Tuesday 15th September - What's been happening?

 The answer to that question depends on context.

Leaving climate emergencies, politics, pandemics and world events out, it has been a quiet week here in suburbia.

The schools are in full cry now which means the scenes outside the sweet shop are like this;

 I mean the top right corner of the picture. He went to post a letter yesterday at about half past three and came back saying 'Never Again'; it was almost impossible to negotiate a sensibly distanced path to the post box in among the hordes of children desperate to buy ice creams on the way home. 

The main subject of today's picture is a bar of chocolate that has been calling to me from the top shelf of the baking cupboard for a couple of days now. I think it was left over from my godmother's store cupboard last December. I had some, and He's had some, and very soon it will cease to bother us. 

What else? We've had scones and tea in a friend's garden - this weather is making things so much easier and more pleasant than they might be - and another friend dropped in after church on Sunday for morning coffee and scones. There's no cake at the moment as we forgot to put eggs (and lettuce and strawberry jam, come to think of it) on the shopping order, so we will have to make do with scones and honey and salad leaves - all full of holes - why? - from the garden. Such deprivation. 

It really is hot at the moment. Like Summer. We will have to start watering the garden from this evening or there will be No salad leaves, with or without holes.

The djembe drumming group met for the first time since March. There are just 6 in the group at the moment so we can still meet, (The Rule of Six... sounds like the title of a Young Adult fantasy book) all masked up, sitting in a widely-spaced circle. It takes a lot of thinking about, to prepare the area and then mop up with disinfectant afterwards. It's thinks like remembering to put the chairs back and THEN disinfect rather than the other way round. I did my usual trick of suddenly doubting that I had locked the church before replacing the key in the key safe, in spite of Knowing that I had watched myself put the key in the lock and turn it. I remember that this was a constant problem when I worked entirely on my own in an IT department (yes, no-one else on the premises) and was so stressed out and over-tired that I would go back and check if I had really and truly locked up about three times before I got home. On this occasion I managed to force myself to accept my memory of locking up - whoo-hoo - that's progress!

Piano teaching has started up again. Four lessons yesterday (looks like Mondays are going to be a bit of a heavy day). The other days have just two or three lessons - I'm in no hurry to fill all the spaces in the timetable. 

Paintings? (Just scroll down to the end if you are bored)

Wednesday 9th - I'd been having a go at doing skies, so here's a sunset

Thursday 10th - watching the man doing the roof on the bungalow conversion opposite

Friday 11th

The new owner (also a builder) chatting to his neighbours, while the other men carry on with the roof

Sunday 13th September, copied from a photograph. 

I didn't paint on Saturday, so used those pages to try out some techniques 

Monday 14th September

Well, that's roughly what has been happening, mostly within a few hundred kilometres of when I'm standing at the moment. 

Time for a cup of tea...

    

Saturday 11th May - May Morris Men ( and Women) and what we saw

Continuing from the previous post........ refilling my cup of cheerfullness

Horsham is full of life and movement today!

It's the annual Morris Dance festival. The Broadwood Morris Men are our local dancers (you can read about them here) http://grahamhirst.net/broadwood/; the Broadwood family (yes, the ones to do with the pianos) lived nearby in Rusper, and were active in the folk revival way back at the beginning of the last century.

Everywhere we went today, we could hear folk tunes, and bells, and the clack of wooden staves. This year there were more black-faced groups than ever before. I saw a group in Oxford last year who dance in almost complete silence - just a the beat of a drum. Eerie. Spooky. Scary.

This group (I've no idea who they are) used a whole band of drummers playing a driving rhythm, but no other instruments at all. They were all dressed completely in black, but joined by the drummers from another group who were much less forbidding in their appearance.

 

Yes, it was raining. But not too hard.

 

 

For lunch we went to Wagamamas and sat by the window eating noodles and lollipop prawns and drinking flowering jasmine tea.

We watched some Morris men doing a complicated dance involving whacking two staves together, or whacking each other's staves, in wild and varied patterns. It began to rain - drops at first, but soon it was coming down in stair rods. The band played faster and faster, and the dancers danced faster and faster, and the whacking changed from being artistic to tricky to down-right terrifying. Round and round, whackety-whack, hop and skip and jump and whackety-whackety - with a great cheer they finished the dance and ran for cover.

 

I watched a blind man  travel the length of the pedestrianised road, edging around planters and outside signs with astonishing accuracy. Then he came to a cluster of little tables bordered by a sort of barrier, outside the bistro opposite us. Horrors! He got himself the wrong side of the barrier, and was tracking down towards a dead end, trapped between the tables and the barrier! I held my breath; after a few more steps he stopped, paused, turned round and extricated himself, and continued on his way undaunted. Respect, I say, and again, respect.

 

I saw a man and a small child heading home. He was carrying a blue bear rather larger than the toddler, and sheltering the enormous toy from the rain with an umbrella.

 

 

That's the kind of pickle I get myself into; I remember buying a frozen turkey. But then, because I was on foot, I had to buy a small cheap backpack to carry it home in, and my back slowly froze from the chill of the turkey working its way through my inadequate jacket and unsuitable backpack.       

Sunday 8th July 2012 - Rhythm and the Soul

All this week I have been obsessed with developing my "junk" samba kit. It is ready for use now - just as well, as it gets its first school trial tomorrow with two year 4 classes. More on the samba kit in another post...

Why do drums energise me? Why do I get so excited at the sound of drums - marching drums, djembes, bodruans, samba, taiko?

I came across this sound clip http://neuropoetry.tumblr.com/post/10575321089/a-recording-of-a-semantron-calling-monastics-to

thanks to a link to this blog below from a retweet of a tweet. It's not a blog I have looked at before, but that's one of the joys of twitter http://alastairadversaria.wordpress.com/2012/07/08/links-and-jottings-2/ and I include the link just to acknowledge the source.


Here is the wikipedia link to find out more about the instrument that made that extrodinary sound, called a semantron: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantron

I found this picture at http://russianbells.com/history/history2.html
which gives an idea of how the sound was produced.

And here are some YouTube links
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JRvJAIr7Vc&feature=related


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zS4ZOQAnpzI

It makes me wonder about the connection between rhythm and soul and spirit - all words with musical meaning, but also with religious connotations.

All the children that I have worked with over three years of teaching djembe and samba have totally bought into the group satisfaction of being part of a cohesive group - either all playing the same thing, or else meeting the challenge of layering up complex rhythmic patterns.

It seems to me that the rhythm of the drum calls to something deep within our unconscious.

(Bagpipes, played well, also do it for me - but not for everyone!)