future of my past

The Shadow Sura

2012-01-16T19:10:00.004+02:00

"The one who has no
shadow within
No shadow to withdraw to
from the company of people
No shadow, no shade, no secret spring
quietly bubbling
No spring whose water heals
the spirit from fever

is helpless in the desert,
blinded by the sun,
doomed to take for real
every mirage,
and the desert sand forever
changing shape,
the city disappeared from maps
remaining as far away

The one who has no
shadow within
No shadow to withdraw to
from the company of people
No shadow, no shade, no secret spring
quietly bubbling
No spring whose water heals
the spirit from fever

Unhappy who has no shadow within"

In the wee interview in the end, he says - paraphrased: "This is madness, of course [writing poetry]… It's a consoling thing to remember, once you've flung something, a few verses, out onto their own orbit, in a way they remain there, whether you remember them or not. When you've done something and meant it for real… Poetry, in its way, has no season, no time, no autumn. They are there, if they are to be, to exist, at all. An organismic thing,which you just sometimes have to blow new life into."

He lived fast, died young, made many headlines due to his lifestyle, but I love his poetry and am currently reading his biography. It is a shame he is not translated into English - this effort is mine, and is here just to give someone who expressed interest a tiny taster.

Rubber boots and party pants

2011-12-31T16:01:00.005+02:00

I have been the hermit of Helsinki for some years. It does me good, seriously - I have fully self-diagnosed hypomaniac tendencies and it's best to keep them under wraps, really it is.

However.

I blame all this on Godot - you remember? He never came, the bastard - I knew he wouldn't, but I bloody waited for him. It took me until July to get back to sleep again. And ever since, well. The hypomania has been pronounced. And, as my mother (may the God of all agnostics bless her and keep her safe and well) has a cold and isn't going to party-party tonight, she has offered to dogsit the beautiful Ms Dogot (who, incidentally, is doing extremely well and is clearly a wonder dog-girl), whom I wouldn't leave alone to bravely bark at the bangies outside. This means I am going to an Igloo-land version of... wait for it... an Igloo-land version of a German Sparkle Party. The hostess has defined it as a "tamer version" of the German one. Warning! This video is dreadful.

I don't know about "tamer"; I might post some pictures to follow. But I will be wearing (pink) rubber boots* (with paisley patterns) and metallic-red party hot pants…
so
it might be a better idea not to.

Happy 2012. Things ridiculous and stupid are sometimes fun enough to keep the doctor away. May this happen to you all year.

Regrets? I've had a few

2011-12-03T15:31:00.004+02:00

Actually, I was meaning to write a full-length post on the topic of regret.

Then it started to feel like way too much up-close-and-personal.

Bumped into this song and – as sometimes happens with songs – it seems to say what I meant to say, without me having to get all embarrassingly self-exposure porno-artist type thing. So we'll make do with the song instead of a long post in words. As for what I wanted to convey, it was something like I don't regret being where I am, but I do regret a lot of the way of the stuff that got me here. Sometimes I also regret the way I have become on the way, or the way I've been.

In a sense I also think it's better to regret than not to.

At least, it feels better that way to me and for me.

Who says miracles are big and meaningful?

2011-12-02T17:50:00.009+02:00

A few winters ago, the power - ability - whatever you care to name it - to turn off street lamps as I passed them came upon me.

No, please, I am serious. A particular street lamp in particular, as will become obvious to you, my esteemed Reader, if you bear with me awhile.

I wanted to and even tried to write about it at the time, but just couldn't find the words to describe it. It started quite innocently, but simultaneously, it felt at once poignant yet for-real spooky. I had noted that a street lamp along a footpath very close to my home was leaning to one side, just slightly, and once, while walking with my dog at night, that it had gone out. Whilst I remained aware of the fact that this surely – if one keeps hold of the scientific world-view one really ought to keep hold of, should one wish to ward off the nice men in white coats only too happy to bring you a nice coat of your very own: the one with the funny sleeves – yes, surely, must be a figment of my own imagination, a fragment of my own dalliance with the possibility of a benign lunacy of a personal kind, yes, well, against the background of all this: to be brief, it developed into something both innocent and spooky, poignant and personally meaningful. And totally removed from all sense and scientific world-view.

Please note, though, that although I say, "while walking with my dog at night", it could have, of course, been most any time of the day, really, given that there is very little daylight to be had in these latitudes at this time of the year. There was, however, snow on the ground, that I remember.

So we walked past the dark street lamp and I noted it had gone dark, and something made me turn back to look at it having walked some twenty metres further. Under my gaze, it flickered bluely, buzzed visibly and lo, switched itself on again.

Ha, I thought to myself, clever little lamp, you waited for me to look at you, didn't you.

Now that's one thing, a lamp - quite clearly one sort of slightly out of order, and, as I said, visibly leaning to one side so it must have had a bad connection - flickering and lighting up again. But that was by no means the end of it, no.

It began as a sort of a game. I would walk past the lamp, and depending on whether it was lit or dark, I would stare at it – playing with the impossibility of ha-ha, let's see if I can make it do it again.

Trouble was, I could. Every time. Without failure. Sometimes it would tease me - it wouldn't light, it wouldn't go out, no matter how I stared. See, I said to myself, told you it is impossible. I would give up and walk on – and it would flicker and light up again. Or go dark. Sometimes it would light up at the mere sight of me, before I had a chance of walking all the way to it and subjecting it to my penetrating stare. And with time, it started to wait until I had stared at it as part of the game, thought of giving up but continued to stare, until my stare would stop being a game and I actually, for real, without any scientific-world-view thought process, just willed it to light again, with the power in these eyes.

That's when I started to find it really weird. Poignant. I told one person. I said, I think that lamp is Jesus, and I think we're having a sort of a love affair.

Thing was, the person I told was Jesus, and we were having a sort of a love affair. They listened to my tale and agreed with me: the lamp was Jesus, in one of his unusual incarnations.

Troublingly, the power - ability - call it what you will - seemed to follow me now. Other lamps along other footpaths started to flicker and switch off, flirting with me, trying to lead me astray. There was one in particular, a tall one, with the orangey glare I dislike, at a crossroads in the nearby woods. Watch it, you, I replied to it sternly more than once. I am not anybody's, just because I can do it. You are not Jesus, I can just tell.

Spring and summer and natural light for most of any given twenty-four hour period of any given day put things on hold between me and Jesus-in-the-lamp. Also I was mostly away for the summer. When the dark times came again, this strange affair had moved into the past, somehow. I still look at the lamp sometimes and wonder whether it could all be rekindled.

Funniest thing is I can't remember how many years ago this was exactly…

All I can do I've done

2011-11-26T10:26:00.004+02:00

There are easy ways to date one's life, if you like, to look back at eras and how things have changed, to have that moment of fancy I was actually there, what would I have thought if I'd seen myself here today. Birthdays and other similar family landmarks in the year spring to mind. I've written about this before, in one of the easy contexts.

Yesterday, though, I realised a sparkling new and exciting way to do the dating: red wine. Yes, folks, it's Beaujolais Nouveau time of the year. Rejoice.

Please, I am an absolute pleb when it comes to any knowledgability about fine things like, well, wine for instance. I have friends who talk with gravitas about the various regions in France/Italy/Spain, I mean winewise, and their comparative pros and cons and so on and so forth. I tend to sort of hrm smile and drink quietly whilst they do so. On the other hand, I have recently adopted the tactic of saying, Me, I am a total pleb when it comes to knowledge about fine things like wine and so on, unlike you people.

Attack is the best defence. I still have a massive load of chips on me shoulders (yes, I'd like salt and vinegar with them please, proper malt vinegar like you can get in any chippie in Britain - or shop, for that matter - and which is virtually un-come-byable over here) and it's time I fucking exorcised that feeling of inferiority. Seriously. Name me one good reason why I should be ashamed of being inferior? There.

So yes, anyway. Beaujolais Nouveau. A hrm light, easy-drinking red, with a fruity nose and, hm, hm, a plastic bottle, this year - it's got an environmental reason behind it, I believe (the other one we can get in this country being in a glass bottle, but it has already sold out most everywhere). And most importantly, always dished out, globally, on the same day, year after year. I bought two (plastic) bottles yesterday (having consumed two glass bottles during the previous couple of weeks). For some reason, I remembered the first time I ever bought some; this would have been in 1988, a full what 23 years ago, in London's fair North Finchley, a place of many personal buried memories, some of which have seen daylight on these pages before, as well (and please, as an aside: that post has quite freakishly become the defining post of this poor near-abandoned blog, to be sure. Even on the most dry periods when nothing whatsoever has entered or indeed left these quiet halls, someone somewhere goes to that post, not because I wrote it, but because of a certain person mentioned in it. This, I find, is an intriguing little thing which seems to support the global village theory).

But I digress. Wildly, and, it would seem, fairly continuously. I bought some Beaujolais Nouveau yesterday, I bought some Beaujolais Nouveau for the first time ever 23 years ago, I know this because I remember the occasion and it will have been very easily exactly or as near as dammit 23 years ago, given the stuff is always available at the same time of the year, as I mentioned some miles above. I was 21; I had read about Beaujolais Nouveau some vague number of years previously in - the shame of it all - a Reader's Digest magazine/booklet/periodical/whatever, and as I happened to pass an offie on my way home, walking through Tally-Ho (what, Square? Can't remember. Corner? Circle? Nah, it's gone), I saw it in the window and walked in and bought a bottle. We were five people flatsharing, give or take a girlfriend or two, and whilst very little wine was ever brought onto the premises, everyone agreed it was a lovely idea and had a glass, and as we were quite a few, there wasn't a great deal for everyone, and it was generally agreed I should have bought two bottles whilst at it.

And this is me now, 23 years later, waving at the 21-year-old myself, hello Anna, this is Anna calling, you will be alright, in the end, after a fashion, don't worry honey, it will all hurt like fucking buggery (sorry guys, this blog should carry a rating for language) but in the end, you'll be, as I said, sort of okay. Weirdly, I was studying at the time, too, as I am again now - and holding onto the fact I had managed to land up in a relationship, although my exceedingly shitty self-image had lead me to believe I never would be good enough for anyone (this is the younger me, right - and not going into what the me of now has to say about that matter, only that the view is more mature now).

And now we just need to wait and see if I'm around in 23 years to latch onto something I have, quite innocently, done this year for the first time or somehow otherwise memorably, whether the 67-year-old me is actually currently waving at me in the future saying, don't worry honey, this is Anna calling, it will all be okay in the end, after a fashion. Ooh can hardly wait, don't you agree?

Love in the time of caldera

2011-11-20T13:25:00.008+02:00

I dreamt about you last night, you rare person with the power to hurt me. It was not a nice dream, I fear, and I apologise for dreaming you into someone who uses my love to cause me pain. Me with my head held high, yes, in the dream too, but you told me to look up, too, so you could see inside me through my eyes. What you saw made you smile. You have such a lovely smile, but in my dream (I apologise!) it was no such thing.

My life written in the lines on my face, I am not doing terribly for my age, I guess, if I behaved more like a graceful sort it could maybe even be said I was doing alright, but the two poles insist I have to, from time to time and for a time, walk the clown, nice-legs-shame-about-the-face. It is good for me to make myself thus ridiculous. Don't ask why. Try guessing. Extrapolate.

I think of some people, and the altruist I wish to be is clearly eroded. I compare them so unfavourably to myself my pettiness is all too evident. What suffering? Please. At twenty-eight, I was a mother of two, desperate to keep alive in a violently unhappy relationship. The old flame I used to support my way out of it caused me more pain of a sort I will not discuss; but I bump into him from time to time and see I haven't, at the end of the day, fared badly. He was hit by a train, he tells me, surprising he is alive, apparently many things inside his chest ruined beyond repair, including his vocal chords. He was a singer; he can still speak. I don't know the details of his substance use nor wish to. Likewise with his accident. His anything. May he go his own way in our jointly-human pursuit of happiness, may our paths not cross to remind me how much I have needed support - any support. Long ago.

Theatre, from time to time, filling the emptiness nothing else can reach, the emptiness I can almost forget and cover over during the spaces between theatre. Did I ever write about that thing I read many years ago, about how the vulvas of old women can apparently grow shut - heal over, as it were? A startling, terrifying read, I remember feeling at the time.

I don't write a great deal these days.

A Kekri post

2011-10-31T21:13:00.003+02:00

In Treatment. Or, Imagined Conversations with the Ex-Therapist.

2011-08-01T21:06:00.004+03:00

- So, here I am. I’m back.

- Yes.

- …

- …

- … …

- …

- “Long pauses.”

- Pardon?

- Long pauses. That’s what you always used to say.

- Ah. Yes.

- It’s funny you should still say that. Because…

- Because…?

- Well, because, you see, ha-ha, I’m not here really. Not really-really. This is only my imagination, and therefore I should be able to make you say whatever I like.

- Yes.

- So why did you still say “long pauses”? It always used to really annoy me.

- Mmm. Although, actually, it wasn’t me, this time, who said “long pauses”. It was you.

- Oh. So it was. But it was only because you always used to say that. Do you remember? Do you, in fact, remember me at all?

- I expect I used to say it because you used to keep long pauses. And yes, yes I do.

- Okay. Well. That’s something, I suppose. And I used to keep long pauses because I didn’t want to talk to you, you see. No, wait. You can’t remember me. You’re not here either. You’re just a figment of my imagination.

- Yes.

- …! This isn’t really going anywhere, you know. I want you to say something else than bloody “yes”. You’re a figment of my imagination, now say things I want to hear.

- Well, as you keep pointing out, I’m only in your imagination, so you should be able to make me say just exactly what you like. Although I do think it would be more helpful if you said what you wanted to say yourself.

- Don’t be getting all bloody clever with me. I don’t like it. I felt real antipathy towards you, you know? You were sort of a cross between frumpy and dawdy and I resented that.

- Was it very important, then?

- Yes it was bloody important. You were a cross between frumpy and dawdy and I couldn’t make out how old you were, but not much older than me, and I couldn’t fathom why you were such a bloody success story, charging me a fortune to lie down on your couch and refuse to talk to you, while I was lying down there, a complete mess, trying to drink myself into oblivion, when I clearly was (in all my ugliness) way more sparky and stuff than you. And the worst was I couldn’t tell you that, no way.

- Yes. Why not?

- I have no bloody idea. Yes I do. Because, because it’s not nice to feel stuff like that, let alone say it.

- Nice?

- Yes you heard me, for fuck’s sakes. You’re not even here, you know, so no point pretending you have to check whether you heard me right. It’s not nice to draw direct comparisons between yourself and other people more balanced and successful than yourself, and make them in your own favour and feel like you’ve somehow been cheated out of something that this other person has undeservedly got.

- I see.

- God, this is a little bit tedious. I thought I’d really go places with this, you know. And it’s not. Going places.

- Mmmm. Well, it’s all up to you, isn’t it – you can make me say whatever you want, as you pointed out. Although I’d still say it’d be more helpful if you just fired away and said whatever you wanted.

- “Fired away”? Fired? Away? You would never have said such a thing.

- No, probably not. But that’s what you just made me say.

- So I could just make you cuss and swear and talk about how you envied me and stuff?

- This being your imagination, then yes of course. Would you want to?

- No. No. Not really, no.

- Not really? Is that really a no?

- Yes, yes it is. What would I gain from your bloody envy? Nothing at all. But God, I used to pay through the nose to see you, and as you know, quite a big portion of the fees – your fees – I had to cover from my own pocket. Your fees, you bastard. It cost me so much and not just money, it took my afternoons after work and I was exhausted and I had no time or energy for my kids, and I didn’t like what I was seeing, and I was totally wanky with my kids and the way they are now is totally my fault, and you should have helped me and you didn’t. You didn’t, you bastard. For all the money I paid you.

- Mmmm. Trouble is you never wanted to talk to me, though, did you?

- No I bloody well didn’t.

- Very difficult for me to help you, then. Particularly when the idea is that you do the talking. It’s meant to be work jointly undertaken. You didn’t expect me to say a magic word, did you?

- Well no, of course not. God, this is just like it was then. I want to be happy, you know, I want to go back and make myself happy then so I could be a better parent.

- A painful desire, to want to have been a better parent. What about being happy now?

- Well, I sort of am. Sort of.

- Ah. Well, that’s a good thing, surely?

- God, I’m not enjoying this anymore, at all. Yes yes yes, it’s a good thing, you frumpy-dawdy fuckwit. Don’t be praising yourself for it, though, it happened long after I left you.

- You left me.

- Yes I did, you bastard. I left you because I couldn’t afford you any longer, and I didn’t feel at all cured or anything, but I had to soldier on on my own and now I’m here, and don’t you be taking any credit for the place of self-honesty that I’ve reached. It hasn’t anything to do with you.

- No.

- So there.

- Yes.

- … !!

- You would have liked to continue with the work we were doing, then?

*

- So. Here I am. I’m back.

- Yes, I can see that.

- Only, I’m still not. It’s still just in my mind. I’m writing all this down. Just warning you.

- …

- God, couldn’t you just say something for once.

- What would you like me to say?

- Tell me I’m lovely. No, don’t.

- This is interesting. Did you want me to think you were lovely?

- NO. Yes. I don’t know.

- …

- I wanted you to love me, I suppose. I wasn’t going to love you, no way, you frumpy-dawdy so-and-so. No way. You know I could have had the Olde Europe dude, don’t you?

- Well, technically yes, I do, because I am a figment of your imagination and as such, share your knowledge. But no, as the person I was, I didn’t know that. How could I have? This isn’t something you wanted to discuss with me, and I had no access to the things you left entirely unsaid.

- Well I could. Have had the Olde Europe dude. I loved him, I was in love with him straightaway. I never wanted you. At all.

- Yet I’m the one you chose.

- No I bloody didn’t. I just let R influence me. I always held it against you.

- What a pity you never brought it up.

- I couldn’t. You wouldn’t have been able to handle my rejection of you, you poor dowdy weakling. I am the strongest thing in creation, I can handle everything. You would have buckled under the weight of my not wanting you.

- I see. That’s how you feel.

- Yes.

- …

- I’m going to go and pull my photos off my camera and onto my computer.

*

- Okay, I’m back here. Shut up. Don’t say a word. So I wanted you to love me and so I would have wanted to continue with “the work we’re doing”. Or the work we were doing, more like. So what? What are you trying to say? Shut UP, I told you already. You’re trying to make me say that I needed you like I need people when I get needy, even though you were frumpy-dowdy and I was angry at you for not being the Olde Europe dude. Aren’t you? Aren’t you? Shut up shut up shut up shut up SHUT UP.

*

- And besides, what does it matter if I say I needed you and felt abandoned when we stopped “the work we were doing”? You’re not here. It’s just me. I can say what I like.

*

Totally obsessed with this song

2011-06-04T11:05:00.002+03:00

Though the dull brain perplexes and retards

2011-06-04T10:24:00.005+03:00

I went out to walk the dog. It was late, after midnight, very white but yet three weeks off the ultimate. We are blessed in my neighbourhood, for we get nightingales.

In my building, many windows were open. Behind one, close to me yet in her own world, I heard a woman cry, alone, no other voice, just hers, crying, crying, inconsolable. I reached out my futile hand, without thinking.

Then my dog and I walked on into the night.

The Mask of Love hides them both

2011-06-01T00:39:00.004+03:00

I love optical illusions, the feeling they give in your brain of a dual reality. I also, um, love love. I am surely not alone in this?

So this here thing is just about the best thing to be found in my papers for some long whiles. Thank you kindly to © Gianni A. Sarcone, www.archimedes-lab.org - and sorry I didn't ask to obtain permission to use the image. But my appreciation and desire to share the love are genuine. Hope this makes up for it all.

Seriously, I am sharing the love in case you haven't been one of the 22 million (and counting) who've already clicked on this…

2011-05-22T23:37:00.002+03:00

This song, video and guy should without any shadow of a doubt be made Planet Earth's intergalactic goodwill messenger. I have spoken.

6–1

2011-05-16T01:40:00.000+03:00

This is for some excellent people I know, and for others whom I don't

2011-05-14T01:05:00.005+03:00

Guys (yes, you know I mean you) - I'm sorry I forgot on the 12th. Selfishly busy going about my own life. May the day come soon when you can be similarly selfish…although I bet you wouldn't be.

Proud to be your friend, my life enriched enormously by knowing you. Thank you for you courage, wisdom, humour and sense of fun in the face of odds which would make many of us unbearable.

I can see my lifetime piling up

2011-05-13T23:21:00.005+03:00

And she might be right to

2011-04-28T21:44:00.003+03:00

Sometimes I dance alone at home, to all sorts of music, all sorts of dance styles, I look like an abject idiot, I don’t give a shit – why should I, no-one will ever see me, it doesn’t matter. I dance with the furniture, I do peculiar things, I enjoy my body alive and moving, I enjoy bringing what is whatever and not physical of me and living, into the world of the physical, dance does that.

Spring

2011-04-26T20:47:00.002+03:00

The air has the scent of laundered sheets drying and of the thawing earth coming alive once more. When I die, I want not to be cremated, I want to be put into the ground so I can become that sweet scent too in time.

Notion of violets so blue?

2011-04-25T00:23:00.001+03:00

What I do in my spare time

2011-04-05T19:27:00.002+03:00

Photo courtesy of Matti Sillanpää.

Dear Reader, you have been neglected but never forgot…

2011-03-07T23:14:00.004+02:00

…sorry about that.

Divine tenderness abounds in everything

2010-12-31T23:38:00.005+02:00

Älä unohda minua

2010-05-29T12:47:00.002+03:00

Externalising the inner chaos...

2010-03-14T12:25:00.004+02:00

I should launder a huge load of bedding and towels, and this requires reserving a time at the launderette, as I haven't the space to dry the things indoors at home and the drying room at the launderette is reserved for laundry washed there. I could just about manage nipping into the launderette and finding a free time on a suitable day - it is, after all, only across the courtyard - but if I did go and do some laundry, I would have to have my (other) wash basket free. Currently, my (other) wash basket is taken over by the (clean) bedding I did last time I managed the laundry effort (the other one holds the dirty stuff, but is not big enough to use for the purpose of taking stuff to and from the launderette. No, you just have to believe me, I know what I'm talking about). I do have designated (and fairly nice) boxes specifically to keep clean laundry in at the back of my walk-in cupboard (and they are labelled, too: sheets, duvet covers, towels, two smaller ones for pillow cases and hand towels). In order to put the (clean) laundry in these (designated) boxes, however, I would have to clear a considerable amount of space in front of them, as there is a total load of stuff there, blocking my way to these boxes. Included in the stuff-which-blocks-the-way are two boxes of books, which most certainly deserve to be somewhere else, but as my one and a half book cases are already full to the brim (the bigger one has books in two layers on most shelves, so the ones in the back layer cannot ever be read or browsed or even looked at), putting these books away would require another book case. As it happens, I do have another book case, but it's at my cousin's, who lives on the other side of town (she's been looking after the thing since I went for my tropical year - it's really lovely, a genuine 1920's functionalist-movement piece of furniture, I've inherited it and love it dearly). To get it from her place, though, I would have to have someone to carry it for me, and moreover, to drive a van for me. I don't know anyone with a van. I would have to rent a van, find someone to drive it for me, and someone to carry the thing for me. Two someones - it's big and heavy. With glass doors.

So this is why I cannot do my bedding at the moment.

Doing laundry is by no means the only thing which desperately needs doing. Just using it to illustrate my point.

Waiting for the big one

2010-03-11T01:08:00.003+02:00

"Hope you feel better soon" is one of those things we all say when someone is feeling like shite. Consequently, it's also one of those things people say to us, should we be feeling that way, too (I was discussing this fact with someone the other day, and it's been playing on my mind ever since, so please just humour me, k? Ta). And while it is the correct and nice and good thing to say, and fine and heart-warming to hear - and one can ususally tell if it is heartfelt and good or merely correct - it isn't always adequate, is it? Its not-enoughness becomes especially clear when one is saying it to another, I find, because, well, it just isn't enough, is it, when one is aware of how it can all be and how menial a thing it is to say, by comparison to the ailment: when the walls cave in on you and the water levels rise and the air around has, inexplicably, become tar, and you carry a rumbling thing inside you which really ought to reach boiling point sometime, for God's sakes, so that it could all really be dealt with, once and for all. Or at least, for now, for a while, at least until next time.

There's a tendency to want to get over feeling like shite as soon as possible. Rest and lie down and take it easy and look after yourself and you'll soon be right as rain (why, incidentally, "right as rain"? Most people grumble like mad if rain goes on for any longer than a few hours. Not saying that there's anything inherently wrong - or indeed, right - with rain going on for just as long as it wants to or needs to or, as it is, after all - so I've understood - a non-conscious thing, for just as long as it does, you understand. Just noting the fact that most of us don't consider it "right"). But just sometimes, it is necessary to feel a whole heaving heap worse, in order to truly feel better, when just getting over the shite quickly is a little like applying a bit of concealer cream on a deep and throbbing boil (sorry to be putting you off your food here). There are times when the things that make you ache must finally be allowed to come to a head, no matter how much it hurts or how debilitating the process.

It is peculiar how difficult this can actually be. One instinctively shies away from pain and anxiety (oh, especially anxiety - it just sucks, does it not?) and tries not to allow the big stuff to come through. It may well be, though, that the only time when allowing the big one to arrive becomes possible are the times when we are already hurting, already at our weakest, not exactly fit for the battle. If not then, we'll continue with the hoping and trying to feel better, we'll maybe even succeed, we'll get over the acute crisis and we'll grow some thicker skin atop the thing to be lanced. And so it gets ever harder, ever more encased in our very beings, its malignancy crippling our souls even though we may not feel the pain every breath we take.

This has come to you directly from your Near-Arctic Good Mood Committee. Hope you're having a lovely day, and if you're not, hope you feel better, no, wait.

September may very well be reminding July*, but what's that November is whispering to March?

2010-03-07T18:10:00.004+02:00

Two weeks and it will be the Equinox. Fantastic word, isn't it, equinox? I like words which manage to have a q and an x in them. Quixotical little words, worthy of our admiration. Love, even. Aren't they? I might like to start a wee collection of them, right here on this post. Donations gratefully accepted.

That's not what I had in mind to say at all, though, you'll be relieved to hear. I was, instead, intending to blether on about the fact that the sun and, hence, light are definitely returning. My balcony is winning the battle against the snow (incredibly, we can actually sit on the chair again). The day has been absolutely beautiful - sunshine, real, proper, warming sunshine, I can't remember when the last time was (possibly September), all day long, blue sky, the great-tits doing their spring ti-ti-tyy thing (it's what they say, right), the light making blazing colour displays of the snow (which most certainly is not white).

I know all this because I've visited my balcony several times today (okay, I did take the dog out for a pee earlier, too), opting, instead of walking outdoors with my face turned towards the sun all day like every other Helsinki-ite with legs, for knitting, watching TV, reading various articles on the Guardian online, other online blips, even writing a bit. So? It's my birthright not to go out and enjoy anything, I'm telling you that for free.

There has been so much snow this year. Three months and as many metres, I kid you not. I may exaggerate a bit, a tiny bit, in the metric number, however, but it's not a hanging offence. Snow in all its original, ur-snow form - white, always, even downtown (where the nouveau post-modern snow is more often than not an interesting and very specific hue of brown, if it's in its snow incarnation, or grey, if its slush. Shut up), because there's been new snow added so often it just hasn't had time to turn any other colour (except for light reasons, as I mentioned above), coating branches of trees with crystal fingers, cars with undiggable-off fur hats, carving the Himalayas along the sides of footpaths and pavements (often enclosing some cars which got rather more fur hat than they might have bargained for - or their drivers, either, for that matter). Icicles like glass skulls of aliens, long-tusked. So much snow for so long it's almost been like my childhood. So much snow for so long it is utterly unbelievable anything living should ever appear ever again.

It might, of course, not. It remains to be seen.

Because Ruth asked, and because she's nice*

2009-12-01T01:04:00.002+02:00

The name of this blog comes from a poem. It goes something like this:

in the future of my past
my children stand waiting for me
I choose it again, and again, and again

I thought the poem was rubbish and didn't capture what the writer meant at all, but it gave good blog name.

*She lives here.

Learn something new every day cetra, part n

2009-11-22T23:14:00.003+02:00

So today I've learnt that in the old legend of love, Tristan and Isolde, at one point King Mark (furious with jealousy and so on) decides to have the illicit lovers burnt at the stake, but when Tristan manages to escape, decides to give his wife to the lepers instead, as their sex toy. No, really. It was in my paper, and I had to go rooting around the internette for more information, and lo, I found it. Unfortunately, only rewordings of the tale, not the original ballads, but *man*. Talk about revenge. The mediaeval folks really knew how to juice up a story.

I feel someone clever who knows more about this should point me in the right direction.

One tries

2009-11-22T19:31:00.002+02:00

Further on the muted hues and haze

2009-11-19T15:42:00.003+02:00

The top two from my balcony this morning...

The other two from the immediate vicinity of my house (taken on ground level, yes). Excuse the bottom one - it has been amateurishly doctored (by yours truly, yes) to be more dramatic. No, really.

In the eye of the beholder

2009-11-19T09:48:00.007+02:00

If muted hues of grey, brown, ochre and green do it for you, November is your month, in spite of the bad publicity it tends to get (and here I am as guilty, or more so, as the next person). The main trouble with November is that you're never, ever out in daylight, for there is so precious little of it - at least if you're here, on these latitudes (and I am). Pretty much dark when you stumble around allowing your dog to do her morning business (and the look in her eye, when you get up in the nighttime darkness and start acting like it's morning, is one of severe chiding), pretty much dark when you trundle through the drizzle to the bus stop to make it home again.

It's dark, and it's only getting more so. However.

I have conjunctivitis, so I noticed this morning (this is "pink eye" for you American folks). So I needed to see a doctor for some eye drops, and so the health centre is pretty much chocker with the pig-flu people - both those who are ill and those who are being vaccinated. Currently children under six. Health care professionals have already been done, as have risk groups such as pregnant women and diabetics and other suchlike losers. Healthy robust adults (such as I) are due to get their vaccination sometime in February, by which time we will all have either died of it or developed natural immunity by living through it. Incidentally, I've been thinking, wouldn't it be just great if pig flu would manifest as a cute little snout forming on your face, a curly wee tail sprouting from the base of your spine, and your speech coming in grunts and oinks? Way better than the current thing. Man, if I were to redesign the world, I'd make it so much more interesting. But I digress. Yes, conjunctivitis, pink eye, unattractive as it is, has (combined with the pig flu of others, and the health centre being unable to see me until eleven-twenty) given me a chance to view November in daytime - daylight through hazy fog, the aforementioned muted earth colours. And lo, it is actually quite lovely.

So that is good. And it's made me think about how when I have my luutamummon mökki, Ms Dogot and I will just really enjoy November, rather than moan and groan through it, about its inherent hopeless ugliness and what have you. We'll sleep as late as we like and potter around in the haze admiring the muted colours when we're up. It might help you understand if I explain about luutamummon mökki a little, though.

In July, Ms Dogot and I had four spectacularly perfect days over at the summer cottage, during which we saw practically no-one, the idyll only ruined by a few words exchanged with the neighbour ("I'm heating the sauna tonight. I'll give you a call when I'm out, so you can go, too. Could I borrow your tick tongs? Ms Dogot's got a tick on her leg, and ours are in town. Ta."). When my parents came to collect us (for we were there carless and carefree), I told them how flawlessly beautiful a time we had had, and how we'd firmly decided this was how we'd spend our lives - in a little cottage in the woods in the middle of nowhere, together, rarely seeing anyone else. My mother (the pragmatist) asked whether we'd considered how we'd earn our keep. No, we hadn't considered that yet, actually. She suggested we (well, I, I suppose, technically) could become a luutamummo - literally, a broom granny. A(n old) lady who collects twigs and makes brooms of them, the weirdo living on the outskirts of human habitation, muttering to herself, the society of civilised people feeling a pity and a shunning and a "wonder how on earth she makes ends meet, nobody ever buys her twigs on a stick". This future plan sounded truly fine to me, but my mother added, after some consideration, that I could probably also get a pension of some sort, if I'd just show enough signs of pensionable instability.

This plan sounds mighty fine, too. And as someone, quite recently, authoritatively claimed that outspoken dreams tend to become reality, I have now started serious work on reaching this goal, as you can see. I'll let you know when it all comes to fruition. In the meantime, to give you an idea of the future of Ms Dogot and myself, we'll be looking out of a window not unlike this one.

Rumours of murder in the global village

2009-11-16T21:41:00.004+02:00

Oh dear. Oh dear.

I'm strangely upset and quite a bit weirded. Out.

Those of you who have been with me here in Blogoslavia for A Very Long Time, may remember that two years ago (almost exactly, in fact) I wrote a post on a character in the neighbourhood I once lived in, in London. Over time, I've had rather a lot of visits based on this post (yes, I do look at my stats and my "recent keyword activity". It's interesting, k? Even when one is sometimes totally unable to even come to one's own blog, let alone say anything there). I thought, at first, that this was because of some morbid reality-TV type enjoyment people were getting from laughing at this poor character *. Then, two days ago, my stats suddenly went quite wild. Instead of the handful of faithfuls (and I love you all - seriously. And your every footprint on my stats is appreciated), I was getting literally hundreds of people, and not just Londoners - people from elsewhere in Britain, too (Glasgow, Maidstone, Manchester) as well as from all over the place (Dublin, Pennsylvania, Perth, Andalucia, Abu Dhabi - I kid you not), searching for the name of this poor hapless simpleton and landing on my above-mentioned post.

So I had to investigate.

Using my extra-special search techniques (secret, MI5 issue), I followed the tracks of one of these (silent, unknown) visitors, and landed on a Facebook Appreciation Society (I'm sorry but I don't understand these things - I'm middle-aged) for this very person. That such a thing should exist is peculiar in itself, and while it feels a little bit like mockery, the introduction to the page assures the reader that it is, in fact, *not* mockery, it is appreciation. But. But but.

The top of the chat thread on this site suggested there was a rumour that this person, whom I did not know personally but whose life, clearly, had been marred in some way, by someone (even though he was known as someone almost always happy and polite), had been cornered by a gang of youths and stabbed to death.

It is, obviously, a hideous thing. A hideous, hideous, tell-tale sign of our times, perhaps, or of human nature, its inherent cruelty, something or another (if it's true, obviously).

And, whilst not meaning to take away from the impact of the hideousness of this rumour, on a completely different level I find the fact that these people (and there have been 129 of them today, k? From all over the place) who, in all likelihood, do not "know" each other - and certainly not me, or indeed, the poor innocent in question, perhaps - are online, looking for facts of his alleged demise - I find it. Something. Strange. Compelling. Almost moving, yet horrible (is this the road traffic accidents on motorways syndrome, only an inch or so away from the "let's laugh at people when they are humiliated on television" syndrome?).

I don't know. I really don't.

But anyway, hence the global village. And I just didn't feel like I could keep quiet about this.

* and I'm avoiding mentioning his name, because I don't want to cash in on the interest and trawl for traffic, under these - or indeed, any - circumstances.

So who was late with the leaves thing, then? *

2009-11-12T20:14:00.005+02:00

So another season's suddenly been and gone, and you're still wearing your yellow leaves when everyone else seems to be all sorted and prepared. What happened? Where does time go? How come everyone else seems to manage so much more in the same time frame? When one slaves and slaves and couldn't possibly be putting any more time into what one has to get done - one would like to, certainly, and would, too, if only it was possible for one to tamper with time's inner workings and give oneself, say, twenty-eight or even thirty-two hours where others have to make do with the usual twenty-four (one might even, under these conditions, find the time to sleep a bit more than four or five hours a night - which would feel like a total luxury and no mistake). Alas, one can't, and is consequently forever running huff-puff-huff-puff to catch up (keeping up being an attempt long since abandoned as impossible).

I bet the other trees are pointing and whispering behind their branches, you know.

* excuse the fuzzy - I took it with my mobile (yes, we have snow)

Verily, I have seen the light

2009-11-09T22:45:00.006+02:00

(and lo, very bright it is too) *

What this means is that I'd like you to pay very close attention to these bits of music, please. In particular, the high notes, which are to be found at circa 0:56...(in the word "Jerusalem")

and (if you are still coherent from the winding beauty of that thing), at circa 1:00...(in the word "Abend")

Well? I hear you say. Well yes, well indeed. For what are those notes? By my count, you see, they must be a (super high) C and a (pretty much super high, too) G, aka the high notes where God lives. Why so? Of course, mostly by the fact that they make me cry (proof positive if ever there was any for the existence of a divine being), but also, let us analyse the notes themselves. C is for "see". G is for - oh yes - "God". Or, if you want to take the other attitude to musical notes, they could be called "do" (as in "do") and "sol" (as in "sun"). See God. Do sun. Do we need more proof? So you could say I have found God, and that means it was well worth the extended Lenten excess. (And, at the end of the day, if I've counted wrong and they're *not*, after all, a C and a G - which they are - we still have the cry factor to prove our point).

It has been brought to my attention that I've had rather a long Lent. True, true. But do, if you please, take a look at the exact dates of my personal Lent. Wait a minute - how many months, exactly? Yeeeees. These things sometimes take a while to, shall we say, gestate.

* I have, of course, had to do some cutting and pasting on this photo so as to make it appear I still have my former, original face, stuck as I now am with the face of - oh woe - Eric Idle

This blog has been observing Lent,

2009-04-09T00:45:00.002+03:00

hence the silence.

A bird had made an angel in the snow

2009-02-20T19:56:00.001+02:00

If "women's matters" make you go queasy, look away now

2009-02-11T18:25:00.008+02:00

I had the dog "done" on Saturday - my beautiful dog girl, the wonder Ms Dogot. Watching her convalesce with a cone on her head and an overhanging bewildered depression has not left me feeling all that well disposed towards man as a species, with our weird way of feeling entitled to decide such matters for members of other species, and, in particular, towards myself.

This state of affairs has led me to take a trip down Imaginy Lane and think about how it would be if it was me instead of her. This is what I see: myself, tricked, utilising my love and trust, into an involuntary hysterectomy, now with a great big long wound down my lower tummy. So I wouldn't fiddle with the stitches, I'd have to wear a cone, too, but obviously, since I'm more likely to use my hands for this, my cone would have to be much bigger, at least past my elbows so I can't bend my arms to scratch where it itches. But for a cone to disable my arms, it would have to be attached not round my neck, like hers, but under my arms, across my breasts (squashed ridiculously, laughably, either inside the cone or just below it). I'd have to wear a harness, too, for the cone to be attached onto, and obviously both would be fixed at the back so I couldn't unfasten them.

The more I think of this, the more it sounds like a butoh performance.

From these thoughts, my mind now makes an associative leap into a documentary I watched the other day - since Ms Dogot's operation, I've been watching more telly than I've watched in the previous eight years put together, as I spend my spare time mostly lying on the floor with her and this seems to invite television. So, one of the things I've watched to lift my spirits was a documentary I'd recorded a few days before on female genital mutilation in West Africa. A jolly old topic, no? So they interviewed various people, and then got to interviewing a - mutilator? A woman of unguessable age, anything between thirty and seventy, I'd say, she's first asked to display her instruments. She brings out a razor blade. She explains her trade.
You snap it in half, lengthwise, to make it more accurate. Then you remove the sharper corners to make the operation easier.
The viewer - me - yelps. Her fingers are chubby and work the blade expertly.
Women in my mother's family have always been circumcisors. My mother was one, my grandmother was one, and so I became one, too. I was my mother's assistant. People pay money for this, so I did it.
Yes yes yes. I'm finding it very easy to think about hating this woman.
Then when I was married off, at eight, I continued to do it in my new tribe.

Oh. Oh. Oh God. I, um, see, I think, or rather, I don't see, I can't.

Anyway, as documentaries on this unspeakability go, it was rather an optimistic one, focusing on the work of Tostan, a grass-roots organisation working towards changing attitudes and practices. I don't generally go for charities in a big way - forgive me for this, but I worry about bureaucrats in Europe lining their pockets with money intended to go to the starving or whatever (although weirdly, Red Cross I find more trustworthy than the others, for no proper reason except maybe the documentary on Rwanda I watched on youtube where the Red Cross guy spoke very highly about his organisation, how they never left him alone when the UN turned their backs blatantly on their guy, with, shall we say, unfortunate results). But this particular charity - the name means "Breakthrough" in wuluf - might be one which I might support.

Q:ing and A:ing

2009-01-30T00:07:00.001+02:00

I have been tagged by Reading the Signs (thank you, Signs), who is a wonderful friend and a BWIM (Blogger Whom I've Met), a poet and a scream, a multi-talent in many ways, but count she cannot, for she called this thing "Three Things About Me". I make it twenty-seven things and that's what you're getting. If you feel you're given too much information, feel most free to pick and choose three items in this post which you want to read.

(Man, this is really a bit unnerving, you know? For I haven't done a tag post in ever such a long while, and while I know it's totally unnecessary and probably even uncalled-for, tag posts always have me suffer a serious honesty-attack, so that I feel that I am somehow divinely required to disclose painfully exposing things about myself. Or at the very, very least, not lie. This feeling is not eased by the fact I took a day's break, and returned round about here. No, not one bit.)

Three jobs I have had in my life: My first job was at a tiny clothes store on the second (British first) floor of an old market hall (photo pinched from somewhere online, but nobody's personal site such as flickr or whatever).

I went to work in the morning, unlocked the shutters, decorated the place by hanging some items on the shop front, opened the shop, sold what I could, counted the till at the end of the day, took my wages - if memory serves, it was 15% of sales - locked up and went home. There were no lunch breaks or anything, but you could ask the shopkeeper at the stall opposite to keep an eye on your place for a bit while you nipped downstairs for a smoke. The owner was in his forties, I'd say, and I suppose he must have either had seamstresses working in a cellar for him, or have bought the stuff from somewhere. He would come to the shop unannounced and irregularly, and apart from having a go at me for doing the shop-front decoration not to his standard, would also grab my bottom and say inappropriate things. It was a sunny summer, the summer of 1982. I remember feeling very grown up. I would be fifteen in the autumn.

My second job was at a restaurant which was owned by a friend and her mother. The place was minute and totally lovely. It was the first of a string of waitressing jobs, and I was to work there, on and off, for a couple of years. I started out being totally terrible but landed up being pretty good. The place was on what is commonly agreed to be the prettiest street in Helsinki - Huvilakatu, "The Villa Street", beautifully illustrated here by French flickrist Dalbera whom I don't know from Adam but who hopefully won't mind me linking to his wonder picture. In later years, I moved away from Finland, I moved back to Finland, and my friend and I made contact again. Her mother had had a stroke and there was no more restauranteuring for either one of them. A place called La Petite Maison operates on the premises nowadays. They take online bookings, if you fancy eating there. I haven't, but the menu looks nice and I have meant to, for old times' sake, if nothing else.

My third job (and I realise these didn't have to be the three first jobs, alright? I have listed them that way through choice, and am lengthy because I can't help myself) was at the now-demolished, iconic Helsinki punk dump Lepakkoluola, where I sold tickets, manned the cloak room at overnight parties, cleaned toilets after overnight parties (the medical students' dos were the worst), sewed curtains for the back of the stage in the Black Room, played pinball and pool, saw bands, spent most of my spare time, and where I met and fell for the first of my great loves-I-couldn't-have and got too drunk on too many occasions, and generally wasted my youth and fresh beauty. I'm sure I received something in return. Experience? Tarnish? Memories?

Three shows that I watch: Right, I will certainly try to keep it shorter now - should be easy as I don't watch all that much TV (which this must surely refer to). I try never to miss an episode of House. Last summer I watched and greatly enjoyed a Russian ten-parter of Master and Margarita. With my younger son - in fact, because of my younger son, I sometimes watch atrociously dreadful shite. Too atrocious, in fact, to be named here.

Three places where I have lived: West Wales. Hawai'i. A small island, not unlike these, in the Sipoo archipelago, not that very far from Helsinki, which is also a place where I've lived. But only in the summers (the island).

Three places where I have been this week: At the opticians. In the sauna. In despair.

Three people who email me regularly: Three good people whom I care about in three different ways.

Three of my favourite foods: This is difficult. Let's just have three of my favourite ingredients, because I don't know what my favourite foods are, and ingredients is difficult enough. Food should not really be prepared without garlic, except maybe porridge and cake. Fresh basil and fresh coriander compete for the coveted Sexiest Herb status (coriander is currently winning, but basil has had its day, too). Wild forest tastes, like mushrooms and wild raspberries, satisfy the places other foods can't reach.

Three places where I’d rather be: Very difficult, this. By a sea which would feel like mine. Travelling on a train through somewhere beautiful and poignant, endlessly. In heaven.

Three friends I think will respond to this message: I'm sort of hoping that three people will read this and feel compelled, to do it, and will let me know that they are. In fact, I'm going to think very intently on three people - three specific people - and see whether my thought provocation works.

Three things I am looking forward to: Becoming someone else for a change. Growing. The return of the light, the light of the summer evenings and nights.

We interrupt the writing of that tag post due to news just in

2009-01-29T21:35:00.003+02:00

It has been brought to my attention, only moments ago, that John Martyn's died today. I saw him live nearly twenty years ago, which I hadn't thought about for years, but for the strange fact that I've only just been talking about him on a comment thread a little way down this page.

I feel strangely responsible, you know. Sorry, John, I never meant it to end this way.

This post will make very little sense, unless

2009-01-24T18:55:00.005+02:00

you have the know-how to read into the intertextuality of blogs.

If indeed the intertextuality of blogs is a field you aren't familiar with, I suggest you try to rectify this soonest, for it adds a whole new dimension to The Blogging Experience.

And that's all for now, folks.

Let's continue on the topic of weather

2009-01-18T20:57:00.003+02:00

We've had a bit of snow today, and it's forecast to continue. This suits me very well otherwise, but I'd like it to be a bit colder so I could rely on it - it's only around minus three. The best weather is when snow falls in tiny needles, wind-driven, horizontal, wild.

Winter weather, that is. It will piss me off no end if we get it in June.

This seems as good a moment as any to embed my favourite Tom Waits song. It's one I have even been known to sing, on occasion - and even in public, not just in the shower.

Hope you enjoy.

Hit by a serious case of keyboard diarrhoea

2009-01-17T16:40:00.004+02:00

It's been getting increasingly cold in Finland since my return on Monday, when it was plus seven with a harsh wind. They tell me it went to minus fifteen while I was away, which is totally unfair - and with no snow, which is quite peculiar. But still, not complaining, it's been getting colder and last night we hit minus twelve on my balcony. And still no snow - the lightest dusting today, hardly there at all. Still, it's probably a good thing, for we were forecast snow and warmer temperatures, which is not desirable. No. It might all make a bit more sense if I mentioned that I like a winter to be properly cold. We used to get them until quite recently. Please take note, all climate-change agnostics, for us in the (near-) Arctic climes will see the change first and in a more pronounced way, and the fact is that the winters have gone pear-shaped in the last five or so years. Certainly since the millenium, for I remember the millenium New Year and it was very, very cold. We had some special Japanese fireworks masters visit Helsinki specially (I think they were somehow invited by the city itself, you understand, not me personally) and I went with a bunch of friends to a central and (relatively) high location in the heart of town to see them. I was wearing an evening dress but on top of it, one of those great big ankle-length woollen overcoats (think Anna Karenina, please) and on top of that, my very beloved blue-green-aquamarine poncho (which has a story to it, but of that another time, mayhap. Oh well - now's the time, I suppose - I bought it from the island which neighboured My Childhood Island, from what still in my childhood was the local school for the island children, an adorable old wooden building with an outdoor toilet (with several, um, seats. One could imagine how totally unpleasant it would have been to run across the yard in mid-winter to go and sit out there - but then I expect the island lasses were used to it, as they had the same thing at home - although maybe with less seats) but which by my adulthood and due to the migration of people from traditional ways of livelihood, to city-living (and I never went to that school, you understand, I lived in the city really but we spent the summers, each glorious two-and-a-half months, in the island neighbouring this island I'm now talking about), had changed into a "local crafts centre" type of affair. I love my poncho, wearing it makes me feel like I'm somehow held safe by my childhood summer sea-landscape. That's that story). It was very cold, as I said, it must have been minus twenty-five or possibly colder. Another friend has told me about their millenium celebrations, how they had a bottle of champagne with them and it had probably been shaken around a bit, for when they popped it to toast in 2000, it shot out a spray which floated back down on them as flakes of frozen champagne. God, how I wish that was my story - I find it an outlandishly fabulous one, like the storyline in a song by an Arctic Tom Waits. (The fireworks, incidentally, were quite good as fireworks go (I have a very split feeling about fireworks). I remember I dreamt about them sometime afterwards, that they formed the number "2000" in the sky, and one spark shot out and landed on my hand like a glittering jewel.)

In minus twenty-five, the moisture which naturally occurs inside your nose starts to turn, well, to ice. It's a strange feeling to snuffle a bit and feel the ice crackle-cracking. In minus thirty and colder, I swear your eyes start to feel a bit more solid and stiff than usually, and breathing through your mouth gives you a stab of hot-cold pain in the back of your throat.

So, well, yes, after this brief look at everything through the lens of Helsinki climatology in the 2000s, I will tell you I absolutely adored going out with my dog in the cold today. She likes the cold - poor thing, her thick fur probably makes her feel overheated most of the time - and runs around like a pup. I cannot watch her running without laughing - in the femininity scale of dog-girls, she is definitely one of those hearty, healthy, earthy types, a robust and rosy-chopped little milk-maid with child-bearing hips and a pleasant if not very refined nature, and her back end definitely kind of wobbles from side to side when she runs, and I can see she's clearly imagining herself to be the fastest thing on four legs. I love her, the poor funny lovely thing that she is.

When your new time has turned into old time, it's time for some new new time

2009-01-16T21:52:00.005+02:00

I bought myself a new watch on the aeroplane the other day, coming back home to Finland. This seems to be something I do regularly, with a twelve-year cycle, as evidenced by the fact this was the second watch I bought on an aeroplane, coming back to Finland (the first one was - wait for it - twelve years ago, and yes, on an aeroplane, coming back home to Finland. What more evidence do we need? Exactly). Seriously, though, the idea of these seemingly unrelated things - aeroplane, buying a watch, twelve years passing - coinciding in my personal space-time sort of tickles me a little. I'd like to imagine that there'll be a third time, and (if I'm lucky), a fourth, too. Go on, let's really let rip - a fifth one is within the realms of possibility. I could have another thirty-six years ahead of me.

And now for my Secret Dossier, Pt. 2

2009-01-10T23:27:00.015+02:00

She prefers cheese and biscuits after a big meal.

(Some other people prefer a big beautiful dollop of panna cotta after a big meal, but that doesn't have anything to do with this dossier.)

Above her sofa bed, directly above her sleeping guests, she has an early-1900s Scandinavian fishing village. She worries it will fall and kill her guests. It doesn't, of course - it charms her guests, but she still worries.

For her guests, she makes cakes shaped like breasts. She has blogged about this, and it's true - they are shaped like breasts.

A pale lady lives on her mantlepiece. Incidentally, the pale lady seems to have no breasts.

Her rugs are tiny.

In her garden, strange, smoke-like ectoplasm creatures surround her guests.

Above her roof, she keeps a steeple and a full moon.

She's lovely, funny, quirkier than you'd think, savvier than you'd expect, an excellent cook and a lovely friend.

But no, I didn't get me a kilt

2009-01-10T20:44:00.005+02:00

Yesterday will go down in the annals of time as The Day I Lost My Haggis Virginity. Look and mark well the indistinct brown pattie on the right. It was delicious and I would gladly have eaten a considerably bigger pattie.

Okay, so it was vegetarian haggis. Not my fault that they make the real thing with things that run.

I have found Edinburgh beautiful. I have also thought it amazing you can go and climb a Scottish mountain (okay, a small one - but still) and still remain in the capital city. I loved the climb. Do please note the road in front of me froze in recognition and welcome.

Also the loch sensed my Ice-Maidenly approach.

I really mean this - would you just please look at the colours. They go right through me. It's just too heartbreakingly fucking beautiful. And yes, this would be the technical term for it.

Today's my last day in Scotland, so I went souvenir shopping. Guilty as charged, Your Honour, I went for the stuff everyone gets from Scotland - but in my defence, at least I made sure the stuff was actually Made in Scotland, rather than buying (cheaper) things which euphemistically say things such as "Inspired by" or "Made to the Traditional Design" (in India - which is what they don't say. Or worse, China).

Farewell, bonnie Scotland. I most dearly hope it doesn't take another eighteen and a half years till I return. As the poet says,

England! thy beauties are tame and domestic,
To one who has rov'd on the mountains afar
Oh! for the crags that are wild and majestic
The deep frowning glories of dark Loch na Garr.

(And he was Scottish, you know. Although I haven't made it to Loch na Garr. But still, there's always next time.)

Two video postcards speak a thousand words

2009-01-09T17:49:00.005+02:00

On my way up Arthur's Seat today I stopped and took a panoramic view for you. Do please note I climbed up the steeper, craggier side.

Once at the top, I again braved the elements and the howling wind, for the purposes of video evidence. Beware - the howling wind sounds horrible in my camera's microphone, do turn your sounds down.

You may need to congratulate me, for I may be in love

2009-01-08T15:03:00.005+02:00

Right so. I don't really necessarily always go for cities in a big way, and I've never had very much to say when people do the "what is your favourite city in Europe/the world" thing. The fact I'm really rather poorly travelled may have something to do with it - all the Parises, Romes, Madrids, Lisbons, cetra remain in a state blissfully unvisited-by-me - but I may start to offer Edinburgh as my answer to these hypothetical conversation-questions. Apart from the general stunningness of the look of the city, and the very good feeling I get from it, there's just this extraordinary quality of light in this city which quite wipes my mind clean. This is considered a good thing.

I'm just saying.

(My host is most lovely, funny, warm and welcoming, too.)

Inside Edge Village

2009-01-06T19:41:00.005+02:00

Today, she took me right into The Edge. It's very lovely, as you can see.

Do please note the "Sea Organ" shop - no visit to The Edge would give a complete picture, she told me, without a visit to the Sea Organ shop. I have been inside it - well, both halves of it, really, both the lower half and the upper half, but that's for me to know (and, obviously, for her, for she knows the Sea Organ shop like the back of her hand, whereas I am a mere peeker-in only, really), and for you to wonder about.

She also said in a tone at once contemplative and matter-of-fact,

"If I go on living on The Edge...

...this...

...is where I'll land up."

Not a bad place to land up, all things considered, and please do note she was being completely contemplatively matter-of-fact, not at all morbid.

It's lovely around here, just saying - the light is mediaeval, it's been crisply-clear (and please do try to notice the fact I did, as specifically requested, bring snow with me, as all of the South of England can attest), and her night skies are dark with a multitude of stars - real, constellationary stars. And what's more, I like her an awful lot.

Off The Edge and right inside it is where she took me today

2009-01-04T16:49:00.011+02:00

We all know she lives on The Edge, and today she took me over it and right inside her forest. But first, a famous blogland landmark,

after which I followed her to her forest, where the space between the trees is magical. Not to mention the trees.

We found the me-tree

and she introduced me to The Tree of Signs.

They are both as magical as each other, I'm sure you'll agree.

And, as I said, so is the space between them.

Greetings from The House of Signs

2009-01-04T02:05:00.005+02:00

I have one thing to say, only, really, and it will come as a surprise to no-one at all, but my host is really lovely.

She has shown me The Gloomy Place

which originally belonged to Eeyore the donkey (incidentally, the character with whom I have most identified with, in the Pooh Bear books), as well as The Enchanted Place, which looks back at this gorgeous view

She's also taken me to London

after which we had fish and chips (the first portion I've had in over a decade, believe it or not). I had curry sauce with mine

Signs had mushy peas

(I helped her eat those).

In a word, she is lovely.

Given how lovely she is, I feel a little guilty (but only a little, mind) that I have secretly crept around her house, collecting items which, so I'm assured, when boiled in a golden pot will produce A Very Temporary Cure for Ennui. It's a nasty thing to do to a beautiful friend, but it is surely for the greater good (for at least those involved in the magic-potion brewing process).

So, as instructed, a picture of every room in her house...

(her kitchen has some powerful magic which only allows photographs taken from the outside)

some weird stuff goes on in the guest bedroom (you can just see the surprised visitor bravely documenting it all)

the stairwell

which leads to the sitting room

(I'm sorry but the rooms are enormous, they simply won't fit into the camera, hence I have to do details only)

and The Study of Signs

very strange things take place on her landing, too

There's also a stairwell which leads to the Inner Sanctum, where Signs sleeps (for she does indeed sleep)

- although the doors seem to open into the starry sky only, and that's where Signs spends her hours of rest. With no small peril to my personal safety (it's bloody hard balancing on the stars, you know), I have, however, managed to capture Signs sleeping

and I also managed to zoom in on a rather disturbing, yet interesting dream sequence of hers

After documenting her dreams, I clipped fair-sized lock of her hair, as instructed

Phew. It's hard work making A Very Temporary Cure for Ennui, but a book from her shelves

(with a glimpse inside)

and a squidge of her toothpaste (but careful - the brush is mine)

and a handful of grass from her garden (yes - weird, I tell you)

along with the optional whisker of her spirit animal, the Cat of Signs

complete the recipe (her favoured cup is imbued with a magic which disallows the image of it to be pulled off a memory card).

With these precious items collected, I can now lay back, think of Scotland, and hope for a better, less Ennui-filled future for us all.

I thank you.

(Englishman? Did I do well?)

Although the leap second may yet ruin it for everyone

2008-12-31T23:19:00.005+02:00

Okay, I'm going to have to be quick here, for I have firmly decided the future of life as we know it and *everything* depends on this post being posted before 2009. So, here goes, and excuse me if the sentences aren't formulated as well as they might, cetra. Too much is at stake, you know.

I wanted to come here and give you lovely things this New Year, given that I failed most miserably at giving you anything at *all* for Christmas. It might be argued, to be sure, that I shouldn't be giving you things which *I* consider lovely, instead asking you what you'd like, what you think would qualify as lovely things, but needs must as I have only twenty-three minutes of this dying year (and, as someone's aunt used to say, "geh, mit Gott, aber geh" - this to 2008, of course, not *you*).

So, the moon and Venus (I *think*) were doing funny things on the sky earlier tonight, look:

they drew love-hearts together. The fact that was and is freezing-froozing cold out there on my balcony, causing (even more) unsteadiness of the photographer's hand, may have something to do with it, but I still thought it was lovely. Here

is what they "really" looked like - still lovely. (I'm hoping v.fervently you'll agree.)

On Christmas Eve, I went looking for something lovely-Christmassy to post, song-wise, and as I've a secret weakness for boy soprano, I wanted it to be that. In my search for a boy soprano singing a Christmassy song of loveliness, I came across this

which, right enough, wasn't a Christmas song at all - it's a part of a Requiem, surely. So I didn't post it, in the end (the fact I fell asleep might have contributed to this, too). And thus there was no Christmas post, either. But the thought is what counts, right? Right, and boy soprano is so lovely a sound they could sing "Mum's Gone to Iceland" for all I care, I'd still weep with the pain of beauty (but it's better when they sing something like they do on the clip, I think.)

Eighteen minutes left. Okay, then I was very pleased indeed to find this piece of music, *finally*,

which I've been trying to track with methods that stretch the definition of "pathetic" and "ridiculous", making overseas friends listen to it on the radio (playing here at my house) to identify it (they *never* say what they play on radio, do they?), and humming a few bars over in one of my comment threads to anyone who'd care to listen/read. I feel gratified that it *is* indeed a Vivaldi, for I had a feeling it was, based most likely on the fact I'd managed to *once* hear them say it was so, rather than any huge knowledge of music.

Sixteen minutes. This piece here is the final scene from "Blue", a Kieslowski film which I really like and watched again a few days ago (it may have been Christmas Day, come to think of it). I find the music very beautiful, although it is "only" composed for the film. The lyrics, in Greek, are the Corinthians thingy about love (I couldn't find one which would have subtitles, which I am upset about, but you can follow them on the "more info" thing on the right margin if you want to). I *adore* the very end, the
"Love never dies
while the prophecies shall be done away
tongues shall be silenced
knowledge shall fade
Thus then shall linger only
faith, hope and love
but the greatest of these is love."

Tongues shall be silenced, knowledge shall fade, my friends, and thus shall linger only faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love, and with that thought in mind, and twelve minutes left, I wish you love and love only for the year about to be born.

(And please don't worry about the leap second - I'm sure we'll be fine.)

And now for something completely different

2008-12-30T23:45:00.003+02:00

My Trip Abroad approaches (I'm going abroad, by the way). I went to change my €s into £s (they've started to look very funny, in the last eleven years. Have you noticed? I've a feeling they've maybe launched a new lot of banknotes in my absence. Oh, and that reminds me of the time that I (last) went to Scotland - they still had pound notes when England didn't, and there was all sorts of fun stuff scribbled onto them by previous users - handsome handlebar moustaches on the Queen, that sort of thing. Och, you gotta love the Scots). At the currency exchange place, they kindly gave me a plastic pouch (pictured above) to keep my money safe. Loosely translated, the text on the bag says "ATTENTION! Handle your money without attracting attention." Chance'd be a fine thing, no? With the colour and rottweiler-sized text and everything.

But still, yes. I'm going Abroad, very soon indeed (although not until next year, mind. And incidentally, what is it with this out-going year - it turned out to be quite a bad one, according to my surveys and, more to the point, my experience? It didn't start out shite, it had no hallmark of doom on it from the outset, yet it's been pretty dreadful, in a whole heap of ways, really), to meet up with these two mad and wonderful people. It's going to be brilliant. That is, if I can get there alive. Anyone seen the film "Pushing Tin"? Nothing spectacularly special about it, as such, just thinking. It's about air-traffic controllers - apparently "pushing tin" is inside jargon for, well, air-traffic controlling. Before I saw the film, I hadn't really ever thought about the tin-pushers and their work very much - they're mainly on strike, in France, are they not? Apart from that, I'd focused my worries on the pilot and the plane itself, but oh, foolish me, for obviously, one should spare a thought, and maybe a quick stab or two of belly-turning terror, for the brave guys guiding the plane down. Planes, in fact. Suffice it to say that the film opens with a quote (which they claim is an authentic one not fabricated for the purposes of scaring the audience members witless) which goes something like "You push tin for years without a problem, and then you have one little mid-air and they never let you hear the end of it."

I'm just saying.

It won't make any difference, but I'll say it anyway: Stop it, stop it, stop it, stop it, stop it, stop it, stop it, stop it, stop.

2008-12-29T22:43:00.006+02:00

The other day, I was reading up on the death of Harold Pinter, and in his Nobel acceptance speech, this extract from a Neruda poem came up -

And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings --
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood.

Jackals that the jackals would despise,
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate!

Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives!

Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain :
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers,
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes,
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull's eye of your hearts.

Today, I've been trying to read about Gaza, I've been trying to understand the hows and whys, trying to imagine a solution, but my mind keeps going back to this poem - and I don't read it as a threat, I read it as a statement of fact. Too much murder and death and horror and it will only breed more.

But don't ask me why

2008-12-28T16:08:00.006+02:00

The sales triggered a counter-consumerist reaction in me yesterday. I came home via the foody shop (where, as I mentioned yesterday, I had a hard time deciding between the creme fraiches with 28% fat, 17% fat, 8% fat, 3% fat, 2% fat, no-lactose, low-lactose, HYLA (don't ask - something to do with lactose), and combinations thereof) and sat at home feeling like a capitalist shite.

Question: Why do I have so much stuff? Inventory. Why do I have so many clothes (I looked at some pyjamas yesterday, they were the only thing I really wanted to buy, but didn't - I have some already)? So many fucking layers of clothing I will never be able to wear out all of them, and besides, so many items I hardly ever wear, or never, even, and it barely helps I've decided to buy second-hand from now on, it's a poxy plaster I apply to my sore, ridiculous, affluent-Westerner conscience. Why do I have so much food in my cupboards? Foodfoodfood, brought here from hither and yon, from all over the fucking place, just so I could delight my palate, not just so I could feed myself and my offspring, and again, not eating meat barely helps, it's a piss in the ocean of global suffering whether I do or not. Why do I have so much stuff? Books. Yesyes, they are for my entertainment and edification, but who and what has given me the right to sit here being entertained and edified? Television, digibox (again, don't ask - it's something to do with being able to watch telly in this country), desktop computer, laptop computer, landline phone, mobile phone, washing machine, lamps and pots and plants and plates and glasses (crystal glasses too, they are beautiful and I like having them, but what do I need them for? Some other woman's entire life is based on the ownership of a single cooking pot, in which she cooks a bean stew, daily, to sell), stuff - stuff - stuff. My life revolves around stuff, does it not? My life, my world, it's inescapable, it's horrendous.

So I went on a foray around the internet, I said hello to a few people, I felt lonely and shaky, I was quite desperate for a bit of communication, even though I also want(ed) to hide alone in a corner, curled up. I went looking for this and that, I uncovered this, I thought it was haunting and beautiful:

but it didn't exactly make me feel any less like a pig. No offence to pigs.

This Christmas thing, I've been wanting to write my thoughts about it for days, and also run away from trying to write my thoughts about it. What sometimes strikes me when I think of the basic core of the story, never mind whether you are religious, never mind whether you believe in Jesus and the saints and all the prophets, never mind whether you believe there's a God at all, let alone whether He could be born a human, what strikes me sometimes is the stabbing beautifulness of the story combined with the fact that for two thousand years, people have - to varying degrees - professed to believing in it, that a child is born, a baby, a beautiful baby boy (I've had two), and we claim to believe he is the saviour of mankind, somehow, and somehow, it is true, look at any baby, anywhere, they are perfection, they could become anything and everything, if only we could give them the world in which they could unfold into what they could be, they truly could save us all, if only we allowed them to, but

just as I'm trying to explain it, explain what I really mean, the thought disintegrates, I can't verbalise it, and I'm left with a melodramatic platitude in my hand. Which is where I am now, but sometimes it's good to write without self-censorship, write like I was writing it anonymously for the eyes of no-one, without thinking how ridiculous I sound. I think.

It all makes me shake inside

2008-12-27T20:09:00.007+02:00

So the shops opened today, oh woe, and the sales were (and are) on. It's bad enough knowing this is the case, but what's infinitely worse, I had to go into the churning consumerist hell-hole which is departmentstoreal down-town - I had promised the older son a winter coat for Christmas (yes, from the post-Christmas sales), and besides which, I catastrophically broke my cafetiere at about half-past one on Christmas Eve, some thirty minutes after all shops had shut, to remain that way until today (yes, that was a total, global, monstrous disaster in the making, it was looking like a coffeeless Christmas was stretching ahead of me, like a loveless desert, but as it happens, my parents rode to the rescue and gave me their percolator thingumy to use and borrow - they have been making their Christmas coffee by a method so ancient even they had a hard time remembering how it went, but little do I care - or did, as now, thankfully, I have a new cafetiere, so the visit to the shopping inferno was not all bad). My son is pleased enough, too, and so he bloody well should be, but I am feeling mostly like my soul is a wrung-out and spent dish cloth. Why is it that some people seem to actually enjoy shopping at the sales? I saw many women, out doing the retail-therapy thing, complete with a friend, clearly having A Girls' Day Out. I bought my son's coat (and exchanged his mobile phone (also a Christmas present) for one which actually, you know, worked) and (while I clearly should have) didn't run straight home, for I still had 28€ on a gift voucher I'd been given by the employer for Christmas (and we paid tax, so enough of your cries of "corruption", k?), and I thought I could maybe find either something reasonable to wear for my up-and-coming Trip Abroad (of which more later), or a new cafetiere, but it turns out my 28 poxy euros would get me nothing whatsoever in the department store to which it's linked, save maybe a couple of pairs of socks, and their cafetieres seemed to cost 40-odd, and so I was forced to go to another shop and buy my cafetiere there, hurrah, but all this left me in the afore-mentioned dishclothy state, to the extent that, once at the foody shops, I realised I was becoming paralysed, when I found myself staring at the various kinds of creme fraiche, totally unable to pick one (and why do they have to have a dozen different types, I ask you?), and then the same again, at the tagliatelle shelf. Horrible. I'm just happy I made it home - I could have, you know, frozen there, and be there still, in the locked-up and darkened shop, looking at alternately the cheap supermarket-brand pasta and the bit-more-dear pretendy-Italian stuff (which I did choose, in the end - but it was spinachy, you understand, and I had to break free and leave).

Apart from all that, I see that Harold Pinter's died, poor sod, but it's not exactly a surprise, given the state he's been in, and that it is estimated Finns will use between fifteen and twenty million euros on fireworks between Christmas and New Year. Excuse me - what? That's a huge fucking sum of money, is it not, and in my opinion there should be a law against such wasteful, polluting, noisy, stupid, spend-thrifty nonsense (not to mention that inevitably, every sodding year, some young eejits manage to rid themselves of their sight and a bunch of fingers, setting the fuckers off whilst pissed).

And apart from all that, I hope you've all had a lovely and peaceful Christmas.

Stuck for pressie ideas? Fret not, help is at hand...

2008-12-23T16:22:00.005+02:00

Not many nights till Christmas now, dear Reader, and even less if you're Scandinavian/German (we celebrate the 24th, you know). Just in case you've been caught short of shopping time, with someone in your life still lacking a Christmas present and you all out of ideas, we here at Future of my Past would like to lend a hand. Behold, the gun-shaped egg mold - the perfect gift for young and old, male and female, with four different firearms to choose from.

(And yes, it is a thing, just google "gun-shaped eggs" and purchase yours today.)

Another figurine

2008-12-21T23:21:00.006+02:00

Reading the Signs writes today about a figurine. I was effected both by the image and what she writes, to the point of being almost startled. I don't know why.

Anyway, I have been meaning to show you this, my favourite necklace. Signs' post brought it to mind, although I haven't much to say about mine except that I love it, it feels warm when worn, and wearing it makes me feel safe. I wore it a lot when I lived in Hawai'i.

And here's some I made earlier

2008-12-20T11:30:00.002+02:00

Do also please carefully note the presence of my beloved laptop, which enables me to mouthbreathe on my visitors, and my visitors to be with me during my Friday night rock'n'roll sessions. Sorry about the unreplied comments, it got to be a very late night. But then that's rock'n'roll life for you.

I'm so rock'n'roll

2008-12-19T23:55:00.004+02:00

Start with an empty tin - one that's originally contained the impossibly-named cheese Gybna Baida works well (and the cheese itself, a feta-esque fair, is very good value for money). Please wash and dry the tin properly before setting out to do anything else. You will also want to have scissors, glue, and some rough, grainy paper.

You'll also need pictures. Print out your own favourites from your flickrdom, but be prepared to spend forever looking through your old stuff and getting momentary maudlin attacks. If you don't have a flickrdom, curse lustily and blame yourself for this thoughtless oversight.

Spend an evening trimming strips of paper to glue onto the tin. It's not as easy as it sounds.

Spend more time trimming your pictures to fit the tins. Glue the pictures onto the tin(s), too.

Make sure to photograph some key steps of your efforts.

Be totally pleased with the unique little biscuit tins you've created, even though the size of the paper strips and pictures is by no means exact and perfect, and there will certainly be the odd gluey bulge here and there. This only adds to the hand-madedness of the things. Congratulate yourself super smugly not only on having made your nearests and dearests Christmas presents, which have cost you practically nothing at all but your time, but also because describing the process provides you with a blog post for your daily blogging effort, which has also cost you practically nothing at all but your time. Reward yourself with a ciggie on the balcony. Feel less self-congratulatory about the fact that it is your twelfth and hence the last-but-one you are allowed tonight.

Decide firmly that you will varnish the tins tonight. No, tomorrow morning. Honest. Just write the blog post for now.

Discover that blogger refuses to upload the pictures illustrating some key steps of your biscuit-tin efforts. Feel cheated and decide to post now and amend with photos (and comment replies) later.

Go to watch Dr Zhivago, part 9 of 11 (it is a Russian effort and for your money, you prefer it beyond measure to the book, which you think is the totally terriblest Russian "great" you have ever made yourself wade through). Keep reminding yourself you'll need to remember to bake some biscuits to put in the biscuit tins. You'll need the reminding.

In praise of bollocks

2008-12-18T23:42:00.005+02:00

Sometimes, when I'm sad or hurting, the only thing I can do is run headlong into churning out bollocks, to wade in it nose-deep, to savour it and have it make me giggle in spite of myself, to allow it to wash over me and through me like a tidal wave of nonsense, which it in fact is, to drink it like mother's milk, to eat it like air. Rejoice, rejoice, for Holy Bollocks is with thee, verily, even at your hour of distress.

No time for bollocks now, though, for I simply must take the dog out for a pee. Be seeing you.

Here, again, blogging, sleeping

2008-12-17T22:54:00.004+02:00

The thing about daily posting is the excitement it brings to one's hum-drum existence. Normally, I will have absolutely no idea what I'm going to write about, which leaves me fumbling at the laptop at decades past bedtime and results in posts written whilst asleep (please take this literally, for it's the truth). The next day can then be spent anxiously wondering what sort of self-revelatory stuff I may have published. There are anti-climaxes, though, as when one finds that the most outrageous thing one has managed is numerous typos in a post a handful of lines long - and one in the title field, as well, oh woe. Note to self: t-o-o means also; t-w-o is the number. The utter shame of it all - and while I've sometimes let dreadful shameful typos stand to increase my shame tolerance, there's shame tolerance and shame tolerance and I couldn't let the too-two thing go uncorrected. Stupid foreign bollocks.

Anyhow, excitement. Went to the theatre today and saw The Scottish Play - quite a jolly little number, that, and I would recommend the production (SPOILER ALERT: Macduff kills him, in the end), if anybody happens to be in the Helsinki area and fancies a bit of Shakespeare in Finnish. I have always found the theatrical superstition-tradition of not saying "Macb*th" out loud somehow sweet and endearing, and tend to follow it, for fun (not a real magical disaster-avoidance thing, for me, this - although I do think theatres shouldn't really be whistled in), but I know some "real theatricals" who sneer at the custom. Actually, some years ago I got it into my head that I should get one of those wee Scottie terriers and call it Macbeath - which would have me nearly saying it a hundred times a day. Haven't, so far, but who's to say. It would have to be a rescue dog, mind, for I don't think I'd ever take another kind, now. So if you're about to abandon a Scottie, do drop me a line. (Ms Dogot says don't you dare bring another dog to this home and this bed, but we can ignore her a little bit because she neither writes nor reads my blog - unlike the pets of some other notable bloggers.)

I may have missed a step or two, it's true

2008-12-16T23:13:00.007+02:00

As a child, I was very prone to magical thinking. I am a singleton, so I had no-one to compare notes with, and therefore it took until my twenties to discover that while this is maybe not normal, it is certainly quite commonplace. It meant that seemingly unimportant everyday things (reaching a certain step of the staircase before the door to the staircase would bang shut, for instance, was a central and daily magic-making point) would - although totally unrelated - somehow relate to the Grand Scheme of Things: to avoiding horrendous, fateful events (usually not specified in the magic, but Very Big, always). Sometimes it would enable the possibility of finding love and happiness, too, but mostly it was an avoidance-type magic.

Thing is (and I believe psychology folks will agree), you don't really need to scratch people deeper than a little teeny-weensy bit, and the old magic will be uncovered. This idea gives me great comfort, as it proves I'm not alone in conjuring up plans to save the universe using coffee cups rinsed in the right fashion, cetra.

Christmas calendar post number something or another

2008-12-15T23:54:00.006+02:00

You know the way I'm forever carrying on about the nights not being properly dark in these dark end-of-days days, blah, blah, and how the cloudy night sky is a diseased hue of post-apocalyptic orange-brown, blah blah? Just for the record - I haven't been lying.

Please note I have done nothing whatsoever to the image (taken just before six pm on Saturday 13th of December) - not even straightened it (the thingumy I was using as a makeshift tripod for the night-time low-light camera-function thing was crooked, and so's the picture), let alone tint it.

I rest my case. Let the oil run out quickly, let the nuclear reactors run dry, let there be no electricity wasted on making the world this colour. The Green Revolution can't come quick enough, I say.

I really can't say I regret rien

2008-12-14T16:02:00.003+02:00

I was meaning to write about regret today - a feeling which my mental-emotional (and, who knows, physical too, perhaps? For from what I've understood, they're (claiming to) find more and more of our mental-emotional-psychological thingies are rooted in physiological causes, serotonin release, noradrenaline, blah, blah, let's for God's sakes try to get back to what I was saying) my system seems to generate both amply and skillfully, relating both to things I have done and things I haven't. I don't really mean the "menial" things, like an embarrassing hair style and/or clothes when young (or indeed, now), or digging some totally talentless band, or whatever. No, I regret major life choices - entire decades - all bloody sorts.

However. For reasons too dull to be listed (including having to get up special early tomorrow morning, for work reasons, blah and yawn) I have decided against writing about regret today - a fact you might have difficulty believing if you've borne with me thus far, as I've just harped about regret for half a page. No, I'll leave it for another day, and instead I'll quote a couple of lines from a poem which caught my mind the other day, when I went on my Knausgaard investigations and looked up some stuff by Hölderlin, one of his favourite authors on angels. I rather have a feeling that Hölderlin would require reading in German in peace and quiet, and possibly supported by conversations with someone who was well acquainted with the writing (I found this helped me with getting into Blake), but this bit resonated effortlessly:

" You too wanted better things, but love
forces all of us down. Sorrow bends us more
forcefully, but the arc doesn't return to its
point of origin without a reason."

although I must say I start having trouble with the arc not returning. I don't know whether I understand, and whether I agree with the sentiment (as I've understood it - your interpretations are welcome, thank you). I am not entirely sure at all whether I believe in the "there's a reason for all this suffering, in the grand scheme of things" take on life and everything - but up until that point, I find it says something, something. Something. Something I do believe in, I suppose.

I used to go to church secretly as a girl, too

2008-12-13T23:00:00.004+02:00

I'm not much of a church-goer, which will probably come as a complete and horrible surprise to no-one at all, but a few years ago, not long before Christmas, I gathered up my flock and went to listen to a Christmas concert. There was a particular reason for my doing so - my dad sang in the choir, and it was during my brief interlude years of trying to live by the concept "if I just act like we're all functional rather than dysfunctional, it'll all go away and we'll be ever so wholesome". Don't judge me too harshly, though, please, there were mitigating circumstances for my behaving thuslike out of character, but I shan't go into those just now, for I really want to get to the point I wanted to get to, before I've spent seventeen blog metres on this and it's half past tomorrow morning o'clock and I pass out, with the point I want to get to forever unreached.

So we went to the church - a big, bold, manly old thing, built on one of the highest points in the city, in the traditionally "working-class" side of town, although why I want to mention that fact here specifically I don't know, except maybe to give you a better feel for the whole hewn-out-of-granite-ness of the place. The church was packed - mostly, I expect, due to people like us, families of the choir members, the choir a hobby choir, neither brilliant nor terrible. As part of the programme, some sing-along was included, and the church organ bellowed out O Come All Ye Faithful, and we the churchful sang for all our lungs were worth, and there was a big, wonderful, exhilarating moment of losing my self into the music, physically losing my self into it, bodily, for singing is a very body thing, and the thundering of the church organ is a very physical music, and I sometimes feel if only there could be rites and rituals I could take part in, like that, regularly, where I could lose myself in that way, I would love to have religion for that purpose, for the here and now becoming a heightened moment, a moment in time separated into an another-timeness, where, momentarily freed from myself, I could be free, I wouldn't really have all that much need for religion to give me a life after this one, if only it could give me that.

Yes, I realise odd names are my weakness

2008-12-12T23:09:00.004+02:00

Today was going to be the glorious day when I wouldn't sit here, at an ungodly hour, searching the cavities of my mind - in vain - for some crappy topic to write a few dodgy lines on, to fulfill my rashly-stupid post-a-day pledge; for already in the morning, at the bus stop, a subject came to me, complete with some sentences, a rare and appreciated wonder (thank you, Baby Jesus).

However. Disaster struck, as it so often does in human life - indeed, often precisely when the tiny human is at her most gratefully merry over how well it has all turned out, in the end. Over the course of my working day, I have forgotten what it was I was going to blog about. Fuck.

So here I am again, at an ungodly hour cetra, searching the cavities of my mind cetra. But there's nothing quite like the human spirit, the sheer gritty willpower, the so-very-Finnish sisu, particularly when assisted by Our Friend, The Internet, for the blog posts are all sitting there, methinks, waiting to be plucked and played.

Or bloody something. Anyway, my foraging around online has brought me two gems tonight. No, actually way more - it's been a good evening for the Internet - but let's see how many I can squeeze in before I collapse.

The eminent scientists Prof and Dr Wickramasinghe, from the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology (yes, I'm sticking with heavenly matters), are suggesting that the airborne microbial life, which the atmosphere of Venus (yes, the planet) might support, might, under suitable conditions - solar wind strength, solar and planetary alignments, that sort of thing - be blown into the Earth's atmosphere within weeks, maybe only days. Alright, so the alignment conditions aren't right at the moment, so you don't need to don your tin-foil hats just yet - wait till 2012 for that - but it's still fairly shatteringly sci-fi news, even with a double "might" in one sentence. There might be titchy-tiny life flying about on our planetary neighbour. It might fly here. And while some other scientist guy - a Prof Fred, or something - is dissing this suggestion as "extremely unlikely", my faith is with the coolly-named Wickramasinghes. And no, I made none of that up (not even Cardiff).

The other thing was also celestial in nature - I chanced upon this other unfeasibly-named guy Karl O Knausgaard's top ten books about angels. He himself has written one, and lo, I wish to read it - the Independent guy adored it ("a heavenly delight"), the Guardian guy pretty much hated it, but with a name like Knausgaard, I can't let this author go by me unread. Besides which, as one of his top ten books he lists Poems and Fragments by Friedrich Hölderlin, and while I'm only aware of Hölderlin as a name, really, what he says about the book is sufficient to make me want to read his.

Okay - now I have run out of momentum. But I'm glad the angels got a mention.

Too much of everything in the world

2008-12-11T20:55:00.007+02:00

Today would have been a fairly brilliant day for those with an unquenchable interest in the weirdness of life and the world. A not-terribly-thorough look at three online news"papers" gives us such gems as

- an actor slicing his own throat onstage in Vienna - the prop knife turning out to be a brand-spanking new real one. The police are investigating the matter, whereas the actor goes back onstage the next night (let's hear it for actors, folks)

- a Chinese lady losing her hearing in one ear as kissing her boyfriend bursts her eardrum

- a Lebanese farmer announcing he's grown a sweet potato weighing over eleven kilos (that'd be about 25 pounds for you Imperial types) - see picture (copyright AFP shamelessly flogged) above

- and a Japanese toy factory announcing a set of Obama Family action figures (image owned by Getty)

All this coupled with yesterday's black hole revelations would really have made my day (and you must know that I'm incredibly tired, and when tired, tend to go into uncontrollable fits of laughter at the least provocation) but I also came across some totally unfunny news at beautiful NMJ's. And now I mostly feel like a shit for posting about the odd-quirky stuff.

Bollocks, blankets, bother, black holes, and bacci

2008-12-10T19:46:00.004+02:00

Oh oh. I wrote myself out of topics yesterday, what with bringing the ruddy blanket into play and everything - just to think, I could have milked that blanket for weeks, really, but I just threw it all away. What a losery thing to have done. Which is why I find myself here, in the middle of the night, with nothing to say (yes, "I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry". It's good to find one's inner poet, I'm sure, but it makes blogging a bit difficult.)

So anyway, yes. I had noted - with some difficulty, for the newspaper I get is the Swedish-language one, which adds a note of challenge to deciphering the daily madnesses of the world - that there had been a spot of bother between the Greek police force and the local teenagers, so I went to the BBC website just now to see if they could tell me stuff about it in a language I'm, like, totally fluent in, innit. But nevermind Greece's tear-gassed teenagers - did you see there's a black hole in the centre of the galaxy? Sorry, but there was a time when you couldn't turn around in my life without bumping into astronomers, so this news still has me reeling a bit (and handily, now the Greeks have somewhere to put their teenagers - or their police).

Apart from this big news, I would like to point out that cigarettes are sometimes really beautiful but sometimes just fail to deliver. Today, alas, is one of the latter days. But as I'm not a giver-upper, I'll give them another chance to shine tomorrow.

I still miss that old thing, from time to time

2008-12-09T22:35:00.005+02:00

Today is my name-day - or was, as the day is nearly over. Not to worry, there'll be another one next year. As a child, I almost used to prefer name days (but oh, God damn, but I can't think what the proper spelling is - keep trying different ways and they each look as wrong as the other. Must check. Moment, please, gentle Reader. Right. Sorry about that - but my friend, Wikipedia, has now informed me name day is indeed the correct spelling. So now that all that is alright, I can go back to claiming that in my childhood, I almost used to prefer name days) to birthdays - less fuss, the "lightness" of the occasion allowing for just some slightly-special party fun, without pressure. Besides, the season was more appealing - being born in early-ish Autumn meant I had always only just returned to school, on each and every birthday - and I never enjoyed returning to school, whereas on my name day, the weather had a beautiful crispy bite, the snow was high and clean, the night came early and dark, and the stars were bright. Yay me and, in particular, yay the weather of the days that were.

So that was that. On the other hand, today sees my three-hundredth blog post. I am quite amazed at the number, myself - this means that, as I haven't been here for quite three years yet, I must have - on average - blogged (roughly) every three days. Given that I know I'm prone to the occasional month-long silence, I must have been ridiculously prolific at other times. Yay me, once more (I think - as a fair amount of it is complete codswallop).

So that was that. Apart from these heady double celebrations, I've been thinking, today, about a certain blanket I had for many, many years - sky blue, hemmed with large white stitches of some ilk, whose corners I used to gnaw in the boredom of a four-year-old made to take daytime naps at Steiner school, on which I changed the nappies of my first-born, and which I lost on a post-sunbathing pub crawl session with the man who'd become my second ex-husband (although I wouldn't have believed you if you'd told me that then). Not so yay me, in this instance.

And that, gentle Reader, is that. Except that today, I noticed, once again, how lucky I am to have a job which really comforts one in feelings of existential loneliness, in the fear-dread of the aloneness of life and death, that sort of jolly stuff. Fleeting moments of contact, in which I will go on.

And that - really, honestly, truly - is that, for tonight. A wetly-snowy Helsinki bids you goodnight. Thank you for listening.

I miss dark being properly dark

2008-12-08T21:08:00.003+02:00

I swear that the cloudy night sky never used to be orange, in the winters of my childhood. It just used to be dark, without stars.

It used to be lovely.

Not even going to mention the two-day gap in my daily posting

2008-12-07T14:48:00.004+02:00

Throughout my life, I've had a number of recurring dream-themes. These include

- the end of the world being immediate, because I witness a mushroom cloud rising in the distance (often seen through a window). My reaction to this is a panicked hurry to tell the person I'm with that I love them,

- trying to hit my father, but failing, because my arms will only move in the slow-motion typical to nightmares. My father will just look at me, just look, and I feel dreadful, not only because I can't vent my rage, but also because now he knows it is there,

- I find myself in my house, one that I've once lived in, in the past, or forgotten I own, or not known about. The unifying factor of my dream houses is there is a secret room, which feels delicious and right and I can't understand how I've not remembered about it.

Interpretations and readings are welcomed. Thank you.

Ah, the Shame, the Shame, or, Judged by the Company We Keep (I Think)

2008-12-04T23:47:00.006+02:00

Today in Helsinki:
a cold shoulder of comfort: sheets of sleet for the heavy of heart,
abysmal weather complete with every type of unpleasantness: sleet, hailstones, torrential sub-zero rain,
half an hour delays on the buses*, due to the OSCE meeting of European foreign ministers,
and while we're attempting brokering a deal of some sort on European security,
yesterday also saw us amongst the handful of nations not signing the international treaty banning cluster weapons - alongside the United States, Russia, Israel, China (and a freakish Poland) - all the well-known peacebrokerniks, in fact. Cluster weapons are considered to be (allow me to quote the Prime Minister) "such a significant part of Finland’s defence". Against whom, one may wonder. Surely not one of our fellow clusterniks, the one to the right of us, on the map? Sorry but I fail to see the point. I'm not politically knowledgable, even less so militarily, but I'd bet quite a lot that, well, no matter how big ours are, they've got bigger clusters than we do, so we could at the very least keep a moral high ground. Or am I not seeing the point, somehow?

This concludes tonight's update from this Northern nook, this Arctic cranny. Night night.

*(and we realise half an hour doesn't sound like much, but when you're used to trusting the timetables, it's an age, trust me)

Considering the relative situations of the laundry, the dog, and me

2008-12-03T21:22:00.005+02:00

The laundry awaits hanging, the dog awaits walking, and I await some divine intervention which would set aright all the things which sorely need arighting. Of the three of us, I think - no, I know I have the longest awaiting period.

On looking in and on-looking and other odd feelings

2008-12-02T23:22:00.005+02:00

Over the course of a working day, I deal with some fifty people or thereaboutsish (give or take ten or twenty). That sounds like quite a lot and, in fact, is. You might therefore correctly say I have a fairly peopley working life. On the other hand, over the course of the non-working part of my day (or indeed, over a day off work) I deal with about twoish people (give or take one or two). You might therefore correctly say I have a fairly aloney private life. This is mostly no problem whatsoever. I mostly prefer it that way.

However, there are times when I unexpectedly feel very alone and not in the nice way. Oddly enough, reading (other people's) blogs has started to trigger this feeling, quite often. I've tried to analyse what goes on there, but the closest I can get is that either it feels like I'm looking in on other people communicating - the outsider, peeping in through a secret window, into the warm glow of a homely hearth, a gathering of friends, blah-blah... or that I'm looking in on other people not communicating, each waving desperately from their own islet of self, notice me, notice me. Sometimes reading my own blog also triggers these feelings. It's too strange and quite emphatically not particularly nice.

There have been places, too, over the course of my life, which have triggered a profound feeling of loneliness. Innocent places really, with ostensibly no reason whatsoever to induce such gloom. A particular cross-road in Wales, for instance, with a house on the corner - a perfectly normal Welsh cottage, two up, two down, windows all on one side, looking at the road from which it's pulled back a few metres, where it's probably sat for a hundred years or thereabouts - made me feel so fully desolate I could have wailed every time I drove past it - but only at night, when the lights were on indoors. During the daylight hours it was just an ordinary cottage, and I'd mock myself for having felt so strange about it - only to feel the same desolation when next driving past it in the dark. Doubly strange as I usually totally delight in looking in through other people's lit windows (sorry everyone). And there was a graveyard in Hawai'i (and I normally like - no, love - graveyards - the older the better. This has been the case from early childhood onwards, when I'd want to go for a walk in the graveyard whenever I was visiting another town - and I used to have the most debilitating fear of death, too) which made me feel so profoundly lonely, like there could be nothing quite as lonely as dying there and my body, my poor dead body being buried there, on that sea-front cliff-top graveyard with no proper gravestones and the wrong kind of flowers - anthuriums, other other-worldly weirdities, too big, too garish in colour, just too-too, and looking endlessly over the endless expanse of the Pacific, towards the North Pole some fucking thousands of miles away, all dead and too far away.

And please don't tell me I wouldn't have minded, as I would have been dead. I know that. I also know I would most certainly have become a frightfully restless ghost. At least if (and indeed, when) I die and get buried here, in the loneliness of what my bones are made of, I can just remain dead.

On that high note I am off for my last cigarette. Of the night, you understand. It's late and I need to sleep. See you tomorrow.

My favourite part of my body are my laugh lines

2008-12-01T22:37:00.003+02:00

Day two of my daily blogging regime, and I'm already despairing. What the fucking blazes made me come up with such ridiculously over-harsh medication for my blog-clog? I ask you. What a total dork. I have nothing to say, and what's more, I don't want to say anything.

I don't want to say anything. I wonder why.

Nulla dies sine linea, or something

2008-11-30T23:55:00.007+02:00

So I had hate mail the other day - well, not hate mail as such, really, rather an unfriendly sweary comment on one of my blogs. I've been pretty lucky, as I know some people have untold hassle with trolls and other nose-picking creatures of the down-side of the blogosphere, and I haven't had to deal with very much in that way at all. Anyway, this person swore a little and did a bit of name-calling blah-blah, but what actually had me thinking was he said I "try too hard" - and this, unhappily, dear Reader, may well be true of the past few weeks (months, even). How hateful - there's nothing worse than laboured performance, be that performance a stage thing or a blog post or a whatever. Thing is, as you may have noticed, I have been a bit quiet lately and the longer I have left it the harder it has been to come and say something, and so any little peep I've managed to eek out of myself has been a real squeeze and an effort. So there's only one thing for it, I reckon, and that's just to come here and say something, just any old tripe, every day.

Only right now I'm about to fall asleep, so this has to be enough for today's requirements. Except I've been dying to put this picture up for so long, whilst simultaneously being unable to say something to go with it, that I'm just going to go ahead and do it now - some people will (maybe) remember my story of the East German guy and the Walkman stereo. This bottle-opener is the one he gave me in exchange, twenty-one and a bit years ago, and totally useless it is too, and I was gladder than glad when it turned up at the summer cottage this July.

Hello, it's been a while, and bye for now, too, although hope to be back sooner this time

2008-11-29T16:47:00.005+02:00

So you think right, today's the day I'll start Christmas cleaning. Not that I care all that awfully about Christmas as such - for various reasons it is firmly associated with various anxieties in my mind, and fails to deliver a sense of (for the lack of a better word) spiritual event (I vastly prefer Easter, if you must know), but every now and then it's very satisfying to immerse oneself in an orgy of cleaning. Before you start, though, you must do the dishes you so spectacularly failed to do last night, as well as finish reading your paper (there's been these terrorist attacks in Mumbai, you know), and read The Poniatric Englishman's latest post (when he posts, it's always a treat). During these things, you will realise there's a play on tonight, at one of the small Helsinki theatres, which you'd quite like to see (you met the guy who designed the prosthetic-leg things, complete with varicose veins, at a party you went to - in itself, a rare occurrence), and toy with the idea of chucking cleaning altogether, in favour of more artistical indulgences. This seems both like a good idea (the best and sometimes only way to go and do stuff is to surprise oneself and do it without any warning or planning) and a terrifying one, and you're relieved to find they still have plenty of performances and you can go and do it another time. So it's back to cleaning, hurrah, and there's also a Russian series on TV which you've been following, as well as a four-part BBC travel programme about Paris (quite good to knit to), and a documentary about Kieslowski plus a film of his - all this you'd miss if you ventured to the theatre. Before you start cleaning, though, you could go and have a cigarette on the balcony, and you do. While you're out there relaxedly smoking, you can ponder over whether you should put the rugs (rolled up and stored in the walk-in cupboard to protect them from your dogot-on-heat) on the floor after hoovering and mopping it, even though the rugs themselves haven't been taken on the rug balcony for a beating, and which you cannot do until Monday morning (or you could, but you're not supposed to), and how nice it would be to be able to walk into the walk-in cupboard again (the rugs effectively make this an impossibility), and whether, once the rugs were out, you might not finally pack up all your summer clothes and take them down into the cellar, but in order to do this, you will have to unpack the box the winter clothes are in, and while you could just put them somewhere for the time being - so as to free the space for the summer clothes being packed away, you understand - it is still a troubling thing to know you haven't anywhere to put them, really, and you think that so much seems to depend on the fact that you can't get round to buying some of those storage-basket things which you could keep in the hall closet to house all your winter things like woolly socks and stuff, and the lack of baskets and the absolute impossiblity of getting round to buying such things becomes the symptomatic emblem, the symbol of your failure to function as a grown-up woman in the world (other people are so organised, you know, by comparison to me), and releases the balcony-leap fantasy again. This must not be taken very seriously at all, you know, for I live on the tenth floor and my balcony nearly always releases that fantasy in me - "do please leap before you fall" - although I haven't always suffered from vertigo and don't really have it terribly badly now (I can, after all, live on the tenth floor and use the balcony very regularly). The first time I remember being hit by it was about a decade ago, when I took my older son on the Big Wheel thing in the Helsinki fun fair. I was not expecting to be scared, so it hit me by surprise in a most unpleasant manner. He was peeking over the edge of the little round boat thing we were suspended in, and I fought hard to keep it together somehow, when all I wanted was to hug the central pole which sustained our life with all fours and wail in terror, never mind the distinctly unimpressed-looking middle-aged man of stereotypical Finnishness and his toddler daughter. Another really unpleasant vertigo experience also has my son in it, we were in Budapest together and went to that big cathedral there - I fail to remember the name. The views were really outstanding and he ran around the dome once or twice less apathetically than you'd expect a thirteen-year-old to do, but there was no way on earth I was going to be able to leave the wider balcony bit to do the same. I was surprised to find a photo of him there - I hadn't lost the ability to point and shoot, anyway, which is a good thing. Here, look:

And before I start hoovering, I will, of course, need to go to the shop and make something to eat. Maybe I'll just leave the cleaning till tomorrow, this blog post's taken up ages. Hurrah.

This just in from our Wall Street correspondent

2008-10-29T23:37:00.001+02:00

And another thing

2008-10-22T23:32:00.004+03:00

Finland, my native land, seems to have gone properly mad. Not only has it become an annual autumn ritual for some sad wank to take a bent metal object that goes bang to school with them, but now there's also been an arson attack against the Turkish Embassy in Helsinki. The Embassy spokesmen say they reckon the Kurdish separatist organisation PKK is behind the attack. The (Finnish) police spokesman says the four Kurdish youths held suspect "all speak good Finnish".

Be all that as it may, I have my own theories (Exclusive! Read it only on Future of my Past!) - for apart from the Turkish Embassy, the building in question (pictured here from an angle not shown on other news sites)

housed, for no less than twenty-five years, the theatre group which I'm currently in (early) retirement from. A bit too much of a coincidence, don't you find? For actors are an emotionally volatile lot, and can bear a never-ending grudge for not being cast (or worse still, being cast as the back end of a donkey).

I feel that way, too, sometimes

2008-10-22T21:05:00.004+03:00

And so it came to pass that the blogger became so desperate to post something - anything - on her beautiful-looking but sadly-neglected and hence cobwebby blog that she finally decided it was better to publish any old tripe - never mind the quality, feel the width - and lo, just as her woes were at their darkest, from the World Wide Web heavens above she was given a question - "Would YOU Have Published This Embarrassing John McCain Photo?" - and she screamed, "Hell, yes" and published it.

2008-09-23T20:31:00.001+03:00

In the Beginning Was the Word:

2008-09-20T00:35:00.011+03:00

An ode to a metre of my bookcase, and a thank you to my own personal divine being, the Lord of Words, the bringer of support and love and comfort and healing (amongst other things).

Nineteen eighty-four. A bright shiny morning. The Iliad:
In the land of heroes, Ulysses travels with Herodotus.

See the portable atheist, with a paperback bible (with apocrypha)
and the end of faith: this way for the gas, ladies and gentlemen.

The trouble with Islam today: rock’n’roll, the Lucifer effect,
the soccer war.
The making of Americans.
The Emperor, the Shah of Shahs.

These are letters from the Earth,
these are selected poems, selected poems,
these are the complete sonnets and poems,
this is a sorrow beyond dreams,
this is life, a user’s manual,
this is the unknown story.

Another day of life. Women as lovers:
perfume.
Lust.
Greed.

Stick out your tongue.
Better never to have been.
Play Captain Corelli’s mandolin.

And the darkness comprehended it not

2008-09-15T00:06:00.008+03:00

I gave him my phone number. I had to, really, circumstances left me little choice. I gave him my phone number and I knew it meant he could then call my home whenever it suited him, but I wasn’t worried, not really, only annoyed by the knowledge of the access it gave him.

I thought I was strong, I thought I was no longer afraid. I was wrong. Fear never leaves you once you have it. I spoke with him three times in as many days, and felt the way my words opened up a passageway for him to tread, to worm his way back into my brain and into my life, my words, words I said, which he could repeat and twist and turn and rape and turn into words I didn’t say.

I can feel the terror clenching my breath, I can feel the fear adrenalin tightening my muscles, stiffening my joints, locking my jaw into that position, the position of fear and defence. This from three phone calls, not all of them long, not at all. But by now, twelve years of recovery have fallen off, and I stand bone-naked again, and the mere sound of his voice, the intimidations in his tone, the insinuations in his undertones, are enough to send me down the vortex.

I didn’t have a phone line. I had it connected as a present, and I loved it, but now, after three calls in as many days, I know the sound of the phone ringing will hit me with an immediate pang of panic. He can get to my house, he can get to my life, he can get to me.

My friend taught me a monologue by Ntozake Shange, from her play For Coloured Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf. I will quote it here from memory, so forgive me if I get bits wrong –

”One thing I don’t need
is any more apologies.
I got sorry greeting me at my front door
you can keep yours.
I don’t know what to do with them:
they don’t open doors
or bring the sun back
they don’t make me happy
or get a morning paper
didn’t nobody stop using
my tears
to wash cars
cause of sorry.
I am simply tired of collecting
“I didn’t know I was so important to you”
I’m gonna give some away.
Can’t get to the clothes in my closet
for all the sorries.
I’m gonna put a sign upon the door
leave a message by the phone
“If you called to say you’re sorry, call someone else.
I don’t use them anymore.”
I’m gonna let
“sorry”
“didn’t mean to”
and
“how could I know about that?”
take a long walk
down a dark and musty street in Brooklyn.
I’m gonna do exactly what I want to
and I won’t be sorry for none of it.
Let sorry soothe your soul
I’m gonna soothe mine.

You were always inconsistent
first doing something
then being sorry
beating my heart to death
talking about you sorry
well.
I will not call.
I’m not gonna be nice.
I’m gonna raise my voice
and scream and holler
and break things
and race the engine
and I’ll tell all your secrets about yourself
to your face
and I’ll play my Oliver Lake records
loud
and I won’t be sorry for none of it.
I loved you
on purpose.
I was open
on purpose.
I still crave the intimacy and close talk.
And I’m not even sorry
about you being sorry
you can carry all the guilt and grime you want to
just don’t give it to me
I can’t use another sorry.

Next time
you should admit
you’re mean, trifling, low-down, and no count
straight out
instead of being sorry all the time
enjoy being yourself.”

I loved the monologue, I loved doing it, I loved it that my friend taught me it and helped me with it, and I felt I made it my own (yes, even though I’m white), but you know, I was wrong, because the ones I picked never, ever say they’re sorry. They aren't, either.

The Tales of Walkman. Next stop, Jerusalem

2008-09-08T22:03:00.000+03:00

I thought I’d open this all cleverly like and say “I must have forgotten Jerusalem, for verily my keyboard has dried to the top of my mouth”. Or something. But when I went to write it, it was clearly just painful.

Let’s just be upfront. I have a block. I have A Block as big as the Andes, as big as Antarctica, all covered over with ice, a block huge and remotely looming. In fact, dear Reader, I’m not even here, for I can’t actually open up a “new post” page – I can’t even look at my blog – so in reality I’m in Word, trying to trick myself into writing something which maybe I can copy-paste into a “new post” page without really looking and then it will be done. Shhh. Let’s keep it a secret, let’s not let me know. (Trouble is of course I wanted to insert pictures and video footage of Antarctica and all sorts of cleverness which I don’t know whether it can be done in Word, so I may have to give up on that. Or maybe I’ll come in later and stick it in, once it’s up. If it goes up. We shall see. Aren’t you excited? Aren’t I?)

It’s not as if I haven’t been meaning to write. Every now and then I’ve had thoughts, the precursors of a blog post coming up (these have been varied and have included things such as the discovery of the bottle-opener, which I got in exchange for a Sony Walkman in 1987, on a train through what was then known as the East Block. I have blogged about this exchange [insert link here] and spent an hour or more in an attempt to take a decent photo of the thing, on a particularly bad day [insert photo here]; a bee which made me think of Lemminkäinen’s mother [insert image here]; how a haircut gave me a premonition of a distant doom; how a book once ruined a Christmas for me [maybe insert link here?]; and, well, various things [insert collection of summer photos here]). But the question of why? has cropped up, too, and because it used to feel good doesn’t seem a good enough answer.

But, you know, here I am, all the same. Although I’m not, of course, as we know – I’m actually in Word. But still. Hello. And thank you and sorry to those who’ve left comments which remain unanswered. I shall get to you, soon, I shall, I promise.

Chapter One

2008-07-06T14:24:00.005+03:00

July and there is already less birdsong in the woods, the birds have coupled and reared their offspring into an uncharming adolescence of hopping around, not flightless but almost, sometimes landing in the mouth of a passing dog, leaving the dog dumbstruck at its own hunter abilities. July, less birdsong, it's the height of summer yet you know time has turned, you are moving away from it again, not toward it, you missed it again, you didn't catch redemption, and the knowledge churns up a terrible feeling of loss in you, and the worst is when you tell yourself, I missed it again, I missed redemption, redemption will never come, and the reply you hear yourself give is it would, if only you were - what? clever? talented? tuned-in? relaxed? meditative? worthy? - if only you were something enough to catch it. To have caught it.

They have ruined my little woods, they've cut down trees and turned up the forest floor and are creating yet another footpath through it. I can't fathom why, the wood was already enclosed by footpaths, the triangle formed by them could be walked briskly in fifteen minutes, and there were little paths through it anyway, and the footpath they are building seems the width of a country highway. I love paths, I love finding old paths in woods, paths that used to take people from somewhere they were to somewhere they needed to go, or wanted to go. You can see them in the forest floor, even when the undergrowth has returned there's an indentation, a particular look that you can recognise if you've seen it before.

None of these woods are a forest, of course, they hardly even merit the title "woods". Anyone read Günter Grass's The Rat? I read it a good few years ago, while still in Wales, when my children were small, or maybe I only had the one, I can't remember. I do remember liking it profoundly (and here I must confess I haven't read The Tin Drum, I haven't seen the film (fell asleep to it very recently, but that's no comment on the film really - I have a tendency to sleep to films), I didn't even see the theatre adaptation in Helsinki this spring which was highly praised and which I really did mean to see, the woman playing the lead was said to be astounding. So there's a hole in my well-readedness you could punch your fist through, but at least I'm honest about it), although when I looked it up online now, most reviewers called it, basically, a "boring jeremiad". Good word, jeremiad. Anyway - in The Rat, the characters from the Grimm fairy tales are organising some sort of effort to save the world because the forests are dying, and with the forests, the fairy tales will too, because if there are no forests big enough for a child to get lost in, the fairy tales will die.

I want a forest big enough to get lost in, but my current world doesn't have any, even in my countryside the forests are little patches in between agricultural land, and that is not the same, that is wilderness lost and tamed, I want it the other way round, if anything, I want the agricultural land as little side-remarks in the margins of the forest, nestling in the nook of a wood, comfortable and necessary yet clearly secondary to the uncultivated wilderness. My childhood summers were spent on an island in the Gulf of Finland, the forest went from shore to shore save the odd rocky outcrop which usually faces the open sea, and the fields were as I described them a sentence or so ago, patches between the wilderness, oats and potato, mostly, although from photographs taken from an aerial survey aeroplane in the 1930s you could tell the amount of cultivated land had been much greater then, people on the islands were fishing folk with self-sufficiency farms, and each patch of land flat enough to be ploughed had been taken into use. There was a tale from the war years of how the islanders heard someone speaking Russian in the woods, and there was panic, no men around, just the women and children and maybe some old folks, but nothing came of it, no-one knows if it was the Desantnik, the parachute troops, or if it was a case of nerves strung too high, for too long, which made someone hear things which weren't really there.

This post is called "Chapter One" because a friend I've known for a long time said just recently that I should write my autobiography. Bless him, but I hope this post shows conclusively why it isn't a possibility, I'm way too rambling. Anyhow, this post is dedicated to you, my dear friend The Elder. Petite pomme, as we say.

A Day in the Life, or how to make my piquant sauce To Die For

2008-07-04T17:22:00.007+03:00

Sometimes I'm struck by the various skills and abilities I have, seemingly quite independent of my conscious mind. Today I found my fingers delicately picking up and feeling tomatoes at the shop, knowing by gentle feeling whether they were just right or not, and taking pleasure in knowing and feeling it, my mind elsewhere, as it often is, but my body working cleverly, with experience and enjoyment.

Continue the success story with cooking. Take an oven dish big enough to hold your fillet of salmon. Squeeze into it the juice of a lemon - or like today, a lemon and a half, why not. Add enough runny honey, and sea salt, and ground mixed chillipepper spice. Take the bottle of Gewürztdaminer Mezzacorona out of the fridge (no, it didn't really have enough time to cool while you drank the mouthful of cider leftover from two weeks ago and smoked a ciggie on the balcony, and began preparing the marinade, but that just can't be helped now), open it, pour a glassful and tip it into the oven dish and another for yourself. Taste it and find it nice. Acknowledge the fact that, indeed, it did not have quite enough time to go cold. Mix the marinade ingredients in the oven dish with a spoon or similar. Place your salmon fillet, face down, skin-side up, into the marinade. Put the bally lot back into the fridge.

Take and chop up finely a red onion and enough garlic. Saute gently in olive oil until soft and lovely. Add some flour (oh - you will have boiled the kettle for a pint of fish stock. Shop-bought will do) but go easy on it - you don't want a thick squidgy sauce, you want it just right. Allow the flour to cook just a little and remove from heat. Stir in the stock - little by little is good, so you achieve a homogenous consistency each time before adding more stock. This will ensure the sauce is not lumpy. (And oh again - you will have heated your oven up to 200° C whilst diddling with the onions cetra). Once all the stock is added, bring to boil. Your oven will most likely have just heated up now, ready like a reliable actor in the wings, on cue, so do now take the salmon in its oven dish out of the fridge and, holding on to the salmon so as not to lose it, pour the lovely stingy sweet-sour piquant marinade into the sauce. Smear the skin side of the salmon with oil (if you have a cheapo less nice one bought e.g. by your mother, it will be good enough this time - it's only to easy the job of the washer-upper afterwards, as the skin isn't really worth eating in this dish), tip him over (face up, skin-side down) and pop him in the oven.

Take a break. Go and speak with your mother on the phone about your cousin's wife and the fact you both suspect she's either mad or has post-puertum exhaustia and compulsive disorders, while painting your toenails and smoking (the balcony is good for this - the day is as hot as these latitudes will allow). Once finished with both the phonecall and the toenails, pour yourself some more wine (it's even nicer now it's properly chilled), put the new potatoes you mean to boil in the sink with some cold water, and a pot of water for them, to boil. Drink some wine. Start writing a blog post. Go back and wash the potatoes so they, in their turn, are ready and waiting like good reliable actors cetra when their cue comes. Go back to drink more wine. Don't forget to stir and taste your lovely sauce every now and then. It is gorgeous, if I say so myself. Continue with your blog post and the wine. Have another cigarette.

In your near future, you foresee having to super-rapidly throw together your favourite salad - spinach, tomato, feta cheese, lightly-roasted pine nuts, olive oil and balsamic vinegar (curse the fact you forgot to buy olives, again, and worry over whether to use a bit of avocado or save it all till tomorrow when it would be properly soft), as well as eating, putting on that designer-label summer dress you bought second hand for a mere 12€ and have washed and ironed, but not worn, and maybe some make up and hair fiddling although maybe not, and hurrying off to hear your friends play their music and allow their new films to be viewed. Be aware that after the official programme has finished, the sweltering evening will most likely degenerate into drinking more wine and being all cultural and artsy.

Have another cigarette, add fresh dill to the To Die For sauce (leaves and stalks - use scissors, it's more fun) and to your drained new potatoes. Realise your blog post lacks all the wee details you wanted it to have - how your cooker and kitchen are freshly cleaned yesterday, how you put kitchen paper atop your drained potatoes (and the lid on tight - they cook to perfection in their own steam).

Don't forget the feeling of the tomatoes, though, that was a lovely find.

To counteract the myriad single magpies,

2008-06-28T20:45:00.013+03:00

we, meaning the dog and I, came across a patch of good luck, in the wasteland on a grassy verge.

She wanted to eat them, so we had to leave.

I'm doing e's

2008-06-13T22:15:00.011+03:00

(but only because Signs made me)

See - there,
there, where the yew tree bends,
the street ends,
there where the creek, the green,
the sweetness -

there we’ll never meet,
we’ll never be there,
never.
We’ll never remember
these trees, these streets,
never the green sweetness,
never the “remember, when we”,
we’ll never. Never. Yet
yes, there,
there where the streets the trees the sweetness the green -
there remember me.

Remember me?
Here, the desert weeps, bereft, endless.

Sever me.
(Keep me.)
Remember me.
(Delete me.)

I just spent half an hour online looking for it

2008-06-01T12:53:00.007+03:00

Do you remember, PG Tips used to have little cards inside the box, teabag cards? For a while they were Flags of the World, and there was a series of Mysteries, too (I remember at least two mysteries - there was the Bigfoot, and also an image of a medium spewing out ectoplasm in a ghostly shape), but the one I want to reminisce about belonged to a series of landscapes, I can't remember what the uniting factor amongst them was, if it just wasn't a Places of the World sort of thing. I had moved to London quite recently, let's say less than a year ago, and found a boyfriend and become a sort of a step-parent as well, as my boyfriend had a son who turned three in our first October together, and whom he was trying to see regularly and from whose mother he'd had a messy separation not that much before I met him. We collected the PG Tips teabag cards for his son, and he actually got quite good with knowing the flags of the world. I think we kept the flag stack at our house so he had something interesting to look through when he stayed with us, but I also had a little collection of the landscapes series which I gave to him. We were taking him back one night, to his mum, and in the car he sat at the back with me, his dad was driving, and we were talking about this and that, the little boy and I, and I have to say people hadn't really taken a great deal of trouble talking to the boy, my boyfriend included, and this should have served as a forewarning for me but it didn't, because youth is stupid and I was only twenty-one and alone in a strange country and a city too big for me. So the little boy looked through the stack of cards, there were maybe ten or so of them, I hadn't that many landscapes, and there were two of the same - a castle at sunset, somewhere, maybe Wales but more likely not (that would have been too much synchronicity), somewhere by the sea, the sky was pink and blue-hazy and the water reflected it although there were waves, and you could see the turret and the castle wall and there was a mist in the air. It was a beautiful if a little kitschy shot, the cards were small, remember, about half the size of a packet of ciggies, and he realised he had two of the same, and he wondered silently over this for a moment and then, I think without saying a word, he gave me the other one, and I intuited he wanted me to have it because he had decided to trust me and be my friend. Eight years later when he had become the half-brother of my two sons and I left his dad, I spoke with him on the phone once, once only, his dad put him on I think simply to hurt me and make me feel guilty and bad, and we spoke a few words, I said I had to leave your dad but you know I love you, don't you, and he said yes, yes he did, and that he loved me too.

I failed to keep in touch with him, I sent him a card and a trinket for his twenty-first birthday, from Hawai'i, ten years later - ten years! - but he didn't write back. It belongs to the category of "things I did really badly make a mess of", and I think I still have the teabag card somewhere, somewhere, it is certainly embedded in my memory, this card given to me half my life ago, by a small child who trusted me with his friendship and who will this autumn be the age I was when I became a mother, and I wish there was a technique to pull images off the brain and download them onto Macintosh computers, because I would like to put that picture here.

I wanted to pick you some lilies-of-the-valley, today

2008-06-01T11:45:00.001+03:00

Can't do it myself

2008-05-25T12:49:00.001+03:00

I like seeing old people on bicycles, the wind going through grey hair, their knees going up and down, and somewhere inside underneath alongside them I fancy I see the scab-kneed boy, the girl in plaits, hurtling towards the future, decades ago.

Incessantly snuffling about - a dogot update

2008-05-24T15:06:00.005+03:00

I love it that she takes me out walking at night (or very late evening, depending on the hours you keep) particularly now that it's not getting dark anymore (although, as I said, we're still getting stars, so it's nowhere near as light as it can - and will - get. The other night I checked my claim and at twenty-five minutes to midnight I could count three stars, and forty-five minutes later I could make out all of the Big Dipper, but it's a blue darkness, not a black one, and when you get away from the street lights you realise you can see perfectly well without them - better, even, or certainly better further. Darker than dusk, lighter than darkness). Of course I loved her taking me out on wintry nights as well, but that's right beside the point at the moment and seems to belong to a different life, because right now we plunge ourselves into the night of light darkness, together, and because it's late and there are few, if any, people about and I trust her, I will let her off the leash so she can explore the night. The smells of the kevätkesän yö, spring-summer night are heady in her nose, in both our noses, actually (and yes, we have words for the between-seasons times of the year - kevätkesä, syyskesä, syystalvi, kevättalvi. It's very useful). She will leap and run and roll on the grass a little, but what she loves most is following her nose, unravelling the spaghetti of scents which evidently wiggle along the ground, her chunky-ish bottom swinging amusingly from side to side as she trots along, all determined and purposeful, in concentric circles and spirals, with sudden twirls and turns and steps back, and all the while I hear her snifi-snifi-snifi-FHRHRFF, the latter being the huff of her outbreath with which, I fancy, she empties her nose of the scents she's gathered, to make space for more. She can go on like this forever, it seems, and all I can hear is her and the nightingales (there are at least three in the neighbourhood), because I am good at blocking out the drone-hum of the motorway a mile or so off, and it's anyway not all that busy at this hour, and I love her and am, like her, loving the night and its smells (although I prefer the bird cherry blossoms, the grass, the nettles, the fir trees, to the hares' and rabbits' tracks which she is so drawn to and I can't detect, and I'm so not letting on that I too wander around with a snifi-snifi-FHRHF nose-noise).

NMJ - this is for you

2008-05-22T19:34:00.003+03:00

(She'll know exactly why. And please try to ignore the fact I failed to polish the glass first.)

I'm saying this to myself, but you can read it too (translation mine)

2008-05-19T19:21:00.000+03:00

Nukkumaan käydessä ajattelen:
Huomenna minä lämmitän saunan,
pidän itseäni hyvänä,
kävelytän, uitan, pesen,
kutsun itseni iltateelle,
puhuttelen ystävällisesti ja ihaillen,
kehun: Sinä pieni urhea nainen,
minä luotan sinuun.

~ Eeva Kilpi

(As I'm going to bed I think:
Tomorrow, I'll heat up the sauna,
I'll treat myself kindly, I'll
take myself for a walk, a swim, I'll wash myself,
invite myself for evening tea,
I'll address myself fondly, with admiration,
I'll praise myself: You little, courageous woman,
I trust you.)

As they do, as one does (notes, observations)

2008-05-16T18:36:00.005+03:00

The nightingale does say jug-jug-jug, I seem to recall the Elizabethans put special emphasis on this,
and
smells come out more at night,
and
it's not really getting dark anymore, although you have to be in an unlit place to note this. Although we still get stars. And although there are times I am obviously grateful for the footpaths being lit, darkness is actually scarier when you're trying to keep out of it.

And
melancholia is more nuanced, and a bit like the sea. You can plunge or be plunged into it, swim and sink and drown in it, but depression - my depression, at any rate - is flat and grey and two-dimensional and doesn't feel like anything, which is why it is so terrifying. I hate it looming in my life.

And
meanwhile back in the real world,
children suffocate in the ruins of their schools, some of them the age of the tinies I teach and treasure, some of them the age of my own offspring, they'd already made it to the edge of young adulthood, were already in the hallway of life, hungrily peeking through the keyhole at The World (as the poet says). Several days it'll take some of them to die, their young bodies and sweet limbs crushed and broken,
and
bodies float downstream on the Irrawaddy, swollen bloated bellies upwards, greening, blackening, the sickly-sweetish reek of death heightened, no doubt, by the tropics (remember how the dead rats stank in a day in Hawai'i), flesh beginning to to fall off them in rotting chunks, people and buffalo in an agrarian harmony in death as in life (they come from upstream, the survivors say, they are not our villagers)

(and don't forget to mention the syringes you pick up at the playground, or the lesson about things to not touch you had to give them in a circle, using your demo case of needles and fake-blood-soaked wads of kitchen paper cetra)

I'm not going to pretend I know shit about it, but

2008-05-12T22:19:00.002+03:00

some of the loveliest people I've met in years, do.

Too much, I'd bet.

Some other people would do well to listen to them.

A Portrait of the Artist in Six Words, Courtesy of Dr But Why?

2008-05-06T13:22:00.009+03:00

Anna MR - A small number of large experiences.

"Well, once I'm dead, you'll be free", was her parting shot - that'll teach me to shut up

2008-04-29T17:12:00.002+03:00

I think it may just be mothers are straight from Satan's personal collection of people. On the sly, and thus doubly wicked and evil.

I've been thinking darkly about my maternal relationship whilst window-cleaning this weekend. I rather like window-cleaning. I do a reasonably good job too, rarely any stripes, although it is not often I am allowed to do it because My Mum usually announces out of the blue that she's done it already.

My Mum rang me up on Sunday morning asking whether I wanted to go to mökki (the summer cottage). No, I said, I can't really, because the dog has a runny tum again, I'll be cleaning windows instead. Oh no, you mustn't, she said. Wait till I've brought you my special cleaning thing with a long handle. You can't be climbing onto chairs to reach up, not on the tenth floor. Mum, I don't have to climb onto chairs, I can reach just fine without. No you can't, I always have to climb onto chairs. Yes well you have higher ceilings and windows and you are a lot shorter than I. Well, remember to use vinegar water. No, I have Windus. OH. I never use Windus. Well I have it so I'm going to use it, okay? Okay, okay. I'll call you later to make sure you haven't fallen out of the window.

I have known many people, often women, who will never get over a certain bitterness towards their mums. I am pleased to report I do not feel it - but there are times I feel there could be reasonable grounds for it.

And I'll surely never be grown up.

Waxing lyrical

2008-04-18T22:33:00.006+03:00

There are times when I bore myself to tears and a hateful rage with my me-ness. To tears. Okay. Forcing myself to see five lovely things:
The buds.
The (new) leaves of this year's weeds.
The sunset pink reflecting in the bog.
The frogs fucking in the puddles in their dozens.
Seagulls, fishing, luminous in the dusk.

Brittle heart of leaden glass, don't break.

God how I bore myself.

First they break your body, then they break your heart

2008-04-15T19:55:00.004+03:00

Shell-shocked by life, currently, how painful and downright difficult and unmanageable it all can be, and how poorly one seems to manage the things that matter, and also wondering how much blame is it reasonable to apportion oneself, and how much of it all is just in the luck of the draw, chance, whatever.

I'm talking about children, of course, one's offspring, how they grow and change and become people in their own right, if you like, and sometimes it is not all a bed of roses, no. It may turn out so one can't say oh yas, my son, you know, he studies and plays football and the violin, or something, sometimes some of us have to say well you know, I am going to have to turn him to professionals, because what I have been able to do is now done, for better and worse, surely there are things that could still be done, avenues as yet unexplored blah, but as it is, I - me - I cannot do it, because my sleeve (as they say in Finnish) is empty, what I - me - could do has been done, and this is where it's got us.

(I'm here reminded of the Hollywood flick of some years ago, As Good as It Gets, it was really quite a good flick, I thought, and Jack Nicholson's character says something like "Yes well life is all yachts and sandwiches for some people but we aren't those people". Wish I could remember exactly how that line went. I bet I'll go and look for it on YouTube before I know it, and then I'll miss sauna because nipping into YouTube always seems to take hours of my life. But yes. Yachts and sandwiches and studies and interests and achievements and stuff it may be, only we aren't those people.)

I wish I could remember (something else that's coming up in my mind via some associative process) what book it was in and by whom, but there was a thing I read (years ago) where the writer posed a question, a "what if" - what if life moved backwards, and we disappeared, in the end, into the mental abyss of infancy and ultimately, back into the womb, would the final separation, the final parting, the final good-bye to those we love be any less painful. I am thinking about that now, playing with it in my mind (never really known whether I thought very highly of this particular "what if", but it has stuck on the mind, at least the skeletal framework of it), in a "yes, just think, we would live backwards, we'd come together from the various dust particles and ashes and what not, to, to - what is the opposite of the verb "to age"? Enyoungen? To enyoungen and enyoungen until finally we'd disappear up our mothers' ~~birth canals~~ no, better not write that, someone is bound to feel quite sick reading it, and then slowly disintegrate into cells which would become particles of her body, and all told it doesn't sound much different from the disintegration and disappearance into the ground.

The magpies have been coming in ones and twos so far this spring. Fine-looking birds they are, actually, magpies, shiny and handsome and graphically stylish. I wouldn't mind having one, and then I'd know where Sorrow would be, it would be waiting for me at home.

This Post Is About Orgasms, Take Two, aka The Second Coming. The Anniversary Edition, Including the Final and Ultimate Truth on the Matter at Hand.

2008-04-09T20:03:00.009+03:00

Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra
trafitto da un raggio di sole:
ed è subito sera.

(Salvatore Quasimodo)

(The author of this blog would like to thank all her siblings-and-partners-in-crime, who came and exposed themselves, so beautiful, so naked, so poignant, so funny, so brilliant. Thank you. You made my earth move, you changed my life.

She would also like to point out that the idea for an anniversary post was put into her head by someone else. Bloody poets.)