Two True Blue

You can go all of a blue afternoon without finding the right blue, then two turn up at once, like red busses, one after another.

Warmer Than Hot Water Bottles

I quicken my pace – I’m getting warmer - a car looking almost as blue as its parking space.  The car’s parked next to a tree and the tree’s wrapped in some kind of raffia matting and is supported by wooden stakes - one of which is marked – painted – with a dash of parking-spot-blue paint.

There’s a photograph (a not-wanted poster?) attached to the tree. The photograph depicts the very same tree it’s on/of, except, in the photograph there are two blue bags parked on the grass beneath the tree. The bags are the blue of the parking-space markings – the blue I’m searching for in a car – and they have a red cross through them, banning blue bag parking in blue parking spaces. First they ban hot water bottles in doorways, now this! What is it with the Swiss?  

Hot Water Bottle Ban

As I neared the city centre I came upon a doorway banning hot water bottles: two blue bottles stuck to the floor, one of the blue bottles the blue I was searching for in a car.

Blue In The Face

Wrong blue: car in relation to parking space. Right blue: parking space to blue in the face (of the head in the background).

Almost Blue

I step off a green tram onto a blue bike. The blue of the bike is the exact hue of blue of the car I’m searching for: the blue of the chalk - that is the bike - is the exact shade of blue used (painted) to define the parking spaces. But I’m in a park, not a parking space. On exiting the park I’m once again forced to photograph a car that’s hue of blue is closer to, but still not true to the blue of its parking space. 

Weighing Machine Impersonating A Golf Green

Near some empty blue parking spaces I come across a bed sleeping next to a weighing machine: a weighing machine impersonating a golf green? I weigh myself - 62kgs - it works! But it’s the wrong kind of green – the grass is greener, so I carry on down the strasse, but before I encounter my next blue car (in a blue bay) I’m overcome with nostalgia for golf (even though I’ve never hit a ball). I return to the weighing machine, jump up and down on the springy bed beside it: I’m a golf ball bouncing on a trampoline. Then, like a golf ball pitching on a green - I score a hole-in-one - I land the weighing machine, sending the scales off the scale. I leave them forever fixed on 40kgs.

I continue with a bounce in my step. I’ve been destructive, now let’s be constructive, and in no time at all I spy another blue car parked in a blue spot. But (yet again) it’s the wrong kind of blue... it's almost green, but the wrong kind of green, too. 

The Blues

Blue Afternoon

In the time between these two photographs – four hours, on a blue afternoon in Basel – 44 blue cars, each parked in a bluely defined parking space, were photographed. The photographer was searching for a blue car that’s shade of blue matched the blue of the rectangle enclosing it.  

  To be continued...

Blue-Sky Thinking

I walk down off the South Downs into Lewes. On entering the town the first building I encounter is the castle-like Lewes Prison. After admiring the real castle I pass Swan Vistas, Jonathan Swan’s jewelry workshop (Google it if you don’t believe me). I stop for lunch at The Swan Inn. I feel sorry for the swan on the pub sign: she’s chained-up, and her plight’s made worse by the fact that there are doves (free as birds) sunning themselves the roof immediately behind her. Then just as I’m photographing the pub-sign, a loud siren sounds out from the direction of the prison: an escape attempt? The siren causes the doves to take flight, and I have an idea.

The thing to do is facilitate collaboration between Jonathan Swan’s jewelry workshop in Lewis and the Her Majesty's Prison, Lewes, towards the mass-production of swan key rings. Blue-Sky thinking. Keynote thinking: Swans belong to Her Majesty, and prisoners are locked-up at Her Majesty’s pleasure: swan key-chains, why not? Unless all the prisoners really have taken flight…

  

The Knee To The Key To The Swan's Head

For Proust, in his book Swan In Love, the taste of a Madeline (dipped in tea) unlocked ‘involuntary memory’. The Madeline was the key. I’ve just drawn Madeline (seen from above) from memory - but it looks more like a knee. The drawing has unlocked a knee, and knees once open (to one) – no need for a key - can just as easily be locked shut.

So I traced M’s key - her front-door key (I still have it after all these years) – instead. M being someone I’ve closed the door on – no longer see; M’s a distant memory. But the tracing turned out to be the key to a swan’s head. 

Proust and Roussel

Raymond Roussel riding a white swan

As a child Roussel lived at 25 boulevard Malesherbes, a near neighbour of Marcel Proust - author of Swann’s Way and Swann In Love -, who occupied number 9. Roussel, like Proust, had an overbearing mother who insisted that her son underwent a medical examination every day! In later life when holidaying abroad, Roussel always carried a coffin among his luggage, so as not to inconvenience other travellers in case he passed away. 

Marcel Proust on his deathbed 

For both authors daily contact with reality seemed strewn with pitfalls, and their writings (or 'excavations', as Roussel put it) - written albeit through the employment very different procedures - were a search for lost time. Cocteau (who met Roussel in what would now be known as a rehab clinic) called Roussel ‘the Proust of dreams’. Independent of one another (for it is uncertain that they ever met) Proust and Roussel fasted for days on end then indulged on childish foods: marshmallows, brioche bread pudding – devoured a vast quantity of cakes.