Sunday January 30th 2022

08:00 I show Lois some pictures on my phone from the Instagram website as we lie in bed sipping our tea. These are pictures posted by our elder daughter Alison. She and Ed bought a crumbling Victorian mansion in Hampshire last year.

Lois and I sometimes worry whether they've taken on too much, trying to get the house and 6.5 acre garden into shape. And they've both working, Ed full time, and Ali part time, and they've also got 3 children, ages 15, 13 and 11.

Still, they're young, aren't they. Not like us, to put it mildly. Oh dear!

Ali wrote yesterday:

My god - rather them than us haha!!!!!

I'm wondering whether to tell them about the Onion News website guidance for DIY-ers. The useful thing about this website is that guidance for all projects is generally reduced to two overriding principles, like in this case:

See? With Onion News all DIY becomes simples haha!!!!

10:30 Lois gets going in the dining-room on zoom session with the first of her sect's 2 meetings today, so I go up to the attic - something I rarely do these days. 

The last time I went up there was to get our Christmas tree down in early December 2020. And after that Christmas, to save work, I didn't even take the tree back up there when January 2021 came around - we stuffed the whole tree, ornaments and all, under our younger daughter Sarah's old bed - it's not a real tree by the way, it was made in China like everything else haha! 

Of course I find some mystery items, which I show photos of to Lois but she's as mystified as I am. For instance a massive painting of some stately home that neither of us has ever heard of.

I find a massive painting of a stately home that neither

Lois nor I have ever heard of

What madness !!!!!

Mark the Gardener has offered to help us empty the attic of anything we want to bring down from there, so this morning I go up there and take a few photos to show Lois. The total clutter is not nearly as bad as I thought it might be. I did do a lot of work up there a couple of years back, and this has helped enormously, I can see now. 

Once again, as above, we're basically following the Onion News website's two simplified guidelines for cleaning out attics:

We haven't got a basement but we've got a garage that looks somewhat similar. Problem sorted!

See? Simples !!!!!!

17:00 Red sky at night - shepherd's delight. 

red sky at night, shepherd's delight

- and it's roast lamb for dinner tonight, which is nice

Tonight we'll (mostly) be eating roast shoulder of lamb, roast potatoes and parsnips, and sprouts. Yum yum!

shepherd's delight: Lois starts on her roast lamb and potatoes

with mint sauce, plus parsnips and sprouts - yum yum!

20:00 We watch some TV, an interesting documentary on the life and works of the painter Lucian Freud.

Lucien was a grandson of the father of modern psychology, Sigmund Freud. He was born in Berlin in 1922, but luckily his family fled to England in the 1930's, alarmed by the rise of the Nazis.

The great thing about Lucian Freud's work is that you don't need some expert to explain to you what his paintings mean - they're just paintings of people, usually with no clothes on, painted as realistically as possible.

In fact, however, to be exact, it's people painted more realistically than is possible. Who knew that "surrealism" originally didn't mean images from dreams and nightmares etc with bent surfaces etc, looking all weird. It originally meant just the sort of art that Freud always specialised in - i.e. heightened realism.

We see art historian John Richardson discussing this with Freud in a 2010 interview in tonight's programme. Richardson and Freud discuss how when André Breton and Picasso first coined the term "surrealism" it originally had a hyphen: "sur-realism", and it meant that somehow the image was more real than the real thing. [??? - Ed]

art historian John Richardson (left) talking to Freud

in this 2010 interview

But then, the two men agree, Breton later took the word and corrupted it. He took away the hyphen and surrealism became dreams and spirits, and all kinds of weird things.

And it's nice tonight for Lois and me to see some of our favourite Lucian Freud paintings. 

I think it's fair to say that Lucien was always fairly self-obsessed, and we're amused to see him unable to resist making an early "painting-bomb" type of appearance in this early study from 1947. The woman in this one is the model who later became his first wife, Kitty Garman.

The model for this next one, set in a Paris hotel bedroom, was the woman who later became his second wife, Lady Caroline Blackwood, daughter of the Guinness heiress. Caroline's heavy drinking and smoking are said to have been the key assets that attracted him away from his first wife, Kitty. 

Poor Kitty !!!!!

Lady Caroline famously used to get bored while sitting for Freud, and often insisted on reading a book to while away the longueurs or should I say "long hours"? I don't think Freud ever did anything very fast. 

Poor Caroline !!!!!

Then there are the pictures that remind us of Rembrandt, like the startled-man one, appropriately called "Startled Man" (1948).

Both Freud and Rembrandt knew how to do "startled" - that's for sure!

Ironically, Lois and I found that a lot of our early selfie work with our phones' cameras featured this kind of face, as we struggled to pose appropriately and press the "button" at the same time, something we consistently failed to do, I'm afraid. Oh dear. 

What madness !!!!

As Freud grew older, we see an even less confident man in his self-portraits, like this next one, Man with a Blue Scarf (2010). In the picture he paints himself clutching at his scarf - he always wore a scarf, by this stage, it seems, both indoors and out. 

Lois and I tend to wear scarves outdoors at this time of year, but we always take them off when we get home - call us foolish if you like, but we like to live dangerously at least some of the time haha!

Apparently, as he grew older, his greatest fear was of losing not just his scarf, but, crucially, of losing his mind, and ceasing to have his old sharpness and critical sense. 

Join the club, Lucien!!! [Too late for that - he's dead! - Ed]

Fascinating stuff !!!!!

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!