The pub was called The White Hart, so it seemed meant. I’d never been inside it before. It was good. Nice atmosphere, a good mix of people, friendly bar staff and good loos. I hope to return.

While having a haircut on Thursday I got stuck into The Overstory by Richard Powers. I’m ashamed to say I have never read anything by him before. If this novel is typical of his writing, I shall certainly be borrowing more books by him from the library. It’s a book to savour. I’m still on the first section Roots, and when I read about Trump’s rambling, terrifying speech in South Carolina and the rapturous response it got it made me think of these words on pp 105-6:

“…it’s Dougie’s growing conviction that the greatest flaw of the (human) species is its overwhelming tendency to mistake agreement for truth. Single biggest influence on what a body will or won’t believe is what nearby bodies broadcast over the public band.Get three people in the room and they’ll decide that the law of gravity is evil and should be rescinded because one of their uncles got shit-faced and fell off the roof.”

Diaries, 14th February 2024, Significant Dates, Books and Outings

Maybe there hasn’t been so much hype this year, or maybe I just haven’t been paying attention, but until I saw a girl walking down the road with a rose in her hand, then a man (if only I had had a camera in my hand) cycling along holding a bouquet, the lead up to Valentine’s Day had passed me by. Yes, I did see chocolates in the shape of hearts in the shops even before New Year, but nothing over the last few days. Perhaps it’s because it coincides with the first day of Lent this year, and there seems to have been a lot about pancakes, though little about giving things up, and then it’s also Chinese New Year. Children can join a workshop at a local library to make paper dragons. That’s rather nice.

Diaries, 13th January 2024, Saucepans, Poetry and Detective Stories

I’ve just bought some saucepans. Well, everyone needs a bit of excitement in their lives from time to time. I chose click and collect, so I’ll get them tomorrow morning. Woohoo. The purchase is necessary as one of my pans is falling apart, and I’m increasingly aware of how scruffy my ceramic hob is after twenty years of hard wear. Now that Octavia has an induction hob, I cook a meal to take round to share with her it can be a problem. I always used to take whatever it was in the saucepan it was cooked in, but my pans are not compatible with her hob. So I’ve made sure my new pans will be, and if and when I decide on a new hob I may go the induction route too. May. Not Shall. Cousin has an induction hob which I use when I am at her house and it has frequently frustrated me. I do like the way the heat is instant. But boy, these hobs can be very pernickety. Don’t hold your breath.

The weather is cold, and although we are inching (I can’t really say centremetrering with any conviction so in this instance imperial measurements look set to rule for some time. Memo to self: look up the origin of the verb to inch) towards more daylight, it is slow. When not working, I’m reading and watching television. I’ve just read The Raptures by Jan Carson. I loved it and highly recommend it. She’s a writer I come across a lot when I am in NI. She’s evidently a regular at book signings at No Alibis. Maybe she even saw and admired MasterB’s calendar which hung there last year. She sat behind Cecilia and me at the Homeplace in the summer, and admired Cecilia’s top. Mine came in for no admiration. However, here, across the water, it’s rare to find her books. NI is a small place. I have been at so many events attended also by Malachi O’Doherty and his wife Maureen Boyle that he gives me a little confused smile of recognition, but evidently has no idea who I am. I even ran into them when I was Girl From the North Country at the Grand Opera House last year. I don’t think Maureen has registered my presence. Maybe she’s been too busy thinking poetic thoughts. It would be fun to claim I ran into Seamus Heaney in JC Stewarts’s in Magherafelt, but that would be a fib. Did Seamus do the grocery shopping? I have no idea.

Diaries, 1st January 2024, So a New Year

It’s grey outside, though it started bright. The sort of day to pull on your boots, wrap up in fleece, scarf and gloves, put some lunch and a bottle of water in a backpack and head out. Well, it would be that sort of day if my foot were up to it, which it isn’t, not yet. I don’t think it’ll be long though, at least for a shortish walk. Every day it feels more normal. Some swelling, but it’s gradually diminishing. I’ve returned to my work. only a little, as it involves walking and standing, and if I’ve learned anything these past weeks it’s that rest is the key to recuperation.

For the first time I felt excited when I saw the Christmas lights in the West End. Usually I see them go up, weeks before Christmas which always seems like those Easter eggs which go on sale early in the new year, and each year now they are the same with the same corporate logos. This time I saw them first at night, and I gazed at them from the windows of a bus taking me to see a show at a theatre. But it was the Christmas trees at various junctions I liked the most. Tall and covered in lights, they were magical. As I wrote before, it’s supposed to be Prince Albert who introduced this country to the Christmas tree tradition, but my great aunt Madge maintained it was one of our German ancestors, so I like to make a little personal claim each time I see one twinkling in the windows of a neighbour’s house. Less of a claim when they are put out onto the street ready for collection by the council in the New Year. They look sad, shabby and unloved by then, stripped of finery.

Diaries, 30th November 2023, Ups and Downs

It’s so long since I posted I don’t recall whether I had my new television or not, and if I did, whether it was installed on a bracket on the wall which allows me to push the television against the wall when I’m not watching it, or angle it for a good view from where I’m sitting. I feel very high tech. The size of the screen (32″) is almost twice that of my previous television, but minuscule compared to the televisions many people are buying now.

So new television, new arrangement in the living room. Saturday was spent moving bits of furniture about and dusting those bits of skirting board and corners which don’t get much attention in the usual run of things. MasterB was asleep under my bed when I was doing this and, being a cat and very keen on routine and resistant to change, cast an appalled look around the room when he came in and vocalised his disapproval. He then investigated everything, rubbed his face against everything to remind me that they belonged to him, and now seems to have accepted the new set up. This is fortunate as I do not want to move it all back.

Footwise I am making progress, but after a great day on Saturday, this week has been marked by strange new pains across the top of my foot just below my toes. I do so wish I were seeing a physiotherapist regularly who could advise what I should be doing and what to expect. I’m continuing with my home devised exercises and I am convinced they are helping.

When I had my op two months ago, Michèle appeared with a pile of books. I have been slowly making my way through them as well as the library books I also borrowed. The other day I finished Home Fire by Kamila Shamshie, a sort of take on the story of Antigone set around ten years ago when ISIS was at boiling point and we were watching in shock and horror at people going to join up, and the reactions of the state at home. I’m not going to go into the story but if you haven’t read it, do.

Diaries, 23rd October 2023, the Big Wide World

Prior to my surgery, MasterB was going out every evening. In the two weeks immediately following my surgery pitifully and eloquently he protested his needs to be let out to my supporters, but they turned a deaf ear, fearful he might disappear or worse.

The lovely neighbours opposite returned, happy to let him out and equally important, get him back in. But it seems that in those two weeks of enforced incarceration my boy had rather lost his nerve. He asked to go out, they accompanied him down the stairs, only for him to take fright at something in the street and retreat to the safety of the flat. I went through the same routine with him last night. We stood at the open door, he almost stepped onto the pavement, then withdrew when someone walked down the street. Eventually he turned and ran back up the stairs.

In the first days following surgery I looked longingly out of the windows. Six weeks seemed an interminably long time. Now I am more mobile, but a bit like MasterB I have become used to being inside. I’m nervous about going out. I’ve been over to Marks and Spencer, round to Helena’s, I’ve taken my recycling downstairs to the blue bin, but the library seems a huge distance away, and boarding a bus fraught with danger.

Diaries, 8th October 2023, Personally Mostly Up, Globally Pretty Awful

I’m feeling a bit more balanced today. Yesterday was hard. I have been comparing my convalescence to a long haul flight, and as my hospital appointment tomorrow morning drew nearer, I had that impatience one gets as arrival time nears. The impatience I feel when the announcement is made that all passengers should return to their seats, attach seatbelts, restore both seat and table to upright positions, prepare for landing. Or is that only me? But of course it’s not the final destination. This is the first stop over. The time when you hope the connections work, there’ll be no problems boarding your next flight, and with luck you’ll have a pleasant and brief interlude before continuing your journey strapped into an aeroplane seat.

Diaries, 1st October 2023, Minor Triumphs

Talk to the paw

I just love this picture. It’s too late for the 2024 Ginger Ninja calendar which is ready to go to the printer this week, but it may have to replace the current header (sorry Judy) which has been in place for quite a while now, and then be included in 2025’s calendar if I do one.

So if you are keen to have pictures of MasterB, the incomparable cat with whom I share my life and this blog, to accompany you throughout 2024 let me know pronto. The print run is small, a handful of aficionados, and the cost which has been around £8.50 plus p&p if required, I suspect will increase though hopefully not by much. I aim to cover my costs, not make a profit from the calendar.

I managed successfully to clear his poo from the litter tray and dispose of it without mishap. Phew. So far since my op this task has been performed by someone else, but today he performed his evacuations while we were alone. A small triumph on my part but one which feels significant. I enjoy my own company and am happy to spend time alone, so it’s quite a change to have so many visitors, eat meals in company, chat. There’s a certain irony that, despite being confined to the flat and able to do little for myself, I am now probably more tuned in with what is happening with friends and neighbours and across the community than usual. MasterB’s enjoyment of our increased social life is tempered by the fact that no one will let him go outside however vocally he explains it is vital he is allowed to do so.

Tonight a DIY job, long delayed, will be performed by Jimmy who is on supper duty. Ratatouille, rice and tender stem broccoli, since you ask. The toilet seat, which has an unnerving habit of sliding sideways, will be replaced. Not before time.

I’m down to the last hundred pages of American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld. I’ve enjoyed it very much, though as usual I am bewildered by the terminology of US universities, the reunion weekends, the animal mascots. There must be a history somewhere of how these things began and developed. Until I have understood, these references leave me in a haze of incomprehension. I’d not heard of Sittenfeld before picking up this book. I picked it up at the library due to its size. Over six hundred pages seemed a good length read for the start of my sofa marathon. It was the Kate Atkinson comment on the front cover saying it was her favourite book of the year, the year being presumably more than a decade ago when it was first published, which made me decide to borrow it. I have a mouth watering stack of books to choose from when I finish this one, plus the gossipy memoir by Rupert Everett to finish. What chance my tax return?