WINDOW VIEWS - From The Other Side

The french windows in my room open wide onto an extensive back garden. The care home's lawn, shrubbery, wildlife and residents are all framed for me by these doors. I view all this from within my wheelchair. I end up looking out on this landscape for a huge part of the day. Putting a lot of effort into getting the maximum amount of interest and stimulation from it. I've taken to observing events in minute detail, from the changes in weather, the arrival and passing of seasons, to the tracks of birds and aeroplanes in flight, Then there are the smear trails of snails, the insects and spiders who slide or scamper across the glass. the scuttle of leaves. I've closely watched the working methods of the gardener, for instance, as he mows the lawn. He is quite impressive I must say, very neat and precise. Fascinating to see it all happen.  It's almost meditative. I would never have been that patient when I was his age. I couldn't wait to get such everyday manual tasks over and done with. Hurrying on to the next thing on my invisible to do list. 

On fine sunny days, I get rolled out to take my recreation al fresco. I sit in my wheelchair by a bench with members of my family or carers, but mostly  on my own. People are, understandably, reluctant to come and see me these days, it must be so unrewarding to visit, its distressing for them I expect. It is certainly distressing for me. They never see how I cry inwardly, to myself once they are gone.

I experienced a great upwelling of sadness as the nights drew in. When the patio doors needed to be closed to keep in the heat. As the last rays of summer sunlight vanish behind the poplar trees at the bottom of the garden. Left to gaze out at the looming gloom, until its absorbed into complete pitch black. At some point my Filipeno carer Doris will arrive - 'Mr Turner time to turn you around. Shall I turn the TV on? Do you want to watch anything tonight? She'll turn me around, looking directly into my eyes. Trying to gauge from the simplest expressive eye movement, my preference from a short list of programmes she rolls off. Since my accident I am, what my doctor casually refers to as 'a lock in', Moving my eyes, but nothing else. Mind alert as ever. Emotionally taught and frustrated, at not being able to vent it all out loud. 'No more fucking Pointless, Please! I don't really enjoy what I see on television, its so trite. Though it eats up the time I guess. I want to communicate what I most desire. But I feel effectively buried alive in my body.

However, the pitch dark evenings brought much more than I expected. More than a few fluttering moths trying to batter themselves to death on the patio windows. Familiar faces have begun to appear, glowing, hovering, emanating within the darkness. At first it was just my wife, but it expanded, within a matter of days, to a veritable parade of the good, bad and the ugly from my past life.  Relatives close and distant, just popping by to see how I am, I guess. I wonder really why they are coming. Does this mean something? 'Preparing me for death? What is their purpose? What is mine now? Though they do speak to me without speaking. I hear nothing, but can intuit what they mean. Mostly its just greetings and polite how are you's. My Mother visited yesterday. She was trying to communicate something to me, I couldn't quite fathom what. I felt quite a lot of emotional cross waves, heavy and mournful. When she retreated from view, I felt grief all over again. I spend all my time isolated, except for when these spirit faces arise. There are days when I hate Doris arriving. I want to scream - 'fuck off!' - loudly right in her face. But can't, obviously.

  

SCREEN SHOT - Congo

Some films, though made with the best of intentions, inevitably fall short of their own original aims. Others, even in the very moment of their conception know they are about to make a crock of shite and just roll with it. Congo, from 1995, is the most glorious example of a movie so bad it's a complete joy to watch. In the aftermath of Jurassic Park's original success, a mere few years before, Michael Creighton back catalogue became sought after source material for blockbuster movies. They spent 50 million dollars on Congo and it grossed three times that. I've never seen so much money spread so invisibly across a movie screen.

The story is a poor man's update of Rider Haggard, full of the usual egregious greed and casual racism about tribal Africa. As if the 19th century preoccupation with that continent as the source of the darkest primeaval proto civilisations, was still going strong well over a century later. Dr Karen Ross ( Laura Linney) has to go to the Congo to find out what happened to her fiancé, the latter's callous Father ( Joe Don Baker) pays for the trip on the proviso she comes back with mega diamonds. Meanwhile, Dr Peter Elliot (Dylan Welsh) wants to return his intelligent sign language trained ape Amy to the wild. The only way he can do this is if Herkemer Homolka ( Tim Curry ) a supposedly rich Rumanian philanthropist pays for it. Homolka wants to locate the diamond mines associated with the Lost City of Zinj. So far, so preposterous.

What can save a half bad movie is a script savvy enough to be self parodying, and actors who are willing to put their tongues firmly in their cheek, to send up both the film and their part in it. Fortunately, no one thought to do that here, so what you see in Congo is a movie almost completely devoid of self awareness and the parlous artistic territory it is travelling through. 

The two chief joys of this movie are the assumed accents, primarily Tim Curry's Rumanian accent, which travels insecurely in and around the Balkans, briefly touches on Russia before coming back to its very wobbly east european failed state. When this ludicrous accent meets the inane script you occasionally have brilliant moments of collision. They arrive in the ruins of Zinj which appear to have columns and columns of hieroglyphs written over the walls.  By the next morning Tim Curry emerges from his tent ' U know do's Eero glps we saw on du walls, I ave translated dem all' If I were being charitable I'd say Curry was the only one who knew what he was doing here, but.......?

In the dodgy accent department he is not alone. We have Captain Monroe Kelly (Ernie Hudson) , a mercenary known as 'the great white hunter' who 'also happens to be black'. The black American actor, Ernie Hudson, who was strangely thought to be an excellent casting choice. This wasn't an early precursor of 'blind' casting, its just dumb. 

Hudson plays it straight faced, without any sense of how weirdly inappropriate it feels. Not a glimmer of irony, for the entire length of the movie. Using the sort of upper class English accent only Hollywood could think was authentic. Its cadences on more than a few occasions landing back on the wrong side of the Atlantic. In one sticky moment of crisis in the movie, he utters in plummy posh tones - 'first we must locate our comrades, then the ape, before we even consider leaving'. As if they should sit down for tea and sandwiches then decide what to do, before the approaching mad gorillas eviscerate them. Lets not go into the mad gorillas, not right now, eh? Oh, this is so inspirational.  Its a truly terrible movie, played as if unblemished by shame, it so transcends itself that it becomes tolerably good.

CARROT REVIEW - 6/8 ( Trash Elevated Score )

Currently available to stream on Channel Four

POEM - by Wendell Berry

The Peace of Wild Things
by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

THE BEST BEFORE DATE - 1982 - Sulk by The Associates

The Associates were only ever a brief fling. Alan Rankine met up with a self consciously extravagant vocalist Billie Mackenzie in 1979. Success took its time coming though. It wasn't until their second album Sulk, that what they were doing appeared to align with the contemporary Zeitgeist. Party Fears Two and Club Country were both first recorded in the early days of their career. Recognising that these tracks were their best stuff to date, they didn't want to waste them by releasing them to an unreceptive audience. So they held both of them back and waited. Then in 1982 with Sulk, the time arrived, and they had a double whammy of hits in quick succession.

Mackenzie was always such a limelight grabbing glamorously effete presence. You have to very consciously turn your focus onto what Rankine is doing in the background, the edgy yet, furiously urgent guitar trilling, almost flamenco. The catchy piano rills, riffs and cadences. Everything in the production literally drowning in echo, the background singing, sound delays and reverb. This ought not to work, it ought to be an absolute acoustic mess, but it isn't. It pushes the sonic envelope, but it's also classy, and they knew that from the moment they made it.

Sulk was a rare thing, garnering both popular and critical acclaim. The Associates in their original twosome split later that year, 1982, due to the usual musical differences. Mackenzie liked spending the record company advance too much. He wanted the lifestyle and success a more pop orientated direction might bring. Rankine, ever the indie, wanted to keep pulling on the fringes of pop and letting it messily unravel a bit. In reality both were inveterate outsiders. 

Despite the brevity of their popularity The Associates were daring, they could be dark and menacingly brooding one moment, then full of cabaret swagger or fizzing with stylish pizzaz the next. They had a huge influence on the next generation of performers such as Bjork and U2. Mackenzie made two more albums as The Associates, and one solo album, before sadly taking his life in 1997 at the age of 39. His reputation as probably the finest male vocalist of his generation remains intact. Rankine became a musical mentor, facilitator and producer for numerous Scottish bands, that included at one point The Cocteau Twins. He died, as you may know. quite recently in 2023 at the age of 64.

WINDOW VIEWS - Another Quiet Day

From the shop counter there was a clear view through the shop window out onto the street and down the hill in the direction of the central bus hub. You could tell when the buses arrived from the town suburbs and surrounding villages, because people would spill out, heading towards the main street like a particularly virulent plague. But 'towards the main street' meant that they would be heading away from the shop Restorative Moments. Aiming for the new retail park, with its tiny multi-plex cinema and studio theatre. This was part of the recently re-named Arts Quarter. 'I mean, what half arsed tiny market town has an Arts Quarter!' Gregory would mutter under his breath. Well, this one did, but why they didn't imagine including his shop was a frequent burning question. He blamed the town planners and the Councillors for a lack of vision. But it was the sheep like nature of human beings as shoppers, that angered him most. Allowing themselves to be herded and funneled towards an intended market without a second thought. Lemmings!

Gregory had been at work barely an hour, and was already working himself up into being cheesed off. No one had actually come into the store yet. He felt extremely uncomfortable with even the thought that this was going to be yet another quiet day. There had been a brief gaggle of people wandering passed the window. Just as quickly, and just as noisily, they moved on in cackles and fits of giggles at some in joke or other. If they stopped to view any of his stock on the outside tables it was with self-evident disinterest. Items were picked up, then discarded as if they were an exceptionally smelly sock. Another chap examined a piece of stock in such close forensic detail, as if to ascertain exactly how it had come into existence. Took photos of it on his phone. Now satisfied that he had found out enough to either make it for himself, or buy something identical or better online, he put the further shop soiled item back down. It was as if the whole purpose of Gregory's shop was as a three dimensional interactive catalogue display. Making it easier for folk to purchase with confidence online, having seen the thing you wanted and handled them in real life. 'Did no one buy on impulse any more?'

On quiet days Gregory didn't find it hard not to conjure semi- reasonable justifications for cultivating a resentful attitude. Resentfulness he understood perfectly well, but how easily that soured into disinterest he tended to miss. That disinterest made manifest in his demeanour, further deterred custom. It could, and was, becoming a vicious self perpetuating cycle. He was already referred to as Gregory the Grump, even by his own regular and devoted customers. There had come a point when his disinterest became endemic, he'd ceased acknowledging that it might be there. And once it became ensconced like a truly bad tempered and overweight pig, all was lost. A shop like his, could then enter its own death spiral so slowly and gently, that by the time an owner woke up to the now precipitous speedy nature of its decline, it was generally too late to avert catastrophe. 

Gregory's disinterest now lay like the dust on its shelves and stock had done - for quite some time. Potential customers could smell the neglect, the decay, the lack of interest, a mile off. In fact down the end of the road as you came out of the central bus hub. Understandably, rather than walk towards a rather unpleasant fetid atmosphere, most folk chose to walk away from it. Toawards the flashy vulgarity and artificial bon homie of the new retail park. Where people inhaled a pumped in perfume creating within them feelings of being loved and valued. With a complimentary squirt of cream and dusting of cinnamon on your cappuccino and piped muzak to boot, What was there not to like?

SHERINGHAM DIARY No 74 - One Singular Exemption

I'm not usually a man prone to colds or flu. I've not had Covid, as yet, fortunately. But this winter I have had a 'cold' for the first time in many a year. The last time, if the out of date cough medicine I had is anything to go by, was somewhere between 2017 when it was made and 2020 when it passed its use by date. As they are so infrequent an experience, I tend to forget what a full on 'cold' can be like.  And, when I do succumb, I tend to have a heavy one.

They generally start with a severe migraine like headache, only easing as a progressive nasal rawness develops and a sense of something gooey and adhesive gradually accumulates in my throat and upper chest. The 2022 version never fully progressed to the runny nose final stage. Somewhere in the week before Christmas the chesty catarrh cough that had been so persistent and irritating, suddenly went away. However, first week in January 2023 the cough reimerged with a vengeance along with an intermittent headache. I generally don't give in to 'poor me man flu like behaviour'  But I am feeling peeved for foolishly thinking I'd seen the bugger off. I blame it being so unseasonably mild. 

Getting this bug to move on is not proving easy. I have bought myself a fresh bottle of cough medicine should you be concerned lest I'd risked self medicating with the out of date one. I think you might be reading my obituary if I had, or of a particularly explosive stomach inflammation brought on by extreme acid reflux. I've already had two nights of perpetual coughing with little sleep on the lounge sofa. It will pass, all things being impermanent, but the lethargic lingering of this cough might be the one singular exemption.

Judging by the complete dearth of Lem Sips in North Norfolk, I am not the only one plagued by an unrelenting cough. Sales of cough medicines seem be the only thing currently booming. In our shop we are now in an entirely altered retail realm. December came within a few hundred yards of last years monthly total. So well done to us. You would not have guessed it from November. But perhaps folk just pushed the boat out later, and that bit further knowing full well they'd have to push it right back in again, come January. Post New Year always feels as though someone switched the algorithm in our collective brains, from Yo Go Shoppy to No Go Shoppy Shoppy.

In past January's we've stayed open for a fortnight before fully closing for four weeks. Opening up again February Half Term.  But it was made plain by the first two days post New Years Day, when we took zero pounds, that this year would be progressing along quite different lines. So we decided to only open on Fridays and Saturdays between now and mid February. Apart from the cafe, all the shops like us are following a two day week. So when the Christmas decorations came down on twelfth night, The Courtyard appeared to suddenly descend into seasonal hibernation. Strangely our main sales in the first week have been lampshades, not normally a Winter season staple. But this Winter looks likely to be an even odder beast than usual.

Taking a longer period of reduced opening, leaves more time available to complete our bookkeeping and tax return. And once completed, to set too on a list of things that need attention or are grievously neglected during the rest of the year. Four weeks plus, seems like an absolute age, yet it will fly by, if previous years are anything to go by.  At the moment with my persistent coughing now producing pain in the chest muscles, I cannot even laugh wholeheartedly. All my virtuous plans to get back swimming and meditating regularly have been unavoidably delayed by bad lung health. The NHS website is vague about the length of time a cough can linger in the body after a chesty cough infection. Apparently it can go on for as long as eight weeks, after which it becomes chronic. Which, as you can imagine, I do not find at all reassuring.

With more time off work, comes the mental space to ponder, reflect and reconsider how things are done. So Jnanasalin and I have talked about tidying up product ranges. Paring then back to eight core fabrics. There is also coming the now annual fabric hunt to Lincoln and Stamford, what might we discover new for this year? If we don't encounter a stunning mid century fabric range to get excited about, we are considering breaking out of this stylistic period and testing a capsule range of fabrics from the Arts & Crafts era. Steering clear of Strawberry Thief and other such Morris cliches you'd see in every garden centre and department store throughout the land.

We also want to adjust the style of our signage and labeling so that they work both in the shop or on a craft stall. Currently they are at variance and this means a lot of chopping and changing when preparing for a makers market. In a more normal year than this, I might be pushing for an aesthetic and paint refresh to the shops decor. But we cannot even be sure what the year ahead will bring, so that is off the agenda. As is the idea of moving to bigger high street premises. We are currently in a bardo of just wait and see what 2023 brings once the season begins at Easter, coming early at the end of March. 

Hang onto your hats prepare for a bumpy ride.

LISTENING TO - Bloody Mary by Lady Gaga

Somewhere in the mists of time Lady Gaga veered off into the well ploughed mainstream. All those visual shock tactics just became passe. Where that slipping point was is unclear but I would have thought, until recently, it was somewhere around the Born This Way I baled. This was such a clichéd and obvious bit of pandering to her gay fan base.

Then, up crops this track, Bloody Mary, from said album. Apparently gone viral because a speeded up version was used in a dance sequence in the Netflix series Wednesday. Since then a whole Tik Tok viral storm erupted of fan videos. The track was released and hit the top forty. Kerching for Gaga.

But a have to admit this is a late period piece of classic pure pop from the queen of shlock fashion. As with all of Lady Gaga's better work it has not one, not two, but at the very least, three musical catch phrases that just keep you forever singing along. As a songwriter she never breaks musical conventions, but god does she play them well. Whilst, nothing ever compares to the sheer visual and aural brilliance that was Bad Romance, Bloody Mary reminds you what peak Gaga could be capable of.

SCREEN SHOT - You Were Never Really Here

Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) is a much damaged man. He earns his living by. rescuing kidnapped children. The brutal manner in which he executes his missions, has more to do with trying to kill his own demons. The past, in split second flashbacks, is spliced with his present, his fantasies, and keeping a handle on his own mental stability that constantly teeters on the edge of breakdown. He gets a new job, to rescue a politician's abducted young daughter. She is being held and sexually abused in a guarded tenement building. He succeeds in saving her, only to find there is a much more complicated game going on here than he has been led to believe. The whole situation goes rapidly, and savagely, out of control.

This film from 2017 is a much overlooked piece of masterful noir film making by Lynn Ramsey. The opening ten to fifteen minutes is tense, ompletely without dialogue as you are introduced to Joe's completely screwed up world. The sharp editing of imagery is accompanied by an equally sharp piece of sound tracking by Jonny Greenwood that is stupendous.  The best I've seen since the beginning intro to Drive. This is 'show not tell' at a whole other level. Throughout the film you are constantly made aware of Joe's mental state by the nature and quality of sound. You may be just seeing a long slow shot of Joe sat panting, but the sound track is of a discordant prepared piano as out of kilter as his mind. All the surrounding incidental sounds of a coffee percolating, passing street sounds, are woven in, all over amplified to give a palpable sense of a perceptual worldview that is completely out of whack. 

It is a brave piece of filmmaking that only ever hints at why what is happening is happening. Never feeling the need to cross all the T's and dot the I's. To over explain. You are left like Joe, never fully grasping what is going on before your eyes. Ramsay helps Joaquin Phoenix deliver one of his best performances. A totally brilliant film that becomes even better on this my second viewing.

CARROT REVIEW - 8/8

FINISHED READING - Gnosticism by Stephan A Hoeller

In looking for a general introduction to Gnosticism I chose this. It certainly provided an overview of the beliefs, gives you short biographies of significant Gnostics their life and ideas, and outlines Gnostic movements. But there is something in its chosen style of exposition that gets in the way of a clearly well thought out exposition, namely the author.

Stephan A Hoeller is a professor and practitioner of Gnosticism and goodness does he want you to know. The book is littered with his personal theories, opinions, defences and proselytising of Gnosticism. The last few chapters are really a succession of statements about the contemporary ills and flaws in modern society and how much better we'd all be if Gnosticism was more widely practiced. He declares Hinduism and Buddhism are essentially gnostic in principle, and a lot of things are apparently. And its not as if he is not right in many of the things he asserts, but a bit less subjectivity and expression of partisan viewpoints and more distance would not have gone amiss. To show not tell. There are a lot of words here, specialist gnostic words, Jungian words, umbrella words that require careful decoding and explanations. Words that tend in Hoeller's hands, unfortunately, to get in the way, he got in the way. Making it more difficult to connect with the theoretical structures, or what gnostic texts had to say for themselves

Gnosticism does have a lot within to excite and recommend it.  Its central idea being that the world and us within it, are made flawed from the moment of inception. It's not therefore the fault of our sinning. We do not need to be punished, nor be redeemed. We are born into a fractured relationship with ourselves, the world and the gods. We begin by using our deepening self knowledge to investigate and restore our relationship with the unknowable god. To mend and rejoin our being with that fundamental essence of all things. Becoming one through gnosis with gnosis. Myth and allogory replacing dogma, are strong qualities in Gnostic teachings too. I've certainly gained a few pointers of where to read next. So this has not been a complete waste of time to read.

As a religious philosophies go Gnosticism is probably the most esoteric and hence harder to pin down. Its been challenged before for its heretical concepts by numerous Christians, challenged about whether it really existed as a coherent religious movement ( it can appear tenuous ), challenged over the authenticity of its ' secret' texts. ( they're old but what they represented was piecemeal until the Nag Hammadhi Texts were found ) 

There is also something about texts being dubbed 'secret'. They were actively censored, forbidden and suppressed, this appeals to the modern predilection for conspiracy theories, challenging perceived conventions, and alternative facts.  Wholeheartedly exploited by Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code. If the Gnostic Gospels are actually 'gospels', then what they say they are represents an entirely different spiritual discourse that Jesus employed privately to his disciples. More metaphysical than his simpler public talks, where he used parables as teaching devices. 

I don't know what scientific and textual analysis has been done on these 'secret' texts to establish their age or original provenance. This book is by a 'devotee', so is probably not the place to find that out. Hoeller is too concerned all the time to justify or castigate the Catholic orthodoxy and to sell you Gnosticisms self evident theological richness and diversity. I just don't think he does a particularly good job of that.

CARROT REVIEW 4/8

WINDOW VIEWS - What She Has Seen

Some said, she couldn't possibly have seen what she said she'd seen. Hers was a small bay window on the second floor, on an oblique corner plot, not looking directly out on to the street at all. So at an angle to Seaborne Terrace, at a further diagonal to No 5. How she could have seen more than the briefest shaft of a shadow? A figure seen only from out of the corner of her eye, was no figure at all. That was, for them at least, not good enough.

However, she knew what she'd seen was far more than a shadow. It was at twilight admittedly, so she understood why people would doubt what her vision was of this liminal manifestation.  But, she would not renounce or revise what she had seen either. That figure was suggestive to her of something touched with the divine. It did not feel benign though. She was scared of it, by what she was not sure at the time. Realising later that she'd drawn too close to what was truly sacred, frighteningly so. There was something in the fluttering dusky wing of it as it flashed across the road and vanished through the door of No 5. 

This changed her so profoundly. For days she had the sensation of herself glowing, in a golden aura type way. The next day crossing the road to lay flowers where she'd seen the charcoal black angel. She did that regularly, until a local TV journalist approached her to ask why. Before that interview was finished, her vision, her sanity and her past was being called into question. and found wanting. It felt, to her, that her experience was being taken away from her and publicly trashed. 

Everyone behaved towards her differently after that. Pubs went quiet, people crossed the road. Homeless folk appeared to understand, perhaps because they were treated in a similar manner, or they had seen it too. But over time she hid herself away more in her room, becoming more reclusive. Until no one saw her at all. Several weeks later the landlord called round to find the flat apparently uninhabited. With only a scorched silhouette mark on the sofa to prove anyone had ever been there.

FINISHED READING - Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo

When you first start reading a novel its the quality of the writing that strikes you first. Whether its sparse, cold, succinct, warm, flowing, flowery, passionate, restrained, illuminating, imaginative or simply dull. Great writing has this sense of positive uplift as you read, a burgeoning enthusiastic engagement- Oh yes, I am going to really enjoy this. This will be exciting to read. Girl, Woman, Other completely grabbed my attention and never really let go through all its four hundred plus pages. This was a real treat.

With each chapter you are presented with a central character whose background and present story is told. The following chapter will be someone else perhaps only briefly encountered in the previous tale. Each woman's story tells us of the different way they live, the pressures to be a certain way, the prejudices, the rebellions,the conformity, the confidence or lack of it, successful or not, the loves and tragedies. Everyone responds in a unique way to this sense of being seen as other, whether that be as a being through class, female,black, mixed race, gay, trans. These are the many perspectives vividly brought to life, their upsides, their downsides, triumphs and failures. Each woman linked to another via a chain of experience over many generations and eras. Holding across the narrative a shared unity of purpose and desire for meaning.

Evaristo shows you every angle and obstacle. How each person findstheir particular way through. Some do not overcome their limitations, some fight, the consequences are not always beneficial. The richly diverse ways to a persons identity are often hard won. Her overarching focus is femininity, gender and race and how these intersect with one another. Shown in all its complexity and multi-facetedness. I identified with their struggle. Where for all their best efforts and intentions, they do fail, and whether they learn or not from that failing. Striving to fully realise your identity is an ongoing universal human desire. 

The expression of gender has behavioural expectations and limitations in our society. Ones further compounded by cultural and racial prejudices. These are just three ways in which the human desire to be liberated can be either thwarted or manifested. People simply want to feel free to be who they want to be. Sometimes they prove to be their own worst enemy, but just as often its other people, other men, other women, their partners, families, social expectations that are crippling them.

This is a truly fabulous book, each chapter a kaleidoscopic window on not just one, but many women's experience of life. At the same time it presents a picture of Britain too, not always likeable or favourable. A Britain that still can't quite bring itself to full embrace the broad spectrum of this wonderfully rich diverse nation, as it actually is.

CARROT REVIEW - 7/8

FEATURE - Iris Van Herpen

This video gives you a clear portrait of both the beauty, complexity and mind-blowing WOW factor of this Dutch fashion designers work. Through multiple layers of fabric and 3D printed elements, she creates clothes that operate on the cutting edge of both technology and fashion. This short film, without narration, gives you a sense for both the sensuality and sculptural qualities of her costumes. Its quite astonishing, I assure you.

LISTENING TO - Carnage by Nick Cave & Warren Ellis

 

Warren Ellis has been the creative force running alongside Nick Cave's  in all its forms in various configurations of bands, to film scores and now this collaboration. Becoming part of this constantly refertilising musical presence, whilst Cave goes through another renaissance in his already distinguished career. Unfortunately this time propelled forth on unfolding grief, a consequence of his son Arthur's untimely death. Undoubtedly cathartic, this work also arises from a need to understand the inexplicable. What has happened, how he has felt and responded. Songs on Carnage, are exculpatory, exploratory, trying to explain, expel or contextualise what is not resolvable.

The work they've created together is both personal and universal in its resonances. The songs are allusive in their poeticism, pointing away from his own pain to an imaginative simulacrum. Its as though Caves career has been leading up to this moment, when grief would, as he has said himself, crack him open.  Instigating a change in him he cannot reverse, even if he should want to.

A repeated current running through the decades of Cave's work has been his love for a biblical reference, musically mining declamatory oracles, the fundamentalism of southern gothic. Such fevered rants once consumed even his outward demeanour. The passion is now tempered with a resigned lyricism. Faith, whatever it is for him, has remained an obsession, wanting and not wanting it, loving and despising it. Trying to understand, like many of us do, our divergent responses. 

And so on Carnage we have a number of tracks that land upon the ear like urging hymns or psalms, such as Lavender Field or Carnage. Plaintive yearning melodies looking for some form of impossible resolution. It is significant that what opens the album is the track Hand of God. Where he swims out to the deepest part of the river and 'lets the river cast its spell on me' hoping to prompt the hand of god, to reach down and save him. Thus proving he exists, or cares. The strings swoon with evident unease, as the words Hand of God are incantated, as though calling for God to be present, to explain themselves. Cave rolls and groans his words and voice around an almost mythic search for clarity. 

And from this track onward the search for resolution permeates each following track. The sky returning as a metaphor repeatedly, from which a presence, a brief remembrance or the Kingdom may emerge. Somewhere he could rest easier. The obliqueness of his lyrics draws you into this realm, with its own colour, language and specific imagery. Both worldly and other worldly. Its a compelling album to listened to, yet the thought of returning to it is not without emotional reservations. Love, doubt, hate and melancholy swirl around in this mist of loss and longing, settling on shattered ground. This is often  simply heart rending.

 

CARROT REVIEW - 8/8

SHERINGHAM DIARY NO 73 - Becoming A Devotee Of The True Pie

I love a witty business name, one that neatly captures its purpose, style and zeitgeist. On our travels anywhere we invariably have to drive towards Kings Lynn. On that road we regularly pass a dog grooming business called Scruffy 2 Fluffy, which I find simply a work of linguistic genius. We all know examples no doubt of Hairdressers with a clever pun ot innuendo in the title, but  Scuffy 2 Fluffy proves it can crop up in other unlikely places too. Like Sheringham, where similar to so many coastal towns these days, it has developed bands of early morning sea swimmers. Come rain or shine they bravely toddle down to the sea front in their dry robes, maxi towels over their shoulders. for a chilling dip into the briny. It is a much more popular form of social grouping with women than men, perhaps for the most obvious wrinkly winkle reasons. So the women's sea swimming group in Sheringham, it appears, is quite substantial and has given itself a group moniker that I think is truly a thing of awe and resplendent wonder - The Blue Tits.

So we are at the turn of the year once again. What a perfect storm of crap events. A horrendous year for avoidable cock ups. 2022 has been without shame. With no signs of letting up its destructive unsettled progress, as we cross that artificially designated boundary in time and name, called The New Year. But one cannot help but try to brush off the dust of the previous year still clinging to our coat tails. To at least begin 2023 with an optimistic reset. Christmas has come and gone. It was enjoyable, provided a moment or two to reconnect with ourselves, now that the mad hurry towards the 25th has ceased. 

At Cottonwood Home, we are already looking into what new things we'd like to make or introduce to our stock range. Fresh fabrics to consider trying out. Making plans, with no idea what the economic circumstances we will encounter will be really like. We are going to have to be cautious and considered in any decisions, I expect. Particularly in the first quarter of the year when income is traditionally squeezed anyway. Shoppers who pushed the boat out too far in December, may find themselves madly bailing out an unmanageable rising debt level by the end of January. Spring may have some unpleasant surprises for us all.

But before all that, we have the dreaded self assessment tax return. Joy of joys. This year we feel to be less on the case, with so much additional emotional plate spinning going on. But the process of harvesting and sorting invoices and expenditure receipts has begun. Until the great data entry looms. These are both largely my role in the proceedings. Before Jnanasalin does the final huge tidying up and balancing bit of the accounting. Ever year I say to myself, lets keep on top of this, lets get into the habit of doing the accounts monthly. It would be so much easier if we did. Your memory of what transpired 18 months later really does go a bit vague, so you look at payments and wonder what the hell happened here? 

My first accountant,a friend of my parents, insisted you should start doing ones accounts in the way you mean to carry on. And he was right, because once there is a backlog, the mountain you have to climb just doesn't get any lower. Actively discouraging you in any effort to be on top of it. And so, this momentum of clarity and intent to get fully up to date, ebbs away. Like any New Year's Resolution, it lasts, not very long. And so even now, even whilst I say to myself that this year, of all years, it would be so much better to be fully on top of it. At the back of my mind is a flickering neon sign saying - ' Not a chance, mate'

Optimism, that's a rare quality these days. Harder to maintain or keep hold of, easily worn away by cynicism born of unrelenting bad news. Whether pessimistic, optimistic, fatalistic or apathetic there is frequently a lack of realism behind these. They're all coping strategies, giving the changeable impermanent and unpredictable nature of life an apparent philosophical unrufflable sheen. Coping strategies are fine just so long as they are seen as such, and not as a complete or correct view on life. Name the demons, beneath their outward appearance of willpower or resignation. 

2023 may prove to be a mix of many things, not all of them catastrophic or doom ridden. I can paint the world in a uniform colour of bleak as well as the next person. It can be my default mood setting. I can miss so much that is good, of value and to be grateful for, whenever I do this. Allowing the 'eight worldly winds'* to lead me, knock me about the head. Never more so than when the external circumstances, economic and otherwise, appear so turbulent and unpredictable.

Me after I've had a Matey Bubble Bath

 

As I mature in age, many things like one's libido become slower in ripening, I have, like folk over many millennia, had to become more relaxed and sanguine about what might be or have been. Its not that its all over, but one cannot do some activities without there being a more significant consequence than would have been previously, even a few minutes ago. I can go swimming, do my thirty lengths quite smartly still, then and hour or two later a wave of physical weariness will verily come upon me. Dragging down alertness of mind and hence productivity, if not to a halt, to an entirely slower speed of execution - from 78rpm to 45rpm. I've had generally to adopt a steadier, slower and more equanimous pace of working, I make more mistakes if I don't. Fortunately being a craft maker does benefit from this considered and less hurried pace of work. That more youthful frenetic pace of execution seems somewhat mad these days. What is all that hurrying about? Overly concerned about reaching destinations and giving insufficient attention to the travelling.

I viewed an interview with Karen Armstrong on You Tube recently. She said, what I thought was a really interesting idea. That the fundamentalism we see in many contemporary religions ( political and ecological too ) is a direct consequence of the emergence and dominance of scientific truth and rationalism. That faith, for some, has to become this incontrovertible truth, certain of its veracity to the point of immovable dogmatic belief. To match with scientific certainty, religious certainty. Her view being that faith has always been founded previously upon a 'cloud of unknowing', evolving out of doubts, uncertainty and the mystically suggestive experience of something transcendentally other.

We were in a Norwich cafe a while back. I ordered a flat white with an apricot Danish pastry. The flat white proved passable, the Danish pastry came warmed with a slight crisp flake to the pastry. We loved it. Prompting the question - why on earth don't we cook our pasties and pies properly? Its such a tragic loss to ones pie eating experience. Flabby sunk pastry half returned to water, is now a common place thing because of the convenience of microwave cooking. You can now buy from Tesco frozen Maple Danish, Cinnamon Swirls, Almond Croissants, Pain Au Chocolate pastries you can bake at home. Why wouldn't you want to do that, rather than tolerate its rather damp substitute. And so I became a convert, A devout follower of the True Pie.

Though it seems strange to say this - I love pies. Unfortunately, haste and supposed time saving has had a consequence. Impoverishing the pastie, pie,flan or frittata of its ultimate form and transcendent nature. Unwittingly I've robbed myself of this sheer delight - of a good crust, a well baked flan case, the flakiness of a danish pastry, the golden pastry top to a pie. Along with slow cooking, devoting time,say twenty minutes, to cooking pastry properly is really not much to ask. I wonder about ourselves these days, always on a mission to do things fast, to save time, without clarifying exactly for what, to do what? In my experience this contemporary compulsion to save time is a bit of a hamster on a wheel situation. It is never ending. Its a mind set with little to do with reality. We believe we must be able to do everything and therefore require as much time as possible. When, I would humbly suggest, we should prioritise quality of experience over quantity. So in 2023, choose to get off that wheel and cook yourself the real experience of The True Pie.

A current favourite

* The Eight Worldly Winds, is a Buddhist teaching that describes basic ideas and impulses that can dominate and rule our life should we pursue them. Coming in four pairs - Praise & Blame, Success & Failure, Pleasure & Pain, Fame & Infamy