Shortly, The Chicken Hipster piece will be posted.
Until then, relax and think about something else. Like architraves or pediments. Maybe ancanthus leaves.
Or simply Google "Chicken Hipster" and be amazed.......
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
My Daughter Is Leaving And I'm A Wreck
First published in The Globe & Mail
August 25/2010
So I asked Katy, my wife, to help me get some perspective. Or, more accurately, to throw me a lifeline. “I don’t see her all broken up about this,” I said. “It’s like she wants to leave.”
Ever so sensitive, Katy replied, “What did you expect? We spend 17 years preparing her to go and so now she does it. Hardly rocket science.”
That wasn’t the solace I was after, so I moped.
Louis L’Amour once said, “How long is a girl a child? She is a child, and then one morning you wake up she’s a woman, and a dozen different people of whom you recognize none.” I get it, Louis; well said. But it doesn’t make me feel any better.
August 25/2010
It was a selfish view, of course, and naive. I’ve been proved wrong and now I’ve been brought to the brink and forced to look over the edge. What I see mystifies me. I don’t see disaster, not for her at least, but rather a wide road rolling out under her feet, a world beckoning. And I don’t see her looking back and hesitating.
So I asked Katy, my wife, to help me get some perspective. Or, more accurately, to throw me a lifeline. “I don’t see her all broken up about this,” I said. “It’s like she wants to leave.”
Ever so sensitive, Katy replied, “What did you expect? We spend 17 years preparing her to go and so now she does it. Hardly rocket science.”
That wasn’t the solace I was after, so I moped.
— David Gillett for The Globe and Mail
But she had a point. We’d entered into the bittersweet season with Molly-Claire: bitter at her leaving, but tasting the sweetness of knowing she’s ready. This was what we’d wanted, after all – that she be able to confidently soar in her own sky. Honey, Be My Keira Knightley
Originally published in The Globe And Mail July 30, 2010It was a perfect day to have a midlife crisis, but not in a Porsche with a tattooed yoga instructor. Instead, I'd chase Jane Austen and track her down in the wilds of Derbyshire, on her own turf. My wife, Katy, was resigned, recognizing the telltale signs: I'd been practising my posture and had stuffed a waistcoat into my carry-on. “Let's just keep this to ourselves, okay?” she said.
It's not that I didn't want a Porsche and a tattoo, but there was something about dear Jane that got my blood going. The good diction maybe? The witty repartee?
Actually, it was Keira Knightley playing Elizabeth Bennet in Pride & Prejudice, standing on that exposed ridge, her skirts flowing out like smoke behind her, the music swelling, the achingly impossible beauty of it all. I'd find it and Katy would pose there. On that very cliff.
Our trip to Derbyshire, England, was to be a warm-up for a week climbing in the fells of Cumbria, but it quickly morphed into a serious search for iconic scenes from period costume dramas. We explored Chatsworth, lost in the endless corridors of Mr. Darcy's overblown Pemberley, gliding with reverence through the sculpture gallery, catching glimpses of Her Ladyship's chickens beyond the sash windows. We walked the misty shadows of Haddon Hall, that most perfectly preserved medieval pile, which stood in for Lizzie's bedroom, featured prominently in The Other Boleyn Girl, and played Thornfield Hall in the most recent Jane Eyre. But that was all tea cups and costumes. I wanted raw drama, the wild moors, the bleak soul-searching loneliness of what, for the Georgians, spoke of noble wilderness.
So the Peak District had me. The first of England's National Parks, it is within an hour's drive of a third of England's population, and visited by 20 million people a year. But for us it was still lonely on that day in May, the trails empty, the narrow lanes populated only by puzzled sheep and muddy tractors.
In one of Hathersage's many hiking shops, I approached the map shelf. Before I could ask, an Aussie with skin like a brown lizard anticipated my question: “Need a route map for Stanage Edge? Lizzie Bennet's famous rock. Have the lady pose there, eh mate?” He dealt me a waterproof map outlining an 17-kilometre loop that would take us up onto the moors and across the edge of the world, the millstone grit escarpment where Austen's heroine went to clear her head.
It was hard going at first, seriously uphill, a leg-burner. Katy followed, no doubt rehearsing a Jane Austen quote: “Husbands and wives generally understand when opposition will be vain.” Then the narrow path gave way to rolling moorland where we had only reeling rooks and scudding clouds as company. The escarpment loomed ahead of us, a sheer cliff in stark contrast to the lush heather and flowering gorse of the moor.
“There it is, that's it!” I enthused. Grumbling, Katy climbed the knobby column of stone and balanced precariously on its narrow podium. I hadn't told her that the Edge was a mecca for British rock climbers. “Sorry, not quite right. Watch your step.”
Katy dutifully climbed a few more before we found it: the perfect silhouette, the right background. “Hold your hiking poles out behind you a bit. Make them look like a Georgian frock, kind of blowing in the wind if you can manage.” Cue Jean-Yves Thibaudet on piano. She finally had it: Lizzie Bennet in all her innocent angst and gazing into the distance. It was a wrap.
On the way back down to the village, rain threatening, we passed isolated North Lees Hall, an Elizabethan manor house where Charlotte Bronte had Mrs. Rochester jump from the roof to her death in Jane Eyre.
Katy, with a furrowed brow, looked at the house, gauging its height against the stormy horizon, then at me. “Not a chance,” she said.
I put my camera away. She'd done more than her share of posing for the day. “Time for the Packhorse Pub?” I suggested, smiling innocently. She had suffered enough for the sake of my midlife crisis. And as Jane once put it in Persuasion: “One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has all been suffering, nothing but suffering.”
And we still had more Derbyshire to see.
Patience is a virtue
This blog is under construction.
Being an architect has not helped much in the flow-chart, get it done on time and under budget aspect of blogging. After all, there are buildings to design, snowshoe treks to undertake, books to read and new things to write...but be patient and check in again soon.
Sorry. Really, I am.
(...well maybe....)
Being an architect has not helped much in the flow-chart, get it done on time and under budget aspect of blogging. After all, there are buildings to design, snowshoe treks to undertake, books to read and new things to write...but be patient and check in again soon.
Sorry. Really, I am.
(...well maybe....)
Coming soon....
Articles originally published in The Globe & Mail newspaper on subjects ranging from: Jane Austen to Urban Chickens to Statement Architecture to Missing My Daughter...
IN PROGRESS BOOK PROJECT: village1349
In Village1349, Charlie Cooper finds himself fighting with the memories of one night of senseless violence and nine long years of mystery revolving around the disappearance of his war-veteran grandfather. A family trip to a run down manor house in northern England only adds to his troubles as the mysteries pile in on him: bizarre links to a classified World War 2 operation, ominous threats from a shadowy corporation, rumors of a secret community and run-ins with costumed characters who seem to be from another age - scared, mystified and pre-occupied with the bubonic plague. As the storm clouds of fundamentalism , pandemic disease and biological warfare gather, a strange mix of characters emerge: medieval re-enactors, disillusioned ex-hippies, savvy executives…and well-armed warriors caught in what seems like a time warp, the year 1349, when the Black death ravaged Europe.Charlie meets Alfred, a sickly fugitive his own age, dressed in Medieval clothes…and adept at swordplay. They soon find they have much in common but how different their respective worlds are: one framed by technology, the other by ancient arts; one world governed by science, the other a universe where God and faith are all.
In the tradition of books such as Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, Susan Price’s The Sterkarm Handshake and The Pit by Ann Pillings, this story plays with the tensions between past and present and the fine line between reality and fantasy, but always keeps one foot solidly in the here and now, tenuous though that footing is.I’m an architect with a penchant for Medieval architecture and have had two mystery novels for young teens published: Mystery Rider at Thunder Ridge and The Great Reptile Race (both Chariot Books). I’ve also written for periodicals and anthologies on issues of creativity, architecture and social history. I live in Ontario and have roots in northern England, a place I often visit and where Village1349 is set. In fact, I recently returned from walking the ancient Offa’s Dyke Trail in Wales, (105 miles, 1005 blisters) with my wife, a medieval scholar at the University of Toronto’s Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies. (Yes, it’s a mouthful…)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)