I resolve

...to be a good friend, to care for myself and for those I love

...to do something creative every day, whether it is writing or drawing or sewing or baking or making chutney, or whatever else comes along

...to be patient with myself and others

...to eat healthily and spend time outdoors regularly, and to have solitude and company, each in good measure, when I need them

...to keep moving along my own path

...to do what is necessary, and remember that pleasure is also a necessity

...to remember I am not responsible for everyone else's feelings

...and to follow my bliss.

It's amazing to realise, writing these things down, how quickly the self-censoring inner voice starts up, expressing shock and misgiving about such a self-indulgent, self-absorbed collection of new year's resolutions.  Why, almost all of them are about me! 

Begone, inner critic!  I am what I am, and I too have the right to be happy.

I am a single woman with no children and no dependents.  I'm an introvert, yes, but I don't live in a vacuum, nor do I want to.  I have a lot of love to give, and I can choose to whom to give it; and I do choose, and I do give.  But the best way I can give that love actively and usefully, the best way I can be a good friend to others, is if I am in good shape myself, mentally, emotionally and physically.  So this list, designed to help me remember to do what hakes me happiest, is not self-absorption but self-acceptance. 

I hope these resolutions will be moderately keep-able. 

Happy New Year!

It's been an odd one, has 2014.  There was a lot of stress and disruption in my life, most of it dropped upon me out of the blue rather than wished-for or chosen by me.  There were troubles for many others, too, and for the world at large.  If I were just a tad more New Age and dippy I would say 2014 had pretty difficult vibrations.  I've often found myself wanting to be able to be a better friend to someone than I actually had the energy for, which is a sad feeling. 

There have been jolts and shocks, and losses, some of them bitter. 

But there have been good things too.  Big ones, like new friends, a new place to live, my mother's bad leg gradually improving (she's not there yet but every bit helps, as someone-or-other's adverts are fond of saying), at last making a little headway on the problems at work...  and little things; the singing wrens, the perfect roses, the fascinating lecture, the afternoon spent making damson jam...  I've written quite a lot, though I could certainly have written more if I were better organised.  I've been to a lovely wedding, and some terrific exhibitions at the Dulwich Picture Gallery and the V&A, and I've just about managed to keep up with my friends.  I've been to the coast a few times, and I've seen some very good ballet and contemporary dance and some very good films.  I've had a couple of very pleasant restful holidays, too (though I could have done with both of them being twice as long!). 

But I reach the turning of the year hoping very much that at least some of the drawn-out struggles and miseries of 2014 will be resolved in the coming months.  Here's to a year which really does bring renewed hope and life, and opportunities, and friendship, and love.  Here's to good health, physical, mental and emotional, for all my family and friends; nay, for everyone out there.  Here's to writing and drawing and singing and good books to read, and laughter, and spending time with the people you love. 

Here's to a happy new year.

What I reallyreally want...

I'm not very likely to get everything I really want, so I ought (by the standards I was brought up on) to be saying "Well, that won't happen so I'll settle for this instead...". 

Instead I am going to remind myself that it was on February 26th, 2003 that I said to an old friend over lunch "Well, I'm never going to meet anyone as interesting as my Favourite Baritone..." - and then walked into my Favourite Baritone outside the Post Office, the very next day. 

I look back on this weird event, as its tenth anniversary approaches, and I think that if the Almighty had wanted to give me a good kick up the a**e S/He couldn't have picked a better way to do it. 

That one (very brief) encounter in the street remains one of the biggest shocks I've ever had in my life.  Favourite Baritone had no reason whatever, at least none that I have ever discovered, for being there, on that particular day, in that particular place.  It was nowhere near where he lives.  And he stopped walking down the road right next to me.  I only looked up because I thought the pair of feet that had stopped so apparently deliberately right beside me must belong to someone I knew. 

It taught me, more effectively than any amount of preaching and teaching and pep-talking could ever have done, that anything that is within the laws of physics can happen; anything, however improbable. 

Favourite Baritone has gone on to have a pretty good ten years - lots of career success (well deserved), plus getting married and becoming a dad.  His missus has had quite a good patch too; getting married and becoming a mum, obviously, plus continuing her own rather fabulous career as a Principal of the Royal Ballet to some pretty wonderful effect.  Talk about a Golden Couple!  More power and happiness to them in 2013...

And I have gone on to have an eventful decade; a lot of which would not have happened without my having had that bizarre lesson in the Nature of the Possible.  My dad would probably still have passed away and I expect that Baby Bro would still have got his degree.  I imagine that national and international events would still have been much the same, too.  But I'm fairly sure that I would never have moved to London, found a job that paid me enough to live on, or started writing again, if I hadn't had that encounter.  So my thanks to FB, for being on that street corner, that fateful day, and kick-starting all that for me.  I owe you, mate!

May 2013, then, be a year in which more interesting things happen, in celebration and recollection of that first, startling realisation - that almost anything can happen, and therefore some good things may...

And in the name of optimism, I am going to ask for at least one of the following:
To get my writing properly published - and widely read;
To write lots more;
To meet interesting people and make new friends;
To get my own place to live and finally get out of living in shared flats and other bizarre digs;
To be healthy and for all my family and friends to be healthy too;
Love;
Joy;
Happiness;
And a hunk of my very own. Preferably an intelligent, creative one who can do DIY and likes my cooking.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Until New Year's Eve, then...

It seems the nutjobs were indeed wrong, since the world did not end at 11.35am today.  However, today is the last time I’ll have guaranteed access to the internet until December 31^st.  So, the continuation of history notwithstanding, this is probably my sign-off for 2012. 

If the world does end today, just a little later than predicted, it’s going out on a high of sorts for me.  The sun is shining, the temperature is above zero, I saw a jogger dressed as Father Christmas this morning (complete with heart-rate monitor), the trees on Brentford Eyot are gleaming in their winter bark colours of red-gold and olive- green, there’s a lovely dog running about on the Green, I have coffee and nougat and sesame biscuits in the office, I’ve revised and typed up to the end of chapter two of “Gold Hawk” and am happy with it so far, and I have the next nine days off work.  And last night I met TCI and G for a pre-Christmas beer-and-nachos at the Prince’s Head in Richmond, and a cute chap a couple of tables away kept making eyes at me.  Think a balding Jason Isaacs crossed with a balding Liev Schreiber; i.e. seriously attractive, despite the follicular issues (the nachos at the Prince’s Head are excellent, too, but that's not my photo, just one I swiped off the internet.  Our Nachos had lots more cheese, plus lashings of guacamole and sour cream, and the beers should be Fuller's Organic Honeydew, not whatever that is [looks like a Guinness and a pint of orange squash, actually]).

Got home, a little tipsy and very cheerful, packed my bags for Christmas, discovered I had not posted K’s present – boll*cks! – put it to take to the post office in my lunch break today, and actually got myself to bed at a reasonable hour.  I then dreamed I was hiking in the snow in the Cairngorms with a certain JL Renner.  When we stopped for lunch he made hot chocolate over a campfire for me.  Good man! 

That makes three really delightful hunk-dreams in the last few days; I am now married to William Houston, RDJ drives my removal van, and Mr Renner makes me hot choc.  It seems my subconscious is on a high of sorts as well.

Solstice Greetings, Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year to you!

A long post; January already, and the Immies for 2011

Thursday already.  Heck, January already.  Hey, it’s 2012...

It was, as I had hoped, a very peaceful Christmas and a quiet New Year (apart from the massive firework display down the road and the madly barking neighbourhood dogs this set off).  Walking and relaxing with my family, doing a massive jigsaw, seeing a few friends, sleeping ten hours a night, eating too many Pringles...  Sometimes it’s good for one just to do very little and simply rest, body and mind.

And now it is January again.  Happy New Year, everyone.  The weather has been all over the place today; one minute we have had sun falling across the grass of Kew Green and bare trees shining against a chilly blue sky, then next moment the skies turn black and rain lashes down in curtains.  It seemed quite sensible to think of new beginnings and new resolutions without irony, each time the fresh-washed sun reappeared; but those periodic bursts of wintry rain make me want to hide my head and go to sleep underground instead.

I’ve had a couple of odd encounters over the last week.  At a New Year’s party I thought I saw an old school-mate across the room – she was a tough lass in her youth, so I’ll call her Tuffisa.  Tuffisa hardly seemed to have changed at all in almost thirty years; still the same curly black hair, girlish figure, casual clothes and determined expression.  I wondered if she would remember me, and was hesitating whether to go over and say “hi” when beside me someone said “Oh, Imogen, Tuffisa Jones is here, do come and say hi” – and led me across to a totally different woman.  The real Tuffisa had changed beyond recognition; she is now blonde, elegant, gracious and decidedly voluptuous (not that I can talk!).  The weird bit came when she introduced me to her partner, since she was the woman I had thought was Tuffisa herself.   She turned out to be really nice, and it was good to see Tuffy again after such a very long time; but it did give me a funny turn to start with.  Is it odd of me to have been spooked by an old friend’s new partner looking so like the adolescent appearance of the old friend? 

Then on Tuesday night I was at the wonderful “Slava’s Snow Show” (SEE THIS IF YOU HAVEN’T- IT’S BRILLIANT!!) and two rows in front of me was a chap with whom I could have sworn I used to do amateur drama, back in the day.  He seemed to be with his family, and I used to have a terrific crush on him when he was single, so in the circumstances I didn’t like to butt in.  The last time I had seen him was while I was a student, when he was a tall, handsome Malcolm in “Macbeth”, and I was doing costumes.  When I thought about it I realised this must have been nearly fifteen years ago, and that gave me a funny feeling, too.  It just doesn’t feel that long.

The moral of this (other than “Hi, ‘Malcolm’, if you’re reading this!”) is Tempus Fugit.  Time flies, so have fun, do things that interest you, and don’t let life just slip away. 

In the which spirit, I have decided to try and do something creative every day during 2012.  I’m hoping that by making my definition of “creative” as open as possible I can avoid the usual backsliding and collapse of New Year’s Resolutions.  After all, do something creative covers a pretty wide remit.  So far I have made notes, written a bit more of a story, and made more notes about something else.  Even if all I do is make notes, I’ll still achieve something if I make a few every single day...  That’s the idea, anyway.

The other big thing I like to do in January is to think about the highlights of the past year. So here is my list of “Immies” for last year:

The Imogen Awards 2011

Best concerts:

“Infernal Dance”, the Philharmonia Orchestra’s Bartok season, was everything one could wish -  thrilling and revelatory; the Violin concerto no 2 with Christian Tetzlaff, Yefim Bronfmann showing off in the Piano concertos, the delicious “Wooden Prince” Suite, the complete “Miraculous Mandarin”, a marvellous performance of “Contrasts”...  The whole thing concluded with a gobsmacking “Bluebeard”.  Marvellous!

http://www.philharmonia.co.uk/bartok/

Prom 32 – Christian Tetzlaff (again – oh swoon) playing the Brahms concerto superbly, followed by the extraordinary “Das Klagende Lied” with the BBCSO under Edward Gardner.

Prom 41 – the BBCSO again, under Mark Wigglesworth, in a lovely programme, mainly of Britten, ending with a life-enhancingly energetic “Spring Symphony”.

Best exhibition:

Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, Dulwich Picture Gallery.  No contest!  This runs for a couple more days, finishing at the end of this weekend, so if you like powerful dynamic landscape painting, hurry down to Dulwich...

Best dance:

I have been seeing a lot of ballet this year.  I’m not quite sure why, but for me it is perhaps the most consistently thrilling of all the performed arts.  This year was particularly good:

“Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” by Christopher Wheeldon for the Royal Ballet.  This was simply gorgeous, and tremendous fun!

“Metamorphosis” by Arthur Pita at the Linbury Studio Theatre.  An extraordinary new piece; deeply terrifying and deeply moving.

The ENB “Black and White” mixed bill was excellent, especially the revival of “Suite en Blanc”.  At the risk of sounding daft I am going to say it - the moment the curtain goes up on that panorama of dancers is practically worth the ticket price on its own.

The many “Manons” of the Royal Ballet!  I saw four performances in total over the year – three in the summer and another one in the autumn.  All were excellent, and it was marvellous to have a chance to see the subtle differences of interpretation between performers.

The Royal Ballet’s mixed bills were excellent this year: Asphodel Meadows/Enigma Variations/Gloria and the one that included Ashton’s “Rhapsody” both epitomised everything that is going right for the RB at the moment; ravishing beauty, emotional truth, and technical mastery at every level, from the principals right down to the newest members of the corps. 

Best World Music

Ealing Global Festival.  What a great day out this local mini-WOMAD is every year!

Best opera

La Bohème at the ENO.  I caught one of the last performances of the run; it’s a lovely production with great sets and naturalistic direction.  Elizabeth Llewellyn was a revelation; she certainly ought to wind up as a very big star indeed.  She has a glorious voice and she can act.  She’s also very beautiful.  A perfect Mimí in a perfectly-judged production.

“Pelléas et Mélisande” at the Barbican (concert performance).  No staging at all, just excellent singers lined up in front of an excellent orchestra, all led by an excellent conductor.  Favourite Baritone was an intense, passionate Pelléas and Laurent Naouri a magnificent and tragic Golaud.

Best individual performers:

1)      Ballet:

Carlos Acosta and Tamara Rojo in Swan Lake, for a partnership of regal scale and brilliance.  La Rojo was even better in the beautiful in “Marguerite and Armand”, a real cry-into-your-lap performance.

Steven McRae; passionate and doomed in “The Rite of Spring”, febrile and anguished as Prince Siegfried in “Swan Lake”, or just showing off his bravura chops in “Rhapsody”; every little thing he does is magic...

Edward Watson, astonishing in “Metamorphosis”.

The lovely Hikaru Kobayashi getting a chance to shine, and seizing it with both hands, as Princess Aurora in “Sleeping Beauty”.

2)      Opera:

Elizabeth Llewellyn in “La Bohème” at the ENO – see above.

Kristine Opolais in “Madame Butterfly” at the Royal Opera was terrific and had me crying my eyes out.

Stuart Skelton, John Tomlinson and Iain Paterson, all deeply moving in “Parsifal”.

3)      Concert:

This has been rather a year for virtuosos:

Nikolai Lugansky’s fabulous solo recital at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, playing Chopin, Brahms and Liszt.

Christian Tetzlaff playing Brahms at the Proms and Bartok at the Festival Hall.

Gil Shaham restoring the Bruch violin concerto no 1 from saccharine to stunner in Prom 62.

Stephen Hough playing Liszt’s Piano Concerto no 1 with the Budapest Festival Orchestra under Ivan Fischer.

And last but not least

The ever-magnificent Sarah Connolly, heart-breaking in “Das Lied von der Erde” at the Festival Hall last February.  Worth missing part of The DipGeek’s birthday party for (and I do not say that lightly, as The DipGeek throws a good party).

May 2012 be as good, culturally and in other ways! 

Merry Christmas, everyone!...

Another busy year draws to a close.  I’m unlikely to have access to the internet again before January (& if anyone is thinking “poor you”, don’t! – I could do with some peace and quiet and one less technological temptation is no bad thing).  So as far as blogging is concerned, this is the last post of 2011.  And an odd old year it’s been, too.

Work has been busy and rather over-pressured a lot of the time.  On the creative front it’s been rather an uneventful year, with several things ticking over and progressing quietly, but nothing spectacular happening.  The garden has been a blessing as usual, and is beginning to look more like a proper garden as the shrubs I planted in 2009 settle in and put on growth.  My vegetable growing was a bit of a mess this year; slug-shredded chard, blighted tomatoes, beetroots that never germinated, but  climbing French beans that cropped extremely heavily, although in bursts rather than evenly, and rampaged everywhere, trying to escape over the fence and feed next door as well...

And now it is almost Christmas.  Ten days off.  In the Gardens, Father Christmas is seeing his last families today, and the carousel is playing a tootling pipe-organ cover of Slade's "So here it is, Merry Christmas" (one year we had one that played Sousa marches, which I liked but everyone else thought was very peculiar).  The first snowdrops are out in the Rock Garden, and Juno irises are flowering in the Alpine House, and a fine winter drizzle is falling everywhere in the misty dusk.

Tomorrow my elder brother is giving me a lift down to Kent.  Tonight I will have to have a takeaway for supper, because I have wound-down my supply of perishables so successfully that it’s that or a tin of baked beans (& much though I baked beans, they aren’t very celebratory).  Tomorrow we slip off to the countryside. 

So Merry Christmas to one and all, and may the new year bring you prosperity and happiness, success and good health! 

Busy busy bee

Whoah - did I say Happy New year? Crikey.

It's been a hectic first week of the year, with work surprisingly busy (January is normally deathly quiet) plus several pieces of bad news - a sudden death (not in my family, God be thanked, but the sister of someone I'm very fond of); another friend v upset and stressed with a pile of cr*ppy things landing on her all at once; another friend has been assaulted and has gone to ground completely like a bear denning, so I am worried about both of them and am telling myself they are both intelligent, sensible adults who will make wise choices and take care of themselves; and then someone I got on well with at work has left very suddenly and no-one knows why, so there is an uncomfortable mixture of worry and speculation in her wake - though pleasingly as yet no nasty gossip... And on the good side, at least my cousin's folks in Queensland are not in that bit of Queensland...

Well, it's Friday night now and despite the rain I am off home. Hurrah for weekends! - & may no more disasters happen during the next two days, please...

Happy New Year!

2010 has been an odd year for me, with some good things and some tough ones, but I feel on balanace it was a year of slow progress forwards. I hope to make more of the same in 2011; and hope very much that the same will be true for all my friends and family. Sometimes when the tough times strike one down it can feel almost impossible to get through and come out the other side. But it does happen; day by day one gets there. All of you who've had a stinker of a 2010, my thoughts are with you and I wish you better times to come; healing for your sorrows and strength for your hands and your hearts, and happiness to come. May it be a good New Year for you all!

New Year, New Me; or, better still, can I just have the Old Me back, please?

I have already noticed it’s a new year; in fact I don’t think I’ve forgotten and written last year’s date once, which I’m rather proud of. But my chief focus at present is on getting back the use of my right hand and arm, and I hadn’t really thought about New Year’s Resolutions, New Year New Me, etc. Time to rectify that, maybe?

Of course, getting my arm back is a Resolution in itself. I gather that it can be anything from a couple of months to a couple of years to recover fully from a broken wrist and the associated surgery. So that is Resolution no. 1, then; getting back my right arm, flexible, strong and fit. I’ll never be able to lift a fully grown woman over my head, I know, but I’d like to be able to play badminton again, and swim, and use a handsaw in the garden, and knead bread dough, and return to my Scottish Country Dancing group able to cope with a fast swing in a right-hand hold…

Resolution no. 2; I want this to be the year of actually looking for an agent, instead of simply talking about it (& then panicking). Gulp. I’m panicking slightly just thinking about it; but writing needs to be read, otherwise it is just distilled daydreams.

Resolution no. 3; do more drawing. I was having so much fun in November, drawing at "Re-Rite" and working from my drawings, and now I have lost momentum, for unavoidable reasons, but I had managed to remind myself of what utter bliss it is, and I want to do more. This is dependent on Resolution no. 1, above, of course. Get arm back, then draw.

Resolution no. 4; see all the cultural events I want to get to. Don’t look at brochures and websites and then say “Oh, I can’t afford it and I’ll probably be too tired anyway.” A great concert, exhibition, ballet or theatre performance boosts me up and fires my spirit. Embrace it. Living in London has its down-sides, after all; so enjoy the rich and hugely varied up-sides as much as possible.

Resolution no. 5; more time out of doors. Seeing the beauty and the sweet ceaseless changing cycle of the natural world also boosts me up, and fires my spirit, just like watching dancers or listening to great music.

I don’t think I need to resolve to write more, since until the broken wrist I was getting on with that fairly steadily. Typing since then has been such a drag, and writing by hand almost impossible, that I have stopped writing temporarily, but I am itching to get on with things. The protagonist of “Café Tano” and her tree surgeon friend have been stuck in a fairly sticky situation for the last seven weeks, and I want to get them out; “Ramundi’s Sisters" is three-quarters typed up/revised; and Iain Siward, Aietes and the android professor are sitting in a shuttle, deep in outer space, worrying about who they are, where they are going, what has been happening, and why Iain is still alive (well, Professor Maddix isn’t worrying exactly, being an android; she’s just terribly, calmly, unexcitedly interested).

Oh, I want my life back! I want my right hand back! I want my arm, I want my arm!!

I am working like mad at my exercises, and the residual post-operative numbness is fairly minimal now, and all my tendons except the one in the thumb seem to be working fine. It’s not long now; on Friday the cast is due to come off. Gods, get me through this last push, these last few days of prison; get me through, get me through…

New Year, New You

...Well, that's the theory, anyway. As Kerry (flatmate, "Wicked" fan, mentioned before in context of origami) remarked in ironic tones at midnight on Wednesday "Happy New Year! - hey, our lives have just been completely transformed." We then drank a large amount of champagne very quickly and went out in the street to wave sparklers and cooo at the neighbours' fireworks, so you can see that the mood of adult cynicism didn't last. In fact we had a great evening; she has taken up baking, and produced a very creditable apple pie with a rich chocolate crust. Paulo missed out on the pie as he had decided at the last minute to try and get to the Mayoral fireworks, and announced at the kitchen door "I am going out to the streets, I may be some time"; at which we both shrieked "Goodbye, Captain Oates!" and fell around laughing, much to his bewilderment (unsurprisingly, Robert Falcon Scott is not a national figure in Portugal).

Captain Scott; author of one of my favourite quotes (from his last journal entry):

"I do not regret this journey; we took risks, we knew that we took them, things have turned out against us; therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of providence, determined still to do our best to the last."

As a statement of calm resolution in the face of defeat, and of what I can only call the spiritual equivalent of Truth-to-materials, that takes some beating.

I had that quotation stuck on the wall of my studio space at college for four years out of the five I was there. I remember one of the tutors stopping to read it once, then snapping dramatically at me that I hadn't taken any risks at all; I replied mulishly that I thought for me I had, and she pouted and flung her hair(ex-KIAD people will probably be able to guess which tutor this was!). I simply hadn't the nerve to say "Lady, I have taken a far bigger risk than most of the students you applaud as risk-takers - I have done my own thing, consistently, even though it was neither fashionable nor popular with you, and even though I know it won't get me a good degree."

Yea, I'm a reb, me! Ahem, kind-of, ~ish...

Anyway, going back to new years and new starts; 2008 has been very much a year of reshaping and shaking up, and of altering the basic formulae, as 'twere, so that I reached the end feeling rather different from the woman who went in, twelve months ago. Most of this tranformational process has been internal - mental and emotional and, dare I say, spiritual. I hope this coming year will be one of building on these new foundations and starting to make real headway on realising my plans and dreams.

And I hope it will be so for all of you, too. Happy New Year, everyone!