The Story of Furniture

"After school, amidst the drowsy tick of the tall-case clocks, he taught me the pore and lustre of different woods, their colours, the ripple and gloss of tiger maple and the frothed grain of burled walnut, their weights in my hand and even their different scents - "sometimes, when you're not sure what you have, it's easiest just to take a sniff" - spicy mahogany, dusty-smelling oak, black cherry with its characteristic tang and the flowery, amber-resin smell of rosewood..."

"Downstairs - weak light, wood shavings on the floor - there was something of the feel of a stable, great beasts standing patiently in the dim. Hobie made me see the creaturely quality of good furniture, in how he talked of the pieces as 'he' and 'she', in the muscular, almost animal quality that distinguished great pieces from their stiff, boxy, more mannered peers and in the affectionate way he ran his hand along the dark, glowing flanks of his sideboards and lowboys, like pets. He was a good teacher and very soon, by walking me through the process of examination and comparison, he'd taught me how to identify a reproduction: by wear that was too even (antiques were always worn asymmetrically); by edges that were machine-cut instead of hand-planed (a sensitive fingertip could feel a machine edge, even in poor light); but more than that by a flat, dead quality of wood, lacking a certain glow: the magic that came from centuries of being touched and used and passed through human hands."

"To contemplate the lives of these dignified old highboys and secretaries - lives longer and gentler than human life - sank me into calm like a stone in deep water, so that when it was time to go I walked out stunned and blinking into the glare of Sixth Avenue, hardly knowing where I was." 

***

I'm still reading Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch. 

On the morning that Theo Decker is due to have a meeting with his school Principal, possibly about to be excluded for standing with his friend Tom Cable as he smoked a cigarette on school premises, an explosive device tears apart a New York art gallery. For the second time that week, Theo find himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. He escapes unscathed; his mother is killed. 

At his feet in the ruins of the gallery, he spots a painting his mother admired: Fabritius' The Goldfinch. Miraculously, it's completely intact. Dazed, shaking, he slips it into his bag and picks his way through the debris to the outside world. 

The good stuff thus far: well, the description of the blast is bloody impressive; and written before 9/11, h'apparently. And the grief of a teenage boy - the injustice and impossibility of it - "there had to be some way I could go back to the rainy street and make it all happen differently" - is beautifully rendered. Some days his whole body rings like a tuning fork and he watches film after film, numb. Other days, he turns the shower up to full power, gets in and howls. 

And I mean, who couldn't love passages like the above? 

Buuuut - and I'm resisting the urge to say that there IS a but, but there is - look, there it is, just there, three of them, in fact - I'm now just about 300 pages in and things are getting a bit strange. Theo, having been reunited with his dear old Pa and shipped out to Vegas to live with him, seems to have hooked up with a new friend, Boris, and is turning into a bit of a wastrel. There's been a lot of bloody fist fights and throwing up in swimming pools. 

Anyway. I shall persevere and let you know. 

***

In other news, the furniture passages above reminded me of a kiddies' book I bought ages ago in Sedbergh and inspired me to dig it out and make a framed print a bit like my Swimming, Swimming, In The Swimming Pool project. Guess what I'm doing this weekend? Apart from watching series 2 of The West Wing and making a voodoo doll of Donna/Dana, obvs. And Mandy, if I have the time.  

National Stress Awareness Day

So, a certain lovely blogger brought this Blog Something Every Day in November challenge to my attention, and for one crazy moment I thought, I can do that, YEAH MAN, bring it ON!

And then I remembered that I'm a fan of of the Blogging Disappearing Act (see here, here and, well, pretty much every third post on this blog for further evidence). 

Foolish Laura. Overestimating your productivity once again, I see.

But then today's prompt was National Stress Awareness Day and I thought, well, surely I have something to say about that. I mean, I have a marking pile that deserves its own postcode, an exhaustion-induced twitchy eyelid and the seven worst weeks of the academic year in terms of slog-value ahead. Oh, and an ongoing IBS saga (glad you checked in tonight, eh?) 

Are you a stresshead? I am. I wrote a poem when I was eight and I can still remember one of the lines: 'I really am a worrier/I hate a telling off.' Laureate-worthy, I know. It's not so much the telling off that bothers me now, but the worrier bit's still true. I'm a people pleaser. I want everyone to be OK. I'm utterly obnoxious in the way that I believe that it's only me - no one else - who's capable of doing it, whatever 'it' is: marking the essay, putting up the wall display, whatevs. But in the meantime I'm smiling at everyone and trying not to offend them and worrying that I've trodden on their toes and....argh. It's a 'mare. I wish I didn't care so much - about an email to a parent, about my crooked teeth, about the phone charger being on the floor and not in the phone-charger-box (Hello Anal-Phone Charger-Obsessives-Anonymous, are you there?) in the drawer - but I do. 

And actually, that's a lie about wishing I didn't care so much. It's important to care. But not to the point of going completely bonkers, eh? 

So what words of wisdom do I have? Well, I'd start with DON'T follow the advice of a Deputy Head I worked with onceuponatime who said of another member of staff, "I mean, she said she was stressed. STRESSED? Pfft! I mean, every member of the Senior Leadership Team's got a prescription for beta blockers MINIMUM! It's how you get promoted in this school!" 

Um. Okaaaay. Life doesn't have to be like that, you know. 

Be strict with yourself. Have a cut-off point. Take a breath. Be appropriately selfish. Say 'no' when you need to so that your 'yes' means summat. Make a sign for your office door that reads 'DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL - GO AWAY' for when you want some uninterrupted time - you know, for marking, or staring agape at Buzzfeed. Make time to do something you want to do - paint your nails, write a blog post, go to a dogs' home and take one of those poor buggers for a walk - anything to help you come back to what you normally do with renewed vigour. 

And, in desperate times, make sure you have a well-scheduled trip somewhere - oo, say to London - to meet up with friends, go to the theatre, eat Mexican food in Soho and drink cocktails until it's the wee hours and an eye-rolling waitress tells you to DUFO*. 

And there you have my weekend plans. Eek. Can't wait. Hope you have something similarly lovely planned?


* It's an acronym. Got it?

**pictures from vhmckenzie here. 

Holiday-ay

I mean holiday-ay in the manner of a Madonna singalong. Thinking about it, though, personal gusto reserves are pretty depleted after an eight-week half-term and I have a bit of a sore throat so if I were to sing it I'd probably sound more like Robbie in The Wedding Singer than Lady Madge. 

Everybody spread the word
I live in my sister's baaaaaasement....

We've had two training days (two!) Thursday and Friday this week, which was a blessed moment of inspiration on somebody's part. Nothing puts a body of staff in a collective sunny mood like wearing jeans, eating free pain au chocolat and having some time to climb down from the top of one's tree and have a bit of a tidy up. My office is spotless and the world is MINE for the taking!

We also had the obligatory pre-half-term training session, except this one was really rather good. The speaker (this guy, formerly of The Bill and Casualty, ooo) won me over pretty quickly when he began with a Hamlet quote on self-doubt - "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams" - and continued by using Henry V as an example of inspirational leadership. 

Henry V. Worrrr. The good stuff. 

Lots was learned, including the Important Soundbite that sometimes people need to unburden themselves - also known as whinging - and THAT'S OK. I mean, if they're genuinely trying to derail fundamental ways of working then it probably needs dealing with, but everyone needs a good old moan now and again. If instead you vow to hate them forever and record their spiteful words in your Little Book of Personal Grudges, you're actually being more of a Macbeth than a Henry V AND WE ALL KNOW HOW THAT TURNED OUT, DON'T WE?

So I've had two days of sort-out time and inspo and I'm currently busying myself by making a sign for my office door which reads 'DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL - GO AWAY' for when I'm having a night-before-Agincourt moment. 

We're up at 3:30am tomorrow to get a flight to Spainland. A week in the company of leathery 11am brandy-loving Brits awaits.  I cannot wait to be one of their number.  

Baby, baby, baby you should see me now

So when you build your house

then call me

home

***

So no great shakes here. 

Work and that. Busy busy.

Oh, apart from I went to see Fleetwood Mac. You know, Fleetwood Mac. No big deal. The greatest band of all time (ssh, no one tell Jarvis).

Let me list the trials involved in seeing Fleetwood Mac midweek in Antwerp:

1) Getting the tram back INTO Brussels from work and getting train back OUT of Brussels to Antwerp (trial admittedly eased by a cheeky Kriek and a weirdo cassis dessert)
2) Staying in a shabby budget Ibis which smelt of fags and the lobby of which was full of men wearing knock-off sportswear carting about hundreds - hundreds - of black binliners. 
3) An ill-advised burger at midnight. Stevie does whet the appetite somewhat. 
4) Getting the 5:44 train back to Brussels the following morning after four beers and ill-advised burger to go and teach and think and work all day. 

The final verdict is, however, that all trials were completely Worth It. 

Here follows my thank you letter to the Mac:

Dear John McVie, 

You didn't say a right lot (um, that would be nothing), but you did wear a very nice white flat cap. 

*

Dear Mick Fleetwood,

You look more and more like Santa Claus as the years go by. 

Your drum solo was brilliant. 'Are you with me?' YEEEEEEEAH!

*

Dear Lindsey Buckingham, 

I thought you were rather dashing, if a bit skeletal-faced. Then you started to sweat quite a lot (I appreciated the sweat.)  

PS Tusk was wicked. 

*

Dear Miss Nicks,

I'm so in awe I can't bring myself to write 'Dear Stevie'. 

You blew me away with your tambourine and your ribbons and your dress like a medieval bat. 

You owned that stage like a luxe version of Goldie Hawn. 

And the hair; the impossible mermaid hair. Just wow. 

I think that bit where they take the mick out of your voice on South Park is a bit cruel, to be honest. You are a cathedral of quivering awesomeness and I bow before your greatness. 

*

Dear Stage Designers, 

All of the stuff in the background was brilliant. 

Spinning worlds and exploding stars and rising smoke and snarling bears and blinking eyes and swirling psychedelica. A+ for everything.

Geometric waves and the like

What's that? You want a poor quality video of the last 36 seconds of Landslide? Well, you've come to to the right place! Enjoy.  

                                                 

Harvest

October! *doubleblink* October is here, and it's a palace.

This is as good a place to start as any. 

Staring at Lakes by Michael Harding

Depression. Not exactly a topic to get people racing to the Amazon check-out button, eh? However the subtitle of Michael Harding's Staring at Lakes is 'A Memoir of Love, Melancholy and Magical Thinking', which sounds less oppressive and a fair bit more New Age-y and, if I'm honest, probably made me linger a little longer when I first spotted it in The Gutter Bookshop in Dublin a few weeks ago. Make no mistake, though, this is definitely a book about depression: about its physical manifestations and the way it cuts a mind to ribbons; about a life spent searching for a solution in the sanitary life of the Catholic priesthood and years later in the slums of India. A pretty nasty physical illness, some fairly 'out there' therapy methods and a significant amount of navel-gazing later and Harding has his answer to the depression conundrum. 

More of that in a minute.

You see, Harding - novelist, playwright, Irish Times columnist - is depressed, and has been for a lifetime. Late in the book he comments drily that this is perhaps literally true; he started crying from the moment he exited the womb and was a maungy kid whose constant bawling cut short the family holiday in Enniscrone one year. 

But forget the crying - the crying isn't important. Unlike so many people who write about depression, Harding isn't into describing the minutiae of the chemical cocktails he's required to take or construct pages and pages of extended metaphors of the drowning/dark veil/black dog variety. Like he says on the back cover, this started out as a book about depression, but it's not a bloated, self-important work, nor - and this is important - is it actually depressing itself. Somehow along the way, everything else in Harding's life wound its way into it: his childhood, his early vocation, his writing, his marriage, his travels,  his humour, the ever-present figure of Father Fingers, the priest of his youth who called his young charges 'asses' - they're all there in a ramshackle orderlessness, popping up wherever Harding sees fit. I suppose his point might be that these things 'drop in' to the narrative in much the same way as thoughts - welcome or unwelcome, happy or depressive - sneak up on the unwitting human mind in real life.

Let me state an obvious point that struck me about Staring at Lakes: Harding is a man. He thinks like a man and he writes like a man. Sometimes his man-ness is a perhaps a bit too much (his description of his rock-hard erection as he lies in a chaste Buddhist monk's cell in Mongolia...erm, yeah. Insert eyes-popping-straight-mouthed emoticon here). But overall I found it refreshing to get a male perspective. So much of writing that is openly and honestly (and famously) about depression is by women, it seems. There's a whole litany of wearying and teenagey Girl, Interrupteds and Prozac Nations out there, and it pisses me of a bit that some of my favourite writers - Woolf and Plath - are pigeon-holed as the poster-girls of literary misery to the extent that it dominates everything we know and think of them. But that's a discussion for another day.

So Harding takes us on a wander through the years and a wander through his mind. We see the little boy who dressed up in his mother's clothes and shoes in imitation of the Child of Prague on the mantelpiece; a step that not-so-illogically led him to the frocks and fripperies of the Catholic priesthood in his 20s. He writes of the Church as being an exciting institution in the 70s, post-Vatican II and led by Paul VI ('a cross between Hamlet and Danny la Rue' - that just about wins the Best Description Of A Pope Ever competition for me) and the arrival of John Paul with his face 'like a rock carved into love' and a voice not of doubt but of certainty and authority, under whose rule Harding had to leave.  He's critical of Catholicism without being malicious or poisonous, and acknowledges the trauma involved in losing any faith - whether an individual's or in wider society - no matter how disillusioned or corrupt it may have become at the upper echelons of the hierarchy.

He recalls his joy in meeting his wife (sculptor Cathy Carman), but how the marriage started to stagnate - 'time sucked the freshness out of it, as it sucks from everything' - and how the birth of his daughter and his never-questioned love for 'the artist' was set against his restlessness, his nagging desire to be something new or something more than what he was - he loved them, but needed to be apart from them. Hence his dabbling in meditation, his years as a Buddhist, his treks to India and Mongolia and his experimentation with New Age therapies. And somewhere along the way - perhaps after being rebirthed on a therapist's couch in innercity Dublin, or perhaps by playing a corpse in a film and, yes, both incidents are as bizarre as they sound; or perhaps after the deaths of his father and mother, and the inevitability of transience and the importance of living rather than worrying in the moment is laid out in front of him - he found the answer. Fear, or more specifically fear of death. It paralyses, it instills feelings of failure and frustration and, at the other end of the scale, it encourages crazy behaviour - the likes of which Harding indulges in on a couple of occasions narrated here and his wife deserves a medal for putting up with. His debt of gratitude to Carman is obvious, for continuing to reassure him stoically that 'it will end', but also for giving him 'time to mourn and cry for all the lives (he) had never lived.' Harding, though, by the end of the book is done with clinging on to dogmas and practices and disguises and is ready to 'begin all over again.' 

I loved it: I loved the way it was written and the ideas it explored. I loved the anecdotes and the Irishness and the truths and the humour and the beauty. Read, read, read.

****

What's been your read of the summer? I'd love to hear about the books that've made you fold corners and kept you up till all hours.

Week Three in the School Holiday House

So I have just returned to Belgy after five days in Ireland on my own because that's what all the cool kids do these days - you know, go on holiday by themselves and get lost on buses and end up in Tesco Extra buying a nectarine because they need an excuse to speak to the checkout girl to ask directions. 

It was kind of an experiment because, I suppose, if in future I'm going to have two months holiday in the summer (WOE IS ME), I kind of need to sort out what I can do with all that time (DOUBLE WOE IS ME. My brain hurts from all of the mental sorting out). 

So I came to Ireland, on account of it being a bit safe and easy. I've grown up going to Ireland (though not this bit) so I sort of know the score on all the important stuff, like which flavour of Tayto crisps is the best (salt and vinegar, duh) and that Fir and Mna on toilet doors are the other way around to what you'd think. Be warned. 

Wicklow is a bit of a funny place, really; funny in that it's kind of like Cornwall or the Isle of Wight or somewhere else beautiful but not really Irish. Don't get me wrong, it's stunning. Over the last week I've walked the Bray's Head to Greystones coastal path and back and marvelled at its Riviera-esque beauty (the 30+ degree temperatures aided that comparison, admittedly). Hmm. Maybe it's the accent, which is often quite Dublin-y and perhaps to my English-attuned ears sounds a bit standoffish. Maybe I'm just feeling bitter because an American guide to Ireland that I found in the B&B doesn't even MENTION Sligo. Not a word. Gah. Dunno, it just feels different. Jeff, the B&B owner, was telling me (completely unverified fact coming up) that two thirds of Ireland's population live in Dublin and the three counties around it - so Meath, Kildare and Wicklow. So if that's true, I suppose it's not that surprising that they feel a bit different. It's all a bit less personal, more savvy, more attuned to the tourists. 

Ireland in loads-of-blue-skies-and-green-stuff-shocker.

I visited two Ancestral Homes, too - beautiful big old estate mansions and their grounds owned by influential English landowners whose titles were created for them by Queen Elizabeth I or King James. I was ready for a big Irish history geekathon; I was fully expecting lots of colour displays about the Famine and Fenian uprisings and maybe a box of dressing-up clothes where kids could don the garb of Irish peasants. So many former estate houses were destroyed in the Irish Civil War, but what was the craic here? Why did these survive? I paid my 8 euros and I wanted ANSWERS - and mebbes a cup of tea. 

But there wasn't a sign or an exhibition to be found. Not even a sniff of a leaflet. There ARE tour guide booklets with photos of Earls with non-Irish surnames smiling benevolently in open collar and tweed, but they advertise events like falconry and farmers' markets and berry-foraging and bee-keeping days. The tea rooms are painted in sherbert shades from Farrow and Ball. Given the amount of coaches that were tipping old ladies out before midday, I'd say the pensioner pound is pretty strong; the gift shops were piled with packets of flower seed and tasteful mugs and natty stationery. Beyond the carefully pruned formal gardens, the wildness looks in. The whole thing is all very lovely, but also a little...curious. They've got ultra-modern refits and wifi and wedding packages and suddenly they've been neutered. What history? Oh, this little old country pile? 

So that was a bit strange.

But then it's still Irish in lots of regards. I was staying at a delightful B&B about 2 miles from the nearest village, and the owner dropped a group of us down in the village one evening for a meal. There was an American lady and her German partner in the back (now there was an interesting pair - there must have been twenty years difference between their ages minimum, perhaps more like thirty, and she was all yoga-taut with scary Madonna arms and intense eyes and lots of very high-tech walking equipment and the first time I came across them in the communal room they were dancing - like, 'we're-oblivious-to-everyone' twirling each other around and around - and yet they were in separate bedrooms. What was this? A marriage of mutual convenience? A meeting of pen-friends? The mind boggles). American Lady was asking about food options.

'WHERE WOULD WE GET SOME FISH? I WANT FISH. AND, LIKE, LOTS OF RAW VEGETABLES.'

Good luck with that Gwyneth Paltrow, I thought to myself, you're about as likely to get some weird LA-inspired low-carb nonsense here as you are a gilded unicorn horn. You're in IRELAND pet. There's a pub and two takeaways. It's something deep-fried or nothing. I can recommend some good Tayto crisps if you like.  

And at that I felt smug and quite at home. 

Here are some more, less political thoughts/observations:
  - Five bus journeys, only one of which was completely in the wrong direction. That's good going for me. 
- SEVEN EUROS FIFTY FOR A JAMESON AND DIET COKE.
- Saw Christy Moore live in a tiny venue. My mum is totes jel.
- A Dublin chav (female, completely off her tits) on O'Connell street shouting at a girl wearing a headscarf: 'Tha's not roigh'! Bein' oll covered up!', then trying to stop random passersby to ask their opinion on aforementioned lady's clearly outrageous decision to wear a HEADSCARF ON HER OWN HEAD* in an aggressive manner. 'Whaddya think? Whadda YOU think?' *deep sarcasm, obviously. 
- Had 'the best coffee in Dublin' (so says the sign) served by The Bald Barista, who has that very phrase 'The Bald Barista' tattooed onto the back of his baldy heed*. *Geordie accent. Take note.  
- 'IT'S IRELAND'S BIGGEST WATERFALL I UNDERSTAND'* *a special prize if you get this reference. 

Anyway must dash, I have raging sunburn to attend to (sad face).

Have you been on holiday on your own? Was it weird?

Also, please let me know if your sunburn is worse than mine. It would make me feel less of a penis.