Food for thought

Butternut squash, sweet potatoes, green and red and yellow peppers, mushrooms, carrots: all are roasting in the oven. Wild rocket, spinach and watercress leaves sit in a salad bowl. Our son laughs with his mother in the bathroom. Our daughter watches a cooking programme on TV. The kettle boils, ready to accompany the rice on its eventual journey to our familial stomach. It is like a self-generating Grand Central Station in the kitchen. We went swimming today. On our way to the pool on the other side of the park - one of the lungs of the city as someone once put it - we stopped to watch the beginning of the race in which I thought my acquaintance from the war zone may be participating. If he was, I did not see him. In the pool, I noticed, we were pretty much the only people speaking our native tongue. There was many a consonant cluster used. At one point I lay on my customary back and stared up at the rusting beams as I floated like a leaf across the surface. In one arm our son was grinning away, safe therefore, and our daughter was tearing through the water in front doing the crawl. Unusually for her, the artist wasn't feeling up to a swim and I turned to watch her through the tall glass windows separating her from the pool. She was reading. Her head looked deep in thought and was part-obscured by the reflection of the people in the pool. It was like a bad collage made by a painfully bad artist. Most unbefitting. Anyway, I pulled our children across the pool again and listened to their laughter as I narrowly missed the other parents and children still caught up in their gushing waves of consonant clusters. These are precious moments, I was thinking. This is the peace zone. Here we make people welcome. And the gallerist returns tomorrow.

Home Cinema Verite

A channel this weekend is dedicating its entire playlist to a writer whose many stories have been made into films and TV programmes. It is against this backdrop that I study the backs of three watching heads – one adult, two children – on the bright red sofa, though in this instance watching what our man wrote only the screenplay of. I watch on and listen further. The boy’s laughter is the loudest, the girl's concentration the greatest. A man on screen with a makeshift rocket on his back meanwhile squirts water from his mouth. It is a film also from the artist’s childhood, which gives the occasion an added dimension. Indeed the artist says while watching that it really has left an impression on her. This film for some reason passed me by. I think I used to avoid what I considered to be viewing clichés, or obvious events, but it was no reflection on a thing’s merit, more a need I suspect to reinstate a kind of emotional independence on proceedings, brought on by having from an early age no parents. Basically, the idea of a happy family gathered around a film or programme which everyone enjoyed was alien to me, and I think I resented the idea of too much cheerfulness lest it insulted the tragedy of my parents’ early deaths. (How warped is that.) Anyway, thankfully, this didn’t infiltrate my take on art. If anything, the idea of the artist as an independent creative tour de force was incredibly reassuring. I look across the room again. The film is finished and the three figures have dispersed satisfied from the sofa. The boy is lying on the floor with a small plastic boar-driven chariot in his hand. The girl says she is doing nothing but I know she is flicking through a shopping catalogue, just like her father used to do with his grandmother’s favourite store’s catalogue before Christmas. The artist has now returned to the bright red sofa. She is sitting to one side with an ‘unashamedly spiritual’ book on her lap. Actually, the boy is this side of the sofa now, with his dungeon of doom. I think what it is is that they are all energised. The film has stimulated them. It has given them a boost. This is my point about creativity. It is a life force.