Aw Diddums

Funny how quickly things change… a couple of days ago the PC was rendering Apophysis fractals, but tonight it’s rendering a 3D scene in Bryce. Life would be very dull if there was only one thing to do. I wouldn’t have thought of it but there’s a minor contest for science fiction images. My bent is much more towards fantasy, but I came across a folder of unused 3D scenes which were quite promising. Maybe, with a little work, they would fit.

Looking at the other entries, it hasn’t a snowball’s chance… but it’s literally the taking part that counts; lots of fun and new ideas.

I didn’t come here to bore everyone senseless (oh, well maybe I did, but not deliberately). I was thinking about how people make certain decisions that X is OK but Y is not… for instance, traditional photography versus digital photography. All kinds of photography versus manipulation or ‘tweaking’. Those are very broad examples; the individual permutations of biases and prejudices are endless. “I despise the brushed metal effect,” is one phrase I came across a while ago. Nobody bothered to reply. What he really meant that he thought it was overused by uncool people. On a Come Dine with Me show, someone said “you used one of those two-handled things to open the wine. The RIGHT way to open wine is…” and my mother and I looked at each other.

X is cool, the right kind, the right way, used by the right people. Y is not.

These biases start young. I was rambling round one of the arty sites and came across a conversation where someone was required to describe the process of photomanipulation. Despite the friendly reply from the photomanipulator, the enquirer dismissed it as ’simply cutting and pasting the images of other users’. That’s not necessarily true; photomanipulators aren’t barred from using their own images. And if they just cut and pasted things, they would probably not look good… there is much more to it than that.

If you think about painting a picture (traditional media), you might have a still life specially set up in the studio (various items taken out of their own environments and placed together in an attractive way). If you think about photography, there are portraits of people perched against backgrounds, graduates wearing cheesy grins and clutching false rolled-up certificates (slightly battered round the edges), models wearing evening gear and make-up. When you took a photo of wild nature on holiday, you waited for a break in the crowds of other tourists and angled the shot to avoid the telephone pole and picnic signs. Then, people enjoy movies and fiction, but they’ve never been real.

I’m referring to the expectation that photos etc are worth nothing if they are not a real, true representation of the subject. If the sunset is peachy pink and there’s a boat on the water, it should remain peachy pink with a boat on the water. I don’t understand that, as there’s nothing 100 percent natural or ‘true’ about any of it. That same stretch of sky could be glorious blue and gold tomorrow. What we see out of our own eyes or perceive with our own minds is never the full, eternal truth; still less committing it to a piece of paper and saying “this is last night’s sunset.” It’s not a sunset… it’s a piece of paper.

There’s nothing ‘true’ about painting, photography, sculpture, drawing…. none of it.

As for the ‘using other people’s stuff’ thing, well… provided you make a good image and credit the original photographers / artists (who gave permission in the first place), or avoid all of that and use your own stock anyway, then I don’t see a problem. It’s still work: searching out the images you want; using tools, skills, the mind’s eye… trying to achieve a particular result. Sometimes the ‘cheat’ is much harder to pull off than the real thing.

In the conversation I mentioned, the photomanipulator asked if the other person would like to try that genre. No, said the other person – she would never do it… she preferred to stick with the usual kind of art.

I went to see who this philistine was, and what sort of art she went for, and I didn’t find much there to support. It was all one kind of thing (not terribly adventurous) and not particularly well done. But before I got too sneery in the privacy of my own room, I checked her profile… and she was only 14.

Ah. She’s got time yet. I’m sure I was dismissive of things (and stuck in an artistic rut) when I was 14, but in time I learned life is never black and white. Rather to my dismay. Then again, what would art be if we didn’t have other shades to play with?

The arty sites have a plethora of contests, just for fun, and I’ve been finding them a source of inspiration. I’ve only entered one so far, but got an honourable mention. I’ve been working with others in view, and it’s had the effect of making me even more prolific but not actually posting anything… just in case I post something I could have put in one of these small contests. Most of them say “only new images please.”

I’m usually reasonably pleased with the pictures I turn out, but something unsettling has occurred. The last four pictures I made… I didn’t just like them; I loved them. I was using techniques I avoided before (drawing and painting) and didn’t set out meaning to; it just happened. Even stranger, I only wanted to make one of them, and that was in the nature of a quickie (to try out a Photoshop tutorial).

A short aside: I have a bit of a mental block when it comes to talking about this particular hobby. I don’t like saying ‘my art’ or ‘my artwork’ as it sounds so pompous, and usually alternate between ‘my pictures’ and ‘my images’… but that gets old quite fast. Another mental block I have is when it comes to digital stuff, I can never say “I painted” or “I drew,” as I see those being for traditional media only (real pencils, paints, paper). I know that ‘painting’ and ‘drawing’ are accepted terms in digital media too… isn’t drawing with a mouse or a tablet pen just as much a physical process as drawing with a pencil? And it’s not even as precise, half the time. Still, I avoid it, as I know if I said “I painted a picture today,” most people would assume I’d had the watercolours out.

That leaves me with the problem of how to describe the process… “I made something, created something, did something?” Icky. Overtones of school and Blue Peter.

About the four pictures I made that I liked more than I expected to… I was fairly sure none of them would work, and if they did, it would take some hard slogging to make anything of them; wouldn’t it be easier to make a vector picture with gradients and layer styles? I was in two minds about trying these projects at all. Even worse, I disliked the raw material I started out with… two ugly fractals, an artificial vector flower (made by myself in Paintshop Pro), an untidy Photoshop brush (still be to superceded… deliberately spelling that with a ‘c’…) and a shaky drawing with the small El Cheapo tablet dating from the Year 2000 which I recently dug out from a plastic bag. (It doesn’t go with Mac System X, so I had to put it on the PC… and even then the installation was a bit iffy).

The tablet is supposed to make drawing easier, but my first effort was messy and not worth a second look. I thought “never mind, I’ll send it across to the Mac so the little white Mac-mouse can clean it up.” That’s not what the tablet is for… but the shaky drawing is now in one of my Golden Four pictures.

The thing is, you often hear people say (usually of photos) that if it was bad to start with, you can’t make it good. I disagree. You could take the worst photo in the world and turn it into a thing of beauty, though it probably wouldn’t be a photo any more.

To start with, it’s all I can do to keep on with these tough projects, but as time goes by and I see signs that something good is emerging, a sense of wonder creeps in… and you couldn’t drag me away.

This might not seem to be connected, but we were watching Stargate after missing the beginning. It was about an alien city in a dome; the citizens were linked to a main computer and were being brainwashed. People were being killed to keep the population small and manageable, and the survivors’ memories were altered so that they wouldn’t notice their fellows had vanished. I was convinced the Council (or some higher body) were the villains, but they were as much victims as anybody. At the end, I said to Mum, “who was doing it?”
“The computer,” said Mum, squinting strangely at me.
“I just thought… someone must have programmed it to do those things?”
“It was the computer. It got into their minds, like it’s got into yours, and makes them all unseeing and unheeding…”

So, the computer’s the villain. Such a weaver of fantastic worlds and things that don’t exist… even pictures that aren’t on paper. Though, the other day, someone I was talking to said it wasn’t till she had one of her fractals professionally printed and held it in her hands that she realized it was real.

Sometimes I wonder what will happen when I die… will all these pictures, including the Golden Four, be zapped? My diaries burned, disks shredded, words lost? My whole life on computer, deleted.

Mum says she doesn’t care what happens after she dies. The whole planet could blow up; it wouldn’t make any difference to her. But it matters to me. Apart from caring what happens to cats, trees, and dolphins, I want to feel I’ve left some kind of mark. If the planet implodes, so do my pictures. Maybe I will be the only person (apart from Mum and the Computer) to have seen them.

It’s funny how the subconscious mind operates. The other night I dreamed a young student was procrastinating by churning out fractals and Apophysis scripts instead of studying for his exams. His study topics included fractals but he was wasting time on fractal art instead. He even wrote a little poem which he put on his site… and this is it, word for word, not a woolly half-memory of a fading dream:

The breaks are in the wrong places but it has exactly 17 syllables… like a haiku. Yes, I suppose the computer has got into my mind.

Delilah just loves insects and plays cat-and-mouse with them. Having bopped a fly so that it lay at her feet, I thought she would crush and eat it… but she picked it up in her mouth and dropped it near Samson, alive and kicking, so that they could both bully it.

I don’t like to see anything tortured, so I scooped it up in my hands (it didn’t protest) and pushed it outside the door. The feeling of its wings fluttering against my palms made me frown for a moment… I was reminded of a dream I had a couple of nights earlier.

In this dream, I was living alone in London. I had lots of friends there but had withdrawn from their company for a little. I needed time on my own but felt guilty. One lovely sunny morning, the sky was blue and the breezes playing, and I was having a quiet little picnic on the grass well away from the crowds. There were trees heavy with pink blossom, and I stood beside them and tried to compose a little haiku.

“The may tree blooms… no, wait. The may tree blossoms…”

Pacian came up and stretched out on the grass beside my picnic basket, heaving a sigh. “What a day. So full of crowds in the Big Smoke. We haven’t seen you around for a while. You hibernating or sumpting?”
“Oh, you know me,” I said. “Just taking time out for a while. How is Geosomin?”
“Oh, fine, fine! She was asking after you too. Are you coming round to see the new baby?”
“Oh yes, the baby. I’ve not met him yet, have I? I will come round soon; just not today.”
“Don’t leave it too long.”
“I won’t. Well… I better be getting home now. Things to do.”

I stood up and packed the food away in my trolley. Sharky was in the park too, strolling around, so I popped him in the trolley and zipped up the lid. It was the best way to get him home through the streets. I was just about to set off when Pacian stopped me. “Sharky is kicking up a rumpus.”

I opened the trolley and peeked in… sure enough, Sharky wasn’t sitting purring as I had imagined – he was half standing, wailing anxiously at me, things falling on top of him.

“Oh,” I said, “I thought he was sitting comfortably on the rug, but he’s just jumbled up in there with the rest of my stuff.” I felt upset because he had been shouting inside the trolley and I didn’t hear… it took someone else to point it out.
I pulled everything straight so that the cat was sitting peaceably on the rug again, zipped up the trolley, and set off.

My way home lay through a market… it was half empty today, but I ran into an ex-colleague, Dick. He was packing up a stall.
“Nobody’s around,” he said. “I’m taking all this stuff back to the office.”
“It’s a nice day for it,” I said. “How’s Donna?”
“Donna’s her usual self.”
Once he told me Donna didn’t like the song ‘Oh Donna, you make me stand up; you make me sit down, Donna, sit down, Donna…’ I had grown up with the song, and didn’t sympathize – till I looked up the lyrics.
“How are things at work, Dick?”
“Oh, so-so. Every thing’s at sixes and sevens just now. We could do with more workers.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “But it’s a beautiful day and I’m enjoying my freedom. Have fun!”

I took off, leaving Dick labouring disconsolately.

Near the candyfloss stall, a large moth whirled round and round me, trying to escape the attentions of a large red-coloured rat. The rat ran round and round me, scrambling across my clothing. They were both moving very fast, and I caught the moth and held it between my hands, trying to protect it from the rat. My heart was in my mouth as I was worried the rat would get the moth anyway, and then I would feel terrible for trying to protect it and not succeeding. It was fine, though; I took the moth somewhere safe and let it fly away… and the rat never knew. It kept looking round for it, and eventually gave up and went to get some candyfloss instead.

Meanwhile, Samson and Delilah are still torturing all the flies they can catch. Those insects have no idea what it takes to stay out of the wee devils’ reach. I have rescued three so far, all lightly battering the palms of my hands. Yesterday when they were chasing one which was waving the white flag of surrender, I picked it up and popped it out of the window. The cats watched it zoom off into the blue, then turned and glared at me.

I don’t think I’m Person of Note around here at the moment…

Goodness me:
Show Us What’s Happening (contest). I don’t feel inspired myself, but had been wondering if I could depict agoraphobia or even deafness; this contest isn’t a world away from it.

The other day I was brushing my teeth and pondering (don’t we all?) on the uncertainty I often feel about the day ahead. I was wondering how I would describe that if I had to. At first I thought “it’s like going to battle without your armour,” but we don’t wear armour today…

This is the nearest I can come to it: it’s like going to work in your pyjamas and bunny slippers, and everybody else speaks a different language. It’s going to rain, and you haven’t brought your umbrella or handbag, which are at home with the door unlocked. You’ve got on the bus and and realize to your horror that you either don’t have the fare or have lost your ticket, and you don’t recognize the part of town you’re in.

I hate feeling like that in the morning.

Tagged by Kaz! I’m still impressed.
I particularly like the idea of adding pictures. Here’s my effort:

5 things in my bag:

I don’t have a bag any more: I have a trolley. The cats are curious to see what’s inside – they pop casually out of the top after a wee scrimmage around. I don’t keep them in there, though, so they’re not included in the following list.

1: Conversation notepad and my favourite pen (from Staples).

2: Cheap necklace of a dragon. Bought as a small gift for someone but still rattling around in my trolley.

3: Mobile phone. There is no QWERTY pad, so it’s a pain to text with.

4: RNLI luggage label, in case Bluebird (my trolley) gets himself lost.

5: Pentax microfibre lens wipe. It was bought twenty years ago for my Nikon camera, but is great for cleaning my specs. I have three dotted around the house as they’re never where I want them.

5 favourite things in my ROOM:

For ‘my’ room I’m talking about the one I’m sitting in: the sitting room upstairs. As the cats aren’t currently in it, they won’t be making it into this list either.

1: The bears. The white one sat with Fusspot the Siamese near the fire when he was unwell. The other softies belong to Mum, but they (and the black furry hat) sought sanctuary in here when she threatened to send them to charity. They are all quite big; the croc is over a metre long, but the brown bear is the biggest.

2: My bureau. I inherited it directly from a family member (that is, it wasn’t left to the family, it was left to me). I wish the kittens didn’t think it was brilliant fun to climb it by leaping on the shallow slope with all their claws out. Scratches are just about visible in the photo. The thing stuck on the glass is a monster cut from cheerful birthday paper. The monsters were blu-tacked to a door at my old house, and I’m not quite sure how they got over here.

3: Bluebird my trolley. Will go with me anywhere at any time without grumbling, and takes the weight of our shopping. On his own he is very lightweight, and can be collapsed flat when the car is full.

4: Disney print from The Jungle Book 1967. I bought it because it reminded me of my relationship with my sister. Which of us is which character, do you think? The answer is somewhere here.

5: The computers. Look at this pair… Mac and PC, cheek by jowl. You see the poor old PC in the middle of rendering an Apophysis fractal. It has six and a half hours left to go. I up-prop the keyboard so that the cats won’t tramp about on it and spoil the render. If you’re curious about the wallpaper on the Mac, you can find it here. It’s not by me, but I wish it was.

5 things I always wanted to do.

1: Write a book!!! (Yes, I know that’s an empty desire shared by millions).

2: See Africky again.

3: Get much more powerful computers, with all the rendering and graphics applications I could ever wish for (plus all the storage).

4: Enjoy my job (whatever it might be) so fully you couldn’t tear me away from it (brain fog without the guilt).

5: Escape into a time-suspended zone of my own so that by the time I’m fully refreshed and ready to face life again, I can pop out to discover that no time at all has gone by. The zone must not be Narnia, but it’s a similar idea.

5 things I’m currently into:

1: Computer graphics and digital photography.

2: Dean Koontz books, preferably the non-flippant ones. (I didn’t like Life Expectancy, which was about a clown, a baker, and people having babies).

3: Instant Mocha coffee. I thought there could be nothing better than Morrison’s instant mocha, but I was wrong. The star of the evening is now Nescafe Double Choca Mocha.

4: Blogs – I don’t know what I would do without mine and the community here.

5: Idling (of course!)

5 Persons to TAG:
Since I tagged people for my last one, I’ll let this one slide. Go ahead with the meme if you’re in the mood. Pictures are not required, but might make it more fun.

I keep writing blog posts and not posting them. I’m not even sure where they’ve got to.

I’ve discovered I can add simple elements (letters and symbols) into Apophysis to be rendered as beautiful fractal art… it’s just as well I can’t add photos and things, as I would be rendering fractals of the cats. There is now a version for Macs called Apophysis-J… I’ve not tried it yet as I’m trying to hold off. Partly for my sake, partly for the Mac’s.

A couple of nights ago I made 16 pictures. They weren’t straightforward renders or ’snapshot fractals’ as I’ve seen them referred to; but they seemed so easy. It could be I’m feeling a little tired of it now… not forever, mind you. I always come back to this.

Last night I was amused because somebody wandered past one of my art pages and said “Really crazy work you have… out of the ordinary.” I imagine that was a compliment, as he added one to his favourites (not the other crazy stuff, mind you). I don’t think I do anything different; I’m trying all sorts of things and haven’t settled down to anything in particular. Today I’m doing fractals, tomorrow it could be airbrushing. It depends on the genres you’re used to viewing.

I came up with a picture a while ago using Photoshop brushes which Mum said were like hat pins. The person who made them requires permission if they’re used commercially, and someone sent her a photo of a pizza box with her ‘hat pins’ all over it. They hadn’t asked her first.

I feel in need of a megamug of very hot strong mocha to clear the fog I’m in. I hope I find what I’ve done with the other blog posts. Maybe they fell into Apophysis by mistake, and are spilling out as floods of spirals, curls, swirls and Julias.

Samson was tagged by Pearl over in Shu’s Small World, and is mighty chuffed! Says it’s a weird feeling to have a lovely blue cat (is she blue?) come flickering out of nowhere, give him a playful swat, then vanish again. But maybe he can do the same to a few others – should be interesting to try. If a big cream cat appears all of a sudden, don’t scream… it’s just Samson.

1. What I was doing 10 years ago.
This one’s easy – I wasn’t born then. The cat before me had just about been born himself. He was a Grand Premier (though not 10 years ago!) I’m not sure I will bother, myself – maybe one day, but I’m not in a hurry.

2. 5 things on my to-do list for today.
Eat, sleep, roam around my territory, chase wasps, and toss the fake mouse a few times (if I can’t get a live one).

3. Snacks I enjoy.
Just our usual meals, preferably meat rather than fish. Anything else isn’t food. Delilah eats Stilton, salmon, and cheesy crisps, but I don’t fancy any of that myself.

4. Things I would do if I were a billionaire.
Retire to my own private island with Delilah, Diddums and her mother. The island will have any number of fresh springs we can drink from.

5. Three of my bad habits.
Using the litter box just as Diddums sits down to rest with coffee or lunch; constantly demanding to have the tap turned on for me; getting my eye scratched during play (I’m recovering from my fourth scratch, or is it my fifth?)

6. Five places I’ve lived.
Small village where I was born. And then this room here – corner of the sofa, squeezed down as far as I could go. Then I moved behind the computer desk, sometimes switching to the book shelf, where I hunkered down behind the piles of books. Then there was the top of the tallest unit in the room. Now I live downstairs in the cat hammock beside the front door. It’s a great address… catches lots of heat at night from the radiator, and a warm golden pool of sunlight in the morning.

7. Five jobs I’ve had.
Friend to Diddums; companion to my playmate Delilah; a little excitement in the life of Cheeky (who still likes to ambush us); park keeper; somebody for Diddums to blog about. That’s five.

I tag…. your pet or animal companion! *Pow!* A big cream cat appears and thumps into your leg like a particularly heavy sack of sand.

Normally, around this time of year, I’m muttering about crowded cafés, shops, streets and roads. Not so much this year! For a couple of weeks now I’ve been smiling happily, feeling warm and giving… I suspect it has something to do with the art sites I frequent. When people are being people around you, having their quirks, weaknesses, concerns and their strengths (largely the creative process, or at least the desire to do well at it) – it gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling!

When folk come along and add your work to their favourites, that doesn’t hurt either… all sorts of people, from teenage girls to 65 year-old guys in Finland. You have something in common with them and so you’re no longer thinking (for example) that older people play Bridge rather than get on the net, or that younger people are an alien species who lurk on street corners. When I was 16, if I’d known other 16 year-olds who were keen to share their passion for drawing, painting or photography with me, I’d have been delighted. Who knows what difference the internet would have made to me at that age?

Getting back to my recent resurgence of love and goodwill to all humankind, a possible factor is that phenomenon I mentioned in an earlier blog post: when I don’t do something very much, I glide through it with ease. If I was going to town every other day, I’d be a lot grumpier than I am now.

A couple of days ago, Mum asked me why I was grinning. I told her I got a new comment on my ‘introvert bloggers’ post and was thinking about how disastrous it would be if the internet collapsed all of a sudden. “Imagine life without it,” I said.

“Aiee!” said Mum, then (after a pause), “introverts have a warped view of life.”

Pushing away the niggling thought that I have a tendency to ‘think’ myself into tight corners, I said “but you’re an introvert yourself.”
“Yes – I’m an introvert.”
“Though you have lots of friends and sit on all those committees.”
“When I was your age, I wouldn’t have been able to give speeches and talks, but it’s not so bad now. Anyway, we can’t let idiots run everything.”
“By idiots… do you mean extroverts?”
“Er… more or less. There’s usually a balance.”
“Extroverts go out and do stuff without thinking, while introverts think about things so much they don’t want to do them?”
“Something like that.”

Hmm…

A stray memory surfaced in my mind just now. I was working on a large poster with a friend in art class at school. It was beginning to grate on me that she was so bossy; she would say “do this” and we did it all her way, though I was a better artist. I found I was scared to touch the picture without permission. Further back in this post I was complaining that I couldn’t share the fun of artwork with friends (apart from the odd scribble with felt tip pens), but what was going on here was not sharing.

One day I decided it was my picture too, and I was jolly well going to put some dots in. Of course they looked terrible, and if I’d been in my right senses I would never have bothered with them. When my friend saw them, she got very cross and painted all the dots out again, and I didn’t object. She was completely unaware, I think, that I hadn’t put the dots in because I wanted dots… I’d put them in to assert myself a little.

This is doubtless one good reason why introverts and extroverts don’t always work well together. If someone you know at work or school is acting mulishly, throwing senseless spanners in the works, it’s possible that something similar is going on. If you don’t want me to break out in a rash of dots, don’t boss me. (Ahem).

Tutorial finished… it gave me two pictures to put in my online art gallery. The first was so-so (I didn’t like the red and pink colour combination but the thing had a life of its own!) so I made another with colours more to my taste.

Today I didn’t have to walk Thundercloud, so I walked Mum instead, taking my camera along. Ran out of film (or rather card space) in the first five minutes, having taken the 512MB card instead of the 1GB card. It was a bit bright for photos anyway – it was 3pm but felt (and looked) more like noon.

I was annoyed when I framed a nice shot of the footpath with overhanging trees, “ah, lovely, just trees and Mum wandering gently along,” finger tightening on the shutter… and two sweaty joggers shot past me into the frame. I didn’t even hear them coming.

I didn’t ask for that, cosmos.

The photo you see here isn’t that one, but it has Mum in it. Get out the magnifying glass.

I’m still working on the tutorial – it’s taking me days. I wonder if some of the others were able to do it in one night? Maybe the more practised ones can.

In my last post I said I wanted a nice pink gradient the next day (meaning a more cheerful mood instead of the blue one). When I got up next morning, the next bit of my picture to be worked on was a soft pink. That’s what I’ve been working with all day. Request answered – thank you, cosmos.

I’ve gone a little quiet, I know – I’m following more Photoshop tutorials. It’s great when I find ones I can use in Photoshop Elements 2.0. So many other Photoshoppers seem able to afford the top applications.

On Wednesday night I had a dream…. it cast a slight shade, a transparent gradient, over my day. The closer we got to bedtime, the bluer the cast of my mood.

In the dream, I went to tea with one of my cat clients, doing my best to make pleasant conversation, but she cocked a sardonic eyebrow at me. I was relieved when one of her cats shot off to the end of the garden, and a terrible caterwauling arose. It seemed her cat was picking on one of my cats, Lucky. Lucky died years back, before I started this blog.

I rescued him by picking him up and carrying him back to my seat. He seemed surprised at first, then clung closely to me, purring deeply. I could feel it vibrating through my heart. He seemed to be saying “it’s such a long time since you last held me.” I was bemused to realize it myself, and couldn’t think why such a distance had grown between us.

Later in the dream I discovered I had a huge aquarium at the back of my upstairs sitting room. It contained three large fish, about 40 cm long: two sharks and a human diver. I had to carry one of the fish to another part of the house in a red plastic bucket. I could have picked any of the three – the diver, the slim pretty shark, or the strong, sturdy, moody shark… I picked the moody one. He was the most likely to bite, but I felt he would be better able to deal with being removed from the tank. After scooping him out, I was annoyed to find there was no water in the bucket – I had to dash off to get some before I could put him in.

We were possibly showing him to a visitor, after which I returned him to the tank… he was slightly limp, but recovered quickly. Nobody had been bitten.

Sharky… I wonder if there’s a connection. Cats who have passed on… one of them missing me, and the other swimming moodily in a tank.

And then thinking how people are here one day and gone the next. Dad working abroad, making a life for himself and his family – and now it’s just us. And the baby mouse… I rescued him from the cats. At first I thought he was dead, and Samson was pinning him down with one claw, but when I got closer, the little thing was shaking. His legs were so thin and crumpled under him that one looked broken, but he was just weak. I took him straight outside with some crumbs. I don’t like wearing my nice pink slippers outside, but for the mouse’s sake, I trekked them across wet grass and placed him in a snug corner near the shed. He hobbled and wobbled slowly under the shed… Not convinced he will have survived, but maybe he found a nest of leaves and slept himself to recovery.

Mum accused Samson of nibbling the top off a muffin, but I said I gave it to the mouse.

I was in Photoshop Elements painting a light bulb in a lamp, when a song came into my head… one of Melanie’s most ’sobbing’ melodies. It might have been Candles in the Rain but I’m not sure; it’s years since I’ve played her music. It wasn’t Ruby Tuesday; I would recognize it as soon as it came up.

The Photoshop tutorial was absorbing, but while working on it, I remembered a stray comment from one of the 30 or 40 others who have already followed it. She said she decided to do it because there was nothing else to do, and she was feeling sad, longing for some human contact. I became aware in my mind of all the others tracing the same lines – some quickly, some slowly, some happily, others less so.

I’d like a nice pink gradient tomorrow, please, and a different song.