January 13, 2021

Exhausted.

Exhausted by everything.

No lectures today. Should've studied; just slept.

Found a tweet that captured the feeling:

 

 

Thank you, Elizabeth Teng and the two hundred and forty one thousand tweeps who feel the same. It's nice to know I'm not alone.

Things:

1. The Caroline Quentin interview in today's Graun set my Aspie/ADHD alarm bells ringing very, very loudly.

She couldn't hold plates and talk at the same time, so couldn't work as a waitress. Couldn't add up, so lost an admin job. Would jump on a train and go anywhere to be anyone somebody else wanted her to be. The painful shyness. The need for privacy. The vulnerability. She's fucked up, emotional, and excrutiatingly honest. She fell in love with her husband the first time she saw him. 

Yep to all of that.

2. The news that the parliament building of New Zealand has been attacked by a man with an axe.

This made me sad because when I lived in Wellington this was the level of security at the Beehive. You could walk either side of or under the gate so the actual barrier was just some gold lettering:

In my lifetime I've gone from shortcutting through Downing Street to get to and from St James's Park, to seeing that public right of way blocked by security checkpoints and armed police. I would hate for NZ to end up like that.

3. Johnny Marr (The Smiths) and Steve Jones (Sex Pistols) have both published autobiographies! Why wasn't I informed? Situation rectified with reservations immediately placed at my brilliant public library.

4. You can watch War Horse and other National Theatre productions online at the moment. Details on the wonderful Ian Visits blog. 

5. I found out about a person called Public Universal Friend. A 21st century character back in the days of yore. Possible inventor of the mullet. Is anything truly new? (No.)

6. Cannot WAIT to watch this Word In Your Ear podcast about The Beatles:

 

Thanks to Smash Hits and Old Grey Whistle Test I've loved the Hepworth/Ellen dyad for a very long time, so throw some Beatles into the mix and I am very much there for that.

7. Through the Looking Glass: I was captivated by the haunted faces of these gentle, hairy people.

8. An essay that puts into words everything I've been chewing over since I got my autism diagnosis: Am I Disabled? 

Joanne Limburg absolutely nails it. The doubts, the ambiguities, the struggles involved in suddenly having to change everything you thought you knew about yourself. The countless tangents you consider just to fill out a form. The tiresomeness of the 'oh! I never would have guessed' reactions. 

I had that conversation just yesterday, and came away feeling angry and upset - blaming myself, as usual, for something, although I'm not entirely sure what. 

For not being a brilliant verbalist, able to put them instantly at ease, when you notice how the tone of voice, the manner, changes ever so slightly after you've uttered the dreaded A-word? How their sudden awkwardness and corresponding forced jollity hangs in the air and that's the worst thing of all? 

For not being able to explain how utterly wrong the bulk of the literature about autism is, especially as it relates to women, because you know they're now thinking about Rain Man and automatons and pity, but it's not like that, it really, really isn't?

"I seemed to have replaced the labour involved in passing for non-disabled with the labour of dealing with other people’s discomfort when I chose not to pass."

Something like that. 

9. A horrific milestone reached today: more than 100,000 UK deaths. 

1564 deaths reported in the last 24 hours. 

Same again tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after, and the day after.

It makes my head spin. This was mostly avoidable. 

I have nowhere to put this feeling and no words to describe it.

10. Today's photo: the banality of evil.

January 12, 2021

Walked to work this morning to reintroduce my body to the concept of regular exercise.

Lecture in the afternoon on the philosophy of death as it relates to near-death experiences.

Now recovering on the sofa.

Today's idle internet browsing yields:

Nine months in the long limbo of long Covid, a sobering read by Ed Rooksby:

"...the fact is that you just don’t know if you are ‘vulnerable’ or not to this virus – no one can be sure that they are ‘safe’ from it. Indeed it’s currently thought that one in 20 people who develop symptoms on infection might suffer symptoms lasting more than eight weeks and, further, a significant number of those people remain unwell for several months (at least) after infection. This isn’t ‘just’ elderly people or those with ‘pre-existing health conditions’, but includes relatively young, relatively fit and active people like me..."

Good news for Beatles fans - Klaus Voormann has an online shop!

Revisited Jon Ronson's exquisite 2006 Graun article about the TV show Deal or No Deal, Think Outside The Box, and found this paragraph:

"According to the Cult Information Centre's pamphlet Cults: A Practical Guide, cult leaders routinely employ 26 skilful techniques to keep their followers under their spell. One of the main ones is "Isolation: inducing loss of reality by physical separation from family, friends, society and rational references."" 

Hmm.

Today's photo: The View From Here.

January 11, 2021

Online uni lectures resumed this afternoon, so today I didn't spend hours staring at Twitter, I spent hours staring at Teams. 

I learned that 12,000 years ago, a dead woman was buried with around 80 tortoise shells, various parts of cow and wild boar, a wing bone from a golden eagle, two marten skulls, a leopard’s pelvis, and a severed human foot. Fair enough.

Had time to get a walk in (and some groceries) before lectures started. Daylight! Shops! I'd forgotten what they were like.

Found some Spring in the park, that was nice:

Good stuff I saw online :

The BMJ laying into the government and media for their handling of lockdown.

A tweet from @BBCWorldService: "Mysterious miniature buildings have popped up on streets across Europe, built by mice for a secret organisation." 

I am utterly unable to resist clickbait like that. More info - and wonderful photos - about AnonyMouse here and here.

An interview with Francie Schwartz, girlfriend of Paul McCartney in the interregnum between Jane and Linda. Despite publishing a book about her Beatle adventures in 1972, hers wasn't a name I'd come across before. 

I was charmed by the generosity of her descriptions of George and Yoko, and by the revelation Mr Lennon was a voracious consumer of Kellogg's cornflakes.

Today's photo: it's all good in my hood.

January 10, 2021

A day of catching up on open tabs and avoiding adult responsibilities again.

1. Some words of comfort in Neil Gaiman's 2021 annual new year's address:

"if all you can manage is to get out of bed in the morning, then do that and be proud of what you've managed, not frustrated by what you haven't."

2. Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum has made 709,000 artworks available for free online. I didn't visit when I was there - only explored its irresistible cycleway - but I did visit the equally if not moreso culturally important cat museum.

3. Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty released a statement today trying to hammer home into the thick minds of the British public (or perhaps just the thick minds of the British government) how serious the Covid situation is here now: 

"Every unnecessary interaction you have could be the link in a chain of transmission which has a vulnerable person at the end." 

Completely agree, Chris, but how come I have suddenly become an "essential worker" when I wasn't last year, and I'm expected to go back to a job tomorrow that would not be necessary had the government insisted universities put a stop to the face-to-face teaching? 

I'd be quite happy staying quietly at home on my own until all this blows over, if only they'd let me.

4. Read a very interesting essay on the QAnon phenomenon from the perspective of a game designer. He compares it to an enormous ARG (alternate reality game) and makes a convincing argument for psy ops.

"The more information that is out there, the easier it is to allow apophenia to guide us into anything."

We should probably be worried.

5. Had a wee boogie to the rocking video on this article about compulsory music-making in Guinea as a way to rebuild a shattered culture:

"When French colonial forces pulled out of Guinea following its declaration of independence in 1958, they notoriously even took the lightbulbs. Rebuilding was the first focus of the West African nation, and that included the strengthening of its cultural identity. Under the leadership of music lover President Ahmed Sékou Touré, the government was soon sending out guitars, saxophones, and brass instruments to 35 state-funded prefecture orchestras as part of a new authenticité policy. This directive encouraged a cultural revival that mixed traditional sounds with contemporary music, particularly Cuban and Latin rhythms."

Somehow I can't see the government doing something like this once the pandemic is over. They seem to be more intent on destroying the arts altogether.

6. Bookmarked an interesting list of free public domain footage sources should I ever feel moved to make a documentary.

7. Finally had a proper look at a tab I've had open since 2 Jan, Black Cab London.  There is so much there to explore. This is what caught my eye today:

A-Z of Cockney Rhyming Slang  

Travels on the Tube - Rickmansworth (this humble suburb yielding unexpected connections to Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Titanic, and the founding of Pennsylvania.)  

Clapham Rail Disaster This brought back two distinct memories for me. 

First, that opening paragraph: "the characteristic sound of doors slamming shut on an old-style British Rail train." This is a sound younger generations won't know unless they hang out on heritage steam railways for fun, but just reading those words prompted that particular commuting soundtrack to start playing in my head as if I was actually standing on a draughty platform somewhere.

The second memory is more difficult - I knew one of the people responsible for the fault that led to the crash.

The new Black Cab site also looks good and the post about St Pauls reminded me of my mum. She was a Londoner born in 1920 and she volunteered as a Fire Warden during the war. My dad used to tell us she "caught bombs" at St Pauls but I don't know when, or what she did or saw, as she never talked about it. Every time I click on articles like this I hope to find a photo of her.

8. There was an enjoyable article in The Graun about people being sawn in half for spectacle and financial gain "and nearly always being miraculously put back together."

(Nearly always??)

9. Revisited the brilliant New Zealand writer Ashleigh Young's delicate essay on hikikomori: 

"How can a person in isolation make their way back?" 

This question has never felt so pertinent.

10. Found on Twitter Randall Rudd's instructions for drawing a drop of water:

 

 

Which led, in typical Twitter fashion, to another helpful piece of art instruction:

 

(Who is Randall Rudd?)

 

11. Loved this:

 

Hermes Berrio, My Precious - 2020 (via Rabih again).

12. Finally read a tab that's been open for a week, about lockdown walking. 

I used to walk about 3km a day. Since March, with all the bodies out there doing this amazing new activity, I've probably walked about 30km in total. Round here, there are just too many people outside. They come to my patch for their daily exercise, hundreds of them.

It's not in my nature to break the rules by driving anywhere to escape. 

So here I am, in my flat, looking at the internet instead.

13. Listened to Wake Up Calls, a strange and lovely collection of music based on birdsong, by Cosmo Sheldrake.

"Wake Up Calls’ was created over a nine year period, using recordings of bird song featured on the red and amber lists of endangered British birds (with the exception of a Robin and a Blackbird, which aren’t endangered – yet)."

(Buy the album, support an artist.)

Today's photo: a picture of neglect. I remember when I needed coats/front doors all the time.

And that was Sunday.

January 9, 2021

THIS IS THE GREATEST THING EVER:

File under 'If Flight of the Conchords Were Female'.

I found WindowSwap (also the greatest thing ever).

I watched another video about autism except this time I was lured in under false pretences - Can You Be An Introvert Director? by David Sandberg. Turned out well though and as a person who's spent many a breaktime lurking in the toilets I could totally relate.

I wrote down some quick and easy snack recipes to put in my recipe folder (a real folder not a digital folder).

I put poor Lemon Pig out of his misery, burying him with full military honours in the compost bin:

He lived fast and died young - ultimately 2021 proved too much for him. Go well, friend.

I loved these fabric books by Louise Bourgeois (tweeted by #WOMENSART):

I read about the death rites of various Malagasy and I also finished The Rhine by Ben Coates. Now I need to cycle the length of the Rhine. Madagascar would also be nice but for the lemurs rather than the anthropology (lemurs are the greatest thing ever).

I went for a walk. Waited until very late before venturing out for maximum people-avoidance:

It was too late to get groceries. 

It's cold out there, chaps.

January 8, 2021

What scintillating entertainments did I conjure up for myself today?

I really enjoyed browsing the ELECTRONICOS FANTASTiCOS! YouTube channel.

""ELECTRONICOS FANTASTiCOS!" project has been reincarnating various retired consumer electronics as musical instruments such as Electric Fan Harp, CRT-TV Drums, Air Conditioner Harp etc. The band plays them by catching electromagnetic waves."

Pretty damn amazing and I would LOVE to have a go on those drum tellies.

Keeping with the Japanese theme but in a slightly different musical style, I listened to the chimes that get played in Tokyo and beyond every day at 5pm. I'd read about them in Lauren Elkin's brilliant book Flâneuse so was interested to hear what they sounded like.

It was also fascinating to see the tiny glimpses of Japanese life in each video.

(Tomorrow I may attempt the invigorating calisthenics exercises forced upon the people of Akahama-cho at 7am daily.)

Somebody tweeted a link to Z-Library, something I'd not come across before. It holds more than 6 million ebooks and 80 million articles, all free - that's got to be worth bookmarking.

I watched a lecture by the amazing Tony Attwood who described my entire young life experience:

(Now that's how you talk about autism, Dr SBC.)

I wish I'd had information like this when I was growing up because I basically spent 40-odd years thinking I was useless and awful.

It would have been David Bowie's 74th birthday today and there was a lot of love for him washing around online. 

Ever keen for a Beatles link, I found this interview where George Harrison, sounding magnificently off his tits, describes Bowie as dopey-looking, while John Lennon springs to his defence (the Bowie bit starts at 3:40). Bless. I miss all three of them very much.

I only took two photos today, both solely for the purposes of this blog.

One was of Lemon Pig's continuing, rapid and horrific decline:

 

And the other was of the campfire flatbread I made for lunch because I'm out of bread and getting dressed and walking down the road to Tesco felt like too big an ask.

Campfire flatbread

1/2 cup self-raising flour

1 tbsp powdered milk

water

plus herbs, olives, whatever for savoury

or cinnamon, sultanas, whatever for sweet

Bung it all in, mix it all up til it's a sticky dough. Dollop it onto an oiled piece of tin foil in a hot frying pan. Squish it down, cook it until it's sort of set everywhere. I do the thin edges too.

I prefer the savoury version but today my sweet tooth got the better of me and I filled this one with sliced apple and lots of honey. Then I ate the rest of the apple for dessert. WIN.

(NB it's "campfire flatbread" because the recipe came from an outdoors blog - can't remember which one now - and the idea was you can put the dry ingredients in a bag and add the water once you've arrived at your preferred spot in the wilderness and got your campfire going. Anything you can cook on a campfire is good in my books.)

Perhaps some photos from outside tomorrow as I really do need to get some groceries in. Only 1 in 50 British people have Covid at the moment so I'm sure it'll be fine.

The big news on Twitter this evening is they just banned DJT for life. Too little too late, lads.

January 7, 2021

When I finally managed to turn off the news and get into bed last night, I wondered what would be different in the morning.

I'd hoped to wake to find that decisive action had been taken; that the people who could and should have been putting a stop to all this since January 2017 had finally done so at last. That everyone involved - including Dorito Mussolini himself - had been rounded up and arrested.

LOL. My bad.

The weighted parcel I bought online last week was delivered this afternoon in a huge box:

I took the only sensible course of action in view of current events: get in the box, put the weighted blanket over my head and stay there for the rest of the day.

Got no uni work done as my brain appears to have shut down. I now function at survival level only. I don't feel depressed but something is definitely not right - I'm just... not functioning. Sort of floating above everything in a floppy, disinterested way. No doubt this is really bad from a mental health point of view but I can't seem to make myself care.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In today's bookmarking news, I very much liked this:

Shared by the wonderful Rabih Alameddine, who tweets amazing art daily, it's Kathryn Clark's 2015 "Foreclosure Quilt, Washington D.C."

I really like the idea of recording and presenting data through art, and I especially love representations of maps. Look at this amazing 'aerial' embroidery that somebody alerted me to last year:

It's an idea I would like to play around with if I ever get my brain back.

I enjoyed this New York Times article, How Poets Use Punctuation as a Superpower and a Secret Weapon. 

"Perhaps the most insistent example of foregrounded punctuation is the quotation marks in Alice Notley’s “The Descent of Alette” (1990), which appear around every phrase and some single words, such that no word in the book is not encased in quotations. It begins:

“One day, I awoke” “& found myself on” “a subway, endlessly”

“I didn’t know” “how I’d arrived there or” “who I was” “exactly”

As such we perceive all the language as a series of discrete utterances, communicated haltingly, with difficulty, which has a mesmerizing effect, as if the poem were not the message itself but the medium, the channeling. In all of these instances, I do start to hear the punctuation, much more than I usually hear it. Punctuation often serves to force a pause, but the pause isn’t silence."

My favourite thing to do is cut up magazines to make picture or word collages, and the above reminded me of the weird bitty paragraphs I've spent many happy hours putting together:

Weird and disjointed, but containing their own meaning somehow. I was intrigued by the idea you could do that with your own words too.

I came across the Twitter account of Alex Norris, who makes brilliant comics with a recurring punchline: "Oh no."

This resonated so much I went straight to the online shop and bought an "Oh no" pin.

My photo of the day was taken from inside the box. From my vantage point on the floor I looked up and noticed the sky was being weird; long regular claw-marks scratched across the darkening sky:

I'm no meteorologist but I guess, based on scientific observations of the BBC Weather page and the temperature in my flat, that clouds like that mean it's going to be cold.

What a day. I've learnt during lockdown that you just need to ride days like this out - stay in the box, hide under the blanket, don't beat yourself up, just do whatever you need to do to get through and out the other side. 

There'll be another day tomorrow, all going well (one must never assume), and you can pick up the reins again then if you want/need/are able to.

As wiser ones than me have observed: This too shall pass.

 

 

January 6, 2021

It's very strange to watch disaster unfold in real time. 

I'm reeling.

First came the announcement of 1041 new UK Covid deaths in the last 24 hours. 

One thousand and forty one people dead when they shouldn't be, and 63,000 new cases reported today. About 1% of people who catch it, die. Do the maths.

Then, America.

Everything went from incredibly bad to insanely worse in under four hours.

It is not a happy feeling to be living through history.

On New Year's Eve, I made a Lemon Pig, a long-standing Twitter tradition since, oh, 2017. Look at his eager, happy little face:

 This is how Lemon Pig looks this evening:

2021: life comes at you fast.

 

January 5, 2021

Today I tried to do some studying, I really did, but sentences like this make my brain shut down:

I find it hard to absorb complex information from a screen - nothing really sinks in. Thus it took me about four hours to slog through one 20-page pdf (I include in the timings two naps).

Shame I can't sleep at night the way I sleep when I'm meant to be working.

Despite it being a lovely sunny day, I stayed inside again. Isn't that what everybody's meant to be doing? 

I watched a documentary about the artist Stephen Wiltshire: 

He's such an amazing talent and I love his gentleness. 

Apart from the jaw-dropping art, the best bit is a boy's reaction to Stephen telling him he doesn't like sport. The face pulled at 36:44 is hilarious. The worst bit is the patronising tone certain professionals use when talking about autism. Don't start me.

I learned two new words: emic and democide.

I read about Sergei Krikalev - the cosmonaut who was left behind in space. What an extraordinary story. I wondered what happened to Sergei and turned to Wikipedia expecting to find a broken man with alcohol problems and severe trust issues - especially in light of the lemon and horseradish incident - but no, seems he turned out all right.

His Wiki page mentions a woman called Margaret Iaquinto: 

"Throughout his various missions aboard Mir, Krikalev regularly communicated with various amateur radio operators (hams) across the globe. A particularly lengthy relationship was formed between Krikalev and amateur radio operator Margaret Iaquinto. At one point during one of his stays in space, he contacted her once a day for an entire year. Krikalev and Iaquinto successfully communicated via packet radio for the first time in history between an orbiting space station, and an amateur radio operator. They communicated about personal matters, as well as political ones. Iaquinto set up a makeshift digital bulletin board that the Mir cosmonauts would often use to obtain uncensored western news and information regarding the state of the collapsing Soviet Union."

Her link led nowhere and I wondered why her page had been deleted, because that's pretty interesting. 

There was more info on Wiki's deletion log, which you can read here. Further digging found the missing page on Deletionpedia. 

Turns out an American teacher fluent in Russian who moved to Australia and befriended passing cosmonauts via ham radio, who subsequently won awards for outstanding tech achievements, and who was invited to Houston Space Centre by NASA, was deemed "non-notable" by the Wikipedia lot. Okay.

By now I wanted to see Maggie's face. Here she is:

(Photo: Herald Sun.)

Her obituary says she was respected, admired, and widely loved which is not a surprise if you go by that smile.

In Twitter news, so there was this thing that happened the other day. It's summarised neatly in this meme posted by @topntran:

 

Some days Twitter is amusing, some days Twitter is a hellhole, and every day it drags you in and keeps you there in a whirlpool of dopamine. People not on Twitter have no idea of the emotional intensity it can generate. 

 

This article by Dan Sheehan, I Hate It Here, See You Tomorrow - a howl of desperation provoked by Bean Dad - pretty much sums up why I was so desperate to wean myself off Twitter in 2019 I cancelled my entire home internet package. 

 

(...And that, kids, is how I found myself alone in a global pandemic with no wifi.)

"What are we doing here? Who is making us do this?" asks Dan."...I used to love being online but it now feels like any positive byproducts of social media were just misunderstood early symptoms of something much darker. All the fun memes and Wife Guys trained us to come when called, to reliably provide daily discourse so that the content mill could continue to churn at the cost of our time and sanity. 

We logged on because chemically simulated fun on demand sounded too good to pass up and we stayed because we were right. Like teens sharing cigarettes behind the bleachers who’ve become middle aged smokers cursing the cold, we’re no longer in a position to easily divorce ourselves from our habit despite the fact that the deal became one sided long ago.

We’re all like Bean Dad’s poor daughter, being promised that if we work hard enough for long enough, eventually we will get this broken machine to do what we want it to do. And we don’t even like baked beans. But what’re we going to do, leave? In the tenth month of a seemingly infinite pandemic, these digital spaces are all most of us have. We count ourselves lucky that hell at least has group chats."

I hear you buddy.

Photo of the day:

 

True dat. The looking's the hard bit.

January 4, 2021

I woke up this morning and got straight on with procrastinating about my university course work. 

That took the form of yet more tidying/cleaning, going out for a walk, then coming home and alternately stressing out about the latest corona-idiocy from the government and falling asleep on the sofa. I finally approached Moodle around 7pm with all the verve and excitement of a dog being dragged to the vet for an injection.

Thus, unlike previous days/weeks, I didn't spend most of my time falling down entertaining Twitter rabbitholes. 

On the other hand, and speaking of dogs, I did get my first photo du jour of 2021 from Outside:

 

These two baleful faces tracked my every move as I walked past their house.

Online, I am still trying to click my way through Austin Kleon's 100 Things That Made My Year (2020).

After closing Blogger last night, which technically counts as today as it was way past midnight when I finished, I read a fascinating article called 'Falsehoods programmers believe about time zones' - I didn't understand half of it but the bit about Nepal made me laugh.

I also came across an interesting Twitter thread by Sam Dylan Finch about how to build a workable routine for yourself when you have ADHD - it's here if you're interested. It's something I truly struggle with.

 

Sam suggests not demanding too much of yourself - compile your list of "basic" tasks (shown left) and only move on to the more ambitious tasks (shown right) if you're moved to. The idea is that ticking off the things you do anyway will propel you into doing the equivalent harder stuff.

It's great in principle but I had to laugh as the only "basic" task I manage with any regularity is breakfast and even that's touch and go. However it's an intriguing idea and I will study it further when I, erm, when I do.

I make myself do uni work with the help of a time planner - colour in a square every time I manage to study for an hour; and let me tell you when I get into the zone that sweet hit of pink square is a drug. Some nights I just keep going til I die of exhaustion.

I'm studying Anthropology and the new module is 'Death, Burial and the Afterlife'. This is the module blurb:

One of the ways in which we experience our humanity is in our treatment of our dead and in particular our understanding of what happens to us when we die. This module explores different understandings of death, dying and the afterlife drawing upon a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, drawing on case studies from the earliest burials in the Palaeolithic, Neolithic skull cults in the Near East, through Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, Medieval Europe, and modern China. Themes explored include rites of passage, ancestor cults, funerary practices and social status, commemoration, pollution, physical anthropology and the materiality of the body, medieval relics, the philosophy of death, the afterlife and the meaning of life. As such the module aims to give students a thorough grounding in understandings of death and the afterlife as these are studied within the humanities.

Looks good. I have A LOT of reading to do this Reading Week.

In other news, December's mail is finally starting to arrive after my local sorting office was laid low by a double whammy of excess parcel activity and Covid before Christmas. I received a birthday present (17 December) from my sister today; it's my new favourite T-shirt.

I forgot to eat dinner tonight so am going to forage for crisps and/or cereal as it's too late to cook now. I'm not sure any rinky dinky planner can help with executive dysfunction this bad but I live in hope.

 

January 3, 2021

These were the best things I saw today from the safety of my room:

1. Becky Margraf's hand-stitched felt faces:

This has given me so many ideas!

2. Look Up London's blogpost about the veritable zoo hidden in plain sight around the City of London. When I finally get to visit London again, I will be keeping my eyes peeled for the beaver, cat, mice and swan in particular.

Reading about the animals reminded me of the beautiful dolphin statue along the Chelsea Embankment - I found more info on that here, with added surprise Beatles connection.

3. A thought-provoking Guardian article about Generation Z and the Covid pandemic came with artworks submitted by the young people interviewed. I was really struck by this image by Oliwia Charowska. I wish I'd been capable of making art like this when I was 16:

It's incredibly sad that young people are suffering, but heartening to know that they've seen through the establishment's bullshit and are really not happy about it. That way change lies. Bring it on.

4. The lovely Austin Kleon is always good value for money and today on his Twitter I found a quote of his worth jotting down in the notebook I collect bon mots in:

"Writing begins when "I hate this" progresses to "let me articulate why I hate this."

Can't argue with that! He'd got pissed off with people posting quotes as memes and blowing the nuance of the original words out of the water; that prompted his latest daily blog post (read his Twitter thread here). 

Now I feel conflicted about writing down his words out of context in my quotes notebook.

5. I did some tidying up and sorting out today. E.g., put things in frames that needed framing; stuck stickers onto things that needed stickers. I also eviscerated my advent calendar to recycle into next year's gift tags and cards. And I tidied my desk! I tidied my desk. If you'd seen my desk you'd know why this was a big deal. I think this blog is already helping me connect to reality again.

 6. I didn't leave my flat again today, so had to take the photo du jour in here. I thought it was a fitting summary of the day's activites:

"Clutter has only two possible causes: too much effort is required to put things away or it is unclear where things belong." Marie Kondo ♡

I've had that quote pinned up ever since I read her book - it helps, when I remember to look at it.

I enrolled at university in September and term starts again tomorrow - luckily, it's online only. I've had a whole month off in which I've gone feral, so feel unprepared and very rusty. It's only reading week, but the thought of knuckling down again is horrifying.

 

January 2, 2021

So, scrub the first two ideas mentioned back there, now I've had ANOTHER idea.

I was diagnosed with ASD in 2019, and with ADHD on top of that in 2020. 

This makes sense of EVERYTHING. 

Everything I am, everything I've always been.

Not least that like a magpie, I have an instinct to hoard fascinating or potentially useful things. Information, pictures, articles, inspiration, songs, ideas. This is a manifestation of the autistic love of collecting.

However, in the keeping of all this stuff I am completely disorganised. This is the ADHD.

On the laptop I have endless random files and folders. Thousands of photos, images and documents saved, bookmarks I'll never look at again, pdfs and music files and snips and the rest of it.

In real life there are overflowing boxes stuffed with paper - clippings, magazines, notebooks, postcards, souvenirs, tickets and programmes, paperwork. Piles and piles of books - there are never enough books. A desk I can barely see, let alone use.

There is clutter, chaos, in every corner of my life.

It gets a bit overwhelming sometimes, especially when you live in a tiny attic bedsit (three strides across from bed to sofa) which you haven't really left since March.

But I was reading Austin Kleon's blog the other day and realised that like him, I too could use my own small corner of the internet to put some of this stuff out there. Share it, rather than keep it hidden away. 

Maybe that would channel this need to collect into something more useful AND more organised. 

If I find something interesting or lovely, chances are someone else will too, right? And if I post it here there's a chance I'll both remember it exists AND be able to find it again? If it's safely blogged then maybe I can finally close that tab I've had open for weeks, throw away that scrap of paper? 

This could spell the end of my paper mountain desk nightmare. 

This can only be a good thing.

So, in the spirit of all things Kleon, I present to you some things I enjoyed on 2 January 2021.

1. 64 Reasons To Celebrate Paul McCartney, which lead me to this gorgeous acoustic demo version of Cilla Black's Step Inside Love with Macca on guitar:

 

And from there to this, Cilla and Dudley Moore performing If I Fell, which never fails to put a smile on my face (song starts at 0:49):

2. Related: Pete Paphides' McCartney Mixcloud podcast, celebrating Macca's new album. Gotta love Macca.

3. Ryan Photography on Twitter: "Did anybody else stalk a tree in 2020?"

(I didn't, due to not leaving the flat much between March and December, but I have done in previous years: evidence here.)

4. An incredible essay on nature and mortality at What A Shrink Thinks: 

"I wonder if I want to be a therapist anymore. I often want to talk about things that most my clients are not interested in. I want to talk about death and acceptance and climate breakdown and loss and grief and to have compassion for ourselves even as we struggle to comprehend our own destructiveness. I think of how species over-grow and damage a particular ecosystem if they find themselves tossed by wind or water into environments where they have no predators and abundant prey. Are we any more conscious, as a hive, as a collective, than a colony of beavers who flood and “destroy” a prairie and transform it into a swamp, or a swarm of locust who kill all the plants and all of the other species that require those plants to survive..."

I would definitely be interested in talking about things like that. Read the essay here.

5. Jacob Collier, who I'd never heard of before this amazing clip popped up on my Twitter feed. Wowzers.

6. The fact that Switzerland - a landlocked country - has a merchant navy (from Ben Coates' book The Rhine).

7. Korean National Ballet's haunting lockdown videos:

8. I finished something I started today, which happens so rarely it warrants a mention. 

A scented candle ran out last week and on a whim I scooped out the still-warm waxy goo with my finger and smeared it onto a piece of paper. The next day I added gold poster paint. The paint ran like mercury over the wax and settled in droplets. I let it dry. Next I fancied seeing what would happen if I smeared the wax with dry pastels (dry because I didn't have oil-based). This wiped the gold paint off and made the wax pleasingly dirty. I scratched it with a fingernail until it looked suitably furious - I had decided, somewhere between the pastels and the scratching, that it was going to be an expression of rage about 2020. Today I added the text, which involved a battle with Microsoft Word and transparency sheets and took two attempts to get right due to being an idiot and smudging. It is now tucked in my visual diary, where it will sit undisturbed until I die and somebody throws it away. Here it is, hope you like it:

9. I typed up a list of all the books I read in 2020. There were 74. I'm a bit cross about that because the goal was 100 and I had all the time in the world to achieve it, but none of the concentration.

10. Finally, if we're going to attempt the traditional January resolution of 'post one photo a day' then here's today's effort (I didn't go out, what can I say):

The calendar - Books & Cats - was a Christmas gift from a friend who knows me scarily well.

Happy New Year. Stay safe x

 

January 1, 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Looking into 2021. 

 

Taken on 1 January at 1.32am, from my open window, the first fresh air I'd breathed for a week.

No, Wait

Scrub the previous thought, I've had a better idea.

I was going to write about my record collection, specifically, my singles (and these things are the love of my life), but since I've barely left my flat since 23 March and it looks like there'll be little to no chance of a holiday this year, I think I would like instead to relive past travel adventures - go on holiday vicariously, as it were, with the aid of old photos, notebooks and diaries.

So if you would like to learn how a Weasel likes to explore foreign places (and trust me, it's not like how ordinary people do it) then WATCH THIS SPACE.

First installment coming soon, when I will recreate my 2019 attempt to drive round Europe in a month.

(Spoiler: Europe's quite big. Who knew?)

The adventure comprised almost entirely of car parks, McDonalds, McDonalds car parks, anxiety, toilet anxiety and wondering what all the signs say, but there were boring bits too.

Find out what it's like to travel without a smartphone, relying purely on rat cunning and a 2018 Philip's Road Atlas! Discover how to be a tourist when you don't like going where everybody else goes and for that reason scorn guidebooks! Understand how to plan a month-long trip based on things you read in the comments section of a Guardian article rather than anything concrete or sensible! Learn how to communicate abroad when your grasp of even English is not that great and under pressure you're liable to confuse "bonjour" and "au revoir"!

The holiday was, obviously, a blast.

I can't wait to get started.

It's Going To Happen

Not sure when, as I cancelled my home broadband in August, don't have time at work, and don't have a smartphone, BUT - I'm going to start up the blog again. Yes.

Not that I have anything to write about, and not that anyone reads blogs anymore, but hey. I've thought of a project that will amuse me if nobody else.

I had a lovely time re-reading all the old posts and comments before consigning them to the archive - you lot really are lovely, aren't you? Hope you're all still out there somewhere, and doing fine.

Kisses x