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What day would I go back to?

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All the days in our lives,

Stretch out at first, then shrink,

Behind us, gone.

No rewind button for life,

No voicemail recording our every word.

Gone, long ago,  barely remembered. ..

What day would I go back to?

To hear parents voices again, and tell them

How much I loved them?

Or the first day at school, tell myself not to be so shy?

Trying to make perfume from rose petals as a child

Or older, wiser, learning to drive.

Time travel is a one way street, into the future.

If I could go back I would be pleased to meet you again.

Maybe visit a few less railways,

And see the sea a few more times.

Go back to holidays in Devon.

If I could go back I would say,

Don’t take that awful job,

Stay safe and well.

Don’t waste your life for a pay packet,

Let’s live and love.

 

Abstract cats

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These are works in progress, a Ginger autumn cat and a Catfish, I’m doing quite flat designs on black canvases. The catfish painting looks better in the second photo but I think the Ginger autumn cat isn’t quite right yet.

Yesterday I bought metallic colours that really glint in the light, I think my problem is photographing them as they are a bit over exposed in places. I may add additional colours as the Orange is not as subtle as I would like.

Talking about cats and painting, keeping my cats from drinking my paint water is a challenge. I will try and remember to empty it tonight!

Anyway these are going into my exhibition / art sale at the weekend, so I had better get on with them.

X

Kitty cats

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Kitty little, kitty life,

Kitty food, kitty moods,

Cat paws, cat whiskers,

Cat nose, cat eyes.

Moggie purrs, Moggie snores,

Moggie paws, moggie ears,

Feline mind, feline fine,

Feline playing, feline leaps

Felix chase, Felix eat,

Felix fly, Felix fur…

Cats at home, cats in the garden,

cats up trees, cats chase toys.

Beautiful, soft, fluffy and fierce,

Cats are my friends for life….

Grey man

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Actually green man, but I decided to see what he would look like in black and white.

I took the photograph at Salts Mill in Saltaire, Yorkshire, about 4 years ago.

Green men are found all around the country, representing the spirit of the fertile world?  I guess so. This one was a design on a large gardinere in the Salts Mill complex. I think he is probably a Victorian design. There us something quite disconcerting about green leaves growing out of his mouth. It reminds me of when a was a child, when I was told if I ate apple pips an apple tree would grow inside me!

We also visited a green man shop in Pickering, in the north Yorkshire moors a few years before, and came home with a tiny green man and a plaque of a lady surrounded in sea shells and seaweed. I’m not sure exactly where it was, I think it was near the railway station, in the centre of the town, it may have closed by now.

I like painting green men and women, there is a succulent power in them, green and verdant.

 

Chameleon

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Oh Chameleon,

How do I draw you?

You are Camouflaged in camouflage !

You hide in plain site

Like an octopus hides itself

Or a wobbigong shark,

Or a squid…..

Oh Chameleon

Your tongue is so long,

Like a limpet catching prey,

As long as a woodpeckers tongue

wrapped round its brain?

Or an anteaters snout?

I don’t know,

Because I can’t see you,

Hide in plain sight

Out of sight.

That’s your trick

Sneaky……

Sticks and string

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We went to Archery today and I had a go with a longbow for the first time.

I didn’t take any photos  (I wasn’t that good ) but it felt completely different to the bows we have been using .

Let me explain. We have been using recurve bows. They have a central riser with a cut out in one side so that the arrow flies straight. Then you have two limbs that attach top and bottom which curve back away from the riser. You have to use a stringer to pull the limbs back so you can attach the string. The bows are made of metal and carbon fiber, the arrows are metal or carbon fibre.

I have been using junior bows with either 14 or 16 pounds of pressure on them, that means it only takes a light pressure to pull the sting back sufficiently to shoot the arrows. I’ve hit a few golds but its hard to work out your aim and I have been using sites to try and aim.

So today one if the other archery members had brought along his longbow “a couple I sticks and a string” and that’s basically what it is. No sights, a rubber band round the shaft of the bow if you want to help you aim. The bow is one long peice of wood, usually English Yew which is naturally laminated and springy. No “window” or bend in the wood, so your arrows have to go round the bow,  you have to aim off to get them on target. You also have to make sure that the arrow is the right way round, with the cock feather towards you so the other two don’t catch on the bow. The arrows are wooden with metal tips, and feathers cut down to shape for flights. You have to wear a glove so the arrow which rests on the top of your hand does not leave splinters in you as the arrow is shot. The other change was that the bow was 35 pounds of pressure, more than twice what I have been pulling! It was hard work, my shots were all around the target and I didn’t hit a gold no matter how I tried. I couldn’t hit the middle of the boss  (target). But I really took to it and want to have another try.

 

Time Ticks

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PicsArt_1536439451689It does! I started writing this over 12 hours ago but then the battery on my tablet went flat so I had to wait until now .

Anyway, time does tick by, sometimes I know exactly when the alarm is going to go off, and it does. I can wake up a second before the alarm clock goes off….nothing is clicking or whirring or spinning to give me a cue or a clue. Same with the alarm on our oven, last night I got up from my chair to check it just before it went off.

One explanation is the brain has tiny cells beating regularly giving us a sense of time. There are also electric nodes in your heart that regulate your heartbeat, and your breathing is a regular rhythm allowing you to get just the right amount of air.

But what is time, why do we feel times arrow? Why does a cup fall and then break as it hits the floor? Why isn’t it on the floor then bouncing back up onto the table, reforming from smashed to solid in a second? There is something called entropy, everything breaks down over time. Everything tends towards chaos. The Universe is cooling, as space expands. Astrophysicists speak of the heat death of the universe as everything spreads out and cools towards absolute zero. Galaxies are flying away from each other. If things continue, in many billions or trillions of years, we would have completely black skies, no stars in sight. Our Sun will have cooled to a husk of burnt matter and all the other Stars will fly off away for us. There is something called red shift, as galaxies move away their light shifts towards the red end of the spectrum, the larger the red shift the faster they are moving. There are theories about things called dark energy and dark matter that try to explain this, but I wouldn’t know where to start with that aspect of space time.

Time ticks for everything, although time may not actually exist, it might just be our way of measuring the passing of things happening, but not understanding the universe. But if it is real there may be an advantage of time. The end of the universe or more likely its continuous, infinite existence, will not happen in our time. But a long long long time in the future.

 

Looking out

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The eye peeps out, looking into the street, one clear square of glass, the rest opaque, hiding the room beyond.

A glimpse of an eye, now gone. The rusting bars of the window still hold firm grip of the blackened glass. No splits or cracks, just that small patch where once there was..a blue eye? Almost missed, only glanced at.

Do I knock on the door next to the window? Or ignore it and walk by. The dilemma is not knowing which to choose. Who (or what ) is in there? It could be a homeless person, a drunk, a security guard. I am alone, walking down an old alley way. No, I dare not chance knocking, I don’t know what the outcome might be. I might come back in daylight. I leave the window and eye behind, walking quickly….

But steps are following me……..