fabergemonkey

I am really a girl

… apparently. This what my friends tell me anyway.

Here’s why.

I have eleven bags. Not silly little manbags, but proper rufty-tufty bags for putting proper rufty-tuftystuff in (like my netbook, my portable hard-drive, camera, various just-in-case medicines, multi-tool, swiss army knife, sunglasses, glasses, head torch, keys, wallet)

• Four camera(ish) bags, four rucksacks, two laptop bags and two courier style bags. And two general do it all bags. Oh, that comes to fourteen bags. Oops.

I have fourteen coats.

• Two work coats, two gilets, seven outdoorsy waterproofy softshelly coats and a down jacket. And two fleece coats. This is down from sixteen.

I have fourteen pairs of shoes.

• Two pairs of work shoes, one pair of ‘going out’ shoes, three pairs of trail/approach shoes, three pairs of walking boots, one pair of mountain boots, two pairs of cycling shoes and two pairs of trainers/running shoes.

Hang on. That is fourteen of each item? What? That isn’t right… *counts*. It is. Crap.

I have been reliably informed that no man should have more than three of each (actually there should be nil bags).

And that no man should be able to reel off all of the above from the top of his head. And know where each item is, and what it goes with.

Oh Lordy… I’m a girl.

Sometimes I stand in my study, studying the books on my bookcases. Invariably these are my favourite authors/books. The right hand bookcase contains my poetry and classics collection, as well as several shelves of must read/to read/kinda in the middle of reading/just read. It’s a complicated system. I turn around, often with a little sigh or frown attached.

I look at the bookcase to the left of my desk: other favourite authors/paperbacks/1950′s/60s/70s/80s/90s pulpfiction. It is a very complicated classification system.

I sigh again, and ponder, then glance at the shelves on the wall above my desk. These heave with artbooks/photography books/history/mythology/science/military/business. Mixed in with them are Unread. This section is simpler.

I will spin around several times, hands on hips, arms folded, glaring, frowning, sighing, thinking. This can take quite a while. It’s a complicated process, requiring the right amount of physical erudition to match the internal consternation.

I wander out on to the landing, looking at the small(er) bookcase there. This is stuff/fiction/non-fiction/paperbacks/stored randomly bookcase. It has piles of books on top of it. This case also contains Unread, but with some In Progress. Still pondering. I crouch, I look, I pull some out and flick through. I put back. 

I stand up, and go back through into the study again, pulling books out, glancing, reading a bit, putting back. I wander downstairs, grab a coffee/hot chocolate/glass of water.

I look at the kitchen/dining room bookcase. Travel/cookery/outdoors/travel writing/maps. Also some Unread. By this time I frowning, and tutting.

I sit in front of the bookcase in the living room, pulling photography book after photography book out, glancing, reading, pondering, cogitating. They go back in.

I sit back; thinking, frowning. I go back upstairs, coffee cup forgotten, steaming slowly to coldness.

I trapse back into the study; I look, I frown, I spin backwards and forwards. I pull books out, look at them, put them back.

I am getting grumpy. Quite grumpy.

There are some days when you know you want to read something, but you just don’t know what that something is. And, invariably, despite looking, re-looking and looking once again, you really don’t have whatever it is you want to read on your shelves.

I have a lot of those days.

just

I cannot articulate where I am. It is too much; too happy, too sad, too fretful, too intimidating, too terrifying, too painful, too blissful, too full of dreams, too full of despairs, too full of contrasts and conundrums and fear and needs and desires and doubts. It is a maelstrom of contradictions; too powerful and too demanding.

Today, it is just too much.

its a book world

I learnt to read when I was six. Of course I had learnt to ‘read’ before then, but the words and sentences didn’t really make much sense nor did it seem that there should be a reason for them to.

When I was six we moved to Papua New Guinea, arriving in that alien world from a temporary stay in Peterborough in the UK. My father had taken a job as a civil engineer for the PNG government, a post they had held open for him for over three years. I don’t remember that much about our arrival in Port Moresby, only that we had to stay some time as the guests of the local representative for some weeks whilst our home in Kainantu was finalised.

To keep me out of trouble I was given a pile of the local comics to read, primarily those of the Phantom (the Ghost Who Walks). I was hooked. I could only follow the stories in the pictures but it soon became apparent that I was missing a great deal of information and story. Without realising it, frustration drove me to connect the letters to words, the words to sentences and the sentences to meaning. I began to read.

I became a voracious reader, the libraries in the schools I attended became a vast reservoir wonder and exploration. I remember trying to read the Silmarillion on more than one occasion, albeit unsuccessfully. I was eight. When we moved back to the UK I continued to read ravenously, my limited pocket money strained by football, arcades and books. I read the Commando comics, whole series of abridged myths and legends, game books and fantasy books and crime and all sorts of stuff.

The local libraries in Hampshire once held an initiative to encourage reading; over the course of two weeks you had to read at least six books, answering questions to prove you had read them, with the reward of a certificate if you achieved this heady target. There was also a special prize for the child who read the most books during that period, a fact that I was oblivious to. I read thirty-three books during those two weeks, coming only second, in the whole county, to a girl from Aldershot who had read thirty-six books. I didn’t care, it was the books that mattered. I was twelve.

For a while, after the disastrous excursion that was university, I worked in bookselling, a job I loved and enjoyed thoroughly, and a job that fed my book habit incessantly. I bought books with almost involuntary fervour, until my bedroom overflowed with them. In one flat the ends of the stairs became bookshelves, every ledge and nook and cranny a haven of the written word. Today my study is stuffed to the brim, with the bookcases on the landing and downstairs barely relieving the pressure.

Ten years ago I went to San Francisco, taking my book-soulmate with me. There we were introduced to the joyous delights of the Green Apple and City Lights bookstores. I went to theUSA with six books, my BSM with four. We returned to the UK with 52 and 49 respectively, in the main the result of one day in Green Apple Books, a day that my cousins still mention with a wry grin. Pilgrim Books on Kathmandu was another memorable discovery, although only a very few books were bought there. Today Hay-on-Wye is a bookshop Mecca for me, with Beware of the Leopard in Bristol another firm favourite. There are numerous little bookshops in the Cotswolds that are great too, although I visit them too rarely.

I buy books at a rate that out-paces my ability to read, and I read quickly and often. That is the way of things, my weekly purchases threatening the integrity of my To-Read pile. I do not care, one day I will have read them all, no matter how far off in the future that is.

I have friends who Do Not Read. Not ever. Not once. An old flatmate borrowed the same book for every holiday for three and a half years, and there were lots of holidays. He never finished it. Another just reads business books. That’s what she reads, she has no patience for anything else, and doesn’t get fiction. I don’t understand either of them.

I love books, I love the feel of them, the sight of them on the shelf. I love the heft and smell and symbolism of them. But most of all I love the words and stories contained within, that wondrous magic through which the writer communicates. I love the invisible effort that was poured into each book, the tales and the telling. I love the wild imagination, the detail vividly drawn, I love the research and intensity and frivolity. I love the care, the attention, the passion and the love.

I love books because they hold the stories, the endeavours and the dreams of our species. They hold what has been, what was dreamt, and what is and what may be. And beyond that they are the vessels for our inventiveness, our cunning, courage and cleverness. They hold our diversity and our commonality. They are a testament to our successes and failures, our aspirations and depravities. In their unthinkable multitude they are the essence of us, both real and unreal, and they speak to us with the countless voices of those who undertake to comprehend the wonder that is humanity.

I love books because, on any level, they are simply what they are, and remain exactly that for each of us.

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what now?

A few years ago, my closest friend and book soul-mate were doing our usual thing and browsing through the shelves of one of the countless secondhand bookshops we have visited over the years. If memory serves me this was a tiny bookshop in the Cotswolds, and it was summer.

As we plucked books out and flicked through them, sometimes showing them to each other, more often than not putting them back but occasionally putting them to one side, she picked up a book of poetry and opened it randomly. After a moment of reading she beckoned me over and handed it to me without a word. The book was the Minus Sign by Carlos Drummond de Andrade and the poem below is the one she had opened the book at.

José

What now, José?
The party’s done,
the lights put out,
the people gone,
the night gone cold,
And now, José?
And now, yourself?
your nameless self,
who cuts them dead,
you maker of verse
who loves, protests?
And now, José?

You’re loverless,
no podium,
no tenderness,
drink won’t go down,
smoke won’t suck in,
the mouth won’t spit,
the night’s gone cold,
dawn hasn’t come,
the bus won’t come
nor laughter come
nor utopia come
and it’s all done
and it’s all fled,
the white mould grows,
and now, José?

And now, José?
your gentle word,
your flash of fever,
your greeds and fasts,
your library,
your vein of gold,
your suit of glass,
your incoherences,
your hate, and now?

If you’d just scream,
if you’d just whine,
if you’d just play
a Viennese waltz,
if you’d just sleep,
or at least get tired,
if you’d just die…
But you don’t die,
you’re tough, José!

Yourself in the dark
like a beast in a den,
with no pagan gods,
with no bare wall
to lean back on,
with no jet horse
that flees at a gallop,
you march, José!
José, how come?

Key in your hand
you want the door,
there’s no more door;
you want to drown,
but the sea dried up;
you want to go home
- what home is that?
José, what next?

It has been a few years since that poem reached out of the book and struck me dumb, so accurately did it deconstruct me. In the intervening years I would like to think I have changed from the person who resonated so but I fear, whilst much progress has been made, I have not as much as I think or hoped.

But then again, maybe I have.

this week I bought…

three books (I think). I realised the other day that telling you that I bought three books is pretty uninteresting, so I thought I would elaborate…

Best Served Cold, Joe Abercrombie (£9.73 – Amazon)

I have been reading JA’s First Law series over the last couple of years and, whilst initially dubious, ended up enjoying them quite a bit. His characters are invariably flawed, his plots engaging and the overall story-arc inviting. This book is set in the same universe, but a different locale, and I am looking forward to seeing what he does with it.

Men and their Sheds, Summat Thorburn (£2 – Village fete)

This is a great little photobook about men and their sheds. Obvious really. It looks at the varying and imaginative uses that the men in question have made of their sheds, as well as the often unique/crazed designs that they have used.

Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame (50p – Village fete)

This is the 1968 hardback edition of this classic story. I have never read it and couldn’t pass up the opportunity of such a nice looking book for such a bargain price. However, this (below) is what completely sold it to me. I am sucker for this sort of thing.

Total spend: £12.23

Happiness: Pretty happy

rediscovered (i)

loving you
i betrayed myself
put to rest
those self serving lies
cremated in the fire
of my emotion
the belief I once
owned of myself
knowing you
I revealed myself
emptied
the walls of rooms
shattered doors
bound in the steel
of solitude
offered myself
to the altar of
your sun
and in that conflagaration
burned the eyes
that saw shadows
amidst the lights
stood alone
these many years
watching a world go by
in the café of my life
sipping the dregs
of false memories
listening for the sound
of another voice
been alone
these mortal years
grasped in the fist
of my belief
till
the loving you
that with loving slices
destroyed my introspect-
ion
revelled in my destruct-
ion
until haunted
like a ghost’s
chime
i came home
and in your sight
rediscovered
myself

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serendipity

Some days, unexpectedly, fate, the winds, who knows what, will bring you someone or something that will change your life. Be it subtle or magnificent in degree, that inconsequential moment of serendipity will often be forgotten and seldom remembered well or even recognised. Treasure it, thank it, open up and go with it, because, more often than not, it will be momentous in ways you cannot begin to comprehend.

oh my…

If you follow me on twitter you may have been aware today that, as I was sitting in the Tobacco Factory, drinking coffee, blogging and watching the world go by, a young lady came in with her friends and sat down next to me.

Nothing remarkable about that. She was attractive and vivacious and smiled at me a couple of times.

Except that she was the second only woman ever to turn me into a catatonic hopeless mess.

In one of my previous jobs there worked a lady of a similar age to me called Yasmeen (she was a consultant with the company’s IT partner). Yasmeen was the first woman to ever turn me into a catatonic hopeless mess. By her sheer presence alone. She wasn’t remarkably beautiful, although she was exotic and pretty. She was confident, but not charismatically so. She dressed very well and had amazing long black hair.

The thing was, she would walk into the room or the office and every single higher brain function that I possessed would slow and turn themselves off with audible clicks. I know this because everyone in my office would turn to me and watch it happen. With a smile on their collective faces.

If I was in the kitchen making tea and she came in and spoke to me, which she often did, I would lose all coherency, all eloquence and the complexity of my thoughts would head for the pub at full gallop, leaving me with a desperately diminished sense of self-esteem. It became known as the Yasmeen Effect and my colleagues and friends would rejoice in it fully.

There was something about the way she carried herself, the way she moved and spoke and smiled. There was an undefinable quality that she possessed that would reach into my mind and turn everything off. Every single time, without fail. If she walked in to this room now I would be struck in the same way, without a shadow of a doubt.

Today, unexpectedly, and from out of the blue, the Yasmeen Effect struck me once again. And despite my tongue-tied haplessness, there was a small amount of  pleasure in the experience, knowing that I could be so inexplicably affected by the simple presence of another person.