One of the joys(?) of using Pierre Noire is that it really is quite soft and so with my heavy weight fingers it tends to break off quite easily so these are the only two sketches of the forth coming Sherlock characters I could bother to do before the faff of having to sharpen the pencil/crayon got too much – I bore easily!
Far too cold to venture out in the morning (I am a man of advancing years after all!) Instead I decided to do the next best thing – sit in the warmth a revist the images I captured a couple of weeks ago – I think that was worth the effort.
There was a time when I knew where I stood. A time when a painting was a painting and a photograph was, well, a photograph. Those days are long long gone and we now live in this digital post analogue world where nothing seems to be what it was. Even in the digital world I had my boundaries but now I am slowly blurring those as well. This painting is a case in point. I used to make paintings with paint then I moved to using photoshop and everything was fine. Now as the end of the year approaches I find that I am moving away once more from Photoshop as my digital painting medium to replace it with Procreate on my iPad. But even here the lines are blurred as the original painting was then post produced using photoshop into something looks almost like a photograph. So we come full circle…sort of?
So more and more well known people seem to have chosen this time of year to take their last breath. Carrie Fisher is the latest and possibly best known or rather her 20 year old self is/was. One of the advantages(?) that the famous have over we the great unwashed is that they never actually die, apart that is from those who actually know them. For as long as their is some way of showing star wars movies then Carrie Fisher will live again as much as she ever did. Of course in this digitally connected world we who inhabit this world also now don’t die, instead we will continue on in the cloud so in one sense we have started to move beyond our own mortality. Of course the shadow we leave in the cloud when we have died is not really us, although given the many FB friends we have who we haven’t ever met or perhaps we did when we were much younger and have had any real face time in years, who would know the difference? Of course there are companies out there that would actually maintain our digital presence so we might all start to find shortly we may find it difficult to tell who is physically alive as opposed to only cloud alive.
None of this will be of any comfort to the family and friends of the famous who have recently died. Carrie Fisher was a real person to them but as I wrote the other day there are many many more people in the world who are feeling the same pains and anguish for the loss of a friend, loved one as those felt by a famous actress. To all of those people I wish you the best and hope that some day you will be able to come to term with your loss. But don’t feel you have to rush this…we are all different and we grieve in our own way.
PS
If this all seems just a little matter of fact for you well in my defence I have seen and dealt with many deaths in my professional life. I have seen many many ways that people die by choice or not and so after all of this you tend to view death as, well, matter of fact. Although one of things I didn’t have to deal with is how to end someone’s digital life which I suspect may well be really difficult as it would dredge up too many painful memories when dealing with intimate matters such as passwords that is assuming that the dead person didn’t use Password as their password. One day someone will have to do that for me – I don’t envy them.
Strange bookends I know but the deaths of David Bowie and George Michael make 2016, for me, more poignant. Yes we have a had the political upheavals of Brexit and the election of Trump but these really are something for the future, Bowie’s and Michael’s death are here and now. Of the two the recent death of George Michael has been much more powerful because he was actually younger than I am. I grew up with David Bowie. I bought Ziggy Stardust when it first came out, I think, and it formed the musical back drop to my youth yet Bowie was always this man, somehow removed from anything I might ever know. George Michael was somewhat different. He was the fresh faced star as I was the older man and so my interaction with his music was different, more removed.
Both men will be missed by their fans but of course much more keenly by their close friends and family. Perhaps the one small comfort the grieving can take is that both men left a legacy of creative genius in their own different yet complementary way.
So winter storm Barbara is starting her run across the country and many Christmas lights are going to be blown over. This morning I went shopping with my wife for the Christmas supplies and it was crazy – all around people were filling their shopping trolleys with more and more stuff and I have to wonder just how much of the stuff we all buy at Christmas is necessary? Of course the answer is very little but we all do it anyway even when some of us can’t really afford to do it – perhaps in the long run we all can’t but that is another story for another time.
It looks like storm Babbs will finally blow herself out just after the Christmas period is over just in time for us all to take stock and get ready to make those New Year’s resolution that usually never make it out of January. Yet those of us lucky to live in the rich west don’t know just how lucky we really are. I was reading an article in the Economist the other day which said that something like if you are worth a ridiculously small amount of money, perhaps as small as $1000 then you are some of the richest people on the plant. I suspect the figures might slightly be out but the point is very true. We in the west are rich beyond the dreams of most of the people in the world, in fact probably beyond the dreams of most of the people who have ever lived yet we still fill our trolleys full of stuff we don’t really need at Christmas.
To try and fact check this I just googled richest 10% of the world and got result about the richest people in the world, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett et al. Yes these people are richer than anything anyone can imagine but if you are able to run a Google search then the chances are you are too.
So why not embrace the fact that you are rich? Why not this Christmas just accept that idea for one moment? Perhaps then we might find Christmas just a little more than whether we can afford to put lights around our houses and just enjoy the little things. I doubt I will do this but then again I am one of the richest 10% in the world so naturally I want more. I never claimed to be perfect.
Merry Christmas.
Enough of the mixed cliche/pun or whatever. As we head towards the Christmas period a number of things are starting to crystallize about Brexit – the chances of getting a soft Brexit are becoming slimmer by the day. The latest blow to this came from the latest twist in the Singapore/EU trade deal which would seem to indicate that any Brexit deal will have to ratified by all of the remaining EU countries which will be a devil’s own job. Of course the advantage that Britain has over Singapore is that we already comply with all the standards etc that the EU requires. However, this doesn’t mean that it will be easy, even before we come to the ratification by other EU countries, because of two real stumbling blocks: Free movement of people and the role of the European Court of Justice. How this is overcome is where a willingness to compromise on both sides will be paramount and a realisation that it is in both sides interest to do so.
This doesn’t mean that a deal won’t be struck but it looks very very unlikely in the two year article 50 period and I doubt that there is any political will on the British side to extend that time line which means we will have to trade with the EU as though we were never a member of the EU which of course will hurt the EU just as much as it will hurt Britain but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.
So in the New Year anybody who is responsible for exporting from Britain will really have to come to terms with a world where there is no trade deal between Britain and the EU and have to plan accordingly. It will mean that some jobs will be displaced but as to what the true extent of that maybe we will have to wait and see. There will be a huge amount of noise and smoke floating around as groups lobby for their own special interest but that is one of the many costs of living in a free country.
So as the year come to a close I have now spent quite a bit of time reflecting on Brexit and I have to say I have somewhat changed my mind. Yes I wanted us to stay in the EU but that boat has sailed. I now think that we need to embrace Brevit as a clean break as anything else will be a drag on the economy. We are going to have to accept that in the short term there will be a cost to be paid and we will have to hope that it is worth it. I suspect it won’t be as high as I feared before the vote but there will be a cost nonetheless. We do have numerous advantages compared to all of the countries left in the EU and we should try and profit from them especially if the EU doesn’t want to work with Britain to both our mutual benefit. It is going to be a bumpy and at times painful next 10 years but we will survive because you know what we have been through these things before and we have done so in the past.
Every so often we all look in the mirror and wonder who is that old sod looking back is? As you do grow older you do realise that trying to reconcile what you see in the mirror with your own self image is part of the aging process and as with everything in life we all manage to achieve this task to differing degrees of satisfaction. One thing is sure…no matter how much we try and deny what we see in the mirror with make up, surgery, wigs dyes etc in the end the face in the mirror will always follows us around. My advice for what it is worth is just accept what you have become and move on with your life.
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