Petty comforts: major irritations

No matter the pressure. No matter how pressing the circumstances. When something has to be done: I can find something else to do.

For example: the house. Selling? Not selling? Packing to complete? Flights to be booked? Finances to be sorted out?
Probably. To be done now? Definitely.

But on the other hand: what was the name of the artist who painted ‘Fallen Idol’? Perhaps not Victorian. Later? What’s the point in having the internet if it can’t tell you the things you want to know? However long it takes.

Past tense. Took. Never let it be said that I idled when a minor point of information was eluding me. So. Problem solved. The painter’s name was John Collins 1859 – 1934 http://www.victorianartinbritain.co.uk/biog/collier.htm for more information - though thinking about it, who on earth would want to know any more about him? However, finding the artist was the easy bit: every piece of information about him mentioned his painting ‘Fallen Idol’ but none of them illustrated it. Nothing daunted I eventually found a copy of the painting in a book on ‘Standard Copying Techniques for Artworks’ – and I used to think that trying to find something in the Guinness Book of World Records was the ultimate Odyssey in digressions! I now realise that youthful addiction to that cornucopia of essential trivia was but proper preparation for the mind boggling expanse of the irrelevant that the internet represents.

God bless it!

The illustration is not quite up to standard, it is, after all just an illustration to show how to photograph an oil painting, but it’s the only one I can find. By the way I didn’t realise that Collins was the artist of the rather haunting painting of Hudson after he had been set adrift with his son by mutineers. That painting is in the same class as The Childhood of Raleigh – and I mean that quite literally as those paintings together with ‘When Did You Last See Your Father’ were the sort of art which hung in our classrooms and corridors when I was a kid. Ah yes, in those halcyon days when I still had some sympathy with the Royalists as opposed to the Roundheads and could read ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’ and think that Sir Percy was quite right in rescuing the oppressed aristocrats from the clutches of the revolutionary rabble. How times have changed and the ‘right but repulsive’ have won out against the ‘wrong but romantic’ brigade! I put it all down to reading ‘1066 And All That’ at an impressionable age.

It is now well into the afternoon and my solicitor is proving to be very elusive in confirming the date for completion. The rain is hammering down (so the Pathetic Fallacy is at full strength) I have just come back from visiting Ray who looks as though he is at the end of his life and am feeling thoroughly miserable. Brown Pickfords’ boxes sit Warhol-like by the window and I am subdued into inactivity when there is so much (So Much!) waiting to be done. All it takes is one small phone call which stubbornly refuses to brighten up my day.

Patience is not one of the virtues which characterises my approach to life and is something which I am used to encountering in allegorical paintings and soppily moralistic poems rather than exemplifying in quotidian action. This typing is a form of displacement activity masquerading as patience and it is wearing a little thin.

Something, as a notably selfish and dead Prince of Wales so helpfully used to say, must be done!

The evening now and a most unsatisfactory end to the day: no one called I had to do the phoning to find out that very little had happened. That’s not the point: the point is that I should have been told that nothing was happening.

I have taken the plunge and booked Pickfords to come and get the rest of the stuff on Tuesday. The house should be denuded by midday and ready for the buyers to take possession and for us to . . . uh . . . find somewhere to live!

Such larks!

Reality is nibbling at my feet and when completion becomes a fact I fear that it will start gobbling down my psyche whole!

We’ll see.