Saturday morning

In typical Ba-esque fashion, I have set myself up with a desk as opposed to addressing the washing. I have hovered, but the work surfaces need tending to. Today I woke up with a terrible hangover, having been plied with Sancerre by my godmother, Hannah, the night before. In the morning I found myself propped up on my bed by one of the larger cushions, which has a baby blue starched linen cover.  I don't care much for the pattern, but its texture in terms of the linen count is more than satisfactory. 

Feeling at a considerable distance from 'on form', I padded over to the kitchen in my slippers and dressing gown. Ignoring the coffee cups and biscuit platters, I smile at the porridge saucepan. Fond images of Saturdays at 139b flit across my mind, where, in the same dressing gown and slippers (I would rise early, but wouldn't dress until late), Lucian would greet me with a cry of despair: ' Oh Sister Aimee, when I wake up with a hangover, and I'm greeted by your leftover porridge skins. I'm attempting to start the afternoon, and  can't help but think that looks almost as awful as I feel.' Then Adelia would rush in and say: 'I moost ave ze couffee: Aimee, if you wish, would you car fo soume avec ze whipped cream. Zis is the oonly way I can ahddress St Augusteeen. I ope it weeel aide you wiz the Maaarrrrlow. Oh whare did I leeve ze electronic whisk.'  Then we'd set about making the most awful mess in our attempt to woosh up some kind of revision treat. Things would escalate into brunch. Felix would be called to come over and cook eggs, and we'd make Lucian cycle off to get some fresh posh bread. So rather than hurry to clean up the mess, I let the washing up  sit there as a memory prop. 

Turning to the fridge door, I fumble for orange juice, but my hand grasps at the Lemonade. Swigging from the container, in addition to a barrage of sweet, salty and sour tastes, fully revive my poorly head. I refocus and look out of the kitchen window. To my intense shock New York seems to have disappeared. I rush back to the bedroom: the view is indeed empty. As it is in the bathroom, reflected a thousand times in the tall wall mirrors. I return to the living room and sit on the couch. The room is situated on the corner of the building, so as I gaze in front of me, out of the corner of my eye is also the presence of a window on the right-hand wall, facing in a different direction. Yet out of each of the three windows I can see, not one of them has anything at all to show. For the first time I feel giddy at being so high up on the 29th floor. Suspended in the clouds, my little bubble of proportions faces out onto nothing. New York has really gone. In the left hand window you can see a portion of the bathroom wall, as it jutts out a little further. I like this because the brickwork acts as a kind of proportion stick against the expansive view of the city. Yet here, the terracotta edges don't brush against a crisp blue sky, or the carpeted green of Central Park. Nor do they dwarf the neon red 'CNN' sign, atop one of the distant skyscrapers. It brushes against a white expanse.  Perhaps this is what it feels like to be in a giant film set, with the blue screen surrounding you. Or more like a giant apple mac advert. Any second now an enormous silhouette will come crashing through the window, clutching a Mac Book air, some cute folk song blasting in the background. 

I think sitting inside a skyscraper is so dramatic because it's where you experience this perfect collision between the natural and the urban world. You're in the air, yet also in one of the most urbanised structures humans have yet come up with. I don't know why the sky doesn't get such a focus as the rest of the 'natural world.'  Perhaps this is because it's so very difficult to capture an image of it. Now I experience alot of thinking about the natural world through telly shows: like David Atts show on the sea. Yet even the sky seems to out do the deep blue, in its evasion of successful photography. In the 1830s photographers would have to capture the sky separately to the foreground image, if they wanted to include it in their final 'image'. Some even used the same sky in several photographs, because it was so hard to capture one that reflects how really good looking the sky is. So sometimes you would have a scene, most often in urban towns, where the principal subject was a street lamp, metro sign, or a bridge. The sky in such cases was considered relatively unimportant, was not photographed by itself and later collaged back into the image of the city. Instead it was left as the camera 'saw' it: blank. I think this is most like what the fog resembles to me now. Perhaps this is why I think the sky-as-subject is still the property of painting. I think it's in 'Good Night Mr Tom', when Tom recalls his dead wife saying that if she could only paint one thing, then it would be the sky, because it's never the same thing twice, but always in perpetual motion. John Constable's (nearing living relative: Barbara Windsor) 'cloud studies' has some pretty exciting sky, if you can call Constable exciting! 

So, yet, now the sky isn't there, and I'm so shocked by it's absence, I'm wondering why the sky isn't such a Big Thing that we think about.  It's perpetual motion should be something that draws us towards captivating it's ever changing composure. 'Le Plaisir' is all about characters in 'perpetual motion': showing how pleasure can be innocent, refreshing and funny, yet equally or perhaps simultainiously ugly, cruel and pathetic. Like the sky, 'plaisir' is neither wholly one thing or another, but a little of both.