That brilliant stimulant.

{"Yes, we had a table just like this when I was a little girl," said my Mum. "The exact same colour, too."}

Coffee and its powers of keeping the mind and body alert is being called upon with increasing frequency, though still incapable of holding candle to Honoré de Balzac and his addiction. Four cups, not the rumoured forty of Balzac, is my maximum, lest my jitters take over. As I have neither black hair nor liver spots, I will not follow suit and attempt his recipe for coffee drinking that enables “ideas (to) quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground… Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination’s orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; (and) the paper is spread with ink.”

As seems my pattern of late, here are a few more recent postcard collages of mine.

+ For a look at Louise and my recent collaborative artists' book being printed, skip this way.


{I don't recommend that you follow suit.}


{Companionship on such a day was invaluable, surely.}


{Taking the quickest pathway home. (The original postcard sent to me by Marieke Berghuis Leewens. Thank you MBL.)}


{Yes, I'll concede. It's quite impressive.}

Finally, I have discovered a horrible, rather brutal method that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and legs shaped like bowling pins. It is a question of using finely pulverized, dense coffee, cold and anhydrous, consumed on an empty stomach. This coffee falls into your stomach, a sack whose velvety interior is lined with tapestries of suckers and papillae. The coffee finds nothing else in the sack, and so it attacks these delicate and voluptuous linings; it acts like a food and demands digestive juices; it wrings and twists the stomach for these juices, appealing as a pythoness appeals to her god; it brutalizes these beautiful stomach linings as a wagon master abuses ponies; the plexus becomes inflamed; sparks shoot all the way up to the brain. From that moment on, everything becomes agitated.
(The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee, Honoré de Balzac)