Dear July, nine: immersion.

Yesterday, I started the day writing in a coffee shop. While I was working, a table of three sat beside me – a grandmother, a mother and a daughter – and started a conversation amongst themselves about ‘what it would be like to swim in a swimming-pool of hot chocolate’. The grandmother was miming – doing the breaststroke mid-air – saying how she would swim with her mouth open, swimming and swallowing and swimming and swallowing, drinking it all up. ‘Just imagine,’ she said. ‘Imagine swimming in a pool of chocolate...’

Later in the day, after my friend (also a writer) came to meet me, we relocated to the library to work and ended up sitting at a table upstairs that hangs over the librarians’ desk on the ground floor. After an hour or two of ‘pulling teeth’ ideas-wise, I decided to listen to a bit of music to make myself focus and finally (finally) managed to get into a flow with the chapter I was working on. Ideas and words started coming relatively quickly. And then I heard a man’s voice below saying: ‘a lentil soup bath’. I stopped typing and took one earphone out. ‘Would it be lentil? Or tomato and basil?’ The librarians downstairs – three of them – seemed to be involved in one of those bizarre ‘it’s quiet and we’re really bored’ kind of conversations that only seem to happen at work. They were laughing and talking about what it might be like to take a bath in a bowl of soup. ‘Just imagine it...'

Weird.

I don’t know the significance of this. Might be the weather (last week’s no-tights-needed heat has been replaced by probably-a-good-idea-to-wear-tights-and-a-few-vests-and-some-jumpers drizzle. Right now, the idea of swimming in a pool of hot chocolate doesn’t sound like such a bad idea).

♥

Notes.

The music I was listening to included: this and: this. (Current chapter isn't a particularly happy one, thus the wistfulness...)

Today’s poem: Love after Love by Derek Walcott 

Picture by: Hazuki Koike (I found it: here. The artist's website is in Japanese, so I'm not sure whether to link to it because I don't know what it says!)

three (or four) recent noticings

Noticed Thing #1: I overheard two girls in Tesco the other week debating what kind of crisps to buy for their movie night in. Girl One was balancing a 2 litre bottle of Coke on her hip like a baby. Girl Two seemed more interested in picking off the last of her pastel green nail varnish than anything else. 

GIRL ONE: [tilting her head back to look at all the crisp packets on the shelf] "So... Pringles Cheese and Chive? Or Sensations Thai Sweet Chilli?"  

GIRL TWO: [shrugging, not looking up] "I dunno. I’m not a big fan of those ‘Sensations’, though."

GIRL ONE: [swivelling round to look her friend in the eye] "Aye, you say that now – but you didn’t say anything when you were fair tuckin’ into mine last week."

Ha!

Noticed Thing #2: We bought a particularly delicious batch of nectarines towards the start of September (a bundle of nectarines? A bunch of nectarines? A bevy? A bouquet? A brood? I’m not sure of the right collective noun). They were juicy and sweet, and I ate quite a lot of them (sometimes in a row). 

One day, after consuming my second nectarine of the morning, I hopped through to my brother’s bedroom to try and encourage him to try one also. Only, once I got there, I couldn’t for the life of me remember the word: ‘nectarine’. It had completely vanished – poof! – from my head. So I ended up standing awkwardly in his doorway, mouthing fruit names – "apricot, peach, pear, plumb" – until – "pineapple, tangerine, nectarine – yes!" – I found the word I was looking for.

I’m finding this happening quite a lot recently. Words hide from me in the middle of sentences, causing me to falter and then fumble about with synonyms or vague descriptions or hand gestures to try and get my point across. The words I need appear a little-too-late in my mind. Strange.

Noticed Thing #3: Yesterday, while I was in the library writing notes on Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (amazing, amazing book), I saw a man walk in through the front door carrying a yellow banana in his hand, and a toddler in his back-pack. They were as bald as each other, with the same wide-eyed expression, and the two of them made me think, smilingly, of monkeys. 

...which then, in turn, reminded me of this poem by Carol Ann Duffy (see below) which has always made me laugh. It comes from her collection of poems, The World’s Wife, where she looks anew at famous male figures throughout history, literature, etc and retells something of their story through the eyes of the women associated with them, women who have typically been forgotten about.

Mrs Darwin 

7^th April 1852

Went to the Zoo.
I said to Him–
Something about that Chimpanzee over there reminds me of you.

(These pictures, I think, could count as a Noticed Thing #4. They were all taken fairly recently on my phone while on various commutes to work and Glasgow and back.)

♥

I was once a tall tree

I noticed this toilet-door graffiti in the Mitchell Library in Glasgow*. There were the usual graffiti suspects scrawled over the door (e.g. ‘Yer maw!’ or ‘Lucy + Gregg 4eva!!’ [enclosed in a crudely shaped heart] and so on), but I liked how a few of these were quite poetic (and uplifting). I've never met anyone who has admitted to writing on toilet doors. I wonder what gives people the urge to do it:

('If you are reading this then be happy. 'Cause, hey! You are alive')

('One day you will be loved the way I am. You deserve it, trust me.')

('Choose life.')

('I was once a tall tree/I was once a child')

♥

*Incidentally, I was at the Mitchell Library during the Aye Write! Festival – a wonderful book festival which runs every year over a few weeks in the spring. Over the past few years I’ve heard lots of interesting writers including David Aaronovitch, Germaine Greer, Julian Baggini, Susie Orbach, and others. (I’ve yet to go and hear a poet or a novelist. This will be a must for next year...)

The evening these pictures were taken was quite exciting as, rather than going to listen to a reading, I was actually giving a reading along with two other students from my year at university. (I’d received an award for a piece of flash fiction as part of Strathclyde University’s writing completion: the Keith Wright Memorial Award, judged by Ewan Morrison.) An amazing – if slightly nerve-wracking – experience! My first ever public reading, and also the first ever time I've been given a spot of money for a piece of writing. 

good news! good news!

I remember having a conversation with my friend at the start of third year. We were on the way to a lecture, waiting outside the library to cross the road. I think it was raining because I seem to remember looking out at the traffic* from under an umbrella. We were wondering who would take over the editor positions for the university newspaper next year and I can remember saying something like:

‘I don’t think I’d be able to do it. It would be good, but it seems like so much work on top of everything else.’**

[Flash-forward to a few months later (the 11^th of May to be exact) where I’m at an AGM meeting, standing in front of a group of students giving a speech about why I should be Features Editor]

So, this is a post just to say that... I’ve been elected 'Features Editor' of the Strathclyde Telegraph for the next academic year!! I’m very excited (and a little nervous... there’s a lot to learn)! It's a fantastic opportunity! I’ll keep you all posted on how that goes!

♥

*Speaking of traffic... my mum was showing me these roadsafety videos from when she was a wee girl. Hilarious, and slightly disturbing.

 **It’s funny the things you think you’ll never be able to do! One thing I’ve recognised about myself is that my instant reaction to most things is:

‘No! Absolutely not. (But thanks all the same.)'

(Not quite sure why that is... possibly a symptom of being an introvert, or a born-worrier.) I’ve been trying to hold off saying these words out loud as much as possible and give myself time to properly mull things over. Once I’ve thought about them I often come round to liking whatever idea it was I was so determined agaisnt earlier. O! to be one of those fearless, instinctively brave sort of people. (I guess, though, those sort of people, if they exist, are a rare breed...)

♥

(Pictures from: Oh My Cavalier)

Bibliothèque de l'Absurde.

This week I noticed someone walking around the university library in a banana costume. I wonder why...?

♥

I also spotted an army-man doll hanging from one of the library signs. Again, why? Who put it there? Why did they put it there? Why did they have a plastic army-man doll with them in the first place? (...Are they okay?)

Also (!) I keep on finding library books like this, covered from margin to margin in other people's scribbling and highlighting.

Very distracting. My eye is pulled towards the underlined sections, and then I end up scanning over the parts that have not been underlined because someone, somewhere, for some reason thought that these sections were less important. But hang on! Why should I trust these underlining menaces? Who are these people? They might be skinny tuxedoed men with crooked moustaches and phony French accents, who tip-toe around from library to library, underlining completely irrelevant sections of books out of sheer badness. Now that I'm on to them, I shall be influenced by their pencil marks no more!

(I also noticed this little star on the train. It is not related to libraries, although I probably had seven or eight books in my backpack, it just made me smile.)

...off to read some more of 'Tom Jones' now.

(p.s. I thought I should add that the title of this post is meant to be 'library of the absurd'. If my very poor French, and freetranslation.com, have led me into to saying something frightfully rude: apologies.)