Monthly Archives

May 2015

A cycle of extreme determination and then crash

The Father quietly reminds me that I’ve a history of doing too much and then regressing back to an ornery thirteen-year-old as I disintegrate. He’s normally about a week too late, and more polite.

I started this week without having had enough sleep, something to do with a cancelled flight, the Midget’s addictive chatter and a concert. Last weekend was a great weekend.

There’s a higher background stress permeating the air around me: I need to find somewhere to live and at work we’re down a team member. Recruitment is a slow slow business that’s wearing us down. Furthermore, I’m in the beginnings of a potential freelance opportunity that’s amazing – if I can make it work. And… I’m racing 10km at the weekend.

In comparison to some it’s a pretty small list. For me however, it’s huge.

I know I’ve got problems when my dispraxic tongue begins tripping me up. My boss stares back across the desk at me. My words tumble out, but they’re all in the wrong order as if my tongue had taken leave of my brain and decided to try a shot at improvisation. It feels like I’m simultaneously trying to rub my stomach, pat my head and sing a nursery rhyme. I’m failing.

My skin is outraged.

There’s a tightness behind my eye, and more from alarm than habit I put on my glasses. I can handle a migraine, but I’d really rather it happened in the safety of home. Friday arrives with a sense of relief. I’m knocking over glasses, breaking them as I attempt to wash up and snapping at people who don’t deserve it. I need to stop.

Of course, none of this is a real problem. Give it a few days and I’ll be fighting fit. A few early nights, maybe an hour or two of meditation, a quiet afternoon spent curled up with a book and progress on the housing issue and I’ll be re-energised.

Yet, maybe it will be a few months, hopefully longer, but I’ll soon be back here again. It’s a cycle of extreme determination and then crash. I don’t recognise I’m falling apart until it’s too late and despite my determination I can’t seem to learn.

The Nonna and the art gallery – a story

Art painting
This artwork was done by my cousin and I for Tall Aunty’s school play, July 2018.

When the Midget and I took the Nonna to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park and showed her one of the galleries, she was amazed. She told us that she’d never before been to such a place. I laughed and didn’t understand. How could anyone get so old but never walk inside an art gallery?

The exhibition was of the artist Joan Miró, whose art is a childlike scribble, colouring between the lines with bold reds and blues. It’s fun art and demands a sense of humour. At first, the Nonna, who I believe saw the world as if through a pinhole*, had no idea what she was looking at. There were paintings that people seemed to be staring at quite intently and sculptures that people congregated around for a moment or two to exchange a gently spoken opinion, but to her that was it.

First, in true Nonna fashion, she stated that she was missing whatever skill or knowledge one should possess when looking at art. I smiled and held her arm tight in mine. Then I guided her gently though questions I go through when I look at a piece of art.

When she started suggesting opinions she was hesitant, as if expecting it to be a test in which there was a right and a wrong.

But soon the Nonna’s eyes sparkled. Verbose by nature, the Nonna quickly got the hang of sharing what she thought might be going on in the picture. She was leading the conversation about the art she was seeing. Although a lot of the time the Nonna had a tendency towards the pessimistic, in Miro’s paintings, the Nonna saw sunsets and gardens. A yellow circle here or a green shape there might represent the sun or a tree. She was interpreting the picture in her own way, drawing out her own unique meaning from the art.

And she loved it.


 

*The Nonna’s many years of diabetes resulted in eyesight that lacked periphery vision. What she saw, she seemed to see well. Most things, however, she didn’t see. To compensate she used her walking stick as a method of attack to clear the way of puppies and small children alike.

The Nonna died in the Spring of 2014.

 

Two days more of painting walls (trees and leopard spots)

Apologies, this is an old post and I’ve mislaid the original pictures of the painting…

I have an arrangement with the Mother. I don’t have to do any washing-up, or drying-up. I don’t have to do any cooking. Instead, what I must do is paint the bathroom in the style of an Ancient Egyptian tomb.

This just goes to show how amazing the Mother is. Of course, most people don’t have the desire to paint walls with ancient tomb designs. Oddly I do, but I wouldn’t have come to that conclusion if it wasn’t that the Mother gave me the space to play.

However, all those trees that you now see on the wall, I didn’t paint them. The Mother did, along with the cooking and the cleaning etc.. I sketched the trees, I’ve sketched all the figures, I’ve worked out how to draw a man chopping down a tree in the same style as a scribe 3500 years ago. I’ve done a lot of work with a ruler and a pencil, but little with an actual paint brush. However, if you look carefully at the edge below the pond you’ll see some narrow black lines. The black paint work – that’s mine.

Between life drawing class on Tuesday, my Zebraphant and the bathroom walls it feels like I’ve barely been without a pencil or paintbrush in my hand. This is definitely an improvement. There’s something magical about being absorbed by a painting. It’s like all the rest of the world is a game and the only things that matter are the lines you’re manipulating there in front of you.

At this point in my writing, the mother ran into the living-room screeching “strawberries”. To set the scene, I’m wearing a tatty old pair of ripped jeans and my faded Credit Suisse t-shirt that I was once given as a freebie as I passed through a corridor on the university campus. I’m sitting on the floor. The sun has suddenly appeared.

Within a minute or two we’re all sitting in the garden sipping champagne and nibbling strawberries.

I do love my family, and all their eccentricities.