I've not written about my time in the States enough, apparently. I've guest blogged at Pond Parleys here and my ego thinks that you should go and read it.
I teach creative writing, and often what happens is that my students repeat my words back to me and I don't understand that it was me who said them first and it's a headfuck. I love teaching. I love communicating knowledge and I love using my skill with words to package information in a way that lands with the other person. I sort of took it upon myself, at the end of last year, to help one of the girls I used to nanny with her 11+ because I could so clearly identify where her boldest missteps were and part of me thought maybe I am interfering too much and then her mother cancelled her tutor and asked me to come over instead and you know what? She aced the exam and I know I played a part in that. After, when she called me to tell me how good she felt about what she'd done, I cried. She's working on a novel and she FaceTimed me on Easter Sunday from a walk on the Devon coast to show me some goat poo. That child reminds me to be love. Some people have comme...
On Sunday afternoon I wondered what, exactly, the repercussions of public nudity might be. I stood in a field of yellow rape seed , bared shoulders shrouded by a floor-length kimono that was a gift from my father to Mama Janie about twenty years ago, after a business trip to Japan. He was always going to Japan on business, my dad. I was *almost* ready to drop it -- but, I think you can get arrested for public indecency, can’t you? I wondered what I would do if I happened across an unclothed twenty-seven year old in the bushes. I don’t know if I’d laugh, or cry. I loosened the fabric around my shoulders and listened to the voice behind the camera. ‘Okay then,’ she said. ‘And now let it fall a little to reveal your sides. Yup – just like that. Perfect. And a little more…?’ I shuddered against the cold and let the gown disappear towards the soil. And just like that I was naked in the Cambridge countryside, nothing but a sultry gaze and an icy breeze adorning my frame. Project #strongandse...
The metre-and-a-half wide frame has hung empty above my bed since July. I paid a man to hang it. I'd harboured, to begin with, reservations about how my feminism and my employment of somebody else to execute the job dovetailed awkwardly, but after I hit myself in the face with a hammer one night, not understanding the difference between a nail at 45 degrees into a diving wall and a drill with a spiral anchor into a brick wall, I decided the most feminist act would be, in fact, to use my hard-earned feminist money to feministly delegate somebody better qualified to help me out - who yes, just so happened to be a man. I have never looked back. The room needed something above the bed - that's why I got the frame and had it hung - but I couldn't rush to fill it. It needed to be right. I didn't want a generic Ikea print: they can satisfy the dead area behind the door in the living room because that is a neutral space. Bedrooms - bedrooms must be ...
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