The Ring

More than half a year has passed now since my husband lost his ring. It happened after a whole day of a frenzied cleaning in the house and of heavy food shopping outside. By the time he realised the ring was no longer on his finger, it was dark outside and hours of re-tracing his steps with a torch and running to the shops before they closed proved absolutely fruitless. After an adrenaline filled hour of searching through rubbish bin bags, electric hoover bags, drains and of turning everything upside down and inside out again and finding a plethora of other things, but not the ring, I was left full of a superstitious heavy despair and a deep genuine sadness. Then I thought a lot of my Grandmother and her way with lost and missing things and her image and words came back as vivid as ever and I saw her sitting there shaking her head and laughing the situation away.

My Grandmother had a habit for losing and misplacing things on a very regular basis. The years before she was confined to a bed, she would sit on her chair to clean vegetables, such as runner beans, parsley, spinach, potatoes, carrots, ladyfingers and so on. She started with a pile of one single vegetable in a plastic tub and she had with her a sharp knife and another empty plastic tub. She took absolutely ages to go through the vegetables and selected, cleaned and cut them so, so carefully and meticulously that around an hour or so later the previously empty tub was only half full with the most elegantly cut, selected and turned vegetables imaginable, while the other tub had doubled in size full of shavings, off cuts, stalks, stringy bits and  rejected leaves. It always seemed to me such a huge waste that only one fifth of her grocery shopping, albeit in a beautiful condition, ever made it to the cooking pot. If I was in the house I had to censor the tub with the rejected bits, as within it one could find my Grandmother's glasses, her sharp knife, a pen, a lighter, matches, paper clips, rubbers, sharpeners, money and other such things. If no one was around to check the tub, more likely than not, we would have to retrieve the rubbish bag from the street and try to save some of the missing things. My mother always used the bags that the medicine were delivered in at her pharmacy as those bags had her surname printed on them and it made it much easier for us to retrieve them amongst all the other rubbish bin bags.

My Grandmother always said that she wished that things had a voice and could talk to you. That way you could just shout out at them when you lost them and then they would reply back so that you could find them in no time. All the wasted time lost in looking for all the misplaced things would be gained back. I would remind her then, that if things had a voice of their own they would probably wish to talk all the time and not just reserve the talking for when you called out to them and there would be so much noise, whispering and shouting out amongst them that it would make it unbearable to live. But my Grandmother shook her head and said that it was rubbish and that any sensible person should be able to block out anything that they did not wish to hear and only listen to what was important to them. I struggled to argue back with her when she came up with such weird things, so I had to make my peace with watching her finger around things in the house without her glasses, feeling for lost items and for her glasses, when all the while she was moving things around as she went and pleaded to God to give objects a voice of their own so that she could find everything that she had lost.

After my Grandmother was confined to her bed in her room and was unable to go to any other room, a great change came upon the household. Things still kept on getting lost, because by that time we had all acquired a feel for misplacing things, or worse for tidying each other's things away in the wrong place. But now my Grandmother had developed an amazing gift for finding where things were from the comforts of her bed. She would just ask a few questions, such as "so who gave you that book then?" and "was it the one that makes you laugh by yourself in your room?", "oh, I think that book must be at the bottom of your rucksack, under the pencil case". And that was where the book was. She helped my mother find important lost documents, tickets to the cinema, music cassettes and lost pairs of scissors without ever getting up from her bed. I started to wonder whether things were actually talking to her at last, but when I asked her about it she said she didn't need them to talk to her anymore.

After going through every single action my husband could remember doing the day he lost the ring, I obsessed about it enough and finally found myself focusing on an action I was convinced held the solution as to where the lost ring was. At some point during the cleaning frenzy he had shook a child's small weaved tapestry outside the back window. His fingers were cold from the chilly weather and thinner than normal and such a violent, shaking action could be able to remove a ring and send it flying very easily. Convinced by this fact and glad to finally be free of repeated and uncontrolled visualizations of countless ways the ring could have got lost, I started to try and re-create the actual scene of the misfortune. I took a beer bottle top and held it with my finger while shaking the small tapestry at the same time. I tried this three times and all three times the bottle tops were carried away by the shaking motion to the left, onto a patio belonging to a ground floor communal area. I soon realised this area was not accessible to the tenants and a high metal gate stood locked with a padlock on it, as if safeguarding the lost ring inside. I contemplated jumping over, but then I thought I might as well do it the right way and talk to the concierge about the incident, raising his awareness too, in case the ring was found by someone else in the vicinity. The concierge kindly unlocked the metal gate for me, but stayed there searching with me, making it impossible for me to search for a very long time or anywhere else but on that little patio. Above it there was an area of unruly growing weeds and reeds, but I was so self aware in my searching with the concierge over my head that I did not look there at all.    

Deeply disappointed and mildly perplexed as to how and why my scientific approach to finding the ring had failed, I tried to rethink things that night before sleeping. Just as I was about to let go of the whole thing, succumb to sleep and finally make a welcome peace with losing the ring, I thought how the weight of it was all wrong. The beer bottle top was not only solid and not hollow in the middle (so wrong shape), it was also much lighter than a man's gold ring. And there the madness began of trying to find a metal wire, thick and heavy enough to re-create the actual size and weight of the ring so as to reenact the scene of the misfortune all over again. This time the fake rings were not carried away by the movement of shaking the tapestry to the left, but all fell further away and straight ahead  in  a little area between the railway tracks' fence and the fence of our block of flats. That thin strip of land was full of reeds,weeds, grass and pebbles and I was now convinced more than ever that I had indeed worked out where the lost ring was.

I thought then that if  I in fact managed to find the ring in that little strip of land, I would be a kind of hero in my husband's eyes and also match my aunty's amazing achievement of finding a bundle of money she had lost as a student. She always told me this story during the summer holidays and I loved listening to it again and again. She had collected the money of her fellow students and her own, as she always did on the first of every month. The marble sculpture students all lived and practiced on the island of Tinos and rented an old lady's island house in a small village. My aunty took her bike and had to ride all the way the the capital of the island to the old lady's son's house where she would present her with the money. On the way there she had lots of other chores to do, drop off things to different people, stop to mail letters and feed some stray dogs on the way. She also stopped to drink some water in a fresh water spring of a small village in the middle of the way and met there a very elderly lady who she took cookies to. All the while the money was rolled in a bundle secured with an elastic band which she kept in her fist while riding the bike and in her pocket at all other times, as she always had done before. But that particular time, when she reached the capital and was about to ring the old lady's bell, she realised in a moment of cold blind panic that the money was no longer in her pocket and no longer in her fist. She cycled all the way back and stopped at every single place she had stopped before, talking and asking every single soul she met if they had seen a bundle of money or heard of anyone who might have come across it. After a fruitless search, exhausted and absolutely at a loss of how that money could be raised again and how to break the news to her house mates and to the old lady, she went straight to bed having decided not to tell anyone about the lost money yet and to find it first thing in the morning.

During that night, my aunty played back in her mind, just like a movie, every single scene of that day and tried to see it from the perspective of the lost bundle of money. She described it as follows: she tried to be the bundle of money and see how it felt at that right moment; was the bundle warm in someone's hand or was it laying cold in the night dropped somewhere along the way? And then she felt it; she could feel the frozen water and she could almost see the pebbles and the wet slippery moss and  hear the slow, melodic gurgling of the spring water. The  bundle was laying there in the spring's little pond, covered in freezing water, the moon shining above it, just where she had bent to drink the cold water directly from the spring using both her hands as a cup. She was so sure of it, there was no doubt in her mind about it, so that she got up, got dressed and sat outside waiting for the first ray of light to appear behind the mountain. And when there was light enough to ride, she went off on her bike, as fast as she could and when she reached the fresh water spring with its little pond she bent down and stretched her hand and as sure as the day light, there was the bundle of money, just as she had seen it in her mind the night before.

The problem was that there was no way I could get to that strip of land between the train tracks and the building. I could potentially jump over the fence of our building, but how could I get the concierge to let me through the first gate and then make him leave me alone so that I could jump over the fence? Jumping from the railway side of the fence was even more difficult to achieve as there are cameras there and I would probably get arrested if I got caught. I thought of  befriending a rail worker and ask him politely to look for me for the ring. Then I thought of approaching the railway staff and asking them to let me through and check myself when the trains no longer run. But I was told that freight trains run all night through, a fact that I already knew very well, and that members of the public and passengers and in fact the staff themselves, were not allowed behind the railway tracks. I noticed that occasionally some gardeners worked on the weeds and planted flowers on the other side of the rails, but despite observing them every day they never worked on the thin strip of unruly grass on my side of the rails,but instead stayed put and beautified the opposite side. So what else was I to do but use my binoculars from the back window to observe inch by inch all the undergrowth and plants on the thin strip of land. I was quite amazed of how much detail one can see if one concentrates on a very small sample of something. I was really hoping to be writing this post once I had found the ring, but such a thing has unfortunately not happened yet. I am starting to make my peace with the possibility that we might never find the ring and that we might need to get a new one. This fact still brings a deep sadness in me, but one that is now mixed up with a bit of disappointment for not been able to find it. But I am still convinced that the ring is somewhere around and I am now left with a very strange habit of looking down from the window at the undergrowth with the binoculars while confused passengers occasionally look up at me from the train platform wondering what exactly I could be looking at.  

Observe carefully a small section of an undergrowth and using clay (adjust the materials according to the students' age: e.g. use play dough or plasticine for younger students) create a tile and on it recreate the textures and shapes you have observed. Create at least three different marks in relief and three different marks as indentations. You can collect articles from the undergrowth (twigs, seeds, pebbles etc.) and you can use household  equipment (rolling pin, garlic squeezer etc.) to help you make your marks. Each tile should also contain a creepy-crawly creature (worm, snail, ladybird etc).

 Lesson for year 7 students from a great Art teacher at a school in Brentwood, Essex. 

The Fish

For the past few weeks he had spotted a large fish in its hole at the side of a rock. In the beginning he thought that the fish just went into the hole to hide from him, but after a few days he realised that the hole was the fish's home. Most of the times he had seen it, it was in the hole, its head poking out a little bit. You would not have been able to guess it was there unless you had watched it going in at some point. A few times the hole was empty, so he guessed the fish had gone hunting or else it was hidden deep inside. The idea had been spreading in his mind for a few days now. Firstly he thought how great it would be if he could catch it. And then he thought how he would look in her eyes if he were to catch such a large fish and present it to her. And then how she would look, the expression on her face when she saw him with the fish. Once when he was a little boy he saw a fisherman bringing back a huge grey, ugly fish, so large and so heavy that they had to put it on a little trolley and pull it all the way to the fisherman's house. The kids had pushed a large red carnation at the side of its head and a cloth over it, so that it looked like an old dancer reposing after her act. Everyone stopped and looked and cheered at the huge fish and the fisherman had become a kind of a hero for a while for managing to catch such a monster of a thing. He remembered the fisherman's wife, all red and shiny cheeked, with her large bosom bouncing up and down, as she fussed and complained at how she was ever going to cook such a monstrosity and what a hassle it all was, when all the while she was glowing and flushing with pride and hidden joy at her husband's achievement.

The hole was about four to five meters down, in an area full of small rocky formations, grey and sharp, that all looked pretty much the same. If you floated above the hole without moving, you would soon be carried away one direction or the other and you would have to relocate the hole all over again. He had chosen a few marks on the bottom of the sea as references, a large cement brick and an old piece of rope, which were both near the hole. From above it was easier to know where to dive, as the tip of the large rock the fish was using as a home was protruding outside the water surface and had an old rusty metal chain attached to it. But he was more concerned about the practicalities of how he should present her with the fish. They met every Wednesday evening at five in the village square. He was not sure if it was appropriate to bring the fish with him to the meeting. It would be convenient because he would come straight from the sea, as if he had just caught it there and then by chance on that particular day. It would all look as if it was meant to happen that way, as if it was part of their fates. On the other hand he would not be nicely dressed, clean and smelling well. Also how should he carry the fish itself? Surely not in a plastic bag. In a basket maybe, or better in a net-bag. That would be best. He thought that ideally he could rush quickly home, if he caught it fast, then wash and change clothes and then go to the village with the fish but clean and proper. But would that sadden his mother that he would give such a catch to someone else and not leave it at home for them to have?  

He decided to take with him to the rocks some extra things, his clean clothes, a towel and a flask of water. This way he would rinse and dry himself after catching the fish, he would change clothes and then leave the old ones and the flask, the snorkel and the mask and the trident in a bundle, hide them in the rocks and collect them the next day. The problem with this is that he ended up carrying a whole lot of stuff, like a tourist, when all he normally needed was his mask and snorkel. But that was a sacrifice that had to be made. When he reached the spot with the rusty chain he undressed quickly and put on his mask and snorkel. It was two o'clock and the sun would have been unbearable had it not been for some silent misty clouds hovering above the rocks. He left the trident on the rock with the chain. Entering the water was a relief, a small sigh of gratefulness escaped him as he finally left the hot rocks above and all the dilemmas they harvested. After he savoured the cool water for a few minutes, diving deep and somersaulting to the bottom, he suddenly remembered the fish and quickly looked for the hole. The hole was empty. He went up for some air and dived again all the way down to have a better look. The hole was definitely empty. He went up again and hovered above the spot thinking that he should make sure the fish was not hidden deep inside the hole. He spotted a broken tree branch on the sea floor and went to catch it. He poked inside the hole to see if the fish was there. He was really surprised to find that the hole was not deep at all and that the fish would not be able to hide there entirely. The bit of its head would always stick out a little. He went up for air again and stayed there hovering above the spot. He had not really anticipated this. He must wait for the fish to come back. But would it come back before four o'clock? He would not be able to leave any later than four to quarter past four from the rocks or he would be late.

As he hovered above the area with the sharp rocks, he felt himself drifting away from the hole towards the deep sea. He let himself go for a while and then felt the urge to swim without the stupid mask and snorkel. He swam back to the rock with the chain and took off his mask and snorkel and left them there together with the trident. He swam away towards the open sea, dived deep and came up fast, his torso coming out of the water surface, his mouth spitting out water. He hovered facing the sky, like he was asleep, with arms and legs all spread out. He swam sideways, like a dolphin, keeping his legs merged together as if he had a mermaid's tail. He dived again and breathed most of his air out so that he was down for longer, heavy, looking upwards at the surface of the sea from below. The surface became a mirror, a shiny solid thing and he rushed up to shatter it with a sudden thrust of his legs. When he looked around he saw that he was now well away from the rocks, drifted at least a hundred metres away. He swam rapidly back as if he was trying to win an imaginary race and he laughed and cheered himself when he reached the rock, just as if he was the worthy winner. Once there he put on his mask and snorkel again and this time he took his trident with him.

The fish was still not there. The hole lay there dark and grey and menacing, but no tip of fish head was protruding from it. A crab was moving around the hole entrance as if to check it out, but was reluctant to go all the way in. He felt for the first time that day the sense of excitement turning into a disappointing weight and he shivered with a cold wave of lost anticipation. His fingertips had started to acquire that alien, soaked surface on them, like old raisins drunk in alcohol. He felt his teeth starting to shudder a bit and contemplated getting out for a while and waiting in the sun. But a new thought crossed his mind just then; would it not be more appropriate to collect shells from the sea floor for her? He knew how much she liked shells, she often collected them at the beach herself. He dropped the trident a meter or so away from the fish hole and started to look around for shells. A bit deeper in, around five to six meters down, he saw a beautiful large nautilus with its marks yet unaffected by salt deposits. It was bright and shiny and for a moment he wondered weather the creature was still within it. He just caught it with the first dive, but his ears did not decompress properly and he came up with a gasp for air and a little painful cry that surprised him. The shell was heavy and beautiful but kept his hands full. He went all the way to the rock with the chain and left the shell there. The sun hit him on the face and instead of warming him up the sudden difference in temperature made him shiver for a moment uncontrollably.

He went off again without checking for the fish. He looked for more shells further out, but was unable to find any more big ones. He found a cluster of spiky shells, more interesting for their shapes than their colour, which looked to have been collected there and eaten by an octopus. But the octopus had abandoned its nest, or was out hunting. For a moment he almost thought that he should wait for the octopus to return and that this could be even a more impressive catch if it was a big one. But he came to his senses and remembered the fish. He picked up a handful of shells and then did not know what to do with them. They kept his hands full and he did not really want to go all the way to the rock again. He put them at the back of his swimming pants, but immediately regretted it as the sharp ends cut into his soaked skin. He went to look at the hole again. He could feel a desperate sort of frustration welling up in him, as he guessed the time to be at least half past three by now. The fish was there. He was so taken by that fact that he hovered above the hole for a good few minutes. The fish looked nervous and it kept popping its head out a bit and then reversing back in the hole as if something was not quite comfortable inside. He saw the trident laying on the sea floor at the side of the hole. He needed to retrieve it quickly without much fuss so that he did not scare the fish away.

But then he hesitated. With the trident in his hands hovering above the hole he thought of the shells cutting into his flesh. They were definitely what she would have liked best. But he was not sure any more what he would like to give her best. He thought that giving her both the fish and the shells would be inappropriate, each thing removing the other's importance. And he felt that he was meant to kill the fish as that was what he had set out to do on that day. Not killing it would be unfair to himself and to the fish, like cancelling a pre-arranged agreement. Even if this would bring the fish's death. He thought of all these very quickly as he hovered above the hole and with a deep breath dived and thrust the trident towards the hole. It hit the rock at the side of the hole, breaking part of the rock and lifting a cloud of grey stone and sand around. He caught a glimpse of the fish leaving the hole and in his panic delayed to come up for air. He took small quick breaths spitting the snorkel away from his mouth and dived quickly again to try and find the fish. The panic came over him as the hole lay empty and the fish was nowhere to be seen. He caught sight of the crab near the cement brick. He felt a heavy disappointment and he swore in his wet swollen mouth. Then he saw the fish hiding behind a low rock.  Its grey wet body was still, but its tale was shaking. He felt the excitement coming back and dived for the trident. His right arm had felt heavy, cold and foreign, like a wooden prosthetic arm when he threw the trident the first time. Now he pinched it and poked and hit it with his other hand to bring it back to life and warm it up a bit. He approached the fish from behind and with a controlled exhaling breath he took his time aiming. The trident left his hand and silently hit the fish on the spine. It moved its tail spasmodically but did not really flap around as much as he thought it would have. He had to go back for a breath before retrieving the trident with the fish.

He came out by the rock with the rusty chain. The fish was already dead. He must have caught something in his spine to kill it so fast. It looked smaller than he had imagined, deformed by the glass of the mask, its size enhanced. He sat by the chain numb from the cold. His fingertips were full of cuts from the shells and had been bleeding. The shells were in his pants and had also cut quite deep into his flesh. He could not feel anything with his fingertips, they were so wet and wrinkled. He picked up all the small spiky shells and threw them far in the water.The sun scorched his skin filling it with goosebumps. He shuddered violently but did not move for the towel. The fish still wet and heavy and grey, lay there with its eyes shiny with what he thought resembled a startled expression. The beautiful nautilus next to it was fighting the fish with its presence. So he picked it up and threw it as far away as possible. He could not make a move yet to wash and change his clothes. Suddenly he reached for his shoe and took out his watch. The time was ten minutes to five. A panic came over him and his hands reached to his head and his fingers combed through his hair. He got up fast and and dried himself quickly without rinsing. He put on his clothes that clung to his still wrinkled skin. There was no way he would be in time now. Would she wait for him? He left all his things in an opening in the rocks. He put the fish in the net bag and started to climb up the rocks. The fish looked out of place in the bag and he thought it was getting smaller by the minute the further away he got from the sea.

At the very top of the rocks he stumbled on a thorny bush and fell sideways with force onto the net bag. The fish got squashed under his ribs and he heard its spine and jaws braking under his weight. He cursed and got up inspecting his white shirt. The previously sharply ironed shirt was wet and wrinkled now and with a fishy grey patch on its side. His eyes welled with angry pressure. He picked up the fish and looked at it to see if it still looked all right. He rushed forwards on the path using the downwards slope to help him, walking fast and feeling a sorry kind of love for the fish. He wanted to present it in a way that did it justice, so that she too would see it as an offering, as part of his dedication to her. But a few metres ahead he stopped dead in his tracks. The fish was not gutted. He could not present her with a fish that was not cleaned. Would she be expected to clean and gut it and de-scale it herself? He very clearly remembered that the fisherman had gutted his fish before parading it through the village and taking it to his wife. How could he not have thought of that? And why did he not have his knife with him? He stood there with the fish in the net-bag looking at it as if it was meant to have the answer. It was hopeless. He could not go to her with a dead fish with its insides still intact. He thought of throwing it away and running to her. Then he thought of going with it as it was but not giving it to her. The first he found immoral. The second he found rude. He sat down with the fish in his lap and his fingers through his hair. He got up, turned around and made his way home. He would gut it there and leave it with his mother. He dragged his feet up hill and looked at the fish in the net bag. He could see her still waiting for him. Slowly her eyes losing their sparkle as he was not showing up. Then she would get up, walking straight and full of her pride, not looking around any more to see if he was approaching, and all the while she would have no idea about the fish.

                                                                         ~

The Fish

Aretousa's The Fish

Aretousa's The Fish at Sea

Snaps

In the end of last week I found myself on the train from Glasgow to London. Initially my carriage was almost empty so I indulged in some quiet time and changed a few seats till I found an unreserved spot that I liked. That seat was part of a four seat arrangement around a table; all other three seats were empty and unreserved. At Carlisle the carriage was suddenly full and people were struggling to find a free seat. A company of three came and occupied the unreserved seats around my table. There were two men and a lady, all past the age of sixty as far as I could guess and all three seemed to be friends or in any case they knew each other already. They each had a fat bundle of Sunday newspapers which they dropped with a thud on the table and started to ferociously read without exchanging a word for a good part of an hour. That suited me very fine, as the increasingly loud background noise was giving me a nauseous headache. After an hour or so, the three people started to converse with each other and I soon worked out that two of them were a couple and the other man knew them relatively well.

I initially tried to not listen to their conversation, but by doing that their talking became just a noise which joined the other loud background noise, only to make my head worse. But if I concentrated and focused on their talk, then the background noise slowly faded away and my hearing cleared. I have had a long time to study their faces and clothes undisturbed already, so I had now the chance to match a voice to each person. The next two hours or so, were a very similar experience to getting to know a new lover. They were quite posh people; the couple seemed to own a large estate off Carlisle which was very close to the other man's farm. They talked about the different ways they had tried to raise money to keep it going and the land and things they had to sell and auction in order to save it from bankruptcy. The other man had a very memorably typical "English" face to me and was talking about being a farmer and his trials during the "mad cow" times. They all had children and grandchildren and houses in France and Northern Italy and by the next hour I felt I had already been to the house in France and met the man's newborn grandson. Next they talked about travelling and where they had gone in the past three years. The couple had done one of my dream trips, the Trans Siberian rail journey through Russia and China, which I was only able to partly complete. Their description of it to the man was as good as being on that train.

It was a very funny, yet oddly familiar feeling. The strangeness of it all in the beginning. New faces and new voices talking about a completely different way of life. Then as you relax and listen and let yourself go, you feel you are suddenly being sucked in, drawn into a completely alien place. At that point you can almost see yourself living like that, like those new people, being a part of this other life. And if at that point you don't get scared of letting go or of the feeling of losing yourself, you have suddenly found yourself joined with this new life, lost in a whirlpool of an otherness. And before you know it that otherness becomes familiar and becomes your reality and you are caught in and living in it, with all its details. I felt I knew their common friend Mary and I felt I knew all the people they were talking about, I could almost smell them at that very point. If you narrowly escape getting sucked in with this new "love", then you probably feel a great sense of relief, of what it could have been, a relief from having avoided entering an alien place. But if you have been drawn in, then what else is there for you than that very thing?

And so there I was, vulnerable by my tiredness and my hearing ache, a complete stranger to them but totally living in their world for almost three hours. The trolley came to our table twice and as if by plan, both times the tea had just finished as the trolley reached our table. The man joked with me about it, how we were never going to get our tea before we reached London, and I felt like my uncle was joking with me at that point and not a total stranger. The three people left very abruptly as the train stopped, I barely had time to say bye or smile at them. I did not think of them again until now, of the "snap" I got into their lives. Today I saw a photo of the Prince of Wales in the newspaper and I suddenly realised that was who that man on the train reminded me of. And then I thought of all the "snaps" people get in their lifetimes and what could determine when they allow themselves to be taken along or resist. It is probably a very fine line between the two, maybe even sometimes a bit of a chance, like when we never got the tea on the train.

Some of the images I am working on for the children's book, include partly obscured views of things. I tried out here some ways of partly hiding images based on the faces of those three people.

  

Happy Halloween

I am quite proud of the fact that I had very little fears as a kid and could face most things and situations with great courage. In fact I seemed to attract all sorts of potentially dangerous situations and came in contact with things and living things that I should have most probably avoided. The root of this fearlessness of course, was founded on the lack of awareness of potential dangers combined with a strong desire to prove myself useful to others, as well as a secret satisfaction in coming very close to danger, but avoiding it in the last minute. With this attitude, I was the one kid everyone came to when there was trouble, so that I had to handle living snakes, climb up very high trees to rescue stuck cats, go deep down abandoned building foundations to retrieve balls, try to trap rats without killing them, remove dead bodies of electrocuted cats, enter abandoned old houses at night looking for clues, talking to total strangers about random things and so on and so forth.

I had my fair share of accidents and scars from behaving like this, but all that these achieved was to give my sense of fearlessness a boost, as none of them were very serious and after a small accident more kids seemed to approach me with brand new missions and I felt really useful, as if I had some unique power. Once, when I was seven years old, I got stuck in the ancient elevator of our block of flats by myself after a power cut. I was in there in the dark, between two floors, for more than two hours before the firemen came to get me out, but all the while I was in conversation with a friend of mine who was talking to me from the other side of the elevator door. I genuinely do not remember feeling scared then, and that incident was the cherry on my pie of reputation as a fearless child. It followed me all the way to high school, until one day, when I was on an island with two friends of mine staying in a rented room, it left me for ever.

One evening, when we came back to our room from a whole day out, we laid on our beds exhausted but happy. The windows were open as the heat was still excruciating, the lights were on and the curtains drawn. Suddenly I remember one of my friends shouting "cockroach!cockroach!". I have to say here, that the Greek islands have a specific kind of blond-reddish colour cockroach which can reach a very large size and can occasionally fly. They are a very common sight there, attracted by the wet and humid conditions of the islands and are more like a "creature" rather than a "pest", mainly living outdoors but often venturing indoors through drains or through open windows and doors. There is very little one can do to avoid them completely and they can be found occasionally even in the most hygienically clean houses. The cockroach in our room was behaving typically of the species and walking along the line where the ceiling met the wall. They seem to like walking along edges and corners rather than in exposed areas. My friends both looked at me with the expectation that I would get up and catch it or something and throw it out of the open window. They both stayed there with heads turned to me for what felt like ages. The cockroach walked all the way to the window edge and stopped there, but I still had not moved from my spot.

I think I had handled spiders before in the presence of these friends so they were still standing around as if in a frozen frame waiting for me to move. When it became apparent that I was not moving anywhere, one of my friends tried to shake the curtain in an attempt to lead the cockroach out of the open window. The cockroach (which I think must have some sort of high sensory intelligence) started to fly around the room, with a huge spread of papery winds that made an unforgettably high pitched sound. At that point my friends screamed and ducked on the floor, the cockroach eventually sat on the curtain and somebody must have come in the room and got it out somehow. Meanwhile, I was still sat on the bed, my blood completely frozen, my heart racing and then stopping and then racing and then stopping again. The sweat had almost frozen on my skin, then the heat came and hit me hard and the sweat started burning and my whole body was burning and it felt like there was no air and no one ever asked me to do anything remotely courageous again.

This thing with the cockroaches was totally my Grandmother's fault. In her naivety she used to tell me all sort of age inappropriate things and tales, so that occasionally I got them all mixed up in my head. As a kid I remember her finding cockroaches in our house and catching them with her hand, crushing them or killing them with the sole of a shoe. After she had done either of these things as if they were the most natural thing in the world, then she would sit me down and say: "Let me tell you now about the story of the lady with the long black hair who used to go to the hairdressers". Apparently this lady who had long thick black hair (just like my grandmother had) used to save all the little money she had to go to the hairdressers to have her hair styled this particular way: all rolled up into a bun on the back of her head. This required a certain amount of rolls and sprays and so on and was a long and expensive hairstyle and the lady could only afford to do it once a month. (I am not sure what decade my Grandmother was referring to, but it always seemed to me at the time that she was talking about someone she knew in Crete, between the wars. I am more likely to believe now that this was all an urban legend.) 

Anyway, the lady tried her best to keep this hairdo going for the whole month, so that she did not take the bun apart from her head, did not wash or comb her hair. When a strange smell started to come out from her little house, the neighbours went in to see what was wrong. They found her seemingly asleep on her bed, dressed in her night gown and the hair arranged in the bun on top of her head. But then the bun and the hair seemed to move and to the neighbours' horror the whole thing came apart in their hands, detaching from her head when they tried to touch it. The cockroaches had used it as a nest, they had burrowed in there and all the way under the poor lady's scalp. They were feeding on the lady's brains and newly hatched cockroaches were emerging all the time. My grandmother would shake her head in a moment's mourning and then she would go along her business, washing the dishes and doing her chores. Meanwhile I stood there, completely petrified for the first time in my life of a living creature, not really wanting to see one like that again, really feeling like cutting my hair short (and doing it for years afterwards) and not really wanting to sleep again. If I ever come across a cockroach now that I have a child, I would like to believe that I will be able to remove it from the vicinity somehow without betraying my fear. Or that I will be able to remove myself and the child from the situation and hope that the cockroach won't be there when we return. Or that someone else will remove it for us. I really do not want to think about it that much.

  

Book Leaves

A couple of weeks ago I decided to write and illustrate a children's book. This is something I have been thinking about for a long time, something that has always lingered in my mind as a possibility. But the idea had never taken any shape as such, because I never really thought about it seriously for long enough. But two weeks ago I started thinking that I should really work on something that was "real". This was the exact word that my mind used, so then I had to question why writing and illustrating a children's book was more real than, for example, writing this blog or making some work at home. The work I make at home and on this blog has an immediate affect on my close environment and is beneficial to me as a result of that and of course as a process in its own right. So I came to the conclusion that the use of the world real in this case was highly associated with addressing a wider relevant audience and also potentially translating this new way of communicating to an audience (in this case the children's book) into cash.

Once this became clear in my mind I started thinking about the story of the book. Looking back at this, I am a bit puzzled as to why I should start thinking of making up a story rather than thinking of the visual side of the book first, namely its illustrations. I consider myself a visual person, so that came as a surprise, but that is how it happened and the story was more or less completed within a weekend and I was happy with it. Then the most bizarre thing happened as I was completely unable to proceed with the illustrations and I got caught up in a strange place and felt like someone who is holding a pencil in their hands for the first time. I have a large collection of illustrated books for children so I am familiar with a lot of different styles of illustrating, from different countries and different decades. But it only now became apparent that illustrating a book for children was a whole different discipline of its own, one that in spite of my love for illustrated books remained a strange land to me.  

So I flicked through the pages of numerous children's books and made a short, very basic, list of the kinds of illustrations that stood out to me and grouped them into 5 categories. Firstly, there were the books with illustrations which filled the whole page. In these books the pages are full with drawings of great detail, there are hardly any spaces where you can see the blank page behind. These illustrations are busy, detailed and quite traditional. Although they are not overall my favourite, I have noticed that children love observing them and finding all the small things depicted in the pages. Such illustrations feature in classic books like Each Peach Pear Plum and The Gruffalo. Secondly there are the illustrations done seemingly effortlessly, as if on the spot, illustrations with great movement and expression, typically using black waterproof ink and then watercolours on top. The background in these illustrations is typically left blank and they include Quentin Blake's illustrations and Polly Dunbar's in the Tilly and Friends series. Thirdly there are the retro illustrations, more stylised, bold and brightly coloured, reminiscent of 50's design. They are the ones I am mostly drawn to and I have seen some new illustrators working in this way, such as Alison Murray and Bob Staake. On the fourth category there are illustrators who have worked with or included many of what I consider indirect marks (for more on this look here). These illustrations have been made with collage, stamps, different mark making tools and screen prints. Famous illustrators working this way include Eric Carle and Leo Lionni. Finally, in the fifth category I included books with illustrations which incorporated in their design the use of flaps, holes and textured materials. Exceptional books of this style include the French books illustrated by Ramadier & Bourgeau and the books by Petr Horacek.

What this very basic categorisation of illustrations made me realise is, that whichever style one chose to go with, or invent a new one for that matter, they would have to stick with it throughout the book. They would have to be consistent. There would have to be a continuation through the book, so that a young reader or observer can follow the plot and the characters from page to page. That realisation hit me a bit and it occurred to me that this would be the most challenging thing for me to master if I were to indeed illustrated the story myself. The other thing that I noticed, flicking through the book leaves, was that I was not very keen (with a few exceptions) on the illustrations done of human characters. My story has several characters in it and the main character is a small boy who appears in every illustration. Getting that boy drawn so that it is memorable and distinct and also being able to draw it again and again so that it is recognisable as the same boy in different poses, would all be key factors.

So I spent the next week or so trying to draw and design this little boy, again and again. Caught in a bit of a trap by keeping in my mind all the illustrations of children that I had seen and mainly disliked and worse the ones that I had liked. As the days went by and the boy was still nowhere near completed I started to have irrational thoughts. I started to think as I was falling asleep, that there will be ages before I ever manage to draw this boy, if I ever manage it, and that it was inevitable that in the meantime someone would actually come up with the same idea as I had and write the same story. The almost identical book would be published with great success and all because I had left it so long to draw this boy. Then I would wake up laughing at myself for giving this story of mine so much credit; but nevertheless instead of going back to sleep I would start sketching the little boy all over again. As more days went by with no boy, I started seeing clues all around me that directed back to my story. Just like when you are thinking of a song and then you turn on the radio and there it is playing on. So I thought I should leave the boy alone and start working on the enjoyable to me bits of the book, the background and the environments surrounding the characters.

So, as the first illustration includes fallen autumn leaves, we had some fun collecting a lot of them with Aretousa and trying out different ways of making marks with them. After two weeks only the first illustration is done, with more than ten to go, but I did manage to make the boy after I had done the background. I made it to kind of fit the background as I was unable to make him any other way. The words leaf and leaves in Greek (filo and fila) start with the letter Φ (fi), so this was a perfect opportunity to make one more letter for Aretousa. The word φύλλο (filo as in filo pastry-very thinly rolled pastry, as thin as a leaf or a book page) is also used for book pages in Greek so that you would say a book has so and so many leaves. I am taking this as a good sign since I am trying to make a book of my own, although I have to say that the only thing that felt "real" this week was actually making the letter Φ.

Fiare Luăm

There often are some specific sounds that one associates with specific places, so much so that when you hear those sounds your brain seems to automatically register you present at that specific place. These sounds seem to have become so familiar and so connected to a place, that their presence is not questioned any more, they are part of the place, part of the background. For example in Athens, there have always been some mobile sellers who use pick up vans to sell everything, from pots and soil to fruits and vegetables. Others collect old household items, from chairs and beds to fridges and washing machines and others simply ride around to advertise forthcoming theatre productions. What they all have in common is a megaphone and someone calling out what they are selling or buying and what they are advertising. These days some of the sounds are pre-recorded, but when I was small they used to improvise on the spot and call out loudly to everyone, making rhymes or even singing out to advertise their services. The theatre production callers often used music too to attract their audience. These sounds are so familiar and associated with Athens in my mind, that if I heard them one day in London, for an instance my brain would think I am in Athens. It would be a confusing thing.  

I believe that a similar sound for a British person would be the ice cream van. I think that its music must be so synonymous to a childhood place or a vacation town, that it would bring you straight back there, were you to suddenly hear it in a foreign country. Ironically, when I first came to study in Newcastle, I often heard this strange music playing in the late spring afternoons underneath my house. I had no idea where it was coming from, as the van remained obscured from my view. I could tell that the sound was moving closer, then staying at one place and them moving away. But I found it an eerie and melancholic sound and it took me two whole years to finally work out it was an ice cream van announcing its appearance. I still find it quite extraordinary that two principally identical means of advertising mobile goods and services -using loud music or words- have such a distinct and unique association with a place, that I was unable to make the connection and guess that the music was there to advertise and sell something, just like it does in Athens.

A few years ago, I accompanied a good friend of mine to a short trip to Bucharest. Her apartment was in the centre of the city and we used it as our base for our ventures further out. The first day I was there, I was woken up by the most melodic singing voice I have ever heard in a man and sat up on the bed completely astounded. I had no idea what to think of it and I could only tell it was live and not recorded singing and that it was coming from outside the window. The second morning, I woke up before I heard anything and was waiting to see if I would hear the singing again. Soon enough I heard the same man singing and I opened the window to try and locate where it was coming from. I could not see anything below, the protruding balconies were blocking my view of the road. I could hear though some brass tingling and jiggling noises and some clicking noises too. I then thought that maybe someone was singing to a girl they liked below, in the fashion of  a "candatha" love song of some Greek islands. On that day I told my friend about it and was thinking of this singing voice and its tune all day. The voice was stuck in my head and the tune was very haunting, repeating the words that sounded to me like: fare lui, fare lui.

The next day I woke my friend up earlier yet and we sat out on the balcony to wait for the man to sing again. And then we saw it; a horse and a carriage coming from all the way down the road, the hooves of the horse on the pavement clicking and the voice approaching, already really melodic from so far away. The cart was full of metal bits, parts of copper pipes, rusty cylinders, oil drums, brass handles hanging from ropes; everything was moving and making brass bell like noises. The man's voice was approaching so loud and haunting, I wished I was some sort of talent hunter person to take him off the street and straight into the opera house. If he wanted of course. I have never heard anything like his singing and my friend said he was saying "Fiare Luăm", which means literally, metal I take. For the second time I was unable to identify sound as the means for mobile sellers to advertise their goods and services; my familiarity to the Greek mobile sellers was so place-specific, so localised, that years of listening to their megaphones in Athens seems to have made no difference at all.

I find this occurrence quite disturbing. I suspect that a similar thing might be happening with other very familiar things, not only with sounds and their connection to places. I find the beach where I spent a big part of my childhood summers so familiar to me that it almost feels it is my own. This summer I came across some pebbles on it which I have never seen there before. I came across them by chance when Aretousa picked up one and gave it to me. They look quite normal when dry, but once they are wet they reveal a very strange, almost futuristic network of lines all over their surface. There are not that many of them on the beach and I made a point of collecting only a few. These small little pebbles were such a shock to my sense of knowing the beach and my familiarity to it, that they fell literally like small bombshells on the whole summer. I took them out of my pockets and wet them and placed them on whatever was around and kept on checking them again and again. I found it quite amazing that a natural thing like those pebbles could have such a linear and geometric design on them; that what I considered a very natural place, with earthy colours and familiar single-colour pebbles, would suddenly produce these strange, almost man-drawn lines.

But mainly, the shock was to my sense of familiarity to the place, to a place where I feel extremely comfortable, and to the arrogant -and of course false- notion that one might really know a place or a person inside out. The crucial detail that things could change or that you simply fail to notice things seems to become obscured by that sense of comfort and familiarity, to the extent that I was unable to recognise something so familiar as a sound advertising some mobile goods, in a slightly different context, twice. But these pebbles were such a big surprise to my personal notion of the beach, that I suspect in the summers to come I will be much more perceptive to it and the way it has become now, after so many years.

Sea Monsters, Part Two

I might have only been able to find some small and fragmented samples of "Sea Monsters" on the beach this year, but a new breed of things seems to be making itself present there, in a very conspicuous way, not solemnly reserved for after-stormy weather. The best time to observe this is just after sunrise during a walk along the beach. Many people with dogs choose to do that in the early morning, so that the dogs have a chance to swim too before the beach gets busy with kids and people who object to dog bathing. They are the people who typically pick up these things, not because they want to clean the beach or necessarily pass them on to someone, but merely because it is almost impossible for anyone not to stop and pick them up. During such a walk you would be sure to come across many forgotten beach toys. People stay on the beach till after sunset, so probably by the time they decide to leave they can hardly see what is been left behind. The toys just lie there on the sand, on the pebbles and amongst the dried seaweed. Most commonly there are plastic rakes, moulds, spades, boats, buckets, cars, balls and so on. What makes them irresistible, even to serious adults, is their bright colours and the way they stand out like huge candies scattered on the beach.

The first time I was aware of this, is when my aunty brought back from her walk a pink plastic spade and a green plastic rake for Aretousa. I thought it was an one-off incident to come across these things, but as the weeks passed by more and more things were brought back. Of course Aretousa was much more taken by these things than any other present bought for her, including her own brand new set of beach toys, which remained almost untouched throughout the summer. Many thoughts passed through my mind then, things like: why do people keep on forgetting and losing their toys week after week? How come that amongst the toys we have been finding we still have not come across the same design twice? How many different designs of rakes and spades are out there? If the toys are not picked up by anyone -which is very rare as by ten thirty in the morning the beach is almost always clean- or if they are left on a bench in the pine forest, then someone will eventually pick them up, pass them on to a kid they know, who will eventually forget them on the beach and so start the circle again. So the beach becomes a place for exchanging toys really, as no one seems to care whether they still have their original set of beach toys or they are just playing with found ones.

A sample of beach toys found within a fortnight

This might have started like a little summer surprise and a treat for a small girl, but it soon turned into a bit of an obsession with me. Every morning I was waiting to see what kind of shape was brought back and what colour and size it would be. I observed that the colours which came up most were, pink, purple, green and orange. They all had a kind of powdery, pastel finish to them, which made them look like some sort of sweets even more. Then a very sad and unreasonable thought came to me about this new kind of "Sea Monsters". When such colourful, useful and fun things lay on the beach on a daily basis, how would any kids be expected to look for the kind of "Sea Monsters" of my childhood? On the beach, with its natural, earthy colours, these objects stand out so much, it is almost offensive to my eyes. My love for natural colours, my inability to apply paint on top of any three dimensional object vaguely resembling a sculpture and my reminiscing of old "Sea Monsters", all rebel against these newcomers. But then, I remember that with a closer look, the pebbles and the sand itself have quite bright colours. My cousins and I used to collect bright pebbles and bring them home. When we reached home they were dry and looked pale and dull. But when we put them under water again all their colours came back to life. Then the most absurd thought came to my mind: what would it take for my small, delicate samples of old style "Sea Monsters" to be noticed on the beach? What if they were the same colours as these beach toys; is that what it takes for a natural shape like that to stand out? Of course, little did I care about other people's perception of painted bits of broken and twisted roots. What I was really interested in was to see if I could bare to paint these things with bright colours and to observe what became of them once painted.

And so, with a few left over wall paints, I started to try and recreate the prominent colours of the toys: pink, light purple, dark purple, orange and green. I got the colour combinations right almost instantly and intuitively for some, but I found it almost impossible to arrive at the very powdery, pale purple used in these toys and the very distinctive green, which seemed to have an enormous amount of yellow in it. It was very important to me that the colours were as close to that of the toys as possible, to recreate this soft, plastic, toy-like feel that is so distinctive and characteristic about them. Dipping the pieces of old fashioned "Sea Monsters" in the paint was actually quite a satisfactory experience, but I only managed to cover two of them completely; the rest remained only half submerged in paint.

After that all that remained for me to do was take them to the beach and see how they looked there.

I really did not know what to think of the pieces of "Sea Monsters" painted and dropped on the beach then, and I still do not know what to think of them now. I only know that I preferred finding the old fashioned "Sea Monsters" the way I did back then and I prefer finding the new, plastic toys the way we did now. But because I remained unsure of what to think of them, I brought a few back to London and what a surprise it was when I saw them laid out on typical London backdrops. They looked more at home here than they ever did covered in paint on the beach and seemingly unaffected by their journey as they were, they fell right into place amongst the colours of London's transport information leaflets. At the end of the holidays we had around four bags full of plastic beach toys, of which we gave away a big portion to friends and acquaintances with children. Near the time when we were preparing to leave, I had the reoccurring dream that I was walking on the beach at sunrise and I was scattering the remaining plastic toys around for the early walkers to find. I almost thought I should do that, but of course never did and they are all still in a bag waiting for Aretousa to play with next summer.