Coffee shop wisdom

Everyone is speaking to me in Confucianisms today. Lady buying flowers says: 'If you are down to your last two loaves, sell one and buy a lily.' I like that one, very deep.

When I say 'everyone' I am exaggerating a touch, as that was the only pseudo Chinese proverb offered up to me in the course of the day, but my mum was in one of her 'words of wisdom' moods on the phone tonight so I feel as if I have been staring into the very jaws of old age for the past hour. Also read Forster again at the airport waiting to pick up my mother-in-law and loved this line, which also links to my painting 'A narrow cocoon' which I am taking to an auction house tomorrow:

'Inside its cocoon of work or social obligation, the human spirit slumbers..'

His point being quite similar to Hugh Grant in 'Four Weddings and a Funeral'; that the 'human spirit needs to be occupied by mundane events, work and wedding planning to avoid looking into that gaping maw too often. Airport coffee lounges are a great place to face your demons and stare into space asking unanswerable questions; anonymity and lack of interference are pretty much guaranteed and the chair is yours for as long as needed; life flows by in an ever changing and often downright disturbing frieze and if the urge takes you, the possibility to jump the country is always right there. I saw a baby go by wearing what I am pretty sure was a cake band, not a head band, on its downy little head; just plain wrong and alarming when you are defocused and pondering life.

Failed utterly to do any painting so far today due to airport transport and mother communication, so I shall claim the last fading hours of daylight (yikes, nearly midsummer!) to lay down some ideas and outlines on the boards that are levelling accusing stares at me across the studio. Dinner is to be a simple but effective braised rice with white fish fillets in some kind of seasoning; found some fresh coconut on reduction which made it a quarter the price of the tinned milk, which for some reason it now nearly the same price as petrol. Probably more. My maths is rubbish. Tomorrow; huge painting that only just fits in car needs transporting to swanky auction house for hopeful, please-please, sale to rich tasteful person which will start the slow climb out of poverty!