Next week we’re going back to England. It feels more hypothetical than done-and-dusted and that’s probably to do with the busy we’ve been keeping. The Euro’s been filming for over a month, and I’ve been eating, sleeping and breathing 1 of 2 manuscripty projects since mid-October.

Yesterday I walked home - it was freezing and I stuck paper towels in my ears to keep the cold out. It’s the only exercise I’ll get this week and it’s no where near enough. I’m just shy of stir crazy and the knitting someone suggested isn’t doing the trick. (I just want to poke things with the needles.)

Last night my neighbour was lighting his house and his tree and this made me want to light something too. We’re not putting up a Christmas tree this year. Not even a Christmas Twig. This makes me feel a little like Charlie Brown but not too much because Holt House always has a wonderful tree and that’s where we’ll be.

Speaking of Christmas, barring books for my besties I’ve done zero shopping. That leaves six days and counting to get things sorted Stateside. I am totally freaking out.

Orson Welles meets HG Wells and someone was there to broadcast it. (Please note the misspelling in the video title is not mine.)

HG is lovely. And asks Orson about the film he is making - Citizen Kane.

Orson Welles: “It’s a new sort of motion picture with a new method of presentation.”

HG Wells: “If I don’t misunderstand you completely I think there will be a lot of jolly good new noises in it.”

Delicious.

I blame Stephen Fry.

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For some reason, every time I look at photos of Flynn and me from our EPIC ADVENTURE WEEKEND, I break out in BABOOSHKA and arabesque around the living room. “Babooshka…Babooshku…Babooshku…” See. Told you.

Happy Birthday Bunny.

I love you.

B.
xx

p.s.
A squirrel took this photo.
I am dead serious.

Before he became “The Darcy to End All Darcys” the ridiculously talented and RADA-trained Matthew Macfadyen contributed to the DVD ‘Essential Poems (To Fall In Love By)’.

A naughty little someone has posted his readings to YouTube.

I am very glad of it.

W.B. Yeats.
When You Are Old.
Read by Matthew Macfadyen.

William Carlos Williams.
This is Just to Say.
Read by Matthew Macfadyen.

William Shakespeare.
Sonnet 29.
Read by Matthew Macfadyen.

I close my eyes and sigh. What a voice.

I don’t often think of Blossoming Souls when I think of Proust. Most often it’s just this is heavy and Steve Carell. I know that’s terribly silly and unfair. But that’s Rorschach for you.

“I hold the blank page headed Friday November Thirteenth to the light of that day. There seems to my eye some discrepancy between the two. There, outside is the day; as it happens, bluish, cloudy, still and fine. Here is the page; white, smooth. How am I to bring about a marriage between them? But let me try, with a pen, dipped in ink.” -Virginia Woolf

I thought it something that I should be reading this on my own Friday November Thirteenth. I’m in America, in the South, but the week has been full of what The Euro calls Proper Northern Weather. And by ‘Northern’ I mean , of course, the North as referred to by the M5 - The North of England.

I was inking in my own diary this afternoon, something I rarely do anymore. My last handwritten entry was over three months ago. I wrote about John Malkovich as The Great Buck Howard.
— — — —

Friday 13 Nov 2009: She stopped remembering today. Or yesterday, maybe. Maybe even before that, to be honest. But I didn’t know it then. I know it now. That she stopped remembering. Today. My lovely little grandma.

B.

Words on monitors, made of ones and zeros, never seem as real as those made from pen and ink or impressions on ribbon.

Someone died and I was sitting on a set of concrete steps that belonged to a neighbour thinking “I’ve been ostracized and I don’t even care.” My head hurt from the weight of itself and when I tried to turn it, to unstick the glue that made it stuck, I saw the neighbour whose steps I sat upon and it was Nick Clooney.

I thought ‘this is childhood’ because he was always in mine. Smiling. Sitting on a stool and talking up silver screens and things. Making me feel a little better about the varnished walls and green shag carpet that made me feel so bad.

Nick Clooney.

He sat down beside me and said “just breathe” and I said “they call it putting on airs if you don’t have a criminal record.” It was true and we both knew it and I tried to breathe like he told me to do. Because breathing is a true thing too.

When I think of everything there is to know and learn, I get so excited my stomach hurts.

This evening Steph and I went for sushi but had profiteroles and petite fours instead. Then we watched The Hours and talked about Virginia Woolf and listened to the radio broadcast she did for the BBC in 1937. After that we looked through the photo album of Virginia’s father, Leslie Stephen, and wondered at paintings by her sister Vanessa.

We decided to read Mrs Dalloway together and then to buy “Afterwords: Letters on the Death of Virginia Woolf”, but only once. We reminisced about our time in Bloomsbury when we walked past the Tavistock Hotel every morning and every night and sat in Gordon Square just because our feet hurt and we could.

There are too many things I want to read and so much more I want to say but my stomach really does hurt from the profiteroles and I’m just flat out tired. The lady in the photo is Julia Jackson Duckworth Stephen, Virginia’s mother. Something about her reminds me of my own mother when she was young. I think it’s the eyes.