The Turquoise Gate - a dream set down

I can't remember the last time I woke up because I was crying out in a dream. Mostly with dreams I forget. This one is clinging insistently. I decided to draw it & to write it. It's not horror exactly, but there was a sense of menace that was not easily shaken off. It was one of the few times when wished there was someone else in the house with me.

The Turquoise Gate

The gate at the top of the stairs is old.
Turquoise paint peels off the metal.
It's wet from the rain.
I fiddle with the latch & I think I have it closed.
I push to test it but it swings open.
I pull it closed & try again because I know what's coming.
The rain obscures everything in my field of vision. 
The rain bounces off the white marble steps that lead up to the house. 

The rain is a dense white veil. 

I can see nothing.

Then I can. 

The image is blurred but it is there.

A small dark form. 

It's closer than I thought because I didn't see it coming. 

And it's closer now. 

And the latch will not fasten. 

Narrenschiff

Otherwise known as "The Ship of Fools".

This has been a favourite image/conceit of mine for a long time ever since my first encounter with  it in W.H.Auden's Atlantis.

"Only The Ship of Fools is making the journey this year."

I come back to it every time I feel adrift. Now is one of those times.

This is my verse. Not as long as Auden's and, of course, not nearly as elegant.

The Ship of Fools is in dry dock.

They chip the barnacles off the hull.

They tar the wood, replace the nails,

And stitch the rents in all the sails.

 

The Ship of Fools is in dry dock.

When all is done, they let me board.

They float the craft, and hoist the main,

And then we put to sea again.

The shirt off his back. A story.

 

 

This week saw Youth Homelessness Matters Day. I'm not quite sure why it registered with me this year as opposed to other years but it must be a good thing that it is coming more into the public consciousness. The story below is about homelessness and youth, though not a homeless youth as you will see.

 

There’s a man. He’s homeless. I see him most mornings when I walk from the train station to the bus-stop. His territory is the area around the William street shops, across the road from the Wesley church, which is also the area where I have been catching buses for many years.

 

This morning when I saw him he was asleep, sitting upright against the wall of the souvenir shop and, as always, seeing him reminded me of my interaction with him which was over 8 years ago, and this story which I want to tell you now.

A winter evening on William Street. It was windy in the city as it often is. I stood in the queue for the bus, as I often did and still do. There was a stirring in the crowd to the side of me and I turned around. The man was lying on the pavement outside the burger restaurant. One of the many homeless, he was dishevelled, a bit dirty. His eyes were closed and blood pooled out around his head.

People stepped away. Others, having seen what was going on, either gawped at the spreading blood or turned back and continued waiting for the bus. Then a young man stepped out of the crowd. And he was very young, maybe 19 or 20, no older than that. He knelt beside the wounded man and gently shook his shoulder to see if he was awake. I could hear him saying “Are you all right, mate?”

I went to help because my teacher-instinct kicked in. I see a situation that needs managing and if no one else wants to take charge, I’ll do it. I can’t help it. As the young guy cradled the man’s wounded head, we eased him into the recovery position. The blood continued to pour. Later I found out that head-wounds bleed a lot, but in that moment it looked very serious. As I got out my phone and called for an ambulance, the young guy took off his t-shirt and used it to stanch the blood-flow.

Three things I remember about that occasion. The first was the wordless communication between the young guy and me. We didn’t speak. We didn’t need to. There was a job to be done and we just got on with it. The second was the image of a skinny youth kneeling shirtless in the winter cold, in a pool of blood, tending to someone who was injured. The last was the odd sense that the three of us existed in a bubble of a world – the people who didn’t stop to stare kept on walking; the staff inside the burger restaurant all came and stared through the window, but none of them came out to help or offer the use of a First Aid kit which they must surely have had inside.

The ambulance came eventually. I can’t remember how long it took to get there. The paramedics took over. We stood and watched as they lifted their patient onto the stretcher and got him it into the ambulance. Reality began to hit home when one of the paramedics came over to us. He offered hand-sanitiser and then advised us to look into testing for blood-born diseases as soon as we could. He looked the young guy up and down and then produced a thermal-blanket. Then they left.

And there we were, two strangers standing in the cold street. A school teacher with a blood on her skirt hem; a young guy with a silver thermal blanket where his shirt should have been. Dazed and smelling of hand-sanitiser, we looked at each other.

“I’m Snowy,” he said, and held out his hand.

I shook his hand and gave him my name.

“You did a good thing today, Snowy,” I said.

He smiled.

“Yeah, well, better go and get myself a shirt. Can’t go on the bus like this.”

“Yes, of course.”

“See you then.”

“See you.”

And he walked off.

I think it was a couple of weeks later that I saw the homeless guy again.  He was better, though bandaged.He was asleep in one of his usual spots. As I mentioned above, he is still around to this day. His situation hasn’t changed.

When I see him though, I think about Snowy. Just an ordinary young guy but one who I remember as noble and compassionate in the midst of the indifference crowd. Someone who would literally give the shirt off his back to help a fellow human.

 

Imprimatur

 

I have put some of my art online. Dipping a toe into the critical waters, if you like. I made a conscious decision to start drawing again. I made this decision in January. I went out and bought a sketch pad. I bought pens and pencils. Nothing happened for a while though. The sketch pad sat on my coffee table and was ignored. 

At one stage, I made myself pick it up and I made myself draw. The results were contrived and banal. I dropped it back onto the table and left it there. But one night, when the house was too big, too empty, too quiet for one person, and just being in it felt oppressive, somewhere around midnight I found myself holding a biro and the rejected sketch-pad. The pen moved in the familiar anticlockwise oval that I’ve been sketching for years. Around and around and around – the lines not even, not clear, a blurry edge that becomes a face. I say ‘face’ but there are never any features – these are the old friends who exist in the margins and end-pages of my books. The people of my annotations.

A person’s art is as distinctive as their handwriting. Possibly your art says as much about personality as handwriting is said to do. I wonder what mine says about me. The leitmotifs occur with regularity:

The faceless people.

The classical drapery.

The arches and fan-vaults.

Steps.

Poppy-like flowers and aspidistra-like greenery.

Swirls, spirals, scrolls, volutes, and swashes.

Spheres, cones, pyramids, and boxes.

All manner of strange craft.

Go ahead, analyse me. It’s probably all deeply significant. Or not.

Through the years I have decorated journals and notebooks with these images. As I grew older, they made their presence known in my work diary, on the edges of the minutes of meetings, and in the spaces in seminar handouts. Rarely, however, have they existed in a dedicated space. Neither have they been a focussed task, more a valve to release the pressure for a brain that was elsewhere engaged.

The sudden space and silence that has come into my life seem to have encouraged their renaissance. The florescence into colour has been enabled by the new digital dimension. A sketch becomes a photograph which transforms through applications. I have a pixelated paintbox and a whole range of effects. Finally, I can realise (if that is the word for digital art) the ideas in my head. The technology makes it possible for me to achieve the effects that I intend.

 

 

There’s a certain level of acceptance as well. A colour, selected unintentionally, is allowed to remain. A shadow caused by photography in the wrong light is turned into a feature of the piece. It’s my ‘imperfect stitch’ though not an intentionally introduced flaw, rather an uncorrected error.

 

 

It’s a new thing for me to be relaxed about imperfection. It’s a new thing for me to put my creations out there for other people to see. A couple of samples risked on Instagram brought the approval of actual artists. The virtual imprimatur was unexpected and thrilling.

I may do more of this.

Also, it has brought me back to this blog.

 

 

IQS - I quit Strawberrythief

 

 

It's been a good almost-four years but it's time for something new.

 

I've enjoyed the eating, the baking, the nostalgia, and the sharing. I'll continue to do all of these things but the eating and baking will stay on the @strawberrythief Twitter account and the nostalgia and sharing will move to a new blog which is more about me and less about what I eat and drink.

It's been so great to know that there are people out there reading what I've written and I'll be leaving the blog up so people can still read and access the recipes if they want to.
 

So long and thanks for all the Shiraz.

 

Nicki - The Strawberrythief

Summer, Secrets, and Shiraz

With the first Secret Cake Club of 2014 fast-approaching, I remembered that I hadn’t yet blogged about the last (amazing, spectacular, bigger-than-Ben-Hur) Secret Cake Club of 2013.

The theme was “Summer” which gave endless scope for creativity. When I think of summer, mostly I think of the British summers of my childhood where any day over 20C was considered hot and the high 20s were positively tropical. I think of beach holidays in Cornwall, barbecues in the back garden, long summer evenings, Wimbledon and all the things that went with it – strawberries and cream, gin and tonic, lemon barley water, cucumber sandwiches.

But I’ve lived over half my life in Australia now, so I also associate summer with Christmas and sunburn, pavements too hot to walk on, sunshine too strong to go out in. The barbecues are still there and so is the beach, but I also think bushfires and swimming pools and cold, cold wine.

 

 

In the end I decided to go for the cold, cold wine in dessert form. My go-to drink is sparkling Shiraz which I think of as inherently Australian as I had never seen it or even heard of it before I moved here. The depth and substance of red wine with the fun of champenoise bubbles – how could anyone not love it? Besides, it means that I can continue to drink Shiraz during the summer rather that wait for the cooler months to come around.

 

I used this recipe from Maggie Beer because it is simple yet stunning. It’s perfect to finish a Christmas feast, but doesn’t have to be limited to Christmas - any time in summer will do. Maggie uses raspberries in her recipe so I did too, but you could use any other summer fruit. Maggie burns off the alcohol in her recipe which I didn’t do. I like a decent boozy dessert, but if you are catering for the family, it might be worth making a booze-free batch for the kiddies.
 

 

 

I made my jellies into individual portions for the Cake Club people and prettied them up with edible gold and candied rose-buds. They looked great. They tasted…powerful. The tartness of the raspberries provided a good contrast to the heavy sweetness of the jelly. You could serve this jelly with cream or ice-cream or, as I did, just on its own.

 

It was a show-stopping cake club. Emma, our host at Table Culture in Subiaco, had gone above and beyond to make sure that we were taken care of. There were cool pitchers of iced water with chunks of fruit in them. There was a lavishly decorated table on which were two decadent Christmas cakes. There was champagne and there was barista-brewed coffee. Oh, and I mustn't forget the generous in-store discount that was offered on all products.

 

 Not only did we get the chance to participate in a raffle and win some great prizes, but, to the delight of all the guests, Emma had organised for us each to have a loaf tin to take home, courtesy of her friend, the representative of Le Creuset. There under the Christmas tree were the tins all stacked up. (If it looks a little bare in my picture that's because I was one of the last to leave and all the tins had been taken)

 

As always, Cake Club members provided an intriguing array of food.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I came home with my usual box of delights which never lasts quite as long as I think they will.

 

I also now have a very handy dessert recipe for those days when it is too hot to be in the kitchen but where a great dessert is necessary. There might also be some sparkling Shiraz left over. I said 'might'.

 

Plain sailing

 

 

It’s not a great photograph.

I was asked if I would like a picture and I said ‘yes’, handed the Captain my iPhone, and let him snap away. The filter in the app was randomised which is why the odd sepia colour. It’s not remotely flattering. I look, quite honestly, like a madwoman with particularly bad hair. I am grinning like an idiot. I’d had about 3 plastic cups of cheap sparkling wine beforehand. A tipsy madwoman with particularly bad hair. We won’t speculate on whether anyone should have let me behind the wheel.

 

 

But I'm posting it regardless because, even with the weird tone and me looking grotesque and toothy, it is my favourite picture of all the pictures that I have from my vacation because I think that was the point where I was at my happiest. I was steering a 1922 Baltic Cruiser in full sail back into port. Behind me you can see the Sydney Harbour Bridge which we had just sailed underneath. The Opera House is also in view. I’ve got the Australian flag whipping me in the face and a mouthful of hair – blame the harbour breezes – but I am controlling this amazing vessel, so all is right with the world.

December was a mix of the sublime and the utterly depressing.  The to-be-preserved-in-a-photograph moments were thrown into sharp relief by the what-the-hell-am-I-going-to-do? moments. Christmas sent me into a panic. The few days before New Year were the worst –a period of displacement and dejection and aloneness. But here’s the thing, with the help of dear friends, it all came good and the sense of being cast adrift was replaced by a sense of having a destination and, ultimately, a safe place to weigh anchor.

I know that all is starting to be well again because I am writing again. This is a good sign.

So I did a lot of fun stuff and I managed a lot of shitty stuff, but the upshot is that I had my longest holiday in 6 years and have come into the New Year with a lot of plans and ideas percolating in my brain. This year will definitely be a year of changes, but the one thing that won’t change is the food adventures and the kitchen experiments and the writing that goes with them.





A few holiday snaps are below, some of which will make it into the many blogs posts which I need to catch up on, and then it’s time to batten down the hatches and set sail for the uncharted territory which is 2014.

The excitement of a journey

New places to see (the Southern Highlands)





Giving in to nerdiness (Ultimo Centre, Sydney)



Remembering how to relax (The Langham Hotel, Sydney)

Treating myself to the good stuff

A toast to the friend who saved Christmas



A heart-breaking return

BFAMS to help me through the bad stuff

The relief of New Year's Eve.

 

An unexpected addition to the new household