Dementia

Blog absence due to lack of time and scanner.

But here is an old project from last year on foundation. A book

called 'Living with Dementia', showing a day in the life of a couple. The woman has to do everything for the man with the illness, feed him, bathe him, lead him to bed. The project brief was 'Sequence', and I made the concertina book to illustrate the impact of the dementia on family members. The neverending sequence of caring.

Bacteria

'Tiny bacteria may seem rather unintelligent, but a bacterial crowd can accomplish the Sisyphean task of turning microgears millions of times bigger than themselves. The microbes start out by swimming randomly, but occasionally collide with the spokes of a gear and begin pushing. Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and Northwestern University observed a crowd gather and push against the spokes.

Several hundred bacteria teamed up in order to turn one gear. When multiple gears sat next to one another with spokes connected, like in a clock, the bacteria began turning both gears in opposite directions, and created a synchronous movement.'

Amazing.

Give me a J....J!

Soup wheel

The Soup Book is a very nicely written book, from the fifties I think. I got it for 10p from the Fara charity shop bin, and was pleasantly surprised by these lovely fold out 'soup wheels'. You use one can of the central ingredient, then half a can of one of the next, half again of something from the the next ring, and a smidgen from the outer ring. How beautiful is that.

Also, Richard Wentworth speaks well about menus:

"I like menus, I like the gap between desire and text and interpretation. It's a social thing, coursing across the print, watching the maths, eyeing the props, taking pleasure in my ignorance, editing and re-editing. You plan a risk, you rehearse a conservative choice, you plunge in. It's only ingredients, processes and procedures but there is room to extemporise, to play clerk of works, to write a short play, to paint by numbers. Talking is the same, just quicker. I like using words to order and I like unfamiliar words. I have, for want of language, pointed at other people's dishes and, very occasionally, I have ordered by numbers."

FINALLY Richard Dawkins

Yesterday I finally, finally finished a book I've been reading since I went to Germany in August. It is by Richard Dawkins, and is called 'The Ancestor's Tale: Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life'. Oh it is such a brilliant brilliant book. Here is his blurb because he says it better than I could ever paraphrase.

'The Ancestor's Tale is a pilgrimage: a journey of four billion years. We. modern human beings, are the pilgrims, and we are travelling back in time to seek out our ancestors. Simultaneously every living creature is setting off on its own journey with the same mission. Each pilgrim tells its tale along the way, and covers the processes involved in the unfolding of life on Earth.

Onwards we go, squeezing precariously through mass extinctions. Eventually we pass that fundamental turning point for life on earth, the combining of a single celled protozoan-to-be with a bacterium to form a cell with a nucleus. Once we have done so, all living things take the final strecth of the pilgrimage together to the origin of life'

I've never read a book that makes me actually gasp out loud in amazement, there are just so many things you could never imagine about life. Dawkins bases his pilgrimage on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, instead of the miller's tale there's the marsupial mole's tale, the barnacle's tale, the redwood's tale... He writes in such a beautiful, non-patronising way. It is science but not boring science. He even refers to The Subtle Knife, talks about the creatures that use seed pods for wheels, as a lovely aside.

I did get very bogged down near the end and strung it out for months - once it got to bacteria level I didn't understand very much. But still there were bits and wonderful pieces. The Ancestor's Tale is, I think, one of my all time best books I have ever read.

Monday evening spent in IKEA Purley Way, the first section of my self directed drawing project on shopping. Oddly deserted, I felt very conspicuous and so was not so brave as I thought at brazenly drawing people about their business. But it's a start. Interesting to observe there is a definite 'Ikea walk': slow, funeral march pace, very leany side-to-side. It's the shoppers saunter. My drawings don't succeed in describing this, yet. I had meatballs for dinner of course.

Natural History Museum

On beautiful 'goffrata' paper, the yellow book in the fabriano '7 senses of paper'.