timely things

During a trip back to the UK last week I met the publishers who will be publishing my novel.
It was a really enjoyable meeting, and I came away feeling motivated, excited, very happy, and all the other things one would expect after slogging away at the writing game for a very long time.
How great it would be, I thought, to celebrate this personally momentous point in time by commissioning a painting or other piece of art/craft. And then the very thing presented itself at the Wirksworth Art and Architecture Trail in Derbyshire.
Some years ago I had mentioned to Richard Bett, a jeweller whose work I greatly admire that it would be wonderful if he could create me a bespoke piece to mark the point when I finally found a 'home' for my novel. He must have had a psychic episode as on seeing me he exclaimed 'Kate. You're here! Look - I made something for you." He hadn't known that the book had found a publisher, or that I would be at the trail but there it was, a silver pendant featuring the heroine of the book astride her horse, Kafka.

                           

Favourite spaces and places

There are many for me: Hampstead Heath ponds, in fact, a lot of London in general; Cerbère, a particular stone bench in a tiny hamlet called Aspro in Crete, from which you can see the mountains and the sea, Pamphill in Dorset, the lanes of Wirksworth in Derbyshire; Canford Cliffs, the woolly hills across from where we live, our garden, and amongst many other places - Wingreen, in Dorset.
This small wedge of beech trees atop a rounded hill of grass and wild flowers kept cropped by sheep is an oddly magical place to me, and probably to others. Odd, as in there isn't a great deal there - rabbits, rabbit droppings, cowslips in the spring, and, nearly always, larks singing that odd twizzling little song as they rise into the sky (which always seems blue in my mind's eye - a remembered/possibly imagined, blue of my childhood days).
We, (Mum and I), would make a pilgrimage there fairly often to walk, picnic and just sit looking at the vastness of clouds and the smallness of the distant ridge where, somewhere, if you had super binoculars, you would be able to make out the stile at the end of her road.

                                    

Hair through the ages

Well, mine through my ages.
Some people I know have always had pretty much the same hairstyle. My friend Jo for example; for as long as I have known her she has had beautiful blonde, well-behaved hair, cut in a longish bob: why change it? I suppose if I had well-behaved hair I might leave it alone, but it's that sort of slightly wavy, not curly, a bit frizzy and generally annoying. Or perhaps everyone thinks that . . . do people who have wonderful corkscrew curls, long for placid unflappable hair? Or vice versa.

My first 'style,' wasn't. It was just my hair, long enough almost to sit on: a blonde mane with a sort of rasta mat underneath as it was rarely brushed except if my mother really insisted.
Then at some point it got cut, can't remember when, and I can't remember how long, short or anything until . . . the 80s.
Yes I had a perm, worse than any footballer. I used to ride a moped and on taking off the helmet, rather than being able to swish a shining waterfall of hair, a statically manic ball of hair would spring forth.
The perm went fairly quickly, replaced by, I actually can't remember what. My only memory of that point in the hair diary was getting my ear cut by a hairdresser in 'Blow Jobs' (really, I kid not) in Bournemouth. Blood spurted impressively for some minutes, the upshot being a free cut.
During art college days my hair was blonde, pink, blue and cut by friends; people high on stuff, by myself, and once, shaved bald for a photo shoot, earning 50 quid.

Post art college I was living in London. Having NO money, I discovered a hairdressing school on Tottenham Court Road where you could pay a couple of pounds for a 'style' as long as you were happy to let them do whatever they wanted. The result once was a blonde Teddy Boy quiff which was fairly awful; that then morphed into a series of streaked blonde and orange affairs, and then I went sleek and black-bobbed for a few years.

As The Bob is a difficult one to maintain, I eventually tired of it, and opted for various short styles, often cut by myself; sometimes looking like mouse attack, other times successful enough for people to comment on in a positive way.
When I had more money in London I used to treat myself to a rare jaunt to a State of the Art salon in Kensington, full of welded metal, funky mirrors and black leather-clad hairdressers. I was far to scared to ask what they were going to do, and it was always a surprise, usually a good one.

When I moved to Nottingham I would join the queue of elderly men at the barber opposite where I lived. The barber, probably around sixty-five must have cut about fifty heads of hair a day, barely noticing one customer leave and another take the chair. This was probably the worst cut of my hair history: the Flat Top - awful.

Wirksworth - Ian the barber, I think. And occasional forays into a real salon in Derby.

Birmingham - Ah yes, Marc the yakking hairdresser in a nice salon off the Lace Market. He was a very good stylist and incredible talker. I think I did learn his entire life history several times over.  

Hairdo for our Wedding - proper, hyper posh, scary salon in the new expensive town centre development at that time - short, slightly aubergine - my hair, not the salon.

And so to France.

There are about twenty hair shops in our small town. I have been in about three of them.
They are all scary and full of women with new handbags and perfect nails at all times. The only advantage over British places is that they don't tend to ask if it's your day off, or 'you doin a bita shoppin', or 'goin anywhere nice for your holiday this year'?
Maybe they don't give a duck gizzard, or perhaps I give off vibes of total disinterest, but either way I have on those rare occasions managed to bury myself in a book and adjust my head-tilt as required.

Then we met Alvin: super hairdresser, artist and photographer who lives part time in a small village nearby, and part time in New York.
He's brilliant. We trade hairdo's for car lodging at our place and it works well. Only problem is that during the times he is in the USA for long periods, the hair lapses into 'me and scissors', whereupon he will patiently do his best to correct the damage on his return.

Having had a rather good longish side parted bob 'do' for some time, I've now had it chopped; mainly due to hair in the eyes becoming annoying and thus a woolly hat becoming more and more of a feature - in and out of the house.

So that's where I am at the moment: short, mousy, possibly the real colour I never saw all those years, before the grey descended . . .

There's always the hat option.

Being on the planet.

I read a fascinating blog yesterday called The Hermitage - talented art/music couple roaming the British roads in a wheely wooden caravan/truck.
It got me wondering and wandering a bit about being stationary (most of the time) on the earth. I suddenly had an urge to purge...to throw away all collected detritus, buy a donkey or two and stumble off into the unknown. Not realistic with boy at school, piano, 20,000 books, thing I am writing on etc, etc.
After a moment's reflection I remembered that I would not be happy without our base, somewhere to put plants in the ground, somewhere to be able to watch Star Trek DVDs whenever one felt like it.
So, what is it that makes us attached to one place, or, are most of us attached to several places. I certainly have a few bits of the world that I feel an affinity with, the coast around Cerbère, Areas of London and Dorset. Although I lived in Brum for many years and Derbyshire before that, I don't hold any real nostalgic memories about those places, except a few little lanes in Wirksworth, our back garden in Birmingham and the nearby 'reservoir cafe'.

Sometimes it's small details that make me feel connected with where I am. This road outside our house, the trees as they change with the seasons, the cherries and the walnuts, the hills and shadows.

On seeing a fragment of floor tile on the way back from a dog walk, I suddenly remembered an exhibition I had seen in London when I was very young. It must have made a well-embedded memory as I have recalled it often in the past.
It featured several works by the Boyle family - the series where they pinpointed, through a series of stages, a tiny fragment of the Earth's surface, and then copied its minute detail through resin and paint. The one I recall most strongly was a rectangle of pathway from somewhere in London. The cracked surface of black and cream tile, the earth and weeds: the very essence of so many of the city's front gardens.