Spelling herbs: Basel is Blackford hill and beyond
Well, what sits on the window cil matches the mood green outside. At the top of the hill on the top floor the coffee machine whistles away and so does the wind outside, you wouldn’t think we were about to break in to summer, or is what used to be mid Lothian (now Edinburgh) always like this? Perhaps its just written in the script. The clouded sky does bring out different levels of green though, which I quite like. The same greens that are Basel, Coriander, Parsley, more Basel, Thyme, more Coriander, and some Lettuce – all fighting for their own light.
It begins to rain again slightly, one or two drops fastened against the window. This matches the sound of the fridge next to me as it extracts the warm air from inside leaving a fairly cold temperature. This method of extraction is also like leaving the flat and confronting the rain. Its probably colder inside than out.
There is a red leafed tree sat just beyond the green line of trees just below the window. This colour matches a plant I once had in my possession, bought from Homebase on 15% off day. A wonderful purple-y red and leaves like velvet. I used this as a prop in a film piece I made starring myself. That was in Glasgow and I remember holding the plant, still wrapped in its plastic, and clambering on the train with my other props at Haymarket station. This was around a month ago now.
The gallery where these props were filmed alongside myself is just off George Square in the centre of Glasgow. Its a tricky one way system to get to the correct street and luckily my friend has a nippy 70s soft top to manoeuvre there. I enlisted her help in exchange for an apple juice to help me pick up the props after the exhibition: she kindly agreed and we drove back to her place afterwards lifting the plant – now out of its wrappings flourishing with its colours – from the car and taking it in to her ground floor bedsit.
The plant now lives in the bedsit and this little bit of colour that resides in Edinburgh, just outside of my window enclosed within the tree, now lives in Glasgow’s west end near the Kelvingrove museum.
My friend is from South Queensferry and detests Edinburgh as the city she had to return to from London after study. Since I moved East she has not been too visit me. But yesterday, like a character from an Iris Murdoch novel, she crept back in to my life. She knocked on my flat door I let her in and she sat at my kitchen table, in the seat where I now sit writing this. It felt displaced, she said “its just like your old flat in Glasgow, but in Edinburgh”. With her usual expectant hunger I fed her.
I begin to think of partnerships now. I have realised quite recently that my drawings and perhaps my films and performances – under the guise of ‘collaboration’ – are in fact an exploration of partnerships.
Soon we will return north in the same 70s soft top. But its raining pretty heavy now and the slick black leather roof would leak…
