The Lookout Aldeburgh

It's always a highlight seeing the art and installation at The Lookout on the beach in Aldeburgh.

 You can see the spiral stairs leading up to the tower room at the top on the post 2nd November... where each year Caroline Wiseman puts on another work combining artist and poet.

This year the art is by Issam Kourbaj. The poetry by Ruth Padel.

The combined work is called ...

Dark Water, Burning World, 80 Moons and Counting.

To mark the sixth anniversary of the uprising in Syria, poet, classicist and Hellenophile Ruth Padel, joins artist Issam Kourbaj, to present an intervention that explores the millennia-long relations between the Near East and ancient Greece. At this event, Kourbaj will launch Dark Water, Burning World - a new artwork inspired by 5th century BC Syrian vessels on display in Gallery 21; and Padel will read a new poem Lesbos 2015 - influenced by her meetings on the island of Lesbos, both with the inhabitants and with some of the thousands of Syrians who have fled there.

So you reach the top and look in and are confronted by the boats full of burnt out matches and the clear Irish voice of Ruth Padel reading her poems influenced by her visits to Lesbos and the influx of so many broken lives.

The boats cover the floor of the upper room and fill the old wooden window frames. 

While we were there we noticed a family on the beach playing as families do...with dogs and children running and laughing...

...and in the icy cold waters of the North Sea a lone swimmer can just be made out fighting the waves.

Two worlds.

The Work can be viewed at The Fitzwilliam Gallery and The V and A as well.

Room 101

Thursday...and it's writer's workshop and the prompt is...

Room 101

We're to choose three things/ people/ situations we would like banned forever and thrown into that fearful room that Orwell wrote so graphically about!

Oh dear! What to put in? I'm thinking that there is so much to be dumped at the moment, that I'm not sure where to start.

Well let's see.I could start with the Syrian situation.That doesn't mean that I want to dump any people in that room.No no never. But the situation that has initiated the whole shebang. I read this week that the real reason has nothing whatsoever to do with bombs and fighting. No no. The real reason apparantly is ...the escalation of global warming. Yes.  Syria's fields have dried up. Parched. Dry. no rain falls.

We should have been thinking about that some decades ago. People need food. People need water.  Even the Pope himself got in on the act this week in Washington. I heard him say it this morning on the early news in his wonderful hesitant English. Too late though for the Syrians or others in that desperate situation as well.The only thing to do is put the war and all the trouble into room 101.

And talking about global warming and how to counteract the consequences, I heard the head of Greenpeace say...also on the early news..he's all for technologies.Well good. We need all the help we can get. Need to go forward with up-to-date technology. So..that means solar energy. They say that the north African deserts alone, fitted up with solar energy farms could produce enough energy to light up the whole world.

But wind farms? Oh dear I feel I could get into trouble here. I would put most of them into that scary room.We were travelling last week through the hills and valleys of our lovely northern countryside, when... bang... wallop.. on the top of a magnificent mountain...a row of white giants! And do you know I've heard that if the wind is too strong or if the wind is non existant...well they don't even work!

Think I'd better move swiftly on!...as I know this is a very emotive subject...not that it could be any more emotive than a drought in Syria and the people in power deciding who gets the water and who doesn't.

Anyway I'm think now about the third lot to go in the room. I'm sure that we all want litter louts and those owners who leave their doggy parcels halfway across the pavement, put into the room...
But I want to put in all of those drivers who think that their cars will be safer if they park them up on the pavement. Especially in narrow suburban streets. No room left for babes in prams. So on to the busy road they must be pushed. Must take a chance and dice with death as the drivers whizz past them, inches away from the pram wheels. Not that my grand daughter does that. No no!. She doesn't go out on to the road in her motorised wheelchair. Her policy is if there's not enough room between the wall or hedge and the passenger door of the parked car......just to plough on...!! Oh I hear you say, what if she scrapes the side of the car? Well the answer to that is...it gets scraped! The family worked that policy out over 19 years of frustration.

I think we could say...so did the Syrian people. Frustration boils over in drastic situations and the consequences are not always pretty. We've seen that on our screens recently. It takes years to end up in certain scenarios and years more to come to terms with new situations...if ever.