Dream Home

I need to move. Our house is too small and it is falling apart.  Before we move the house must be put together again and made appealing to new buyers, in the meantime we still have to live there. For now I will put the complexities of house buying and selling to one side because of all considerations the most important is where we shall move.

How delightful it would be to list location and house style as main considerations, to have the sort of budget that might allow us to meet with Kirsty and Phil and then turn our noses up at every single property that comes our way. Imagine the joy of “finding” a beautiful abounded higgledy piggledy witch house, of having The Renovation Man come around and advise us or even (dream of dreams) designing our perfect family home under the approving eye of Kevin McCloud. I have of course designed it with words, and I my husband could make it as a fully rendered 3D model, the boy could make it out of Lego and cardboard, I could make all of us out of felt and see how comfortably we might fit into the dream house.

This could be nice by AndyArtisand

Allow me to describe it to you. It will be in walking distance of my work and the child’s school (the one he’s at now and the one he will be at in the future: as yet to be confirmed).  It will be a Gothic revival cottage with interior Georgian features and art deco follies in the garden. It will be close to the sea in the middle of a dark wood at the top of a hill and provide excellent light for sewing, painting and other craft work: an isolated building at the epicenter of a thriving community of just our sort of people. 

In all; everything about the location will be cohesive, it will have an art crafts type character that lacks pretension. They will be the sounds of music lessons drifting from windows on summer afternoons. In the local pubs will be old people happy to discuss philosophy whilst others are keen to engage youngsters in games of chess. They will be a lively music scene with twice yearly music festivals well attended by the genuine article. There absolutely must be a midsummer festival seeped in pagan traditions stretching so far back that only one old ancient can play the required unrecognizable instrument and no where is written the words of the song children must sing.

The town will have a character so established that you might turn it into a persona and use it for marketing purposes. It will be rich with Tintagel type myths and once visited it will haunt your dreams like a nice version of Gustav Meryink’s Prague.

I shall perhaps be scouring the properties section of the local press for some time, meanwhile I have Pinterest to provide inspiring bohemian interiors and a small two up two down property to repair. 

Which Me?

Writing is a solitary experience; something you do alone when pieces of your mind fall through your finger tips to create a new world, with sights, sounds, smells and feelings that belong to someone else, someone you made up. Sewing is quite different, you craft your creations with your hands and when I do it, I talk to no one. Now the pieces of my mind fall out and have no- where to go, they just waft about me like a mist of questions.

I should hate to be a stay at home mother, yet a part of me longs to live in a cottage by the sea, take walks on the morning beach, grow my own herbs and make a living from selling water colours of beautiful shoes.  I would go crazy if it wasn't for the noise of everyone else to keep my mind in check.

Who then am I? To know ones-self is necessary to emotional growth. How can anything as multi-layered as a person possibly know oneself? How can a writer create a convincing multi-layered character when we are in essence so many layers of contradiction?   Sometimes a character won’t perform unless given the right name. What happens when you change your name? When I married and took my husband’s name I wrote a poem wondering what happened to the other me, where did she go? Then I resurrected her and used her as my writers name. How has she changed over the years? In fact how many versions of me are there? Sometimes I feel like all the Elizabeth’s at the end of Bioshock Infinite, there is the mother me, the crafting me, the writing me, the housekeeper me, the wife, teacher, and the crazy me.

My many archetypes illustrated by AndyArtisand

When I was little I used to stare at my reflection until I had tunnel vision. I would get a feeling of great unease as I became more detached from my reflection and I would wait for her to make the wrong move. Those contradictions have long been the focus of story- telling, Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Bruce Banner and the Hulk even OZ in Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

We are far more complex than the good and bad, we are sometimes the painted face of the crying clown (think Tony Hancock). We develop alter egos, (think Ziggy Stardust). We take on stage names until we no longer exist (Judy Garland where did Frances Gum go? And at what stage did she turn into Dorothy Gale?). After forty two years of playing Deirdre Barlow who’s dreams was Anne Kirkbride having, her own or Deirdre’s?

Am I all of Jung’s archetypes at once? Sometimes I have my mother’s face and my father’s manner, other times my mouth is doing that thing my son’s mouth does when demonstrating yo-yo tricks.

Perhaps I change with the phases of the moon. Maybe I need to leave the sewing for a while and go back to chapter nine where through my finger- tips I can think the thoughts of non-existent characters.

Dignity

Occasionally after a busy day of teaching, blogging, making felt things, baking or weaving baskets out of plastic bags, I will announce to the husband that I should like to relax and watch a nice horror movie. I like horror movies: I find their predictability comforting: I like spotting the music box that will start playing once the child is in bed, or identifying the dead bird moment (they fly into window panes, they are usually crows)  and of course I love to predict the timing of the father characters descent into madness. I find the horror just distracting enough to provide me with a curious level of enjoyment.

Dignity and Horror Listen illustrated by AndyArtisand 

Why then do I also enjoy politics? I find the predictability infuriating. I find the statements and manifesto claims increasingly preposterous more so than any music box and some of the things they say are considerably worse than maggots wriggling across a sleeping wife’s belly. Especially repulsive do I find the claim that there is dignity in work. Dignity in earning a wage, note that they never verify this or even provide a web link, they sate that there is Dignity in work as though it is an absolute truth.

My sophisticated research of running a google search reveals that “60 % of workers unhappy in their jobs”, “almost two thirds of workers unhappy in their jobs” .There are 7,420,000 results for “Unhappy in their jobs UK”. Is there dignity in work or dignity in working for money? What about job roles that leave the worker indignant? Does the pay create dignity? Is there dignity in inheritance? Is it the task that is lacking dignity? I know of jobs that are crushingly soul destroying for some people and yet enjoyable for others, of job roles that would fill some people with horror and others with glee. I wonder where the dignity comes from. I think there is dignity in a task well done. This is just my personal philosophy, not an absolute truth. I feel that a task well done is a task that makes a difference, be this the pleasure a guest receives from eating a meal you took care over or the personal satisfaction of cleaning bathroom tiles till they shine.

Perhaps the dignity comes from making a difference. In game development theory, immersion and user motivation comes from the player’s awareness that their choices and actions in game make a difference. Player motivation and satisfaction come from achievements in the form of various rewards, in the work place the reward is the pay, which for most rarely rises.

In the game world; rewards and achievements are used to challenge the player onward and to keep them in the game. IRL (in real life) the worker is challenged through the removal of  resources, a decrease in time allowed and pay freezes, whilst loyalty is rewarded with zero contract hours.

Ask a DOTA2 competitor if there is dignity in play, perhaps there is dignity in work, as for dignity in preposterous political claims: there the dignity is lacking.

Listen

I once gave a lesson called “listen: a creative exercise”. It was about as being aware of the wider world, the sounds of the children at crèche, the sound of the lift, the drama of the wind and so on. You can’t really design a game world without wider awareness, you can’t really write without that wider awareness; you need to know the soft hollow howl that spirals around the bath overflow, in the winter, whilst you lay among the bubbles.

Listen illustrated by AndyArtisand

Think of the sounds of childhood, the creaking, the gurgling of the boiler, the opening and closing of doors and the faint hum of the TV, sounds that tell you the house is still awake and you, you must stop being interested in those sounds. Stop being interested and sleep. They fade out into a watery bubble until a cat cries in the garden and beneath the blankets, your mind’s eye pictures an urban baby Moses bundled in the light of The Little Match Stick Girl. The cat baby bundle drifts away as you fall into child- like dreams.

I remember the sound of silence; a throbbing foreboding sound that I had experienced in nightmares: as a teenager it haunted me. It was the sound of alone, of isolation, of not belonging. It was inescapable and could not be drowned out. The phone would seem shrill against the thickness of the silence, the cassette player powerless to dent the fog of silence. I now believe it to be the hiss of the radiator combined with the beating of my heart and general teenage angst.

Until recently I've liked to listen to Radio 4, documentaries and comedies, but my son has the gift of talking over the punch line, so now we play music instead. No one listens to the music, they just talk. It seems to me there is a lot of talking and very little listening. So often we hear politicians “talk” they say, “If you will let me finish.” Then they repeat the importance of having a debate. I don’t see how you can debate if you don’t listen. Listening is being smothered by the urge to speak, what is said is becoming unimportant, talking has turned into a rhythm, repeating things in threes, blaming one another and shouting, shouting positive statements of defiance “We will do this and We will do that and We WILL SAVE YOU.” No one is listening they are just waiting for their chance to speak, not to reply, just to make more noise, because when you break it down no one is even saying anything anymore, nothing new at least.

Now I don’t listen to the radio so much, but stay in the kitchen with the window open. I can hear the wind, the rain and  the soft breathing of two dogs. Against that once doom laden sound of the radiator hiss I weave. Or maybe I crochet, I’m not really sure what it’s called, I’m making a basket from plastic carrier bags and I’m listening. After a while the weaving and repetition and the sounds of outside all become one rhythm and they still the chatter of my mind. I am meditating.

Sexy

The lift or elevator is a notoriously awkward environment. In order to eliminate the painful experience of a populated lift there exists a certain elevator etiquette that should be observed. Lift protocol is not written in any staff, student or visitors handbook but is instead embedded into the fabric of our social structure and ingrained into our psyche much like queuing.  

I feel it necessary to remind my readers of this etiquette in order to contextualize a lift experience I had last Wednesday. There were four of us: myself and three young lads, the lift was descending and stopped to collect five teenage girls, one of whom declared to her four friends “I’m defiantly the most sexy person in this lift.” For a moment I was horrified, briefly in my flu based daydream I had imagined myself to look rather like Angelina Jolie, but alas a glance at my general downtrodden and elderly demeanor dispelled this little fantasy. The young lads to be fair weren't sexy either, though it would of course raise some questions if I thought they were, neither though were any of the five teenage girls. Clearly some of the people in that lift were younger, more vibrant, had better teeth, better skin, glossier hair, oodles of misplaced confidence, but sorry love, no one in that lift was sexy.

Sexy me? as illustrated by AndyArtisand

Morally I feel I should question the breath of that teenage girls ambition “to be sexy”, intellectually however I've been pondering the nature of sexy. I thought long and hard about who was sexy and came up with icons of a bygone age; Sophia Loren, Brigitte Bardot, Marilyn Monroe, and concluded that to be sexy one must have curves, big lips and a surname ending in ‘O’. Consider where that leaves Scarlett Johansson with two O’s. That’s me out then, the teenage girl had better curves than me and she may even have had an O in her surname.  The thing is I know, that sexy is more than that, I dug around deeper in history; Pola Negri, Theda Bara, Josephine Baker, Louise Brooks, Clara Bow: it seems the O and the curves are still quite important, but so too is an element of mystery. Me out again.

I tried a different approach, what do I find sexy? Sexy is passion, sexy is breathlessness (Marilyn Monroe), sexy is abandon, the sort of abandon that leaves your hair tousled (Brigitte Bardot), your clothing ever so slightly disheveled (Sophia Loren in some movies.) 

When it comes to men sexy means messy hair, artists and scientific genius alike are far too preoccupied for hair, for matching clothes (remember the eleventh Doctor), sexy is a bit unpredictable…I was on to something: miss-matched, preoccupied and messy hair, Then I cut my fringe, you should see it, it shows wild abandon and demonstrates how I must have been so preoccupied with higher more mysterious sexy things that my fringe can only ever be considered Sexy..too sexy for the lift at least.

The Delights of Delirium

I have succumbed to the phenomena known as Dry January, JessHelicopter is doing it again and I realize it will no doubt be good for me; furthermore abstinence can lead to great spiritual insight and by default creativity. I can be more or less guaranteed creative clarity probably even a burst or two of uncontrolled genius; indeed during an exceptionally wet Last Day of December, I was so overcome with the planned content of my next lecture that I wrote it as sixty eight page screen play, with Anne Hathaway in the leading role.

Then the delirium came. At first I assumed it was a hangover, I've had hangovers enough to know them well and to recognize an impostor: the common cold masquerading as a regular hangover, like the tail end of a hurricane promising to “clear the air”. No air was cleared, the throbbing head of shrunken brain did not lessen but worsened and spread to throbbing nose and aching teeth, until the cold became more than an ailment of the head and seeped into an affliction of the bones, of the joints of the nerve endings.

Teenage reading of Victorian novels has left me well versed in the art of convalescing and so I retired to my bedroom chamber where propped up by a mound of tapestry pillows, and beneath a hundred feather quilts I entered that delicious stage of delirium; my skin so sensitive it might have belonged to my sixteen year old self about to explode from the brush of my true loves fingers, my mind a whir of disjointed Dr. Who like thoughts and acid house fractals, where a thousand ideas fluttered about me laughing at my fingers too weak to hold a pen, my eyes too pained to see the paper and my logic thwarted by the marking of seams and UV unwrapping of a billion honey combs. I tossed and turned, I felt every lump and bump in the mattress as though I were a Princess brought in from the storm only to have my night’s sleep ruined by a single pea. I sensed every speck of dust in the room, heard each rain drop as it slid down the window pane and saw shadows in the mirrors that did not belong, as there are no tapered candles here to flicker on Grace Poole’s table.

a new look me as illustrated by  AndyArtisand

The adventures into which I was plunged that night, the terrible dreams, the falling through abyss after abyss and twisting from one warped reality into another; left me cleansed. Two months later or was it two days? I emerged as a young tribesman might from initiation into adult hood, as a fresh Witch from her first flight across the moonlit sky, and the jumble that was honeycombs, shadows and snippets of yes I must confess: Leonard Cohen songs, cleared to open a pathway onwards and deeper into January. Yes I am still tender and require gentle care, I can only drink consommé the colour of August sunshine but I have found the next lines to chapter nine. I can go on! I embrace you Dry January, I thank you Delirium and I hate you Mondays, for tomorrow is back to work. 

Stiff Lip

Is it a natural human condition to deconstruct each element of one’s facial features? With the incessant barrage of air brushed notions of perfection, has facial analysis become a common pass time? Might it be that Narcissus was not in love with his own image, but instead obsessing about the shape of his chin? To avoid subjecting myself to such unhealthy comparisons I have eliminated a third of my face by introducing a fringe, which I then cut myself and now have to wear a hat for two months until it stops looking ridiculous. I have also attempted to grow a beard and so eliminate another third of my face. Subject as I am to rules of convention, I achieved a half millimeter of growth before heating the hot wax, spreading it on my upper lip, laying down a strip of fabric and attaching orange gunk to the infested area, only to rip it off and find I had created a sticky mustache. Several plucks with the tweezers later I inspected the upper lip which was not stiff.

If such dedication to upper lip perfection does not result in a stiff one then I have no idea how I can achieve such a state of being. After-all it is a British thing; it is part of our Dunkirk spirit. It is staying calm and carrying on.

I know of no one who stays calm and carries on. I know of faces set like stone trying to do what they must and crumbling and crying like an overused pillow each night, because staying calm is hurting them. For those not crying each night, there are those drinking each night. The others are not crying and appearing to stay calm because the Doctor has given them drugs to do so. Others are running, not metaphorically, but literally running around streets and country lanes in a kind of escapist way and also because that sort of exercise releases endorphins which work a bit like the drugs and alcohol the rest of us are surviving on. No one’s lip is stiff.

This lack of stiff lip, this myth of Britishness has been more than evident in the Scottish referendum. There were no stiff lips from politicians, but red faces and “heart” felt pleas and then there were the threats. The kind of threats received when you go to a party your mum doesn't want you to go to. “If you go I’ll take your Playstation away.” In this case Tesco was going to leave. I don’t see the problem more space for Lidl and Aldi.

During the past two weeks I have seen not resolve but pessimism as a British trait: the general message being if you do things differently it’s going to be a failure, bad things will happen, the man will be angry.

Well here’s a thing. What if you go for what you believe in? What if the outcome is a good outcome? What if change is positive? Why not? Why for once can’t good things happen?

The No campaign won but the positive attitude of the Yes campaign has lead to change, a change that was due and a change that must be for the good.