Altered images pt 1

Fun with fronds 1

Fun with Fronds 2

Go for gold

is there anybody there?

A metaphor for some damn thing or other

Self-portrait

Right River of Dreams

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

Resurgam, Blast First, Whatever

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:

Life before Photoshop

True love

Druggy Fool number 1

Patricia Jacqueline Priscilla Granger, née Cliff
26 / 7/ 1947 - 8 /9/2012
I love you, Chip

special people

You can't really say that anyone has wasted their talents. A talent is a gift, something bestowed rather than worked for. If it comes attached to an obligation, or it would not be a gift, but a payment in advance, or bribe.
A talent should never be a duty. Just because someone can draw fluently, sing like an angel or move like Bojangles, does not mean that they should devote their lives to doing so for the entertainment and elevation of others if what they really, really want is to sit in a hole watching reruns of Bilko, Cheers, Soap, Frasier and The Simpsons, plus the complete works of Laurel and Hardy – and indeed who could blame me?

Why Brock won't be watching the World Cup

An extract from an unfinished novel based on The Wind in the Willows

He leaned over and removed the offending image from his sight by yanking the plug from its socket. 'Bugry!' he boomed. 'God, how I hate it. Homosexuality with an incomprehensible offside law. Still, what do you expect from a public school game?'
Molly raised a brow, and opened his mouth to enquire, but Brock had moved swiftly and inevitably into grumblemode, and mounted his hobby-horse. ‘What really gets me,' he said, snapping three Rizlas from the packet, 'is that they make you shove your face up another man’s arse, or wrap your arms round his naked thighs and pull him to the ground, and then some cunt in tracksuit bottoms with a sagging arse tells you it's character-building. Maybe it is, maybe it builds characters like him, but who actually wants to become a sadistic closet case with a degree in Fascistic Pusillanimity who thinks communal showering, untamed facial hair, swilling fucking ‘ale’ and bellowing tuneless obscenities while wallowing with other blokes in a bath full of lukewarm scummy water give him the semblance of a real man, rather than that of a sad little shit prepared to undergo humiliation and discomfort in order not to feel excluded and for the chance to take some revenge for his miserable life by raking or punching some other cunt in a ruck? We could pity them, I suppose, but I don’t. They’re all cunts and they should get off my fucking telly when I want to watch the racing.
‘And the people who pay to watch them are even worse. Braying shaggy-faced twats in car coats and sheepskins, all “well played” and hip flasks and four-wheel drives. And that fucking Chariot shit. What’s that about?’ Spittle flecked the corners of his mouth.
Time to change the subject, thought Molly. ‘It’s not quite like that in Rugby League you know.’
‘Yeah, there’s better pies for a start’ said Dobbin, who was, after all, from The North, and was therefore an authority on such things.

L’avenir, c'est moi - Molly lays it down

An extract from an unfinished novel

'My entire family, down through the years, have taken it in turns to make sacrifices for the next generation and the glorious future, killing their own dreams so their children can have some of their own. Well, now the future for which all those sacrifices has been made is here. I’m the last of the line, bar some distant cousins in Bristol; my grandad’s brothers got slaughtered on the Somme, dad was the only male of his generation, so it’s all distilled down to me, the guardian of the Mollicroft legacy, the avatar of dynastic hope.
'Well, I have absolutely no intention of passing on my genes, let alone the hopes and fortunes attendant upon the family name. As soon as I get my hands on it, I’m going to fucking spend it, I’m going to piss it away in uselessness, and attempt to experience all those things my forefathers didn’t because they were too poor, too stupid, too working class, too fucking decent; I’m going to live for them all – take those drinks, shuck those responsibilities, cut those strings and dynamite my bridges behind, ahead and in front. I’m putting a headlock on hedonism, opening every orifice and organ to excitement and harvesting experience in the highways and hedgerows and anywhere else beginning with aitch. I intend to go out with a smile on my face and tales to tell that’ll pin back the ears of the dead.’
Jim looked at him, vaguely stupefied by his friend's sudden and vehement eloquence. ‘Well, I suppose some poor sod’s got to do it.’

The strange demise of Biff's mum

Extract from an unfinished novel

In idle moments Biff would wonder where she had been going that day, when she had left her apartment building in just her shoes, underwear and a pristine white housecoat, purse in hand, no make-up, not even a bit of lippy, rushing out the door at the exact moment the hoist gave way. And then... well, you see it in cartoons, don’t you? In some of them it positively rains pianos and safes.
Of course, the ’toon usually slaps itself back into shape, if only to get its head blown off three seconds later; but even a glancing blow from a 1930s wood cabinet Rockola jukebox with 10 meters of gravitational acceleration behind it is extremely inimical to human health. And there was nothing glancing about the blow delivered by the Rockola with Mrs Margaret O’Toole’s name on it. Biff’s mother took the full whack on her shoulder-blades; instant raspberry pavlova.
Of course, the removal company payed up big-time, and there was life insurance, too ... he had enough to buy the house and some over.
Incidentally, did you know that Rockola had nothing to do with rock ’n’ roll? it was the name of the people who ran the company. Czechs I think.

lost paragraphs looking for a rodeo to join

He was the sort of man who would buy a Martian Schoolgirls single simply to separate his alphabetically-arranged collections of Martha and the Vandellas and the Marvelettes, which had a tendency to miscegenate enthusiastically when juxtaposed.

Autumn afternoon, overcast, last hour before sundown. Cold air softening all colours, lights coming on on near and distant rises, bluesilver and sodiumgold, the walls of factories and houses Cezanne-blocking the shape of the hill in pastels of plaster and old brick, muted;

'You always worry that they’re going to leave you for someone with a bigger record collection. '

Molly sighed. Not an inward or modest exhalation, but a gust of disgust that rippled the papers on the desk, set the wind chimes to tinkling and incidentally knocked a passing bluebottle out of its buzzing torporous orbit to spin and right itself again on another course entirely. This it followed with a droning indifference that discomfited Molly further.

‘The root passion of rock and roll is the yearning and hunger for the joy that comes only with a first time. It always sounds simply thrilling and affirmative to the young, who are still running the gamut of new experiences, and increasingly elegiacal to those whose youthful fires are flickering.’

His words wreathed upwards in curlicues of smoke, tracing baroque lines in blue and gray in the eddies of their combined and communal breathing, the frenzies of insects, and the odd ripple conjured chaotically from a hurricane half a world away.

You remember what it’s like being a teenager, and having to deal with hot shame and embarrassment on a daily basis?

‘I’m tired and hungry, and on the verge of being exhausted and ravenous. I’m also fucking angry. For fuck’s sake make me a fucking sandwich.