Oh dear, another unsatisfactory day in our house-hunting.
Lois and I sold our own house a week ago, after it had only been on the market for 2 days, and this took us by surprise. But now we have to find somewhere smaller to buy. We've looked at a few houses, just from the outside so far, to make sure they're not next door to an abattoir or a maximum security prison - you know those little nagging worries that plague nervous house-hunters!
We've never gone inside any houses as yet - until this morning, when we drive the 26 miles over to Malvern, armed with a list of 3 bungalows that we've arranged to view the insides of.
Bungalow no. 2 is a possible, but Lois and I are still not sure whether we can downsize to be small enough to fit into it. The kitchen's quite small, and the people who live there at the moment don't seem to have about 800 books, like we have.
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!
13:00 We come home, have lunch, and then go to bed for a nap - poor souls that we are! We don't think we've yet seen the house that we "must have" - damn! But that's only to be expected at this stage of the game, I imagine.
15:00 We stagger out of bed and drive over to see our old friends the Wilsons, Steve and Anne-Marie. We first met them when both they and I all worked for the British Embassy in Washington in the early 1980's. And Washington was where Steve and Anne-Marie met each other and later got married.
We haven't seen them since before the pandemic. So it's nice to sit in their back garden this afternoon talking about "the old Embassy days", while having a cup of tea and a piece of Anne-Marie's delicious home-made lemon drizzle and blueberry cake - yum yum!
We are able to show each other our respective grandchildren photos - their two grandchildren are much younger than ours - they're only toddlers, whereas ours are 15, 13, 11 and 8.
And Steve and Anne-Marie have still got an "aged parent" to worry about, like we did 15 years ago: Steve's aged mother lives in Lincoln, 135 miles away, and they have to do the trip to go and see her every 3 weeks on average, they say.
So all in all they're definitely at a stage of life that's quite a bit earlier than ours, that's for sure.
flashback to 1994: me (centre) with Steve and Anne-Marie
with their two children, Thomas and Catherine, in our back garden:
little Catherine now works in epidemiology, so she's in a lot of demand
at the moment, to put it mildly !!!!!
19:00 Our daughter Alison who lives in Headley, Hampshire with Ed and their 3 children Josie (15), Rosalind (13) and Isaac (11) has put a couple of charming pictures up on social media. Ed and Rosalind are on their way to Copenhagen for the weekend, so that Rosalind can see her "bestie" Lucia's confirmation. Ali and Ed and the children lived in Copenhagen for 6 years from 2012 to 2018.
our granddaughter Rosalind and our son-in-law Ed
on their way to Copenhagen for the weekend - exciting!
20:00 We wind down by watching the first half of a documentary about the popular Dutch graphic artist Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972), on the Sky Arts channel.
Incredibly, Escher, who was born to a wealthy mathematically-inclined Dutch family, turned out to have been a sickly child, who was sent, for health reasons, to a pensione in the Dutch seaside town of Kijkduin, where he also attended school.
Who's ever heard of Kijkduin? Well, I have, because my parents, siblings and I spent 3 weeks in that area in 1965, on a house-exchange holiday.
Who would have thought it, eh?!!!!!
flashback to August 1965 -
me at Kijkduin, aged 19
August 1965: my parents on the beach at Kijkduin,
with my later brother Steve (13) and my sister Gill (7)
- happy days !!!!!
And then coincidence upon coincidence, after Escher got married in 1924, he and Jette lived in Viareggio, another seaside resort in Italy, near where our daughter Alison lodged in 1998-9 when she was having a study year at the university in Pisa. What are the chances of that happening, eh? !!!!!
on the beach at Viareggio
And in tonight's programme we hear some of Escher's other diary entries that he made at the time.[What about Escher's art, then? - Ed]
Yes, I almost forgot about Escher's art there, but only for a second, luckily !!!!
How did Escher come to concentrate on his mathematically intricate style of interlocking patterns - that's the big question! And it turns out it was all kicked off after he wrote to an Italian cruise company, saying that if they gave him and Jette free passage on one of their Mediterranean cruises round the coast to Valencia, that he would do lots of drawings and woodcuts of the voyage that they could use in their advertising. And they wrote back and said Yes, which was nice!
one of the woodcuts the young Escher made
during the couple's "free cruise" round the Med
It was when the couple got off at Valencia and started touring the region overland, that Escher had his great epiphany - he saw that the historical buildings erected by the Moors, in places like Granada, were decorated with masses of intricate repeating patterns. Apparently it was forbidden in Islam to draw pictures of real people or animals. And Lois says it was the same with the Jews, which I didn't realise.
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!
The couple visited the Alhambra, where he wrote, in his diary, that they "spent three days copying passionately" - my god! And other tourists would crowd round them to watch them at it.
Suddenly now, it all begins to make sense about Escher's famous later works - like the picture of masses of fish that is also at the same time a picture of masses of birds, and then there are all those unending staircases: that sort of thing! Yes, sheer endlessness was what he became fascinated with!
[When's this blog post going to end?! - Ed]
And think of all those staircases, like his "Relativity":
Of one work in this series, Escher writes that "Three surfaces of the Earth intersect at a right angle, and people live on each of them. Two inhabitants, if they come from different surfaces cannot live on the same floor, because their notion of what is horizontal and vertical is not the same. However, they can uses the same staircase, but with one person ascending and the other descending, for they live in different worlds, and therefore cannot have any knowledge of each other's existence".
Fascinating stuff! And it's ironic that Lois and I are at the moment contemplating a possible "life without stairs", if we go ahead and buy a bungalow. Perhaps a few Escher prints on the walls will remind us of "the stairs of yesterday"? I'm not really sure..
22:00 The programme's only halfway through, but Lois and I switch off the TV because it's time for bed. We'll watch the rest of the programme another time.
We go upstairs, and on the way up, we don't meet anybody coming down, which is nice. Imagine what a nightmare it would be going up to bed in one of Escher's houses and bumping into lots of other couples just like us, coming down, or even going sideways - that would be awkward, to put it mildly!
And would we ever get to the actual bed?
My god - what a nightmare !!!!
Zzzzzzzz!!!!!
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