There is something about the creative process as I experience it, a process of collecting and bringing together which starts out quite chaotic and then clarifies as gradually distinctions and clarifications appear. So it is with water gilding: I realise one of my problems is the the distinction between the area to be gilded and the area where I do not want the glue to spread needs a physical boundary, a tiny trough in the surface.
I have also just read Bee Wilson’s fantastic book “How we learn to Eat”. Which essentially is about how our consumerist food culture has no boundaries apart from those associated with making money. So we are bombarded with messages to consume for the sake of consumption. The health messages are up against a wall of messages selling us stuff. And that the family challenge is to create boundaries based on health at home within that unruly non domestic culture. And that what we need to be creating at home in response, rather than being scary and rigid or puritanical and off putting or guilt inducing needs to include the notion of pleasure at the very heart.
This book which is well indexed lead me to research more about a Finish approach to sensory food education for Nursery children, which also has implications for looking after the elderly. It looks at an approach to food education that encourages the use of all senses by using art, play and culinary approaches, and a concentration on basic natural produce using creative processes to explore and create positive experiences of food produce and cooking and a base line of experience of a wide range of fresh produce. Anyone involved in child or elderly care might be interested by this:
http://sapere-asso.fr/finlande/
The site is in Finish bit don’t be put off there is an option at the top of the page for English Language.
W London Story No 4
And West London Story Number 4 is about the pleasure of rule-breaking in childhood with a complicit Mum!
This story teller told me of how strict her father was, in particular in relationship to school attendance, but how sometimes without his knowledge her mother would indulge her with a day off school…
“My story is about a childhood memory which is about when we were let off from school which was not a lot, um, my Mum would go to the….my Mum would go to the local butchers and buy some pies, like um Cornish pasties, particular pies, we’d have these for lunch.
Yeah, Cornish Pasties (laughing) yeah. I loved the way they looked, you know the way they were glazed with the egg, yeah…”
So these little food memories, these small pleasures that make up our basic selves…
The process of dementia can be seen as an unravelling of all the understandings we have built up over a life time. I have not written much about Padma recently, her stories are disappearing, her ability to frame her world is falling apart, and her ability to manage daily basic needs are collapsing, a source of anxiety and anger for her and grief for those of us caring for her.
The Phoenix Cinema in East Finchley has started some dementia friendly screenings, they have chosen some films with great care, they are light on plot, heavy on music, the sound is low and the lights are up. There is a break in the middle for some “Singing for the brain”. Last week we went and the cinema itself seemed to delight her, the routine of popcorn, and the seats and the setting, she felt like she had been there before. It touched something that gave her a reason to speak and to be contented. And above all it demanded nothing of her we will be back. Use the link below to find out more.
https://www.phoenixcinema.co.uk
And this week I caught, just in time the show “Nature’s Bounty” at Kew which ends at the end of this month, looking at botanical drawings.
http://www.kew.org/visit-kew-gardens/whats-on
You walk though the modern galleries, with these simple colourful beautiful images, floating in the space of their pages, iconic and defining as they were, each in its own space, curated for a sense of calm and beauty and connectedness between the present and the past: between using drawing to clarify and define, and celebrate, and often explore the new. And then you go up the stairs to the chaos of the old gallery with image after image climbing up the walls and it is shocking to the point of being unbearable, like a travel agent run by a hyperactive toddler…. overwhelming. And then it seems clear to me that without memory, or ways to understand things, to clarify and bring things together, where your senses no longer make sense, perhaps this is what it is like.
