illustration

Hilary Knight's Eloise (and skipperdee too)

Hilary Knight

Quentin Blake

some things are tremendously significant, some things are moot.

i do want to be an artist, and a poet, and sometimes i want to be an illustrator. i want to work in a library, or in a museum, or for a publishing company, but mostly i want to be a continuity announcer, just like Kathy Clugston. 

i adore Hilary Knight, Lugwig Bemelmans and Quentin Blake, and the sinister motivation of Joe Orton's defacement of sacristy. the pelicans i lay my hands on have led me to become a little obsessive and i found such a website that seems to be filled with gems.

record girls

Sandie Shaw

Marianne Faithfull

Cathy McGowan

Susannah York

Juliette Greco

dear friend, there are things i want very much to tell you, i simply dont know if i can. perhaps tomorrow i will have the time. you know that chanteuses make me cry, that i'v been lonely for too long, that i am just like someone else but that i dont know who that is. 
i've found some things to cry over.
its no more who i want to be but where and with whom. you do know its you.
meantime its c'est la vie, etc.

adventurous children inspire my daily wear.

Swallows and Amazons (1974)

source: asos.com

The Secret Garden (1993)

source: asos.com

The Railway Children (1970)

source: topshop.com

the long train ride along the coast

And then England—southern England, probably the sleekest landscape in the world. It is difficult when you pass that way, especially when you are peacefully recovering from sea-sickness with the plush cushions of a boat-train carriage under your bum, to believe that anything is really happening anywhere. Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don’t worry, the milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday. The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth’s surface. Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen—all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.


George Orwell, Homage To Catalonia, the last page.

looking through the bars of the Preston General Cemetery, upon the graves of the recently deceased Italian men.

an angel in the C of E. section of the Melbourne General Cemetary.

along the western(?) path of the same

the view of Queen's College from the inside of the same

two things i like to do: take photographs on my mother's old olympus automatic and spend lots of time in cemeteries. on this particular day i went for a long walk among the C of E. graves and closed the gate of one and found myself under a molted tree whereupon i was completely unable to see the ground. I ate homemade vanilla cake in a gazebo and listened to lots of Felt and Aztec Camera, if i recall correctly. I only feel uneasy when i see rats crawling out of war graves, even though I know there is at least four feet between the ground and the person who was once placed in it.

for the love of a good sponge cake

vintage vogue

Julie Christie and Tom Courtenay for Vogue in 1965 after the success of a little film where they shared exactly eleven minutes of screen time together, called Billy Liar, and directed by John Schlesinger. found at this treasure here.

and back to work i go once more. perhaps 700 words so far is not too terrible a feat.

Sometimes i do find the most wonderful things. they are the things that belong here, and nothing else does. i want to write poetically, meta-physically like Lawrence or Yeats and say things that nobody understands but are infinitely more important. about men who write and who tell the truth any any era and through any form. 

i shan't use any media form that i have become so accustomed to, i shall spend my days cooking and clack clack clacking on my typewriter, dreaming of Gene Kelly and Alain Delon, cafe' au lait in Cafe de Flore and picnics by the Severn. I might even eventually have the funds to do any thing i like, like finding the sort of flat the couple discover in Goodbye Lenin! that's covered in vines and only needs a bed and a sink. i don't ask for much, honest i am.

i'm sorry that i cannot fininsh this eloquently, words do not suffice for the message i want to convey. all i know is that L'etrenger does have an awful lot of sense in what he does and that i can't worry about other, more fickle human beings than i. i prefer my father to anyone else in the world.

(except perhaps Alain)