Miranda July

is my big girl crush, I love her writing, her art projects are brilliant and she is very good at titles -I am particularly fond of  Eleven Heavy Things 


As we have both contributed to Sheila Heti's book Women in Clothes - I feel like we are colleagues if not actual friends.

Miranda visited Bristol last night to talk about her new book The First Bad Man (which is great!) and I have spent the last week suppressing my excitement in case it didn't happen*

Just in case she really did show up I resisted eating kippers for lunch as I hoped to get to speak to her.

She showed up, she was patient with the embarrassingly awful interviewer and she was funny, she also signed my copies of her books and was charming.



*last time I went to see a writer at this same venue he didn't show

Progress report

It might seem that not much is happening in my life but  I am actually being very productive:

Firstly: I underwent bicycle light training and have now successfully mastered 'switching the lamp on and off' and also 'blinking mode'

Secondly: I have received a package of moth pheromone strips to lure male moths away from the girls and into a sticky trap I also have some scented pads to strew among my rugs and jumpers.

I heard on the radio that when a pest controller comes to your house he uses a pencil to test if a hole is big enough for a mouse - I'm not strong enough to think about mice yet.

Thirdly: I have embarked on a new reknit - someone gave me a nude-colour cashmere jumper saying that the colour was ugly. It is a bit raw-meat-like but I can't resist the softness. It was also a bit small for either of us so I am reknitting the top part on extra big needles - if it ends up looking like chicken mince I shall have to dye it.

Giant, slobbery, affectionate dog lover required!

yet another job ad where I am simply failing to meet basic requirements.

This is a shame because if I was a slobbery giant I could be in a town which boasts major attractions:

Tesco Express, fish & chips, chinese takeaway, Dominoes, Indian restaurant, hairdressers, coffee shop and Vets are all within a 2 minute walk.

Today at the Brain Surgery

We remembered that the patient who was about to arrive had invited us (me and the Brain Doctor) to a Valentine party that was rather expensive and involved music we didn't like and was too far away and anyway we're not a couple...

we had discussed this party last week

... and we thought we could attend and enjoy the party if we were cross-dressed because he likes wearing women's clothes and wigs and I have always wondered what it would be like to have a sock in my trousers - not the sort I don't know about - that yesterday-sock that leaks out of the end of the trouser-leg but the sort I do know about that gets in the way of walking.

in the end we did not attend so as not to compromise our professional demeanor

I had another assignation with Rabbit

I like being warm but she hates it and she had arrived first so we sat in the draught.

I was late because my new bike light wouldn't switch off so I had to wrestle the whole lighting apparatus off the bike and hide it,  blinking on, in my pocket.

At the end of our meal the battery was exhausted so I had to push the bike home.

Video of the year

Post by American Wind Energy Association (AWEA).

A neat gentleman

in tartan slacks waits to see the Brain Doctor, he's a visiting hairdresser and he always wears a particularly nice cologne.

we're talking about the cold weather and he asks to see my gloves

They're no good get down to the Pound Shop they do really good thermal ones

For a pound?

I expect they're from abroad

While waiting his turn in the Brain Surgery

a large gentleman talked about the pub across the road

It used to be an abattoir - my mum made me go and work there when I was thirteen she said go there and learn how to be a butcher and you'll never be out of work

Did you become a butcher?

No I became a printer, lithographers were very well respected in those days we wore bowler hats

Three bus stops up the road

from my house there's a prison and all around the prison are streets and streets of samey-looking houses.

One local nosey parker devised a scheme to get a peep into as many people's houses as possible, she suggested that the whole neighbourhood did art in their windows for three hours this evening and let the rest of everybody in the whole world walk around gawking into their houses

AND THEY DID!!!!

This evening I have been peeping into peoples houses - whole front rooms have been transformed into a disco or an aquarium, someone made several little illuminated boxes of glass animal scenarios and many children made Lego-worlds and cardboard Minecraft Worlds in their windows.

One house was bathed in a projection of flames - the house next door had a giant puppet sausage-on-a-toasting-fork tipping towards the flames.

There was a house that had made it's front garden into a beach with a punch-and-judy show and a beach hut and a flock of seagulls on the washing line guarded by a Cliff-Richard-singing-light-flashing dalek.

There were houses that looked like they were full of balloons or full of a forest and lots of people just left their curtains open so you could look at their stuff

and it was great!

knitted bedspread

All those charity shop jumpers have yielded tons of odd assorted yarn so I've used it to make a knitted patchwork blanket. It's all in thick ribby garter stitch which is very springy and lovely.

I made a cake with rapeseed oil

It was delicious and I have just eaten another piece

then I carried on typing and noticed a dark flake on my keyboard - thinking it to be a missed piece of cake I popped it in my mouth.

IT WASN"T CAKE!!!

horse-and-kangaroo eating cat. sitter wanted

I checked out the details but unfortunately I don't fit the profile;

... We are looking for a reliable animal lover. A single gay man preferred but not exclusively so. We are not looking for couples or families however, sorry. We would prefer someone based in Europe please.

 The female cat has a food allergy so she can only eat fresh horsemeat or kangaroo meat, ... You have to be OK with that and with keeping an eye on her so she doesn't eat anything she shouldn't...

On the train home

I looked for the quiet carriage and sat opposite two young women, an enormous pile of make up was tipped out on the table between us and one of the girls was picking up a succession of pots and brushes and attacking her face with them while narrating her endless anxieties;

...I'm really worried about being stuck in a taxi for - like - three hours with a random frenchman

Not in an 'I'm-scared-for-my-life' sort of way but in an 'oh-my-god-what-if-he-tries-to-talk-to-me' way

My niece has just learned to write her name

The Brain Surgery is feeling a bit end-of-days

The low-voltage-long-life bulb that hangs from a cord in the waiting room has half burned out. The half with a tiny bit of light remaining is begging for mercy.

Also black spots started growing on the carpet in one of the consulting rooms, this was another of the things about which we must not speak.

When the spots had joined up and one large area in the consulting room was really quite swampy I asked the Brain Doctor if he was concerned, he said not and we continued not to speak of this thing, and all the other things.

Last week two ladies in matching hats came for treatment and I directed the eldest one to that room.

She came straight back out and asked if we knew about the wet monster. It seemed shocking her saying out loud the thing that we must not say but I said yes we knew and she went back in again and her daughter smiled at me as if to say

My mother, she imagines all sorts of things

Last Saturday my hot waters broke

and didn't get fixed until Wednesday

FOUR days washing in a cold basin

from Wednesday onwards I took THREE baths per day - in case it broke again and I needed to get in-credit clean

until today - now I'm back to the normal amount

Limpy, Lumpy and Shaky

Today Whiplash became part-owner of a poor abandoned little dog who got run over and now only has three legs

also we were visited by a friend who is looking after two dogs, one with tumours on it's face, the other one trembles uncontrollably.

The conversation has turned marineward ...

... at night parrotfish make themselves a mucous bubble to sleep in

this stops predators being able to smell them

it also stops lice settling on them when they're not looking

Immortal Jellyfish please

email from Nature Picture Library

Dear all,
We’ve had a request for either / both stills and footage of several creatures. The most important / difficult to find of these is the wolverine frog, but new images or footage of the other two would also be useful. (Immortal jellyfish next most important, and pistol shrimp less important).

Wolverine frog (also known as hairy frog or horror frog) - Trichobatrachus robustus
Immortal jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii
Pistol shrimp

The wolverine frog has already given me the shaky horrors but I really really want an immortal jelly fish so if anyone has a spare one please send it to me.

I'm back at the knitting

 this one's by Agata Oleksiak

Wig Lady moved in last night, I cooked roast vegetables and bouncy chicken for us.


Wig Lady told us about the men who harvest hair from the heads of east european maidens, this is the second most desired hair (first most desired hair is scandanavian) east european hair usually ends up on the heads of people appearing on really bad television shows.

wiggery pokery

A wig-maker (operatic) has just arranged to move in with us for the next two months. I'm ridiculously excited about the idea.

At the garden meeting this evening I told my gardening friends about the wig-maker  - one of the other gardeners revealed herself to be a wig mistress in real life.

I want to be 'in wigs'

Tattoo Man is back

He and the Brain Doctor dealt with the biscuit situation over new year

and now he's busy clumping in and out, using heavy machinery and making sure that I can see what fine muscles he has.

Biscuitlandia

I am back to work at the Brain Surgery

In my absence, biscuit-gifts from grateful patients have filled the waiting room.

Anyone wanting to see the Brain Doctor will need to eat a path to his door - also he needs rescuing as he's too small to push his own way out.

I hand a LUXURY SELECTION BOX to a waiting patient, the man-who-is-always-grumpy

No thank you, I got a pile of my own at home, people keep giving me the buggers I don't know what they think I'm going to do with them. I used to get them wholesale - Family Circle - that's a quality biscuit that is - I could get  two boxes for a fiver. That was my Christmas present for everyone a few years back. Then they put the price up  - kept the box the same size but reduced the goods inside - so I don't bother buying them anymore.

My nephew attends a knitting club

he has already made a fabulous range of jewelry, helter skelters, monsters, money-holding-things and this divine gun

last week he asked me to knit a very specific sort of scarf that he could decorate





He is still working as a pastry chef, he and his sister made the Christmas tree cookies;

The cats have challenged each other

to find the highest most wobbly thing to get on top of. The tops of doors are ideal.

I spent Christmas day with my sister and the rest of the family, when I returned to the cat house the kitchen door was closed and the bath full of poo.

The cats had worked together to prise open the airing cupboard door, this had banged the kitchen door shut, the kitchen is where the litter trays are and also the cat flap to the back garden.

They have shown me the trick several times since. It takes a lot of frantic scrabbling to get the cupboard door open, the cupboard is mainly packed with towels and spare bedding - on one shelf is a  clear plastic container half-full of pegs. Once the door has been opened the cats take it in turns to leap onto the door, the game is then to get from the top of the door into the plastic peg box which has exactly enough space in it to contain most of a cat.

The cats have emerged

from their bunkers and are now mainly perching on things higher than us. When they think we might not notice, a paw reaches over to pat an ear or someone's hair gets nibbled.

Lawn Sausage

I heard talk about Lorne Sausage before I saw the packaging - until then I assumed that it was the Scots euphemism for what happens when you keep dogs

I've moved into a house

close to my sister's house


I shall be cat-sitting here for the next few days.

The cats hide from me, in boxes, behind furniture, in the bath ... when they feel brave they raise a periscope and report my movements to each other via walkie-talkies

it is our big solstice celebration

we are staying in Scotland with my sister and her children. My three-year-old niece is very keen on biscuits -  I asked which were her favourite

Jammy Todgers

it's knitting season again

I knit to while away the hours at the Brain Surgery; people arrive, I knit we chat, when we've chatted for the right amount of time I direct them to a consulting room, when they have closed the door some of them take off their clothes and lie down.

Yesterday I did not pay proper attention to the schedule and sent a lady to a room to take off her clothes and lie down. and then another lady arrived .... who had an appointment before her.


I'm blaming my inattention on over-biscuiting

over-biscuiting

the patients pay their bill and hand us gift-wrapped boxes

all the boxes contain exactly the same DE-LUXE chocolate biscuit selection

there are only three of us here to eat them

it seems rude to offer them round to the waiting patients - it would be like giving them back their presents

tomorrow I must find a route home that involves more homeless people

I wrote a 'To Do' list last night

nothing on it has been achieved so I've had to add:

clean stove

phone mortgage company

phone mortgage company again

phone mortgage company again

be apoplectic

make tea

drink tea

clear up mess made during stove cleaning

now I have things to cross off

Breathing holes

The Brain Doctor handed me a heavy catalogue and asked me to order new covers for the treatment tables.

I found some thick bouncy blue covers and called the number on the book.

the woman at the end of the phone said:

treatment table covers? with a breathing hole or without?

with

we stock pearl beige terry towelling

I'd like the blue spongy ones

we don't do those

she hung up

I noticed that the catalogue cover was dated 2005

Christmas cat fan required north london

Still keeping an eye on those small ads

Day Two Painting Billboards

Arrived at Bearpit to find the boards I'd started the day before had been scribbled over during the night - adapted designs to reduce the impact of taggers.

Went to get coffee, the women running the Bearpit café were inspecting the newly installed planters; one of them was full of vomit and another's plants were uprooted.

Neighbourly drunks came by to say good morning, a woman stopped to chat and then a young junkie who is magnetically attracted to soft-looking women arrived, he got some change from us and wandered off.

I started painting; an Irish girl-with-a-guitar arrived and started busking. By the end of the first song she had proper money collecting by her feet,  a boy-with-a-guitar turned up, stood beside her and made like he was in her band (they had never met before). Then the junkie returned and circled, trying to work out how to get the money out of her case without anyone noticing, he settled on standing very close to them, jingling his own coins in the hope that people would think he was collecting for the band.

and that is why painting outside is slow work.

Misdirection

My neighbourhood is a bit right-on; awash with unwashed, scruffy-haired, Guardian-reading types. The few eating places that are not vegetarian use meat scantily - more as a sort of seasoning, because those of us who do like a bit of bacon feel guilty about the effect that scoffing huge quantities of dead animal has on the planet  (the animal doesn't do too well out of it either apparently).

I'd heard that a new restaurant called 'Meat' was going to be opening, with a name like that I assumed they'd be hefting whole ox carcasses on the table, the diners would crowd round and chew directly on the raw flesh - I've just looked at a press release from this company and it turns out that it will be just another chicken wing and burger joint.

I'm painting billboards

to protest our government's enthusiasm for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)

My shiny leopard-skin-effect shopping trolley was used to ship pots of paint to the billboards. I unpacked it mostly without incident but pulling out the last pot of paint made the lid came off and the contents emptied into the trolley. I pushed it over a drain expecting the paint to leak away - it didn't but neither could I tip the paint out of the trolley without making very big white mess on the brand-spanking-new-multi-million pound pedestrian surface so I let the trolley be a paint kettle which was ungainly.

The underpass (where I was painting), attracts people who need to do a bit of public shouting - the morning was spent with  three Friends of Jesus and a sound system and the End of Days. They moved on and the drunks who normally live close to my house came to sit and watch me and then an American-girl-with-a-guitar arrived, she was lovely and friendly but she only knew Empire State of Mind which she sang in the voice of  Kermit-the-Frog - the drunks howled along like Youtube huskies.

I have to go back and finish the job tomorrow

At tonight's art event

Woman enters the room guiding an elderly lady

This is my mother - she's ninety-one

Another woman steps forward head tilted in challenge

My mother's ninety-one

When's your mother's birthday?

March

mine's in October

(sotto voce) My mother's older

Lemurs

today I'm printmaking again

Manners

My mother-in-law likes us to just stick arms out and help ourselves without waiting to be served so at the start of a meal as we are just sitting down she bellows above our chatter;

BOARDING HOUSE REACH EVERYONE!

Head fiddling

My friend was trying to explain the notion of opposites to his son: wet/dry, light/dark, heavy/light ... the boy moved swiftly into advanced extremism and asked

... what's the opposite of a frying pan? a tree?


during work-avoidance today I wondered what the opposite of a dinosaur might be and came up with a feather, bracken, a woodlouse and flu.  BUT ... if the dinosaur was a metaphor for Venice then it's opposite could be an Asian stilt village or the Gobi desert... I have no idea where this is going



I was also thinking of Andy Goldsworthy because I think he's fab

Since yesterday

I can't stop thinking about all those musicians released through the Berlin wall

Today's surprises at the Brain Surgery:

A surprising amount of patients either forgot to arrive or arrived late

One of the people who didn't come was someone we thought had died last year - we were surprised that she made an appointment at all

A surprising amount of Italian patients, one of them had a tiny baby, another used to be a concert cellist. When the Berlin wall came down the musician market became flooded with cellists - the Berliners undercut the Italians and my new friend was unable to find enough work

The free car park is less than five minutes walk away, despite this a surprising number of people borrow someone else's disabled badge so they can park just that little bit closer

Between patients I managed to darn a thousand bite-holes in the moth-eaten jumper

The man came into the kitchen

wearing a jumper dotted with moth cocoons -  fine merino wool - last year's christmas present. Normally I would have jumped around on account of the scattering of cocoons and baby hatching moths as the man moved around the house but  the cottonwool in my head has stifled my ability to react.

I'm trying to shift the cottonwool by boiling my head over a bowl of steamy water to which I have added rosemary and mint - if there is any medicinal purpose in doing this I don't know because, despite my telling some other people to the contrary, I am not actually a doctor.

My favourite patient

at the Brain Surgery is a hundred and fifty years old, tiny as a wren with orange hair. Her wardrobe is fabulous.

She came in yesterday - a hairy tartan scarf tied round her neck in a manner that I am definitely going to try later, we talked about her new husband:

Is this your first marriage?

Yes, I've done a lot of weird things in my life but until this year I've never been married

Rabbit's handwriting

is neat and regular and strong like a properly formed grown-up. My handwriting is chaotic and varies from day to day.

When Rabbit is bored she does mirror writing in the margins of our shared notebook which is exactly as neat as her non-mirror writing.

Rabbit was in the reception room

fulminating about a sportsman on the cover of a magazine then about various other people who I think also played sport - Rabbit asked what I thought about them

I said that I had no idea who any of the people mentioned were

We agreed that we should meet out of work - the negociations went like this:

We could go for a drink

I don't drink alcohol, we could go for coffee

I don't drink non-alcohol

Do you like cake?

No

Cinema?

I hate cinema. A play? I love theatre

I hate plays. There's a cafe over the bridge where I go to for lunch sometimes, they always do a really nice dahl

I love dahl

our common ground is dahl, the Brain Doctor and a fondness for Neil Pearson

I have a new colleague at the Brain Surgery

today Rabbit and I took our lunch together and discovered that we are actually Jack Spratt and his Wife, we each detest everything the other one adores, it was wonderful and I think we should get married.

It rained so hard

I wore my new pointy boys shoes which are a bit slippy so I had to fight my way to the Brain Surgery this morning, my hands were too occupied with my bag and umbrella for air-punching.

When I redecorated the Surgery a few months back I rearranged the artwork in a way that favoured waiting patients. In my absence the Brain Doctor has put all the good paintings back into his consulting rooms - the reception area, and my view, is once again blessed with cheesy floral arrangements and faded sailing ships.

it is also cold

How's this for spooky

I usually cycle to the Brain Surgery but this morning felt like a walking day

then Miranda July sent me an email


More walking is called for today. Or if you are caged, regularly pace your cage, shake the bars, punch the air.

good luck,
Miranda

and I shall punch the air as I walk