bones in the walls

 

Up in Crickhowell for a few days, I took some of my cards around likely places. Like Book-ish, a fine indy bookshop in the town. Emma is busily getting ready to open a second, more child-focused shop in Abergavenny, too.

In Abergavenny, I went to the Tithe Barn and had a nice talk with the woman on the counter (whose name I unfortunately forgot. Sorry.) about Partrishow, which is one of her favourite places too.

 She said that when she was very small, her aunt told her that, in the olden days (it's always the olden days in stories), when the priests died they were buried in the walls, and the bones kept showing through however often they painted the walls.

Mischievous aunt!

map reading for beginners

map reading for beginners, originally uploaded by Dru Marland.

This picture's kept me occupied for the last few days. It's intended as the cover for Deborah's next poetry collection, a work in progress. The picture incorporates several elements in her poems, and develops some of the ideas behind my Partrishow picture. There's also a big nod in the direction of Kathleen Jamie's poem 'Meadowsweet', because it seemed to work so well with the picture and is such a good poem, in its turn referencing a tradition that 'suggests that certain of the Gaelic women poets were buried face down'.

different voices

I was down at the health centre the other day (routine blood test, blah) and found that they'd installed a new telly screen thing that played public information films about giving up smoking and not driving when you're tired. It also made announcements, calling patients to their appointments. Where previously the Tannoy system had the individual doctors mumbling self-effacingly into their microphones ("was that my name? I'm sure it sounded a bit like it...") or bellowing, as was their wont, there is now a cut-and-paste computer voice thing that does its best to read the patients' and doctors' names in English well-wrought.

All very entertaining it was too.

It got me thinking of other uses for this sort of software, and so I tried this:

• Send a piece of poetry as a text message to my land-line number
• Record the result when the message arrives

And here is the result; the closing lines of Carol Ann Duffy's Prayer. Enjoy.

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer -
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

sprung

hare, originally uploaded by Dru Marland.

A hare for March, though this one is not going to be dashing around any time soon; it's in a case at Bristol City Muesum, still looking slightly aggrieved at having been stuffed.

The black headed gulls have got their new Lone Ranger masks on, as I saw yesterday morning while cycling out over the Downs. And in the afternoon the sky cleared entirely, and the day turned beautiful. As I was whizzing the circular saw around some MDF out on the road (don't want to fill the flat with sawdust) the silences in between the saw were punctuated with bursts of woodpecker drumming from the trees over the road.

quantifiable welsh poem

 

I early learned that brontosauruses
Are long as three red London buses
And all the folk in China’ll quite
Fit upon the Isle of Wight.

Rare indeed's the object which is

Not compared with football pitches
But other places try and fail
To be as close a fit to Wales as Wales.

...inspired by this on the radio....

three hares stained glass

Today's picture. This is the third version of the three hares that I've painted. I got the idea when Suzanne asked about something for the porthole on her narrowboat. Now to see about getting the design made up into stickers!

Ravilious, Bristol, and submarines

I've been enjoying James Russell's new book, Ravilious: Submarine, because I like Eric Ravilious' pictures and I've never seen the complete series of submarine pictures he produced during his time (subsequently and sadly cut short) as a war artist.

Apart from the submarine pics, there's loads of other stuff giving context and influences, and it was nice finding a picture from David Inshaw there too, another fave artist!

I took the pictures here down in Bristol city docks, because they've got a Ravilious connection too; before the war, he nearly got run over by a train here...

 "...when Eric had decided to go on drawing outside after dark, and was working intently on his picture of a paddle steamer, he had suddenly heard a grinding noise and a voice calling out, 'lucky for you I saw you, old cock, or you'd have been a box of cold meat.' Eric had set up his easel, without noticing it was on the tracks of one of those light railways that are used in the docks." (Helen Binyon)

 Eric Ravilious: P&A Campbell's 'Britannia'

Sealink IOW ferry 'Southsea'

Mardyke wharf, Bristol

Perhaps this is the picture that he was working on at that time. Here is P&A Campbell's paddle steamer, Britannia, on Mardyke Wharf. And below it is a more recent visitor, the former Sealink Isle of Wight ferry Southsea, which failed to get preserved and ended up scrapped. I once took a trip on this boat, across the Solent. I was working for Sealink IOW at the time, on their car ferries. I sat in the crew mess on the trip; they whiled away the time on the voyage by drinking Stella and doing hot knives on the stove.