Using a pestle and mortar, grind the ingredients to a fine grade, and then mix with a little water, to make a paste. You can form the pellets by rolling the paste in the hollow of your hand. Make these about the size and shape of flattened peas, and leave them on a clean surface in the sun to dry. Once they are thoroughly dry you can begin to paint them.

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The game board was left as if the play had been interrupted, the players having stepped away for a moment, perhaps to go into the courtyard to see what the sound was. They would have been caught by the blast, turned to powder, but in here nothing was disturbed, and a thin layer of grey dust had settled on everything. Black was winning, or certainly had the advantage. He briefly found himself playing out the game in his mind, and then got back to the task of documenting the scene.

He had a few days left on this job. He should be done by the end of the week. Then he could pack up and head back north, taking a couple of days break before he started on the barn for Gustafsson.

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It’s remembering that’s difficult. I know there’s something I’m meant to do but can’t put my finger on it. It follows me like a faint smell, one of those ones you worry only you can smell, or that may even be you. You’re smelling something, and you know you are, but can’t be certain what, and no one else will tell you.

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“Just another manic Monday …”, the breakfast show on the local radio station always got that in somewhere, it would be played each week before nine a.m. on Mondays. Sometimes she heard it in the car on the way in. Wasn’t there some theory, or maybe theory was too strong a word, that said Monday was one of the worst days to begin the working week? Wishing it was an “I don’t have to run day."

By organising the material into groups, and giving a label or nominal to each subdivision she began to get some sense of being in control, or at least partly in control. It was her system of organisation, she’d chosen what would go where and even had an answer why for each of them, if anyone were to ask her.

Some days she thought of measures of time, of what they felt like. Starting from something she felt could be simply stated, a day, an hour, a quarter of an hour, a minute, a second. She didn’t try to guess the length of time, didn’t test herself as to how accurately she could estimate a minute, but tried to grasp a sense of what each period felt like, as it might be imagined. What did a year feel like, what sense did thinking of that length of time give her? What was it to imagine a week? Not any particular week, but the duration or extent of a week. How would she describe a decade? She didn’t go beyond that, as she was looking to get a sense of something she might assess, and did not think that the sensing of a century was available to her.

Running through her head was that Abba song, ‘The Day Before You Came’, with its listing of the unfulfilled repetitive days the girl lives before she meets the man of her dreams. Was that what her life was now? Without the retrospective viewpoint of coupled happiness.

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The image of the Gallery interior was odd, in that it wasn't sharp enough to clearly identify or really see the individual paintings, and cut some of them off awkwardly. The photograph gave little sense of the scale or shape of the space, making it difficult to judge the size of individual works. It presented a pattern of brownish rectangles edged in muddy ochres and distributed in a rough grid on a dark red background.

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Thorsten is the able, the independent one, so where does his disproportionate annoyance originate? Marcus requires assistance, but is not dependent on him alone. His memory is of his father becoming similarly stressed and angry when he forgot, and this was at a time when his brother was living at home and going to work each day, so that should have made it an easily remembered part of the daily round. Thorsten has resorted to setting an alarm on his phone to remind him; this takes some of the anxiety out of the process and helps keep the calm in the household. There may be reasons for his forgetting. Perhaps something in him resents or resists the expectation, the ‘being responsible’ of the big brother.

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I drew round my hand and you drew round yours, so that the outlines overlapped, and I thought of the hands in cave paintings, outlined in blown earth pigments, and you mentioned being told off for drawing on the wall at home as a child, and then we wrote our initials, and the date, and got on with putting the wallpaper up.

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A system of icons or visual signs is recommended for users who are not literate, whose first language is not English, who have learning disabilities, or who suffer from conditions affecting memory or cognition. These icons need to be simple, recognisable and printed at a scale that is clearly visible. Testing on sample groups is advised before a new icon system is introduced.

Rhythms, biorhythms and diurnal patterns are not fully understood. Evidence for them has been observed in subjects over extended periods, and links to lunar, solar and planetary cycles have been proposed.

The new dispenser allows for the tracking and management of uptake as the monitor can clearly see what stage has been reached, the rate of use, and the remaining product. Replacement or replenishment can be planned, and crises of supply avoided down the line.

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Making copies of the old photos, and photographing the other bits of paper, ephemera, scrapbook stuff, this was a sensible way of keeping them; it was a more efficient method of archiving, shifting from the material or hard copy to the digital, tidying things, making better use of space. He hadn’t decided yet what to do afterwards, to burn them, or put them in the rubbish? Maybe he could borrow a shredder from work and then put all of it in the recycling.

He’d been taking pictures like this for a while. An inventory of sorts, working through the objects in the house, one at a time. There was a Tumblr that he posted them on, but that was as far as it went for now. It was when he was taking pictures of postcards and photos, working through a shoebox full, that he noticed the sensation of falling, of tipping into a void; it was a brief feeling of vertigo, and it passed fairly quickly, but it had happened again since.

People mention missing days, or blackouts, and he’d seen references to a ‘missing decade’ where a pop star had gone into seclusion and hadn’t released any material for years, but this was different. It wasn’t like student drinking bouts where you wake up and part of next day’s task is piecing together the previous evening and night, sorting a jigsaw, and maybe getting bits confirmed by the others, checking phone images, and embarrassedly asking someone what you’d said. This was a hole in his memory, with clear edges, edges he could go up to, almost touch, but not see beyond; and he could point to where the gap ended, where the recollection began again. Is this the sort of feeling that suggests to some people they were abducted by aliens, or was it a symptom of aging and to be expected? Mostly, his memory of events was continuous, but there was a distinct feeling at times that a chunk had been cut out, as if a film editor had made a clean splice. He recalled reading of the calendar alteration that removed twelve days from people’s lives; there had been riots as crowds demanded their time back, but the twelve days had never been lived and so would not have left the sense of a missing block. Though he could not work out how any more life could have fitted into the rift, the sense of a tear or hole was what he felt.

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How do things begin? and then go on going on? Is there a pattern here that can be recognised in little images of sunrise, or an opening door, or perhaps simply the number one?

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Between us, we agreed on a shift system to keep watch through the night, roughly three hours on for each of us; I would go first, from sunset to midnight. It wasn’t cold, and the nights were shorter at this time of year. Mainly it was listening; the darkness hurt my eyes if I tried to stare out into it. There was nothing to focus on, just a deep green blankness.