And it's Friday again already...

Actually my excuse this time is that I was off work sick (foul 'fluey bug) for several days. Very unwise of me as a new girl to be ill, but there was no way I was coming in to Kew - I could hardly make it as far as the kitchen (one floor down) last weekend. Greatly relieved to feel more or less myself again by today; I know one can take well over a week to recover from 'flu. Good news at work is that Julie has been replaced (well, in so far as the irreplaceable can ever be - oh, dear, no, that sounds as if she snuffed it whereas all she's really done is go to Durham). So when Roxana gets back from her long weekend off we'll have a full team in Visitor Info again.
However, my creative activities over the last week have been limited to sewing, which one can do sitting up in bed fairly easily. I've cannibalised a baggy sweater and made from it a sweater that fits me, and have nearly finished doing the same to a cotton suntop for next year. And I strung some beads. Strenuous stuff. Apart from that I have read a great deal, which is always good even when the circumstances are horrible; a Dorothy L Sayers I picked up for 50 pence at a Lifeboat Station Open Day books-and-junk-stall, a guide to Cuba and a fascinating book by a guy called Phil Cousineau about the philosophy of pilgrimage.
The washing machine still hadn't been fixed when I left for work this morning - that's three and a half weeks now of handwashing my socks and underwear - good thing I'm not squeamish (or leaky). I'm not used to it any more, though I've done plenty of it in my time, mostly many years ago when a student, in digs with no washing machine and no local laundrette.
Have drafted some material for my putative Creativity magazine but am now wondering if I was barking to moot the idea in the first place, as no-one I asked for input or suggestions has got back to me at all. Not even to say "You're barking." Hmmm. Watch this space. I'm sure every creative innovator has moments of terrible self doubt (says she, attempting to aggrandise a very unimportant issue). But after all, it may have been a really silly idea...
Hoping all are well; have a good weekend.

Friday lunchtime

I've just done a little game that a website I belong to sets its members once a month, and found it rather illuminating. I think I'll try to make a point of doing it fairly regularly, if only to remind myself of my blessings. I'll see if I can download it into here... It'll come complete with Aries' slightly idiosyncratic typing, if so, so brace yourselves.

hello family!
time to know where we are in our life right now...
answer this form to seeforyourself how well you really are!
peace and blessed be.
1. how is your life in general right now?
2. what are the good things that have happened? how do you feel about them? akawhat are you grateful for?
3. what are the things that have happened that you don't know whether or not itis really good or bad? lol.
4. compare numbers 2 and 3... which list is longer? do you like the parts thatyou are focusing more or not?
5. how is your physical health right now? why do you think it's like that? howdo you plan to improve it?
7. how is your spiritual health right now? are you more spiritually content ordisarranged?
8. on a scale of 1-10 how stressed are you? (ten being very extremelyhumungously lol stressed... and one being as peaceful as i can be)
9. goals achieved:
10. goals pending:
11. new goals:
12. notes to self:
13. praises to self:
14. how much do you love yourself? at a scale of 1-10 (ten being highest and 1being lowest)
15. did you treat yourself to something great within the month? what was it? didyou like it? would you do it again?
feel free to post this to the group or just answer and keep it to yourself. lol.at the end of the year, take a view on all of them and you'll see how far youhave grown as a person! lol.

And at this juncture, perhaps I should step up and reveal one of my big secret tips for keeping the creative flame alight: Self-help books.
Don't laugh - seriously, titter ye not; these things have their uses, and, to add clitch upon clitch (as my dad used to say), if it works for you don't knock it. There's plenty of idiocy, capitalist self-congratulation, and fluffy white-light-ism out there, but if you find a tip that works for you in a self help book, a magazine, a website, Woman's Own or anything else, use it and be unashamed about it.
What else has been going on? Got home late last night, found the washing machine still hasn't been fixed and now apparently won't be for at least another week to ten days. Sandra (landlady) so embarrassed as she had faithfully promised it would be operating by end of Thurs, she had been raiding all of our dirty-washing baskets and conducted the mother of all visits to a launderette in Southall. So alarmed was I at the thought of her seeing the pigsty my room is at present that I spent the rest of the evening tidying instead of doing some prints as I'd planned. >sigh<
Not much on the tele tonight, though, so maybe I'll get all inky this evening.

A week later...

In fact more than a week later. Good grief, time flies etc etc. How depressing that we are into October already, though at least the weather is a lot better than it was for most of the summer. I went to another wonderful performance last night - Schoenberg and Mahler, this time, absolutely brilliantly played by the Budapest Festival Orchestra under Ivan Fischer, with a couple of fantastic soloists; a sturdy, heroic tenor of somewhat wardrobe-like build, and a mezzo who sounded and surprisingly also looked like an angel.
I've had more thoughts re the possibility of launching a magazine. Clearly the tube journey home from the West End is conducive to same. It's going to be a quarterly, featuring new writing, both non-fiction and fiction, visual imagery, and poetry, with a strong Goddess/pagan focus, and a general remit of "Creation Spirituality and the Spirituality of Creativity".
I will sort out a snappier title, though.
And for those who are reeling at the above, if you haven't heard of Creation Spirituality, be not afraid; it has absolutely bugger all to do with Creationism. I do not believe god created the world in 7 days. Not my god, not yours, not any bally god. Why bypass a perfectly good process like evolution, and at enormous effort, expense and general trouble, just to show off the fact that you can? The gods have better things to do, I'm sure.
Anyway, I'll be preparing a first issue over the next few weeks, with an aim to launching at Samhein. If anyone wants to contribute, let me know!

Wednesday lunchtime...

I was at a flamenco company last night at the Queen Elizabth Hall; terrific. Fabulous guitar-playing, singing and brilliant dancers, and because they all get carried away and did lots of encores they over-ran by about 40 minutes so I was fairly late home and am now knackered. The atmosphere was marvellous; the slightly wow-y amplification, the audience cheering and whooping, the couple in front of me necking, the amount of drink being brought into the auditorium (I've never seen this before at the QEH!) - it was all powerfully reminiscent of being in a dodgy spanish nightclub, and brought back my six months in Granada with intense vividness. The women's ridiculous dresses were wonderful, too, making them look like respectively a costume doll, a very animated sea-slug, and Morticia Addams.
I'd love to go back to Granada some time; ideally for Las Cruces, when the whole city turns itself out of doors and makes a fiesta in every square for three days. >sigh< Happy memories...
Coming home on the tube, I was seized by a sudden desire to start a magazine. It would have to be a quarterly initially, to give me time to put an issue together, but I found myself thinking of all sorts of things I could put in it and people I could get to contribute, and getting raher excited. Watch this space. Goddess only knows if I can do this, but it feels like a living idea...

V quickly, Monday evening...

Got to be quick as I need to do all sorts of stuff and have already worked till six. Job has taken a startling turn for the worse after I inherited Julie's workload as well as my own. Not only heaps extra, but heaps of shit. Sorry to be so blunt about it. Ugh. I have been dumped on by so many negative people in the course of today I feel like screaming.
I'd had a lovely weekend, too. Very lazy on saturday, then sunday I went down into Richmond with a sketchbook and had a great time painting and drawing. Richmond Green v odd - full of (forgive me, but they were) braying yuppies shouting "Horatio!" and "Pandora!" and so forth after their children as said children gambolled happily in other families' picnics, took off with other families' footballs, chased other families' dogs, etc. I did some pastel sketches of light under trees and kept a low profile.
Then I moved to the riverbank and suddenly was in heaven. Sunlight pouring down, creating wonderful colours and reflections, shadows and depths in the water. Happy, relaxed people wandering along, having a beer or a meal, sitting in the sun. Ducks and swans getting fed with bread crusts. Dads rowing their kids and lads rowing their loves (and one love nobly rowing her lad) about in skiffs on the river. A guy and a little boy in a motor launch heading upriver with loads of supermarket shopping bags (I guess with the state of the roads round here maybe the river is a better traffic route if you live in Teddington or Twickenham or on Eel Pie Island...). The atmosphere was peaceful, chilled, warm (excuse contradiction in terms!) and happy. And it was HOT. It was glorious. I painted a rather splashy watercolour of the view upriver and did some studies of waterfowl. There was even a great crested grebe, briefly surfacing, surveying us all regally before vanishing with an elegant dive and reappearing in the blaze of reflected light to westward. I managed to catch the tiniest painted dabble of a sketch of him before he dived again and was gone.
I've been listening to Kerry (flatmate, origami-butterfly girl, remember?) talking about lots of exciting things going on in her life at the moment, and it is pretty inspiring. Then factor in the sense of wellbeing that comes from a happy and successful sketching and painting session like that; add on the bliss of having sat in the sun for several hours; and altogether one feels fantastically happy and ready for anything.
So now it is raining and I have a week's backlog of complaint letters to deal with (Julie's legacy, rats). But I call to mind the sunlight and the shifting deep colours and dazzles of the water, the swans with their cygnets, the willow boughs shifting and drifting across on the far bank, and the blessed heat on my skin, and I know I am not really being overwhelmed by the stupidity of these letters and emails. I am simply doing this for a living. I am doing this to live, because real life is out there - not in here. Out there in the daylight, be it sun or shadow, in the fascination of laminations of tone and subtle nuances of colour and light, and the heart-opening of doing my true, real work for a day.

mid-afternoon...

Work seems to be decaying into a rather random bout of chatting and cake-eating as we bid Julie farewell. Very nice cake; definately in favour of more cake at work. The gluten-free ginger cake from The Village Bakery was particularly good.
I'm going to do something constructive, and answer a complaint letter - a v silly complaint (like most of them). Why do people complain about unutterably stupid things that can't be remedied, while suffering in silence through some of the appalling customer non-service that happens every day? People are odd.
It occurs to me that one of the other reasons I will miss Julie is that she is far more computer-savvy than me and I have been picking her brains to solve my computer difficulties for absolutley ages... "Julie, how do I ~?" "Julie, where would I find a ~?" "Julie, I'm having problems with Excel..." etc etc. I'm just going to have to cope without.
Think positive, Imogen. The woman behind me at the Opera House last night was reading "The Power of Positive Thinking" in the interval; an odd conjunction with Don Giovanni. I wonder what a really trendy director would make of trying to relate the two...

Friday the 19th, already...

My goodness, how time whips by.
I'm rather embarrassed by my last entry - what a dismal soul I am sometimes, all scratchy and ranting. Proper grumpy little miss, in fact.
Very tired today, with back ache and period pain, and not much sleep after getting home after midnight from "Don Giovanni" to find the house full of people who wanted to talk... to me... Lovely, except I'd prefer to be popular at 10.30 than 12.30 pm! Then tonight is the leaving "do" of my colleague and dear friend Julie, who is going off to do a Phd, half in Durham and half in The Gambia. I'm going to miss her dreadfully, though I know she is going to have a much happier time using her brain to research control measures for the flies that transmit trachoma than she has done answering 'phones at Kew. Our loss is, hopefully, medical science's gain. Well, medical science in the eventual long-term, anyway. Initially just scientific knowledge about flies and their habits. I'm being very decorous here - her field trips are going to involve collecting large amounts of human excrement, so I probably ought to be making all the crap jokes I can. Anyway, I'm going to miss her and want to give her a good send-off. But then I have a free weekend, whoopee...
Which means some R&R, a nice long walk in the park, and some painting.
I started some more greetings cards, with stars and what were meant to be angels. The angels came out rather hefty and, frankly, menacing looking. Since I do not accept that idea that angels are the Almighty's vigilante force, I will have to work back into them again, thoroughly, probably using a lot of glitter, coloured ink washes and maybe snippets of collage. The stars, and some swirling patterns like spiral galaxies, are rather effective, though. I am running out of blank cards, which is a problem, but I'm sure I can track more down somewhere.
I think I will have to add it onto my list of tips for stimulating one's creativity; buy a box of blank greetings cards. The fact that one sees some progress, and so quickly, with card after card suddenly having colours and images on it, is exciting and inspiring.