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