Sunshine, sanding and demon fiddlers

Yes, you did read that right.  Sunshine.  We actually had a sunny weekend.  Bang on time for the start of the school holidays, the summer has arrived.

Friday evening was passed grouting and sanding and gloss-painting (& eating curry) with TCI and her lovely (albeit knackered) fella G.  They’re both getting seriously frazzled after living in a house under renovation for well over two months.  The place is still filthy and cluttered; but it is completely transformed from the last time I saw it.  It is going to be lovely, eventually.  In fact “eventually” is almost upon them (though a good cleaning session would make this more obvious).  I am terribly envious; I would love to be renovating my own place >sigh< for me to live in >sighs again< and love and make my own >sniff< and do my best Candide thing in the garden...  Anyway, I enjoy grouting and sanding, and I hope I was some small help, for a few hours.  The curry was good, too.

Saturday was a normal Saturday.  Grocery shopping, washing-machine-running, vacuum-ing, etc.  Plus the inevitable writing, afternoon and early evening, assisted by a wee drop of rather pleasant Islay single malt; and to finish the day off, Tom Hiddleston as Henry V on the tele, looking beautiful and tormented and very muddy, speaking those great speeches of patriotism and honour as if he’d never heard a word of them before and had absolutely no idea that they are, well, kind-of well-known...   It's a lovely magic act; give a good actor a cliché and watch it disappear.

Sunday was the Ealing Global Music Festival.  Festivalette, perhaps, as it’s only one afternoon and evening.  The sun shone all day, and I wore a gypsy top and got sunburnt shoulders (& a surprisingly large number of men looked down my cleavage – hurrah, the old bazzoom still has its mojo!)...  Drank too much cider, danced a lot, ate festival-type food, and listened to good music: Romany pop, Peruvian rock, latin funk, straightforward reggae, lovely country & western (the mellow rocky end of C&W, not the weepy-waily end) from Roosevelt Bandwagon, and total bananas they-made-my-feet-dance-boss-honest mayhem from The Destroyers (think klezmer-inflected lovechild of Bellowhead and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds). 

Best act of the day, though, was the first one up; The Long Notes.  It was rough on them; a group this good shouldn’t be having to play the warm-up to anyone, and there they were, giving their considerable all to a half-empty marquee where no-one had yet had enough to drink to get up and dance (not even me, and I dance easy).  Cracking good stuff; Scottish/Irish folk fusion played with passion and stunning musicianship – squeezebox, rhythm guitar, fiery-fingered banjo and one of the best fiddlers I’ve heard in years...    The three blokes were even cute!  Bloody lovely, and a band I will watch out for in future...  If they play anywhere near you, go along and revel in sheer tradtastic genius. 

And in between acts, sitting on the damp grass, drinking cider in the sun, I wrote.  And on the bus home at 11.00pm, I wrote; and sitting up in bed at midnight, trying to finish the scene before I keeled over with tiredness.  To my great delight, the story seems to have gotten enough headway now that the Muse can go off and play fantasy games about actors with nice behinds, and leave me to get on with the work.  This is a Very Satisfying Feeling.  When the story is only going because the Muse is driving its car, I know that the engine may fail at any time.  This engine seems to have its own firepower by now. 

So all in all it was a good weekend, but as happens sometimes I am more tired after my R&R than before it.

A good weekend

On Friday we bade goodbye to my line manager Curlywoman; blast. I liked Curlywoman and she was a good boss, but she’s got a “dream job” selling hotel bookings - her idea of a dream job, not mine! – and in the end you can’t blame someone for pursuing their dream job. We all had a good evening at The Botanist, one of the local pubs, and I made the most of feeling okay again after my gyppy tum of earlier in the week. Many jokes were told, a fair number of glasses of wine were drunk, a lot of nachos and chips were eaten, poems were read, I bought a drink for someone I barely know because I thought she looked sad (only to find she looked sad because she was Very Very Drunk and feeling ill) and one of the Press Office suddenly cornered me with a barrage of questions about why-are-you-still-single-Imogen, to which I couldn’t give a satisfactory answer, largely because I don’t have one.

Got home at midnight, slightly tipsy despite having been sensible and had plenty of fruit juice as well as nice Aussie plonk. Dan v amused – “I’ve never seen you drunk before!” – I think he had a picture of me as a sober, wholefood-eating, sketchbook-wielding yoghurt-weaving type who never lets her hair down even a teensy bit...

Saturday – posted a birthday present, sent “Gabriel Yeats” off to the third agent on my list, fixed a problem with my rent payments, bought groceries, ran the washing machine, tidied and weeded in the garden, typed up some more of “Ramundi’s Sisters”, made cauliflower cheese, and watched a lovely sentimental movie.

Sunday – sorted out a lot of stuff, cleaned and tidied my bedside cabinet and my desk, typed up a lot more of “Ramundi’s Sisters” and dealt with a tricky revision, made braised quorn with lemon and herbs, and watched the last part of “Lark Rise to Candleford” (largely to report on it to my mum, who was out and whose video is out of action) and the latest episode of “Being Human”; then to wind down after that I finished another of the "back burner" project summaries, and started yet another. It took a while to wind down, truth to tell, as “Being Human” was a cracking good episode, funny and touching and thoroughly scary. When they get the balance right, they have a lovely little series there...

Typing and revising doesn’t leave anything concrete behind, the way working in the garden does, but it is very satisfying to see the pile of dog-eared manuscript getting smaller, and the size of the typed file getting bigger. I’ve got to the last section of “Ramundi’s Sisters”, I’ve reached 1927, and I’m just five scenes away from the end of the story.

Then I’ll need to re-read the whole thing, clean up typos I’ve missed, decide how much further revision it needs, and finally try sending it to the first agent I sent “Gabriel Yeats” to, since she did say that if I had anything more mainstream she’d like to see it. I’d be a fool if I passed up on an offer like that; as a tyro writer, I’m incredibly lucky to have that chance of further attention.

“Ramundi’s Sisters” is a different kettle of fish from “Gabriel Yeats” in many ways. I guess it is still magical realism, though; but it is at the end of the spectrum that has relatively little magic proportional to realism – “Gabriel Yeats” is right at the magic end, and possibly a little off it - the deep end, that is - as well. The other major thing they have in common is that they are both very romantic. It’s perhaps an embarrassing admission, but clearly I still Believe In Love.

Perhaps an even more embarrassing admission today. This Feb 14th I have had, for the twelfth year in a row, no Valentine cards. The frenzied month-long promotion of Valentine’s Day does get a little grating when one is long-term single; the only good thing about it was seeing the flower stalls I pass on my way into work, all packed with extra flowers today.

Finally, and I know this is a bit of an odd segue, but here’s Mr Orchid Nursery himself, telling you how to trim and repot your Phalaenopsis. A few nice shots of the interior of the Orchid Nursery (& a lot of footage of Mr O. Nursery’s hands – perfectly nice hands, I hasten to add, but the orchids are better).

Five o'clock approaches...

...and I start to feel more human.

Not fully human, as yet - it'll take a little shift in the hormonal levels to do that - but more like a sane adult who's had a bafflingly rough week, and less like The Scream personified (I can only find it with Homer, sadly, not Lisa).

And all gloomy thoughts aside, I'm quite sure I can fit in a baking session and some writing, and possibly a trip to the Wetland Centre. Don't know if I can rustle up a party tonight, working from scratch, with no guests and no budget, though... But ah, I have a bottle of cheap Sauvignon Blanc in the bottom of the wardrobe, so all is not lost. I will sit in the wardrobe and drink my sorrows dry.