:(

I feel like such an idiot for not arranging to do anything on New Year's Eve and so ending up sitting in my room in an empty empty Durham, with a stomach cramp no less. And not even a train ride because my keys to the flat in Edinburgh have disappeared, so I missed my train and have that to worry about, instead of 'Anjali, being on your own has never been a problem for you so let's just have a wonderful evening!' No, I need to find that key or think up another plan, because I want to be out of the house ASAP, because I suspect the Browns (our landlords) may come in tomorrow, and I told them I was leaving today.
Also, do you have any idea where the manual for my printer is so I can find out how to fix 'error 5100' and print out all the lecture notes for last term. The work situation at the end of term 2 is depressing. Other people actually work! I want to work! I need to sort my life out. I am going to sort my life out tomorrow.
Meanwhile, a fantastic little production is taking shape in my head - and also panicking me when I think about next term because I want to direct this thing but also want to act in something - there is so much going on drama-wise next term and I really really want to be in at least two of them (but no, of course that's a bad idea. I need to look at dates and things and work out what I can do sensibly) but also work has to take centre stage (ha ha, funny choice of phrase)because about a quarter of my degree is due next term! Not that much. But a heck of a lot.

But my holidays have been awesome! The first part - I went to London - I love London! My brother lives in a flat in Shadwell, which is in East London, and inhabited almost entirely by Bangladeshis, and I loved it.
Yes, it is really not good for me to be holed up here, when it's people and places that get me excited. Also, there are very few books, both here and in my flat in Edinburgh. I can't live like that. I miss intensely the library at Morland. (Which is where I spent Christmas. Oh, wood-burning stoves! ) Books, fire and company.

I should go and cook something and then...I should probably call my parents in the morning - quite early in the morning, and ask what to do and whether Patrizios are there with spare key...

Here is a video to cheer you up. I've watched it perhaps 50 times. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=WCUfkMkVbwo

And a Happy New Year.
I would appreciate a hug and a prayer, spiritually rubbish year of prolonged crisis to tell you the truth, but God has got a hold of me and already the sky is lightening. I have been rubbish at communicating - like a child with a disability - but I hope for that to change - I plan for that to change - I will be writing letters and telling everything to someone. Because not talking is nonsensical self-punishment. I want to look back on 2009 and say 'that was an awesome year, full of love and growth and light and life and excitement'. Man, I'm starving. I love you all. xxxx

I've just been to a lecture, and I feel I should congratulate myself whenever I do something like this. I missed five last week, plus a tutorial. I'd started to forget about this degree business. So I'm panicking a bit.
Every day feels like a new and experimental life. Like when you've come back from the dead, or someone you know has died, or you've taken the day off to take the train to Wales. You're divorced from routine or responsibility. You're in a special pocket of existing, in fact when you sit in a room full of other people on computers you suspect you might only be a trick of the light.
I really should work.
I've been given a new life!
I am so free!
I am going to be responsible about this!
I am going to do something else that defies logic!

Today I sat in Esquires and read the deaths notices from start to finish
(If I go home I can finish that pizza)
Some sort of emotional masochism? I needed to feel
I wanted to sit in a coffee shop and plumb the depths of people's experience
Goodness I feel funny. All I had today was one large ('ampio') cup of coffee ('latte') with raspberry syrup. Now it's 3 o'clock. I'm floating
That was one thing - bearable and sad and important - every day people's lives are being changed. Everybody dies, and today these particular families are face to face with the abyss under existence and through the cracks in carefully constructed lives it's the same thing. And families and love and all the churches and flowers and how many are Christians? I hoped they all were. I made myself believe that they all were.
On the next page was other things - someone's kitten lost - and a year on - maybe a few years on - people remembering the dead. And someone called Ashley who had a poem printed from 'mam and dad', and one from Gran. I went to the toilet and cried like a baby. My heart breaks so often these days. Remembrance day and all those poor boys in the army.
Let's get some books out, but I really need to eat.
I was out of the house at eleven! I experienced sunlight! I went to a lecture and now I'm in the library! It's like being on holiday.
Four hours till rehearsal - hmmm, I could do two hours of reading for my essay? Yes. I could go to Castle library arrrrrrrgh that darn project, I get so frustrated because their ideas are so different to mine.
I am starving.
I was sick last week, don't worry, I'm not that much of a slacker.

Actually, I wrote another post as well, but it doesn't seem to be here.

Prologue

We start in Paris, because that is where I was early July, all four of us in the most beautiful flat in the most beautiful city. Elizabeth Simpson is an artist - about eighty, with a squeaky tremulous voice for a lady who's fairly large - in a rugby way. Not fat. Just large. She's had an operation on her vocal chords, and in other places as well. All this is irrelevant - she spends every winter in India, recently researching Marwari tribal art, or something - a few months in Paris and the rest in England. I have met her once. I showed her around Kota fort and she took photographs of every inch of wallpainting, which was incredible or futile because her hands were shaking like anything. What fascinated me was that all her accent was English except her r's. Her r's were French.

When she was staying with Mum last year she became very ill, and Mum took care of her, and so is credited with saving her life, and so was offered a stay in Elizabeth's flat in Paris. There we go.

It was The Most brilliant living space I have ever been in. I fell in love utterly. More than anything there was just freedom and creativity oozing from every corner. A little rough, a little ramshackle, wooden floorboards, rooms just thrown together (it seems) in an organic sort of layout, meaning there were tiny wee corridors - the French flat version of Edinburgh Old Town, perhaps. But it must have cost a heck of a lot.- oh and balconies, with plantpots. The main 'space', shall we call it, was a long room with great [French windows, are they called?] all down one side, onto the balconies, and divided into two by a curtain. One half, next to the kitchen, had the dining table, and the other half had just a pool table and a couch, that I slept on. Also there were several bookshelves, books, art material, stacks of framed paintings, piles of books, 'objets d'art'...oh, and a large model aeroplane hanging from the ceiling above the dining table, that sort of thing. She collected a heck of a lot - beautiful things from all over the world - little sculptures, paintings on cloth and paper, beaded jewellery draped around lampshades, and the most gorgeous rugs and textiles. It is perfect, so much so that the bathroom is slightly grotty and the showerhead sometimes comes off (you must understand that this is perfect, these are the perfect living conditions, I hate shininess.

This was a long time ago and remembering it, in the light of what I have just said, gives me hope. I have stayed at rich people's houses and have hated it - beautiful houses, family houses. I just can't do it. I can't feel at home there. Now, we must understand that though I said 'rich houses', though richness seems to typify the houses I am thinking of when I am there, I do not think, actually, that the problem is wealth. Because I love Morland House - which is obviously big and ancient and not poor. Is that because I have basically grown up there and the issue is 'feeling I belong'? Also, the Anokhi Farm - where the people have loads of money and the houses are beautifully and intelligently designed. (These people are textile/fashion designers in India and their house is just gorgeous. And I can imagine myself living there.) Perhaps it is just an issue of 'too much carpet'. There are all kinds of things at work here probably, but I really do balk at *too much comfort!* Insular houses and insular lifestyles.

But I was telling you about India.

I'm in Paris, feeling very French, and thinking that perhaps in the future I will be French. I would love to revisit all the wonderful places we saw in Paris - the utter joy of everywhere, the creativity and the marks of so many great men. It was very inspiring. And all French people are beautiful. We left a few days before Bastille Day. We saw the flags up on the Champs-Elysees, and we saw aeroplanes practising flying down it. And then it was time to go to India. I didn't want to go.

The way I got to India was: first on the Eurostar, to London. Then to Heathrow. Then fly to Delhi, overnight. It was very disorientating. At Heathrow after a day of travelling I didn't know where I was, which country, no idea. I take my stash of UK coins out of the secret pocket of my bag - 'lots of 2p coins' I say to myself - the phrase '2p coins' is oddly familiar, which is comforting, and its exhilarating in a small way that something should be familiar. I have to search under piles of obscurity for the meaning of 2p coins - why, where have I been? I have forgotten about Paris.

WH Smith is another of those exhilaratingly comforting places. There is even some territorial pride in what I feel here. Pride in myself that here is something I'm familiar with - it's mine.

This part of this airport that I'm in is glamorous in such an Asian way, I feel. All these perfume shops and things. Like Dubai or somewhere. All the attendants and people are also all what people'd call 'Asian', and most of the other passengers-in-waiting are too. Non-glamour: a group of Bulbuls standing two by two in a line giggle and eagerly look and nudge each other at an English guy. They are around fifteen, gawky, uniformed. He is tall, droopy, in shorts, curly lightish hair, scruffy and nondescript  and average/less than average-looking and I feel so annoyed at them. And Mr Sir barks 'where's your partner?' because all these teenagers must have partners, and they let themselves, how spastic. 

 

[*One Indian phenomenon - the teenage girl who is unaware of her breasts, bodily hair and appearance in general. Funny, because most Indian women are acutely aware of their femininity, right down to the smallest graceful gorgeous girls in my school in my village, who danced coyly with mehndi proudly on their hands. And there was such a huge understanding of what it is to be a woman, and a being-women-together feel. That was in a village setting. 

And I am annoyed that an English muchly-pierced alternative-looking girl is wildly incongruous and stared at in suspicion and distrust. 

...oh, did I not post this? To be continued. I'm probably in the middle of some train of thought here, but zjooppp....

What?!

This is crazy! For months - months, I tell you - have been unable to access this blogger thing. It wouldn't let me sign on.
Well helloooooo.......
triumphant and joyful ladida - as if, for example, the host of a radio show had been held captive in Afghanistan for 7 months and was now back on air.
So, I am listening to the Last Night of the Proms. I have SO much to tell you. Firstly, I was in India for a month very recently and I need to get all that down; I need it processed. In a crazy whatever jumble - like processed cheese rather than fully matured, perhaps, but at least it's there and I am bursting. I've stopped writing in sentences and diary and moleskine are crammed full of snippets that are pretty futile by themselves, unless they were to be displayed /as/ snippets in a glass cabinet, at least with some overall artistic direction, I don't know. I have been clumsy and kamikaze with my thoughts, which are less thoughts and more impressions. Camera-less I took to the conscious release of memories, on the basis that *letting go* is always a good thing. I'm not sure I'd advise it. The idea wasn't really to let go of everything that has ever happened to me, but to Actually Start This Time and get rid of old ideas and unfinished projects. Because what I really want to do - or need to do - is to build something out of the scraps of impression of everything that's happened to me and everything I've ever thought.

The need to create is also the need to communicate, yes? 'Create' in the sense of transferring some sort of meaning, I don't mean welding gates or whatever. How sad is art that's never received/read/audienceless. Although the artist would probably have enough imagination to keep him going.

Patriotism (different subject) - yes, I am very patriotic sometimes. I recall an evening last month when I managed to feel patriotic about India, Scotland and Great Britain. All in one evening. Yay. It was the Edinburgh Military Tattoo. Songs especially are very powerful.

Okay, enough.

I'm reading this book. It's okay. Nothing special. If you were going to write one book, you wouldn't write this one. If you were going to write on book a year, you still wouldn't write this one. Maybe if you were on number 100 and had run out of meaningful things to write about. Three girls, a couple of decades ago, not being very interesting. You know, I hate it when people in books don't speak like real people. She's actually not that bad at description. And she can craft a novel (a bland one, where all the characters are coated in a blandness - like Pat in the Scotland Street novels.Why do people like drawing young girls like this?) And the
romances are predictable and unrealistic.

Restlessness.

And did those feet, in ancient times.

I will not cease from mental strife, nor shall my sword sleep in my hand.

What a literally awesome tune. "Tune".

'God save the queen' - now there's an uninspiring song.
Oh, I think it was during the national anthem that my heart swelled for the UK - although there were audible groans as we were asked to stand up.

Intriguing:

Do they always play the national anthem at one in the morning on radio 4?

The Story of Christmas

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light.

The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John bore wotness about him, and cried out, "This was he of whom I said, 'He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.' ") And from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known.

Thanks be to God!

Happy New Year for yesterday

This is so ridiculous! The Festival Theatre website said it had e-mailed my password to my e-mail address, but it hasn't! Grrr.

My brother called this morning while I was still in bed, and I as the phone rang I thought 'it's Susie calling to ask me to supper, as it's Friday', and then I realised it wasn't Friday, it's Wednesday. Wednesday was a concept too remote from my life. What the heck is Wednesday? There's no such thing as Wednesday. This is what you think before you are fully awake.