big skies - deep waters - long memories

I'm writing this on our last evening in Orkney - tomorrow morning we catch the Hamnavoe ferry from Stromness back to Caithness (I can't call it "mainland" since Mainland is what they call the largest island here on Orkney). I'm trying to get my thoughts into enough of a linear form to fit them into things like words and sentences, while I'm still here, so that time and the city and the resuming of life doesn't dull the experience of this last week. This seems the sort of place that will drift away, somewhere past the cliffs of Hoy, pulled back to the islands and the sea, not something you can take with you. That's why people come here once and keep coming back. Or never leave at all.

And everywhere there's the marks made by people long ago - Skara Brae is the one everyone's heard of, but Maeshowe stole our hearts. You crawl though a 10 meter long passageway, lined with single 20 tonne blocks, and emerge in the main high-ceilinged chamber, three tombs like box-beds set into the walls. The blocks of the main room are covered with carefully etched graffiti - but no lazy tags or scrawled nicknames - these were made with axes and stones - by Vikings, 1000 years ago. The tomb was already old when they entered, sheltering from a wild snowstorm for three nights. Legends says there were 100 of them in the small space (a bit of Viking exaggeration?) - but they alleviated the boredom by writing messages on the walls: "Ingigerth is the most beautiful"...."The man who is most skilled in runes west of the ocean carved these with the axe of Gauk Trandilsson"....and up high, written by a man surely sitting on the shoulders of another -"Eyjolf Kolbeinsson carved these runes high". On the winter solstice the setting sun hits the Barnhouse standing stone, aligned perfectly with the entrance to the tomb, shines down the passage and illuminates the back wall of the Maeshowe. Oh, and you can watch it live via webcam every year - 21st of December (about 3.30, when the sun sets on the shortest day in Orkney).

The Ring of Brodgar is a huge stone circle amongst the heather, just across the water from Maeshowe. 104 meters in diameter, with a 130 meter diameter encircling ditch dug into the bedrock. The stones are huge - phenomenally big - and all from different places around the islands. The ditch was dug and the stones erected at the same time, but by different people - 4,500 years ago.

The Ness of Brodgar dig a little way down the road is uncovering a series of buildings of some kind - though they've no idea yet what they could be. We walked around, wondering if the people who made them had any possible notion that, 4-5ooo years from then people would be there - that people would even care? Perhaps they thought their society and culture would survive for ever, no mystery to their buildings because they would still be in use.

At the Tomb of the Eagles we handled Neolithic pottery shards. One was decorated with little fingernail crescent grooves. I put my nail in these marks - the same marks made by someone else's fingernails, 5000 years ago. A sense of vertigo, of incredulity. 5000 years ago.

But this is everywhere here - on every island - practically in every backyard. There are something like 300-odd Neolithic dwellings here, just rough circular marks in a farmer's field of a garden. Only a handful have been excavated, or ever will. Not much treasure here - the bronze-age hardly even made it to Orkney, most of the people here too poor (and too practical) to ever bother with the expensive, soft bronze.

I've spent most of my childhood in the remote hills of Mid-Wales. I know the bees on the brilliant purple heather and the scrubby moorland hills, rocky beaches and constant gales. I know the evening sunlight on the water and the geese skidding in to land. It shouldn't be new to me, or have this effect on me, but it does somehow.

The sky is just so big here. It's an odd feeling: being this open, amongst this much space, yet feeling as though you're right in the clouds, shielded from the mainland and the rest of the world behind a curtain of sky. And there's so much weather here too - it comes and goes at incredible speeds. It rains (though not as much as the rest of the UK), but the rain doesn't stay for long. Every evening here has been gloriously sunny. The wind never stops - you don't want it to, because a gap in the gales brings the midges out like demons. Our faces are red and happy with sun and wind-burn.

All we need now is a glimpse of orca during the ferry trip. Crossing all fingers and other crossable body-parts....

Well who'd a thunk it?!

For three years a friend at work has been telling me that I need to start cycling into work. For three years I've been replying with one or more of the following:

1) No.

2) Just absolutely no.

3) When hell freezes over.

4) Not in a bajillion years.

5) hahahahahhhAhahhahahahahahahahhhaahahah!

6) Really, no.

I'd spent the majority of my youth on increasingly larger hand-me-down bikes from my cousins or brother. I still remember the day I got my first ever brand new bike, my wonderful Grandad who I've mentioned here before would get my brother and I a new one every few years on our birthdays. I remember coming home from holiday one day when I was God-knows how old and demanding my stabilisers be taken off my little red, yellow and blue bike. There were rides to Llyn Eiddwen, bikes dumped unceremoniously in the rushes by the side of sheep-poo covered tarmac, Dad shepherding us on occasional trips, he on his big white Raleigh racing bike. Off-road rides up The Top of the farm, skipping ropes tied to each handle bar so my brother and I could pretend we were riding horses and play Lonesome Dove (yes, we did actually do this). But the extent of the traffic on Mynydd Bach was the occasional sheep with a death-wish, or on a really busy day, a tractor from a neighbouring farm.

But in London traffic? I would surely be flattened by a bus in a day. Or murdered by angry "expert" cyclists with serious faces and serious bikes and even more serious lycra. And considering my brief foray into learning to drive didn't go so well (I still have frequent recurrent nightmares about being put behind the wheel of a car) and the fact that I sometimes have to think quite hard before being sure which is my left and right - well, I thought it was probably best for everyone if I just stayed off the roads.

And then one day the impossible happened: my cycle-mad flatmate asked why I didn't just get a bike.........and I actually found myself considering it. And considering it in scenarios that didn't end with me under the wheels of a bus.

A little bit of idle searching online and I came across the Bobbin Bicycles site, which is basically porn for any vintage-style bike lovers out there. I'd heard about Pashley a while ago, and have been watching the past two annual Tweed Runs with tweed-green-eyed envy, but never in my wildest dreams could I have ever imagined owning one of these beauties.

If you've never heard of Pashley, I don't blame you, but they really are the most beautiful bikes.

Established in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1926 by an ex-WW1 dispatch rider, they're still making them the same way, in the same place over eighty years later. With bikes named "The Guv'nor" and "The Princess" you can't help be charmed. I'd seen a fair few of the ladies Princesses around and fallen in love from afar, but searching the Bobbin catalogue that day I came across the Pashley Poppy . It was a bit of a Wayne's World moment, me practically drooling on the keyboard and swearing that one day she will be mine.

A few weeks later the bike came up in the Bobbin summer sale, and I jumped. Taking her out for a test-ride I fell instantly in love with the "sit-up-and-beg" style of the high handlebars. I rode around the lovely quiet square behind the shop a few times quit happily in the skirt I happened to be wearing that day, and noticed how people smiled at me and my lovely bike. I knew I had to buy it - not just that model but that very bike. I walked away with it about 20 minutes later....and got it in the back of a taxi as I wasn't quite brave enough to make an hour and a half journey across London in rush-hour on my brand new bike just yet.

I thought it would be ages before I worked up the courage to begin riding on London roads, but progressed in one weekend from riding on the Thames path to Barnes, then riding to South Bank on some of the cycle lanes on roads, and then attempting my journey to work on a beautiful quiet sunday morning. By monday I made my first trip to work in rush-hour traffic and was loving it. Okay, so I still get a bit sicky-feeling with nerves when I think about it (not loving the lorries and buses....and serious cyclists frowning at me and my sedate pace every morning) but the wonderful feeling of air and movement and speed is infinitely nicer than the stale soot, delayed and cramped tube carriages. I even think that the type of perspiration you get from a bike is preferable to the type of perspiration you get from a tube journey at this time of the year. Here are some of the brilliant things that I've seen and have made me smile on my couple of weeks cycling to work:

A man jumping over a 7-foot wide cobbled road on roller-blades.

A business man crossing the road smoking a pipe.

The Royal Albert Hall and memorial every morning and evening.

Little girls being led around the paddock in Hyde Park on little piebald ponies early in the morning.

A man waiting at a crossing who looked exactly like my Grandad.

And here's what I've learned:

I love cycling.

My bike is a bit like me (old before her time, a bit creaky, likes to dress in vintage).

I call my bike Poppet and talk to it regularly. Out loud.

I bruise like a peach and my inner thighs are purple right now.

Safety is Sexy.

Exercise is fun when you don't know you're doing it.

If I can do it, anyone can.

And if I do end up under a bus? I just hope my Poppet makes it unscathed.

Illustrat(h)er..

So it turns out it's quite hard to get a picture of my tattoo - they warned me that a circle on my wrist would stretch, in time, and though it hasn't warped into an oval yet it does tend to look that way when I stretch it around to take a photo of it.

It's a year since I got it and I thought it a good time to write some thinky thoughts about it. I know this might sound stupid to people who have countless tattoos, but to me this was a very profound experience - and though I often wake up in the morning having dreamt of the crazy extensions that I've had tattooed around it (not sure what this signifies), it's not an experience that I'm in a hurry to have again.

Don't get me wrong - I love my tattoo. I've never regretted it, and I don't think I ever will, precisely because it was the act of getting it done that means as much, if not more to me, than the mark itself.

Have you ever doodled something on the back of your hand to reming yourself - something that you need to pick up at the shops, or a doctors appointment maybe? My tattoo is a bit like that - which is one of the reasons why I wanted it somewhere as prominent and visible as my wrist. It's to remind me, to make me think, about lots of things.

The design itself is a "koru", a Maori symbol that I have a jade necklace of from New Zealand. It quickly became a sort of good-luck charm, and it made me feel safer and more confident to have it with me when I needed a bit of a boost. I like the cyclical, natural look to it. Some people have commented it looks like a shell, like a nautilus, or a ying and yang symbol, or...well, a foetus. Okay so the last one is a little weird (I can't imagine who'd want that on their wrist) but it's interesting that they all sort of represent the same thing. The design itself, and the Maori's koru symbol is based on an unfurling silver fern. It represents new life, new beginnings, but also, ultimately, that life goes the way it is supposed to go, and the way it has done for millions of years. According to wikipedia: "The circular shape of the koru helps to convey the idea of perpetual movement while the inner coil suggests a return to the point of origin."

At the risk of sounding a bit of a hippie - I like this idea, and it comforts me. I want to look at my wrist every day and remind myself that I'm on the right path, that everything it as it is supposed to be and the little things that cause me pain, and anxiety now, are ultimately transient. Every now and then I need to remind myself that I'm doing the right thing, that I've come a long way but there's a whole life ahead of me. Also, anyone who has come into contact with me at all will probably realise that I the world's biggest worrier - and I'm constantly battling with the niggling feeling that I don't deserve such wonderful friends, such a great job, such a nice life. Not in the sense that I'm not good enough to deserve good things, in a moral sense, but that I'm not grown-up or worthy enough, somehow. That I'm running with the big kids and one day they're going to notice that I shouldn't be here. So koru is to remind me that, in the words of Desiderata:

"You are a child of the universe

no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should."

As I mentioned before, the act of getting it done was important. I had just passed the three year anniversary of my moving to London, which in itself was a big deal for me. This time last year I thought I was happy, but I was lonely, a bit lost, trying to find myself again, I think. So the act of getting it done, the permanence of it and the pain, is to prove to myself that I am an adult - I am capable, I am strong - I can deal with these things. I can make big decisions and I can deal with the consequences.

Which brings me on to my last reason: if any of you know me well enough to have heard me go off on one of my "the trouble with kids these days!" rants, you'll know that I'm big on the responsibility of the individual - incidentally one of the reasons why the idea of organised religion has never sat well with me. Last year I was coming out of a place that had affected me deeply, and made me think deeply about my position in this world, the people around me and the way I want to go on with my life.

It basically boils down to this: shit happens. The world can be really fucking cruel sometimes. People can be horrible to you, or manipulative, or mean. Past relationships, friendships, childhood bullies, families. All of these people we come into contact with can leave marks on us, that affect us for a long time. But ultimately I believe you can't let this affect the way you treat other people. I wanted to remind myself that I am the only person responsible for myself, and I should be the only person who can leave a mark on myself.

So. A little bit deep and thinky, maybe. But I suppose if you're going to get a permanent picture drawn on you then it might as well be for a significant reason. So my tattoo is my lifelong "To Do" list: live well; remember I have a right to be here; be responsible; treat other people well - and you'll get where you're supposed to be.

Or, you know, something.

P.S. Lawks, this blog is getting far too serious! I'm going to have to counter this with something really stupid and frivolous. Go and check out "Condescending Lama" on http://animalsbeingdicks.com/ for something light and fluffy and really quite funny.

"P.S. How are the tomatoes?"

When I'm feeling sad, or sorry for myself, or lonely, I buy tomatoes for dinner - the small, expensive ones, still on their fuzzy sharp vines. The hot musky smell of them does something peculiar to my brain, opens a little wormhole in my head - or my heart, or somewhere- and sucks me through to my childhood. My own personal, internal, olfactory time machine. Time And Relative Dimensions In Smell. Or...something. I am a child again, standing in my Grandad's greenhouse, breathing in that smell. And it's a little bit theatrical, a little bit hammy (not the smell, the sentiment!), but I remember him like I last saw his yesterday, not five years ago.

But you see, my Grandad was often a little bit theatrical, a little bit hammy. A perfect, and my favourite example: The Curious Tale of The Missing Index Finger....

If I shut my eyes I can see my Grandad's hands - loose, wrinkled skin - the little nub of his left index finger which was cut off below the nail. When my older brother and I were kids he told us he'd got it stuck in the big anti-aircraft Bofors gun he fired during the war (presumably at a time when he and his mates weren't using the barrel of said gun to smuggle stolen tins of raisins, or being stranded on the wrong beaches with it whilst the rest of their regiment fought it out, a little way down the coastline, in the Invasion of Sicily.)

No, he told us that he'd been firing the gun in Egypt when his finger became trapped in the mechanism. Unfortunately it had to be amputated, but the story had a happy ending because he gave the nub of discarded finger, nail and all, to a sad and starving stray dog that had been skulking around camp - which led to the mutt following him around for the rest of the war. My mother, though, has another version: she was told as a child that he lost it in a duel with a Cossack. Yes. A duel. With a Cossack. Asking around, we realised that everyone had been told a different story.

That dashing looking blond lad up there is my Grandad, Ronald Price. I'm currently in the middle of spell-checking and correcting the grammar on the literally hundreds of letters that he sent to his parents whilst away during WWII, and which I've typed up and intend to make into some sort of book for my family. And I've finally found the truth of The Missing Index Finger:

"23^rd March 1945

I missed writing this weeks letter for a day or two as I squashed one of my fingers with a sledge hammer on Monday and the M.O had to cut the end of it off to trim it up. It’s the index finger of the left hand so it won’t bother me at all. It’s healing up very nicely so don’t get worried or anything."

They were putting up a tent. Not quite as glamorous as the duel or even the dramatic gun-mechanism-finger debacle. But this is my favourite story about my Grandad - if you know me well enough the chances are I've already told you it. It's my Grandad, right there. The entertainer. The comedian. The truth may not be as exciting as the overblown and entertaining tales that made us laugh as kids, but there's something in seeing this little paragraph, written to some parents at home in North London, worrying about their only son. Something so young and human. Reading these letters has let me see my Grandad as Gunner Price - in his early twenties, never left home till the war but now traveling the world, and desperate to document and share everything he sees and experiences with his mum, dad and sister back home.

In an odd way, I think I know how he felt. I spent three months in New Zealand at 19, phoning home almost every day to tell my family about the incredible places I'd been to, the people I'd met. I was desperately homesick but loving every minute - but more than that, more than homesickness, I was aching to share it all with the people I loved.

And here's my Grandad, old creaky Grandad young and blond, dancing and swimming and eating his way around Italy, spending his leave in Rome weighed down with guide books ("I saw the famous Colosseum but as it is not the first Roman amphitheatre I’ve seen I wasn’t very stirred"), going to a Turkish Bath in Iraq ("This brings to the surface all sorts of mud and slime whereon you blush hotly and wonder what mother would say"), picking up a tan in Sicily ("Yes sir, that’s me, the body beautiful. Oh what a treat the girls are missing.").

He was obviously making an effort to be cheerful and entertaining for his worried parents back home - and for his sister, who was slowly dying of a brain tumour. His letters to his parents and his sister in those last few months before she died are heartbreakingly chipper and positive, full of cheesy jokes and shared memories for her, and assurances for his parents' benefit that miracles happen every day, no matter what the doctors might say.

But it's the little things, the signoffs ("Cheerio love Ron"), the asides ("I hope Dad has just pruned the roses. Now is the time, you know) and the postcripts ("P.S. How are the tomatoes?") that bring it all home for me.

For a long time I've wanted to write something about my Grandad, but it's so hard to put into words all the things that I want to say. That I want to say to him, really. He passed away on the 29th of October, 2005. And I have missed him desperately, each and every day since.

I want to tell him how much we love him, of course - but other things, silly little insignificant things. I want to tell him that his letters are wonderful, that he was so very funny, and wrote so beautifully, and that I'm sure his words were a great comfort to his parents and sister. I want to tell him about my life now - the books I'm reading, the places I've travelled to and things I've done- the way I found the courage to get up and sing on stage because of him. The way I'll always try to be as good and loving and understanding and curious and excited a human being as he was - that I could never find a greater role model than him. And that I, like him, will never be too grown-up to get excited on Christmas Eve.

But I can't. But I do. In my head, every day. So here I am with my tomatoes, and I am a child again, and it's summer again - stretching on through endless sunny sunday nights, the knowledge of them ending there somewhere, but hazy, out of sight. I'm standing in my Grandad's greenhouse- stiflingly close air heavy with the earthy smell of things growing, sunshine and water on crumbly soil. The little concrete paving slabs line up between the tall green rows, a little tangle of strawberry plants makes a break for freedom through a gap in the breezeblock foundations. But mostly tomatoes. Little hot, sunny, red skin-cracked tomatoes.

"What did the Romans ever do for us, eh?!"

Cor, I spent ages on this picture! Again I'm left wondering when I will grow up and make proper worthy art instead of just drawing girls from different historical eras, but this was a great exercise in drawing straight on Photoshop which I very very rarely do. It's not really my preferred style, but it was good practice. Especially the hair, which took the bulk of 4-5 hours. This tiny crummy upload doesn't really do it justice, but there we go. Her name is Osian, which I know is a boy's name, but still.

I've no idea why but I'm currently in the midst of a massive Roman/Celt fixation. Alright, it's a bit of a lie when I say I don't know why - it all started when I went to see "The Eagle" movie a few weeks ago, based on the fantastic book "The Eagle of the Ninth" by Rosemary Sutcliff. The film is fun - nicely shot, good battle scenes, well acted - a little Hollywood-ish in places but forgiveable. It's not going to win any prizes for groundbreaking cinema, but it's a good fun movie - and it caught my imagination. And it's got that Billy Elliot bloke in it, skulking around being all slavey-y and Gaelic and moody and secretly/blatantly in love with his Roman master - Channing Tatum. Which is a made-up name if ever I heard one.

Every now and then I see a film or read a book which drags me into a particular obsession - usually a historical era. When this happens I just can't get enough of it: I need to read books and magazines about it, daydream about it, I need to watch films, listen to music, completely immerse myself in it. And then a few weeks later and normally with wallet a little lighter I come out the other end of the thing. Until next time, at least.

Mind you, I've always had a particular interest in ancient history and archaeology, so this is at least allowing me to indulge that. Everything seemed...more epic then, didn't it? When men built walls across entire countries, fierce painted tribesmen harried legionaries by appearing and disappearing in the mists, whole countries changed overnight. The list of things the Romans brought to Britain is staggering. I mean, locks and keys, glass, as well as little things like politics and governments and, you know, really really straight roads. They even had under-floor heating ("hypocausts" - amazing!). Turns out the Romans actually did do a lot for us.

The one thing that it's got me wondering though (and it's a pointless rhetorical question as I doubt anyone is reading this, but I can be self-indulgent on my own blog, right?): so much of our modern English language is from latin, and from the later Norman invasions, But when Rome officially got tired of mad tribesmen and year-long winters and abandoned Britain, the Celts and Saxons and British-born Romans were all left to jostle for power. The Celtic language was meant to be something like Gaelic but a lot more like modern-day Welsh (if that isn't a contradiction in itself) - so why aren't there more Welsh and Gaelic words in the English language? If that's what it evolved from?

Anyway, while I'm digging the whole Ancient Britain thing I feel I should really pimp out and recommend all the books by Rosemary Sutcliffe, and "The Eagle" soundtrack by Atli Örvasson, which has some truly epic celtic themed bits of music. I also watched "Centurion", which is alright but I enjoyed far less than "The Eagle" - because I couldn't give a toss about the characters and there was far too little bromance and much too much gratuitous day-go blood. Although it gets points for judicious use of Michael Fassbender. Oh and I revisited "Gladiator" and reminded myself why I loved it so much when I first saw it, and how magnificent the score by Hans Zimmer is. I'm currently debating whether I can sit through "King Arthur" and Keira Knightley's boney jutting chin again just to see the costumes and weaponry, or if it'll induce a repeat of the fit of hysterical giggles that it did the first time I saw it.

Hmm. Maybe my obsession won't stretch quite that far.

"Beautiful! Just beautiful!"

So on a spacey theme today, in honour of the 50th anniversary of the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, I want to share this song - "Space Walk" by Lemon Jelly. The voice sample used is Alan Bean (so the internet tells me) an American astronaut, describing the sunset as seen on a spacewalk outside their craft. The song itself is wonderfully bouncy, uplifting and summery, but Bean's commentary is gorgeous - it's incredible to think that this is the voice of a man speaking as he sees the earth, the first "point of light" of the sunrise from space. The joy in his comment of "I feel like a million dollars" is evident. He's witnessed a sight that the majority of us will never know - a sight that would without a doubt change a person's life, and their perspective on the world they live in, forever.

Still, it'd scare the shit out of me. But then that's why I'm not an astronaut.

Enjoy!

Aiding and abetting: '50s shoot with Scarab Pictures

So my wonderful and talented friend Claire of Scarab Pictures asked me to run around in the Soho sunshine, dressed in '50s-ish rockabilly clothes - how could I resist? I'm very lucky to have such talented and creatively brilliant friends, who often not only abide my penchant for dressing up, but often actively encourage it!

Check out the whole shoot here.

Newspaper milestones, straws to clutch at, and finding hope and shouting fucking loudly about it.

Today I bought The Times - I rarely buy newspapers, in fact, I only really do when there's something really significant on the front page. I take them home, well-thumbed and read on the tube, the ink slightly worn off on my fingers, and pack them away safely in a box.

I can pinpoint this habit back to a specific date - 12th of September 2001. I remember the front page clearly: vivid, almost obscenely blue sky; two stark white lines; a smudge of black smoke; balls of bright fire. Moments before the World Trade Center towers collapsed. I was almost 17, had just moved school, was blissfully unaware of my naivety. But this - this was too big a thing. The other day I sat around with some friends, nearly ten years on, and the conversation somehow turned to that day. It's almost a cliche, but everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing on that day. It's a milestone now, a Before and After. No one, no matter how young, could fail to see how utterly and completely world-changing that day was.

So I bought a newspaper. And it wasn't just the covers I wanted to keep, the terrifying headlines or the shocking images - I wanted the whole papers. I wanted to look back in years to come and see all the many mundane trivialities we concerned ourselves with on the days that rocked the world off its axis, for just a moment. The way that we were still talking about the latest film reviews or the celebrity gossip when the little path we're blazing as a species is shunted sideways, in the blink of an eye, changing everything.

So there they sit, these paper records: dictators and towers and cities toppled, men rescued from deep under ground, new leaders elected, economies slumped, earth shifting and ash-clouds. A little while ago I was clearing out my old room at home and came across those papers, now all packed and sealed in a box that I left my parents with strict instructions to stash in the attic.

Folded and piled neatly next to old birthday cards, my exam results, diaries, letters from friends - little transient things that never seem to lose their significance over time. There's something fascinating in the complete paradox: the fragility of the paper and ink, and the permanence of the stories they tell.

So today's Times will go into the box, and some day I know I'll look back on it and realise how the events that began last friday off the coast of Japan sent aftershocks rippling into the years to come. My only real wish is that, over the years, I will be able to add to this odd collection with happier headlines.

I feel on the brink of being drowned by this tsunami of terrible images, body-counts and lives utterly devastated - I hope that somehow we can rise as a species, rise all over the world and pull ourselves out of this swamping desolation. I know there's so much we can do, so much we can achieve - incredible things. But they're never as loud or as insistent as the tragedies, and this needs to change. We need to get over our rubber-necking morbid fascination and shout - really fucking loud - about all the wonderful things people do for each other and for the world we live in every day.

And with that, I'll finish with a link that I've found and has made me smile, just a little. Small miracles amid the carnage, from the Brisbane Times. Read to bolster your ever dwindling hope reserves. If anyone is reading this and finds similarly hopeful links please do feel free to post and share here - clutch at enough straws and we might just make it through.

EDIT: Since posting this I keep seeing little bits of...well, maybe not "good news" as such, but tiny little human things that I suspect are happening all over Japan right now - kind acts, a smile here or there, politeness and respect and civility in the face of utter ruin. Everywhere we see the depths that humans can sink when they are afraid, in pain - to but I want to hear the stories of the good things - which (believe it or not) are human nature too. So I'm going to compile them here:

BBC news - an old man sifts through the wreckage of a ruined Japanese city, searching for stranger's keepsakes - he finds a photo of a smiling man holding a baby under a blue sky, blossom on the trees in the background, another of a line of children in uniform, a school trip - he puts them in a plastic bag. "The army will burn all of this. If these children are gone now this will be precious to someone."

BBC news - Katie Hinman of ABC News tweets: "Driving through the wreckage of Sendai, and saw the saddest sight: a bewildered horse standing alone among it all."

Then later:

The tweet by Katie Hinman of ABC News about the lonely horse in Sendai (See 2146) prompted Breda Gahan in Dublin to email in: "Can't believe I read this. Please return horse to Natsuko Komura." The BBC's Damian Grammaticas interviewed Ms Komura on Sunday as she searched for her trusty steed near Sendai's beach. She had been riding it when the tsunami approached on Friday, but had not seen it since.

BBC news - A Twitter campaign has been set up to persuade Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary, Yukio Edano, to go to bed.Mr Edano has been dutifully covering the nuclear crisis at all hours of the day and night, but many TV viewers feel the strain is beginning to tell. The hashtag #edano_nero - "Edano, go to bed" - has been trending on Twitter.

Christchurch, New Zealand

I can't believe it was almost 7 years ago that we sat enjoying the autumn sunshine in Cathedral Square, Christchurch - sitting on a bench outside the beautiful cathedral, watching buskers and street performers, moving every now and then as the sun sunk lower and the huge shadow cast by the spire crept towards us.

We were staying in a hostel opposite the cathedral, and spent the days roaming the city - taking the tram to the art gallery and wandering around its lovely little bead shop. We walked miles to find a little vintage shop where Cara bought a lovely deep green velvet blazer and Bridget a fantastic '70s green and white polka dot dress. We walked for about 40 minutes one evening out of town to a cinema to watch "Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban". I bought the book - I picked it up again the other day. It made me smile to see the inscription I'd written on the title page: "Bought in Christchurch, New Zealand - the perfect place to Potter. 15th June, 2004"

And it was the perfect city to potter, with its old Hogwarts/Oxford/Cambridge buildings - pretty much the only old stone architecture in NZ. It had a wonderful, friendly atmosphere - probably due to our meeting up with Hannah (old friends of the family, she'd moved there when she was younger. I hadn't seen her in years but it was like nothing had changed) and the warm friendly attitude of the locals...but maybe also due to its familiar English feel and that fact that, after nearly 3 months traveling around the country, we were nearing the end of our trip. As much as I loved the place, I was looking forward to seeing home, familiarity again.

A few days later we took a small internal flight from Christchurch to Auckland, and from there a flight back to the UK. I swore I saw Orlando Bloom in the airport. I jiggled my legs the whole journey - a nervous flyer, a nervous everything - but as the plane rose above the clouds the view was breathtaking: a blanket of cloud with the snow-capped Southern Alps a line snaking away into the north.

All I can seem to think about now is that evening, sitting outside the cathedral. I have a photo somewhere of us sitting on the bench, Bridget perched on the top wearing her polka dot dress. That bench is under rubble now - the spire of the cathedral collapsed during the quake. I remember the little old ladies that worked in the cathedral visitor centre and I hope they got out before the whole thing came down.

Such a terrible terrible thing - and strangely, almost shamefully, I feel more shaken and upset by it than any tragedy before, because I feel like I know that city.

If you can spare anything, please please donate to the Red Cross NZ earthquake appeal.

Roadtrips: Scotland

Every now and then I'm overcome with the odd pang of homesickness - in times like these I dream of heather-purple moorland, crashing waves beneath cliffs clad in frith and coconut scented gorse, red kites circling over green forested valleys. Quiet. Fresh air. Growing things.

Don't get me wrong: I love London, I really do. But my heart aint half in the country, and every now and then I feel I need to top up my dwindling levels of fresh air, mud and salt sea-breezes or I'll keel over and never make it out of the city alive.

Oddly these pangs seem to coincide with the changing of the seasons. In spring I start to think of snowdrops pushing through the black soil, unseasonable warm days walking on the clifftops around Llangrannog, the garden at home starting to turn green. In summer I dream of warm nights watching the bats flit around the yard, crab-fishing and hillwalking and tick-searching annual holidays in Scotland as a child, clouds of midges and everything smelling like citronella. In autumn my thoughts turn to dull orange beach leaves, blustery walks with two smelly black labradors along the mountain tops and evenings in front the fire with my family, watching tv or chatting. In winter I think of rain-lashed windows, hot-water bottles, cold foggy days and woodsmoke.

(photo by Ian Cameron here)

Right now though, this pang for countryside and fresh air has coincided with an overwhelming need for a holiday, and all I can think about is a fantasy summer roadtrip across Scotland. I want to drive through Glencoe, feeling like the only people for miles and miles, the tripled-peaks of the Three Sisters that used to fascinate me as a child looming above us, passing tiny Eilean Munde (Isle of the Dead) in Loch Leven where the distant gravestones poke out amongst the tall pine trees, a lonely white crofter's cottage or bothy speckling the feet of the mountain every here and there. I want to take the Corran Ferry across Loch Linnhe and see the stormy sunlight break through the clouds above the solitary lighthouse, hear the roar of stags across the valley, search for ticks on bare legs through bracken, dip my toes in peaty-pebbled loch beaches. I want to smell the wild garlic down by the sea shoreline, carpeted in seaweed, otters and seals bobbing heads out from the waters and lazing on rocks around the pretty painted Tobermoray harbour.

It's a strange feeling, something that's hard to describe, when you feel like you belong to a place and a place belongs to you. I feel that way about my home in Wales but I think I've always that personal belonging to and from and for Scotland also, especially the west coast and the highlands. I know my parents would love to move there one day, and if Wales had to lose them to anywhere I think Scotland would be a fitting substitute - and I could visit them a lot I suppose! Some of my family have just moved to the Isle of Mull, another of my favourite childhood places, so I might just have to add them to the itinerary of my fantasy Scotland road trip too...

I hope I do get the opportunity to go some time this year - it's been a while since I've paid a visit and I feel my second home calling to me. For now I can only dream - and listen to my specially made Scottish Roadtrip Playlist on spotify (here)

(photo by Eamonn Shute here)

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(Ardtornish on the west coast of Scotland, where we went every year with friends when I was younger, photo by Nick Connor from here)

Costume, not Fashion

Cor, it's a bit dusty around here isn't it?! I suppose I have been a bit lax in posting for the past, oh, year or so....

Lately though I've felt myself having real thinky thoughts, or just feeling the need to write things down again, regardless of whether or not anyone is reading them or if it's just me, shouting into the internet void. So I'm going to try to post here a bit more this year, and make a real effort to document things.

So to start things I want to try and get some thoughts down, about, well, why I do what I do - or more specifically, why I look the way I look.

I think a lot of people are surprised when they see photos (or sometimes even footage) of me larking about in full costume-swing - whether that's head-to-toe 1950s style, or at midnight on Halloween dressed as dead Marie Antoinette, demanding cake and fluttering my fan in a coquettish manner as I swept through the dirty puddles of Soho side-streets. I've always been a very self-conscious, shy person, you see. No. Really.

I've no idea how I've got to be this person, and sometimes it actually does surprise me. I wonder how much of it is really that dressing up is playing, pretending...or maybe hiding? When dressed as a 1920s flapper or jitterbugging in mock WRAF uniform with GIs underneath the railway arches of Shoreditch, I'm not Jemima from small town west Wales who is a bit self-conscious and speccy and anxious. I can be anyone I want to be. And that gives me the freedom to be myself in a way that I could never be before.

I know I look stupid, and I don't think I mind. I think I've become accustomed to the fact that I can quite easily make a fool of myself, even whilst trying my best to keep a low profile. It's best to embrace - pre-empt it, almost. I don't mind looking stupid - there are far worse things to be. Like the sad little prediction of regret you know is waiting for you in the future, the one you feel the very moment life is passing you by. I've spent a long time with that feeling - we're old friends. There's a lot of things I was too shy and too sensible and too sober to do - and those are the things the little voice in my head repeats like a broken record.

Ah yes - the voice in my head, the killer of an internal monologue. It's a little voice that narrates my day to day life with cutting, harsh observations about myself and my inability to survive in the adult world - she sounds very much like me, but bitchy and delighting in torturing myself for every mistake or wobble. My biggest fear is not regret in itself, but the failure of character, of quality, of courage maybe, that leads me to falter and hesitate just before that leap out of my comfort zone into the unknown. "Oh of you course you couldn't do it - you're not good enough, are you?" she says "You've always known you're not capable". God I hate that bitch.

But I've come to realise how huge a contributing factor that voice has been in every quiet little humdrum victory in my life - stupid insignificant things like the first time I wore something that I wanted to wear, even though I knew it would make people look at me. But in bigger things, more vital things too - like the first time I stood up on stage and sang with my friend in an open mic night. It's that voice that helps me not say no to the opportunities that I really, really want to try, but terrify me. Like stage-maiding at a burlesque night in a skimpy showgirl outfit, or helping out as a magician's assistant on stage (this time in a very prim 1940s nurse's outfit).

Most of these significant, challenging experiences in my life involve dressing up in some kind of costume. How we present ourselves to the outside world is hugely important - and incredibly trivial. If I step out of the house today wearing insane '80s prints leggings (which I did. Because they made me laugh) then is anyone really going to care? I might get some funny comments or teasing from my colleagues at work (which I did), but is that really important? If I laugh and make fun of myself, are any of those people really going to spare a second thought to it?

There are bigger more important things in this world than fashion or how we look. Which is not to say that it's not hugely important to ourselves, but only in the way that it makes us feel or behave and interact with the world around us. I don't think there is anything vain or shallow about being interested in what you're wearing. If you religiously follow the dictates of Vogue regardless of whether or not you want to wear 8-inch leather peep-toe boot-sandals, well..... I wear things that make me smile, make me feel like I'm playing dress-up, like I'm in another age or another world or another story - and that helps me live my life with a smile on my face, feeling confident and happy in myself. And there's nothing so satisfying as the confidence that comes in feeling comfortable in your own skin - and the clothes - you're in. Okay, so I've made some pretty insane and maybe amusing choices of clothing over the years, and I will look back and laugh and cringe, but I know I'll never regret.

Every time I step out of the house wearing something a little bit different, the horrible little voice in my head softens a bit. Instead of doing something purely to prove wrong the voice telling me that I'm too weak, I can use the confidence built on past experiences to know that I am strong enough to go through life embracing the next experience. Having fun, living - and looking - the way that I want to.