There’s a rather adventurous clothes company in San Francisco called Betabrand. I read something about them online last year and liked their idea. They put up a photo of a new design and ask potential buyers to vote for it. If enough people do, they make it. I was feeling a bit down having been diagnosed with Pulmonary Embolism and this silly-in-a-good-way sweater appealed to me in my gloomy mood. So I voted for it and, eventually, it arrived. I then saw another wacky idea from them and thought these people are fun. They started to ask customers to send it photographs of themselves, preferably silly ones, wearing their products and then they published them on their website. Suddenly, a whole load of us, enjoying their sense of the ridiculous, sent in photos like this one I took (above).

It was hilarious, some time later, to see myself on their website modeling their Coyote Tooth Saddle Blanket Sweater. A star was born – well, almost.

Last summer I bought another product from them, a zanily colourful pair of swimming shorts to take on holiday with me to the Venetian Lido. Well, I sent Betabrand another photo – this time me doing my Taichi in my new shorts on the beach in Italy. Weirdly they got in touch – they’d tracked me down on my blog – you have to admire these guys, and asked if I’d do an article for them about my holiday so that they could include the photos of me in their gear.

I did the piece and sent it to them and then they, well a highly enthusiastic man called Robbie Wiedie, asked for a video of me reading one of my poems – well, they were pretty persuasive and, this is the result. The piece I wrote is published on their webpage as Colin Bell’s Dispatches From Venice and the link is below the recording I made of my poem Wrestling Angels. Oh yes, by the way, my Pulmonary Embolism has nearly gone but this little detour into my modelling career definitely cheered me up.

Colin Bell’s Dispatches From Venice | Model Citizen Spotlight:
http://www.betabrand.com/blog/33204/colin-bells-dispatches-venice-model-citizen-spotlight

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I have been obsessing on the artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 – 1882) as I reported in yesterday’s blog. Sorry about this but Rossetti’s poem The Blessed Damozel (1850), new to me until this week, has continued to play around in my head. I read it at one of my regular online poetry events the other day and thought I would just have to get it out of my system by recording myself reading it here in my room.

The Blessed Damozel is dead. She has been in what the poet imagines as Heaven for ten years now leaving him, her bereft lover, on Earth pining for her. She is pining too even though she is meant to be in a state of bliss. She looks over the golden balcony of Heaven down to Earth and hopes (and prays) that her love will come soon to join her because then they will be able to continue their Earthly passion in Paradise.  She looks forward to the totally impossible time when she and her lover will fulfil their erotic desires in the garden Paradise protected, even more inprobably, by the Virgin Mary herself.  The Damozel imagines this reunited life just like any heart-broken lover down here on Earth. The poet, I think, does not really believe this literally of course but he succeeds in showing the power of love and romantic passion even in some imagined unattainable eternal bliss.  He was much influenced by Dante’s La Vita Nuova (1295). Dante, of course, knew all about thr soul’s suffering in both Heaven and Hell.   Rossetti worked on this poem for over twenty years and then made a painting of it too – also called The Blessed Damozel (1875 – 1878) – where the Damazel has lost her golden hair for pure Pre-Raphaelite auburn. Her lover, the poet, lies moodily gazing up towards Heaven from a lyrically beautiful English woodland.

Anyway, here it is – recorded yesterday here in the recording studio that is my desktop computer at home in Lewes, UK. I hope you get at least some of its haunting Romantic flavour.

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