Why is this? Why have so many of us lost a sense of public courtesy? We are richer than we have ever been but, equally, our sense of social obligation has never been weaker.

I know I'm going to come across as a total Grumpy Old Woman with this post, but seriously, I'm noticing such a lack of respect for other people and one's environment in today's society. Just this afternoon, I went to the cinema and unfortunately sat in the same row as a couple who talked for a fair amount of time through the film, which has always been pretty much par for the course in our north London cinema. But did they really have to keep turning their mobile phones on and distracting me with the bright light of the screen? Maybe I'm becoming one of a minority who goes to a film to watch a film, not to talk and send text messages.

Then I walked over to B&Q to buy some last-minute crocus and tulip bulbs for the garden. Because I can never have too many spring flowers. Walking ahead of me were a couple of young boys, dropping fastfood wrappers in their wake. Ok, I understand that 'Keep Britain Tidy' is not as inspiring or convincing as 'Keep Australia Beautiful', but come on... didn't their parents teach them not to drop litter? And then, the piece de resistance. A motorcycle rider decided he didn't want to wait in traffic but instead drove across two pedestrian crossings and their accompanying traffic islands, narrowly missing pedestrians in the process. What is that about? Too many people just wanting to do what they want to do, go where they want to go with no thought for other people. 'Me and mine' above all else.

These days I'm not so game to challenge people on their antisocial behaviour, because mostly you get told to F off, oh, and didn't you know that these days you get stabbed for asking someone to stop throwing chips at your girlfriend? I did call security once when some teenagers were running riot through a screening of a film, literally running around the cinema, and that was satisfying. Luckily they weren't waiting outside for me afterwards.

Chicos

If you gradually eat a whole bag of these, sent with birthday presents from home, all by yourself because your husband doesn't like them, you're not going to feel very well. You'll probably also be wondering what your more politically correct associates might make of a bag full of little chocolate jelly babies. Sorry, jubes.

How to find a lost friend

It's gradually come to my attention that I seem to have lost a friend. As in misplaced, as in lost touch and had no luck in tracing through the easy routes. The last time I saw her was just before she left England (2002, 2003?) to go back to Australia with her husband and son, and we were in email contact after that for a couple of years.

Mutual friends haven't heard from her. The email address she was using isn't valid anymore, neither is her parents' email address, which she was using for a while. I got no response from the wedding invitation mailed to her parents' home address.

So I've been thinking for a while of printing out a few 'Hi, how are you, but more to the point, where are you?' letters and sending them to her parents' home address (they might have moved), but also to all the primary schools, preschools, kindergartens and nurseries (last we knew she was an early childhood teacher) in the last town she mentioned as being 'home'. It's fairly likely she's no longer there, except that her son was at school there and she may have wanted to stay settled for that reason, but I don't really know where else to look. Google helped me with the name of a school she was working at in 2005 - but the site doesn't seem to have been updated since then. I might email the school with a request for a message to be passed on if she's still there. Maybe she doesn't want to be in contact with us anymore for some reason, or maybe she's lost all our contact info as well.

Autumnal

I realised, slightly too late, that I need to carry my camera around with me to attempt to capture some of the gorgeous autumn details. Here are a few from today, and tonight. Of course, London's not a patch on the countryside, but it has its moments.

I saw my first famous person for a while today. Fiona Shaw (with Saffron Burrows I think - or a clone) waiting at the same bus stop as me in Camden Town. Actually, the only reason I realised this familiar-looking person was Fiona Shaw was because of her leggy companion. I saw Saffron a couple of years ago in Fresh and Wild in Soho. These little celebrity encounters remind me where I am. It doesn't happen so much in Brisbane.

As I left my therapist's rooms tonight, I passed a girl in the waiting room, music blaring from her ears via her iPod. For a moment, I had the faint hope she might be there for some iPod rehabilitation therapy.

The work that never ends

The difficulty with being married to a poet, who also does teaching work and project work for the Royal Literary Fund (aka being kind of employed by Winnie the Pooh!), is that I come home from a day of being a very busy personal assistant, wanting to just veg out and watch Heroes, and the poet is still on the go.

Even worse, sometimes he wants to utilise my occasionally impressive skills on Powerpoint or Word, or needs me to design an Excel spreadsheet to help him do his taxes. Worse than that, sometimes he pays me to help him with a project and that means I have to get it done to time, on his terms. He is a perfectionist of the highest order. Which is admirable, but sometimes maddening. Thank goodness my boss at work is not a perfectionist or I would be tearing my hair out. Most of our arguments centre around the computer, like there is some irritated, grumpy vortex that just pulls me in when we sit down to work on something together.

My pc is the internet pc in our house, which means the poet spends a fair amount of time on it doing his email. His pc is the inviolable virus-free-clean-zone machine that has never been breathed upon by a dirty modem. And I've just come home to catch a peek at his inbox where there is a lengthy email from someone he's working with, with several attachments, which is going to mean he will be at my pc working for some time to come when he gets home. Hence this blog post being typed now. (Actually, hence this blog post at all!)

On a cheerier and less whinging note, am I the only blogger to get unfeasibly excited by someone I don't know commenting on my blog? It's just as well really, as I seem to have no irl friends who use the internet for fun (I feel like a 17-year-old with no friends who own mobile phones) and so Married to a Poet is mostly a comment-free zone.

Rabbits, cake and Hello Kitty

I've slightly run out of blogging steam and time so instead of posting something about me, I'll direct your attention to these other very worthy blogs:

Disapproving Rabbits - A blog showcasing the disapproval of our bunny friends
Hello Kitty Hell - Who knew there was so much to share about Hello Kitty?
Cupcake Bakeshop - I don't bake cakes, I rarely even eat cupcakes, but I cannot resist this blog and the scrumptious photographs.

My current favourite cupcake

Also, check out the NaBloPoMo Randomizer (button just on the right). I seem to get a few repeats of blogs when I use it, but it's a great way of finding new sites to read. And let's face it, we can all do with a few more funny/witty/superbly photographed/insightful/silly blogs in our internet lives.

Oh, here is an Anne snippet of little or no importance - the poet and I have been watching Heroes on DVD. I think I'm falling into a space where I can only enjoy television series with a fantasy element. Here's hoping Joss Whedon's new show Dollhouse fits the bill, even if Eliza Dushku looks worrying like Heather Graham in that photo.

So Bourgeois

I'm not really up with contemporary art, or any art for that matter. I have a definite soft spot for Magritte, but otherwise my knowledge is pretty scanty. I saw a room filled with Louise Bourgeois' nighttime doodles at the Tate and was intrigued, but since then I haven't been that drawn to much of her work. Until I saw this cushion in last Saturday's Guardian Weekend magazine.

For someone in her nineties especially, that's pretty cool. With which succinct statement I cleverly illustrate just why I don't comment on art much.

p.s.

The power of positive thinking

I just won £20 from the poet in a bet that a free PDF converter would work on his computer without any problems. He often seems to come to things relating to computers anticipating that they will probably go wrong - based on some past experience. So the PDFs worked perfectly and I now have £20. He originally wanted to bet £100, but as I am rather broke, I said no. How I wish now I had been more positive!

And yay for the lucrative power of positive thinking!

Gel-what?-o

We've been lucky enough to travel to Italy twice this year, and both times ate a lot of gelati, because it really is the best, in Europe at least. I think King Island (Tasmania) might produce some pretty special ice cream along with all that cream and cheese. These two flavours, the top one from the best gelateria in the world - Della Palma (there's one in Rome and one in New York) - and the bottom flavour from Orta, gave us pause for thought.

Yes, it does say Viagra.

One last thing about poets

This one, anyway. He may profess that he adores a certain character in a certain sadly finished television series, and yet he takes particular pleasure in watching her die, over and over, on the DVD. Is it sexy or something to have a sword run through you from shoulder to navel?

Orta

So, Orta was really beautiful.

Picture an old cobbled-street town on the bank of a huge lake. And in the middle of that lake, a tiny island that looks like it has been torn from the pages of a fairytale book, crammed with ancient buildings including a church that houses a saint in a glass box. Actually, he's mostly just bones now. Look up from the lake to the surrounding mountains, the Dolomites, some with faint snow caps, and beyond them to the Alps and Switzerland. Look down to the plate on the table in the little restaurant you are sitting in and lift your fork.

You have to do all that work because the photo really doesn't do it justice.

Yes, actually, I am married to a poet

So I realised that for a blog called Married to a Poet, I don't really write that much about the whole being married to a poet thing. For all I know, you're thinking about spending a fairly big proportion of your life with a poet too and you've stumbled here in search of tips and experience.

Not sure I have much to offer there, unless your poet is like mine - not recognisably a stereotypical poet i.e. not fey or sentimental. He's not a performance poet by the popular definition of the word which seems to equate pretty well with 'rapper'. But he is an incredible performer (he co-founded a group called Shadowork, who create amazing voice soundscapes) and he writes damn good poetry. He has published about seven books, two of which have sold out and one is in a second print. Oh, and he was a physicist first. And yet not geeky either. Come to think of it, he is all about not conforming to stereotype.

Anyway, here are some musings about poetry from a poet wife's perspective.

1. The poetry world, in the UK at least, is rather political, and it does increasingly seem who you know rather than the quality of your work that gets you readings and festival appearances and residencies and sometimes even published. This is a big frustration that you will probably come to share and wish you could blog about.

2. You cannot make a living by writing and publishing poetry alone. Maybe someone like Seamus Heaney can, or the few poets in the curious higher echelons who are at every festival, have agents and command high fees, but your average pretty successful poet is going to need a day job, or at least do a lot of freelance work. Teaching is popular, and there is an ever-growing hungry adult student body for creative writing classes and workshops (witness the rise of the creative writing MA in the UK) as well as all those kids in schools. Getting work on BBC radio is good, because they pay per minute.

3. If you write poetry yourself, and you become intimate with another poet, you may just feel the desire to start working in another genre if your loved one's mastery of the art makes you wonder why you bother. Or maybe that's just me.

4. You may arrive home from work, or return from being in another room to find a poem or several awaiting your audience. You may get a phone call which is a poem. You may surprise yourself at just how usefully critical your reading of poetry becomes.

5. You may find yourself reading poems written before the poet met you, and wishing they were written for you, or just that you had been around to give him/her a hug.

Like this one.

IF YOU WERE TO COME BACK

I'd stand at the door like one bereaved:
Aghast and breathless,
With silence stretched between us
For a second
Before it snapped -
And my heart burst its banks
In belief.

Then I'd draw you in by both hands
I'd kiss you on the mouth, on the face
Wear out your name
with soft saying
I'd kiss you more than you would want
Until you'd have to draw back, breathless
As one wounded
To try to speak, to tell me
Why it was you came.

Ok, look away now

This is so so silly, but now, having watched the last episode of Buffy, and knowing there are no more, it feels a tiny bit like a light has gone out. Sad. In a different way to Six Feet Under being over, or even The Flying Doctors when I was a lot younger. Because there was magic in Buffy, literally and in the very fabric of the show. Not to mention the seriously amusing dialogue.



And I cannot believe how appropriate this song would have been for Buffy. Or was it even used in it sometime?

If I could tell the world just one thing
It would be that we're all OK
And not to worry 'cause worry is wasteful
And useless in times like these
I won't be made useless
I won't be idle with despair
I will gather myself around my faith
For light does the darkness most fear

Seriously, if you ever enjoyed Buffy, close your eyes and let the montage happen. Tearfulness.



Maybe I'll grow up now.

Tricky

So for Halloween we are not answering the door, closing the curtains and ignoring rings on the doorbell from hooligans asking us for money. I really wish we had little kids coming around with their parents and we could give them sweets, but alas, not in this part of north London. I should have realised what Halloween in London would be like when I lived in Ealing and a kid at a bus stop, a few days before Halloween, asked me for a pound. I asked her why and she said, ‘For Halloween’. She didn’t blink when I said it wasn’t even Halloween yet. Eventually the lack of movement of my hand to my purse alerted her to the fact that she should probably ask someone else.

While closeted in our dark house, we will very appropriately be watching the final two episodes (ever! sob!) of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer'. Actually, she hasn’t been slaying too many vampires lately. She should probably be known as ‘Buffy the Slayer who investigates creepy demonic situations with her friends and sometimes slays vampires too’.. Maybe there will be some vampires in the final big battle for the world, because the poet gets bored when there’s no fighting. I get a bit antsy when there’s no Anya.

Also, I will be psyching myself up for NaBloPoMo – The Return.

I have never really seen the point of Nanowrimo unless you already want to write a novel. Maybe I do, maybe one day. For now I'm sticking to short stories. But hey, it keeps all the wannabe novelists off the streets, and creative endeavour can only be a good thing compared to crime, substance abuse and other popular pursuits. But would someone somewhere please share the draft novel they have produced during Nanowrimo? I have never seen one, which only reinforces my suspicion that they are all really crap. (Except for my friend Shari's, of course, because she is a writer).

Gratuitous Anya post

Yes, I am actually a 14 year old girl living in 2003. And proud of it.

The Buffy Project - part 2

The poet is still addicted (less so than me, he gets bored with the non-fighty episodes) and I am starting to get sad because we have only one more disc to watch of the entire series. Three, maybe four episodes and it's all over. Is it just me, or when you really enjoy a television series, does it become like an alternative universe to you - the characters you love or hate do actually exist out there somewhere?

Sigh. Soon, no more Anya to adore from the wrong side of the DVD player. No more Buffy's clothes to study and sometimes covet. No more camp Andrew - how amused am I that he's become a regular character? No more occasionally irritating Willow and increasingly chubby Xander. No more Giles.... but wait! Do I detect the stirrings of a BBC television film (please let it be a series) in the wings? Or will I be reduced to starting the whole process over again with the Angel series, in hopes that Buffy characters will make regular visits, or that Cordelia will remind me of Anya?

And my lovely lovely favourite character dies, apparently. This is the problem with watching series years after they ended. The internet knows these things and tells you when you're not ready to know.

However, despite my fantastic ability to suspend disbelief, and in an attempt to distract myself from the upcoming series finale, I'd like to highlight two Buffy anomalies for the record:

1. All vampires turn to dust when staked, even those who only died very recently. It's a great visual effect, but surely only those who died so long ago that their original bodies would actually be dust should dust? Of course, that would mean that the very term 'dusting' would have to be reconsidered.

2. Vampires with souls, i.e. Angel and Spike (much prefer Spike, btw) feel remorse for their killings and cannot kill humans due to the emotional pain. However, humans, who supposedly had souls all along and are demon-free - kill all the time and some of them don't seem to feel much remorse. So does the reintroduction of a soul into a soulless creature make them better than human? Or was it just not thought through very well.

You get what you give

This song has always had the strangest and most lovely effect on me - both saddening and uplifting. Now it also makes me homesick. I think I might have heard it for the first time in Australia (although it was released the year I came to London) and there's something about being twenty-seven in a bright climate in a young country that is so bittersweet now.

I still think it's slightly too slow-paced, but I can overlook that. The singer is kind of geekily endearing. Like a cute younger brother.

Frightening a little mouse under her chair

The poet is going to London to visit the Queen for National Poetry Day tomorrow.

He has threatened* to misbehave but is of course the epitome of a professional always.

We're just back from a fantastic weekend at Orta in northern Italy. Lakes, islands, poetry and new friends, a wonderful way to spend my 37th birthday weekend.


*Hmm, I wonder if a blog post with 'threat' and 'Queen' in close proximity is flagged up by the security services?

Right Brain/Left Brain Freakiness

So I'm obviously a right-brainer, but it freaks me out that the poet and I saw her going in opposite directions at the same time! And that you can change her direction by concentrating.

Click here for the weird whirling woman

We're off to Lake Orta in Italy for the Poetry on the Lake festival and for the poet to collect a prize. Four star hotel on a lake, poetry and Italian weather for my birthday sounds pretty good. If only I didn't have a sneaking suspicion that London's weather is going to be even better over the weekend - but then has the BBC's forecasting ever been accurate?

Weeping guitars

I love this version of George Harrison's 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps'. (And the way the video makes you think Nyjon plays the guitar...)



And I promise this is my last Nyjon post. But one last little thing, if any of you are interested in hearing the song the poet wrote for me with Nyjon, go to the cdbaby link a few entries earlier and click on 'First Love, Last Love'.

Useful site for UK ebayers

fatfingers.co.uk finds items on ebay (UK) that might get missed and not snapped up because the seller has mispelled the item description. Not that I'm encouraging ebay addiction or anything.

More Nyjon

Must. Stop. Looking. On. Youtube. For. Videos. That. Make. Me. Homesick.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oV_gY156LOQ&mode=related&search=

Must. Go. To. Bed. Now.

Music man

I keep forgetting to post about the debut album of a friend, Nyjon. He's a medical doctor (also trained as a naturopath) who runs a clinic on Harley Street (the prestigious medical location in England) using herbal medicine and diet to help people with cancer, and he's set up a charity (Chart) to raise money for people who can't afford this complementary medicine. And he sings, and writes songs, sometimes with the poet. I'm a bit too excited about the fact that the song 'First Love, Last Love' is one that the poet wrote for me with Nyjon, before the married days.

To use words not my own, [the album's] inventive blend of pop, funk and R&B carries a powerful and enduring message, spanning themes from responsibility and honesty in love to ecology and social reality. If only Al Gore would listen, I'm sure he'd snap up 'Lover Earth' (cowritten with the poet) as an environmental campaign song. Nyjon and the poet have just done another environmental song - Blue - which you can hear here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/DrNyjonEccles

You can listen to tracks, download them or purchase the CD from: http://cdbaby.com/cd/nyjon

His cover of George Harrison's 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps' is pretty special too. It's not on the album but is a fundraiser for Chart. To get the single, simply make a donation via their website.

The Buffy Project - part 1

When we got back from Australia at the end of May, and life in London seemed dismal and drab, as it often does, but PARTICULARLY WHEN THERE WAS NO SUMMER IN SIGHT, I decided it was time to finish something that was set in motion some years ago.

I was a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan. When I first moved to London in 1998 I stayed in on Friday nights to watch Buffy on Sky One. I watched Angel too, because it was on afterwards, but it never grabbed me so much. When I moved in with the poet in mid 2000, much of my concern at living in a house without a television was that I wouldn't be getting my regular fix of Buffy. I wasn't sure I could do it, and my mother was convinced I had a secret television hidden in a cupboard somewhere, but I grew to appreciate and enjoy not having a television. Buffy got left behind, and it was ok.

My brother had a couple of seasons on DVD which I watched back to back one December I was in Brisbane, when it was too hot to move and the rest of the city languished inside with their air conditioning. It was the last time I saw my father, and he watched many of the episodes with me. Somehow it became a bit of a bonding experience for us, not that you could have predicted my dad enjoying a show about a teenage vampire slayer.

But otherwise my life was Buffy-free. Perhaps it was the lack of sun turning my thoughts towards those who dwell in darkness, or maybe it was just silliness, but I decided to watch the entire series of Buffy this year - seasons 1-7 - to see what I had missed out on. It helped that the poet and I had just bought a portable DVD player so we could watch films (my pc was pretty old and slow and mangled most DVD viewing experiences).

And so began the great Buffy Project of 2007.

To be continued...

Silly as a bum-full of Smarties

I've just come back from the cinema, watching Kenny. What a guy. The film made me homesick for Australia, for the kind of guy I've met nowhere else in the world - completely down to earth and patient and decent, a bit rough and maybe not the smartest, but you'd trust him with your life. Not that people like that are peculiar to Australia, of course they're not, but there's a particular Australian breed of them. Fair dinkum types.

The kind of man who peppers his speech with 'he's serious as a heart attack, mate' and 'busy as a one-armed bricklayer in Baghdad'. Who has an unironic 'Advance Australia Fair ' singalong in the car with his little boy. Who looks out of his window in Nashville Tennessee on his first ever trip out of Australia, sees snow and says, 'Look at that, that's lovely. Good on 'em.'

Maybe I wouldn't want to marry him, but I sure as hell would want him for a brother-in-law or friend. Come to think of it, my Aussie brother-in-law is not far off. A good bloke.

'Useless as tits on a bull' got a big laugh from rest of the (British of course) audience, whereas the phrase just sounds normal to me. I guess I haven't lost all trace of Australian-ness, thank goodness. Even if I apparently sound like a Pom.

Who would have thought that finally getting broadband (now that I have a pc that can handle it) would be so satisfying?

Who would have thought the poet would ever be able to access his email quickly and efficiently, in a way that didn't bring despair to the entire household?

Thank you Tiscali.

Ire

How sad would it be for me to start carrying around my digital camera, just so that I would be able to gather photographic evidence of the blatant disregard for law that seems endemic in the UK today? Laws that are meant to protect the public.

e.g. two perfect opportunities from today

1. A van driving the wrong way down a one way street and nearly running me over. If I hadn't chanced to look in that direction just in case of idiots (a cyclist nearly mowed me down on the same street doing the same thing), it would not have been a pretty sight.

2. A man driving along while using his mobile phone. No hands free kit even.

I fantastised as I walked about getting clear photos showing the crime and the registration plate and sending them to the police, but who am I kidding?

It seems that too many people just want to do what they want to do, regardless of whether it might harm someone else. They obviously didn't have the same parenting I did. Which probably means they didn't get drummed into them that 'fooling leads to fighting' either. It does, it really really does!

Pasta - it's not just for people

(just back from Italy - more to come)

What tube tickets should look like

Thanks to serif publishing

London is a city of people that just want to get home on time

http://nostrich.net/archives/delays-on-the-underground/

I couldn't have said it better myself *. There's no panic on the Underground, no commuter terror as the threat level climbs to critical and then back to severe. I don't know whether it's the much-claimed Blitz spirit, or whether it's a big city mentality, but I seem to have lived here long enough to just get on with things, like everyone else. I do like seeing extra police on the streets and in the stations though.

* Oh, who am I kidding, the pedant in me would have said 'who' not 'that'.

Perfect

In one of the comments on the BBC Have Your Say Forum the other day:

This is the UK. We only have two seasons -
rainy and August.

Revelling in Croxley

On Saturday I went with some friends to the Croxley Revels - a big village fair that's been held annually for hundreds of years. There were lots of stalls for worthy causes, selling the usual range of weird and tacky but sometimes strangely useful items (I picked up a book stand for the poet's readings). Lots of plants, including a stall from the local allotment-holders, and apparently cakes, although I missed those. A milkshake stand making chocolate-bar-flavoured milkshakes, candy floss galore and at least three face-painting stalls. And three women wandering about covered in wooden clothespegs - hedgehogs, apparently.

It was fun, and what really impressed me was the sense of community: families and pensioners and young couples standing outside their houses (glasses of wine and cans of lager optional) watching the parade of Brownies, dancers, policemen and Noah's Ark (populated with very cute little lions and tigers) before all trooping behind in the street with their revelling shoes on and their cake and plant money in their pockets. I lost my camera, and someone handed it in. Call me cynical but I can't see that happening in London.

As well as the stalls (I bought a sage plant and a fuchsia - and I will not let the snails have them!), there was the central arena where one could watch 'dancers' aged 4-15. The baby cheerleaders were pretty cute.

And then the piece de resistance - Brownies dancing around the maypole.

After the brownies did their maypoling, rather impressively not once getting tangled up, ending with the creation of a 'spiderweb'...

there was some nonsense with local schools and an enormous ball as the grand finale.

Right on cue the rain bucketed down and we ran for cover into a local pub. Entirely appropriate that an English celebration of midsummer should conclude with a freezing deluge.

In and around a poet's house, chapter 1

We are not a Buddhist household. (Luckily for me, as last night I stomped about 25 snails. Not without regret and guilt, but it was them or my sunflower seedlings. Frankly, I have had to abandon my friendlier, less murderous practice of throwing snails into the nether regions of the garden because the little bastards keep coming back. Which is why last night at 1am I was confronted by an army of shelled leaf-munchers, of all sizes. And hence the stomping. Today I bought beer baits, but I think the stomping may be kinder than slow dissolving in salty beer - or is that just me?)

So we are not Buddhist. Some of us are. however, dipping our toes into the learning of Kabbalah. But this is ok, because in Kabbalism there is reincarnation, but there is no reincarnation as insects. Unless they just haven't got around to telling me that bit yet?

Monday

I miss natural spaces I can get lost in. Too much time spent underground and in busy London saps my spirit.

And oh! How I've missed my daily blog fix. I have a lot of catching up to do.

Oh, the love

Now I have two very convincing reasons to be in Australia.

The elder asked why the poet couldn't live in England and I live in Australia. When I explained my silly adult reasons, he looked calmly at me and issued an ultimatum: 'Live here!'

His baby cousin just grinned and tried to eat my hair.

We went to Australia

Sadly, we had to return to London and the joy of January temperatures, wind and rain in late May.

'If you set out on a search or a journey, because you are made to, because you sense something calling from within, some voice which may be still and small but will not let you rest until you pay it heed. Something that tells you you are in fact free to act in a different manner however impossible it might seem, well... if you set out on such a journey... you will be met.

You will be met.'

What Happens Now, Jeremy Dyson

Photographic Proof of my Amazing Paranoia (TM)

Last week I had a little operation to remove a polyp in my uterus. Filling out forms with the registrar beforehand, I come to the consent form, and the section where I say yes, ok, I've been told about the things that may go wrong while you're cutting and scraping and poking cameras into places cameras shouldn't go and you may do what you need to if you mess up or my body messes up for you. Fun things like a perforated uterus or accidental injury to other parts.

Was hysterectomy on that list? No.

Was hysterectomy a realistic potential risk of the particular procedure they were carrying out on my anaesthetised body? No.

Was I sitting there in my flimsy gown and disposable pants, clutching a pillow and thinking, oh my god if I don't put 'hysterectomy' down and something goes badly wrong and they can't stop the bleeding* and they have to take everything out and I wake up sans reproductive organs I am going to be so pissed that I wasn't paranoid enough to say 'you guys have to wake me up if you're going to remove things other than the polyp and ask me if it's okay, ok?'

One guess.

(* my last, major, operation did entail that risk, and I was warned an emergency hysterectomy was possible if that happened)

Happy Easter

Hope you have a happy and safe day.

(And hooray for the secret tulips which have really brightened our previously blue (irises, bluebells, hyacinths) garden.)

The Long Good Friday

If I had grown up in England, I don’t think there is any chance I would have continued to attend Sunday mass until the age of 20, as I did in Brisbane. I’ve only attended a handful of masses here in London, and I’ve never felt the spiritual life and joy I knew in my church in Brisbane. The hymns, for one thing, are so slow in comparison; even the same hymns sung in Australia are sung so slowly that for me they lose a lot of their spirit.

When I was a kid we had one priest, Father Dennis, who looked as I imagined Jesus must have, and was so kind and loving and playful, again as I imagined Jesus then. He had longish black hair and a big bushy black beard, bright laughing blue eyes, and after mass all the kids and young people would gather around him. He was just good to be around. I've never met another priest like him, but the priest who married us had a some of the same playfulness.

Today being Good Friday, I decided to go to the Stations of the Cross, or the ‘Celebration of the Lord’s Passion’ as our local Catholic church, the one the poet and I were married in, calls it. I have fond memories of attending the Stations in our church in Brisbane, a moving service where the priest took the cross to each ‘station’ around the walls of the church and we heard about the different parts of Christ’s journey carrying his cross to Golgotha, where he was crucified and died.

Today was rather different. The church was completely packed out when I arrived at about five minutes to three (the hour Jesus is supposed to have died) and some of us were shepherded to a side room, with a large glass window opening onto the altar.

After the readings and the gospel, after the priest’s homily and some rather drawn out sung prayers and responses, stertorously delivered by one of the priests, (to my mind, sung prayers only really work if the singer has a beautiful or at least tuneful voice, and they’re not very very slow, otherwise they are just as or more effective being spoken) there was the veneration of the cross. After various prayers, the congregation, all fifty-seven thousand of us, were invited to show our respects to the cross, by genuflecting or kissing it. Meanwhile, in our little side room, two little boys raced around an unfurnished space, playing war with imaginary guns and bombs, their parents sitting some distance away, either worshipfully oblivious or pretending not to know them.

I prayed for a while, and the choir sang hymns for a very long time, but then there was an interminable silence where nothing seemed to be happening in the part of the church we could see from our fishbowl window. This was punctuated by a tiny girl whimpering ‘my jeans are hurt-in me mommy,’ over and over. Her mother sat behind me staring straight ahead. Finally the priest brought the Eucharist to the altar.

I made an escape after communion. I’m glad I went, because I wanted to remember what Good Friday is really about. Things have been difficult for me lately and I wanted to be in the company of a sorrow greater than my own – someone who suffered tremendously and was humiliated and killed. Someone who had to believe the promise that his death wouldn’t be final, as in a much smaller way I have to believe that things will get easier. Next time, though, unless I’m in Australia, I’ll just stay home and use my little Stations of the Cross book to pray by myself.

I imagine it’s sacrilege to poke fun at typos in church literature, but this hymn…

His dying crimson like a robe,
spreads o’er his body on the tree;
then I am dead to all the globe,
and all the glove is dead to me.

Poor unloved glove.

Icy

Janetta's icecream (in St Andrews) deserves a post of its own.

Not a patch on D'ella Palma in Rome (and New York, apparently), but rather delicious all the same.

StAnza

A couple of weekends ago the poet and I went to the St Andrews Poetry Festival. It was a working weekend for him, he was reading and taking part in a discussion about the film based on his Chernobyl book, which was show twice and sold out both times. For me, it was a chance to enjoy a six-hour train journey, spent mostly snoozing, reading and watching the countryside wend its way past, while the poet chatted with a couple of women on their way to a hen night in Edinburgh, and then a couple of nights in a very cozy bed and breakfast, with two days wandering from event to meal to icecream (dutch chocolate and walnut & maple, from Janetta's, an experience I'd been advised not to miss) to brisk walk. Walking was necessarily brisk as it was absolutely freezing.

It seems the rest of the UK had fairly hellish, windy, snowy weather that weekend, but we were well-sheltered in St Andrews, and only glimpsed a few little snowflakes on the morning we left.

I had two chances to talk to to Gwyneth Lewis, author of Sunbathing in the Rain, which I read and found immensely helpful earlier this year and thank her for the book, but the first time I didn't want to interrupt her when she was eating and talking with friends, and the second time I was unsure whether the woman bending over a bag outside the 100 Poets reading (definitely very mixed quality there!) was actually here or just had similar hair. Kicking myself now.

Being so close to the poet and reading a reasonable amount of contemporary poetry over the years myself, has given me a fairly critical ear for what works and what doesn't. Regardless of whether I actually like it. There is a lot of underworked, or just not good enough, poetry out there - winning prizes and getting acclaim seemingly only because of the name of the poet - and it's frustrating when despite the quality of his work (and the number of prizes his work has won), the poet doesn't make the 'upper tier' of poetry in this country. More reason to move to Australia, I say!

The secret tulips

They're almost here!

St Anza... literary festival... poetry... geddit?

This weekend the poet and I are going to the St Andrews Literary Festival aka StAnza. He’s doing a couple of readings and the film of his Chernobyl poem will be shown twice, once with a discussion session.

I’ll be wandering around between his events, checking out some of the other events and probably spending too much money on books. Because they can be signed! By the actual authors! I’ll probably be wearing my Fussy tshirt – where better to wear clothing emblazoned with ‘Writing well is the best revenge’ than a literary festival?

I can’t wait for the long train journey – potential rail strikes and people who may have to be reprimanded for iPod abuse notwithstanding – time to read and sleep and gaze out the window at the countryside. Working on the Queensland Rail account in my deep dark Australian advertising past really sucked me into the romance of the rail. Or maybe it’s genetic, my granddad worked on building many of the state’s railways. I’ll be fighting the poet for the seat facing backwards because I believe you really do see more that way. When you’re facing in the direction of travel it all goes by too fast, I like to let the country unravel behind me.

Kids these days

Somehow, starting his first year at school has got my nephew so excited that he's channelling John Travolta. I fear for his social standing with the other 5 year olds. Is he too young for an intervention?

Things the UK hasn’t got right yet #1

When I was at the cinema today to see ‘Freedom Writers’ (pretty good, if you like ‘teacher inspires wayward teens and changes their lives’ films like Dangerous Minds, with a smattering of the Holocaust. Also, when did Hilary Swank become such a babe?), I noticed that there was a new drink on sale:Frozen Fanta.

Great, so the UK’s cinemas finally get slushy-type drinks that aren’t blue, and the best they can come up with is Fanta??

Give me my Frozen Coke!

Note to self

Stop writing blog entries in your head while lazing in bed on Sunday mornings and then not actually typing them and posting them!

And another...

Perhaps all dragons in our lives are really princesses, just waiting to see us just once being beautiful and ourageous. Perhaps everything fearful is basically helplessness that seeks our help.

Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

As someone who has spent far too much of her life being fearful, this appeals.

I have no idea where I have stored the current volume of the 'quote journal' I've been keeping for about fifteen years. Until I find it, I have random scraps of paper piling up on my desk.

Speaking of piles of paper, I had to move more than a few yesterday when I vaccuumed the entire house*. I think the last time I did such a thorough job may have been just before my mother visited for the wedding. I hate vacuuming. Actually, vacuuming a simple square empty room I quite enjoy, vacuuming a room with minimal furniture I don't mind, but moving everything, including rugs and mats to vaccum underneath is a real pain. Almost but not quite worth the satisfaction afterward. Also, I have a dust allergy, and while this is not a problem anymore since I was 'desensitised' at 17-18, I miss the days of not being allowed to vacuum because it stirs the dust up and aggravates allergies. And oh! I'd almost forgotten being let off housework altogether sometimes because it seriously makes me feel sick. All that bending down and straightening up does me in.

When we were kids, our mother would pretend the vaccuum cleaner was a crocodile, and we would (well, I would, my younger siblings probably scoffed at my immaturity from the safety of the kitchen) jump out of reach onto the lounge (in American/British, the sofa), occasionally dangling little feet daringly close to the fearsome metal creature's maw. I remember the abject terror if Mum raised the sucker end and came after our feet, or if I was just a bit too slow in lifting my ankles and the cold metal pushed into them. Imagination is a wondrous thing.

However, vaccuming is not quite so much fun when there's only me and the fish safe in his glass box and a poet absorbed in his work who's liable to brain me if I go near his study. And then there's the stairs. Bane of my vacuum-wielding life. Usually I give up and relegate them to 'next time', picking up any obvious bits of fluff to assuage my conscience but yesterday I took a deep breath, attached the tiny little vacuum head to the end of the hose and painstakingly vacuumed each furry green surface of every bloody stair. All the while balancing the body of the vacuum cleaner against my legs as it threatened to drag me down the stairs because the cord is too short to go all the way upstairs if plugged in downstairs.

Between times, the poet occasionally runs his hand several times over the carpet and triumphantly comes up with a tangled swirl of girl-hair that seems to be unpickupable by vaccum. I on the other hand take pains never to run my hands over the carpet, as what I don't know can't make me feel guilty.

* I lie. I didn't vaccum the spare room. But seriously, there's like a square foot of rarely trodden bare carpet in there.

Wise words

But you yourself will always be the worst enemy you can encounter; you yourself lie in wait for yourself in caves and forests.

Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

Dreamtalk

This morning I was lying drowsing, having just woken from a dream, when the poet started to talk in his sleep. The words I caught coming from his mouth were sentences from the dream I'd just had! Of course, the actual words have been completely erased from my memory, but wow.

p.s. I can heartily recommend being married to a poet on Valentine's Day.

Save our hospital

My local hospital, Chase Farm, has been threatened for some time with cuts and closures of various services, the most frightening of which is the potential closure of the Accident and Emergency department. This would mean that in an emergency, people would have to go to North Middlesex Hospital or Barnet Hospital. Chase Farm is far easier for me to get to by public transport, far quicker in an ambulance (which I've had to do twice thanks to ovarian cysts) whereas North Middlesex is already overstretched, and I don't even know where Barnet Hospital is!

Purely selfishly, I want A&E to stay, and judging by the public outcry so do lots of other people. If you happen to live in Enfield or its environs, and Chase Farm Hospital is one you use or might potentially need to use, please sign the petition at http://www.handsoffourhospital.org/canwe.php

(Cristina, this means you! ;) )

Baggage

I have this little green rucksack I take everywhere with me. And I do mean pretty much everywhere.

Originally it was the 'day pack' belonging to the big backpack that was my leaving gift from the advertising agency I worked for in Brisbane, when I was made redundant and decided to try my luck in London. It zips onto the front of the backpack for travelling and then detaches for day use. I still have the backpack too, with the Australian flag I sewed onto the pocket for easy identification and patriotism, languishing in a cupboard in the spare room with blankets and pillows. I never actually went backpacking, but it served as my suitcase for a couple of months while I travelled (with my mother! on coach tours!) around Britain and Europe before settling in London.

But this rucksack. It's so handy. It accomodates my bottle of water, my book(s), my journal, my umbrella (woe betide the fool who goes anywhere in the UK without an umbrella), an emergency stash of pills and herbal remedies, pens, a hairbrush, handcream and other things besides. I take it to work, to the library, grocery shopping, to the movies, pretty much everywhere. It carries books as happily as it does apples and grapes.

I love backpacks. My shoulders start to scream in pain if either of them is singled out for load-bearing responsibilities, but they're happy to share the weight using a backpack. My green bag has a largish pocket at the front which is perfect for keeping a few small essentials, and a wonderful open pocket at the back which lies snug against my back - ideal for magazines or maps or plastic bags or anything flat which needs to be got at quickly. I can't imagine a bag more suited to carrying around my daily life.

I need to get a new one, I know, a smarter one, one that's more business like, less...... green. But I am so loathe to get rid of it. That's why when the zip broke I pinned it together and somehow made it work again. Why when it broke again I just re-zipped it every time (every day) it came apart. Why I ignore the fact that the lining has almost completely flaked off and leaves traces of itself on any clothing I might carry in it (probably because when the bag gets a bit grubby (as is normal for anything that travels on the tube) I throw it in the washing machine). Why I finally, last week, sewed up the zip partway so it had more strength.

I tell myself I'm being environmentally sound, reusing rather than replacing, mending and making do. But it's more than that - in some way it's a talisman, a symbol of my survival in this cold and often unfriendly city, of almost nine years of living here. It's one of the only things I brought from Australia with me and still use. I think it's got a few more years in it.

Reading

(nicked from Confessions of an Author)

Miles Kington in How Many Books Are You Reading At The Moment? reckons we're all reading about 10 books at once these days, and challenges us to go and look at the tottering piles on our bedside tables. He has a point. He says:

'Go to your bedside table and honestly tell me what books are there. All of them. Not just the books you would like people to think you were reading'

ok...

• Just started Cell by Stephen King today. Always good to read something that justifies my decision not to get a mobile phone. I've had a bad cold and King is a great convalescent read.
• Cave in the Snow by Vicki Mackenzie. The story of Tenzin Palmo,a British Buddhist nun. Inspirational, her example has taught me a lot about mindfulness and has unearthed a slight yearning towards Buddhism. I originally bought this book a few years ago when it was mentioned in another book written by an Australian journalist (Holy Cow!)
  
• Philosophy in 30 Days by Dominique Janicaud. Dipping into this one occasionally.
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. Started this some years back and recently rescued it from my bookshelf. Haven't actually opened it again yet.
• Sunstroke and other stories by Tessa Hadley. I've read some good reviews of this collection and am always on the look out for good short stories. Our library didn't have any of her books on the shelves and I'm impatient so treated myself to the paperback. This is the book I'm carrying everywhere in my backpack, usually along with at least one other.
  
• Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You by Richard O'Connor. Have been reading this sporadically over the last several months. Mostly when depressed. Not sure it holds the miracle answer promised by the title, but it's sound stuff.
• More, Now, Again by Elizabeth Wurtzel. I think this is my third reading. I find her writing strangely comforting, especially when I'm not feeling so happy myself.

I've just finished reading Sylvia Brownrigg's The Delivery Room. Achingly beautiful. And any book which involves psychotherapy can usually pique my interest.

Foodies alert

Confused about what to eat for a healthy body and life? Conflicting advice from doctors and food companies and nutritionists?

We finally have the definitive answer:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Now you can't say you haven't been told.

Snow day

I cleverly managed to take two days annual leave to coincide with the second and biggest snowfall in London this year. Hooray for lying in bed and watching fat flakes fall.

I'm perturbed by the fact that our goldfish will never know what it is like to be warm, being a cold water creature who would die if his water increased much in temperature. But never to know the feeling of cosiness? How terribly sad.

So many posts I have part-composed in my head, so slack since NaPoBloMo. Have faith in me.

Sneezing

Sneezes are the best thing ever when I’m feeling anxious. Or sick. Except, you know, if the sneezes are chain-sneezes, non-stop and exhausting. That’s not fun for anyone.

I could have really done without an hour’s worth of police helicopter flying above our back gardens at 4.30 this morning.

Today was probably the official most depressing day of the year, given that the official day was Monday 23rd last year. Glad that’s out of the way. Onward and upward.

Conservatory days

Yesterday and today have been my idea of perfect winter days - clear blue sky with a few wind-whipped thin clouds, bright sunshine. Ideal for walking in the park, and sitting down on a bench to read. Except the cold seeps through all my layers until after a few chapters I'm chilled to the bone and have to get up.

This is where a conservatory would come in handy. Nice glass walls and roof to let in the bright and keep out the cold. An armchair instead of a wooden bench. Easy access to herbal tea and necessary sweet things. Will have to work on the poet. I wonder whether the council would let me build a conservatory in the middle of the park.

Spring is hastening. The little clump of purple crocus has budded in the centre of our lawn, and walking through St Pancras park on the way to work, there are eager splashes of yellow and white already open.