Wish I'd known

Our windows at work look out over Salamanca Place to Sullivans Cove. I have been meaning to mention how lovely the view is on sunny winter mornings. A line of large plane trees (or something similar) block the water view for most of the year, but once the leaves fall you get that low-angle sunlight glittering off the swell, cut by the wakes of the boats.

When I am having a quiet moment in the far kitchen corner waiting for the kettle, I have noticed I can see the top windows of the Art School, on the far side of the cove. [As an aside, I am not happy calling it a cove as it the most fakey-fake tymes of olde word that is bandied about by real estate and marketing types to give any small patch of oil-scummed water a touch of picturesque - sadly that is actually it’s name]. Just in time for my first year, the Art School moved into a refurbished former jam factory on the docks.

It’s a very long time ago now. I worked much harder then (well, at least in my final year) than I do now. While I waited for the kettle to boil I thought about all the 1970s and 80s technology that was still hanging around then, and requiring to be mastered by graphic design students.

In those days "cut" meant cut and "paste"meant paste. We had scalpels and x-acto knives, and hot wax, heat-set gelatin stuff, rubber cement (and the piece of crepe shoe sole everyone had for getting rid of the excess) and worst of all, aerosol spray glue. Letraset, rapidograph pens, the process camera and copyproof bromides, the golfball typewriter with 4 fonts! Those bendy blue plastic strips and french curves. The Pantone colour markers. Man. And I was so bad at it all. If the Macintosh had not come along when it did I would now be a librarian or something.

Pic pinched from Graphic Leftovers blog

I was sometimes pretty miserable when I was a 20-something, and looking over at the art school it occurred to me that 1988 me would have really had something to look forward to if he could have seen 2011 me. A beautiful, lovely, patient wife who is also all the things I am not, which is handy. Two amazing kids. And no spray glue at all, ever.