Don’t let anyone tell you you’re not worth the earth – these streets are your streets, this turf is your turf.

Today’s title is from The King Blues – What If Punk Never Happened? And there are many things, there are so very many things that I could write about Climate Camp 2009, and other experiences I’ve had in the last couple of weeks. None of it would be very coherent or cohesive, though, I would find it difficult to get points across, I would argue with myself, I would struggle as I always do.  This statement addresses some of my concerns about it, and this article voices some of my hopes and happinesses.

And what about me? I am well and happy. My head is full of ideas, hopes, fears, half-formed analyses. A lot of things are wrong in the world. Some things are right and good. Some things are ugly. Some things are beautiful. I had some time to think and a lot to think about. I value opportunities to meet and spend time with interesting and kind people. My brother is one of the most interesting and kind people I know. I value time spent with him, above much else. I met several new interesting and interested and kind people, too. I like being heard and respected for who I am. I enjoy pubs, pretty girls, Thai food, sunshine, laughter, foxes, freedom and fire. All of the above were features of my week away. I missed my lover, and my bike. My sister is sixteen years old. I got to Newcastle to see her a few hours before her birthday began.

This weekend just gone was Rosh Hashanah, Jewish New Year – it started at sunset on Friday. I guess that means I started it by tipsily cycling home from the pub where my newish boss had treated me and a colleague to drinkies following an unexpected, but pleasant, ‘it’s 5pm on a Friday and this bottle of wine has been in the fridge for ages!’ one in the office. I had a ‘credit crunch date’ at home, as the boy and I need all the spare dolla we can muster for paying the deposit on, and buying stuff to go in, our new flat next week. We had a nice meal and watched The Proposition – I’d seen it before, in the cinema with K, but he hadn’t, and it is still as bleak yet brilliant as I remembered. Then we sat and talked about stuff and I ended up crying about EDL and/or UAF until I felt very very sick, and not sleeping well at all, wakefully Thinking about Things until after 4am.

I got up on Saturday morning with puffy eyes, had some tea, and baked some really nice cinnamon biscuits. Then had some more tea, then went out on my bike to meet my good buddy P, who I hadn’t seen in four weeks, due to our busy lives. We met at the start of the canal, rode down the Union canal path (nice and flat, and mostly wide with just a couple of slightly scary bits where you’re supposed to get off and walk, but of course we don’t), over aqueducts and under viaducts, talking about stuff – what we’d both been doing over the month, his 30th birthday being in a few days, bikes – to where it meets the Water of Leith path somewhere around Wester Hailes and so we switched on to that (pretty good, scenic, but a lot more bumpy – rather him than me on that roady bike he has borrowed from his brother while the latter is in New Zealand. Leon can handle all the rocks, sticks and mud just fine) and took it all the way to Balerno, where it somewhat abruptly ends. It had been pretty grey and drizzly all day and a proper downpour commenced just as we stood there wondering what to do, so we went to the shop and bought some milk to have with our biscuits, then went a little way back along the path looking for shelter. I always find it sort of awesome how much cover the trees can offer from even this torrential rain – we quickly found a really nice dry spot with a big rock to sit on.

Then P decided that if we scrambled down a horribly steep bit to the river’s edge, it would be a perfect place for a little fire, but upon investigating my handbag it turned out we had no means of making the fire (a mirror, yes, but not enough sunlight for that) so, as the rain wore off, he went back to the shop and bought a lighter, the cheapest newspaper he could find (Daily Express – ugh ugh ugh!), and a fruit loaf, while I ate an apple and collected firewood. We locked our bikes together just off the path. He leapt fearlessly down the slope to his proposed fireplace and I crept gingerly behind him, which took about twenty times as long, but didn’t fall. He crumpled up paper, mysteriously found a huge, comfortable plank and by means of balancing it across rocks, assembled it into a handy bench upwind so we’d be out of the way of any smoke. I built the sticks into the little pyramid over the crumpled paper, gathered some more wood, and lit the fire. He got a rock and bashed the protruding ends of some ‘deadly’ nails back into his lumber bench, convinced me it was now safe to sit on, and flapped the remaining paper at the base of the fire as a makeshift bellows, to get the flames going. Then we just sat and toasted pieces of fruit loaf on a stick and had them and the cookies with milk and talked and stared at the beautiful fire for a couple of hours. When it was time to go home (as he had a curry to make) we let the fire burn itself out and then doused the embers using water from the river in the empty milk bottle. The sun had come out while we were sitting there and it was finally a really beautiful, crisply sunny late afternoon, and clearly the last day of summer, and the start of something new. The ride back was easy because it was all very slightly downhill, and we had a laugh, and talked about autumn and time and light, places, politics, plants and plans.
I went home and hung out with D without crying about UAF, and made some totally delicious vegetarian chilli. That was Rosh Hashanah. When I was younger I used to go to shul.

I talked to my dad on the phone. My mum’s got swine flu but he said she’s not feeling too bad. He’d been to the first day of his teacher training course at uni, so he hadn’t been to shul either, which is more ground-breaking – and had spent the week working in the school where he’s been volunteering part-time for a while now. He told me that it had been the most enjoyable working week of his life and I wasn’t surprised, but was very happy for him. I told him about my three-month review and how happy I was at work too, and about my plans for my career, and about K’s success in Catalunya, and about my bike ride. He told me about reading a story to the children (And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street) and how he was impressed and amused by some of their own creative writing, and described the way that he cycles to the school and to uni now – it has been a very long time since he hasn’t had to drive to work, as he used to work a long way out of town in Consett and Blyth. And he told me that my sister had been at a surprise party for her (belatedly) and one or two of her friends’ birthdays.
Obviously I’m gutted for my mum being ill, and I don’t really know what my brother did, but for the rest of us I kind of love that we each celebrated the New Year in our own, very meaningful ways. I think God would like it, if there was one.

In summary, then, same as almost always I suppose: small things good, big things… not so good. Or thereabouts. I am not mentioning the footy. My hopes and plans for 5770 are pretty shiny and exciting. They include

• not filling in one single job application form
• Barcelona
• A garden
• Saving up for this, yeeeah booooi!

Happy new year to you too.

 

The silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun.

I’ve been meaning to get around to writing something a bit less ‘oh mama, can this really be the end?’ around here, something rather more reflective of my usual generally pretty chipper life and times. Only, over the last few weeks, life hasn’t been the usual, not really. It’s been just stressful and angry, lonely and hard, missing persons, and pretty awful overall, with bright spots cast by the wonderful people I try to surround myself with and by climbing high enough to get above the fog (literally, but also a painfully obvious metaphor, no?).
Also the damn wind won’t stop blowing, which I hate. It makes cycling, and indeed walking in the ‘wrong’ direction, feel like a chore – it can’t have been like this last April when I first got Leon (yes, I have been a cyclist for one year and one day!), now it just feels awfully inexhaustible, and exhausting. Although I have just recently gone caffeine-neutral as an experiment, so that might also not be helping. It is not good!

Anyway – to write, you need some inspiration, and I’ll be honest, I am truly spoiled for it. It’s spring and I’m in Edinburgh where so much of the city is bordered in fantastic vivid sap green, everything that was so sad just a few weeks ago, so bleak and dried-up, has come to life and it’s all bursting with newness and potential. I guess that this is almost the best time of the year for that. Bright sunlight streaming dappled through these many leaves feels like a real blessing, all the better for its having been away so long. I hope I never lose the delight of witnessing this annual return to life. I mean, it’s been 25 years and, just as Samir said the other week, it just seems to get more miraculous and joyful each time, not less.

Apart from leaves, there’s friends and art. The quietly wonderful James Robertson, who I’m lucky enough to know in a professional capacity, brought a breath of fresh air, and the word ‘bawheidedness’, into the quiet of the Scottish Poetry Library (which is in itself a very excellent thing) with a bubblingly brilliant reading from the two latest pamphlets from his press, Kettillonia. Again, that warm feeling, like springtime, of newness out of the old, surprises out of the familiar.  Gordon Dargie read powerfully and passionately, and often funnily, of youth and young manhood; James read reflectively and raptly, soft echoes resounding in his words of lives past, glowing, glints.

He was kind enough to insist on presenting me with a copy of his book which I’d expressed an interest in. It’s gorgeous. I probably should read rather more contemporary fiction. Off the top of my head, novels that I’ve read that were originally published in the past ten years: Everything is Illuminated, if nobody speaks of remarkable things, The Good Mayor, and now half of James’ novel The Testament of Gideon Mack. I’ve enjoyed them all, in different ways. I’m sure there must be some others I’m forgetting (oh, something by Will Self, but those are all the same really), but yeah, the point is, I don’t do it much. There’s always just so many books I want to read and most of them aren’t contemporary, not really, now that the twentieth century’s been and gone. I suppose in a way that puts García Márquez, Heller, Kundera into the ever-stretching bracket of [the past] with the classics and epics; what chance do I have against the weight of all the past and all that’s never done nor dusted?

But to get to what was supposed to be the point: now there’s something that’s kept me inspired, kept spinning in my head, filling up those dry old channels which are usually full of crust and crud like thinking about work, conversations I have had, I might have, I didn’t have, wondering what people are doing, thinking, wondering what I’m going to have for tea tonight. These mental arteries like drought-stricken, dusty riverbeds are now green and overgrown (like the fantastic, lush peace of the huge half-forgotten cemetery, full of bluebells and birdsong, that I climbed into on Monday with Sarah) with thoughts of essential music, rhythms and patterns, colours; thoughts of Wounded Knee.

Wounded Knee is a downright incredible dude. For one thing, he’s amazing at communicating – getting across what he’s thinking and feeling to his audience, which is what makes him such a different prospect from an evening with most artists. I think it’s fair to say that the phrase ‘audience participation’ usually strikes a chilling chord of fear and horror in the hearts of all right-minded people (it was ruined at an early age by the multifaceted badness that was schools’ theatre), but somehow WK manages to make this feel like collaboration rather than participation, something much more natural and joyful, like connection. The bowling ball song and the birdsong, and ramsons (one of my favourite words and definitely one of my favourite smells, it’s a long story, but they’re the wonderful smell of the Hermitage in spring and summer, the cycle paths, the burn, the cemetery too, and I’ve long thought they’re the smell I will most miss if I ever go and live elsewhere. I’ve never been anywhere else where it’s so easy to surround yourself with that wonderful fresh greenness in the middle of a real, populated city). The sound, the fury, the sheer cathartic noise of a room full of young people really thinking about testicular cancer; screaming, a gong. Being more than the sum of our parts. The awareness, somewhere in the sidelines, of how odd it might look, if I could be outside looking in at myself, to be so rapt – wrapped – in the depth and sincerity and resonance of the unamplified songs of a man in purple underpants standing by a white wall.

The first time I saw Wounded Knee it was like falling down the rabbit-hole. It’s just like that, I guess, with the tangible texture and growth of his sound using loop pedals; the surprise of hearing something I never had heard –

The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down what seemed to be a very deep well.

Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her, and to wonder what was going to happen next. First, she tried to look down and make out what she was coming to, but it was too dark to see anything: then she looked at the sides of the well, and noticed that they were filled with cupboards and book-shelves: here and there she saw maps and pictures hung upon pegs.

but this time, at the second Downsizesound, there was no electricity and no loops, it was more level, all of our many feet remaining on the ground, but a feeling more like finding yourself in a secret green glade – a blossoming arbour or a mossy clearing in a vibrant old forest – with one you just realised you love. Tapping in to something bigger and older and darker and more alive than any of us. Sharing time and sounds and silence. And knowing what someone means, or getting the impression that you know, insofar as we ever can know what anyone means, is just unbeatable.

Alasdair Roberts did wonderful things with words. I’m no music critic (as you’ll have noticed) and don’t really know how much I can say about him other than to say it’s really not often I come away from a gig thinking ‘that must be a bit what it must be like if you could be in a very small intimate space with some of the Decemberists’, or ‘that must have been a bit what it was like to see a young Bob Dylan’, and definitely not both at once, but this is what I thought about him. He also seemed to reference Yeats, bringing back welcome echoes of the first poem my mother ever read to me – ‘because a fire was in my blood’, I recalled happily at his tale of the hazel wood, and given the fortnight that had gone before this night, was it ever. I’d been thinking, talking about hazel trees just the other day, I perhaps ascribe too much significance to coincidence sometimes, but if I were you I’d not be surprised to see the image of some lucky Corylus avellana leaf coming soon to a ribcage near you. Alasdair Roberts sang, heartfelt and convincing and light (in the way that insect wings are light and beautiful, not beer or entertainment) songs of dowsing, really quite considerable gore, the three ages of man, sociopathy and saturninity (gosh I love that word. Word of the week, I think), among other things, and that is some feat.

An incredibly vivifying evening was brought to a close by the spirited Issho Taiko drummers – four people, many different drums, accompanied by accordion, flute, guitars played with skewers, xylophone. To say they had impressive technical skills is really not the half of it, the red-blooded forceful drumming coming together with the otherworldly melodies to bring about a breathtaking, haunting happening in the room. A deep, vital,  feeling suffused me, deep in my belly, the same place as sex or somewhere very near it. Joyous and uplifting, it just physically got to me: made me stand up straight, made me feel taller and kind of better, grounded, self-aware. It also underlined, or was, the reason for seeing this sort of thing (and no, I have no idea what ‘this sort of thing’ is either) live because recorded it’s like losing a dimension or two or three. Sometimes gigs can just be adding vision to sound, seeing people play songs you’ve heard before; this couldn’t have been much more different. It was adding vision and touch and experience to sound; feeling and hearing and doing something totally new – it was collective, people joining and working wonderfully together – which I think is both necessary and inspiring; exaltant, and in truth, revolutionary.
(And for more on that note: Nowtopia, which I should write more about but don’t have time because the Edinburgh book launch is happening right now! Read and learn and be the change.)

 

Because the tide is high, and it’s rising still, and I don’t want to see it at my windowsill.

Really didn’t want this to be true.

Despite everything I’d heard first-hand from my brother*, who is one of the most kind, intelligent and brilliant people in the world, despite everything I’d seen and read and spent hours and hours worrying and arguing and weeping about last week, lacking sleep, lacking rest, lacking the ability to smile, I had just about managed to get myself to think that the person who told him that the pigs had pretty much killed an innocent man must have been somehow mistaken; just about managed to shake off the memories of Jean-Charles de Menezes and Blair Peach and make myself begin to suspect I could believe that it couldn’t be true, that it had all been so confused and unclear that we would never know what really happened and that it must have just been a tragedy and nobody was to blame. I didn’t want this to be true.

Look. Watch. Remember. And act.

Be the change you want to see in the world.

* Here, he explains part of what happened to him and his friends:

Someone arrives with a thick tarpaulin banner of the kind you can use to block truncheon blows (I think it’s the “C(A)PIT(A)LISM KILLS” one, but mostly see it from behind, so it’s impossible to be sure) and we assemble behind it and start pushing forward. By this point, we’ve already been pepper-sprayed, but I’m wearing sunglasses and have my mouth covered so I’m fine. As the two lines meet, our banner gets shoved back, and someone falls over. More people fall over. I fall over. Other people fall on me. The light gets completely blocked out.
Eventually, I manage to get back to my feet. I’m OK, but a cop’s smashed M over the head with a baton. If you remember my previous email where I mentioned a comrade being known for his extreme, saintly generosity and niceness, that’s him. A flashback: In one of those absurdly over-the-top juxtapositions that’re only meant to happen in crude agitprop and not in real life, the night before (when he was out of the room, obv) we’d been discussing how nice he is and how it’s difficult to describe how nice he is, because there are lots of people who can be described as “nice”, and most of them will sometimes put other people’s needs ahead of their own, and sometimes not, but with M it’s not even something that’s ever in doubt, he just seems to do it automatically, so anyone who spends much time with him ends up taking advantage, not intentionally or anything, just because it’s impossible to avoid doing so with someone who’s so consistently altruistic.
And now he has blood pouring down his face as a result of being hit over the head while he lay on the floor.

- my brother, 21, April 5 2009

 

It’s been a long, long time coming, but I know a change is gonna come.

I don’t do this often, but this is important:

Please, please, please go to the cinema and watch this film this weekend.

The Age of Stupid

If you’re in Edinburgh, it’s showing at the Filmhouse for a week from this Friday, with a bunch of events around the screenings in association with the lovely people of Take One: Action, and on this page you can find local screenings throughout the UK. I watched the premiere on Sunday night, and apart from anything else, it’s bloody brilliant – it really is the most thought-provoking, outlook-changing, unmissable, oddly life-affirming £6 you’ll spend in a good while.

There are terrifying, horrifying moments – as stomach-lurching and spine-shivering as anything from War of the Worlds or 28 Days Later – but this isn’t science fiction. Instead, you find yourself shuddering at things like the realisation that about 40% of natural gas is still being burned off at source across Nigeria’s 1000 onshore oil wells. Yes, that’s the same natural gas that we use to cook and heat our homes: according to the World Bank, over 100 billion cubic metres of it – that’s the combined annual gas consumption of Germany and France – are ‘flared’, uselessly spewing filthy, toxic smoke into the air, every year, apparently because it’s not easy enough for oil companies to make a profit storing and exporting the fuel. In Nigeria, the practice continues despite the new law prohibiting it from 1 January 2009. Much like the High Court ruling that prohibited it from 2005, then.

It’s difficult not to feel appalled at moments like this – but that’s not the whole story. The Age of Stupid, like our world itself, is beautifully put together, inspiring and frightening by turns; part-disaster movie, part-cautionary tale. There’s no knight in shining armour, no fairy godmother, and no straightforward way to a happy ending, but for me, some of the most thought-provoking moments are genuinely uplifting. Watch the excellently named Alvin DuVernay III – the Shell employee who lost his home and everything he owned, but saved the lives of more than 100 of his neighbours in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina – sitting in a jazz bar and reflecting on what he’s learned from the experience about materialism and the way Americans use energy, the way we all live, and tell me you’ve seen a more – good GOD I hate this word and can’t believe I’m about to use it – heartwarming scene in a film this year.

Incidentally, from filmmaker Franny Armstrong’s fascinating backstage diary: [Alvin] is haunted by all the people he didn’t save. He said he “lost his humanity” that day – because he was so focused on getting as many people as possible that sometimes he snapped when people asked if they could bring lots of luggage or go back for something they forgot. Now he says he wants to find all those people and apologise for being short with them.

If that dude has lost his humanity, there’s a lot of us could really do with finding some of it.

Anyway, got distracted there, my point is: it’s pretty easy to feel tiny in the face of climate change. It’s easy to feel terrified, to feel there’s nothing you can do to help avert the forthcoming catastrophe – in short, to freak out. Easy, but certainly not logical – this is our world, our generation, and this is real change that’s happening now, to us. This is why Age of Stupid media producer, brilliant animator and all-round mensch Leo Murray wants you to

Wake Up, Freak Out – then Get a Grip

Very seriously, if you don’t see The Age of Stupid (which would be, well, stupid), if you don’t even read this whole post, then please, please DO take 10 minutes to watch Wake Up, Freak Out – then Get a Grip. It’s short, it’s easy, it’s free, it’s got some ace artwork, and it might just change your life. On peut le voir en français ici, and it’s also available in Deutsch, Español, Nederlands, Türkçe and English with subtitles.

Another of the most resonant moments in The Age of Stupid, for me, was a quiet reflection from an Englishman. Piers Guy, a windfarm developer who’s struggling to achieve positive change against the disturbingly blinkered ‘not in my back yard’-ism of a snobbish, Home Counties tweed-wearing set, stands in Airfield Farm, near Bedfordshire, and is reminded of the war and how the land got its name: “You only have to look at the terrible things in our history, which everyone regrets now”, he muses, “massacres, the Holocaust, and a lot of that was just going along with what was the predominant thinking at the time.”

And this is it, this is what I needed: the reminder that yes, massive social, economic and political changes for the better can happen. More than that, they do happen, must happen, and will happen, and relatively fast.

A hundred years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to vote, and it’d be massively unlikely for me to go to university – but as early as the 70s the UK had a female Prime Minister (granted, she was a shit one, but that’s beside the point here). Sixty years ago, black children in the USA were segregated into ‘Negro’ schools, and couldn’t ride buses or trains, use drinking fountains, or play sports with their white peers; today the President is black. These changes have happened within living memory, and there’s more – the film goes into the (rather exciting) possibilities for going forward into a cleaner, greener future and working to achieve a position of global energy equality, which will unsurprisingly involve the US and Europe seriously (though gradually) downsizing our fossil fuel consumption. (Al Gore: ‘They’re seeing the writing on every wall’).

My grandparents, probably some of your parents, remember life during wartime – living in fear through Blitzkrieg over London, and worse in Poland and the former USSR; losing brothers to the fighting, watching children die from treatable diseases. And they remember dealing with serious shortages – they remember the rationing of clothes, petrol, soap, sugar, meat, fat, then bread, then potatoes. Nobody’s asking our generation to give up our lives for our freedom and principles, and we’re not even talking about rationing bread, more like rationing the time we spend with big-screen TVs, XBoxes, cheap flights. Unquestionably we can face this fight. It’s started in the Maldives, it’s coming to Copenhagen this year.

We can do this, we can survive – and more than that, we can and we will live low impact.

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Newsflash: Bikes are still amazing!

Who’s with me (pictured)?

Pete Postlethwaite is with me.

And finally, bonus fun, whimsical and actually rather beautiful link by way of a reward for having read this far: check out Leo and Bill’s creation of the universe with milk and a fishbowl.

: :  :  : 

 

Mayday

remember that day when we saw the kite caught in the big tree
the little ginger cat from your neighbour’s garden had followed us all the way to the shop
the red kite in the big tree and you with grass stains on the knees of your jeans
i think every boy in the park climbed into that tree to get the kite back down,
human pyramids, twelve boys up in the big tree and you and me laughing at the foot
playing catch with an old tennis ball

and in the end they got it and the pretty girl said thank you
and in the end none of them took her home
pollok dave said he got her number but elgin dave said he never did
either way, we didn’t see her again.
in the evening your neighbours had a barbecue and shouted over the wall for us to come round
we fed that little ginger cat on scraps of chicken until it fell contentedly asleep
the sky was all orangey fading into slate

 

There she goes, my beautiful world.

Up until I was about nine or so, I always thought these were called ‘plain trees’ – no special name, just your common-or-garden, standard variety tree. In London, where I lived, they’re all over the place, so it seemed a reasonable assumption. In fact it’s spelled ‘plane’ and they are London Planes, Platanus × hispanica (or × acerifolia).
The London Plane is a hybrid of two trees from either side of the world, Platanus orientalis and P. occidentalis. The Eurasian one, orientalis, is obviously the closer to home for me and is the one that interests me more. It (like the London plane) is huge, beautiful, sturdy, fast-growing and long-lived — they’re particularly revered in Greece, where at Kos, there’s one that’s supposed to be 2,400 years old under which Hippocrates taught medicine.
The leaves can be used to treat certain eye problems, and while (unlike me) the plane tree is super tough and hardy, (like me) it loves and needs sunlight — in fact, from one of the tree books I love so much at the national library I’ve made a note of the decisive sentence, ‘It cannot grow in the shade’.

Really though, for me, this one is about where I’m from and remembering how much good and beauty and strength I get from that. My other two leaves, for their own reasons, are to do with growth and newness, looking forward and finding my own way in the world, my place in Edinburgh, where I’m at or where I’m going more than where I’ve been. This leaf, which I picked up last time I was down there on my way to Camp for Climate Action 2008, is to balance that out a bit, is about recognising that the past is wonderful too and that, as I keep saying, I’m very lucky and blessed to have such fantastic people in my life who have always been there for me. To remind myself, perhaps, a little, that it’s not always all about what’s new: you need roots and wings.
Home and family are all mixed up together for me; memories of London are inevitably memories of my brother, my parents, and my sister’s birth. Memories of primary school and starting to know myself, learning to learn. The first pavements I ever walked were scattered with plane leaves, and so this seems only natural, simple and right.

London, of course, is the hometown of very many other people, many great and inspiring people. Not least among them is William Morris, the great Walthamstownian (that is clearly not a word, but should be). I’ve quoted him here before and will again (particularly if and when I add an elm leaf to my little gallery – see Previously on Alice’s torso), because he’s endlessly appropriate. All of these together, with my lily and shooting star, are symbolic of Morris’s and my shared understanding that there is so much beauty, so much deserving of awe and adoration in nature, and that it’s worth looking after. So, I think I shall leave you with him today, on pattern-designing:

You may be sure that any decoration is futile, and has fallen into at least the first stage of degradation, when it does not remind you of something beyond itself, of something of which it is but a visible symbol. [...]
[T]hose natural forms which are at once most familiar and most delightful to us, as well from association as from beauty, are the best for our purpose. The rose, the lily, the tulip, the oak, the vine, and all the herbs and trees that even we cockneys know about, they will serve our turn better than queer, outlandish, upsidedown-looking growths. If we cannot be original with these simple things, we shan’t help ourselves out by the uncouth ones.

(lecture, 1881)

 

This is not the future my mother warned me about.

Important things:

• Winter food
• Terminator: Salvation

So, winter food is a super important part of making winter livable through, bearable. Adrian Chiles always says ‘have a bearable week’ in his sign off thing on MOTD2, and now every time I hear the word it reminds me of him, could be worse I suppose, but it’s still a bit odd, yo.

The main winter things I pride myself on doing well are soups (which often turn out more like stews, which are amazing) and cookies (pictured). I did make some pretty fantastic chocolate chip gingerbread one time as well, mind. I’ll not bother writing out a recipe for stew because everyone knows how to make stew, it’s like ‘put tasty things in pot, stir, cook well’, but I will put this one for cookies here mainly because it took me a little time and effort to translate it from weird American measurements, improve it, think of the glaze and all that. Also because it is ace, being really really easy to do and yielding damn fine results which are highly praised by all who munch them (lots of people, I took the last two batches to a seasonal tea-party the other day, and previous ones have measured up to the exacting treat-eating standards of both Dollface and P).

 

To wish impossible things

We are walking back toward the towering Koutobia mosque that we’re using as a handy landmark, when we realise it’s 4pm and the resonant solemn call of the muezzin rings out from it, amplified but pure, clear and bright as a summer stream but rich and deep like molasses, dewy, soft thick emerald Scottish moss, old longstanding trees. Heartwood. We are awestruck and silenced and it feels odd to think that the call is not for me, so pervasive and essential does it seem, and I don’t know what to do and sit down there to think and listen, listen and think.

Another day, as I look out of the window, the later prayer time must fall and a man in a red shirt stops where he is, unrolls his mat and kneels there, bowing toward Mecca, as this wonderful hot bright city seems to pause for breath in the purple twilight, dusky and dusty, breathing in deeply and calmly and just noticing, just taking stock, at this moment when day meets night. Again something takes hold of me, my heart – I’m humbled and shy; I feel perhaps I start to understand, being here, why one might believe and say and sing that God was great. I feel a part of something bigger, and at the same time I feel refreshed and affirmed to be one and unique and me; one of many.

And it’s the stars I think of, not the ones I know obscured by London smog and Edinburgh haar, but dreams, simulations or imaginations of journeys through space with them whooshing up huge and burning on every side; the stars up there in the thin atmosphere and the neat bounded glassy stars of the intricate repetitive tile work down here, radiating their own way, in painstakingly-mapped, bright, straight lines and angles; and the people, who glow like little stars, one and all.

And I think that Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, and Stephen Dedalus and Dr Rieux and Billy Pilgrim and old Wandering Aengus, and maybe Winston Smith, Alex Portnoy, Candide and le Petit Prince and Titus Groan and certainly old Walt Whitman and his body electric, would have got it as well and nodded and swung to this same beat, I’d always thought it was all about searching for something inexpressible and elusive, something subtle, indefinable, untouchable, something that would never be found, but now I think perhaps at the same time it’s about knowing and realising, feeling it, that it’s all over us and under us, that it’s inescapably there, here, now.

 

I can’t forget.

From my notebook:
Marrakech is hot and red and dusty and everything I thought it would be and more. I wasn’t ready for the sleepy, hungry tough cats and kittens who stalk these streets like quiet implacable kings; napping in ruins, artfully evicting the last little particles of meat and marrow from scrap bones, almost skittishly watchful yet lazily proud. Tiny birds hop and flit picturesquely in the dust and the orange trees and teeter shyly forward to drink tiny sips from the fountains.

I wasn’t ready for the omnipresent dirt bikes – ‘scramblers’ says the boy – which zoom unpredictably down every street and many pavements and even, haltingly, noisily, through the narrow walkways of the souks, penetrating into every possible twig and stem and vein of the red city and issuing big belches of heady petrol smell into the still air. These seem to be ridden by every imaginable class of citizen – old men in djellabas, chic ladies in shades, people going to work, laughing young couples and skinny boys in football shirts and striped shirts and trainers, two to a bike, cruising with the bright, assured and wonderful air of the vivacious young of every land, looking confident full of the intent of grabbing Life soundly in both hands and squeezing the vital hot sweet juice out and drinking their fill, and starting with this here overheated and shining red motorised pedal cycle and this wide clear road that turns violet at nightfall when the big fat moon comes up; when the merchants pack up their multi-coloured, glittering, paintbox stalls and kneel to pray; when we pass a man washing his face, hands and feet from a big metal drum re-filled with water in the street and it looks such a vitally simple and refreshing prospect as this incredible baking day draws to a close; when I feel like perhaps my eyes will never be the same again, permanently just a little widened with the sheer effort of trying to take in all the amazing sights I’ve seen: all the sweet-shop, chalky colours, all the dazzling, endless, repeating, calming inlaid tile work of palaces and tombs, all the life and light and the multifacted breathing singing shining unity of the market, a time and a place, a small world.

 

Hey, that’s no way to say goodbye.

Hey, that’s no way to say goodbye.

So whoa, how ace was yesterday, as transfer deadline days go?! Man City, I don’t even know where to begin, Man City started the day with effectively no owner after absolute nutjob of a Thai ex-prime minister billionaire “human rights abuser of the worst kind” fly-by-night Thaksin ‘Frank’ Shinawatra had his £800m assets frozen. Not the most promising of starts, and then by lunchtime the boys in sky blue are apparently rolling in oil money, waving over £30m of it at Wor Dimi, pictured above, presumably at least half sincerely and the rest with the concerted aim of pissing all over the cornflakes of veteran veiny-nosed gobshite ‘Sir’ Alex, also pictured above? And buying Robinho.

Incidentally, I myself was praying for Kevin Keegan to sneakily nab this sulky bugger off our hands for 50p or something, having never forgotten the mildly entertaining chat when he first came over about his being a mental Magpie: “Dimitar told me it was his dream to play for Newcastle United one day and wear the same shirt as Alan Shearer, who is my son’s hero”, said his ma. His old schoolmate Mario Bekov, who has known Berbatov for 20 years, said his admiration for the former Toon ace bordered on obsession. “Dimitar never missed a Newcastle game when it was on television. And Shearer was up there with Pele as a God for him.” Alas, this one really was but a dream. Sure he would only have fallen victim to the curse of NUFC/Michael Owen syndrome and sustained a mysterious ‘training ground injury’ like all their other half decent players ever. Serious, what is it with that? Is it from foightin’? Well, now they have Joey ‘stubbed out a lit cigar in a youth player’s eye and also assaulted a 15-year-old’ Barton, so probably yes. And also the Messiah himself is heading off down the Gallowgate Jobcentre. Or not. Probably. Maybe.

So, the point is, yes I am going to miss Berbs. I’ll miss his weirdly early receding hairline, complete with girly Alice band, I’ll miss his deep-set eyes and his lovely accent, I’ll miss his great long runs and his flailing predation and I guess I’ll miss his teenage strops. And I’ll definitely miss the time he netted four against Reading. WHAT IS THAT EVEN CALLED? A four-trick? A fat trick? A hat-trick-and-then-some? A fourgasm? A Dimi? And what will become of him? I’m not too sure. I think, as we’ve seen, boy’s perhaps got too much of an ego on him and he wants to be a superstar, and I just am not sure whether he’ll look quite as good as he thinks he will lining up alongside Ronaldo and Tévez and even, on a good day, Giggsy… and there is just no sign of anyone EVER stopping wanking on about Ronaldo, so will there be enough wankery left over for wee Berbs? WE SHALL SEE. Also I just really really dislike Man U and always have and always will, I dunno. Even though I do love red.

What will become of Berbatov? What will become of Keegan and NUFC? What will become of Pavlyuchenko with no Arshavin? How cute was it when Corluka said he was really happy to come to Spurs because Luka Modric is his bestest friend? Is Daniel Levy a nob head and should I have given up on him years ago? Why do I get so worked up about this stuff, actually? Do you care about footy? You mostly don’t, do you? What about some of you? Club football? International football? Do you know what I mean if I say something about no matter how rational and logical and sensible you want to be about it, you just can’t help but feel disappointed with mornings like this one and ever so slightly angry at players who’re ‘disloyal’ to the club, even when they’re Bulgarian Toon fans and you hated the way the whole Jol thing was handled and it all really has very little to do at all with lovely old scummy old North London and the grimy smoggy streets you walked and ran and grazed your knees on as a little girl, and besides all that you actually lived very slightly closer to Upton Park anyway? No? I should go to bed, really, shouldn’t I?

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT
With no transfer window to entertain me, I had to console myself with playing the old ‘Elvis Costello-lyrics-related-facebook-status-updates’ game with my brother instead, today. In case you were wondering. That’s awesome.

I went to Critical Mass! With M, who is wicked cool. I met a nice Australian(?) girl. My back wheel/mudguard situation was a little bit mashed up: boo. P fixed it, pumped my tyres and stopped the seat squeaking too: yay yay yay.

You know what is really really cool?

Mehndi

sri’s mehndi hands by darcitananda

And
Mandalas

the end. by misscaro

Aaaand
Islamic tile art

Image Plate from Owen Jones’ 1853 classic, “The Grammar of Ornament”, as scanned by cool origamist EricGjerde

Isfahan/ Imam(Shah) Mosque by HORIZON

And pretty much all intricately detailed fractalicious abstract things. AWESOME.

 

News from nowhere

Come gather ’round people, wherever you roam
And admit that the waters around you have grown
And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimming
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.

“My point would be that there’s nothing in the ice core that gives us any cause for comfort,” said Dr Eric Wolff from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS).
“There’s nothing that suggests that the Earth will take care of the increase in carbon dioxide.
The ice core suggests that the increase in carbon dioxide will definitely give us a climate change that will be dangerous.”

I don’t know if you can see
The changes that have come over me
In these last few days I’ve been afraid
That I might drift away

["A]nd while you live you will see all round you people engaged in making others live lives which are not their own, while they themselves care nothing for their own real lives – men who hate life though they fear death. Go back and be the happier for having seen us, for having added a little hope to your struggle. Go on living while you may, striving, with whatsoever pain and labour needs must be, to build up little by little the new day of fellowship, and rest, and happiness.”

Yes, surely! and if others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream.

It is because everything I have fought for and that all campaigners for social justice have ever fought for – food, clean water, shelter, security – is jeopardised by climate change. Those who claim to identify a conflict between environmentalism and humanitarianism have either failed to read the science or have refused to understand it.

CONTENTS:

Bob DYLAN, The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1963). Alice ROSS, photograph: Kingsnorth coal and oil-fired power station, England (2008). Yoshitomo NARA, sprout the ambassador (2001). Dougie MACLEAN, Caledonia (1979). William MORRIS, Acanthus wallpaper (1875). William MORRIS, News from Nowhere (1890). Alice ROSS, photograph: skies above Kingsnorth crossed by power lines (2008). George MONBIOT, The stakes could not be higher. Everything hinges on stopping coal (2008).

 

Damn it feels good to be a gangsta.

This week I have been mostly jumping for joy

because I have got a new job. In four weeks I will start being an assistant at a small, young publishing firm by the sea. I don’t want to get ahead of myself too much or anything but I think this might actually finally be the beginning of my career. It’s going to be amazing you guys. As are my tiger socks.

I rode my bike all the way to Cramond and back, by the way. With P. He wouldn’t stop showing off and doing tricks. The sea looked like this. It was absolutely brilliant.

I took D, my favorite colleague, to the pub to tell him about my notice, and it was really fantastically sunny so we sat out in the beer garden and we talked about everything and laughed and even had little bits of seriousness chat as well. It was ace. Then I rode my bike home really fast again. I’m going to get a new tattoo.

Tomorrow I’m going away up North with Dollface and we are very excited! Just to stroll about in a changed scene and have a little mini-holidayette. There is much celebrating to be done. Back soon.

 

I know what you talk about in your sleep.

A quick note of some things that have been happening: I look out of windows. I go to parties. I enjoy the kind warm light of summer evenings and I stay up late. I write letters. I go for walks, I go for bike rides, I try to capture little moments and pieces of things. I try to hold on. I smile, I grin, I laugh, and I make other people laugh. I kiss. I remember.

I went to the zoo in the course of my voluntary work (meaning I didn’t have my camera) and I saw a black jaguar. It was just insanely beautiful. I will have to go back.

I grow beans! P gave me a scarlet runner bean one night, I planted it in my kitchen and was enchanted, thrilled, delighted to see it grow.

So then I asked him for another one for my office and he gave me three so my colleagues could join the fun – ‘in the spirit of competition’, he said. The race is on. D’s is the tallest and mine is the smallest, right now, which is sort of like our bodies as well. Slow and steady. The one in the kitchen is huge and it’s tying itself in knots, but I think in a happy way.

I went to a party and met lots of people, some of whom were lovely; I talked to people I’d met before and people I only ever see at parties. In the morning, a boy who is an experimental physicist at CERN sat and kindly explained to me about subatomic particles, and the large hadron collider, and the Higgs boson, and why it was important. He wanted to know why I was interested, and seemed happy with my explanation. Behind him, the large kitchen window treated us to a view of the gradually changing sky as the sun came up, from darkness into the most beautiful, bright, pure, sunny day I’ve seen in ages. Conor brought up Richard P. Feynman, quoted something from What Do You Care What Other People Think?. He seemed pleased that I’d heard of him before, knew something about him, as with Murray Gell-Mann, Max Planck, ALICE, singularities and everything else for which I have Laurence to thank. In RPF’s case, actually, it is not L but my parents, I read a book or two of his from their shelves when I was younger, I feel I should state this, I don’t know why.

Here’s one of my favourite things he wrote, on the same note:

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is “mere”. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part… What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
(The Feynman Lectures on Physics, 1964)

I walked on home through the morning and everything shone. With dew and new sunlight, but also with something else, I think.

Last night I went to Medina with P and we heard the most amazing thing, a lean man in a check shirt and black beard stepped up on to the modest little stage and he sang; in the yellow and red light he made a thousand wonderful sounds using only his voice, with a loop pedal gently stroking layers upon layers of resonant rhythms, of murmurs and howls… There’s no way that words are ever going to get close to explaining it. And yeah, there were other performers, there was other music as well. But Wounded Knee and his wondrous wandering lament for Phil O’Donnell blew my tiny mind.
I talked to Simon Kirby who is one of my most admired living people and I hadn’t seen him for ages. I hugged him, in fact. I hope I did not make a fool of myself. Si told us about an upcoming installation he’s working on, where bamboo robots will make traditional Chinese music float in and out of home-grown Scottish leaves and blossoms, echoes fading through the midsummer night’s air. Sometimes, I think I must have dreamed things but actually they were real. I can’t wait.
We stayed out late and lay in the grass in the big dark park because we didn’t feel like going home yet; it was a school night but fuck it, I wanted to see stars. Then as I walked home, savouring again the strange bluish quiet of a deserted Princes Street, I listened to my mp3 player and it played (What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding? What, indeed.

In the morning I had an email, a sort of free-association free-verse, from Rémy who was one of the loveliest people I’d met at the party; we’d bonded over our mutual love of notes and notebooks, and I’d hoped I’d hear from him again sometime.

It was strictly too sunny to be at work, and I felt funny and fuzzy from lack of sleep, so I just took the afternoon off and rode my bike around in Holyrood Park and it looked like this.

This is my life and it’s pretty fucking incredible, you know.

 

I wouldn’t normally do this kind of thing.

Today has been much more than okay. I could try to write about it all, try to pin everything down – I could write about laughing in the kitchen, smiling down the stairs at the big blue sky that feels like a promise kept; about getting the best text message and sitting on the bus at a stop light and the shining silver banner fluttering in the breeze from a window, flashing at me HAPPY BIRTHDAY, HAPPY BIRTHDAY. About a little walk all on my own in the Hermitage of Braid where the bottom fell off the heel of my boot and I didn’t mind a bit, about feeling ridiculously, insanely lucky that 15 minutes from my happy, friendly, stuffy, ramshackle old office I could be here in this idyll, sitting high on a hill in the fresh dewy grass with daffodils filtering the light to gold, with the burn glinting as it runs by below, with the beautiful big trees reaching right up to this magnificent sky. About all the songs I listened to, lying there wrapped up in my purple hat and polka dot scarf, my green boots and the green grass, my skirt with the pink flowers on, my bright white legs goose-pimpling and then warming, surprised to feel the sunshine, and how hard it was to not sing along, how maybe sometimes I did a little bit because after all there was nobody else there, just me and the birds. And of course I could write about Helen, and a pat on the back. And about smiling all the way home, and coming home to my boy and putting on Wonderful World by Sam Cooke and dancing with him in the living room in our socks, holding each other close in that special not-shy, easy, supportive way and feeling very beautiful and happy and in love.
But I dunno, I don’t think I could ever really nail the way it just is.

 

You’re my number one guy.

That’s how I roll.

My bike’s name is Leon and he is awesome.