the artist and the dilettante
We're just back from having an evening out - in Andorra. We were invited by Sue & Steve the only other English - well, Yorkshire, which is nearly the same thing, I can understand most of what they're saying - people who live in the village. He's setting up a broadband consultancy there - which means an appartment & an office & visits from us & huge meals & lots of cheap drink - and Skiing.
Now, I haven't skied since I was a youth, but that hasn't stopped me from getting a pair of skis and getting all the clothes and getting all excited. All we didn't get was the snow. Global warming. Bugger bugger bugger.
Mary laughs at my hobbies. She makes fun of my all-consuming, and all-too-soon-spent enthusiasms. But only afterwards. And only in the general and aimiable way of women at work in their ceaseless struggle to keep man from monomania. While reserving to herself the right to be singleminded.
So she has seen Cricket come and go - watching uncritically from the sidelines as I displayed my unerringly accurate talent as Fixtures Secretary, for sending our hapless pub team (The All Nations, Clapham Common) across London every weekend to certain slaughter at the hands of teams so talented they should have been trashing Australia. And unironically applauding my conspicuous skill-less-ness (there is such a word now, for it alone describes my way with a cricket bat. And ball.)
She has witnessed them all come and go : rollerblading (hurtling across concrete on narrow wheels into hard fixed objects) then canoeing (as in poleing upstream while standing, as in sailing a 24-inch-wide craft while lying down, as in - well you get the picture : doing something stupid in a narrow tippy boat) , sea-kayaking (more silly stuff in something even skinnier and less stable), and off-road motorcycling (think: amateurish suicide-attempts halfway up mountains where the crows will have time to pick your bones clean before the rescue services can find you). I salute her stalwartness in watching me head off at weekends not knowing if I would return in a bag, or bags, or ever. Perhaps that was her plan - if so she concealed her hopes (I prefer fears) behind a remarkably uncynical and supportive front.
She, meanwhile, was engaged on more serious business. All she ever wanted to do was paint. With her father away in Africa or the Far East on some telecommunications contract, she signed up, with her mother's support and encouragement, for four years at Cork College of Art. After just one year her father pulled the plug. She had just come joint top of year (with her best friend Maud Cotter - now an acclaimed Irish sculptor). If she wanted to continue her third-level education it would have to be something serious, some profession - and at university.
To spite him she chose philosophy. She went on to get her masters, and an offer of doctorate study at a college in the States. She chose instead to stick with me and my plans, and to have a baby.
She did return to painting - which had by then become a sad and outmoded occupation for an artist - Art having become a matter of silly piles of bricks, specious statements of intent, and serious money. She has painted steadily through those years, staging a few shows in Cork and Dublin, selling privately. And now after a gap, another solo show in Carcassonne, this May : two floors in a delightful gallery - La Maison du Chevallier, a mediaeval knight's house.
You are all cordially invited : to meet a dedicated painter and her dilettante partner.
Now, I haven't skied since I was a youth, but that hasn't stopped me from getting a pair of skis and getting all the clothes and getting all excited. All we didn't get was the snow. Global warming. Bugger bugger bugger.
Mary laughs at my hobbies. She makes fun of my all-consuming, and all-too-soon-spent enthusiasms. But only afterwards. And only in the general and aimiable way of women at work in their ceaseless struggle to keep man from monomania. While reserving to herself the right to be singleminded.
So she has seen Cricket come and go - watching uncritically from the sidelines as I displayed my unerringly accurate talent as Fixtures Secretary, for sending our hapless pub team (The All Nations, Clapham Common) across London every weekend to certain slaughter at the hands of teams so talented they should have been trashing Australia. And unironically applauding my conspicuous skill-less-ness (there is such a word now, for it alone describes my way with a cricket bat. And ball.)
She has witnessed them all come and go : rollerblading (hurtling across concrete on narrow wheels into hard fixed objects) then canoeing (as in poleing upstream while standing, as in sailing a 24-inch-wide craft while lying down, as in - well you get the picture : doing something stupid in a narrow tippy boat) , sea-kayaking (more silly stuff in something even skinnier and less stable), and off-road motorcycling (think: amateurish suicide-attempts halfway up mountains where the crows will have time to pick your bones clean before the rescue services can find you). I salute her stalwartness in watching me head off at weekends not knowing if I would return in a bag, or bags, or ever. Perhaps that was her plan - if so she concealed her hopes (I prefer fears) behind a remarkably uncynical and supportive front.
She, meanwhile, was engaged on more serious business. All she ever wanted to do was paint. With her father away in Africa or the Far East on some telecommunications contract, she signed up, with her mother's support and encouragement, for four years at Cork College of Art. After just one year her father pulled the plug. She had just come joint top of year (with her best friend Maud Cotter - now an acclaimed Irish sculptor). If she wanted to continue her third-level education it would have to be something serious, some profession - and at university.
To spite him she chose philosophy. She went on to get her masters, and an offer of doctorate study at a college in the States. She chose instead to stick with me and my plans, and to have a baby.
She did return to painting - which had by then become a sad and outmoded occupation for an artist - Art having become a matter of silly piles of bricks, specious statements of intent, and serious money. She has painted steadily through those years, staging a few shows in Cork and Dublin, selling privately. And now after a gap, another solo show in Carcassonne, this May : two floors in a delightful gallery - La Maison du Chevallier, a mediaeval knight's house.
You are all cordially invited : to meet a dedicated painter and her dilettante partner.