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Please, mother of life, let it rain.
Susannah came back into the office after her lunch break, announcing “Hey, dragonflies rock!” – she’s been eating by the waterlily pool outside the Jodrell Laboratory and topping up her tan. Me, I cowered indoors all through my break, avoiding the sudden, sweltering heat. It’s too darned hot for me. I’ve taken to wearing my loosest and most floaty clothes, which today means a floppy pink gingham dress that makes me look pregnant and shows off my less than perfectly toned arms. I’ve just been in the ladies’, running cold water over my wrists and the backs of my hands. I’m befuddled enough by the temperature and the mugginess that I got confused by the taps, which admittedly are counter-intuitive – I’ve only been using them for a year, after all – and couldn’t turn the water off at all for a messy, wet, panicked moment.
I read the Geek in The Gambia's accounts of the heat there and know I couldn’t handle that, not unless the only other option were instant termination. Heat and humidity combined really sap me; they wipe up my energy and spit me out like a dead fly. Maybe I'll never see a real rainforest.
To crown it all, it’s turned grey; I don’t even have the beauty of dry, golden-baked Kew Green in the sunshine to look at. It looks as if it’s going to rain; please, goddess, lady of the west, guardian of water, autumn and evening, let it rain.
It rained yesterday – I was out in the garden, transplanting petunias and portulacas into the last of the pots, sweating and filthy in shorts and an ancient suntop, when suddenly there was a little murmur of a breeze, and as I straightened up thinking “That’s often the preamble of rain”, the first drops began to fall. Then more drops. And more. For a good five minutes it went on in this vein, with single huge drops falling one by one, as if the gods were flicking rain at me from their fingers instead of pouring it out wholesale. Each drop struck with a distinct sound – ping if it hit the barbecue, slap if it hit the table, bong if it hit the roof of next door’s shed, a dusty pflutt on the paving, plip if it hit a leaf. I went on working, and the raindrops hit me, too (I also go plip, which is interesting – does this mean I am a plant at heart?). Each drop was cold, blissfully cold; and on striking, each one spread over my skin with a trickly splatter. It was like being licked on the run by invisible, airbourne, slobbery elf dogs.
I came to the last of the pots, a twelve-inch green-glazed ceramic job, and upended it to chuck out the mass of old dead leaves accumulated inside, and got a bizarre shock. It was full of cutlery. Spoons – about fifteen spoons of different sizes and designs – four butter knives (who uses butter knives? - no surprise that no-one missed them), a pair of nutcrackers that look as though something tried to eat them, and a bizarre gadget shaped like a pair of lobster claws, which I think is a fancy beer-bottle opener. The spoons are mostly corroded 1940s and ‘50s EPNS of varying elegance (or lack thereof) though a few are stainless steel. One spoon says “Potosi Silver” proudly on the back – though as it is probably the worst corroded of the lot I am left dubious as to what kind of "Silver" this is. I’ve cleaned and disinfected the stainless steel, as we are short of spoons, but I doubt if much can be done to save the electroplate. But why? – why?!? It was perfectly good cutlery once – why hide it in a flowerpot? People are so very odd sometimes.
Then it began to rain in earnest, and even I was driven indoors, though I held out until I was good and wet. Oh to be in England, now that summer’s here…
Monday, 29 June 2009
Friday, 26 June 2009
Odd echoes and reminders, and dream-casts, and day-dreams...
I've just been given a free smoothie - apparently Innocent Smoothies are trying to smarm up to Kew, or Kew is trying to smarm up to them (it wasn't clear which from the cheerful colleague who brought them round). It's Mango and Passion Fruit and is cold and delicious. But the taste conjures all sorts of odd memories, running in loops and swirls through my mind, their many different colours and nuances twining like oil-paint on water, floating over one another, blending into queer new combinations...
The tang of passion fruit takes me back with enormous intensity to a winter holiday in Madeira a few years ago. I had been quite unwell the preceding summer and autumn and was awaiting an operation; I got tired very easily, slept to all hours and did very little except stroll through the beautiful streets of Funchal, sit in the sun, and eat too much (Madeiran cooking was uniformly superb, even in quite touristy places). I became hooked on freshly-pressed passion-fruit purée and probably drank several glasses a day, and also on the gorgeous pudim de maracuja, something like passion-fruit blancmange only delicious in a way that the term 'blancmange' would seem to render pretty unlikely, which my favourite rather scruffy neighbourhood restaurant, the "Tangerina", served. Now the sweet yet sour flavour always takes me straight back to Funchal, sitting on the pebble-mosaic'ed terrace of a café in the cathedral square, shaded by huge acacias.
The taste of mango, on the other hand, brings me back to making my own smoothies, two years ago, and that is a weirdly but acutely painful memory, for all sorts of reasons I am not proud of or happy about; reasons, in fact, that I probably shouldn't be writing about here. When something you have been very, very happy about goes belly-up in a really unpleasant and irretrievable way, it is an altogether different kind of sweet-yet-sour experience looking back on it - as in, it was (or seemed to be) so good, and then it All Went Wrong. And two years later the taste of mango conjures all the delight and excitement, and all the grief and loss and the pain of rejection.
The colours and blurs that that memory conjures are too complex, and too self-indulgently unhappy, to write about, even obliquely; even now.
Let's put it aside, then, since it is still too raw to contemplate. One has the right to make one's way through any grieving process at one's own pace and in one's own way, after all. Let's think about beauty again: Today's number one beautiful sight was a single orange-yellow flower petal, slightly dried and creased, swinging from a thread of spider silk beneath a tree. It looked like a fairy, for a moment, dancing before me in mid-air as I came up the path.
One other thing; I have a bad habit of playing "Dream Cast My Novel" - do all tyro writers do this, I wonder? Characters come to me in a very visual way, and there is a certain mad fun in trying subsequantly to spot actors who have, if not literally the right looks, then something of the right quality, so that one can picture them conveying the character as a person rather than a performance of a person. So I have a mental list of actors who'd be good as my protagonist Simon, actors who'd be good as Anne, actors who'd be good as Gabriel Yeats and actors who'd be good as Rose. Only one name on the latter list, actually, that of the wonderfully-named Honeysuckle Weeks, who is so nearly perfect-for-Rose as to be slightly uncanny.
Anyway, last night I was tired and sleepy and I slummocked in front of the tele, channel-hopping (we have freeview - yay, more than five channels, at last channel-hopping really means exactly that). I found myself watching a show called "The Mentalist" - rather good in the way of US tele series with lightweight content skilfully done, and better actors than the material needs giving it backbone and humanity and a powerful illusion of substance. The leading man, an Australian called Simon Baker, is almost indecently good-looking, and manages to convey a mixture of insoucience and bottled-up tension that is oddly powerful. He's not tall enough, his eyes are blue not grey, and he's an Aussie, but he'd be a great Gabriel Yeats, because he is seriously handsome and can do both charm and inwardness.
My Dream Cast list gets slowly but surely more ambitious!
Simon Cenarth: William Houston. Or, at a pinch, Damian Lewis, another very fine ginger British actor of about the right age.
Anne Hope: Naomi Watts, provided she would dye her hair for it (I said I was ambitious). Or, if only time travel were possible, the young Eleanor Bron.
Gabriel Yeats: JJ Feild, or Simon Baker, or Tom Hiddlestone.
Rose Leland: Honeysuckle Weeks.
What one does about the casting of Felix Angus or Thomas Rosenau I don't know. Fun with CGI, anyone?
well, a girl can dream...
The tang of passion fruit takes me back with enormous intensity to a winter holiday in Madeira a few years ago. I had been quite unwell the preceding summer and autumn and was awaiting an operation; I got tired very easily, slept to all hours and did very little except stroll through the beautiful streets of Funchal, sit in the sun, and eat too much (Madeiran cooking was uniformly superb, even in quite touristy places). I became hooked on freshly-pressed passion-fruit purée and probably drank several glasses a day, and also on the gorgeous pudim de maracuja, something like passion-fruit blancmange only delicious in a way that the term 'blancmange' would seem to render pretty unlikely, which my favourite rather scruffy neighbourhood restaurant, the "Tangerina", served. Now the sweet yet sour flavour always takes me straight back to Funchal, sitting on the pebble-mosaic'ed terrace of a café in the cathedral square, shaded by huge acacias.
The taste of mango, on the other hand, brings me back to making my own smoothies, two years ago, and that is a weirdly but acutely painful memory, for all sorts of reasons I am not proud of or happy about; reasons, in fact, that I probably shouldn't be writing about here. When something you have been very, very happy about goes belly-up in a really unpleasant and irretrievable way, it is an altogether different kind of sweet-yet-sour experience looking back on it - as in, it was (or seemed to be) so good, and then it All Went Wrong. And two years later the taste of mango conjures all the delight and excitement, and all the grief and loss and the pain of rejection.
The colours and blurs that that memory conjures are too complex, and too self-indulgently unhappy, to write about, even obliquely; even now.
Let's put it aside, then, since it is still too raw to contemplate. One has the right to make one's way through any grieving process at one's own pace and in one's own way, after all. Let's think about beauty again: Today's number one beautiful sight was a single orange-yellow flower petal, slightly dried and creased, swinging from a thread of spider silk beneath a tree. It looked like a fairy, for a moment, dancing before me in mid-air as I came up the path.
One other thing; I have a bad habit of playing "Dream Cast My Novel" - do all tyro writers do this, I wonder? Characters come to me in a very visual way, and there is a certain mad fun in trying subsequantly to spot actors who have, if not literally the right looks, then something of the right quality, so that one can picture them conveying the character as a person rather than a performance of a person. So I have a mental list of actors who'd be good as my protagonist Simon, actors who'd be good as Anne, actors who'd be good as Gabriel Yeats and actors who'd be good as Rose. Only one name on the latter list, actually, that of the wonderfully-named Honeysuckle Weeks, who is so nearly perfect-for-Rose as to be slightly uncanny.
Anyway, last night I was tired and sleepy and I slummocked in front of the tele, channel-hopping (we have freeview - yay, more than five channels, at last channel-hopping really means exactly that). I found myself watching a show called "The Mentalist" - rather good in the way of US tele series with lightweight content skilfully done, and better actors than the material needs giving it backbone and humanity and a powerful illusion of substance. The leading man, an Australian called Simon Baker, is almost indecently good-looking, and manages to convey a mixture of insoucience and bottled-up tension that is oddly powerful. He's not tall enough, his eyes are blue not grey, and he's an Aussie, but he'd be a great Gabriel Yeats, because he is seriously handsome and can do both charm and inwardness.
My Dream Cast list gets slowly but surely more ambitious!
Simon Cenarth: William Houston. Or, at a pinch, Damian Lewis, another very fine ginger British actor of about the right age.
Anne Hope: Naomi Watts, provided she would dye her hair for it (I said I was ambitious). Or, if only time travel were possible, the young Eleanor Bron.
Gabriel Yeats: JJ Feild, or Simon Baker, or Tom Hiddlestone.
Rose Leland: Honeysuckle Weeks.
What one does about the casting of Felix Angus or Thomas Rosenau I don't know. Fun with CGI, anyone?
well, a girl can dream...
Thursday, 25 June 2009
Beauty...
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This is what my eyes have been beholding today.
1) The keyboard of my computer at work; beautiful because extremely useful and well-suited to the work it is meant to do.
2) The view of Kew Green out of the window - dry, golden grass, soft green cushion-y linden trees, and sunlight. Earlier there were kids playing cricket. Now a group of young blokes are booting a ball around. One of them is in full team colours for some football team or other, complete with player's name (unreadable at this distance) on his back. One has stripped down to a pair of chopped-off shorts - he has a fine physique and is laughing at something as I write.
3) A blackbird sitting & singing on the parapet of the white stone portico in front of the office.
4) My new ring - I bought it a few weeks back in one of those mad ethnic-and-odd-stuff shops where if you want a flowervase shaped like a seashell, red and black rag rugs, and a doorcurtain in six different shades of luminous plastic beads, you'll be very happy indeed. The ring is made of little cut-glass crystal petals, wired together into a flower shape - lilac, sky blue, red, rose pink,a rather faint green and bright yellow. In the centre, the "boss of stamens" is a single sparkly clear glass crystal. It's unusually girly for me but it charmed me when I saw it and it still does now.
5) The ox-eye daisies outside the rear door of the office, and the wonderful array of delicate grass-seed heads in the patch of uncut lawn, now involuntary hay-meadow, where the daisies have grown up and flowered.
6) My little cut-out figure of Rimmer (from "Red Dwarf"), which still manages to be both rather sweet and terribly funny at the same time.
And many more, too many to count but blessings all.
I've been tired most of the day; my evening out with K. turned out to be as I'd expected. She is pretty cut-up about losing her aunt and her grandfather, but at least with regard to the break-up has now moved on from the stage where one cries a lot and says "N.'s left me, how can I go on?" to the stage where one says "N. is a knob!". From my own past experience, i think this is healthy, and a necessary stage in the recovery process. And anyway, N. must be a knob, to treat K. like this.
1) The keyboard of my computer at work; beautiful because extremely useful and well-suited to the work it is meant to do.
2) The view of Kew Green out of the window - dry, golden grass, soft green cushion-y linden trees, and sunlight. Earlier there were kids playing cricket. Now a group of young blokes are booting a ball around. One of them is in full team colours for some football team or other, complete with player's name (unreadable at this distance) on his back. One has stripped down to a pair of chopped-off shorts - he has a fine physique and is laughing at something as I write.
3) A blackbird sitting & singing on the parapet of the white stone portico in front of the office.
4) My new ring - I bought it a few weeks back in one of those mad ethnic-and-odd-stuff shops where if you want a flowervase shaped like a seashell, red and black rag rugs, and a doorcurtain in six different shades of luminous plastic beads, you'll be very happy indeed. The ring is made of little cut-glass crystal petals, wired together into a flower shape - lilac, sky blue, red, rose pink,a rather faint green and bright yellow. In the centre, the "boss of stamens" is a single sparkly clear glass crystal. It's unusually girly for me but it charmed me when I saw it and it still does now.
5) The ox-eye daisies outside the rear door of the office, and the wonderful array of delicate grass-seed heads in the patch of uncut lawn, now involuntary hay-meadow, where the daisies have grown up and flowered.
6) My little cut-out figure of Rimmer (from "Red Dwarf"), which still manages to be both rather sweet and terribly funny at the same time.
And many more, too many to count but blessings all.
I've been tired most of the day; my evening out with K. turned out to be as I'd expected. She is pretty cut-up about losing her aunt and her grandfather, but at least with regard to the break-up has now moved on from the stage where one cries a lot and says "N.'s left me, how can I go on?" to the stage where one says "N. is a knob!". From my own past experience, i think this is healthy, and a necessary stage in the recovery process. And anyway, N. must be a knob, to treat K. like this.
Wednesday, 24 June 2009
Things going wrong...
or, one of those weeks.
One of my colleagues has, um, well, let's just say that out of the blue she's lost the plot rather, and is now off on long-term sick leave. It would be unprofessional to say more. But it means that a department that was already short-staffed is now trying to distribute another person's workload amongst the staff, and as the saying goes, a quart into a pint pot won't go. Very depressing.
Then, I've just learned that my favourite baritone has pulled out of "Il Barbiere di Seviglia" at the ROH under doctor's orders, needing total rest. I didn't have a ticket (it was that or "Ondine", and I really wanted to see "Ondine", so I jumped that way and not for the Rossini) but those I know who did mostly had tickets principally to see Mr K. in action, and are pretty pee'd off. Myself, I'm just concerned that he's been pushing himself too hard, silly bloke.
Luckily I no longer live near him and his family, so I'm spared any temptation to peer over their front hedge as I go by (& that is a very good thing!!). I used to live a few streets away, and I'm afraid that sometimes I did peer, like a nosy kid; and then sometimes I would pass him on his way to the shops or the gym, almost invariably looking worn-out and flat... He's one of those performers who put 110% into everything, and rush from Munich on a Tuesday to Manchester on a Wednesday, and then back to Munich, and then go straight into rehearsals somewhere in the US without even time to get over the jet-lag. When someone drives themself that hard they have to stop occasionally, or things start to snap. Having just seen someone flip, I don't like to think of someone I really admire going that way.
Now tonight I'm having a drink with a friend who's just had two members of her family die and a relationship break up within a month. She's had some emotional health problems in the past and is sounding terribly stressed, though as yet still rational - aware, if you like, that she's in a bad way, whereas when you are really up the creek you don't know it at all... But I imagine she will really, really need to talk; so I'm expecting a heavy evening.
You know, things like this remind me of how much I am grateful for - my good health (it has not always been thus, so I know what it is to be without), the blessed fact that none of my family have popped it recently, and even at times the fact of being single, since at least that spares me the misery of being ditched.
One of my colleagues has, um, well, let's just say that out of the blue she's lost the plot rather, and is now off on long-term sick leave. It would be unprofessional to say more. But it means that a department that was already short-staffed is now trying to distribute another person's workload amongst the staff, and as the saying goes, a quart into a pint pot won't go. Very depressing.
Then, I've just learned that my favourite baritone has pulled out of "Il Barbiere di Seviglia" at the ROH under doctor's orders, needing total rest. I didn't have a ticket (it was that or "Ondine", and I really wanted to see "Ondine", so I jumped that way and not for the Rossini) but those I know who did mostly had tickets principally to see Mr K. in action, and are pretty pee'd off. Myself, I'm just concerned that he's been pushing himself too hard, silly bloke.
Luckily I no longer live near him and his family, so I'm spared any temptation to peer over their front hedge as I go by (& that is a very good thing!!). I used to live a few streets away, and I'm afraid that sometimes I did peer, like a nosy kid; and then sometimes I would pass him on his way to the shops or the gym, almost invariably looking worn-out and flat... He's one of those performers who put 110% into everything, and rush from Munich on a Tuesday to Manchester on a Wednesday, and then back to Munich, and then go straight into rehearsals somewhere in the US without even time to get over the jet-lag. When someone drives themself that hard they have to stop occasionally, or things start to snap. Having just seen someone flip, I don't like to think of someone I really admire going that way.
Now tonight I'm having a drink with a friend who's just had two members of her family die and a relationship break up within a month. She's had some emotional health problems in the past and is sounding terribly stressed, though as yet still rational - aware, if you like, that she's in a bad way, whereas when you are really up the creek you don't know it at all... But I imagine she will really, really need to talk; so I'm expecting a heavy evening.
You know, things like this remind me of how much I am grateful for - my good health (it has not always been thus, so I know what it is to be without), the blessed fact that none of my family have popped it recently, and even at times the fact of being single, since at least that spares me the misery of being ditched.
Tuesday, 23 June 2009
First you think you're there...
... then you realise you're not. It isn't finished; there's more work to be done. You want to yell. You want to cry. But then you do the only thing you can - you put your shoulder back to the wheel, and move things on a wee bit more.
I was reading something supposedly set in the Middle Ages; suddenly one of the characters said "You snuck up on me", and I thought "Ouch! Did they really say that in the fourteenth century?". It set me to thinking, though, about how easy it is to have fictional characters talking, or thinking, or acting, out of period. It's something I've worked hard to achieve in "GY", trying to make Simon, Anne and Gabriel credible as people of their respective centuries. Simon may seem a bit more modern, but I hope untidily so, since I was careful to make him totally non-PC in his terms of reference. He's partly based on my maternal grandfather, who was an autodidact and a socialist, and pretty liberal for his time, yet happily used terms and phrases that would make the average good lefty today scream in horror. He certainly wasn't a racist or a sexist - by the standards of his time. He made sure that none of his family ever used the word "nigger" because he knew it was offensive and insulting; but he used "negro", which nowadays is equally unacceptable, all his life, as to him it was a neutral term. His view of homosexuality was "I can't say I like it but I suppose a man can't help it if he's born that way", which was extraordinarily liberal for his generation; yet he used terms like "poof" and "queer" quite happily. He championed his daughter's equal right to a good education and a good career, yet still called women "ladies" and opened doors for them and offered them his seat on the bus. He wasn't ginger, although Simon is, but he did play the fiddle, and he was one of the hardest-working, most honourable and stalwart people I have ever known.
Anyway, I sat there on my bed trying again to run through the "period indicators" I've used, and wondering if I've got them right, and suddenly thought of something I had never realised. Because Anne and Simon are going to end up as a couple I have done my best to give them similar values; but they are people of different periods - Simon is a man of the early twentieth century, Anne is born in 1782. I don't think it is out of period for her to be rather wilful and determined, as I am sure that in every era there have been people who chafed against the constrictions of their society, and thought "outside the box". But the basic foundation upon which her view of the world is built would be different from Simon's. Specifically, it doesn't make sense, in the context of her times, to have her attempts to help Mrs Viner be prompted solely by a mixture of professionalism and humanistic fellow-feeling. Compassion, to a woman born in the late eighteenth century, would be a religious, not a secular, virtue. Anne, at least when we first meet her, has to be a christian.
This is going to be a bit tricky, as I'm not one, and, too, it's hard to put myself mentally back past the Victorians, with their deep and public piety, ostentatious religiosity and occasional horrible double standards, to try and imagine what might have been the religious world view of a middle-class, rather free-thinking Georgian bluestocking. But I set-to last night and started to make the necessary tweaks. I think tweaks are all that are needed; I'm not going completely to rewrite the character. I'm too fond of Anne to effect a major transformation, and anyway, I don't think one is needed - she is already thoroughly christian (in the best sense, that is, as in moral, kind, considerate) in her actions, she just never speaks of it or shows it as a conscious motivation. That's what I have to tweak.
The funny thing was, I immediately spotted three typos I'd missed on each previous re-reading, and discovered that the pagination goes haywire at one point. So it was definitely for the best that I had opened the text up again.
I was reading something supposedly set in the Middle Ages; suddenly one of the characters said "You snuck up on me", and I thought "Ouch! Did they really say that in the fourteenth century?". It set me to thinking, though, about how easy it is to have fictional characters talking, or thinking, or acting, out of period. It's something I've worked hard to achieve in "GY", trying to make Simon, Anne and Gabriel credible as people of their respective centuries. Simon may seem a bit more modern, but I hope untidily so, since I was careful to make him totally non-PC in his terms of reference. He's partly based on my maternal grandfather, who was an autodidact and a socialist, and pretty liberal for his time, yet happily used terms and phrases that would make the average good lefty today scream in horror. He certainly wasn't a racist or a sexist - by the standards of his time. He made sure that none of his family ever used the word "nigger" because he knew it was offensive and insulting; but he used "negro", which nowadays is equally unacceptable, all his life, as to him it was a neutral term. His view of homosexuality was "I can't say I like it but I suppose a man can't help it if he's born that way", which was extraordinarily liberal for his generation; yet he used terms like "poof" and "queer" quite happily. He championed his daughter's equal right to a good education and a good career, yet still called women "ladies" and opened doors for them and offered them his seat on the bus. He wasn't ginger, although Simon is, but he did play the fiddle, and he was one of the hardest-working, most honourable and stalwart people I have ever known.
Anyway, I sat there on my bed trying again to run through the "period indicators" I've used, and wondering if I've got them right, and suddenly thought of something I had never realised. Because Anne and Simon are going to end up as a couple I have done my best to give them similar values; but they are people of different periods - Simon is a man of the early twentieth century, Anne is born in 1782. I don't think it is out of period for her to be rather wilful and determined, as I am sure that in every era there have been people who chafed against the constrictions of their society, and thought "outside the box". But the basic foundation upon which her view of the world is built would be different from Simon's. Specifically, it doesn't make sense, in the context of her times, to have her attempts to help Mrs Viner be prompted solely by a mixture of professionalism and humanistic fellow-feeling. Compassion, to a woman born in the late eighteenth century, would be a religious, not a secular, virtue. Anne, at least when we first meet her, has to be a christian.
This is going to be a bit tricky, as I'm not one, and, too, it's hard to put myself mentally back past the Victorians, with their deep and public piety, ostentatious religiosity and occasional horrible double standards, to try and imagine what might have been the religious world view of a middle-class, rather free-thinking Georgian bluestocking. But I set-to last night and started to make the necessary tweaks. I think tweaks are all that are needed; I'm not going completely to rewrite the character. I'm too fond of Anne to effect a major transformation, and anyway, I don't think one is needed - she is already thoroughly christian (in the best sense, that is, as in moral, kind, considerate) in her actions, she just never speaks of it or shows it as a conscious motivation. That's what I have to tweak.
The funny thing was, I immediately spotted three typos I'd missed on each previous re-reading, and discovered that the pagination goes haywire at one point. So it was definitely for the best that I had opened the text up again.
Thursday, 18 June 2009
No moaning today...
...nor grumbles, nor gripes. I have realised with a nasty jolt that lately I have done nothing but complain about *s*t*u*f*f* in this blog, and truly I have bugger all to complain about compared to many people, not to mention other life-forms.
So here instead are some of the good things. Brace yourselves; this is Imogen celebrating instead of Imogen whinging.
1. It hasn't rained yet today.
2. A nice-looking bloke in an open-topped car grinned at me this morning as I was cycling to work (realistically, I know this was probably because I was showing a hell of a lot of leg owing to my skirt blowing back, but I am only human and a grin is still a grin).
3. The linden trees are in full blossom everywhere and the scent is indescribable; sweet yet herbal, hauntingly evocative of open spaces and clear light, and other such things that are lacking in west London but delightful still when called up in the memory.
4. I have found out how to work the Dvd player at home, and was able to sit down and watch a good movie, that night a couple of evenings ago when I felt so terrible.
5. Ever since watching said good movie ("Master and Commander") I have been humming the lovely, dancing melody of the piece by Boccherini that is played as the film ends; unlike most tunes that get into one's head and won't leave, this one continues to delight me even after several days. As does the memory of the film; I had forgotten how brilliantly it conjures up a totally believable shipboard life, how damned exciting it is, and how marvellous the cinematography is. I had forgotten that Russell Crowe gives one of his best performances in it (he sleepwalks through "Gladiator", yet is capable of immense subtlety - see this, or "LA Confidential", or "A Brilliant Mind" in which he underplays stringently, in a rôle where a lot of actors would have chewed the scenery until they collapsed choking on it). I had forgotten that Paul Bettany is also terrific (usually I find him slightly creepy) and the rest of the cast bats right down the order.
6. The Gardens here at Kew are looking lovey - the Mediterranean Garden is a mass of cistus and phlomis and my beloved Spartium juncium, and awash in sweet and resinous incense-y scents. The garden at home is also looking good, though on a laughably small scale in comparison; my first marigold came out yesterday, a tiny buttonhole of egg-yolk yellow, clashing wonderfully with the pink wild geranium growing next to it.
7. I saw "Ondine" at the Royal Ballet a couple of weeks ago and was blown away by it; what a ballet, what a score, and oh how divinely wonderful is Miyako Yoshida...
8. I had a great writing fit last night and cracked a couple of knotty revisions in "GY".
9. It's the end of the day and I can go home now and have a drink.
So here instead are some of the good things. Brace yourselves; this is Imogen celebrating instead of Imogen whinging.
1. It hasn't rained yet today.
2. A nice-looking bloke in an open-topped car grinned at me this morning as I was cycling to work (realistically, I know this was probably because I was showing a hell of a lot of leg owing to my skirt blowing back, but I am only human and a grin is still a grin).
3. The linden trees are in full blossom everywhere and the scent is indescribable; sweet yet herbal, hauntingly evocative of open spaces and clear light, and other such things that are lacking in west London but delightful still when called up in the memory.
4. I have found out how to work the Dvd player at home, and was able to sit down and watch a good movie, that night a couple of evenings ago when I felt so terrible.
5. Ever since watching said good movie ("Master and Commander") I have been humming the lovely, dancing melody of the piece by Boccherini that is played as the film ends; unlike most tunes that get into one's head and won't leave, this one continues to delight me even after several days. As does the memory of the film; I had forgotten how brilliantly it conjures up a totally believable shipboard life, how damned exciting it is, and how marvellous the cinematography is. I had forgotten that Russell Crowe gives one of his best performances in it (he sleepwalks through "Gladiator", yet is capable of immense subtlety - see this, or "LA Confidential", or "A Brilliant Mind" in which he underplays stringently, in a rôle where a lot of actors would have chewed the scenery until they collapsed choking on it). I had forgotten that Paul Bettany is also terrific (usually I find him slightly creepy) and the rest of the cast bats right down the order.
6. The Gardens here at Kew are looking lovey - the Mediterranean Garden is a mass of cistus and phlomis and my beloved Spartium juncium, and awash in sweet and resinous incense-y scents. The garden at home is also looking good, though on a laughably small scale in comparison; my first marigold came out yesterday, a tiny buttonhole of egg-yolk yellow, clashing wonderfully with the pink wild geranium growing next to it.
7. I saw "Ondine" at the Royal Ballet a couple of weeks ago and was blown away by it; what a ballet, what a score, and oh how divinely wonderful is Miyako Yoshida...
8. I had a great writing fit last night and cracked a couple of knotty revisions in "GY".
9. It's the end of the day and I can go home now and have a drink.
Tuesday, 16 June 2009
Colour Therapy?...
or, is red food restorative?
My mother has a theory that it is. If I were living with her at the moment, I would go home and wail pathetically at her, and she would give me beetroot and tomato risotto and a glass of red wine for supper. And she would say "That'll put some blood back into you."
I had beetroot for lunch, thinking of her, and I'm tempted to do the risotto and red wine thing for supper too, although I really shouldn't be drinking mid-week. But - well - what can I say? Holy hormones? - holy cow, yes! Boy I just love (not) being a woman at these times. I'm tired and crotchetty and washed out, and I feel as if something has beaten me about the midriff for twelve hours straight.
Hoping to cycle home without being rained on tonight, after being caught in a spectacular cloudburst yesterday evening thanks to stopping for five minutes to buy ibuprofen at Boots on the Chiswick High Road.
My mother has a theory that it is. If I were living with her at the moment, I would go home and wail pathetically at her, and she would give me beetroot and tomato risotto and a glass of red wine for supper. And she would say "That'll put some blood back into you."
I had beetroot for lunch, thinking of her, and I'm tempted to do the risotto and red wine thing for supper too, although I really shouldn't be drinking mid-week. But - well - what can I say? Holy hormones? - holy cow, yes! Boy I just love (not) being a woman at these times. I'm tired and crotchetty and washed out, and I feel as if something has beaten me about the midriff for twelve hours straight.
Hoping to cycle home without being rained on tonight, after being caught in a spectacular cloudburst yesterday evening thanks to stopping for five minutes to buy ibuprofen at Boots on the Chiswick High Road.
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