back up blog

To begin is to break your own heart. To choose means to  not choose  all those other things. Before you begin, the possibilities are endless. The way your one true love will look, how your first novel will sound on the page. Before you begin, everything is perfect, because before you begin it’s a world of imagination painted in only your best and most favourite colours. Beginning is a pull into the real world. The real world is hard. It is beautiful and surprising and sometimes, at noon on a Tuesday on the roof of an art gallery, you will drink a glass of wine and look at the view and wonder how you will ever leave this spot, this moment, because everything is as right as it could be. But the real world is also never enough money, and never enough time, and never enough talent, or recognition, or love, or contentedness. The real world is compromise. Compromise. I read somewhere that compromise is “halfway happy”, and that is what beginning is. Halfway happy. Not as good as not beginnin

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 personal. Considered. It'