Animals Strike Curious Poses

Another fantastic image from my cyber friend over at Black and White - I have followed his blog for the last couple of years and it only becomes more beautiful there.

My skin is moisturised. The sun is shining and the sky is blue. Beyond my window a tiny bird is singing to my bird feeder as a prelude to stealing its peanuts. Ida Maria sings to me from a freshly borrowed library cd (what an amazing service the library is - you should use it more). The Loft is tidy for the first time in a month or so and fresh laundry dries in front of my seventies gas fire. This looks like a picture of domestic bliss, at last.

Kate's blog is back online - yay! Check it out and send her healing vibes as she recovers from New Monia in New Zealand (see what I did there - does the fun of The Daily never stop??). And while you're strutting so confidently around the blogosphere, stop off at Psyconym's blog, too - her signature image at the top of the screen is just amazing, and her posts make me feel like I'm living inside a Daniel Clowes graphic novel. Actually, I kind of fancy me and Psyconym as alternative Enid and Rebecca's - bugsy the cat mask.

Despite the many joys in the world, I am antsy. Still too busy thinking of what I desire to notice what I have. It's such a cliche to miss the obvious, and a capital error, as our Sherlock would say. I'm back at the Doyle collection today after spending the morning there yesterday with the new records project manager, Michael. I spent an hour researching an obscure skotographer called Madge Donohoe.

But what is a skotographer, Sarah, I hear the gentle readers cry (I keep typing it as scatographer, which I'm too afraid to look up in the dictionary, quite frankly).

Well, a skotographer is someone who takes pictures without the use of a camera or light, in Madge's case by pressing packages of photographic plates to her head. This is how I currently spend my spare time, analysing the pictures of spiritualist photographers, and I wonder my dreams are so haunting?!

Following my adventures with Madge, I spent a couple of hours cataloguing pictures of a medium called Kathleen Goligher, who was famous for producing ectoplasm, but trust me, you don't need me to get into that with you.

I find me impossible right now. Try as I might to outrun me, I'm always here waiting when I get home at night. Damn my persistence.

I'm flirting with Ida Maria. Her record label describes her as a cross between Amy Winehouse and The Strokes, which seems too frightening for words.

Or blow me a kiss, and that's lucky too

I can't get enough of the work of artist Silverlimit, on deviantart.com. Check out his gallery here

The moon is a slice of cheese as white as love outside my window, against a sky as dark as a broken promise. Above the rooftops opposite the Loft is a single yellow star snuffed out in moments by the fingers of clouds, only to reappear a moment later, as hope does just at the moment you begin to feel the darkness will never break again.

My face hovers in the glass, lit by my laptop and appearing as a ghost. This is how I feel today, as if I am hardly here at all. I am verified in the reflections I catch in other people's eyes.

Eeyore days and long, sleepless nights are punctuated for me by the sound of my neighbour's all night bass line, which roars into the night as she sleeps peacefully through it. I am sleeping in the living room again. The bedroom is so cold that being in it at night makes me feel like a Charles Dicken's pauper, or a Clarendon Road Irregular separated from her merry gang.

I am sleeping badly: fitful, packed with anxious dreams and memories that run over my heart when I wake as nails on a blackboard. During the day I have endless energy but only for work. I temp, and write, and organise and write. I write for clients, for the blog, for others and, for the first time since I was a child, I write easily and fluently for myself. My diary knows me again and my notebook is crammed with outlines for stories waiting to be written. Who knows, maybe I'll even finish something......

I have not been so conscious of solitude since my childhood, a time when I wore myself like protection - unlike now, as I wear myself like a hand-me-down. I would love to feel as I did then again, complete, self-enclosed, whole. It's just a matter of practice, though, to return to that sense of myself I think, learning to hear then to trust my own voice. Practice, mixed with belief and perhaps a sprinkle of magic, faith, or whatever we're calling it nowadays. And I'm getting lots of that. Like Garbo: more often than not, I want to be alone, though it never sounds as good when I say it.

The moments I like myself best though, are, as ever, in the company of others - one among many reasons why I will always make a lousy hermit. These moments are unpredictable, unplanned, they take me by surprise: discussing with Lynda (the beauty of whom I cannot begin to describe here, and which shines so much brighter because she has no idea it's there - oops, she does now!) the impact of watching Duckula as a child on her decision to become a vegetarian in later life, or gossiping with the Chief, or guessing cryptic clues with my friend Steve as though I'm some kind of crossword autist (I sometimes arrive at the right answer, but don't know how I got there).

I spend this time alone to learn myself again, but it will always be others who teach me to love what I find. Tonight's music comes fromTerra Naomi. Like House, I never get enough of Vicodin. The song, obviously.



I still miss you Kate x

And I Must Admit That I Was A Bit Scared

Name the opening titles this is from, you crazy buzz monkeys, I double triple dare you....

I just heard from Kit Kat half way around the world and it was just about the most wonderful thing imaginable, even more so than being David Tennant's towel after his morning shower.

I always ponder in myself why it is that I never see the full-entire (which is like the Mull of Kintyre except different in every conceivable way) beauty of a thing until it is no longer with me. Things are usually no longer with me because I either have taken the thing apart and can't put it back together again or life - often with my help - has decided that, as with Kate, I am just not to have access to her for a while.

I miss her every day, but I have to hear her voice to remember with joy and pain all tied together ('laughter through tears - my favourite emotion' - life size lollipop of David Tennant to the person who can name the film that line is from. No, not really. As if I'm going to give away my lifesize lollipop of David Tennant) just how much I miss her.

Kate is recovering from being poorly, which is rubbish after travelling halfway round the world, or at least I thought so at first, but having spoken to her I think where lovelier to spend some recovery time than on the beach in New Zealand?

I've recently found Newton Faulkner and become a huge fan of his beautiful voice and quirky, irreverent, beautifully touching lyrics, so today has a little somt'n-somt'n of our Newton covering Kate Nash.

And he's ginger. Properly.



In other news, I had one too many Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters with James last night, though the evidence of my own eyes tells me he came out of it far worse than I did, although to balance the equation, he can programme a computo at 3am utterly besozzled out of his mind, so I guess we're even. Not that it's a competition. But if it was, I'd probably still win.