Monday nights are his studio nights. My night to engage in aimless wandering. Alone.

We seldom do anything apart. Lea once questioned the benefits of this. “The danger of always being at each other’s fingertips,” she said, “is that one day you wont be, and where will you be then?

I said it works for us because we know what it’s like to be apart. Really apart. Four thousand miles apart. We once went an entire year without seeing one another. And, until last year, being separated for six weeks at a time wasn’t that uncommon. So we have a lot of seconds and minutes to make up for.

But I digress.

Tonight I’m listening to Simon & Garfunkel. Playing with a plastic dinosaur. And reading Oscar Wilde in the interim. Fitness Bootcamp starts tomorrow, so I may order pizza as well. Normally I don’t do things that counter-productive. But it’s a Monday.

It always happens around 3:00am when I open my eyes and catch the light from the street lamp throwing itself onto the shadow sleeping beside me.

For a split second I go completely out of myself. I’m startled and even a little angry because I have no idea who this person is! **

My heart is pounding and my voice is caught and even though it just takes a moment to remember, a moment is enough. I’m wide awake and just really annoyed because I’m never gonna get back to sleep and why do I keep doing this?

I’m not sure what this says about me. Chaz will say it’s a boundary issue and I need to get it sussed out properly. Clare will tell me I just need to stop eating Bengali before bedtime. But I’d like to think it’s only this: I’m use to a California King. Not the proximity of a Queen.

When I told The Euro about it he just rolled his eyes and said, “Well, an hour before you do that, you wake up singing some freaky Victorian nursery rhyme in a really scary little voice. Sometimes, I have to get up and leave the room. You’re that spooky.”

At least he can’t say I’m not an interesting bed buddy. (My grandmother will NOT LOVE the way that sounds.)

—

**To the 5 (FIVE) family members who have already written to ask ‘What happened to your husband?’….Good grief, it IS him. Otherwise, there’s very little point to the story. Comprenez-vous?

I just googled ’sister quotes’ and was bombarded with purple prose. Sunshine and solace all over the place. Save it for the love letters because, lets be honest, sisterhood isn’t so much a Hallmark card as a Lifetime movie. And I mean that in the very best ‘Help Farrah Fawcett Cage Her Evil Ex Up In the Fireplace’ sort of way.

Seriously though, I think this quote from Toni Morrison probably sums it up better than anything:

A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves - a special kind of double. ~Toni Morrison

Though I have a sneaking suspicion, if my own sister were asked to pull a quote from her hat, it would be this one:

Big sisters are the crab grass in the lawn of life. ~Charles M. Schulz

Anyway…I just found these photos floating around in cyberspace. So I decided to steal them. She has 24 hours to request a retraction.

I’m really tired of dealing with the folks at Homeland Security. I understand they have a job to do but there’s only so many times I can be asked to hand over $600 before I feel like pulling my teeth out. Next thing you know the Home Office will be asking me to cough up another grand to solidify my UK visa. Wait a minute…they already have.

I know it could be worse. I could be having to hand out money to an overpriced solicitor as well. Or I could be stuck in limbo somewhere mid-Atlantic because neither country will let both of us land. But that’s just me being melodramatic - something The Euro says I MUST work on.

I’ve been filling out immigration forms pretty steadily for about ten years now; wholly by choice because if you fancy living in a country other than your own it’s just the price you pay. But these last two years have become really tedious.

To be fair, immigration procedures are pretty straight forward* as long as you read the manual. But reading the manual isn’t something most people like to do. They’d rather pay Joe Barrister to do it for them. And even those of us who do read it get bored after a while. Especially if we’re following the instructions.

*Small caveat: Straightforward if you’re a normal Brit trying to get into America or a normal American trying to get into Britain.

I’m reading William Hazlitt and enjoying it. I read most things twice these days. Once for style. Once for entertainment. I’m still on style.

I’m not sure when I quit reading for the sake of a story; when I became more concerned with the way words were used and strung together. I’m thinking it was probably around 2001.

Just after 11 September when I picked up some bit or bob from Waterstones and had to read and re-read and re-re-read it because nothing sunk in or made sense in those days. Internalisation didn’t seem to matter when the external world was going to hell. It all seems very dramatic and probably counter to itself now but that’s exactly how I felt then.

And the more I read the words to understand their meaning, the more I didn’t care. I mean, I did. But only for the words. Only in so far as they were what they were. Not because they told a story or led to anything new or separate on the next page.

I love words - even though I don’t use them so well as I’d like - and they sometimes get in the way because I find myself stopping, as with Hazlitt, and ooohing and aahhing and underlining things like “drab coloured Quakerism of mortality” and “mixed motives of human character” and not getting on with the main…which is reading. So in that way they’re a nuisance.

Anyway, here is Hazlitt. I think. Flynn will tell me if I’m right.

I’ve been diagramming Shakespeare tonight. I called my seven year old niece for help but she was busy explaining the merits of water birthing to her mother who was busy explaining the demerits right back.

I watched Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1996) twice over the weekend. That’s eight hours. Give or take, but mostly give because I kept rewinding the scenes with Horatio and Ophelia.

I’m thoroughly smitten with Branagh at the moment. He’s both brilliant and beautiful in the role. I stand by this in spite of Flynn’s exclamation…“Kenneth Branagh! Fo’ real??? I find that odd”.

I’ve just booked Steph and me tickets to see The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Globe next month because, you know, might as well.

I should probably call and tell her.

Last night we saw The Dark Knight. (No spoilers, BTW.)

The first thing I noticed was Christian Bale’s mouth, and how well it suits a mask. After that, the only thing I noticed - was the other mouth and the way its owner used it to help create himself.

The interrogation scene in particular…terrifically disturbing.

The Joker’s “Great Social Experiment” and the one who first turned it on its head - reminiscent of The Misfit and the themes that surround him in another similarly seasoned story “A Good Man (Is Hard to Find)”. Maybe that’s just me reading too much Flannery. Or maybe that’s the genius of writer/director Christopher Nolan. A true hero…is hard to find. It’s not such a reach, you see.

The Euro made the case that Heath Ledger’s death made the movie. And of course he’s probably right. There’s no denying the added dimension. Doubtful most of us would try, as we will, to understand the core of a character Nolan and Ledger made such an effort to layer up, if the man behind it had not seemed, if only in an urban myth sort of way, to have become it.

Earlier this week I read about Oscar fanfare that would never be because Hollywood is apparently quite the cad when it comes to honouring late actors. That Ledger’s performance will be all but forgotten by the time nomination season rolls around.

I rather doubt it.

“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological. This is a large statement, and it is dangerous to make it, for almost anything you say about Southern belief can be denied in the next breath with equal propriety.

But approaching the subject from the standpoint of the writer, I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn’t convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God.

Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive. They cast strange shadows, particularly in our literature. In any case, it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.”

-Flannery O’Connor, “The Grotesque in Southern Fiction”

All I want to do is go to bed with a good book. Something light and fluffy that doesn’t make me think too hard or long to write in the margin. I also want to eat sushi. Or nothing at all. Because nothing at all is preferable to anything else I can think of. Except sushi. Spicy tuna rolls. Yum.

Flynn just sent me this email: ‘Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well.’ Hemingway, Snows of Kilimanjaro. It made my day.

The other night at a ‘do’ The Euro looked at me and said “Make yourself useful. Get me a drink.” I walked away and thought about leaving for Peru - Peru’s been on my mind a lot you see - and all the things I would have said and done if he had said the same thing two years ago.

I remembered Steph’s admonition, “Choose your battles.” And Mal’s ever-constant reply, “Ok. I choose this one!” And then ran into both of them at the door. I felt better, and turned around and ran into him. He said “I’m sorry” and gave me a champagne flute filled with diet coke and ice. Because that’s his kind of drink.

I’ve been reading C.S. Lewis. He’s talking about words and how they lose their meaning and become of no use to anyone when they aren’t treated in the literal sense. Like ‘gentleman’. How it use to refer to a specific type of landed noble person. How someone then used it to refer to how that specific type of person ought to behave and caused it to become a verb instead of a noun. Until it became a noun again. How this caused the original word to lose all value and meaning.

I’m mesmerized by Lewis today. So much so, I just ordered The Complete C.S. Lewis Signature Classics. Wonder if I’ll feel the same after 752 pages of apologetics?