Blaugustine's Other Blog

TAVIRA SEQUEL

2009-12-18T20:06:00.001Z

YESSSS!!

In Tavira I noticed that there is an artists' association and gallery called Casa 5 and when I got back home I looked it up on the internet and found that they have an artists' residency programme. After a friendly exchange of emails, I sent in my application.

Obviously I was just obeying orders from that cunning life-coach in the sky who thinks I need a kick up the cosmic derrière to propel me out of my little swivel chair in front of my little screen in my little London routine. Obviously my application was accepted. I'm all shook up!

So, around the middle or end of January I'll be going back for about five or six weeks, staying in Casa 5 and working on paintings, drawings, collage, video etc. based on Tavira - the town, the people, the ambiance, whatever inspiration strikes while I'm there - with an exhibition in the gallery at the end of my residency. I'll have my laptop and WIFI so blogging will continue, if perhaps intermittently (as usual).

Here's an appropriate graffiti I discovered on a wall in Tavira - I didn't know when I took the picture that it would be so appropriate.

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NOT THE TURNER PRIZE

2009-12-10T00:33:00.000Z

(I've desaturated the above Guardian newspaper colour photo of Richard Wright's Turner Prizewinning gold-leaf mural, thus revealing only its black pattern.)

You've seen Rorschach ink blots haven't you? Some of you will have tried spattering black ink on a sheet of paper by flicking a brush, folding the paper in half, carefully smoothing it down and then opening it to reveal...taraaaa! A map of your unconscious? A Turner prizewinning work?

Here is a little demonstration of how you could create your own Turner prizework in approximately fifteen minutes, or less if you leave out making Photoshopped versions. Adding drops of water and oil to your ink spattering can add more textures. Transferring your masterpiece to a wall, cupboard, curtain or tee-shirt and applying gold leaf to it will take a bit longer but is perfectly feasible.

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POST-TAVIRA REPORT

2009-12-09T04:35:00.003Z

POST-TAVIRA REPORT

Yes, the lion you saw in the slideshow is my cherished lion - or rather his sun-bleached and rain-battered twin. I was walking along the banks of the Gilao river in Tavira when I suddenly saw him, tied to the top of a brilliantly coloured fishing boat, looking around with a bemused expression. Call it coincidence, chance or destiny, but I find it thrilling that the twin of a stuffed lion I bought from an Asian shop in Camden Town should turn up to greet me on my very first day in a small town in Portugal. How likely is that?

Anyway, I fell in love with Tavira. Bits of it had a nostalgic familiarity, flashbacks of Paraguay or Brazil or Mexico. Other parts entirely different, Moorish, blue-tiled, whiter-than-white rough plaster walls, intricate baroque woodwork, latticed windows, and doors, doors! Amazing doors of every colour and texture, works of art in their own right. Short, human-size palm trees and very tall phallic ones, shaved so that only an ecstatic green tuft emerges from the crown, the rest of the bulbous trunk naked and scaly.

At this time of year the streets are quiet and the unpretentious cafés are frequented mainly by locals, a few polite tourists and expat residents. I sat there at ease, drinking café con leite, my forgotten Portuguese coming back in fragments, spattered with Spanish and Italian, and I thought: I could spend some time here, get back into painting, live the small-town life. The more I caressed this thought, the more exciting it felt so I got up, walked into a nearby estate agent's office and asked the dapper white-bearded man at the desk if he had any apartments to rent in the centre of town. He was Swedish, spoke perfect English, and said there were no rentals on his list at present but his colleague down the street might have some. He put a "Back Soon" sign on the door and walked out with me.

Just round the corner he pointed to the top floor of a balconied house, looking out towards the river and the Roman bridge. "There's an apartment for rent up there", he said. "Oh!" I said, "When could I see it?" "Right now," he said, "I have the keys". We walked up two or three flights and entered a delightful living room, marred only by an after-thought, a dangerously vertical wooden stairway in the middle, leading to a low-ceilinged loft bedroom with its own bathroom. Downstairs was another bedroom and bathroom and a modern kitchen. In a moment of madness I thought, yes, this is it! Fortunately the price was too high and that loft stairway too lethal.

Then we went into another agent's office across the street and the young Portuguese colleague said there were a couple of places he could show me. So my new Swedish friend and my new Portuguese friend together walked me around town and showed me two apartments, both affordable, with magnificent terraces. I said I was interested in renting for a couple of months, probably January-February, but the owner of the flat I liked best wanted a twelve-month tenancy and the other place seemed too big for me. I left my address with both agents and they said they'd let me know of anything that might come up.

When I met my brother for dinner later he was flabbergasted by my unexpected coup de foudre for Tavira and the speed of my action-on-impulse. Well, I said, if it happens it will only be for a couple of months and if it doesn't happen, that's okay. He was an excellent guide, though he only moved to Tavira in July (excruciatingly hot then and in August) and we went to his favourite spot, reached in about fifteen minutes by motorboat, the Ilha de Tavira - an idyllic island, endless expanse of pristine golden sands, deserted in winter, a nature reserve where batallions of gulls stand at attention, concentrating intensely on the waves crashing against the shore. What an error to say that birds are flighty! They are probably the most focused creatures I know of. I wish I was as focused as a bird.

Now I must focus on tasks back here at home, finish La Vie en Rosé and other unfinished things, and if there's a sequel to the Tavira adventure, of course I'll blog it. I might post some more snippets of video but there's far too much and it needs drastic editing. Strangely enough I didn't do any drawing, probably because it was too drawable and I didn't feel like adding to the vast heaving storehouse of picturesque postcardy scenes of picturesque postcardy locations all around the world.

If I ever do paint in Tavira, I would try to find a different way of communicating, filtering, translating my experience of the place into a visual language. That's what I find so fantastic in Van Gogh's paintings of Arles: they have become as popular and commercial as postcardy postcards, but the actual works are never merely picturesque. He focuses on the landscape or the chair or the sunflower with the same kind of attention that the gulls give to the waves, a hungry attention, purposeful, passionate, a desire to assimilate the object. Not at all the same as cool observation or skilful representation.

BACK FROM BEAUTIFUL TAVIRA

2009-12-07T13:16:00.004Z

Will write about it later today. Meanwhile here's a slideshow.

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ON THE MOVE

2009-11-20T01:38:00.002Z

Haven't got back into my stride yet but have to stride again as I am going away tomorrow, for a week, to Portugal, to see my brother, who recently moved to Tavira in the Algarve. Will bring back movie and photos and who knows what else. See y'all soon. La Vie en Rosé is not forgotten!

Here's another poem-like doodle thing to fill this blank space.

NECESSITY

2009-11-15T15:40:00.001Z

Am adding this to the POEMPICTURES page. Does it need explanation?

NOT ONE-TRACK-MINDED

2009-11-11T17:26:00.002Z

One-track-minded people are those who achieve things - sometimes great things, sometimes terrible things. They are the ones you hear about because they'll have discovered something momentous or solved a problem nobody's ever solved or gone spectacularly insane or committed some particularly atrocious crime. Their locomotive brain drives them relentlessly along that one track they've chosen and doesn't stop at all the little stations along the way to have a coffee and a look around.

I am not one-track-minded, as my record shows. But I've always thought I should/would/could be if only I...um...stuck to one track. Oh yes, for short periods of time I can enter that zone where it's always four in the morning and breakfast is at nine pm and the outside world is really really outside and the mind is totally focused on the idea, the task, the problem. It's a marvellous zone to be in, exciting, challenging, even if it's totally obsessive and egocentric, shutting out anything and anyone who is a distraction. But I can't stay there, distractions rush in like noisy children, new tracks appear out of the blue - which one to follow? It's a fairground out there, irresistible and irrelevant distractions all over the place.

Know what I mean?

Anyway, I'll get back to La Vie en Rosé very shortly as soon as the deck is cleared of other unfinished business. Meanwhile my non-winning comic strip, along with other non-winners, is at Forbidden Planet, and there's a plan afoot to collectively publish a book of the non-winning graphic entries, a kind of Salon des Refusés. You can see some of the other entries on flickr here. Any Londoners interested in comics (ie sequential art: more sophisticated title) are very welcome to attend the next forum of Laydeez Do Comics on Monday 30th November, 6:30pm, details on their website. I'll be doing a short (10 minute) visual presentation there.

I've made a new section to post my POEMPICTURES . I was inspired by this new site.

NOT THE WINNER

2009-11-01T20:25:00.005Z

of the OBSERVER/CAPE GRAPHIC SHORT STORY COMPETITION

I knew my entry had no chance but I'm glad I took up the challenge. I agree that Vivien McDermid's story Paint with her lovely illustrations (published today in the Observer magazine section) deserved the prize but I haven't seen the other submissions.

Anyway, so as not to let it go to waste, herewith for your entertainment is the full strip I submitted to this competition. (CLICK ON IMAGES FOR LARGER VERSION)

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WOMEN IN COMICS CONFERENCE, CAMBRIDGE NEW HALL, 25 October 2009

2009-10-30T17:18:00.004Z

Chuffed to discover that Sarah McIntyre has posted some of my sketches on her blog . She was one of the speakers at this conference which I was very glad to have been able to attend on my return from France. I am not at all qualified to review such a comics-erudite event since my relationship to comics is intermittent and I'm an outsider in the vast family of comics creators who work in this medium full time and have made their mark in it. The sequential format does interest me very much indeed and I want to explore it much further (in my always-to-be-continued graphic novel) but there's a great deal of activity and information related to comics culture that I tend to pass by, probably to my detriment.
http://www.dominique-goblet.be/

Having been an artists' book-maker for a long time, the creators I respond to most are those whose approach and ideas are in that vein and who use sequential images as part of their visual/verbal art practice rather than as comics per se. Pages filled with small frames, each loaded with tiny text and drawings, no matter how appealing the story or concept irritate my eyes and brain. I prefer layouts which spread over the available space, flowing in and out of consciousness as time itself does. Such an artist is Dominique Goblet whose work I was excited to discover at the conference. I saw some of her books on the tables and bought one immediately: Souvenir D'Une Journée Parfaite - atmospheric, quirky, melancholy and moving on different levels of time, space, memory and emotion, beautifully expressed in monochrome drawings and an evocative, scratchily handwritten text. Hearing her later in conversation with Paul Gravett (top right in the photos below) confirmed the impression that my concerns and aims were very much in tune with hers. We will keep in touch and I hope to visit her studio in Brussels some time.

About Paul Gravett, no praise can ever be too high: he is responsible for stimulating interest in comics, encouraging innumerable comics artists in the UK and elsewhere and writing about comics critically, perceptively and knowledgeably. Back in the 1980's when I was producing and self-publishing my mini-series The Augustine Adventures (Small Packages) Paul was one of the first to review them in his magazine Escape and he has always been supportive. I think he has a pair of wings tucked away behind his shoulder blades, enabling him to appear wherever and whenever comics creators are assembled, lighting up the place with his good will and open-minded attention.

Sarah Lightman (who organised the conference along with Dr. Laurence Grove of the University of Glasgow) is another artist I've recently met whose work resonates with me. An exhibition of her diary drawings, In Memoriam, is currently in New Hall, focusing on ordinary objects (packets of biscuits, lace, toothbrush etc.) sensitively drawn in pencil, as conduits for autobiographical reflection. Each image has a pithy caption which leads you out of the object represented and into the artist's mind as she was drawing it. Sarah, along with illustrator Nicola Streeten, recently founded Laydeez Do Comics , a forum focusing on comic works based on life narrative, meeting once a month. I went along to one meeting and will be back for more.

I could write more about the conference but I'm going to stop here as I want to post this and get on with where I left off before I disappeared to France.

NOT BAD NOMAD

2009-10-29T16:33:00.002Z

My hotel room balcony, Clamart.

I am back home but still floating in a nomadic space where 'home' is just the last bed you slept in and the last place you ate your breakfast. And despite the insecurity, strangeness and discomforts of that floating world, I must say it has its charm and its usefulness. For one thing it liberates you, temporarily, from the force of habit. Your time, your attention, your surroundings all undergo a transformation which may or may not be to your liking but it certainly kicks you in the inertia-zone and wakes up at least some of your somnolent neurons. I walked more, ate less, got up earlier, went to sleep earlier and thought less about myself than I have in a long time. Things which needed to be done got done and although a feeling of being a remotely-controlled robot occasionally surfaced, there were moments of zen-like discovery and intense engagement for which I am grateful.

My sister, continuing her astonishingly quick recovery, is going back to Rome with her daughter this week. They are together in Paris at the moment where Annie is enjoying her release from the prison, as she calls it, of hospital. I don't believe my presence was a factor in her speedy rehabilitation, she's got her own indomitable will for that. But maybe the old familiar rusty pattern of sisterly irritation takes on movement and meaning when seen out of an unfamiliar window.

Back a little later with report of the Cambridge Women in Comics Event which I attended on Sunday.

THE FRENCH IN MOI?

2009-10-15T19:02:00.004+01:00

I was born in France, my mother, her mother and father and everyone up and down that family tree were French, therefore something in me must be French, part of my bloodstream must taste of vin rouge and some of my brain cells must be tuned to the sound of the French voice. But non, ce n'est pas comme ça. I do not feel French, vin rouge gives me a headache and the sound of French voices speaking all at once sounds to me like chickens trapped in a cattle truck. The voices of Jacques Brel or Leo Ferré or Edith Piaf, that's another kettle of bouillabaise entirely. I can relate to those, absolument, and the same goes for Matisse and several others in the domains of art, literature or philosophy. I have a penchant for French intellectuals' bushy eyebrows and flowing hair (the men) and the women are beautiful, if too professionally made up. But in front of any French television programme, even those intelligent ones in which luminaries from various fields intelligently discuss serious issues, in five minutes I want to run screaming from the room. Or sitting in a café, listening to men standing at the bar talking in highly excited, combative tones about something or other, I feel like a visitor from another planet.

Complaining I can understand. Maybe that's the French gene in me. I am argumentative and a good complainer. Not for me the Anglo-Saxon embarassment about sending badly cooked food back to the kitchen, letting sleeping dogs lie and not rocking the boat. Those dogs had better wake up when I'm around and the boat rocks and rolls.

A fraught trip back to the hospital yesterday and a painful procedure for my sister to endure (is there anything worse then having tubes and instruments poked up your nostrils?) but things are calmer today. The weather has turned very cold and I didn't bring my winter coat.

HEADLESS BISHOPS AT BREAKFAST

2009-10-13T09:15:00.004+01:00

The tables and chairs in the breakfast room at my hotel are wearing skirts, long golden yellow brocaded skirts. It looks like a gathering of headless bishops, an ecclesiastical convention imagined by the Surrealists. Surveying the scene from above is the always open eye of a television, pouring out old Disney cartoons dubbed in French, which makes the quacking and barking and squealing even more hysterical than in the native version. Plastic flowers and candles adorn the skirted tables. Breakfast is good: crusty baguette, croissant, butter, jam, orange juice, coffee.

Taking a shower is a daunting tour de force: if you make the fatal mistake of turning the hot tap on first, boiling water sprays you and the room from cracks in the long black rubber hose attached to the bath. Today the cold water tap fell off. There are no hooks to hang anything. Maybe the French have not yet discovered hooks. But I saw some of those suction ones in the Super U yesterday and if I were staying longer I'd buy a sackful and stick them everywhere.

I love this hotel. The friendly Moroccans who appear to be running it are philosophical about Things That Don't Work As They Should (c'est la vie) and will fix them almost as soon as possible.

My sister is definitely better. Yesterday we went for a walk in the streets around the clinic and today we'll do a longer walk. Mood has improved along with la santé. Please may it continue to be so.

THIS IS WHERE I AM NOW

2009-10-10T23:21:00.008+01:00

Some photos of Clamart, a small town in the region called the Hauts- de- Seine where my sister is sitting, bored and fed up in a convalescence clinic and where I like my hotel room.
CLICK ON PICS FOR MUCH BIGGER VIEW.

MOVED AGAIN

2009-10-09T19:08:00.004+01:00

This morning my sister and I travelled by ambulance out of the big Roussy hospital to a convalescent clinic further out of the Paris periphery, near a small provincial town. The doctor wants her to stay two or three weeks but Annie has never been one to do what she's told or to accept that she is not Superwoman. Her recovery from the operation, thanks to the brilliant skill of the surgeon, has been astonishing but she is still not fit enough to go back to 'normal' life. Arriving at the clinic, there was a bit of a kerfuffle - to use a gentle British euphemism for one hell of a drama - because the lady was not well pleased with the place or with anything, really.

Never mind. Things have calmed down now and I am installed in a cozy room in a small hotel in the town centre, with a WIFI connection that actually works. I like this area much better than where I was before, at least there's human life out there, not just cars. There are shops and restaurants, boulangeries and boucheries and coiffeurs (more coiffeurs than anything else, for some reason - maybe the ladies of the town are particularly hair-conscious). My hotel is one of those typically French romantic petits hotels where things that don't work (like the missing top of the hot water tap) are quite charming and attended to with casual good humour by the proprietor. I much prefer this to mass-produced anonymously efficient tourist-oriented establishments. My room is the kind where one could probably write a book, should one be so inclined. One is not, pour le moment, so inclined.

Pictures of some sort will be forthcoming, soon I hope.

PARIS UPDATE

2009-10-05T18:22:00.011+01:00

Water towers near hospital parking.

The hospital, Institut Gustave Roussy.

Internet connection in my room is unreliable but it seems I may have to move very soon, maybe this week, maybe next. My sister, who is doing extremely well, is going to be transferred to a convalescence clinic which we hope will be in central Paris but all depends on a complicated admin system over which we have no control. I have to find somewhere else to live which will be near her but I can't even start looking until the hospital tells me when and where she's going. Because I'm too tense to write anything interesting, I'll post some photos I took of my current surroundings. Back soon, hopefully with better visuals and verbals.

The self-catering room where I'm living.

From Paris

2009-10-02T23:52:00.006+01:00

Well, not really Paris. More like the back of beyond, a sub-urb, a soulless banlieu where cars, presumably driven by humans, have taken over what used to be landscape and little shops, cafes, people-ish things. Instead there are motorways, roundabouts, traffic lights, bridges under which hapless pedestrians (people actually walking) risk life and limb to cross to yet another traffic island and thence make their weary way to....the Super Market! The only place for miles where something for supper may be found though it is fairly sure to consist mainly of additives. I'm only slightly exaggerating.

Enough. I'll write less robotically in a couple of days. I've finally managed to get an internet connection. My sister is more or less okay: the operation was a success in removing the malignant intruder but has left her like a boxer after a particularly brutal fight where the other guy won. Still her wondrous fighting spirit remains undaunted. Praise the Lord and the surgeon and Annie.

Images are some I've been mousing as a kind of journal while practicing being without my beloved graphic tablet.

TECHNICAL REPORT

2009-09-27T12:03:00.001+01:00

Have been struggling for the past few days to make my new MacBook behave exactly the same way as my familiar and friendly desktop iMac but this is beyond the realm of possibility. The new baby has its own personality and refuses to be a clone. There's also my ignorance of all things laptoppish and WIFI-ish. To make a very long boring story short, it looks like the only way I'll be able to blog from Paris will be on my my mirror blog (assuming I'll succeed in getting a connection) and not here in your familiar Blaugustine page. No problem if you're already reading me on Blogger. Anyhow, wish me technical success and many thanks for all kind messages regarding my sister's op.

A bientôt.

DON'T MIND THE GAP

2009-09-24T18:52:00.002+01:00

DON'T MIND THE GAP

Friends, I'm very sorry for my long absence from internetting. I have been slaving, struggling, doing-my-usual-procrastinating, over a task with a deadline of tomorrow. Well, I finished and delivered it yesterday, all out of breath, and what do you know? The deadline's been pushed forward nearly a month. So I could have procrastinated even longer. Never mind, at least I can gloat about achieving something ahead of time.

I'm afraid there may be another gap because I have to go away on Sept.28th for about three weeks. I'll have internet access so maybe I'll be able to add more installments to La Vie en Rosé while I'm away. My sister is having a serious operation in Paris and will have to stay in hospital for about 15 days afterwards and I want to be near her during that time.

I am moving the Vie en Rosé to its own section so that I can carry on blogging about other things over here and so that anyone who hasn't kept up with the story can start from the beginning. I've put the chapters in consecutive order so I'm afraid you have to scroll down to the bottom in order to see the latest.

Hang in there, I'll be back soon. When I get to grips with WIFI which, believe it or not, I haven't used before, I will report on what's happening in and around me and maybe even manage to upload some pictures.Gotta go and do some techy stuff now, transferring files to laptop. See you in Paris.

La Vie en Rosé: PART ELEVEN

2009-08-30T23:57:00.004+01:00

Photo of Ferdinand Cheval and his wheelbarrow from here . Drawing of Susan by NdA.

Walking home, lost in her thoughts, Susan tripped on a broken bottle dropped on the road by a drunken driver's drunken passenger. Cursing at the top of her lungs the selfish human race, cars, motorists, country roads, drunks, her own clumsiness, she carefully picked up the offending object and looked for a safe place to dispose of it. Behind the boarded-up factory an open pit had gradually become filled with the village's detritus. Susan read the label remaining on the jagged lower half of the bottle before flinging it onto the sad, chaotic pile of consumer rejects.

"Ha! Chateau Le Raz rosé!" she said, "Serves me right. Hair of the dog!"

The answering machine was blinking in her study but Susan ignored it. She switched on the computer and began searching for Facteur Cheval. As the the postman's life story appeared on the screen, she dabbed at her skinned knee with disinfectant and began reading, clicking on one link after another until all the blanks in her imagination had been filled in by the astonishing facts. It was only while watching a video tour of the Palais Idéal that she listened to George's message.

"I'm sitting in the airport being stared at by beautiful women. But don't worry, darling, I'm wearing my burqa. I want a pinstriped one, okay? If you behave yourself I'll call you from New York."

Susan smiled, feeling strangely detached and very tired. She went upstairs, got into bed and fell asleep almost immediately. She dreamt about a man pushing a wheelbarrow filled with pink bottles. The man looked like Père Lafitte, then like George, then it wasn't a man but Susan herself.

La Vie en Rosé: PART TEN

2009-08-24T17:03:00.000+01:00

Sorry for the long gaps between installments, life and other things demand my attention. I'm afraid there may be a longer gap before Part Eleven appears as I must finish some urgent work. But please don't go away. As well as a beginning and a middle, this story will also, in due course, have an ending.

La Vie en Rosé PART TEN (illustration coming shortly)

Torn between regret at having brought a stranger into his secret oasis and the impulse to share it, Lafitte hesitated. Susan’s eager attentivenesss touched him and suddenly he realised that his mother was the last person he had spoken to about things close to his heart and by that time, she could only smile and nod in the absent way of those who are already out of life's reach. He stood up, coughed to clear his throat which felt tight and prickly, and began speaking as if he were in his pulpit, delivering the Sunday homily.

“Since I was a young boy, I read in a book about people who did fantastique exploits. Comme ça. For no reason. In this book I learn about le facteur Cheval, a simple postman in the village of Hauterive. One day in 1879, during his walk to deliver the letters, he begins to collect stones. First he takes them in his pockets, later he carries them in a basket and then in a brouette – how you say?”

“A wheelbarrow.” Susan leaned forward, absorbed.

“Walking more than 30 kilometres every day Ferdinand Cheval collects small and big stones and begins to build something. Something éxtraordinaire. A castle, a palace, le Palais Idéal. He constructs this miracle completely alone, sometimes by the light of an oil lamp in the night. It takes him thirty-three years.“

Père Lafitte, hands behind his back, gazed up at the clouds moving in slow motion across the cerulean blue sky.

“What does it look like, the palace? You’ve been there?“

“No, I have not been there. I do not need to go there. It is enough for me to know that Ferdinand Cheval existed and that he did this. Vous voyez, Madame, it is possible to live one’s life in the enchantment of a magnificent no sense. Le Bon Dieu, to some people, it makes no sense. But I became a priest for the same reason le facteur Cheval built his Palais Idéal. Comme ça.”

“And when you are here, in your garden, you feel what le facteur Cheval felt.” Oh yes! Susan thought, I too know about magnificent no sense.

The unfamiliar experience of talking about himself had exhausted Lafitte and he was now confronted with another unfamiliarity: l’anglaise had instantly grasped something which he had never mentioned to anyone. In a rush of enthusiasm he continued.

“Oui, c’est ça! When I come here I dream about what I would build. In my mind I have constructed many beautiful things, so many! But en réalité, I will never be like Ferdinand Cheval. I will not carry the stones.”

“But.... you could…………”

Lafitte interrupted firmly: “Please! I do not need to make dreams real. I love my Palais Idéal as it is.”

He held out his hand which Susan grasped in both of hers. “I must go back to my church now. You can stay here a while longer if you wish. You may come back when you like. But I ask you, s’il vous plaît, do not speak to people of this place. Vous comprenez?”

“Mon Père, don’t worry, I will carry this treasure close to my heart. You have no idea what a gift you’ve given me today. Merci beaucoup and beaucoup encore." Susan followed the priest out through the opening in the green wall. "Now I will go home and get to know Monsieur the postman.”

La Vie en Rosé: PART NINE

2009-08-14T23:57:00.007+01:00

The narrow dirt track was bordered by open fields on one side and a speckled curtain of trees and hedges on the other. The dregs of last night's alcohol still lingering in Susan's blood had made her legs sluggish and she struggled to keep up with Lafitte's brisk pace. He led the way, pushing his bike before him and eventually stopped in front of a gap in the green curtain. He lifted the latch of a rusty iron gate and held it open, waiting for Susan to enter.

"Voilà, c'est ici."

"It's wonderful! C'est merveilleux!" Susan said, stepping gratefully into the cooler air and dappled shade of a wood.

"My mother inherited it from her father. They say he was a nobleman, un Marquis. They say she was his fille naturelle - not légitime? " Lafitte shrugged. "I don't know what is true. It does not matter to me. She never knew what to do with the gift but she loved it. Before she died she told me: C'est à toi. It is yours."

Susan sensed that the priest did not want commentary or questions and this suited her mood perfectly. She followed him down a well-trodden mossy path snaking between the trees, ending at what appeared to be a solid green wall. On closer inspection it proved to be a fence, a strong lattice of branches deftly woven together and thickly covered with climbing vines. Lafitte leaned against a section of the wall and pushed at it lightly with his hands. A door opened with a burst of sunlight, revealing a magical tableau: a clearing - a large, grassy, almost circular open space, protected on all sides by sheltering trees and bushes. At the far end, a pond sparkled, birds skimming and swooping around it.

The beauty and tranquility of the scene gripped Susan like a pain. She walked over to one of the smooth flat rocks which dented the gently undulating carpet of grass and sat down, trying to hold back inexplicable tears. Lafitte rested his bike against a tree and stood perfectly still, his eyes closed as if in prayer.

"The first time I saw this place I sat down on one of those rocks and I cried. Even now, every time, every day, it is like.....Je ne sais pas." He opened his hands in that Gallic gesture which can mean helplessness or 'words are inadequate.' "Vous comprenez?"

Susan looked at the priest with an expression that was almost reverence. "Oui, je comprends. And I don't know how to thank you for letting me see this extraordinary spot. I'm sure you don't want many people to find it."

"C'est vrai. Je suis très égoiste. I am very selfish. But perhaps le bon Dieu gave me this space to speak with him, to dream." Moving slowly, as if sleepwalking, Lafitte sat down on a rock near the pond. He seemed to accept Susan's presence yet to be simultaneously oblivious to it. After a long silence broken only by bird and insect sounds, he leaned forward on his elbows and addressed her in an enthusiastic, boyish tone.

"You have heard about Le Facteur Cheval?"

Susan smiled. "The postman horse? The horse postman? The postman on a horse? No, I'm afraid I haven't."

"He is very famous. Ferdinand Cheval. You can find him on your inter nette - what you say? Gogle." Lafitte rose to his feet, suddenly severe. "I must be getting back now. I'm sure you have things to do too, Madame."

"Mon Père, we Brits are always making jokes! I didn't mean to offend you," Susan pleaded. "Please tell me about Facteur Cheval. I'd really like to know." Lafitte gave her a sidelong glance to check her sincerity then sat down again with a sigh.

BIRTHDAY BOOK

2009-08-06T16:46:00.012+01:00

(We temporarily interrupt La Vie en Rosé to bring you Natalie's birthday, one day in advance.)

August 7, 2009 - BIRTHDAY BOOK

If I were to write one page
for every year of my life (UPDATE: I meant to say year in the video too)
that would be a very short book
even if I live to be a hundred.

A hundred pages! That's not a novel.
Maybe a novella
a long short story
or a slim volume of poetry.
Not enough for me.

To make a proper heavy book
a door-stopper
I'd need a lot of illustrations
even for those pages I can't remember
and those which must remain
silent, unwritten.

And where are all the people?
All those who took the pictures?
Who made me smile
or frown
or cry?

Those who shaped me.
Without them
who am I?

MORE

La Vie en Rosé: PART EIGHT

2009-07-27T23:59:00.004+01:00

As the door slammed shut, Susan's hand loosened on the heavy frying pan, tipping its perfectly cooked yellow guts onto the kitchen floor. The sight of the abandoned scrambled eggs scattered over the red tiles filled her with unbearable sadness. She began to cry. She desperately wanted to run after George, stop him from leaving, make love to him and, just as desperately, also wanted to kill him.

The desire for a drink took possession of Susan with such force that she found herself standing in the pantry reaching for a bottle of red as if she were remotely controlled. Floating above the gentle chirrup of early morning birdsong a harsh and monotonous sound suddenly erupted into her consciousness: a dog barking - an idiotic bark barkbark, pause, bark barkbark, pause.

Susan stood still, listening intently, remembering as if it had been a dream a sepia-stained kitchen and the priest's calm, reassuring silence. She put the wine bottle back on its shelf. Upstairs she dressed quickly in jeans and trainers, took her rucksack and sun hat off the hook. At the front door she hesitated for a moment, staring at her car. She wished the car would become invisible and reappear only when absolutely needed. In London she had walked rather than take any form of transport but here, out in the country, absurdly, she was always driving. Now she would walk, just walk and walk. There were intriguing side roads she had never explored.

* * *

(Which do you like better of the two versions of the illustration below? I can't decide.)

Père Lafitte on his bicycle, hair and cassock flowing in the wind, looked like some strange black bird, especially when he took both hands off the handlebars, stretching his arms out like wings as he coasted downhill, exhilarated. Every morning after mass he would get on his bike and pedal purposefully, always taking the same route along the winding country lanes. When parish duties prevented a morning ride, he would find time for it in the evening. He could not let a day go by, whatever the season, without a visit to to his own private paradise.

The villagers were used to le Père sur son vélo whizzing past, so intent on his mission that he would forget to greet them. They shrugged, muttering about his eccentricity. Everyone knew about his mother's legacy, that piece of land he was so attached to. Some had tried to buy it from him and been brusquely rejected. Questions about what, if anything, he intended to do with it were also severely brushed aside. Le terrain du Père Lafitte came up in village gossip as regularly as the tide and just as regularly receded.

At first Lafitte didn't recognise Susan. She was coming down the road just as he was about to turn into the narrow track leading to his property and her features were blurred by the shade of her straw hat. When she saw him a wide smile broke over her face. To his surprise, he found that he was pleased to see her.

"It's fate," she said, "You're exactly the person I wanted to run into this morning."

"Bonjour Madame, you are well today?" He dismounted and stood awkwardly leaning on his bike.

"Je suis Suzanne, Père Lafitte, not Madame, and I'm much better today. I'm sorry for my behaviour last night, whatever it was. I can't quite remember!" She laughed. "Where are you off to if I may ask?"

The furious debate in Lafitte's mind was quickly resolved. "I am visiting mon terrain. Would you like to see it?"

"There is nothing I would like more, mon Père."

La Vie en Rosé: PART SEVEN

2009-07-23T23:29:00.004+01:00

Susan awoke to the sounds of breakfast-making, sounds which sent the unmistakeable message up the stairs and into her ears: "Why aren't you doing this for me?" Dimly through the hangover blur she remembered that George was leaving for America today. One of those lucrative lecture tours she had become expert at setting up for him. Susan sighed, rolled out of bed and pulled on a tee shirt.

In the kitchen, George was drinking coffee and eating toast.

"Do you want scrambled eggs with or without Alka Seltzer?" he said, giving her his best smile, the melt-in-your-heart smile.

Susan began breaking eggs into a bowl, glancing sideways at George. Freshly shaved and showered, carefully-casually dressed, he looked alert and mischievous, the look he always had when going off on another adventure. Why did he have to be so damned attractive?

"Why can't there be burkas for men?" she said, "For women to put on their men when they go out. So that other women can't lust after them."

"That's a brilliant idea! Put Your Husband In A Burka And Save Your Marriage. Brilliant! Work it out while I'm away. Make some designs. We'll start a business." He noted the weariness in Susan's face. "I'm serious, Susan: do it!"

"Here we go. Always giving me a project when you're about to leave so you won't feel guilty. Not that you ever feel guilty."

George pushed his chair back, making a harsh screeching sound on the tiles. "I'll have breakfast at the airport. Keep this up and I won't come back." He picked up his suitcase which was ready and waiting in the hall. Susan moved towards him, still holding the frying pan. "Wait! Eat your eggs at least!"

George opened the door and walked out into the misty morning without a backward glance. The taxi driver, Henri Bazaine, was already waiting for him at the bottom of the dirt track leading to the house. The airport was almost two hours' drive away and Monsieur Georges was a generous tipper so Henri made sure he was always on time and that his old Renault was clean and shiny. Besides, he liked talking to the famous writer, perhaps one day he would write about Henri.

"Bonjour Monsieur, vous allez bien?"

Instead of sitting next to the driver as usual, George got into the back of the car. He didn't really want to sleep but neither did he feel like chatting. "Bonjour Henri. Oui, ça va mais je suis fatigué. I'll sleep for a bit, if you don't mind."

"But of course Mister Georges! I will be quiet as a pin drop." Henri was proud of his English, picked up over the years from the Anglo expats and summer tourists.

George smiled at Henri's turn of phrase. Mistakes were so much more interesting than correctness. He leaned back and closed his eyes. A cloying smell of rose-scented air freshener filled the car although the windows were open. Henri believed in air freshener and in all other synthetic miracles and nothing could shake his faith. George felt a wave of irritation rising from his chest into his head. If Susan was going to start drinking again everything would go haywire, the order she had brought into his haphazard life would disintegrate. Why was she focusing so relentlessly on his sexual habits? George hated the word promiscuous: he simply took what life generously offered him. And why the hell not? Susan demanded 'honesty'. But what purpose could disclosure possibly serve? The details - who, where, when, how? Pointlessly cruel honesty. George's denials were a form of courtesy, protecting Susan's feelings. So-called open marriage was a sham, a fiction, and polygamy would be unutterably boringly predictable. The charm of affairs was that you never knew if or when or where one might happen and whether or not you would give in to temptation. The decision to marry or live with someone was sufficient commitment and little trips down interesting side-roads didn't mean you were leaving home or had any desire to leave home. Susan had always understood this but since their move to France she had begun to play the jealous wife and he couldn't bear it. "The only kind of fidelity I understand," George thought," Is fidelity to one's work. No one can tempt me away from the muse."

"Henri, are you faithful to your wife?"

"Ah Monsieur! I am the most faithful type, me. Mais c'est les femmes who do not be true. My wife she trumped me with another man. Now I have another wife mais je ne la trust pas non plus."

George laughed, closing his eyes again. He was getting impatient to be in the air, on his way.

La Vie en Rosé: PART SIX

2009-07-11T19:29:00.003+01:00

"I like Lafitte. He's completely free from bullshit." Susan was talking to herself, caressed by a warm breeze. "Rare in anybody but in a priest, it's a bloody miracle. I should have got to know him sooner."

The way home was through the village and then twenty minutes down a pot-holed road with a boarded-up tile factory and a couple of abandoned farms as the only scenic attractions. When they decided to move to France, minimal traffic was the first item on George and Susan's list. All the picturesque places shown to them by over-excited estate agents could only be accessed in summer if you were willing to spend hours sitting nose to tail in traffic queues longer than those in London. So they went off on their own, driving randomly around the country, drinking a lot of wine and following hunches until, eventually, they found La Rive and an unremarkable house with potential to become their home.

Susan shivered, one of those sudden, mysterious shivers not caused by the weather but by some inner climate change. George. She did not believe in love at first sight and it was not love when she first laid eyes on him. Only a certainty that all the affairs and occupations which had crowded her life until then were merely rehearsals and that here, at last, was the role she was meant to play. No question, no hesitation. Whoosh! Her past was swept off the map and the future was clear: George. She had no illusions. He was so transparent you knew immediately that he was trouble. No matter. He was the only unambiguous decision she had ever made. And decisive she became. Susan seduced him slowly, trusting her instincts, ignoring all obstacles, especially those designed by George to make her fail. " I'm not your man, " he'd say repeatedly. But year by year, denial after denial, he grew to depend on her. Susan was making an adequate living as a free-lance proof-reader and typist and he had come to her recommended by a friend. George was well-enough established among the cognoscenti but he was no literary superstar and too disorganised to go after superstardom, though he craved it. Susan, he discovered, was an excellent organiser and it was foolish to keep on resisting when she was so eager to take on the task of ensuring his immortality, as if her own life depended on it.

* * *

By the time George got home from the party Susan was asleep. "You could have told me you were leaving," he said, getting into bed, "I looked all over for you."

"No you fucking didn't. You were busy entertaining Mrs. Morrison."

"Look,' George said, turning away and closing his eyes, " If you want to go back on the booze, that's your choice, Susan. But I'm not going down that road of paranoia with you."