Table tip

New blog template

Apparently what I do in response to feeling wretched is redesign my blog template, which must be better than picking a fight with a dear one or getting drunk. I've long wanted a template with tabbed, static sections, and tried out many an incarnation in Typepad, which seemed probably the best I could manage since the workings of Wordpress are a mystery to me. Nothing I came up with pleased me. The final provocation/inspiration was the really stylish and spacious new template at Via Negativa - I can't do anything like that, but for god's sake, stop pissing about and do something with this small project!
 
Meanwhile, new Blogger templates have been busting out all over, and in the end I've found more of what I wanted there than in Typepad. It's an improvement, I think, on the unobjectionable, formless page I've been using for ages. Main gripe is the photos, which I'd like a little smaller (if anyone knows of a way to customise this in Blogger with one operation rather than fiddling with the code for each photo...). The original lure was a new title and more focused content, but I seem to be attached after all to the all-embracing notion of life as rhubarb - remaining of the other plan is the sidebar text, and a resolve to try and write more regularly about art and stories and creativity. No doubt there'll be much tweaking and it'll take a while to put an initial selection of stuff on all the pages. Setting up the links page - something I lamentably haven't had for a long time - will be a priority, and getting a domain name, looking into search engine optimisation...

Reasons to be cheerful

yellow

mellow

shadows

sun-flowers
spots ofglory

in the grey

Rain, shame

Raining hard this morning, the smell of petrichor replaced by damp exhaust fumes, and I feel chilled and assaulted by it, reminded of my mother and the way she always took the weather personally - how absurd and infuriating I found that, how victimised and bitter she must have felt.

Do I feel then, these days, just as victimised and bitter? Probably. The best I can do is try and not take it out on others the way she did, not spread the same twisted misery around me (except here - sorry).

The middle of summer, and I have a fearsome workload, as usual, but no immediate deadlines - up to me how I organise and prioritise it all for completion in the next four or five weeks; up to me, more or less, how many hours I work, since there's untaken holiday.

I have just enough energy to rage at the slowly trudging through it, not getting any more behind at least, that is all I can manage. Just enough to wish I could seize my life and shake it, do better than this for god's sake, but not enough to act.

Not sleeping much, too vague and numb to read much, even more alone than usual with most friends and acquaintances away. Intermittently horror-struck at the thought of the relentless cycling round into a new academic year.

Cope, breathe, cope, so tired of it all, and now soaked and coldly clammy at the edges... hard not to take it personally. Hard not to furl my umbrella, lie down in the soggy street and let it rain on me, rain on me, wash me away. And thinking, damply and with shame (yes, of course I am), of Pakistan.

Through

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