shipping out...

well blogger, its been lovely, but....

http://onlygotone.wordpress.com/

maya has moved.....

please come with me!

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i repeat: i am no longer blogging here, but at wordpress..............

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fyi..

i have found the visual aid to an earlier post....

for your reference, the post in question... 

et voila..... 

today x 2:

this is my friend today .....as i am off sick....my ears feel well though

at the risk of peddling... i still have two more invites....

fastest fingers first....

today x 1:

look at these...

if there's one thing i love, its watching people's facing while they think of an answer to a tricky question  ...

biannual

today is sixth months since the worst day

 

there have been times, in the early months, when i thought 'gracious, one day it will be six months since it happened. that will be wierd. but not as wierd as when it will be one year'

 

and today it is six months.

 

i am not dwelling or mulling or feeling sad (yet! ha) but i just thought it deserved a small mention.

 

it is rainy today

orange sky...

i'm not going to pretend i know why the sky is orange in this song....but i really believe you should listen to it. it is called -orange sky- by alexi murdoch

well i had a dream i stood beneath an orange sky

yes i had a dream i stood beneath an orange sky

with my brother standing by

with my brother standing by

said brother you know, you know,

its a long road we've been walking on

brother you know it is, you know it is,

such a long road we've been walking on

and i had a dream i stood beneath an orange sky

with my sister standing by

with my sister standing by

i said sister here is what i know now, here is what i know now...

in your love my salvation lies

in your love my salvation lies

in your love my salvation lies

in your love, in your love, in your love...

oh but sister you know i'm so weary

and you know sister my heart's been broken

sometimes sometimes my mind is too strong

to carry on

too strong to carry on

when i am alone

when i've thrown off the weight of this crazy stone

when i've lost all care for the things i own

that's when i miss you

that's when i miss you

that's when i miss you, you who are my home

you who are my home

and here is what i know now,

here is what i know now..

in your love my salvation lies

in your love my salvation lies

in your love my salvation lies

in your love my salvation lies

in your love my salvation lies

in your love, in your love, in your love....

well i had a dream i stood beneath an orange sky

yes i had a dream i stood beneath an orange sky

with my brother and my sister standing by

with my brother and my sister standing by

with my brother and my sister standing by

Sometimes

...i have these moments of utter bewilderment and incomprehension as
to how you simply are no longer here.you are nowhere. You have
vanished. It is not magic. It is shit.

leisure

is the name of surely one of the greatest albums of the 1990s....

you got the brilliant picture on the cover, of the crazy lady in the floral swimming cap....you got the band members sitting in some fields among some disinterested cows on the inlay...and you have she's so high, there's no other way, etc etc for your listening pleasure

it is also a common noun for something which i am finding quite hard to tackle at the moment

at times, not often,  i find myself left with an open weekend, a whole 48 hours of leisure...

its perverse, really, that one who historically has been so made up at the thought of un-booked time, so joyous at the prospect of no committments and the freedom to choose how to spend her time, can suddenly find the idea quite difficult. 

i realise more and more that my time in manchester was populated, easily-filled and pleasurable because of the sheer volume of choices open to me as to where i would go and with whom i would do what when i got there. the option of staying indoors was also pleasing, my beauty of an apartment at blair estates was a fine place to spend some coccooned time, no plans, no outings, just time, cooking, pottering and coffee....

here the options are far fewer in number, and it seems can only been elected in advance if they are to have any hope of resulting in good times....

this frustrates me and pains me slightly, i am not used to a whole weekend that centres around one plan, one pub trip, one coffee time or some such....

today i am rather feeling the lack of variety, which is bizarre, really, because today is also the day that i procured the follwing for myself:

a new phone

a new haircut

two new skirts

one pair of new trousers

one new cardigan

lots of new haircare products

lots of new skincare products

a new make-up bag

and yet you see it is newness of conversation in nice places that i most like on my weekends....so here i am and its eleven-thirty on a saturday night, kinda bored!

n'est ce pas?

you give good gifts to me

i pray that i receive them well

so pass the cup of suffering

and let the oil of joy be poured

i'll say - 

god is good

god is good

we love your purpose, father

we want the glory to be yours,

so pass the cup of suffering

and let the oil of joy be poured

we'll say - 

god is good

god is good

i do like that song, very much

so..

..am thinking that it is about time i began to think about working towards possibly getting re-acquainted with the lord...am missing knowing him and being found in him, learning of and from him.....and missing seeing truth before me and having certainties that i can be certain of. 

lots of things are about to change in the next wee while, such as me hopefully moving back to bristol in february.....leaving my family coccoon...this house where i have been so tended to and held in these last six horrible months....

i cannot tell you how this terrifies me. and also how much i want to live in bristol. in an apartment. with my kitchen things and my friend, and in a city i so want to be friends with. 

but old fears quiet slowly and new fears ever slower.....

and yet i feel some new shoots...snowdrops are one of my top five flowers....they are not yet to be seen but in a few weeks, i will go for some journeys through the fields and woods of this shire and see them in their early-spring meaningfulness.....

i miss god. i miss knowing that he can be and wishes to be my all, my waking and working, my laughing and loving, he wants to be in all of it. and i am tired of being in all of it without him

i have not the first clue where to begin to look for him. i know he cannot be far because he has been quietly ever so good to me in the valley....has shown lights of hope and glades of green calmness. ...he sat with me in the small hours, when i have not exactly turned to him but have simply known he must surely be there. 

i also know he is real now more than i ever have. i know he is good because he always has been. 

if anyone knows the way, give a girl a hand...

come all ye..

i am in my house, with tree and lights, and winter pimms.

there are people from our little road outside in the turning area, gathered in coats and hats singing carols and being merry together.

people keep asking me how i am, or how i think i am going to be, over these coming days.

he was going to be here you see, this christmas. the kids were due to be with their mother for christmas this year so he wanted to come here.

as you know, if you have been around these pages for any length of time, or been around me during this time of year, i love christmas the most. i love the detail of it, the routine and the surprise of it, the grandeur and luxuriousness of it, the music and smells of it.

and this year so far has held many of its usual charms. the sensory delights, the present-wrapping (i love that part..) and the figuring out how well you really do know your family in order that your present may be a joy to them and not just something else to find room in the house for....

what i have realised this evening is that being on my own or undistracted or unoccupied at this particular christmas season is probably not going to be the best thing. the silence is deafening.

i had a dream about him last night. probably only the second that i have had since 15/7....and to wake from it was, well, it was like losing him all over again.

this should now be qualified by saying that he was a GRUMP about christmas and drove me mad last year with his lack of enthusiasm for my favourite holiday....

tears stream

it just won't stop, this evening, lads...

out of nowhere, the crying came and now it goes on and on....

its bizarre. it stops for a minute but then its back on.

unbelievable

first aid..

so here it is...
the following is my smash hits poll winers of 2008, as ever a good three or four weeks before the end of the year, as per the -smash hits- regime...

the things i could not have survived this year without:

my brother, nicholas
my sister, fiona
sally
catelin
my phone
subway..chicken..hearty italian bread..foot-long with all the salad and sweet onion sauce..
-how to save a life-, the album, by the fray
gavin and stacey
the book of psalms
the 08:42 from the glos to the briz, everyday, sharp, monday to friday...
emily, who has been so faithful and phoned me every single week.....
the thought of that nose...
cigarettes
my mother and my father
my blog: the musings, the sheer volume of space, the comments and fans....
the knowing that i made him happier than he had ever been
the west wing, seasons 1 - 7 (twice..)
percol de guatemela..and the trusty travel mug for the train ride to work..
the daily emails from the forest crowd at work...
dara o'briain
facebook
No 7
my duvet
the peace that came from writing the eulogy..
the produce of the following musical artists:
dispatch
royksopp
scott matthews
arcade fire
stoney
elbow
john mayer
sigur ros

in addition, the knowing that if someone fell in love with me once, it might well happen again...
also, lavendar oil and tedious bill bryson books for the getting-to-sleep
also the australians, faithfully awake in the wee small hours!
dry dry dry white wine
the hope of moving back to the briz with one of my oldest and dearest in the new year...
stowfords
trof original everytime i have been in maanchester
the cheeky on-the-hop random googlemail/facebook chats that give a small lift, a word of love, a thought for the day or a genuinely-posed question as to my current state of well-being..
radio four

anyway, the end...

these are the things i cannot do without, and for your part in them i am most very glad..x

which dashwood are you?

i have recently been entertaining ideas about colonel brandon

i would like to air them here.

a disclaimer to cover and translate and clarify this whole post would be to say that i do not claim to have any immediate need for resolution or even process of this idea - that is to say, there is no man who has induced such thoughts, or sparked this particular bout of musing; these are thoughts that have come about through thinking about myself, and dear friend of mine....we were both mariannes in our youth and now i believe we may be finding the inner eleonor.

i am referring dear reader of course, to the sibling heroines of austen's -sense and sensibility-...i am referring, of course, to eleonor and marianne dashwood...

i cannot claim to be a great austennite, i am not sure i would ever want to be able to claim such. in fact i find the whole genre somewhat tiresome with its endless dramatizations and re-costuming...but i imagine that had i been a girl at her time of writing, i would have awaited her new books with such hope and probably some slight fervour, in the manner that i awaited a new blur album or christmastime book vouchers.....that replenishment of new sensory love, that stocking-up on new lyrical ideas and ficticious adventures.....that books and music alone can bring to me, film does not come close...nor pictures....not a visual learner, this one! i leave that to my catelin.

imagine, its 1846 (or whenever austen was around, i have no idea!) and you are 17, 18 years old....a girl...and austen is alive and writing in the world. imagine the thrill you would feel at knowing that you would open that newly printed volume to find a semblance of a stronger, freer, truer you, a you that felt your fetters but did not obey them or bow to her elders, a you that made time to read and study first and foremost, a you that would always rather see the scoundrel reformed out of love for you than marry a man you could guarantee would make you happy....

not so our eleonor...

you cannot help but love her. as maddeningly prim as she may be, as shriek-provokingly reserved, as much to blame for her own singleness as anyone else, you cannot help but love her.

but with marianne it is different, you can want to be her, she's the beauty, the flame, the siren of the household, still young and still not wordly, but free and impassioaed and poetic and romantic.

until perhaps you spend time with me and fiona you would not imagine that two sisters could be so different in real-life. she is eleomor to my marianne, always has been - and she, five years my junior!

as their story unfolds, and you watch like a car crash exploding and scraping and churning before your eyes as marianne falls in love and then finds herself betrayed, humiliated, abandoned and frankly, beside herself.

he is willoughby. he is wild and natural and unpretensious and adores shakespeare and speaks lyrically, with humour and flair, he has the capacity to adore and to express that adoration in public and dramatic ways. she falls for him the instant that he finds her, fallen and injured, up on the moor in a great storm. he lifts her as if she weighed no more than a twig! ensures she gets home, and call ths next day to check on her. 'what care i for colds when there is such a man!?' she is heard exclaiming, before he is even out of the house.....

the affair is mighty and tempestuous, they become close, shockingly close by the standards of the day, they are demonstrative and joyous in each-other's company.

eleonor finds it hard. not out of envy or embarassment, but out of concern for her sister. that terrible, grasping fear that one can only have for a sister, or a sister-like-friend, where you know that it is too late, and that you will be the one to help re-assemble her when it is over. she does not trust either him or her to be enough for each-other. she thinks practically at all times and looks to practicalities as excuses to not live her own life, to not live her own love or write her own story. she is the worker, the provider, the worrier.

but actually you know that she is in love, and that that love will take over her eventually, and that maybe for one moment she will allow herself sufficient freedom to let it out, let it breathe, let it be heard, received and returned.

when marianne's heart is, so coolly, so inevitably, so mercilessly broken, through the simple abandonment of her by willoghby for another, she grieves; she does this fully, intentionally, all-consumingly......it is worse than death to her - he chose not to love her anymore, he chose not to be hers anymore, but instead to adore another...

for marianne, this is the end of all that she has anticipated and longed for. it is the ruination of what she had always believed would be, when love came, the greatest acheievement and pursuit of her life, that to love would bring out the finest and best in her, that to be loved in return would be the most compelling, overwhelming and beautiful experience she could have to live through.

and now? what have i left?

well, colonel brandon transpires to be the most loving, attentive, adoring and impassioned surprise of a man that i have ever encountered in fiction. he has been secretly admiring her for the duration of the book, but would never have seen fit to offer himself to her, to ask anything of her, believing that she would not be tamed, that he would never be a match for her, that she would always want for more than he could love her with.

at her most broken he is there. not as an eager substitute, but as the one to whom she pleads 'you will not stay away long?' when he tells her he must away for a while......she soon needs him, she soon loves and wants him, with what remains of her she finds pieces enough to love again...

these may be seen as the leftover parts of her, the lost property, the shreds and shards of the whole that she used to be.....but i think that now i begin to see that the concentrated me is emerging, the essential, essence of that marianne, post willoughby, post death, post heart-break.....she becomes eleonor, she now sees love as something which must be beneficial as well as romantic, must be continuous and constant as much as it must be tempestuous, must be chosen as much - if not more - than it must be an involuntary falling.....

anyway, those were my thoughts...

there is

something tragically oxymoronic about having to put a double duvet cover on by yourself

mmmm

so today i ordered my very own copy of the extra special box set of lovely christmas music by the magnificent sufjan stevens....if you do not have it, you should re-think that....

+/-

so on the way home from fake london christmas yesterday i was thinking about how it was my worst and best fake christmas ever. i laughed more than i have before, the dinner was the best one we've ever managed and i felt honestly christmassy which was quite a feat given the earliness of it all....but i missed my boy, who at last year's faux noel was a newcomer, and who loved every minute of it...

and then while on the bus heading out through west london i was enjoying a song and grinning and tapping my toes and wishing i was driving myself in my own car so i could sing out loud to whatever it was....minutes later it was -covered in rain- on the ear-phones and i was doing the quiet-stream-crying that i have perfected during the hours of train-rides i have survived between here and the briz over the last few months.....and i realised that this is a fairly neat summary of the bizarre, other-worldly experience that grief starts you on and carries you through and semi-ruins you with...

there is simply no telling what may occur from one moment to the next. its like a very natural, hugely understandable form of something bi-polar, and i think that for me the balance weighing against the sheer devastation of it all, is the memory of his nose, his eyes, his skin, his shoulders, his children, his care for me, his speedy walking, his disehevilled appearance, his endless supply of trivial facts and his determination from day one that i was the one for him.

devastating, somehow equally....

i think that i have overcome my fear of it; i no longer panic at the ups and downs of it all. i no longer find myself gripped by the idea that it might never end. i know that it is not only unavoidable but that this mourning, this missing and this weeping is ultimately what will produce (and i think i may say tentatively, has already begun to produce..) the morning, the new skin over wound, the new scope for plans-yet-made...the new love for jesus who, it turns out, really does save....


i am still having the odd bill bryson night here and there (i read bill bryson and his tiresome, humourless anecdotes when i am unable to sleep...) but you know, advent is upon us, and you know how i adore advent...a time for expecting to hope again.....and again....and again...

pleeeease

can someone with a brain help me deal with this white-line business....?!

public service announcement..

so pals i discovered something recently that perturbed me somewhat so i thought i would share...

when you are a user of facebook, your information can only be seen by the people you permit it to be seen by, non?

unless...

...you are listed as being part of the facebook platform.

if you are listed as being part of the facebook platform, anytime someone googles your name, the results now almost invariably start with your entry on facebook. yes that's right, members of the platform are visible as being facebook members, including network and a selction of your friend-list (including their profile pictures) to the whole world, whether they are even users of facebook or not, let alone friends of yours on facebook or not!

"what is this platform of which you speak?" i hear you ask

anytime you add one of those wretched applications, you sign up to it.

so all those uber-pokes and travel maps and sending someone a graffiti fish, - that's the platform.

get off them now or people can see you on the internet who you haven't given permission to be able to see you on the internet!

its a difficult road we tread, this information superhighway. it has many pitfalls. this i believe is one of them.

sometimes

someone writes something that i find so compelling that i feel as though i am in the story, that i am the character, that the memories are mine or that i can hear, see and smell as their own fictional senses do.

other times, someone writes something, and i really do know a bit about being in that particular kind of story.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/nov/18/organ-donation-health-policy-transplant

i could not ever have described the transition from the old life to the new life any better myself...