We so need one of these

Modern Toss

(excuse the newspaper graininess)

Sometimes I think Miranda July has a window into my mind

Are you angry? Punch a pillow. Was it satisfying? Not hardly. These days people are too angry for punching. What you might try is stabbing. Take an old pillow and lay it on the front lawn. Stab it with a big pointy knife. Again and again and again. Stab hard enough for the point of the knife to go into the ground. Stab until the pillow is gone and you are just stabbing the earth again and again, as if you want to kill it for continuing to spin, as if you are getting revenge for having to live on this planet day after day, alone.

Phew!

"the truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more"

So Many Books! Gabriel Zaid

Thank you Lucy Mangan for alerting me to this enabling wisdom. I shall no longer feel guilty about the growth of my shelf of unread books. A growth which somehow continues unabated despite constant reading. Can I help it if books make me feel safe?

Sometimes graffiti just says it all

On the grey stone wall of the alley I walk through to the train station each weekday morning:

F**K ENFIELD. TIME TO EAT.

Yeah, this place makes me hungry too.

two of my favourite happy songs for a rainy weekend

Poetry party

Sunday night the poet and I went along to his publisher Enitharmon's 40th anniversary party. They also publish art books, so it wasn't all poets, but there were some well known literary figures (in the poetry world at least) there. And much grey hair. I usually wallflower at these events, or stick close to the poet as he moves around his various friends and acquaintances, and I did my share of that last night, but also spent a reasonable amount of time talking to a couple of people. I am so shy, especially around writers (probably because I feel I should be writing more myself).

It was a good night (at the Almeida restaurant) and had I wanted to share the poet's Monday hangover, the waiters who smilingly foisted wine and prosecco on us at every opportunity would have been my willing accomplices.
The poet introduced me to the man who took this famous photograph of WH Auden, Stephen Spender, Ted Hughes, TS Eliot and Louis McNeice (in random order). He told us how he scrambled around looking through the negatives when Sylvia Plath became well known (or died?) as she had been at the same event and was hanging around in the background, but found no potentially very lucrative photos of her. Wouldn't knowing the future be a boon in that kind of situation!

Memelicious

(from wirenth)

What FIVE items would you ask for, if you knew (or hoped) someone would buy them for you this year?

1) A digiscribble to make work life easier (I am taking so many minutes these days, which will teach me to be perceived as being good at it!)
2) A photo printer, to avoid the cutting out of photos
3) The top book on my Amazon wishlist
4) A dollshouse
5) Pet rats and a guarantee of someone to look after them when we were away

Also...

So long NaBloPoMo

And fingers crossed that I might win a prize, despite the dastardly tube making one of my posts after midnight.

I guess my post-it note can be retired until next year.

Happy birthday poet!

Happy birthday to my darling poet.

May your 50th year be filled with love and new poems. Good wines, excellent food and improved health. Book sales and phenomenal readings.

Almost there...

And while I will miss NaBloPoMo for the impetus it gave my blogging, it will be nice not to have to blog every single day unless I want to.

It's the poet's birthday tomorrow, so I'm wrapping his 'please only give me things that are useful' presents and getting ready for our big day out tomorrow. I'll probably go to the post office in the morning and send off a box of Christmas presents to Australia to avoid the hideous Saturday morning queues. Don't even speak to me about Abbey National - routinely queues out the door.

Just read in Metro tonight that there is another form of MRSA that's not hospital-acquired. Maybe this will be the pandemic the NHS is busy preparing for, not bird flu after all. I really really hope not. Not bird flu, not community MRSA, not anything. No pandemic, ok.

Sometimes life is like this

If Facebook doesn't believe in santa, I don't believe in Facebook

I've been over Facebook for a while. I don't really see the point apart from finding people you've lost touch with, and all those turkeys being thrown at me and being Superpoked is kind of irritating. Once I've found someone, I'd much prefer to keep in touch with people by email and snailmail, or in person if they're local.

I guess my internet community and livejournal experience, where you actually have a forum for discussion (that's not hidden under news feeds and who has friended who) and hearing about people's lives, probably made me a poor candidate for this kind of social networking site. Also, how do people have the time to do anything on Facebook except update their status and respond to all the invitations, pokes, growing gifts etc?

This Guardian article was the last straw. I'll keep my listing up, but I'll disable all of those applications.

I am grateful for Christmas cacti, cyclamen and fake Australian parrots in these dark November days. And Wes Anderson's latest, The Darjeeling Limited, for a spot of Indian sun in the midst of grey suburban London.

Howard out!

John Howard concedes defeat in the Australian election.

He definitely had long enough - ten years, or eleven? And Anne in Brisbane agrees with Anne in London who is from Brisbane,

I might look into postal voting for Australian elections in future. I think I've dropped off the electoral role after nine years in London. I did go along to the High Commission a few times to vote early on, but then it seemed to be more important to vote in the country I'm actually living in. Psst, Brown, can we have an election please?

Dammit

Well, I could backdate my post by 40 minutes and pretend I'm posting on Friday, but it's officially Saturday and I have lost my NaBloPoMo cred. Dammit.

A big shout out to London Transport for being so slow in getting me and the poet home from his reading at the Poetry Cafe in Covent Garden - an excellent night of poetry from Jacqueline Gabbitas and my poet, with wonderful jazz and blues. Somehow ended up talking about the upcoming Australian election with the singer (who is from New Zealand). I think that may well be the only conversation about politics I have ever willingly engaged in in my life, and I don't pretend to have said anything knowledgeable. I should vote, really, but I haven't for a few years (I've been in the UK 9 and a half) and I do vote in the UK elections.

p.s. Dammit. I was doing so well with the daily posting, it feels really unfair to be caught out by a time issue. If only I felt safe blogging at work.

(Does it count if I was composing this post all the way home in my head)

Just when you thought there would be no more Buffy blogging

It's been a little while now since we watched the last episode. The pain of Anya's death is fading. The jonesing for a regular DVD fix is waning. I'm no longer thinking in Buffy-isms (which is a bit sad actually as some of the dialogue is darn witty). But I do still have this to sustain me:

I only own the first five issues, but apparently there could be as many as 50 by the time they finish. Not quite the same as having all the characters speak their lines outside my head, and nowhere near as funny, but it is satisfying to see what their creator thought would happen to them next.

Wherein spam is strangely appropriate as an opener

My Beloved,

As you read this, I don't want you to feel sorry for me, because, I believe everyone will die someday.

2007 has been a year of worrying about my health, maybe it's because now that I'm 37 I am starting to notice the signs of ageing. There has been mega-worrying about my teeth, which I've never had any problems with at all, but I now have some acid erosion, which isn't terrible or uncommon, but damn. So I'm rather obsessive about not eating lots of food which is acidic, and rinsing my mouth after fruit. Also, I'd like to get my teeth whitened but am concerned about the possible long term effects, also the sensitivity. I would hate to have lovely white teeth for a while, only for them all to fall out in 20 years...

And then I had a blocked ear from early August, which still hasn't cleared properly. No problems visible in two doctor visits and no real pain apart from occasional aching. Mystery. Strangely, I know several other people who've had ear issues recently, ongoing and mysterious like mine. Maybe there's some strange new virus around.

And just today, as the first period cramps from hell close in, I started to think about my ureters. Not that I often do, those poor neglected little tubes that run from my kidneys to my bladder. But it was relevant, I promise, because I have endometriosis, which happens to be on my ureters as well as other places. And I was in a Google kind of mood today, which was really reassuring. Like, renal failure reassuring. I shall think positive and since I haven't had any problems since surgery 4 years ago, I might just write to my consultant (I don't see her regularly as I don't really have much pain despite severe endo) and ask her if we should be monitoring those poor little tubes, especially if I decide to have a break from the continuous pill.

Not a particularly cheerful day, and I also made a silly non-work-related decision at work today, which I regret but felt right at the time. Hopefully it will all be ok.

But now, to finish as I began...

The last of my money which no one knows of is the huge cash deposit of Eleven Million Five Hundred Thousand Dollars that I have with a Security Home/Deport in United Kingdom for safe keeping. I will want you to help me collect this deposit and disburse it to some charity organizations and to the less privileged. While I await to hear from you the earliest possible time to enable me give you some guard lines on how to get the project done.reply me through my reached email.

ok?

BBDO (no, not the advertising agency)

It's the poet's birthday next week and we're going to continue the tradition (started last year) of a Big Birthday Day Out (BBDO). Last year we went into the West End and had lunch at the kind of all-you-can-eat Asian buffet the poet loves, then queued up in Leicester Square for half-price theatre tickets and saw a matinee performance of Les Miserables. Then it was over to the South Bank for a quick dinner and a very engaging theatrical interpretation of Virgina Woolf's The Waves.

(I had my own BBDO last year when we caught a train to Ely with a friend and played tourists for the day, cream tea included. This year we were in Italy for my birthday, it was more like a Big Birthday Weekend.)

This year the poet has to take his mother to an appointment late morning, so we'll be kicking off later, but I figure we can still fit in a matinee theatre performance and then dinner at Chez Gerard, where I am hopelessly in love with their anchovy butter. The poet likes his steak, so we'll both be happy.