The Emperor's Terrapin, et seq

[desperance]

Gotta love jade. How not? Even without its being so tied in to the history of China and my own creative obsessions, I have always loved the colours, the textures, the variety of jade.

Sunderland is currently being visited by a prime object, a great terrapin carved from a boulder of nephrite jade (I have been known to get sniffy about nephrite, poor cousin of the true jadeite, Imperial jade - but not tonight); so of course we had to go and pay our respects. I was there last night with friends: Gail-Nina Anderson, comics god Bryan Talbot and his wife Mary (Wikipedia has an entry for 'notable people named Mary Talbot', but none of them can hold a candle to ours), durham_rambler and shewhomust, who has written up the Terrapin and the evening here to far greater effect than I could, 'cos she knows more than I do and is wiser.

So I stayed overnight with Bryan & Mary, and came back this morning via a meeting at the Arts Council, wherein we discussed my plans to obtain money from them for this year's Phantoms projects and my own return to Taipei. Please to cross fortunate digits and engage in luck-wishing.

And tonight I have just picked up this week's bag of organic veg. I have green beans, wet garlic, summer squash, courgette, fennel, shallots, carrots and potatoes, and count myself a fortunate man.

Comments

[desperance.livejournal.com]

PS - and a cucumber. How could I forget my cucumber? It is - uncucumbrian. Six inches long, stout at one end and narrow at the other - like one of those leather-and-shot coshes that I forget the name of, unless they are the type called life-preservers. Only green, obviously.

[glass-mountain.livejournal.com]

Green jade and green veg...somehow it sounds very relaxing and pleasant! I love jade too though am more of a quartz and sometimes turquoise person. Might you go to Taipei? These are things that Jessicas can only dream of at the moment - but they are happy dreams! :)

[davidbarnett.livejournal.com]

How's Bryan doing? And, more to the point, when's Alice in Sunderland to be released? Bryan and I share a birthplace (Wigan) and when he lived in Preston and I was a cub reporter on the Lancashire Evening Post I would make up all kinds of preposterous reasons to visit him and his rat on the pretence of writing articles about The Nazz or Luther Arkwright just so as I could sit in his fantastic little study and yakk about comics with him for an afternoon.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

He's fine, and Mary likewise. Alice in Sunderland will be published by Jonathan Cape in (I think) February (pauses to check Amazon - yup, it's listed). I'm in Alice. Me. Appearing as myself. It's scary-wonderful; I'm an Artwork...