Doing, Reading, Listening

IT'S GODDAMN MARCH PEOPLE! Thank. The. Sweet. Baby. Jesus. 

I wrote that thing after Christmas about January and how great and restorative and blah blah blah it is and yeah, it was fine, but February, man February was a total downer. That it is the shortest month is literally all it has going for it and knocking back vitamin D tablets like they were tic tacs, counting down the days until friends visited at the end of the month and spending long (really long, interminable) evenings in the bath with the lights turned off was the only way through it.

But it's over! Yay! A weight, a 28 29 day weight has lifted and I am feeling sparklings of what's that? Optimism? Woo! 

Doing: this week in Doing I have been writing but not as rigidly as I was. I have worked on my big thing and I've worked on a few shorter things and for the first time it has been enjoyable. I have also been doing a lot of thinking about my What Next? and if that is getting a job or going back to college or throwing myself into starting a new business. None of those things are imminently achievable but neither are they petrifying, like they were a month ago.

Reading {paper}; still Game of Thrones, the first book. It's terrible, I can't stop. Also The Official DVSA Guide To Driving 2015 (the technique changes annually, who knew?). 

Reading {the internet}; Aside from the dresses I couldn't give two shits about the Oscars but I enjoyed this piece in  The Pool on Disney-esque dressing, whether would be be as interested in watching if the women involved didn't dress like celluloid princesses and if there a princess gene that makes some kids want to dress in mountains of pastel satin while others would rather go naked than wear a princess dress? From my small study group of two, I would say that she might be on to something there. 

Do I think Alicia Vikander and Cate Blanchett wanted to look like Disney characters? Do I think that two highly intelligent and accomplished women woke up and asked their stylists to make them into fairytale princesses for kicks? In terms of a brief, “just do whatever it takes for me to avoid the worst-dressed lists, so that I can block the sexist, racist farrago that is the Oscars out of my mind for another 364 days” is more likely. 

The Disney princess analogy, and our willingness to invoke it, says far more about us than it does about any individual actress. All they’re doing is playing the game. They know that if they dress up nicely, Hollywood will reward them for playing their part in a pageant which, let us not mince words, feels as dated as most things that originated in 1929. Laura Craik, The Pool.

Also on the Oscars and fashion and women and feminism, these pieces in the Guardian and again, The Pool about Jenny Beavan, the genius costume designer behind Mad Max who deigned, deigned to turn up to the Oscars in jeans and a leather jacket, with unbrushed hair and NO MAKE UP (how very dare she) and the frankly horrifying reactions of the fuckwits, I mean men, who she walked past to get to the stage.

Alejandro Iñárritu glowered as if a woman in a leather jacket was somehow more repulsive than DiCaprio chomping down a raw bison liver. One man, bless his heart, all but leapt into the arms of his companion as she sauntered past, in the same manner that a housewife in a 1950s cartoon would if a mouse suddenly crawled out from under the skirting board. Stuart Heritage, The Guardian. 

c. VW Golf advert

Reading {the internets} cont. 

Everything by Emma Lindsay, whose piece about what she learned from dating rape victims went viral last week but who is interesting and articulate and moving on many issues.

There’s another annoying thing that often comes up when I date people who aren’t down with their bodies: I often end up feeling like shit about mine. My ex and I got in this fight once where I said “Do you feel like I accept your body? Because I don’t feel like you accept mine.” She was shocked, and told me she did feel like I accepted her body and was upset that it didn’t feel reciprocated. And I asked her, with all the negative things she said about herself, how could I ever feel safe? She was clearly capable of putting her own body through a fucking ruthless judgement, why would I expect she wasn’t judging mine just as harshly? Emma Linday, Medium. 

This interview with John Irving, who I continue to adore, despite it being years and years since he's written anything I enjoyed reading, because he wrote two of my favourite books ever, a handful more of my almost-favourite books ever and knows how to wrestle a bear.

“The bear is almost blind but one thing he will see is your eyes,” he says, in best shiver-making, frontiersman-mode. “So you must never make direct eye contact. Avert your gaze.” He suddenly transforms into a cringing courtier and adds: “Retreat slowly from the bear and allow him gangway. Above all, don’t run. A bear will outrun a horse over a short distance. They chase and kill deer. Look at the way they’re built, with a powerful upper body, like a sprinter’s.” Somehow you can’t imagine picking up hard-won backwoods tips like these from Julian Barnes. Stephen Smith, The Guardian. 

The Pool (again) is running a series on Motherhood, Sali Hughes on Post Natal Depression (but really on all depression) is wonderful.

'I wasn’t exaggerating. I genuinely felt insane. Since the birth of my much-wanted baby, and the death of my father a few weeks later, my life had felt like an interminable movie I was watching from behind a thick sheet of tracing paper' Sali Hughes, The Pool. 

Listening; I haven't been doing a lot of listening, I've been adoring silence where I can get it, but yesterday Lyra and I walked into the moors and I listened to the latest episode of This American Life, it was heartbreaking, and a stern lesson in believing people when they tell you stuff, even if they are not telling you stuff in the way you think they should tell you stuff. 

There are two songs playing in my head constantly (three if you include that godawful Adele one that won't get off my radio); Hozier's WorkSong which is absurdly beautiful and Lukas Graham's 7 Years, which also won't get off my radio and which I can't decide if I actually like or if it's just catchy like flu.

What doeth, readeth and listeneth you this week?

Time is gonna take so much away.

Time is gonna take so much away
but there's a way that time can offer you a trade.
Time is gonna take so much away
but there's a way that time can offer you a trade.
You gotta do something that you can get nicer at.
You gotta do something that you can get wiser at.
You better do something that you can get better at
'cause that's the only thing that time will leave you with.
'Cause time is gonna take so much away
but there's a way that time can offer you a trade. 

It might be cabaret.
it could be poetry.
It might be trying to make a new happy family.
It could be violin repair or chemistry.
But if it's something that takes a lot of time that's good.
'Cause time is gonna take so much away
but there's a way that time can offer you a trade.
Because your looks are gonna leave you.
And your cities gonna change too.
And your shoes are gonna wear through.
Yeah, time is gonna take so much away
but there's a way that you can offer time a trade. 

You gotta do something that you can get smarter at.
You gotta do something that you might just be a starter at.
You better do something that you can get better at.
'Cause that's the thing that time will leave you with.
And maybe that's why they call a trade a trade,
like when they say that you should go and learn a trade.
The thing you do don't have to be to learn a trade
just get something back from time for all it takes away. 

It could be many things.
It could be anything.
It could be expertise in Middle-Eastern travelling.
Something to slowly sure to balance life's unravelling. 
You have no choice you have to pay times price,
but you can use the price to buy you something nice.
Something you can only buy with lots of time
so when you're old, which you will, some whippersnapper's mind. 

It might be researching a book that takes you seven years.
A book that helps to make the path we take to freedom clear.
and when you're done you see it started with a good idea.
One good idea could cost you thousands of your days,
but it's just time you'd be spending anyways.
You have no choice, you have to pay times price
but you can use the price to buy you something nice. 

So I've decided recently,
too try to trade more decently. 

Your current favourite?

What's your current favourite song? Not your all time favourite, just the one that you keep hearing on the radio and turning the volume up, or the one that you've just started listening to again after years of having forgotten about it.

This is mine. It makes me so happy. Partly it's just exactly the sort of upbeat shtick I need right now (I'm suffering from Winter so bad this year, so bad), but more so it takes me right back to August and the Olympics and that week Nye and I spent in Brighton without the kids, pounding the streets in blazing sunshine looking for our new house and watching Bolt run really fast on a big screen on the beach at twilight. It was a good August.

.

To Macca's Shirt

To Macca's Shirt (On exhibition at the Museum of Liverpool, alongside Macca's trousers)
By Roger McGough 

You arrived washed, ironed and lightly starched.Stars and stripes on the label, 'Broadway and Sunset Strip'Assumed he'd brought you back from his first American trip. 

But you weren't my style. Too flash for a teacherI left you in the laundry bag and squirrelled you away.Forty years on I re-read the label: Esquire regd. Glasgow. 

May 1960, the Silver Beatles on tour with Johnny Gentle.Two weeks in Scotland, bread on the night, and the lureof the Sanforized shrunk imports in the Esquire shop. 

Though never quite living up to the promise of your name,at least you appeared on stage and realized your dreams.Felt a sense of history coursing through your seams. 

The alternative? Shoplifted by a teddy boy from Alloafor the dance at the Town Hall. Lipstick on your collar,sweat on your oxters and blood on your cuffs. 

To end up here, the carapace of a silver beetle,pinned down under glass, would have been unthinkable.A shroud, ghostly, Sanforized and unshrinkable. 

• From As Far As I Know, published by Viking. via The Guardian .photo of The Beatles in Scotland, from Sound and Vision, via photosfan

soundtrack

You know when you're walking down a street by yourself (always by yourself) and the sun is shining and your hair looks good and you don't have any vomit on your trousers, what song do you hear? What song would be the soundtrack to that bit in the film of your life where everything is going right, just briefly? Mine is Seven Nation Army by The White Stripes. It's impossible not to hear that song in your head and not feel like you're the coolest cat in the whole damn world. 

*inspired by this post by Miss Pickering, who I believe might be one of the coolest cats in the whole damn world.  

Distraction and comfort

When you're alone
And life is making you lonely,
You can always go downtown
When you've got worries,
All the noise and the hurry
Seems to help, I know, downtown

Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city
Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty
How can you lose?

The lights are much brighter there
You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares and go
Downtown, things'll be great when you're
Downtown, no finer place for sure,
Downtown, everything's waiting for you

You might have noticed that the tone around these parts has been a little woebegone recently. That despite lovely things ahapenning and lovely people abounding, the air has felt a little heavy, a little sorrowful. I've been trying to keep cheerful but you see, my Grandad is sick and I am sad, and try as I might I just can't keep my chin up.

The Boy and I are Up North for the week, staying with my Gran and visiting my Grandad in hospital. Relief at finally being here to hold hands, hug tight, give love, keep company fights with a constant desire to run, to hide, to find somewhere (preferably sunny, with a cocktail and a masseuse) where everything is ok and one of my very favourite people in the world is not in hospital, not dying.

But I don't think that this is one of those situations, unlike say... a bear attack, where running away would actually help (all bets are welcome on who the first person will be to leave a comment telling me that when a bear attacks you would be an idiot to run away, that what in fact you need to do is play dead, shout 'bad bear' or sing Copacabana at the top of your voice because that really scares the crap out of those big furry bastards.)

I can however run away temporarily. There are places, very certain places that help. When we're at home, ikea is my Downtown. The palace to organisational devices instantly distracts me, reassures me and calms my worried soul, assuring me that there is order in the world, that chaos and unpredictability can be banished, if only for the couple of hours it takes to follow the well sign posted path, testing the best sofas, resting in that bouncing chair that The Boy oohs and ahhs over but I tell him is just too damn ugly to ever find a place in our home, opening and closing the drawers and cupboards in those perfectly formed, never used kitchens and uttering a sigh of contentment as the drawers slide silently shut on their magic, cushioned rails.

I buy the same things every time - glass jars in all three sizes, energy saving lightbulbs, cafe style tumblers and a birch photo frame. Sometimes a plant pot. You can never have enough of any of the above.

I don't even like ikea though. Most of their furniture is nothing but offensive to the eyes, as durable as if it were made from weetabix and destined to end up in landfill within five years. The teenage staff with their pest-control blue and yellow outfits and their 'do I havvvvve to?' expressions make me growl with irritation and that all pervasive smell of meatballs and hotdogs has turned my stomach ever since my aunt who's a nurse muttered 'that's exactly what gangrenous flesh smells like' when we were standing in the queue.

And yet when it feels like life is going to overwhelm me, like I'm drowning in a sea of uncertainty and the ability to Just Keep Breathing is starting to slip away, ikea is my life raft. Which does of course indicate that I'm nuts, because who but those people that live in white boxes filled with white shiny furniture and organisational devices hidden behind white lacquered doors on silent hinges is actually calmed by ikea?


However as we are Up North, there is no ikea. The nearest ikea is 166 miles away. Which is probably for the best as we have about 18 of those damn tumblers, the kitchen counters are filled with glass jars, all of the lights are lit and I can't afford any more photo frames. (Oh god. The nearest ikea is 166 miles away and the Boy and I have been discussing moving Up North one day. Would I even be able move 166 miles from ikea? That would make it a seven and a half hour round trip each time I have an anxiety attack. Not including shopping/recovery time. And I don't drive.)

While there may not be a Palace to Organisation, there is my favourite shop in the world, a shop a million times better and the polar opposite to ikea. An antique shop, in the countryside, down a lane lined with fields, filled with sheep, who have just had lambs, who bounce in the air and make me smile. The shop is divided between a church where the furniture, fashion and fireplaces live and three outbuildings filled with china, linen, jewellery, antique cameras, old postcards, countless other intriguing whatsits and swallows nesting in the rafters. And there's a courtyard, littered with a collection of vintage toy trucks and tricycles, rocking horses and tin cars, sitting there as if they were abandoned this morning when the children were called in for lunch. Or to sweep the chimneys, or whatever it was kids did back when toys were made of tin, not plastic.

And this place is my heaven. It too calms me on days like today when it felt like a world that is supposed to be solid was threatening to start crumbling. A slow walk through the mounds of furniture, stacked high but not nearly high enough to reach the vaulted roof of the church, not nearly high enough to touch the beams. Finger tips traced across polished wood, carved stone, cast plaster. Chairs with three legs, burst cushions, escaping springs. Ceramic bed pans and foot warmers and the wardrobe from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, bursting with furs that make my stomach crawl with fascinated revulsion. Lace veils with holes in them, kid gloves that have never been worn. Velvet top hats and army uniforms, bath tubs with cast iron feet and deep deep sinks from gutted farm houses. And on and on it goes, each item with a history, a soul, fragments of the person who owned it embedded in its makeup. And with each thing a reassurance that something remains, something survives, not everything brakes and sometimes, even when it does it is still beautiful, still valued.

All photographs by me.