I've been a little casual about writing my blog this summer, that happens, stuff happens, and I think to blog it, but then more stuff happens, and then before I know it I'm on a catch up and I don't know where to start. 
So, to make things easy, I'm going to start with today, and forget what has happened over the past few weeks. It may be that once I'm back in the swing of scribbling and recording my doings I will pick up some of the summer threads but for the mean time, I will focus on today. 
Every six months or so I turn my compost heaps, sieving the end heap so that the beautiful, sweet-smelling, friable earth is separate from any un-rotted twigs and clinker. I cannot put into words how much pleasure this job gives me. 
Often I am joined by a robin but this years visitor was much shyer than in previous years, or less hungry, and watched and whistled at me from a distance. 
I use the fresh compost to top dress alternating flower beds in the garden which allows me to get to know what is growing and to really feel the earth as I move and muddle plants that are in the wrong place, or new to me. 
A few weeks ago my dad gave me a viburnum layer which he had potted up for me, so that has now found it's place. And I've been moving clumps of iris foetidissima about. I started with just a few of these some years back that they have self seeded liberally, which is good although the leaves really do smell bad. 
It's autumn and although we've just had a week of that beautiful golden sunshine that comes with the season. It's the kind of balmy weather that makes a body feel like summer is still hanging in there tho' the light is different, more slanting and in many ways more gorgeous than summer's more fearsome glare. But there's not so many flowers, and not so many insects either. 
The hydrangeas are now a dusky pink, fading as they go over. The fuschias and persicaras are still in bloom, and the cyclamen have started to come out. 
And various seedheads - columbine, honesty and red campion - are ripe. In a better managed garden I would leave my grasses and seedheads to weather the winter, some gardeners manage to make that look very nice but unfortunately my garden is too much of a shambles to have good looking untidiness, so most of them get cut back after they have shed their seed. Gardens are an ongoing process anyway, one day, maybe, my garden will look just so all the year round and in the meantime I'll just live in hope. 

   

We gave the notes to Didsbury library.

And lastly a continuation of my Human Rights Act Library Project, sadly my notes are still only scribbled out words on scraps of paper but it's fun to share this project with people I love. It's an innocent enough thing to do but somehow the act of placing the notes feels a little naughty. My accomplices and I enter the library with a secret mission and leave with a "my-work-here-is-finished" air. 
Later on in the day after a glass of wine or two we talked about the human rights act and that in a sense is part of what I hope this project will do. I hope that it will provoke some thought and maybe discussion. Thought is a fairly ethereal action, but powerful, a thought voiced can be like stone dropped into a pool. 
In the west we live in a world that is a mess of thoughts, a heavy-weight media presence means that we are easily nudged into following a course dictated to us by overbearing power-players. It is good to pause, to slip out of the mainstream, and exchange ideas with people who are precious to us, whose views we want to know, whose views we care to respect, whose views we chose to respect.
On the sunday we returned to the Whitworth to see Cornelia Parker's Magna Carta piece. The things that my son had said to me the night before meant that I saw it with different eyes, felt it with a different being. I guess that is the power of dialogue and exchanging thoughts, it is mind expanding, and as the mind expands our consciousness opens and a greater world is born, a world of possibilities unfurling into the infinite.   

     

And we chanced upon a piece of work by Lemn Sissay, a poet I have only recently discovered. It's pretty special seeing something that you have previously only seen on a laptop screen in its concrete form. 

Over the weekend I went to Manchester to see my son and his lovely girlfriend. Amongst other things he took me to see an exhibition of contemporary art at the Whitworth http://www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/currentexhibitions/msiggcollection/. I particularly liked the Yangjiang Group work which was disturbing and then so beautiful I couldn't stop thinking about it. And Ai Wei Wei's organised axe heads. Wang Peng's body prints had a strange sweetness that drew me. Also Wang Jin's photographs of his Ice Wall.  

My piece for the sculpture trail is done.