Thoughts

A possible perception of a Brit might be someone who is OTT, base, foul-mouthed, boozing, brainless and brash.

An Englishman... perhaps more refined, reserved, rounded, romantic and blessed with a unique and wicked sense of humour as opposed to being pompous, pampered, proud and priggish.

Being a bit of everything is nearer the mark, I fear.

I hope everyone resists tarring me with the same brush as a Brit, though...I'm good old fashioned English.

This was just one thought rattling around my brain today (Wednesday) and lingered for a while before passing through.

Another thought...there is a difference between a turnip and a swede...different taste, texture, size and colour. I have an intense dislike of both, even though raw turnip straight from the field probably kept me alive in my early years. Of the two, swede is a clear winner in the totally disgusting category.

Another thought...there are so many things we have today that weren't around when I was born. I googled them and felt very, very old. To give you an idea...
TV / Anything plastic / Anything cordless (which is usually plastic anyway) / Central heating / Scanners, printers or photocopiers / Microwave ovens / Anything digital / Computers and for me, at least...electricity.

Another thought...someone I work with will be around my current age in forty years time and could be talking as I am to him now, to someone as young as he is now. I will be long gone, of course. I envy him his forty years. this thought outstayed it's welcome and I wondered how long I have left.

Another thought...a light went out when Robert Brault retired from posting his original quotes today. I thought how good it would be to categorise all of his quotes as an easy personal reference...it's something I've wanted to do for such a long time as I can never find the quote I need when I needed it most. Actually, perhaps I should first seek permission before I fall foul of copyright restrictions.

I think this time he really is serious about quitting regular blog entries. He'll be missed. If you are not familiar with his quotes, check his blog...you will not be disappointed. (Shortcut to Robert Brault Reader in the sidebar to the right).

Also thinking about France...just one more day to go!

Actually, this is now Thursday and I've been running around with last minute preparations. I've been in the garden, sharpening an axe and now I need to cut the grass...not with the axe. :)

MIL was a bit confused this morning as she thought it was Friday and was upset she had missed her hair appointment. All is well...I convinced her it wasn't Friday. I reckon she's sufficiently pleased with me to warrant a chocolate egg for the journey. Darn it, I'd better go and get a couple in case it doesn't cross her mind.

Goodness knows how she will get on with our proxy votes for the AV referendum next week. We haven't told her yet that she will be voting on our behalf.

Feeling seriously chilled now, even though the car isn't packed.

No longer feeling chilled now that we are trying to get everything in the car.

Everything packed...a miracle!

Happy days! Just a few hours sleep and we'll be on our way.

Way too long...

I had a great day yesterday helping out with Jon and Serene's house move.

Feeling a little sad as I woke with the back of my right hand covering my left eye. I just lay there thinking of four sisters in our expanded family...Pollyanna, Tammy, Serene and Naomi...such a diversity of life experience and personal challenges. An online journal sometimes means I am unable to be as personal as I'd like in recording my feelings, but perhaps I may be able to expand another time.

The sun is up, it's Sunday and I'm off to church for my fix. You may think Mormons don't study the Bible but this year is all about the New Testament. I'm learning so much about myself and life in these pages.

Feeling good right now, especially about next week...Friday in particular as we jump in the car and point it in the direction of France. There will be a smile on my face as I turn the ignition key. Has it really been half a year since our last visit?

Too long...way too long.

At work but not working.

A new day and a new work location for me as I move from this glass house...

To this one...

It's a much nicer working environment (we are just a little deeper in at the top of the stairs to the right) but we have absolutely no work to do. We see the initials of those in India against the emails we should be working on but we are not allowed to pull them.

The team have received their official notification of redundancy for the 31st May and mine will no doubt be in my hand today...if they remember I'm still here.

It's a strange situation. We who have given so much are now considered surplus to requirement. I'm pleased for India, but feel the hierachy could have been more sensitive and appreciative of what the UK workforce they are discarding has achieved. Yes, they offered us alternative employment but being on the phone to irate customers every second of the day is something I would find difficult to get out of bed for. Other jobs on offer were equally daunting.

It really is time for change and I'm up for the challenge of what might lay ahead of me. I feel bright and optimistic even though there is a global tendancy to paint the worst possible picture. I suppose if I had a mortgage and debt, I would feel differently, but thankfully I haven't and I don't. I feel so fortunate to have such freedom. I do feel for those who are younger with families to provide for.

I think I would like an interesting little part time job when I finish here as I don't want to paint full-time until we are living in France. It needs to be built up steadily...perhaps another year.

When all around we see anarchy, war, poverty, waste, unemployment, uncertaintly, disaster, devastation, murder, and mayhem, am I asking too much for simplicity, security and a happy existence or is my little bright protected bubble about to burst?

I suspect that the world will be just as I choose to see it, regardless of what happens...which means I'll be fine.

Breathe a Tuesday

Last night I was sorting through an old drawer full of papers that I'd shoved out of the way over the years, and found this poem of sorts.

I have no idea why I wrote it or why I gave it this title. Perhaps it was a Monday morning (I used to hate Monday mornings...still do to a lesser degree.)

My October 17th (1988)

Gone the heart of the free

Now hurt, held in timeless tender trap

Weeping, yet silent

And sure to meet a glittering birthday in defeat.

Today was not a good day even though the gallery sold one of my paintings. 

I spent all day talking to various people in India as they attempted to make all the systems available to me. I was locked out of them all. I had no authority. I had no work. I was not recognised. I couldn't even use the internet.

It was so strange to hear the breathing of someone so far away accessing my desktop and moving around my screen. It occurred to me that the person sitting next to him wouldn't hear him as well as little old me tucked away in the UK. I was having an experience that was denied everyone that had ever lived up to a few years ago. Incredible, yet it soon bored and frustrated me. It was the Monday blues kicking in and it was a long, long day.

I was still on the phone...this time to an indian I could barely understand who kept me at my desktop long after everyone else had gone home.

I arrived home to see the car missing.  I didn't have my door key and after twenty minutes of knocking, MIL eventually heard me and opened the door...just as the car pulled in the drive. Bev had had a tough day too and needed to stay behind. We are both ready to see this day off.

Come breathe a Tuesday into our tired Monday minds.

New gallery views...day and night.

Solved!

"Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness".

Sadly, the budding graffiti artist who scribbled on a wall between Morrisons and Newark Market Square wasn't using his (or her) own material. The real poet was Samuel Beckett. And I know it wasn't Beckett himself 'cos he never shopped at Morrisons, visited Newark or lived beyond 1989.

Samuel Beckett was born on Good Friday, April 13, 1906, near Dublin, Ireland. Raised in a middle class, Protestant home, the son of a quantity surveyor and a nurse, he was sent off at the age of 14 to attend the same school which Oscar Wilde had attended. Looking back on his childhood, he once remarked, "I had little talent for happiness."
Beckett was consistent in his loneliness. The unhappy boy soon grew into an unhappy young man, often so depressed that he stayed in bed until mid afternoon. He was difficult to engage in any lengthy conversation--it took hours and lots of drinks to warm him up--but the women could not resist him. The lonely young poet, however, would not allow anyone to penetrate his solitude. He once remarked, after rejecting advances from James Joyce's daughter, that he was dead and had no feelings that were human.
In 1928, Samuel Beckett moved to Paris, and the city quickly won his heart. Shortly after he arrived, a mutual friend introduced him to James Joyce, and Beckett quickly became an apostle of the older writer. At the age of 23, he wrote an essay in defense of Joyce's magnum opus against the public's lazy demand for easy comprehensibility. A year later, he won his first literary prize--10 pounds for a poem entitled "Whoroscope" which dealt with the philosopher Descartes meditating on the subject of time and the transiency of life. After writing a study of Proust, however, Beckett came to the conclusion that habit and routine were the "cancer of time", so he gave up his post at Trinity College and set out on a nomadic journey across Europe.
Beckett made his way through Ireland, France, England, and Germany, all the while writing poems and stories and doing odd jobs to get by. In the course of his journies, he no doubt came into contact with many tramps and wanderers, and these aquaintances would later translate into some of his finest characters. Whenever he happened to pass through Paris, he would call on Joyce, and they would have long visits, although it was rumored that they mostly sit in silence, both suffused with sadness.
Beckett finally settled down in Paris in 1937. Shortly thereafter, he was stabbed in the street by a man who had approached him asking for money. He would learn later, in the hospital, that he had a perforated lung. After his recovery, he went to visit his assailant in prison. When asked why he had attacked Beckett, the prisoner replied "Je ne sais pas, Monsieur", a phrase hauntingly reminiscent of some of the lost and confused souls that would populate the writer's later works.
During World War II, Beckett stayed in Paris--even after it had become occupied by the Germans. He joined the underground movement and fought for the resistance until 1942 when several members of his group were arrested and he was forced to flee with his French-born wife to the unoccupied zone. In 1945, after it had been liberated from the Germans, he returned to Paris and began his most prolific period as a writer. In the five years that followed, he wrote Eleutheria, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, the novels Malloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, and Mercier et Camier, two books of short stories, and a book of criticism.
Samuel Beckett's first play, Eleutheria, mirrors his own search for freedom, revolving around a young man's efforts to cut himself loose from his family and social obligations. His first real triumph, however, came on January 5, 1953, when Waiting for Godot premiered at the Théâtre de Babylone. In spite of some expectations to the contrary, the strange little play in which "nothing happens" became an instant success, running for four hundred performances at the Théâtre de Babylone and enjoying the critical praise of dramatists as diverse as Tennessee Williams, Jean Anouilh, Thornton Wilder, and William Saroyan who remarked, "It will make it easier for me and everyone else to write freely in the theatre." Perhaps the most famous production of Waiting for Godot, however, took place in 1957 when a company of actors from the San Francisco Actor's Workshop presented the play at the San Quentin penitentiary for an audience of over fourteen hundred convicts. Surprisingly, the production was a great success. The prisoners understood as well as Vladimir and Estragon that life means waiting, killing time and clinging to the hope that relief may be just around the corner. If not today, then perhaps tomorrow.
Beckett secured his position as a master dramatist on April 3, 1957 when his second masterpiece, Endgame, premiered (in French) at the Royal Court Theatre in London. Although English was his native language, all of Beckett's major works were originally written in French--a curious phenomenon since Beckett's mother tongue was the accepted international language of the twentieth century. Apparently, however, he wanted the discipline and economy of expression that an acquired language would force upon on him.
Beckett's dramatic works do not rely on the traditional elements of drama. He trades in plot, characterization, and final solution, which had hitherto been the hallmarks of drama, for a series of concrete stage images. Language is useless, for he creates a mythical universe peopled by lonely creatures who struggle vainly to express the unexpressable. His characters exist in a terrible dreamlike vacuum, overcome by an overwhelming sense of bewilderment and grief, grotesquely attempting some form of communication, then crawling on, endlessly.
Beckett was the first of the absurdists to win international fame. His works have been translated into over twenty languages. In 1969 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He continued to write until his death in 1989, but the task grew more and more difficult with each work until, in the end, he said that each word seemed to him "an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness."

Census

By law, every household in England has to fill out a census form every ten years.

Today is the day so if you are planning to come and stay with us tonight, be quick because I've already started filling the form out and I have to include you.

FINISHED!

How personal is that? They've asked for tons of information which was never included in past census returns.

We had a good laugh though.