January notebook

Two successes I can claim as a parent: they both love music and football (even if one of them supports Arsenal).

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Thom Gunn (??)

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‘Every soul moment sold for a life of constant distraction’ -Simon Parke, One Minute Meditation (p.48), on mobile phones

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The five of you smiling,
stare into sunlight

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‘The wide margins of happiness that border the story of faith’ -Eugene Paterson, Praying With the Psalms

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Lookout, Lookout – Perfume Genius

All We Grow – S. Carey

Cycling Trivialities – José Ganzález

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Overheard on a YouTube clip played by Tatty one morning: ‘Not every adolescence is responsible for producing a Cat Stevens.’

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Delay going online each day.

Be distracted by what you love, not what the culture shouts at you

Do what you need to do (e.g. be vulnerable) whether the world is watching or not

Keep a notebook with you -the ideas do vanish

Spend out on what -and who- you love, and on that which feeds you

Continue to point the light at others

Silence

Morning silence, radio silence: practise it

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‘There are two extremes to avoid: being completely absorbed in your pain and being distracted by so many things that you stay far away from the wound that you want to heal.’ -Henri Nouwen, The Inner Voice of Love, p.3

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“When […] was dying we read your poems together. They did not say it’s going to be all right. They told it exactly as it was. That meant everything.”

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Pauline Boty, from Ali Smith’s Autumn. Why have I not heard of her before?

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‘His boots rang on naked stone. Stumbled on juniper roots embedded in fissures, saw veins of quartz like congealed lightning… Translucent thirty-foot combers the colour of bottles crashed onto stone, coursed bubbles into a churning lake of milk shot with cream. Even hundreds of feet above the sea the salt mist stung his eyes and beaded his face and jacket with fine droplets. Waves struck with the hollowed basso peculiar to ovens and mouseholes.’ -Annie Proulx, The Shipping News, pp. 208-9.

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Soup

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Reffed by Clive Thomas; Dickie Attenborough in his Rolls; 1976? Leyton Orient?

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The last of my Christmas Toblerone

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A very fat wood pigeon in the garden today. Looking this way, left, right, complete neck turn, for cats, other birds, then down from the fence, onto the bench, then the patio, then the lawn, for the bird feed which had spilled during the gales. There were two piles. One tiny one on the patio, and one larger clump on the lawn. First it started on the small pile, then proceeded to peck at the edges of the large clump of seed which it appeared not to notice.

A bright blue day, after what has felt like weeks of wind and rain.

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I have started reading classical music reviews. Does this mean I am now a grown up?

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Are cricket deaths more bitter than other deaths?

 

 

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