Highly Sensitive People

Yes, that's me on Major Yeats in a "fun day" costume competition at Fox Hollow in Tennessee. We got a 4th. The costume was a couch and a couch potato. I was wearing an old dressing gown, had a packet of chocolate chip cookies in one pocket and a TV guide in the other. I had a shower cap over my riding helmet. I covered Yeats in the ugliest sofa cover I could find, and pinned little pillows to it. The costume was suggested to me by a journalist colleague, David Wickert (now of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution) because he had heard me moan about Yeats' laziness so often.

One would assume, I assume, that artists would be highly sensitive people (HSPs). I suspect there are some exceptions, and that some artists can cope with crowds and noise and excessive demands on their time and all sorts of upheaval. I suspect there is a continuum, with some artists being extremely highly sensitive, and others being a little more towards laid-back and unflappable.

I would place myself at the far end of the bell curve on the extremely highly sensitive side.

I loathe loud music. I find it offensive when someone else's music invades my space. What makes them think I would enjoy whatever gormless crap they are subjecting their ears and mind to? I had neighbors like that in Maryland; summer was often a trial. It turns out that some new people who have moved in near me recently in Cornwall are of that ilk. The people who lived there before had a pre-teen son whose friends came over and they got quite noisy in the garden on the trampoline...but it was happy noise and not arrogant, like the playing of your music for other people's ears, unasked. Kid happy noise=good; arrogant subjection of others to crappy music=bad. Or simply, relaxingly human v. aggravating.

Poster child for pernickety (that's persnickety in the US)

Which leads me to suspect that--using myself as the poster child--a certain amount of personal space is part of the sensitivity, as is a highly developed concept of polite behaviour.

Of course, I may be wrong. But once again, I shall make an assumption that artists are HSPs and, as well, usually introverts.

There are people who would debate that about me. I'm one of the few writer/editors I know who didn't mind giving speeches to civic groups when I was doing special projects for a daily newspaper in Virginia/Tennessee (in a town on the state line). I also worked in national marketing for the second-oldest theatre in the US; I had to get up on stage occasionally and give the "curtain speech" when the Artistic Director was out of town. I thought it was fun.

But now...well, all that belongs where one of my horse trainer friends, my dear friend Peter Krukoski of Fox Hollow Riding Academy in Tennessee, put it many years ago when he and I were having a tiff. "Your problem," he said, "Is that you are an introvert who learned to act like an extrovert to get what you want." 

Coping with faux extroversion

He was right. Exactly right. As a journalist, I phoned and met people day in and day out. At the theatre, ditto. It was a living, a pretty good one, and sometimes exciting. But the horses were my safe, quiet place. On horseback, I was in another world. Riding horses over fences is wonderfully relaxing simply because you will have only one thing on your mind; communicating perfectly and wordlessly with that horse so that you both land on the other side together. I loved it. It was the antidote to the faux extroversion I practiced when I wasn't on horseback.

Now that I've (mostly) left the journalism behind, and working for a wacky organization like a theatre isn't even on the radar screen, I find I've reverted to introvert. I scarcely want to answer the phone. It takes me a week to recover emotionally from hosting a small dinner party. The thought of going out stumping to promote my artworks leaves me...well...in search of an arsenic substitute and the courage to take it.  (I might also propose that arty folk have a tendency to dramatise......)

I've retired my horse and frankly, he and I together were an art form--a sort of free-form flying expressionist art form at times when we magically and suddenly parted company, other times exhibiting classical perfection over fences.  I have no intention of getting another horse. Indeed, there is no other horse in the world I'd care to ride except Yeats. I did ride others...lots of others...and even leased a few before and during my years showing Yeats, just so I wouldn't get stale. But as for the ride, Yeats is a huge bugger, as stubborn as the day is long, too smart for our own good...and the apple of my eye from the minute I first sat on his broad back. His gaits are not great; when we won a class, it was over fences, not on the flat. He's a great, careful jumper. Well, he was after Peter and I trained him, with some help from my friend January Johnson, an artist on horseback, who is now an artist with food. Yeats is larking about in a friend's pasture in Tennessee in his rather posh retirement; I still own him and pay his bills because, well, I love him.

A good substitute for a horse?

I need to replace horsemanship in my life; I need the total immersion break from the pursuit of art, the sort of break that riding gave me from the pursuit of interviewees or promotion of a theatre. I have no idea what that might be. (All suggestions gratefully accepted.)

Unless, of course, it could be art that is the relief from the pursuit of art. Perhaps I should just give up the perfectionism of the mid-century-born American to be the hostess with the mostess and every other screwy thing heaped on some of us by grandmothers giving Victorian ideals another life, and do more painting when I'm tired of painting. Or at least, relax about anything else I do.

Right then. My next dinner party won't be a selection of wonders from my French cookbooks served amongst the Irish crystal. It will be spag bol* with jug wine in Jamie Oliver glasses (dishwasher safe), take it or leave it.


*Americans: Spag bol is Britspeak for spaghetti bolognese, or in other words, pasta with tomato-meat sauce.

Wrist watches as life and art

A watch designed after Chagall's work. I MIGHT concede to owning one...if I could conceive of paying for it. See the story about it here.

I have never really liked watches. I only grudgingly wear one, and only because I'm a tiny bit obsessive about being on time. But I disliked them so much when I was a child that I refused to learn to tell time for years. I was about nine years old before I admitted to my mother that I actually had been able to tell time for about six years at that point. I just found the entire idea, I think, of living by the hour to be ludicrous. And yes, I guess they had their hands full with me.

As I got older, I found that watches were also impractical for much of my life. I spent a lot of time tucking my watch someplace safe when I went to ride a horse because I knew the watch would be ruined if, a) I came off in the mud, or, b) I had to bathe the horse after the ride, quite a common thing except in the middle of winter. And then I discovered plastic watches.

Oh, for joy!  Three bucks at the local convenience store/gas station (UK residents, read 2 quid and petrol station), they lasted several months, and who cared? Toss it, buy a new one.

Before that, though, I had--I shamefacedly admit--gotten into a novelty watch phase. If the watch was weird, would buy it. Before a trip to Paris, I bought a really fun (and plastic!) watch that had a vibrant parrot head cover that flipped open to reveal the watch face beneath. As I have small wrists, it was probably the first thing about me anyone saw.

On the plane to Paris, I noticed in the "buy me" magazine a lovely thing called a Rock Watch. The works were by some respected watchmaker, and the face was a bit of pink quartz, I believe. I really liked it but decided I could buy one cheaper in Paris.

Fast-forward to four days later. My husband and I were sitting in a little Alsatian restaurant on the Rue St. Germain. We were sitting on the glassed-in porch. A mother, her little girl of about seven and the grandmother were seated a few tables away, also on the porch.

Throughout my meal, the little girl stared at me. When the trio was finished, the little girl bounded over to me and stood beside the table, staring at MY WATCH.

The mother hurried over. "Non, non, Sandrine," she said, followed by rapid gentle scolding in French. I don't speak French, except for phrasebook French. But we communicated  partly in English, partly in German and a bit in French. The little girl was in love with my watch. I asked if I might make a present of it. The mother said no, no, it was too extravagant. I said it wasn't, that I had paid no more than ten dollars for it in Miami and I was happy for the child to have it as she so adored it. Besides, I thought, it would give me an excuse to buy the Rock Watch.

So the mother relented, I put my watch on the little girl's wrist, and off the trio went up the street.

Shortly, the little girl was back, this time outside the window, blowing me kisses. Certainly, that was worth ten bucks.

I never did get a Rock Watch. We were busy seeing things. When we finally got to Bon Marche, I refused to spend that much on a blasted watch; the one in the airplane catalog had been cheaper, as it turned out.

But I did decide that someday, I would write a story about Sandrine. This is not that story. It will be fiction, and it will have a very lovely, totally natural character named Sandrine, not unlike Madeleine...but nicer.

Rant: Carrion crows of the art world

Rembrandt van Rijn self-portrait, one of two "given" to Spain by the late Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza (Wiki Commons)

 


I have been reading, when the spirit moves me, a collection of the late Dominick Dunne's Vanity Fair articles, Fatal Charms and The Mansions of Limbo. I had already read all of his novels, all of those based on real members of either the fabulously wealthy 400 old families in New York City, or the upstart nouveau riche of Hollywood. Dunne had some connection to both those populations.


Dunne was a good writer. And brave. He said OJ was guilty before anyone else did. He also had to insert himself into the events and lifestyles of the rich and infamous to produce his detailed descriptions of how the one-percenter live, just as he had had to attend every revolting minute of the OJ courtroom fiasco.

By the time I was two-thirds through the book, I knew more than anyone has a need to know about robber politicians such as the Ferdinand and Imelda Marcoso, and upstart nobility wannabes such as Claus von Bulow.  Dunne also wrote about the unspeakable Menendez brothers, and Lady Kenmare, who may or may not have hastened the departures from life of four husbands. (Noel Coward thought she had, according to Dunne.) Dunne threw in a few articles about a couple of decent sorts, actress Diane Keaton among them. But still...

Where art enters, so do rogues

And then, last night, I got to the art part: The story of some of the peregrinations of art collector Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza.

Who?

Well. Let me tell you. Years ago, I adored Architectural Digest magazine. In my heart of hearts, I wanted to live in one of the houses they profiled. Almost any one of them, really. But I vividly recall the article about Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza and his fabulous houses; it was probably the late 1970s or early 1980s when I read that article. Most of the houses in Architectural Digest belong to unspeakably rich people, many of whom are also unspeakably tacky. Perfect Dominick Dunne fodder. And, while I might have hoped to become unspeakably rich myself, tackiness was never one of my life goals.

I say that, doubtless, because I'm hopelessly middle-class. Too bad.

Rich and tacky didn't seem to faze the Thyssen-Bornemiszas, especially when it came to foisting his expenses onto others while extracting coinage from their pockets.

Baron HH Thyssen-Bornemisza (doesn't it sound like a pirate's sailing ship?) had amassed a truly astonishing art collection that he didn't want to be sundered after his death. So he decided to give it to whatever nation was willing to pay him handsomely AND build a brand new, state-of-the-art museum to house it in. Prince Charles paid a visit to the baron's castle trying to get the collection for the UK. The executive director of New York City's Metropolitan Museum approached the baron to try to snag it for his already obscenely overstocked collection; there are more paintings and objets d'art stored in underground passages below the place than are hung on its wall. German Chancellor Helmut Kohl also entered the race. (Note: Dunne said the baron's collection was second only to Her Majesty's, and hers is the greatest in the world.)

In the end, Spain got the collection--probably because the baron's fifth wife was Spanish--and the citizens of Spain got stuck footing the bill for the collection. Granted, they've got back some Goyas and El Grecos that had left the country. But it begs the term "gift" when the nation has to pony up boatloads of cash to acquire the "gift." Isn't that just a purchase? In fact, in this case, it is even worse; it is a rental agreement. According to Dunne, the Spanish government would be paying to the baron's foundation a rental of $5 million for ten years, after which, one supposes, the "gift" would be renegotiated.

Duke of Plaza Toro? (with apologies to Gilbert & Sullivan)

In addition, the baron expected to become a duke as a result of the gift, which would make his commoner wife a baroness.  Baron T-B was already a baron via his first marriage (of five) to a Hungarian baroness and some convoluted hurly-burly to get the title bestowed upon him. Otherwise, he was just little Hans Heinrich Thyssen, son of a robber baron. But robber barons who become so-called hereditary barons are SO much more acceptable in the BEST homes, don't you know? And I suppose similar would pertain to wives of barons of either sort who had started out as beauty queens: Tita Thyssen-Bornemisza had been Miss Spain in 1961. The poor thing had a crown, but no hereditary title.


Regardless of whose offspring are noble and whose are not, the thing that is abundantly clear is that this pack of greedy, self-absorbed humans don't enjoy their wealth of art treasures; they display them and use them to enhance their putative standing amongst other humans of similar ilk. They are, indeed, little better than carrion crows, picking over the remains left by people with bona fide talent and brains, i.e., the artists. On the one hand, they deny the public the opportunity to appreciate great artworks by keeping them behind their own gates; on the other hand, when they figure the pearly gates are the next ones they might see, they entice governments to pay them and their heirs handsomely to return the art to public view.

No set of blackguards is, apparently, more crow-like than the Thyssen-Bornemiszas. Even those who are not of their blood are out for blood. Tita's son by a former spouse, adopted by the baron, sued his mother and lord knows who else, to acquire $7 million worth of paintings from the gifted collection that he said his adoptive father had promised to him. And apparently, the gift was even more convoluted than Dunne knew in the late 1980s, when he was writing about it.

Crowing about art

Indeed, if you click the link above and even skim the article, you'll conclude the only thing possible to conclude:

If these folks lived in the rural United States, shopped at Wal-Mart, ate too much, drank panther-piss beer, hit their wives and lived in mobile homes instead of living in the best cities in Europe, shopping in Paris, eating small portions of foie gras, drinking Cristal champagne, suing each other at the drop of a hat and living in palaces, then the best art they'd have on their walls would be the free calendar from the auto repair shop. Indeed, we would give up our fascination with them fairly quickly.

Postscript: Tonight, if I have the stomach for it, I will get to the article about the auction of the jewels of the Duchess of Windsor.  I might have to go to the hairdresser tomorrow so I can shed the useless and doubtless disgusting gossip I will pick up tonight. Providing anyone remembers who the late and not widely lamented Wallis Warfield Simpson even was, that is.

The Age of Miracles, redux

(Wiki Commons)

I just finished an awful/good book. No, I don't mean awfully good. I mean it was awful, but it was good. It was The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker. When I bought it in Waitrose one day last week--when I was hungering for a real book and not something downloaded to my Kindle--I thought it looked like it might be Chick Lit, but a bit better.

It wasn't Chick Lit, and it was better, but it was terrifying. It concerns The Slowing, a time when the earth ceases rotating on its axis every 24 hours, with the rotation getting slower and slower and slower.

You can't imagine what that does to life on earth, human and otherwise.

But Walker imagined it, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized this novel could, some time or other, be true. After all, we really don't know what the effects would be on earth of some disaster in the universe beyond the light years we have so far been able to detect. It could show up some day, without warning, and turn everything on its head, so to speak.

And then, earlier today, I saw Sandy Wager's post on Facebook's Plymouth & Southwest Artists page about the problems inherent in getting the UK government to cease supporting the unspeakably rich by gutting the programs that serve the rest of us--approximately 99%--and especially crafts workers. Considering that crafts workers encompasses a large number of professions, from people making inexpensive papier mache utilitarian objects to silversmiths working in precious metals and stones, anything that happens to them will have a domino effect on everyone else

So then, I thought, "Someone needs to write a novel about life on earth after the unspeakable few destroy all the arts for the many." This would include crafts, of course, but also music, theatre, and the written word--poetry, novels, ephemera of all sorts. What sort of world would it be? What sort of illnesses would people develop? Walker posits a few illnesses caused by The Slowing in her book. An anti-Stendahl syndrome would be a natural: a person passes out and goes into shock from his or her first encounter with completely unembellished ugliness. In Walker's book, people sicken and die from the disturbed circadian rhythms. Can people die from unrelieved ugliness, out of control utilitarianism in all they encounter? I suspect they could. I suspect I could.

Sandy's post noted, "Most craft occupations are subsumed within occupational and industrial codes which are mainly non-creative." That is, government statisticians, in their infinite absence of wisdom, may well have classified a company that makes leather seats for Mercedes automobiles in the same code as the leather worker who crafts Druid items and sells them at craft fairs. And then the statistics wonks could conclude, after surveying the financial health of that "code", that there is no need for intervention of a helpful kind by the government. That will be fine for the maker of Mercedes seats, but not for Sally Leathercrafter in Pentreskeard, Cornwall.

Here are my two suggestions:

1. Write a book like The Age of Miracles based on the destruction of arts and crafts in developed nations. (I have a feeling, though, it would read a lot like anything by Ayn Rand, and might suggest a screenplay much like Other People's Money...or just an average day's reporting on The City or Wall Street.)

2. Look at the proposed changes to the classification of crafts and offer any cogent support that you can. Click here to see where the statistical issues are at present.The major thrust of all of this is simply to determine the monetary value of creative efforts; this, of course, will influence where government money is spent. It would seem to be paramount to ensure that crafts were included in all considerations governing the arts. Not to do so would be like considering dental services to be divorced from health. And that would be ludicrous, and result in negatives for almost all concerned.

The Age of Miracles, now that I put in perspective, would be one in which the arts were valued once again, as they were in Druid times--when bards and ovates were supported by the clan in toto and held in high esteem as well. Now THAT would be a miracle this crass age.

*"Stendhal syndrome, Stendhal's syndrome, hyperkulturemia, or Florence syndrome is a psychosomatic disorder that causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, confusion and even hallucinations when an individual is exposed to art, usually when the art is particularly beautiful or a large amount of art is in a single place. The term can also be used to describe a similar reaction to a surfeit of choice in other circumstances, e.g. when confronted with immense beauty in the natural world.
"The illness is named after the famous 19th-century French author Stendhal (pseudonym of Henri-Marie Beyle), who described his experience with the phenomenon during his 1817 visit to Florence in his book Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio." Wikipedia

This is your creativity; This is your creativity in cyberspace...

 (Wiki commons)

This is your brain. Note how neat it is, and how each area and its function are identified. This is a nice brain.

 

(Wiki commons) 

This is your brain after five days of doing computer things. Building websites for your work. Endlessly inputting meta tags and other garbage. Indeed, this IS garbage. No, your brain. No, garbage.....

 

This is all by way of explanation for my absence from the blogosphere recently. But today, finally, I finished a sales page that will go live on Monday. Which means that I can get back to painting. Which means that I can get back to writing about painting...or even writing about writing.

ANYTHING EXCEPT ENTERING THE SAME INFORMATION OVER AND OVER AGAIN TO SATISFY THE REQUIREMENTS OF CAFEPRESS. It is deadly; it is the perfect task for George W. Bush. He might have been up to that; he certainly wasn't up to governing the United States. And if he went on endless vacations, as he did, who would care? One would need only to get another smirking chimp to do the input tasks.

But I digress. I never really saw the need for artists' and writers' retreats before. I do now. After a week of cybercrapola, I need to retreat, into a world where meaningful things exist. Birds. Clouds. Movement. Sounds of nature. Sounds of human life. Interaction. At least two brain cells that are working well enough to communicate with each other and possibly create something...a thought, a picture, an object, even a swell dinner from scratch.

I'm cleaning out the garbage tonight. I'm having a change of scene, and I'm not going to waste the rebirth of my creative juices by cooking. We are going to our favorite Devon restaurant, Steps of Tavistock, a place that's so homey*, it could be home. The fact that the woman owner, Suzanne Oldfield, is a former American and her husband, Adrian Oldfield (the chef) is British--thereby offering precisely the same combination as my husband and I do--has nothing to do with it.

What has something to do with it is that it the atmosphere will be both restful and friendly, and the food excellent and well-prepared. The background music is either classical or post-big-band jazz, either of which let one's mind wander in gentle ways. 

Steps restaurant is familiar, indeed, it is almost genetic. Simon's late father, Ronald, went there once or twice a week for a good meal and some company after Simon's mother had died and Ronald had moved into town, diagonally across the street, in fact, from the restaurant. We lived in that flat for a year before we bought a house; great location, great flat. It retained the vibes of Ronald, a gentle man who actually wrote letters to his wife from their cat--in Cockney--when she was in the hospital giving birth to Simon. They used to keep mother and baby for a week back then, even when all was well as it was in her case.

I know what I'm having tonight: Adrian's fantastic green salad, perfectly dressed. The shallow fried crab cakes or maybe the sea bass, with sauteed potatoes. Adrian Oldfield is an artist with those potatoes. They are so perfect, so delicious that I could be perfectly happy with those alone. A bottle of Belle Muraille, a red wine, not expensive, but a favorite of Suzanne Oldfield, and us. And very probably the creme brulee.

See, I told you it was homey. In the perfection of its homey-ness, it is high art. In the perfection and consistency of Adrian's traditional Cordon Bleu British cuisine, there is high art. In Suzanne's running of the front of the house, there is high art. But it is comfortable art, precisely the kind that will salve the misuse of a creative brain so that it can begin again to find some new and interesting things about its own creative world, in my case, painting and writing.

* I must persist in the American usage. The British usage would be homeliness, but in the US that means ugly...and I can't gt past it. Mea culpa.

Today, the gardenia

The secret garden. (A favorite space from the OTHER house I lived in in Florida. c. LHMcBride 2013)

I have always loved gardenias. When I was a child, a popular perfume was called Jungle Gardenia. By the time I graduated from high school in the US, I had a practical reason to love the scent, as well; it was so strong, it covered up body odor. Really? Well, it's like this. My boyfriend's best friend was dating a girl we called Dirty Diane because she smelled. When the boy asked me what sort of corsage I thought he might get for her for the prom, I immediately answered "Gardenia." It worked. To a point.

When I bought a house in Florida eons ago, it came with two 30-foot mango trees that tossed the ripe fruit down to us. So much, in fact, that we and ten families couldn't eat it all, so we gave most of it away to an old man who sold the mangoes from a cart west of I-95--which means he sold them in the poor section of town and made some money for himself, sorely needed. He just came into the garden every other day and took what he wanted, leaving us two for ourselves.

We also had a key lime tree that produced fruit about nine months of the year. I made many, many key lime pies, even after giving away a good number of the limes.

And we had a huge, vibrant, dark green, venerable gardenia bush. It had to be ten feet in diameter, and was at least 6 feet tall. I didn't know what it was when we bought the house, as it wasn't in bloom right then. But it was never in any danger from me. First, I don't like insects and snakes, or the bufo toads that inhabited the man-made pond, so I was unlikely to mess around in the garden to begin with and, second, the plantings were so lush and beautiful, there was really no need to do anything at all to them, except the odd trimming and dead-leaf clearing.

When that plant began to bloom, it was as if the gods had answered another prayer. I would pick some gardenias for the house, but mainly, I would stand in front of that bush  almost worshipping it as I drank the scent in for as long as I felt it was seemly to do so. I was alone; the garden was very private. But still, one feels like a cosmic nut sometimes when indulging the senses too deeply.

We sold the house, after only a year, and moved back to New York City. That move remains one of the most painful of the far too many moves in my adult life. I was glad to leave behind the changes in the neighborhood, the precursor to turning it first into a raging slum and later resurrecting it as a business district, with all those lovely old Florida homes turned into doctor's offices and insurance company locations. (The transformation was complete when I revisited the spot about five years ago, and the lovely white clapboard house had been painted a corporate, ugly brown and the front garden paved over.)

But I was immensely sad to leave the gardenia...and the mangoes and key limes. And the breezy Florida room. But mainly the gardenias.

When we moved to England from Maryland three years ago, I left behind my lilac bush--my second-favorite flower--which had finally gotten to the stage of producing abundant blooms. Naturally, we have planted two behind our house in Cornwall, the largest producing--after two years--a small bouquet. I had no gardenia inside or out in Maryland; the winters are too cold for them to survive. And I just didn't get around to finding an indoor one.

Here, in Cornwall, I have a gardenia plant in bloom in the house. It got leggy three winters back when we lived in a rented house while our new one was being finished. But it produces tons of flowers twice a year anyway. It's blooming now. And yes, I stand in front of it at its perch in the window next to the french doors (it FILLS the window) and drink in the scent. I'm thinking of putting it outdoors in a very big pot after this blossom time is done. I'm also thinking of adding a glass greenhouse to the back garden before winter, so I can move it into shelter to winter over. It's really too big for indoors, but I'll be darned if I lose another specimen of my favorite flower.

Here's the church, see the sheeple....

Church and its sheeple (LHM, 2013)

Apparently, I have developed a "thing" about goofy sheep doing goofy things. That's not why we went to the little village of St. Ewe on Sunday, but it tied in nicely with a goofy sheep thing I had drawn a couple of days earlier.

Naturally, St. Ewe has nothing whatever to do with sheep. The name of the place in Cornish is Lannewa, rather close to ewe at the end, I think. And there is, supposedly, an actual St. Ewe about whom, says Wikipedia, little is known. There are, as it happens, lots of Cornish churches named after saints about whom little is known. And those named after saints whose fate is known...sheesh. For example, there's the Roman Catholic Church of St. Cuthbert Mayne in Launceston. Poor fellow was hanged, drawn and quartered after the Reformation because he would not disavow the Roman Catholic Church. There is some indication that he was at least unconscious for the really vile parts, the drawing and quartering, although hangees were usually taken down while still alive and conscious to suffer greatly and repent them of all their sins.

That church is just up the road from St. Stephens, C of E. St. Stephen didn't have a very lovely end either; he was stoned to death in front of Saul of Tarsus, later known as St. Paul...who also probably suffered martyrdom, although there is no proof of that. Maybe he got lucky. Maybe his fame from writing all those epistles saved him, much as fame saves criminals from harsh punishment in the modern world. I mean, look at all the philandering politicians who don't even suffer a slap on the wrist in the UK or the US because their fame buys them a pass.

But back to the elusive St. Ewe. Even the online Catholic Encyclopedia has nothing about him. Or her. But nonetheless, there is a Norman cruciform church in the village dedicated to St. Ewe, with additions in the 14th and 15th centuries. It is surrounded by a cemetery (of course), but it also offers a walking path through a lovely, damp wood, complete with causeway over the deepest parts until the public footpath opens onto a farmer's field.

We wandered a bit in the church grounds after lunch at The Crown, where the landlord kindly allowed Brownie inside even though the pub was full and there were only tables available in the carpeted dining room. He said if we'd keep her right next to us where she could sit on a bit of stone floor, that would be fine. And it was. She was surprisingly good. Not having been raised from a pup as a pub-going dog, she has had to learn the etiquette in her old age.

Brownie under a table at The Jamaica Inn the first winter we lived here, 2009.

Life plans that go awry

Flowers, Paris (c. Laura Harrison McBride, 2013)

This morning at breakfast, my husband and I began talking about life plans. Well, my life plans anyway. His life plan has never waivered; he wanted to work in electronics, went to school courtesy of Cable & Wireless, worked for them in Yemen and the Gambia, saw the writing on the wall, became a telecoms engineer/programmer...and still is, a few decades and a couple of continents later.

I, on the other hand, wanted to be an actress. Then I wanted to be a novelist. Then I wanted to be a writer. Then I wanted to be a psychologist. Then I wanted to be a linguist. Then I wanted to be a journalist. Then I wanted to be an artist again. Then I wanted to be an interior designer. Oops....back to artist. Then I wanted to own an advertising agency (did that.) Then I wanted to train horses (did that). Then I wanted to keep being a writer and be an artist...and move first to Paris and, when I began to become feeble, move to Ireland to die.

Lucid dreaming

As it happens, I married a Brit, moved to Cornwall, and continued on as a writer and artist. All the other desires are happily of blessed memory. Sort of. Things you've wanted to be and things that you actually did remain a part of you. For example, imagine my shock when, in my 40s, I did some lucid dreaming asking for what to do next; I was then a freelance journalist and learning to train horses. The answer that came to me in the night: Work in theatre.

"WHAT!  Come ON. Are you kidding? Do you know how OLD I am?" I asked the provider of answers all these questions and got no reply. But I for sure was not going to up sticks, move to New York and hope to go on casting calls, despite my undergraduate degree that was split between English Lit. and Theatre.

So I figured lucid dreaming didn't work. But then, ta da, I got a call from the editor of a newspaper who wanted a theatre reviewer. No kidding! So I talked with the man, wrote a sample review, and got hired. I stayed three years, a longevity record for me as an employee; it was the best gig I've ever had. (PS, that man is still a great editor, now in Johnson City, Tennessee, USA.)

Getting psychedelic over pizza?

I've never lost my love for Paris. Well, not exactly. Of all my travels (not that there are so many), I have had both the best and worst in Paris. The worst is the most recent. My own fault: NEVER go to Paris during Christmas week. Still, I hunger for the beauty of Paris, the street scenes so imbued with the loveliness of life--even on an ordinary street such as the one in the painting above--that Paris remains the apotheosis of all things wonderful, regardless of what small miseries one might have experienced there.

My life plan at the moment doesn't include a trip to Paris immediately. I've sort of been entranced by the descriptions of Neapolitan pizza in Eat Pray Love, and my stomach may insist on a return to Italy...maybe Rome and Naples, just as in Eat Pray Love.

I don't think I'll go on to India, though. But then...life plans have a habit of changing, I do love Indian food, I have a personal guru (Hi, Arthur!), and I studied the anthropology of India at university. That course was taught by Allan D. Coult, a colleague of Timothy Leary of LSD fame. (When I looked him up, I found he died only a couple of years after I took his course, and he really wasn't very old.) The course wasn't so much about India, really, as about Coult's beliefs about the interplay between what one eats and what one is. But I digress....

Oh. Well, actually, I'm finished. And dinner needs to be made, dog needs to be fed, cat needs to be located and locked in for the night....