Of Birds and Windy Weather

When was it I came close to complaining it was getting too hot? A week and a half ago?? The last few days I’ve been back to wearing a winter jacket! On Saturday for the opening of the sculpture biennal I took a spring/summer jacket, but so wished I’d taken a warmer one instead! So the next day I took one of the winter jackets out again. (Actually all my winter coats/ jackets are still in a wardrobe in the flat and usually never get put away any further than that. But I had “put them away” in the sense of giving them a brush and going through the pockets etc, and hoping not to need them again for another four months or so…)

Walking home from the Supermarket on Sunday (with the warmer jacket on), I stopped for a while on the walkbridge over the river, put my groceries down, and watched the gulls playing in the wind. They certainly seemed to be enjoying it (the wind) even if I wasn’t…

You who live near windy coasts and other waters that attact gulls, will know what I mean. They wait for a hard gust of wind, throw themselves against it, flap their wings like crazy… Sometimes they get lucky and manage to take advantage of it for elegant loops. At other times the wind gets too strong for them and they just look ridiculous, flapping away but being blown backwards instead. But they take it all with a laugh!

But the gulls can be bullies too… This one kept bothering a family of goldeneyes:

The goldeneyes I’m really happy to see, because when I started watching ducks from this spot in the river, three or four years ago, there was one pair of them, male and female, among a flock of mallards; but then the female disappeared, and for two years I kept seeing the drake alone; still keeping close to, but also some distance from, the mallards. He looked lonely!

Now there is again a male and a female and I think I spotted some little ones too. It could be a different drake too of course, but in my imagination it is the same one who has found himself a new wife…

I’d still need an even better camera to spy on birds!

The Silver 70s

In December 2011, I blogged about having received an email request to use an image I had published on my blog back in 2009. It was not one of my photos, but a scanned image of an old ticket from Leeds Rolarena in 1972 - when at the age of 16 going on 17, I spent a month in Yorkshire, staying with an English family. (If you want to read or revisit that story, you’ll find it here.)

The request came from someone putting together a video for a 1970s exhibition at Leeds City Museum. The exhibition has come and gone (January – April 2012), but the videos from it can now be watched on YouTube (published by the museum). The clip where my ticket appears (briefly) - My 1970s: Going Out - is just one of 52 short videos on a wide variety of topics. If you’re feeling nostalgic about the 1970s, go to YouTube to watch some more…  Knock yourself out!

 

Sculpture Biennal 2012–The Grand Opening

Today was the opening ceremony of the Sculpture Biennal 2012 in my town (Borås, Sweden).

When I set out from home around 10:30 AM it looked like we were going to have a sunny and fine day - but the wind turned out to be so cold I actually wished I’d taken my winter jacket! Brrr! And just as the opening ceremony started at noon, so did the rain…

I’m glad I went early because that gave me a chance to walk around and look at many of the sculptures before the “crowd” began to gather – and I even got a bit of blue sky in some of my photos.

Most of the new/borrowed sculptures this time are displayed in and outside/near our Cultural Centre (the building in the background above), which was re-opened last autumn after a major renovation. The building houses the art museum, the town library and the town theatre.

Opposite the Cultural Centre is one of two big old churches in the town centre belonging to the Church of Sweden, which used to be state church until church and state were separated in the year 2000.

Actually this church is not all that old – it’s from 1906.

In the Sculpture Biennal of 2012, the Cultural Centre and the Church are cooperating, and some of the borrowed sculptures are on display inside the church.

The Biennal opening ceremony took place in the little park behind the church. You can see from the way people were dressed that it was far from a hot day!

         

I have to confess that when it started to rain, I gave up staying around to listen to the whole speech. Instead I sneaked away to have a cup of tea in the café, before the rest of the crowd got the same idea…

The sculpture in the pictures above is

Var rädd om jorden [Look after the Earth]
by Carl-Fredrik Reutersvärd

Here is what the Biennal brochure says about it:

The breadth of Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd’s art manifests itself by crossing the boundaries between different genres and techniques. His works often show the influence of humour, puns and word association games. At the age of 55, Reuterswärd had a stroke which paralysed him on his right side. Since then he has worked hard to re-learn how to write and paint - now with his left hand.

The bronze sculpture called Var rädd om jorden [Look after the Earth] (2010), is an exclamation mark at a distance, but the Earth detonated when viewed more closely. Looking after one another and our Earth, living to ensure we do not poison, over-consume and stress ourselves into violence and unnecessary depletion of the Earth’s resources, are the messages the artist wants to convey. The work was donated to the town of Borås before the re-opening of the Cultural Centre.

More sculptures coming up in future posts!
(Also in my Picture Book blog.)

 

And the Moral of the Story Is …

In yesterday’s post - answering the question what kind of book I would write if I could – I said that although I always loved to write, I never really felt I had a Great Story lurking, just waiting to be told.

This morning I woke up reminded of something that might contradict that statement: On several occasions lately, I’ve woken up in the morning with the feeling of having dreamt “a complete story” rather than the usual odd fragments shifting shape and focus from one part of the dream to the other.

The annoying part is that I’m never quite able to recall the details! It’s just that feeling… of the dream having had a starting point, and a proper (hm!) plot, and reaching The End before I wake up. But the memories of it dissolve when hit by daylight!

This morning I stayed in bed for a while, trying to recall the dream. But of course the notepad and pencil that should be beside my bed weren’t there, and I had to get up to get them, and before I’d found them, most of the dream was gone. All that I was able to jot down was one sentence, summing up the “moral” of the story:

“Sometimes the person who we think is placing obstacles in our way, is really the one who is trying to clear the way.”

Then I put the notepad aside and completely forgot all about it during the rest of the day - until just now when I happened to find the pad again, and saw the words I had written on it.

As for the rest, I only vaguely seem to recall a house full of people, and flowerpots being moved around and turning up where they shouldn’t be – and that the person responsible was not the one everyone suspected.

If you happen to be a Great Novelist, please feel free to steal the plot. I doubt I’ll be able to do much with it…
*LOL*

BTT: Do It Yourself

Today’s Booking Through Thursday question comes from Cathy De Los Santos, who asks:

If you could write a book, what would it be about, and why? (Though, of course, some of you already HAVE.)

I used to want to be a writer - or at least I used to think of myself as someone who wanted to be a writer, which is not necessarily the same thing. I never really had my head full of stories waiting to be written though… At least not with plots long enough to build a book around.

Back in the 1990’s I attended a few summer courses in creative writing and I enjoyed that a lot; but I still never really felt that I had The Great Story lurking, just waiting to be told.

This past year, after the death of my parents… Going through old photo albums, and notes on bit and pieces of family history, and old postcards collected and written by my grandmother’s siblings… I do sometimes wonder if there might be a story waiting among those fragments…

I think that if I could, I’d want to write a book about “ordinary people” whose story would otherwise be forgotten. To be able to make characters interesting, who would not have thought of themselves that way.

As I write that, I realize that we do have a very strong tradition of working class literature in Sweden. I read a lot of that kind of books back in my youth.

Best known abroad is probably Vilhelm Moberg’s The Emigrants series, about Swedish emigrants moving to the USA in the 19th century; also filmed by Jan Troell in the 1970's. Probably very hard to outdo!

Looking at facts rather than dreams… Forms of writing that always came easier to me have been letters, short reflections, essays, occasionally a bit of poetry. Blogging is perfect because there are no rules. A blog post can be anything (except perhaps a Great Novel). So maybe I should just stick to that…

… Or if I ever do write a book, perhaps I should try an epistolary* form!

*(= “written in the form of or carried on by letters or correspondence”)