A DAY IN THE LIFE

Do you have typical days, when the pattern of the previous day is repeated almost identically, like wallpaper ? Can you remember all details of the pattern? Here's one of mine.


Got up about 10 am when the phone rang. I usually set the alarm clock for an optimistic 7:30 but since I rarely get to bed before 3 or 4 am, when it rings I switch it off, reasoning that I deserve another couple of hours. Mornings are something I would like to be better acquainted with and enjoy the benefits of more often. My mornings are blurry, foggy, indecisive. Decisions like: should I turn on the computer or have breakfast loom unresolved. Breakfast won today so I shuffled to the kitchen wearing pyjamas and red bathrobe - this is a very old mumsy robe which I must get rid of. Something jazzier and more morning-friendly is required, as long as it doesn't have a belt. I hate belted robes so don't get me one if you're thinking of it. 

Breakfast is two wholewheat mini-pitta (from Marks & Spencer) toasted in the toaster then spread with unsalted butter and a couple of slices of Emmental. An apple, a clementine, a cup of maté, no sugar or honey. While consuming this petit déjeuner I read yesterday's newspaper, the Independent. Because my morning brain is foggy, I read everything, even if I'm not interested. I have been known to read the advertisements for cars, which I have no interest in whatsoever. Droning in my blurry consciousness is a robot voice which sounds, I'm afraid, like Stephen Hawking, insisting that I should stop this robotic behaviour and Get On With The Day. 

Eventually I obey and shuffle to the bathroom. No, first I turn on the computer to check email and to find out if there are any comments here on the blog. Well, overnight somebody in another time zone might have commented, innit? Bugger, no new comments. Quick peek at my stats: not much traffic there either. Shit. But wait: the stats say I've had 699 visitors so far this month - 699 and October has just begun! That's more people than I've met in my entire life, probably. Okay maybe it's not 699 visitors but 699 visits. Even if it's only 300 people that's still more real people than I actually know. So what if they don't comment? They have visited this space and I should be gleeful. I am gleeful. I make a couple of administrative phone calls.Then I put some laundry in the washing machine. Then I go in the bathroom. 

Bathroom business takes quite a while. I need to stand in the shower for at least ten minutes even though that's terribly wasteful, ecologically speaking, because only hot water running down the back of my neck dispels the brain fog. I dress in my painting clothes, old striped purple top and blue no-Yoga Yoga trousers and then it's face-the-face time: in magnifying mirror on bedroom window-sill I examine my morning mug and adjust whatever can be adjusted, which is not much. A bit of concealer under the eyes, some plucking of stray hairs, lipstick. Now I'm ready for the day. It's about 2 pm.

I go upstairs to my studio and confront The Painting (DNA/Prism/Frames of Reference). I stand back and examine what still needs to be done. While I'm working I notice how much painting ressembles carpentry or construction in general. All about fitting this into that, balancing, assessing, eliminating, concealing, revealing. It's not glamorous or inspirational, it's just work - if some mystery or chemistry subsequently occurs between viewer and finished canvas, that's a bonus. I work until about 5 pm then go downstairs and make coffee, eat a couple of biscuits and a clementine. Quick look at email then back upstairs. More work on the painting until daylight starts to fade. Very annoyed that the days are getting shorter. Have to stop, the colours are wrong under electric light. The painting still needs more work, I'll do it tomorrow. It's about 7 pm.

I start preparing dinner, my only real meal of the day. I've got some organic beef and a lot of vegetables. I rarely eat beef but when I do, I like to make a hearty dish and tonight a casserole suits the approach of winter. I'm a good cook, if I say so myself, unschooled but creative within a limited range. Occasionally I'll follow a recipe but mostly I improvise, throwing together flavours I like. Turn the oven on to 200C and while it heats up, sauté the beef chunks in a bit of olive oil with a chopped red onion, garlic, chopped ginger, a red pepper. Add spices: cumin, coriander, thyme, black pepper, salt. A dash of red wine and stir on high heat until the meat is well-browned. The oven is ready so transfer the contents of the pan into a deep earthenware pot, add more red wine then pile in the rest of the chopped vegetables: carrots, new potatoes, parsnips, courgette, baby corn. Put the lid on the pot and bung the thing in the oven. It will take an hour and a half/two hours. Meanwhile I nibble a few black olives and drink cold coffee in a tall glass with ice cubes and a dash of port, the real Portuguese Port from Porto, a recent gift. I don't know if my mixture is a proper drink but it tastes good. 

Back to the computer to look at email again, write a few replies, browse some blogs, then begin writing this blog post. Around 9:30 pm the delicious smell says my dinner is ready. I add some quickly boiled fresh peas to the mix and ladle out a very generous helping of my casserole. It is exquisite, of course. Half a glass of red wine remains in the bottle so I drink it. A clementine is my dessert. End of food for today. Washing up can wait until morning. 

I come back to the Mac and move the August and September blog posts to my archive. It is now five past 1 am on October 13 and I think I will go to bed unless I decide to add a picture to this post and then maybe browse some blogs. 

This was my typical day that was. How typical was yours? 

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UPSTAIRS AND THE UNBEARABLE NECESSITY OF CHAOS

What attracted me to this top floor flat when I first saw it was that it had an upstairs: a small, awkward-shaped, added-on loft, the sloping ceiling high enough in the middle for me to stand upright but not for any taller people. A space obviously unsuitable for large artwork but I took it anyway. Kindly friends helped to lug my heavy etching press up the narrow staircase, I had a sink installed, built racks and shelves for my equipment, and for quite a while the place served me well enough for printmaking and graphics. 

Now, almost sixteen years later, it's become less of a studio and more of a chaotic storage dump. Mea culpa, yes, but I also blame the advent of the digital age. The Mac is downstairs: that explains everything, doesn't it? A computer, a graphic tablet and thou, my muse, and we can happily ignore all of that upstairs mess - the paints, the unfinished paintings, the broken frames, the stacks of paper, the smell of solvents, the greasy rags, the bits of wood, the bottles and jars and boxes and tins and tubes of art-stuff which, the less it is used, the more it accumulates in case it will be used at a later date. 

But wait. Lately I've been neglecting downstairs (less blogging, less computering in general, did you notice?) and cautiously venturing back upstairs to sit there and think. A few nights ago - late night is usually my decision time - I resolved to start clearing the chaos. But then I noticed that the mess was visually quite intriguing so I decided to start a new large painting instead.
You can see its present stage in the middle of the bottom row of these photos. The painting will incorporate, in as yet unpredictable fashion, fragments of the things I see upstairs, including parts of an old, unfinished painting of my parents when young (middle row). The canvas is almost my height, the ceiling not high enough for an easel and the room too narrow and crowded to allow some other support so I have to work in a variety of crouching positions. But now I need the chaos to stay as it is because it's my current inspiration. 

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GUARDIAN PRIZEWINNER FINISHES WORK

It's been a brilliant week. Even the radical change in my daily routine was a bonus. I think I might start keeping normal working hours from now on instead of my crazy night owl schedule. Whenever I read the G2 section of the Guardian henceforth, I will see faces instead of newsprint, the smiling faces of those people I sat near on the third floor of the Guardian building on Farringdon Road. As a guest of the Women pages I was warmly welcomed and felt at ease in their world, taking my seat every morning amongst the rows of computers (same Mac I have at home), everyone focused on individual tasks but definitely part of a team, with much laughter floating over the top of the monitor screens. I'm so used to working alone that initially I was worried I wouldn't be able to write when surrounded by people, but the opposite was true. Each person's concentration was a boost to my own and with none of the distractions I have at home, I could get on with the job.

My job was twofold: one was to edit a feature about artists who happen to be older women - an idea which was among those I submitted to the competition last year. The article was due to be published this week but at a production meeting, it was realised that Wednesday's G2 cover story was about old men (why they have a harder time growing old than women do) so the oldie artists in the same issue would have been too much of a good thing. It's therefore been scheduled to appear next Wednesday - don't miss it, it's excellent!

My second task was to write the feature which you can read today, online or on newsprint. Many thanks to Beth Cassandra, Fran Sacred Ordinary, Marja Leena Marja-Leena, Penelope GrannyP, Rain, Rainy Day Thought and Tamar , who all gave me quotes to incorporate in the text. I hope they get lots of new blog visitors as a result.

The online version, for some reason, is missing the note which, in the newspaper, is printed at the bottom of the article: Today's Women pages were guest-edited by Natalie d'Arbeloff, the joint winner of our first Mary Stott prize.

I would have like to illustrate it but, understandably, the Guardian has their own design team and the image provided, while attractive, is not what I had in mind. In the online version there's no illustration anyway, so when I got home I drew the one below. Look at it while you read Where are all the older female geeks?

Update (1pm): Thank you so much, everyone, for all your encouraging comments and forgive me for not responding individually to each of them. It's a fantastic thrill to see your responses to my article. The reason it focuses attention on older women is because it was written for, doh, the Women page and because the statistics (if you can ever trust statistics) do say that there's a considerably larger proportion of geekish older males out there on the net.

I also want to make clear that I have absolutely no quibble with the fact that the illustration in the print version was done by a Guardian staff designer - this is their job and I was only there for a few days as a guest. In any case, I only did this cartoon after I got home last night and it took me about four hours! It certainly would not have made the paper's deadline. Blaugustine is where I can post my own images anytime, about anything, taking as long as I want. That's one of the beauties of blogging.

One more thing: it was not possible to add hyperlinks for the bloggers I mentioned but their blogs' titles are given, therefore interested people can easily find them via Google.

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