I’m making good progress with the physical re-ordering of the place. Most of the books are back on the shelves, in their newly rational homes. Sadly this is due in no small measure to the fact that my regular climbing partner had to cry off this morning, to deal with the attempted break-in at his shop. I entertained myself by playing some of our old vinyl records on the newly reinstalled hi-fi. It still works really well. It was a bit of a shock, however, when I discovered that it is possible to play both sides of an LP. That shows how long it has been out of commission.
My wife remarked, as we came together for dinner, how nice it was that I was reunited with my music. She said that she had some sense that I was recovering a part of myself. That was an interesting and very astute observation.
As I worked on the books my mind was wandering around the art scene, and I begin to discern in the fog a sense of future direction. (This is partly distilled from my continuing reading of Kenneth Clark on landscape.) This is still an incompletely grasped vision, and I will need to let it mature. It is interesting, and to some extent disturbing, to realise that the development of artistic ideas isn’t something that can simply be planned and put into action. Significantly, I feel that something is afoot here which parallels the experience of rediscovering my musical past, but I’m not sure how that works. The feeling that there is a way forward is actually rooted in the feeling that I ought to return to the development of ideas and methods tried in the past.
This morning I fixed up to have a conversation with the planning department of the local authority in connection with the possibility that we might want to make some alterations to the building. Digging into the records I made an interesting discovery. We have always known that the house is more than 200 years old (the date 1814 is over the front door.) There have been various claims, however, that this represents the date of the current form of the structure, and that this is based on an older building. The information I uncovered this morning suggests that the house might actually go back to 1702. It’s not surprising that the planning department take a keen interest in what we propose to do with it.
PS: These mice are just too much! They ignore the traps and bait set out for them. I think they have started to play baseball, treating a circuit of the kitchen as a home run. I think it was the cartoon cat Tom who used to say: “I hate those meeces to pieces!”