I Live Here Now

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And Masha’s father, who all his life longed for a “ royale”, a real grand piano, plays music into the empty rooms of the flat. All structured data from the main, Property, Lexeme, and EntitySchema namespaces is available under the Creative Commons CC0 License; text in the other namespaces is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply.

I had not known then that she was from the hostel, or from Ukraine and anyhow, she may not have wanted to be disturbed. Very often when I walk, my thoughts are elsewhere but walking and drawing made me mindfully aware, moment to moment of where I was, and the position of my body in that space: my spatial relationship to the tree I was passing; the bird flying high over my head; the sea ahead of me in the distance.It is true that actual relationships had emerged from the initial imaginary ones of my writing, with the women upstairs, but not with the woman in the basement. In the café window on the street below there is a poster of the same bandstand, drawn by Leon Kossoff. She too has had a reunion of long parted family members from different countries in a rented French house cancelled.

Many of the larger lumps had taken flight, descended to the pavement, and there were bare gaps where once there had been bouncy hillocks of green. It cheered us up hugely to play together, and as the days shortened we would play on even as the sheet music blurred into darkness, under the yellowing leaves.

He came to draw here in his eighties, making drawings day after day, for several years, sitting on a bench among the plane trees, with coloured pencils. We are taking each other in, newly alert to the fragility of each person, and perhaps more carefully attentive as we attempt to sound out the edges where our seperateness meets; that must also be re-found after the long imposed distancing. Thankyou I so enjoyed reading your thoughts about drawing and walking , it’s inspired me to immerse myself too as I move house into an urban environment as a way to understand and find my place in a new neighbourhood. Oblepikha in Russian, also known as Sea Buckthorn, or Sanddorn in German, is overlooked by Scottish foragers.

The enthusiasts tend to be from more northerly countries, where the berries are prized for providing essential vitamins through the dark winters. Others followed, at a Care Home and this autumn our first at the Neurological Rehabilitation Unit which is on the site of the largest hospital in the city. I am shocked by its power to make things jump awake but also by the persistence of the city inside me, a charge rarely evoked by revisiting. But I kept going, almost enjoying the pain and scratches, bending and wrenching the branches off with my bare hands as we marvelled at the abundance.Each year, the procession stops at the house of a well known fiddle player, now many years dead, and there is music and dancing outside the house. The professor even allowed me a moment’s nostalgia for the Soviet produced three and five litre glass jars that were such a ubiquitous detail of my Moscow year — thick blue-green glass vessels packed with pickled cabbage, or marrows, or mushrooms become slimy and viscous, too large or many for the fridge, they sat out in rows on frosted balconies, in easy reach of the kitchen table. But I want to get to Belgium, there is a painting I would like to see in Ghent — Children Washing by James Ensor. I felt at home with these small creatures, reassured by their presence on the wet stone, by their proliferation, even. I walked there in the rain, warm yellow of birch and plane leaves, acid yellow of high vis jackets of the police guarding the barrier.