my life as a artist
the wanderer returns
Thursday 8th November 2007 9:01 PM
Hello Mr and Mrs Blogwatcher! Greetings to you, your gracefully aging parents, and all your beautiful sons and daughters! I have been away, with the poetry, the art, the tide and the fairies, on the lost shores of Aldeburgh, where Suffolk loses its toe-hold, and slips into the sea.
Aldeburgh's charming oddness and sense of singularity was enhanced and echoed by my inability to get a signal for my mobile phone or the internet connection for the lap-top. Sometimes it was like being in an Orwellian sci-fi novel called '1957'.
On my first night, I ate in the restaurant that seemed to offer the best vegetarian option. However, it turned out to be one of those nouvelle 'excuse me waiter, my plate's dirty' cuisine sort of places, so the three-bean wrap I ordered was exactly that. When the waitress brought it over, I thought she was being like a wine-waiter that pours you half an inch as a taster, so after I'd eaten it, I called her over, and said 'That's fine, I'll have some of that.' Instead, she brought me a bill for sixteen pounds, so I ate that instead, but it tasted a bit bitter and overcooked.
On Thursday night, the joint launch of the festival and the exhibition was held in the Peter Pears gallery. I got slightly drunk on red wine, and sold four text-pieces to a golden Labrador, called Tim. On Friday I stayed in and counted my dog biscuits.
On Saturday afternoon, I did a gig with Owen O'Neill, an Irish poet and playwright that I used to do comedy gigs with fifteen years ago. Aldeburgh's attentive, genteel atmosphere was very different to those days, and I'm sure that Owen found their murmurs of respectful appreciation infinitely preferable to the comedy club's usual, cheery shouts of 'Fuck off you ginger twat'
On Saturday night I had my solo gig in the Jubilee Hall. It went very well, except for a slightly strangulated laugh after I said, 'I asked the woman in the jewellers shop if they sold crucifixes. She went into the backroom, and after a short while said 'Do you want a plain one or one with a little man on?'
On Sunday, before I took the exhibition down, I sold another three paintings. ( I bit my arm, I sucked the blood, and cried 'A sale! A sale!') Such are my new-found riches, that as soon as I got back to York, I bought a bottle of maple syrup, which I blended with lime juice, fresh herbs, garlic, ginger and chilli, and savoured the sweet tang of success.
Meanwhile, outside, under the duvet of night, there are moans and rustlings, as the trees are being undressed by the ravishing wind. Mucky buggers.
Comments
Well done mate! Don't spend it all on drugs.
Posted by Les Miserable , on Friday 9th November 2007, 5:18 PM
A certified accountant buys a picture for the bar, while couples full of fish and chips do crosswords in their car, and it feels like we're in Suffolks Brigadoon, another jolly Aldeburgh afternoon.
Posted by Tom Waites , on Friday 9th November 2007, 12:23 PM
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