Bowls

Clients: can't live without them; sometimes can't live with them! The present job I'm working on is a quarterly magazine which should be a straight-forward matter of dropping content into pre-designed page templates and just tweaking a little bit here and there to allow for the inevitable oddities of content. But this is the seventh issue I've done and still the client can't get things properly organised. This time I was told there was a firm date by which the job should be printed and ready for distribution and asked to work back from that and set appropriate milestone dates. I did that, but we're already behind schedule due to a long list of content which has still not been finalised by the client and failure on their part to get back to me with responses to queries for clarification. At this stage I've done all I can, and my design work has stalled. It's all very frustrating, but at least I can hold hand on heart and head up high in the knowledge that I'm not to blame.

All this meant that I was able to go to the National Concert this evening for a long-anticipated performance of Messiaen's Turangalîla Symphony. My all-time-ever greatest musical experience was a previous performance of this work (back in 1976 as part of the Dublin Festival of 20th Century Music, with Messiaen himself present), and I heard it again here in 1990. Tonight's performance, good as it was, didn't eclipse the memory of that first hearing, so it will be interesting to hear it yet again at the beginning of May when I'm in Zurich with the Music Group. It's an extraordinary work, which calls for enormous orchestral forces, including a weird electronic instrument called the Onde Martenot, so performances are rare. Hearing it twice within such a short space of time is due to the fact that this year is the centenary of Messiaen's birth.

Anyway, even though the job is behind schedule, I still had quite a bit of work to do earlier today to do page layouts for the material I had got from the client, so once again I wasn't able to get out and about for a bit of outdoor blipping. So household items were called into service yet again for a quite tabletop photo session. These bowls date back a long time. I remember eating dessert out of them while my Dad was still alive (and he died in 1979!), and for some reason I always associate tinned fruit and ice cream with them. Apart from bringing back old memories, I decided to arrange a few of them and frame them in the camera, without the usual cropping which I tend to indulge in. So this is as plain and simple as it gets (apart from a tiny bit of tweaking with the RAW image).