the kitchen
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You will find here, expansions of terms that are gateways to other worlds, as well as descriptive flatulence of which my integral editor has relieved the core pages,
putting it aside for those who thrive on such gases, of which this very statement is a perfect example.
Glossary and Asides
The book by Chris Stewart Published by Sort Of Books, Summer 2002. The sequal to Driving Over Lemons. The book includes a couple of chapters which sketch and/or parody me and the pool. Symbolically, I possess neither an umbrella nor a track suit, let alone a purple one. Neither are my mannerisms quite as caricatured as they appear in the book, even if I do spout technicalities at people who, sometimes misguidedly, solicit them! Make up your own mind about the rest as you peruse the web site! Chris courteously offered me manuscript ofthe book and the opportunity to veto any references to me, and my first reaction as an insider, was surprise at the extent to which some of the events and characters, including my own, had been reconstructed to make the story, in ways that I found a little less plausible than they might be to an outsider. But I will go along with the many others who will say that A Parrot is an entertaining read. It is a story is for its own sake rather than claiming to be an accurate history. If Chris and I did not share some belief in aesthetics and the desire to promote ecological development, much less of this would have happened. So, I applaud my caricature, and assert my own identity forthwith.
Now don't get me wrong here! Two of the cinema experiences of my childhood were the films Help by the Beatles, and Summer Holiday by Cliff, connecting the mundane suburbia of my childhood with the excitement of the alluringly exotic. Unfortunately both the above entities have produced much mediocrity to boot. The idea of travelling around (presumably) Europe in a red, double decker London bus must have been the seed of an idea for many like me, currently based in a vehicle. Not to mention the Bachelor Boy sentiments also expressed there in!
Co-counselling International is a peer-led, non-hierarchical organisation which maintains links between individuals and smaller groups practising co-counselling.
It is a breakaway from the autocratic Re-evaluation Counselling (RC) organisation founded by Harvey Jackins who did much to develop the principles of co-counselling.
The CCI model of co-counselling is a structure of psychological and personal understanding and methods which individuals apply with their own discretion and motivation
to their own situations. It involves expression of emotions in a safe environment, in a group or with a partner who has contracted to support one in specific ways.
This often allows participants to experience insights and re-evaluate their beliefs or behaviour in ways that might otherwise not be possible.
CCIers sometimes have a an enjoyable, playful time together as well as working on their 'stuff'.
CCI is different from therapy with a professional counsellor in that the arrangement between client and counsellor is always reciprocal in terms of time and attention.
CCI is thus only suitable for those who are able to give full attention to another person for a contracted time.
I have been a member of the London CCI co-counselling community, on and off, since the late 1980's.
A simple search will return many internet sites related to CCI co-counselling.
This is a cci site representing the UK at
www.dpets.demon.co.uk....
This is a european site at
http://home.planet.nl....
Both the operating systems and electromagnetic emissions of computers affect me profoundly.
The latter is fairly easily dealt with by using only machines with LCD screens for extended periods.
Within a matter of minutes I have been aware of swelling and an uncomfortable and alarming fever-like feeling mainly in my neck and face, sitting in front of CRT monitors.
Operating systems get me between two opposing evils - their blockheadedness on the one hand, and on the other, the sad attempt of certain notable ones to
ameliorate for their abysmal failure at intuitiveness with my-little-ponyness (my little computer, my little program, my little address... the 'little' being,
of course, implied like the parent humouring the 5 year-old <end rant> ...the pink plastic pony styled after the barbie-doll being the spawn of the my little... genus.)
My answer to these pincers has been to stay fairly exclusively within a highly customised Macintosh OS environment where I know how to deal with most things that irritate me
and can customise or script almost anything to do with the machine.
Presently, however, the major issue is simply the sedentariness of keyboard and screen orientated activities! Roll-on reliable, fast speech recognition!
My life has been becoming more computerised since 1992, paper being too bulky, obscure, vulnerable and uneditable a medium on which to store a life's worth of information when one is essentially mobile.
If you're a Mac nerd, I use G3s rather than G4s not only because they're still faster than most personal computers in existence
and now reasonably priced,
but because the rectilinear slabs of the G4 are anathema to my visual style language, albeit of nice materials and proportions.
I may yet get to like them but I hope for a softer looking laptop before I need to upgrade to one....
If you have a one-track mind, no doubt you have your own idea on what this is, but apparently it is a small bit of the brain that in some people is more responsive than others to sunlight,
inspiring them to be more active or depressed.
|
the kitchen |
part of the hallway with Halloween procession |
Chris Stewart's publishers. Their web site is at www.sortof.co.uk. Dunno what you'll find there; haven't been there yet.
The van started as a 1989 Transit long wheelbase high-top.
I do a lot of maintenance and bodywork on it to keep it tidy, but it also survives better for being off the English roads in the winter.
I avoided typical caravan appliances wherever possible, because they are overpriced, fragile and often tacky,
not giving the performance I demand from the equipment I use every day.
The down side of this is that the van ends up weighing nearly 3 tonnes.
But it's on its third engine now, a 115 hp 2.5 litre turbo diesel, and running better than ever, so the weight's only a problem when I try to throw it around like a sports car.
Cruise control makes driving long distances much more relaxing.
For electricity, I have two 12 V alternators on the engine giving about 2 kW at 24 V, 300 W of solar panels and a 5 kW gas back up generator.
These charge 200 -300 Ah of deep cycle batteries slung under the chassis.
A 2 kW (peak) sine wave inverter will efficiently run any appliance on board, including the microwave.
The interior lighting amounts to some130 W, equivalent to about 450W of conventional lamps.
There are two mobile phones wired in with external aerials, loudspeakers and microphones.
One of them I use mostly for internet connection with the computer. I sometimes also connect a CB radio.
A heat exchanger on the engine water system provides domestic hot water.
A 70 litre water tank and two pumps give more than the customary dribble of caravan systems.
I am in the process of building a small gas powered combined-heat-and-power unit based on a recent, efficient design of motor scooter engine,
which will provide me with very cheap electricity and air conditioning with free hot water and heating when it is running.
The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It's not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time. They have the mystery of ferns that disappeared a million years ago into the coal of the carboniferous era. They carry their own light and shade. The vainest, most slap-happy and irreverent of men, in the presence of redwoods goes under a spell of wonder and respect. Respect - that's the word. One feels the need to bow to unquestioned sovereigns. I have known these great ones since my earliest childhood, have lived among them, camped and slept against their warm monster bodies, and no amount of association has bred contempt in me. And the feeling is not limited to me.
A number of years ago, a newcomer, a stranger, moved to my country near Monterey. His senses must have been blunted and atrophied with money and the getting of it. He bought a grove of sempervirens in a deep valley near the coast, and then, as was his right by ownership, he cut them down and sold the lumber, and left on the ground the wreckage of his slaughter. Shock and numb outrage filled the town. This was not only murder but sacrilege. We looked on that man with loathing and he was marked to the day of his death.
Of course, many of the ancient groves have been lumbered off, but many of the stately monuments remain and will remain, for a good and interesting reason. States and governments could not buy and protect these holy trees. This being so, clubs, organizations, even individuals, bought them and dedicated them to the future. I don't know any other similar case. Such is the impact of the sequoias on the human mind.
**I stayed two days close to the bodies of the giants, and there were no trippers, no chattering troupes with cameras. There's a cathedral hush here. Perhaps the thick soft bark absorbs sound and creates a silence. The trees rise straight up to zenith; there is no horizon. The dawn comes early and remains dawn until the sun is high. Then the green fernlike foliage so far up strains the sunlight to a green gold and distributes it in shafts or rather in stripes of light and shade. After the sun passes zenith it is afternoon and quickly evening with a whispering dusk as long as was the morning.
Thus time and the ordinary divisions of the day are changed. To me dawn and dusk are quiet times, and here in the redwoods nearly the whole of daylight is a quiet time. Birds move in the dim light or flash like sparks through the stripes of sun, but they make little sound. Underfoot is a mattress of needles deposited for over two thousand years. No sound of footsteps can be heard on this thick blanket. To me there's a remote and cloistered feeling here. One holds back speech for fear of disturbing something - what? From my earliest childhood I've felt that something was going on in the groves, something of which I was not a part. And if I had forgotten the feeling, I soon got it back.
At night, the darkness is black - only straight up a patch of gray and an occasional star. And there's a breathing in the black, for these huge things that control the day and inhabit the night are living things and have presence, and perhaps feeling, and, somewhere in deep-down perception, perhaps communication. I have had lifelong association with these things. (Odd that the word "trees" does not apply.) I can accept them and their power and their age because I was early exposed to them. On the other hand, people lacking such experience begin to have a feeling of uneasiness here, of danger, of being shut in, enclosed and overwhelmed. It is not only the size of these redwoods but their strangeness that frightens them. And why not? For these are the last remaining members of a race that flourished over four continents as far hack in geologic time as the upper Jurassic period. Fossils of these ancients have been found dating from the Cretaceous era while in the Eocene and Miocene they were spread over England and Europe and America. And then the glaciers moved down and wiped the Titans out beyond recovery. And only these few are left - a stunning memory of what the world was like once long ago. Can it be that we do not love to be reminded that we are very young and callow in a world that was old when we came into it? And could there be a strong resistance to the certainty that a living world will continue its stately way when we no longer inhabit it?
from Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck, first published 1962.
Valandil was an appropriate nom de plume for one of a couple who
spent much of their time writing epistles in runes to each other when they could not be together.
When the artist took up its timeshare in this mind at the age of about thirty,
hardly related to the person I had operated as until then, it assumed a new name.
The wild, young dolphin reached an agreement with the ancient elf who had almost disappeared, and the result was eventually Val dolphin.
Thus the elf got a higher profile but at the cost of his endil, a bit too cumbersome for contemporary use.
I like Val being ambivalent about gender, when I am feeling that way, explained under the personal involvement heading.
Trev, Val and dolphin all get used as informal names, depending on my mood and company.
Dolphin I write with a small d, except like here, to keep the cadence of the sentences.
This is to symbolise an aspiration to being any wild dolphin, the dolphin spirit, without ego... some chance.
To confound rigidity, I sometimes run the names together or alter a letter or two.
The name may now have become clichéd but at least I am not an anonymous dolphin.
I began using the name several years before it ever occured to me to take on pool building,
when the worst perpetrator of plagiarism on the personality of this pretty creature known to me was a company selling showers in England.
And as I still like the name, as well as having a commitment to it, I am keeping it.
In my 20's and 30's, I published several personal adverts in magazines looking for a partner but the adverts tended to produce people more unlikely than did situations allowing friendships to begin face to face. However, I did, as an indirect result, get to know one or two who have been important in my life. Now, the scribe insists on trying again, for the first time, on his own web site. My changing facets make settlement on just who shall be portrayed frustrating. Luckily, I find the structuring and balancing of it quite satisfying. Less satisfying is tailoring my openness to an audience among whom many may be critical. But having discovered magic yet so rarely meeting beings who want to work it in a similar way, I try to make the best of this opportunity.
That's the end of the personal asides....
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first edition: 2002 February 27th
this edition: 2004 January 23rd