Drawing

For many and various reasons I have rather neglected my blog this year, principally because I have yielded to a creative impulse to take up drawing; time I may have used to blog I have applied to sketching and exploring the mysteries of colouring with watercolour.  I am a tyro at the game, more enthusiastic than skillful, but I am enjoying learning and believe it to be something I may stick with for a while.

Early in January I joined a local art course run by an ex-professional artist who has given me a great deal of help and encouragement.  Since joining the course I have tried, fairly successfully, to make time each day to practise drawing. Some of this time, inevitably has been stolen from time I might hitherto have spent blogging.

I hope not to completely abandon ‘Sensate Man’. I yet have plenty to say, much of which concerns present problems here in Greece, my chosen country of residence, but because I am not adequately informed about these matters to form, let alone to publish, any usefully informative material concerning the country’s future, be it within or outside of the eurozone or the EU, I am keeping such opinions as I have to myself.  I am however confident that the nation and its people will survive; the sun will continue to shine, the sea will continue to lap on the sand and, at base, life will continue as it has here for an infinite number of generations past.

I have started a new blog.  For the time being this is no more than an empty shell but in due time I shall use it as a repository for my drawings, a personal collection and record of the development of the skills I hope will issue from continuing practice and acquisition of knowledge of the craft.  

Φιλο

About three weeks ago, as I was leaving the house to forage for food in a taverna in one or another of the local villages, I noticed a stray dog greedily eating food that had been put down for the tribe of semi-feral cats that live around the house, earning their meagre keep by serving as deterrent to rodents and reptiles which may otherwise set up home in the old pile of stone and rubble that serves as home. I have the good fortune to live in a paradise - an authentic Garden of Eden, complete with a population of Asps.  The following day the dog was still hanging around outside the house, his ribs showing through his skin.  I am not really much of a dog person but nor can I watch an animal starve on my doorstep.  The dog was fed.  There is in Greece a considerable stray dog problem, a problem not apparently recognised by most greeks who have a very different attitude to animals from the generally caring, anthropocentric attitudes of the majority of northern europeans.  Having enjoyed our hospitality, ‘Dog’, as I chose to call him, seemed in no hurry to move on.  During the first days of his residence he was very jumpy and would not come near me but, two weeks to the day after he arrived, he hesitatingly allowed me to gently stroke his head.  He is yet very nervous but less so each day.  As it now seems he will be here indefinitely we thought it best that he had a name other than ‘Dog’; ‘Dog’, is now ‘Philo’ (Φιλο being greek for friend).

Philo is third dog we have kept here during the past fourteen years.  Topsy was the first.  She was a similar breed to Philo.  She turned up one hot summer day.  She was first spotted early in the day laying in the middle of the track that leads away from the house.  As the morning wore on, and heated up, she moved steadily nearer to the house.  Eventually Elisabeth took a bucket of water to her which our visitor drank enthusiastically before laying down again.  A quick glance at the pads of her feet explained why, in places they had worn through to her flesh; she must have walked for miles.

Topsy stayed for four years during which she hardly left the surrounds of the house.  When the car left the house she would follow it to the village where she would wait until it returned when she would follow it back to the house.  One day when the car returned from an outing Topsy was not around to follow it home.  She had disappeared as enigmatically as she had arrived four years earlier.  She is still much missed.

Some years after Topsy.  A friend who had taken in a stray dog contacted to ask us if we would be interested in taking the animal off his hands.  Our friend already had a pet dog and could not really cope with two.  I told him that, under no circumstances did I want another dog.  I do not know how it happened but Milly, a white, long-haired english sheepdog type of animal did eventually come to live here.  She too stayed for four years dying here of an illness the symptoms of which we had assumed to be pregnancy but obviously were not.  By the time we decided to call in a vet Milly, who despite her swollen abdomen had continued to eat and appear normal, was beyond help.  Burying her remains was one of the worst and most memorable tasks I have ever had to face.

Tomorrow, Philo will have been here for three weeks.  As with Topsy, how and from where they came to find this remote place, a kilometer from the nearest metaled road and what they might have experienced in their pasts are enigmas as impossible to decode as is that of how long Philo might now remain here.  He is, I believe, becoming aware he is welcome to stay.  If he does he will continue to enjoy the hospitality of the house and the freedom to wander as far and as long as he wishes, through the largely natural, fenceless wilderness around us.

Regeneration

Some years ago a large Lentisc (Mastic tree) that I could see from my kitchen window blew down in a storm.  The tree was old and weak; rotting from the inside.  Through subsequent seasons the hollow stub that remained rooted in the ground began to show new growth until, several seasons on from the tree’s destruction, the many new shoots thrown up by the ancient root had developed into something of a large shrub.  To try to encourage the growth of a single strong new tree from the original root, I thinned the ‘shrub’ to a single shoot .  In due time this sapling may grow into as fine and stately a tree as was its parent.  Inevitably the new tree will one day grow old, rot from the inside and, unable to resist the ravages of future storms, be broken to its destruction.  Maybe the generations-old root will again throw up new growth.  Whether or not this will be the case I can not know but I can be confident that, should it be so, I shall not be around to witness it.  My own shoots, my grandchildren, may, and if not themselves perhaps their shoots will enjoy something of that which I enjoyed of the tree’s parent.  Should this be the case I can be comfortable in that my arboreal prunings of the past week shall not have been in vain; the circle will not have been broken.

New Year

I prefer not to get into a sweat about 'New Year'.  My own new year either began some ten days ago when the magic workings of the universe again began to allow a little more daylight into each day or will begin on Thursday which will mark another annual anniversary of my birth.  Neat and limited packages of  time past or, possibly, yet to come are of little concern to me; it is the moment that I essay to enjoy living.

Christmas

For anyone dropping in here today, and all of those who do not, I wish this special day to be one of peace and contentment.

Winter in Messinias

Sunrise, 30th November 2011

Reading a fellow blogger's illustrated report of snow in Stirling and my daughter's tales of being cold in Kent has provoked me to remind you all that it is not necessary to tolerate such privations.  Relocate!  Here in Messina the weather remains pleasantly mild and there are few days during which the sun fails to make at very least a token appearance for an hour or two; invariably, morning coffee can be enjoyed out of doors on an average of three days out of four.  The far away mountain-top snow I can see from my balcony looks magnificent.  The price of almost everything is rocketing, incomes are being slashed but the sun continues to shine on us and very shortly the days will begin again to  grow longer.  Hooray!

Brindisi

In Ireland there are books to be had that are not common currency elsewhere.  Most towns, even the smaller ones, seemed to support at least one bookshop and most bookshops had several shelves of ‘Irish interest’ books; books, concerning Irish history, topography and culture, largely published by Irish publishers. In order to counter my ignorance of things Irish I spent many happy hours of my sojourn there browsing such shelves, a pastime which brought me home wealthier by more than two score of new books. It was while browsing in one of these bookshops that, by happy accident, I picked up a copy of ‘ Edgelands’ by poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts; a book that has nothing to do with Ireland whatsoever.  Reading the first few pages sold the book to me.

I enjoy this type of unclassifiable reading; serendipity.  Farley and Roberts’ book celebrates and winkles out poetry from places to which most of us would rather turn a blind eye; the factory estates, tips, sewage farms and wastelands which, these days, surround most of our larger towns and cities.

Although not mentioned in ‘Edgelands’, the port of Brindisi is one such place, a vast acreage of concrete parking areas and security fences at the end of an autostrada; the terminus is situated miles to the south of Brindisi town - itself an edgeland of housing estates and little else. I spent the better part of the afternoon of Monday 28^th November there, waiting to board the ferry that would bring me home.  That the ferry port was working at a fraction of its capacity did not deter the enterprising local trader pictured above from trying his luck to flog his wares to the handful of people, largely Bulgarian lorry drivers, patiently waiting the afternoon away.  Not being in need of anything the mobile trader had amongst his stock I contented myself watching one of the longest murmurations of starlings I have ever seen, its form and tone infinitely varying as the shifting, swelling, contracting mass of birds murmurated across the clear evening sky.