Gill insisted that I got up with Lola this morning - she woke at about 7am and we got up at 7.20. I was feeling dead to the world. Somehow managed to make her breakfast, went upstairs, read her a few books on the sofa (actually, we read her farm book, then her farm book again, then her Morning Time book, then Morning Time again, then Morning Time again, then Morning Time again, then Caveman Dave, then Caveman Dave again, then Morning Time again, then Morning Time again, then the Farm book again….) before I ended up falling asleep with Rowan and Lola playing together.
Long, strange and rather troubled dreams… the kind that pick up from where you left off while awake. I was supposed to be looking after Lola, but kept falling asleep, and Gill kept trying to wake me up. At one point she pulled me off the platform that our bed is on and my limp body slumped down, head cracking on the floor. Later on, we were at the farmhouse in Switzerland. There was some kind of psychotherapist there. My mum and dad were there, various other relatives too I think. The therapist was asking us to remember the time when we were happiest in our life. Nothing really stood out, but he prompted and prompted. Moments from childhood started coming to me. The therapist got us all to find types of “double plants” (where two plants were growing intertwined) and to separate them out and throw them into a bucket of water - apparently one plant would sink while the other floated, and this would heal all kind of psychological wounds and reconcile us with out pasts, presents and futures. I had some moss with some little herby plant with arrowhead leaves growing out of it, and as I plucked them apart and tossed the parts into the bucket I was thinking of a time when I used to play with my cousins in their big sunny back garden in Haydon. I was overcome with a wave of nostalgic sadness, and I burst into tears. I started crying uncontrollably, and I could actually feel the weeping doing some good. Just as I was starting to get into my stride, the real world intruded - Gill was next to the sofa demanding that I wake up. This time, when she pulled my limp body off the sofa feet-first and my head cracked to the floor, it was for real, and I woke up feeling like I’d been on the verge of discovering something incredible and life-changing, and I just couldn’t help crying as I tried to shake away the sleep.
Went to see The Legendary Stardust Cowboy on Saturday, at David Bowie’s meltdown in the Queen Elizabeth Hall. He was awesome. Superlative. Far better than I had hoped to expect. An idiot-savant of screaming, yelling and bugles. Makes me want to play nothing but rockabilly music and shout a lot. In fact, I may do just that.
I managed to grab a few photos, though my battery was low. I was a bit miffed towards the end of the set when one of the ushers came up to me and asked me to stop using my camera. It wasn’t as if I was using a flash, like the dozens of occasionally slightly distracting people around me (who didn’t receive similar warnings), but of course unlike them, with their forward-pointing flashes, I was guilty of having an LCD screen which made me easy to spot and pounce on from behind. Grrr.
Woo! Not something I’ve ever thought about before but… Mal was talking about his Attention Defecit Disorder and I took this test to see… turns out I “may have ADD”. Hmmm. Surprised I even managed to make it through the 4 pages of the test.
Since the advent of Google Groups, I’ve got back into the habit of posting to newsgroups, at least in a small way. Funny, I never really used to do this with Deja (I think because I forgot the password to my account). It’s a bit of a hassle having to go back to the site to check for replies to my posts, and having to wait half a day for the posts to show up, but I got fed up with subscribing to newsgroups through Agent several years ago, when the noise to signal ratio just got too much for me.
I now use them pretty exclusively for solving computing problems, but I do relish the opportunity to have a bit of a duel once in a while, so it was nice (in a nasty way) when somebody took my post on alt.ecommerce as an opportunity to start lecturing me and ignoring my original request. Flame bait! I humbled him in ever such a gentle way, felt slightly bad at having done so (after all, he had taught me a few useful things), but then was very happy when I got posts off-list basically saying well done for the put-down, he was due for it: “He fancies himself quite knowledgeable in the world of business. If I could buy him for what he’s worth and sell him for what he thinks he’s worth I could retire a very wealthy man.”
Went to see The Closet with Gill tonight - it was lovely - very lightweight, but a really nice, feel-good movie, and it had me chuckling most of the way through. Some lovely little subtleties to it as well, like the way that Daniel Auteuil’s shifty bulging eyes as he walks into the office, just after one of the women he works with tells her colleague “I always knew he was gay. He looks at you sideways. Like a pigeon”. So many wonderful little pieces to this film, they don’t add up to any kind of magnificent whole but they do give you lots of warm glows.
S’funny. Last film I saw Auteuil in was Girl on the Bridge (awesome - beautiful, sexy, wonderful, exciting, gorgeous film) - well, this time around it was Auteuil who almost jumped near the beginning, and his elderly homosexual neighbour who came to save him and in doing so changed his life (I love the way he did it… “don’t jump, my car is underneath your balcony and you’ll damage it. It’s an old car, but the roof is still OK”, and then later “I lied, it wasn’t my car…. you should never be nice to depressives, it’s the worst thing for them”).
Whoah! Awesome! The Universe is a beautiful place.
I just signed up at Deviant Art… I’m MrFunction. It’s… I’m a bit unsure about the whole thing, firstly as I’m giving away some of my favourite photos and secondly because it’s all a bit… geeky… but it seems like a nice community, and it’s nice to get comments on my work (I posted 4 photos and within less than 5 minutes I had 7 comments on them).
I’ve also found some really nice work from other people - I especially like pretty much everything that this gal has done (her deviant art page is here).
Took some video of Rowan, Beth and Lola dancing the other day. Couldn’t resist digitising some (warning, 1.5Mb download - 59secs low quality MPEG)
Wow! Ever wondered what it’s like inside the mind of a deity?
I uploaded my photos from London this weekend into two new Life pages - People and Places and Things.
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