Odd, unsettled...

It's an odd patch.  I get bad news, I reel, I find my feet again, I realise that until I get more facts I can't make any decisions or plans, and I am left in limbo.  I won't get more facts until this Thursday at the earliest. 

At least it isn't my health, or that of anyone close to me.  

Meanwhile the weather veers between dramatic late autumnal sunshine and dramatic thick mists and raw chill.  The ground is thick with fallen leaves now, but even now there are still many more clinging on to the trees, for we still have not yet had a single frost, or a single gale. I am beginning to allow myself the hope that the weather for my winter break in Cornwall may be okay.  It's only ten days' time before I go now.

In the last week I have, besides work, been doing some more writing, had an afternoon birdwatching and sketching at the Wetland Centre, baked chocolate orange sultana muffins, had supper with a friend, been to "The Sleeping Beauty" (Marianela Nuñez, absolutely wonderful again as Aurora), sung (badly) in the first Christmas Choir practice and been on a Tree Identification training walk.  I've been busy, and happy.  But I hate this business of being in limbo.  It's like being in the dentist's waiting room, only worse by at least an order of magnitude.  Even if in the end the news is bad, I'd rather know, and at least be able to plan for it...

Autumn beauty

What a beautiful creature the humble moorhen is. I spent yesterday afternoon at the London Wetland Centre in Barnes. It was a glorious autumn day, with a perfect blue sky and golden, slanting sunlioght pouring down on the lakes and marshes and the shimmering purple and gold of the reedbeds. I didn't see anything rare, but I didn't care (I'm not much of a twitcher, though I do like spotting the odd bittern in the winter). There were lots of beautiful native and migrant birds - teal, wigeon and shoveller ducks, Canada and greylag geese, mute swans, lapwings, and hundreds of coots and moorhens. Seen close-to, the common moorhen is an exquisite bird, sleek and slender in its quakerly black and white plumage, with that wonderful ruby-red bill and front, and huge, wavy-looking green feet. (The photo is not mine, I'm afraid, but was pinched off a website called Birds of Oklahoma - it is the same species as we get in the UK, though, and it's a lovely pic).

Visiting the Wetland Centre always gives me a touch of heartache for the Kent marshes near where I used to live; Oare, Reculver, Seasalter, Sandwich Bay, and the huge skies and sweeping horizons of Romney Marsh. If I were a millionaire (unlikely, but still...), I'd buy a house on Romney Marsh, and have those big skies all about me for the rest of my life...

Busy busy bee...

...that's me at the moment. Just spent my lunch break answering work 'phone calls because my colleagues were already too busy answering other calls. And now my lunch break is over and I still haven't reviewed "Cinderella" (magical) or written about my lovely Sunday afternoon drawing waterfowl at the London Wetland Centre... or my tomato seedlings... or the weather... or my ultrasound results.

All in good time. I hope.

More beauty (& without lechery this time)

One of my great passions is drawing from nature; birds, animals, plants, and of course people. I often take a sketchbook to the London Wetland Centre(WWT) in Barnes and draw the waterfowl - that's where this goose and coot were drawn, I think...

Many of the birds at the WWT are quite tame and are unconcerned by my standing staring at them and drawing. Others, the wild birds, I have to draw through binoculars (I don't just use them for ogling men at the ballet!). But the challenge of drawing a living subject, something animated, moving, and getting on with his/her/its life, is always a delight. The orchestral musicians of the Philharmonia, and the handsome Maestro waving his arms; people on the tube; the wildfowl at the WWT... It is always a joy to draw.

Years ago in Granada I spent almost the whole of the fiesta of Las Cruces drawing the dancers in the streets. It was heaven; sunshine, music, happy people dancing sevillanas and boleros, the streets and squares all decorated and chiringuitos selling cold beers, cold cola, manzanilla and pinchos; and me drawing like a madwoman.

Please, dear gods, let me get enough use of my hand back - soon - to write and draw again. It is nine days today till I get the cast off. Yes, I am counting.

Good things - list for the day

Good things about this time of year; because I have to remind myself, being essentially a spring creature and not an autumn and winter one.

Russet apples. Picasso painted them, I eat them. Their strange, furry-looking skins and rich-flavoured, firm flesh are a joy of the season. Like the wonderful Discovery and Worcester Pearmain, they are strictly seasonal and are one of my reasons for continuing to live in the UK. Seriously – British apples are a reason to live here. Try Spanish apples if you don’t believe me.

Autumn leaves. Do I need to say more? Sheer beauty, and all the evanescence of spring with the added poignancy of fading and ending instead of new life…

Booking tickets. I’m partway through a binge of bookings for concerts and ballet and opera for the winter. As the weather gets colder and the days get darker, at least I have lots of goodies to look forward to, from Vieux Farka Touré, to two new pieces premiering at the Royal Ballet,
to this
to Stuart Skelton singing Boris in “Katya Kabanova” (can’t wait, can’t wait; have to wait, bah!).

Conifer pollen. I used to have dreadful hayfever in my twenties but it eased off gradually as the years went on, and by the time I started working at Kew it was a thing of the past. At this time of year a lot of coniferous trees are flowering, and if, like today, it is rainy (which is what they need, as it is via the action of raindrops that their flowers are pollinated), the paths and pavements around here are speckled and streaked with the pale gold dust of fallen pollen. It reminds me of the line in Seferis’ “A Word for Summer” – “A few pine needles left after the rains/Raggedly strewn, and red like tattered nets” – only with blonde pollen not rusty needles. As the rest of the northern hemisphere’s plant world thinks “Time to shut up shop for the winter”, conifers are going “It’s that time of year again – hey, let’s make babies!” On windy days the pollen dances off the trees in clouds, like millions of tiny blonde sprites leaping together into flight.

Evenings when the muse is tired, watching movies on my new dvd player. I tidied up my dvd collection last night, sorting it into feature films, opera and concerts, and ballet... In the process, whetting my appetite for a good wallow in all three categories. Next rainy evening, I think I might settle down to "Swan Lake", or possibly "The Devil's Backbone", or possibly "The Cunning Little Vixen" (which I have bought a new copy of since my old one has vanished into the unknown tender hands of someone else who likes Janacek...

Migratory birds. Redwings. Beautful geese flying in from the artic. Chilly afternoons at the London Wetland centre blowing on my numbed fingers, trying to draw Great Crested Grebes in their stark, spare winter plumage.

Winter walks in the arboretum here at Kew, listening to robins singing and nuthatches and goldcrests and long-tailed titmice trilling their signal calls, and soaking up the bleak, misty, dripping atmosphere under the dark pines.

Better...

I now have eight tiny weeny baby tomato seedlings through – they are about five millimetres high and look like bits of green thread. It’s so hard to believe that actual whole tomatoes will come eventually from plants so miraculously small and delicate…

I had a good weekend; went to the Wetland Centre in Barnes to sketch birds and enjoy the sunshine (and a disgracefully indulgent lunch out); did some gardening; did some sewing; got on with the typing up and revising of “Ramundi’s sisters” and wrote a big chunk of “Café Tano” (the last was done under the influence, but this is actually quite appropriate as the narrator is in a fairly weird state of mind and is recounting a vision). Also made some more headway on “Fortitude” but as this is currently onto a prolonged conversation taking place between two people who are rather awkward with one another, it is proceeding rather awkwardly! However I feel I achieved a good deal – and I even got an early night last night.