Only temporary …
I’ll miss my temporary desk. OK, it wasn’t very big and had to double as a table but at least everything was within arm’s reach.
On Monday we moved out of the – very warm – flat we’d rented for the winter and into our – very cold – metal box up on the hillside. At 6am on Tuesday it was 1°C INSIDE.
A few days later, a few degrees warmer. We have hats, thick socks, three duvets and a cat to keep us warm at night. I am resigned to having only a temporary space at the table and a makeshift resting place for my notebooks (three boxes covered with fabric). I have an old school desk but need a chair the right height to use it. I look out onto a hazel tree strung with bird feeders in the foreground and a view of the hills through a gap in the hedge. Like the birds, like everyone, I am waiting for spring.
Walk along the river Wye
Books are like seeds …
“Books are like seeds: they come to life when you read them, and grow spines and leaves. I need trees around me as I need books around me, so building bookshelves is something like planting trees.”
© Roger Deakin, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm (Penguin, 2008).
(Things are) Looking Up
The Colour of… umm.Tulips.
The tulips were a lovely gift from my mother who made me promise, on GUIDE’S HONOUR*, this morning to buy some Buttercup Syrup for my cough.
So. No, I’m not well but yes I am reading (Geoff Dyer’s The Colour of Memory – very good, and entertaining) and yes I am writing again. Finished and subbed a short piece this week after reading Oliver Burkeman’s piece in the Guardian last weekend (Helsinki Bus Station theory). And yes, despite having zero energy I will stay on the bus, I will stay on the fucking bus, just for the ride. *No, I wasn’t a girl guide.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds: Jubilee Street
This track’s hounding me too. ‘I got love in my tummy and a tiny little pain/And a 10 ton catastrophe on a 60 pound chain’. Brilliant.
The National: Bloodbuzz Ohio
Been three days now. Can’t get this voice, these lyrics out of my head. #4 in BBC 6Music’s top 100 best tracks of last decade.
