It's been a long time since I wandered around with my camera. It was nice today, strolling into town on the Northside, snapping away and breathing the spring air.
Henry Street.
A lovely day - chilly but bright and smelling of all those good spring scents.
Mary Street this afternoon.
A dilapidated building in Smithfield.
I pass this every day, to and from work. In the morning it's a hive of activity, with men whizzing around on forklifts and stacks of fruit and vegetables by the roadside. The colours are amazing and it's always cheering to pass. The six-foot-high sacks of carrots beg to be climbed into, and I love that fresh carroty aroma. In the evenings, the shutters are down and there is nothing and no one there - almost as though I imagined the whole thing. The occasional squashed potato or battered apple is all that convinces me otherwise.
Loyal readers will have noticed a distinct lack of posts here lately...for this I apologise, but there has really been nothing of note to blog about. Not that this has ever stopped me before, but it seems that I have reached a dead end, blogwise. I am playing with Tumblr at the moment, which allows me to post more truncated, less thought-provoking items at high speed...and I'm struggling to find stuff for that too. Perhaps I have exhausted my online personality and have nothing left to give? I'm saddened to think that my blog will become yet another of those abandoned, and yet, it seems this is the way of the western world - discover, enthuse, rhapsodise, obsess...dwindle, fade, forget/destroy. Everything seems to be expendable now, and this blog is no exception...and yet, I feel like I should buck this wasteful trend and keep plugging on regardless, to prove that not everything should be binned when the fun fades.
Phoenix Park is beginning to bloom and for once, the sun was beaming down on the few early risers taking the morning air when I ventured into the park for a twenty-minute pick-me-up. More days like this, please.
There's a trend on Facebook at the moment where you have to write 25 things about yourself, tag 25 people you know, and they have to write 25 things about themselves and tag 25 people, and so on and so on. It's probably a marketing ploy, but a very smart one if so, because people love to talk about themselves. And of course, I'm no exception; after all, I have a blog, a tumblelog and I'm on Facebook. I wrote my 25 Things and thought I'd post them here too, for your amusement.
And if it is a marketing ploy, I shall be receiving information about healthcare, creative writing courses and religious organisations relating to Baden-Powell.
1. I am accident prone and not very steady on my pins. I sprained my ankle when I was 5 (falling over some toy bricks), again a few years later (falling off a kerb) and then cracked a bone in the other ankle (roller skating over a broom handle) when I was 12. I've dislocated my toe, torn cartilage in my knee, and sustained mild concussion four times. I fall over around once a year, usually in public.
2. I want to become fluent in German but fear that I will never be good enough at it.
3. I take things too seriously.
4. I've had three facial piercings, none of which settled well. My eyebrow piercing went manky and migrated after I was kicked in the face at a gig. It was removed dramatically in the Minor Injuries Unit with pliers that resembled bolt cutters (this was before piercings were commonplace and people knew how to open ball closure rings).
5. When I was a child I had lots of rituals, including jumping over the 13th stair while making blowing noises (to blow any residual bad luck from my heels) and never admitting to myself that I was cold in case I burned to death suddenly in the night.
6. When safety adverts came on the television (for fireworks etc), I used to run into the hall and sit on the stairs until they'd finished. I did the same when Michael Jackson's Thriller came on - I didn't actually see the video until I was 15 years old.
7. When I was very small I hurled a plate, frisbee-style, across the room in a rage because my parents refused to come downstairs and see the Monarch butterfly I'd found in the garden. There's still a dent in my mother's mantelpiece where the plate made contact.
8. I was a Brownie and a Guide. Brownies was fun because we made stuff with felt and buttons and bits of string, but I hated Guides. I wasn't very good at it; while the other girls amassed their badges, I gained two in Brownies and four in Guides. For the Guides' Collector and Toymaker badges, I simply rehashed all the stuff I'd used for the Brownie badges. I still have no idea how I got away with that. My other two Guides badges were Writer and Road Safety. I was most proud of the Writer badge.
9. While a Guide, I accidentally shot my guide leader's son in the leg with an air rifle. We were at a shooting gallery and I had a gun with a faulty trigger - I didn't even realise what had happened until we were back in the meeting hall. My guide leader never forgave me.
10. I like baking biscuits. The best bit is when all the washing up and clearing up is done and there's just a plate of warm, neat biscuits, as if by magic.
11. There's a particular type of blue that makes me feel sick when I see a lot of it - for example, if it's on a wall. One time I arrived home to discover that, along with painting the living room walls bright orange, my housemates had filled in the door panels with my feared blue colour. They'd done it as a surprise, not realising my aversion to it. I never really got used to it; the orange was pretty funky though.
12. I used to be 15 stone. Despite losing five stone, I remain obsessed about my weight. It makes me very boring.
13. I'm a hypochondriac. If I get a pain in my chest or my arm, I think it might be a heart defect. If my leg tingles or hurts, I think it's DVT.
14.I once ate 12 packets of Hula Hoops in a single sitting. I still love Hula Hoops. Plain are best.
15. I suffer from Raynaud's disease, and sometimes my fingertips go blue. Mostly they just go white and shrivelled.
16. I've never had a "proper" pet. I had two goldfish and two tortoises when I was little; poking Timothy Tortoise in the face with dandelions until he ate them was as much interaction as I had with them. The other tortoise was called Jethro Tull and he died almost immediately from some unknown tortoise disease. I'd love a cat but am afraid I wouldn't have the patience to deal with it.
17. Dogs frighten me a bit.
18. So do people.
19. The smells I like the most are; vanilla, fresh bread, brewing coffee, cigarette or peat smoke in my boyfriend's hair, My Queen by Alexander McQueen, fresh washing, Nag Champa incense, candles that have just been blown out.
20. I am quite vain. My glasses make me feel very ugly.
21. I was born five weeks' premature. I should have been born at the end of December; evidently I realised in the womb what a disaster it would be when it came to receiving presents for birthdays and Christmases, and so I decided to arrive early.
22. I want to write but no longer know how. When I was very small and people asked me what I wanted to be, I would always tell them that I would be "an author". I was inspired by Jayne Fisher, who wrote The Garden Gang books. Some of that conviction would be really nice right now.
23. I believed in Father Christmas until I was 10 and steadfastly refused to accept my parents' admission that it was all a hoax. My mother would write letters from Santa with her left hand and post them to me. They were very convincing.
24. I measure the success of my day by tiny achievements; cleaning the house, walking to and from work, studying for an hour, reading a story, updating my blog, emailing a friend. I celebrate these tiny victories and then feel a little lame when I read about people who run marathons or write novels or fight systems.
25. My parents nearly named me Beverley.
Like
cropped hair or
dropped glass or
fast falls or
phone calls or
brief views or
rushed truths or
silent booths
or noodle soup
we come
to a
stop.
I wish I didn't, but I really enjoy seeing what writers' and artists' desks look like. Workstations, studios, writing rooms...they all fascinate me. The Guardian recently ran a feature in the Review section where each week it showed a photo of a writer's room and had the writer provide an overview. Another example is Francis Bacon's studio, which was moved from its original location and painstakingly reconstructed in Dublin's Hugh Lane gallery - a fine insight into the painter's surroundings and habitat.
I'm lucky enough to have commandeered the spare room for my desk (my long-suffering boyfriend has to make do with the former dining table, though it does look like an impressive hub of futuristic enchantment, especially when he has everything glowing and humming merrily away). The spare room is starting to blossom into my own space, despite desperately trying to keep it as neutral as possible so that visitors don't feel like they're being suffocated with my personal tastes. The postcards and little characters are slowly beginning to spread...
It's only a matter of time before the walls are full and we won't be able to open the door without an Edward Scissorhands finger poking us in the eye.
Well, not me, but this. I usually find herbal teas bland-o-riffic, like a soggy, wussy version of whatever they were meant to be. Peppermint tea is bearable because it's like drinking a hot mug of Rennies. Everything else produces an audible "meh" from me and the boxes always end up in the office communal kitchen, so that everyone else can try them and make "meh" noises as well. This was until I forked out a shocking €3.05 for 15 little teabags from Yogi Tea. There's plenty of blah-blah on the box, telling you how spiritual/special/glee-giving the tea is, but ultimately, it tastes nice and that's all I'm looking for. Finding a god in the bottom of my cup is not what I need at the end of a long day.
Now, if you don't like ginger, cinnamon or warm spices, give this one a wide berth. If you do, this will rock your world, insofar as a teabag can. The ingredients are ginger, fennel, cinnamon, aniseed, coriander, cinnamon extract, ginger oil and licorice. Yum.
Some ginger Factoids:
- Ginger is recommended for its analgesic, sedative and antibacterial properties. And presumably because it tastes nice covered in chocolate. Bizarrely, it can cause changes in blood pressure and heart rhythm, and can apparently react with Warfarin (a blood-thinning drug). Who'd have thought a humble spice could be so potent?
- According to the Encyclopaedia of Spices, ginger is so called because it takes its name from the Sanskrit word stringa-vera, meaning "with a body like a horn".
- Wiki supplies us with this nugget of wisdom: "Ginger is also a minor chemical irritant, and because of this was used as a horse suppository by pre-World War I mounted regiments for figging." Being of pure mind, I had to look up figging. I really, really wish I hadn't.
So, if you're not planning on shoving it anywhere delicate and you're not on Warfarin, grab a box of this stuff today. The box even has a simple Yoga technique for you to try, so you can spill your tea in your lap while you attempt the lotus position. Happy days.
You need a squeezy Jack Skellington Head! 
Squeeze and kneed him! Make him gurn! Throw him against a wall and watch him bounce! Or just roll him gently between your hands and feel instantly better because he's so damn cute.
"I thought that a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets."
Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths
