journalesque

Note To Self

The thing about blogging is that, assuming you're not completely awful at it, people eventually start reading what you write. Probably not a lot of people. Probably people you don't even know in the beginning. So you write whatever you feel like writing and you put yourself out there because it's just the internet, not real life. And it's fine for awhile, blogging in relative anonymity, without much thought of what it might lead to or concern for the potential consequences. But eventually, inevitably, your two lives, real and virtual, begin to collide, and the people you'd neatly slotted into one category or the other start to bleed into both. It's all terribly awkward.

It wasn't so much the collision of lives that bothered me. That unexpectedly turned out to be one of the best bits. Rather, the problem was the creeping self-consciousness, and the growing realisation that I wasn't hiding nearly as well as I thought I was. Being that vulnerable is unnerving, like when you're thirteen and you walk past a group of boys and, suddenly aware that you're exposed in a way you don't yet fully understand, start to blush uncontrollably. Apart from the self-consciousness, there was also the fact that I was no longer the same person I'd been when I started blogging. It's difficult enough to transition from angst-ridden teenager to marginally-less-angst-ridden adult at the best of times. It's even trickier when your entire emo-style rantings are there in black and white for all to see.

I toyed with the idea of a 'hidden' blog, but I'm terrible at keeping secrets and any attempt at a public-but-anonymous blog would, I think, have failed miserably – too much effort to maintain, too stripped of detail and context to be of interest to anyone, myself included. So I stopped blogging. Truthfully, I think I was just bored and had finally run out of things to say. But the other thing about blogging is that the urge never entirely goes away. And when life gets interesting again, when thoughts and ideas and opinions previously exhausted resurface anew, fresh and ready for interrogation, the fingers get itchy once again. So here I am. I have so much to tell you.

50 Songs

50 songs I love. In alphabetical order, 'cause that's how I roll.

4.35am - Gemma Hayes
A Life Less Ordinary - Ash
All The Young Dudes - Mott The Hoople
American Pie - Don McLean
And It Stoned Me - Van Morrison
Aria (Goldberg Variations) - Bach (Glenn Gould)
Because The Night - Patti Smith Group
Breathe Me - Sia
Carvel - John Frusciante
Chariot's Rise - Lizze West

Chelsea - Counting Crows
Children Of The Revolution - T-Rex
Closer To The Start - Duke Special
Daysleeper - REM
Denis - Blondie
Downtown - Petula Clark
Fidelity - Regina Spektor
Friday I'm In Love - The Cure
Guide Me Home - Freddie Mercury
Hoppipolla - Sigur Ros

I'm His Child - Zella Jackson Price
It's My Life - No Doubt
La Cienega Just Smiled - Ryan Adams
Landslide - Smashing Pumpkins
Leaving To Stay - Jonny Lang
Life On Mars? - David Bowie
Love Of My Life - Queen
Manic Monday - The Bangles
Monsters - Band of Horses
Moon River - Henry Mancini

My Skin - Natalie Merchant
My Sundown - Jimmy Eat World
Never Forget You - Noisettes
One Day Like This - Elbow
Only You - Yazoo
Pictures Of You - The Cure
Rain King - Counting Crows
Ran For Miles - Gemma Hayes
Save Me - Aimee Mann
Sleep To Dream - Fiona Apple

Somebody To Love - Queen
Somewhere Over The Rainbow - Israel Kamakawiwo'ole
Stand By Me - Ben E. King
State Of The Union - David Ford
Street Life - Roxy Music
Stuck In A Moment You Can't Get Out Of - U2
Teenage Kicks - The Undertones
There She Goes - The La's
Whole Wide World - Wreckless Eric
Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots - The Flaming Lips

Playlist for the ones that are on Spotify.

From The Archives: The Old Plane Tree

The thing I remember most about my first time in Bath is the walking. I find walking – shoes and weather permitting – to be one of the more tolerable forms of exercise, along with horse-riding (where really the horse does most of the work) and yoga (which barely counts as exercise at all – at least the way I do it), but requiring less expense or preparation than either. It was March, although closer to the spring end of the month than the winter. The town was cool and crisp and bright, with sunlight bouncing off the golden Bath stone walls. I was wearing my cream coat with the tiny glistening speckles; smart, well-cut, more expensive looking than it actually was.

From the station, I walked up Manvers Street and Pierrepont Street, got lost somewhere around Sally Lunn's, and had to call the hotel for directions. It was just around the corner, the first of a short row of townhouses right beside the Abbey, perfectly central. My room was on the second floor, overlooking the square. I had dinner in the pub across the road alone, and, feeling conspicuous among the locals, tried to hide my embarrassment by pretending to read the tourist leaflets I'd picked up at the hotel.

When I'd finished it was dark outside, but still early, so I started walking. It seems odd to me now, and a little bit scary, that I walked around on my own in the dark in an entirely unfamiliar place, but I did and I never felt unsafe. It's just that sort of town. In less than a minute I'd found my way to the Abbey, beautifully lit up right in front of me. That's the thing about Bath – the history of the place is everywhere you go. Shops and offices sit inside borrowed buildings knowing that the buildings will be there long after they've gone, just as they were a hundred years ago and a hundred years before that. Even the town's longest residents are strangers to this history.

The following morning I visited the Roman Baths, then walked up the hill to the Jane Austen Centre. I didn't especially like Jane Austen then, but she was, as they tell you, Bath's most famous resident. They also tell you, rather apologetically, as though you might think it's their fault, that she hated the place. I wondered, so enchanted that first day by its charm and elegance, how it could be hated by anyone. (Eventually, I took a sort of comfort in the fact that she'd been miserable there too, and she grew on me somewhat.) I felt less self-conscious eating lunch in the tearoom – I was sure Jane Austen would understand the single girl awkwardness – and caught the eye of a middle-aged woman also eating alone. I almost asked her to join me, but couldn't think what I might say to her if she accepted. I'm not much of a small talker.

Onwards, upwards, to The Circus and The Royal Crescent. Legs aching, but worth it. So beautiful, so uniform, so precise. I do love symmetry. The Fashion Museum was next, and was full of French schoolchildren (Bath, I later discovered, is a city populated in seemingly equal parts by residents, students and tourists). Corsets, crinolines, Manolo Blahniks. Exhausted by then I headed back, and on the way bought food to eat at the hotel because I was too tired to fake nonchalance in public. The loneliness began to wash over me at that point and the night ahead felt very long. I've always thought of myself as a solitary sort of person; you get used to being on your own, occupying yourself, when you grow up without siblings. I never minded that, but it's not the same as being properly alone in a strange place.

The next day, craving human contact of any sort, I went on a walking tour. It was led by a man in his 70s, with that lovely lilting Somerset voice, who could almost walk faster than I could run. We walked the same route I'd taken the day before, and I was freshly surprised as the city revealed itself to me once again. An older couple asked why I was there, were suitably impressed when I told them, and wished me luck at the end. I spent the afternoon enraptured by the place where I expected to spend the next four years of my life, the place on which I thought my future depended.

I sometimes wish this was my only memory of Bath. That this city, hewn from the hills which surround it, could always in my mind be a pleasant and welcoming thought to drift to, instead of tarnished with the experience that would come months later. When the limestone walls I'd thought so light and elegant were dark and oppressive, and the hills trapped me inside so that I felt almost mad with loneliness. In the end I ran away, and, as I swept down the incline of Bathwick Hill, I looked into the winking lights of the town and felt only relief.

From The Archives: Strings

I've been listening to Ravel's String Quartet in F Major rather obsessively lately and I think I'm a little bit in love. It was a random discovery; the second movement features in the credits of The Camomile Lawn, which is one of the best TV adaptations of a book I've seen* – not quite as good as BBC's Pride and Prejudice mini-series, but definitely in the top five.

It was odd that I should discover the Quartet in the way I did, since I now know it to be a major work which was strongly influenced by Fauré – and I love Fauré. It makes me wonder what else I'm missing out on by sticking too much to what I know. Although what I 'know' mainly consists of a bit of Bach (which I maintain is all anyone really needs to qualify as civilised) and enough other stuff to very occasionally get a right answer on the University Challenge music round.

*In a strange twist of casting fate, both The Camomile Lawn and Pride and Prejudice starred Jennifer Ehle. The Camomile Lawn also starred Toby Stevens, who went on to play Mr Rochester in the BBC's adaptation of Jane Eyre. Jennifer Ehle dated Toby Stevens during the filming of The Camomile Lawn and Colin Firth (Mr Darcy) during Pride and Prejudice, meaning that she's dated both Mr Rochester and Mr Darcy, the hussy. Rochester vs Darcy – now that's a book I want to read.

From The Archives: Saturday

As a member of the post-ceasefire/Good Friday Agreement generation who came of age in a Northern Ireland functioning, for the first time in a long time, as something resembling a democracy, the possibility of real, substantial and positive political change exists for me as not just an abstract possibility, but a demonstrable reality. The sense of optimism that results from this still relatively new and precarious détente is what underpins my politics, and it is why, when I decided it was time to stop talking about politics and start doing politics, I joined the party that seemed to me to have flourished the most in recent years, and was demonstrating real commitment to tackling issues that had been ignored for much too long.

And so it was that I, and a rag-tag bunch of fellow optimists/election candidates, spent Saturday afternoon out and about, leaflets in hand, smiles at the ready, knocking on doors with all the energy and verve that can only exist in the earliest weeks of an election campaign. We managed to (mostly) dodge the rain, and there were enough of us that we got quite a lot done. The responses – when people were in, at least – were generally positive. It was a good day, the kind that makes you feel like what you're doing is worth it, that what you're working for has meaning and value.

Then I came home and saw the headline that a young police officer in Omagh had been murdered.

I considered putting that last sentence at the end of the previous paragraph. But I couldn't. Quite apart from the fact that so awful a piece of information ought to stand alone, the attachment of it to a jolly little paragraph about how I spent my afternoon would be horrendously distasteful. I feel, instinctively, that perhaps I shouldn't be talking about Constable Kerr at all. That, even as a very minor election candidate, I must speak and act responsibly, and that commenting on this terrible act would be somehow opportunistic and exploitative. Besides, how can I possibly have anything useful to say anyway? I'm not sure there is any real solace in words when it comes to things like this. I think some losses are beyond even the best words, and I have none of those.

But, the thing is, he was one of us. He was part of this generation, my generation, who grew up believing that politics could work. That, rather than continuing a cycle of violence that never had anything to do with us in the first place, we could do things differently, and better. Constable Kerr embodied the hopes of a new generation when he signed up to serve his community – his whole community – as a police officer. That he has been murdered in the course of doing his job is an assault not just on the political process, but on us. We were never part of The Troubles. It was never our conflict. And none of us should ever be dying in car bombs.

I don't know where to go from here. I feel shocked and angry and so terribly sad for his family and community. And I fear the consequences, not because I think there will be retaliation – at least I desperately hope not – but because I'm afraid that a lot of young people, and especially young people from similar backgrounds to Constable Kerr, will have had their trust in the peace process irrevocably shattered. I hope this is not the case. I hope we will continue to fight for the better society we know is possible. For us, and for him, and for everyone.

From The Archives: Things I've Learned On The Campaign Trail

1. Never leave the house without: a camera/phone, plasters, tissues, water, snacks, an umbrella, a decent argument.
2. If a house has more than three cars in the drive, they're (probably) not going to vote Green. Wind chimes, on the other hand, are a good sign.
3. Small dogs are much scarier than big dogs.
4. There is no non-awkward way of apologising for getting someone out of the bath.
5. Men over the age of 70 think I'm totally hawt.
6. When someone starts a sentence with the words "There is absolutely nothing worse than...," get ready to smile and nod. It almost never ends with war/genocide/poverty/etc.
7. Sometimes you have to make a choice between getting the leaflet through the letterbox and keeping a layer of skin. If you choose the skin you have no integrity and should probably just give up.
8. Why yes, you can get sunburned in April (if you're me).
9. People are surprisingly lovely, supportive and encouraging, usually when you need it most and often when you least expect it.
10. The art of losing isn't hard to master. Winning with grace is much more difficult.

On Being Ill - Virginia Woolf

Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of the temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist's arm-chair and confuse his 'Rinse the mouth - rinse the mouth' with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us – when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.

Borges and I - Jorge Luis Borges

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things. Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him. I do not know which of us has written this page.

Trans. James E. Irby, 1964