Walking The Dog

One road.  One walk.  One day. And I want to cry. How hard is it to keep rubbish in your car?  Clearly, the answer is quite hard.  Picture the litter-lout or litter-bug. Why in the UK we (or is it just me?) use lout, which is male and defined as a man or boy who acts boorishly or with aggression and without consideration towards others, is a puzzle, because I suspect littering is not an entirely male habit. Anyway, back to the lout who, in his  (or her. But I will use his and let you assume his or her ) first act of loutish behaviour, broke the law eating while driving. And probably thought he was driving safely - it didn't cross his mind that eating may have been, perhaps, a little distracting. Why would it have been? The wrapper unwrapped itself, of course! The ring-pull tugged and folded itself against the can; the crisp packet yawned itself open and the dozens of probiotic drink bottles (yes!!) pulled their own foil caps off. So th...

What do I remember of the year we spent in Australia? The heat; the long drives; long-striding lightning dancing across distant, dry plains; the gorillas at Melbourne zoo; an abundance of unfamiliar fruit and vegetables; kangaroo (and roo-burgers); trams; crisp slithers of eucalyptus leaves underfoot on forest trails; a little girl who didn't like sand between her toes; vertiginous peaks and plummeting shadows and cliffs where the earth had broken and fissured in the Blue Mountains; the Twelve Apostles of the Southern Ocean; spiders (lots of spiders); a relaxed cafe culture; Italian food on Lygon Street; earthy browns and creamy dots of aboriginal paintings; verandahs; snakes; public parks; wind, buffeting and forcing dry grit into your face round every pavement corner; and a distant city that sat on the palm of my hand - yes to all of those. But the sharpest memory is of the light: a fierce light, forcing a wash of white over everything burning in its glare. An unforgiving lig...

A life without stories would be impossible. Look for something that doesn't have a story and resign yourself to never finding it. A grain of sand on a beach; a petal on a flower; the broken handle on my cup; the rusted rivet in a metal bridge; and the gum stuck to the pavement, all have a story. Everything does - there's the how did it get there; where did it come from; who put it there; what happened to bring it in front of me at this precise time? What is a story? Story - definition: a true or fictitious account of a sequence of events and characters; its purpose being to entertain or inform. We constantly ask ourselves, what's the story? Or, what's in a story? Different questions, but essentially addressing the same thing: we like to know. And if we don't know, we like to make an attempt at explaining things - we pry, we wonder, we invent - who did that, why, where, what happened next? We fill in the gaps. Not always accurately. But we fill them anyway, ...

According to Tate Modern - ART CHANGES WE CHANGE  I wonder if it's just me ... just me - the sufficiently pedantic one, who bothers to be bothered by this declaration? Everyone else simply walks on by. If they notice the words, perhaps they glance, read, shrug a 'yes, whatever' and walk on. Me - I glance, read and the words trigger an agitated avalanche; a silent screaming 'Whaaaaat?!' Surely, something's missing. Perhaps, a comma. Or any of the following: when, how, where, if, and, as.  All would fit. Wouldn't they? Or am I alone in my nit-picking, pernickety little world; worrying what these words mean? What the intent was behind displaying them large above the brick wall of the iconic Tate? What they are meant to say? But fail to say. Perhaps, the point is that different people will read different things into them. If they bother to read them at all. I'm still bothered, though, about what they mean to me. And what they clearly do...