Think, Speak and Do

Change of scene

2006-10-25T20:44:00.000+01:00

If anyone had told me at the time I started this that I'd be so poor at writing it, I'd probably not have bothered! Anyway, in the true spirit of sharing worldly goods, Pab's let me write here.

See you on the Other Side!

Catch-up

2006-08-01T18:50:00.000+01:00

Hmm, it's been a while. I didn't realise when I started this experiment that I'd be so rubbish at making time to keep up with writing, and although it was tempting to try to write a load of date-faked retrospectives I found that it's been so long since I last wrote that I'd actually forgotten what I'd been up to. Or maybe I've been taking a leaf out of my soon-to-be husband's book.

Anyway.

One item of note is the long-overdue closure of one of the less happy chapters of my life: my PhD/MPhil. I registered to do the research on the first of October 1997: three submissions, two failures (well, three actually if you count failing my first-year submission too) and almost exactly nine years later, it's finally all done. There was a time when I would have been devastated to have finished with an MPhil rather than the PhD that I thought I'd be getting out of it, but with the benefit of time and reflection (or rather, having done the mental equivalent of putting it under the bed for the last two years) I'm actually quite pleased with the overall outcome. Now that it doesn't matter to my career, and it's stopped costing me money.

Monday morning

2006-07-17T22:18:00.000+01:00

Having left my car at work on Friday evening, I walked to work this morning, early. The walk takes about half an hour, at about the same pace as the traffic on a bad morning, but this morning it was well worth it as a chance to enjoy the sunshine and start the day gently.

I enjoy this early period before work, as a meditative time when I can fill my ears with music and be transported into a parallel place. This morning I noticed round green fruit hanging from the trees which a few months ago were covered in white blossom. The sun sparked through the leaves of the trees on the fringe of The Wilderness, and on my way onto the campus my eye was caught by a single sycamore leaf, manically waving a happy welcome, blown by its own personal breeze.

False toenails...

2006-07-16T23:01:00.000+01:00

....no, it's really true, they exist and are in use, although why defeats me. I have seen them with my very own eyes. On the number 12 bus in Reading.

I couldn't leave without imparting this particularly unusual piece of information, if you could call it such a thing.

Night-night.

Blog retrospective

2006-07-16T22:59:00.000+01:00

An early lesson.

If you're going to do it, do it either a) daily without fail or b) acknowledge when you've been too busy/lacking in inspiration.
Don't save it all up for a big marathon unless you've got the stamina, or broadband.

Sportscar in London

2006-07-16T22:38:00.003+01:00

Or, how to arrive in style.
We met with P's lovely sister, her husband and their beautiful daughter to see Undercover Surrealism at the Hayward. Train timetabling meant that we either caught a bus from Ipswich, drive to Marks Tey and pick up the train, or drive the whole way to London, and we chose the latter as a treat. I've never been through central London by car, and the prospect of driving through the immense and iconic streets seemed to good to miss.

Catch the exhibition while you can: the juxtaposition of Dali with a massive photograph of a rather hairy toe undelines the more serious counter-reading of the significance of the key Surrealists. It takes a while to absorb, but for an alternative to the standard reading of the works of Dali, Picasso and Miro the exhibition provided some thought-provoking ideas.

And it was wonderful. Roof off the car, gazing in wide-eyed wonder at the geography of the buildings, their intricacies, the skill of managing the traffic, the reality of the place. A charity bike race through Lambeth, an accident on Tower Bridge, views across Waterloo, all burning in the bright sunshine. Runners dodging the camera-wielding tourists on the Embankment, overdressed hotel porters, a small group of young men in ghetto-chic miming and posing for a video filmed under the South Bank.

Lunch in Wagamama, a quick trip to John Lewis to add to the wedding list, and a trip out to Primrose Hill to admire the view before heading back to Paddington. Getting onto my final train, I was filled with a feeling that the spell had been broken and the shadow of the mundane loomed large.

Shingle Street

2006-07-15T22:31:00.000+01:00

I love this place. A thick beach of ochre yellow and spotty brown pebbles; cold grey North Sea views. Usually wildly desolate, today, dotted with sunbathers. Dashing in and out of the surf, it was still cold enough in the water to be refreshingly British, and wholesome in a windburning kind of way.

The stones were warm and smooth, and the sound of the waves as they sucked at the shingles was the otherwordly noise of a hundred shipwrecks.

Wrong kind of heat

2006-07-14T22:03:00.000+01:00

The kind that apparently makes rails go wrong.

I didn't think it was that hot today, at least, not as hot as that mad week when the whole nation got its collective tan and places like Margate probably had a run on jellied eels and Mr Whippy.

On my way to Woodbridge during the afternoon, the First Great Western service I was on first slowed to 20 mph, to allow to the train to skate along the heated-to-plasma-phase rails, and then stopped at Iver (Iver? Where?) because train in front had done an emergency stop.

I got to Paddington a little bit behind time, and decided to brave the Circle line (a bit hit and miss since the engineering works started) and was impressed when one arrived in good time and went to Edgeware Road. Where it stopped, and waited. And waited.

It seems that they have to queue in a row to stop at the platform, and that this queue can get quite long, and last for quite a while until the situation resolves itself. Sort of like tranport constipation, if one should be so crude.

Agitated men in crumpled suits looked at their watches in consternation. The smiling Asian man sitting next to me with a beautiful potted plant between his feet gazed out of the window. The larking boys swinging from the roof bars got fidgety and play-punched each other. An attractive, aging hippy-Earth-Mother type hummed to herself, and periodically checked an ancient mobile phone. When the train finally lurched forwards, the human millieu was jostled together, and elbows, cases, bags and bodies collided. The tall black man who'd sat down on his luggage (a Paratroop Regiment careers guide and a box of new army-style boots) toppled over, laughing. All of us now sweating, and the carriage feeling like a greenhouse.

From Liverpool street, more delays - a long wait at points ouside Ipswich, sitting opposite an irrate fellow-traveller, on a train where the trolley service liquid refreshment had started to run dry. 'Got any water?' I asked, seeing that there wasn't any. 'It's Adnam's beer or pop m'love' came the answer, and so, warm can of Sprite in hand I waited again for train movement, and watched out of the window as ducks flew past over the ripening corn fields, and the sun lit the Suffolk countryside.

The Eraser

2006-07-14T21:40:00.000+01:00

The CD that Pab and I simultaneously bought for my birthday was Thom Yorke's one-man (even he shies away from calling it a solo) record The Eraser. Complete with what feels like recycled carboard fold-out case covered in a Stanley Donwood lino cut, the album itself is well worth it. Recorded around the same time as Kid A, it's similar in tone, with the main revelation being the quality of Thom's vocals. I'm the biggest Radiohead fan this side of my computer screen, but even I'm prepared to concede that sometimes Thom is a little...strained? Nasal? Incomprehensible? For a side-project, the results are stunning, and stand-out songs for me include the tracks Analyse and HarrowDownHill, a reference to the late Dr David Kelly. The lyric 'don't walk the plank like I did' isn't an obvious opener, but HarrowDownHill grows into an edgy song of persecution and loss. It's not a happy album, but uplifting in a soul-burning kind of way; music which is greater than the sum of its parts.

Birthday Girl

2006-07-12T21:30:00.000+01:00

I'm 31 today! Thirty-one years since I popped out of Mummy's tummy/was delivered by the Stork/Daddy went to the vegetable garden and found me in the cabbage row (or if you want to suggest a better lie to tell impressionable children about their origins, please do let me know).

Actually, Daddy used to mainly find slugs and caterpillars in the cabbage row, so maybe there's some milage in that one.

I have eaten plenty of cake and been fussed over, have recieved some lovely cards and have accidently bought for myself the same CD which Pab sent me in the post as a gift (complete with envelope bearing the instruction NOT TO BE OPENED UNTIL WEDNESDAY; as if I would). Bless, two minds that think as one.

I am going grey and getting saggy, but at least I have the age-accumulated wisdom to not give a stuff.

When the cat's away...

2006-07-10T21:12:00.000+01:00

....this particular mouse is still left with lots of work, and play is item 42 on the agenda.

For various reasons, I'm the sole representative of my company present at work for the next two days. It ought to be the slacker's charter to absolutely sod all, but in the best tradition of homework, leaving it to the last minute would mean I'd be in for big trouble. I'd love there to be an equivalent of 'the dog ate it' but in my field of work the excuse would be mildly implausible.

Strangely enough, it's very restful here on my own, and I could get a taste for doing at least the non-practical part of my job at home. There's fewer distractions working alone, and in fact, less work on the whole. If it wasn't for the fact that I'm so busy, I could forget that this is meant to be a chore.

Oh well.

Fens

2006-07-08T20:46:00.000+01:00

I suppose that the area immediately around the village where I grew up isn't really, properly Fens, but I always have a nostalgic feeling for 'home' that pictures it as a land of flat fields and wide open skies. Barely ten miles from my childhood home, the Fens proper start - travel further east, and the A47 take you through the old, ancient lands, full of stories and legends: the warrior rebel Hereward, the lights in the mist that lead travellers to their deaths, freshly-caught fish that speak prophesy. As we drove today across the border in Norfolk, through old villages that bred the dead-before-my-time members of my family, I could feel the sense of opportunity, prosperity and connectivity with everything that it bright and shiny and 'now' slipping away. No Mercs and BMWs here - scribbled illegible spray paint on the grey, pebble-dashed wall of a house; a dented and sagging vehicle in the driveway. Boys cycling aimlessly around a sparse patch of grass, dressed in identikit sub-urban synthetics and branded caps. Everywhere, the all-pervasive sense that this area in a once-rich arable heartland had become the cold end of the universe, where the light of material sucess shone wan.

And yet, and yet. To hear the local accent again made my heart glad, and the scenery filled me with joy - fields below road level, tall reeds along the banks. An area where 'new' rivers are born, parallel cuts in the black earth, and drainage ditches are named for their length, and where the sea keeps an uneasy truce with the land, borne of human ingenuity and time. I will always feel that a part of me is home when I come here, but that home is an old one.

Friday morning

2006-07-07T11:31:00.000+01:00

Driving to work this morning, small things caught my eye: the torn fragment of a driver's L-plate laying in the road, the bright yellow colour of the overly-large T-shirt worn by a man jogging down the path beside me, the friendly chatter of two school girls on the opposite side of the road. The grey sky hadn't quite given in to rain, and a cool breeze wafted the sounds of radios, conversation and birdsong through the open windows as I sat and waited in the stillness of gridlocked traffic at the mini-roundabout.

I see most of these sights everyday, and experience similar feelings. Annoyance at the four-by-four hovering millimeters behind me. Joy at the sight and smell of the beautiful gardens lined with lavender and roses along the way. A quote from Marcus Aurelius came to mind: "ask yourself, am I afraid of death because I won't be able to do this anymore?"

It's hard to escape the significance of today's date. I have to pass through London later today, and I'll be remembering not just the events of last year, but the quiet, mundane smallness of my own daily life.

Spider

2006-07-04T21:41:00.000+01:00

I read somewhere that spiders are meant to be good luck, and that having them come to live in your house is an honour.

I am not an arachnophobe. Repeat it enough times, and the feeling of paranoia and general patheticness sort of goes away. Until this morning, when the thing on the ceiling above my bed, which I'd assumed was a moth, turned out to be an extraordinarily large house spider. When I was a student, a researcher in my department did a study on the big hairy spiders that appear as if from nowhere in your house; he put an appeal in the local paper for specimens, and over the next few mornings we were treated to various jam-jars full of the things appearing in the faculty reception area.

This one was the Daddy, and it was taking no messing. It wouldn't fit up the tube on the vacuum. It sat impassively watching, like a prop from a cheap B-movie, as I got ready for work. I got dressed in a flash, convinced that any moment it would leap from amongst the folds of the Artex and land on me. Or worse, drop in the drawers, shoes, my hair - anywhere. All the trashy spider-fear films that I've ever seen (Starship Troopers, anyone?) replayed in the time I spent cowering gingerly underneath the thing as I tried to pretend I wasn't bothered. Horribly fascinated, I hadn't the heart to blast it with the tin of Spray Mount that I'd found. I gave it a reprieve: be gone by the time I get back, or you're for it.

Leaving work, I thought, hey, I'm not scared. Spider? I'm like, zillions of times bigger, it's more scared of me, no problem. I've got a big vase I can sort of catch it in, we're all God's creatures, it'll kill the mosquitoes, let it be. It's probably good to have the top predator of the fly world on my side. I got to the top of the stairs, poked my head around the bedroom door carefully in case it was waiting like a well-placed bucket over the doorframe.

It was gone.
I felt really stupid.

I spent half the night scaring myself that it would reappear and scuttle over me. I even expected to find it, horror of horrors, in my bed, which would be enough to turn me into an insomniac. But in the morning it was still gone, and hasn't been back. In a funny kind of way, I sort of miss it.