Let's go fly a kite.

The wind is as light as it gets in February, a mere 15mph - perfect kite flying weather. That yesterday two kites arrived in the post, completely unexpectedly, is serendipity at its finest.  

My aunt, their great aunt, clicked some buttons in Canada and had them sent to us and we are desperate to see them airborne. Or rather, they are desperate to see them airborne, I am desperate to go to bed as I have had a sort of a head and a sinus and a throat and a muscle thing for a few days and I feel like a bag of cold turd. But the bright blue sky, the glowing grass and the squeals of excitement from my winter-bored children draw me outside and into the red striped, metal framed, finger snapping deck chairs that used to live in my Grandparent's shed and make a once or twice yearly appearance on the lawn when I was a kid. Memories of skin sheared from knuckles turn to warnings that 'If you play with those chairs they will eat your fingers right off'. Sometimes I lie to my children to keep them safe.  

I lean into the taut canvas with a cup of coffee and watch as Nye shows them how to string the kites, where to stand, how to hold firm as he runs across the garden trying to catch the wind.  Huddled in my parka and hat and scarf and gloves and snow boots I shiver in the cut glass air of a February afternoon - watching my family play, listening to the dog go mental for the flying thing she is not allowed to attack and marvelling at the golden light that bathes my world.

Five, Ella.

A grin of tiny pearly teeth and a glint of pure, wild mischief flash from behind her overgrown golden fringe and she leaps straight at me. From the ground she is in my arms in the time it takes me to open my mouth, my 'what are you doing?' never getting it's chance to taste air. Her legs snap around my waist like magnets and with her arms waving in the air like a hippy at Glastonbury she is in my arms, my spider monkey - as light and as easy as her namesake. 

If her sister did that to me (and she's tried) she would knock me to the ground, give me a black eye and put my back out for a week. Ella is only a kilo lighter, has only ever been at most, a kilo lighter and yet she carries herself with such ease, flying just above the surface of the waves, that she feels little heavier now than she ever has. In my lap she settles in, curled like a cat and no more obtrusive. Sometimes an arm or leg goes awry and I get punched in the face but it's not clumsiness, more a case of limbs too long to control, jumps a little too ambitious to pull off, momentary forgetfulness that she can not in fact fly and I am not in fact an immovable object.

'You're not a snuggler like your sister' people tell her, but they've got it wrong, she is, she just takes her time to suss out who to trust, her need for an audience is minimal to non-existent in comparison to her twin's.
When I lie on my side to watch telly, with my knees bent up towards my hips – the only way I can fit onto our little two person sofa – she climbs into the triangular gap between my legs and the back cushions, resting her head on my bum and tucking her knees up to her chest. We fit together perfectly, one large and one little piece of a jigsaw, a jigsaw that builds the picture that is our family. The dog tries to climb in too, she doesn't fit but somehow Ella squeezes her in, wrapping her arms around her neck and loving her fiercely. 

Running off ahead on a still and perfectly crisp winter morning, the sun backlights her and with all of her height she looks both tiny, too small to be allowed out of my reach, and like that's it, she's off, see you later. Today she needs space, tomorrow perhaps she won't let you out of her sight. My independent, curious, ephemeral wanderer. 

Not that she isn't also batshit crazy at times, point a camera at her and her eyes will cross, her tongue will stick out at a wonky angle and an inhuman noise will emanate from her contorted face - it's not cool, whatever she might think. When the music comes on she dances like a wild thing, spinning moves from a break-dancing video we watched once, eighteen months ago. Her memory is a steel trap - when we need reminded where we were when that thing happened, when need the dog's lead un-lost or the way out of the woods pointed we ask Ella, she knows where shit is. Of course sometimes she gets confused, she is only five, although it's easy to forget - she was born older, with a look in her eye and a quiet fire burning steadily in her soul. 

I can't help but wonder what age she will reach when the world feels more comfortable to her, what age it is that her heart was born. Will she have to wait until she's thirty like I did, for her life to catch up with her soul? We can only wait and see and that - watching this spider monkey grow into and then beyond her world - is a prospect that thrills me.

Five, Ammie.

She pins me down, a weight that still takes me by surprise. Five, how did she become five? How did they become five? They have ten years between them, nobody counts parenting in accumulative terms but they should - I have parented ten years of childhood and yet I'm no less clueless than when I started.

Curled into a ball in my lap she radiates into me, she is my hot water bottle, my lap dog, my ballast. She is both boulder and kitten - skull crashing against my cheekbone, elbows jabbing hard into my tits, silken golden strands tickling my face and silvery down catching the light from the setting sun. Just as I find a way to balance her weight so that the nerve that's been trapped in my hip for weeks doesn't thrum at too high a frequency, she shifts. From curled like a sleeping puppy she stretches, legs sliding forth and draping one either side of mine, t-shirt riding up and exposing a belly as soft and warm as risen dough, head lolling like a bowling ball against my chest. It will be a maximum of three minutes before she rearranges herself again; wriggling, squirming, shifting, constant flux and motion, a lava lamp of a child.

Which is as it has always been, she started kicking the shit out of me as soon as she was big enough to kick. Implanted higher she punched and kicked and rolled against my stomach, then my ribs and finally my lungs. Her sister - desperate for her own space - turned away from her at the first chance she got, nuzzled her head into my pelvis and stayed still and quiet, weathering the punches and biding her time. Once born we had to tie her up to get her to sleep (they call it swaddling but it is what it is), arms and legs bound to tiny body to stop them from thrashing the whole night long. It was with bitter reluctance that we stopped wrapping her, many months later than recommended. The desire to bind her tightly in fabric so that she would just stay still lurked in the guilty corners of my brain until . . . well sometimes it still creeps over me.

She doesn't let me hold her much any more. She is five, she is busy and she needs to be sick before she crawls into my lap, sweating and sniffing and sighing and clutching that same ugly little rabbit she has been carrying around for years. Little Bunny has become more vocal of late; before we left London he was pretty quiet, living mainly in her bed, going unmentioned from morning until night, but since we started dragging our children hither and yon he has had quite a lot to say - for a stuffed animal. His birthdays come twice weekly, he learned French and then Gaelic but decided that he'd rather speak Nonsense. His tastes in food blossomed and shrunk, as contrary as well, a five year old. 'It wasn't me, it was Little Bun' has become the most common explanation for something becoming mysteriously broken or lost, or for when Quiet Time has become distinctly un-quiet.

She has five year of life under her belt, she is learning to read and write and live in this world without her parents there at every step, and yet when her hair (recently hacked off at school in a fit of annoyance) is swept back from her face, her eyes closed and lashes resting on rounded cheeks, she is the same boulder-headed baby she was five years ago, exactly the same, and seeing how little she has changed since she was just brand new to this world my heart aches and grows and throbs. She is my baby, my girl, that tiny scrap who kicked and fought so hard, from conception right the damn way through. May that never change. 

The Bandit Rabbit and the Homicidal Hipster.

Happy World Book Day. 

She became a much happier lumberjack once the tickly beard was removed and an untickly one painted on. Now I await their return from school and the indignant clamour of 'the other kids were dressed as superheroes, you said superheroes DIDN'T COUNT. *I* wanted to be a superhero too.' 

One day they'll appreciate my push for them to be creative, literary, individual, right? Right? 

On January.

It would seem that January is nobody's favourite month but I don't hate it with the passion that many appear to. Yes, it's dark and yes it's long and yes Spring is still so far away and no it doesn't have the sparkling promise of fun and feasting that December does, but it's also quiet, and gentle and if you aren't insane and treating it as a period of abstinence and self-denial after the excesses of Christmas then it's a month ripe for wrapping up in a nest of whatever comforts you and looking after yourself in front of the fire (real or proverbial).

I don't hold with January as a month of self-denial, January is a fine month to do more of what pleases you, not less. No one drops by in January, there are few social engagements, kids go to school and come home again every day of the week (unless you get a storm day, which is more welcome in January than it was in November). January is by and large a month where you are left to your own devices, other people busy with their own recovery from their own Christmasses - be that a recovery of kindness or one of deprivation - and being left to my own devices is pretty much my favourite thing. And then at the end of the month of knitting and resting and drawing and thinking and staring into space I am rewarded with my birthday, which is something that I enjoy more and more every year. Yes, I like January.

At the end of this week I'm going away all by myself, which is also one of my favourite things. I'm going to Glasgow to photograph four families (another of my favourite things) and there is a whole lot that I'm looking forward to about the trip because as much as I love this island, after almost three months I am desperate as fuck to get off it. I'm also desperate to work, to take photos again and be paid for it, to spend time with people who value not just my skills but also their families, their children and the precious fleeting moments of every day family life enough to give me their time and money to capture them.

I think I've mentioned before that I always return from family photo sessions appreciating and loving my own family that little bit more. I'm hoping that doing four sessions over two days will increase and intensify that feeling exponentially because at the moment – I have to admit - I'm not appreciating my family life that much at all. I mean obviouslyofcourseitgoeswithoutsaying that I love and appreciate my husband and my kids and the fact that I have them and that they're all wonderful human beings etc etc etc, but I'm also tired and stretched and frustrated and irritated by being little more than a cook and a cleaner and a referee and a personal assistant in our little set up we have going here.

We're still settling into our new life and Nye and the girls have settled a lot faster than I have. They have their roles and their places and their lives, Nye has a job, the girls have school, they all have friends and colleagues and classmates that they see everyday. I have... the house and the dog and a list of chores. And a whole bunch of niggling ideas and dreams but not quite the gumption to make any of them happen any time soon. It's a process and as I sit at home I'm constantly fiddling with the rubix cube of my world, trying to find a way to make the pieces align but my inability to figure it out is making me royally pissed off and I am looking forward to a few days off, a few days in a world that doesn't need made sense of because it's not my world, I'm just visiting.

Other things I'm looking forward to include coffee from single source beans and an espresso machine, with crema on top and pretension on the side. Leaving the house and walking down the street and seeing other human beings but not knowing a single one of them and not having to stop and talk to any of them one single bit. Walking past those human beings on pavements. (Pavements! There is a pavement on the island, but it's only two feet wide and maybe forty feet long and it doesn't really go anywhere. It's still nice to walk along it though, for the novelty.) Going to the cinema and drinking wine alone in the dark* (there is a cinema that visits the island every few months, it comes in the back of a lorry and parks 10 miles away and I can't drive and we don't have a babysitter and while it's an amazing thing that a cinema comes in the back of a lorry it may be less frustrating if it just didn't come at all.) Friends who I can see on foot, with little notice or planning, in a variety of interesting locations, some of which serve foreign food. Shops, shops full of things I don't want, don't need and can't afford, but shops none the less. Working as a photographer who isn't a wedding photographer that does family photography sometimes but is just a Photographer (who doesn't do weddings so don't ask me). Spending seven hours on the bus, each way. With sandwiches and podcasts and knitting and probably not any books because I get travel sick but also absolutely no one to ask me any questions at all for SEVEN HOURS.


Yes, I like January and I like this trip very much.

*Shitting fuck. I just looked up the listings and the indie cinema near where I'm staying is only showing Star Wars, The Hateful Eight and that Leonardo DiCaprio one. That's a lot of middle aged white men with beards, or Star Wars which I have only ever watched because my kids love it. Do I want to see any of these? Do I? Tell me.

Going Home, a journey in phone photos.

Words soon come.