Tiger Lily Time
14 July

July is passing by.

The Tiger Lilies which Roland gave us a couple of years back and which did nothing last summer have exploded into a riotous orange fireballs of colour.

I'm feeling very out of sorts still. Ross chided me the other day with being a grumpy old bastard. I asked him in all honesty whether or not his remark was a spur of the moment thing or whether he was making a more general statement. He swears that it was spur of the moment but it concerned me. General grumpiness was one of my more prevalent characteristics in the autumn as I became depressed, I just hope that I'm not going in that direction again.

I know that there are many things in my life that are better now than they were six months ago. But I don't feel that, in many areas, I have made much headway. I still feel very cut off. There are something like a dozen emails from people sitting my Inbox waiting for a reply but, even though I have composed many missives in my mind, the idea of actually communicating feels wrong. I feel as though I've cleared the worst but don't have the umph to achieve the best.

Basically, I need to be galvanised or to galvanise myself.

I just looked up the word galvanise in the dictionary. It means to rouse, to stimulate, to energise, to coat with metal by electrolysis. Perhaps that is it. Maybe I have a zinc coating which is preventing the rust forming but which has encased me in a smothering embrace.

I've just finished The Lady and the Unicorn by Tracy Chevalier - she also wrote Girl with a Pearl Earring. Superficially, there are similarities between the two since they take as their starting point the creation of a work of art. In this case, the work of art in question is 15th Century tapestry created in Brussels for a French nobleman. What the novel explores is the way lives are a tapestry; the way the hidden meanings of the tapestry are, in themselves, much less strange than the hidden meanings in the (fictional) lives themselves. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Good in its way also was The Sex Lives of Cannibals by J Maarten Troost. This is a true tale of Americans living for two years in Kiribati, a very small island republic in the South Pacific far away from anywhere else. It is a very smart disquisition on how two inhabitants of one of the most pampered and materialistic cultures on the globe cope with the almost complete deprivation of living without things like electricity, running water, doctors, restaurants, shops, etc. There are a lot of very perceptive and prescient swipes at globalisation, fair trade and foreign aid.

My new colleague started last week. He goes by the sobriquet Mitch. I think that he'll be OK but I do find his constant nervous energy very enervating.

The Tate is normally closed on Mondays but, now that the summer season has begun, they are opening their door on the first day of the working week. Ross and I took the opportunity to re-visit The Secret Life of Clay and enjoyed it just as much the second time round so that it is still worth its four stars. We also looked in on Rhinegold: Art from Cologne which was dreadful pretentious tosh and hardly worth a single star.