The Land of Nod

Strawberry, banana, spinach & almond milk smoothie.

I don't imagine that Henry IV and I have much in common -- I have neither leprosy, nor a kingdom to rule, and last I checked there seemed no likelihood of anyone wishing to assassinate me -- but we do seem to share a tendency towards insomnia:

O sleep, O gentle sleep,

Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,

That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down

And steep my senses in forgetfulness?

Like my Plantagenet pal, I often find the Land of Nod an elusive destination. It takes forever to get there, and when finally I do find my way, I can't seem to manage to stay. Unlike my Plantagenet pal, I don't mind who else gets to go there, as long as I'm there too.

A Reluctant Percussionist on the Cumberbatch Bandwagon

Banana and peanutbutter, again (not the whole jar!).

I'm a contrary sort of a person, I suppose, so if something is all the rage, I tend to be rather resistant to  it. Brad Pitt never adorned my bedroom wall as a teenager, nor Keanu Reeves. But damn it if Benedict Cumberbatch isn't just a bit dreamboaty. Don't get me wrong, I'm not playing the tune, but I'm on the bandwagon for sure -- playing the triangle -- or those funny wooden cylindrical things that look like building blocks -- a little embarrassed by the whole thing. It's the T-Shirt that did it:

Now THIS is what a feminist looks like #ellefeminism #BenedictCumberbatch http://t.co/yEEt05Fd0I pic.twitter.com/2mjibOXT3n
— ELLEUK (@ELLEUK) October 27, 2014

And this too:

Gloves, and Other Tales

A peanut butter slathered banana. Mmmm.

Klinger's Glove series popped into my head today (I think it was stumbling upon Otto Dix in The Guardian that did it). I've always been bewitched by it. I suppose it's the logical progression of a childhood obsession with Outside Over There: from one mesmerically dark set of imagery to the next.

There's something so romantic about gloves, so vital: lost gloves, found gloves. For so flimsy a garment, it certainly supports a great deal of intrigue -- for me at least. I suppose it's all to do with touch: brushing fingers when you shouldn't, electrifying first caresses, longing to hold a hand that isn't yours to reach out for. A glove -- moulded to your hand -- takes on the taint of all this intrigue.

(On second thoughts though, your glove might just be some entirely unromantic half-mothed stopgap you picked up in Boots on an unseasonably cold day... and I could be talking utter nonsense.)

One Dancing Non-Princess

Peanutbutter and jam on yummy baguette.

I always loved the story of the twelve dancing princesses when I was little. It wasn't the neatness of the union with the twelve prancing princes that did it (I feel sure the version we had when small didn't see the eldest married off to some hoary old stalkerish pervert: if it did, I have firmly blocked it out). And certainly it wasn't the princess element that resonated: tombstone-toothed little girls with tangled curly hair seldom identified as princesses, in my experience at least. Instead, it was the enchanted forests and tattered shoes that captured my imagination: the branches broken from magical trees, the invisible cloak, midnight boat rides, the dancing 'til dawn.

I have always walked through my shoes at a rate of knots, scuffing them almost at once, prone as I was (am) to ambush by paving stones (and the ire of parents -- Startrite shoes in width and length  measurements did not come cheap).  However hard I tried (try), my shoes seemed (seem) always more battered than anyone else's. That the state of my shoes could be down to more than just clumsiness was (is) an appealing prospect: if my poor scuffed shoes could talk, what stories would they tell of my nocturnal adventures...

A Band of Peg-Toothed Squashes

Crunchy nut cornflakes.

Sometimes it is quite necessary for a group of adults to get together and carve pumpkins. Pumpkins are a good deal easier to carve than turnips. Not of course that there can be much debate on the matter.

Like any good Scot, the humble turnip was the chosen Jack O'Lantern vegetable in my guising days. One spent hours hollowing out the damn things, risking loss of digits as one did so, before even getting down to the business of carving a likeness. Once satisfied with your gnarly creation, you would thread it with string and tote it about, followed everywhere by the stench of turnip.

The merry band of pumpkin friends we carved out today are a good deal less pungent, and rather splendid (though we do says so ourselves).

A Misattribution Worth Investigating

Boiled egg and marmite soldiers.

Apparently Hemmingway never did say "write drunk, edit sober." Never-the-less, given my recent authorial paralysis, it's worth a shot.

I have a bottle of Jura, my serious face on (glasses too), and I may have had a half bottle of prosecco headstart. 1,000 words. Do not pass go; do not collect £200.

A Drunk and Debauched Recycling Box

Bacon roll.

Our red recycling box has been on a five-day bender. I just found it filthy and disorderly outside a bar, reeking of fags and booze.

The blue one pulled the last disappearing act, resurfacing some weeks later, following what may have been a torrid affair with a neighbour. I found it a street away, sitting dejectedly on the pavement, a chip missing from one corner (we never mistreat them so).

It's as though a life as a receptacle for empty receptacles weren't fulfilling enough.

Excellent Creatures

Peanutbutter on toast

Tonight I have mostly been snuggling with this guy, and drinking wine. He is an excellent listener. As are the excellent humans I spent the evening with.

Cry Me a River

A very health breakfast.

My imagination is often very visual. I see the things I want to write and then I search for the words. For a little while at school, I thought perhaps I was a screenwriter, not a novelist.

For a long time I have had an image in my head from the book that who knows if I will ever write. A woman in tears wades out into a river and stands weeping in the water. She cries so hard, her tears turn the river into a frothing torrent about her. When the waters subside, there is a rock in the place where she stood, and she has disappeared to fairyland, swept away by a kelpie.

Sometimes I feel like I could cry up my own raging river. Perhaps that's where the picture came from, through eye blurring tears, that roll down your cheeks and splash on the floor. I've certainly cried some floods. So far though, no kelpies.

Words from Sir Walter, Scott

Banana

The entrance to Waverley #waverley200 pic.twitter.com/gHdv1HigTc
— Edinburgh Spotlight (@edinspotlight) October 18, 2014

This popped up in my Facebook feed today (and yes, I hate myself a little bit for writing that). I must say, fucked if I know what the other half of the battle is. Though I've never really experienced either arena as a battleground -- that would suggest that there are occasions when it seems like I might be winning...

Something Afoot

Banana; a raspberry bun; boiled egg on toast;
doppelgänger shreddies (the astute amongst you
 will notice a breakfast is missing;
it was a fishcake with a poached egg & hollandaise

Either shoes are getting bigger, or my feet are getting smaller. Time was, I was a dependable size 6. These days, a 6 is like wearing a pair of clown shoes, and a 5 is just that little bit too small -- length-wise at least. (Britons, by and large seem to be a spade-footed, short-legged species, and I've yet to find a pair of shoes that didn't slop off my heels, and a pair of trousers that didn't need letting down.)

It's an odd position to find myself in: almost-dainty-footed-ness. I've always thought of my feet as somewhat flipper like. Perhaps because growing up my father always told me I had hands like feet and feet like fenders, oh and tombstones rather than teeth. I've long considered my extremities rather outsized for my height -- all legs and arms and fingers and toes and not a great deal of torso -- or head, as it happens (I once borrowed a five-year-old cousin's bicycle helmet; I was not five at the time. More like 25.).

I feel like I've wandered into an odd kind of a fairy tale, and I can't yet tell if I'm the heroine, or just a vanishing-footed curiosity along the way...

Of Jumpers and Peanuts

The last of the funny italian biscuit thingys.

I have a new favourite jumper. It's big, and sloppy and cosy: it comes down below my bottom -- and the sleeves pull over my hands. It's blue and grey, and I think I've worn it every day for almost a fortnight. Not all day; but at some stage most days (usually the evening when it wouldn't quite do to be in PJs just yet) I wriggle into it and hunker down.

This jumper is, I suppose, something of a blanky; and we know from Charlie Brown the trauma of parting with treasured blankets. This trauma is on the horizon. I must wash my beloved jumper, and fear I will not escape a Linus-like decline while I wait for it to dry.

Not Really All that Pinterested

Pumpkin pie again! Happy Day!

I have a Pinterest account (I joined it in fulfilment of bridesmaiding duties), but I can't work it, and I don't know how to leave it. I've only recently learned to stop calling it pin-ter-rest. Occasionally I even feel slightly guilty about my neglect of this sphere of the internet. From time to time, I get messages notifying me that someone has pinned something on a board that I am unable to find, and I feel a sort of pang. I suppose I oughtn't to worry. I'm sure it feels no obligation to me.

Moomins on the Mind

Pumpkin pie -- oh yes!
(Sunday's breakfast was a pork taco, which I gobbled so fast I failed to photograph)

One of the stranger episodes in a life punctuated by oddities, was the bleary-eyed, jet-lagged fuzzy afternoon (morning? evening? it's hard to say) I spent at Helsinki airport: a place that was teaming with Moomins. It was five-hour layover between Delhi and London.

It's my only brush with Finland; and I remember being hungry, and tired and beset by Moomins at every turn: creatures that I have always found just the tiniest bit -- whisper it -- sinister. (This is to say nothing of Little My, who is profoundly unsettling.)

I do not recommend that a person short on sleep, and rich in overactive imaginings spend any time surrounded my Moomin figures of every size and form -- soft, hard, edible, two-dimensional, three-dimensional. It is the sort of experience that lodges itself, indelibly in the mind, and creeps unbound into one's consciousness from time to time, a half-remembered waking nightmare of blank expressioned, moon-faced beings lunging at you out of nowhere, their round, eyes unblinking and emotionless. Like right now, in fact: my mind is awhirl with Moomins.

It's Always Ourselves we Find in the Sea

Rice crispies.

Well, it's turning out to be a poetical sort of a weekend. Today I went to Crammond, which I think needed. I am, after all, an island girl, and sometimes I just sort of need to be by the sea to start finding my way again. ee cummings was quite right: "For whatever we lose(like a you or a me) it’s always ourselves we find in the sea":

maggie and milly and molly and may

went down to the beach(to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang

so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,

and milly befriended a stranded star

whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing

which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:

and may came home with a smooth round stone

as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me) 

it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

The Bottom is Out of the Universe

Banana and a cantucci biscuit

I had rather less tea than the usual deluge today. Perhaps that's what put me in mind of this Kipling poem:

“We had a kettle: we let it leak:

Our not repairing made it worse.

We haven't had any tea for a week…

The bottom is out of the Universe!”

I've posted it before, but since I found it, it's always rather stuck with me. Somehow it serves as a funny sort of reminder that so often when all goes upside-down with life, there was a small part of you that couldn't help but see it coming: it's just you went ahead and were a little reckless anyway, because you wanted it to be different.

The Two Most Antithetical Words in the English Language

Bacon roll

With four girls, two bottles of wine and plenty of wit, somewhere along the way this evening the subject of cervical smears came up, and with it, the most unlikely word pairing of all time -- schooch and relax.

You schooch, and you relax, you speculum wielding monster!

Attack of the Skull-Turnip Creatrures

Cantuccci biscuits (!) -- orange & hazelnut, and an apple

In further adventures on the peculiar dreams front, last night's was a new high (or perhaps low?). It began, in heart-thumping fashion, with two people (it's unclear if I was one of the people, or merely an observer) hiding in a broken-down car from a hoard of consciousness-invading creatures that had the form of a cross between skulls and turnips, with little arms and legs.

These creatures were simultaneously preposterous and menacing: preposterous in that they could be kicked about like footballs, and menacing in that wherever they arrived -- in their hoards -- people disappeared, their consciousnesses fading first, until, devoid of free will, they sort of vanished into the ether.

Our cowering two were happened upon first by a band of hoodie wearers hellbent of stealing the clapped out car. In the scuffle that ensued, the pair found themselves tied up in a garage, observing as their captors worked on the car: all the while fearful of the inevitable arrival of the skull-turnip creatures.

When (of course) they teemed in, the captured pair managed somehow to free themselves, jumping into the car which at first wheezed away from danger in an unimpressive, and lurching first gear, as the skull-turnip creatures thronged after them. Eventually, creature-defying speeds were reached with the successful implementation of forth gear...

The strangest thing of all was that it became evident to one of our hapless pair (who was constantly responsible for rescuing the other of the duo) that only they and un-empathetic psychopaths seemed to remain resistant to the thrall of the skull-turnip creatures -- prompting our protagonist to worry that perhaps they too were a psychopath...

Lessons in Chromatics

Banana

Black is a colour. So the Gap would like me to know in their latest advertisements -- which seem to be everywhere. A flaxen-haired Jena Malone, black-jeaned and-shoed, reclines alongside this declaration; slouched in a pose reminiscent of many evenings I've spent post-too-much supper wondering whether it would really be so bad if I simply never buttoned my jeans again.

This is confusing to me, because I am sure that I was always told that black is not a colour. One of those clever tricks that technicians played on we more semantic creatures: "Ah ha, but technically black isn't a colour -- it's all the colours mixed together." Except that any time I tried this theory for myself, I produced a miry mess of paint in a shade no right-minded soul would ever think to apply to a pair of jeans (or shoes).

Well, oh great and powerful Gap, let me tell you, black is in fact an absence of colour.

My Kingdom for a Dishwasher

Honey nut cornflakes

Much as my bedroom is a generator of unfolded garments and other-half-less socks, our kitchen is a generator of washing up. However often we wash up, more appears. The management of this Sisyphean task is pretty evenly shared, I'd say: in that I see my flatmate washing up, roughly as much as I wash up myself.

However often we wash up though, it seems that more appears. And what I wonder is, how two normal sized beings with normal sized appetites and normal sized proclivities to cook, generate quite so much to soak and scrub.

I suppose if we had a dishwasher though, we'd spend our days wondering why it was always in need of emptying...

Nat King Cole and an Orangutan

Mango and banana

French toast, maple syrup and bacon (made by my lovely flatmate)

It's been a bad week for me on the being emotionally (and otherwise) manipulated by advertisements front. I almost welled up -- and certainly got hungry -- watching a heart-string tugging advert for Kentucky Fried Chicken, of all things. I mean, really. Really. I am not proud of myself.

And then the people at SSE pulled this one: an orangutan, and Nat King Cole. How can a person see an orangutan, and hear a Nat King Cole song and not come over all weepy? (Though the less said about the own goal that is an energy company featuring in its advertisements a creature whose habitat is rapidly disappearing due to our incessant overconsumption of everything -- most of it requiring an electricity connection I'd hazard -- the better… I reckon.)

A Micro-Flat, You Say?

Honey nut cornflakes and a banana.

I suppose I lived in a micro-flat once. It was in Place de Clichy, a stop-gap one summer between one flat and another. It had the world's tiniest bathroom, in which I had to keep my hands pinned firmly to my sides in order to turn around. Washing my hair was a challenge. And certainly there was no scope for cat swinging.

As I recall the potential for catering was pretty limited, too. I had a small fridge, and a hob ring -- perhaps two -- more-or-less on the sink, and I think possibly a microwave. The fridge hummed all night. And I had to hang my washing out my window to dry it. The wind whisked away a couple of pairs of my pants once and I had to despatch an obliging friend to rescue them (they were nice spotty ones!): they'd landed on top of a flat-roofed extension in the courtyard that I lacked the upper-body strength to haul myself on to.

I can't imagine paying £1 million to live there.

Cholera, Anyone?

Honey nut cornflakes and an allegedly energy releasing drink

This photograph does not do anything like justice to the extraordinarily pondweed-ish hue of this morning's drink -- the inevitable result of shopping at Waitrose whilst tired and lurgy-full (still!).

It was packed full of wizzy ingredients, including something I briefly thought was cholera powder (hair of the dog that bit you?), but was in fact chlorella powder. The google gods tell me this is some sort of algal superfood -- so that explains the pondweed hue, then.

I can't claim to have been particularly energised this morning, but it was -- despite the algae (and some seaweed) -- quite tasty. And my sore throat is, at last, much improved. No more Jazz standards in the shower for me: though this may be down to the pineapple element of the drink (an excellent cure for any sort of throaty-itis, I have found), than the dubious green ingredients.