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.