Simple Pleasures

This is Noah and Dylan's first entry in Simple Pleasures. It's Saturday morning, Tom and Jerry has just finished, the Enfants Terribles were lying together on the couch under the blue blanket, but now it's time to get active and seize this day...

Noah likes drawing, Charlie Chaplin, seeing his cousins Finlay and Jake, Lego and taking photos.

Dylan likes playgrounds, eating Indian food, his Daddy and his friends and going round to play.

They've gone next door to play now so i'll take the opportunity to springboard off their pleasures.

Cartoons: The Hair Bear Bunch (Ooh ooh Mr Beazley and my kinda afro), Bugs Bunny; meeting Chuck Jones in Cambridge and asking him why Bugs dresses up in women's clothing so often; Hong Kong Phooey (Is it Henry the mild mannered janitor? Could be.)...

Lying down, relaxing: in the back garden of Lellow House in the summer, just listening; on our bed on Saturday afternoons; on grassy banks where it's quiet, perhaps the sound of a river flowing past.

Drawing: getting lost in my drawing, Egon Schiele, good quality pencils, black oil pastel, Aubrey Beardsley, the fine black line of the Rotring pen, Henry Moore's chalk sculptural drawings, emptying the wooden shavings from the pencil sharpener.

Charlie Chaplin: Dylan is named after Charlie (Dylan Charlie Wilf). My favourite film is Modern Times. His humanity; his defiance of Adolf; his dedication to creativity, day after day in the cutting room; his balletic movement; the dancing rolls in The Gold Rush; the monkey on the tightrope in The Circus; City Lights... and I think I'll call it a day there. A leisurely breakfast (weekends and holidays only) beckons. Next time I think I'll pick up at the City Lights bookshop in San Francisco...

You can't reflect on the sources of Happiness too long before you get to Music. I'll always remember a quotation I heard at school by Walter Pater (whoever he was, a pal of Oscar Wilde if I remember right - and while we're on the subject of Oscar it's a good time to chuck The Importance of Being Earnest and The Ballad of Reading Gaol into the Simple Pleasures pot, and while on the subject of those let's toss in woodcuts, as my copy of Reading Gaol is illustrated with woodcuts by Frans Masereel, and the films of Albert Lewin including The Picture of Dorian Gray and Pandora and the Flying Dutchman which brings us neatly to James Mason's voice and Ava Gardner's beauty ...and the beauty of Women and the voice of her ex-hubby Frank Sinarta and ...well we're back to music - but look how infectious this Pleasure thing is, and now back to Walter, reigning in this sentence in a way John Milton would be proud of - oh yes, Sing heavenly muse, let's not forget Paradise Lost, in particular that red Cambridge edition we had at school in Mr Fitch's class, which had a major impact on me because it first made me aware of the narrowness and artificiality of school subjects and the connections between things [very internety really]) ah yes dear old Walter who said: "All Art aspires to the condition of music" which I read as meaning that every other art form would love to achieve the directness of Music's impact on the heart, I mean look at this jumble of words... It could all be said in a phrase of music from say Miles Davis' transcendent Flamenco Sketches.

Light flurries of snow.

Snow flakes floating into your face.

Coming in from the cold.

Home.

Going out into the cold bright day.

The sign above our front door going out: "Dun Na nGall Donegal 1" - I mile. Or (less than) 1 day away.

Donegal.

Fanad Head. Port Salon beach. The sea arch just north of there.

That day I watched the sea weed swirling around my feet (by the arch), browns and greens and eddies of water in a PERFECT MOMENT. Noah and Dylan were playing by the water's edge with Una nearby.