Holiday time :)

Passport, passport…….. Where’s my passport?

Can I fit an extra pair of shoes in my case, I’ve got room, but it is already kind of heavy, I only need 3 pairs right?

Why does my suitcase look empty, I’m fairly sure my packing skills aren’t that good so why is there so much room? I’ve forgotten something haven’t I? I have no idea what I’ve forgotten to pack, damn, O I’m not unpacking and checking. Nope I’m not, I had better unpack and check.

Have I got enough sun cream? Have I got enough insect repellent? Do I need a bigger jacket for the plane? Four books is enough for 10 days right? I’m not going to finish them all?

Need to put a bathing costume in my carry on just in case my suit case gets lost.

Where the hell is my passport?

I’m going on holiday, and I am horribly excited even if I do have to have these irritating thoughts running through my head. Actually the thought about the passport I really need to start listening to because I’m leaving this afternoon. Leaving the UK for a better climate is also pointless at the moment because the fabulous weather we have been having, still I’m excited.  I’m going somewhere completely new.

I haven’t been able to go one holiday in ages, my job keeps getting in the way, I had to be a grown up and put that first. I had to cancel one to Florida last minute, I was so upset.  It much easier when I was young, my mum always knew where my passport was, we would go in the school holidays so there was no conflict, and a parent booked it easy.

I love travelling and going on holidays (I even like airports), I love ending up somewhere new and interesting. I love not knowing exactly what I’m going to get where I get there or what I’ll do. It’s opportunity to explore somewhere new and leave your old world behind for a little bit. So happy right now, or would be if I could find my bloody passport.

So I’m on vacation for the 10 days, I’ll you guys when I get back.

An Old friend in London Town

What I’ll remember most about yesterday was the soaring temperature, the dry air and sticky skin, fidgeting and grinning from overwhelming excitement and anticipation and the shear relief of hearing an almost lost voice and having a hug I have missed. The last time I was in London was a little under a year ago and last time I saw Kat was a little over 2 years and 2 weeks ago. I love both immensely, for wildly different reasons but I don’t see either as much as I would like.

Kat was my roommate while I was studying in America, I hadn’t shared a room since I was eight and despised the idea of having no solitary escape. Kat made having a roommate not only bearable but a wonderful part of my experience in America. She made what had been a sparse and gloomy room, home by filling it with trinkets, colour, noise and friendship. When I finally returned to Britain and my own room, I felt like someone had ripped away part of my being, she had been such a big part of my life it was odd to now have a life and a room without her.

I can’t remember ever really doing the tourist thing in London but who could say no to that chance and seeing an old friend?? London has never disappointed me but to look at everything through the eyes of a traveller was incredible. No one cares that it is over crowed, with people rushing or the expense; we were idle and easy going, swapping stories, answering question (seriously who knew I could regurgitate so much crap about the Royals) and filling her in on a whistle stop tour of London and Britain’s culture and quirks.

We started at London Bridge before following the South Bank of the Thames to the Globe. I love it at the Globe there is so much history there and the white round architecture always amuses me. We than went next door to the Tate, which I have to say is an extraordinarily ugly building considering it houses some beautiful art work. Yesterday they also had a BBQ outside, expensive but good. We followed the burger with a walk across the Millennium Bridge (the one that gets destroyed in the Harry Potter films) to S. Pauls on the opposite side of the river. This is a stunning building and the  gardens at the beginning of summer smell fantastic. We strolled up The Mall to Buckingham Palace and down The Mall to Trafalgar Square where we people watched whilst discussing education, politics, art, music and sports just like when we were hiding in our room pretending to work.  We found time to squeeze in a visit to  St. James Park, Piccadilly Circus before it got dark and we arrived in Leicester Square  it got dark and finally we ate at a proper English pub (or at least as proper as it gets in London).

I loved every moment of it even when my camera died, particularly that I was acting like a complete  tourist. When I go to London I go to shop, to the theatre or an exhibition, for work, I don’t see London, it’s just another city. I adored yesterday because I felt like I was seeing bits I had missed and because I was with amazing people. I was with Kat and in a prolonged moment of a day, doing all those things was so much better. So here is the upside to being a bit older, I can afford to go to London and buy my friend dinner. I can spend the day doing nothing and it be a wonderful guilty pleasure because I can drop everything and still go to work the next day. I’m now old enough to have a friend from years ago who lives in a different country and maintain it.   

Hello Sunshine

HI SUNSHINE!! Where have you been?? I thought you had deserted the UK. Oh well, better late than never. I may have found a bright side to being a grown-up or adult or whatever. After a hard day’s work (yeah, that’s not the bright side) having your phone light up with a text from a friend expressing your exact thoughts, “Beer Garden?? 8ish??” I don’t think I have ever really appreciated a beer garden until now. I have decided that the luxury of driving to a wonderful pub or bar, finding that last table in the garden you can laden with drinks and surrounding it with excellent friends, was something worth waiting for.

Since the sun has finally decided to show its face this is an indulgence that is worth working all day for, worth finding those sunglasses that have been gathering dust and worth dragging yourself out in a hot and suffocating car to find somewhere where you can sit outside and let the world pass you by but for a few hours. I don’t think  many things in life that is more delightful that, settling down on a warm evening watching the night roll in with sounding yourself some choice friends and a first-rate drink. It is where lazy conversation, nostalgia and gentle laugher runs rampant. It is where friendships are cemented, love is found, places like this is where things happen lethargicly when you are not paying attention. Someone should have told me I could do this when I got older; I may have, possible, perhaps complained a little less or disliked the idea slightly less.

Where I am the best version of me.

Is there a place where you feel like a different person, or perhaps where you feel like a superior or ultimate version of yourself? Somewhere that brings out your greatest aspects, diminishes you faults, somewhere where you excel. Mine is my old university town. I have yet to find anywhere that can make me feel safe and peaceful; it is where I formed some of great ideas about literature, art, friends and life. Aberystwyth in Wales lives in its own dazzling bubble, with little crime, vice or evil one can quite happy forget there is a big bad world beyond it boarders. It was a place where I could just be, just live and be happy.

I went through a lot of pain there but I never felt isolated or lonely. It wasn’t just the incredible people I met there, the place itself stood by my side, it laughed with me, stood close by me when I cried in the dark and stopped the world to comfort me. I miss it, I miss the people I love so much I cling to them as though I’m afraid they are a wonderful dream that will slip through my fingers. I miss the person I was there, the better, smarter, prettier and happier person. I miss the conversations about politics, books, comics, films, music, love, passion and life. I wondered if it was just me who had a place like this? Or does everyone have a place where they are the person they could be?   

Tumbling Pretties

Why a slow week at work is bad for your health.

I remember in my youth (ha like I’m old now) that some weeks used to feel like they dragged but I don’t think I have every really understood the idea of a slow week until I got a job. I’m an underling, and when work is quiet I have nothing and I mean NOTHING to do. I mean what do adults do at work, when there is nothing to do. When I was at school I passed notes and day dreamed of the promise of 8 hot hazy summer weeks, I don’t even get those any more. I have also come to the conclusion that a sluggish week at work is incredibly bad for your health.

1. A slow week at work means I’ve become frustrated, anxious and stressed, I’m not only bored but completely puzzled where has all the work gone?? I had some last week, so where is this weeks?? Have I just missed it, is there something massively important I am meant to be doing that I’m not?? Is it all just piling up and I’m  going to end up dealing with it all next week, which lets face it, would suck for future me. This worry makes me feel nauseous.
2. Fear sets in as well like I said I’m an underling and if there is no work there is no job and I’ll be the first to go. Maybe I should be spending all this spare time figuring out how to make the copier machine work when the odd little light comes on and become a little less expendable. All this fear is equally not nice and I worry I may lose sleep; well actually the worry about losing sleep is making me lose sleep.
3. Increased intake of coffee, tea and biscuits are beginning to take there toll. Having the time to frequent the kitchen is not helping the waist line, I can’t even remember how many cookies I had today and I pretty sure I don’t want to.
4. I’ve started chit chatting with the people I work with more, because I now have the opportunity and this had lead to some of the most mundane conversations imaginable. I have also come to realise that I don’t like half of them as much as I thought I did. I also find out things I really really really didn’t want to know.
5. After I have become lethargic, frustrated, worried, scared, fat and isolated it will inevitably not be a slow week next week, it will be a hectic week and I will want to go in a corner and cry and shout at the cosmos for just being irritating.

 

Great Gatsby

I have a list of books in my head that I’m desperate to read or think that I should read. On the list is the Great Gatsby which I finished about a week ago. It has taken me a while to figure out what I thought and feel about the novel. It was never going to measure up to the magnitude I had built it up to. I suppose that will always be a problem when you pick up a novel that is so renowned, by an author as admired as F. Scott Fitzgerald. Words and phrases such as ‘classic’ and ‘loved by everyone’ will always mar you opinion for better or worse before you even read the first line.

I felt that the novel was dull, like 1984 I felt nothing really happened for a long time. I felt no emotional investment; I didn’t care for Nick, who did nothing but watch the world he happily inhabited with cynicism, I didn’t care for Daisy and after the intrigue of waiting for the infamous Gatsby to appear on the written page I no longer cared for Jay. And I was waiting, always waiting; waiting for Fitzgerald to say something, less obvious than, look at the moral decay of our time, look at the decay of the American dream. I wanted him say something subtle, through all the negative, all the putrid and festering commotion, something positive. I wanted there to be an understated acknowledgment that there was still beauty in life, however much the good hearts and dreams are doomed to die and leave little mark on a glittering materialistic world. There are many things I could say about the novel but I could never say it wasn’t beautiful, I kept reading because it was aesthetically so pleasing.

This carefully crafted piece of art is at heart a thwarted love story of star-crossed lovers and while keeping to the traditional separation devices of money and status, the fact the lovers aren’t perfect makes them easier to relate to. Romantic idolised lovers are untouchable; however, it is their flaws that make Daisy and Gatsby interesting. It is the flaws in the lovers and in the wealthy that leads to their destruction, the society and morals around them are decaying. Both of these verge on being romanticised but are dragged back to represent the dark dangerous world that was developing in the 1920’s. It is the disillusionment that Fitzgerald presents to the reader that is so striking, the 1920s is a world presented full of greed and the pursuit of pleasure that is an all top accurate illustration of our current world, a world despite it rotten core will remain outwardly stunning.

Fitzgerald speaks to the readers fears that good hearts like Gatsby’s seem doomed to die but isn’t that just because we remember? No one will remember Tom, Daisy or Jordan but we will always recall the one who is great long after they are gone, believing they left too early. It is the fear that our dreams will die that speaks so well to the reader, no one wants to believe that the American or Gatsby’s dream will die or worse, in its essence is untouchable. Fitzgerald does raise the question, do we idealise and perfect dreams to a point that renders them unattainable and effectively doom them to die in a materialist world?

Gatsby may have been trapped in the past by status and background but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t capable of recreation. Yes I wish Gatsby wasn’t chasing a past summer but who is to say he wouldn’t create a better summer when he caught it? What I love about Gatsby is that he believes in the green light despite what he has seen in war and how cynical the world has made him. He still believes in his dream of the better world he wants to create. The belief that people will choose to dream of something better in a dark world is wonderful and one I believe in whole heartedly.

So yeah, I still think it was dull and there were things I didn’t like about The Great Gatsbybut I doubt that is what I’m going to talk about when someone asks me if I’ve read the book.

Tumbling Pretties

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Haunting presence

I’ve had an odd day, I mean really odd. You know that feeling, when without having heard or seen a person, you know someone is standing very close to you; you can just sense their presence. It’s an intolerable feeling that makes you whirl around desperate to relieve the abhorrent feeling of uncertainly, to know who is there. That is how I have felt all day like there is someone horrible haunting my right shoulder, their head hovering just behind my right ear. It is an insufferable feeling; someone is almost breathing down my neck and ruffling my hair, but when I turn around there is nothing just indecipherable air.

This morning, lying contentedly in bed, I floated between dreams and consciousness; I was mundanely playing with the idea of getting up. The edge of my bed sank as someone gently sat on the mattress, for a moment I assumed my Mother had come in to my room to talk to me. She remained silent and I didn’t move, hoping to achieve a few more winks of the doze I was enjoying. The burden slowly rose from my bed and I decided I was dreaming and so could remained lying on my front with my head buried in my pillow a little longer. The weight then returned and this time oppressively clung and clung to the air around me. Something/someone lent over me from the left side of my bed, over my body to hang its head between mine and the wall. I immediately lurched up bewildered by anyone doing this to me; I struggled up frantically the atmosphere around me pushing down. There was no one there, I was met with a nonexistent presence, I was alone in my room lit by pale morning light and my own heavy breathing.

I spent the rest of the day being followed. My every move watched intently, every action and stride manically observed and met invisibly and silently. At work, several times I spun around, certain that if I moved fast enough I would see…. something. I could not alleviate the harsh impression that there was something haunting my day. Every sense seems to betray me because I felt there was something lingering I just couldn’t see or hear or touch. It’s just there, only it exists in the corner of my eye when it thinks I’m not looking and it thinks is safe.

I am completely rattled, disturbed by this absent company. I am preoccupied by the troubling sense of an angel, ghost, imagined spectre has taken to squandering time in my presence, just beyond appearance. It is finding a foul amusement agitating my nerves and unsettling me in the twilight of my cold room. I can feel it just behind me, toying with the wind chime in my window, with long blacken nails, on a twisted mottled hand. It is tinkling leisurely with the slender metal, waiting and watching for something, I just don’t know what. I think it wants to teach me that you are never too old to be frightened by nothing.

Occationally you watch something and it’s just like: yeah, that just works. It just fits in with your life, and where you are in the world. It speaks to you but also amuses you, makes you smile and feel a little bit better even if your weren’t especially down to start with.

So I thought I would share it. Enjoy

The perfect couple.

I told my friends that is they would let me take a photo of their shoes I would blog about them. I love these this pair and they are a wonderful couple and fab individuals. As people they are very different but they are a perfect compliment to one another and they make each other very happy which I’m pretty sure is the whole point. I sware there shoes speak volumes about there relationship, different colours, different sizies, different styles but they look great together, they feel great together and they work great together. They are just great together.

My Avengers warm up, better late then never.

 “What do you think of The Avengers?” My friend asked me while standing at the bar buying us drinks.

“You mean Avengers Assembled?” Was my response as I kept him company.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever, what did you think?”

“Haven’t seen it yet”

“What?! SERIOUSLY! I know it’s only just come out but I would have thought you were first in line.”

“I’ve only seen Iron Man and Iron Man 2, I haven’t seen the others and I don’t want to see the Avengers until I’ve seen Thor, Captain America, The Incredible Hulk, no….. wait, yeah all of them.”

“You haven’t se- who the hell are you, I feel like I don’t know you! You’ve changed! No you can’t have your drink, you haven’t seen Thor!!”

Before I explain this quote from my Saturday night where I wasn’t allowed a beer because I didn’t know how epic Thor was and my friend insistence that there is a significant possibility I have been replaced by a shape shifter or an android, I would just like to say something. Really Marvel you changed the name from The Avengers to Avengers Assembled in UK because we used to have a TV show called The Avengers in the 60’s and 70’s, really, how stupid do you think we are? I mean have you seen how much publicity is out for your film? Do you really think someone is going to get confused? Trust me everyone in UK is still calling the film The Avengers and not thinking about a TV series they have never heard of.

My friend’s reaction I suppose could be valid, I love comic books and most people who even vaguely know me know this, it’s really not a secret. I also adore action and hero movies, I think of them as feel good films, good usually triumphs and in a world that has so little black and white it’s a little bit comforting.  I know a lot about comics, and yes I maybe a self-confessed DC girl but Marvel at times has some spectacular moments. When Iron Man came out however I was underwhelmed and didn’t make the effort to see it, I had never been a huge fan of the Iron Man comics. As for the Incredible Hulk, after the 2003 attempt I wasn’t holding out much hope for the film.

But then I went to America and Iron Man 2 came out and someone physically sat on me making me watch Iron Man so they could drag me to watch Iron Man 2 on a road trip. Apparently I had to see them in order. I thought Iron Man and Iron Man 2 were amazing, I felt it was something fresh and an amazing take on what it is to be a hero. Stark no matter how great he thinks he is, knows he isn’t perfect, he knows he has flaws but don’t let these rule his life. It was fun, it was thrilling and it kicked ass, what more could a person want.

Since then I have had every intension to watch the Incredible Hulk and Thor and Captain America when they came out, but I didn’t see them. I don’t even remember why I didn’t. That was until last night where after been ridiculed, told I was betraying my inner child and being desperately ill; I decided I would lie in bed feeling sorry for myself for about 6 hours and watched Thor, Captain America and Incredible Hulk.

It was AWESOME!! These have to be the best 6 hours I have spent with my TV. I am an idiot for not seeing them earlier; I have wasted years by not having these films in my life. They made not being able to breathe, not only bearable but fun. And yes I’m pretty sure I wasn’t oxygen deprived or delirious. I am seeing The Avengers Avengers Assembled as soon as possible.