Walking The Dog

Sometimes, when I visit an art exhibition, it is enough to spend an hour or so getting lost in the paintings. Sometimes, the paintings are not to my taste and rather than getting lost in the art, it loses me and I leave feeling that I have walked through a sweetshop and failed to eat any of the sweets. I have been to art exhibitions where every picture is a wow - Turner, Lowry, the 2017 BP portrait award - and to some where none is - Rauschenberg at Tate Modern. And I have been to some unexpected gems - Ernest Shepherd's illustrations at the Winnie the Pooh exhibition at the V&A and a marine art exhibition in 2016, in a small maritime gallery in Mystic, USA. Special exhibitions or event exhibitions are expensive and I have devised a private, retrospective is-it-worth-it score. If there is one picture that makes me stop and stare. And stare again. That pauses time. And takes my breath away. If there is one of these - there only needs to be one - then the is-it-worth-it wor...

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...