Wintering

Nothing and everything is the same. I wake from half-sleep to a cold nose and heavy limbs, sinking into the cold mattress. I’m so cold that if I even move an inch I’m afraid the steely air will reach through my thin cotton trousers and penetrate the core of my body, and if that happens my chances of getting up are zero. I press snooze several times and drowse, eventually facing the inevitable – rushing upstairs, half-blind, scratching around for a mug. Water bubbles up inside the kettle, and there’s a sharp smell as a thick slice of lemon flops onto thick wood. It’s winter here.

Leche/Latte/Milk

This year’s birthday was Lush (initial cap intended!) Much better than the Bridget Jones’ style crying-in-the-bath episode last year. I took the day off (should be a human right), and spent a luscious, indulgent afternoon on the South Bank, breathing in the air swirled around by passers-by and tall London busses on Waterloo Bridge (‘with tears in my eyes...’*). I saw the Jeff Wall photography exhibition at Tate Modern. I studied some of his stuff in American Photo-texts for my MA, and I’d forgotten how clever he is at distorting reality so intently that it comes full circle and appears real again. Take the image Milk.

At first glance it’s a shot in a lifetime, the hapless photographer happens upon a vagabond cracking open a lively carton of milk outside an anonymous looking building. That first reading/viewing is an illusion though. All of Wall’s work is set-up and directed like a movie. Even so, the message is still as strong. I kinda love this photo. I read it as a commentary on the eclectic nature of city life. The only action in the image is the milk, which we see in full flight spraying out of the carton. It’s beautiful, a white fan reaching up to the sky. Of course, a second later the liquid will stain the man’s clothes and run over the clean paving stones. We’re privileged to be caught in a moment that is not-quite, never going to reach its destination. The man is looking away from the action, and in doing so he chooses to occupy a space outside of the image. He’s every bit involved and every bit detached from his surroundings. Like so many in the city, life carries on around him, just inside his peripheral vision. Part of the action, yet completely passive, disengaged. ‘Love it!’ as my friend T would say!

* Ref to a Wendy Cope poem called 'Jenny'

Art

There's an awesome exhibition at the Hayward Gallery at the moment. It's called 'Universal Experience: Art, Life and the Tourists' Eye' and is an amalgamation of photography, film, installation art, sculpture and general strangenesss. They have one piece that I've seen before in many a modern art gallery in the states - it consists of a pile of sweets piled up in a corner. Visitors are invited to take a sweet and therefore actively engage with the artwork. The weight of sweets at the start of the exhibition is the weight of the artist's partner, who died of AIDS. As the shiny-wrapped candies diminish there's a continual remembrance of the diminished life of one man. It made me think of communion and thousands of people carrying around a symbol of a man's death digesting in their stomachs.

Scarfing Again

I've started to knit a scarf. I merrily chose wool in the habberdashery department of a local store on Saturday, and with a few false starts with casting on (I can never quite remember how to do it), I managed to get going. The wool is kinda tricky, it has all these little bits sticking out which require continue rescuing from the stitches, but I was determined. I spent two concentrated hours on the train to London clattering grey needles together, and having completed about six inches I was getting a bit smug. Ah, I thought, I'll be an expert! I'll knit everyone a hat for Christmas! I'll impress them with cables and pom poms! I'll get labels made and sew them onto the plethora of finished products... That was until I realised that I'd managed to get from 25 stiches to 52 in the space of about 20 rows. I think I have more practise to do. I've ripped it all out and am going to start again. Hmm.

Hooks

It was Graham Greene who wrote ‘Hate lay like boredom over the evening ahead.’ On reading those words from an earlier blog again, I’m overcome with the dreadful realisation that boredom lies like hate over my life this week, generously covering the minutes, hours, evenings, weekends, weeks ahead. I’m devoid of stimulation, creativity and newness and the old paranoia has begun to creep in. The rain is hitting the window vengefully, and the pounding and darkness sweeping through the room adds to my glum mood. I’m seldom this bored. Something, or someone usually hooks through the grey and tugs on my hair with a word, photo, story, recipe or exhibition, and my attention is turned towards iridescent light, colour, texture and gorgeous paragraphs flow through and around and into my ever-decreasing mind. I’d see the light transmigrate through the twinkling rolled-glass on the window, and my eyes would turn to see doweling shaped lines of sunlight stretching through the trees. The right corner of my mouth would turn, ever-so-slightly upwards and the stiff air retained in tight lungs would gush out, leaving a lighter, gentler being on the heavy couch.

But today there are no such distractions and I’m alone with myself, the loneliest kind of aloneness. Mindlessly, I hit ‘next blog’, and there I am. The hook curves into my mind, and for the next ten minutes I’m hooked reading about sewing and appliqué, knitting and small children. For similar creative refreshment, check out this blog, and these fantastically gorgeous little people:

More haiku

I definitely
Want to see you again – thought
I should let you know.

Turning leaves

It’s my birthday in exactly one week. In seven days time I’ll be turning twenty-six. (I wonder why we say ‘turning’ instead of ‘getting to’ or ‘becoming’. Turning reminds me of people turning in their graves.) When I was younger, well, maybe 13 or 14, I used to imagine what life would be like when I ‘grew up’, and I would visually see a kind of ladder with each year as a rung, and there would be all kinds of pictures of things sitting on the rungs. Like for 23 I’d have a cool job wearing grey pinstripes and tying my hair back in a slick professional style. On rung 25 I would imagine me being married, and at 30 there’d be like three kids and at 32 holidays in Australia and a big house. How little reality there is when you’re 13!

Anyway, the purpose of this blog was to say that if any of you gorgeous people were in any way thinking of buying me a birthday present (and I really don’t expect any at all, and if you've just clicked 'next blog' then you really won't be) then please, please, please could you either:

Give the money to the poor or
Get a book token?

I know homeless people might spend your hard-earned cash on drugs, and book tokens are boring and disappointingly difficult to wrap up nicely, but all I would like in the whole world is like half of Foyles, or Borders, or that cool bookshop called Pan on the Fulham Road that stacks its books really crazily in piles like cry out to be knocked over like dominoes. There’s a list in my head of stuff I want to read, and it’s getting longer and longer. Thanks for reading. Reading for thanks.

Gassing late at night

Tonight I got home to a house full of wood dust and cardboard and furniture in strange places (we’re getting renovations done), and after twenty minutes sitting on a dusty sofa half reading Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk and half watching The West Wing (which my flatmate is completely addicted to, she’s like hooked up with a venflon or something), I felt so filthy that I decided to have a nice warm bath. We’ve got one of those really satisfying Victorian baths that is about five and a half feet long, so I can actually lie down in it and my toes only just reach the end. It must be really dreadful for the environment when it’s full up with steaming H20, but it’s a luxury I really appreciate, honestly. As I was running the bath water I realised there wasn’t any steam and the smell of Radox muscle soak had taken on a gas like odour… It turned out that the boiler had stopped working and there was gas leaking out from the extractor pipe. Do you know what though? I used to work for British Gas and am a legend in the gas department. (Though ‘legend’ is open to interpretation, and no, I don’t do house calls.) A simple investigation found that the builders had been chucking their rubbish (wood, old carpets, smashed up kitchen tables) down the front of the house, and this plethora of scrap had blocked up the flue pipe! Ten minutes in damp air outside heaving underlay layered with grime and trying not to rip my (new and unfortunately too big) Earl jeans on numerous bits of gripper rod, and the pipe was visible once more. A quick fiddle with the pilot light and we-hey! Hot water. it was actually one of the most satisfying things I’ve done in ages and I realised there must be immense satisfaction in manual labour, fixing things. I only really fix my hair. Anyway, the moral of this story is: always hire a skip.

Sunset

My dad sent me this photo the other day. It kinda makes me smile when I get stuff from my Dad on email, because I always know it's taken him ages to send it... Anyway, it was worth it, take a look at the photo and then read the text below.



The photograph attached was taken by the crew on board the Columbia during its last mission, on a cloudless day. The picture is of Europe and Africa when the sun is setting. Half of the picture is in night. The bright dots you see are the cities lights. The top part of Africa is the Sahara Desert. Note that the lights are already on in Holland, Paris, and Barcelona, and that's it's still daylight in Dublin, London, Lisbon, and Madrid. The sun is still shining on the Strait of Gibraltar. The Mediterranean Sea is already in darkness. In the middle of the Atlantic Ocean you can see the Azores Islands; below them to the right are the Madeira Islands; a bit below are the Canary Islands; and further south, close to the farthest western point of Africa, are the Cape Verde Islands. Note that the Sahara is huge and can be seen clearly both during Daytime and night time. To the left, on top, is Greenland, totally frozen.

Edited

The editors were ace, even though I felt faint just as they played their opening song and had to sit at the back on a step for most of the gig. They pretty much played the album and a couple a new songs. ‘All Sparks’ was cool. From chatting to some mates I was surprised how many people haven’t heard of them, so for more info click here.

Editors

Yay! I'm off to see these guys tonight at The Astoria, pretty cool. I wonder how it'll compare to seeing them in front of about forty people in the Square Pie Tent at Glastonbury earlier this year. There we were, eating chicken pie for breakfast, well, brunch, resting our weary calf muscles from wading through knee-deep mud, when a couple of guys got up and played an acoustic set, complete with wellies. They were awesome and I was hooked.

I'm kinda chuffed about the irony of liking a band named after my profession.

Tales of Loss

This weekend, my mobile 'phone decided to take a break. Maybe it was fed up of ringing, beeping, waking me up in the morning and storing a random assortment of strange images on its memory card. For whatever reason its little screen stayed black, and it stopped working. At first, I looked at it incredulously and began a little game (often played) of turning it off and back on again. Only this time nothing happened. The black screen was still staring at me.

Never mind, I thought, it's just a 'phone and it can be fixed.

Thing is, it's not just a 'phone - it's kinda my life ... in that little silver lump of moulded plastic the size of a bar of soap lies my contact with the outside world. I couldn't go to a party because I didn't have the address, and the numbers of all those I could have called to get it were stored inside. It's weird, I feel like I've lost a friend... or I have no friends, I can't decide which. At least ten times a day I reach into my bag to check for messages and missed calls, but the handbag is devoid of items the size of a bar of soap this week. Maybe I'll get used to this and become one of those irritating people who only have a landline and are never in, those you have to arrange to meet at precise times because there's no way of texting to say you'll be ten minutes late. Hmmm. It's a thought.

Another go...

Trying to tie up
Shoelaces with cold fingers makes
My heart long for spring.

Haiku

why aren’t there more
syllables in this wretched
poetic form, I ask?

--

you can’t do much with
five, seven, five, a season -
three lines, that’s the end.

--

give me a sonnet
anyday and I’ll laugh through
couplets and rhyming.

Journeying

Familarity breeds claustrophobia, especially in the city. This weekend I had the fortune of leaving the smoke behind to cross county after county by train and car. It's a sad fact of life that I find car journeys more than a bit exciting, more than likely due to their rarity. Changing gear and sitting at trafic lights in a private metal box has long been replaced with the clatter of a tube carriage, or the hum of displaced air past cold ears as I pedal my way through grid-locked streets. On Saturday evening between 8 and 9 o'clock, I sat silently, alone in the back of a blue VW Golf streaming through Gloucestershire in the twilight. The sky played out a light show for an audience of one, wispy grey clouds and twinkly stars fixed my eyes without blinking. With the simplicity of the sky and familiar white noise, sleep came gently.