Worth it

So on Thursday I woke up with horrible food poisoning. I even threw up, which was actually quite exciting - because I haven't done so since I was 12, even when I was really ill - and practically the highlight of my day. It wasn't a great day. Honestly I think I've been nearly as ill in the past month as I have in the whole of the previous year in Mexico and I'm getting fed up with it.

I considered to myself that karma might be taking its revenge on me for being mean about my friends on the internet, which I did feel a bit guilty about, even if I had been feeling miserable and abandoned. But then I found out that one of my colleagues, with a hard-as-nails, been-in-Mexico-for-decades stomach had got sick with very similar symptoms and could definitely blame it on his cafeteria sandwich. I had also had a sandwich, so I felt rather relieved, perversely, since it is not a good thing that the cafeteria, where I eat every day, is poisoning us; it was nice to know that I didn't have myself to blame for recklessly eating 'dodgy' festival food. (I also found out that what I had taken to be particularly nasty ham - there is only one kind of sandwich every day so you can't choose - was in fact head cheese, i.e. brawn. Look it up on wikipedia if you have a strong stomach. If I hadn't already thrown up that would've tipped the balance. Urgh.)

But even when I was feeling at my worst, I did, defiantly, think to myself that I would still rather have gone to the festival. The short story is that it was completely awesome, and a million times better than the cinema any day!

When I arrived at the sports ground, the main venue for the festival, a rather unearthly kind of music was floating through the stalls and the crowds. I toddled along to find an Indonesian gamelan playing in front of the little church inexplicably located within the sports ground. I enjoyed listening to and watching it for a while very much. As well as the music itself, I liked the kinesis of it, the hypnotic way the players moved together and the music flowed from it. I liked the seriousness of the young Mexicans who were playing. I liked the visual beauty of the instruments, and the sheer strangeness of finding them here under a darkening Mexican sky, listening with my strange British ears.

My poisonous sandwich having been a small and very long-ago lunch, I was very hungry, and so I went to explore the many and varied delights of the food stalls. I bought delicious esquites (hot herby corn off the cob served up from a huge pot, with mayonnaise, cheese and lime, and chilli powder if you're not me), hot fries with weird yellow salt (no idea why it was weird and yellow), ponche (hot sugary fruity cinnamony yummy punch) and a gordita (sweet flat bready goodness). I just noticed how many times I wrote 'hot' in that sentence, but it was a freezing cold night (literally), and heat was very much to be desired.

Retiring with some of my booty, I went to sit up on the giant concrete steps of the stands in front of the main stage, and although I would rather not have been there alone I was quite happy sipping ponche and watching some excellent flamenco.

However, I was even happier to get a text message from a Mexican friend asking where I was, and managed to find him down below in the standing area. It was great to see him and great to have someone to chat and crack jokes and enjoy things with. (I was massively proud of myself when I understood a joke someone next to us in the crowd made and we looked at each other and laughed.) The stagehands did their stuff, and then the next act came on, complete with the weirdest musical instrument I have ever seen. A giant frame, the size of a garden shed, like a cube with octagons for sides, and a kind of set of ribs in the middle which the musician seemed to bash like a xylophone. With that, a cello, an actual xylophone, and a guest appearance from a didgeridoo, they played some of the hippiest music I have ever heard in my life. You'd file it under "world", but more classically-trained musicians discovering weird instruments than any kind of traditional music, and you wouldn't be surprised to hear it in an aromatherapist's waiting room. Being one of those dirty hippy types I was kind of enjoying it, but the crowd were cold and restless and wanted Willie Colon - unlike on previous days the acts were running significantly behind schedule due to technical problems. Mexican crowds don't tend to be shy in showing their disapproval, so I was feeling pretty uncomfortable with all the angry shouting and whistling - and sorry for the poor floppy-haired cellist who was trying to chat to the crowd in between pieces! And yet at least some people seemed to be enjoying the weird hippy music, because there was also cheering and clapping, and at the end they shouted for more - unless that was sarcasm?!

The tension built as instruments were moved on and off stage, and the sound was checked and rechecked. Finally, more than an hour and a half late, Willie Colon and his band began to play. And from that first moment I couldn't stop grinning - they were absolutely amazing! For a start, the music itself is just excellent - very, very good salsa tunes, the irresistable kind that you just have to move to, with the gorgeously jazzy flavour of New York salsa - and I actually knew most of them. And the band and the sound system were both superb, so you could really enjoy them. And then hearing them live was a whole extra experience. Unlike in the recorded versions, there were a lot of solos - trombone (Willie is a trombonist as well as a singer), trumpet, keyboard, and drums - and they played around with the songs a lot more. You could hear the melodies and the rhythms changing and evolving through the song, and as they segued seamlessly into the next one. And I really liked being able to see the instruments being played and what was making the music. They played my favourite songs - Talento de Televisión and Gitana - and we even danced a bit (difficult, other than on the spot, in the crowd!).

I loved every song and I am so happy I went. It reminded me just how much I love salsa (I have been leaning rather towards cumbia recently) and showed me just how amazing it can be live. It may not have been my once in a lifetime chance to see Willie Colon, if I wanted it enough, but I'm pretty sure it was my once in a lifetime chance to see Willie Colon for free a couple of miles from my house, standing in the cold amongst a hyped-up crowd of locals in my home town.

[I was trying to add a video here too, but blogger doesn't like that idea.]

Just me and my willie

Tonight, Willie Colon is coming to my backwater nowhere-special town and playing - for free - as part of this week's music and cultural festival, the one big event of the year here. Willie Colon is one of the world's greatest and most famous salsa musicians and singers - ask someone who knows about salsa to name five great salseros and he's likely to be amongst them; buy a salsa compilation CD and he'll be on there - and it is absolutely incredible to me that he is actually going to be here. I love his music, and, of course, wild horses couldn't keep me away.

BUT, none of my friends will come with me. A couple would come but are unavoidably busy, but a whole group of them have decided to go to the cinema. And MCDONALDS.

That's right, they chose Hollywood shite and nasty evil-corporate junkfood, available any day of the week and anywhere in the world, over the (only) event of the year, crowds, excitement, all manner of delicious Mexican foodstuffs, and WILLIE COLON live, for FREE! How is that possible? I don't know how anyone can be so irredeemably RUBBISH... let alone a sizeable chunk of the people I think of as my friends.

So, having vented my spleen a little, I'm off out now. On my own. And I'm feeling rather blue. Let's hope the music lifts my spirit rather than just emphasising that I've no-one to enjoy it with.

From Alpha to Zulu and Apples to Zebra

I'm quite a big fan of phonetic alphabets, or spelling alphabets - foxtrot, november, juliet, that sort of thing. My grandmother taught me the standard alpha, bravo, charlie alphabet off by heart when I was a young teenager and had never heard of it before, and I found it immensely pleasing. The representation of letters by words is a nice reversal of the normal state of affairs, and there's rather a wonderful quality of litany about them... and of course there's always something cool about knowing something a little out of the ordinary, and something with the thrill of spies and cops and robbers all the better.

I happened to stray into reading about phonetic alphabets on the wikipedia today - as will happen sometimes (I was wondering where "ack emma" came from). It's very interesting, at least if you're a geek like me.

And I came across this, the alphabet used by the Royal Navy during World War I:

Apples Butter Charlie Duff Edward Freddy George Harry Ink Johnnie King London Monkey Nuts Orange Pudding Queenie Robert Sugar Tommy Uncle Vinegar Willie Xerxes Yellow Zebra

And it breaks my heart. It speaks so clearly to me, so eloquently, of boys playing a game, all youthful patriotism and Edwardian innocence, the gleeful, inky storybook schoolboys who I cherished in my fierce, bookish childhood heart. Of men still boys, cheeky, swaggering boys, racing to war as to the playground, lambs to the slaughter.


I also like this one, used by the Allies during World War II, enormously - there is something unsquashably cheerful about it:

Able Baker Charlie Dog Easy Fox George How Item Jig King Love Mike Nan Oboe Peter Queen Roger Sugar Tare Uncle Victor William X-ray Yoke Zebra

And this too, an interwar alphabet used in aviation and a hymn to the globe:

Amsterdam Baltimore Casablanca Denmark Edison Florida Gallipoli Havana Italia Jerusalem Kilogramme Liverpool Madagascar New_York Oslo Paris Quebec Roma Santiago Tripoli Upsala Valencia Washington Xanthippe Yokohama Zurich

Able Baker has such beautifully short words, and Amsterdam Baltimore such beautifully long ones!

News, new to me

A home for elderly prostitutes in Mexico City. Their stories are very sad, but that this home now exists is a beautiful thing - and partly funded by the city government, which does seem to be, relatively speaking, remarkably enlightened:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7028449.stm

Atrocities in Ethiopia. The use of the term 'insurgency' or 'insurgent' has a tendency to make me incandescent with rage; especially so here:
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/article3067244.ece

Good news for women everywhere... but not for another decade or so:
http://news.independent.co.uk/health/article3067225.ece
Really, it's appalling that no major conceptual advances in oral contraceptives have been made for more than half a century, but perhaps, given a medical and research establishment that has traditionally been - and to a large extent continues to be - male-dominated and blind to the needs of women, it's not all that surprising.

A crazy wonderful house in a Brazilian favela:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7016930.stm
(Maybe not strictly News, but awesome!)

Weekending

NB: I wrote this post a little while ago but wanted to dig up photos and edit out some of the long-windedness before I published. Well, one out of two ain’t bad! However, the weekend in question is actually a couple of weekends ago now.

I’m aware that my blog hasn’t been up to much in the way of insights into, or even descriptions of, my life in Mexico. Mostly, I think, because there is so much that for me is odd, funny, exciting, interesting, wonderful, and more odd, that new things are always happening that seem worth writing about, and I never catch up with myself. Or, alternatively, because I am lame.

So, in the manner of a primary school Monday morning, I am going to write about what I did last weekend. Only I don’t have any wax crayons to draw a picture.

On Friday, I worked until late, and it rained, and I was tired and ill. So instead of going to watch a colleague doing pre-Hispanic dances in his pueblo, I went home and quietly enjoyed being by myself. Then I hung out for a bit with some friends (other youthful types on campus) who were also tired and lacklustre and every word anyone said irritated me entirely irrationally.

And so I went home and screwed up my energy and courage and called a taxi and went out to dance in a very insalubrious club – a big box full of heat and smoke and bodies and beats. I can pretty much guarantee I was the only white girl in the place, and the only person lip-synching along to ‘Saturday Night’ by the Underdog Project (which I love, shamefacedly and sentimentally, and was the best tune of the night amongst a parade of dull, indistinguishable electronica). It was all endless identical beats and hot, sweating skin, like a club anywhere… until, this being Mexico, and always surprising, always odd, out comes the mariachi band sometime in the wee hours, complete with shiny-buttoned uniforms and shiny trumpets, and everyone is suddenly dancing to popular norteño tunes, closely-coupled. It’s difficult to express what a weird contrast these two styles are, but to give you an idea here is one of the most popular norteños (and one of my favourites – the chorus means more or less “I love you the way you are”):


I got inevitably a bit perved on by random drunk guys. I greeted and smiled awkwardly at my friend’s friends, and even more awkwardly at his theatre professor. We held hands, me and a beautiful boy in the dark, as he drew me out of the way of people pushing past, or led me onto the dance floor, and I didn’t know if it meant anything. But it made me happy.


On Saturday, I felt like I nearly died getting up in the morning to buy vegetables from Jesus (tee hee). I got ready to face the world v e r y s l o w l y indeed. When I finally got my act together I went to collect my test results from the clinic (nothing terrible, I just had a weird stomach thing that took a long time to shift. You have no dignity left when you have had to be in the same room as a woman labelling your poo samples. Haha, MS Word doesn’t have the word poo in its dictionary, but it does have pueblo. Now that is a bizarre level of prudery. Anyway…) and then pootled on up to the nearest of the many pueblos around here named San Miguel, all of which were having big St Michael’s day fiestas, just because it seemed like a shame not to go and have a look.

The streets leading up to the church were full of stalls selling festive things: special biscuits and sweet breads, nuts and candies and candied nuts, toys and cowboy hats. In the main square, entered through floral archways, a mariachi band played on one stage, while the next band’s instruments were set up ready on another. On the other side of the church, dormant fairground rides waited to let their buzz and lights and noise loose on the evening. In the garden of the church, biers decorated with flowers were on display, waiting to carry each of the churches saints through the town. The garden was the perfect habitat for them, brightly painted and brilliant with flowers. The front of the church itself was entirely decorated with a figure of San Miguel, surrounded by fish and starfish and dolphins and mermaids (I’m not entirely sure why), all made up of flowers. The inside of the church took your breath away even more; it was literally full of flowers, thousands and thousands of lilies covering each pillar and surrounding each saint’s niche, filling the air with their scent as people waited patiently in line to light candles and offer a few coins and their prayers to San Miguel.

And, the best of all these things, the entire town was swathed in bunting in all the colours of the rainbow, which I honestly think is one of the loveliest things I have ever seen.

A saint's bier (if bier is the right word? Litter maybe?):

Looking up at the front of the church:

Inside the church:

Another saint-carrier, in the shape of a swan, with bizarre blonde mermaids on the church wall behind:

Fairground rides:

Flags:

As pretty as San Miguel gets:

More pictures of the flags, taken on a sunnier day, from inside someone else's car while driving through:

On the combi on the way back into town I gazed out of the window at cactuses and agaves and bright yellow ‘Mexican sunflowers’ – huge yellow daisies really – and tangles of smaller daisies in pink and white all growing in scrubby nowhere land beyond the roadside. I thought about how I barely notice huge cactuses and agaves anymore, and how strange it is that for a British person – and for me when I arrived – they are strange and exotic and enormously striking. It’s rather melancholy that sometime – soon, really – they won’t be ordinary things outside the bus window for me either. It’s odd to think of them not being part of the general background. I wonder if they will always be something I don’t really notice anymore, something part of my personal internal landscape of the ordinary, or if in a few years time they’ll once again be something to stare at and exclaim over.

In town I ran errands, and went to buy a gift for a friend’s birthday in one of the town’s two glass factories, by far my favourite of the two – a dusty, higgledy-piggledy Aladdin’s cave of glass. Going there is always a tremendous pleasure for me. It is fascinating and beautiful and strangely peaceful, like a half-forgotten church, and absolutely deserves its own entry, but for now here is a picture I took that I like very much:

In the evening I made strawberry fool and dug out my black lace tights and went off to a party, a sort-of-goodbye party for my boss, who I wish wasn’t leaving, but that’s another story. And I’m sure that it was an excellent party, only a motley group of us were leaving early. And this was the big event of the night: we had tickets for a hot salsa concert – Grupo Niche, a genuine big-name, one of the world’s best known salsa groups, all the way from Colombia; La Sonora Dinamita, a Colombian cumbia group; and Maelo Ruiz, a pretty big cheese in Salsa from Puerto Rico – all performing only a few miles away.

Well, I don’t know what I was expecting from the venue, but it wasn’t an enormous aircraft hanger set in a vast expanse of concrete, open to the night air. And our seats in the ‘VIP area’? Stools at rickety wooden tables, on rickety wooden balconies on either side of the hangar (though I was glad to have them rather than be trying to stick to my friends in the thousands-strong crowd below). It soon became clear that we needn’t have left early, as the crowd gradually gradually grew and the evening didn’t really start for a few hours. We danced a bit, and then danced some more to the salsa playing over the speakers; the first support band were terrible, but the second I liked, with their crazy pelvic thrusts and ridiculous dancing and energetic merengue.

This being Mexico, and always surprising, always odd, the main acts were preceded by a blast of electronica as a number of neon-clad figures ran onto the stage, now lit with UV, to treat us to some bizarre high-octane dance routines before disappearing like an acid-fuelled dream. And then, finally, after endless fiddling with the mikes and the amps and all that jazz, with the crowd getting more and more impatient, whistling angrily, Grupo Niche appeared. And the sad thing is the sad quality was truly terrible. So I can say I’ve seen the famous Grupo Niche live, but I’m not sure I can say I’ve heard them.

The Niche bus arrives - through the crowd!:

The famous Group Niche:

I found it really surreal that the crowd of thousands were almost all dancing during the recorded salsa before and between the bands, but hardly anyone danced while they were playing (though our group did). I mean, how cool is it to say that you’ve danced to Grupo Niche? I’m not sure if it was out of respect for the music, or disgust at the sound quality, but the way I see it salsa is for dancing to – especially if you can’t hear the fine details all too well!

Half our group left during a hiatus halfway through Grupo Niche (including the other non-Latinos, and while I dislike stereotypes I do think it tends to be more of a Western trait to be disappointed when things aren’t how you imagined them, and unable just to enjoy things as they are). After that things did actually get better. They lowered the volume, which diminished the feedback, and we danced anyway, including a conga line around our table. And I danced a lot with a certain person – a different boy, but equally confusing and unreadable.

Then a lot more restless waiting, and Sonora Dinamita finally came on. For me they instantly lit up the stage. They were vibrant, sexy, exciting, full of energy – you just had to get up and dance. I absolutely loved them, but I only got to dance a couple of songs. My companions wanted to head off and so we left – me dancing all the way to the carpark and wishing I could stay. (When I say carpark, I mean patch of weedy wasteground half-full of rusting trucks. What else?) We hadn’t even heard the final act – and it was gone 3am. And then, dark, empty roads; remembering I hadn’t eaten properly all day and that might be contributing to my spinning head; tired, perhaps intimate conversation in Spanish; food; and sleep.


On Sunday I didn’t even remember I’d planned to do some work as I sleepwalked my way into the day, and made another strawberry fool for another party – this time a tea party to say goodbye to a good friend and colleague. A very different kind of party: all international staff, tea and cake, adult conversation. I found myself rather incapable of normal sociable behaviour, wrapped in a tired bubble of my own abstraction, so I ate heaps of delicious goodies and sat on the grass watching the kids playing the goat, which was a pleasure. The feeling of warm concrete under bare feet made me happy, and later on so did the stars. We talked into the evening, and then some of us relocated and talked some more, and I was there but also not really there at all.

The best postcard ever?

I think so.

And look, it came all the way from Thailand, with elephants on the stamp!

Post always makes my day, but this especially so. It arrived yesterday, having confused our secretary immensely along the way, and it has been making me grin ever since.

My lovely friend Ed and I (who I don't believe reads this, so there is just no point being rude about him here) have been engaged in a coded correspondence for some time. We send each other messages to decode, with some kind of cunning clue as to what the code is. For no reason other than playfulness and for the fun of the puzzle. However, we seem to have trailed off - my last cipher was clearly just too brilliant - which is a sad state of affairs and hopefully to be reversed.

Meanwhile, I mentioned this to my lovely friend Nathan, who seems to have been rather taken with the idea, and somehow ended up vaguely promising me a coded missive. And here it is! All the way from Thailand to Mexico, and all the more exciting because - though I knew what it was at once - I wasn't definitely expecting it.

I haven't cracked it yet. I am puzzled, and a little frustrated, and intrigued, and thoroughly enjoying the challenge.

Hurray for the post, and hurray for childish games!

Thrills and spills

I wrote this comment yesterday on the blog of the lovely Laura:

It's a very ponderable question - danger and excitement vs safety and security. I love that Mexico is - to me - always a little bit unpredictable and crazy, that people don't worry so much about risks and making everything safe and sanitised, that the streets are full of colour and noise and music, that people - on average - seem to throw themselves more wholeheartedly into living (even though they can also be very conservative, very cautious). On the other hand - for all the great sense of community and much greater love of children here - I would have serious concerns about bringing up children in a place where the police are not to be trusted, where random crime feels so much more likely, and likely to go unpunished, where rules on the environment, on food safety, road safety, etc are so much weaker and in any case barely enforced, where money is power and power is routinely abused. It is not a comfortable place... and yet it is exciting, alive, exhilarating. The question is, can you have one without the other? I sort of suspect not, which is sad.

Ideally I would polish this up into a longer and more thought-out post, but knowing me I wouldn't get round to it. Meanwhile, this sums up something that is often on one's mind here, one way or another.

A little chaos, danger, unpredictability are fine things to be able to enjoy as an adventuring outsider, but not for the people who have to live with corruption, unfairness, lack of redress, pointless risk. Of course I wouldn't argue that all of the vibracy of Mexican culture is tied up in this or somehow depends on it. But there is so much here that is relaxed and disorganised and chaotic and spontaneous and fun - music, street vendors, celebrations, pilgrimages, parades - that just wouldn't be allowed in Britain, they'd be regulated out of existance. You can't have family-run stalls springing up overnight to sell every kind of sweet and savoury treat on high days and holidays when there are strict laws on food hygiene and not clogging up the streets and reporting your taxable income and who can sell what where. You can't have trucks packed with excited pilgrims, or rattletrap buses decorated with crucifixes and vases of crysanthemums and Virgins and miscellaneous stickers, or you and seven friends squeezed into one car on the way home from a club, if road safety is regulated and taken seriously.

I don't have a conclusion, I don't know how things can be balanced for the best, but I do know that I am in a privileged position to be able to enjoy this crazy place, largely without having to struggle with all the things that make life difficult for ordinary people here. And a wonderful, crazy place it is.

One year (and a bit) on

I have now been in Mexico a little over a year. I intended to write a one-year anniversary post, but, predictably, didn’t quite get round to it.

A year ago, even a few months ago, I had no intention of staying in my job for more than a year; I was offered another 12-month contract but another year just looked too long and frightened me too much.

However, I eventually decided to accept an offer to stay on another six months as a consultant rather than an intern, and I’m very happy I did. I wouldn’t be ready to leave Mexico now: there’s too much I still haven’t done, and I’m finally at a point with my Spanish where I can hold reasonably natural conversations.

Of course, I’ve learned all kinds of things this year, many of which I can’t put my finger on or can’t put into words. Things have changed a lot – for me and around me – in the time I’ve been here. As is the nature of a research institution, many people have arrived and many people have departed. As I’ve got to know people, some I like less than when I first met them, some much more. Slowly slowly, as is my wont, I have made friends, built relationships. Overall there are many more younger people without families working at the centre, and living on campus, than when I first arrived. This means people to do things with and hang out with, and my lonely first months seem a long time ago.

Nonetheless, living here can be really hard. I love Mexico, I absolutely fucking love so many things about it and I don’t like to think too hard about how I’ll feel about eventually being back ‘home’, and I love being an independent adult, and I love making genuine connections with people here… but, it is sometimes a very lonely road indeed, living far away from your friends, your home, your culture.

One of my crunch moments came on Saturday, when I organised a party to celebrate my one-year anniversary here – a barbecue followed by salsa dancing in town. I put a lot of effort and money and time into it. I spent most of Saturday shopping for snacks and meat and bread and salad and fruit and then lovingly making desserts: chocolate cake, fruit jellies, mango muffins with cream cheese frosting, fruit salad. All of which I actually kind of enjoy, if I hadn’t been stressed about getting everything done. I’d invited around 60 people, maybe more, a mixture of Mexicans and international staff, and I expected between 30 and 40 to actually show up. In the event, there were barely 20 of us, including only a couple of Mexicans.

Now I know the thing to do is to just enjoy the party and the people there, but I couldn’t help feeling intensely miserable about the whole thing, not important after all to the people I thought I could count as friends and friendly colleagues. However much I rationalised that people have families (who were welcome too), prior commitments, other things they need to be doing, it really hurt – especially the people who’d said they’d be there. Mexicans do that sometimes, say yes when it’s really a no, presumably to avoid hurting your feelings, but I absolutely hate it. So I felt pathetic and alone and embarrassed about the too-much food, and ill and kind of detached and struggling to join in normal conversation. And then to make things worse nobody wanted to go dancing.

Not that I sat in a corner and cried all evening: I smiled and enjoyed the kids being silly and made conversation. But I ultimately didn’t enjoy my party. Intellectually I know that these things happen; sometimes a lot of people just happen to end up with other things to do. But I feel the social ground beneath my feet seems to have turned to quicksand. I don’t feel certain of anyone, and I just want to spend time alone.

This too shall pass.

Update

My jelly has gone mouldy. In three measly days in the fridge, it has grown a layer of mould. It was especially nice jelly, made for a party, with blackberries and strawberries in it. Which are mouldy.

I am now sick, tired, jellyless, and EXTREMELY hacked off.

Mostly absent

I am sick. And I am sick of it.

This week I finally seem to be shaking of the medical-oddity stomach bug I have had for the last two weeks, only to see my cough blossom into a full-on coughing, sneezing, aching, exhausting, phlegmy, stinking rotten cold.

Yesterday I went home early from work, and today I spent the morning in bed, but I decided to come in to work because I couldn't face another grumpy afternoon of not sleeping and not doing anything else either.

So now I am technically at work, but I am incredibly spaced out. I feel like my brain is floating somewhere slightly outside my body, and my body is floating somewhere slightly out of the normal plane of existence. Everything is quieter than normal, and somehow far away. It would be quite cool, if my head wasn't also aching in a spacey kind of way.

Today itself is conspiring to add to this surreal feeling. The weather is cloudy and chilly, even when I finally made walked into work at midday. The warmth of a hot shower and warm blankets clung on under my clothes, and that feeling felt so familiar, like stepping outside on a winter's day at home. Being at home in the daytime feels like being a student. And then this afternoon, unusually, I went to a lecture being held here on agricultural research. And so I feel like I am not here and now at all, but have slipped back into a winter afternoon in Cambridge. I remember cutting throught the Old Schools, those so-Victorian corridors; ill-heated labs and lecture theatres; the desperate scribble of the pen chasing the voice; the smell of wet wool; busy pre-Christmas streets; the snap of cold air; the pleasure of being wrapped up warm; vague mists rising from the river; gracefully jumbled architecture rising from the mists. Most of my mind is somewhere else entirely, while my autopilot navigates me somehow through the day's interactions.

So I am sick, fed up, and a bit out of my tree. Pass the jelly.

Titled

I would like to write the book to go with this title:

Cradlesongs for Lost Children

That's all.

the wisdom of stick-men

There are only two or three webcomics I always read, and www.xkcd.com is one of them. It's funny and geeky and touching and I love it. Today I was reminded of one of my favourites (click to make it a bit bigger):


Amen to that.

While reading the news/blog section I have also just discovered that this guy did something so amazing it makes me smile all over. He sneaked some coordinates, a date and a time into a comic months ago, and then last week turned up at the place - as did dozens of other people, strangers, "lovely people all brought together by their shared interest in adventure, puzzles, and people, and dreams", for an afternoon of fun and silliness. Words cannot express how cool I think that is.

La vida de la calle

Last night when I was in town, I saw:
- a couple of boys sitting in the front of a music shop, strumming away on a guitar, letting their sweet, peaceful tune float out into the street.
- kids hanging around on the bandstand, breakdancing to reggaeton.
- a couple of young men sitting on a wrought-iron bench playing cards in the dark with a Spanish deck (coins, cups, swords and clubs).
And couples of all ages, and families, and groups of schoolchildren, strolling and eating and shopping and talking. All the shopfronts open to the street, the pavements lined with stalls, street food for sale everywhere, balloon sellers in the main square, music blaring from shops and stalls and cars.

I love this about Mexico, the life of the street. The way people don’t necessarily scurry home at the first possible opportunity, the way more of life is lived outside, the way people are happy sometimes to just hang out together.