The Potato Eater

He woke up in a fuzzy, confused way and those first couple of minutes of the day were all he lived for now. The seconds it took for his brain to start focusing and working properly were almost like before, he had not registered yet where he was or what year and month it was, he was still in the forgiving, pill-assisted arms of sleep, his nose sniffing the smell of the pillow, his eyelids still heavy, his fingers and cheek smelling faintly of saliva. And then, as he got dragged out of the sleepy, dispersing fog by his own consciousness, he remembered and felt that it no longer was like before and that the nightmare was real and he had just woken up into another day of it.

The pain he felt seemed to wake up with him and follow him around the whole day, making a point about it so that he could not forget himself at any instance. It turned everything inwards, so that all his attention was forced back onto himself, so that he was made aware of his own body and was unable to escape it. He often thought that this might have been his body's way of declaring that it had been lacking in attention and nurturing by it's owner, so he had observed himself taking extra care of certain parts of his body, like his fingers and had caught himself staring and fiddling with them repeatedly. He had bought a glycerine smelling ointment with which he massaged his fingers and palms frequently each day and then he sat and waited for the oily substance to dry so that he could move on and use his hands again. It was often a good part of an hour till he got up after massaging his hands, but the sense of time had little significance to him now.

He would have had no interest in getting up from the bed and doing much at all had it not been for one sickly and yellowing ficus plant that she had left behind. He wanted with all his heart to kill it and had purposefully not watered it for weeks, but when it denied its destiny he became obsessed with seeing how much it would last before it dried out. Lately he had felt the cruelty of the fact that he had to be burdened with it because her mind was clear and light and free enough for her to have forgotten the damn thing behind. He wanted to throw it away, but he hated the fact that he had no choice. In a moment of rage he had kicked it and broken the pot into three visible parts, but the ficus roots still held the pot more or less together. Since then he had picked it up, put a black tape all around it and started to water it a little bit each day. The water dripped down onto the marble top of the table and onto the floor. Other than that, there was only green tea, the potatoes and the smell of soap that held him together.

He took an awfully long time with each thing he did. He stayed under the shower and let the water run on him till he lost the sense of his skin. He washed his hands with an old fashioned soap and smelled it in the damp air gaining a great amount of pleasure from it. When he got an instant of a pleasurable moment he immediately tensed and stilled to see if his pain was still there. And of course it was, but he now realised that he might soon be unable to live without this pain. The apartment was so bare, free from anything that would cause memories to resurface as they had put it, and he liked it very much this way. But it was not true that he would feel a great weight being lifted when all the clutter was gone. He felt a great sense of loss and he missed everything, so much so that sometimes he stretched his hand to catch something and when he reached an empty space his heart tingled like an amputated limb. He was nevertheless able to only take care of as few things as possible now.

If it was up to him he would not eat. He felt as if he was feeding his pain to keep him alive. He boiled water in a big pot and in a small one at the same time. The small one was ready very quickly and he threw in green tea leaves and stirred them around with a Japanese delicate bamboo whisk which he did not remember owning. He strained the tea through a sieve in his one mug and sat down to drink it. He sat for ages and drank it slowly and watched himself sitting there, his mind blank and his gaze glazed. At least that was some improvement, he was not thinking. The pain returned, refreshed by the tea it seemed, and forced him to move. The water in the big pot was boiling now.

He took the potatoes in the sink in a plastic tub and washed them very carefully with a metal brush. Some earth and sprouts were cleaned out and he run his fingers over the surface to make sure they were clean. He often scratched his fingers with the metal brush as he cleaned the potatoes and he made no effort to be careful about it; he enjoyed the stinging of the water and soap on the tiny cuts. He peeled each potato carefully with a knife and tried to make one continuous cut so that he ended with a curly garland-like bit of potato left behind. Once the potatoes they were all peeled, he cut each one into six parts, as equal in size as possible. At that point he stopped and stilled in a moment of panic, checking, and then he felt his pain again.

The water was almost all evaporated in the big pot, so he filled it up again with cold water from the tap. He fiddled about on the spot while waiting for it to boil again and then threw the potatoes in. He had tried all sorts of different potatoes lately and had finally found the ones he liked the best. After that he stuck to those ones and got into a state of great agitation when they were not in stock at the local shop. He now took some green oil and a lemon and made his dressing and for the first time in months felt the inklings of hunger. He drained the potatoes and salted them and dressed them and then he sat down to eat them. He had been eating them just like that for weeks and that predictability of their taste, of their purchase and preparation was what gave him something constant to grab upon.

On his next trip to the shop something extraordinary happened to him. He picked up a jar of capers. He did not realise that he had done it until he was at the till and had the money counted and ready to pay for the potatoes. Then he noticed that the woman asked for more money and he saw the jar of capers. He flushed and flapped about with the change, put everything in his bag and rushed off. He did not touch the jar of capers for a week. Then one day another thing happened. He crossed the road and approached the shop from the opposite side. He had not done this for months and stopped half way up the street, thinking that he should cross back again and walk his usual way. But he kept on and then stopped outside the florist's. He saw a pink pot with black handles and before he knew it he was paying for it at the till and was also buying a bag of soil. He reached the house completely exhausted, he felt totally spent and cried a shaking, violent sob with no tears.

The next two days he felt worse than ever and he dragged himself around lost in a pill-filled miasma. But the third day he got up, went straight to the ficus plant, took it out of his broken pot, unravelled slightly its spinning roots and re-potted it into the new pink and black amphora-like pot. He cleaned everything and placed it back on its spot, watered it and finally sat down to observe it. It looked perfect and somehow less yellow now and less sick. He cleaned his hands with the soap and stopped and stilled to inhale the warm steamy old soap smell. He made his boiled potatoes and decided to add the capers to the dressing. By the end of the day he felt his pain coming back, like an old friend knocking on a paper door and walking through it anyway, without waiting for an answer. But that day he felt a physical tiredness that was so welcomed, so longed for, that he cried in his sleep and woke up on a wet pillow.

He applied the glycerine-like cream on his knees and rubbed his thinning legs. He went to boil the water and only put on the small pot for the tea. The tea felt tart and he put a spoonful of jam in it, like they used to do in Russia. He licked the spoon and felt the forgotten sweetness of it. He stared at the ficus who was now leaning towards the window and the light. The curtains on the window were dirty. He had never noticed how dirty they were. They must have accumulated all the smells of cigarettes and of cooking from the last decade. He thought of what kind of colour curtains would suit this place best. Thick enough to stop the strong sunlight from entering and blinding him but not so thick and dark as to prevent any light from reaching the ficus plant. He turned a bill envelope around and started sketching a pattern for a curtain for the room. He was happy with it after half an hour and then he got up and filled the big pot with water for the potatoes.

~

For Ms Regina Stavraki, our Art teacher who taught us everything about the potato print

Εγώ

I often try to remember the way I thought as a child, in an attempt to understand better and put myself in the place of young children and students. I find that one often remembers a lot of things about their childhood, incidents, conversations, places, people and objects, but it is very hard to try and remember how one thought about things when they were children. The pattern of thought established over the years seems to overtake and conceal the early paths of childhood thought. If I do not do this, I often find myself getting quite frustrated at the apparent self-centred demeanour of young students and at the inflexibility of opinion in teenage students. But if I try and remember some of the ways in which I thought as a child, then I am able to harvest much more patience towards seemingly unfounded behaviour because I begin to understand, or rather I begin to remember, how things seemed to me when I was a child.

One of the things that pops in my mind first, is the trouble I had as a child of comprehending the idea of identity and of people having more than one role. A very vivid example and one that I find embarrassing thinking about today, was my profound confusion over the character of James Bond. I remember someone commenting that Sean Connery was great playing James Bond in Goldfinger. Then my mother said that Ian Fleming had created the character of James Bond. And then that Ian Fleming had based James Bond on real people he had met during his service as an intelligence officer. So it was: Sean Connery is James Bond (who is based on many other people) in Ian Fleming's Goldfinger. I remember asking repeated questions about that, of who is who, and many adults explaining it to me, but not doing a great job, as I kept on it for ages, till people shushed me or laughed. I also had trouble establishing the fact that people had more than one role and more than one name to describe them, all at once. That they could be a man, and a father, and a son and a brother and a teacher and a husband and a gardener and so on. I felt that the more roles they had the more complicated they were thus the worse they would be at it, so that someone who was only a man, a son and a teacher, was definitely better than someone who was a hundred things all at the same time. If it was possible that someone was only a man or only a teacher that would be the best of all; but I saw that that was impossible by definition. The difficulty of comprehending the complexity of human identity which I demonstrated as a child, lies I think in the very strong sense that children have of their own self. It's because they have such a powerful and clear sense of their own self, that it is very hard for them to see the world from other people's points and put themselves into other people's place, so that their actions and behaviour often appear to adults as egocentric and lacking in empathy.

This very clear and strong sense of the self that children demonstrate, is often reflected in their teenage years through their opinions and beliefs on different issues. These opinions are often expressed in a black and white manner, are very categorical and inflexible and the teenager is adamant that their opinion will never change and that nothing that might happen in the future will ever alter their mind. The reason for this, lies I think in the difficulty of children to project themselves into different situations, environments and circumstances and due to their lack of experiences purely based on their age, it is extremely hard for them to see things in any other way than what feels and seems to be right for them, there and then. And because things feel and seem extremely clear to them at the time, they are very passionate that they will never change their mind about them and will always feel the same, no matter what.

When I remember it, I am often very reminiscent of this power, of feeling a hundred percent sure of something, of feeling invincible and certain and of the naivety and innocence of the belief that everything which is done with good intentions is bound to come to a good end. I remember an incident which happened during the Yugoslav war in my home town in a suburb of Athens. I think it must have been around 1993, but it could have been slightly earlier. The Yugoslav wars were very much part of our lives in Greece for several years and the coverage on the radio and television was extremely extended, detailed and constant. Everyone was following the developments of the wars, especially the Bosnian war, as if there was a war in our own country and the radio in our home and most homes was on all the time with the news. At some point there was a war alarm and everyone went to buy canned goods and bottled water from the supermarkets as news had it that the war would reach the Greek region of Macedonia. By the time I got to the supermarket with my grandmother, all that was left were jarred caper leaves and sweetened condensed milk cans.

Many operations were organised to send help to the refugee camps, by schools, churches and bigger organisations, in the form of blankets, canned food, clothes and bottled water. I took an active part in collecting and packing the aid goods at the local youth centre and it was a very uplifting and rewarding experience. What I really liked about it, was that I knew who was offering what, and I often saw fellow kids donating their dolls, or men I knew giving their old coats and ladies giving their household blankets. Everything was put in big crate boxes, and things had to be layered a certain way, so that blankets were at the bottom, followed by a layer of canned good, then more clothes, then tins again, then coats and so on and so forth. We managed to fill several large boxes and together with boxes filled from the neighbouring suburb, a whole van was filled ready to be send to the border. We were told the people would have the goods within the next two weeks and that the boxes would be delivered by air. At that point I felt that for the first time I was doing something other than listening to the radio in the night and worrying about the people of Yugoslavia, doing nothing at all to help them.

Ten days later, news came with visual images in the television, that due to a mistake several tonnes of aid goods were dropped upon a refugee camp in the border, resulting in the death of an unknown number of civilians, mainly women and children. I was never certain whether our boxes were amongst the aid dropped on the refugee camp, (but I did see images of stuffed toys, blankets and tins amongst dead bodies). Apparently our boxes were passed on to an international organisation and it was impossible to track them. But the fact was, that I was left unable to comprehend how a fundamentally positive and good willed action could have turned like that and in my desperation to understand it, I blamed it on war, giving war itself an evil personification, so that such bad and unfortunate and unfair things could surely be happening because war/evil was on. That gave me a bit of a peace of mind for a while, having something evil to blame when things went wrong, but when my child's mind started to notice that unfair and bad things were happening all the time, everywhere, regardless of whether there was a war on, and even if there was no evil around, then I was totally at a loss of how to proceed with understanding the world. Now that my earlier understanding of cause and effect was shaken, now that there was no guarantee that an action that had started with good intentions and hard work would necessarily end well, I came to notice an element of randomness and fickleness and uncontrollability, that could easily defy logic, faith and everything in between.

Of course, that worked both ways, and it could equally happen with positive things, so that the element of the unknown, of a surprise, a coincidence, luck or whatever it could be called, could become an incredibly magical thing. I thankfully noticed that also, so that I could now start perceiving myself as a person in the world who was bound to be affected by their surroundings and by circumstances. At some point I let myself see the world from as many points of view of other people as I could possibly imagine and I tried my best to put myself in the position of people whose opinions I completely and passionately disagreed with. I was hoping that in this way I could begin to understand how and why they may think the way they do and how that was justified in their own eyes. I became so good at that though, so detached from my own views and beliefs, that I lost myself a bit, as I could now see the world from everybody's point of view, so that even the actions of the worst criminal became more transparent to me. I could never agree with the beliefs, or with the actions of a criminal mind for example, but I could now understand it. When that happened and when I noticed myself understanding with ease how it was possible for people whose acts I detested to do the things they did, I stopped and after that became content with being less forceful when expressing my own views. 

The word Εγώ (Ego) means "I" and "self" in Greek and I was expecting it to be one of the first words that a child would use to describe themselves, since it is such an easy, short word. However, I have noticed that very young children refer to themselves in third person with their names, so that a boy named Harry would say for example "Harry wants some water" before he says "I want some water". Aretousa says a whole story in third person, so that Aretousa did this and that today and so on, and when I try to tell her to say "I did so and so today", she then says "Yes, you did do so and so, but Aretousa did this and that". So the letter Έψιλον (Epsilon) stands for Εγώ in the Greek alphabet letters we are making with Aretousa, although I think we are both still coming to grips with exactly what ourselves stand for.

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.