We went to England...

... flying over London,

to Essex, to Stansted Mountfitchet, which has a castle, but we didn't go into it, indeed we never have, because although it is a real Norman castle, or the remains of one, it has been developed into something resembling a large adventure playground:

There are tame deer there (you can just see them in the right of the picture) but they have warts, my sister says, and one of the peahens has escaped and wreaks havoc in my niece's garden, where it also laid a rather disgusting looking egg. All of which does not constitute good taste. My sister's house, however does, especially her piles of handmade patchwork quilts,

which are quite breathtaking when thrown out on display in a manner like that of Persian carpets, (I took many photos of them and hope to post them here, though it will be hard to do them full justice).

We ate rather a lot of cake, more or less every day. Oops.

 We visited Waltham Abbey,

and Norwich, which we now call Nowwitch, rather than Norritch,

and met some local residents:

We watched the world swing by from my sister's living room:

and we hung out with Ziggy the cat (you are best covering yourself with a large dust sheet and to wear light-coloured clothing when you do this, since he drops his own weight in clingy white fur every day, which Tom in his better-disposed moments says is stardust)

and friends - that's my niece, who's also called Tom, on the other side of Zig; she is all loveliness,

and we met up with Natalie (the first time for me), who is all loveliness too, and whose home is surely one of the richest, most colourful, stimulating and beautiful environments I've ever been in:

And then we flew home.

~

I was rather erratic in my photo taking, with hundreds of some subjects and none of others, though Tom took more, some of which I might pinch. However, in the manner of springtime holidays, we returned to a garden resembling the Lost Kingdom, but also with the refreshed will and motivation to get to work on it, and to weather which has, in a week, resolved to make the transition from bleak chill to smiling sunshine. I am also carrying an excess of weight from winter lassitude and all the cake which must needs be addressed and removed, and no small number of this-and-that projects to start and to finish, so heightened activity outside and elsewhere is called for. I'll be back on the blog scene as and when.

Kettle's Yard: plexiglass

My sister has been promising to take me to Kettle's Yard for a long time now, but somehow or other we've never quite made it; whenever we've gone to Cambridge it's been closed, or we've been committed to doing something else, or whatever.  This time, the first day I was in England, I asked if we might go.

Now I find everyone, everywhere, I mention it to tells me that they know and love the place better than almost any other museum or gallery anywhere, and it would seem that I must be the very last person on earth to visit it, so I won't write a big introduction.  The website is excellent, and will show and tell you more about the place, its founders and history, than I can; suffice it to say I can quite well understand why it is everyone's favourite museum or gallery anywhere, even though it's not really quite either of those things, in the traditionally accepted sense.

I hadn't expected to be able to take pictures, but in fact for a fee of £2 (entry is free), and on the understanding that I would not use flash, I could take all I could eat.  Tom encountered a similar arrangement at Southwark cathedral when he was in London, and it's a good one, I think.  I was the only person photographing, none of the usual hordes of slightly spaced-out looking people holding out their phones at everything like members of a Star Trek away team exploring the surface of a new planet, though I suspect this was as much to do with the milieu and the people who typically visit it than an unwillingness to pay up.  As I never use flash anyway and always have all the stupid artificial whirring and clicking noises on the camera turned off, I hope I was being discreet and not intrusive.  My niece T, who was with us, said she didn't really know if I was photographing or not, which was good. 

Taking nice photos at Kettle's Yard is really like shooting proverbial fish in a proverbial barrel (a figure of speech that has always puzzled me somewhat, since the action would seem to me unreliable and potentially hazardous, leading to a leaking barrel at best and a dangerous wet ricochet at worst; I wonder if anyone has in fact done it?)

 The beauty of the objects and spaces, their lighting and compositional arrangements, can rarely be faulted, you don't have to do any work to find a good picture everywhere you turn.

Consequently, I took an awful lot of pictures, which, with the demands of the garden in a few much needed days of dry weather, and other things, since I came home, I've not finished editing.  To start with though, this plexiglass hanging sculpture mobile: a great, slowly turning lens in a leafy alcove.  

It hung by a light nylon thread, which seemed too fine to support it, and would twirl gently when you so much as blew on it; a slight touch to it, unthinking, with the back of my knuckle, brought the wrath of the lady attendant down on my head: 'Fingermarks!' she rebuked.  Quite right too.  

There are no labels on anything here, which is one reason that it's different and better than other museums or galleries - if you want to know about anything you can buy a guide or ask one of the attendants, but in fact the meditative, immersive quality of the place, and the sense that it was, and still is, a home and the things there its inhabitants, make one disinclined to want to go around with your nose in a catalogue or needing to elicit a continuous noisy commentary from someone.

So I can't tell you who made the plexiglass sculpture mobile.

But we felt we could look at it for a long time.  T looks as if she is consulting it in oracular fashion, (perhaps to learn who is the fairest of Lucy's nieces of them all, which is an unanswerable question, they're all gorgeous).

I tried to video it in motion, but unfortunately it didn't come out, I'm not familiar enough with the video function on this camera, which is not intuitive like the old one was, or I'm just inept.  Instead here's a series of  still shots.

~

More Kettle's Yard stuff later, but it's another dry day and outside I must go.

Windows again (looking out)

Isn't it our geometry,
the window, the simplest shape 
effortlessly drawn around
our enormous life?

The one you love is never lovelier
than when you see her 
in the frame of a window,
made nearly timeless.

All risks are done away with.  Being
stands at the heart of love,
with just this small surrounding space 
of which you are master.

(Rilke, Windows III )

~

It's enough that, on a balcony
or in the frame of a window
a woman hesitates ... 

                ... to be
the one we've lost
on having seen her once appear.

And if she should lift up her arms,
a delicate vase, to tie her hair:
how much our loss
gains sudden emphasis by that
and our misfortune brilliance!


(Rilke, Windows I )

~

(Looking out from a Costa coffee shop in Cambridge, thinking I'd been lugging the camera about but not taking many photos, so decided I'd try a bit of street photography through the windows.  Kind of thing when Jean does it it looks full of mindfulness and atmosphere and possible meaning, when I do it it just looks like mucking about pointing the camera at random, which it is.  But as Rilke keeps saying, things seen through a window...

The only person I reckon is really recognisable is my sister, drinking her coffee, so I hope this doesn't offend anyone's sensibilities on matters of privacy.)

More Windows

Window, a measure of waiting,
filled up so many times,
when a life pours out and grows
impatient for another life.

You pull apart and pull towards,
changeable as the sea,
a glass where, suddenly, our faces mirror
themselves and mix with what we see there.

A scrap of freedom compromised
by chance's presence;
taken up by something that's inside us that levels
with the superfluity of what's outside.

~

(Rilke, Windows IV.  My translation again.  I'll get around to appending the originals at some point.

Photos taken from London Bridge.  Not sure what the building is.)

'Today I'm in a window mood...'

.

Today I'm in a window mood

where living seems only to look,

and every taste surprises me

as filling and as knowing as a book.

( Rilke, The Windows XII, my translation/version from the French, as I can't quite get on with Poulin's and there don't seem to be many others.  I've got a bloody nerve.  RMR wrote some 400 poems in French near the end of his life, after the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus.)

- Photos - Saffron Walden and Cambridge.