Lines and patterns

A riff on the week.

Staring out of the train window, the hummocks reclining in the distance I notice lines in the fields. Perpendicular moving through the grass. The lines of ownership. Boundaries. Of toil and graft and harvest and the furrows where nature has driven through, proving it is the master of us all.

I look down at my hands. More lines. Pronounced. Not as soft. Creases of living and doing. Of caring and love. Lines from creating and making. Of time passing and accelerating. Lines the weather has grooved out.

I remember holding my grandmother’s hands in hospital. Her skin almost translucent. Silver. I guess she knew she was reaching her end, and her hands after 91 years of living understood how to touch. They communicated, with the slightest movement, more than we could articulate. I filed her nails and massaged in cream. It was the last time I held her.

In the gallery the artist has used line to immense effect. Deep charcoal. She has the power and imagination to erase, smudge and add creating a mythological landscape in a face. Her hands covered in ashen residue.

Alison Lambert Human Explorations: Heads and Myths at Derby Museum and Art Gallery

On the train home a young man excitedly asks passengers where they are going and tells them how to get there. The changes they need to make. I think about the pleasure his brain finds in recording this. I too love the tube map and would memorise chunks of it. Lines intersecting, junctions. Mind the gap.

There are no straight lines in my town. Everything slopes. I pass the lawnmower shop. The corner plot, so anachronistic in a townscape of Poundland’s, mocha lattes and nail bars. In his overalls he starts to prepare the many machines for bed. Every day he sets them out in a grid, starting in the garage they edge onto the street. I wonder if they all have a place. The Lawnflite, Atco and Hayter mowers. He revs them up and petrol fills the air.

I follow the route home. A gentle curve. The street has been familiar to me for 40 years. I remember the shops that were once here. The dance shop where the traditional signwriting has been revealed on the facia.

A cat in the window yawns as I pass. It’s whiskers poking out like spokes on a wheel.

I walk through the cemetery. A circular path, passing the oblong headstones. A woman in a khaki beanie stands in the distance tidying flowers. A gigantic pink neon balloon in the shape of a number 4 is next to her. My heart sinks with the weight of her grief. Like an anchor thrown overboard.

We cross a cattle grid.

“What’s this?” you say.

“It’s to stop the sheep and cows wandering into the road,” I reply, genuinely excited that you have never seen one. As your small feet balance on the steel tubes to cross it.

We’re back in the fields.