It used to be trade name of a shoe polish. I remember it from my childhood, it always conjured up lovely notions. And cherry blossom is especially beautiful. The tree of it along Llanbadarn Road, in the backyard of the Nursery School is bulging, positively bursting with it. And there are van Gogh’s paintings of it. It will fall soon. Enjoy it while you can.
There is serendipity everywhere. I spoke of Paula Rego yesterday during my interview with A and then there was her voice coming out of the radio an hour or so later as part of a promo for a Desert Island Discs revisited promo. I can’t imagine she was an easy interviewee. Sue Lawley did her best no doubt. She isn’t polite. I remember her in that bookshop in Cambridge, wild, untamed, thrilling but scary. And her work always gets me in the stomach, it punches me there. It is magnificent. Nobody draws like her. I am floored by her brilliance. But she still scares me. There is no ‘paying lip-service to niceties’ in her – she is uncontrolled. And there it is there on her canvases. I told A to look at her work, saying that I saw a link but there isn’t really, A is fragile, cautious, a free spirit but not untamed, not feral like Paula. Her voice on the radio talking about using the figure more and more. I’m interested in looking, she said, now.
No one was abroad as I walked. I saw the lorry driver sleeping in his Tesco’s truck and the woman in the bakery filling the shelves and that man in one of the houses along Mill Street sitting in his kitchen on his computer, his face lit up by its screen. And that was all, no police, no night-time wanderers. Oh, there were two cats skittering across the road. But that was all. Just me. And the moon.
