on holiday

:D

and i'm heading home

hope you all have a lovely Easter weekend.

trolly x

i was interested to read a report on the School that becomes a family.

so here a school that has no formal examinations at all, and encourages students to follow their own interests. although students leave with no formal qualifications, many do go on to university.

one key to success, though, must be the small class sizes, which enables greater focus on individual learning needs.

hmmm.

and next week my daughter starts school and goes straight into a class of 35...

but.

just imagine a world without exams....

yesterday

in the garage

tidying up

in a foul mood:

throwing stuff about

and banging myself. as i do. when i'm too cross to be in a confined space surrounded by heavy, sharp, rusty stuff. waiting to fall on me.

do you know? i managed to heave a huge amp out the garage on my own: the strength of two, i had yesterday.

i was that cross.

and today?

a calmer karma

surrounds me

[deep breath]

and i have with the very gentlest handling

potted on pots and pots of seedlings

without breaking a single one

i took apart the cot in my daughter's bedroom today; it'd been there for the last couple of years mainly used as a convenient dumping point to store stuff in. but there, also, just in case.

but just in case just didn't happen.

so taking it down is final recognition that there will be no more babies: just my daughter, me and he. we three.

and now the cot is stored away in bits in the garage; and i dunno, it put me in bad-feeling-sorry-for-myself kinda mood, which has taken most of the day to shake off.

and now i feel

that i may well end up drinking too much tonight.

right oh.

re the rats.

i've been reading that sleep loss really hacks off rats.

so.

i know they're under the shed. probably asleep.

the only question now is

what loud music do i play to them

that's going to do the trick

and not land me with an ASBO?

there's a ruddy great big, brown rat out back...

pinching the bread i put down for the blackbirds.

what do i do?

kill it?

[that could be a problem, as the only thing i'm any good at killing is potted plants]

[and conversation]

[and punch lines]

[and my feet]

[cringing]

but can rats - i assume that there's more than one - be dealt with humanely, or am i being daft, and should i do like my Dad did and sit and wait with a big, heavy shovel....?

thwack.

i first happened upon the Cowboy Junkies when i was twenty-two, working in a cafe, frying stuff for a living.

i was loading the potato tumbler peeling machine, sack of potatoes on my shoulder; cold, raw hands from the cold, raw water. and on the radio came Blue Moon, and i was taken from that place then.

it became a marker in my life. and on hearing that i did not know but that i was drawing a line in the sand.

so listen, sometime.

it's like this:

we hear more and more music in our daily lives than ever before, and it influences us in all kinds of subtle and not so subtle ways.

keep a note of all the music you hear in one day and how it makes you feel. it might be birdsong, music from next door, a traffic jingle, adverts, shop music - whatever.

you need to use a specific form and return it by the 26th April.

Photofora has a lovely series of photos which take you the length of Nevsky in the snow.

The coldest I have ever been in my life was in St Petersburg, December 1994. It was -27C.

It hurt to breathe.

I had gone well prepared, I thought, having bought the finest, thickest wool coat that a UK chain store was able to offer: complete with faux-fur collar to snuggle in. My host took one look at my coat, shook her head, and hooted with laughter. Within a day I had been kitted out in borrowed furs. I needed them.

In the long darkness that is winter in Russia, I remember the bright shop lights of Nevsky Prospekt flooding out across the icy pavements. Nevsky is a long, wide street that runs down to the Winter Palace, and is boarded on both sides by eighteenth century town houses.

Everywhere underfoot, thick shot-ice. It was all I could do to stay on my feet. It snowed and then froze, snowed and froze; the rubbish of the city frozen in with each layer, to be released in the sudden thaw of Spring. And below ground, in the warmth of the underground, homeless children gathered by the score.

And I remember the flower sellers on Nevsky, selling single, long-stemmed roses from wooden and glass-fronted boxes, that were somehow also like shrines to the flowers themselves. Behind the glass numerous small, flickering candles giving off meagre heat in an attempt to stop the petals from freezing.

And me in my borrowed fur coat and fur hat on my way to get the tram home; so much the part that, 'Jensheena, pajalsta', (Miss, please), and, look, I was being offered a seat, and I sat down. And felt warm at last.

Imagination is more important than knowledge...

Albert Einstein, (1879 - 1955)

Remember those newspaper ads? Slightly studious, indeterminately-aged, earnest man peering back at you through rather serious glasses (or was he holding a pipe - darn it, I can't remember), in quasi-intellectual style? Although he tries hard to have us believe otherwise, a good memory is more than the sum of your glasses and a sagacious expression. We know that. Don't we?

But…read on…

He doesn't forget his Mum's birthday; he's never stuck for words, or left with that exquisitely embarrassing silence upon forgetting the name of a colleague at a party. Because he doesn't forget.

Can you imagine being with someone who would remember everything you forgot? And take pleasure in reminding you. How much fun would that be?

My guess is that the relationship would be blissfully short-lived. And end with a sharp poke in the eye (having taken afore-mentioned glasses off first). Ha! Remember that, Mr Memory, UK!

Franco Magnani paints from memory. In the process of remembering he is also describing what he has forgotten. And in the space between the two he explores what it is to be. His work is both real and imagined: creating landscapes that exist, and don't.

So, next time you're scratching your head, don't let the memory moguls get you down. Forgetting is important.

I just wish I could get Mr Memory UK off my brain…that he lingers there at all is worrying, very worrying indeed…

grand:

is what i say to this:

Crazy song makes musical history

but.

folks.

listen up.

there i am. driving back from sunday afternoon stuff to hear Radio 1 claiming

claiming

the success of Gnarls Barkley as their own.

that's right.

their's.

it's amazing.

when something once so illegal

becomes so utterly desirable

and mainstream

that the BBC can't keep its hands off.

Do any of us end up where we expected to be? I doubt it. Because our expectations often change as we find ourselves doing what we do.

But somehow our dreams sit outside of this. And stick their tongues out at us when we have the temerity to glance at them.

Mine have long since stopped recognising me.

And me?

Well, if I hadn't been thrown out of physics for being so woefully bad at maths, and been thrown out of maths for being so woefully inept at standing up to the bully who was my maths teacher, I'd quite like to have built bridges.

I'd be creating and designing those glorious structures that use maths so creatively in an attempt to defy physics. I'd be a bit of an anarchist. I'd build bridges just for the hell of it. Wherever I could.

Not just bridges that span chasms, or tiptoe delicately over estuaries, or find themselves remarkably with clouds for companions, but bridges that help us to be free, and fully to be.

I'd build bridges across forests just so that we might walk through the treetops and look down; I'd build a bridge to bring us right down over the surface of a lake like the skimming of a flat pebble across it; I'd build bridges to stride across cities, radiating out in all directions. My bridges would barely touch the ground.

That's what I'd quite like to be doing if I wasn't doing what I do now…and you?