Apr 092015
 


Picture by Russell Lumb
Artist: Russell Lumb

No peace

New booking. Workers’ Educational Association life-class at the Bickerthwaite United Reformed Church. The group gets off to a slow start even though I was ready for kick-off dead on the hour. It is chatty, noisy. They are used to having an ongoing repartee with the model. Their accuracy must be shit if they don’t mind a model whose face is moving. I bet they’re rubbish at hands and feet.

Stop talking to me, people. I want to be inside my head. Please. Leave me alone.

Straight after modelling I go for my counselling session. Conveniently, the Mental Health Services Area Office is behind this very church. It’s a Portacabin. Beside the entrance I crouch to lock my bicycle. The rickety door slams open, clunks closed. A previous client hurries away. When I straighten up, I see that it was Bel.

At home I put on Bach’s suite for solo cello in G major. [Or listen to sample here]. I love how a solitary gifted person’s use of a tool makes this beautiful sound.

I am an artists’ tool. It’s good, being a tool. It’s a raison d’etre.

I play the prelude over and over and over and over. All through the night.

 

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  2 responses to “Page 48”

  1. Great to hear the W.E.A still thrives – reminds me of the old days of wonderfully self-educated trade unionists and a principled Labour Party.

  2. The W.E.A. is a neo-Soviet dinosaur. It has an insane, nonsensical bureaucracy. And crap pay rates for life models, but I am desperate.
    I suppose one ought to be positive, but why does left-wing idealism manifest in utter inefficiency and lack of basic good business practice?

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