Take my lips…

“Take my lips. Take my arms I never use them.”

“I can’t forget you, My whole world turns misty blue.”

“There are moments during the day that I cannot breathe.”

Short history of sadness

Soft in the head

There are plenty of people trying to fool us these days and plenty who are happy to be fooled.

I met a woman who kneels when taking a bath and only eats boiled eggs standing up. She remains faithful to both.

Objects that I use are lost, abandoned or forsaken. They are found in flea markets, antique shops and boot fairs, places where lives pass and many have ended.

He relied on his anchors to keep him steady, to stop him feeling overwhelmed. But aged 75, he realised that his therapy and his job were finally holding him back.

Reflection in a window

Summer kisses…

Summer kisses, winter tears Perfect tense. Bittersweet

He had a passion for fine wines, high ceilings and back doors.

There is north and there’s south and then there is Winson Green.

“I feel most coloured when I am thrown against a sharp, white background.” Zora Neale Hurston

‘A fire should be left burning Till it burns itself out: We shan’t have another chance to dance and shout Once the flames are silent…’

‘They are cutting down the trees on Primrose Hill. The wood is white like the roast flesh of chicken, Each tree falling like a closing fan; No more looking at the view from seats beneath the branches, Everything is going to plan…’ Louis MacNeice - Autumn Journal

Capitalism is cosmopolitan, while democracy is tied to a territorial jurisdiction. Capitalism means one pound one vote, while democracy means one citizen, one vote. One danger, then, is that wealth buys power in the name of order, turning democracy into plutocracy. Another is that demagogues seize power in the name of the people turning democracy into autocracy. Martin Wolf FT

Mural in Aix-en-Provence

He was of an age…

He was of an age where he needed his leg emptying regularly

In heaven everything makes you cry

‘Smeared with soot or tarnished with rust, half broken or many times mended.’ Esther Bintliff

We live in the shadowlands, the sun always shining somewhere else…

Vertigo

This heightened sense came suddenly, at the death of your mother and the turn of an uncertain year.

Unexpected and unclearing, you lie in bed, a shadow of your mother, looking ahead at the fast moving world, only steadied by thoughts of heavy weights and low lying things.

I try to calm you, talk solidly, help you hold the railings, remind you of your walking yesterday and again tomorrow, of our summer in France and Italy on smooth lines and slow boats,

That the swimming is inside your head. That your mind has misread the situation. That we will get this straightened out.

St Paul’s chuch, Birmingham

What is more…

What is more surreal that a nose between two eyes?

If you talk to God you are a Christian; if God talks to you, you are a schizophrenic.

Forced landings Winter cast Uncertain lips. In a manner of speaking Too big to bury

When you do a Yorkshireman wrong he puts a stone in his pocket, and after seven years he turns it, then leaves it another seven years, turns it again, and finally throws it at you.

“I was nine stone when I fell for Jessie.” overheard

An accent that carved its initials on your eardrum

Cimetro Monumentale, Milano

Many years now…

Many years now I have been engaged in the manufacture of paints and, more precisely, their formulation: from this art I earn or sustenance and support my family. It's an ancient and noble art; the earliest reference appears in Genesis 6:14, where it is related how, in obedience to an exact specification on the part of the Almighty, Noah (probably using a brush) covered the Ark, inside and out, with pitch.

But is was also a subely fraudulent art, which tends to hide the substratum, endowing it with the colour and the appearance of what it is not, in this it is related to the arts of makeup and costume, which are equally ancient (Isaiah 3:16ff) Tantulum Primo Levi

Fanfare

Cold Blow Lane

I love voices that have a slightly broken crack in them

“It’s a lovely day tomorrow, Tomorrow is a lovely day”

Bodies

Sleep mimics death, But death never wakes. It doesn’t even look possible. Nothing can be done.

Etruscan tomb, National Etruscan Museum, Villa Giulia, Rome

That pile of paper..

“That pile of paper on his left was still alive, like watches ticking on the wrists of dead soldiers.” (Jean Cocteau) on the death of Marcel Proust, 18 November 1922

‘You were saying…’

“It seems that the case for the humanities has to be made yet again. While the sciences and hi-tech subjects result in discoveries of immediate application to how we live, the humanities endorse the values that make life itself worth living.” Joan Bakewell

In 1968, liberal political reforms in Czechoslovakia triggered the invasion of Soviet troops. Protests followed in which opposition was often expressed in acts of non violent resistance. When listening to the radio was banned, people responded by ‘listening' to newspaper-covered bricks on the street.

War memorial, Saint Michel L’Observatoire, France

It is the world…

It is the word touched the most and worn away

‘Most things are never meant…’ Philip Larkin

‘We are diving for our lives when we should be diving for pearls’ Robert Wyatt

The best sound from a grand piano is heard if you lie underneath it

Her face was easily collapsible

As a place of redundancy and disappointment, chances missed and the road running out, this pub remains a liquid refuge, a place of contented mourning.

“I did yoga for so many years. And my back is so much better since I stopped.”

On the recession.. “the first thing is that it definitely means people are getting less tattoos.” Nine Lives Tattoo Parlour

A gap the distance of two teeth opened up between them, a fissure the couple will need to brace.

Anyone goIng north?…

“Anyone going north?”

“I kinda want to hit you but with something soft.”

“Bloom, Bloom….help, I am sinking.”

History is just one damned thing after another

This is like popping a collar and taking a long drag on a cigarette

“Yes, too much sugar in the blood, that is. That means that you can’t drink any more and you fall over.”

Acting out

Venice will linger in your mind; and her smell of mud, incense, fish, age, filth and velvet hang around your nostrils; and the soft lap of her back-canals wilI also echo in your ears; and whenever you go in life you will feel somewhere over your shoulder, pink, castellated, shimmering presence, the domes and riggings and crooked pinnacles of the Serenissima. Jan Morris

Capitoline Museum, Rome

It resembled a bed…

It resembled a bed in which the world had slept badly

‘facially he resembled an anteater who had run out of ants.’ Clive James

“Inventing things that don’t work is a brilliant thing, you know. People are asking you what the big secret is. And you know what? There isn’t one.” William Lyttle

“Writing is about knowing how to breathe within the sentence. And how to put some silence both in the lines and between the lines, so that the reader can breathe with me, unhurriedly, adapting to my rhythm as well as to theirs, in a sort of indispensable counterpoint.” Clarice Lispector

Rhyl, North Wales

I forgot to reMEmBer…

“I Forgot to Remember to Forget” Elvis Presley song

The concrete is beginning to set

Britain is more edge than centre

Active service

Shallow breath

I hope her hair grows nice

Walking through Mantua, a city in Italy referred to as ‘sleeping beauty’ owing to its undiscovered charm, the quiet was suddenly broken by a low flying military jet. It spliced through the renaissance architecture to announce that the world we now live in is not a dream but a dreadful reality. The echo remains sickening.

Menton, France

Art poem…

Art is……

A perfect solution

A revelation

A line of sight

A fine weight

A soft rubbing

A thin shaving

A surface tension

A remembrance

A sideways glance

A perfect pitch

A delicious itch

A taste thing

A witnessing

A leap of faith

A deep breath

............ A sign of life.

THe wind made…

The wind made the old ones unsteady on their feet

Why buildings collapse

‘The secret of happiness is for nothing to happen’ Saul Leiter

If you put a crown on the head of a clown, you do not make him a king. You turn the palace into a circus. What a shabby and shameful carnival it has been. Andrew Rawnsley Guardian July 2022

Ross Edgley, who swam the route in 2018, reported suffering from ‘salt tongue’ (“I realised something was bad when I woke up with chunks of it on my pillow,” he said later), and had to wrap his neck in duct tape.

Family photograph left on the moon

A large open hand..

A large open hand lies on a thick disc of middle-aged wood. It is baseball glove sized, a daddy's hand, slightly curving upwards from the palm. It is hand to grasp and hold or to place something as an offering to say thank you or I am yours. Cast in solid iron, it has sat at my feet in my living room for seventeen years

An uncertain hour

Schwartz argued that one of the goals of a university education, especially a liberal arts education, is to teach students how to think. The trouble is, said Schwartz, “nobody really knows what that means”.

Some EnGlishmen…

Some Englishmen, Daniel Defoe is supposed to have said, would “fight to the death against popery, without knowing whether popery was a man or a horse”. The author of Robinson Crusoe was on to something about nativists: their indiscriminate and almost cheerful belligerence. The precise identity of the adversary matters less to them than the opportunity to show strength. Janan Ganesh Financial Times

Las Vegas is the Spanish word for meadows

On maps, blue is the colour of where you are not.

The woman who put fluoride on my teeth.

Roy Hattersley going now for two pounds and Jeremy Corbyn for three, secondhand. The lives of labour are clearly running out.

In the world of a pessimist, everything gets better.

Speaking one’s mind

Going south

“With you”, he told her, “I can’t miss.”

Hard feelings

The sculptor Philip King’s studio wall

How many strawberries…..

“How many strawberries grow in the salt of the sea?” Scottish folk song

Brief encounter

‘Kiss up’ - the kissing sound that casino dealers use when they want to get colleagues’ attention.

“In prison there is nothing to do but smoke and scowl.” Peter Doherty

“I hope Putin doesn’t have my phone number.” Overheard comment by a friend’s elderly mother

Up close

Aptly, the Latin name for the watercress plant is Nasturtium officinale, which translates as “nose twister”.

Lost for words

"You can only wait in the shelter," he writes in his diary. "Some are waiting for spring, some - for the morning to come, some - for the end of the war. And someone is waiting for the bomb to come and kill everyone."

Trwyn Du Lighthouse, Anglesey, Wales

I always haD a biscuit…

I always had a biscuit for my dog and a sweetie for my son. 

America doesn’t solve problems, it overwhelms them.

It might simply be that he is lazy, as he always eats and drinks things that are are body temperature. 

My hearts aches. Is it grieving or the start of something I need to have looked at?

In Venice an ombre, meaning ‘a shadow’, is a small wine glass named after the shadow the bell tower of Piazza San Marco that wine sellers used to follow to keep their wine cool. 

“France is a paradise inhabited by people who think that they’re in hell.” Sylvain Tesson

Improving our ability to see people behind the label 

There is a power…

“There is power, which can resurrect high cities from the ashes, but no power in the world is capable of lifting the light eyelashes over the eyes of a dead child” Vasily Grossman 

The father I knew, and the man I never will 

Dog whistles to the worried well 

Dust jacket 

“See me missus. If I had brains I’d be dangerous.” The people you passed in the streets, some walking with purpose, some wandering one way, then turning and walking back the other. Others just standing.’ These Days - Lucy Caldwell                                                         

He is good at making shadows. Even in broad daylight, his presence sits behind an unseen absence. . 

Cliff chalk, Margate, Kent

the result….

The result of the stroke was that she could not look back and no longer look down. She had to feel for everything.

Pronounced dead, her house smelled of sour milk and dried mushroom.

They crumpled like empty crisp packets and within 10 seconds were gone. 

I am interested in how many flavours a feeling can have.

Parting shot

Photographs are souvenirs of an unfinished world 

Unheimlich - unhomely, unsettling, disturbing or everything that ought to remain hidden and secret becoming visible. 

He was skilled in the art of doing nothing, driven by a burning ambition to avoid success. Looking back, his life was totally fulfilled by its emptiness. 

Sixty seven lessons of life. 

Womb to tomb

Sperm to worm 

A person’s back tells me more than their front’ Saul Leiter

Oscar Wilde’s prison cell door

I like things that are moving....

“I like things that are moving. And now, where I live, I see the mighty Atlantic passing by” Laurie Anderson interviewed in New York

Warren Buffett, the veteran US investor, once said that it’s only when the tide goes out that you see who’s been swimming naked.

Design is a way to understand the world and how you can change it.

In Glasgow the rain keeps the grass green and the people pale and bronchial 

A Flaneur is a botanist of the pavement - Baudelaire 

Like a house full of children playing with matches.

“I hope to see more of you.” “There isn’t any more.”  Diane Arbus 

He was like a water beetle gliding across the waters face. If he asked how he did it, he would sink. He never asked and never sank.

Even his reds were cold as ice Francis Bacon 

“It seems like the soul... loses itself in itself when shaken and disturbed unless given something to grasp on to; and so we must always provide it with an object to butt up against and to act upon.” Essais’, 1580. 

Zeppelin airship repair

Elephants on the move…

Elephants on the move.

Great singers have great ears 

Not for dancing 

‘What does your surname taste like?’

‘My father tastes like processed peas

The Plimsoll line gauges the weight load of a ship. Where is your load line? I cannot see it, though I can sense it.

In the west, we are in a golden age of ignorance fuelled by distraction and political tribalism, inevitably leading to distrust, doubt and theories of conspiracy. We need to slow down, calm down and imagine that we are wrong  

A smile so wide it was audible