I thoroughly enjoyed completing my recent series of mini-watercolour landscapes of Dartmoor Scenes, and in the process I found that I had managed to insert a short burst of art practice into my daily(ish) routine. Consequently, it wasn’t a surprise that I found myself wanting to continue painting mini-pictures each morning. The only question was: What should I paint next?
The answer – well the first answer at least – turned out to be house plants. This might seem like a somewhat strange choice, especially as the vast majority of the pictures I have painted in the last year have been location-based: buildings or landscapes of one sort or another. But in fact, house plants are a subject that I have painted before.
My initial foray into painting house plants stemmed from a ‘location’ painting that I did back in November as a birthday present for a family friend who just happens to run a wonderful plant shop in Plymouth. The picture I produced was much appreciated and has subsequently been professionally framed and put on display…
When I was painting this picture I really enjoyed painting the various plants with their different forms and pots, and so a few weeks afterwards I did a quick painting showing an assortment of plants in a suitably varied set of pots on a couple of wooden shelves (based on some nice chunky wooden ones that we had just put up in our kitchen!).
The next time we paid a visit to the shop it was suggested that I might produce some house plant greetings cards and have them for sale alongside some others (quite different) produced by a couple of local artists that were already on sale in the shop. Unfortunately, when painting my original picture I had not thought about placement of the design, and with some of the painted areas reaching almost to the edge of the paper it was not easy to use it for a printed card without risking some fairly crude surgery to some of the plants on the top shelf! However, that conversation sowed the seed of the idea in my mind, and so when I was considering where to go next with my mini-paintings, house plants were an obvious choice.
The result was the set of 12 mini-pictures of individual house plants which I have put together into the composite picture at the top of this post. Like my Dartmoor Scenes pictures, these are 5 cm squares, and I have also had a sample greetings card printed from each individual picture and a 3 x 3 composite of a selection of the pictures. These printed version all worked nicely despite being enlarged to almost double their original size, and I will probably pursue trying to sell these in some format in the future. But whilst I loved painting the mini-pictures of individual plants, and really liked the composite pictures too, I did feel that the original picture, with an assortment of plants on shelves was the best of all. The plants are obviously the star players, but those chunky wooden shelves play an important supporting role.
To bring things right up to date, a couple of days ago I sat down and painted a second version of my ‘house plants on shelves’ picture, and this time I made sure that I positioned the painting in the middle of a larger piece of watercolour paper so that I could subsequently crop the picture without fear of pruning the plants! I’m pleased with the result (see below), and I can now go ahead and get some copies printed ready for sale.
Obviously, I’m not expecting to make a fortune from this activity, but I do think it will be fascinating to see whether my picture is able to catch the eyes of any customers enough to persuade them to part with a few pounds of their hard-earned cash…
Oh J.K. Rowling (a.k.a. Robert Galbraith)… Why oh why do you seem to be obsessed with writing ever longer lengthier novels?
The Ink Black Heart is the sixth novel in the Cormoran Strike series, written by J.K. Rowling under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. The plot follows Strike and his former assistant, now professional partner, Robin Ellacott, as they try to get to the bottom of a complex and grisly crime – the murder of the co-creator of a highly successful online cartoon series (The Ink Black Heart of the book’s title) in the very graveyard in which the cartoon is set. The story plot is typically convoluted, throwing in lots of characters, many of whom are suspects at some point, with all of the action happening alongside the ongoing will-they-won’t-they saga of Strike and Robin’s frustrated relationship.
Compounding this complexity, the plot is made even more complicated to follow by the fact that large chunks of the dialogue between some of the characters takes place via online messaging threads. This throws up two issues for the reader. First, because the characters involved in the online messaging conversations hide their identity behind anonymous usernames it is some way into the book before you know who is talking to who (obviously, this is deliberate). Secondly, it is an (impossible?) challenge to work out how to read up to three parallel conversations between different pairs or groups of, sometimes overlapping, individuals. I can understand why the Rowling/Galbraith chose to write these sections in this way – the chat threads take place within an online game that is based on The Ink Black Heart cartoon – but I felt it made reading the book unnecessarily hard, and at times rather frustrating, work.
I should come clean… In general, I’m not a fan of long books. I like to feel that I am making reasonably rapid progress through a novel and that I won’t get stuck on the same book for more than a few weeks. So with The Ink Black Heart extending to around 1200 pages it took me a while to summon up the courage to make a start on it. However, it wasn’t simply the length of The Ink Black Heart that set me off on the wrong foot, because I’ve also had a long-standing gripe about the way that Rowling’s books seem to get longer and longer with each new one that comes out. This happened with the Harry Potter series, in which the first three titles were quite short, easily-tackled, but still satisfying stories, as the later volumes became progressively more ‘doorstop-like’ each time one appeared. I still enjoyed all of these books, but when I read them I really felt that Rowling’s writing could perhaps do with a good dose of editing… [hark at me, calling out one of the most successful, if not the most successful, writers of modern times.]
Rowling’s tendency for bloated writing is something that I think is particularly apparent in the Strike novels. I do enjoy reading them, but I can’t help but wonder whether it is really necessary to drape Strike and Robin’s relationship across quite so many pages. I think it’a all a bit tedious, and find myself almost screaming at the pair of them to just get on with it. [For balance here, I should say that both my wife and my elder daughter completely disagree with me on this point!] There is also a lot of description of minute details of events that have no bearing on the plot, which is fine if you like that sort of thing (i.e. not being allowed to get to the heart of the matter as quickly as you would like), but stretches my patience close to breaking point. I suspect that The Ink Black Heart could probably be half its present length and still be a great read (and obviously a better read in my opinion).
Perhaps, in the future, Rowling/Galbraith could write two separate books that can be read in parallel – one housing all of the crime/sleuthing-related action and then for those that can be bothered to read it, a second volume that takes a microscopic look at the trials and torments of the relationship between Strike and Robin. At the end of each chapter of the first volume the text could read something like this:
Reader: If you want to get straight on with the exciting action to discover just how the shocking realization that Strike and Robin have just made takes them one step closer to uncovering the identity of the killer that lives in their midst, then turn the page and read on. But if, instead, you’d like to lose the thread of the story and forget exactly who said what to whom as you read another account of Robin’s misapprehension of Strike’s words to her in their last conversation and Strike’s desperate attempts to convince himself that getting closer to Robin can’t possibly be the obvious conclusion of them spending almost every waking hour together, then switch over to the companion volume where things might eventually get ever-so-slightly slushy.
I am kneeling on the floor, left arm supporting my weight as my body leans forward. My right arm reaches out with elbow pointing away and fingers spread to rest gently on the soft green cloth. My index finger draws back and swings down to send the small plastic figure skittering forwards. It arcs right before nudging the over-sized plastic sphere so that it rolls perfectly into place. They’re in with a chance here…
I lift my knee to shift my body sideways and disaster strikes. A momentary loss of stability brings my knee rapidly downwards. Instantly, there are two sources of suffering. There is the sharp pain as a small plastic shape drills its way into my knee and as I cry out masking its sound, the crack of the double leg fracture occurs. Another star will be entering the treatment room…
If you were a football-crazy child in the 1970s you may well have experienced something like the event described above. Before football became a constantly-available televisual anaesthetic, we had to make do with the once-a-year spectacle of the FA Cup Final, the stay-up-late drama of Match of the Day, the post-Sunday-lunch-treat of The Big Match or the intoxicating excitement of European games on BBC Radio 2 (2000 metres Long Wave), with their mysterious interference of howls and whistles. To experience the ebbs-and-flows and thrills-and-spills of Liverpool versus Manchester United we had to create them ourselves, on a piece of green cloth with 22 plastic figures, a small ball and a set of goals. This was Subbuteo Table Football.
With the passing of time, my recollection of how Subbuteo entered my life is somewhat hazy. I have always told myself that what I remember is being given a Subbuteo set by my parents as a birthday present. If that is true it would have been the Club Edition, the standard set with cloth pitch, two goals, two teams, three small balls and a set of corner and halfway flags. In this set, the teams sport blue or red shirts and socks and plain white shorts, and so an imaginative youngster can play games between, for example, Everton, Portsmouth or Rochdale and Manchester United, Charlton Athletic or Barnsley. But my memory also tells me that my parents were not impressed with the value for money this set provided, it was taken back to the shop, and an alternative plan put in place to enable their disappointingly football-mad child to indulge what could only be a passing phase. But surely I am misremembering… returning an already gifted child’s present back to the store? That can’t be right. Over fifty years on, I have no way of finding out the truth.
What is certain, is that I never owned the Subbuteo Club Edition as a child, and so I never possessed the thin, green, slightly shiny cloth pitch with its white printed markings, the regulation, square-‘timbered’ goals with red and blue nets, and the two standard teams with their basic blue-white-blue and red-white-red kit combinations. Instead, my games were played out on a pitch lovingly made by my needlework-teacher mother, with line markings zig-zag stitched in white cotton into a piece of heavyweight, deep green cloth, cut, measured and marked to exactly the same size as the official one. That I never owned that standard pitch stung me at the time. Every child knows that there is no substitute for the specific branded item that they want as a Christmas or birthday present, and any parent who has tried to buck that rule will probably know it too. But now it is time for me to confess that my home-made pitch was in many ways better than the proper one. The heaviness of the cloth meant that the playing surface smoothed out better, and the darker colour was so much nicer. True, the stitched lines did sit ever so slightly proud of the playing surface, especially where corners turned or joins were made and the weight of stitches increased, but this was just something to take into account during play. (I wonder now whether this is why I so hate to see defenders trying to guide the ball out for a goal kick as I sit in my seat at Home Park and cheer on the team I adopted some thirty plus years ago!) To accompany my home-made pitch I needed goals and because these were bought as a separate item I had a set of ‘World Cup’ goals, modelled, I think, on those used in the 1974 World Cup in Germany (with round posts and crossbars, and realistic white nets and green plastic bases). Again, somewhat sheepishly, I confess that these were better, more solid, more exotic than the basic goals of the Club Edition.
It was my original teams that were the real source of disappointment, or more precisely it was one of them. My guess is that they were whatever the local stockist had going at a rock-bottom price. I think that one team was the simple red-white-red kit found in the Club Edition, which was fair enough. But the other? Well, that was Bangor. Who in 1974, apart from an actual fan of ‘The Seasiders’, had even heard of Bangor? And what sort of team plays in yellow shirts with blue sleeves and black shorts anyway? I suggest the answers to those two questions are: ‘pretty much no-one’, ‘none of any significance’ and to the first question again: ‘certainly not me’.
Subbuteo proved to be more than a passing phase in my life and over the next few years I built my supplies. There were more teams – Liverpool miraculously appeared one Christmas morning (well done parents!) and a successful raid on a local jumble sale bizarrely gave me imaginary trips from my home in Somerset to the Edinburgh derby, with the deep maroon shirts of the Hearts of Midlothian and, always one of my favourites, the white-sleeved, green shirts of Hibernian. At ‘peak-Subbuteo’ I had maybe ten teams, but which ten they were was always changing as I set to work with Humbrol model paints and fine tipped brushes. Over time, my players put on weight as layers of colour were added, flesh and hair were re-tinted and black boots were polished (always black of course).
There were accessories – corner and line flags (who didn’t snap these?), a referee and linesman set (pointless), self-adhesive shirt numbers (an aid for the internal commentary that filled my head), the TV camera tower, the green, picket-fence-style pitch surround, a set of six ball boys resplendent in yellow tracksuits with red stripes down their arms (useless for retrieving the ball when it rolled under the piano) and, best of all, the scoreboard, with its rotating number dials and two slots to insert whichever of the multitude of small printed card slips displayed the names of the teams currently in play. There were many others, and as a child who could happily spend hours poring over catalogues I certainly knew about and wanted them all – the FA Cup, throw-in taking figures, corner taking figures, working floodlights and eventually, in a move that presaged the stadium building phase of modern football, the grandstand.
By the time of my early teens, my pitch was pinned to a low, perfectly-sized table that had once housed my older brother’s model railway. I fixed a cardboard edge to form a pitch surround complete with painted advertising hoardings and at one end there was room for a stand, lovingly crafted from an old cardboard box. The table sat in the corner of my bedroom and was the venue for countless games, with me playing both teams, one predominantly right-handed, the other left-handed in what must have given games some approximation to home advantage. Subbuteo is clearly a game designed for two players, pitting their wits and their skills against each other in friendly rivalry, but almost all of my matches were played out as me versus me. It was a realm for individual, personal immersion and a chance to escape to victory, and defeat, away from prying eyes.
My knock-out tournaments were huge affairs, and for these the card tabs of the match scoreboard came into their own. I would draw them out one-by-one to build a complete set of fixtures, the cards laid out on the floor in pairs, winners of fixture one playing winners of fixture two etc., each round progressing with ever-decreasing numbers until I arrived at the final pairing. I don’t remember any strong favouritism coming in to play, but I suspect that the referee’s decisions on matters such as penalties or offside were not always without bias and that stoppage time at the end of matches was probably ‘fluid’. These tournaments, with 64 teams at the outset, comprised 63 matches and lasted several days – just me in my own little world of imaginary football, right hand, left hand, back and forth, shoulders aching, knees numb.
At some point, all of my Subbuteo teams and accessories went the same way as my Action Man, Matchbox cars and sundry other items, sold to fund my burgeoning interest in home computers. But my attachment to the game remained strong, such that in the late 1990s, presumably after I had made much mention of it, my wife bought me a set as a wedding anniversary present. Finally, at the age of 30-something, I owned the proper Club Edition complete with its basic goals, its oh-so-breakable corner flags, its boring team kits and its horrible, thin, shiny pitch… That set now resides in our loft along with a Plymouth Argyle team that was also gifted to me (1993/94: green and white striped shirts with black shorts) and I must confess that it has been little played. As an adult I could not escape the obvious bias in my play, and I no longer possessed the patience to let a game unfold or the ability to put up with the strain of reaching, leaning and shuffling around on the floor. But despite this lack of match action, I confess that many, many times I have caught myself scrolling through online listings, just a finger’s flick away from re-uniting myself with the pitch surround, TV tower or scoreboard, and once I gazed with horror at a particular ‘completed item’: Bangor team, in box – sold for £165.
… The big hand in the sky reaches down to lift the star winger from the field. He must await the final whistle before taking his turn on the operating board. Despite horrific injuries he will return to play again, nicknamed ‘Stumpy’, with bulges of glue where shin bones have been fixed and a slight sideways lean that will enable him to turn in ways that none of his teammates can.
Back on the pitch, the ball lies just inside the penalty area. My right hand reaches across and lines up behind the number 10 as my left arm extends, twisting round to grasp the small green plastic handle that emerges behind the goal. This is the moment… Flick. Jerk. The handle swings across, clattering the goalkeeper, arms stretched ever-hopefully upwards, against the frame of the goal. That would most certainly have hurt. But the ball has gone the other way and now lies nestled neatly in the far corner of the goal. The painted fans behind the goal are stunned as they wonder just where the referee found eight minutes of stoppage time, and then the final, silent, whistle sounds. The rotating dial on the scoreboard turns, the next number appears, and the FA Cup has produced its greatest ever shock… Manchester United 0, Southport 1. ‘The Sandgrounders’ have had their day.
I wrote this piece a few years ago, one of three that I produced under the collective working title: ‘Glances and Glimpses’, each capturing my thoughts on, or memories of, an activity or incident that connected different periods of my life and/or opened a window onto some aspect of my character. Earlier this year, I spent some time revising and editing it in the hope that it might be deemed suitable for publication in the magazine When Saturday Comes – it wasn’t, in fact the rejection email came back to me so quickly that was hard not to think that it did not even pass beneath the eyes of the ‘reader’. But it would be a pity if it remained hidden out of sight and didn’t even have the opportunity to find a reader or two, and perhaps spark a few memories of other injured players, self-made competitions, or great cup upsets.
If this piece resonates at all with you then please drop a comment below. It’d be great to read about other similar memories.
I spied you threading your way up the narrow ghyll, just down there where the waters tumble over rocks on their long route down to the sea.
I watched you picking your way along the stoney path, stopping to rest awhile under the shade of that old, wizened tree.
I sensed that with each step of climb, up, up, onto the high moor, your mind opened like the land, and all of your thoughts broke free.
I was amused to observe you pause now and then, looking about to take in the sights, knowing that you had not yet seen me.
You think this land belongs to you, your thoughts confirmed by the remnant workings and heaps of spoil the miners left behind.
You see evidence all around, backed up by the words on the pages of your guide, that this remote corner of the world is here for humankind.
You sense that there are creatures here and rue the fact that they hide from view, wishing they’d show themselves, so that you can tick them off the list you carry in your mind.
You imagine how it must have been to dig into this land, with the dust, the noise, and the aching limbs, to bring out the ore enriched with the heaviest metal one can find.
And then, at last, you catch sight of me as I stand waiting patiently beside the stream. I thought you’d never notice, so deeply did you dream. You stop, and, stretching out one arm, guide your companion’s sight. You speak in hushed voices, moving slowly so as not to create fright.
I shift my weight a little, and turn my head to best present myself to you. For there have been many others who have stopped to see this profile view. And trust me, I know what to do.
Stick-like legs beneath my plump grey body, surprisingly large when seen close by. Arching neck, dagger bill, the crown of feathers that adorns my head. All of this can make you sigh. And, of course, I know only too well, that what you really want is to see me fly.
So, I rouse myself fully, unfurl my mighty wings and with three swift beats I am up and away, hammering the air as I move along the stream, until, tantalisingly out of sight, I find another spot to stay.
Twice more I lead you on our little dance. I fly upstream and you advance.
You are thinking that there must be only meagre pickings in such a small and insignificant stream as this, and that to sustain so large a body I must have to spend an age to find a useful meal from tiny fish, and that to live here as I do, must be so hard and pose a lot of risk. But there are things that you don’t realise, and sights that you have missed.
This is the miners’ land no more.
And you are only passing through.
And things are not exactly as they seem.
For the land you see around you, all the hills, the rocks, the fields, the walls, and each and every one of the countless little streams, has a mighty ruler who has chosen to be at its helm.
And you, my passing admirer?
You are welcome in my realm.
(c) Tim O’Hare, July 2023
About this poem: This poem was inspired by the sights experienced and thoughts that dropped into my head during a wonderful walk while on our summer holiday in Ilkley, Yorkshire. The route took us along the valley of the River Wharfe and then north for lunch at The Old School Tearoom [highly recommended] in the tiny village of Hebden. From there, we slowly made our way up Hebden Ghyll, a narrow valley that was once the location for extensive lead-mining activities. As the terrain opened up to the expansive higher moorland, I saw a heron standing at the side of the small stream than ran down the ghyll. We stood and watched it for a few moments, and I commented that with the stream being so narrow it must offer slim pickings, and that it must be hard for such a large bird to sustain itself there. And then, of course, the heron did what herons always do…
At the beginning of last month (March 2025) I decided that I wanted to try to embed a more regular art practice into my life. So, one evening, I sliced a piece of watercolour paper into a series of 5 cm squares with the intention of painting some kind of miniature picture each morning. I didn’t know what I would paint, just that I would try to paint something, as often as I could.
It was interesting, then, to wake up the next day and find myself sitting down at my painting table at 7:30 am, before I had even eaten breakfast, painting a little scene of a tor and some scattered rocks, a scene that is typical of Dartmoor, the National Park just north of Plymouth where I live. Because I was working on such a small piece of paper, and because I was trying to work quickly, before I got fully enmeshed in the day’s activities, I found myself adopting a simpler style than usual, with fewer, and bolder, colours and some use of cross-hatching to show shadows and darker areas. I liked what emerged.
After that first painting (the one at the top-left of the composite picture at the top of this post) I still didn’t know what would happen next, but at some point, perhaps after two or three days, I came to realise that I was creating a series of miniature pictures that I labelled Dartmoor Scenes. Initially, it was my intention to paint five pictures, one on each weekday, but having successfully reached that number I decided to push on to nine. This seemed to me to be a good number for a series of little square pictures, neatly forming a 3 x 3 grid.
As I approached what I thought would be the final picture, I received a comment on my Bluesky (social media) account on which where I was posting my new picture each day, suggesting that the pictures would make a nice calendar. It was an idea that I liked, a lot, but of course a calendar needs 12 pictures, one for each month… and so my miniature watercolour Dartmoor Scenes series had to become a collection of 12 pictures in total.
I really enjoyed producing these little pictures (and have since gone on to produce two more sets of 12 similarly-sized pictures on different themes – watch this space for details!). I enjoyed being forced to keep things simple and was really happy with the results (more in some cases than in others). I particularly like the stone row and stone circle pictures on the top row (second-left and top-right), and the tree and wall scene (third-left, bottom row). I also really like the way that they look when placed together.
Although it was already almost the end of March by the time I received it, I got a desk calendar printed up as a kind of test run to see how well it worked… and it worked very well indeed, the pictures coping with being expanded to almost double their original size. Subsequently, I have also had each picture printed as a 10 cm square card and had some copies of a larger card printed with a 3 x 3 composite of the nine pictures that I think are the best of the selection. At some point I hope to get more of these cards printed so that I can have a go at trying to sell some of my artwork. It will be interesting to see what happens if and when I do!
As an experiment in trying to be more regular with my artistic endeavours, this activity has worked really well, and although I have now moved on from Dartmoor Scenes, I suspect that I will return to this theme again at some point and complete another set (at least another four to get to a 4 x 4 grid, but who knows, maybe I have another 13, 24 or even 37 Dartmoor Scenes still in me!)
If you like these pictures, I’d love it if you added a quick comment to this post. It would be fun to know which one(s) you like best.
I started reading Jan Swafford’s Language of the Spirit – An Introduction to Classical Music back in June 2023 and finally completed just a fortnight ago. It would be tempting to conclude from this that it was a book that I struggled through but, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
I grew up in a household that was full of classical music, from the long, purpose-made shelf unit in the living room that was stuffed full of vinyl records, to the assortment of musical instruments that my father acquired and dabbled with (flute, trumpet, clarinet, mandolin, violin). Apparently, when my brother and sister and I were very young, we would be accompanied on our way to bed by our personal favourite pieces of music, presumably each one being some piece that we had reacted to positively at some point. I don’t recall what my sister’s piece was, but I do know that my (older) brother’s piece was a movement from Schubert’s ‘Trout’ Quintet and mine was the rather stirring ‘March Slav’ by Tchaikovsky (so it is probably no coincidence that Tchaikovsky later became one of my absolute favourites).
I had piano lessons from the age of about six and then at around nine years old I began to learn the ‘cello (because apparently I had shown an interest in learning it, although I can’t say that I remember that and I suspect it was more because it was an instrument that my father wished he had been able to learn). I was never that great at the piano, and stopped after passing my Grade 6 exam, but playing the ‘cello certainly became a big part of my life all the way through my teens and well into my 20s. Over the years, I played in various ensembles and orchestras, in particular leading the ‘cello section in the Somerset Youth Orchestra, the Somerset County Orchestra, Oxford Sinfonietta and Bangor University Orchestra and being on the first desk of the ‘cello section for the annual summer gatherings of the Somerset Chamber Ensemble/Orchestra. It’s fair to say that I was a pretty good ‘cellist – although better known, I think, for my expressive playing than for a robust technique (or any kind of technique at all really – practice and I have never really been comfortable bedfellows in any area of activity…).
I always enjoyed orchestral music the most, especially music composed from around 1850 through to perhaps 1930 – the romantic and late-romantic periods – music full of emotion, passion and angst. My mother used to call the kind of music I liked best ‘troubled music’, which I guess is fair: Brahms, Tchaikovsky (and assorted other Russian composers of that time), Wagner, Sibelius, Richard Strauss, Mahler – that kind of thing. Unlike a lot of musicians, I never went much for some of the classical greats like Bach and Mozart, especially the latter, whose music (am I allowed to write this?) I tend to find rather boring.
In Language of the Spirit, Jan Swafford, a US-composer and music academic, provides a wonderful journey through the classical music canon, from early single-line chants, through all of the great names, and right up to the present day and the post-modernists. The book is mostly written on a one-composer-per-chapter basis, with most chapters being perhaps six to eight pages in length. In each case, Swafford outlines what makes each composer’s work distinctive, and provides a little detail of about their life, their influences and their major works, which brings me to the reason why it has taken me the best part of two years to finish the book…
Just for fun, I decided at the outset that I would listen to every piece of music that Swafford had picked out as being important or a good example of some aspect of a composer’s works. This meant that for each chapter I created a playlist with something like 8-15 pieces requiring multiple (many in some cases) hours of listening – Spotify was my friend! In the end, I managed to listen to every single piece that was highlighted or recommended (including several full operas) except for one piece by Stockhausen that I couldn’t find (but based on the Stockhausen works that I did listen to I can’t say I am too upset about that).
I listened to lots of music that I already knew well, lots of music that I thought that I knew well, and even more music that I didn’t know at all, some of it major works by major composers. I had a few surprises, particularly enjoying the music of Schumann (who I have never paid that much attention to in the past) and Grieg (who I always thought was a bit lightweight), and despite not really enjoying most of the noise that was described as atonal and/or post-modern, there was something about the work of Philip Glass that I enjoyed more than I feel I should have done.
Having now finished reading the book, and having listened to the last piece (John Adams’ Shaker Loops), I was spurred on to re-arrange the furniture in the small bedroom that I use as a kind of home office/personal den so that I could fit in some nice wooden CD shelves that we have struggled to find a good home for recently, and I unboxed all of the CDs (not just classical) that have sat out of sight since we packed them up last summer before having our kitchen re-modeled.
If you don’t know much about classical music but want to know more then I thoroughly recommend Swafford’s book. It is written for a general reader and gives a lot of interesting background and insight into a huge range of music. Alternatively, if you are like me, and know (or think you know) a lot about classical music already, then Language of the Spirit is a great stimulus to rediscovering old favourites and discovering new ones (and also discovering ‘music’ that you will never want to hear again for that matter – but each to their own of course!). Reading Language of the Spirit didn’t convert me into a Mozart-lover – I’m still very much in the ‘troubled music’ camp – but it did broaden my knowledge and has given me a number of composers to explore further. I also discovered that rather than being the somewhat over-sentimental ‘slush-fest’, that I recalled it being from when I played it with the Somerset Youth Orchestra over 40 years ago, Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto is indeed a rather special piece of music.
Some time ago, something like 10 years ago to be more precise, the basic idea for a children’s adventure story popped into my head. It was really just the bare bones of a story – a title (Empedocles’ Children), an underlying basis for the story, a vague idea of the way that it would conclude, and a fairly detailed visual image of the event that would launch the reader into the action. At some point, fairly early on, I wrote out a version of the first chapter, but once those words were out of me, I didn’t do much to make further progress. In the meantime, fragments and ideas for the story would pop into my head at random moments, often resulting in me excitedly exclaiming to whoever was in the vicinity that: “I have just had a great idea for my book when I write it”. I think this must have happened quite a lot and over an extended period (years) because eventually, after one such utterance, my younger daughter (who would have been in her late teens at the time) responded with the rather cutting, but entirely fair, response: “Well that will never happen.”
But, eventually, I did begin to make progress, producing several more chapters in 2021 and then, in a series of bursts of creativity that became gradually longer, more frequent and more reliable, I found myself approaching the end of the story. Along the way I found the process of writing the story an absolutely fascinating one. Whether it is the ‘right’ or ‘best’ way to approach things or not (and it is probably not), I wrote the story without any kind of outline or plan, other than knowing a little about where the main characters in the story (four children called Conlaed, Yara, Tal and Karin) had to end up, and a final climax to the story that became gradually sharper in my mind as it approached. Instead, I simply sat myself down and let the story emerge. When I talk to people about this process I usually use one of two analogies – that story writing is like find a seam of precious ore and then chipping away to follow it through the surrounding rock, or that it is like gently pulling on a thread to tease it from a knotty bundle. I also tended towards thinking that even though I didn’t know how the story would unfold, I could trust my characters to show me. In that sense, I was simply following them on their journey, and describing the events that befell them as I did so. At times, it was hard to escape the feeling that the story (stories in general) are already ‘out there’ and that the task of a writer is to find (not create) one and then reveal it to others.
A couple of months ago I reached the point where I had a full draft of the story, and I then spent some time reading it through to check for errors, omissions and inconsistencies and to make any corrections and revisions that were necessary. I spent quite a lot of time going and back and forth with the dialogue, struggling a bit to work out the best way to format this (which I found difficult because there does not seem to be a standard method for presenting dialogue, something that surprised me a lot). Then, with a final draft version completed I was left wondering what, exactly, I should do next with all of those words. And there were a lot of them, a whopping 110,000 or so in fact, because the final version came at with 48 chapters (plus a prologue, interlude and epilogue).
I’m still not quite sure what I will do next with my manuscript. I know that I can go down a self-publishing route fairly quickly and easily – I have already got the text in a ‘flowable’ format suitable for e-readers. I also know that to try to get a book published by a traditional publisher first requires gaining the interest of a Literary Agent, something that seems to be incredibly difficult – so I know that that route is both difficult and unlikely to be successful. My instinct is that I want to at least try to go down the traditional publishing route and see what happens, and so at the moment I am working my way through various materials that should help me engage with that process. At some point, I might actually get to the stage of having written a synopsis, a query letter, identified comparative titles (‘comps’), drawn-up a long-list of suitable agents to query, and a short list for a first batch of submissions. Then all it will take is a bit of bravery and a willingness to suffer rejection…
In the meantime, I decided that one of the issues with writing (certainly these days when writing on a computer) is that once you have finished your story you have nothing physical to show for your efforts. With this in mind, I spent a week or two putting my text into an attractive, ‘proper’ book format, painted some pictures to use as cover art, and then I sent it off to a printing company to get a few copies of it as a properly printed paperback book. Now, even if I make no further progress towards publishing it at all, I can, at least, glance at my bookshelf and see a nice fat paperback sitting there that I produced. Just that thought is rather satisfying and it allows me to inwardly respond to my daughter’s statement, “that will never happen”, with the words “but look, it did!”
If anyone reading this thinks that they’d like to be a test reader then please do get in touch. The story follows a group of children who are brought together as they travel through a disintegrating island realm, facing all kinds of natural challenges – fire, floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and landslides – as they are gradually drawn towards the mountain that sits at the island’s core and, unknowingly to a meeting with a strange philosopher-hermit who must share the wisdom that will allow the fractured peoples of the island to come together to re-build their world. I think that the book would probably be put into the ‘middle grade’ of perhaps ‘9-12 age group’ categories but honestly, it’s a fun adventure with lots of twists and turns that adults should enjoy too – I certainly did!
Sometimes little pieces of wisdom appear in front of you out of nowhere. You see or hear something that makes you stop and think, and you then find yourself carrying it with you as time passes.
A couple of years ago we paid a visit to the National Railway Museum in York. In addition to some rather impression locomotives and rolling stock of various vintages, the museum is home to a vast range of smaller items associated with rail transport through the ages. Whilst wandering through the exhibits, I was much taken with a simple cast iron sign that was bolted to the wall (shown in the photograph above). Painted a rather satisfying and suitably alert-inducing red, its white embossed letters spell out the message: ‘WARNING – STOP LOOK & LISTEN BEFORE CROSSING THE LINE.’
There are a few things that I particularly like about this sign – its colour, the neat, bold use of capital letters, the way that the words are perfectly balanced and centralized, and the inclusion of the final full stop. Somehow, that last grammatical detail adds to the feeling that this is a sign that was serious about doing its job…
…which was obviously to warn people to take care crossing an unguarded railway line.
I guess that most people visiting the museum walk past that sign without taking much notice of it. In fact, many probably don’t even register that it is there. But as soon as I saw it, I knew that it was a sign and the message that it conveys, were something that I wanted to capture for posterity:
-WARNING- STOP LOOK & LISTEN BEFORE CROSSING THE LINE.
Isn’t that great advice, not simply in relation to navigating the obviously dangerous act of crossing a railway line, but for life in general?
A problem shared is a problem halved, or so the saying goes. But whether that is really true is debatable I suppose.
My problem had been hidden deep inside until you called it by its name. And that was like the whistle, blown to start the game.
The problem that was diagnosed affected how I lived. It stopped me getting on with things; it made my brain a sieve.
This problem that you helped me with is tricky to unpack, It means my brain keeps worrying. I never can relax.
The problem I am grappling with is not a sickness I contracted. Rather, it’s part of me, so always I’m distracted.
The problem you explored with me in many ways defies convention. It’s not that I don’t want to, I just can’t control my attention.
The problem that I shared with you for years has had me troubled. And to be honest, since you got involved its size has more than doubled.
It isn’t that you didn’t help because certainly you did. It’s just that now I’m in the game you’ve helped me lift the lid.
The problem that was inside me has now come bursting out. And now I want to dance and sing and jump and scream and even shout!
My problem shared, it hasn’t halved, or reduced in size at all. But now we’ve torn down all the bricks it’s no longer a wall.
So, although my problem may have multiplied by three or four or five. Truly, I give thanks because you’ve helped me come alive.
(c) Tim O’Hare, July 2023
About this poem: I was given a diagnosis of ADHD at the age of 56 in summer 2022 through a private provider called ‘Problem Shared’, and for about 9 months in late 2022 and the first half of 2023 I had roughly monthly online sessions with a prescribing nurse. These conversations were always very enjoyable (for both of us I think) and helped me to unpack some of the challenges I was experiencing and to express my thoughts and ideas on tackling those challenges, and on ADHD more generally. This poem was not intended to relate only to my interactions with the ‘Problem Shared’ organization, but I used the name as a starting point. It captures the idea that whilst my diagnosis, and subsequent treatment, has certainly generally the flow of my life a lot better, it has also opened up all kinds of additional issues and challenges.
As I noted in another recent ‘art’ post (Home Park, Plymouth Argyle), it seems to have become a ‘thing’ that I create handmade cards for birthdays and special occasions associated with family and friends. For these cards, I generally paint a small watercolour picture of a scene that has a special connection to the person or event being celebrated or one that just shows a place that they really like. I usually use some small (roughly 10cm x 15cm) rough-edged raggy paper, for the painting and then I tape this to a simple brown card. This gives an interesting and attractive, rather rustic, feel to the cards which I think is appropriate given their handmade nature.
I painted the picture above, of Ronda in southern Spain, at the start of last month to use on a birthday card for my elder daughter’s husband. They travelled to Ronda to attend the wedding of one of my her workmates just a month or two before their own wedding last June and he liked it so much that my daughter was quick to suggest it as the subject for his card. To be completely honest, the other alternative was for me to try to paint a picture of Stamford Bridge, home to Chelsea F.C. (his team sadly) and apart from me not wanting to have to paint a scene that had lots of people in it, it was quite difficult to find a suitable picture to base a painting on. So, Ronda it was…
Funnily enough, despite being an incredibly scenic and much photographed location, with its deep gorge and steep cliff faces, Ronda was also a difficult subject to find a suitable picture to recreate as a painting. Most of the photographs of the town that I could find online were either taken from a distant vantage point designed to show the full majesty of the cliff-top location (which then made all of the interesting details of the buildings etc. shrink to an unworkable size) or were focused on a single ornate building or just the bridge that spans the gorge (and so did not really capture anything about the setting). In the end I opted for this shot of the bridge with a decent chunk of the cliff faces visible and some suitably Spanish-looking buildings. I tried to capture some of the drama in the scene as the setting sun creates its own lightshow between the pillars of the bridge. The picture/card was certainly appreciated, so I can’t have done too bad of job!
Tim O'Hare 