Many happy returns on your 60th birthday!

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A bit of a non-day really. Is it just me who gets these sometimes?? Nothing much of any great excitement has happened, and I haven't had any great moments of inspiration. Neither is there any chocolate in the house to console myself with, dammit. Well, not that I can actually eat it anyway - we're saving the last of the anniversary Thornton's chocolate champers bottle till tonight. Well, it's Friday, innit?

However, the good news is that I do feel slightly better. Well enough anyway to go shopping in Godalming this morning and find out that they seem to have discontinued not one but two shampoos I regularly use. Two! I ask you! Deep, deep sigh ... I begin to suspect that it's a government plot to slowly take away every product I have ever found that I actually like so that eventually I won't exist at all as there'll be nothing for me to buy. (Cue: I'm not paranoid; it's just that everyone's against me ...). Anyway, I didn't have the psychic energy to make a fuss or chain myself to the shampoo factory railings, so I just bought another version and will hope for the best ...

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Creative freelancing - singing, writing, photographing - is a jigsaw of both time and energy. I remember a mezzo-soprano friend saying that she had seven jobs, and that was only the regular ones. Unlike her, most of my jobs happen at home. But still, there's the teaching, the editorial reporting, the blogging, the tax return, the friendly conversations with aspiring writers, the occasional treat like next week in Madrid, the accounts, the library-runs... At least I'm between novels in the promotional sense, so there's not much to do on that front.

But those are the dishwashing and bed-making of the writing life. Novels as children is such a cliché, but just at the moment, struggling to do the right thing - the best - for what's closest to my heart, it's hard not to see it like that.

The current novel - still nameless - is in its final stages before I wave it off to university with my editor. Every now and then it still needs real, off-the-wall creative thought - that title, for instance - but for the most part I'm doing last-minute packing and admin. My editor's been helping with tutoring and admissions, but...


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Being a bit of a Russo-phile, I was very interested to discover that the Curzon chain of cinemas are screening a festival of Russian films. It so happens that my friend Ed Hughes has composed, and recorded, full scores for two of the films in the season - Strike and Battleship Potemkin both by Eisenstein.

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Amazon was over here today, checking out my little space in the minefield that is Musician’s flat. She was impressed enough to suggest more visits; the space Musician inhabits, ie, living-room, is a maze of wires – a bit like a spider’s web, where he sits in the middle and spins his music, moving bits of something here, there and everywhere. She never comes here – and that hurts his feelings; he’s the sensitive middle child, and gets upset when she tells him his place is bogging. So now she knows that some kind of clean has entered the building she’ll pop over now and again. I usually have to walk the several streets it is to her flat, so I’m happy; now I can continue my layabout life and if she needs me she can come here.


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Woke up to a rather annoying cold this morning - bummer, eh - so am dowsing myself with Lemsip and Nurofen Plus. The perfect combination. Consequently, I have been drooping round the flat this morning and doing writing work in my dressing gown. Something I normally never like doing. Still seem to have got the stuff done I was planning to though, which is at least cheering me up after this week's various disasters. Such stuff included preparing for next week's University Writers' Group meeting and the Goldenford meeting, both being on Tuesday. The launch of Irene Black's eBay book, Sold to the Lady with the Lime-Green Laptop is fast approaching, so there's loads to do. And it's well worth buying - it's a fun read with lots of wild pictures - so get your orders in now!

Not only that but I've submitted some poems to various competitions - and yes I knew I was going to ease down on this activity due to general cynicism about the whole literary world thang, but I felt strong enough to face it today so have taken the iron by the horns and heated it. Or some such twaddle. And at least it makes my spreadsheets look slightly more used. Hurrah ...

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Hello

I've not updated for a while because I've been that busy. Life at the moment seems determined to prevent me from working on my book. There are bills to pay, a housemate who is in and out of work like a dog down a ferret hole, and several circumstances have added up to rental apocalypse. So...

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A photo taken . . . holding a moment in time, suspended . . . contemplating a tree. The two of us just sat in the mid-morning sunshine, on a bench in the Sydney Botanic Gardens, a coffee comfortably nestled in our hands, contemplating a tree. Simple things can be so good. It wasn't just any tree. We knew its botanical name. Did someone once say that until something has a name it doesn't exist. It was an Araucaria cunninghamii better known as a Hoop Pine.

Let me explain. As part of the multi facetted project we have embarked on, we have decided to photograph some of the 900 Australian native plants mentioned by Allan Cunningham in Robert Heward’s “Biographical Sketch of Allan Cunningham FLS MRGS” published in 1842.

Why? . . . because it sounds like an interesting thing to do.

Allan Cunningham collected plants in Australia between 1816 and 1839 and he collected them from areas not touched by the “colonial” hand, pristine wilderness. Plants are part of history just like buildings, roads, bridges art and literature. This man sacrificed his life in the pursuit of rare specimens . . . in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. I see him as a bit of a botanical warrior.

In Australia we don’t have a lot of architectural history, not before the 1800s anyway. No wars are recorded, no famous philosophers' thoughts to muse on, no Roman roads or ruins. It’s an ancient land once inhabited only by people who lived in harmony with it, as part of nature. Sure they had their tribal fights, wherever man is there is conflict, but there were no written records, no bricks and mortar, no paper written on, no written language. Back beyond 1800 our history is the land and what grew on it and what it looked like, how it breathed and how it was. We may not have material things that depict our country’s early history, however we do have the natural history of the plants, the animals, the rocks and the earth plus the living memory of the aboriginal people.

My British, bookish, botanical warrior collected thousands of plants and sent them back to Kew Gardens, to his friend and colleague Robert Brown, for classification. Some of those plants can be found today in the herbariums of the world.


More of that later . . .

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Spent a lot of yesterday evening feeling shattered and napping before … um … going to bed, so decided to stop the rot today by taking a De-Stress pill first thing. So far, it’s working, aha! Still think I should have brought the darn things into work with me though. Once again, I have been running round the campus replacing arrows so that students don’t get lost in the bushes on their way to various registrations. Or not too many times anyway. M’dears, it’s utterly exhausting … Pause for smelling salts and an elegant sinking onto the sofa …

Not only that but the boss deposited a full box of chocolates on my desk last night – sadly not for me (arrgghh!!), but for the students while they register. So I was forced to hand the choccies over to the Registration people for them to distribute this morning, sigh … But all was not lost, as I did nick one last night …

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Well, I think I’m finally falling apart; I was at the hospital yesterday morning, at the face clinic and I am suffering from DMT which means, Dysfunctional Mandibular something. She said that my jaw might not return to the way it was; I should get my mouth open wider than it is now, but don’t think I’ll be facing a future that includes Big Macs. They had to take impressions of my teeth to make me some kind of shield that I’ll need to wear at night to gently relax the tissues in my jaw area. Apparently, I’ve been overworking my poor old jaw, because I have to chew on one side – there being no teeth on the bottom of the other side! Long and convoluted, I know, but let this be a warning to those of you out there chewing on one side…GIVE IT A REST!




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