The life of inanimate objects, number . . . not sure

Perhaps everyone sees landmasses on pavements and within ceiling cracks, notes the jauntiness or sadness of a building according to its windows and doors placement, and imagines the internal thoughts of overlooked, once useful items. Or not. I do seem to spend quite a lot of time wondering if abandoned chairs feel depressed, or if our car would mentally benefit from a deep clean - or any sort of clean . . . Sentimental/deranged, possibly, or just someone who wonders about everything and suspects none of us know very much about anything - one only has to look at recent events in America, and the amount of mech rattling going on in Russia . . . 

From the left: "Oh . . . what's the point of. . . anything? You stand here screwed to a filthy grey wall from forty years, spouting out copper sulphate whenever it's required. Do they thank me? Do they? And they still haven't given me enough insulation . . . and my tube has a hole in it - mice chewed through it last winter - bloody painful I can tell you.

Come on . . . cheer up! It's not that bad. Look at the sky, and clouds - the birds. D'you know a little wren sat on my spout yesterday - drank some water and sang. Wonderful it was. Made you glad to be alive.

Oh, shut up! You're not alive, are you. Just superior coz you're taller than us two. At least your pipes only have H20 going through them - me? stinky old tractor oil - gets everywhere - look at the state of this wall. And you hold the rag, Favouritism. That's what it is.

Just

Such a hopeful and sometimes overoptimistic word . . . I'll just knock that wall down there and then we're going to put a pool in where the terrace is . . . the sort of thing our friend Alvin would say - and he'd somehow do it, successfully.

With my new website, we were just going to slide the new site over to the domain name, twiddle a few settings and it would all work. Nope. Two weeks of emails, phone calls and enlisting of much help from kind people - thank you Glynn . . . it finally has taken up residence on or in the net. Yes, I am a non spring chicken semi-luddite, and that's OK.

A few images from the site made, by Nick Lockett and myself, and a link below.

My extraordinary polymath musician husband, Mark Lockett, built the site.

https://kateahardy.com/

Phone separation and useful consequences

While trying to ensure that I didn't wake Mark at some crazy-early hour this morning, I insomniac-ly snuck out of bed, felt about for my phone on the bookshelf and  . . . no phone. Rather than putting on a light and thus really waking him, I went downstairs . . . without . . . the phone. As someone who likes a good rant about everyone being stuck to their screens it was a sobering moment to realise that I am fairly, or greatly- possibly, addicted too. I made tea and ignored the urge to go back upstairs and hunt about for it, instead, sat down with mug and a book I had scanned through off and on but had always been distracted by, not just the phone, but jobs and life generally. 

Book in question is a marvellous compendium of David Sedaris's diaries. Marvellous in that it's his work, but also the putting together of it with intriguing diary pages inserted into the main book. Three-quarters of an hour of inspiring reading and observation which has already had an influence, no -hate that word - a resonance in/within/around me and my ensuing work; rather than said amount of time used in staring at weird phishing emails, and gawping at someone working out with a chicken/singing dog/ferret in barbi outfit, etc on procrastination-o-gram. Thank you Nick for buying me the book and lugging it all the way from the UK - big tome!

10,500

 . . .  roughly the times we have used this ergonomic and ancient wooden spoon before it sadly gave up yesterday - a calculation based on certainly a dish created a day, probably two, over several decades.

We do get rather over sentimental about our objects, especially ones that have been with us through all the house moves, and this case, with Mark before I met him, and it came from a junk shop then so the calculation could be way off. Thousands of stir-fries, stews, soups, curries and who knows what before Mark purchased it.

Thank you spoon. I was getting very daft and thinking about putting on the kitchen wall but finally it became a piece of highly efficient kindling due to the quantities of olive oil it had absorbed over the years.

Absorbing the past

My current series of paintings are all based on sketches done from train windows on London train journeys. I've been using the timed sketch idea for some years but decided to restrict the journeys to London as it's my main inspiration place for current and future writing ideas. As well as journeys the sketches can be from a static place - café windows a favourite, or a brief standing/crouching sketch if I have been captivated on a walk by a particular cluster of buildings, trees, etc.

As I mentioned before on this blog, I stopped painting for some time as I felt disturbed at having to purchase plastic (acrylic) paint in plastic tubes, and buying wood specifically to then cover it in paint. Having now decided to only buy 'second hand' paint from online sites such as gumtree/Vinted et al, and only using found wood or old pictures bought in recycling emporiums, I feel this to be ok, or as near as ok as possible until I perhaps make a sortie into using earth pigments and fallen trees.

The picture below is an extraordinary example of 50s/60s factory paintings (I assume); where someone has been trained to dab and smear, creating a homogenised version of a landscape, in this case one I find extremely eerie. It cost four euro in the many-times-on-this-blog-mentioned Emmaus, so someone rid themselves of something rather worrying, Emmaus made a bit, and I get a large and cheap canvas to work on - with some unready interesting textures which will work well with my next sketch - that of Greenwich and the dome structure, the two minute's limitation making some interesting swoops and lines.

I hope the previous painter - or their ghost won't mind be borrowing the surface; I find it interesting to absorb someone's forgotten brushstrokes into a new image. Would they have had a cooling mug of tea on their work station as I will no doubt have? and similar worries, fantasies, music or blankness running through their mind as they had worked.

Putting it all in one place

My stuff - years of it - manuscripts, drawings, finished books, short stories, back-burner ideas and paintings. My lovely brother had made me a website some years ago but I'd never really got to grips with how to update it so it did rather just sit there gathering internet webs and receiving the odd dubious comment. Thanks to a PR guy who I talked to as the audiobook was nearing completion I realised I had to make a functioning space where all my work could be viewed, and the site updated regularly.

Gripped with I'm sure I could do a site confidence, Mark did - with a lot of frustration and learning on the way. I'm super impressed with what he has created, along with some excellent portraiture and stills done by his cousin, Nick Lockett - ace photographer.

It's been a useful exercise for me too - trawling through boxes of pen and ink sketches, writing texts to accompany each page, and throwing out a lot of previously held-onto-for-no-real-reason stuff, and contacting people about use of audio clips, etc. One highlight of this being that we were given the right to use the recording of Anton Lesser reading my short story, The Hundred and Fifty-Eighth Book, which is just . . . delicious. Click here to listen to the marvellous Mr Lesser, and here for a preview of the site.

It's a grey day . . .

  . . . outside our house in the Loire, and it could be a very, very grey, dark, sombre, frightening, depressing, worrying, daunting, disheartening, alarming, dreadful, awful, horrific, ghastly, hideous, petrifying, bleak, saddening, funeral, dispiriting, joyless, oppressive, dismal, alarming world if the American people (or half of them) vote for an ancient, sun-damaged, racist villain instead of an intelligent, empathetic, educated woman. 

It's not looking hopeful . . . 

 

My first novel

It wasn't Going Out in the Midday Sun - written in 2010; it was actually the small volume (moth-soft exercise book from my junior school days) that I've been looking for whilst Mark has been building my website. as I wished to feature an early work . . . 

I knew it was somewhere but just as I know that my collection of short stories written in place of a thesis for my film and photography degree is/was somewhere it stubbornly remained hidden, until just now . . . it's good to have a purge and or rearrangement of stuff - there it was clamped between Far From the Madding Crowd and a tome on retro London.