Picture Prompts with Simon

I’m very particular about tea.   Now I acknowledge that I’m hardly alone in this – ceremonies and rituals abound around the world on how to make this drink and are caught up in various national identities, especially in Asian countries.  The making of tea can be profoundly spiritual and even religious in some cultures, with it being an important part of Vietnamese weddings for example.  For me, however, my tea ceremony is divorced from the metaphysical.  It is one of warming the pot, swirling and jiggling it, and of a precise sequence of additions that is simply a formalized way of making tea to my own taste – with a twist.  The twist is that how I do it reminds me of something.  That, wherever I go – and carry my tea with me – I am British. It’s axiomatic that a nice hot cup of tea sustained the entire British nation through world wars and other paroxysms ancient and modern.  High tea and the accoutrements that go with it - sparkling, Sheffield s...

Dead bridge arcs above, Yahweh’s promise to mankind, colourless, broken

DAY ONE:  IMPASTO The light from the lowering sun played thickly on angular features, broken textures of experience and graceful years.  Beauty - of a very profound kind - the therapist thought. “Hello Pamela,” said the therapist gently, “And how are we today?” Visibly assembling her response, a slow frown spread across the face of Pamela Beck. “These memories.  They aren’t mine.  I shouldn’t be keeping them.”  Her voice has physical qualities, the therapist thought.  It has heft and depth.  It has a surface .   “Whose are they Pamela?” There was a pause as her eyes lifted to meet his. “Whose are what?”  The puzzlement was genuine.  Information has been forgotten instantly again, the therapist thought.  This is something - indicative.   “The memories you hold.  Perhaps you could just describe them to me?” “A few days ago, I remember feeling very down in the dumps. I didn’t want to go out. I ...

Q.E.F. “Come in” said Mrs. Prospect, “into my parlour said the spider to the fly”, misquoting, I think, Mary Howitt.   A genial, if a tad florid woman draped in a scarlet dress, Mrs. Prospect – real name Mrs. Hamilton, recently widowed – smiled broadly and waved me past the entrance hall and into her expansive and remarkably sterile living room.   “May I offer you some coffee Mr…..?” she asked pointing me to a white chair next to a large bay window. “Petrescu, Mrs. Hamilton”, I responded.   “Nathan Petrescu.   And thankyou, I would love some.   It’s been a long drive to get here and I skipped breakfast.”   No harm in letting her know the sacrifices I’ve made to be here.   Ha! I spent a lifetime looking for you …   (A song 1 from the radio I heard on that drive enters my head for some reason.   Which is odd given I don’t even like country music…) Mrs. Prospect nodded and pottered off to her equally steri...

I rub the ice crystals from my eyes and see my friend Rosie playing naked in the snow. Rosie is 11 years old, like me, and has a label, like me. A so-called descriptive word that, like all words, is pregnant with power and purpose. Autism. It is seven years ago in the foothills surrounding Canberra, Australia, and it is the first time Rosie and I have seen snow. It is strange and beautiful and cold and we don’t know what to do with it. So we bathe in it. Parents, not just our own, yell at us, not understanding. In just exactly the same way that they never do. Why are you doing that? Put some clothes on. Aren’t you cold? Yes, we feel the cold. But maybe not the same as everyone else, and we sure can’t show it like everyone else. We are different, so maybe we don’t mind it. It is said that the Inuit people of Northern Canada have fifty words for snow. And it’s true – they do. Qana is falling snow. Piqsirpoq is drifting snow. Matsaaruti is wet snow. Pukak is dry, powdered snow that...