Saturday 15th March - colour of the day; BLACK

 Woke to another beautiful pale pink frosty clear morning... so perfect to look at but rather nippy to experience for  real...

Breakfast

I'm back on ferrous sulphate (iron) pills which takes some thinking about. 'Take one tablet twice a day with food. Take one hour before, or two hours eating eggs, wholegrains, milk, or calcium supplements' say the destructions (yes, we always call any instructions 'destructions', reasons lost in the mists of time).

My preferred breakfast us whole grain cereal with hot milk. Or wholemeal toast. Huh.

Plus I take a calcium supplement twice a day. Huh again.

So I'm now having a small slice of boring brown toast, a small non-milky coffee and an iron tablet as a first breakfast.

I had a slight difficulty with my toast this morning;

I haven't burned my toast that spectacularly for decades! I popped the red button, fished out the charred remains of the bread and dropped it, still smoking, in the sink. My mother taught me that the quickest way to clear a smoke-filled space is to work the door like a huge vertical fan, by opening and shutting it. I think that was something she learned as a child in the war; her home town of Velsen, in the Netherlands, is at the seaward end of the Amsterdam ship canal and was heavily bombed.

Anyway the door thing cleared the kitchen of smoke and I made more toast.

An hour later I had my second breakfast!

Tea, muesli with hot milk, water, and a dish of assorted tablets and capsules. That big white one gets chewed up - it's the calcium supplement. My mother loathed them; wpshe was prescribed them after her stroke. My father would 'dish up' her meds in a little dish, as I do now, and she would drop the calcium one straight in the bin. 

The Big Red Capsule is a new additional med, and needs to be taken with a substantial meals ie more than a small slice of toast, hence two breakfasts.

'Hiking'

Later I added yesterday's step count to my current virtual hike, the Jurrasic Coast Path. A measly 1200 steps; I try to hit 2000 before bed but my heart wasn't in it yesterday. 

I'm really enjoying the views and the weather, without the effort of going up up uphill and then down down downhill.

You can really imagine yourself there!

Art

Because I'm not very busy at the moment (heavy on the irony there) and I really neeeeed another thing to do (you may laugh at me for no longer than 10 seconds please), I have signed on to a futurelearn free online course on collage. It's only 4 weeks long, and the expectation is that you spend 3-4 hours a week doing the lessons.

Today was my first day. Week 1 is all about mark-making, confining yourself to just using black.

I was having a lovely time, 'taking a line for a walk' to begin with

(That's a Paul Klee quote). Then I turned the page and hot our a brush and my beautiful carbon black ink. I think you can guess what happened next 

That ink sure is black! And spreads so very, very fast! BB leapt to my rescue and between us we managed to keep the ink to just the top of my small table, and he did a magnificent job of mopping it up.

And then I put the ink away and carried on with a pencil. Much safer.

Music

Well, musics, really.

One thing led to another...

With so much 'black' featuring in today I thought of the folk song 'Black is the colour of my true love's hair'.

I did not expect to find this 1964 recording... it is fascinatingly different. 

I had come across Cathy Berberian before in primary school music teaching. One of the units for year 5/6 was on graphic scores, ie scores using alternatives to traditional music notation. It featured an extract from 'Stripsody', compised and performed by Cathy Berberian. You needed to have your wits about you to survive this lesson as a teacher, but if all went well it was a brilliant unit.

The sniggering started with the title, 'Stripsody', an amalgam of 'cartoon strips' and 'rhapsody'. Once that was under control, you could issue handouts of the graphic score. I used to agree a pact with the children that I would play the extract twice; could they get the laughter over and done with on the first hearing, and then try and control themselves and concentrate at the second hearing. That usually worked.

We then went on to create individual, and group 'Stripsody' style compositions, starting with one word, written as it was to be sounded. This was always popular, (and also entertaining and inclusive. I would circle round and help, and suggest to shy children that they could write, and make, a tiny sound, or even hold up a blank piece of paper and contribute a silent space to the composition. It's remarkable how expressively the children could use their voice.