Meanderings
Ikea Southampton sent me a birthday invite a few weeks ago, saying it was turning 15, which didn’t seem right at all, because it only opened a few years ago. Ludicrous. When I do the maths, it works out- Ikea (a refuge to parents of small children with hours to occupy, with unlimited coffee for meet-ups) opened just before my son was born, and my son is 15 this week, which is equally ludicrous because he is a tiny baby (he is bigger than me).
My son always asks to go to Otmoor near his birthday, which is our nearest RSPB reserve. He likes to watch the birds and I will happily sit and draw reeds while he does, but my husband is less keen about sitting still, and he has to drive us, so it tends to be a yearly visit. I feel like we might have won my husband over this time though; he has binoculars now, and did some pretty solid bird spotting. ‘KINGFISHER’ he says with some urgency, and he is not wrong; there are two in fact. ‘Oh wow’ says my son, watching them them perch on a branch ‘you can actually see them’. We’ve seen kingfishers before, if you have a child and binoculars kindly people will tell you where to sit and watch for them. It’s just kingfishers, up till now, have been a fast moving blue speck. They haven’t been things with beaks, with feathers, with glorious electric blue diamond on thier backs as they fly away. We haven’t seen them.
‘HERONS’ says my husband, before pausing, confused because they’re clearly enormous, and with a limited vocabulary to describe really big birds he asks ‘are they …peacocks?’ They may as well be pterosaurs, huge unearthly dinosaurs, making a noise that’s a cross between a goose honking and one of those squeaky dog toy chickens. They land close enough for a clear view, ringing a distant bell; an illustration on the cover of a book on Chinese brush painting: where the tail should be is a feather duster, a small red cap on the head. A pair of cranes.
We see the marsh harriers, we see herons courting in the reeds and we see a sparrowhawk dive onto a tree full of reed bunting (I say see but again really, I saw a tail. I heard a lot of squawking though). It was a remarkable and inspiring trip out, but the cranes are what made it for me. I didn’t know cranes breed at Otmoor, and the surprise enhanced my delight at seeing them. When I go to my yoga lesson, Chris tells me when she moved to Abingdon in 1979, when it was a different place, before all the houses, she had cranes come into the back garden, and kingfishers were a common sight along the river, and I feel a pang of immense sadness that such wonderful things have been taken from us.
Workings
Gotta push through. My son used to whisper it like a mantra when he was small, along with ‘never give up’. He learnt them from school; I used to think it was sort of endearing but now it annoys me they taught him that.
I lie in bed I with a dull pain in my forearm, watching the pigeons peck the tightly formed buds of plum blossom, feeling upset that my son’s school never taught balance. There was no rest to redress the pushing, there was no yielding to compensate the never giving up. Of course we need to give up, I have given up hundreds of times, on activities that had served their purpose, bad habits, things that were never going to work out and made no sense to pursue. Quitting and resting are life skills that aren’t taught or acknowledged until you get older, until the small hurts grow into big pains that can’t heal until you quit all that pushing.
This week I cycled to the gym with the feeling I really shouldn’t because I was tired and sore, and even when my tyre was flat halfway there I didn’t turn back knowing all the time I should, because while I can roll down the hill, once I’m down I’m stranded at the bottom with a 40 minute walk home in the pouring rain. I knew that, but I pushed on, maybe that’s what our insane culture has indoctrinated me into believing is the right thing. Luckily a yoga friend gave me a lift back. Her name is also Deborah, we have bonded over a Deborah confusion in class. I quite like having a namesake:
-Getting a bike into a ford mondeo is a two man job -sexist, outdated, incorrect
-Getting a bike into a ford mondeo is a two Deborah job -modern, sensible, accurate (I helped a bit)
Halfway through printing, I wander through the kitchen to get a drink, leaving the owl looking very much like a mutant furby and spy the muntjac in the garden. Mama is eating my spindle tree again, and baby, now a gangling adolescent, has become confident and adventurous. I see him take a stick off the picnic table, and throw it about the garden. I stand transfixed by his game as he tosses it and chases it about like a dog; the main difference is he eats the stick at the end of the game. I have never observed play in deer, and his joyous enthusiasm in the half light of gathering dusk was contagious. Deborah (not me) said she went to a Burns night dinner and someone bought a Muntjac to barbecue. I hope no one barbecues my friends. I leave the printing till next week, when hopefully my arm has recovered.
Findings
I have found a palette I like in flying tiger (the shop), which has ended my existential palette crisis from a few weeks ago. I think I like this one more than the sold out one, so all’s well that ends well. I also found (not in flying tiger) this really big brush. I don’t know quite why I need a really big brush, but I got it because the that’s a big brush>that’s a good price for a really big brush>I could afford that really big brush chain of thought does not seem involve why I would need such a thing. I like the smaller versions, which I pick up cheaply at the car boot sale, I think it’s just the novelty of a useful thing I like being the wrong size; I find really small versions of things interesting too. I expect I’ll find some use for it.
I wish I’d seen (and posted) this page in What it is, a new (to me) Lynda Barry book the Royal Mail finally deigned to bring me before I posted last week because it extends ponderings on the aliveness of things in that post into the realm of thought and ideas. Interesting.
Sad to hear of the passing of Dan Hillier, a favourite of Stephen Elcock whose collections are a favourite of mine. RIP
Thank you all so much for reading, sharing and recommending my rantings, and your purchases in the shop. I have no idea why you do, but please keep it up x