residual...a cute hamster

(slightly distorted, and eyeing the barbecue nervously, perhaps...)


ahh...

friday night evening light nice and warm

my friends did a great barbie/dessert combo, and we sat out til half-one talking. it was lovely

closed for renovations

This blog is closed for a while -- for positive reasons this time: I'm going to be focusing on writing that novel, and doing some different, active things rather than all this morose navel-gazing on a daily basis (which is what this has become). I think I'm much happier, and a better bloke, when I do stuff rather than talk.

Feel free to drop me an email -- andycorsham@tesco.net -- if you fancy a chat.

See you in a bit!

Andy x

Desolate

Something from my Krakow notebook, which kind of matches my mood today...

Katowice: On the train back to Krakow. Evening. Between the coal-mining/processing plants and the suburban railway station...six blokes leaning against a wall, between the railway line and yet another set of derelict industrial buildings -- all displaced bricks and jagged-glassed, metal-framed windows. The blokes with beer bottles, woolly caps, echoes of West European street/urban dress styles. Unreal MTV wardrobe. Posturing for a video that'll never be made.

I don't think I've ever seen so many decaying, part-demolished buildings in so small a space. Christ, it's depressing.

It's been raining, and the sky's still overcast. The evening is coming down prematurely because of all the cloud and dirt. Katowice isn't pretty. For the first time on this trip, the general decrepitude and run--downness makes my heart sink (rather than appearing interesting/characterful/historically revealing).

It's as if an entire industrial age is collapsing and crumbling back into the earth: brick by brick, building by building. An overwhelming atmosphere of decay. Signal boxes that look like forts in enemy territory; outposts against hordes of hoodied barbarians. Badlands. Ashy wastelands. Wild, abandoned zones of drink, drugs, gangs, rape, glue-sniffing, unremarked death.

It's getting cool now, with the sun invisible and low behind the clouds. You can feel the rain coming, see it in that flat, 'white-between-slate-grey-clouds' light. In the gloomy carriage interior, the drunks who seemed amusing earlier now seem threatening, and the empty seats look ominous rather than luxuriously spacious.

Fences, gates, locks, dogs, ashy earth. Deathly. Gloomy.

Abandoned buffers in old sidings -- the tracks long gone. Weeds where the rails used to be. Shit.

As the light faded under that cloudy sky, that sense of desolation became almost frenzied. As if I was in the grip of a strange, unbidden, panicky fear. A most peculiar feeling, like a panic attack. Every rain-soaked, ashy house yard looked like the end of someone's sad, impoverished life; and every puddled mud track curving off into the woods took on the aspect of a path to World War Two killing site.

This evening, feeling like this, and tired, and wanting to get home, and knowing what I know about history, Poland feels like a country -- and a landscape -- that has death hovering over it in the rain and the rising mist. Drear and desolate.

Ho hum. If my life was a country, at the moment it would be Poland.

Bollocks. I wonder if I might be 'clinically' depressed? I've been anhedonic for weeks.

Bad day at the office

I'm used to being good -- or even really good at what I do. Sometimes, though, a couple or three things in one day remind me that, in my current job, there's too much stuff that I'm mediocre/not very good at. I hate that: it works much better if I live in a fool's paradise and never get reminded about it. Bugger.

b e c a l m e d (2)

Some more notes from my Krakow notebook (if you can bear any more narcissistic self-examination and mixed metaphor sundaes...):

07.06.05. 08:10 -- sitting on my hotel bed after breakfast, waiting for digestion, rest and reflection to do their things and bring me to a state of energetic jump off.

I've noticed that my handwriting has settled down this morning, into something neat and measured, something more thoughtful and careful, suggesting precision, thought, accuracy, seriousness, authority. A divergence from my usual frenetic scrawl. Suggestive of calm and control, those fugitive conditions that haunt me so rarely.

This makes me think about sitting at a cafe table under a parasol, looking around me and writing down wise, insightful, witty, pithy thoughts. Seeds for short stories. Novel-founding images and character insights. The third cup of coffee arrives: you feel happy and contented despite the caffeine frazzle -- in touch with your true self. The waitress is attentive and sympathetic, and you are doing what you love to do, and it shows in your absorption, calm, and confidence. You've 'found yourself' -- talent, discipline and inspiration have folded into each other, merged, made something whole and robust. And you've got the time and energy you need.

You crumple up the old soft, pliable, thinly-sketched you and put that scrunched-up paper napkin-like self into the ashtray. The balled paper gives one last suggestion of life (it decompresses a little), then settles back into forgettable immobility. It's like an old skin that you've shed: you've scraped your way out of that outdated chrysalis, and your fully-formed self is released at last, ready to fly, and buzz, and alight, and feed, and move on -- self-sufficient, self-propelled, unafraid of what's on the other side of the next patch of undergrowth, the next thicket, the next field. So different from that soft, anxious, creeping thing that -- just yesterday -- moved slowly and repeatedly through the same rotting leaf litter on that same small patch of well-covered ground.

And the next day, towards the end of my train journey:

08.06.05. Interesting journey, especially in terms of the effect that 11-plus hours on these trains have had on my focus, looseness and creativity. ('Looseness' in the sense of being relaxed, being myself, feeling able to follow wherever my creative thoughts take me; that sense almost of being 'outside time', where you don't have any of the usual prompts of duty or of habit -- this feels like a space where my brain can do that unconstrained free-association work that's essential for my creativity, and for my belief in that creativity, and for stamina in keeping at it.) It's as if the fact of being 'captive' on a train, without options, communicates itself to your unconscious and says, "go on then -- here's your opportunity, get stuck in." And doing so gets you into that 'flow state' where one association/image feeds the next, and sets up a pattern/dynamic where they start to come thick and fast, freely and richly, and where you stop doing that 'conscious policing' thing...your thoughts outstrip the censor and just break through however they like.

The lesson here is to create the space where this can happen: forgetting about the time- and space-provision necessities of writing/creativity has helped me become stagnant/arid/boring/A. N. Other metaphor for uncreative and dull.

And another thing (with the warm evening sunlight flickering through the trackside trees and onto the faces of the passengers, on the seat shoulders, on the sheened edges of the luggage racks...) -- er, another thing: this session of thinking and creating has really lifted my mood; I feel completely different from how I did first thing this morning, and all because of this amazing thing I've been doing with my pen, hand, wrist, arm, and brain. How cool is that?

I'm going on about this so much because I'm trying to drum these lessons into my brain: transcribing these notes is part of my project of retraining myself to write daily, to do it for the sake of it, for the simple enjoyment of it, to find that place where your fingers move over the keyboard almost without you thinking about it, your fingertips microseconds ahead of your conscious mind. The dart and flow of creativity, emerging almost on its own. Even if you're churning out turgid crap that no-one else wants to read, the act of writing is pleasure enough in itself when it comes like this.

b e c a l m e d (1)

I wonder if everyone who has the luxury of self-examination sometimes feels like this? Like they've just woken up from a dream of their own life, where they've been occupying their body's space, but not truly living? As if they're just drifting, a boat with no engine, driven whichever way the tide and swells take them. Powerless and hollowed out.

I was looking back at the notebook I took away with me on holiday to Poland and Germany, and which somebody has been writing in -- maybe me, maybe some fictional character. It doesn't start off very well:

05.06.05. Been feeling a bit anhedonic of late: only alcohol, bad food and the intensity of heart to hearts have taken the edge off that fuzzy anonymity/invisibility, so I've been doing too much booze and fat, and not enjoying life very much. The resultant weight gain has locked me into a tightening spiral of excess, self-disgust, powerlessness, and circle-completing comfort eating/drinking. Not been doing anything creative: Blog stalled. Novel dead.

That's the background for this Krakow trip, which I booked on a whim one lager-fuelled Friday evening in April. I had it slated as a 'research' trip for my novel ("Broken"), a project that I subsequently threw aside in disgust. Stripped of that incentive, I've been feeling ambivalent about the trip, and a bit anxious and nervous about this strange, unknown place.

So. Moody, anxious, anhedonic. No shape to, or pleasure in, my life. Overweight, self-conscious, defeated, miserable, full of self-loathing. The perfect preparation for a holiday, eh?

My trip did get better, though. Strangely, it got better when I was on the train to Germany to see my relatives, trapped inside a metal tube for twelve hours. First, I was reading some poems from Seamus Heaney's big, fat Opened Ground collection, and some of these poems were really speaking clearly to me:

08.05.05. Part of a stanza from "Markings":

All these things entered you
As if they were both the door and what came through it.
They marked the spot, marked time and held it open.

There's something here [although you really need the stuff that precedes it as well...] that means I'm almost feeling the meaning rather than understanding it. These are lines that sneak up on you, say something deep and mysterious, and leave you with a newly-opened space to explore. And yet, as soon as you start trying articulate the meaning that's spoken to you, your words start to drift away from you, or else they pile up on each other, too eager to try and explain what they can't quite grasp -- before the meaning gets away from you.

In the lines before this stanza, Heaney writes about a child's evening football game, the adult's ground markings for a building or ploughing -- images of explicitness and implicitness have been wound together, the concrete and the imagined. I guess this creates a kind of diffuse space in your mind, where the tangible and the liminal coexist, and speak to each other in whispers. This is a space almost beyond words, a 'felt' space that we reach through some unconscious emotional channel. What seems to happen here -- for me at least -- is that the line about "the door and what came through it" does precisely that 'time fixing' thing inside the poem. For a moment, you're on the brink of that wordless space, feeling the poem's images shiver and merge in your mind, feeling the emotional connections, and being 'primed' to feel the strangeness of that door opening.

It's as if life's fleetingness, these momentary clarities and experiences, are held there for a moment in the poetry -- close to conscious understanding, but always provisional -- before they dissolve back into what's lost. And I guess that's the space we live in all the time -- suspended in the concrete now between the dissolution of the past and the haze of the future.

I wonder if there's something here, too, about living in the moment? ie that being here -- and being here, present is partly a function of registering the limitations of not living in the now: that all the energy you spend reanalysing the past or angsting about the future is wasted energy -- nothing's bringing back (or changing) the past, and only action will make the future different. The desire to move through time like a wave...to be a volume of water and feel the wave move through you...some metaphor like that is what I'm stretching for here...

So...all that waffle told me what? Well, that, I don't spend enough examining the world of now. That I drift through my life like a ghost most of the time, hardly noticing where I am, often thinking about being somewhere else, doing something else, instead of making the most of the moment, and taking my chances in doing something different, and taking control of things. How that solipsistic reanalysis of the past is a barrier to action. And, especially, how little time I spend doing the things that I really love doing: reading, writing, thinking: engaging with the world and trying to constantly see it anew, and fresh, and to make sense of things.

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Terrific Book

I heartily commend Dirt Music by Tim Winton.

When I finished reading it, sitting on a bench under some trees on a sunny morning in Krakow, I wrote the following in my notebook:

...a tremendously well-written, gripping and emotionally engaging novel, full of feeling, colour, [poetic description], memory and emotional power. At the end [details omitted so as not to spoil things], it makes you want to cry. A fine book. It feels like one that will resonate, like Cat's Eye

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Poland

I haven't been posting exactly 'regularly' lately, I know.

Next week will be post-free (unless I send summat compelling from my phone, or chance upon a cyber-cafe): I'm off to Krakow/Auschwitz/Germany-by-train for a week.

Have a great week, why don't you?

A x

---

Der Untergang

I went to see Downfall the other evening -- the recent German film about the final days of Hitler and his inner circle in his Berlin bunker in 1945.

It's a pretty extraordinary film. If you have even the slightest interest in history, I really recommend that you go see it. I don't have a coherent view on it as yet (I think I need to go and see it again soon), but I do have some random thoughts...

It's two and a half hours long; it has two main sets -- the dimly-lit subterranean bunker complex, and artillery-ravaged Berlin; its subject matter is unremittingly bleak; and yet, despite all that, it never drags -- the time flew by. To make that happen, the director has to be doing something special.

It's gripping and dark: there's a sense of foreboding, and of inevitability, and you get caught up in the strange logic of the frenzied atmosphere, where suicide and self-immolation seems the only rational choice. The shells rumble and crash, the walls and ceilings shake, dust falls, lights flicker, the tension and the claustrophobia build.

There's a cast of the famous and the not-so-famous: Hitler, Eva Braun, Himmler, Speer, Bormann -- the Hitler circle; the military high command -- Keitel, Jodl et al; and the 'lesser' figures -- Hitler's secretary, Traudl Junge, various SS/Wehrmacht officers and men. What's both interesting and disturbing is the way that you get drawn into this world, and how you feel yourself engaging with these people as human beings, and sympathising/empathising with them. Given the repulsiveness of the Nazi ideology and its horrendous results, there's a bit of you that's resistant to this identification/empathy -- it seems like a betrayal. There's been controversy about the 'humanisation' of Hitler, and I guess that criticism could be extended more broadly across the rest of the characters -- you find yourself differentiating them into 'decent', 'good/bad' and so on, and then you pull yourself up, remembering that they're all part of this inner circle, serving this monstrous man and ideology. But I think that's part of the richness of this film -- to make you look beyond the more 'comfortable' conception of alien monstrousness and see, instead, the reality of differentiation between people, all bound somehow to the same twisted, malevolent belief system. It feels like a truer reflection of messy reality to me.

Another criticism I've heard is that the film is somehow an apologia for the German people's part in the Nazi past -- the argument here seems to be that, by showing Hitler's tirades against the 'failed' German 'race', the film-maker is implicitly portraying the German people as 'victims' of Hitler, and thereby excusing/diluting their complicity in the Third Reich's dark history. And yet, in the film, there's an explicit rejection of this: Goebbels is given a speech that cites the responsibility of the people who -- in large numbers -- voted for Hitler and the Nazis in the 1933 elections; the essence of this speech is "this is what they chose". Given that, I find it hard to understand the criticism.

Traudl Junge, Hitler's secretary, tops and tails the film with brief interview excerpts, filmed when she was in her 80s (by my guess). In these segments, she reveals a (fairly typical, I think) disconnect between her own experience and the wider effects of Nazism -- as if she couldn't see that she was somehow implicated, or couldn't bring herself to make the connection. I think this echoes what Gitta Sereny wrote about Albert Speer.

Anyway, go and see it and make your own mind up. It's a pretty extraordinary experience.

innocent

remember the innocent eye, ear, nose and touch receptors of childhood?

remember how the world was before your senses got contaminated by your intellect? before everything got mediated through the rules, received wisdom, and fashions that you learned? when you could hear a piece of music and have a purely emotional response, unsullied by the dictates of 'cool' or of intellectual snobbery?

remember how beautiful that world was, before you'd made your mind up about everything?

now

now that i've given up thinking too much about stuff, and given up the excessive self-analysis (apart from this rule-disproving exception, damnit...), i find that: i've more time for other people; i'm less self-centred; i communicate better; i get less het up; i do more spontaneous things; i enjoy music and language more; i realise how precious everything is; i realise how beautiful most stuff is; the world opens up in colour.

good.

bollocks (pardon my french)

ok, so there are two rant-worthy things here, imo: (i) the way the bbc - our 'premiere' broadcasting organisation, apparently - report this story: would they report it like this on the today programme? on pm? on newsnight? no, of course not. but because it's on the web site, they can do simplified/glib/dumbed down, with a sensationalist tabloid headline. and (ii) the essence of this story (it seems to me) is about the desire that the offender radically changes that behaviour - hood- and cap-wearing is not radical behaviour change; it's tabloid gloss.

grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

the rant-inducing story

Pre-Nostalgia

I'm full of good feeling this evening, after another lovely walk through the park. The sun was out, going down in the west (surprise!). There were...

...evening shadows and the distant column of (I can't remember his name -- some aristo-militarist -- the Duke of Marlborough? -- who won the battle of Blenheim, giving him the right to manufacture fags in red and white packets)...



There were...

...squirrels in and around the trees, whose trunks were dappled in the evening light...



One of the squirrels said "Your cameraphone's not too hot in high contrast conditions, is it?" Pretty perspicacious, for a mammal with a brain the size of a walnut.

In this country, I think we're all supposed to be disdainful of grey squirrels, on account of how they have almost completely displaced the 'native' red squirrels from their former ranges. It's as if the greys are thought of as rapacious marauders, 'coming over here' and eating our nuts, ruining the neighbourhood for the indigenous stock. I can't dislike them: they're just doing what their natures make them do -- it's hardly their fault if we introduced them and altered the previous ecological niche balance, is it? And they have such cute, delicate twitchy noses, and Disneyesque eyes...

Down by the lake's wriggling offshoot, there was...

...a blackberry shoot with a nursery of dozens of tiny yellow-striped spiders in a globular cluster, strapped in place with sheaths of web...



One of the spiders said "Your cameraphone's not really up to close work, is it?" Arachnid sarcasm at its best.

On the lakelet, baby coots tried to muscle their way past incipient lily pads, while their parent dove and bobbed, bringing up glistening morsels that caught the sun as they were passed from beak to tiny beak. Insects salsa'd over the surface, backlit, making tremors on the water that expanded as sunlit ripples. Midges bit my head and neck. A heron sat on a jetty rail on the other side of the lake, caught in a shaft of sunlight between the trees. Dark shapes moved in the water and, once, one of the fish leapt. The air smelled of warm, mown grass, and there were the scents of blossom, suggestive of honeysuckle and magnolia.

And all the while I'm drinking this in, there's a bit of me that's already feeling sad and wistful about when I don't live here any more. I wish I could live in the moment more...

aurora australis

loads of beautiful pictures of the aurora australis at this British Antarctic Survey-related site. fascinating (provided you don't think about John Carpenter's The Thing).

extended moments

three moments that seem to expand to fill a 'consciousness time' far longer than their actual duration:

1. the moment between being aware that you're treading on a snail and your boot sole being flat against the ground


2. the moment between the realisation that you're going to hit the car in front and the actual collision


3. the moment between hitting the 'send' button and realising that you've accidentally 'replied to all'
   

silences

there's a lot to be said for silence: for example, when you've got nothing to say, why not just keep quiet?

i'm a bit fed up with myself at the moment. one of the things i'm really fed up with is my own constant self-examination and self-analysis. even i'm bored with it. i feel the need for a period of welcome silence, and the need to de-centre my self from the centre of my life: i've been taking a good look at that self, and it's getting on my wick.

i need a period of trial separation from myself; to learn how to live again, without my head up my arse.

the end.

nature notes coda

i managed to get a snapshot of one of those big snails, with a teaspoon for scale:



awesome.

gush

have you heard KT Tunstall's The Other Side of the World from her Eye to the Telescope disc? it's perfect.

porky

walking round the Blenheim estate this evening, i noticed that i'm getting a beer belly: round and taut. horrible.

time to make a change: i've been neglecting my health and fitness. i need to start a new project -- operation pork lop.

nature notes

(from my walk in the dull, chilly evening.)

1. monster molluscs: the biggest snails i've ever seen in the wild, dragging themselves across the cut strip towards the road. i thought they were mushrooms at first: they had very pale -- almost white -- shells, and their soft parts were very pale grey, with hints of pale green and tan in places. the shells were -- ooh, that big: about two inches in diameter. you wouldn't want to tread on one of those in the dark...


2. marauding mammals: walking along, i could see a pale green apron of fallen leaves around a tree: it looked as though it was having its own private autumn. as i got closer, i could see individual leaves and lumps of foliage falling. looking up, i watched two squirrels darting about, stopping, and systematically eating their way through the leaf growth, after which they'd let the mutilated clumps fall to the ground. they were literally shredding the canopy. i couldn't work out what they were eating: i looked at some of the fallen residue, and could see a few caterpillars in amongst the buds; there were also proto-nuts embedded in the new growth. any ideas, nature lovers?

Phenomenon/Noumenon

Sundust

Soap

Something...

...cheery.

There's a new Wallace and Gromit film out in the autumn.

consistency

The US's drive for democracy and freedom continues in Uzbekistan

C₂H₅OH

Alcohol, like nature, abhors a vacuum.

It will fill any vacuum, however ill-defined that vacuum's shape.

This can be good. It can also be bad. I oscillate between those two interpretations.

FICT_003: autumn

The bus stops up at the crossroads, where the old sheep drovers' track meets the big road linking the two nearest towns. She's going to head north east: the town there is near the sea, which she's never seen, but would like to, and it's on the main railway line. She can get anywhere from there.

It's pitch dark by the time the bus comes, lights white through the light rain, scouring the tarmac with a sweeping, cold dazzle. She reaches back into the darkness of the wooden shelter, feeling for her rucksack, dragging it across the damp floor of rough planks, and imagining the woodlice and spiders back there in the rotting, scuttling dark. The moist, soft, familiar smell of home almost makes her choke, but then the bus door guffs open on its gas strut, spilling orangey light onto her shoes as she steps up, over the cold puddle that's draining into the gutter.

The bus's windows are steamed up, but she swipes a clear arc on the glass and cups her hands into a shielded tunnel of reflection-free darkness, trying to see the landscape through the wet night outside. The bus sweeps a corona of light in front of it, but, to the side, she catches the pale smear of the passing hedges, distant yellow farmhouse lights, and -- once, she's sure, just before she falls asleep -- the grey swoop of an owl's wings.

FICT_002: autumn

She needs people around her who love her. She needs to be with people who won't judge her. She needs to be around people who will let her be herself, and who will laugh with her, and at all her jokes, but who won't laugh at her, even when she's at her most ridiculous.

She can't stand to be judged, or laughed at. If people who don't know her make judgements or assumptions about her, it makes her incandescently angry: her ears and cheeks burn, and she can barely speak. It's as if these ignorant, baseless judgements destroy her, negate her existence, undermine all the depth and self-awareness that she's developed. They know nothing, and they have no right to make judgements about her. How dare they?

She must have people love her, sympathise with her, make allowances for her. It's what she does for other people all the time -- and she's always done it -- so why should it be so much to ask?

But there is nobody left who does any of these things for her, so she's leaving. All the people she loved, and all the people who were kind and tolerant, are gone, disappeared from her life.

Idiots.

The bus should be here soon.

byte-rich evening walk...

...around Blenheim.

Starting at the weir...



...where a pied wagtail hovered between rocks and half-submerged branches, catching insects, and where two coots shepherded their two chicks and fed them food from their dabbling.

As I mentioned the other day, the trees are looking marvellous: so many different vivid, rich colours...



(The red is pretty close to the actuality this time.)

Lower down, you can see the still-incredible complexity and elegance of the individual branch, the individual leaf...



...all combining in immense profusion.

And this beauty works at all scales. From the smooth symmetry and multi-candled/castellated horse chestnut at a distance...



...and zooming in to the individual candles of blossom...



...with their subtle, alternately pink and yellow hearts.

Such fractal delicacy and beauty.

And a big blue sky, brushed with fine cloud and scarred with a distant contrail...



Nice walk.

still hope

not quite over the hill

FICT_001: autumn

It's autumn already: another year draining into the early dusk. The fields are turning to their winter browns in the fading light, ploughed and harrowed and soaked by a month's rain. It's been blustery today, with fresh white clouds grazing across the blue sky in the morning, but, as the day's gone on, a gauzy grey cloud layer has smeared between the earth and the sky. Where the sun's setting, behind a curtain of cloud, the fields are bruised brownish purple.

The church sits in a hollow, ringed with dark trees. There's a bluish sheen over the black-green leaves, and she always suspects that the roots have drawn up death from the graves and made into a fine garment. When the sun's set and the congregation have left, and when the wind's flickering through the desiccated branches, the leaves skitter against each other, dry and crisp. In that scratching and scraping she can hear the death of the year coming, and feel the long dark of winter creeping in, unrelieved by high, bright light, or by the touch of warm air on her skin. Winter is as flinty and dark as the church's stones.

She remembers the day they buried her sister here. That was an autumn day, too, devoid of hope or light: a muffling fog that barely lifted all day; the wheels of the undertaker's traditional black wood carriage squeaking and rattling in the mist; the pathetic, straggling group of mourners, with her -- nine years old -- at the front, the only surviving member of the family.

That was nearly ten years ago. It'll be ten years in a month.

She can't remember Esther's face any more, except when she reminds herself with a photograph: even after a few days, the image fades again, like a word that's on the tip of her tongue, but unrecoverable; she can see the outline of the thing that was Esther, but the content won't come. Sometimes, in a dream, Esther will loom over her, smiling, and Rachel will awake with such a vivid sense of her sister's presence that she'll say her name into the darkness -- sometimes questioningly, sometimes emphatically, sometimes resignedly. The dream summons Esther's old shape and smell and weight into her mind, and it'll take a few minutes for the vividness to fade, and for Rachel to subside back into sleep. Sometimes she'll try and hang on to the images and sense impression memories, but they're elusive, vaporous, and they always get away. The poignant, irreplaceable space where the loved one lived, and still lives in memory. After a dream like that, which she'll remember again in the morning, shorn of its immediacy but still sharply moving, she'll be silent and moody all day, railing against the unfairness of the world that can hold up such a clear image and then snatch it away, with no hope of its voluntary recreation.

Esther's grave is at the furthest edge of of the graveyard, in the shadow of the low stone wall and a patchy hawthorn, which is brown and pinched, awaiting the fall of its last leaves. Rachel pushes open the dense wooden gate and goes in under the dark trees, and rests her rucksack against the hard exposed roots of the hawthorn. She stands over Esther's grave, with a ticklish mist of drizzle on her cheeks.

She's come to say 'goodbye', in her own way. She doesn't say anything aloud, but stands with her feet on the uneven grass, and takes in the view beyond the stone wall: the flat fields, the hedgelines, the clumps of scrubby trees, the misty horizon smeared into the sky, all in poorly-differentiated tones of grey and brown. Her legs feel inert, and she breathes out heavily, a great sigh of resigned frustration. She wants to stay, but she wants to go as well.

All the greyness, and her indecision and apprehension, make her feel like crying.

So she cries a little, big fat tears joining force with the mist on her cheeks. She's not really crying for her sister, or for loss, but for the realisation that this part of her life is over, and will never come again. She's nineteen.

Wednesday

A much more imposing heading.

It speaks of confidence and authority.

(Except...Blogger isn't rendering it properly, so the effect is lost.)

I will use it often, as a kind of pseudo-NLP trick.

And horizontal rules.

---

t r e e s

i walked around Blenheim for the first time in ages on Sunday: vast sky, fat sun, big cool breeze, pairs of lambs snugglng close to mum, the green grass riffled by the wind and smelling of sheep wee, very pregnant ewes moving slowly and tentatively. bucolic spring.

and the trees. hundreds of tall, mature trees in leaf, with the sunlight filtering/dappling/slanting/dazzling through the fresh growth. so much accessible beauty on a privately owned estate. dozens of pheasants in amongst the trunks.

on the way back, i camerphoned these big red buggers. the colour's a bit false, but they really are a very warm coppery red (copper beeches?)



lovely.

Saturday

I finished Saturday this evening. There's so much that's good about this book, but I can't help feeling -- churlishly, perhaps -- that it doesn't quite make the final leap to perfection. Why? Because there are some things about the last sections that -- even though they depict a situation I haven't been in (not exactly, anyway) -- don't quite ring true to me: a sudden transformation through poetry; a coincidence of role and location; the performance of an operation after a traumatic event. Here, it felt to me as if the internal logic of the story had dragged it away from the novel's rootedness in a tangible, beautifully depicted world of experience, thought and sensation. After the deep conviction and believability of what came before, this last part felt a little...not strained, but a little too neat, perhaps: the shape of the story is satisfied, but not -- for me, at least -- the wider truth of the tone and conviction of the piece. I also feel that some of the socio-political narratives feel a bit clunky...not fully integrated in the characters' voices.

I feel rotten writing this: there's some really beautiful, true and moving writing in this book. I'd still recommend it as a treasure house of spare, precise prose, of great desription (of moods, things, emotional and physical states), and of profound emotional truths. Maybe I'm suffering from a failure of imagination: read it and see what you think.

This is the first Ian McEwan book I've read. I've got his whole back catalogue to work through, and I'm looking forward to it.

monday, monday

it's dark now, and there's rain pattering on the skylight. i'm feeling a bit blue.

i'm nearing the end of Ian McEwan's Saturday. it's a stealthy book. i don't know what happens at the end, but i have a sense of dread about the dodgy/violent character whose car the main protagonist scraped earlier in the day. what's stealthy is the way that the prose insinuates the main character's - Henry Perowne's - voice and epiphanies into your head, drifting from mood to mood and detail detail to detail. also intriguing is the way that Henry's voice - cool, cerebral, analytical, objective - co-exists with those everyday epiphanies, and with the wealth of love in the book: in the section i've just read, Henry visited his increasingly senile mother in her old people's home, and then dropped in on his son's band's jam session; in both contexts, you could sense the intimacy with, and love for, these people - it percolates through the prose, insidiously, and osmoses into you. touching, clever, and intriguing.

Magrittian oxymoron

I'm not saying anything today.

wall texture

m a

a fuzzy picture of mum, laughing:



and a crisper one of her smiling:

requiem for a delusion

you get used to dreams dying: the love that doesn't work out; the longed-for college place that turns sour; the house that's perfect for you, but which you can't afford; your desire to be six feet tall.

i have abandoned the big fat novel i've been 'working on' (read 'not working on') since the start of the year. the seed of this project was planted about six or seven years ago, and has ebbed and flowed in and out of my mind ever since: scenes, characters and general structure have grown, shrunk, and morphed into different shapes, but the spine of the thing has been around for ages. this weekend, though, i realised that it just wasn't going to happen: it's tired, it's stale, it's lifeless, it' directionless. it's a flaccid series of tableaux and personal histories, lacking shape and energy.

worse, i can't summon up the energy and enthusiasm to wrestle with it and turn it into something more sinuous and galvanic. this is symptomatic of: my lack of technical skills and expertise; my sense that it's just duty that's keeping me pecking away at the story; my inability to concentrate, and my lack of determination.

when i was on the dole for a few months in 2003, i wrote 150 pages of a different novel, and really felt like i could make it happen: it gave, shape, meaning and direction to my life at a difficult time. now that i'm working full time again, i have to carve out the time to write: i have to display a degree of dedication and discipline that i just don't have. this makes me think that i'm never going to finish anything that's novel-sized in scale and scope.

i've harboured the idea of being a writer for 20-odd years, and yet i've never applied myself to achieving anything in a consistent and concrete way. i think that says everything that needs to be said about the realism of my expectations, and about my dedication.

so i'm packing it in. that dream/delusion needs to be laid to rest. i need to find a different one.

b a t h

my bathroom window is clear glass, south-facing, and sun-catching, but overlooked by next door's garden, and by the houses behind. being a shy brit, i'm self-conscious, and don't like to have my bathtime ablutions on display. so i let down the blind and hook the string around the tap: this leaves a strip of light at the bottom of the blind, which fans out into the big blue bathroom. it makes the light seem soft and evening-like, whatever the time of day.

you know that noise you make when you sink down into a deep, hot bath, and the copious scented bubbles slide past you and make a honeycombed ruff around your head and neck as you lie back? that mmmmm---ahhhhhhhhh noise? that's blissful, that is.

a g a i n

the form changes as the sun moves round...



neat.

the usual

Refraction:



Reflection:



It took me a while to work out what this reflection was...it's from the bevelled edge of the stairwell, white, gloss-painted wood, reflecting on to the wall. Ribby/spinal look. Makes me think of whale skeletons.

ok, i lied

i need your help with this one. i'm trying to reconcile two sentence fragments:

1. tony blair has 'listened and learned'
2. blunkett

breathtaking arrogance.

real independence and courage

An inspiring story.

odd

i've just been looking at my blog stats, and i noticed that i seem to be getting a load of random links to my blog, from sites that couldn't possibly deliberately link to mine. so...either lots of people are hopping from blog to blog, or someone's doing something weird with some code.

stealing from yourself

another manky day at work. and why? oh, that old thing about feeling that you haven't done everything you should have done, and feeling that what you did do wasn't up to the quality that you'd want it to be.

leaving aside my usual self-scouring perfectionist schtick, i realise that i brought this on myself: at this time of my workplace's month, everyone is in a frenzy to complete their submissions to the body that decides which projects are goers, and which are duds. and everybody leaves it to the last minute, of course. which is fine, so long as you've gathered all your evidence and just need to assemble it (which was the case with me...i'm such a goodie-goodie). but...i had a cascade of people asking me for estimates/process maps of how my team would get their projects done, and i neglected my own work so that i could satisfy these peoples' need for information. which meant that i reached 12 o'clock today with shit-loads still to do, and no fecking hope of doing it all. frustrating: i can never say 'sorry, fuck off, i've got my own problems to solve'.

fucking messiah complex.

fuck, i'm in a bad mood. can you tell?

light of my leaf

Walked round to the paper shop this morning, about 0745. Saw some leaves catching the sunlight and snapped them with my cameraphone. They came out a bit weird...strange glow and flare effects. Looks kinda unreal.

zone

This is a post-election-free zone: I'm fed up with people's simplistic, unsophisticated, glib, knowing, shallow opinions, and with the hollow posturing and 'right-on' sets of comfortable, unnuanced, consensus opinions about facking politics. (That includes my own.)

Christ, I'm in a bad mood. Sorry.

thursday postscript

it's funny how thing turn out...as Prefab Sprout insisted, in their splendid song, it's a Life of Surprises: although I've been feeling a bit manky, and the world's mostly a crock of shit (or a crapberg, if you like), there are little everyday interventions that people make that make everything look suddenly beautiful, and bathed in light: for example, an email from an old friend that triggers deep memories; or an email comment from an esteemed colleague that makes you realise that what you're doing in the 9 to 5 makes a difference to someone; chance discussions in the workplace where you connect with people and realise that those human connections are what makes life worthwhile.

Tiny, everyday epiphanies.

wise guy

Or...my life as a workplace motivational poster...

Do you ever have those days when everything you planned to do goes out of the window? When distractions, unexpected problems, and 'emergent issues' tear up your schedule and replace it with uncontrollable gunk? When you gradually realise that all the important stuff you had to have finished by the weekend is going to have to be crammed into Friday?

I had one of those days today.

I used to get really uptight and frustrated about days like that, days that were clearly 'getting away from me'. Nowadays, I just let them go. They can find their own liberated place in the sun, free from my misplaced desire to control them, and to stop time, and to mould the universe to my convenience. It's not going to happen, is it?

Let them go. All this will pass.

glum-ish

Ever Fallen In Love With Someone (You Shouldn't've Fallen In Love With)? (Buzzcocks, 1978)

I have. Again. I do it all the time.

I think I may just have to have a good blub...

scatalogical mishearing

I was going to Sainsbury's.
She said: "I need chocolate"
I said: "Plain or milk?"
She heard "Anal milk?"
She said "ANAL MILK?"
We laughed.

Do you remember the last time you laughed and something came out of your nose? That didn't happen today, but when it does, you know that you're alive, that some things are funny, and that the empty spaces in your head are all connected, and that they allow the free flow of materials between them. This is both gross and strangely life-affirming (in my twisted view).

Manic Moggies

There're at least 3 cats out in the back garden, making those bizarre (and hilarious, I think) yowling, groaning, mewling noises: a weird rhythmic counterpoint that rises and falls, changes its dynamics, and achieves a strange circular quality.

I think these noises translate as:

• What you looking at?


• You looking at my bird?


• Any chance of a shag?


• Get off my manor


• You're barred


• Leave it, Fluffy, he's not worth it

Hearing that noise through the dark, and through the open window, always makes me smile. Catworld is a weird place: weirder than Enders

big fat evening cloud

top verse

Seamus Heaney is a wonderful poet: he's the only writer whose works I go out and buy as soon as they're released (remember when you used to do that for all sorts of bands?)

Anyway, here's a site featuring him reading some poems. I think In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911-1984 is particularly touching.

shadows and wallpaper

cheap entertainment

i just watched something rather beautiful, and almost free: i'd made coffee in my big white china cup, and set it down on the table by the window while i munched toast and jam. there was a dark vase behind the cup, and side-/back-lighting from the window.
i focussed on the toast.
some movement in my peripheral vision got my attention, and i turned my head to see steam/vapour coiling up from the coffee surface, greyed by the backlight and contrasted by the dark surface of the vase. i watched, almost mesmerised, as the vapour rose. it's too complex and dynamic to describe briefly (no poet, I), but think of endless variations on: tongues and tendrils; coils, loops, and pinnacles; sheets and swirls; static patterns that hold for a while, then sudden bursts of change and turbulence; smooth curves; undulating pulses; jagged jabs; gassy cones and helixes; constant change and variety, uncapturable and undescribable in words.
amazing complexity and variety, just heat, liquid, gas and a bit of light.
treat yourself...put a brew on and set it down in a light source.

sunday evening light

sunday afternoon

spring and summer

Jesus, what a beautiful day! (I picked a good one to take off.)

The sun has been out all day, the sky has been blue, there's blossom and new growth everywhere, and the birds are still singing and fledging.

Just now, I had to turn off my music and listen, through the open skylight, to the sound of the first swifts of the year: they're circling and swooping in the cooling evening air, making their exhilarating tsweee tsweee calls as they hoover insects up out of the air. Swifts are wonderful birds: wings like a curved black knife blade, fantastic agility in the air...and they sleep on the wing, only ever landing to brood their eggs.

I did some gardening earlier, and was joined by a cat...



...which mostly ignored me:



Later, I walked to the shops, and came back through the churchyard at the back of the church...



...and took my inevitable 'blossom' picture:



A lovely day for me.