is there a word for the opposite of talent?

Inabilities doesn't seem right I want to call it 'anti-talents' which might be an infection caught from a year in academia where making up words is de rigueur

my gum is stitched up

the wrist magically normal again

I paid my mother-in-law a visit - her back is bad and household chores are accumulating.

The job that most needed tackling turned out to be ironing - it didn't seem fair to mention that I'm the world's worst ironiste so I got started ...  

After a while we decided that I might be more usefully employed in the garden.

So that I wouldn't feel bad about the ironing, mother-in-law listed the two other people (both children) who are worse at ironing than me.

Owchy time

the IN/OUT of Europe referendum has stirred up an underbelly stew of misery - we're still reeling from that debacle.

also my wrist has been malfunctioning - today I went for a cortisone injection at the hospital which was really really hurty. On my way home from the hospital there was a limping man who was hurting a lot more than me and really needed the hospital so I turned around and we walked back there together with him using me as a walking stick and it must have looked like a very funny three-legged race because the path was all pot-holed and we stumbled like a pair of drunkards.

Tomorrow I am having more dental work done but afterwards I shall go back to London and look after my favourite cats while my bruises go yellow and purple.

In other news

The Birds have tolerated us poking about in their garden for long enough and have started visiting us for a good nosey around. Mrs Bird, appalled at the standards of housekeeping among humans, comes in every day to try and tidy us up. Mr Bird sometimes comes with her but he usually gets tangled in glassware or computer cables and makes things worse so she usually leaves him behind to look after the children. This is today's visit

Where to start?

there were cats and now there are none

there was school but that's  finished for summer

I'm sort of back in Bristol but keep going away - that embroidered rendition of Clifton Suspension Bridge was discovered on a visit to a Stoke Newington junk shop on wednesday with my fairy-godmother-aunt who haggled mercilessly to buy it for me. After the f-g-m-a left I met my tutor and asked him if our exam results were out yet

yes but I haven't worked out how to publish them

visited Holy Island with the Man to see the priory and the upside down Hobbit boats

then to Scotland to see my sister and the nibblings where a discussion of future careers was going on:
adult: you can be anything you want
five-year-old : can I be a Wot Wot Hoo Ha?

Afterthought

I feel the need to draw your attention to this poem about hermits

It was like the Sleeping Beauty House

While I've been up in That London for the last few months the dust snuck in and blanketed the house - slightly less in the places where someone had brushed a space to eat at the table or torn a path through the cobwebs on the stairs.

But I'm back and banging moths out of their sexy revels in my jumpers, degreasing the stove, taking the bindweed off the pinks and marigolds in the garden and getting my sunny sunshine clothes out from the under-the-bed-boxes.

It's lovely to be home

I've come back to Bristol

the garden is full of slugs and I'm shaking moths out of blankets as the Man appears - I tell him that we're besieged

no he says, we're popular

Mealtimes

Gary makes sure there's no funny business with the knives, Brian and Nigel cover the exit -Barbara is sitting on my feet

being held under strict surveillance

I'm under house arrest - will smuggle out messages when I've finished the tunnel

cat polisher

Two weeks ago the toothless cat had starey fur that was a bit sticky-feeling and off-putting and she also really really wanted a lot of hugs - so gave her a rub down with a slightly damp towel like it was a gigantic mother's tongue and put in a bit of regular brushwork with a soft rubber brush ... she's come up all lovely and shiny. 

I'm hoping that the owners are going to be ok with this new shiny cat when they come home because maybe they like sticky cats and they might just think that I've broken her

On Friday we said goodbye

to our friend Simon,

he hadn't been that keen on music* so there were no hymns or any kind of singing, instead we told stories about him that made us laugh because he was the funniest man in the world, he saved butterflies and kept a supply of food plants in his garden for distressed caterpillars and he would chase people up the street with the litter they'd dropped and wave it in their face - which sometimes got them angry and he had collections of bits of old motorbikes and interesting bicycles and big mechanical pencil sharpeners and his yard was full of the bee hives that he'd made because he kept rescuing bee swarms - once he inadvertently upset one of the hives and made a bee so angry that it chased him inside and upstairs and managed to follow him into his bedroom to sting him.

we'll miss him


*He went to a concert once  - the Rolling Stones - and slept through it

The other cat is perched by my ear

she purrs constantly - a rumble accompanied by the wobbly creaky-squeakiness - like an old fashioned pusher lawnmower

Different cat in the bag

This one is also sitting on my pencil case

I left my jacket on the sofa

when I came downstairs this morning it had been turned into a cat's nest and one arm was covered in sicked up hairballs  

I read until cross-eyed then walked out across Highbury Fields which were teeming with frisbee-playing youth. I should've been happy in the sun and the smokey barbeque air but an enormous gloom has descended.

the man came home

but today I had to return to London - another cat sit and a study binge before exams.

I am looking after a pair of rescued cats, one of them is already sitting  in an alert position in my half-unpacked suitcase, the girl cat has neither teeth nor tail and talks incessantly - naturally I am already very fond of them. 

We're in Highbury which is quite posh and appears to be a lesbian hotspot

The man is on his way home

the man is on his way home

the man is on his way home


from switzerland where he has been visiting these exact same ants


An Irish Sisterhood Practise their Defence Skills from Ammonite Films on Vimeo.

in other news

last year I wrote a post about the man going out to film a woman and her dogs who'd discovered bioluminescent worms in their french garden

the bioluminescence film is now ready and can be seen on english television on monday - here's a clip  http://bbc.in/1Oecrz0

exam study leads me to search for bathing suits

definitely getting this one

Too much going on

exams next week - scary   
houseboat study continues - great   
a death - tragic 
home -  messy 
weather - changeable/British 
friends - brilliant-but-not-enough-time
end of first school year - emptiness looms
job-hunting - grim

Tomorrow I am back at school

but today I am in Bristol  - we sat by the fire, me mending jumpers while my Japanese friend, K made a patchwork quilt and we spoke together about everything:

I showed her the holes in my jumper and made a crying face
moths ... moths make me sad

she thought I was talking about moss and looked puzzled, I explained about the creatures that eat my jumpers
aaah yes in Japan sometimes I think I can hear them in the roof space

That turned out to be mouses so I mimed an evil tiny flying nibbling thing  

Vienna was full of cake and sun

and I spent last Saturday walking beside something I took to be the Danube until I looked at a map and realised it was just a canal.

Returning to London, the Thames houseboat research continued, we visited a squillionnaire who owns three large houseboats - one for himself, another for his offspring and a third for guests, afterwards we visited the lady who had run the boatyard for 30 years, we told her that we'd just met Mr Threeboats. She scoffed

Him - he's an idiot!

We had been sifting through newspaper cuttings in the library going back to the fifties, there were many stories concerning glamorous-looking students, actors and writers who lived on the houseboats in those days, I wondered how accurate this image of houseboat tenants was

When I arrived in the boatyard (the early '70s), the houseboats were mainly occupied by old women, very well educated women, their boats full of books, interesting women who wanted to be left alone

In other news
spent last night with some girlfriends dancing to Prince songs

Back in Bristol today

walking through town it's hard not to notice the huge increase in homeless people. One neat, nice-looking older man walked up to me with a box filled half with nettles and half wild garlic

would you like some wild garlic, I've just picked it in Leigh Woods ... I'm homeless these days

foraging seems a whole lot better than standing around selling Big Issues but I worry about animal contamination when I can't see where the garlic gets picked so I let him fill my bag with nettles and then spent an hour cursing him as my hands got stung to pieces preparing it.  Cooked up with lentils, lemon and coconut it's delicious but my hands are still fizzing.

IN OTHER NEWS I'M GOING TO VIENNA TOMORROW!!!

One of the boats we visited yesterday

(the one with the muddy burglar under the bow)  was 'pratically given' to the owner's mother in the '60s when she was an art student. I hadn't really understood what was going on when he said that she used to have to get up in the night to pour concrete into the hull and stop water coming in - this aspect of boat life was clarified by an elderly lady today:

you had to bail every day because the wooden boats were so leaky, in 1974 a woman gave me her boat for fifteen pounds because she'd come to hate it. I bailed both boats every day and got hers fixed up, then sold it for three thousand pounds and took off to South America but my lodger sublet my boat and the sub-letter wouldn't bail - I got a call to say the boat had sunk but I still had the mooring and a thousand pounds so I bought this boat - this one's got a steel hull.

Today we started interviewing houseboatees

as part of an effort to record people living on boats on the Thames before they all get wiped away by property developers.  Newspaper clippings from the sixties tell stories of louche living and bawdy behaviour but we'd heard that the rising cost of moorings had respectabilised boaty life and that we'd find none of that sort of thing these days.

As we got to our first mooring so did the police - to evict a conman who had got into a houseboat on the pretext of doing repairs then locked the owner out and refused to leave. Four years later he was now taking his belongings, one armful at a time, to a waiting car several yards down the road.

We continued on our ways and spent the next hour with someone who told a story about the police helicoptering over his boat one night, shining lights in at him and then finally knocking at his door because a burglar had been seen running into the lowtide mud, rolling around in it and then wriggling in under the bow of the houseboat.

As we left the boat we saw the conman, he had filled the car to bursting and was continuing to pile his bags on the pavement around it and having an argument with the driver about how they were going to fill the car and also get in and drive it away.

blanch a whole cauliflower

then chopchopchop the florets and little stalks into crumbs  

mix with  tahini, cinnamon, good oil, saltpepperandlemonjuice 

chochopchop roasted walnuts, hard boiled eggs and  parsley  

mix that into the dressed cauliflower crumbs

cover the dish with butter paper and put it in the oven you just switched off, next to the almost-cooked roast salmon so that when Rosa turns up one hour late it will still be delicious 

also

the point is to have enough of the cauliflower dish leftover to fry up the next day - if you want to feel that it's a whole new thing add chopped anchovies and sprinkle with crispy breadcrumbs

two full days off the boat and I'm still swaying

or maybe the motion is what seamen call 'tacking'  - possibly I was a boat in a former life and, having discovered my roots, I'm trying to get get back there.

In other news

A reunion lunch at the family home yesterday - seventeen of us squashed round a table intended for six-to-eight in what-used-to-be-the-garage, shepherds pie and carrots for everyone followed by an assortment of cream pies. Once everyone was in place at the table we were locked into a sort of chinese puzzle - no-one could leave the room unless everyone rotated in the correct order.

After lunch my nephew continued an eternal wrestling match with his other auntie which is now in it's sixth year and my gappy-toothed niece declared her love for a magenta-haired cousin, imprisoning her in one of the bedrooms for the purpose of telling monster/princess stories.

I adjust quickly to being on a boat

but I am becoming more and more vertiginous when I leave the boat and walk around on this good earth

so I've decided to leave the boat for good 

I'm feeling a bit sad about this

but not a really really sad because I have come to look after my favourite cats and there is a proper bathroom and it's warm 

the tortoiseshell is currently leaping in and out of my capacious handbag and Wheezy has made a nest out of my pajamas

I woke to the sound of running feet

lots of them passing by the barge there was also a sort of commotion.

Assuming that a crime was happening I stayed put and then forgot about it. Once I'd persuaded the damp firewood  to catch fire, I put the kettle on and wandered into the park. There, under a large gazebo, was a man in a Puffa jacket tidying away thermos flasks and bananas. I asked what had just happened

It's the Nike race, they should be at Kings Cross by now

Notes on camp:

barge life is basically camping - issues that are insignificant at 'real home' suddenly loom large;

what goes in:

the quantity of stuff you carry to camp - you must keep this quantity in your head because if you could barely carry the stuff you arrived with and then you acquire more stuff - something has to 'disappear'.

what goes out:

I carried  quite a lot of food and tea to the boat - putting it into my body is simply hiding it from view - the way things work on the boat means that I have to plan my café visits strategically.

Luckily, there is a municipal swimming pool close by - combining bathing and bathroom addresses my major camping issues in one fell swoop.

fuel:

The boat has solar panels - if I manage things well (and if the sun shines sometimes) I have power for lights and batteries - so far I'm handy with that.

For heating and cooking I've been using the woodburning stove - I've been trawling the park daily to pick up kindling and any other useful wood but to be effective logs are needed, there was a small supply when I arrived and I've used those up.

This morning I bought a sack of the logs at the nearby garage and now I know that London wood is, by weight, more costly than diamonds and that my lovely stove suppers are costing more than I imagined.

Today there were visitors

we ate satsumas while waiting for our crumpets to cook on the stove

in the evenings

the man who lives two barges away from me on the canal takes a double bass and a chair to the park railings. 


He puts the chair and the instrument over the railings then climbs over and settles down to play

Barge life

is very tranquil - I am on a stretch of canal near an enormous park in East London, sunlight sparkles off the ceiling and it's all very beautiful. Last night I cooked my sweet potato supper in the woodburning stove.

Yesterday I walked across to the main road which is lined with Fancy-Gifts-for a pound-shops, pawnbrokers and counselling services, shops with shutters-down-long-closed and 50p burger bars. 

Today I crossed the park to a universe where everyone is slim and accompanied by stylish children in Bugaboo pushchairs, in this world the cafés are smart and vegetables organic. I purchased two of the most expensive sausages in the world and took them home to pop them in the stove for lunch.

Tate Modern

with mother-in-law having coffee. The actress Judy Dench is being discussed and she says

you know she's my twin? 

same birthday? 

same age, same height - five foot exactly, I'm keeping a close eye on her to see if she shrinks

Despite being keen on neither Opera

nor Philip Glass, I had really enjoyed a recent production of Aknaton, so I accepted an offer to go and see a Harold Pinter play at the Old Vic this evening*

The show started at 7.30 - at 7.35 I was standing alone in the foyer watching a fuzzy version of Timothy Spall on the foyer screen. I hadn't been able to contact my friend who had my ticket and who I thought was meeting me early enough before the show for supper.

A thought crept into my head and I walked up the road to the Young Vic where my friend was waiting for me to join her for the show that started there at 8pm. It starred Jane Horrocks so I guessed that it would be an acting thing but it turned out to be singing and dancing thing - the sort of thing that I really don't like.

Also, before all that, my bus from Bristol to London waited in the bus station for seventy minutes before its driver turned up - I don't feel that I've had the best use of a beautiful day 


* I feel the same way about Pinter as I do about Opera - one day I will like them and then I'll know that I've grown up

I've been home

and I'm still here, seeing friends and the Man and sniffing round the house throwing out all the potatoes whose sprouts have encircled the larder and doing laundry and filling an enormous bin bag with my most stupid shoes (actually I kept the MOST stupid shoes for just-in-case) and then hefted them down to the charity shop. Then I wrote my next essay for school and I have forgotten to get my hair cut twice and I've been wearing my freshly knitted tank top and skipping in the spring weather.

Today I walked up the steep hill to my house as two young women were coming down - one of them handed me a daffodil as we passed each other. 

Tomorrow I return to London I will go and see The Caretaker at the Old Vic and on Friday I will take charge of a narrowboat on the canal - for one whole month I will be a Bargee

I ushed a film this evening

It was a film about economists and fiscal irresponsibility.  Usually I can shut the doors once the event starts and sit peacefully in the lobby but the older men in the audience were nodding off and the auditorium was periodically rent with the farty sound of raucous snoring. So my duties included Snore Control which involved creeping around and poking anyone sleeping too noisily.


It was a long bus journey back to my hipster loft with the taupe-coloured-cats-that-match-the towels-and-carpets. The Snoring Control made me hungry so I just have eaten a tin of sardines (straight from the tin of course) I now realise that was a big mistake and I am going to be eating those fish all night and the kitties want some too

never live far from an eel dealer

This one is opposite the end of my street

Sping is here

also noted by the local primary school

Exotic Matter

- a weekend event run in a trendy East-side location by continental young men in fashionable trousers and cardigans.

The proposal for the weekend was incoherent and the attendance fee extremely inexpensive, leading me to think two things about it:

i) it would be bad

ii) I should at least go look-see 

The event location was an hour's walk from where I'm staying via a section of London's canal system that I was previously unaware of - that in itself was worth the entrance fee.

The event turned out to be a brilliant combination of imagineering about future materials, revelations about the exotic-ness of everyday things and hearing some truly impressive people discussing their research into the subject of futuricity, materiality and weirdness.

moral of this story: I am taught several lessons in a very short amount of time and realising, yet again, how I never learn lessons that I should've previously learned about making assumptions etc.

I went to the Coliseum

 a building so gorgeous that I was dazzled at once when I walked in and then double-dazzled by the show -   Akhenaeton.

The night out was a treat offered by a dear friend who slipped some salmon pink silk culottes into my handbag while we were sipping Chardonnay in the Coliseum bar -  she'd found them in a charity shop up north and thought they were very 'me'

here's a trailer for the show

In other news 

I have moved to an über-trendy location in Hackney, the local butcher shop is fitted with mahogany-faced refrigerated cupboards - in the evening it becomes a restaurant where people sit on high stools at the marble chopping counters sucking bone marrow, discussing chitterling and comparing face-hair products.

The new cats are excitable blonde bushbabies, bouncing off furniture and leaping improbably high heights as they stalk and pounce on each other. We are housed in a heavily securitised city loft within sight of a long-established eel-pie shop  - the sort that used to serve people who worked on slagheaps or collected nightsoil for a living.

Foot Foot

is as soft as a very soft thing and she's all mine for the next 3 days

In other news I am about to embark on a survey of Thames houseboats - the weather was dazzlingly good today and I spent it drifting slowly upriver with people-who-know-things pointing at dutch barges, lighters and clippers. 

In the morning I will leave the monster house

I'm anxious about leaving this place super-correctly with everything properly clean and locked up and I've quadruple-checked that I'm leaving on the right day because I muffed my entrance by arriving a day early last week. All very embarrassing, I'd been given a key the previous week so I just barged my way in while calling out to the kitties and then there I was in the hallway and looking up to see two shocked faces peering down at me from the upstairs bannister.

Luckily I had somewhere else to go and I just went away and arrived again the next day but the cats have made no attempt to hide the fact that they think I'm an eejit.

I think I'm looking after a little deaf cat next week but the owner doesn't want to meet me until the day before she goes away and there's always the possibility that one of us is a mad axe murderess.

I did a bit of shopping

then caught the bus back to the monster-cat house. It was a busy bus and I sat next to a woman who was muttering angrily, I thought she was just a regular mad person but then I caught some words about kids and biscuits so I agreed wholeheartedly and we were soon best friends exchanging information about our tea habits:

first thing through that door I make a cuppa 

me too 

with plenty of condensed milk

?

and if I go anywhere on holiday my bags are full of teabags and tinned milk

a large polar bear bean bag

has been moving around the house.  I usually have to step over it when I come in the front door, I put it back on the piano stool and in the morning it's been dumped in the hallway or the kitchen. At night after I've gone to bed I can hear frenetic cat activity - I took this to be the cats playing or fighting which seemed strange as the lady cat seems to spend most of her time snoring on her bed-on-a-pole

Last night the male cat demonstrated that the polar bear bean bag is actually a very hard-working sex slave, also the rug ... and the blanket I had put over my legs.

monster cats

at the new place - the lady cat exudes a muscular air of menace, right now she's snoring loudly but when she's not snoring she's glaring at me from her bed-on-a-stick, if I walk within a foot of this panoptican, she swipes at me with her slashy claws. The boy is more feminine and mews at me incessantly - they both want to know what I've done with their people


I'm somewhere near Dagenham and I'm finding it pretty exotic, the local shops are multi-purpose, selling food and non-food items, in interesting combinations. The shelves are packed with English-ey tinned things that I'd forgotten existed: potatoes, curry, cling peaches and evaporated milk. There are also loads of not-English-ey tinned things like ackee and saltfish. Sacks of many different brands of rice are piled high against the windows and the freezers have pizza and ice cream one side and bags of exotic fish the other - I got two big bags of frozen anchovies for £5.50 just because I could, I'm now stuck with how to eat that amount of fish before leaving on Friday*


*I'm under strict instructions to feed nothing but Whiskas Cattameat to the monsters

went to post office with parcels

at the counter my attention is riveted by a sprawling handwritten list of 'Useful Numbers'

a box has been drawn around one particular number, the heading in bold outlined caps

HOSTAGE HELPLINE

I've moved east

on the bus to my new home I sat across from a woman dressed up to go out; careful make-up, nicely done hair, a big shaggy zebra coat that tied at the waist. On her bare tattooed feet she wore blue carpet slippers with images of poo on them.

I couldn't stop staring at her feet, trying to read the tattooes, also the slippers-coat combo was interesting 

but mainly I was trying to de-code the poo.

I travelled east for most of the afternoon, to the far reaches of London - this new place contains a high level of sleepwear-as-daywear: fluorescent fluffy bathrobes, fun-fur pajama bottoms, slippers.

Can anyone tell me if this is a 'thing' (the poo, the sleepwear) or did I just stumble across an East London version of Zombie Day 


I have new monster cats, the lady cat sits on top of a bed-on-a-post and tries to flay me with her claws when I walk past

Mother's day call to mum-in-law

she tells me that my father-in-law had a nosebleed that got out of hand last week so if they venture out these days they go prepared.

we were at the theatre last night with our pockets full of torn up underpants just in case it happened again 

she misinterpreted my concerned noises

it was all white underwear, nothing gaudy

joining in with student socialising

I was invited for chilli  along with some other classmates by a fellow student who put it out over the facebook

any time after 3pm   

I arrived at 4.30 by which time the inviter was a little stoned, no-one else had arrived yet

we shared a bowl of chilli in the living room - the sofa was made up as a bed and there was also a bed in the room (London student houses look for maximum occupation)


a housemate was having noisy sex above our heads

the anti-empiricist

i counted an apple and an orange
it came to two  
this was on tuesday  
by thursday it was still two  
but at four minutes to ten  
it was three 

hello i thought, i'm on to something 
and continued counting  
but it was only three that once  
i must've made a mistake that one time

ivor cutler

from the jelly mountain series on bbc radio 4 which can still be heard for a few more days here

Today was gorgeous and sunny

I took a bus to Wapping and walked west along the Thames. 

There's a part where you turn a corner and suddenly see Tower Bridge and the Shard and City Hall and loads of boats with tall masts - in that sunshine and the blue blue sky it was dazzling. 

I had just recovered from my initial dazzlement and resumed walking when a young French couple came around the corner, I knew they were French because he went totally over the top and shouted

OOoaaHHH
(that's French for wow!)

and then more noise and then silence while she shrugged and went

Bof

and he stared at her and there was an argument which got louder and I heard him say

Non, on n'a pas ça a Paris

and then he walked off

today

there was an academic seminar, the panel game sort where people take turns to speak for a few minutes about their research. From my limited experience these things are attended mainly by people with NHS haircuts and sensible shoes but this one was enlivened by two women, one who had come dressed as a Superhero and another as a sparkly land-mermaid.



I have finished knitting a tank top, it has a red neck area and a pink tummy area dark grey-and-pale stripes in between