I’ve been tagged. I have no idea what a meme is but I will try to play. The wonderful Doc Susie tagged me, she of ‘Up the Hill Backwards’ fame and I have been told this is how you play. I have lifted the rules directly from her blog as she did to the chap who tagged her…and so it goes:
Zombie Carpet Training Day
It is sunny outside but inside the room with the florescent ‘dinky donk dink’ lights is chilly. Training. Doesn’t matter what it is for, the excitement palls in a room like this…and training is always done in rooms like this. I don’t mind the uncomfortable plastic chairs that look as if they could fall apart but are always heavy and difficult to lift (and you know you are going to have to lift them when it comes to those horrifically […]
Sprung Feet
On the radio today was a programme called ‘Go For It’, a children’s programme with the presenter Barney Harwood. Today they had several children in talking about grief and loss with the children’s poet laureate, Michael Rosen, who had lost his son to meningitis. I sat with my hands over my face trying not to get tears on my keyboard (a recurring hazard these days) listening to them so sweetly grappling with the intricacies of grief. One child turned to […]
Getting In Step
I have a dark and painful family secret. I finally can take the shame no more . It is time to drag back the blackened curtains and let the light come streaming in and so, with immense (even if I say so myself) strength of will, I take a first step towards releasing myself from the terrible burden…..
Cojones!
OK so no blog for a while..sorry… It has been a combination of having soggy brain and the fact I got wimpy after seeing an interview of Upcoming Handsome Norwegian-English Author in a Sunday paper. In the article the young chap (interesting childhood, overcoming some adversity or other, speaks at least four languages) sat looking moody with the sun streaming through his (slightly receding) golden curls whilst the journalist twittered on about his sexiness, intellect, his ability to articulate humanities […]
Get Knitted
‘Control’ is a film that has been much acclaimed in the past few months. It is about the gifted but tormented lead singer of a band called Joy Division who hanged himself at the age of 23. (Did I conjucate ‘hanged’ correctly? )
Ga Xao Xa Ot
It s Sunday evening and the batteries in my eyes need replacing after another few hours transcribing and fiddling around with interviews on this computer. It’s been a strange week. The Middle East a suppurating sore on the radio and the bizarre ghoulish discoveries at the old children’s home in Jersey. That story…..! I think back to how helpless we were as children at boarding school; parents 5000 miles away, letters checked by staff and no access to money or […]
Barking
Cambridge did itself proud today, bright and sun full and sharply chill with high, blue skies. It felt a little treacherous looking out of my window at it all, sitting with my headphones on and listening to play back of the interviews I had taken one night on the banks of the Kafue river in Zambia. The bush is noisy at night. Tree frogs, crickets, night jars, jackals, hippo and a far off lion sing, hoot, shriek, giggle and call […]
Zambia Trip Part 1
Japanese cars. Thousands of bloody cheap Japanese cars in pastel colours all called things like ‘Big Horn’ and ‘Yakult’ (well…possibly) have been flooding into Zambia and now in the capital Lusaka the traffic grinds into grid-lock twice a day every day. There is much building work too. Many of the derelict sites that had been there when I left 4 years ago have been bought up, tarted up and stuffed with glass. The supermarkets have almost everything (bar pork pies) […]
Mosquito blues
Today on the news they were discussing the very British method of keeping teenagers as murderously miserable and as isolated as possible. The method, invented to keep the teenage riffraff away from ‘volitile’ areas such as street corners and shopping areas in case they run riot and graffiti everything or stab everyone or, god forbid, demand some kind of loving respect and equality, is called ‘the mosquito’ and is a sonar weapon that a Bond villain would be proud. It […]