Rayge at the dying of the light: 2013

In 1974, I moved into a ground floor flat at 168 Putney Bridge Road, which led to the famous Putney Bridge, with the Levellers church at the end. The flat was on a side turning, which led to a less celebrated bridge, the footbridge that runs alongside the District Line as it comes out of Putney Bridge Station (which is across the river in Fulham). I used it sometimes, but preferred to get the bus to work, and moved away to north-west London in 1977.

In the late 80s, I started going to see a therapist in East Putney, and took to getting off the tube a stop early so I could walk over the bridge, which in the years since I had lived there, I discovered, had been covered with layer on layer of tagging graffiti in a riot of colours, and I could use my close-up lenses to find images no-one had intended.

There were maybe half a dozen panels like this on the bridge

The persistence of love


A day by the sea

Girl group sound

A tip of the hat

The Rings of Saturn

The great sperm race

origins

When I started this blog, it was an occasional indulgence, an on-line file for misplaced odds and ends of artworks and whimsies (more odd than ended, most of them).

And then, Chip – my partner in art and work, as well as life and love – was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and I started a new blog, The Days Are Just Packed, with the idea of keeping her friends and relatives informed, but it soon evolved into a paean to this most extraordinary of people and the life and style and love story she and I had cobbled together over thirty years.

When she died, there was a whiplash-inducing overnight adjustment from mostly-about-Chip to all-about-me, and I was forced to face a future I had formerly refused to countenance. Who the fuck was I going to be, now that I was no longer part of Chip and Ray? This was probably the last chance I would get to reinvent myself, so I had to get it right.

Because definitions are limiting, and I have the kind of contrarian mind that always prefers the exception to the rule, the lost cause to the sure thing, I have long said that there were only three descriptions I would ungrudgingly own – artist, Romantic and psychenaut – and I'm not too sure about those. That description applied to me before I met Chip, and I'd basically been adrift for 15 years – since my father died. At the time I often thought I was doing all right, although even I had to acknowledge that I had a spectacularly fucked-up love life and as a result no sex life at all for much of my 20s. I couldn't fancy going back to that.

But of course I wouldn't have to, because this time I not only had an extraordinary – and largely unsorted – legacy of memories, records, evocative gee-gaws, diaries, photographs and more photographs, a virtual patisserie of Proustian madeleines, at my disposal, but I also had a better place to live, a really good collection of life-enhancing stuff and, most important of all, no gnawing sense of incompletion arising from my chronic lack of a partner to share love with. I've done that now: we did it well – eventually – and I don't really want to do it again.

I believe in magick, because I've lived it, and it works: I think that Uncle Aleister’s dicta from The Book of the Law, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”, "Every man and woman is a star" and ‘Love is the law, love under will”, are as good a description of the fundamental nature of life and consciousness as any other I heard, particularly as I came to understand that my true will and nature is to experience and to wonder and to make art out of whatever I find or do, to tease out the joy and beauty in it and to try to find a way to share it with others.

Writing The Days Are Just Packed showed me this was the perfect medium for what I like to do, so I'm reviving this blog as a home base for the usual foolishness, continuing TDAJP as a place for stories about Chip and our life together, and launching four more, ScrapBook about the puppy that Chip chose for us a month before she died and In Deepest Devon covering the present day, and two historical ones, Stuff and Nonsense sifting for sense and substance in things and the ultimately self explanatory Druggy Fools. At least two more, about the garden Chip and I made, and places I have visited and photographed, are in preparation, and I'm hoping to post in at least one of them every day.(edit a somewhat hubristic aim, as it turned out...)

What I eventually hope will happen is that they will grow and cross-fertilize and become one great, wobbling organic thing, unconfined, synergistic, witty and strangely beautiful. Much like me really.

Finally, a few photos to lower the tone: