I wouldn’t be here normally other than the fact that the lie-in didn’t quite go as planned. Three things conferred to sabotage it. Firstly, the duck next door which thinks it’s a cockeral, quacked in bursts relentlously like a machine gun from dawn, the new alarm clock which projects on the ceiling went off without my husband having read the intructions as to how to stop it and, while this was happening, the timed coffee machine which my husband had bought me, started to bubble in the kitchen and sent the dog into paroxysms of barking as he thought it had sprung to life.
I dragged myself downstairs to deal with the dog and thought I would look into the banking situation to see if we could avoid bankruptcy after the Christmas excess and then thought, sod that, I’ll look at the blogs instead.
Christmas pressies. I got a beautiful, fat little copy of ‘One Thousand Drawings’ by Tracey Emin. It is chunky, off white with delicate, tissue like pages, filled with her spidery little drawings that speak of fragile and personal experiences. I’ve always liked her drawing, although I think, content wise, it will stay out of younger children’s reach. I like the fact that she can’t spell for toffee in her comments.
This morning I remembered while looking at it, a forgotten memory. When we lived in East Kent and my husband worked at the Pfizer giant when viagra was discovered (yep, we were there, when the rats went a bit funny and they advertised in the local rag for volunteers to come and watch dodgy movies to test it out). New found success led to a sweeping out of old ways and with it many of the pre -mac graphic designers lost their jobs. One such man was a good friend, Alan, Tracey Emins half brother. For a while he came and sat on our sofa with his quiet partner and shared a bottle of red wine to mull over his no longer needed fifteen years of service. A really, gentle, funny man with Tracy’s face plus a long, distinctively impressive moustache, more suited to a slightly dishevelled, retired sergeant major. I’d forgotten Alan, he was quite close to Tracey, I guess time moved on and so did he. But looking at her book I just remembered him, and that difficult time we shared.
