April 2020 – OZTHOUGHTS

Woodford, The Planting Festival – A Festival With A Difference

For several years Lotty and I have worked as volunteers at the Woodford Planting Festival, which is a much quieter event than the Woodford Folk Festival. 100 volunteers instead of about 3000!

We have also worked on the Folk Festival – as Intergalactic S-Bend Warriors, which you can read all about in this post: Woodford Folk Festival

We have worked this one as stage managers and each year we worked the same theatre/tent which meant that effectively we were in control of our “theatres” for the duration of our shifts each day. Given that our shifts were about 8 hours long this was quite a load to bear.

In my case it was the biggest tent/theatre in the festival, and my duties consisted of, among other things, ensuring that the speakers/performers were on stage on time, and rather harder, off stage on time too.

Occasionally I had to go on stage and introduce them, or give them our thanks, but generally there were “Introducers” who carried out this function rather better than I could… Public speaking is not really my thing I am afraid.

One of our other duties was ensuring that the auditorium was clean before every performance, which in most such festivals is a hell of a lot of work,as people arrive with food and drinks, and cheerfully leave their rubbish for others to clean up – but the good folk who attend this festival are of a different sort, and almost always take their rubbish away with them and dump it in one of the many bins around the place, so I was confronted by an auditorium that only had one bottle and a couple of packets of food to deal with after most performances. Made a nice change I can tell you from one of my other regular volunteering jobs, the La Boite theatre, where after each performance we have to clean up loads of glasses, food bags and bottles – to be honest, I fail to see why people need to take so much food and drink into a show that will only last about an hour and a half – are they so near to dying of thirst or hunger that they absolutely have to have sustenance during a show?

All that aside, it is a gentle festival to work on, the people who attend it are for the most part gentle Hippy-like souls who wander around with friendly grins on their faces – not stoned but simply content to be there. One of the things I particularly noted each year we are there is how the patrolling cops behave.

We have a number of uniformed policemen who patrol the festival all the time it is open, and on the first day they tend to be like cops all over the world, scowling and disapproving of the festival goers, but as the days pass, they become more and more relaxed, so by the third day they are wandering around with the same silly grins as all the festival goers and greeting everyone with a friendly grin and waves… Nice to see them becoming human in that fashion.

The actual shows tend to be people who speak on a wide range of topics, and the occasional music group as well, so I have had a bloke who discussed the idea of Australia building a number of new submarines under the control of a French ship building company, who pointed out that the arithmetic of the deal made no sense for Australia, and that it would be cheaper to hang onto the existing fleet of perfectly good and never actually used, submarines and to give each of the people it was intended to hire for this project a couple of billion dollars – this startling conclusion he proved with a load of facts and figures.

I have also had a world famous cartoonist, Michael Leunig giving two talks in my theatre. The first one was worrying as he didn’t bother to come back stage, but wandered into the theatre about when he was due to speak, and clambered onto the stage from the auditorium side and sat himself in the chair I hurriedly got onto the stage, and then spoke for the entire time he was booked for as a steady stream of consciousness… It was superb! The second time he was due to speak, later that same day, the management who were unhappy with how the first one had gone, insisted that he was back-stage in time, and had a bloke to ask him questions, which was rather less entertaining – Oh well……….

All in all, a pleasant way to pass a few days, and a gentle reminder of those far off Hippy Days of yore.

A Fashion Show Where Charles The First Lost His Head

Many years ago, I found myself working on a fashion show, in, of all places, the Banqueting House in Whitehall – which is chiefly noted for being the place where poor old Charles the 1st had his head chopped off.

He had his appointment with eternity on a scaffold that had been built outside one of the huge windows that the hall had, overlooking Whitehall, so he had had to walk through the Banqueting Hall to get to the place where his head was going to be hacked off… A dismal idea and an odd place to hold a fashion show I felt!

Anyhow, I was asked to help with the lighting of this show by a good friend of mine, Robie Simpson, who was the technical manager of the Roundhouse Theatre where I was the Production Manager at this time, so we were both moonlighting.

I had never had anything to do with the world of fashion, so this was an eye opener for me. The designer in this case was Zandra Rhodes, who at the time was a young and somewhat revolutionary designer, who even I had heard off.

So, on the appointed morning (the show was due to be held in the evening) we turned up at the Banqueting House with all our considerable piles of lights, cables and control systems and started to set it all up. While we were doing this, all the models turned up and started to sort themselves out.

For them, it was all a normal matter, so they set up their dressing area in an adjoining room and started sorting out who would wear which outfit.

By this time, the catwalk (as I learned to call it) had been constructed by a team of carpenters, so the girls and Zandra began to rehearse the show.

For me this was extraordinary, the girls sort of minced along that catwalk in all manner of what I thought were really odd clothes and sort of stopped once they got to the end of the catwalk and sort of twirled and posed for a few minutes, and then minced back the way they had come, and duly disappeared into their dressing room, and then the next girl came out and went through the same actions.

One thing that I noticed about the models was their unbelievable thinness, they all looked like they had escaped from Belsen or some similar place. A more unhealthy bunch of girls I have never seen. The other thing that was very obvious, was that they were mostly extremely young, about the same age as the groupies we had each Sunday at the Roundhouse. Altogether surprising I found, as I had assumed (on what basis I don’t know) that they would mostly be in their 20’s.

While all of this was going on, Zandra Rhodes and her various assistants were rushing around, fussing over all manner of tiny details and generally getting in everyone’s way.

In due time the actual show started, and I was busy working one of the follow spots, following the various girls along the catwalk in various colours and enjoying the show – well, sort of……..

The audience fascinated me as much as the girls did, a more raddled bunch of men and women I had never seen. They were all buried under layers of make-up and jewellery (both genders) and, of course, were dressed in the latest modes. Actually, the audience were as much part of the show as the girls in their costumes I felt.

A very odd experience in a “normal” way.

Directors I have known, Brook and Barrault, Two very different men

During my years at the Roundhouse Theatre, we had the most amazing range of shows, from enormous film festivals, film crews shooting films, classical concerts, both ancient and contemporary, musicals, Shakespeare in a variety of styles, rock concerts, conferences, dance theatre and so on, the list is actually way too long to remember. Most shows were either one day events or only stayed with us for a month or so. Thus the change overs were long and frequent.

I have never worked so hard in my life as I did there.

Some of the events we had, do remain firmly in my memory, others have disappeared in the mists of time, which for some of them is a kindness to put it mildly as they were so unbelievably awful they deserve no better.

For the fun of it I shall describe some of those that did stick in my memory and the events surrounding them.

Some of these descriptions will be short, and only mention things that stood out about a particular production, others may well be rather longer if I can both remember anything much about them, and if they were so remarkable they are worth describing in some detail. So a series of random anecdotes really.

Obviously this will mean that I shall tell of my impressions of working with a number of amazingly talented, famous or totally untalented individuals who passed me in those years. Some of the least talented were also the most famous… Amazing what some people can manage with a loud voice and no talent.

Lets start with Peter Brook.

At that time he was probably the most successful and famous theatre director in the world, held in awe and almost godlike admiration by all actors and theatre folk for his brilliant directing mainly of Shakespeare. And there is no denying that he was a most amazing and wonderful director, and all his productions were a joy to experience. But unfortunately for me and my stage technicians, he was also a most unpleasant and arrogant man to have to deal with.

While I was at the Roundhouse he directed, either A Midsummer’s Dream, or the Tempest, I cant remember which it was, and his production entailed completely rebuilding the stage and seating in the theatre, which is a hell of a lot of work obviously. This we were used to, and had systems in place to make it as easy as possible, but it is a noisy and messy affair.

Generally productions were rehearsed elsewhere in rehearsal rooms somewhere, and the actors only came to rehears in the theatre for the last few days before their show opened, which gave us the time to crash around, hang lights, build seating rostra and stages and so on at our own pace.

For some reason however, Brooke felt it was necessary for him and his actors to do all their preparations in the theatre itself, not a happy mix.. Noisy technicians and actors trying to come to terms with his idiosyncratic vision of the play do not go well in the same space.

So whilst demanding we build a very complex auditorium and stage for his production, Brook also insisted on total silence as he and his actors played a range of theatrical games in a corner of the theatre.

His technique for getting silence was to sort of freeze whenever a particularly loud crash or stream of furious swearing from one or other technician occurred. Curious to see, he would sit there like a statue waiting for us to realise he was displeased and stop making any noises.

Unfortunately for him, my technicians had seen so many famous and admired people that they were totally unimpressed by him, and started to play a game with him… One of them would start hammering away at a bit of wood, which would cause him to freeze…. Silence would fall…. Then Brook would unfreeze and start working again.. whereupon one of the technicians would produce a loud noise… Brook would freeze again, and so it would go on, all day long.

During all of this I tried to stay out of sight, so I couldn’t be asked to make my guys work in total silence, as this would obviously been impossible and silly.

On the other hand, we also had a production called Rabelais, directed by Jean-Louis Barrault who was also a director of genius, a man with a long and highly regarded history in film and theatre. Unlike Brooke, this guy was a dream to work with, kind, thoughtful, brilliant, funny and civilised, and more importantly also worshiped by actors, particularly the cast of this show.

In spite of hardly speaking a word of English, and working here with an entirely English cast, he managed to communicate his ideas and needs with no real trouble, often resorting to mime to do this (for those of you who do not know of him, he was a famous mime among other things). I shall never forget him miming a war horse for one of the British actors who was having trouble miming that damned horse….. Barrault got up on the stage and damn me, but he became a horse… Superb guy.

He even managed to win over my technicians, which is no mean achievement, they fell for him totally, and would do anything he asked of them at once and to the best of their abilities.

Curiously he had a remarkable similarity to Kenneth Williams, which was a bit disconcerting at times.

The show itself was great fun to see, as it took place without seating over a long more or less cruciform set of stages, so the audience sort of followed the action from stage area to stage area. By the way, it was actually Rabalaise’s story of Gargantua, a very noisy, earthy and funny story, which an all English cast managed to pull off, in spite of the trouble English trained actors have with moving, being more word orientated in their training.

It is interesting to see how two more or less equally brilliant directors got the results they did by such totally different approaches to their cast and technicians. Give me Barrault’s approach any day over Brook’s arrogant approach.. The Barrault experience was a real pleasure for all involved, the Brook was only good for the audience, we hated him with a passion and thus got no enjoyment out of our work with him. And enjoying your work is important we all felt..

More to come as I think of it….

Our lives on a couple of boats – Part Three

Well, so far we have arrived in Amsterdam and sold Mjojo and bought the Good Old Water Rat, and continued to settle in A’dam, that most pleasing of cities and next thing was to start converting Water Rat into a house on the water, which occupied us for the next 20 odd years, and finally was more or less finished about a month before we finally left Holland and went to live in France – also another story worth telling, probably I have already told in this blog, have a look at the various posts, there are 201 after all, and you will find various accounts of our lives in La Douce France.

At our mooring at the Entrepotdok in Amsterdam – with a load of firewood for the winter

The first job we had to start the conversion of the Water Rat into a house was to take up the planks that were on the floor of the hold, and grease all the steel-work on the inside of the hull bottom. So, that is what we did, heating up the grease so that it ran nicely into the corners and so on under the hold floor. Whilst as a barge, she was a relatively small vessel, this was still a hell of a big job as far as we were concerned – but in due time it was finished and we could put back all the planks that were the hold floor and start to consider how we wanted to convert her into a house.

All of this took a very long time, as we were far from fanatical about it all, and also we had to earn our livings as well – in my case that was as a model maker, chiefly working for museums and similar, and Lotty was a teacher at the International School of Amsterdam. Also, we wanted to enjoy ourselves and use the Water Rat to see the Netherlands, so we chugged happily around the country enjoying ourselves with the freedom that she gave us. We could – and did – fill her up with water at the fuel bunker ships along all the major canals, and at night we could simply head for the side of the river or canal and tie her up to a handy tree and enjoy ourselves in the quiet country side.

As we had the engine running at the same speed all day long, she was very economical with diesel fuel, and considering that she had what was in effect a large truck engine, our fuel costs were not unreasonable. We also became really expert at dealing with the many locks we encountered, or bridges that had to be opened for us to pass under them, and on a number of occasions we ventured out into what was in effect the north sea, the Ijsselmeer to the north of Amsterdam, where on occasions we found ourselves in a dodgy situation as barges are not really designed to sail in rough water – one of the drawbacks of having a vessel with a flat bottom, waves get under it and push you over………

Anyhow, happily this never happened to us, though we did have our teeth clenching moments.

One of the things about the Water Rat was that as she wasn’t laden with cargo, her bows were actually out of the water, so on one occasion whilst in a very small canal in Friesland, and found our way blocked by a bridge that had a sign on it telling us that it would next open in June……. And this was in April! So, as it was not really possible to reverse for the many kilometers to the larger canal that we had turned off. I thought about it for a while, and came to the conclusion that the only solution was to set the bows up on the canal bank and turn on that fulcrum. So, I did just that, scaring the hell out of a flock of sheep who were grazing in that field when suddenly a very large steel thing came at them, and managed to get about 8 or so meters onto their field. Anyhow, it worked OK, and we sailed without a care back to the bigger canal.

Maintaining our mobile home was an annual event, every year we went to a beach on the tidal river Lek, and when the tide went out we ensured that the Water Rat was nice and high and dry, and over a couple of tides we would tar the whole of her ides, up to and over the water line. Then every alternate year, we had to go onto a slip and do the same, as well as under her hull… As you can see in the photos, this was a hell of a lot of work – she may have been a small barge, but she was still damn big!

Me and Jake engaged in spreading tar all over the Water Rat

Slowly we converted her… clad the walls inside the hold with tongue and groove pine, installed a working kitchen, built a shower and lavatory, created a bed (raised) for us and a decent cabin at the bows for Jake and generally made her into a civilised home… And the finishing touch we finally achieved about 3 months before we sold her and left the Netherlands and moved to France, which was installing an efficient oil fired central heating system.

With some extremely good friends, one of our favourite people, Margot. The kitchen is behind me and the wood stove is in the foreground…

One of those geese was named Diner….. With an obvious intention on our part… But it never happened, and we later heard that she lived to a ripe old age as a free spirit on the canals of Amsterdam…………

At about this time, I created a steel and copper model of the Water Rat for the Maritime museum, the model was about a meter long…

Well, in a way, that is the story of our various house boats, after that we lived in boring houses… Well not really – In France we lived in a ruined granite mine and in Australia we have actually built our house from the ground up, with our hands… Anyhow, that is it for now.

Our lives on a couple of boats – Part Two

As I hope you will have read in part one of this stirring account of our lives on boats, we had just bought the Water Rat and managed to get it as far as Alphen on the Rijn where the engine had blown up. So there I was, on my own in a shipyard wrestling with the problems about choosing a new engine for our later to be trusty vessel.

An odd business altogether really. Other people dashing about on our boat was a new experience to us both – Lotty had driven down and joined me on board.

Anyhow, to cut a long and painful experience short, in due time a 6 cylinder Deutz was built into the boat, and all connected up and tested, and so off I went again, still alone in the boat as Lotty had to drive the car back to Amsterdam.

Happily this time it all went smoothly, including getting through the lock at the start of the canal. The only real problem I had was the huge Pusher tugs with their 12,000 ton lighters in front of them hurtling along at 30 kilometers, could and did pick up my boat in their bow wave, which was alarming to say the least – I found myself surfing on a 28 meter long vessel, not a good idea!! I discovered that if I put her into reverse and gave it all the power in her, we came off the bow wave and could carry on calmly. It was then a case of quickly putting her into forward again and carrying on before the bows swung around and I ended across the canal. Altogether a dodgy situation!!

Water Rat chugging along in Friesland. The “cage” behind the wheel house is a Kinder Kooi, a safe place for a young kid to be while the boat was chugging along.

At this time we were based in the north of Amsterdam, at a place called Nieuwendamerdijk where we had tied up with Mjojo for some time, so we tied up the Water Rat in the same place and carried on with our lives.

We quickly fell foul of the Harbour Service of Amsterdam, who came around to charge us the fee for being in Amsterdam, and quickly told us that we could only stay in Amsterdam for about 6 weeks and then had to go away for some days, and then of course we could return………..

So, that was the story of our lives for quite some years – tied up in Nieuwendamerdijk for about a month, and then off to Weesp or some other town outside Amsterdam. All a bit tedious, but it did force us to learn how to drive the good old Water Rat around, and get her through locks safely and generally learn how to cope with such a large vessel.

We fitted remarkably well into the local life in Nieuwendamerdijk and became good friends with both other boat dwellers (mostly professional cargo carrying folk) and shore dwellers too, and had a very enjoyable number of years there, even with the everlasting having to leave Amsterdam at regular intervals.

Showing the wheel house and Het Roofje. This was taken while she was on the slip so we could paint her hull with tar

At this time, we lived in what was called het Roofje, which is the accommodation behind the wheel house. which was very civilised, consisting of two small bedrooms, a bog, a sitting room and a small kitchen, and Jake lived in het vooronder, which was a double cabin right up in the bows of the boat.

The actual hold was still as it was in the time of the previous owner, who was a professional skipper, a 17 x 5 x 3 meter long empty space, which we intended to convert into our home in due course.

So, that is all for this installment…. More to come, of course!

Zdzislaw Beksinski – A gothic artist of distopian tendencies.. To put it mildly!

This alarming and grim image is typical of the work of this artist from Poland who specialised in creating this sort of image. I have to add at this point that I may seem to be attracted to dystopian and grim images, this is not so, I simply put them in this blog as I suspect that such images are more likely to spark some sort of creative surge in people.

Anyhow this is a very typical example of the work of this artist. He grew up in war torn Poland, which obviously had a profound effect on his later life – so as a kid he played with war things, as you can see in this photo of him with a friend playing outside a damaged Block House with live shells…

If you saw him, you wouldn’t think for a minute that he would produce the sort of images he went on to create – as you can perhaps see in this photo of him, taken shortly before he was murdered by a teenager he wouldn’t lend a few hundred Zlotys to.

Anyhow, enough of this waffle, here are some typical images created by him, and he was prolific, so there are no end of other images (all essentially about the same thing though) which you can find easily enough online.

See? Gruesome and horrid… But they can produce some interesting thoughts I reckon…

Our lives on a couple of boats – Part One

Just before I left the Roundhouse Theatre in London in 1974 (in itself that is a story worth knowing! Link to that story) , we decided that we would sail to Australia (as one does) and via a friend we found the ideal boat for this voyage, Mjojo, and lived on her for a couple of years and made various passages around the English coast and finally we set off to sail to Australia, but ran into incredible South Western storms, with waves taller than the mast of Mjojo, so rather than fight our way into this ridiculous storm, we gave in and turned around, and ended up in Amsterdam, where we lived on her (with occasional trips into the North Sea) for about 2 years until the birth of our son.

Mjojo was her name, and she was perhaps the most beautiful sailing boat you could imagine. She had been designed by an English architect, Rod Pickering, based on a combination of ideas, the boat that Joshua Slocum used when he sailed around the world, the Spray, and the boats that were in use every day in the Indian Ocean, so he had her built on Lamu, an island off the coast of Kenya by the guys there who normally built Dhows for the local sailors.

The building off Mjojo is an epic tale in itself, and well worth reading, so here is a link to the website of Jojo, Rod’s daughter after whom the boat was named:

Mjojo=Little Jojo. https://islandswift.blogspot.com/2014/08/mjojo.html

In passing I would like to point out that you will read in Jojo’s account, that Mjojo was kept in Amsterdam and started to rot. This is true, but not while we had her. We sold her to a local when our son was born (1976) when it became apparent that we would have to stay in Holland as we were told our son would need medication for his entire life – this turned out not to be true, by the way.

Anyhow, here are some photos of Mjojo in all her glory to show you what a beautiful vessel she was – and is.

Just for your information, she was 42 feet long (+bowsprit of 15 feet), beam was 15 feet, she drew 7 feet along her entire keel so she was incredibly stable and was a gaff rigged cutter. Oh, and she weighed 24 tons, because of the incredibly heavy wood she was built from (72 pounds a cubic foot!).

Anyway, as I said, on the birth of our son we thought that we would have to stay in Holland for his entire childhood, and as I have pointed out earlier in this post, keeping an ocean going wooden sailboat in the fresh water of Amsterdam wasn’t a good idea for a wooden boat – also she was a bit small for us to actually live in if we were staying in Amsterdam. So we sold her to a German guy who apparently had all manner of plans for her, none of which actually occurred, so she started to rot, poor boat.

We borrowed a flat from a friend in a small town near to Amsterdam and set about looking for a steel barge to live in (and to wander around Europe’s extensive network of inland water-ways in). After some months, we found a likely barge, called Eerste Zorg (which means First Worry ) a 28 meter long steel barge, built in 1924, registered to carry 120 tons and we could afford her asking price. So we negotiated with the owner, and reached agreement and then came to great day when we would have to take her over.

Nerve wracking to say the least, as I had never tried to sail such a large vessel, and one that only had an engine as well. So I went to Papendrecht (just to the south of Rotterdam) to take her over, and the owner agreed to sail with me up to Rotterdam so that I had a chance to see how it all worked.

So that is what happened.

Together we sailed, well, I say sailed, actually it was a question of driving her, up to Rotterdam and once there, the previous owner tied us up to a jetty and went on his merry way, leaving me with the job of getting her from Rotterdam to Amsterdam on my own. Lotty, my wife, had driven me down to meet the previous owner, and then driven back to Amsterdam.

Gulp!

Anyhow, taking my courage in my hands… I set off up the river Lek, which leads from Rotterdam to the start of the Amsterdam-Rijn canal, which as its name would suggest, connects the Rijn (Rhine) to Amsterdam. At this point in its journey to the North Sea the Rhine is called the Lek.

The Lek is a very wide river, and much used by all manner of cargo barges of all sizes, and I quickly realised that my 120 ton 28 meter Luxe Motor (that is the name of its type of barge) is a really small vessel. I was surrounded by barges of 500 tons to huge combinations of 3000 ton lighters connected up in threes to a sort of super pushing boat hurtling along at upwards of 30 kilometers per hour – to put this in context, my little barge could only manage about 11 kilometers per hour.

Altogether alarming to put it mildly!

After about an hour of this nerve wracking stuff, there was suddenly an explosion below me, in the engine room of my barge, and the motor stopped. So there I was, effectively in the fast lane of an aquatic motorway with a barge without an engine.

I rushed to the bows, and managed to drop the anchor, which was huge! Luckily it gripped the river bottom, and I swung around so my stern was pointing down river to Rotterdam, and there I was, stuck.

Various barges honked at me as basically I was blocking the “fast Lane” but there was nothing I could do about it.

After a while, a police boat appeared and came alongside to demand to know what the hell I thought I was playing at, anchoring in the middle of a hugely busy river and holding every one up.

Once one of these cops came on board, and I was able to show him what had happened (peering into my engine room at an obviously destroyed engine), he said to me that I should crank up the anchor and they would tow me to a repair yard to get things looked at.

This caused the next embarrassment for me… How the hell do you bring up an anchor on such a boat? I had no idea how to do that, and feeling idiotic, I told the cop this. So, with the patience of Job, he showed me how it worked, and clambered back onto his boat and gave me a tow rope to secure to my bows, and we hauled up the anchor, see photo below for the size of it, and off we went.

Anyhow, to cut a very long story short, it turned out that the motor was totally destroyed, and it would be necessary to replace it, and as I had bought the barge “as is” I had no claim on the previous owner. So, I gritted my teeth and told the ship yard to go ahead and bung another – more modern – engine into her.

So, after this exciting start to our ownership of what became the Water Rat (chosen because it is the same in Dutch and English) began.

And for the following 24 years we lived in her traveled around Holland in her and generally had a great life on her.

So, in a following installment I shall tell all about how that all went….

In the mean time, here is a photo of her in all her glory at a later mooring in Amsterdam, along side the Maritime Museum for whom I made models somewhat later…….

If you have any thoughts on any of the above, or sailed on Mjojo or the Water Rat please drop me a line to tell me about how it all went.

Jonathan Wolstenholme, an artist with a very curious approach to his work

I have just come across the work of a British contemporary artist -Jonathan Wolstenholme – who is besotted with the idea of books. Not simply a book lover, but a real fanatic about books, so his art is almost exclusively about or around books in one way or another.

As you will see from the following examples of his work, the work he does for himself is exclusively based on the idea of books in a sort of anthropomorphic form, so basically books that are alive and busy with various activities.

So, here is the first example of his work to whet your appetite.

He studied at one of the two art schools I also studied at, Croydon Art College, from 1969 till 1972 and then went on to be a successful illustrator and painter, working for numberless magazines and exhibiting his work in various galleries in London and the USA – in other words, a very successful artist.

His work is not only based around anthropomorphic books, but he also has produced all manner of other types of work, such as this illustration for Alice…….

But his chief pleasure seems to be those human-like books, which he paints in a huge variety of situations – fighting, happy, playing chess and so on, just about any activity that humans get up to, but using books with arms instead of people. Odd really, but so beautifully painted.

So, here are a selection of some more of his work for your pleasure……

So, if his work interests you, there is no end of it online for your pleasure.

More strange and disturbing images to fire your imagination

Once again I have found an intriguing collection of images that I hope will be of use to you guys as sparks to your ideas. In other words, I hope that the images below will give you ideas for stories as opposed to using them in stories.

So, lets get started on them……………

Now this is a restaurant with a difference! A weirdly odd and somewhat Edwardian effect. Many years ago whilst on a winter tour of Scotland with the Little Angel Puppet Theatre we found ourselves at John O’Groats which has a truly odd restaurant as well – and when we arrived there, a totally empty place (it was January after all) we were greeted by this odd building and Hawaiian guitar music blaring out of a public address system… All very odd.

One or other of these two odd images should give you ideas for a story….. Though certainly with a Gothic feel I would imagine.

From the sublime to the ridiculous now.

I would imagine that this silly photo could be the basis for a Sci-Fi story at the very least……. Whilst it is a simple bit of image jiggery-poky and is also mildly funny, it could be the basis of a story about a world in which people’s bodies are manipulated for some reason….. What do you think?

This is simply silly…………… But it is a new look at an old legend perhaps?

Now I have selected three more odd or curious images that give me pause for thought, each one of which seem to me to be ripe with an internal story.

What is happening in them and could one perhaps use all three of them in one story?

Well, perhaps one might use the first two in one story, but I am damned if I can see how one might use the third image in the same story as the first two.

And to finish with, here is a collection of creatures that one would not like to come up against on a dark and stormy night – or even on a sunny day come to think of it! I have no idea what or who they are, I suspect it is some sort of Swiss (or Scandinavian) religious ceremony that has been stolen (as is the case with just about all Christian festivals) from a pre-Christian festival. But whatever it actually is all about, it seems to me to be begging for a story to use it as a central feature of the story. So, lets see what you can do with this one!

If any of these images have been a help for you in any way, please do let me know what you used them for.

Thoughts on, or about, being self-isolated during Corona Virus outbreak

Like almost everyone in the first world just now, both my wife (Lotty) and I, as we are both well over 70 years old, are in voluntary isolation, which is a very odd situation for us both in different ways.

For my part it has meant that I no longer lead the life of a Professional Volunteer as I am in the habit of doing (see several other posts on this aspect of my life) and as a result I am feeling more than a little discombobulated to say the least. For Lotty it has meant the end of her regular walks with our pooch, Gizmo, and a number of friends, followed by a happy hour or two sitting in one or other of Samford’s many cafes solving the many problems of the world or taking several Alpacas for their daily walks at a local riding school.

On the other hand it has meant that she has almost unlimited time for her garden, which is great, as her garden is a self-created jungle in a near vertical slope.

All of that is is pretty normal I suppose. If one is suddenly unable to pursue one’s normal activities for whatever reason. But given that we are healthy enough (for our ages) and at peace with the world, it is an odd feeling that it is unimportant to know what day of the week it is, the almost total silence on the nearby roads (we live in the country about 35 km outside Brisbane) and our normally well filled calendar (Literally, that is how we keep track of our various activities) is now empty – apart from a dental appointment I made this morning for the 1st October to make sure that I beat the rush when this isolation finishes – assuming it ever does of course.

Also the lack of having to be anywhere or do anything special at a given time is an odd feeling. We are able to wander around in our garden so we don’t feel that we are in prison, which I can well imagine those who live in flats in cities can do, so apart from not having used either of our two cars for days now we are living in a reasonably “normal” fashion by and large I suppose.

So basically, we are living in a more or less normal way but with a feeling of isolation at all times, as if the outside world has ceased to exist – which is very odd to say the least. We are sort of living in a small bubble, just our garden and a small section of the road outside our house.

The other main change is that we see none of our friends any more – occasionally one passes on the road and we shout greetings at each other and then they go on their way, so apart from via Facebook and the phone, we have really no contact with anyone else in the whole world and it is now several weeks since I was away from our house – not even in the local village to shop as our son is dealing with all of that.

So we are living in more or less complete isolation in the middle of thousands of other people doing the same – really an odd thing.

Oh well, assuming it will ever be open ( and humanity still exists), I assume it will all return to what we consider to be normal, which is really a pity I feel.