Category: images

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Wet cement

wet cement

What an unusual piece of graffiti. Wet cement, water still pooled in surface irregularities, the foundation of what will be a wall between the street and a generously-proportioned front garden of a large house in a genteel suburb of north London.

Who, I wonder, and why. Wikipedia tells me the second phase of the offensive began on 5 May 1968 so it’s nearly exactly 40 years ago. As well as being long ago it was also far away. There is no Vietnamese community in the area that I am aware of.

Perhaps there is some modern British signification attached to the phrase of which I am ignorant. Maybe it is a reference to recent political events in the USA.

wet cement too

Or perhaps I should just stop worrying about the words and take it at face value.

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Browning

questing

I realised today I could quite happily spend the rest of my life taking pictures of cut flowers. Just as long as they weren’t perfect, of course, and were in F’s kitchen where the light, as you can see, is of a luminous (that’ll be because it’s light – ed) beauty that I haven’t seen anywhere else. Although my bedroom comes close-ish on a good day. Something to do with north-facing-ness apparently.

Maybe I need to turn my bedroom into a studio full of huge bunches of flowers and spend my days moving gently among them as the fibres of their beings unwind.

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Watching me watching you

examination

The Homo sapiens all looked away first.

eyes in the crowd

The minicab driver who eventually delivered me home had a small but hyper-realistic glass eye on a silver chain at his throat.

Looking without seeing. Seeing without looking.

Time for some shut-eye.

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One bruised petal

one bruised petal

This little flower has given me such pleasure. I picked it up from the pavement where it had been dropped, I am pretty sure, by a man who had just walked past with a huge bunch of flowers carefully tied up in paper and ribbons.

When I got home it put it in this little earthenware pot (which I also found abandoned on the street, some months ago) and it has been sitting on the kitchen table for more than a week.

You can just see, on the top petal at the back, a couple of lines of transparency in the colour where it was bruised. These are just as beautiful, I find, as the fine brush-strokes of pigment on the rest of the flower.

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It was an accident

it was an accident

…the sun came out, just for a moment on this otherwise mostly flat-lit grey morning, giving a twist to the twist.

I am very lucky having the time to look as I walk each day. And at the moment I am unable to stop taking pictures. A function, I suppose, of having a small camera about my person rather than failing to cart round the weight of the big one.

knot a hole

It’s not a camera I would ever have chosen for myself but having ended up with it (another accident) I’m learning that what I think I want or don’t want isn’t necessarily the best guide to the best fun.

m2

Metal and wood are what I saw on my walk today. Such a short distance, so many lines and curves, so much beauty.

broken hearted

The rest (what, there are more? oh yes, discrimination has never been my strong point) can be seen here.

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Coils and thorns

bramble and bindweed

Such a delicate determination to life. The sinuous embrace, the needled defence. I once saw a bindweed which had slowly, inexorably, thrown coils around one of its own flowers and strangled it.

Last night I dreamt I was going to die. Not in some vague future but specifically within a day or so. I was somewhere waiting, prepared, terminally ill I supposed. When I woke, in the dream, not yet dead but in a shroud-like garment, it was as though I had been slightly cheated. Another day of waiting.

Not a frightening dream, but definitely troubling.

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Acceptance

Maizy has accepted the inescapable reality of her haircut…

wet iris, cold dog

…although due to the unfortunate climatic conditions she’s still shivering a lot.

Today I went on a wonderful day meditation retreat – Training the mind, freeing the heart: Waking up to each moment. No shivering, much contemplation of acceptance.

Yesterday, after a rather grueling assessment process, I was accepted as a listening volunteer for the Samaritans. All volunteers sign a confidentiality agreement, for obvious reasons. This means that, difficult though it is to believe, I shall have nothing more to say on the subject other than that I am extremely happy.