Wednesday, 26 May 2010

I've told mother that I intend to stay in Canterbury, at least until the end of term, so that I can attend Japanese classes. Weekly classes. So she's asked me to come home Fridays and she'll drive me back on Tuesdays. I've just booked my coach ticket for the start of this commuter-like lifestyle. Uh, such a lifestyle requires packing.. But at least the proportion of my photographs that contain Steve will decrease.

Tuesday, 25 May 2010

I am pointing at my boyfriend Stephen who is blow-drying his hair after a shower. When he's finished we will go to mine for lunch. At the supermarket yesterday, he bought a whole fish: including head, tail and scales. He's going to grill it. And, er, we might have it with.. Well, I'm going to suggest leaves and potatoes.

Down the hallway, our pal is practising on his saxa-ma-phone. He'd bought it just a couple weeks ago and seems to be making good progress on it. Well done.

TICK

I do like the idea of having a man that makes me want to kill.
 

Things I could do now that my exams are over and I have ridiculously incredible amounts of free time:
- make a dress, esp since several attempts to find clothes to buy on the high street have been fruitless
- read Pope's translation of The Iliad
- begin a photo-a-day project
- learn to juggle
- cook every meal from scratch
- learn to ride a bike
- find Bigfoot
- work out why Steve (the boyfriend) is a big fan of Nietzsche

Wednesday, 5 May 2010

I was once told that I could find all my favourite people on the walk home from a dream, and so from then on I would try to leave early. Usually I would leave too early to make that journey with anyone and could only watch them in their dreams. When I told my father that I had seen him sail away he smiled and asked me not to tell anyone of what I heard or saw. He believed that peering into people's dreams is worse than having your ear to their door without them knowing.

People seem more interesting in their dreams and it makes me sad to not be able to talk about all the fights I've seen the small kids win or the good food the poor kids ate. At school everyone played in groups, and these groups wouldn't usually talk to other groups, except in class when we had to work together. But I wanted to tell them that everyone dreams about going to the circus. Then maybe we could all be friends and put together our own circus show.

When I dream of the circus I like to be the trapeze artist. I sit on a swing, high above everyone else, eating popcorn until it's my turn to perform. And  everyone cheers for me. I can hang upside down with only a knee holding on, and then I'd loop round and stand without holding the ropes. At this point I might remember that I'm usually scared of heights and slip. The tent itself will gasp and seem to fall with me. Everything goes alright though. I'm a professional. To make the show more dramatic I waited until the last moment to grab the swing and flip myself back onto it, instead of snatching it right away. It sometimes takes a while before anyone started clapping; maybe they follow the line I would make as I fall and not realise that I'm still at the top.

My best friend Jenny also puts on a show. In school, she's usually tripping over because she doesn't know how to do her shoelaces yet, and she's too shy to ask for help. But in the show she has really good balance; like a flamingo because they sleep standing on one leg. She can walk along the tightrope, doing some spins and flips along the way, and when she gets to the middle she jumps on to a big ball. To keep her balance on the ball she has to take little steps to move as the ball rolled, and she juggles as she does this.

My other best friend, Sandra (but I call her Sandy), was ill that day, so in the dream she just sat in the audience. Hot chocolate is her favourite drink and clowns were always refilling her mug to keep her happy. She's never been to the circus before but she's scared of clowns. At first she didn't want any of their hot chocolate because she was worried that their red nose might've fallen into it when they were making it. So they all took off their noses to make sure that wouldn't happen. That made her more scared though: their white faces made them look like ghosts. My mother told me that things make you scared if you don't understand them properly or if you haven't found a way to fight them. So I suggested to Sandy that she should dress up like a clown, and she did. I can lose count of how many mugs of hot chocolate she drinks after that.

I've seen Jack be the lion tamer. In school he likes to tease people about stupid things like wearing odd socks or saying things differently to the way he does. He still seems mean even in my dreams. The lion doesn't like him because all Jack does is try make the lion angry by hitting him and keeps him in a cage so that he can't play with anyone. The lion doesn't want to be angry but merely be allowed to walk around the circus like the other animals.

Then there's Mary-Ann. She does the strangest thing with her popcorn. My favourite kind is sweet, and so is her's but she doesn't tell her mother that because she always runs off to see the balloon animals being made before the show. So her mother buys her a mixed bag of sweet and salty popcorn to make sure that there's at least half she likes. Except that doesn't mean there'll be half left in the bag. Oh no, because to tell whether a piece of popped corn is sweet or salty you have to taste it. So she'll eat half the bag and the other half will have been spat on to the floor under her seat. It's a terrible waste! When we're painting at school she'll take a bit of every colour before she knows what she wants to paint, and there was this one time where she only needed different shades of brown and yellow, because she was painting her dog, and all the other colour paints were thrown away. Things like that make me angry but she never listens when we tell her not to do that.

A letter home. (reposted from my other blog to tidy things up a bit)


Hello Yusuf.
Maybe you'd like to share this with Rika..
One day we should travel by train together, like the one we took in Geneva. Or we could learn to be gymnasts and fight like ninjas.

I installed Stumbleupon to Firefox yesterday and one of the things it showed me is a way for you to put together your own fireworks show and I thought you might like to try it cos I think you used to play things like this, but I don't know if you'd still like it. I tried it last night and it's alright, I suppose. Not as cool as these drawings some guy did on pavements using just chalk though.

Also, you're studying about the ancient Greeks, right? Well, maybe this might be useful cos it seems to hold information on a lot of myths, which I think is pretty fascinating.


I think you'd enjoy Stumbleupon in your free time too. All you have to do is install it, sign up, tick all the boxes of things that interest you and whenever you click on the button it's added to your web browser it'll bring up a page according to your interests that other people with the same interests have said they liked.

Anyway, reason I've put together this post for you is to show you a photo of a rabbit I took, cos I'd promised you on the phone that I'd show you since you're not here.


It's really small, can you see it? It's smaller than your '32' hat. Whenever I go up to campus I check the clear area around this tree to see if there are any rabbits cos I think they live in the holes at the bottom of it and on the day I had my camera (the day after I called you and told you about the small bunny) I was disappointed cos I couldn't see one, but when I looked back as I walked away I spotted this one. They're pretty well camouflaged.



On the way to campus that day I also saw a white cat in the foresty area opposite the flat. You can't tell from this photo very well, cos I couldn't zoom i enough, but I can tell you because I've seen it in our garden before. It has little ears like a teddy bear (and so we call it a polar bear) and a rather thick and short (thicker than shorter than you'd expect on a cat anyway) tail. When I saw it in our garden it was looking away and at first I thought it was a ferret.
The rain was falling desperately. It wasn't merely noisy and copious, but it was falling very fast. I suppose it was being frantic in its apology, as anyone would be if they had carelessly neglected someone (or something). In this case it was the meadows and forests that had been left suddenly.

She set the pen and notebook on the folding table beside her, and readjusted her reading glasses. This table also held a bowl of candy; there were only four pieces left. Is that enough to show you had tried to save some for someone else? The note she was writing in reads as follows:

"Roadworks at the roundabout on the main road means that the 379 bus has to bypass the Grean Forest area and so for the past week my walk home from the bus stop was a further twenty minutes of being surrounded by the big houses. However, I quite enjoyed yesterday's walk as I saw a new cat on my way home: one I hadn't seen before, and thought it very funny to be sat under a tree. It seemed to me as if it had just woken up from an afternoon nap or arrived from far away and wasn't sure which direction to take. This cat was coloured like a frisian cow, although where a cow would have black patches this cat had grey, and so I named it Daisy: a name I associate with cows more than anything else. Apart from the flower of course.

(This kept me distracted until I reached the garden gate; the neighbour's twins were were at war with the gnomes again.)"

On the mantelpiece stood three framed photographs. There was a photograph of a boy and a girl facing each other, holding their hands up to form an arch and wearing matching ties. This one had been turned so that it wasn't facing outwards but to the side. Another was of a group of people at a picnic; they were all laughing with their eyes closed and probably didn't realise that they were having their picture taken. A coat of furry dust laid over the the glass obscuring the name written on the cake. The last photograph was of a man with a cat on his head. This had gotten dusty also and the name on the cat's collar could not be read.

Every Tuesday evening she would tune in to her favourite program, but this week's murder mystery play was cancelled to make room for a special three-hour episode of a comedic game show. She used to listen to this program whilst eating dinner, but her current job requires her to have dinner two hours later than she used to, and the adjustment in her routine allowed her to forget old habits. That last of the witty jokes made her laugh so thoroughly that she cried. When the show was over she took her plate into the kitchen and washed up. The pocket on the front of her apron was peeling away along one side, though I suppose since she has only a few people left to bake for it doesn't disturb her very much.

"I suppose Linda's going to insist that I host the next club party when I see her tomorrow. Perhaps I ought to give the shelves and blinds a once over."

The sky roared and the rain hissed. People that live alone aren't expected to put as much effort in keeping their home tidy than if they had children running about, but, as it reads on the tag of her feather duster, "A tidy home leaves room for a happy home".

The phone rang feebly in the living room. It squats on a bookshelf between photo albums. She let it ring three times before hanging up the apron and making her way over. The lights flickered as she reached out

"Hello?"
"Dorothy, are you alright?"
"Thomas, I'm fine. Don't worry about me; it's just a bit of rain. About time too!"
"I know what you mean, Dorothy. I was getting worried about my raspberries. Can't have a summer without wild raspberries, can we?"
"Oh no, of course not. But I will see you at the club tomorrow night, won't I?"
"I've been practising my steps since I got home."
"That's wonderful. I think I'll try a bit of that too."
"Right, see you tomorrow night then, old girl."
"And you, Thomas. Good night."
"Good night."

The phone was rarely used, but whenever it was she would feel inclined to bring a photo album back to the armchair with her. She turned the pages slowly, as if peering into something strange for the first time. The photographs were mostly of a happy, young pair; though a few had other people appearing in them also. Everyone seemed cheerful wherever they had been captured, until the last page. There was only one photograph on this page; it was of a woman watering the flowers in the window box. She stood leaning out of the window with her back to the camera. There was a note on the page to accompany the lady and it read:

"Dorothy, please do all the things that make you happy. I'll be right behind you."
To muffle the noise of the pounding rain on the scaffolding she slept as close to the centre of the house as she could comfortably place herself: in the utility room. She made a tent by throwing the bed sheets that were in the dryer over clothes racks and cocooned herself in a sleeping bag. Unfortunately she forgot to bring her alarm clock in with her and when she ran downstairs, to pick up the telephone after it had rung three times, in loose socks she slipped on the tiled hallway floor. Despite the hard fall she managed to take the call before they'd given up.

"Hello?"
"Did you forget and decide to take breakfast in the bath?"
"No, no, nothing like that. There was a violent storm last night and..."
"You slept by your washing machine. Perhaps you ought to keep an alarm clock by the detergent!"
"Well, if you could bring one back for me that would be brilliant. How's the hotel?"
"Lovely, just lovely. Are you smoking?"
"Yes, but it's only menthol. Don't worry. Go on."
"Well, it's all sweeping staircases, fresh flowers and a pianist in the dining room. After dinner we went to the ice cream parlor, then danced in the ballroom!"
"He dances?"
"Like a leading man in a film! Jenny, we danced until the band packed up."
"(You don't deserve him.) He sounds really lovely. What do you have planned for today?"
"Hold on. There's more. We went to the bar afterwards... Oh, I'm going to have to call you back. There's someone at the door."

Jenny took the phone with her to the kitchen. When buying a phone for the house she had made a point about the phone needing a long wire so that a call could be taken anywhere between the kitchen door and halfway up the staircase. Somehow she'd manage to sleep right up to 10 o'clock: a whole two hours later than she usually gets up, so she was definitely hungry at this moment and not mistaking the pains for thirst! The quickest breakfast to prepare would probably be a bowl of cereal. But, in case her sister wants to talk to her for a while, she decides to cook something more filling.

First she drank a glass of water, then poured a glass of apple juice. Why she prefers juice that boldly states it is freshly squeezed over that which is from concentrate I can't understand. Surely they're the same. They both invigorate the late waker with their crisp taste. She mixed a couple eggs in a bowl, set a pan upon a small fire, melted a lump of butter, placed two slices of bread in the toaster, poured the eggs in, crumbled some cheese over the top, grabbed a spatula and scraped at the egg so that no part of it would over cook. Then the phone rang.

"Laura? Could you hold on a moment?"
"But I'm calling long distance!"

She threw the toast into the pan, grabbed the juice and held a banana to her waist using her wrist. After arranging a cushion at the coffee table she picked up the phone.

"Sorry, I was making breakfast."
"And I've filled in four clues in a crossword while you were doing so."
"Who was at the door?"
"Someone from reception. Johnny couldn't get through on the phone, so he sent up some flowers and a note."
"I'm surprised you're not spending all your time together on your exotic getaway."
"Well, his work keeps him very busy. I told you I'd call you this morning, erm, afternoon for me, because he had to meet someone for lunch. But he's back now, and has asked that I bring his camera when I come down."
"So what are you waiting for, Lauren?"
"There's something I have to tell you about him. It's very peculiar... I can't get my head around it."
"What is it? Did he do something to you?"
"No, no. He's a gentleman. Honestly, we do have the best of fun together. It's just something he said."
"And what did he say?"
"He said... that he's sick of everything, except me."
"What?"
"That's what he said, as he held my hand and trembled."
"How weird. What brought that on? Trembled?"
"I don't know. I really don't know. We were talking about.. about reindeer herding before he blurted that out."
"Leslie, that's just as strange. "
"Oh, stop it. That's not exactly helping, you know..."

Eating a banana requires two hands: one to hold it and one to peel it.

"Jenny? Hello?"
"Lisa, I don't know what to say. I don't know anything about him, because you won't let me meet him."
"I have. I invited you in when you dropped off those shoes."
"That's not what I mean. Remember when I started dating Harry and you asked to meet him? Well, I let you throw a birthday party instead of arranging our traditional celebratory dinners so that you could meet him.
"But my birthday isn't for another three months."
"That's besides the point."
"It is. We're straying. So what do you think he meant?"
"I think he was just trying to say he's happy. He's very happy with you."
"And nothing else."
"Right: nothing makes him happy but you."
"Yes, but I meant that only I make him happy."
"That's right."
"And everything else makes him feel terrible."
"So perhaps you should get off the phone and get into action."
"Why are you so eager to get off the phone?"
"I'm not, Lisa, I'm eager for you to go and do what you've travelled halfway around the world to do."
"And what's that?"
"Have fun. Go sightseeing or snorkelling or something. Just get off the phone. He's waiting for you now and I will see you next week, as has been the case for the past 15 years or so. So go."
"You're yelling at me, so I'll leave now."