A hefty prod

Much as I enjoy painting, I need a pretty hefty prod to get me started. Perhaps the problem is that I need convincing that there is any point in my painting at all.  Perhaps it is partly that, when I do get started, it is more of a technical exercise rather than the fulfilment of some arty vision.
Perhaps the real problem is that I haven’t a clue what I am doing other than making marks with paint on canvas or board and hoping that the end product might just amount to a passable illusion of  the person or object being painted. It is as simple, and as difficult, as that.

Sometimes the hefty prod arrives quite unexpectedly, as it did a few days ago when I found this little oil sketch that has been hiding in one of the many mysterious cardboard boxes in our garage. I had forgotten that I had painted it. Like the very few others that have been anywhere near promising, it was a little sketch (4 x 3 inches) that I had produced in about 20 minutes or so, that is, quickly.
This discovery was the hefty prod that set me thinking about a fresh start on one of the four paintings that are, supposedly, “in progress” at the moment. Well, I can’t just sit down at the easel and start straight in. First, I need to re-examine the painting, which has been facing the wall since I ceased work on it a couple of weeks ago. So, in a rare, patient, frame of mind, I sit, clipboard with paper on knee and pencil in hand, a few feet from the painting so that I do not see too much minor detail. It is a portrait and I am still at the stage where I am trying to get an accurate tonal drawing. So I am trying to see what is wrong with it and listing each defect in turn and what I think needs to be done. For reasons that I haven’t thought much about just yet, I have to do this assessment quite separately from any attempt to apply paint. A day, or maybe a week, later I will find another suitable time to make a bit more progress. The task of working out where and why the paint is needed has been done and now I can concentrate on mixing and applying paint. 
I like painting but I need to do it in easy stages and keep it simple. Perhaps that should tell me something!

New links

From time to time I delete a few links from this blog and insert new ones. Neither additions nor deletions are necessarily permanent. The idea is to limit the total number of links while still guiding my visitors to “new” blogs and websites that have caught my attention for one reason or another, if only temporarily.
I have been shuffling the links again recently and have added the following:

Karin Wells Studio - interesting content and not all of it art and painting.
Carolee S. Clark - a painter with an attractive style.
Twitter – needs no introduction.
Nick Robinson’s Newslog - a good source of commentary on UK politics.
The Cycling Lawyer - for expert commentary on the legal issues relevant to cyclists.
Cycle Social - a site with a difference for cyclists of all kinds, sporting, road, commuting, leisure, slow, whatever. The site is relatively new but growing steadily and looking forward to a relaunch early in the New Year. It has enormous potential for cyclists and local clubs who have the inagination and initiative to use it.  I signed up (free) and put myself on the “Members Map” and look forward to meeting (and cycling with) other local members.

Watching for Henry

In theory, Henry (our tortoise) could emerge from hibernation in about two weeks time in the middle of December but exactly when this will happen is anyone’s guess. Some “experts” say that you should wake a tortoise after twelve weeks, otherwise there is a risk that his/her reserves will have been used up and he/she will be too weak to survive. Yet Henry has been known to hibernate for 14-16 weeks in the past without ill effects and has always woken up in his own good time.
Now that, at last, there is a risk of frost within days, Henry’s winter home (a converted rabbit hutch) has been moved from the main part of our garage – which is neither insulated nor heated – to a partitioned section of it where a thermostatically controlled heater keeps the temperature a few degrees above freezing. Within his house, Henry has tucked himself away in the middle of a pile of hay, and his house is covered by a couple of dust sheets so that it remains ventilated but free of draughts. How pampered can one tortoise get!
By checking daily from now on I will notice immediately he wakes up as he will emerge from his pile of hay. My guess is that he will reappear in the first week of January. Watch this space!

Keyboard troubles

Reading the Town Mouse blog today reminded me of my own, usually impatient, efforts to clean my laptop  keyboard. Once, approaching the task with enthusiasm and a brand new yellow duster, I managed to remove half-a-dozen keys at a stroke. I never discovered a way to refit them but fitting a replacement keyboard was easy.

My present problem is much more irritating because this laptop is less than two years old and the problem started several months ago (but outside the guarantee period, naturally). Quite why T I O L and N should have been the first to wear away I don’t know but wouldn’t you think they could make a keyboard that didn’t do this?  I never saw this problem after many years of use on any of the typewriters that I owned, and they all got far more pounding than any computer keyboard.

Cycle Divas and the showerproof saddle covers

Recently, while looking at Cycle Social, I  filled in a poll posted by another member, Cycle Divas, who wanted to know what members thought were the factors that put people off cycling. Prizes were offered to the first few who replied to the poll and, to my surprise, I was among the first few.
Cycle Divas proved to be the business name of a lady who is a qualified National Standards Cycle Instructor and Bikeability provider.   

Cycle Divas  have been preparing a range of showerproof saddle covers which will become available early next year. My prize was one of several prototypes that have been made already and very acceptable it was too. I can anticipate a good demand for these among our growing population of cyclists.  After all, there is nothing more miserable than having to sit on a wet saddle after a rainy day at work or during a shopping trip, etc. and if we are supposed to be doing more cycling, and doing it with style, an old plastic bag just won’t do any more.  This cover is the business and even makes my bike look a bit trendy (and I’m not complaining). It might even deter the thefts of the more expensive saddles by hiding them from view. It covers the saddle very snugly and is quickly attached and detached using a drawstring with a quick-release locking device similar to that found on anoraks and other outdoor clothing.
Cycle Divas hopes to be marketing a range of these covers early in the New Year and they should prove popular, especially as there is so much scope for variations in design.

Cyclists – let’s get together, and promote cycling…

It is shocking I know, but I have done very little cycling lately and I must try to get out there more often. To me, cycling is a leisure activity and a source of exercise and that, at present, is all. In addition it should be a self-perpetuating activity thanks to the pleasure that it provides. This is no longer the case for me and I suspect that I am not alone.  Trouble is, I’ve “done” all the local routes that fall within my range and I really don’t want to cycle much further at present. In fact I have cycled those routes again and again and there is no incentive to continue.
The main reason is that I don’t really enjoy cycling on my own. However, I am not ideal company for most younger and fitter cyclists. I need to cycle at a leisurely pace over a fairly easy route covering a maximum distance of perhaps 10-12 miles just now, but certainly further as fitness improves. This sort of cycling is simply not catered for in my area by any established groups and I am sure that this problem is widespread, and as good a reason as any why so many potential cyclists, especially older ones, haven’t started, or re-started, yet.
I keep thinking that there must be lots of older people who would love to have a gentle cycle ride once or twice or more per week, if only to regain and maintain a bit of fitness  but how to get them together? That is the question. With the best will in the world, the volunteers who run the established cycling clubs in provincial towns and cities cannot cater for every district even if they began to understand the particular needs of the over-60s, and in some cases the well-over-60s, which they probably don’t.
Having almost exhausted local ideas for getting such cyclists together I have continued to look at the internet for solutions. Recently, while looking at various cycling websites I came across one that was new to me, Cycle Social. It has been running for a little over a year and seems to be more user-friendly than other big national sites. It hopes to become Britain’s “biggest social network for cyclists”  and I think that it’s potential could be enormous. It is free to join and has some useful features -  the one that caught my attention was the members map. Members are able to mark their location (only approximately if preferred) on the map, which enables other members to see whereabouts members are in their district and communicate with them if they wish. So far so good.
I joined Cycle Social and marked my approximate location on the map. The search facility enabled me to discover that seven other members were located in the vicinity of Cardiff but it was disappointing to see that only two of them had marked the map and they were outside the city on the opposite side from me.
At this point it occured to me that there are around 320,000 people in Cardiff, the capital of Wales, so why only eight Cardiff cyclists on Cycle Social? Admittedly there are clubs in Cardiff allegedly catering for the city’s cyclists but Cycle Social wouldn’t compete with them. On the contrary, it could improve their communications and help to find them new members – assuming, that is, that they want new members.
As a matter of interest, I had a look at the situation in Bristol, which is only a few miles away, as the crow flies, and is Britain’s first Cycling City, a status that it has enjoyed for just over a year. The population of Bristol is in excess of 400,000. Apparently there are just 12 Cycle Social members listed for Bristol and, again, just one appears on the map. 
It seems reasonable to conclude that, far too often, cyclists themselves are failing to promote cycling and encourage new cyclists, and to support the many campaigns, initiatives and organisations who are working to promote cycling.
Is it apathy, complacency, a lack of imagination or initiative?  Or is it simply a failure to recognise that, with very little effort, we could do so much more to help ourselves in ways which could soon bring results?

Feed the birds

It looks as if Granny-Anne has beaten me to it again! She posted about feeding the birds while I was just thinking about it!
Yes, we started feeding the birds at the end of October, using the rather posh feeder which was a gift from our daughter, Jennie, some months ago.
I must admit that, at first, I was a bit worried that this large, shiny feeder would frighten the birds away. So I hung it out in the garden a couple of months ago to give the birds time to get used to it. It was empty then because I understand that it is not good to feed birds in the summer. I filled it a week ago and only then did I notice a complete absence of birds in our garden. Not one would appear in a space of 10-15 minutes. This was odd.
This seemed so unusual that I contacted the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds via Twitter (yes, I know, how appropriate! But Granny-Anne has used a variation of that one already!) and they replied that it is not unusual for birds to disperse after the young have left the nest.
Nothing happened at the feeder for a few days, until the first visitor that I saw was a Coal Tit, a brave little adventurer who stopped for a quick snack to break his journey. Soon after there was a Robin, then a Blue Tit, then a little gang of House Sparrows  stopped for a quick look in between chasing each other around the trees and finally departing at great speed into a thick hedge a couple of gardens away.
The birds were back at last and all, well, that much at least, was well with the world.

Music – the violin

My violin was an inexpensive old thing about 3-4 years ago, with no particular claim to fame. The label within mentions Antonius Straduarius so I concluded that the instrument was a cheap copy of the great “Strad” and there have been many thousands of those.
It was not the most encouraging of experiences when I started trying to play again earlier this year. First, not playing for the best part of 50 years had undermined my physical coordination and intonation. Secondly, the instrument itself sounded harsh, when it sounded at all. A lot of practice has brought me back to somewhere near my earlier capabilities though I am not sight-reading quite as fluently as before. I am gradually improving the instrument itself while recognising that it might, just,  become acceptable for my purposes but that is probably the best I can hope for. A new set of Dominant strings brought about a vast improvement in the sound, which has now been helped further by a new bridge, suitably modified. While it may seem illogical to spend very much on a bow for a violin of doubtful pedigree, I am beginning to think that my violin is a better instrument than I had thought previously and deserves better than the really cheap bow that is showing its limitations already. Even the “cheap Strad copies” varied considerably in quality and perhaps mine is not so bad after all. Admittedly, it seems to me to project itself rather well – or to put it in more down-to-earth terms, it is loud. On the other hand, something approaching a quite pleasant tone is beginning to become apparent  It will be interesting to hear how it changes over the next couple of hundred hours of practice.

Music – the clarinet

The painting has been a bit sporadic lately, the cycling non-existent (unless you count the exercise bike) but I have been quite productive in terms of musical endeavours. I am assured that there is no connection between this and the fact that one near neighbour has just moved and another will be going shortly! 
The clarinet poses an interesting challenge. It is a transposing instrument. Mine is a Bb clarinet, so if I play the note C on the clarinet, it sounds the same as the note Bb on the piano. So from time to time I get totally bewildered and wonder why they don’t just call it Bb on the clarinet as well instead of calling it C?  Is it me, or am I missing something?
The result of this is that if I want to play a duet involving a non-transposing instrument like a piano or violin, and if the piano or violin music is in, for example, the key of G major, then the clarinet part has to be in A major.
Having gained my musical training on the violin during a large part of my youth I can read treble clef music for the violin but struggle to connect the same music to the clarinet fingering – but that will come with practice. Trouble is, this process is not helped by the fact that I am able (too often in the present context) to play the tune in question “by ear” and tend to ignore the printed music – or I get so involved in actually playing the tune that I forget to look at the music and therefore lose my place in the score. Is this a musical “senior moment” I wonder?
If there is a really disheartening aspect of the clarinet it is reeds. Even experienced clarinetists have problems with reeds – or they would if they hadn’t found their own ways of dealing with them. The problem is that although manufacturers grade their reeds according to their hardness, the raw material is inherently inconsistent – and so are the reeds. The consequence is that a comparative beginner (in particular) may find that out of a box of ten reeds only two or three will be playable straight out of the box.  Just last week I had no playable reeds left, just a motley collection of rejects. Fortunately, I had acquired a copy of “Reeds Reeds Reeds!” by Alan Cresswell.  Alan is a New Orleans style jazz clarinet player, who plays with Max Collie, The Muskrat Ramblers and The Golden Eagle Band at clubs and festivals in UK and Germany. He says that he wrote the book to share his experiences hoping they will help others. It is a slim A5 book of a couple of dozen pages, which includes detailed (and well-illustrated) practical information about reeds, mouthpieces and ligatures and how to improve problematic reeds, whether too hard or too soft. I strongly recommend this book. Why? Last week I had a collection of reject reeds – a collection that cost me more than the book itself. This week they are all working well and producing quite a nice tone.  The book is available from Dawkes, who supply other music shops and Foyles bookshop in London and you may well find stockists by looking for Reeds Reeds Reeds on Google.

I knew very little about the clarinet when I started to play it but that soon changed thanks to David Pino’s book, “The Clarinet and Clarinet Playing”. It is packed with practical advice and information and is very readable. I found it at Amazon.

MBE for Nicole Cooke

I was very pleased today to read that Nicole Cooke, our Olympic and World Champion road racing cyclist from South Wales received the MBE from HRH Prince Charles at Buckingham Palace.  A well-deserved award indeed.