There is a definite sense about life at the moment that I am moving back in time. My current project will include a substantial element of calligraphy. I have done this in the past (see the “galleries” for the Four Quartets project, and my series Set Apart.) This will be different, however, because in the past the lettering has been executed either with pastels or coloured pencils. Now I have decided to try ink, and have dug out my old dip pen. Aware that this will be a new venture I have spent the afternoon practising writing with this antique implement.
A friend of mine, who does calligraphic work regularly, advised me about the need for rehearsal and I’m glad I listened to him. The techniques are quite novel for me. My propensity for the spontaneous gesture has to be reined in and I have to acquire new habits of manual control. A false movement with the pen can result in the tip catching in the texture of the paper, with disastrous results. At the moment, in fact, I’m far from satisfied with my choice of paper, which has turned out to be far too absorbent, resulting in a line that is much too diffuse. There is clearly a long way to go with this one.
I seem to have been time-travelling in other respects also. The hoarding rush on bread in the shops led to my wife deciding to make her own today. She made quite successfully a couple of loaves out of flour that was a year out of date and yeast that was best before January 2017! It’s a long time since she made bread. Maybe it should become a habit.
Our CD player has been sent away for repair, and so we dug out an old radio that allows us to play tapes (yes: tapes!) in the kitchen while we eat in the evenings. Dinner was a strange sentimental journey tonight, listening to rubbishy Yugoslav pop music that I bought in Belgrade while working there in 1968. It all adds to the general impression that we have become detached in time and are somehow drifting about without a secure temporal anchor.