annanotbob's Diaryland Diary
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Jam hot
This whole thing with cognitive ability is more complex, less depressing than I had thought. On the one hand, stupid fucking things, like setting up a new email, filling in a form, learning to use a new uploading site for my photos do my head in. Some of these have been achievable by tackling them as major projects, one step at a time. Others still defeat me, which is frightening and depressing.
But, tonight Sara read me her big final essay about the history of the function of portraiture which I followed without any problem, all through modernism and post-modernism, with a bit of Descartes chucked in here and there. I needed clarification of a couple of points, but she took that as a fault in her expression, and I made a couple of suggestions that she was able to expand on immediately.
So what the fuck's all that about? How can this be? OK, it's only an essay for an access course, but it's good - I fell into teacher-mode as soon as she started and this was a stage beyond A Level, that's for sure, widely researched, making connections all over the place, blah blah, complex. So, if I can follow that, why can't I open a fucking hotmail account, which I've done before and is something eny fule kud do? I don't know the answer to that, but somehow the juxtaposition leaves me feeling it's fucked up rather than I am, so who cares.
So scary to not be able to do things. Makes me doubt myself and my worthiness and I fall right into the black hole.
Short pause while I go to investigate big uproar in the kitchen which culminates in a vigorous clanging of the wind chimes. I had closed the window:
which Bob (cat) has just nearly knocked herself out trying to get through. Moron.
Anyway, by an act of (frankly) heroic determination, I have set up a new email, but not yet managed to get paypal up and running. Imigeshick has changed since I was last there, and I feel I may have missed some crucial point about how it works now, but in the end I got some pics. I hope the one above, of Bob, is bigger this time - that's my view when I'm at the kitchen sink.
This is an old greenhouse up the road at Stanmer Park (my new favourite nursery), which they have just started to clear:
The garden could be the thing to motivate me to plough through the handbook to my camera. Colour - that's what my planting has been about, but when I take a photo of the best bit, it comes out very flat. Sara tells me that the blue of the fence kills the other colours, so I tried putting a bit of board behind, but now all I can see is the horrid plastic pot my poor olive tree has to live in and the colours are only improved a bit:
Be warned - if you mouth off about not giving a shit about your appearance, no bugger will tell you when your cardie is inside-out:
That's Sammie behind me - we're at Tony's tag-rugby tournament. It was all a bit of a shock - we've never had anyone remotely sporty in our family and some of these parents do take it a bit seriously.
The dummy with the bunch of flowers yesterday was from my afternoon on the Open House art trail with Mary and Marion. (The link takes you to another which has the illustrated brochure.) We do one of these every year in the festival, but this is our first since I've lived in Brighton, right in the middle of this one. How wonderful to just mooch up the road and plunge into an art gallery, then another and another and another. And to get inside some of the other houses round here. I realise mine and Jane's have both been 'done' by developers - they've been re-plastered throughout which makes a massive difference to the feel of a place. I'm not averse to a lumpy wall in an old house.
I've sat here for ages trying to think of something to say about the art we saw, but I'm a bit flummoxed, especially since reading Sara's essay. All the work is by local artists, in a range of media - quite a lot of painting and photography but all kinds of other stuff as well - sculpture, papier mache, textiles, really varied in every way. For the life of me I cannot see what quality will later mark them as quite clearly from the early 21st century, but it's in there.
Lovely being with them, Mary and Marion.
This evening I gave Ren a lift to his girlfriend's house, just down the road from where we used to live. I didn't go near the old house, but Sara came too and we had a lovely little jaunt together, off over the hills and along the coast, just as the sun was low in the sky and the shadows were long in the fields.
Tomorrow I may tell you how facebuk and hotmail are between them leaving my forthcoming party in the lap of the gods.
Grateful for:
1. Burgers and chips for tea
2. No one nicking my car which I keep forgetting to lock
3. A few days off having my head examined (as it were), and another one tomorrow
4. A big fat moon shining down on me through the window
5. Living right here, right now
Sweet dreams xxx
9:51 p.m. - 19/05/2008
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