A hippy version of Hilda Ogden

Good morning bloglets and how are we today?  The sun is shining here in blogland and it’s going to be a hot one.  I have declared summer.  I am wearing my ‘Venus’ t-shirt (picture: statue of Venus – not Venus de Milo but the ancient and infinitely better pregnant or fat statue), caption: ‘must be Venus envy’.  I saw it a few years ago – can’t remember where – and had to have it.  Underneath I am wearing trousers I bought a few years ago from Fame Fashions and which I think are meant to be pyjamas but perfectly acceptable as summer trousers.  No, they are not brushed cotton and no, they do not have teddies on them!  I also have a Venus pendant which I sometimes wear.

It is hard in some ways coming back from the chalet.  I cycled back, though, as I think I told you yesterday – and that was great.  Very empowering to get somewhere under your own steam.  Not going to cycle back up until I’m fitter tho as it’s nearly all uphill.  Although, by some strange alchemy, when you’re coming down it’s not all downhill.  Weird.

No-one has yet explained the weird animal in the trees.  I’ll have to look out for it and see if I can take a photo.

When I come back from the chalet I go on Facebook and think – what do I want to get involved with all this for?  And the next day I’m liking and commenting and posting and messaging with the best of them.  It’s a different life up there.  You are with yourself and nature and although I do have conversations with the neighbours I don’t have my mobile on till the evening so all day the conversations are in my head.  Which is what you want when you’re writing.  you need to achieve a balance between the internal and the external.  Too much of either and I go crazy.

Another rejection letter yesterday – this time for a book review.  It was a long shot to review Proust, but you never know.  I love Proust.  Did I mention this before?  Well, not for a week or two anyway.

That’s more than enough.

Enjoy your day

Kirk out

PS  Mark just surfaced and said:  ‘Yesterday you were red.  Today you’re blue.”  I replied: ‘that’s true.  What you said’.  He said, ‘that doesn’t rhyme’.  I said, Mark – it’s a reverse rhyme!

I’m wasted here.

PPS  Just realised I haven’t explained the title of this post.  Due to disastrous haircut (don’t ask) I am wearing a bright blue flowery headscarf.  Nuff said!

Longtemps je me suis couche de bonne heure *

Bonjour mes petits brioches, et comment ca va? My spell-checker is going mad, though it’s interesting to see how many French words can also be something else in English (and therefore not underlined in that plaintive wiggly way.).

How am I? Well, I was feeling frustrated by my lack of progress, but starting to feel that I might be turning a corner, albeit slow and lumbering with many turns and reverses like a juggernaut negotiating a u-bend. There was once, in that loo-paper publication The Daily Sport (now, I think, defunct) a picture of an unfortunate obese woman with the caption “dumps like a truck”. The most unattractive sight in the world – a load of sweaty, overweght males laughing at a picture of an overweight woman.

For some reason yesterday I was thinking of Yosser Hughes. Remember Yosser Hughes? He was the character in Boys from the Black Stuff who went around saying to everyone: “Giz a job – I can do that.’ In the final stages of his malady he gave up and just took to saying “I am Yosser Highes” (If you’re not in the UK, Boys from the Black Stuff was about a bunch of unemployed labourers from Liverpool – and it was seminal TV. Really excellent.)

To Steve’s last night where we discussed his new girlfriend and watched Twelfth Night, the Trevor Nunn film with just-about-everyone-who-was-famous-at-the-time. I wasn’t totally convinced by Ben Kingsley as the fool (not that Ben Kingsley, god bless him, can’t play anyone he damn well pleases, just that the way he played it was a bit odd); nor was I convinced that Nunn was as happy on film as he presumably is on stage. I also found some of the dialogue hard to follow. But this did not make it a bad film. Not at all.

*This, if you didn’t know, is the first line of A la recherche du temps perdu I also went to bed early last night as I am feeling tired at the moment. Maybe it’s the time of year/maybe it’s the time of man/and I don’t know who I am but life is for learning

Ah, Woodstock! Where were you when you first heard that? I suppose, as the conventional wisdom has it, if you can remember, you weren’t there. (Oh, all right – I admit it: I wasn’t there. I was far too young.)

At the reference library today

Definitely need to think of some snappier titles for these posts.  Back to working at the library today as Mark seems to be better.  had an email from Artichoke, the people who ran the Plinth project, asking me if I would like to talk to some women’s magazines about my experience.  I said I would.

Working on my stories today.  Some of them seem very lame indeed, and all of them need lots of work.  The radio play is stuck at the moment – but when things are going well I get a real sense that it all works together.  Not feeling terribly inspired today tho.  Tired.

Have you ever noticed how few indoor seats there are?  If you want to sit and have a packed lunch without getting rained on, there are not too many options.

Reading a book called “Mezzanine” by Nicholson Baker.  It is something I read years ago and nearly bought for Mark, even though at that time we weren’t together.  It concerns the minutiae of life, the things we all notice on a subliminal level but don’t pay attention to, such as the nature of the hole in which you insert your straw in a cup of take-away coffee; and what happens to plastic straws when inserted in a cup of fizzy pop (not a problem I ever have to contend with) and how they have designed them to fit exactly into the lid so the straw doesn’t bob up and out of the drink.

I call it Proust for shoppers.

I am also reading Proust again, first in the English, then in the French.  I only have one volume in the French – in fact, it turned out to be the second part of  volume 5, La Prisonniere – and it starts, bizarrely, in the middle of a paragraph.  Took me ages to find it.

Took Mark ages to find the book, too.  It was my Xmas present last year.

I love Proust.  If I had a second life running alongside the first, I’d use it to read Proust, and write all my responses to him.  And  write down all the quotable stuff.  Actually, I’ve found you begin by writing the odd sentence and end by copying it all.

That’s all folks!  See you next time on the Muppet Show.

Nimbletwimble, puckyduck, fibby fob

… such were the sounds running through my brain as I woke up.  My brain usually wakes up about 15 minutes after the rest of me – as the rising sun sweeps over a lawn, causing the shadows to huddle to a point, so consciousness sweeps my body, starting with the feet.

Why the feet?  So you’re ready for action, I suppose.  But can the feet engage without the brain?

Mm.  Maybe there’s a primitive part of the brain which wakes up first, so that you’re ready for flight if necessary.  Does this make sense?

Does any of this make sense?

Today I am going to do some stretching.  Still tired after Monday’s 54 rounds, although waking up at 5.30 doesn’t help.

Seeing Depth in Trivial Thoughts

There’s something quite Proustian in the most everyday, trivial actions.  For example, when I come up to the bedroom, the top of my sewing box  seems an ideal place to put my teapot, milk jug and mug.  But once I reach the bed, once I am sitting up with the laptop on my knees – the tea seems very inconveniently placed.  Everyday life is made up of hundreds of such incidents – and I am convinced they affect our consciousness at least as much, maybe more than our larger actions.  Lilliputian.

I’ll leave you with that thought.

Enjoy the day, if not the weather.

Kirk out

Something for the rest of your life, sir?

The last couple of days, I’ve been working in the library, hence no blogging.  I have reached a firm decision, which is to write my novel and get it published.  Enough messing around!  Yesterday I imagined what I would do if I had only 4 months to live.  Of course, it is impossible to “live as though” you are going to die soon, but it is essential to make the most of your time, since we don’t know how much of it is left.  I fondly imagine I may have 40 years if I’m lucky (51 now) – but even if that’s so, those 40 years will disappear more and more quickly and seem like 10 in my childhood.  So I’d better get a move-on.

I have also decided to read Proust in French.  This may well take me the rest of my life, hence the title.  This was originally a joke:

Mark – I think barber’s ought to do operations, like they used to.

Me- what sort of operations?

Mark – well, they could offer vasectomies

Me – so after the haircut, they could say, “Something for the rest of your life, sir?”

PS in case you don’t get this, barbers always used to sell condoms, swinging from tree to tree (sorry, a different sketch got in there by mistake) and they would ask, “something for the weekend, sir?”

PPS Maybe I’ll enter the All-England Summarise Proust Contest next year

On time travel

It seemed to me that this was my life; and that from the age of eight I had to keep constant watch on myself or else I would disappear, my consciousness would simply disappear from that time and place and go walkabout – and this would get me in a lot of trouble, particularly at school.

And now look!  I’ve gotten (see?  I’m not against all Americanisms) myself into a situation.  I have a family, I have responsibilities.  How can I be a time traveller now?

And it seems to me that life is like this: just as Proust had to tell all his separate selves that Albertine was dead, so I have to gather up all my separate selves and somehow get them, like an unruly crowd, together in the same space (this is hell – there are so many of them and they keep wandering off) and then we can all move on together.  Not to mention my family.  As they say in “Chicken Run”, “this is about all of us”.

www.imdb.com/title/tt0120630/

And I’m experiencing my life as a chicken run at the moment – the things that I used to enjoy, to find nourishing, now seem to me like chicken feed: this broad highway with so mny avenues to explore now seems like a chicken run, and the avenues have all turned out to be stalls where chickens sleep and lay their eggs, waiting for death.  I see traps everywhere.

I guess I’m lucky I don’t have some kind of multiple personality disorder.

Mmm.  I feel another post coming on.

In Search of the Time to Read Proust

It took me eight years to read “A la recherche du temps perdu”. www.tempsperdu.comBy chance I started with the last volume (that was the only one they had in the library, though I now own all seven). When I read those last (in English) two words, “In Time”, it felt like a bullet through the forehead; like the final resounding chord of a symphony, like that last, long-fading chord in the Beatles’ “Day in the Life”. I was poleaxed. For several moments I couldn’t move, speak or even think. I’m not exaggerating.

One Hundred Years of Reading

But I haven’t finished “Cien Anos de Soledad”, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Hundred_Years_of_Solitude not even in English. It’s too hard to work out who everyone is. And I feel like I should read it in Spanish. But reading Proust in French is, as they say, hors de question. There’s a book – I think it’s Alain de Botton’s book on Proust en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_de_Botton – where a typical Proust sentence is printed like one of those shape poems, curling round and round on itself, taking up the whole page. I love Proust, couldn’t live without him – but, en francais? Impossible!

Welcome back

–  So, Liz – it’s a while since we spoke.  How’s it going?

–  Oh, fine.  I’ve sent a lot of stuff off –

–  Uh huh.  That’s good

–  And I’m doing a lot.  I’ve got about six short stories on the go…

–  Six, eh?

–  Yeah.  Er, one’s about  – well, the time I lived in a yoga centre

–  Mm.  Unusual

–  Yeah, and there was this guy – a musician

–  Oh, right.  Sounds fascinating.

–  No, wait – it’s about abuse

–  Abuse, eh?  That’s different.  Lots of gory guilty details, huh?

–  No, not really.  I mean, it’s quite low key

–  Great, great,   So what else’ve you got?

–  there’s one called “Lions”.  It’s about my childhood

–  Mauled by a lion, were you?  That’d play well.  Scarred for life, both physically and mentally…

–  Ha, ha.  Erm, actually it’s about the time I stole my grandmother’s wedding ring… It’s very symbolic

–  Symbolic is good.

–  Yeah –

–  In low-budget Swedish cinema.

–  Oh.  Right.  Well, I…  Yes, I see.  Well, I also have a story about – well, it’s sort of science fiction.  It’s about the study of thought – you know, how people think.  There’s this museum and…

–  Huh.  I think I see where this is going.

–  No, you don’t!  I mean, with respect, you don’t – you see, there’s a twist…

–  Liz.  What I’m about to say now is for your own good.

–  No, please don’t say that!

–  Right.  Ok.  Well, I think we’re about done here

–  No, wait!  I – there’s more!  I’m working on a radio play!  It’s about social class and finding your way…

–  Of course it is.  Well, do you think you can “find your way” to the door?

–  Proust had trouble getting published, you know!

–  Who?

– OK.  Like you say, I think we’re done.

–  Bye Liz

–  Yes indeed.  Goodbye.