journal of a writing man

Still here, still well, still vacillating between the end of one career (writing) and the start of another (painting).

Meantime, I’ve been hiding indoors from the almost continuous 40 days and 40 nights of St Swithin’s rain, watching old TV programmes on the Internet and getting restless, slowly but surely.

My next door neighbour tells me that when her husband retired he sat at home for three months or so watching TV then got up and bought himself a set of golf clubs, signed up at the local club, and has been an ardent and steady member ever since.  How laudable.

Me, I have a new easel, a set of oil paints, and a stack of canvasses all ready to go.  Getting close, but don’t push me.

Graham, needing no pushing, has decorated and recarpeted two bedrooms and, in addition, has made over my study, fitting new shelves and making space for the easel and a painting station.  Very smart, but just a bit echo-filled just now.

And that brings us up to date.  Not a lot happening round here, as you may have guessed.

Keep safe.

I think I’ve restored the look and the sidebar of this new theme now.  Please let me know if there’s anything missing or too different.

It seems that WordPress had dropped the ‘Cutline’ theme I chose when I set the journal up and have substituted a new/updated one — ‘Coraline’.  I understand that they did post a warning somewhere but I failed to see it.  I was probably sitting looking out at the rain at the time.

What’s happening here?  Not a lot.  Graham’s spending the day over at his mother’s and I’m beginning to think I ought to take my phones and go for a short stroll while the weather is dry/fine.  Why take the phones?  Because if I don’t then the moment I get out of earshot he’ll ring to tell me to motor over and fetch him

Quantum, that is.

I just now discovered that WordPress or something has dropped my ‘theme’ (that’s the thing that controls the appearance on the page) and substituted this one.  Or something.  I’ll see what I can do to restore order to the page and to the sidebar as soon as I can.  Tomorrow, probably.

It rained practically all day today and we both of us decided to batten down the hatches and settle in to enjoy it.  We had to make a quick weekend provisioning trip to Sainsbury’s but that seemed somehow only to provide a soft, melancholy background to the day.  I decided, to keep in the spirit of the thing, to upgrade the weekly wine purchase to six bottles of a decent French sauvignon.  Sometimes you just have to open the purse a little wider in the interests of general cheer.

So, after fish’n'chips this evening and the last of the cheap dry white we have a deliciousness of French plonk to see us through to Monday.  I haven’t checked the weather forecast.  It’s not been overly reliable this past week or so and there seems little point in getting all worked up about it.  Even so, six bottles ought to see us through.

After dancing the day away yesterday and the day before, I woke with a song this morning.  Several songs.  Old Bebe Daniels numbers, including one of my favourites:

Imagination is silly
You go around willy-nilly
For example I go around wanting you.
And yet I can’t imagine that you want me too.

Ah.  Isn’t that nice?  Mind you, my all-time favourite is ‘I can’t love you any more’:

Somewhere around mid-day Graham urged me to stop singing.  Hey ho.  You can’t have everything.

Great fun and much hilarity today as Graham put our pressure washer to the task of cleaning twenty-five years of slime off the paths and from the bottom of the walls on the side and back of the house.  He did a splendid job, of course, and found it all terribly amusing.  Boy oh boy, though, did he get wet!

Me, I sat at the easel for a while, adjusted the height a little more to my liking, and made a pretend pass or two of a dry bristle brush on the surface.  Didn’t feel like spoiling it, though, so I left the paint in the tube.

This evening, over dinner, we started in on the last box of Stargate SG-1 DVDs, enjoying the space battles between the Orai (sp?) and the rest of the clan, including a newly-risen Atlantis way off in the Pegasus galaxy.

It’s a bit of wrench, pulling your brain back from outer space, especially when you’ve had both Shephard and Cameron strutting their stuff in the same testosterone-laden episode.  Such fun.

Back on earth I continue my memory link back fifty years or so to the greasy old dance halls of the period when young men would put a final touch to their well-combed and Brylcreemed hair arrangement and walk over to the primped up little ladies against one wall, flowers every one, and pop out the good old line:  “You dancin’?”  In a Liverpudlian accent of course.

It was a good opening line.  Got used in the opening theme song of the TV “Liver Birds” series, somewhere between then and the final episode.  TV isn’t made like that anymore.  They may not have had stargates back then, but the laughs were better, somehow.  Leastways, the way I remember them they were.

And now it’s crept up to a little past bedtime and we have to go shopping tomorrow.  Such fun.