...and it's hot...

London is baking under a brilliant blue sky; summer arrived a couple of days ago, knocking most normal humans flat.  indoors, the temperature is 29 degrees - that's just below 80 F, for those of you on old money - and compared to out in the sun, indoors feels cool.

Luckily I knew it was coming.  What a great institution the Met Office is; accurate weather forecasts have not always been with us, after all.  Gods bless them and their weather satellites!  I was able to get to bed reasonably early last night and get up fairly early this morning.  It's now ten to two, or thereabouts, and I have washed a load of clothes and hung them to dry, and been into Brentford to go to the supermarket and the street market (for the excellent fruit and veg, if you're curious, as well as a chance to practice self-denial over a lot of temptations for foodies like an olive specialist and a stall from the Old Maids of Honour tea-rooms).  I've lugged back my week's groceries and veggies and brought my washing in again; it had dried in not much more than an hour.  I've baked four spinach and feta pies and braised some baby carrots and broad beans in lemon butter sauce, and cooked a big bag of fresh gooseberries.  I've had some lunch; and now I'm free to have a quiet afternoon.

Yesterday too I stayed in and took things quietly.  I finished reading "Wolf Hall" (superb) but then I got so hot and dopey I ended up having a siesta, and I may do the same this afternoon too.  But I'd like to get some writing done.  With the help of a lot of cold drinks.

I also want to paint my toenails; since I have no intention of wearing anything but sandals on my feet in this weather I may as well have coloured toes.  No-one's looking at my feet, I know, unless perhaps it's to wonder if they are the smelly ones; but it pleases me to have nail varnish on, anyway.

I finished the writing up of "Gold Hawk"; did I say that already?  I managed it, with a final push, by the story's first birthday, middle of last month.  It does still need some further revision; my dear beta-reader the DipGeek has given me some very useful feedback, and the last chapter needs to be tweaked a bit more.  But I'm not too disappointed in it.  It was never meant to be a work of any literary merit, but an adventure story and a piece of fun.  So if anyone reading it enjoys the story and roots for the characters, my work is done.

Now I'm neck deep in several short things all chugging along at their own pace, hoping to get one or two of them finished and make a return to one of the longer stories that have been in abeyance for a while (yes, there are several of them, too).  I'm no nearer finding an agent, no nearer being published anywhere except online, but I'm writing fairly steadily and I'm happy with that.  The Muse in her capricious way has given me a lot of stories to juggle at once, and I'm not a natural juggler, but I'm doing my best.  Creativity comes and goes, and I have always found that the best thing, if you possibly can, is to run with it...

& here are a few more...

Four more from the new camera.  Well, three out of four ain't bad. 

To my surprise, the new camera does seem to be rather good at texture studies.  See above.  But it's v quick to over-expose (or whatever it technically is when there's too much light let in, but there's no film to be exposed in the first place).  And it has a bad habit of not focussing on anything much.  Which is very human of it, but of doubtful desirability in a camera. 

Those blurry eyes are mine, by the way.  My eyes, my eye-bags, my watchful and slightly "f*ck you" expression; all mine.  O-kay...

First attempts with new toy...

So: I bought myself a cheap toy camera.

I've been struggling for a while with the frustration of not being able easily to get photographs in a form that was electronic and hence uploadable.  I found I could order copies of my films on cd rom, but the cost of that mounts up, to say the least, and I realised that fairly soon I would have spent the price of a bottom-of-the-range tinny digital camera, given just how bloody cheap they are getting these days.

So I took myself to Boots - the big Boots in Westfield (Westfield shopping centre, aka The Good Ship Axiom from "Wall-E") - and waited ten minutes until the chap who knew about cameras was free, and I bought one.

Chap-who-knew-about-cameras was charming and enthusiastic and an all-round nice friendly guy.  It was rather like being served by a young Will Smith, only from west London not the USA.  He really did know about cameras, too, and he gave me lots of advice, talked me through all the features, and was perfectly happy to accept it as I worked my way round to buying one of the cheapest ones they sold.

So now I have a little toy.  I've begun trying to get used to it and to experiment with what it will and won't do well.  Initial examples of things it seemingly won't do well are above, but there are some slightly better things to come...  And it's early days yet.

After buying a camera I fled in shock to the tapas bar in one of the huge atria, and had gambas al ajillo and a glass of tinto di verano, yum, good food, yum; and then treated myself to the dvd of the director's cut of "Bladerunner", in a sale, some sensible black cotton trousers, likewise in a sale, and a packet of halva.  Yum again.  I felt like the last of the big spenders by then; new hardware and trousers and a dvd and lunch out?  Shocking.

I'll post some more of the photos in a bit.

Concrete poetry?

This is what comes of working with a piece of software that picks out words from your prose to "gloss" - i.e. it offers an often wildly-inappropriate definition in an automated link.   To get rid of the links you have to go through the prose, again marking and listing your preferred "gloss exemptions". 

I looked at the resulting list of words and I had this:

Natural seed
Oblique tree scarlet species
Fall foliage leaf canopy
Head palm
Wild population
Lens down
Form floral growth
Blossom beneath alpine
It's crimson lilac flower

Wouldn't it bee wonderful...

I just spent the weekend at my mother's, down in Kent.  We didn't do much - talk, have lunch out, that sort of thing.  This afternoon when the weather suddenly brightened up we got in about 1 1/2 hours gardening. 

I hope I burned off a few calories; I certainly give my back a bit of exercise.  I took on the very bend-and-snap job of cutting back the vast amount of golden rod that was overwhelming her gooseberry bushes. 

I got thoroughly scratched by the gooseberries, ungrateful brutes that they are; but there should now be an adequate circulation of air, and a good deal more light, getting in around them; which in turn should mean all those little hard green berries like amazonite beads will be able to ripen and be gorgeous sour-sweet goosegogs, instead of falling off and getting lost in the undergrowth.  

Later, we were sitting peacefully on the bench at the back of her house, looking down the garden and chatting, when I suddenly noticed an enormous quanitity of insects dancing, quite high up and about a hundred yards or so away.  I remember thinking how early in the year it was to have so many mosquitoes.  But just a few minutes later we realised it was in fact an enormous cloud of bees. 

They were coming closer quite fast; by the time we'd commented on them and stood up to get a clearer view, the buzzing was like a crowd of engines approaching.  Common sense kicked in and we went indoors, and watched through binoculars as they came right in to the garden, descending slowly to bunch up in the area of the bigger of the two cypresses.  It looked strangely as though they were settling.  After a few minutes I got curious, and since they weren't flying so widely anymore I went out again.  To my surprise I found I could barely hear them; but when I got closer, I saw why.  They had indeed settled, in a huge throbbing mass on one of the cypress branches.  It was unmistakably a swarm.

The rest of the evening was spent trying to track down a local bee-keeper, which is one of the odder things I've done in my time.  Just before I had to leave for my train we managed to raise one on the phone; but she was in Thanet and didn't really want to drive over to Canterbury in the dusk.  She reassured Mum that the bees would probably stay put for the night now, and gave her the contact details of another bee-keeper who lived a bit closer.  When I got back to London, and rang to say I was home safe, I learned that number two bee-keeper had put Mum in touch with yet another, who was looking for new bees; and he is coming over tomorrow morning to collect them.  Apparently he said "Oh, I'll just knock them off and put them in a cardboard box", an image which has got my poor mother just a touch squeaky. I'd never realised before, but she isn't too keen on bees.

So, one small addition to the bee population of east Kent will be leaving their wild youth and entering the professional arena tomorrow, by the sounds of it.  And Mum will not have to worry about them any more.

The swarm was really very beautiful; in the air, they were dramatic and furious, like a sandstorm of honeybees, and once they'd found the cypress they all packed in very tightly, and stopped flying and buzzing almost completely.  The last thing I saw they had formed into a seething, scrambling mass of golden furry bodies, all clinging together in a sort of melted-ice-cream shape, hanging off the branch.

All rather exciting, anyway.  But back to work and normal life tomorrow.

A bit of a touch of the blues...

This is a perfect Greek sky.  I don't have a comparison-shot, of the dark clouds hanging over London today.  But boy, am I missing those wide blue heavens.  And the heat, and the sunshine, and the dry air, and all the other great and precious beauties of Hellas.

I thought I had posted a short "I'm going on holiday, yippee!" piece, but it seems to have vanished, along with several other recent posts.  Perhaps it will reappear when I upload this?  Who knows...  The mysteries of blogger are past my fathoming.

I went to Kefalonia for a week; I relaxed and swam in the sea and read a great deal and did some writing and slept a lot.  There were swallows nesting under the eaves of almost every house in the vllage and the air was full of their lyrical twittering, morning to night.  The beach was scruffy and undeveloped, with clean sand and pebbles, pine trees and a few elderly benches along the track at the back.  The sea was clear, and as warm as bathwater.  The tavernas and the couple of local cafes were good, the local wine was excellent, and the nights were silent apart from the croaking of frogs and the calling of owls.

And now I'm back in London, which seems incredibly dark in comparison, and decidedly chilly.  My whole being feels like one huge sigh of regret.  It's just one of those blue returns, when I have more than a touch of dust and ashes, and less of a touch of the human spirit, in me.  I wish I did not live in a country where the sky is so very often grey.  There are places where the colour grey is hauntingly beautiful - in some people's eyes, for example - but in the sky it is just sad.

Something to watch out for...

... if you have Sky tv, at least.  Or if you live in New York.

A little while ago I posted a brief raving burble about Arthur Pita's superb contemporary dance adaptation of Kafka's "The Metamorphosis".  I've just seen that
a) it's going to be broadcast on Sky
b) it's going to tour to New York. 

More information here.

If you possibly can, see this production.  It's incredibly harrowing stuff, but is also one of the most brilliant pieces of theatre I've ever seen.  And Edward Watson is astonishing.  Believe me; I know I always burble, but these superlatives are more justified than I know how to express.

Meanwhile, it's a Bank Holiday weekend, yippee.  Frustratingly it's turned grey and showery bang on cue.  We had been enjoying a wonderful spell of settled, calm, sunny weather.  C'est la vie...

Kew Gardens is looking breathtaking as much of the early spring colour is still around while cherry and crab apple blossom, magnolias and rhododendrons are all blooming as well.  Trees are breaking into leaf faster than I've ever known them to; the horse chestnuts have gone in the space of about ten days from having their bud covers falling off and leaves just starting to emerge, to being in full leaf and coming into flower.  Just like that - boom, it's spring.  The bluebells are starting to appear in the Conservation Area and everywhere the air is shimmering with birdsong.  It's paradisal.  I work in paradise.

And I have groceries to shop for and a load of washing to run, and friends to meet, and chapter fifteen to finish (and chapters sixteen and seventeen as well).

Have a good weekend!