Triage

What a useful concept.

I have spent the week painting, so plenty of thinking time. In one way it has been melancholy because Stefan is editing Robert Parker's jazz intro, strange to hear his voice when he has been dead a year, yet he sounds just the same, full of enthusiasm.

I have retreated to the comforts of the mundane, and the common sense of triage. This pleases me, This needs attention, This is out.

I am delighted with my cooker, maybe because it took a certain leap of the imagination to order it from the UK. I just rang John Lewis and they didn't turn a hair. Stefan once accused me in the trendy 70s of having "a John Lewis mentality": guilty as charged.

I am delighted with my poetry collection, less so with my music. I am just too literal, I look at a CD and can't tell what is inside so I dither. Love my new Callas though.

Ambivalent about my books, so many of my touchstones have vanished, could I have lent them? I hate being mean about something which should be shared. Others have lost their gloss, or become shrill or self-righteous. I did replenish my staples from Amazon used books, even the more scarce Whiteheads which I had only found previously in the British Library. The books I am currently reading are not engrossing. Hiding in the Mirror might as well be in Sanskrit for all I understand, the Dalai Lama is getting up my nose, and Nightlife moves along but hasn't pulled me into its world.

I really like children's books. Maybe I should reread His Dark Materials. I have sucked Mary Stewart's Merlin trilogy dry, there is something about her descriptions of season and place which deeply soothes me. Harry Potter is annoying, the central character so uninteresting and two-dimensional. For once I found the film better than the book. The Hounds of the Morrigan is a rich pleasure, I love the language, it is for reading out loud to little children with eyes like saucers. I want to read it to Ariana and Cian.

I will reread Peter Pan.

Maybe I will see if I can find the biography of Mary Russell Mitford on Amazon, An English Spinster. It has been on my mind because her father in later years kept up a low keening which got horribly on her nerves, and Stefan has taken to something similar, part of the creative temperament I suppose. I favour a tuneless whistle, which in time will lead to a mouth like a dog's bottom. I have ample opportunity to view my cinema verite self as Stefan has been doing camera tests; I need to become more conscious of my habitual expressions.

Far and away the most hilarious were his experiments with movement and blurring, for the film we are about to do on the ballet. He has been testing our own HD cameras versus the larger Sonys, and he needed someone to dance.

Er, yes, I danced for him. Nothing could improve the situation so I did it there and then, pausing only to put down the paintbrush. I am twisting his arm to put it on his website and will let blood kin know when it is up, as it also shows the colour I have painted the room (IronBru) and my new haircut and will make you laugh.