Heeeeeey. I didn't mean to take a break from the blog, but here we are. There are several reasons for why it happened, and as it’s now been so long, my question to myself recently has been “Where do I even start?”. I know where I should, but that post will take a while to put together, and will be pain/joyful to write. So I’m just dipping my toe in, giving a life sign, waving hello. I’m here, all is good, and it’s time to take the time to be here again. Hope you’re good.
Woohoo - summer’s over! Thank fudge for that. Never have I ever wanted it over so quickly; maybe it was the intense heat, the drought, the looooong days with not much going on, but boy am I glad that it’s DONE. I’ve come across a few articles in the past couple of weeks with titles like “How to make summer last” or “Hold on to that summer feeling” and I’ve been shaking my head, feeling like I live on another planet, one were I want routines back, the cold and the dark and the quiet, and hibernation. Weird - I know. I think I just have three words for it, and that’s “cold water swimming”. It’s changed my life and has changed me. Summers are kind of a drag now.
I’ll tell you what didn't help either. I missed out on our first holiday abroad together as a family in 2 &1/2 years. Something that I’d so intensely looked forward to, found stressful to book many moons ago, and in the end managed to clear Covid by one day before departure (!). We were due to go to the Dolmites, back to the same place we went in 2008, but this time with Oomoo. It was going to be amazing to be in the mountains again, showing him all the crazy beautiful places there, but it was not to be, not for me anyway. Buddy had been poorly for about a week before we were due to go, and right up to the last minute we didn’t know whether the holiday was a go or a no. Seven hours before our cab was due to pick us up for a ridiculously early flight, it was decided that I’d have to stay behind and look after him, so I unpacked my suitcase, hugely disappointed. But you know, in the scheme of things, not a disaster, just really crap timing. Anyway, we FaceTimed daily and I got sent pictures like this, which made me both happy and sad (that’s O over there, enjoying the view).
Buddy’s fine now, the meds I had to give him twice a day for a week sorted him out. I was also happy that I could look after him during the insanely hot heatwave that hit us mid-July, making sure he stayed in the cooler parts of the house, because look at him - that dude is basically wearing a fur coat 24/7.
19th of July, 7.29am. The day when we hit the highest temperature ever recorded in the UK, +40.3c (104.5F). I’d already spent the previous day indoors in the coolest room of the house and not moving much. I didn’t want to repeat it, so I went out for an early morning walk in the park, which is what everyone with dogs were doing too, before it got too hot. See the tall grass to the left of the picture? It should be a deep green and not a fire hazard. It’s no understatement to feel like we’ve gone past the point of no return with climate change now. It feels surreal to live in a time which is so amazingly shit on so many fronts, all at the same time.
But you all know that. And you didn’t come here to feel down, so let’s change the subject. This is the one picture this summer that I took, that I felt properly excited about taking. It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does it’s a real rush. It’s of course totally subjective, and you might find this picture meh, but in my eyes it ticks a lot of my boxes; a graphic shadow, nice colours, an anonymous child, and catching that second of her hand floating in the air before she grabs hold of the next handrail. AND that she’s under a “sun” wearing a sun hat. Noice.
Actually, going through the pictures for this post I remembered that the summer wasn’t all that bad. There were lots of good things, like feeding my eyes and soul with some great exhibitions. Really enjoyed Fashioning Masculinites at the V&A; I would wear all of these outfits (but then I do wear a lot of mens’ clothing as they’re so much nicer, but actually these are quite feminine or at least unisex 🙃). The two on the left are underwear from the 1700’s (I’ve got a nightie very similar to the first one -ha!).
Edward Munch at the Courthauld was another highlight. Very small but very good.
Also made our way up to Cambridge to see Hockney’s Eye at the Fitzwilliam Museum, which was absolute genius. I love that man’s art and mind so much.
On another boiling hot day me and my gal pals and Oomoo went to Oxford to see Ruth Asawa at Modern Art Oxford. I only realised looking back at my post from the London Asawa exhibition two years ago that this one was way smaller and not as broad. Still, it was great to see and the perfect excuse for an Oxford day trip.
One Friday evening me and my gals A & D went to see Football: Designing the Beautiful Game at the Design Museum, an exhibition that I initially was going to pass on, but after having checked out the website I realised that it actually looked really good. We all loved it, especially as A & D are graphic designers and I used to be one.
It’s not often that I bring O with me to exhibitions anymore; now that he’s old enough to say ‘No thanks’, rather than have no choice and get dragged along, he usually does. But in a long stretch of not doing much, and needing to get out of the house, I knew that he might be a bit more interested in Futureshock at 180 The Strand. There were only two good things in there, and this was one of them, Daydream v.6 by Nonotak. Like one of the best things I’ve seen in ages. I’m glad that you weren’t allowed to go inside it or it would be ruined by everyone capturing for their socials. Oh wait.
Last but not least I saw Etel Adnan’s Colour as Language at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam a couple of weeks ago. Adnan was a published writer and poet who had been painting for 50+ years, and found fame with her art at 87 a few years back with her colourful and minimal abstract paintings, and well deserved too. If that’s not inspiring I don’t know what is.
What else?
well, there were two summer haircuts,
a very tiny bit of wildlife on our front room window right before bed one evening
lots and lots of watching TV
and staying inside away from the heat.
There were also a few day trips; one with A & D to Cambridge,
one with the guys to Brighton
and one earlier mentioned outing to Oxford. I enjoyed all of them immensely. I like the pace of a day trip.
There was also a trip to Kew Gardens right before school started,
as well as one week in Amsterdam, which we all got to go on, although Mr Famapa had to leave a few days early for a job in Warsaw.
And here’s a morning after a sleepover a week ago, right before the house schedule moved into autumn mode. Hope your summer was a-okay, and if you like, tell me about it :)
17/4/21
I fell into a bit of a picture taking funk last year, but was then inspired by an episode of Elizabeth Gilbert’s old podcast ‘Magic Lessons with Elizabeth Gilbert’ (ep.208 if you want to know), where she spoke to a woman who didn’t feel able to call herself a poet. I can 100% relate as I’ve never felt comfortable with saying that I’m a photographer, because you know, real photographers have their work published, and therefor I don’t qualify (I’m not so hung up about that now, as I don’t really care about it as a label anymore; if someone asks I say I’m a photographer, and then the conversation just moves on). Anyway, Gilbert suggested a couple of ideas to the poet (see - I call her that!), one of which was that she should embark on a secret year-long project, which she wasn’t to show anyone until it was finished. The whole point was to create, without any input from anyone else, for your own pleasure, and away from any validation that social media gives you. I immediately knew what my secret project should be. A year’s worth of self portraits, using the self-timer on the camera, and only having three goes to get it ‘right’. I’ve said this so many times, but as I’m always behind the camera there are hardly any photos of me, so it really was a no-brainer. In the end I missed two days, as I had completely forgotten to take a pic on those days, but you know, whatever. I’m going to make a book of it, for myself, so there’s also a physical record of me between 16/4/21 and 16/4/22, and I’m naming it ‘Me me me’.
The picture above is from day 2, on what looks like a nice sunny day, in the garden, with me reading the paper. There’s a LOT of pictures of me reading, which feels good to see.
22/4/21
I didn’t use a tripod, apart from one pic I think, so I had to make use of the floor, shelves, tables - basically any flat surface I could find. I love this picture. That light was just a frickin’ gift!
30/4/21
Me and O reading our books next to each other before his bedtime. Most of the pictures are from home and my everyday life. I very rarely remembered to take a self portrait when I was out and about. A good creative challenge if there ever was one.
2/5/21
A lot of the time I’d forget to take a picture until I was about to go to bed (and a few times I’d remember with a jolt, as I was about to fall asleep).
5/5/21
This makes me laugh. My New Year’s resolution last year was to be able to do three pull ups. I totally failed. A few months before the end of the year my elbow joints gave out, so I couldn’t do any weights for a while, let alone pull ups exercises. Needless to say, I gave up, and this year I realised that New Year’s resolutions are silly, and that I naturally do lots of new things in a year anyway. I also now know that I’ll never be able to do a pull up, and I’m fine with that.
27/5/21
I think this was my only tripod shot. And here I am, getting a blog post together.
10/6/21
I have no shame. Yep. that’s me on the loo.
14/6/21
It’s funny to see how my clothes change as the seasons do too. Buddy is in a lot of the shots. I’m sure he’s looking at me here thinking “She’s so… weird.”
25/7/21
Well, I am. A bit.
2/8/21
But you love me Buddy, and newsflash, we’re all weird. Even you, my furry friend.
7/8/21
And yeah, even away, in our friends’ house, I had to get my weird on. Sometimes I’d do a last millisecond pose, just to change things up.
10/8/21
This ones also makes me laugh. I’ll call it ‘Life at the edge of the sun’.
27/8/21
In the house in the Cotswolds. I like the tones in this one.
14/9/21
So strange to see this room when it was white. I have no idea why we left it so long before we changed the colour in there. It looks so boring and cold compared to how it is now. And yes, Buddy is allowed on the table, because who’s to say he wouldn’t be up there when we’re not in anyway? I draw the line if he’s just been to the loo, but going by my logic, he probably goes up there when he has, when we’re not in - ha!
21/9/21
Me and the moon. Howling at it? Turning into a werewolf? Joking aside, it was a stunning full moon.
I’ll post more of these soon. Hey - that rhymes! Noice.
Last week’s view.
Hey. How goes it? It’s finally better here; our household all went down with Covid a couple of weeks ago, with Oomoo catching it in school and testing positive on his birthday - which seemed a bit mean. He’d actually asked to have the vaccine for his 12th birthday, but we’ll take natural immunity (of sorts) as a consolation. It’s a bit ironic, as I recently had secretly been craving a lockdown (I know, it makes no sense, but I think I was just tired and wanted a break, also, with everything seemingly being even more unknown at the moment, I should be careful what I wish for), and getting ill gave me that slow time that I wanted, needed. Both me and Mr Famapa were due our boosters, but the virus got us before we had the chance to get them. All I kept thinking was how lucky we were that we had had the vaccine to start with, and how, if I felt as badly as I did, what the hell would it have been like without it? So what did I do for 10 days? I set up camp in the spare room, placing my desktop computer in there and watching hours and hours of archive programmes on BBC iPlayer, pretty much only watching old architecture documentaries from the 60’s/70’s/80’s, and other random bits of old TV. I loved every minute of it; to see and hear real people talk about their lives, and see life on the streets as it actually was (and most shows I watched were from London as well) , made me realise that our visual history is usually passed on in time through dramas or interviews with famous people. Here are some of the programmes I watched, if you’re interested and in the UK:
Architecture at the Crossroads - 8. Houses Fit For People
Building Sights - Trellick Tower
Building Sights - Alexander Fleming House
Special Enquiry - A Girl Comes to London
Eye to Eye - Now We Are Married
We also watched Peter Jackson’s Get Back epic Beatles documentary, which was actually magical. Jackson has spent the past four years sifting through 57+ hours of footage that Michael Lindsay-Hogg shot for the 1970 film Let It Be, restoring it and polishing everything up, so it looks like it was shot just weeks ago, and re-telling the story of what led to The Beatles’ last live performance on top of the EMI’s roof on Savile Row. You get to be a fly on the wall as John, Paul, George and Ringo jam and find their way to finished songs like Get Back, Let It Be, I Me Mine and Don’t Let Me Down. The footage of Paul messing about and finally coming up with the intro to Get Back was truly jaw dropping. It felt like I stopped breathing when I watched it happen; it really came out of nowhere! And to see how they create, what are now some of the most famous songs ever written, and how relaxed they are as they figure them out, is just mind blowing. It is incredibly slow at times, but I loved the mundanity of some of it. AND! They’re in their late 20’s here (in fact George is only 25, and Billy Preston who joins the band on keyboards, 23), which is also just crazy. Weirdly, after the almost eight hours were up, we were sad that it was over. I’ve been playing their music non-stop for the past few days, and will keep doing so for a long long time. The two weeks that Covid gave me time wise have been immensely culturally rewarding, and for that I’m truly grateful. Silver linings yo, silver linings.
P.S. If you can’t watch the documentary itself this article sums it up perfectly (about a 10 min read).