Picking up the pace

Unfamiliar birdsong in the morning, the strange angle of the sun through the windows, remind you that it's a different place to the one you know. Like water trickling over stones, life slows down.

Sophorific air in the plane maintains the cocoon and then you arrive. Dappled light through indistinct shapes changes to hard lines, squares within squares. Birds and spring blossom replaced with raincoats and car horns. A shot of adrenalin in the arm, though jarring, invigorates.

Conflicting instincts - drawn towards light and noise but tempted back into the musky warmth of smaller things. Finally you step back onto the perpetually moving track.

Film Noir

The BFI on the South Bank was the location for a screening of fashion and film from the forties onwards. A plush, claret velvet private screening room showing cut off patterns of clothing through time in black and white and vivid colour. When the show was over, I was disgorged onto a streetlit walkway.

A man in a black suit leant against the glowing side of the film institute. His profile lit by a sulphur street lamp, one foot pressing on the wall, head thrown back, he exhaled cigarette smoke. New laws make any smoking an illicit act, but this was especially atmospheric - an unwitting homage, or perhaps something more aware.

At Waterloo station the clock face bore the words 'out of order', black on white, inside the ring of Roman numerals where the hands should have been.

Finally, a woman walked onto the bus on Battersea Park road wearing a red feathered fedora and black double-breasted trench, cinched in. Her hair was dark and neat, her lips were scarlet and her face pale, uncertain, haunted.

Is this all simple coincidence or a more complex plot?

(Image courtesy of Spoony Mushroom on flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/transcendent/)

Her special day

The flowers are beautiful, but mothering is such a drab word - it feels like wet cotton wool in the mouth. Add a letter and it's smothering. Take one away and it's othering.

Interesting that fathering only seems to apply to the act of making a baby, mothering to the prolonged effort of bringing one safely through the obstacle course of childhood and adolescence, into adulthood. Such a heavy burden for one person. Mothering - sounds like carrying lead weights in your pockets.

I probably wouldn't be so down on it, if on this day in 2010 I felt that society had adjusted its expectations of women in any real way following on from the androgynous outpourings of seventies feminists, the dirty, smelly days my aunt spent on Greenham Common. Instead of reinventing itself, this word has retained its milky sourness in the mouth, the moment of inevitable compromise and loss of self, overweening guilt.

You can play at equality in your twenties, drinking cocktails in chrome finished bars with your girlfriends, laughing at the dour suited men. But mothering lies in wait for you - and their dull smirks tell you they know it too. Patriarchy has the last laugh, and it laughs louder these days because it has managed to turn the creative energy of emancipation against us as only the status quo can. Now we have to race with the boys as well as tending the babies. Running with your legs tied, like those dreams where you need to get away but your legs are stuck in treacle.

Don't get me wrong, it's not the children I object to - they're an interesting addition to life. It's the weight of expectations that taking on the mantle involves. So I might just skip past that particular gerund and hope to god that even if a child comes along, I don't need a special day.

Thanks to Marlis1 for the photo (http://www.flickr.com/photos/marialuisa/)

Spring clean haiku

Sweeping the garden
Dead leaves fly up in the air
Like butterfly wings

Polaroid

Running in the park, my mind loosens and memories start to shuffle into the foreground. Perhaps a familiar movement from a small dog bounding beside me, or a shaft of light, penetrating through the bare branches at a specific angle, stirs something. For some reason recollections appear as photographic stills, not moving images, their colours enhanced and laced with the romance of discovery.

Once begun, polaroid bright memories flick through my mind - is it my mind, or something more instinctive? Like the scent of a baby's head - the slideshow set in train, running it's course. Experiences of movies long forgotten, so I thought, everyday images of life from their habitual angles, the strange deja vu experienced when you pass the same place everyday, and everyday it's the same and also slightly different. Memories lie on top of each other, a cross-section of the sedimentary layers of life as lived.

The trick is to recognise these unexpected moments when you plunge into the depths of everything you've ever seen, felt, thought or known. And realising, begin to wonder about how these moments make you. Each one is another layer of memories (or unmemories?) - even sleeping our dreams add to the mix.

How do these experiences contribute to who we are? Is anything, once it has passed through our minds (no matter how glancingly) ever truly discarded, or is it just filed away? And those moments, when you rediscover just a fraction of the experiences you don't even remember having, provide a tantalising glimpse of what lies beneath.

Forgetting about the cookies

Office rage is violent, irrational and overwhelming, and it can be set off by the smallest thing.

If someone just reached over and took a biscuit from your desk, that would be understandable, commonplace even, if a breach of the stricter rules of etiquette.

To go into your drawer and root around is less permissible, but hell, they are probably hungry right? So if there's an open packet they could take one, and maybe leave a note explaining how they fell prey to the basic level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs and were therefore unable to adhere to social conventions, which come way higher up.

But to go into your drawer, open the packet, take three cookies and then just leave the box open so that all the other cookies go stale - well that really takes the biscuit.

The main thing is not to let it invade your inner tranquility, because this is not important. It really isn't anything that you need to worry about - you're bigger than that. Honestly, you are.

If they'd just asked, you would have been happy to share, because that's the kind of maganamous, empathetic and most of all - calm - person you are.

Forget about the cookies. Seriously.

(Image courtesy of Terry Bain www.flickr.com/photos/axis)

End of day

The return of the sun after drab Winter skies also brings back a new time of day - so rare in the shrouded months - sunset.

Gone and immediately forgotten are the countless cloud covered evenings of almost imperceptible dimming from grey to black. The sun, once appeared, cannot resist announcing its departure from the world in a flambouyant flick of its tail. Splattering the receding sky with dripping colour.

It's almost too much to bear, watching a luminous orange sky above silvered lilac water, with the glittering bridge in between. Staring, staring, not thinking, just bearing witness. It's like a small tear in my heart, but I can't turn my eyes away.

Then another evening, a more restrained display. The sky a watercolour wash of pink, gently fading to grey. I think it's over quietly, and then, in it's dying moments, the puffy cumulus clouds are flourescent edged - lipstick kisses on the sky.

Watching the sun set on the horizon reminds me of the physical presence of the world I'm standing on: how much farther it reaches than the end of my fingertips and its bounded edges. Slipping silently beyond, can-canning its farewell, the sun glows out.

(Thanks to AbroadJZ for the picture http://www.flickr.com/photos/abroadjz/)

The colour you’re not

An interesting thought from a nature programme on the BBC last night. The reason that plants appear green to us is because they absorb the red and blue photons in the light spectrum and reject/reflect the green ones. So basically, the colour they appear to be is the very colour in the light spectrum they haven’t absorbed – the colour they’re not.

Musing on this point raises questions about the nature of perception and whether we can trust our senses: potentially everything we see is actually the opposite of what it appears to be… or simply not what it appears to be.

The Ballad of Liberty Jones

The grass is covered in tears
but when you turn them in your hand
they glitter like diamonds

A red sky at night means
something - if you can remember...
a feeling like breathing

The stars are warming lights
a long way from where you are. Falling
asleep you can reach them

Lying down

There's an empty block of flats along the road, nudging up to the millionaires. The blank windows display signs of earlier life: a ripped curtain, a peeling poster. Newer occupants who spraypainted the walls in yellow, pink and black. But now it's completely empty, each room advertising a vacancy.

Underneath the homeless pair have made their nest. Sleeping bags, cardboard boxes, the usual mini-shanty. In the morning, while the builders across the road saw concrete - a sharp metallic whine - and people of purpose pass quickly, the homeless doze. A sleeping protest, a stark contrast.

This shocking scene becomes routine. A sign that everything is in its allotted estate on passing.

One afternoon on that very same road (sleeping bags abandoned for the day - it's good to live in such a safe area), strange symmetry. An old lady lies on her side on the pavement, just next door to the sleepers' den. Like a baby bird fallen too soon from its nest, fragile and bewildered. Someone has placed a white pillow under her head, a snowy duvet over her body.

Concerned passers-by wait for the ambulance's blue flashing light.

(Photo courtesy of Franco Folini - check out his great shots on Flickr)

Looking up

You know it’s Spring when you start to notice city life above pavement level. Something in the warming air and brightening sky stimulates the muscles at the top of your back and you find your neck unbending and elongating, your eyes widening. It’s at times like this that you see that your local pub has got a statue of a cow on its roof, that the park gate has a union jack flag hanging from a huge flag pole. A strange, circular window in a high up attic. The building on your road that has a tree-level garden, providing incongruously tropical vegetation for the pigeons to fly over.

It’s a moot point (or a ‘moo point – go ask the cows’ as Joey would say) whether this recognition is cyclical (the memory of higher things returning each year with the sherbet coloured crocuses in the park), or whether each of these surprising images truly reveal themselves only once to your blinking, light starved eyes, adding another unique and amazing snapshot to the picture book of wonder in your mind. If the latter is true, I just can’t wait for what will appear next year.

(Thanks to WolfieWolf on Flikr for the photo http://www.flickr.com/photos/herry/3341095928/sizes/l/)