Brush up on culture...

I am unreasonably tired for someone who slept nigh on ten hours last night. I can feel the weight of four months’ sleepless weekends sitting on my eyelids. I catch sight of myself in a mirror and am surprised at how exhausted I look – not weary so much as dazed, pale even beneath bronzed cheeks.

Since being single again, I have found myself with a lot more time on my hands. I do and achieve much more. Hours lolling about in bed are no longer an acceptable way to spend Sunday morning, nor is a quiet evening in a desirable way to spend a Saturday night. Thus, on the rare weekends when I am not too hungover to move (and sometimes even on those when I am) I take myself off for a dose of culture. Sundays are often quite busy for me, as I realise that I’m going to have to wait another whole five days for a free one, and consequently pack as much activity into my final few hours of freedom as possible.

Today, my adventure took me to the Saatchi Gallery. It’s not a particularly long walk from my home, although I did predictably manage to get lost amongst the white streets of Pimlico on the way. I must admit I was very much enticed in by the title of the exhibition: The Empire Strikes Back, and with more shame admit that I was too skint to buy the £1.50 guide. As such, I didn’t really have a clue what it was all about. I’ve never been much interested in Indian culture – being half Chinese I didn’t feel like I had a lot of room for any other Asian influences. There was one particularly disturbing exhibit where a stuffed camel was, well, stuffed into a suitcase.

I liked the gallery nonetheless, and followed it up with a visit to the V&A, where I looked at a little display of fairytale illustrations, including some by Dulac and Rackham. I also wandered into the cast courts. The first time I visited the cast courts I was with a guy with whom I was utterly besotted; it was quite a relief to be able to look at them without such a distraction.

Worry about books...

It is payday tomorrow, and to celebrate I went out and spent money that I didn’t yet have. It’s ok though, because I spent it on books, thereby making the only solid investment available to paupers in these pauperising times.

‘My favourite Le Carre, that is to say the one I’ve read the most, i.e. several dozen times…’
These words, uttered pompously by a portly suited man to a fellow portly suited man on the stairs managed to reach me on quite the other side of Waterstone’s. I then decided that life is far too short and full of interest to read any book several dozen times, unless it concerns Moomins, and consequently purchased three by authors completely new to me:

1) The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to be Happy, by Michael Foley
2) What I Loved, by Siri Hustvedt
3) The Wild Places, by Robert Macfarlane

Ok, so the last author isn’t completely new to me – at least not as a human being. He was one of my English tutors and I, along with the rest of the female portion of our seminars (which was the majority), was comfortably besotted. I rarely spoke in seminars, but I did manage to give him an awkward wave once. It was a high point. Anyway, these three books (good thing it was a 3 for 2 offer) pretty much sum up the threads tangling themselves around my brain at the moment – happiness (or rather the lack of it), love (definitely the lack of it) and the wild (not so much lacking as simply inconceivable in the urban paradise that is SE11).

I read this fascinating article by Jason Epstein from The New York Review of Books this morning; it is the best I have come across so far concerning the (inevitably) digital future of books, and should be of interest to not just publishers and writers, but anyone who reads.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23683

Embarking on my first real editing job, and being told I could make a good career out of publishing, naturally I am interested in where this industry I have entered is headed. But my feelings in response to this article are more than just professional interest – I am awed, and terrified. I know I should be too young to cling to the old, but books have been the stepping stones of my life. Furthermore, I am jealous by nature – and resentful of the idea that ‘Digitization makes possible a world in which anyone can claim to be a publisher and anyone can call him- or herself an author.’ As someone who has thrived on traditional (some would say outdated) structures of success – academic examinations being one – and relishes the letters which say that I have a degree which someone else does not, I am not a little dismayed by this literary free-for-all. And finally, I am by no means immune to my mother’s fear of a worldwide powercut simply vapourising the worldwide web (I have still not been able to get anyone to confirm that this is definitely impossible…).

But then again, I am writing this in a blog. One of my two blogs. Who am I to judge?

I am a little anxious about blogging. Is it possibly the most egotistical form of written expression? Is the self-chronicling blogger even more tiresome than the adolescent poet? Am I fretting too much considering no one cares?!

So I was in Topshop Oxford Circus earlier, and, to celebrate London Fashion Week, they were having ongoing 'blogging clinics' with successful fashionista bloggers offering the hapless shopper advice on, presumably, how to also become a successful fashionista blogger. The problem is that in Topshop, height and indifference are the hallmarks of cool - and consequently, being short and enthusiastic, I am deeply un-cool. Just to compound self-consciousness, I have a habit of absent-mindedly picking up a bizarre item of clothing, holding it for just a second too long before realising that it is in fact a size 6 neon lace all-in-one with a velvet crotch and foil shoulder-pads (or something equally confounding) and then shoving it back with a sense of acute embarrassment. No, there is no way I could have approached the fashionista bloggers to discuss their views on bloggery.

It's not just Topshop that's against small people. Shops in general like to laugh at us. They install security cameras and then place all the size 5 shoes on a 7 ft high shelf. They make us stand on straining tip-toes, ask for help, or even occasionally climb - the ultimate behavioural proof of NOT being tall and indifferent. It's a terribly cruel trick - you go into a shop hoping to purchase something which will alter your short-and-enthusiastic image, only to be reminded of it at every turn, until the point where you quit Topshop and go to Octopus on Carnaby Street to look at toasters decorated with clouds, and forks with faces.

Behaving like a whiskeyed granny...

This is the first post of my second blog on the third night of having a hotdog instead of a thumb. Am writing this whilst soaking said thumb in cold water and then blowing on it. This is doing very little to alter the fact that since I poured boiling water over it at 4am on Sunday morning, it has been more akin to a partially-cooked sausage than my familiar digit. I was trying to make a hot water bottle, in the dark, under the influence. I woke up the next morning with the hot water bottle on the floor, and a wet patch on my pillow to whence the hand-bandage had migrated.

I am fairly sure this was Fate punishing me because I had been so chary with the hand mere hours earlier, when someone tried to hold it.