We would like to apologise for the delay to this service.

I’m sorry for all the blog posts I haven’t written (yet). I’m very sorry for being unforgivabley late in replying to a number of emails (rather than just, you know, very late as usual).

For the last week or so I have done none of the many pleasant (communicative) or useful (stuff-sorting) things that I really ought to have done earlier anyway. I am up to my eyeballs in an a work thing that is very large, very tedious and very important.

It is part of a thing upon which a million dollars more or less of funding could hang. Which means no buggering-up room for me. And, given that I have also been busy with a lot of other things recently, it means lots of working twelve-hour days and working at the weekend.

I think anyone who’s ever met me could tell you that such does not come naturally. Consequently am cracking up rather, both physically and mentally. There is a kind of Zenlike calm which comes of knowing you really don’t have time for anything except work, food and washing up, so you don’t have to worry about anything else (such as unwritten emails, to pick an example out of the air…), but I’ve never been all that keen on Zenlike calm. Especially when accompanied by an Enormous amount of stress…

I have a week left to go before the deadline, during which I fully expect to be going mental. But I do remember about all the emails, and I would much rather be writing meandering blogrubbish. Sorry.

Once upon a time, in a forest far away

I just came across, in the course of looking for something else for my work, the first paragraphs of an article about the walnut forests in Kyrgyzstan.

In Kyryzstan, there are great, lonely swathes of fruit forest: walnut, pistachio, juniper, wild apple and wild cherry—and in places pure walnut.

I am happier knowing that walnut forests exist, gnarled, quiet with their secrets, golden with dappled sunlight, soft with moss, sweet with apple and cherry. Imagining them, I feel a little peace.

Smiles: found and lost

Last night I noticed that one of my colleagues has a beautiful dimple. He is a very lovely man but with naturally a sternish sort of set to his face—but his smile entirely transforms him: it is enormous and beatific. He is much older than me and married with children—so don’t go gettin’ any ideas—but nonetheless whenever he smiles I can’t help adoring him.

Being weird, the first thing I had to do when I got home was smile at the mirror. I used to have a dimple when I was younger (two I think when I was little), that my mother used to delight over. But I know they tend to disappear as you get older, and I didn’t remember noticing it for a while, and I was consumed by the need to know.

The answer is that my dimple is still there, but barely. More of a ghost of a dimple really. It’s a tragic business, growing up.

Peculiar things that my mind does when I’m in my office, #2

Some while ago I amused myself by seeing how many strange and fantastical—but recognisable—varieties of stickman I could think up. I drew cat-stick-people, stickmen with wings, antennae and space helmets, stickmen juggling, dancing and standing on their heads, stick witches, angels and devils, stick conjurers with top hats and magic wands (Figure 1). Harmless fun for all the slightly more eccentric members of the family.

Then no more stickmen until the other day, when I suddenly thought about pregnant stickmen and how you would draw one. And had no choice but to experiment. The results are shown in figure 2; I still haven’t decided on the ideal method. (The second one is sitting down with her back to us, by the way, rather than being tortured.)

Pregnancy is a very strange physical phenomenon, when you consider it in stickmen terms.

Then I thought about stickmen with other physical oddities, such as broken limbs (Figure 3). Also very odd, if you are only a stick.

Which all drew me with the inevitability of my own peculiar logic to consider Siamese stickmen (Figure 4). I was excited by the almost endless possibilities for these, but my enthusiasm was curbed after two by the incipient stirrings of some regard for taste. Only stirrings, mind.

My final stickman is a many-armed god (Figure 5). I think it may in fact look like a horrible accident in the genetic engineering lab, involving some spider DNA. Back to the drawing board….

Involuntary word games

I have been working pretty hard at my scary heap of no-fun work recently, often staying til 6.30 or 7. (Which is still late, even if you never seem to make it into the office til 9.15, even though you live about four minutes from it… Ahem.)

On the other hand, sometimes concentrating is a challenge. I had a very busy day on Friday, what with the scary heap, plus several things to look over all at the last minute. However, at some point, the following thought popped, almost entirely fully formed, into my head:

“Oooh,
last,
lest,
list,
lost, and
lust
are all words!”

Two or three minutes of rapid mental-scrabble-tile-shuffling later I had concluded that sets of four-letter words where there is an actual word for each vowel are really quite rare. (Or I am not very good at thinking of them, but I choose not to believe in that possibility.) Plenty of three-word sets, a few more tantalising fours, but no more fives.

I like the set above very much, as all of the words have a certain quality of melancholy, or regret, or longing. Especially if you think of ‘list’ as being what a ship does when its leaning over in a storm at sea—which I did, before I remembered it was also what you take to the supermarket.

I managed to wrench my brain back to my editing, though a part of it kept picking up letters and putting them down again. I did come up with just one more set:

mare
mere
mire
more
mure

Which I also quite like. I may have cheated as I had to look up mure to check it is a word, but on the other hand it is a very good word. Not only is it an archaic word for a wall, but it also (courtesy of Webster’s via dictionary.com) means:

\Mure\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Mured.] [F. murer, L. murare. See Mure, n.] To inclose in walls; to wall; to immure; to shut up. --Spenser.

The five kings are mured in a cave. --John. x. (Heading).

So obviously I had lurid visions of slaves and sacrifices and wronged heroes and tragic maidens, immured alive. It’s very distracting, having my brain.

Not about today

I wrote this post on Thursday, but haven’t posted it yet due to a severe case of involuntary falling asleep the last few evenings. So, not about today.

J.K. Rowling announced the publication date for the final Harry Potter book today. It is amazing how the news of this has put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes, leaving a buzz everywhere it goes. I am very excited. I am also dreading the day, when it will all be over. And I have a morbid terror of JK giving it the ‘wrong’ ending, or forgetting to tie up some loose end and no-one ever knowing.

I have loved very many books very much, in many different ways, but to really, deeply love characters and the worlds they live in beyond the book’s ending—that feeling of affection and familiarity and warm joy at being with them—they generally have to be part of a series. I feel that way about Narnia, and Green Knowe, and Lord Peter Wimsey. I sort of feel that way about Sherlock Holmes, and I think I once felt bliss at being in the company of the Famous Five. There are probably one or two others I could think of if I were standing in front of my bookshelves, but not many.

And… Harry Potter. Harry Potter is not fixed and complete with a dead author. Harry Potter is still being written. We have had to wait always for the next one, knowing that the end was not yet known to the world, and knowing with each book that there was more to come.

I don’t think such things are just a little piece of your life, which, changing, change only that little piece, utterly. They are (also) some colour in the background light, and change all the colours a little. It will be very strange, the irreversible instant when still yet becomes no more.

Also today, my boss arrived back from Africa. I am feeling less and less happy about the appallingly slow progress I am making with a huge heap of no-fun-at-all work. At some point, I feel like it’s all going to explode in a horrible mess of things not being done that had to be done months ago and it all being my fault.

Also today, it was windy—step outside and blown and blustered into life windy. I wished very much I had a kite—a proper stunt kite with two strings, to loop-the-loop and dive bomb and make me feel as close to flying as I can feel without my feet leaving the ground. Even though it isn’t very often sufficiently windy here, I feel that was my most dismal packing oversight. Though I suppose I would also have needed to have packed a willing slave to help me launch it...

awake, opened, breathing

now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened

This is a line I like very much from a poem I like very much by e.e.cummings.

And now, the nose of my nose is breathing.

I went to see the film Perfume this evening. I don’t remember the book (by Patrick Süskind) very well, but I remember that it made my sense of smell awaken; it made me want to smell things, and seek out beautiful scents. He wrote brilliantly about smells; he made you dizzy with them and longing for them, a sense coming alive that you hadn’t realised was dead.

The film probably isn’t as good as the book, they never are, but nonetheless it is very good indeed. Strange, disturbing, and powerfully sensual. Now, afterwards, I want to smell things again, to breathe deeply and fill myself with air, and smell upon it the breathings and the whispers and the sloughed souls of things.

Walking from the car to my apartment, the night was cool and airy, scented with pines. I like the scent of this place—in the day it often smells of warm grain from the fields, like a cross between bread and cut grass. Or, stepping out of the building there is the tang of chlorine from the fountain, like a super-concentrated slap of fresh air.

Now in my apartment I smell guavas—they fill the place with their smell—sharp and richly sweet at the same time, like peardrops except not really like them, plus an edge that is faintly disgusting, cabbagey. And I smell tiny peaches the size and colour of apricots, golden, intensely fruity.

Now I’m thinking about the other things in my apartment. Brittle sticks of cinnamon; soap; my hamsters’ fur; the pages of an old paperback…

Smells awaken instant joy or revulsion without reference to our powers of thought. Smells take us back to past times and places more intensely, more shockingly suddenly and completely than any other sense. You can conjure up the smell of a thousand familiar things—warm milk, oranges, wet paint, roses—in an instant, as if they were there. And yet if I, at least, try to remember at will the smell of a particular place or thing I’ve once experienced, I can’t. You can’t describe smells; you can allude to them in words or pictures but never capture them.

I suppose it is that smells master us, but we can’t master them. They are guerrillas and gypsy-roses, elusive and unfetterable.

Unless, of course, you are the world’s greatest parfumier—and perhaps not even then…

But read/see Perfume, and tell me what you think.

Oh, and another book which I think everyone should read and which revolves around smell is Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins. Brilliant.