21st August 'tapas'

A celebration of summer on the terrace yesterday evening, for no great reason other than these long hot days are numbered.














Of course there are some recompenses for the end of summer, mainly in the form of free jam-making possibilities.

Our friend Dorothy just up the road has a marvelous old orchard stuffed with 'mirabelle' plum and apple trees. Mark has made vast quantities of plum jam now, his giraffe stature enabling him 'graze' the trees at a high level without aid of a ladder.

During the last forage we brought back a pannier full of little stripy apples. Cooked with some market apricots and cloves they were a perfect pudding element of the evening's spread.

I seem to have got into a 'tapas' groove at the moment and am a bit stuck there, partly due to lack of seating space around the terrace table. When I say tapas I mean . . . 'I wonder what is in the fridge or in the garden, and what can we make with it'. Last nights offering was fried courgettes and our one aubergine, lots of tasty tomatoes, patatas pobres (poor man's potatoes), Mark's bread, Claires salad of found figs, goats cheese and black olives, and the most pathetically small (but beautiful) carrots. I never have any luck with growing these elusive vegetables.

I will try harder with our 'potager' (veg patch) next year. Despite putting a tip-up truck's worth of manure into it in the autumn it still only seems to grow tomatoes, potatoes and chilies. THE melon will be ready to eat in about a week, perhaps we'll have another fete to celebrate its maturity . . . 

holiday

Mark and I went on our annual one day and night holiday this week.
Left the dogs, boy and watering to dear friends and set off to Cérét on an extra wiggly route past the man-made lake at Agly. It's the busiest holiday period and only two families were enjoying the lakeside. As a contrast at St Marie on the coast more than 50 million people there, and Mark was the tallest whitest thing on the beach. Incidentally, Mark had said that this particular holiday resort was pleasant - sort of Cuban with a few whitewashed shacks selling grilled fish. He had been there the year before while doing a band tour which involved setting up in 45 degrees, playing for 8 hours, eating vile campsite food, and sleep deprivation, so I suppose he may have remembered it slightly differently.

The swim was worth it.
Lunch was a baguette at the back of poxy?proxy/poxi? supermarket as it was the only place where there was any shade; then we drove hurriedly away from the heat haze coast and inland to Cérét - one of our favorite haunts.
It's an elegant old town with tall thin buildings and even taller shade-giving plane trees. We ate naughty ice creams with 'nappage' of port-like liquid, visited the excellent gallery and waited for the hotel to open so we could siesta.
Hotel Vidal is what all hotels should be: one star, friendly, full of artefacts and very little modern changes. And, therefore, cheap: yes!

Lovely meal in a shady square, took hundreds of photos, and slept to the sound of the 'Blue goose' jazz band in the street outside.

Here are a few photos from Cérét and a corner of my studio (the sitting room) with painting of 'chicken who likes to walk in the garden like a small dog', see few posts back.

Weather

Incredible heat today. It was reading 40 degrees in the shade on the terrace; the wisteria has roasted leaves and the dogs shut down between 8.00 am and 7.00 pm.
I was trying to remember what it feels like to be cold. The cupboard of rather nasty looking jumpers are still there, and the tangle of woolly scarves, but it all seems like another lifetime.

Here is a small film of a bizarre winter tree hung with shoes on the outskirts of Buxton for no great reason except I do remember feeling so cold when I took the film that I couldn't imagine what it would be like to feel hot.

Memories

It's an odd thing the brain, is it not.
How are visual memories stored? Let alone complex musical ones. It's incredible that I can listen to Ravel's La valse as I was doing this morning in my own head with all the string section, horns etc. Or maybe I hear it differently to other people . . . anyway it's all totally extraordinary.

Back to visual re-visitings. Along with all the other odd scraps of imagery in the drawers labelled strange and interesting but unimportant in my brain, I filed a new one on Monday when we went for a walk in one of our favorite 1970's parts of Limoux.
It's a unremarkable estate, but oddly fascinating with its neat gardens and twiddly wrought iron white fences.
We happened upon (Jane Austin moment) a house with a massive rusty iron garage door in front of which stood an old man gazing fondly or possibly hungrily( I couldn't tell for sure) at a small white chicken. We all looked at each other and smiled (not the chicken). The man said: 'he likes to walk like a small dog in the garden'

That was it: unimportant, yet beautifully strange and forever embedded in my memories: rust, white feathers, toothy smile, a walk on a warm day in summer 2009.

I have no photo of it. I might make a painting. Here are some more images from Cerbere, also important memory pictures.

Importance of feathered friends

Yawn, hello . . .

Late night last night, BBQ and following mountain of washing up, started watching 'life on Mars' at 12.30am, then to be woken by passing 'alarm cal'l train at 6.30am.

Anyway.

The first thought I had when looking out of the bedroom window this morning was about birds. There was one passing; there always is. A solitary small black shape against the rushing clouds.

Someone asked me at an exhibition recently why I usually include birds in paintings. I couldn't say for sure. Now I can. They are part of our every moment whether it be a manky pigeon in a London square, or a wheeling swift on a summer breeze.

Mother of all argarves

Saluti,

Amongst forms of procrastination gardening is one of the best.

Our garden is large, and if we (I mostly) gardened in a Southern French style, i.e with attention to the smallest weed, I would have been taken away by persons in white coats some time ago.

Recently, a man came to check the possibly of installing a well in the garden. He looked at the rampaging slope behind the house, with its collection of wild trees engaged in trying to swamp each other and knitted his brows in perplexity and fear.  "Sacré bonhomme, quel travaille . . . merde alors!" He uttered. (Jesus — how much work to do. Shit!)

Yep, no lines of begonias and well behaved fruit trees here, just nature doing its thing with me trying to coax it all into some sort of shape.

These are 'Argarve' cactus, guardians of the house. The mother of them is to the left and was brought back from Portugal by Jean-Paul, one of the previous house owners. She (the cactus) has produced many offspring which have been planted along the drive. Yesterday I started a baby cactus re-location program, which should see the hillside covered with their stripyness in the near future.

Gardening is time consuming but I think for me, like many others, totally essential as part of life. Sometimes I think I would get a lot more done if there was no garden-distraction, but then I would soon be out trawling bits of waste ground to find out who owned them, and planting tomatoes on roundabouts. We used to live in the centre of the town. Above is a photo of our balcony which was in danger of collapse due to weight of plant life . . . it was time to move on.  

Occasionally, its good to be alone.

These are the folks I live with.

I love them . . . and sometimes it's good to have a day on your own: no wet towels on the floor, eat snack lunch at 3.30 in the afternoon, listen to crap records over and over again…

In fact the main reason to have the odd quiet day is to find out where one was in the 'art process'.

It was a useful day, and I think I've worked out where I am heading.

The painting I'm working on currently. The start of a series about train travel, and corresponding to the sketch shown in the previous post.