Category: Life in General

Even if I set out to make a film about a fillet of sole, it would be about me.

We went for a drink at this place. At 11.30 on Fridays they shower you with rose petals from a balcony. The whole place is decor­ated like some kind of baroque stage set from a Fellini film. In fact the whole place is like a Fellini film. They don’t allow camer­as inside, but I took some photos on Marcos’ phone. Instagram photos look amaz­ing on the screen of the iphone 3, but they don’t always look so wonder­ful on the computer.

Enfold­ing sunny spots of green­ery

I haven’t posted here for a while because life has over­taken me a little, and I’ve been dash­ing from place to place. I’m in Palma de Mallorca right now visit­ing Marcos’ family, with a perman­ent move to London on the cards for the end of the month (it can’t come too soon). I’ve got a back­log of photos to work through.

This & That

I haven’t updated in a while. There’s a back­log running. I’ve just been busy work­ing all hours and doing univer­sity work. I’ve seen quite a few films recently tho.

This & That

I haven’t updated here in about a month. Not a great deal has happened. I worked at the museum a fair bit. I got a nasty bout of sinus­it­is & tonsil­lit­is combined and was walk­ing round with a giant swollen hamster face for about 4 days (bigger on one side too-joy!). I still feel a bit bleur­gh, but hope­fully that should go away.

That cat’s some­thing I can’t explain

Char­ity shop haul (+ “help­ful” cat)

Tartan fabric, grey wool skirt, purple dress, flor­al dress, knit­ting pattern book, pattern draft­ing books, Lux the Poet (excel­lent book btw), 70s girls comics annu­al for zine purposes, London Review of Books person­als collec­tion (“Anim­al in bed. Possibly a gnu.”)

For the Loneli­ness You Foster, I Suggest Paul Auster

I’m not doing the book review thing anymore, I lost track. When I added it up, I real­ised that I read at least 3 books a week (fast read­er + a lot of time on trains), so that’s over 150 book reviews in a year. Writ­ing that many book reviews doesn’t really appeal, so I’ll just mention any books that piqued my interest. Recently I’ve been read­ing the New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, the sort of thing I like a lot and wondered why I hadn’t got round to read­ing it before. I think it’s what they were going for in I Heart Hucka­bees and failed to do. I hate that film. (But I love people mess­ing around with the form of detect­ive stor­ies). I’ve also been re-read­ing all my Diana Wynne Jones books, for obvi­ous reas­ons.

Anniver­saire de Victoire

On Saturday I went to Brighton for Vicky’s birth­day. When I arrived at her flat, she had a full birth­day tea laid out with all kinds of treats and drinks, and a red velvet cake that looked like a giant cupcake. Every­one should do that for their birth­day, it was so much fun

Et Tu Moogie?

Last night I went to Moogie Wonder­land. It was Ides of March themed this time, and I made them some stuff.

This is a projec­tion on the life of Juli­us Caesar made with card­board and chro­makey. It’s clunky as hell, and there’s no way I’ll use it for uni, but I got it done in time for the event, and that’s what matters in this instance. (Also the audi­ence is drunk people, and they’re not known for their attent­ive­ness or atten­tion to detail). My main beef with it is there’s too much text (it was the only way I could think of to get the story across when I didn’t have time to do more soph­ist­ic­ated anim­a­tion) and most of the silhou­ettes are too basic. I’m going to remake it, with much better compos­i­tions and just gener­ally at a high­er, more soph­ist­ic­ated level.

Caesar ‘ad some jam for tea

I haven’t updated this for a little while, and I’ve built up a back­log of things to write about

Things I need to write about:
Brighton Zine­fest (I’ve got a whole heap of photos to sort out)
Typic­al Grrls II
Univer­sity Work
Oliv­er Post­g­ate Book
I’ve also got a whole load of films I need to scan.

Typic­al Grrls v1

So last Thursday me & Tukru had our first club­night. All-female playl­ist, free zine, free cake. It wasn’t very busy, as expec­ted for a first night that we hadn’t had a great deal of time to prepare for. Some art students came, they seemed to enjoy them­selves and certainly spent a lot at the bar, which covered our costs. About 11 it got really quiet, and the owner was tired so she decided to close early for the first one. We went home, I was feel­ing a bit disap­poin­ted. It turned out the next day that a whole load of people we knew came along about half 11, but of course the place was closed. Ah well. Next time. We’ve got a month to promote it as well.

Meow, meow, meow

Me & my ex-boyfriend had a cat. He was a stray who decided to move into my friends’ house, and we ended up taking him. We had him for two years as a girl named Mia, until the vet said “you do know your cat is a neutered male, right?” so he rever­ted to his origin­al name of Meow. As cats go, he was pretty good. Very affec­tion­ate, but had some­how missed out on the basic train­ing programme for the cat life­style, and so was always getting himself into scrapes like getting his claws stuck in the sofa and not know­ing what to do. Here he is hypnot­ising himself with one of those glit­ter lamps. Unfor­tu­nately he had to be put down the day before New Year’s Eve, because he was old and ill and had lost the use of his legs and couldn’t eat anymore. Good­bye Meow.

Stuff I’d like to do before I’m 30

So here’s my first entry of 2011. It’d better treat me well (or else, you hear that 2011?).

On Weds I turn 26. This is prob­ably quite old. Here’s some stuff I’d like to do before I’m 30.

Fotoauto­mat

There was a b&w photo­booth round the corner from my hotel in Vienna that was €2 a pop. I took a strip most days to docu­ment what I’d been doing . I also had some with Delal, and some of me hold­ing up signs, but I’ve cut them up for zine use now, and I can’t find what I did with the photo of the whole strips.

Note­book

When I was 17 or so I used to carry this note­book around in my bag to jot stuff down in. In boring moments in the pub, friends used to draw in it too. I managed to lose the insides (I’ve still got a few pages some­where, but I haven’t seen then in a while, I’m sure I’ll uncov­er them when I return to Brighton and unpack my stuff). You can see where other people have scribbled stuff on the cover too, and polar­oid stick­ers got stuck on, and then fell off where the mater­i­al was so flimsy. Those polar­oid izone stick­ers were a bit rubbish really. I scanned the covers a while ago, and forgot about it, and just noticed them on my flickr.

Hats & Hamming it up

The night before I went to Austria I hung out with some friends to drink beer and yell out the answers to quiz shows. I do enjoy a good bit of trivia. Some hats made an outing, and I took some hammily posed photos. I also got really indig­nant about the continu­ing exist­ence of Roger Waters, even though he’s not quite in the Bono league for me.

I spent the summer wast­ing

Yester­day I went round Scott’s to play Scrabble with him & Matt. At the begin­ning of the game I got loads of good letters and managed words like exude. At the end I had noth­ing but Os and Is and resor­ted to crappy words like nut. We ate a lot of chili crisps. Scott won the Scrabble.

My Tempor­ary Room

I’m spend­ing the summer with my mum in my dead end homet­own inbetween a spate of work­ing in Austria, before I return to Brighton the end of Septem­ber. None of the furniture is mine, but the wall colour is the same as when I painted it about 10 years ago. The rest of my stuff, partic­u­larly my moun­tain of records, dvds and books is packed up in a stor­age unit in Brighton for my return.

Pussies Galore

My mum’s got 2 kittens now, about 12 weeks old. She’s had them for about 2 weeks now, so they’re still getting used to things.

Darling Don’t You Go and Cut Yr Hair

I helped my friend Tukru make herself blue. She cut the fringe, and I trimmed the rest of her hair and bleached slices in, and dyed them blue. Most of the blue is in the under­neath layers of her hair, so she doesn’t get in trouble at work.

Danger­ous girls to watch out for

I went with Tukru & some other friends to watch Best Coast the other night. The band were great, but the drinks prices were awful (cheapest drink was £4). They did have a b&w photo­booth in the garden of the venue tho. B&w ones are a rarity in the UK now, most places have those digit­al ones now instead, which have a nasty tend­ency to make you look really spotty with a sort of grey tinge.

Out & About

My friend Chloe came down from Glas­gow on Weds, and we had a drink with 3 of her friends who used to live in London, but now live in Brighton. It was nice to find 3 more of my kind of ladies in Brighton. Jenna runs an altern­at­ive 80s night that I’ve been mean­ing to go to for a while, so that’s where I’m going tonight with Vicky. Unfor­tu­nately I’ve got to go into work this even­ing to hand out certi­fic­ates to kids, but at least I’m free after that.

Whoop­dedo

Good­bye £3 (astound­ingly heavy) commie amp. You have infuri­ated me/​worried me with your dodgy elec­trics for the last time. Hello nice reli­able amp, cour­tesy of GAK’s extremely gener­ous ex-display discount.

Seagull drama

When I came home from work there was a crowd of people outside my front door. There was a woman hold­ing a seagull chick that had fallen down from the nest on the chim­ney pots. The chick was in the big fat gorm­less stage where the parents are fed up of feed­ing it, but it’s not ready to fly yet. There was really no way of putting it back up on the chim­ney pot, so I let the woman in and put the bird on the piece of flat roof that projects out of the window on our land­ing, safely out of the way of cats and foxes. In case he was going to hang around a while, I named the bird Spot, after his feath­ers.

To hypnodo­ma­tio mou

I got into the art MA, so at the end of the month I’m moving out of here, putting my stuff in stor­age and spend­ing the summer bumming round my mum’s to save money (with a quick jaunt out to work for a week in Vienna). I thought I’d take some pictures, seeing as how the room is pretty tidy, as I had to show my possible replace­ments round. In many ways it’s an amaz­ing room, but the total lack of vertic­al space and stor­age space can be a real pain in the arse. Excuse the slightly fuzzy photos, my compact camera is old and decrep­it and doesn’t focus like it used to.

Polit­ics

I used my postal vote today- I’m going to be away from home on polling day. I didn’t get to vote in the 2005 elec­tion, because of a regis­tra­tion mix-up, so I made sure to get it all done way in advance this time. It’s nice to see that the candid­ates in my area for the three big parties are all women. Caroline Lucas has a fairly good chance of getting in in Brighton, she’s the lead­er of the party, and they’re very popu­lar locally. If she wins, she’ll be the first Green party MP. If she weren’t on the list, I’d go for the Lib Dems. That’s who I’ve voted for every other time. I have no idea who will win the elec­tion. I hope it isn’t smug orange plastic-faced Camer­on.

Tea & Sympathy

Earli­er today me & Vicky planned to go to an Alice Tea Party that was advert­ised in a vintage clothes shop. We dressed up Alice style, her in a grey dress with a bow and white tights with black ballet shoes, and me with a chequred skirt, silver and black stripy jump­er, and silver ballet shoes. We got there and the “tea party” turned out to be a shop assist­ant on a small table with some styro­foam cups of tea. Very disap­point­ing

Birth­day Haul

I finally have all my birth­day presents, after ooh, 2 weeks. Thanks Royal Mail.

Snow­cake

I was stuck at home today because of the snow. I wish I’d had multi-coloured sprinkles for this, the pink ones kind of look like blood.

Lady into fox

I’m off work with a stom­ach bug today, I’ve been under the weath­er all this week. This morn­ing I read Lady into Fox by David Garnett. He’s one of the Blooms­bury set who isn’t really famous (apart from the indig­nity of having a less popu­lar Andrew Lloyd Webber music­al based on one of his books). The book was bril­liant, about a bour­geois 1880s coun­try couple and their life after the wife suddenly turns into a fox.

Right now I’m doing lots of laun­dry, writ­ing about Roman emper­ors, and work­ing out what bland food I can have for lunch.

Custom­er Service

My cous­in is work­ing tempor­ar­ily in Craw­ley, a town which exists solely for servi­cing Gatwick Airport, and every day he is confron­ted with a new bizarre sight outside the train station. The best one this week was two dwarves slap­ping each other. He popped into Sainsbury’s and bought a jack­et potato and pack of Garibaldis (those biscuits with rais­ins in which look like squashed flies) for lunch. The man at the counter asked him “Are you going to have a BBQ today then, sir” perfectly seri­ously. He thinks Craw­ley might be direc­ted by David Lynch. I like the idea of a biscuit bbq.

Lash­ings of ginger beer

I’ve been in Medway this week­end, I’m stay­ing at my mum’s, but she’s not there. My auntie went into hospit­al to have her coch­lear implant done, and her daugh­ter is away on her long pre-booked holi­day, so my mum’s gone to pick her up from hospit­al and look after her for a few days until her sense of balance returns.

Sue Rydering

So on Saturday I went to the Sue Ryder hospice sale in Oxford­shire whilst Chris was at work, a treas­ure trove as always.

Char­ity Shop­ping with Tukru

On Sat I went down Rochester with Tukru to do some char­ity shop­ping. She got Ike & Tina Turn­er and Human League records, a unicorn colour­ing book for zine purposes (she’s a big unicorn fan) and I convinced her to get some Agatha Christie books.

Pancakes!

The 24th was Pancake Day here in the UK. You tradi­tion­ally make pancakes to use up all your indul­gent bits before Lent. I’m not at all reli­gious, and I don’t give anything up for Lent, but I always make pancakes.

New Hair

I added some black streaks to my hair, because I thought that the solid pink ( a base of atom­ic pink, made a bit redder with a mix of la riche rubine + flamingo pink) was making me look peaky. It also hand­ily disguised my rapidly grow­ing roots. I’m pleased with it.