Monday 13 May 2013

May, the most pretentious month

2) 'A claim, by implication, an unjustified one' so says Chambers.

This is May, full of promise with flapping blouses of cloudy blossom blowing delightful expectation into our eyes.  We hardly notice brown crunchy daffodils making way for fresh green vanity bursting like silent bullets all around.  Oh yes, much promise accompanying mad birds and high white cumulus scudding the wind in painfully blue skies.  Where is the grey now? What is making people smile like lunatics at the same folk they'd have scowled at two days before? How can we resist such a show to draw us from our stuffy interior existence, casting off clouts like there's no tomorrow, let alone the end of the month. Ah me, how we display our need for Spring.

So, starting the pretentious month, halfway through, I cast off my mental clout and pretend to engage with life well lived: Karine Polwart singing 'bout her birds with birdlike precision, two barbecues (one warm, one freezing) and an immersive historical experience at the Mary Rose Museum preview.  And all that finished off with a Sunday evening Tweet-fest with the Design Museum's #fontsunday - this week, fonts on books. Well, who could resist - maybe four entries might have been overdoing it - so hard to choose between Calvino's Invisible Cities, Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick and Mark the Match Boy - truly - then two of my favourite other-worldly, Eastern European covers and my very, very favourite St. Augustine. Not, yet, oh no, not yet.


Yep, I have joined the list people.  Of course it's 1) 'Foolish vanity or pretence, self importance or affectation' but it's also grabbing some of this wonderful life and the wonder of what it has to offer and just bloody well taking it.

This from Karine Polwart: Follow the Heron at Brighton's Komedia, where I did not see her but someone did!  She really does love tweeting too.

Friday 3 May 2013