16:30 It's late afternoon, and Lois and I feel completely zonked out after a 2 hour meeting of our U3A Intermediate Danish group on Skype, a group which we've been told is entirely unique in the UK.
We spent the morning preparing for a possible physical presence in our house - Jeanette, our group's only genuine Danish member, has told us that something has gone wrong with her version of Skype, so we said she could come and take part in the meeting in our house: we haven't had any of the group members physically present in our house for over 2 years, because of the pandemic, so the possibility that she might join Lois and me "live", sent us into a mild panic. As it turned out, however, Jeanette was able to get Skype to work, so all our tidying-up here wasn't needed in the end.
But what madness !!!!!
The short stories that our group are reading at the moment are all about the hidden passions of Danish vegetable-growers who spend their weekends on their allotments out of town. Yes, we've only just started on the book, but already it's quite steamy enough for our group of old codgers and crows. My god!
How come Danish allotment-holders have so much time to indulge themselves on their allotments in this way? Well, I can now exclusively reveal that it's because they don't do much work there: they just go to them mainly to read books, sit in the sun, and indulge their passions - unlike British allotment-holders, who tend to be digging and weeding, covering themselves in soil and fertilizer in the process - my god (again) !!!!
It's clear that Danish allotments are designed specifically to be low-maintenance. And our group has been looking at the pictures - Danish allotments tend to be all circular or oval-looking, and surrounded by little hedges, but what we want to know is: who mows the patches of grass in between? We don't know but we want to be told!
20:00 We relax with an interesting documentary on the life and works of Edgar Dégas, the French painter (1834-1917).
I've always thought I could have warmed to Dégas if I'd ever met him, because he was very much an "indoors-y" kind of a guy. While impressionists like his friend Manet were going hither and thither out into the countryside producing paintings like "Déjeuner sur l'herbe" (lunch on the grass), Dégas preferred to stay in his studio, painting any outside scenes purely from memory.
That's the way you do it! And it's much better that way. Not only is it less effort - you don't have to dress up and put on a coat and hat, and pack your painting gear into the boot of your carriage etc - because what you remember is always the most important stuff.
He said, "It's all very well to copy what one sees, but it is much better to draw what one does not see except in one's memory. It's a transformation during which the imagination collaborates with the memory. You reproduce only what has struck you. That is the necessary. In that way, your memories and your fantasy are liberated from the tyranny exercised by nature."
It's the same with writing, I think. Don't take notes, just write down what you remember afterwards. Although if you're somebody like a clerk of the court, you might want to reconsider that advice!
Dégas had a complex relationship with the women in his life, to put it mildly. He only really felt comfortable with women if he was paying them, whether it was prostitutes or women who worked for him in other ways, as models or housekeepers.
However it was Zoe Closier, his housekeeper, who was in many ways his ideal woman: she carried out all the then-accepted "duties" of a wife except for the sex. And he didn't have to take any notice of her, as he would a wife. With paid relationships, he felt he knew where he stood, because he always had control in that situation.
Poor Zoe !!!!
Where Dégas had a big problem was in his relationships with women at his own social level, like his friend the painter Mary Cassat. Women like Mary he preferred to keep at arm's length. He sometimes painted her but never showing her particularly as an artist. And of course he never married.
What madness !!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzzz!!!!!
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