Ups and downs

Friday 7 June; a warm, sunny day. For about the first time this year it's shorts and sandals weather (and sun-block and cap).

Feeling righteous after spending the morning checking the nest boxes in Sharphill Wood with two other Friends (of Sharphill Wood) I took a trip (2 buses, but FREE with my bus pass!) to the Djanogly Gallery at Highfields, near to the university.  The exhibition, The First Cut, is ending this weekend and had been recommended by several friends. Sculptures by artists working with paper  -torn, cut, lacquered, folded... There are delicate paper shoes and dresses, figures carved out of books, a walk-in forest of suspended paper trees, a garden made from plant catalogues, a tree 'of knowledge') with leaves made from discarded library books. The experience was utterly breath-taking.

I've brought my camera, so decide to wander around the University Park a while before going home. It's idyllic. Is this freedom? To have the privilege to walk in the sunshine, all worries put aside, no deadlines, nowhere to be, admiring all the girls (many with legs bare to the air) sitting on the grass or doing the circuit of the lake. I want to photograph all of them! After a while I feel like a kid who's had too much chocolate, and head for the bus.

Back to reality! There's a message on the landline. While I've been gone my elderly neighbour has rung because her husband has to go straight to the doctor's (and, it turned out, from there straight to hospital). And I wasn't here to take him.

Next I can't sit outside to read the paper because of the music emanating from our student neighbours at the back. This has been a persistent issue over the past 2-3 weeks; we can't relax outside without being subjected to something or other, which makes it impossible to enjoy the garden. From our Velux window I count 12 young people on the lawn.

After a while they turn it up so loud that it can be heard clearly inside the house as well! I'm seething! I look up 'noise' on the Rushcliffe Borough Council web site. Turns out they require you to talk to the perps before they'll do anything like a noise abatement order. So it looks like I'll have to go round tomorrow. Bugger.

Decide to watch Lars von Trier's 'Antichrist' to take my mind off the noise. Bad idea. Von Trier's work is unique but almost universally bleak; I feel duty-bound to watch his films even though I've never actually liked one. This one starts with a toddler falling to his death during some graphic but unerotic love-making by his parents followed by disturbingly injured animals, strangulation, blood ejaculation, and a DIY clitectomy (using a pair of household scissors).

Lie awake alternately thinking about what I'd like to do to the students and their stereo and what to say when I knock on the door.

(When I do I find them packing up to go home for the summer!)