Secret Agent Artist

I like Bank Holiday Mondays in bookshops
drinking coffee and reading library books.

I’ve never understood the way they sell sunglasses,
or The Daily Mail - but I like that they keep

a small grand piano for miniature playing.

I like watching men in suits buy guides to Italy
from attendants with butterfly painted faces.

I like the pensioners on three for two
and the kids colliding in biographies.

I like the cycle home,
summer heat hitting shoulders.

I like Bank Holiday Mondays.
Dislike Tuesdays.

It was bound to happen really. Mega activity … complete crash.

Today was my first day off in about a fortnight - unless you count Sundays, but even on those I tend to be doing work stuff. I went to bed at about 4am last night, woke up with Damo at 9am. Then went back to sleep until 12.

The day has consisted of mostly sleeping. I did go out for lunch; to the magnificent Go Juicy, where I also bumped into my friend John. After that I bought some sunglasses - and wore them all the way home - and back to bed.

There were some other interludes, in between the sleeping. While out, I tried on several pairs of jeans and 2 t-shirts at TK Max. But I did so in the way a colour blind person might select paint - with little interest. I was like someone in the midst of a drug filled haze. I wandered around, looked at stuff, though not a great deal, then wandered back to the nice safe place, with the no people and soft pillows.

Back at home, I answered a few emails, and in my defense didn’t get back into bed with the intention of sleeping. I did, in fact, finish the P.S Publishing book Damo got sent to review.

The Last Book’ by Zoran Zivkovic - was very, very good. A lot like Haruki Murakmi. Per edition, PS books are much more expensive than your average hard back - but they’re a real pleasure to read. No dust jackets - printed covers, beautiful textures and writers and titles I don’t think you’ll find elsewhere. They’re also less likely to get creased up when you fall asleep next to one…

Right now, its a bit after 10pm. Me and D went to dinner, across the road to Ravoli. I do sound decadent don’t I? I wouldn’t have minded cooking actually - but I just wanted to see the world after all that sleeping. Going into Ravioli at 9.30, results in being the last customer and so not too popular with the owners. And then we nearly forgot to pay for the raita. But Ravioli makes such good stuff.

I’m back to work tomorrow. Jean Binta Breeze is doing a workshop at the art exhibition I’ve been curating: Future Bright. Really looking forward to it - and as I’ll do the workshop as well as make sure it happens ok, it won’t really feel like work.

This is becoming a very long post, maybe I’m trying to make it long to put people off reading down this far. I think what I really wanted to say you see was actually that I think my complete slump today has been something about exhaustion - but also, something about being at a loss. I think I’d very quickly get extremely depressed is it wasn’t for my work. There’s something comforting and actually easy about it rhythm and content. Take it away and I start thinking about the messier stuff. Where’s it all going? What am I doing creatively? Where’s it all going.

Oh dear. Well, tomorrow evening, I’m going to do some poetry at Sugarshack. I might blog about it.

We can’t still
be awake - sitting on the sofa
with the cushions, pushing,
into the backs of our knees
like blanket stitching weed or poison ivy.
There are pink marks, like pressure sores
from sleeping in. This is enforced sleeplessing,
the army would be proud - would shine
bright lights into our eyes, lightly thumb
the purple bags. But we don’t sleep.
Like vampires we just sit -
on sofa cushions, pushing
sleeping hours away unclaimed.
We write, like someone else might pay
for words we scratch onto our screens -
not just us.

I think I may just have discovered the worst TV program, ever made. It’s called Golden Balls.

I’m sitting in Ravoli - this take out/eat in place on Welford Road: I’ve taken to eating my dinner in there because I burn toast and am too lazy to try harder lately. They have a TV. It plays…whatever. The take out place has no discernment - unless of course the owners are taking time out to eat, in which case it’s cricket. But anyway.

Golden Balls is a gameshow presented by Jasper Carrot. When I was a child, Jasper Carrot was a household name: a comedian with his own primetime show - Carrot Uncanned. Now, he is doing this. I feel sad for Jasper Carrot. I am sitting, eating my paneer kebab thinking - this is a sad paneer kebab - Jasper, how did this happen?

It’s hard to be specific about the rules of Golden Balls. It has something to do with lying to your competitors. It has something to do with each contestant having in front of themselves a series of lined up golden balls. They have to guess - I think - which balls have money in them. They are Cassandras for the Daily Mail reading generation.

In the final, two women sit opposite each other, balls between them.

One says “I feel drawn to this one…but I’m not sure..”

the other one says “No go ahead, I trust your judgement”.

Judgement???

The take out proprietor asks me if I’m watching Golden Balls. He doesn’t know that it is called Golden Balls. I piffle at him. As if I would watch this crap. So he changes the channel. Back to the cricket. I miss who wins. I miss how it ends.

Yesterday was a really odd day. Mostly nowadays, my days are good. Up beat happyish affairs. Not to sound too idyllic - but there are sometimes runs, often cups of tea. There are pieces of cake. There are episodes - of the Sopranos. So, yesterday came as not entirely welcome. Odd mood. Tearful. Like the whole world was going to end. Obviously, it got better.

It got to the end of the day and I’d been planning on doing the Live Box (poetry jamming session) down at The Y Theatre - but in my then present mood, I was starting to have doubts. Getting up on stage, moving and shaking and performing over live jazz - in a mood like a mud scraped shoe - didn’t seem like the best plan I’d ever had. Like alcohol you know - if you’re down, you should probably leave it alone. However, the alternative was staying in. And stewing. And we’d completely run out of Sopranos episodes.

So I went. And it was wonderful.

This month’s band was a group called Z-U (pronounced Zu). When I got down there the audience wasn’t the fullest it’d ever been - none of the Leicester artist crew (as I’ll call them here) had made it along. But Sureshot had, and so had I.

The music was dense like a concertina. Multi-layered like a mille feu. The group was a proper jazz trio. Base guitar, sax and drums and as the first song played it was liked stepping into a snowstorm - notes buzzing everywhere, tingling down your spine in tiny explosions. As the set continued, things started to settle down a bit. Melodies started to edge forward, but all the time there was that same energetic tension of sound on the edge of freestyle.

In the second half there were only 4 Live Boxers. Me, Sureshot, a drummer and guitarist. Sureshot did his blues for black. I put a couple of new pieces together (Strawberry and Oboe) and just went with it. Had such fun and we seemed to go down well.

Afterwards, people came up and asked if we often performed together. Nearly said no, but then realised that we actually do. Obviously, The Freedom Showcase - but nowadays also every live box - and we often travel to gigs together. I love performing with him

The band were so cool. Afterwards we sat talking for ages and they invited us down to the Birmingham Drum, to live box with them next Sunday. Definitely, definitely, definitely. Also gonna see if I can get more of a crew together though…

Readers of my boyfriend’s blog will know that he’s always posting up one exciting publication or other (clever bugger Well, guess what?! I’ve got some!!

Click here to go to Great Works - a groovy online journal, edited by Peter Philpott. If you stroll down the side bar you’ll see some of my work.

Also, just this morning - an acceptance from Goblin Fruit for Chicken Ship! Very excited as not only do I really like the journal, it was also mentioned in Ellen Datlow, Gavin Grant and Kelly Link’s ‘Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror’. The piece will be appearing in the journal this Summer and they’ve asked me to do a recording to go with it. I also have to say what my favourite fruit is

How much cake
is ok to eat
at one sitting?

Does it make a difference
if it’s dinner, or the middle
of the afternoon? Oh!

I’ve just had two
grainy slabs of chewy cake.
One made with carrots,

the other fruit.
If you buy them from the shop
with the health food -

does it stop them being unhealthy?
If you have them at 5
then later have supper

If you drink them with tea
and then go to sleep,
content as a guppie-

Surely, that can’t be wrong?

ARgh. Anyone who’s read this blog for a while will kwno that in the past it may have represented me as someone almost entirely obsessed with whether or not they are getting enough sleep. This is because, the rate at which I blog - and often even write poetry! - often increases during stretches of insomnia.

I wake up at 3.30/4am - that sort of time - and not being able to get back to sleep, instead start tapping into Muttering. Unsurprisingly, the content this makes for is not entirely scintillating for the reader. Unless of course the reader is another blogger, also tapping into their own Muttering, unable to sleep and equally obsessed with the fact.

It’s not going to take you a huge stretch of the imagination to work out the point of this post. I woke up at 3.30am, couldn’t get back to sleep, so got up. It’s nearly 5 now and I’ve even had a bath. I’m freak. I know, I know, I don’t need you to tell me.

I also have a number of fairly sleep deprived poems, all on the same subject. As I said, it makes for an alternative slant on what my work’s about. Actually, maybe that’s what it really is about - early morning rising and sleep deprivation, lots of poems about.

And relationships, of course.

First day off for ages today.Technically, yesterday should’ve been as well, but work of one sort or another keeps piling up. Yesterday it was stuff for the NHS Art Show I’m organising. It seems to be generating enough work for an entire job, let alone the other 15 projects I’ve got in motion, well, ok, maybe not 15 but it’s probably quite close to that. Then there’s the writing.

Ah the writing. I really should be making proper time for it. Being theoretically part time at work should have left the space to have written an entire new collection by now, surely…but my output’s been fairly measly. Sigh. I think my mind’s probably on a number of other things, most of which I couldn’t write up here.

That’s the problem really, isn’t it? Y’know with public blogs. Obviously I,  and the other people that keep them get something out of the sharing nature of them, the invisible reaching out to people you’ll probably never meet…but then you’ve got to consider those you will! No offence people I know, there are things I’d tell you over coffee, but we don’t usually have an audiance, and rest assured (people I don’t know) there are things I wouldn’t even tell myself over coffee! That’s the problem. Public diaries are just a bit too public for those tight, wet things that sit on your chest like cold blankets…but secret ones, wouldn’t feel very satisfying.

For me, the point of writing is to communicate. Writing in a book then closing it up and shoving it under the mattress would feel a bit sad - like shouting into the wind, or into the most uncaring and unfeeling of places. In a way, communicating what you can’t say is the better option. Maybe I should have a go at writing some poems about it too! Those ones that are completely impenetrable and impossible to decipher, best of both worlds there!

I can contain myself no longer. I’ve done it, I’ve actually done it, deep breaths Lydia, deep breaths -

I’ve gone and bought a Mac Book Air !!!!!!!!!!!

Damo (BEAUTIFUL man that he is) has been helping me set up various applications and import all my old files over. Gone are the days where I’ll write in a conventional diary! Gone are the days where I’ll keep a conventional address book! I will now be using my envelope sized baby to manage my entire life!

Ooh-that actually sounded a bit scary…

Go! Mac Air, Go! We will be so happy together!

I didn’t tell you this before, but I actually spent my entire weekend, searching out my Macbook Air. I went all the way to Brum to get one (though to be honest, at the time I didn’t think it was going to be quite such a decadent purchase!)  In theory going to Brum should have made the purchase significantly cheaper than retail (I qualify for an educational discount cause of the teaching work I do, but it’s only available if you go to the main Apple shop) However by the time I’d worked myself up into enough of a frenzy to buy one,  it was 5pm. I’d got to the front of the queue, to proudly inform the nice man that yes, I’d like to purchase his finest Air - only to be informed that they’d sold out that morning-ARGHHH!

So. On Sunday (after helping beautiful Damo move boxes) I cycled through rain to catch the Leicester Apple Shop. Got there just as they were closing up - but - they told me (keys in door, exit blocked by mad dripping woman) that they did the discount there too!

Today, Monday, I was back, foolish cash card at the ready. All was going well - until they told me that unlike the Brum Shop they didn’t do the same big discount on warranty. ARgh!… D’you know what I did?

I BOUGHT IT ANYWAY!!!!

And I don’t even care!!

It even has it’s own beautiful little foam case!!

Go Mac Book Air! Go!!