No choice to choose

 As I am off to the Liceu this evening - admittedly for an evening of ballet rather than opera, but that is how the season tickets tumble – I will deny myself the mucky pleasure of pointing out the corrupt sleaze that the Conservatives and presently mired in, led by a craven and despicable apology for a leader 

 

T

who because of a ‘previous appointment’ cannot be in the commons to apologise or accept his knocks for his frankly appalling management of the Paterson Scandal. 

     I will instead, to keep my mind unscarred by justified vitriol, consider decluttering.

 

knees, operation, library, getting rid of books,

      

 

 

     With the present state of my knees, which are little more than flesh covered bags of various sized marbles, our present abode is almost perfectly unsuitable.  The house is spread over three floors with the ground floor containing only the garden and the entrance, while the living quarters start on the third floor.  There is no lift, and the stairs are unyielding and narrow.

     There is no bathroom on the first floor that contains the living room and the kitchen, so everything needs stairs.

     My study (or hollowed out space in clutter) is on the third floor and that also has no bathroom.  The result is, when you get where you want to be, you don’t move until you absolutely have to!

     If, and given the way the health service has been knocked for six by the pandemic that is a big ‘if’, anything by way of an operation was considered to try and get my knees back to something approaching normality – then my house would emphatically NOT be the place to consider recuperation.  This means that we now have to consider moving within the near future.

     This is a sobering and frightening proposition.

     Where I go, there also goes my library.  And libraries, unless you are totally wedded to Kindle, is not something easily transportable.  And my library is large.

     Were I to move taking only my Art books and catalogues then I would be moving more books than most people have in their houses.  And given that they are Art books, a damn sight heavier than the books most people have.  And Art books are but one small part of my holdings.

     In spite of what Toni says and believes, I have ‘rationalised’ by collection over the years.  I did manage to shed a depressingly large section of my library in Cardiff (books, I might add, that I still resent having got rid of) and over the years in Castelldefels I have donated masses of books to educational establishments (and I resent their absence even more) but, and this is a sad, but entirely understandable fact, I have replaced the Lost Volumes with new and essential books that I NEED.

     If I am realistic, I know that we are unlikely to find somewhere as commodious as our present place and that means that I will have to be bloody minded in cutting my holdings even further to the bone before we are able to move.

     Yes, I know that there are some books that moved with me from Cardiff that I have not looked at or even opened since they were unpacked, but I know that they are there and THAT is the important point.

     I also know that I can have the classics of English Literature (at least historical and out of copyright English Literature) stored electronically and I do have various books on my Kindle, but I also have the copies of the books in which I first read them.  And I am and remain a ‘paper purist’ – there is nothing like actually turning the pages and feeling the heft of a volume in your hand.

     Sooner, rather than later, reality is going to have to hit, and I am going to have to make some very hard choices.  But I am putting my faith in prevarication and the liberal application of embrocation to stave off the evil day.

     Long live the bound and printed word!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Broken Un-Birthday!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The week of un-birthday festivities and presents following my actually single birthday took a downward turn today.  Not only has it been raining all night, with howling wind and melodramatic thunder and lightning, but also, when I woke up the electricity had failed.

     I washed by the light of my mobile phone, refused to shave as the hot water wasn’t – see above, electricity failure – and hobbled downstairs (knees still not even remotely right) like some senile hi-tec Lady of the Lamp to do ‘something’ to the box of electricity switches and fuses.  I duly pushed up all those that were down, and nothing happened.

     I debated not going for my early morning swim in the local pool, reasoning that perhaps the outage had extended to their premises, and while I am more than prepared to get up early, I draw the line at swimming in cold water.  But I thought to myself, who else is going to brave the rain, the dark and the pre-dawn?  Only I!

     I was, of course, wrong, and there were plenty of other saddos ready and eager to get their daily exercise over and done with before most people were awake.

     As I am retired, I do not need to be there early ‘before work’, but I find that getting up (at what I am sure my grandparents would have called a ‘reasonable time’) has now become so engrained in me that to lie in bed after the alarm goes off gives little pleasure.

     I wish that I could say that I make full and enthusiastic use of my gained time – but what I do is read The Guardian and thoroughly depress myself before breakfast.

     Living in Catalonia, you would think that I would be able to be fairly detached from what is going on in the UK – and, to a certain extent I can be (or at least try to be) but the political, social, and economic situation in Spain is not rosy either.  Admittedly, we have not committed the idiocy of Brexit, and our Covid figures are nowhere as horrific as those in the UK, but there is little in present day Catalonia to make one wake up and skip one’s way cheerily into the day – but at least the day in Catalonia usually has sun in it!

     My art books are my escape.  Which is an odd thing to say because the sort of art that I like is rarely of the chocolate box niceness, and the arresting images that contemporary art slams into your mind rarely take you away from the world but force you back into it in an uncompromising manner.

     Sometimes the struggle is not with the images, but rather with the juxta-positioning that some curators impose on collections or exhibitions.  Having read through the catalogue for the Poussin exhibition in the National, I was reminded of another exhibition involving Poussin that I went to see in the Dulwich Picture Gallery in which Poussin’s paintings were paired with the coloured scribblings of Cy Twomby.  The Poussin paintings were his series of The Sacraments while Twomby’s paintings were, um, not.

     I am no fan of Twomby’s art, though you might be interested to know that I am in a minority, and in 2015 his Untitled (New York City) was sold at auction for $70,530,000 – so what do I know!

     You might like to compare the two artists:

 

Go

 

 

 

 

 

 

POUSSIN

 

 

 

 

 

 

TWOMBY

 

As I keep telling myself, the money is not relevant to the art.  Money is just the commodification of art.  What value people and institutions place on individual artists is something to consider in evaluating the place of art in a particular society, but it has little to say about the true value of art. 

I still don't like Twomby.