photography

so i kiss goodbye to every little ounce of pain.

Draining are the moments in life when you know not what the future holds. When you know nothing of the crucials, like where you are going to live or where you are going to work or who you are going to meet. In moments like that – or, indeed, months – you learn to live with an acutely heightened awareness of fate. And fate can be prickly thing; control, an abstract. And then, of course, things start dipping into place. Some stay in place, some don’t – but something is better than nothing (and as the erstwhile holder of nothing you are in no position to complain). You would like to say these are the fates aligning – but that would be one part surrender and another part crass. You snatch a glimpse of the future and suddenly you breathe again (only just aware that you had been holding your breath). A little knowledge of the future takes the edges off, at last.

  

 

 

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music

Remember what we’ve said and done and felt about each other; oh, babe, have mercy. Don’t know about you, but sometimes I wonder how I’d survive without Crosby, Stills & Nash’s Suite: Judy Blue Eyes. Too relevant and too good. It’s often the only answer. Like now, it’s September and change is in the air – big change and good change – and so it’s the soundtrack. I’ve got an answer: I’m going to fly away. What have I got to lose?

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Every little trifle for some reason does seem incalculably important today
and when you say of a thing that “nothing hangs on it” it sounds like blasphemy.
There’s never any knowing – how am I to put it? – which of our actions,
which of our idlenesses won’t have things hanging on it forever.

literature
Image
photography

i’m a heavy-headed girl

(don’t ask me how i got this way / ’cause it’s been too long to tell)

Otherwise inconsequential walks down the road are doused in a new hue. There are trifling trips to the British seaside / picnic tables in anchoring market pubs / trains too hot or trains too cold / tanned shoulders in spaghetti-strap camis / impromptu backyard parties / late-night running / the south of France / shandy. Thank you, sunshine, for reminding me where the hope is kept.

 

 

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music

and i adore the surprise of tomorrow’s sunrise, so i linger.

the destroyers in the bimble inn. i am kloot playing northern skies. the back-to-back anthems of chic and nile rodgers. singing i wonder with rodriguez and across 110th street with bobby womack. the motown night in william’s green. the reggae night in the london underground. the relentless sunshine and vodka-surprises and true stories. finding people when you need them most. crying sunday. a blanketed monday morning sunrise. dizzee, dizzee, dizzee.

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literature

no, i’m not leaving exactly as i came.

When Hans took his first step away from her, Sophie cried
out: ‘Wait.’ He wheeled round.

‘Thank you.’

‘I was thinking of saying the same to you. Thank you.’

Hans walked down Glass Alley. His shadow glided from one
window to the next. Sophie stood watching him and her eyes
felt cold. She was still aware of the pang in her gut she had been
feeling since she arrived at the café, yet she felt strangely content.

She hurried down two streets until she caught up with Elsa.
He strode towards the market square. Looked at from above,
from a high balcony or a slit window in the Tower of the Wind,
they might have seemed like two insignificant creatures, two
flecks on the snow. Looked at from the ground, they were two
people weighed down by life.

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life, photography

the moon is hanging in the purple sky.

June is imminent, which can only be a good thing [despite the weather’s attempt to convince us otherwise] as it promises a crop of delights. John Power is paying an acoustic-clad visit to my hometown [for me alone, surely], there’s another flirtation with The Stone Roses to be had on some big London plain, plus an inevitably brilliant reunion with that little-known Somerset farm at the month’s end. Even my anorak’s excited, frankly. Meanwhile, I beg, do walls get any better than this?

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