Brighton Rock

we enjoyed our trip to Brighton. For me it was a bit of a weird experience, revisiting old haunts so many years later. My 19-year-old self seemed to walk a step behind me, reflecting continuously on my past, while my little children ran ahead, commenting loudly and endlessly on their present.

food

Some days (like today) I find myself eating fussily. Noticed that I didn't want to eat any carbs at all. I made a mushroom omelette for breakfast, had some fruit at lunchtime, and very simple dinner of a whole steamed sea bass. which was all very delicious and clean and simple but now I have a gnawing hunger and it is well past my cut-off time for eating. Oh, well, I have irish sausages, home-baked soda bread and coconut yoghurt for the morning... so i can wait.

Angels of Anarchy: Online Exquisite Corpse

... playing The Exquisite Corpse online in advance of visiting this terrific exhibition. Can you spot my line? Hover over each with your mouse to see who wrote which. PS I am NOT Jeanette Winterson, so don't get excited!... tho it's very pleasing to be in her company! :p ;)

Micky

Thinking about everyone you have left behind. Le comhbhrón ó chroí Mícky.

The Samaritans

auction room weirdery

I have lately been very enthralled by the contents of auction rooms.... not to buy, just to look. in fact, a couple of hours in the presence of someone else's lifetime clutter is enough to cure one of consumerism for some time.

been learning to draw in a different way....

quite pleased with the results. Now totally obsessed with drawing. My Lynch poem is to be published in the autumn by The Private Press. This excites me.
Today I will be mainly re-arranging storage and other hardware in the garden. Sunburn here I come.

That's me in the Fountain

Still alive, busying myself t work and at play. Firstly please to be checking the work of my friend Ben -- and see my ghostly presence by the beautiful fountains of Leeds' Victoria Quarter.
Since I last signed in been creating... had some of my artwork published in Polluto Magazine (Issue 4), been reading extracts from my notebooks and poetry at Letterbomb, and just learned three of my poems (Re-Emergence, Blue Velvet ii and Notes from Badlands)are to be published in Black Cherry Magazine. Also been baking bread, making vegetable curries from scratch, designing funky little thangs to sell with my funky friend Lisa, receiving small electric shocks from a big blue hyacinth (that's the culprit, at the top of the post!) camping it up with Ms J, and planting flowers. so yeah, a good Spring so far... :D

Just a Phase...

When I was a teenager, I went through a strange phase of snogging anyone who wanted to snog me, provided I already knew them as a friend. It was terrible, becuase without exception the kissing put me right off them and made them think we were in/ they wanted a relationship. The result was I spent about 6 months hiding from boys who used to be my friend, or being downright horrible to them when they finally tracked me down because I hadn't worked out a strategy to let someone know I wasn;t in the least interested in them and I'd only kissed them out of ... what... boredom?.... curiosity?...charity?
I soon developed an unhealthy interest in seeing boys crying.
Awful, isn't it?

Some Day You Will Ache Like I Ache...

Friend Request

Facebook... what a strange thing a Friend Request can be...

ME:

hi
we have any groups etc in common? I don;t know you... wondering why you have requested ...

Would-be friend:

im thirsty for souls that can still tell me a story
simple and fresh
those that still venture with a smile in the world of the spirits
you seem to be one

ME:

i see.... but where did you find me?

Would-be Friend:

probably on a poetry group or on a Christian group......



Now, dear reader, I am very far from being a member of a Christian Group....

It's Snowing

But it never snows properly in England; it never settles for very long, or very deep. I miss the thigh-high banks of Scottish snow. I want to be home.

Of course!

Of course I was ill! Only an ill person would have given two fucks about whether or not they should ring in sick like that. I stayed in bed for two more days, then dragged myself to work only to be greeted with horrified looks from friends saying that I look ill, I should go home immediately, then further horrified looks when I told them that in fact this was me after a total of four days in bed, and that I was in fact improved. Should;ve gone to bed for another two days... should've called in DEAD.

Stupidly made the mistake of asking someone's opinion on whether I should be writing about someone I slept with lately, whose kinkiness was mildly remarkable ... and ended up with various guilt trips laid on me which, frankly, I could have done without and, equally frankly, I should've foreseen. So... I will write it on here, where he'll never know about it. Apparently I;m to turn up as a character in his next screenplay, so all's fair...

I will be blogging the sordid tale on here very soon, when I can bring myself to type out the contents of the texts I received in the dying day of the liaison, in which the guy stepped over a line he had been teetering near for a month... haven;t seen or heard from him since, and I'm not really surprised (nor am I sorry.... the trouble with kinky men is... well, I will tell you the trouble with kinky men when I write the entry.)

Difficult decisions

I don;t know why I find it so very difficult to decide to take care of my health when I know logically I must...
My children are entirely reliant on me for financial support, housing etc.. all the usual survival stuff; and of course, I must support myself, though I think I could cope with much-reduced circumstances if I hadn't small children. I'm perfecly capable of living in a bedsit or whatever.
So, I work for a living, full time, and fit my creative work around that. I am, also, justifiably and sensibly protective of my job-security. Somewhere along the line I ahve internalised a terrible fear of losing my job on any abitrary basis that someone in authority might decide upon. Consequently, being ill fills me with fear of being off work before it fills me with any other reaction to do with self/health-preservation.
I'm rambling. I'm ill - intermittent fever, several asthma attacks over the weekend - one severe - due to the flu, but the worst moment of all for me was when I had to make the call to work to tell them I won't be in today. And I'm still uncomfortable with it, even though I know that lying here, keeping warm, is what my body needs so that I can continue in the long-term.
And in the very long-term? I haven;t even thought about that... just want to get these children safely grown up and keep them in their home.

today and yesterday

I made a cold become a chest infection by traipsing round the abbey in the cold yesterday evening... but I plan to cocoon in my room all weekend writing and dreaming anyway, so that's ok...

Coincidences

By coincidence, one of my students and I had been spending a lot of time thinking about time last week..,. including, for example, whether we could rely on accounts of the time and date as being accurate, when did time begin to be recorded as we now know it etc....
we wondered whether we;d been led to think like this by my tutorial last week on the subject of Dali - which included a brief consideration of Soft Time.

Anyway, I found this acetate on the ground outside work today. I didn't cause THAT to happen. Did I?

All...

red

Been Looking for an Older Man

I've been looking at types of men to see if I can find an older man type (someone who truly knows what he's doing) that I could find sexy... and woop! Chris Isaak is nine years older.... someone like that could keep me up several weeks in a row without a murmur of complaint from me. What a relief... I thought I was doomed to himbos for the rest of my natural-born... now, I have to go looking...

blue

looking through my pictures today, I found so many like these that I'm beginning to wonder why I always say my favourite colour is green...

Inland Empire

I watched Inland Empire all the way through the other night, as was intended by the auteur. I hadn't managed to watch past the first rehearsal scene depsite several attempts over the past year. I'm glad. I needed to take my mind off my body and my heart for a few hours, and so I used the film - I guess as one might use drugs or alcohol or random sex... no I DON'T guess... EXACTLY as I might have used drugs or alcohol or random sex in the past. Turns out that for me, Saturday night in that frame of mind was the perfect, only possible time for me to watch Inland Empire for the first time. I don;t know what the various confused and disoriented reviewers in the world really saw, but what I saw and heard made utter and perfect emotional sense to me. As the lead crawled on Hollywood boulevard dying, unloved, spewing up blood I finally understood once and for all my own predicament and compulsions; and the denoument offered me inspiration for change within... the self is surely the Inland Empire, and if you don;t love yourself, you will either dish out hate or choose to "love" people who reflect that back to you and leave you bleeding.
As for Lynch's technique,I am constantly impressed by his deep understanding... one of the few, few film-makers who knows music properly and isn;t afraid to create visual poetry.