Blue-tinged

In and around Tate Britain on a damp, blue-tinged afternoon - more photos here,

Liverpool Street

Petrichor

I learned a new word this week from Marja-Leena: petrichor, which means the scent of rain on dry ground, and thought of it as I was sitting in a cafe after work last night and rain began to fall. Just a shower, but it was real, heavy, sluicing rain that soaked into everyone and everything exposed to it and quickly lowered the temperature. It came as a sweet relief after too many hot, humid, but rainless weeks. And then, floating on the air, rising from the wet pavements, from the grateful lawns and flowerbeds of the park across the street, yes, I could smell it!

Still not about Alice Neel

portrait of Ethel Ashton, 1930

Not managing to write about the Alice Neel exhibition. It was such an emotional experience. No paintings have ever affected me so much - and paintings often affect me a lot.  Wow, just wow, but good grief, hoping to come up with more than wow.

Sidewalk

Familiar territory

I’m not in the office today; decided to work four-day weeks for the rest of the summer, since the summer school fiasco used up all my spare money and I can’t afford to go away again. So today I’m going to the Alice Neel show at the Whitechapel Gallery.

Whitechapel, where I worked for a while in the 1990s, in a hot, square, converted cloth warehouse now the head office of a drugs and mental health charity. Whitechapel, home to the largest British-Bangladeshi community, where every morning more and more of the young mothers taking their kids to school were wearing the niqab – black ghosts on the tidy, sterile streets of the public housing estates. Whitechapel Gallery, where I often had lunch with my friend C, where one day in the café she confided something that stunned me and quite changed my image of her. I thought of calling her about the exhibition. My friend who died a few months ago. Whitechapel, where I never go these days. 

I’m pathologically defended with people – probably the result of a mother who bared her (not very  nice) soul to me, as messy, damaged adult souls should not be bared to young children who don’t have a context for the pain, who held me close, too close, her little acolyte. You can’t be pathologically defended against everything and remain alive and sane, so perhaps I give my heart too readily to places, let them bathe me in all the love and hate and fear that make up their auras, and when it all becomes too much I leave and can’t go back.  My little world is full of ordinary places that were once familiar, daily territory, that grew so loaded with feelings, good and bad, that when life moved on they stayed there, vivid ‘hot spots’ in my mental landscape, places to be avoided for fear of getting burned.  

Norwich proved, after all these years, to be a hot spot. Yorkshire, where I used to live, is definitely one – I didn’t go back for more than twenty years. London has its hot spots too. In such a big city you can easily avoid large areas. Holloway, where I lived for nearly a decade with friends I no longer see – I don’t go there. Kings Cross, where I worked in the job that brought me to London, was off my map for the longest time, until the opening of the lovely Kings Place arts centre brought it back into ‘my’ London. I recall consciously trying not to fall into this syndrome when I left the job I did for nearly fifteen years, in a backstreet office in Clapham from where politicians and their acolytes came and went to destinations all over the world (mmm, still an acolyte). It was strange indeed to realise that office would no longer be the magnetic pole that everything whirled around. I didn’t want a hot spot just three miles from my house, so I made an effort to keep in touch, call in from time to time, and bit by bit the place began to lose its charge – better: these ‘hot spots’ are not very healthy.

 So, anyway: Whitechapel, Alice Neel - I think that’s another blogpost.

Reflections and parentheses

Reflections in the River Yare, in the centre of Norwich. Stuck at the railway station for an hour before leaving, with my backpack and my laptop (not a light-weight model) and the railway station having no Left Luggage office (most UK stations don't - they were closed at the height of the IRA bombing campaign in the 1970s and never reopened), I was delighted to find the riverside right across the street and to spend an hour gazing into the water. In fact, I could have spent much longer. It is a lovely city, in a lovely county (as the river link shows a little), whose flat, open, watery landscape is much to my taste  Having exorcised my nasty memories a bit, I do hope really not to feel I have to avoid it for ever!

Fifty-five thoughts

So many thoughts, so often the same ones.

Bad vibrations?

Well, is there anything that I can say about this past week that won't seem like the wildly disproportionate ravings of a sad, mad mind? 

I splurged rather a lot of money on a highly reputed week-long summer school in an activity very close to my heart (I'm not putting a link - they deserve only good publicity).  The working method was anathema to me. I hated it, and hated myself for hating it. That's all, really. Attacked with sharp knives in a precious part of me, a small skill that usually makes me feel competent, confident and centred.

The people were lovely, the food and drink quite excellent. I took it one breath at a time like a good buddhist, and so somehow did not run screaming from the place leaving behind me the sour taste such exhibitions tend to leave; survived it and got home only a bit shell-shocked, wondering: what the hell was that about? 

Norwich is an ancient, cultured city. I'd been there only once before and that was more than thirty years ago, but sharp as yesterday, because it was traumatic. I went there to visit my love, who was inexplicably doing his teaching practice as far as possible from our home in Yorkshire. While there I found out why he'd grabbed the opportunity to absent himself for a while. I mentioned that I'd been to the house where we used to live. S and her new baby were flourishing. No, I hadn't seen T, who'd been ill in bed. At this my love went white and rushed to the phone, and thus it was that I found out he and T had been sleeping together and she'd recently had an abortion. I hadn't seen it coming, not at all. There had been clues, but I'd ignored them because I knew my friend T was only attracted to women. Not bisexual. Not even ever so slightly ambivalent. Lovely, adorable T who was very fond of him, but would never desire him - I guess she was the ultimate challenge to a womaniser. I don't suppose she'd ever given a thought in her life to contraception.  What were they thinking? Whatever did we all think we were doing with each other's hearts and minds, never mind each other's bodies, back in the 1970s? I should have fled screaming at once from Norwich and from that relationship. It took me much longer to leave it.

I hadn't thought of this for many years until I found myself going to the city last week. On the bus from the railway station to the university, a sharp burst of recognition hit me. I think we must have passed the street where my love was living all those years ago. Norwich is a lovely city with a truly wonderful art gallery, but perhaps it's somewhere I'd do better to avoid.  I don't really believe in such things, but, well, what if that need to run screaming remains inside me to be triggered every time I re-enter this bit of the ether? This might not be completely hokey - much about cells and energy that we still don't know...

Black and white

Nope, I can't write about last week. It was a bad week. No one's fault. It's over. 

More photos are here. It's kind of funny that I read and wrote about the resonance and comfort of images shortly before such a heightened awareness of this in the past few days.