Kiev

Today feeling deflated after the rage of the day before yesterday. Do we have a country left to belong to? Hang on in there, May. Preserve us from the rest of them.

Too lazy to write it out: haiku for sunflowers

Do I exist or not?

Once yearly should not be too infrequent for Google to put me through such a rigmarole of security checks. Why DO I have two Google accounts?

Bid spolling

Obviously I shouldn't even consider reading news excerpts on MSN and the like, and, if I do, then I should have no expectations of them. But they are written by people with journalistic pretensions, so why are they so illiterate? Not to write of the comments sections, which are tapped out by people in transit, without their reading glasses, whilst distracted by the other screen they are watching. Spelling has become a mere approximation of the intended meaning. The "printed word" regularised spelling for a few centuries, but now that we are slipping into a post-print world, spelling has become the domain of every/wo/man. I should love the democratisation of this, but I don't.

Terror porn. I worry about the way the speedily networked world presents us with images of the distress of others. I don't believe it is necessary to witness atrocity or its aftermath to feel compassion. We should not have a window into private distress or the terror of small children. I resent the brief frisson of sorrow at a passing newsfeed; it isn't genuine, just a short thrill of feeling a bit sad. Even a small mishap experienced in the real world brings with it a complex set of emotions. Also I refuse to feel guilty for the inhuman deeds of others.

A Day of Failure

Not a European citizen anymore. nuff said

don't. do. stupid. things.

ilustrated life

painted and all shiny

views from the top

Tanzimat room

giant fridge, found blanket, Moomin hotwater bottle, survival

Tanzimat dawn

January 2016

Two months on from writing most of the below and nothing much happened except that I visited hospitals as directed by appointments made for me within the NHS. I created yet another Christmas in the house that has been home for the last sixteen years. I cavilled at creating the family mythology for the umpteenth time but how could I not? How heartless could I be to deprive my dearly beloved of the passive enjoyment of my exertions? It helped to pass the time as did some mindless Christmas employment. Then I went to war inside my head: should I or should I not stay for New Year? I stayed, partly out of my own passivity, partly out of fear that the New Year I imagined elsewhere might not live up to fantasy. Well, it could have been one of two things: better or worse. Actually of no consequence either way since disappointment has become a condition to process and absorb according to its level of intensity. Generally it doesn't kill but it wrenches the soul. New Year was unspectacular: I drank the bottle of cheap champagne that I received as an afterthought from my husband the day after my birthday. No one kissed me though the frogs were active in the pond due to the mildness of the season. By staying I became ill. Being ill made me unable to leave. Staying didn't speed up recovery. So, once again I packed my bags and assumed my nomadic status, somewhat without enthusiasm and a degree of dread at staying in a horrible cheap room. Probably that had prevented my departure, too. Now I'm sitting awake in bed confused by tiredness and a two hour time difference. I needed to sleep by seven in the evening; in England I am not in the habit of going to bed by five in the evening. I told myself it would be ok and I could still wander out for a drink later but I fell asleep for seven hours. I did not know I was so tired. My shoes are stacked in the wine rack and I feel slightly sickened by the sweet smell of cockroach spray. Twenty four hours of being here has persuaded me that a quick slap of a flip-flop is a better solution to the latter problem, although it is a lot more disgusting to dispose of dismembered and disembowelled cockroach than the sprayed variety. They don't take the hint quickly when they've been sprayed but shuffle off trailing some dust and turn belly up as a surprise find later. The spray accumulates in the room as a sickly miasma which is slowly poisoning me instead. Attempts to drown cockroaches in the toilet are also a failure. They thrash around frantically for a while, then reason sets in and they swim calmly to the edge of the water and climb back out. I haven't seen them do this but they don't stay in the water. This leads to the added hazard that they might just stay lurking under the toilet seat. As they have a habit of scuttling out suddenly this could lead to cardiac arrest on the pan. Stacking my shoes in the wine rack is unnecessary but it seems like a tidy thing to do. I makes me feel good to make use of an ugly and superfluous bit of furniture which was randomly placed in the middle of the room when I arrived. The washing machine rather grandly provided in the bedsit is too wide for the gap between the wall and kitchen unit. Obviously several residents have felt frustrated by this and tried to stack it in the space provided, judging by the gouge in the wall, but it just won't go. So it is stacked at a right angle to the end of the kitchen counter, leaving a squarish gap in the corner with the in and out pipes stretched across the useless gap to the right of the washing machine. That leaves just enough space to the left of the washing machine to stow the unnecessary wine rack between the washing machine and the built in wardrobe which is a Cypriot obsession and usually disproportionate to the size of any room. The wine rack is a sort of mini counter which had a long rectangular top. At some point in its life it must have provoked someone to saw off a sliver of the counter so, not only was it ugly to begin with but it now has a pentagonal top which means it no longer can be placed against any straight wall without either leaving a gap at the back or presenting a misshapen profile at the front. Stashing the wine rack in the gap makes it slightly less offensive, though it protrudes just enough to say "hello, I'm still here". It's not very likely that in my solitary existence I would acquire either a wine collection or sundry liqueurs to offer guests so stacking my shoes on the crenulated wire array seems the best solution. The washing machine is an extravagance. I want to know what bedsit dweller stashes so many soiled socks and underpants that warrant a washing machine. The sun here shines three hundred and sixty days a year and a quick hand rinse of any garment will see it dry and sterilised on the washing line in a couple of hours. I would have swapped the washing machine for a kettle. I had to boil water in the frying pan for my first few hours. It's quite difficult to pour water into a cup from a frying pan and impossible to fill a hotwater bottle. I arrived on a Wednesday which is early closing day and meant all practical shops were shut. I found one charity shop open where I was able to buy a quilted bedspread with only a couple of melted patches. The orange valance frill is a good colour match for the plastic chair in the room and some of the green stripes blend with the circular plastic wall clock. I was glad of the bed cover, else I would have spent the first night wrapped in jumpers and jackets. I bought a battery for the clock and it now noisily crunches out the seconds but I am incapable of finding my mobile to know what the time is. The bed fortunately had a fitted sheet with only a tiny cigarette burn. There were a couple of pillows, one of which even had a pillow case with an orange stain. There was also a cockroach and some black hairs. I washed the sheet in cold water as my arrival time did not coincide with any of the three hot water periods of the day. It is 3.40 in the morning and there are people screaming all over the city. It is something they do. I probably wouldn't be able to hear them if the door to the balcony was closed properly but it is temporarily off its hinges so it pulls to at a slight angle to the perpendicular. It has also been installed the wrong way round, so that stepping onto the balcony means squeezing between it and the end of the balcony rail; if it opened the other way one could just step out. Someone needs to tell door installers that a door can be hung either way. The toilet door at home was hung like that by the DIY enthusiast who ruined the rest of the house. Every night visit to the lavatory entailed being trapped between the door, the wall and the top of the stairs with the possibility of taking a wrong step and tumbling down a full flight. We live in difficult times confronted by many choices and hanging doors the right way is just one of them. The neighbour lady is quiet at this hour, fortunately her sleep pattern must be regular because sunlight causes her to step out of her front door and abuse the world at the top of her lungs. At first I thought she was responding to a particular provocation and felt the need to be very abusive in response to that, but as the minutes and then the hours went by and her invective didn't diminish in any way, I realised she just disapproved of all sorts of things and needed to vent her feelings. I don't understand much Greek but I think in her opinion a lot of things are whores or whore related. Maybe she just likes the word. In her own way she is enjoying the sunshine. The balcony is a really nice aspect to the rest of the crummy bedsit. It sports a washing line and has a clear view of the sea. I don't know why a cupful of blue glimpsed between wallscapes should seem superior but it's enjoyable. It speaks to the amoeba that remembers its erstwhile home. Or to the pirate raising his raiding standard. Considering how built up the neighbourhood is, the balcony is surprisingly private, no one overlooks it from any direction. The houses have been built in so many different orientations that, by chance, none face towards the balcony and it is unobstructed by any other high wall. That, and its curvature round the building give it an aspect of 270degrees and most of the winter traverse of light. The view is of slanting shingled roofs, partial courtyards and untidy streets, and more roofs in the distance. Yesterday I bought a kettle and now I can enjoy safe tea making. I am really annoyed at how much I paid for the kettle because in the very next shop I saw the same kettle at half the price. So now I am determined to enjoy the tea I make. I bought a broken bedside table in a charity shop. I watched for many minutes as the man tried to refit the lampshade. I could have watched him for quite a bit longer. I got him to reduce the price. I did not tell him that I would not be using the lampshade as I needed an adequate bulb for reading. Last night I turned the room around completely. Flushed with enthusiasm after stowing the wine rack I knew there had to be a better layout to the room than the way I found it, especially as the air-conditioning unit directly above my pillows was a place that cockroaches dropped out of. I also wasn't a fan of the aerial cable and extension cord draped across the bottom of the balcony door. I imagined a scenario in which I caught my foot on the wires and then somersaulted off the balcony because I fell onto the balcony rail through the tight gap of the door. As the door was unhinged and uncloseable I was not convinced by the shoelace that tied the door handle to the bedknob. The landlord explained at some length the variations on this: bedknob meant a locked door whereas the shoelace could also be used to anchor the door to a balcony rail to stop it from swinging in the wind. This meant getting out onto the balcony in an even tighter contortion by having to squeeze under the shoelace as well as manoeuvering the inside out door. The aerial cable led to the TV which was on top of the giant fridge freezer. It is nearly 5am and someone has left their room and dragged a heavy weight down the stairs. I do not know if it is the same person who has a hacking cough. In the course of moving the TV/fridge installation I broke the set top box thing which was dodgy to start with. First I snapped a pin on the video jack, then the unit stopped working altogether. I don't yet know if this is a tragedy as the set tops only receive limited Greek language TV with occasional English language documentaries that are repeated regularly. Not having an internet connection is worse. Internet in the middle of the night is a must for the committed insomniac. I moved the fridge to the other side of the door so that it wasn't necessary to trail the power cord across the bottom of the balcony door, and cockroaches from the airconditioning unit would in future fall first onto the tv, then onto the fridge. I wonder why the bedsit needs an enormous fridge freezer? I am trying to imagine the tenant who would need to steal a trolley from the supermarket in order to convey so many frozen food products. As it is, I am hiding my food in there from the cockroaches. In the last place I stayed my enemy was ants, millions of them. But it was a hotter season and ants are the cleanup crew of summer debris: dead insects and sandwiches in backpacks. They came out of tiny crevices in the walls. Any fragment of food of any kind was irresistible to them, as was my laptop keyboard. Hundreds of ants played hide and seek up and down the keys savouring some old spilt coffee stain. Putting a bag down unwisely meant that I would carry around a whole ants' nest until I got nipped and realised that I had passengers. By turning the bed through ninety degrees I made room for the broken bedside table lamp on the table. The table is almost beyond describing; I do not know what it is or why it exists. It has a single fat leg which serves as the pivot for three teardrop shape stacking table tops; if they were all opened out they would form a three fingered claw. I cannot imagine the room in which this would be a desirable accessory, a small Cypriot bedsit perhaps. I've closed up all the levels and brought it alongside the bed. Most things are ok placed on it, even cups of tea manage to cling on but not pens. Pens roll because when all the table tops are stacked, their weight sags off the horizontal. WHO designed this thing? WHY? At some point in recent history Cypriots, amongst their many cultural achievements, discovered the fitted wardrobe. Rooms in a lot of Cypriot houses can be quite small but not the fitted wardrobe which is often big enough for someone to live in. Any room in which a small unattached wardrobe would serve is suitable for one of these monstrosities. Very often they come with elaborated doors and handles and cannot be ignored. They stretch from floor to ceiling and are often more solid than the room itself, might even be holding up the ceiling. In theory they are storage spaces. The top shelf of the fitted wardrobe in this room is kind of too high for me to reach and I definitely can't see what's on it unless I take a good step back and do some craning. Since Cypriots are not a tall race this is daft. When I've stopped using the wine rack to store my shoes I will be using it as a ladder.

November 2015

It's embarrassing to document the happening of nothing. It's like discovering that washing up liquid is not necessary to clean dishes. It's like the smell of toast without the presence of bread. Unlike the Windup-Bird man I do not feel the need to sit at the bottom of a well to discover the nub of the nothingness but maybe being on an island in the Mediterranean is not so dissimilar. An island in a sea that doesn't need to mention it's a sea, as if the islands were part of a mainland, which they inextricably are, tied to the continent by the tides of history and the flow of people, some of whom knew why they were coming here, some who made their way deliberately, but equally, plenty who drifted up against its shores by accident or were forced there by the pressure of others. Even refugees have standards. They complain about their conditions in the camps here set up by the British army. Perhaps, by definition, everyone who ever made landfall on an island, is a refugee, from the danger of the sea at least. We were not made to float on waves though we were created in water. Once our essence is fleshly we are too heavy and we desire earth under our feet, a solid place to walk but, more than that, earth to which we belong. Today I'm going to look at more apartments. It's what I did yesterday and the day before and most of the days going back a while now. Sometimes I've seen inside the apartments accompanied professionally by an estate agent who has driven me to a location and told me about the neighbourhood and accurate information like pricing. Though accuracy has become a creative construct with absolutely no benchmarks or rules that guide or define. Sometimes I've been invited in off the street by owners of places wanting a rental client. Sometimes I've made appointments and waited in front of buildings learning their facade and gradually falling out of love with the street where I'm standing. More than often I've noted the phone number on a fence or balcony or telegraph post and ridden on, intending to phone but probably not doing so because that same sense of not wanting to live just there has haunted me. Knowing exactly where to live is an art. And the moment of knowing is a mysterious meeting of mental leylines. Or an accident of sunlight. Sunlight at the bottom of a well. A momentary vision of the life that could be lived there. Whatever comes to pass in that place will make no reference to that moment. No genie will arise in the future to say: " Well, you shouldn't really have moved in here because now look what you've done, this and that would never have happened, so you've only got yourself to blame for this mess." It's something about the nature of choice. Place is only one aspect, the other elements follow or precede depending on how you come to remember it. I moved into the bedsit on St Marks Rise in Hackney because an afterthought made me go to one of two red telephone boxes. The thought was plaguing me that the room I had just looked at was, at least, an improvement on the dump I was living in, and I could make it liveable. At the time I was barely thrilled to be living in London, arriving at the wrong time in my life to make it an adventure. But those two phone boxes were responsible for a lot. I met a husband and had two children. Moving into a place becomes a marker. It becomes the beginning of a story. Places where things happen in our lives are often the chapters of those lives. The time framed within them is relative so the length of time is variable and defined by circumstance. One can live for a long time in a place and little might occur, yet a few weeks or days in another location can be intense and full of occasion that will become large in memory popping like corn or candyfloss to fill the vacancy of a story. Sometimes time stops entirely. Travelling has that effect. Time and space are linked. When they become separated, each in its own sphere ceases to have meaning. Looking for somewhere to live has that effect. Looking for somewhere to live is like travelling. It means being temporarily (paradoxically an adjective of time) anchored to a place to which one has no adhesion, with the purpose of finding another place. The traveller looks at a map maybe on a piece of paper, increasingly in a three-dimensional format, able to see the world virtually and in its proper dimensions. When one has found the other place one will have the desired experience. Looking for a place to live is not identical to travelling because the desired outcome is to stop moving from place to place, it is finding a location from which one will not need to keep moving on. How deep are roots? As deep as they need to be for the living thing above ground to draw nourishment. Below the earth to give breath above the earth. Living things are, for the most part on the earth, not in the earth and not on the sea. And human beings need to find their place on that earth. We are strongly attached to it. The nature of the universe has made it so. When we become detached and displaced it can be difficult to find the attachment again, like a cosmonaut floating without a lifeline we might drift away. It makes one crazy. In the short term it takes the form of home sickness. A random impulse triggers in the brain and says: " I'd love to wander down Islington High Street this afternoon. Oh but hey, I can't. I'd have to see if there's a flight today and it takes five hours, and really, I just want to go there now. Oh shit, I'm sad." That sort of homesickness eventually makes one get on the plane and go home. But the solution is glib. Feeling that one doesn't have a home regardless of having somewhere to live is more profound. The German word Heimweh better defines that condition: a pain for a lost homeland even when one is at home. That's my condition. It's probably the condition of humanity. it is the myth of being dispelled from the Garden of Eden. Except that Christian mythology wants to make it our fault, like we chose to be guilty of our own homelessness. We were children once and the apple was tasty. Unpacking different types of homelessness and homesickness is not even so easy it seems. Trying to get at the condition is like trying to prise a fine hair from one's mouth. It's there to annoy one but grabbing at it with fingers doesn't solve the problem. Looking for somewhere to live when one already feels fundamentally without roots is almost an impossibility. Eventually, at the moment of the final reckoning, one will be able to tally incidents and their places and it will amount to a life but deep down, under the ground, something was missing. So this is why nothing is happening. Time is at a standstill. The days have acquired the dragging bass vibration of a slowed sound tape. Or life is carrying on at the usual speed around me but I am watching it from the capsule of my personal time travel. Someone asked me the other day: "Are you waiting for a sign?" I've always been waiting for a sign. It will be the signal that I have ceased to be a sleepwalker. These are things I have slept through: study, relationships, children, work. I think I was awake when I was a child. It is why I remember childhood intensely; I think I could recall every day of my childhood if I abandoned the present and devoted my hours to reliving the years before age fourteen, fifteen? Unconsciously from about that age my mind resigned itself to sleeping, to let my body be bounced from situation to situation without them being of my choosing. Of course, in my childhood I had no choice at all but I was consciously aware of what was happening. I even understood the subtleties of adult life around me, after all it was what shaped the texture of my days. But slowly I stopped understanding the bigger picture and accepted incidents as they came at me. The last conscious choice I made was to accept homelessness. I felt homeless. My fantasies at fifteen centred on having a home of my own. They were quite intense and included even the furniture I would choose; actually they were never very grand places I lived in but rather dimly lit bedsits based on the limited experience I had of other people's dimly lit bedsits. Imagination failed me on this count, I denied myself the right to sunshine. At the time I lived in a perfectly nice house but the home I grew up in, the nest, was sparsely feathered by my parents. Had they been gannets, their egg would have fallen off the cliff. Human beings have the capacity to fail quite spectacularly before life becomes untenable. I suppose life is like that, it is a tough cookie. It is part of the nature of life itself that life is difficult to extinguish. Seeing the determination of a starving street cat on this Mediterranean island is evidence of the principle. My third coffee of the morning works on my physical body: it makes me want to defecate and simultaneously awakens in me hunger for breakfast. The real asserts precedence over the surreal. The Windup-Birdman can not be left to die at the bottom of the well or there is no story. Today I will look at some apartments. Knowing if one of them is the right one is entirely dependent on understanding why I have come here. And I'm still not quite sure. The apartment needs to capture a lot of sunshine, it cannot be dingy or look out upon a wall. It needs to be like the plastic carrier bag on the table: bright yellow and orange with the recommendation to hold the island in my heart. And the first phonecall of the day has summoned me to explain myself: "Yes, the list you sent me was fine, I would be interested to view all of those. My initial budget limit was 100000 euros but if I saw something really nice I would consider paying more than that, I've seen a few houses that are more expensive; well, I'd really like to live in the centre but it seems that's almost impossible, so no, I don't mind if it's in outlying districts, I'm willing to look further afield, though actually I really want to live in the centre; yes, I'm willing to look really far away for a nice house but what I actually want to do is live right in the middle; once again I'm perfectly happy to compromise on what I really want to do, please just bounce me somewhere and I'll sort of deflate and come to rest any old where that I don't want to live." The sun isn't shining today. The cloud cover is sort of complete, it will probably evaporate and there will be sun later. I am going to look at an apartment that costs 250 euros per month to rent. Economically, even in the long term, this makes sense: no maintenance, no commitment, no fees to authorities, not even a huge outlay over time. But as an overall picture it bears no resemblance to the dream of a sunlit house where I can come and go and please myself and have sheds that can be turned into art studios and butterflies rest on the fence. Because, to some extent, the dream needs to shape the reality, otherwise it is a really pointless exercise. The rebuilding has started upstairs. It begins just after nine. It involves knocking down walls. If I wanted a symbol for my present condition then this is it: living in a hotel that is being rebuilt around me. I couldn't fantasize it. Eventually only my room will still exist, they can't knock it down while I'm renting it, they will have to leave it and so it will still be here on the second floor on a pedestal with rubble lying all around and the traffic on the street blowing the dust through the windows. Having to confront one's own aimlessness is a challenge. "What do you do?" is the first question that people ask. Thoughtlessly. Like the answer they hear is a clue to the person they are meeting. This isn't an original observation but it deserves some thought. At heart it is a crude question. Its answer is usually located in the sphere of work and derivable income which leads to a spontaneous value judgement on likely level of education and affordable lifestyle and hence to an estimate of whether one wants to expend any further energy on befriending. To answer: "Nothing" is a conversation killer. Offering a vague substitute for "nothing" is preferable; of course, it can't immediately take the form of: "I have two Batchelor's degrees and a Masters and I speak six languages but I can't get my act together to have a profession but I have spent quite a long time finding myself and thinking about stuff." Also a conversation killer. "Which of the languages would you like to continue in?" "None, thanks." A new formality is needed: "What is your position vis a vis the kissing of frogs?" Now that would make people think, they would have to adopt an attitude that was not lamely taken care of by their employment of the moment. I cannot yet decide if aimlessness is a good condition. It is a jellyfish. On the one hand it drifts according to no discernible currents. On the other hand it gets tangled within nets of purpose and apparent direction and goes counter the advice and training that are the stuff of education. It's impossible not to feel guilty, which is further complicated by not knowing what to be guilty about. Guilt is a hard case and comes with cause. Aimlessness has attached itself to homelessness, a case of less is more. Somehow finding a home will cure the A-disease. It will involve brooms and brushes and washing up liquid and the smell of toast and hey presto, on the seventh day there was purpose. A friend was laid up with an injured limb and filled out the time with beginning a romantic novel. It was an autobiographical essay, without purpose, of her own relationship with her husband. Of course, it was badly written but touching, pleasant witness to love that has endured. Is there an anti-romantic novel? Not one of drama or episodes of unforgivable behaviour? But a dreary concatenation of nothingness, the aimless state of marriage which dissolves into something loveless. It is a state which is not even related to the natures of the couple involved, it exists in its own right, independently. I learnt the word "concatenation" in a hotel. It was a hotel in Moscow in 1978. Andrew explained that the etymology was from the Latin "catena" for chain. I shared the room with Jill who was from Shiremoor. My friend who tried to write the novel about her married life also lived in Shiremoor. Other than that I have no connection to the place. And I would not like to live there. My dream is not to live on a housing estate in the North East of England but on a sun soaked Mediterranean island. I used to live in the North East of England and, for a while I was happy there. I was content to live there while the pageant of my life variously thrilled to the cacophony of an orchestra striking up or the melody of nightingales. I may never have heard nightingales. I don't actually know what they sound like and I don't know if they are melodious. I enjoyed the presence of the mucky Tyne and the life that clung to its banks. The building which is now a world class art gallery used to be a nesting cliff for gannets. It was protected as their home. The building had been a flour mill at which coasters docked and loaded up with flour. Then the flour trade ceased and the coasters no longer came and the building fell into disrepair though it was sturdy and didn't fall down. It was much loved by the gannets. They covered it in guano and flew round it raucously and fed their babies on every narrow ledge. I left Newcastle in 1989. Sometime in the following decade it became possible to unhouse the gannets, to send them packing, they were only gannets after all. The world isn't short of gannets but it needs more art.

impossible to keep writing

pin to the pin

my drawing

incompetence

I could have got this one off the ground but didn't activate the right protocol; own fault

Hi Anna-Marya,
Thanks for your email. Unfortunately the Kusama competition requires the creation of a new work, in response to a specific brief set by Yayoi Kusama's studio. And I'm afraid to say that the competition ended yesterday.
Thanks though for your interest and I hope you'll continue to contribute projects to the site.
Kind wishes
Jo

re Cornish Holiday

and that was by way of jollying up the contents. Colour. Full.

Cornish Holiday July 2002

mooning in June

a blip of memory has triggered a reminder that I wrote this, and stopped writing to it four years ago