Sheds, the sea, memories and meanderings…

Somehow I either missed them or they were there all along and I just didn’t get close enough to the edge. Anyway, I’ve seen them now, clinging to the cliff above the beach at Nefyn at the place where the mudslide washed away that car ten years or so ago. All safe now, the soil reinforced and stabilised with concrete, mesh and marram grass.

Summer houses or beach huts or sheds, it doesn’t matter – there they stand, three of them, facing the storms and the spray of the sea. Just look at that view, imagine the tranquillity on a sunny day, the excitement of a stormy night. Fireworks and barbecues and long cold drinks, paintings and coffee and bacon sandwiches. My envy knows no bounds

Now I know that the shed life isn’t to everybody’s taste. But give me a warm shed perched on a cliff overlooking the sea and the mountains and I will be a happy man, so happy I may never want to leave. Yes, give me a hut by the sea like the chap I met in Barbados who lived in a tin shack on the beach. No bathroom or kitchen, and the tap was at a standpipe across the way, but an open fire and freshly speared fish, coconuts, and the warm Caribbean to bathe in. No wonder his smile was a mile wide.

I sometimes dream that I live in an upturned boat on the beach like the Peggotty family in David Copperfield, and I often get the urge to get up and go to Derek Jarman’s shed cottage at Dungerness, wander his garden, examine his pebble patterns, his found things, and lose myself in my own memories and meanderings.

Sheds, the sea, memories and meanderings… what better combination?

Wall, hedge, mountains, sky…

So, a few days in Wales and me with an A2 pad of heavy cartridge in the car. I like cartridge sometimes, its smoothness and whiteness.

Up at the stables I took myself off for ten minutes and sat on the concrete churn stand where they used to put the milk for the milk board to collect. No churns any more, no milk board, and now I think about it no cows either.

"Go on, be bold." I said to myself, "Just draw what you feel, it'll come together later."

Just one of those early spring days; rain in the air but refusing to fall, fields returning to vibrant young green, ever present mountains ever present. Colour burns my eyes - blues and greens, reds and purples, blue-grey clouds and mottled ochres.

"The shadow keeps changing, light and dark." Just me with a big, trashed, bold, spirit felt pen.

Scribble, scribble, slash - lost for a few minutes, and back. Wall, hedge, mountains, sky - as seen through my eyes... and more felt than seen.

Shipwrecked...

People seem to expect me to find some answers to the puzzles in my life. I'm not sure that they understand this box I'm in - the way it clicks and moves in a hundred thousand ways, how once you think you have a solution you find that hundreds of moves ago you said a single wrong phrase.

I do.

So off I went to Wales to have a think, a good look, search for the answers. Well, I looked but I didn’t find - perhaps I was looking in all the wrong places.

I looked in the birds bustling on the bird table as they squabbled over seed and fat and nuts. I looked in the sea lapping at the shore, the inland wind making the surface of the sea flow out and on to the horizon. I looked in the flat grey cloud hanging over the mountain, reaching down to touch its old, scarred face, and making it wet with its dampness. I looked in my myriad of pots at seeds just beginning to force their way through the cold soil; they’ll flower late one day I expect. I looked in the cold white flicker of stars, ice chips caught in inky suspension – and yes, I looked in a few bottles.

No clues anywhere, not even a stuffed-in, plastic-bottled, note washed up on the chattering shore – “Help me. I’m shipwrecked.”

Waking along the shingle beach at Criccieth I came across a sea kale. Just the one; lush with new growth, floret heads like broccoli, curly leafed just like land kale - just a lighter green and thicker, almost succulent. Maybe there was an answer here? Reaching down I snapped off a small floret and popped it in my mouth; the greenness hitting my taste immediately, sea salt, the wind, the full moon, an oyster catcher’s cry – but no answers.

Yes, shipwrecked in my bottles. At least I'll have something to eat.

Wobble...

I'm not going to be in for a few days. I'm taking some time to pretend to think and maybe do some scribbling, after all scribbling is when I'm happiest.

I scribble all the time, lots of us do. But sometimes a scribble becomes something else, something far greater, striking a chord in the conciousness of the world - iconic. I think that iconic art is as much about place and time as it is about the image... and then of course there's the marketing and the profile of the scribbler. It all goes together to make a DaVinci, a Warhol, or a Munch. It isn't really all about the scribble at all - is it Mystery Banksy, Mr Hirst?

I wonder how many Munch's and Van Gogh's go unnoticed, spending their days scribbling away but not being seen by that influential someone who takes their scribbles and turns it into dollar-worthy iconic art?

Seventy-four million pounds and all because of a slight wobbly moment on a bridge.

Maybe I''ll find me a bridge to have a wobble on.

Party Pete - a doodle and a tale...

Pete didn’t go to parties any more. It was the laughter you see, all that fun and joking got on his nerves… really got on his nerves. He hated the smiles and giggles and laughter, the guffawing, the tittering, the smirking and snorting – and as for the pointing. No, it was a good job that he didn’t go to parties any more. He felt better for it.

The last party he’d gone to had been no different really. He turned up and within ten minutes or so everybody was laughing. Well, he’d changed all that… he’d soon wiped the smiles off their faces. He left each with a wide red grin though - a really wide red grin - that taught them.

Afterwards he’d tried to wipe the smile off his own face but it just didn’t seem to want to go; he’d rubbed and rubbed but it wouldn’t shift… so he’d given up. Strange really, it had never happened before. No, Pete didn’t go to parties any more. Not that he'd have be able to, even if he’d wanted to; not after all that mess and the other stuff - they’d never let him out again you see.

Perhaps in retrospect he wasn’t cut out to be a clown… Cut out!

Get it! Haaaaaa-haaaaaa!

Corners…

Into everyone’s life a little rain must fall or so they say. But it seems to me to have been too stormy for a while now, hurricane force at times. Oh well, what’s the other thing that they say - spring is just around the corner? Well, this is May and it’s not here yet. Sometimes I think they say too much. Mind you they're not alone there, usually silence is the best of friends - shame that he's not one of mine.

I’ve planted a few violas in the borders and tubs at the back of the house. They’ve been slow to grow and the seeds I’ve sown haven’t shown as yet. Perhaps they won’t show at all, what with the cold and dark and wet. The violas are bright against the damp dark earth - cheering almost.

The rain fall and falls, the wind blows, the seeds don’t grow. Ah well, if they are to be believed beloved spring is just around the corner; and those corners are everywhere - corners to cut, corners to turn, corners to be backed into. Yes, every truth has four corners - and I can't find one, let alone the other three.

The raindrops on the window reflect the ground outside, I reflect also. Ah, sweet reflection – just not mine.

The May queen…

Today is May the first, true May day. It makes me think of morris dancers outside of thatched pubs, planting out, and the maypole that was everywhere when I was six or seven. Do schools still have maypoles I wonder - plaiting the red and white ribbons right down to the ground in a potent fertility dance. It's a strange time, not everything it seems, not all good, not all renewal and growth. There's a darkness to it; darkness and love and worship of the queen of the May.

I married the queen of the May - oh yes I did. Here's a verse to remind her.

The May Queen.

I got up from my chair before she’d even knocked the door. I don’t think I knew that she was there before. But opening it, there was she - head up, eyes bright: “I’ve come for tea, and I may stay the night.” “And you are?” Her broom sweeps the question clean away. “No sugar, only China.” I heard her say as she moved into my home - that Queen of May, sucking my life till every drop was gone. This Queen of May, mayhem more like… and yes, she stayed… and slowly killed my light.