Oer, what does this button do?

New camera in the house. Birthday present, long talked about - it's arrived, all black and ergonomically shaped, sporting many buttons and dials. My anti-technology forcefield kicked in as I opened the box and has remained fairly well in tact.
The manual was only in French or Inuit so it sat there for a little longer until we bought a Digital for Dummies book for the exact model. Interestingly, how many of those books are there out there? Is there one for every single challenge facing us? The dummies guide to what to do with old chip oil? Or the meaning of life perhaps - a slim volume no doubt.
Anyway, the book has arrived. I looked in it a few minutes ago and had to go and play the guitar, make some tea and clean the kitchen, oh and do this blog post. The photo above of small runty dog, looking rather dapper I thought, is to prove to myself that I did work out how to turn the camera on. Now for the serious stuff.

Time 2

That bit in blade runner, near the end, when the menacing blond replicant says 'time to die'. It always makes me cry, even though he's been nonchalantly bumping people off all through the film, and it's corny with the doves.
I went to another funeral yesterday, not in a post-modern nightmare futuristic vision, just in our local church. It was for one of our neighbours; a man of respectable age to pass on — 84.
I cried, not huge sobs, a few tears. I could never work for a funeral directors, or be a priest, I don't know how they all remain so placid looking. The priest was a master of calm benevolent reflection; possibly he controls himself by thinking about lunch, or what time star academy was scheduled for that evening. I suppose once you've done a few hundred funerals you become immune to the tears rising.
The worst bit was when all the elderly soldiers paraded down the isle with the huge regiment flags, I had to study the carvings and soaring stone arches very hard at that point.
Yes the man was old, yes he was good to his family, yes he was a war hero etc, but I know he wanted to do more, he just ran out of time, energy and eyesight.
We used to chat while walking the dogs. He was in the army and police force from late teens onwards, but his real passion was painting. His house was full of his work, technically clever, rather chocolate box, but a lot of latent ideas roaming about. He asked me where I got my ideas from. obviously wishing to go further than the still lives he produced. I wonder what his life would have been had he been born in a different era, when he might have gone to art college, or used his talent for his work rather than a hobby.

time

Oh - the boy person is a just few centimetres short of me - if I stand up straight. I glanced, this morning, at the photo of him I took when he was in the plastic cot next to me in Birmingham maternity ward. Nearly fifteen years ago . . .Where does time go. Evaporates. I'm glad I keep a diary, deadly dull though it is, I can open a page from anytime in the last fifteen years and that day will come to life, the few scrawled words a window onto the few hours we spent walking, eating, laughing, crying - whatever.
Some days stand out; some are dully uniform. The lists may be addressed, or not; we will walk the dogs, music will be practiced, lunch eaten, some attempts to make money, a step closer to the finishing of one or more projects.
I must get out of my furry slippers and velour jog pants and further the day before it, like all the others, becomes another diary page.

Remember remember

Actually I had completely forgotten it was November the 5th until friend Alvin asked what were we doing for it.
Since I had burnt the massive pile of garden trimmings the day before and Ezra is still scared of fireworks, I said 'nothing really'. In the end I made another huge pile of garden debris, Garth brought round some Leclerc fireworks which went phsssst rather than bang, thus not terrifying, and Mark made a super curry and parkin.
A fun evening which must have perplexed our French neighbours as no one burns their garden rubbish at ten pm. Left the fire to fizzle out and went back to the house to eat more cake; discovered that the dog had eaten it . . . Una who is now possibly nineteen and lives to hoover up anything edible or inedible.
I went downstairs slightly anxiously this morning, wondering if there might be a scene from 'La Grande Bouffe' but all was well. Just an old dog re-hoovering the floor for any vestiges of parkin crumb.

Good hair day

I don't know what to say other than how perfectly delectable.
Came across this on someones else's 'musing' blog, sorry to borrow your image . . . But I had to.
My hair is a continual mystery. About once a month I really like it; its just at the right point of fullness, sticking up in the right places, not too floppy and thin looking. Then today, for example, I have mad static hair which has developed a strange tendency to stray to the left.
I found an electric comb-brush-dryer thing in a cupboard left by a guest and attacked the hair with it. Worse.
Short is good, but the feel-good factor lasts about three days and whatever the hairdresser did eludes me as I try to recreate the style. The twenties bob thing was good, but high maintenance. The worst was definitely the perm I had, in the eighties . . . enough said. The weirdest was a white-blond teddy-boy quiff that somebody at a hairdressing school on Tottenham Court Road decided I should have. Dracula black made me look ill, and bright red was short-lived.
When I was about seven I had long golden hair but with sort of Rasta dreads underneath as I was such a tomboy. Since then its just kept getting shorter. Someone did offer me fifty quid at college to shave my head and be photographed - think it was January, and we lived in a student house with a loo that froze over, so hair seemed to be a good thing to keep.
Sometimes I cut my hair myself. Occasionally it works really well, but usually it looks as if rodents have needed nest material.
I do remember a brilliant Eddy Izzard sketch about hair and squirrels in the night, I might try and put in on here. Anyway . . . So back to today: short-ish with a vague aspiration to have a long romantic fringe that I can look out from in a mysterious way . . .

Pulp reality

Our table outside looked like something from a Tarantino film yesterday - height of Pomegranate harvest time, and the knives were out.
These marvels of nature are the only think our garden really grows well apart from tomatoes; I've started planting a small orchard of them.
I love them for many reasons: the flavour, the colour, their cheerful flowers, the fruit from its green marble-ness through to the splitting, burnished finality.
A reoccurring motive for artists across the centuries, I can recall seeing their rounded forms carved into stone above doorways, on castle tapestries and in a thousand paintings from Caravaggio  to Cezanne and beyond.
Every year I mean to start a 'fete' to celebrate them We have fetes of everything else here: potatoes, pumpkins, truffles, wine – of course; snails, asparagus, bread, fois gras, charcuterie, ticks - nah, not really.
There's probably one more batch of jam to be made from the remaining tree, then I might ask a few people who seem to disregard their own crop, leaving them to fall. How can anyone ignore these fruits and leave but a few for the birds to pick over as the weather chills.

The turning year.

First of November. Socks must be found. The fire has now been lit five times and the animals are seeking warmth communally.
Yesterday was a real 'Jack the Ripper' day, perfect for halloween, misty and dank. It reminded me of those early winter mornings in London, walking through Spitalfields market across to Wilkes Street to work, the ghosts lurking in dark doorways of the black-yellow bricked buildings.
Back to this corner of France. Actually, I've just been out for a dog walk and the sock idea has been discarded for the moment. A bright, glistening day, the sky washed to a perfect clarity by yesterday's rain. Pomegranates must be picked. We've done two batches and juiced another bowlful last night for a halloween soup evening. I had a sore throat yesterday, but two glassfuls of the ruby liquid seems to have seen off whatever it was.
So, writing and gardening today, now jobs have been done. Huge amounts of cutting back foliage, and a bit of in-bed writing. First book is now on its, possibly, fifteenth edit, second, written and waiting the first cut, third at rambling stage.
We traded soups last night, Ruth and Chris took the remainder of the pumpkin, and we have their courgette and mint.
Soup, jumpers, firewood, bonfires, two duvets, jam gap after pomegranate. Next jam - cherry around late may.