school

This morning I set off along the single track road from my little stone built home in warm sunshine. My task today is to help paint the school shed in a small (but vital) island primary school. The head teacher had already talked with me about what she would like the shed to look like, using as decoration, all the beach litter the children had collected since last summer. Each time there is a high tide or a high wind, the beaches are covered with flotsam and jetsam, some of it intriguing, some disgusting. Obviously the disgusting bits are appropriately disposed of, but the colourful bits of plastic and rope and twine, shells and bones, and all those things careless folk toss overboard, all are gathered, cleaned and stored for the Grand Shed Occasion.

Which is now. Well, the beginning of it is now. It may take some time to assemble, not least because little children have attention spans extremely short but sweet and by the way, not one of them can stand still without fidgeting.

We walked them around the brown slatted shed, and asked them how they would like to see the end result. We fed them the odd line as they began heading off into Disneyworld, just to reel them in a bit, but not too much. We explained the deck chair stripe idea and the starburst of plastic milk bottle tops on one side; the butterflies and daisies on one end, to compliment the big tubs of wild flowers already established to encourage butterflies. We said that once the stripes were finished, they could play with spatter paint, flicking brush loads (well, not LOADS) against the wall. The boys arms were already flexing and they did have to question whether we really meant it. Their mouths formed a WOW.

Throwing paint at the wall…..like THIS????

Can I use a gun? asked one boy.

Er……I think brushes this time, we told him and there was a chorused ‘Awwwww’ with that sweep up at the tail of it, as if we just might say…….Ok then, why not?

We plan a sort of mural on the side nearest the road, to impress the tourists. Deck chairs, they thought. We could stick one on the wall! chirruped one girl.

Not with PVA, I said, sorry, but you can paint one on. I could hear my voice go all dinky winky but she was no fool, and lost interest immediately. She decided, instead, to paint a square rainbow.

Excellent.

A pair of swallows chattered at me as I worked. Birds on the wire with plans for nest building arrested. Sorry I said, but I’ll be gone soon and there’s plenty of daylight left. A pair of lapwings serenaded me from the seaward field, and sparrows dived in and out from the eaves; everyone so very busy.

It’s good to be busy, among little fidgets, in the sunshine with a salt wind blowing my heart around.

Oh, and a square rainbow about to appear.

Island Blog 46

A friend and I play writing games together. One of us picks a phrase, a subject and we both have to write for say five minutes, or ten, on that phrase or subject. We are not supposed to think, or lift our pen from the page, but just to let our creativity flow unimpeded.

We have had some interesting projects.

‘The day I didn’t call’ was one, I remember, and another, ‘this exquisite wounding’.

A recent one was entitled ‘Frozen’

Just that. Could lead you anywhere.

Here’s what I wrote:

‘Whenever I walk past a statue in some public place, I wonder what was happening to that person before someone froze them forever. Did he or she live out a mostly ordinary life? Was that laudable (obviously) moment in time their only laudable moment in time, or was it all so laudable that we, living out our ordinary lives have to keep being reminded of our ordinariness every time we walk by?

Did his or her feet ever ache in badly made shoes, and were they ever late for school or work or choir practice and did their teeth hurt eating ice cream? Were they kind to others, loving in their homes, humble in opinions? What made them so remarkable? And what would they think of the pigeons who perch on their horizontal bits and shit them white and greasy grey, or the homeless wanderers who slump beneath their lofty limbs?

Sometimes I read the plaque that tells of their achievement, but usually I just march by in my badly made shoes, avoiding pigeon shit and homeless wanderers on my ordinary way from A to B with deadlines in my head and a dirty rain threatening.

In Amsterdam, one moved. A statue, I mean, and I did stop then. Suddenly nothing was ordinary at all and I laughed out loud as the pigeons burst into the sky and an old man on a bench unfolded himself and laughed with me before sinking back down into the folds of his oversized coat’.