A Picture In The Attic

I saw the light
Same picture without supernatural intervention

I do love a nice omen don’t you. Recently a family member has been serving in Afghanistan. My life has been an omen quest seeking reassurance that he will be OK. The garden magpies are tired of being counted and saluted. I have studied tea leaves and cloud patterns. I have been opening books and selecting random words. Then there are the patterns of blowing leaves, not to mention songs on the radio. Not that I’m superstitious or influenced by these things of course. The fact is that all the omens were good and the lad has made it home for Christmas. On his last day there I turned on the TV by chance to see the movie Apollo 13 playing. It was the scene where Marilyn Lovell lost her ring down the plughole. Surely this was a post-modern reflexive omen with the message that things can come good even if there is a disconcerting omen.

The importance of being Artist

So, imagine my agitation this morning when a cosmic collision of omens broke my sense of post-Christmas stupor. I was in the lounge. I had moved a painting to an unusual place in order to rearrange the room. As I reached out to the bookshelf to get down my new 2015 copy of the “Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook”. I saw a shaft of light fall on the painting as if it were a sun. The edge of a window pane was refracting the light and focusing it. I noticed that the book I wanted was on top of the works of Oscar Wilde, containing of course “A Portrait Of Dorian Gray”, in which a hidden painting reveals the true life of a man. This was omen OMG overload. I was trying to decide if 2014 was to be the end of my commercially invisible writing career. 2015 could be a scribble free zone with a proper paying job punctuated by meaningful three for the price of two experiences in Walmart. Was the cosmos sending me a sign? Should there be a third “Passion Patrol” title where the girl cop solves the case with supernatural assistance? She leaves her police equipment unattended while she cavorts in abandoned lust with her mysterious enigmatic lover. Later she opens her official notebook to find the writing of a phantom hand has provided a key to a major crime. Only thing is…… it hasn’t happened yet!

The picture is by Dorset artist Graham Towler and is called Dorset Hill Fort.

Emma Thinx: Will we know it’s the future when we get there?










Chocs Away.

I’m tempted to quote Oscar Wilde on the subject of temptation. Unlike a genius and literary superstar, I can resist – which is probably why I drive a bus. But I am sure that many of my own romantic fiction readers here in the UK will know that it is National Chocolate week. Why do we need it? Every week is chocolate week, even if you don’t succumb to a solitary Malteser. Look – all I’ve had this week is a packet of Turkish Delight – and that was an ASDA own brand budget deal so it can’t really be counted can it? I have put up a struggle in the face of immense aggression from the chocolatiers of this world. Hotel Chocolat sent me an invitation to join their Chocolate Tasting Club. Their brochure invites me to “reach my bliss point”. Do they think that such blatant erotically charged lustful hedonism would move me? Too bloody right it would! Most junk mail goes straight in the bin. I’m not quite ready to take that final step, but I will be once I’ve signed up.



Whilst in ASDA buying my budget Turkish Delight (I think it’s a love it or hate it), I bought some sun flowers. At home in Charente Maritime they are a backdrop to summer, an orgy of careless beauty grown as a crop. You know I think that the context in which we see things is more important than the thing itself. A huge field of blooms is like a mob, an army or a nameless crowd. A few individuals in a vase are a work of art and a study of joy. How would life be if we saw the mass proletariat as precious and beautiful? How would it be if the poor and all the trampled dead of war could live an hour on canvas or in a vase or in the heart of the oppressors? We would know something then of our purpose – which is to love, to forgive and to share our chocolates. You thought I’d got God didn’t you?


Emma thinx: The crop is our reality. Each bloom is our truth.