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Home schooling my daughter today and we were asked to emulate Matisse by making collages out of coloured paper. I was surprised that a 6 year old was learning about Matisse, but also that the home school work of a 6 year old could teach a 53 year old something. I thought Matisse just did paintings. And to be honest, I probably couldn’t pick one of his out. Apparently they go for up to £15 million which was an incentive to have a proper go at making an animal collage. If it works for Matisse, then why not for me?
Phoebe wanted to make a monster with a purple ear that was bigger than the rest of it (I know, it's shit compared to mine) but I decided to let my animal appear through the artistic process. And it ended up being a pretty good dog. If a 6 year old had made this you’d be very impressed. I won't let it go for less than £14 million (I havre to acknowledge that it's not as good as a Matisse) It was lovely doing some art together and very relaxing too. There have been some hairy moments with home schooling, but it’s also been ace to spend some time teaching (and learning with) my daughter.
And it took my mind off the impending unpleasantness that is coming tomorrow. Whilst reality (not vanity as you usually only find nasty stuff) searching myself I came across a gofundme page dedicated to a man called Richard D Herring. I believe that 26 Richard Herring’s were placed on this earth to try and do good, each with a different middle initial so I was sorry to hear that Richard D had gone. Once before I had helped a different Richard Herring reach his funding target by retweeting him and letting my crazy and kind followers chuck in some money. It was a fun way to spread some semi-random positivity. And with thoughts of my own mortality in my head tonight, I thought it would be a good thing for Richard Herrings to stick together and the cause seemed like a good one and it felt good to be paying tribute to a man in Buffalo who I was only linked to via our first and last names. The fund was about $2000 dollars from its target. I felt we could help with that. And tweeted about it. And sure enough people jumped on board and helped push the total up to its target. It feels much better to harness the positive power of Twitter.
Why not bung in five bucks anyway, in memory of Richard D and for the joy of doing something positive and random that will impact and improve the life of someone you will need meet?
Only 25 Richard Herring's remain. Let’s hope we can keep it that way.
I had a lovely chat with Mary Lynn Rajskub tonight for RHLSTP. Having only just met her pretty much the first thing we talked about before the broadcast began was my upcoming operation. It was strange to be telling a stranger before I’d told hardly anyone else, but whilst I have been mildly cryptic about it (though if you’re paying attention it’s pretty obvious what’s going on) I was never going to keep this a secret. There’s too much material in it and also it won’t hurt to reiterate the message (that I’d heard a lot but not properly paid attention to) to check your bits. So around about 12 hours before my operation was due to start I was talking to a woman in America about how I was about to lose a ball.
She was up for the chat about that, and much more. We had more technical difficulties with our streaming service, so for about 10 minutes Mary Lynn’s responses couldn’t be heard, but it’s all backed up and will appear on the podcast in full in three weeks.
I didn’t sleep too well as I thought about what was to come. And what would never come again.
