Disconnected || The Creative Pandemic

I wrote another blog post for The Creative Pandemic called Disconnected, about moving house and not having the internet. You can read it in full here or further down below. 

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DISCONNECTED

The feeling of being disconnected.

I have not had this in a while, maybe when lying in a hospital bed and thinking about all the fun that my friends were having out there, in the summery sun-kissed world. 

(I have moved into a house with the love of my life – I feel like I should precursor this mope with my own context, by the way, I am happy.)

At the moment we have no internet and are busy moving-in; painting, decorating, searching, planning, eating, etc. My mind is taken up by all manner of things like, ‘Where the hell is the dustpan and brush?’ and, ‘Why is this microwave so complicated?’

And yet, when it comes to the witching hour, a term I heard from a friend who has recently given birth, which is when daylight warps into dusk and babies find it disturbing and cry, I get the heebie-jeebies wash over me too.

It’s a certain sinking feeling you get, as if you were in a cavernous auditorium and the lights are being switched off one by one from the back. It’s the encroaching darkness that dampens my mood. It’s why the Danes have hygge, right?

I feel even more out of joint from my normal routine. I have no internet, so can’t check my inbox for unread mail. Usually this means nothing to me, but this is not the deep truth because they do mean something to me, they are my normality. 

I usually unlock my phone out of habit like sighing deeply after climbing a hill, and when I see those red notifications my pulse rate lowers, then I carry on. Even if I return the device to the crevices of my pocket without checking them, it does the trick.

I was never aware of this sort of dependency. I watch my drinking, I watch my sugar intake, but do I watch the number of times I light up my phone for no reason? Pretending to check the time and date although I can’t seem to hold it in my head for more than the split second it took for the light to flash on and off. But the colours of my friends on my wallpaper brighten up my boredom to give me a hit of happiness in these gloomy times.

 

Friday 13th November (moving house)

NON-WORKING DAY in the Outlook calendar

I get Fridays off since my company had to cut staff pay because of Covid-19. Although it’s a good thing for me today because I am moving house!

During the week I boxed up all of my belongings, carefully un-hung pictures from the wall and wrapped them in clothes, so they were less likely to break. I loudly peeled brown tape off the roll and fastened cardboard packages in between headset meetings and Excel formulae frustrations. The sense of relief I felt when I put my ancient work desktop in a box and taped it shut was telling. 

It’s a really odd experience waiting to move into a house (that my boyfriend purchased, so by proxy is our house) when you’ve never owned a place before. The Offer was accepted in the Spring, the Exchange was promised for the end of September, then pushed-back to October and finally in November it happens. All of a sudden, which is why it feels a bit out-of-place, like when you steel yourself for a big non-event. Friday 13th at 2pm is the Completion.

‘What does that mean?’ 

‘It’s when we get the keys! And all the money for the house that I sent to Tim [the lawyer] has been completely transferred to the sellers.’

‘All that money. Gone.’

‘In exchange for a house.’

‘A whole house!’ 

Friday comes and I am ready. Too ready. I have nothing to do until I meet A in Woolwich for the 2pm deadline. I also have no stuff to distract myself with because they are all in boxes. 

I take my yellow rucksack holding my essentials (wallet, phone, keys* – though not the correct ones. *Do you ever leave the house with the wrong keys for your house? There must be a riddle in there somewhere…) plus toiletries and a change of clothes; under one arm my yoga mat, under the other a sleeping bag. Tonight, we stake out the new house expecting all manner of disasters to befall us upon collecting the keys e.g. the previous tenants are still there, or it’s unliveable due to flooding/swarm of locusts/etc. 

It’s one of those mild November afternoons with a mixture of rain and sunshine. I catch the DLR to Greenwich then a train to Woolwich, heading on foot to Europe’s largest Tesco in the town centre, where I’ll rendezvous with my lover to walk into our new house. What a sentence. But first, before we do probably the most exciting thing of our lives, we push a trolley around Tesco buying cleaning products and the most humdrum stuff. A family size pack of pasta, eggs, dustpan and brush, olive oil, cooking oil, table salt. I realise while pushing the trolley down the tea aisle asking A, ‘What coffee do you drink?’ that this may be the last time I ask such questions. I ask him, ‘What milk do you normally get?’ ‘Green top organic.’ ‘Cool, me too.’ I believe we live pretty similar lives, so there’s no need for trepidation, it is mainly amusement at this point that soon we will just be drinking the same coffee apropos of living together. It’s also not like he isn’t allowed to change his habits and start drinking oat milk, I don’t think I would care – but as a live-in partner you might care, or at least be aware that a change in milk drinking habits may portent a bigger shift in temperament or political views. 

Two o’clock. We are walking down a busy road to the estate agents. We walk past the house which is soon to be ours along the way. It looks like a brick-and-mortar house, that’s good, glad we got that right in the first and only ever inspection we made of it, which lasted around twenty minutes. House-viewing is like the most high-stakes speed dating! 

The estate agents are closed (because of covid) but we ring the bell, and someone comes to answer the door. A tells them what we’re here for and she asks him to show his ID through the half-open doorway. Once that’s done, she asks us to wait a minute and then Spencer, who looks and smiles just like an estate agent greets us. He hands us a wad of keys and says have a good time. Simple as that. We walk back over a little park and a flock of pigeons flash mob us and then we’re home.

Getting a key to turn in a lock that’s not familiar to us takes several attempts. I’m a bit worried the keys don’t work. What a stupid view to take when you’ve been handed a set of completely foreign keys to blame the keys for not being able to open a door they’ve been opening for years. Of course, the keys work after our tenth try, then I hop over the threshold. We’re in!

The house is clean to they eye. The sellers left us their lawn mower in pride of place in the middle of the living room, as they’d stated they would in the List of Contents. The rest of the house is pretty amazing. Without the furniture and decorations of the previous owners the features speak for themselves. I never noticed that above the front doorway there was Victorian plasterwork. Or how the two fireplaces have very distinctive colours, almost like characters who are introducing themselves to you as a couple, but with very individual tastes. One is a deep blue and the other a burnished green, like ocean and earth or something complimentary, like wine and beer. I had wanted to paint the living room dark green, and A had wanted to paint the dining room blue after the Offer was accepted, and I only realised now that the fireplaces had persuaded us to do so, tactfully. 

The bathroom is not as tacky as I remembered. The walls are not covered in 00s mosaics, but tiny translucent blue glass tiles – it sounds like the same thing, but I promise you it’s not. We opened the veranda doors and could not get them to close properly again. We flicked on and off the wrong light switches waiting for things to turn on that didn’t, but other things did. It was like meeting someone you find fascinating for the first time.

***

That same day, we unloaded all of A’s family’s hand-me-down furniture. Four dark wooden block chairs with rattan seats, one Ercol chair with much varnish worn off, and nested tables with glass tops. There was one beautiful dark wooden coffee table with a story to go with it. When A’s mum Jeanette was a little girl her most favourite thing was her pen knife, and her mother’s most prized possession was this dark wooden coffee table. The two of them were talking one day around the coffee table, when Jeanette who was playing with her pen knife dropped it and it went slicing through the air and hit her mother’s table. Both of them looked on in shock. Jeanette felt sick with guilt. Her mother stayed silent for too long. The mother broke the silence by stating solemnly, ‘I saw what happened and it was an accident. And I bet you feel very guilty about it, so I won’t be angry with you.’ And for sure, when I stroke the surface of the coffee table, I can make out a clean nick. 

In the fading light of the afternoon, we manage to lock all the doors and drive over Blackheath to where I used to live. Luckily, we find a parking spot right in front of the house. As we load up my boxes into the large car, Alex comes out to help us do the heavy lifting. He is the most helpful man on earth and when we leave, he gives me an un-used paint roller, two paint brushes and a paint tray. It’s appreciated because we’re going to be painting the front room this week. I say goodbye to my old room, but I leave my bicycle behind, so I can come back and ride it home when it’s not raining. Of course, I feel a twinge of sadness to be leaving the House of Abundance, but my old room is in good hands, an OG is moving into it and when I return, it will look like a soulful club with dim lighting and swathes of vinyl records patterning the floorspace, and this will fill me with content. 

Stars over Porlock // Bold Types 2020 Finalist // Glasgow Women's Library

An essay inspired by a holiday with friends was shortlisted for the Bold Types 2020 competition held by the Glasgow Women's Library. It is called Stars over Porlock and you can read it here, or in full below:

Stars over Porlock

The night sky in Porlock was one of the best skies I have ever seen. I can’t tell you what constellations we were under, except for the Plough, with its axial handle jutting out across many light-years. Everybody was in good spirits, some were sat on the lawn with their coats spread beneath them, others were standing barefoot on the soft green grass. We were all looking up, my mouth was hanging open and I held my boyfriend’s arm wrapped around my waist. A bleat from a sheep travelled across swathes of farmland to us. 

    Perhaps this was the happiest holiday of my life. We were all about thirty years old, escaping to the country from grimy city life. It took three days for my snot to not be grey or flecked with pollution. My pores sang in the water! The water in Porlock was delicious and my first cup of tea there was like a beatification. I thought, how can this tea be so delicious (it’s unbranded?) then I found out it couldn’t – but the water could. Coming straight off the granite rocks; clear and mellow like drinking crystal liquid and my hair became softer and fuller too, like a well-groomed poodle’s.

    The stars were phenomenal. It was dark in Porlock and our house was cut deep into the valleys of Somerset. You could hear the distant roar of the sea rolling back and forth over the shingle beaches. In daylight, you could gaze across the garden down to the agricultural lands and then to the salt marshes, then onwards to sea. A flutter of sparrows rose into the air chattering in a frenzy. On the lawn we played Mölkky, a leisurely game where you throw a stick at a clump of other sticks (the Finn’s know how to have fun); Genny made us a tray of gin and tonics and towards the end of the holiday, a jug of sangria to ingeniously use up the surplus saccharine wine.

    The house held up very well. Full at the seams from the beginning with food, booze and friends spilling over into bedrooms assigned for couples, we eased into it, like a cat stretching out after a yawn. We gave each other pet-names like “Grandma Georgia” and the “Chaos Queen”. People took up their well-beloved roles, like Aidan who became the group’s map-bearer on our long country walks. Gee was the charming one, with all the quick-wit and haughtiness of a lifelong tenured butler. Everybody played a part and yet, we were not pigeon-holed. Caring, stubborn, excitable, cynical – all mad – highly entertaining and filled with a mutual respect for one another. How we managed this I’m not quite sure, but Georgia said to me at the end of the holiday aghast, ‘I thought at least someone would have a barney!’ No one particularly talked about work or politics and when they did someone would be good enough to shuffle the conversation along, to avoid any sparks turning into forest fires. Or maybe because there was a pandemic going on, there was less scrutiny or assurance given to such matters, they just didn’t seem important enough. We all felt grateful to be able to go away together with “more than friends” but “less complicated than family”.

    After the trip was over, I was telling my boyfriend’s father about it. He is a good listener, always nodding at the right tempo and reacting to titbits of my story. He has grey hair, a tall frame, and emanates those leadership qualities people long for in boardrooms. Halfway through my retelling of Porlock, something must have clicked in his brain and he began to delve into a memory of a good friend whom he had known since the Seventies. This friend is handsome, intelligent, a delight and on his fortieth birthday he hosted a big bash announcing to the world that this was his wedding day – because he would never marry! Champagne and confetti. The father chuckled, regretting not having more reunions like that when they had had the chance. He told me more about his friend who in the end did get married (a surprise to everyone who was at his birthday party), he had a daughter with his wife, but soon after they divorced… 

    While he told me this I was thinking in the back of my mind, ‘The 1970s is when Tarantino’s film was set; that’s when Patti Smith was getting famous; Joan Didion’s essays are about then.’ It struck me that when the father recounted things from his past, I conjured up a pastiche of different forms of media I had consumed. Famous photographs, movies and music, the nostalgia effect; and in turn, when one day I tell a younger person in the future about my holiday to Porlock, they will be reminded of something they saw once about a pandemic and a referendum; some protests and art.

    I felt then the future was slightly out of reach, my finger’s grasping at floating fresh threads. Everything was becoming and everything was remaining, all at the same time, the world was still and changing. When I am old my memories will be films to the young and their future, relics to someone else after them. I felt the world in a state of continuous flux, like the vivid landscape shimmering and the rolling waves pulsing – but the stars cut into the veil of eternity will outshine us. I let go of my breath and thanked the heavens because it made me feel at peace.

FEAR || The Creative Pandemic

I had a piece of writing feature in The Creative Pandemic titled FEAR, you can also read an earlier draft of it below. It's not very cheery; about the morose state of mind I found myself in when second lockdown was announced. 

FEAR 

I am afraid that this will last too long. 

Too long to be able to call what we once had normal. 

What if I refuse to adapt and live in denial; go in for hugs and be palmed off on to the pavement; what will they think? 

What on earth do they think? I think sadly to myself at home alone in my kitchen: nobody wants this so – what does that mean?

Eventually, we will become reckless and touch hands to face, to cough and splutter and inadvertently kill off the sick and elderly. How un-caring would that be, and could we live with ourselves after that kind of revolution?

I’m disgusted to even think of it and slam my glass down on the Ikea tabletop. I am not worse off, I’ve not been directly hit by this pandemic, so why am I sitting here being morose when there are people far worse off, dealing with poverty and a lack of space and being displaced. 

It puts me in an angry state, I feel caged in and helpless, I feel stupid and lethargic and incapable of doing anything good in the world. This whole thing makes me lose hope. 

I want to talk about the fear of not knowing. 

Not knowing whether what you are doing is right or wrong, or how you even feel about it in the grand scheme of things. People hope the government is doing the right thing, but of course they can’t be because no one knows what the hell to do, no one understands, there’s too much opposing data, too many questions that bring rise to more questions. 

Unlike a maths problem where there’s a cribsheet and fun to solve, the situation is forty thousand dead in eight months and the numbers are mounting. 

EXT. TREE LINED STREET - DAY

The diagnosis of covid is not black and white.

It’s much more complicated than what the public think.

Why aren’t we listening to the doctors who say that lockdown is going to cause more damage to public health than no lockdown?

Fatigue. That’s the big issue.

You mean post-viral fatigue syndrome?

No, the public’s feeling of fatigue.

 

INT. BASEMENT FLOOR KITCHEN - NIGHT

When was the last time you felt alive?

This very morning when I woke up alive and breathing, awake.

Is that what living is – being stuck in your locale, not communicating with society out of fear of infection? Is that really living?

When you put it like that, then no.

That’s what I’m talking about, man.

 

What if we learn to live small-y. Buy kittens, knead sourdough, prune plants and learn to forage mushrooms.

Get into home-schooling and cycle to work, get to know your neighbours and not rely on quick fixes to solve our mundane problems because we’re too poor to be click-baited all year round, out of season.

But what about the daters? 

I heard us couples became smug in our lockdown bubble o’ bliss. What about those of us who have to find a soul-mate, or someone to cuddle up to when the outside world seeps into your core. 

Penetrated by those desperate quiet stares of strangers sat across from you in train carriages, lips and softness smothered by a stretched piece of cloth. All you can do is swallow and hope that this will soon be over.

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Bonfire night

The other night was bonfire night, which coincided with the beginning of lockdown 2.0. I went for a walk while explosions happened all around me in the sky. The evening air was still and smoky; it was like I’d walked back through a veil of time. How the lamp light filtered through the autumn leaves and was held by the smog reminded me of period dramas, like in The Crown when they fill a dampened room with fake smoke to give it that stale, liturgical look of old Britain. There was no one else on the street. A blacked-out Range Rover stealthily crept up beside me, before uneventfully rolling away, perhaps the driver was looking at the fireworks too. Shots rang out! Peals of fuchsia swerved up from behind a brick wall to crackle into sparks and fade out over a garden wall. There was a bottom-heavy moon that night and its creamy glow effused in contrast to the vivid smattering of lights.

Middle class adult

 

I have spent so much time with myself these last couple of days, culminating in me thinking, ‘wow I am a full-time middle-class adult’. There have been moments when I’ve doubted myself, but really this is what I am. I have no qualms, I like who I am, but it is disquieting to catch your own reflection fragmented through many forms of media. You must know what I mean.

I have started to make sourdough. Not only does my housemate have his own bubbling culture, which I easily scooped off to make my own sourdough baby, but I have many people in my close circle / rule of six menagerie, who would let me do the same.  I am very grateful and inundated with tips. Sourdough is a bastard but it’s also a baby; making me set an alarm on my phone for half hour intervals, when it needs feeding or folding.

I started to research ethical home appliances. If you’d care to know Electrolux have this campaign called the Better Living Program with a concept-trailer which is basically aimed entirely at me. I love it, obviously. Although I don’t get why in the non-Anglo-American sites this scheme of machines is called The Green Collection and not the Better Living Program. I wondered why we were so lifestyle aspirational that we needed a continuous verb to bolster my purchase of a vacuum cleaner. Other countries are clearly on board with greener living, easy peasy – costs more but it’s cleaner – but for me, I need to know that what I’m doing is making my life “better”.

I watched a BBC Four documentary. It was about Black British artists and why they’re overlooked or get pigeon-holed, to be forgotten and side-lined by the art world. I did not know that the first Black Female artist to win the Turner Prize happened in 2017, Lubaina Himid, who was 65 at the time and had been making art for decades. Imagine, doing your thing for 30 years and then being the first of your kind to win the thing. I sat drinking my wine, shaking my head.

 

Simon's speakers

I took photographs of Simon’s speakers, which are downstairs in our basement/living room. They are very beautiful objects that he handcrafted with his friend, John, who is a carpenter. While I photographed them; getting the right set-up and focussing in on the warm wood grain, I was totally reminded of the Oceanic art-objects I pored over in my master’s degree. Specifically, malanggan from New Ireland, which are elaborately carved wooden beings that house spirits. These are ephemera that also act as agents in Melanesian society, which is what also made me think of the speakers. I mean, they’re beautifully crafted objects that house the spirit of music, and what has more agency than that? 

Simon’s speakers are what give life to parties – without them people wouldn’t want to stay downstairs, into the small hours of the morning. Whenever he plays his vinyl the housemates congregate to listen, unwittingly sometimes yet the timbre and resonance hold us there. While I took close-ups of Simon's speakers I kept in mind the story of makers in Inuit society, who extended their personhood into art-objects as they crafted them, so that the maker and the made are part of the same thing. If you didn’t do that, they said, the object would never become true.

Simon said this about making his speakers

It took me about five or six years to get all the parts, from eBay – searching online; the drivers are from America. The design is from the 1960s, these loudspeakers were the ones used for public speaking. Lots of people get the parts and make their own speakers. Once we got everything (just before my thirtieth birthday) we decided to build them. Building took about two weeks – it was quick because John ran out of space in his workshop, so for a time the speakers lived in my clinic. My patients would ask, ‘What’s that?’ when they came in to see me.

The wood is walnut and valchromat, an environmentally friendly MDF that’s coloured all the way through. Ours is yellow, so we put wood oil on it to enhance the colour – at first, we used the wrong type of oil so it went really brown, looked like a turd. We had to sand it back down and then this time we used yellow oil and it worked. It wasn’t my first choice to go for these expensive woods, and the walnut weighs a tonne, so I can’t carry the speakers around like a sound system, but John wanted to got for the aesthetic choice. Even though the speakers are really heavy they’re beautiful.

They became the object they wanted to be, I guess. They’re never leaving this room though – we got them down the stairs with about an inch to spare.

Rice

In my kitchen while pottering around I put the leftover rice from the curry last night into a bowl and pour hot water over it (I don’t know where I learnt this). I think it’s an interpretation of Japanese ocha-zuké, where you pour green tea over cold rice, adding some condiments to make it into a palatable refreshing gruel. It’s to decrease waste – my Obaachan absolutely hated wasting anything – a child of The War. If there’s rice stuck to the bottom of the pan then simply add water, put it on the heat and stir. Throw in chopped cabbage, ginger, maybe a dash of soy sauce, spring onions. Why not crack an egg? Don’t you worry, I know what to do with leftover rice.

I use both hands to lift my bowl and carry it surreptitiously into our garden, tiptoeing across the patio slabs so as not to get my feet dirty. I manoeuvre onto the wicker chair and listen to the birdsong trilling. Energetic weeds push up between the slabs – they must’ve gone through a growth spurt during this hot spell – peach coloured roses droop from their stems and the lavender is buzzing. I pull my spoon around the bowl and up to my mouth to get the intense salty taste of chicken stock, the spicy tang of curry cubes and the wholesomeness of white rice.

This is the first time I’ve stayed in London over summer. My world has shrunk enormously, just like everyone else’s and eating food has become an event. Slowly my mind feels like it’s being re-wired to approach situations differently, with more time and flex, simply, the world seems more bendy.

I’ve lived here all my life and still the habits of Obaachan bubble up inside me. For an eighty-six-year-old she moves pretty fast. She might be talking to you from the kitchen, but when you reply she’s already out in the back-garden sweeping the paving stones. I can never keep track of her movements in her own home because that is her domain. Her hair is tightly permed framing her robust face like a cropped lion’s mane; she usually wears an indigo smock with a fetching owl motif over her clothes when she executes her cleaning rituals. Every morning Obaachan gets down on her hands and knees and wipes the floorboards; vacuum-cleans the carpets, both upstairs and downstairs. I caught her once, astride the bath-tub in oversized wellingtons (to stop her feet from getting wet), reaching up to the corners of the ceiling with a mop. I told her to get down carefully and never do it again. What if she were to slip and crack her head on the side of the solid stone bath? She bared her teeth and laughed at me, saying she would never do it again. As if I believed her.

I speak to my grandma every Sunday, although since lockdown it’s been more frequent – it was the best thing we did getting her a smartphone. When I see her pixelated world on my screen it reaffirms for me that another reality can exist. I see the rice-grass spun rope hanging from the kami dana (shrine) in her living room. This small wooden shrine is a house for the many gods, or kami and is positioned just below the ceiling, so when Obaachan holds up her camera phone, the kami dana floats above her head in the background. On the altar stands two vases of freshly cut leaves, a cup of water, and salt on a white porcelain dish. It’s something special that over the many earthquakes her house has endured the kami dana has never come crashing to the ground. I examine the background while talking to her and occasionally I’ll convince myself that her world and my world are not contradictory. Even though our cultures are different, I perfectly understand us.

This physical distance that’s been imposed on us is not too dissimilar from how we used to live. I only get to see her once a year – meeting only once a year isn’t enough when you’re over eighty – we both know realistically there’s not many years left. But this virus has made plans uncertain, a mental breach of something we both held so dearly, the promise of seeing each other again. Missing someone like that isn’t something you can do every day, otherwise the pull gets too strong and becomes a strain. It wears you down and you start to lose hope. So, as long as Obaachan keeps cleaning and I stick to my work… holding the bigger picture in my head, we will share a meal together again. It will be alright.

We have a rice-cooker in Japan, which Obaachan uses every day. Usually she cooks 1 gō of rice for herself (approximately 1 cup) because rice doesn’t keep, but when I’m visiting, she cooks up to 5 gō a piece. ‘Rice tastes better when you are here’, she says to me because the grains become fluffier with a greater volume of water and cooking time. A pang of pity swells inside me because I am reminded, every day she eats alone. Obaachan who is such a good storyteller, captivating us with her funny asides and character voices. Why does she have to eat alone? Because her eldest daughter emigrated to England, her younger daughter married-out to another man’s family as is the way, and her husband died.

I think about her now as I eat my rice. The two of us separated by thousands of miles – it’s not impossible – we could be eating rice at the same time. Not in the same place but in the same present performing the same actions, as in a ritual, finishing off a half-drawn circle; stirring my spoon around the bowl’s edge, tasting the sacred white rice.

HEROINESWAVE EXHIBITION // The Enclosed Garden

I am part of an online feminist exhibition called The Enclosed Garden. It is a very intricately crafted website, so take a  s l o w  look around.

My essay and audio piece which is about alienation is called "Seeds Of" and is in Room 2.

Windy

I like it now with the wind blowing through the house, through open doors and windows, slamming them shut before someone has time to close it. I couldn’t sleep in the heat. The heat which gets all the more trapped in red brick houses, felt like being in a stone oven. I tried to sleep naked on the cold wooden floor, but the floorboards just heated up from my body temperature. I opened the door to the back garden and drowsed on the white pleather sofa, but a mosquito came screeching in my ear, so I slapped my head and went back to bed.

 

Today the wind is whipping everything about. Watching out of the garden door as the red tree on the left-hand side meets branches with the tall bamboo grasses on the right-hand side. Swaying like they’re drunk and shaking their leaves off. I had to prop up the tomato plants, which have shot up and tried to grow too many fruits. The ambition of all of Annina’s tomato plants she left in our care is hard to contend with, but I’ll do my best to help them along. I pruned their boisterous bottom branches and used twine to hold their necks up on sticks. I had to pull three snails off our flowerpots – both impressed and grossed out by their sucker-strength.

 

We have gained a new housemate and a spider recently. The spider (whom I have named Serafina) hovers above the kitchen stairwell and has her web in the window, which is finely constructed and equally distributed across the pane. She sits in the middle of it waiting for prey, but every time I’ve passed her abode, I’ve not seen any flies or insects caught in her net, but on my side of the house at the top of the stairs there are loads of midges. I wonder if she’s made a fool’s choice building it out there, but we shall see.

 

I open the double-doors to my bedroom (purpose built to be a sitting room) and the wind rushes past, scattering papers across my desk. It’s so breezy and blustery in here, like being on the prow of a ship – a Post-it stuck to my ugly work monitor flapping like a sail. I unfurl my sleeping-bag onto the floor and lie down, listening to the whooshes of the wind outside.

 

There is an enormous bush outside my bedroom window, which is very noisy – for a bush. A flutter of sparrows descend onto it every day and chirrup for ages, like a full theatre audience chattering loudly amongst themselves. At night, usually after midnight a family of foxes eat take-away under the bush, ripping open treated cardboard and crunching through discarded chicken bones, falafels and chips. Occasionally a group of people hang out in front of the bush, between 2-3am with drinks. I overhear everything they’re saying, as if we were in conversation because they don’t realise that the bush they’re cotching in front of is actually hiding my open bedroom window. I’ve heard of scandals about stolen money and loved ones who’ve moved away. It’s sad come to think of it and lying awake I’ve wished that I were dreaming and not hearing the real life tales of strangers in a bind.

 

The gusts of wind continue to rock my boat/sleeping-bag, gently from side to side, drifting me off to sleep.

House of Abundance

 

I live in a house of abundance and to say farewell to one of our housemates I made this video for her. 

Thames River Time

When we started walking the sun was up. I got us toasted sandwiches from the main coffee shop in the town centre. There’s something provincial about Woolwich and I want to be part of it. I’m gazing across the central square – while I wait for my coffee – that got done up for the Olympics, a forum with a huge television screen overlooking the concrete steps, where people are sitting. A child is creeping up behind pigeons, afraid he might actually catch one, so changes tact mid-way and runs at them screaming. Two women are chatting over a bag of corn snacks. Tracksuit bottom boy strides by flaunting a Gucci strap-bag on his hip.

You can glimpse all the movement of Woolwich, in one swoop of the eyes because of this central square. I’ve never really noticed it before because London doesn’t have town squares – apart from Trafalgar – the levelling of everyone on the same plain, people passing from side to side, like a game of tennis.

We walk towards the Thames. There is a farmer’s market in the new Woolwich Arsenal development, lined with stalls with striped tarpaulin roofs. People milling about with their dogs on leashes and holding coffee in cardboard cups; it’s not too crowded and could easily be pleasant. I notice more dogs away from the town centre, where all the city commuters live. The price of coffee steadily rises with each step you take towards the river.

There are so many un-built, part-filled flats on the riverside. There is a water-feature that’s worthy of any contemporary housing development - invisible spouts spurt water up and down in time to silent music. At night they light up in fuchsia glows, to give it an East Asian shopping mall feel. Kitsch and modern, also a deterrent for crime and rough sleepers, to cover a whole area with colourful water. Two big Alsatians play-fight amongst the spritz and look like they’re enjoying it.

If you keep walking the Thames footpath stops and you have to skirt around a warehouse complex. We made the wrong turning and found a climbing wall at a dead end. A woman in skin-tight leggings re-directs us and on the way out, we step into a gallery being set up for two artists. I'm won over by their mixed-media art – acrylic paint sandwiched between two sheets of Perspex then hung from a wooden frame by thick chains. Black ink applied with a palette knife over powdery Instagram filter backgrounds. The artists were setting up their Dark Silo exhibition, wearing pandemic face shields. One of them looked like David Hockney crossed with Garth from Wayne’s World.

The sky is filled with drizzle. We press on through streets flanked by enormous boarded-up warehouses and dilapidated civic buildings, and on to the Thames Barriers. The barriers were built in the 1970’s with an intended life-span of up to 2030. That’s only ten years from now. I wonder what the people who constructed the Thames Barriers thought life would be like today. It was a time of retro-futurism and Star Wars and that sci-fi ideal is definitely reflected in the giant curved stainless-steel structures, rising up from the riverbed like the optimistic past, which I have little connection to except through the nostalgia effect.

It’s properly raining now and we’re almost at Greenwich. There's a well-situated pub in between called the Anchor & Hope, where we stop off to have a half-pint and shandy. Music plays from a jukebox. Next to the pub is a seafood van with W-I-N-K-L-E-S painted on the side in royal blue, in old-style signage lettering. The catchy pop-beat of Maria by Blondie pulsates through the pub. Outside on the grey horizon, I can see the strange shape of the Millennium Dome with its toothpick yellow stilts, piercing up through the ground. 

The Thames is a good place to walk, it's like moving through vignettes of bygone eras, and it’s nice to forget sometimes what the day is like.

Tanabata 七夕

I celebrated Tanabata at home in South London, with my new housemates.

This is a traditional Japanese summer festival which is connected to the stars. Legend goes that there is a weaver and a cowherd up in the Heavens who fall in love. But because they fall in love so deeply, they abandon their duties. The sacred silk stops being woven and the cattle wander all over the place. The god who oversees Heaven is pretty angry, so he splits the lovers apart by the Milky Way. Now, only once a year on Tanabata are the couple allowed to meet at the stellar river. To aid them, a flock of magpies appear to create a bridge for them to cross and meet.

It’s a pretty sweet story and has a relation to the stars in our actual galaxy: Altair and Vega. These are part of the summer triangle, which are the brightest stars you can see in the northern hemisphere at this time of year. When the two stars become brightest it means that it is the height of summer, and if you are able to look at them during a dark night sky – in between Vega (the brightest of the two stars and the weaver) and Altair (cowherd) you can distinguish the Milky Way.

On Tanabata, one of the things we do is write wishes on colourful strips of paper called tanzaku, then hang them from a bamboo tree. Here is the emoji to prove it 🎋 You can wish for anything really, like passing your driving test or world peace. Whatever you want. I made somen noodles for dinner, which are thin and white and symbolise the Milky Way, while Simon fried tempura. The best combination is the crunchy fried-ness of the vegetables, dipped in the light noodle broth.

I told Obaachan about me celebrating Tanabata with friends in London. She told me that when she was a girl, she remembers her father going out on Tanabata to gather very long reeds from the river. He would sit on their front porch and wind the reeds around each other. She remembers he would weave out of the reeds two horses, then face them towards each other and bind them together with bamboo. On Tanabata he would release the two horses on to the river for them to be carried away by the water.

‘Why did he do that?’ I asked.

Obaachan makes a hmmmm sort of noise, as if both recalling and trying to work it out.

‘I wonder? It was probably something to do with the region.’ She grins, ‘They were really good horses though.’

The Creature

Moonlight

It started with moonlight. It shone so brightly that it woke me while the night was in full swing. I opened my eyes and waited to get sleepy again but decided instead to go to the bathroom. It was still a novelty to walk upstairs to the white tiled bathroom, which I think is beautiful, in the way hotels in foreign cities are. I had only just moved in. This was my third night’s sleep in clean sheets, in a room no longer filled with dust bunnies. Even though it was night – like I say – the moon was bright, pouring in through the windowpanes like muted floodlights. Outside was still; the days had been hot, and the grass had been scorched.

I stood on the staircase and looked out of the window on to our back garden. There was a small creature, sitting in an upright position on the lawn, peering back at me. At first, I thought it was a squirrel. Its coat was the right colour, grey and dusty looking. But my eyesight is very bad. Also, it was before dawn, so it was difficult to make out defining features. I thought the creature was too large for a squirrel. It may have been a tiny cat. I went back to bed.

Compost

Holly received plants from her parents. Lush basil, tender thyme, spindly mint which she planted in the wooden trough next to the rosemary bush. Annina re-planted the mint into pots of their own, because apparently, they hog water. Over the coming days I would don gardening gloves and rip out the vines, which were threatening the tomatoes and had already strangulated the lavender. I would also make compost from old soil, dead leaves, eggshells and used coffee grains.

We all had seeds to plant. I had shiso. A herb that’s used in Japanese cuisine, which taste a bit like basil and plum – the seed packet told me they were ‘erratic and unreliable’. Simon had unidentified seeds, which he scattered into free pots. Holly planted sunflowers.

Hole

The plants were growing exceedingly well. All this sunlight and humidity was sublime weather for a seed, it seemed. I had my morning coffee black, sat at the blue table in the garden in my string vest and shorts. The sunbeams drenched me at the start of the day, it was like being on holiday. We can all close our eyes and imagine we’re abroad – I remembered a friend saying during peak-lockdown. Then I noticed this hole in the lawn. A dusty puncture where yellow shoots of grass should have been.

Something had been digging!

I noticed a fallen flower head next to it. A white rose had been pulled apart, its petals strewn about, like feathers of a pigeon attack.

‘Oh my god it’s the squirrel.’

‘I thought you said it was a cat,’ Annina said from behind her book.

‘Whatever it is it’s digging holes.’

I totally believed it was doing this because of our stare-off at moonlight. My not reacting to its presence, probably gave it some perverse confidence to go ahead and dig up our garden.

The next day it was worse. The creature had only gone and dug up our basil plant! It had really gone to town and shifted all the soil back and forth, so that black earth covered the remaining herbs.

‘Fucking squirrel.’

I got the hoe and filled in the holes. I did not find any buried nuts in the process. I asked my surrogate mum Susan what to do. She gave me a gardener’s tip: spray diluted washing up liquid around the affected area because squirrels don’t like the taste of it, apparently. I didn’t do that.

The final straw was on a sunny Tuesday morning when I came out for my morning coffee. On the lawn, next to the original hole was a pile of shit.

‘Oh my god! Look what it’s done!’ I was abhorred.

‘This is definitely not a squirrel, or a cat’, Annina said. Of course, she was right, it was a fox.

Monster

‘At first it was a big squirrel, then a tiny cat and now it’s a fox?’ Simon laughs at me, ‘I just don’t trust your eyesight.’ I am now too offended by the chimera to care. Each day I go back to the trough and cover up the holes with more soil. Holly has been doing the same furtively, and so has Annina. We are fighting a losing battle. Twigs of rosemary are being snapped off in the fox’s digging routine, all of which I throw into my compost pot, dejected.

“If you can remove temptations or create an atmosphere that causes a fox to feel nervous about coming into your garden, you’re on the right track to stopping the digging and other problems that the fox is causing.”

My phone lights up with this message sent from Annina upstairs. She knows I am wildly plotting against this fox. I had the idea of putting chilli flakes into the hole, scattering them around the lawn, so maybe it would sting the fox, but Simon pointed out it would be a waste of good chilli flakes.

Showdown

The eve before Genevieve’s birthday the whole household had mysteriously, simultaneously, woken up in the early hours. I recollect hearing blood-curdling screeching from outside and turning over in my bed, so that the duvet gripped me uncomfortably. Caught in a daze, Annina had stopped on the way to the bathroom and was looking out of the window at the erratic movements of a fox.

‘She was running around in circles,’ she recounts bewildered. ‘I don’t think it was a dream. Going from here to there with wild energy, digging frantically. I saw her jump onto the trough and start digging again.’

‘I knew it.’

‘So, I opened the window and she stopped. We looked at each other for a while and I stared at her. Slowly, she retreated to the garage and climbed on to the roof and slinked away.’

‘Oh my god Annina. You did it. You won!’

I hoped the fox would be too disturbed to return to the garden. Maybe she would think twice, now that she knew there was someone here who was a worthy match, who wouldn’t let them get away with murdering our basil.

It was a glorious summer’s day. The air was pregnant with humidity, but the thunderclouds stayed away. Simon inflated two gold balloons in the shape of a number ‘3’ and ‘0’ and attached them to weights, so they could float freely in the garden. We all pitched-in to make Genevieve’s birthday magical, even under the restrictions. Annina commandeered the kitchen and whipped up a banquet. We had two equally complicated and delicious cakes. At the end of the night, after candles had been blown out and all the prosecco drunk, we placed the big shiny balloons on to the lawn next to the original hole.

‘I think this should work,’ I said firmly.

‘I hope so.’

‘Well surely. Anyway, you’ve done the hard part by scaring her off. The balloons are just extra.’

‘Good night.’

‘Night.’

 Epilogue: The fox has not been back since.

Packing and Moving

I am starting to pack up my room. A lovely, homely room I have lived in for about five years – on and off – I went to Japan for 6 months in between, but the room didn’t mind and welcomed me back. There are books on the shelves I never read on philosophy, sociology and political theory. They’re like standing heroes who oversaw my move in and now my move out.

Top tips for movers

·       Test your appliances, wires and devices. When you’ve been in a place for a while, you accumulate a lot of stuff, namely things that supply power to other things. It’s likely some of this tech has given up the ghost. I don’t need to take this mini-USB charger with me when the world i.e. port-sockets have moved on.

·       Close the lid. Find the lid and close all open containers and bottles you have in your possession.

·       Bags in bags. I’m a huge fan of putting small bags within slightly larger bags, and that within even larger bags. Like a Russian doll of your own stuff. I want to compartmentalise my life, to give it an ordered effect, so that I know things can’t escape and get mixed-up with the wrong things. It’s all nonsense but I want it to make sense. Sometimes it’s just about fittings things together. The end result is that it takes up less space, like this small brown leather pouch with an ipod and a wine-aerator in.

·       Get rid of old cards and vouchers.

·       There will be a lot of dust. Be prepared to sneeze.

·       If you have a massive vine – like my overgrown ivy – then unfurl it from the stand it has become attached to. Wrap itself around itself, so that it looks like a sleeping fox in a nest, then gently place it into a plastic bag for transportation.

·       No pain, no gain. Be prepared to stub your toe, scrape your arm, get splinters, etc.

·       Make sure you understand the importance of some things, in other words, “You don’t miss something until it gets smashed.” If you have a framed print you care about then wrap it in scarves.

·       Coats and bags take up the most room. Literally, they’re padding and baggage.

·       Get everything out of your drawers and pile them high on your bed, or the floor. A space where you may survey it, like a lord over his hobbits. This will allow you take stock of all you have, and give rise to discoveries like, oh I had a wad of facemasks my hygiene conscious aunt gave me in Japan – these are actually really useful in a pandemic. Thanks auntie!

·       Use bags for clothes and cases for books. It works with their shapes and consistencies.

During the move, it honestly helps to have friends cook meals for you, so that you can eat at regular intervals and not fall down with exhaustion.

Once you have arrived, hug your friends even if there are social distancing rules in place, because they are now part of your household.

Carefully unwrap the paintings, dust the floors, put the vine back on a pedestal, take a nap and then unpack.