"a romantic wee ballet"

Last Thursday, my sister and I met up in Glasgow in the evening for an impromptu trip to see the Scottish Ballet’s performance of Matthew Bourne’s Highland Fling. It was fantastic: funny, rock and roll, beautiful, horrible, clever, engaging, very tartan (a whole bundle of adjectives all at once). I always like going to the theatre (expensive though it may be) and over the past few years (and really since forever... since reading Noel Streatfeild) I’ve become particularly enraptured with ballet. 

Not the old fashioned sort (i.e. the ballets full of stiff tutus and tight tights, punctuated by lots of look-we’re-very-clever-because-we-can-do-twenty-piroutettes-in-one-go moments). I’m more interested in ballets which use dance as a story-telling medium; the ones which let slip prettiness for expressiveness, precision for fluidity, tradition for narrative drive. The ones I love are less like self-conscious dancing and more like plays without words. 

My favourites so far have been the Scottish Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet, Alice, and Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty (which we went to see for my Mum’s birthday in February, and I think it’s probably one of the best things I’ve ever seen in a theatre. Full stop. So beautiful... and exciting).

♥

(Picture from: here)

passing shadows

As university draws to a close - how strange to write that - deadlines have stepped up a notch. 

So, in the interim period... I thought I’d pop another one of last year’s columns for the Strathclyde Telegraph on here (p.s. This was the very first one I wrote):

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Something I’ve Noticed: Peripheral People
(From the Strathclyde Telegraph. Issue 1. October 2011)

I try to live with my eyes wide open – partly because walking about with closed eyes is kind of dangerous, but also I don’t want to miss anything. I am a third year English and Creative Writing student, and I’m looking forward to writing for you over the coming months. What can you expect from this column? A collection of ‘noticings’: anything from overheard conversations, to observations from the bizarre world of public transport. Hello, friend, and happy reading!

I thought I’d start by telling you about the man who walks past my house every day. He is stout with a rather gruff expression, but what’s particularly fascinating about him is his hair: it is striped. A white stripe runs from the back of his head down into his moustache, almost as though someone painted it there. My sister spotted this soon after we moved. ‘It makes him look a bit like a skunk, doesn’t it?’ We all peeked out the window, and - ‘Yes!’ - it really did! Since then, we have always (rather fondly) referred to him as ‘The Skunk’.

I walked past him recently. He was on his phone, and didn’t look up. As I was walking, it suddenly struck me how odd it was. I have seen The Skunk nearly every day for the past thirteen years – I have had conversations about him, I have worried that he’s ill when no one’s seen him for a few days – and yet he probably doesn’t even know I exist. It’s almost surreal to think how he has been going about his life for years, not realising that he has somehow become a part of mine.

It made me wonder how many people’s stories we all stumble into, unaware. Do people on my street notice me running like a maniac – buttons bursting open, scarf unravelling – to catch the bus? They must: I do it often enough. Maybe I have become part of their daily routine. (‘What’s the time, Marge?’ ‘It must be nearly half nine, Phil. That strange girl just ran past.’)

It’s easy, especially in the city, to feel like we’re invisible – to feel insignificant in the midst of a crowd. It can be frightening – mixed in among a-hundred other faces on a train – to feel like we have lost ourselves, like we have become nothing more than passing shadows.

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot, though, about all the people who have quietly affected me. I don’t mean friends, or even acquaintances. I mean the peripheral people – people like The Skunk, or the couple in my work who always order white coffees, or the lady I saw once lifting her little boy up to the post-box so he could pop the letters in. 

I’m thinking about people like the boy with the blue t-shirt last week who played the harmonica while crossing the road; he  left music trailing behind him as he went. I'm thinking abut people like the old man on my bus a few months ago who I overhead talking to the lady beside him. He was telling her about his wife – about how she ‘made a great Shepherd’s Pie’, and how she was from the Highlands, and how she was a ‘good lass’ – and he was laughing. And then, his face suddenly fell and he became very quiet. And he whispered in a hoarse voice: ‘I’ve lost her now – I’ve lost her.’ And even though he wasn’t even talking to me, I found myself crying into my scarf.

All these people – they make up the story that is my life. They may not be major characters – I might not know their names, or even remember their faces – but something about them, the essence of them, has stuck with me. Maybe my life wouldn’t be dramatically different without them. But it wouldn’t be the same.

Our lives are constantly overlapping. We might not realise the effect we’re having on other people, but we do have an effect. We don’t pass though life unnoticed; we are connected. 

♥

(Pictures from: Will Freeborn - a Scottish artist. Quite a lot of these pictures are from familiar places)

the lion and the sparrow

I spotted this little bird rather bravely resting atop the lion in George Square last week. 'The Lion and the Sparrow' ... that sounds like it could be a children's book or a fable of some sort, doesn't it? (...if, indeed, that is actually a sparrow. I'm no bird-buff).

Speaking of birds, I can hear a couple of them outside my window. Oh yes, Spring is most definitely coming.

subtle.

William Strunk, Jr in The Elements of Style writes this:

'Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.'

I completely agree. I’m trying to get better at this, at chipping away at unnecessary thoughts, words, commas. Writing that is cluttered with too many obscure words and phrases feels a bit self indulgent to me. I think the best writing is hardly noticeable, it honours the ideas it gives form to.

I finished reading The Remains of the Day last week. It is an excellent book, very engaging, and I think it is because Ishiguro writes like this: with quietness. The most powerful moment in the book happens in a single sentence near the end of the story. It is perfect, but I would have missed it – a skipped beat in my heart – if the rest of the novel hadn’t been so muted. Really beautiful.

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(Picture from: here.)

these made me laugh.

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(...not a hysterical, nose-snorting, knee-slapping, can't-actually-breathe sort of laugh. Just a satisfying but small, smiling 'hmmf' to myself, if you know what I mean.)

(Pictures from: here.)

...more writing will come soon. At the moment though, I am researching paint (for a short story). I love the names of some paints: muddy puddle, sorbet, soft gooseberry, mint whisper, natural calico. They are delicious words to say.

six noticings:

1. Leaving things to the last minute – things like walking down to the bus stop, actually writing (and not just planning and researching) assignments, telling people things, getting out of bed, taking dinner out of the oven et cetera – makes life a bit more stressful than it needs to be.

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2. Sometimes, no matter how many times you notice things, you just can’t get them to sink in. The ‘leaving things to the last minute is a bad idea’ thing is an example of this. It is easier to talk about things than to actually do them. This year I will learn. I will.  

(I won’t.)

♥

3. Orange juice is the best cure for thirstiness.

♥ 

4. The reason studying English Literature is so wonderful is because it is actually a little bit of everything: history, theology, psychology, sociology, philosophy, what it means to be a human (not sure what ‘ology’ that falls under...all of them probably). After carrying about my Renaissance Literature anthology for the past four months it feels strange to stick it in my bookcase. So long Spenser, Sidney and friends. Hello Defoe, Fielding and Austen.

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5. This sentence:

‘There is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between ourselves and others’ 

~ Michel de Montaigne, 1634.

I came across it in an essay on the Renaissance notion of identity and ‘the self’. (‘The self’ has been one of the most interesting concepts to look at last semester.) And I agree. If I find it so difficult to understand and know myself – that curious and infuriating person that is both too quiet and too opinionated, both thoughtful and rash, can feel about fourteen things at the same time without knowing which one to listen to – then how is it possible to ever actually know anyone else? I suppose it isn’t. I suppose that is why love, be it romantic or not, is so frightening: it is about relinquishing control and just trusting. It is about being brave.

♥

6. This song (‘Please Speak Well of Me’ by the Weepies).

(Pictures by Eveline Tarunadjaja).

Happy New Year!

I spent the first few hours of 2011 at work, serving drinks, cleaning wine glasses, sweeping up confetti. Just before the stroke of midnight though, everyone who was working was given a small glass of champagne. All the customers gathered by the stage in bow ties and sparkly purple dresses, and all the workers huddled together a little way off.

'Ten! Nine! Eight! Seven! Six! Five! Four! Three! Two! One! Happy New Year!!'

And for a few minutes we were allowed to drop our roles – waitress, bar staff, chef, dish washer – and just be people, toasting in the New Year. A few moments of excitement, hugging people you wouldn't normally, asking about ambitions...and then back to work.

...that is the thing about being a waitress, it is a role. Once I put the uniform on, once I button up the shirt and tie a bow at the back of the apron, I become: The Waitress. Which is fine, but sometimes (during the summer especially, when I’m working for months at a time) it feel quite anonymous, like my 'self' gets lost inside crumpled napkins and dirty dishes... 

There was one day, two summers ago, when the cafe was mobbed – clinking tea cups, piano music, talking, talking, a small child whining, laughing, cutlery rattling – and I had been running about all day bringing ice-cream sundaes and coffees to customers, when I came to a table I’d served earlier. Table 39: a lady, and a man with blue eyes, and their little boy, and his granny who was wearing a bright pink t-shirt. And the man said,

‘I hope they pay you well, because you work very hard.’

And then the granny asked,

‘What’s your name, love?’

‘Melissa.’

And soon I was back to whizzing about with more trays of drinks, but that was lovely. Kindness is beautiful, even if it comes in the form of a few words and a naming.

‘Melissa. My name is Melissa.’

Yes! I am not a uniform. I am a literature student. I had tuggy hair when I was a little girl. I am in love with the idea of love, but frightened of the reality of it. I am an aspiring ‘doer of good’. I am a person.

I try hard to see the customers as people, and not just table numbers. They are living stories, characters with quirks and ambitions. I like it when they remember, and remind me, that I am story too. Just now is only a chapter.

(pictures from Matte Stephens. The last one isn't related, I just thought it was funny...)

love that quiets the world (♥)

Snow gets people talking.

Most people, it seems, 'used to love it' but now they 'hate it'. They start grumbling conversations with fellow commuters, shoppers, and waiting-to-cross-the-road...ers. (‘Achh, this snow...’ A shake of the head and a furrowed brow. ‘Oh I know, I know.’ A mutual display of wet feet and dirt-splattered trousers. ‘It’s just getting beyond a joke now.’ A moment of connection between strangers, and then a parting of ways.)

When it started snowing at the end of November I was saddened to recognise that my attitude was similarly negative. I shook my fist at it, and glowered. (‘Eugh! Snow!’) And then I was shocked at myself; I was thinking like a Grown Up. 

When I was younger, most of my favourite characters – William Brown, the Little Prince, Peter Pan – hated the Grown Ups (those grumpy, sullen-faced individuals that take things too seriously, are always thinking about money, and have become used to the stars). I remember resolving to never become one. 

I hope my grump at the snow isn’t the first steps on the slippery slope. Getting older is inevitable, but becoming one of the Grown Ups is optional.

Yes! Snow is a nuisance: it sneaks under scarves and assaults necks with tiny cold hands. Yes! Snow is hazardous: it renders the motorway useless and causes pensioners to slip and fall. But look! Look at how it makes an ugly town beautiful. Look! Look how it transforms children into artists. And listen! Can you hear that? Hold your breath for a moment, and listen: it is whispering as it falls.

♥

(Title from: here.
Pictures from: here.)