amplify your life!
…during which I spent a day in chef’s whites (thrilling!) and learnt how to make arguably, the best chocolate brownies in the known universe; Mr P did not die in a firey ball of metal à la Goose vs gravity despite being over a thousand feet in the air with no engine; and we both escaped The Marauding Cow Mafia of Minchampton while on an ice cream mission.
Right now I have sunburnt shoulders, and a full heart.
They say you jumped.
Which is so very different from falling.
I wonder if you held your breath
as your feet left the earth,
if a wave of relief and euphoria washed over you
as the simple, certain thrill of gravity took hold?
As physics intervened.
Divinely.
I wonder if you held your breath
as you plunged under,
if you uttered a silent plea,
during that violent gasping baptism
to be taken. Or spared?
I read somewhere, that the valley below the Falls,
through the vast cloud of spray,
is made of rainbow.
I hope you saw it.
I wish that:
What are you wishing for?
He’d downloaded the new Jack White album, handed over an eye-watering amount of dosh for petrol and charged up the natsav, so we were totes prepared for the 90 minutes to Cambridgeshire and there was chat about work and an upcoming holiday that involves rivers and boats and where shall we stop for coffee?
But I was overwhelmed with the awesome of the perfect cloudy blue sky and sunshine after 87 days of rain.
And the fields and fields of gob-smacking yellowness.
Last night – date night – we spent an hour in the company of Lucian Freud’s paintings at the National Portrait Gallery. I am so used to seeing shiny, happy, tanned, thin bodies waxed up the wazoo, it was actually thrilling to see rolls and wrinkles and protrusions in all their unapologetic fleshy abundance.
I had two favourites. ‘Painter and Model‘ is of the artist Celia Paul painting a nude male who lies prone and looks directly at the viewer. She is fully dressed and he is stripped bare – she has all the power in her brush. I liked that it is almost a reversal of the male gaze (until I remembered that of course Freud is painting her, painting him).
And in the last room: ‘Benefits Supervisor Resting‘ of Sue Tilley languidly lying on a sofa (in my photo above). Painted with love and honesty, its flesh as it really is, not tidy, firm and pre-pubescent. There were two other high and wide canvasses of Big Sue (as she was affectionately known) in the room. She is magnificent.
There are no roped off barriers at the NPG; I was close enough to see brush strokes. His work is so intimate, often perverse, I couldn’t help but feel voyeuristic: as though I had been let in on a glorious fleshy secret.
Freud had 13 children (three to different women in 1961) and at 79 he was still up for it. With all that glorious humanity at the end of a brush, how could you not be seduced?
New Zealand summer is Kaiteriteri Beach 1984, when it was so hot my back blistered on a missed spot of sunscreen, now covered in freckles in the shape of an elongated kidney. It’s the year we went camping near Otematata and it rained so much we slept at a Motel where everything in the room was brown. And New Year at Arrowtown when I was seventeen and everyone else in the Universe had a boyfriend and I was leaning against a car feeling slightly woozy from the sun and the drink and the tall boy that thought liked my friend offered me one of his bottles of Reineck. Its the first year back to finding my way home. And then after I met him, in 2009 it was the ‘Sas & Ash Do The Lost Highway‘ Road Trip where I was almost killed by The Eketahuna Chicken Sandwich.
And now *rolls drums* The 2012/13 Pilgrimage Back to the Mother Country! We’ve booked our flights and reserved our seats on the big massive plane with the koru on the tail. We have a stop-over in Southern California with the Fabulous Field-Elliots, and then on the day the Mayan long-count ends, we fly from LAX > AKL (any John Cusack fan knows that being in the air on that particular day is a Very Good Idea). We’ll have Crimble and camping up North with the family, and a few days on the Sunshine Coast with Little Brother and of course we’ll be heading to Welly to see lovely old friends. There will be champagne, frocks and cock jokes with the Queen of the Feminazis.
I am really hoping for a Welly tweet/blog meet up with fabulous peeps I may not yet have met In Real Life. Is anyone planning to be around the first week in Jan?
Note to self: get passports renewed; try to contain self.
*wees self a little bit*
