Wednesday again already? maybe not

Many appreciations to Erin at A Dress a Day for this picture. She clearly has her finger on the pulse!

I'm not sure whether this would really count as an Elegantly Dressed Wednesday offering. I do in fact feel very much as if it is Wednesday today - but, while the knitting itself is very elegant in both conception and execution, and the sock monkeys are themselves classic in every way (except perhaps for their lack of limbs and bodies - but are those perhaps hidden on the inside of the dress?) there is nonetheless something about her hair...

still crzay after all these years

Well, it is depressingly on the rise - and apparently one of my kids saw some teenage chavs throwing stones at a couple of little Hassidic kids (they let them out alone SO young! And incidentally I find that very sweet, if alarming) - but there is at least literary justice, of a sort: on the wall outside my building someone has scrawled in black marker pen: "Jewish idoits".

elegantly dressed Wednesday, and beyond!

How funny! Quink and I have been doing the same thing. It must be the autumn air creeping on us. I spent hours this evening, when I should have been catching up with Albert Square or reading, or at least cleaning the kitchen, instead voraciously reading the internet, in search of the new. Eleven hours in front of a screen today, I think.

Inspired by his wanderings, Quink has instituted - probably fifty yards from where I'm sitting - a fiendishly civilised custom I'm eager to participate in. 'Elegantly Dressed Wednesday' is right up Ms B's street. All I need is a picture of someone dressed elegantly to celebrate the middle of the week. I'll begin right now, with an image that somehow sums up my Baroque existence in the office. (I'm not usually quite this dressed, but I will say that today I wore three little leopard-print bangles...) Also, I wanted his little logo, see right.

The site I was most deeply mired in this evening is The Friday Project, a genius endeavour it's hard to believe no one ever thought of before. Well, no one with the right contacts and expertise. Some of their blogs are scary - even scarier than Scaryduck. Manchester-based Elizabeth Baines is writing about writing, and about clothes, which is very fitting (geddit?!?!) for a Wednesday of elegance.

Random Acts of Reality is compulsive reading, and I always keep up with Dave Hill's Temperama. (Damn, Hackney has some good writers in it!) But in this tiny world - as Quink has so rightly pointed out - so, probably, do you.

Ealier today, indeed, the Fiction Bitch (also hungry for sensation) had linked to Scott Pack of the Friday Project, whose blog "Me and My Big Mouth" started me off earlier, over my pasta - and to The Age of Uncertainty. Now, speaking of tiny worlds, this blog features a really scary series of photographs of models of the cosmos. Look, and quake in your gold-strap sandals. (And then go find some boots: it's cold.)

the country

Well, Ms B has finally, three days in, managed to get onto the internet at Southwold library, which had of course been close for the bank holiday weekend. But there is no facility here for doing anything other than surfing, as if no one had any work to do; so I can't upload any of my various deathless writings off my poor baroque little USB stick till I get back to the 21st century. And the enter button here doesn't work, so new paragraphs are but a dream. Don't even get me started.

I do love to be beside the seaside

Ms Rational Self-Determinism’s younger child, the one who resembles the Artful Dodger, was ill today: she reckons it was the effect of too much fresh sea air on his little Hackney lungs. Duly, he rested.

When that palled, and between bouts of headache and general malaise, the suggestion was mooted of a trip to the swings before dinner. At this the 12-year-old (black leather wristbands, earrings, silver skull rings and all) moans from the couch: “Why do you always make us go out and play? It’s our holiday too, you know!”

But at least he’s been gainfully employed, plotting out in a Black ‘n’ Red notebook the first 19 chapters of his novel, about a posh restaurateur who goes mad and murders all his friends and eventually his staff, finding ever more ingenious ways to hide the bodies – even posing them as customers in his restaurant – before the police burst in, BBC-style, led by someone sinister like Patrick Malahide.

Okay, so the casting is my touch – it’s my holiday too, you know!

it’s a jolly holiday

Ms Baroque has just set off for three rather ill-clad days (don’t say I’m not pushing the boat out) to sleep on the floor of my best friend, Ms Rational Self-Determinism, ’s holiday flat in Suffolk. It’s Southwold; she couldn’t afford a house. The other day she rang to say:” “I just want to warn you, this is a small place. The couch is small.” Oh. How small? “Well… you might want to put the sofa cushions on the floor and sort of, construct, a bed… and you’ll need to bring towels.”

So off I trot, with the (mercifully double) blow-up mattress of my kind new work colleague, plus a cunning little pump, which take up the whole half of my suitcase where the shoes would have been. The books are now all along the front, which made said case fall over mightily on the 149 going through Dalston (Lane of Huge Ladies, with Even Huger Shopping Bags; they just stepped round it without a glance at Ms B).

As I was deliberating earlier over the tiny space left for all my bare essentials (laptop charger, mobile charger, iPod charger, camera charger, dashing hero on charger – no, scrap that one) the phone rang: one of the many friends I thought had fallen off the planet, she’d been away so long.

Breathlessly she tells me how she has totally messed up any chance of our idea of meeting for a coffee (she doesn’t know about my suitcase). Last night, home for the first time in over a week, she overflowed the bath, “which of course made all the shelves fall down in the kitchen” – “I suppose really I’m lucky the ceiling didn’t fall in”, she says – “and this morning the bathroom was still soggy. I only wanted a bath…” She’s just come in from ten days in Bristol having quality time with her 80-plus dad. “It’s just like toddlers all over again,” she sighs; “if you don’t get their meal to them at exactly the right time – ! And every time I’d got him happy the kids started playing up. I’m totally exhausted.”

But then she tells me that last night she had the best time! She rode all the way to Ladbroke Grove on the back of someone’s brand-new motorcycle! My kid was playing up; I lost the drift of whose bike it was. But it was so fun!

Now, my friend needs some fun, so I’m very happy. So I go, well, never mind about the coffee, because I’ve got the cleaner here and I’m only just packing and I have to be at Liverpool Street in three hours, and the laundry’s in, and and and. I tell her about the blow-up mattress. “Don’t even talk about it!” she cries in agitation. “Does yours have a hole in it? Mine deflated in the night, every morning it was flat. So I’ve spent ten solid nights on this so-called ‘inflatable sleeping mat’ which I swear has a maximum depth of half an inch at MOST.”

I say, well that would totally do my back in. “It HAS done my back in! My back is wrecked! And I couldn’t sleep because my hips were hurting so much, I spent every night trying to change position, tossing and turning on half an inch of… rubbery air... And my right leg doesn’t even work any more.”

Sorry to say, here I laughed. She goes on, “It was almost impossible getting on and off that motorcycle!”

This reminds me that another friend told me yesterday about her family’s recent camping holiday. Ms B’s memories of waking in a dew-bedecked private field at 6am in remote Vermont are, of course, no preparation for the English Family Campsite Experience. I started rhapsodising about the crickets, the mountain mist rolling around the trees, and the freezing lake just waiting for the pre-coffee Big Splash - and the diner in the next village stocked with stacks of blueberry pancakes… But no! No one in Friend Two’s campsite got any sleep, on account of a certain crying baby that woke up every morning at 5, two tents away… “It’s not even as if it were crying in the next room,” she reports. “There aren’t any walls.”

art again: the red wedge

It seems a bit unsung, at least in the corridors I've been skulking along lately; but the Tate rehang is quite wonderful. The upside-down piano is indeed gone for the moment, but it was never my absolute favourite thing anyway... and the other day I had an experience there which has stayed with me, the way a dream can stay with you, over subsequent days.

Like so many things that lodge themselves, it had three parts. One: Howard Hodgkin at Tate Britain. Two: Kandinsky at Tate Modern. Three: a whole room of covers and spreads from the 30's Soviet magazine, USSR in Production, which strangely intermixed Stalinist-era propaganda and cutting-edge (and intensely beautiful) graphic design.

First, the Hodgkin - an artist I admit I've always loved. Even his small paintings hit the eye and the brain as if they were large - and even the large ones are intensely intimate. Personal, yes, but invitingly personal rather than excluding. Hugely direct. And this directness, that invites the viewer in, makes the intimacy acknowledged, involves the viewer in the project of expression.

Next, Kandinsky. Ms B crosses the river in the Tate boat, ready for the next expressionist colour hit. Now, Kandinsky is one of those artists everyone says they love. I was fond of him myself as a child and even into my twenties. So, although I was aware of having moved on, I went in with an open mind and ready to be wowed.

So what happened? These paintings strike me as almost unbearably whimsical. The colours are wrong. Even according to the notes they are theoretical constructs, based on "ideas about art" which Kandinsky shared with Shostakovich, eg, and with titles like "Construction" and "Improvisation," seemingly designed to allow nothing in but their ideas of origin. I do resent being made to stand in front of a painting and engage in the juvenile activity of going, "that's a mountain, and that line there represents a person, and look! That must be the cossacks, because there, those blue lines must be their guns!" The colours struck me as being - despite the constant reminders of Kandinsky's insistence on "the spiritual in art" - emotionally unconvincing. I know it's just me, but I found none of the authenticity of experience you find in, say, Hodgkin. Never mind for a moment that Hodgkin couldn't have had his career without the precedent of Kandinsky.

Anyway, it caused a little crisis in me, a turbulence of doubt as to my relationship with an entire period of art history, and with an entire body of artefacts. Did I, unbeknownst even to myself, dislike the 1920's? Had I renounced a peculiarly Russian sensibility which I had always previously thought I loved? Was I a hypocrite without even knowing it??

Enter - me, that is, I entered - one of the newly-hung galleries, an entire room hung with the covers and spreads from USSR In Production. And then I knew. With design input from the leading lights of Revolutionary and post-revolutionary art, like El Lissitzky and Alexander Rodchenko, the magazine - produced in five languages, all the better to spread the word of Stalinism - ran from 1930-1941. It featured huge fold-outs and cutouts and inspiring scenes from the fantasy life of the Soviet Union.

Here is a quote from the introduction to an exhibition at Howard Schickler Fine Art, in Brooklyn: "USSR in Construction appeared soon after Stalin denounced Constructivism as a bourgeois art form and proclaimed Social Realism to be the only acceptable style of art. Displaced artists of the avant-garde turned to photomontage as an alternative. Exploring the relatively new mediums of photography and photomontage, these artists and others managed to successfully fulfill the demands placed upon them by the government, while continuing to experiment and to shape new artistic conventions." The New York Times said this in 1996: "How effective it was in selling Communist doctrine abroad is unknown, but even today it is thoroughly convincing propaganda for the revolution in design that Soviet artists helped foment and spread across the world." - Vicki Goldberg

All at once, looking at spread after spread, and cover after amazing cover, I knew it had not all been a lie: I do still know what I love. These photomontages are intensely beautiful, and the typography still looks daringly fresh. Just looking at these pages, I could feel great waves of the creative energy and dedication that went into their creation.

Now: I realise how ludicrous it is, decrying the deeply felt art of one man for inauthenticity whilst saying I loved the art of a group of people who believed in nothing but their own forms (though arguably Kandinsky... but no, I won't go round in circles.) However, this is purely and only an exploration of a dilemma of personal taste, and as such must be justified.

So: as my love grew, in that room, looking at luminous rotogravure images of huge useless dams being built under forced labour, I also began to feel the sickness of the lie. There is a huge poignancy in almost everything to do with the Russian Revolution. The disjuncture between the pictures and what they purport to represent came to feel like the source of much of their emotional content - if not by any means all. The beauty-out-of-evil paradox (which is the story of the twentieth century - or is it?). Where does art begin, where does the evil end? This is art that grew out of the need of a certain group of people, being suppressed if not actually oppressed (unlike the dam workers), to engage in the creation of visual forms of meaning under difficult conditions. Or is it? Did the art grow precisely out of the tension caused by the lie? Is the art world really so disingenuous? (Puh-lease!) So my confusion flowered into horror. Just at that moment, a woman who had been standing looking at a wall of covers (including the Lissitzky one above, which demonstrates the love of the regional peasant for the protecting Soviet soldier) turned and looked right at me - for maybe a full second - and I suddenly wondered what she had seen in my face.

Whatever it was, it won't let go.

Constable: guard that heritage

At the remarkable hour of only 10.30 of a Saturday morning, Ms Baroque went to the Constable exhibition at Tate Britain, all the way over in Pimlico. I realise this is a surprising choice of viewing experience for me, and it was - I confess - mainly a vehicle for getting myself to the Hodgkin before it finishes - but it was wonderful to see the six big exhibition paintings. together with their remarkable full-size oil sketches.

There is something hard to see about Constable. Maybe it's those cheap prints they used to give away with petrol purchase, or the Christmas biscuit tins - which I now remember in association with a faint smell of gas, from the gas fire, and the sensation of stifling heat, because the idea back then always used to be to keep the door shut with the fire on full - meaning your face went red and your back was freezing against the unheated settee. Remember settees? They are why it's hard to see Constable. So off I trooped, taking care to procure a very millennial cappuccino along the way, in search of this man who painted these pictures. And did I find him? Well - sort of...

...and I did learn something about The Hay Wain which made me love it more - namely, that its original title was Landscape: Noon. This is far more painterly & less sentimental - and actually connected to the subject matter of the painting itself, in which the light shines on a field at the back, and not on the cart at the foreground.

At the end of the exhibition there is a case holding a painting palette, paintbox and brushes rescued from Constable's studio after his death. This element of process was introduced by the sketches, but underexplored by the exhibition as a whole, and then almost ignored when it came to interesting artefacts from his own hand. (The palette looks as if it would fit a right hand... was the man left-handed? Like Ms B herself? We wonder...) Altogether I never felt the exhibiton notes, commentary (sugary reading of an excerpt of Gray's Elegy, with background music, anyone?) or indeed merchandise (pastel tea towels and mugs) elevated the thing much above 'Constable, the Heritage Park'.

Only the paintings did it justice. You do want to jump into them, like Eustace Scrubb (a dangerously nostalgic feeling, typified by the Lewis reference).

The sketch for The Lock is completely wonderful. And of all the pictures, the one that surprises, after you see the sketch. There was also a painting of the pier at Brighton, of which I vastly preferred the fresh, lively sketch. In the final painting Constable darkened the whole sky and made the only sunlight in the picture shine on the new, modern, Regency promenade, leaving all the rustic toilers along the beach literally in the dark. Polemics, & tedious for it.

And when I came out the whole sky seemed completely different. The clouds looked heavy, with real weight, and were moving in ways that made them look alive. As Constable says, the sky is "the chief organ of sentiment" - which makes it just as important in real life as in the gallery - and for the rest of that afternoon the vista over the river, and over the grey buildings we hardly notice normally, was like a familiar face in new surroundings.

on a Greer day...

I wanted to write something about the interview with Salman Rushdie in last week's Telegraph, where he says "we are all living under a fatwa now." I hadn't thought of it that way, but I guess he's right. But now I have no inspiration to say anything about the subject. Maybe I'm just tired.

Anyway, more space was given to Rushdie's domestic bliss with his "fourth and last" wife, the impossibly beautiful, embarrassingly young (why is no one embarrassed?) and oh-so-in-love-with-him (isn't it wonderful) Padma Lakshmi. He says, "she's an astonishingly talented young woman who is just coming into her own." He sounds more like her dad, if you ask me. But then, no one did: unlike Salman, I'm probably a little too old to be interesting!

I did like the part where he so refreshingly said, and I paraphrase but probably only slightly: "I'm saying something people don't usually say about Germaine Greer: she's completely mad."

Of course that has been her charm all these years, but one mustn't take anything she says literally. (Would it have bothered him when she was a leggy 32-year-old? In May 1971 Greer appeared on the cover of LIFE magazine, with the cover line: "Saucy Feminist That Even Men Like".) I just wish she'd say something about Rushdie's alleged reputation for being some kind of Nicky Haslam-style party animal. He was at such pains to deny that he knows how to dance at all that it kind of got me thinking...

29 years today

...

read my lips

This may be indicative of the pass we've come to in world affairs generally. Is it that there's such urgency? Or is it that we've forgotten the power of suggestion, used as we are becoming to one utilitarian layer of politically-correct meaning? Is this why people think - mistakenly, of course - that poetry is no longer 'relevant'??

It looks small, but it is about how we order our perceptions (& I don't mean order them about).

Ms Baroque's brother - yes, the rellies are figuring rather large here at the moment - Ms B's brother, the Count of Baroque (except that he's sort of anti-baroque in his leanings - being an emergency nurse with a crew cut) went to see Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young the other day. They were playing in Bethel, New York, in an amphitheatre on the site of Yasger's Farm, where the original Woodstock festival was. Get that.

Amazing! Neil Young too! Was it fun? But then he says, scarily, 'at least it was better than that anti-war crap he's playing nowadays'.

So I go, neutrally, trying to think if there's anything I don't know about my brother, 'oh really, I haven't heard the new stuff - there was a big picture of him in the Guardian though, he looks absolutely fabulous'.

'Yeah', goes His Grace, 'he does look great. But' - here I know it's still him - 'the new stuff is terrible. You know what, he's lost his metaphor!'

Ohhh?

'Yeah, it's awful! It's like - it's like he has to, you know... say everything outright...'

(And in this picture from the cover of Rolling Stone, do we think our Neil looks ever so slightly like a turtle? In the nicest possible way?)

the autumn

It's here, isn't it. I keep feeling as if it's nearly October. It might be an effect of having had three glorious, hot months off work and now being office-bound with a jacket on the back of my chair; or it might be the yellowing leaves on the tree right under my balcony. It could even be the general air of decay in the world, with clear plastic bags on airplanes, radical jihadists in Walthamstow, the world divided between Israel and Lebanon, and the whole situation.

But every August does this. Sandals or shoes? Even the sunsets over Ally Pally are not what they were a month ago - however tranquil and blue and however wonderfully the geese may fly past as they leave Clissold Park.

Clearly I need rejuvenating and the detox diet is not doing it* - in fact a £1.50 1/3 bottle of tempranillo (Spain's Noble Grape, and I'll go along with that) tells me it's not doing it. EastEnders certainly isn't doing it (I see Wendy Richards has quit, and in my relief I'm only irritated by the fact that she's only quitting because of the violence those poxy script people are doing to the character of Pauline Fowler. So we can't even hate her...)!

I have all the new clothes my semi-Baroque wardrobe can hold. Shoes and boots galore would be lovely but the hallway won't take it. The shelves are groaning with fine and near-fine copies of everything I love. The vegetable drawer is full. I managed to squeeze most of the slipcover back onto the couch, which is endearingly called Caruso. The kids are healthy and my sister's a grandmother. (Jane - oops!)

Any more ideas?

* Note from future: this turned out to be the gall stones.

cast away in 'what is happening'

My favourite part of EM Forster's 'Aspects of the Novel' is where he says: "... in a sort of drooping regretful voice... Yes - oh dear yes - the novel tells a story... I wish that it was not so, that it could be something different - melody, or perception of the truth, not this low atavistic form."

Story of my life.

Last weekend Ms Baroque started a 28-day detox diet (with breaks for socialising) and, to be honest, felt better than for months almost immediately. But not better enough to counteract the exhaustion of trying to impersonate a 9-5 office worker from 9am to 5pm every day - it's not that easy to become Early Victorian. And came the morning she was woken up by the bizarre news that there had been some sort of bomb plot intercepted on her all-important transatlantic route, mass chaos in all airports and, in short, back to square one on the anti-fear-of-flying project. Immediate mental reconnoitring of everyone who's away, where are they, are anyone's kids in America? Like that "where's my bag" moment. Of course we're not thinking about the future yet.

Or, in this case, about the plot itself, which is too bizarre and Bond-like to comprehend.

In my work, 100% sunk into the demanding business of Being New - good humour, willingness, sweetness, the humility of knowing nothing... Argh! I paid a lunchtime visit to the SW1 Oxfam Bookshop, but the beautiful little Muses Library Ben Jonson now nestled in my bag has failed to make much impact - words themselves seem too heavy to lift.

An email from an editor, with a welcome thought regarding an article I was supposed to be writing, came to me as if rolled up in a 200-year-old bottle. Maybe my people are still living, and I'll be rescued?

One of the 24 'men' arrested was in Stoke Newington - typical. And another one was in Clapton. When I first moved to Stoke Newington, in oh was it 1992, it quickly because a running joke that every time anyone was arrested for making a bomb (back then it was the IRA) it was always a shed or garage in Stoke Newington. We'd left Muswell Hill to come here, and you can imagine the joy one day in possibly 1994 when the radio announced five men arrested with lots of explosive materials in Colney Hatch Lane! However, we're long since back to normal. One of the failed July 21 bombers was also from N16.

Meanwhile, I'm discovering the office politics at the new place. Our room is being repainted for a week, and, just as I'm getting used to it, we've been moved to the fourth floor for the duration. Nothing like being put at the desk of someone who just got made redundant to find out how the inter-team dynamics work.

Like the airport officials with their see-through plastic bags, I'm realising that sometimes lucidity is all that really matters.

the bouffant boys

I spent about three hours making some CD compilations yesterday for the office (see, I'm settling in) and googling bands and things. As you do. I made four CD's: "funk soul blues" (BB King to Gnarls Barkley - sorry, I kinda like it - via Sly & Stevie), "arty pop" (so called because it has both Madonna and the Dresden Dolls on it), "Ella et al" (self-explanatory; includes Andrews Sisters & lots of Chet), and "country" - which was the most fun to make, actually. Oh, it has Hank & Patsy & Dolly & Loretta... as well as Johnny Cash, & Gillian Welch. (I nearly included Jim White, the so-called "king of hick hop", but thought instead I might save him for my "tortured heads" CD, featuring Portishead, Radiohead and all the other tortured... Nick Cave. You know.) And in the course of googling images of Bill Monroe's Bluegrass Boys - ever heard their fiddling? and they can yodel - I found possibly my new all-time fave photograph.

Isn't it just beautiful? I think it's the picnic table that makes me love it so. Shame about the quality, it doesn't show as well as I'd like. But to me it looks like a cross between a Diane Arbus and the pictures from when I was a baby.

By the way, my dad (I'd call him "Grandpa Baroque," except that I think he'd prefer "your Majesty") still calls a quiff a pompadour. Maybe I get it from him.

born yesterday

Xander Nicholas Evans





















My nephew's baby!! Jeez, the generations are really running into each other in this family. Ms B is now a ridiculously youthful great-aunt, to say nothing of my little sister being a (gulp) grandma... Craaaazy!

By the way, I do know his name comes from Buffy. I wish I'd been there to see the look on Nana Baroque's face when I told her that, though. Don't you love his hat?

They should be out of the hospital by tomorrow in which instance I hope to have a pic of the Mama, too.

Note: it is now morning and this is only just sinking in. Ever been hit with the last chapter before the first? And Danny, (or, as we can now call him, Daddy) was really the most adorable baby that ever lived. It wasn't very long ago, either.

don't remind me

By the way, this really is Hackney. The police have put a paper through the letterbox about last week's shooting in my road.

At about 4pm last Sunday I heard a sharp crack and an instantaneous load of really nasty shouting. It sounded serious so I went to look - fumbled with the keys to the balcony door, finally got it open just in time to see a man screaming his head off, oddly rummaging through the open boot of a parked car, slam the boot, jump into his car and drive wildly off. Exchanged a few words with my neighbour whose head was poking out her window parallel to mine, and who had caught 3 digits of the licence plate; then, as nothing seemed to be developing, went back in. There were a few blokes gathering on the pavement to discuss it.

Half an hour later when I went out to get my nails done the place was swarming with cops. Half the street was out, skinny, black-hatted men and pale, headscarfed girls all with pale babies tucked under their arms like dolls. Strangely, all the babies were exactly the same size. People were excitedly talking about what they'd seen, which was invariably a lot more than I had. One guy in a long black coat was trying to decribe to the interviewing officer the gun. The officer says: "I can appreciate you may not be very up on firearms, but would you say it was like this" - pulling his own gun out of its holster, making the girls gasp - "or more like, you know, a cowboy gun?" One young mother laughs, "a cowboy gun!? Noooo, it wasn't long, you know, it wasn't one of those long ones..." Cop sighs. "Did it have a, a bit on it that revolved?"

An hour later I'm just leaving the nail bar, with my rosy fingernails and deliciously soft feet, and the mobile rings. It's my 12-year-old and two of her little friends - with their summery frocks and leggings, spotty hair bands, big shoulder bags & shoulder-length earrings - saying, "Hi Mummy, we can't get into our road, there's loads of police & they have the whole thing blocked off." I hurry back - thankful I'm out, because if I'd been in the flat I'd have been stuck in there and unable to get to the girls - and sure enough there is a huge crowd of every kind of person you can imagine all waiting to be allowed in, and a very harassed-looking police officer who has a clipboard and instructions not to give out any information.

The street was blocked off because they were scouring it looking for bullets. It turned out someone was shot. Maybe twice. The parked car was still there, with orange jump leads trailing out of it, cordoned off. They later towed it away.

Another 12-year-old arrives, in a swirly white dress with lace trim, getting off the bus just as the policeman starts to write our names on his clipboard and then escorts us to another set of cops, who let us cross the road into our home. "Oooh, it's so fun!" she enthuses. "Thanks for letting me come!"

At some point in our 30-minute wait, hungry for information, I commented to the nearest cop, "so this might be on the local news?" at which he snorted, "Shouldn't bloody think so! This is Hackney. Happens every day."

Two hours later the police, the cameramen and surveyors, the cordons, were all gone. It just looked like a peaceful summer evening.

And until the piece of paper came through the door, I had indeed forgotten all about it.

Elisabeth Schwarzkopf

Breaking news, of which anyone who knows me will realise the importance in Baroque Mansions: the great soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, in fact pretty much the definitive Mozart soprano has died.

Here's the article from The Independent.

She was 90. I know she hadn't recorded since virtually before I was born. And that's the great thing about Art. ONE of its consolations.

And here is something that only goes to show how much the world has changed since Schwarzkopf made those recordings: the only mp3's I've been able to find, for a link, are actually downloadable as ring tones. Hurrah! But you can hear her online, sort of. So, happy listening - and happy shopping!

There may well be more to say, later. Meantime I have to confess it almost feels as if Mozart has just died - though I know that already happened...

Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above... a meditation on Nature That is Beyond Nature and the life well-spent

This morning I randomly clicked onto a blog run by a young woman in Sacramento, about her friends and family, the activities of her church group, her resolutions for the next year (learn more about specific parts of the Bible, learn to do welding - !! - , lose another 30 lbs on top of the 65 she's already lost) etc. The church group went on a camping trip in some amazing place like in a Western movie, and she took photos of incredible craggy reaches, all rose-pink and gold in the evening light, and lakes sparkling in tall pine forests, with fresh-faced Bible students jumping into them in their innocent bright-coloured bikinis... Crocodiles (as it were) of sweet-faced couples in sensible khaki shorts, and polo shirts with loose sleeves, and socks with their hiking boots, tramping through the unsullied mountain air, talking no doubt about the teachings of St Paul, or maybe the dangers of forest fire.

Well - suffice to say I went for a lunchtime walk today through Mayfair. I confess I do recall thinking as I walked along, "If I walk energetically enough I might get some colour/get a waist/improve my skin tone," and things like that, but I'm pretty sure our Sacramento friends weren't thinking that as they hiked down the gullies singing camping songs. And when I reached Lowndes Square I saw THE tallest trees I've EVER seen. Just good old London plane trees, dripping gunk on all the cars parked below - on Jaguar and Ford hatchback alike - but towering over the impressively tall buildings behind Harvey Nichols they're like primordial trees that should have dinosaurs roaming through them, biting off their tops. (The picture above doesn't do them justice, it only shows the saplings.) And so outrageously green. It was an almost other-worldly experience - though not as other-worldly as gigantic stalagmites instead of roads - and I hadn't had so much as an espresso.

When I reached the SALE-signed windows of Harvey Nicks I turned right around, by the way. And did my primordial dinner-shopping in Waitrose in Belgrave Square. (Oh yes! It's all right for some!)

As the sage himself wrote:

Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above,
Don't fence me in.
Let me ride through the wide open country that I love,
Don't fence me in.
Let me be by myself in the evenin' breeze,
And listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees,
Send me off forever but I ask you please,
Don't fence me in.

My only comfort is that he probably wrote all that with a martini to hand. And I think of the closer-to-home sage Tim Turnbull, whose first poetry collection (Stranded in Sub-Atomica, Donut Press, 2005) is currently shortlisted for Best First Collection in this year's Forward Prize. In his poem "New Romantic" he writes, paraphrasing London's own sage, Oscar Wilde:

... and it strikes me that we're all in the gutter
but some of us are gazing at the shops.

Mrs Reasonable

Here is a link to an excellent article by Natasha Walter in The Guardian. She quotes the formidable Baroness Uddin - by far the coolest, as well as most formidable, person in Tower Hamlets.

Baroness Uddin, for those too harried to click on the link, says, in response to being asked why women's voices weren't being heard in the debate over filming Monica Ali's novel on location in Brick Lane: "Our voices aren't sought! The media are not interested in in us."

Khadija Rahman says: "The men in the community are more uneasy than the women. Brick Lane is famous for its restaurants, which are mainly run by men, and they don't like the fact that Monica Ali, who doesn't live there and doesn't care about their opinions, has had such a success."

Walter goes on to make the point that, essentially, "live and let live" is not an inflammatory-enough opinion to make the news. And of course this harks back to my original post on the subject. By quoting only reactionary extremists, and by favouring anything that sounds like stereotypical "traditional cultural values" (whether it is or not, & whether or not it goes against all the principles of British life) - by, in fact, disallowing a spectrum of thought from within an entire community, as part of the national cultural debate - the press - along with local authority, government, social services etc - is letting all of us down.

work

Well, Ms B is back to being a useful member of society - or at least, she will be useful once she's figured out where they keep the folders, & cosied up to the girl who orders them enough to get the kind she likes - and gone to Paperchase and got some nice pens, and had the two solid weeks of meetings that are scheduled into her Outlook diary (and learns to use the diary), and manages to find the predecessor's notes on Big Project Number One, oh and maybe met the designer, and, and... Actually, in this job she's only the editor, so she also has to get her curly head around the idea of not having to do - in fact, not really being allowed to do - absolutely everything...

Of course I am STILL behind with several writing projects but that is the baroque way. And bonbon eating is not best undertaken as an intensive activity; it seems that without the routine nothing can get done at all, how did all those people like Faulkner manage it? Oh, I know: rich friends let them stay in their hunting cabins. Well, and no wonder they all became alcoholic and suicidal. Six weeks alone in the woods with a typewriter (not even a laptop!) would do my head in.

I went to Southwark Cathedral the other day with a friend, for a drink, and discovered that my poem is wrong, there is a salient detail I made much of which is not as I said. In fact, it's the whole point of the poem. My friend says that's okay, it's true in my poem. But my next idea is also London-physical-infrastructure-based, & now I'm thinking oh my God, research. And I was going to try and make it a villanelle. What a BAD idea.

However, the sad truth is that I'm more likely to get to grips with it on the tube, in 20 minutes a day, than sitting at home with all the time in the world.

I hope.