The walls are talking to me...

It seems words on walls are making me reassess my life. Again.

Exhibit A:

The answer clearly isn't 'this blog', given the length of this hiatus. This is either because I've led such a whirlwind of a life in the last six months there's no time for blogging, or that I've done/seen/read/heard/smelled nothing blog-worthy. You decide. If it's any excuse, I have been rather distracted by vertical vistas posing potentially existential questions...depending on what existential should actually turn out to mean. See also Exhibit B:

I'll told it I'd get back to it.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane?

I love it when magnets make you reasses your life. I can't say it happens often. These delightful words were found on a door in a courtyard somewhere near covent garden, possibly. I interpret it as a call to drink more but also to acheive more. I'm concerned these two goals might be incompatible.

Let's go fly a kite

I have been struggling in inner turmoil with this issue for a while now, and I think I need an outlet.

The issue is Merry-Go-Rounds.

Merry-Go-Rounds: The Silent Killer

I find them simultaneously alluring and disturbing. The 'alluring' part is understandable; they evoke a kind of Edwardian charm of fairgrounds and laughter and candyfloss and dodgems. (Yes I know candyfloss probably isn't Edwardian. Don't shatter the dream). Then of course there's Rosie, the Magical Mystical Merry-Go-Round from Playdays; she was neither alluring nor disturbing, but a necessary evil until Why-Bird graced our screens again. I think I can trace my discomfort with them back to my almost-daily viewings of Mary Poppins as a child. Not only did this film form the bedrock of my feminist principles with the classic song 'Sister Suffragette' and inspire the now half-fulfilled ambition to become a tapdancing chimney-sweep, it also had me 60% convinced that if I rode a Merry-Go-Round, the horses would come semi-alive, leave their stifling fairground structure and gallop/bob down a lane into untold danger/excitement. Possibly including some kind of racecourse. I'm not sure what it says about me that the threat of danger we might encounter on our fantastical journey far outweighed any potential excitement and has left me with an almost crippling phobia of Merry-Go-Rounds, and horses, that I am only now beginning to excavate. Perhaps that I have a fear of the unknown and am unwilling to take (equine) risks? One thing's for certain: after five months publishing books on counselling I am no closer to unravelling my own psychoses. Although I did find myself today uttering the phrase "I cannot believe we only have two books on groupwork!"...and genuinely meaning it.

One Day

"Sometimes when it's going badly she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery"

- David Nicholls; One Day

Scandals in Stonemasonry

You've got to admire a lady who is so ashamed of her nakedness that she covers her face despite being made of stone. The cheery inscription on the stone seems to read: "Is life a boon? If so it must befal that death when he call must call too soon." Man that is depressing. I'd probably get naked too if I had to stand next to that every day. Not sure it would help though.

e.e. cummings: so cool he doesn't need capitals

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
- the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other; then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis


e. e. cummings

West Wing? More like BEST wing...

"I have wit, I have charm, I have brains, I have legs that go all the way down to the floor, my friend"

"I drink from the keg of glory. Bring me the finest muffins and bagels in all the land"

"Why should we go to Mars? Cause it's next. Because we came out of the cave and we looked over the hill and we saw fire. And we crossed the ocean and we pioneered the West and we took to the sky. The history of man is hung on a timeline of exploration and this is what's next."

If for the sake of argument in some kind of Greek-gods-gift-bestowing-upon-me type manner I could write like Aaron Sorkin but in order to do so I would have to be a crack addict...it would be totally worth it.