Man Alive

The artist sits with the children on the bright red sofa while outside it is raining cats and dogs. The three are watching a film - a possibly insipid family tale with a nonetheless perky mixture of animation and live-action - while I sit at the round red table, catching up on some correspondence, including emailed and reported reading, from, to, and about, the war zone. I suppose there is something deeply incongruous about these two elements, fused together as they are like incorrect wires in an impossible conundrum of good electronics and bad poetry, and yet it is because of the work in the war zone that we can pay for the film on the sofa - this makes me sound like a mercenary and yet nothing could be further from the truth. My work there, I like to think, is about grasping the nettle, grabbing the bull by the horns, confronting, along with many others, quite possibly the principal issue of the day, at the same time as being paid for it. Unprompted, the artist leans her head back on the sofa and tells me she will finish writing the email to the impossibly famous artist by the day's end. I feel like a traffic warden ensuring the correct parking of everyone's tasks and yet this also could not be further from the truth. Anyway, I tend sometimes to see nature as the best pattern for mankind to follow, not contrivance, compromise, self-murder, or selfishness. The artist, I like to think, is the same. Talking of nature, the cats and dogs continue to fall from the sky, their tails and floppy ears, whiskers and tongues, touchiness and tunes, cascading to the ground like rolling thunder. By the way, the speculating neighbour was caught by the artist popping his head round the property again, this time under an umbrella. Amusingly, as she opened our bedroom blinds and he guiltily pulled away, it looked as though he had been caught in the act of some kind of voyeurism. Closer to home, the desert lamp is now lit and the backs of everyone's heads are like gargoyles in a church. To my right, the artist's three present pieces are on the wall, made even more mysterious in the half-light, and for a few delightful seconds, it is seldom for longer in life, I feel like the luckiest man alive.