John's Quavering Pencil

In approximately 24 hours time, my daughter will leave home for good (at least, that is her firm intention). It will be some time around 3 a.m. when the taxi will call for her, her large suitcase and her hand luggage. She decided that she would rather have the Big Goodbye at home, so we shall not go with her to the airport.

I have recently awoken from my night sleep (it is now 4 a.m.) and I was finding it difficult to get back to sleep again. I therefore decided to do this short blog. Mind you, I do often wake up in the middle of the night. When this happens I usually make myself a cup of tea and either do a little writing or play my digital piano with the IEMs in place (In Ear Monitors). I have not made tea this time.

A busy and difficult day lies ahead. I can hear that it is raining, from the pitter-patter on my skylight window. I recently put some weed-and-feed onto my lawn and that needs washing in. Later in the week I shall rake out the dead moss and give it a little after-care. Part of my coping strategy will be not to ignore the small things in everyday life that need to be done. When my first wife left me, I made sure that I ate properly and kept my house reasonably clean and tidy. These things matter. They provide a simple and stable framework in which to adjust to new circumstances and from which to reconstitute one’s concept of self. As a response to strong advice from my doctor, I changed my physical being by losing 20 kg over the course of the past year. I achieved this by managing what and how much I ate, on a daily/weekly basis, and by virtue of will-power (old-fashioned as that term may sound). Over the past 10 months I have focussed effort on the improvement of my physical being; in months ahead I shall shift the spotlight to my psychological well-being. Massaging my self-concept or tweaking my persona is something that should provide me with a modicum of amusement, interest or even satisfaction, at the meta-level, given that I taught psychology for 30 years at my local university!

Currently, I am feeling a little better about things. It is possible that writing up this blog helps me sort out my thoughts and feelings. Bye for now, my dear blogophiles.

As the days grind on, we get closer and closer to the imminent date of her departure. The clearing of the room, the sorting out of stuff, and the throwing away of rubbish all help to mercifully blunt sensitivity. Air freight shipping will have to wait until she knows how much space she has in the room or rooms that will usurp the tag of ‘home’. We shall therefore be faced with a second wave of packing and crating some weeks or months after she has gone. For the time being, it has all been stacked into temporary cardboard boxes in order that we may get some idea of the cubic footage that will be required. The weight of the boxes is incredible. I had no idea she had so many CDs DVDs and books.

Things are vanished into boxes

This morning I went to Staples, a big office supply store in the UK, to get a replacement toner cartridge for my computer printer. At the checkout I waited while a father and his son paid for their goods. The boy looked about 18 and from all the files and folders that they were getting my guess is that he was about to go off to university. I saw the father put his credit card into the reader and this thrust me back to when I had done an almost identical thing when my daughter went off to university. The expected wave of emotion swept over me but it has been happening so much these past two weeks I had little difficulty holding back until I had paid for my stuff and got into the car for the ride home. On the way back I stopped briefly at a supermarket to get a loaf of bread. It is still the school holidays here and as I walked over to the bakery with my handbasket I passed a father doing some shopping with his teenage daughters. Of course, yet again more memories were triggered. Everywhere I turn, there are reminders of past family life together. My only hope is that eventually they will become dull and cease to stimulate sharp memories.

I am finding it very difficult to play piano, guitar, or to sing. I think the simple explanation of that must be that singing and playing music is a very emotional thing to do. Not really what I want right now.

At present my daughter has a lot of her books, CDs, DVDs and so forth in piles on our sitting room floor, waiting to be packed into chests for shipping. I suddenly noticed a copy of one of the academic books I wrote before I retired: The Psychology of Food and Eating. I was touched by the fact that she intends to take this  with her. I had given it to her when it was first published some years ago. 

Piles of stuff for the packing chests

My book on food, on top of the pile

This morning I had the full English breakfast with my friend Tom. It is good to talk to friends in circumstances such as these. I tried to explain how sometimes I felt ok, only to be swamped seconds later by waves of sadness and helplessness. We talked about how it had some similarities with the way a bereavement can hit you. Because I have endured periods of darkness in the past, I do feel confident that at some point I will get through it all. The main problem at the moment is that I cannot predict at all when I am going to be hit by the next wave.

I had been feeling not too bad this morning and, after breakfast with Tom, I decided to risk a trip to the supermarket to get in some food items we needed. Stray thoughts kept entering my mind, unbidden. I had to really concentrate in order not to lose it, while I was waiting at the checkout. Then, walking my cart across the tarmac to my car, I kept getting images of my daughter helping to push the cart as a little girl, years ago, perhaps excited by some special treats I had bought for her. Truth be told, it was an amalgam of numerous separate occasions, not one trip, that I had manufactured in my mind’s eye. Somehow, I shall have to repress these mental images, if I am to get back onto an even keel. And that is what I am determined to do, however long it takes and however hard the task. Wish me luck, my dear blogophiles.

I went over to the Lit & Phil library at Newcastle the other day and stocked up with a pile of their excellent whodunnits. I find that I need to read easy page-turners in order to prevent my mind from wandering into what-ifs and what-has-beens that trigger bouts of emotional turmoil without doing any good whatever. I have just finished J.R.L. Anderson’s Death in the greenhouse. It was good to be taken back to an England where it was by no means certain that one would be able to find a telephone to use or whether the person who you wanted to contact would even be connected to the landline telephone exchange. This was a world devoid of much of the electronic detritus that is so typical of today’s quotidian experience.

Therapeutic distractors

Today, I shall move on to Douglas Cark’s The Monday theory.  Things, as they say, continue to be labile.

I woke up at 6 a.m. this morning and thought I felt better than yesterday, so I spent some time doing piano practice, but by the time I was in the shower I was back to square one. I don’t think there is much I can do while I feel raw emotionally, with an upset tummy as the physiological correlate. I think that there is nothing for it but to wait until my daughter has departed on her adventures; eventually things will flatten out. Mind you, it took years, not months to get over the break up of my first marriage. Of course, this is not quite the same thing but it does provide some sort of yardstick. I was watering the flowers in my kitchen window box a little earlier. The summer bedding plants are more or less past their best by now. I think I shall clear out the box once she has left and put some spring bulbs in. That will give me a target. I shall have to get myself back on top of things one way or another by the time the bulbs come into flower. The snowdrops will be first, so I will just have a few months. Then I shall opt for a strategy of structured, if somewhat disciplined, action to fill the days. I am thinking in terms of piano, guitar, and sketching practice. This can be supplemented by other activities with my partner and friends and there will always be the garden to tend, and some walking along the coastal paths.

I am not entirely convinced of the wisdom of sharing all this, heart-on-sleeve, on the blog here. However, it seems to me that there is no point in writing a blog unless you deal with the dark times, along the joyous. Bye for now, my dear blogophiles.

I am up early this morning; it is around 5.00 a.m.  As I awoke I heard the sound of my daughter laughing. She will have been watching a programme downstairs on TV or a DVD; she often stays up most of the night doing that. Previously, she worked mainly a late evening shift at the local cinema but she quit that job last week. This is all part of her grand plan. She is going to emigrate. It is her intention to live and work permanently in a country half-way around the world from where I live. She is able to do that because she has dual nationality. Small things, like the sound of her laughing late at night, have suddenly assumed a poignance hitherto unimaginable. I don’t know how I shall cope with this. I know my world is about to be changed forever. Her laughter knells the start of my final chapter, as I look toward a bleak and sombre old age. Intellectually, I know that it is likely that I shall adjust and that cheap longhaul flights make reasonably frequent visits a possibility. Emotionally, I am a long way from such a calm appraisal. I think there are some similarities with bereavement, in terms of the subjective experience. Indeed, it is semantically accurate to say that I shall feel bereft.

I have been reading James Hamilton’s book on J.M.W.Turner. Apparently, he worked hard and fast, sketching quickly on location, using his archetectural training to take short cuts over the representation of buildings, and finishing off the watercolours back home (using the raw material he gathered in the field). If Turner were working today, he might well make swift use of a compact digital camera to supplement his sketchbook. Hamilton describes him as being a fit and lythe man with plenty of energy. In the 1790s he lived in Covent Garden, London, and walked the forty mile round trip to Bushey, Hertfordshire, in order to make drawings at half-a-crown apiece. I went to school in Bushey, some 150 years later. Who knows? Without knowing it, I may have literally trodden in the great man’s footsteps (unfortunately, there was no chance of doing so in the metaphorical sense).

Hopefully, I shall cheer up soon, my dear blogophiles. This is all I have for you, for the time being.

I am pottering in the garden, watering the flowers in my window box. I have my camera to hand and I take a pic, not of the whole box but a section in the middle showing the multiple flowers coming from a single Chrysanthemum plant.

Chrysanthemum plant in my window box

I move in and focus upon a single bloom. I then put a macro lens onto my camera and get down to clusters of individual petals within the flower. This provides a simple illustration of scale. If I were to move much further in the micro direction I would need to to augment the lens of my eye with that of a microscope. Moving out to a broader view, it would be possible to include the Chrysanthemum plant in a wide angle shot of the whole wall upon which the window box is attached. A wide angle or fish-eye lens is the other side of the coin to the microscope.

Focus upon a single flower

Focus upon the petals within a single flower

The question of scale assumes a point of view. The three photographs of my Chrysanthemum plant provide macro and micro views, relative to where I am standing, which is roughly speaking about a metre away from the plant. If I stand a long way away from something, it appears much smaller. Then, I can only discern things that, in absolute terms, are big (like mountains) and the small things (like flowers) blend into the background and are indistinguishable. When sketching a landscape it is a big mistake to put too much fine detail into objects located in the far distance (such as trees or houses).

If you can see something, then you can describe it (no matter how imperfectly). Where language strains at the seams to provide an adequate tool for such a description, authors have recourse to analogy, metaphor, or even poetry (considered by some to be the ultimate semantic weapon). The issue of scale in the visual world cannot be avoided when writing fiction. However, fiction would be somewhat dull if it was devoid of action. Action always takes place within a spatio-temporal context. In fiction, the question of scale applies not only to space, but also to time.  A century is to a lanscape, as a year is to a tree, or a second is to the petal of a flower.

Clock time (or calendar time) is rather like lattitude and longitude in terms of pinpointing a node in the spatio-temporal matrix. Here and now nail it down to the personal pronoun I. I am always in the present, floating inexorably through calendar time. I can look back into the past and remember my experience of moving through time and space, reliving the now continuum as if it were happening, well… now. I can call upon my creative reserves to relive my past how it might have been, in what-if fashion. My good friend Dr Freud might even suggest that my past has been surreptitiously and creatively re-worked in order that to provide a better fit with the unconscious desires I harbour; what is more, I know nothing of this.

I can look forward into the future and imagine how it will be as I move through the time-space continuum. If I don’t like what I see, there may be things that I can do in order to optimise the likelihood of a better trajectory. If there is no food in the kitchen, a trip to the supermarket will usually be enough to ensure the avoidance of hunger tomorrow, at least in the affluent west.

An author has many choices to make. Will the fiction be told from the present looking back to the past? Will the point of view provide a god-like and privileged access to the minds and activities of all characters at all times? Will the reader see the world through the eyes of just one character? Will the present tense first-person perspective suck the reader into an alternate reality second only to that of the dream world?

And what of the songwriter, the singer, and the storyteller? A casual glance towards the yellow flowers in my window box has led me to the core of what interests me as a writer and performer. I look forward to exploring, in some future blog, the implications of these ideas for my creative writing and performance. For the moment, my dear blogophile, I feel that this provides plenty enough to think about.

This morning I was planting some cyclamen in my garden when I spotted an exceedingly pretty butterfly: a peacock. Fortunately, my compact digital camera was only a few strides away and I had it out of the case in no time at all. I was zooming in the lens as I tip-toed back to my specimen. As I took the first shot I was trying to estimate how close I needed to get to be able to blow it up clearly for a computer image; butterflies are small! I started to bend my knees and ease myself down closer to the butterfly which was lying still on the earth, with its beautiful wings outstretched. It must have sensed my presence, since it brought its wings up together. In this pose, it looked like a very small twig from where I was standing. Clearly this tactic will have been evolved genetically to provide a survival advantage. I backed off and after a minute or so it spread out its wings once again. As I moved in for what I hoped was a closer shot, it rose up and fluttered away.

Peacock butterfly in my garden

In at least some of the sciences it is accepted that the act of observation can affect that which is observed (I believe this roughly-speaking relates to the Heisenberg principle in physics). The spirit of the maxim is certainly applicable to behavioural and social psychology. This morning, it has applied to photography and, indirectly, to internet blogging.

I have been very dissatisfied with the way I have been playing Billy Joel’s Piano Man in my shows. I keep mangling the first part of the chorus. This morning I talked to my piano teacher, Jeanette, about this and she figured out that the problem lay in my right hand fingering. She sorted this out for me and so I shall now go and practice for a while. Hopefully there will be an improvement in my playing in time for my gig at The Ragged Edge on Thursday. Bye for now, my dear blogophiles.

High tide at the cat and dog steps

This morning I went down to the sea shore for a walk along the length of the bay. It was high tide and the waves were pounding the sea wall. I walked for about an hour and found it to be invigorating. There was not a hint of sunshine today; it was very cloudy and the north sea was a dull grey-green.

Taking a moderate amount of excercise and keeping one eye on the diet has enabled me to keep the body mass down to an acceptable level. My health regime has been in operation since last November. I present a pic as evidence for the success (my friend Tom took the photo last Friday when we met for the full English breakfast).

A slimmer version of my First Life avatar

I have been meaning to write a short blog here to mark the 555th gig I played in Second Life. This took place on Sunday and my friend Woodstock Burleigh built the most amazing stage set for it, along the lines of a drawing room scene inspired by my song Mrs Growbeck’s armchair. Many of my SL friends came to the show including Tishe who is the venue owner of Cascadia Harmonics (where I played the gig) and Fabs (who is also a SL live musician). It was Fabs and Tishe who helped me with all the technical stuff when I first started streaming live into SL back in January 2008. And my first show ever was at Tishe’s larger venue, Rocky Shores. I switched to my weekly Sunday performance at the Cascadia venue when she opened it up a long time ago, and the slightly more intimate deck suits the music I play.

My 555th show in Second Life at Cascadia Harmonics

Apart from building the sitting room, Woody also digitally ‘framed’ a selection of my paintings and sketches and exhibited them on the walls around the audience space. That was a lovely surprise for me, and it enabled my art and music to be combined within the same event. So, Woody, a really big thanx to you.