We interrupt the writing of that tag post due to news just in

It has been brought to my attention, only moments ago, that John Martyn's died today. I saw him live nearly twenty years ago, which I hadn't thought about for years, but for the strange fact that I've only just been talking about him on a comment thread a little way down this page.

I feel strangely responsible, you know. Sorry, John, I never meant it to end this way.

Let's continue on the topic of weather

We've had a bit of snow today, and it's forecast to continue. This suits me very well otherwise, but I'd like it to be a bit colder so I could rely on it - it's only around minus three. The best weather is when snow falls in tiny needles, wind-driven, horizontal, wild.

Winter weather, that is. It will piss me off no end if we get it in June.

This seems as good a moment as any to embed my favourite Tom Waits song. It's one I have even been known to sing, on occasion - and even in public, not just in the shower.

Hope you enjoy.

Hit by a serious case of keyboard diarrhoea

It's been getting increasingly cold in Finland since my return on Monday, when it was plus seven with a harsh wind. They tell me it went to minus fifteen while I was away, which is totally unfair - and with no snow, which is quite peculiar. But still, not complaining, it's been getting colder and last night we hit minus twelve on my balcony. And still no snow - the lightest dusting today, hardly there at all. Still, it's probably a good thing, for we were forecast snow and warmer temperatures, which is not desirable. No. It might all make a bit more sense if I mentioned that I like a winter to be properly cold. We used to get them until quite recently. Please take note, all climate-change agnostics, for us in the (near-) Arctic climes will see the change first and in a more pronounced way, and the fact is that the winters have gone pear-shaped in the last five or so years. Certainly since the millenium, for I remember the millenium New Year and it was very, very cold. We had some special Japanese fireworks masters visit Helsinki specially (I think they were somehow invited by the city itself, you understand, not me personally) and I went with a bunch of friends to a central and (relatively) high location in the heart of town to see them. I was wearing an evening dress but on top of it, one of those great big ankle-length woollen overcoats (think Anna Karenina, please) and on top of that, my very beloved blue-green-aquamarine poncho (which has a story to it, but of that another time, mayhap. Oh well - now's the time, I suppose - I bought it from the island which neighboured My Childhood Island, from what still in my childhood was the local school for the island children, an adorable old wooden building with an outdoor toilet (with several, um, seats. One could imagine how totally unpleasant it would have been to run across the yard in mid-winter to go and sit out there - but then I expect the island lasses were used to it, as they had the same thing at home - although maybe with less seats) but which by my adulthood and due to the migration of people from traditional ways of livelihood, to city-living (and I never went to that school, you understand, I lived in the city really but we spent the summers, each glorious two-and-a-half months, in the island neighbouring this island I'm now talking about), had changed into a "local crafts centre" type of affair. I love my poncho, wearing it makes me feel like I'm somehow held safe by my childhood summer sea-landscape. That's that story). It was very cold, as I said, it must have been minus twenty-five or possibly colder. Another friend has told me about their millenium celebrations, how they had a bottle of champagne with them and it had probably been shaken around a bit, for when they popped it to toast in 2000, it shot out a spray which floated back down on them as flakes of frozen champagne. God, how I wish that was my story - I find it an outlandishly fabulous one, like the storyline in a song by an Arctic Tom Waits. (The fireworks, incidentally, were quite good as fireworks go (I have a very split feeling about fireworks). I remember I dreamt about them sometime afterwards, that they formed the number "2000" in the sky, and one spark shot out and landed on my hand like a glittering jewel.)

In minus twenty-five, the moisture which naturally occurs inside your nose starts to turn, well, to ice. It's a strange feeling to snuffle a bit and feel the ice crackle-cracking. In minus thirty and colder, I swear your eyes start to feel a bit more solid and stiff than usually, and breathing through your mouth gives you a stab of hot-cold pain in the back of your throat.

So, well, yes, after this brief look at everything through the lens of Helsinki climatology in the 2000s, I will tell you I absolutely adored going out with my dog in the cold today. She likes the cold - poor thing, her thick fur probably makes her feel overheated most of the time - and runs around like a pup. I cannot watch her running without laughing - in the femininity scale of dog-girls, she is definitely one of those hearty, healthy, earthy types, a robust and rosy-chopped little milk-maid with child-bearing hips and a pleasant if not very refined nature, and her back end definitely kind of wobbles from side to side when she runs, and I can see she's clearly imagining herself to be the fastest thing on four legs. I love her, the poor funny lovely thing that she is.

The Tales of Walkman. Next stop, Jerusalem

I thought I’d open this all cleverly like and say “I must have forgotten Jerusalem, for verily my keyboard has dried to the top of my mouth”. Or something. But when I went to write it, it was clearly just painful.

Let’s just be upfront. I have a block. I have A Block as big as the Andes, as big as Antarctica, all covered over with ice, a block huge and remotely looming. In fact, dear Reader, I’m not even here, for I can’t actually open up a “new post” page – I can’t even look at my blog – so in reality I’m in Word, trying to trick myself into writing something which maybe I can copy-paste into a “new post” page without really looking and then it will be done. Shhh. Let’s keep it a secret, let’s not let me know. (Trouble is of course I wanted to insert pictures and video footage of Antarctica and all sorts of cleverness which I don’t know whether it can be done in Word, so I may have to give up on that. Or maybe I’ll come in later and stick it in, once it’s up. If it goes up. We shall see. Aren’t you excited? Aren’t I?)

It’s not as if I haven’t been meaning to write. Every now and then I’ve had thoughts, the precursors of a blog post coming up (these have been varied and have included things such as the discovery of the bottle-opener, which I got in exchange for a Sony Walkman in 1987, on a train through what was then known as the East Block. I have blogged about this exchange [insert link here] and spent an hour or more in an attempt to take a decent photo of the thing, on a particularly bad day [insert photo here]; a bee which made me think of Lemminkäinen’s mother [insert image here]; how a haircut gave me a premonition of a distant doom; how a book once ruined a Christmas for me [maybe insert link here?]; and, well, various things [insert collection of summer photos here]). But the question of why? has cropped up, too, and because it used to feel good doesn’t seem a good enough answer.

But, you know, here I am, all the same. Although I’m not, of course, as we know – I’m actually in Word. But still. Hello. And thank you and sorry to those who’ve left comments which remain unanswered. I shall get to you, soon, I shall, I promise.

Chapter One

July and there is already less birdsong in the woods, the birds have coupled and reared their offspring into an uncharming adolescence of hopping around, not flightless but almost, sometimes landing in the mouth of a passing dog, leaving the dog dumbstruck at its own hunter abilities. July, less birdsong, it's the height of summer yet you know time has turned, you are moving away from it again, not toward it, you missed it again, you didn't catch redemption, and the knowledge churns up a terrible feeling of loss in you, and the worst is when you tell yourself, I missed it again, I missed redemption, redemption will never come, and the reply you hear yourself give is it would, if only you were - what? clever? talented? tuned-in? relaxed? meditative? worthy? - if only you were something enough to catch it. To have caught it.

They have ruined my little woods, they've cut down trees and turned up the forest floor and are creating yet another footpath through it. I can't fathom why, the wood was already enclosed by footpaths, the triangle formed by them could be walked briskly in fifteen minutes, and there were little paths through it anyway, and the footpath they are building seems the width of a country highway. I love paths, I love finding old paths in woods, paths that used to take people from somewhere they were to somewhere they needed to go, or wanted to go. You can see them in the forest floor, even when the undergrowth has returned there's an indentation, a particular look that you can recognise if you've seen it before.

None of these woods are a forest, of course, they hardly even merit the title "woods". Anyone read Günter Grass's The Rat? I read it a good few years ago, while still in Wales, when my children were small, or maybe I only had the one, I can't remember. I do remember liking it profoundly (and here I must confess I haven't read The Tin Drum, I haven't seen the film (fell asleep to it very recently, but that's no comment on the film really - I have a tendency to sleep to films), I didn't even see the theatre adaptation in Helsinki this spring which was highly praised and which I really did mean to see, the woman playing the lead was said to be astounding. So there's a hole in my well-readedness you could punch your fist through, but at least I'm honest about it), although when I looked it up online now, most reviewers called it, basically, a "boring jeremiad". Good word, jeremiad. Anyway - in The Rat, the characters from the Grimm fairy tales are organising some sort of effort to save the world because the forests are dying, and with the forests, the fairy tales will too, because if there are no forests big enough for a child to get lost in, the fairy tales will die.

I want a forest big enough to get lost in, but my current world doesn't have any, even in my countryside the forests are little patches in between agricultural land, and that is not the same, that is wilderness lost and tamed, I want it the other way round, if anything, I want the agricultural land as little side-remarks in the margins of the forest, nestling in the nook of a wood, comfortable and necessary yet clearly secondary to the uncultivated wilderness. My childhood summers were spent on an island in the Gulf of Finland, the forest went from shore to shore save the odd rocky outcrop which usually faces the open sea, and the fields were as I described them a sentence or so ago, patches between the wilderness, oats and potato, mostly, although from photographs taken from an aerial survey aeroplane in the 1930s you could tell the amount of cultivated land had been much greater then, people on the islands were fishing folk with self-sufficiency farms, and each patch of land flat enough to be ploughed had been taken into use. There was a tale from the war years of how the islanders heard someone speaking Russian in the woods, and there was panic, no men around, just the women and children and maybe some old folks, but nothing came of it, no-one knows if it was the Desantnik, the parachute troops, or if it was a case of nerves strung too high, for too long, which made someone hear things which weren't really there.

This post is called "Chapter One" because a friend I've known for a long time said just recently that I should write my autobiography. Bless him, but I hope this post shows conclusively why it isn't a possibility, I'm way too rambling. Anyhow, this post is dedicated to you, my dear friend The Elder. Petite pomme, as we say.

A Day in the Life, or how to make my piquant sauce To Die For

Sometimes I'm struck by the various skills and abilities I have, seemingly quite independent of my conscious mind. Today I found my fingers delicately picking up and feeling tomatoes at the shop, knowing by gentle feeling whether they were just right or not, and taking pleasure in knowing and feeling it, my mind elsewhere, as it often is, but my body working cleverly, with experience and enjoyment.

Continue the success story with cooking. Take an oven dish big enough to hold your fillet of salmon. Squeeze into it the juice of a lemon - or like today, a lemon and a half, why not. Add enough runny honey, and sea salt, and ground mixed chillipepper spice. Take the bottle of Gewürztdaminer Mezzacorona out of the fridge (no, it didn't really have enough time to cool while you drank the mouthful of cider leftover from two weeks ago and smoked a ciggie on the balcony, and began preparing the marinade, but that just can't be helped now), open it, pour a glassful and tip it into the oven dish and another for yourself. Taste it and find it nice. Acknowledge the fact that, indeed, it did not have quite enough time to go cold. Mix the marinade ingredients in the oven dish with a spoon or similar. Place your salmon fillet, face down, skin-side up, into the marinade. Put the bally lot back into the fridge.

Take and chop up finely a red onion and enough garlic. Saute gently in olive oil until soft and lovely. Add some flour (oh - you will have boiled the kettle for a pint of fish stock. Shop-bought will do) but go easy on it - you don't want a thick squidgy sauce, you want it just right. Allow the flour to cook just a little and remove from heat. Stir in the stock - little by little is good, so you achieve a homogenous consistency each time before adding more stock. This will ensure the sauce is not lumpy. (And oh again - you will have heated your oven up to 200° C whilst diddling with the onions cetra). Once all the stock is added, bring to boil. Your oven will most likely have just heated up now, ready like a reliable actor in the wings, on cue, so do now take the salmon in its oven dish out of the fridge and, holding on to the salmon so as not to lose it, pour the lovely stingy sweet-sour piquant marinade into the sauce. Smear the skin side of the salmon with oil (if you have a cheapo less nice one bought e.g. by your mother, it will be good enough this time - it's only to easy the job of the washer-upper afterwards, as the skin isn't really worth eating in this dish), tip him over (face up, skin-side down) and pop him in the oven.

Take a break. Go and speak with your mother on the phone about your cousin's wife and the fact you both suspect she's either mad or has post-puertum exhaustia and compulsive disorders, while painting your toenails and smoking (the balcony is good for this - the day is as hot as these latitudes will allow). Once finished with both the phonecall and the toenails, pour yourself some more wine (it's even nicer now it's properly chilled), put the new potatoes you mean to boil in the sink with some cold water, and a pot of water for them, to boil. Drink some wine. Start writing a blog post. Go back and wash the potatoes so they, in their turn, are ready and waiting like good reliable actors cetra when their cue comes. Go back to drink more wine. Don't forget to stir and taste your lovely sauce every now and then. It is gorgeous, if I say so myself. Continue with your blog post and the wine. Have another cigarette.

In your near future, you foresee having to super-rapidly throw together your favourite salad - spinach, tomato, feta cheese, lightly-roasted pine nuts, olive oil and balsamic vinegar (curse the fact you forgot to buy olives, again, and worry over whether to use a bit of avocado or save it all till tomorrow when it would be properly soft), as well as eating, putting on that designer-label summer dress you bought second hand for a mere 12€ and have washed and ironed, but not worn, and maybe some make up and hair fiddling although maybe not, and hurrying off to hear your friends play their music and allow their new films to be viewed. Be aware that after the official programme has finished, the sweltering evening will most likely degenerate into drinking more wine and being all cultural and artsy.

Have another cigarette, add fresh dill to the To Die For sauce (leaves and stalks - use scissors, it's more fun) and to your drained new potatoes. Realise your blog post lacks all the wee details you wanted it to have - how your cooker and kitchen are freshly cleaned yesterday, how you put kitchen paper atop your drained potatoes (and the lid on tight - they cook to perfection in their own steam).

Don't forget the feeling of the tomatoes, though, that was a lovely find.

I just spent half an hour online looking for it

Do you remember, PG Tips used to have little cards inside the box, teabag cards? For a while they were Flags of the World, and there was a series of Mysteries, too (I remember at least two mysteries - there was the Bigfoot, and also an image of a medium spewing out ectoplasm in a ghostly shape), but the one I want to reminisce about belonged to a series of landscapes, I can't remember what the uniting factor amongst them was, if it just wasn't a Places of the World sort of thing. I had moved to London quite recently, let's say less than a year ago, and found a boyfriend and become a sort of a step-parent as well, as my boyfriend had a son who turned three in our first October together, and whom he was trying to see regularly and from whose mother he'd had a messy separation not that much before I met him. We collected the PG Tips teabag cards for his son, and he actually got quite good with knowing the flags of the world. I think we kept the flag stack at our house so he had something interesting to look through when he stayed with us, but I also had a little collection of the landscapes series which I gave to him. We were taking him back one night, to his mum, and in the car he sat at the back with me, his dad was driving, and we were talking about this and that, the little boy and I, and I have to say people hadn't really taken a great deal of trouble talking to the boy, my boyfriend included, and this should have served as a forewarning for me but it didn't, because youth is stupid and I was only twenty-one and alone in a strange country and a city too big for me. So the little boy looked through the stack of cards, there were maybe ten or so of them, I hadn't that many landscapes, and there were two of the same - a castle at sunset, somewhere, maybe Wales but more likely not (that would have been too much synchronicity), somewhere by the sea, the sky was pink and blue-hazy and the water reflected it although there were waves, and you could see the turret and the castle wall and there was a mist in the air. It was a beautiful if a little kitschy shot, the cards were small, remember, about half the size of a packet of ciggies, and he realised he had two of the same, and he wondered silently over this for a moment and then, I think without saying a word, he gave me the other one, and I intuited he wanted me to have it because he had decided to trust me and be my friend. Eight years later when he had become the half-brother of my two sons and I left his dad, I spoke with him on the phone once, once only, his dad put him on I think simply to hurt me and make me feel guilty and bad, and we spoke a few words, I said I had to leave your dad but you know I love you, don't you, and he said yes, yes he did, and that he loved me too.

I failed to keep in touch with him, I sent him a card and a trinket for his twenty-first birthday, from Hawai'i, ten years later - ten years! - but he didn't write back. It belongs to the category of "things I did really badly make a mess of", and I think I still have the teabag card somewhere, somewhere, it is certainly embedded in my memory, this card given to me half my life ago, by a small child who trusted me with his friendship and who will this autumn be the age I was when I became a mother, and I wish there was a technique to pull images off the brain and download them onto Macintosh computers, because I would like to put that picture here.

Incessantly snuffling about - a dogot update

I love it that she takes me out walking at night (or very late evening, depending on the hours you keep) particularly now that it's not getting dark anymore (although, as I said, we're still getting stars, so it's nowhere near as light as it can - and will - get. The other night I checked my claim and at twenty-five minutes to midnight I could count three stars, and forty-five minutes later I could make out all of the Big Dipper, but it's a blue darkness, not a black one, and when you get away from the street lights you realise you can see perfectly well without them - better, even, or certainly better further. Darker than dusk, lighter than darkness). Of course I loved her taking me out on wintry nights as well, but that's right beside the point at the moment and seems to belong to a different life, because right now we plunge ourselves into the night of light darkness, together, and because it's late and there are few, if any, people about and I trust her, I will let her off the leash so she can explore the night. The smells of the kevätkesän yö, spring-summer night are heady in her nose, in both our noses, actually (and yes, we have words for the between-seasons times of the year - kevätkesä, syyskesä, syystalvi, kevättalvi. It's very useful). She will leap and run and roll on the grass a little, but what she loves most is following her nose, unravelling the spaghetti of scents which evidently wiggle along the ground, her chunky-ish bottom swinging amusingly from side to side as she trots along, all determined and purposeful, in concentric circles and spirals, with sudden twirls and turns and steps back, and all the while I hear her snifi-snifi-snifi-FHRHRFF, the latter being the huff of her outbreath with which, I fancy, she empties her nose of the scents she's gathered, to make space for more. She can go on like this forever, it seems, and all I can hear is her and the nightingales (there are at least three in the neighbourhood), because I am good at blocking out the drone-hum of the motorway a mile or so off, and it's anyway not all that busy at this hour, and I love her and am, like her, loving the night and its smells (although I prefer the bird cherry blossoms, the grass, the nettles, the fir trees, to the hares' and rabbits' tracks which she is so drawn to and I can't detect, and I'm so not letting on that I too wander around with a snifi-snifi-FHRHF nose-noise).

I'm saying this to myself, but you can read it too (translation mine)

Nukkumaan käydessä ajattelen:
Huomenna minä lämmitän saunan,
pidän itseäni hyvänä,
kävelytän, uitan, pesen,
kutsun itseni iltateelle,
puhuttelen ystävällisesti ja ihaillen,
kehun: Sinä pieni urhea nainen,
minä luotan sinuun.

~ Eeva Kilpi

(As I'm going to bed I think:
Tomorrow, I'll heat up the sauna,
I'll treat myself kindly, I'll
take myself for a walk, a swim, I'll wash myself,
invite myself for evening tea,
I'll address myself fondly, with admiration,
I'll praise myself: You little, courageous woman,
I trust you.)

As they do, as one does (notes, observations)

The nightingale does say jug-jug-jug, I seem to recall the Elizabethans put special emphasis on this,
and
smells come out more at night,
and
it's not really getting dark anymore, although you have to be in an unlit place to note this. Although we still get stars. And although there are times I am obviously grateful for the footpaths being lit, darkness is actually scarier when you're trying to keep out of it.

And
melancholia is more nuanced, and a bit like the sea. You can plunge or be plunged into it, swim and sink and drown in it, but depression - my depression, at any rate - is flat and grey and two-dimensional and doesn't feel like anything, which is why it is so terrifying. I hate it looming in my life.

And
meanwhile back in the real world,
children suffocate in the ruins of their schools, some of them the age of the tinies I teach and treasure, some of them the age of my own offspring, they'd already made it to the edge of young adulthood, were already in the hallway of life, hungrily peeking through the keyhole at The World (as the poet says). Several days it'll take some of them to die, their young bodies and sweet limbs crushed and broken,
and
bodies float downstream on the Irrawaddy, swollen bloated bellies upwards, greening, blackening, the sickly-sweetish reek of death heightened, no doubt, by the tropics (remember how the dead rats stank in a day in Hawai'i), flesh beginning to to fall off them in rotting chunks, people and buffalo in an agrarian harmony in death as in life (they come from upstream, the survivors say, they are not our villagers)


(and don't forget to mention the syringes you pick up at the playground, or the lesson about things to not touch you had to give them in a circle, using your demo case of needles and fake-blood-soaked wads of kitchen paper cetra)

A Portrait of the Artist in Six Words, Courtesy of Dr But Why?

Anna MR - A small number of large experiences.

"Well, once I'm dead, you'll be free", was her parting shot - that'll teach me to shut up

I think it may just be mothers are straight from Satan's personal collection of people. On the sly, and thus doubly wicked and evil.

I've been thinking darkly about my maternal relationship whilst window-cleaning this weekend. I rather like window-cleaning. I do a reasonably good job too, rarely any stripes, although it is not often I am allowed to do it because My Mum usually announces out of the blue that she's done it already.

My Mum rang me up on Sunday morning asking whether I wanted to go to mökki (the summer cottage). No, I said, I can't really, because the dog has a runny tum again, I'll be cleaning windows instead. Oh no, you mustn't, she said. Wait till I've brought you my special cleaning thing with a long handle. You can't be climbing onto chairs to reach up, not on the tenth floor. Mum, I don't have to climb onto chairs, I can reach just fine without. No you can't, I always have to climb onto chairs. Yes well you have higher ceilings and windows and you are a lot shorter than I. Well, remember to use vinegar water. No, I have Windus. OH. I never use Windus. Well I have it so I'm going to use it, okay? Okay, okay. I'll call you later to make sure you haven't fallen out of the window.

I have known many people, often women, who will never get over a certain bitterness towards their mums. I am pleased to report I do not feel it - but there are times I feel there could be reasonable grounds for it.

And I'll surely never be grown up.

First they break your body, then they break your heart

Shell-shocked by life, currently, how painful and downright difficult and unmanageable it all can be, and how poorly one seems to manage the things that matter, and also wondering how much blame is it reasonable to apportion oneself, and how much of it all is just in the luck of the draw, chance, whatever.

I'm talking about children, of course, one's offspring, how they grow and change and become people in their own right, if you like, and sometimes it is not all a bed of roses, no. It may turn out so one can't say oh yas, my son, you know, he studies and plays football and the violin, or something, sometimes some of us have to say well you know, I am going to have to turn him to professionals, because what I have been able to do is now done, for better and worse, surely there are things that could still be done, avenues as yet unexplored blah, but as it is, I - me - I cannot do it, because my sleeve (as they say in Finnish) is empty, what I - me - could do has been done, and this is where it's got us.

(I'm here reminded of the Hollywood flick of some years ago, As Good as It Gets, it was really quite a good flick, I thought, and Jack Nicholson's character says something like "Yes well life is all yachts and sandwiches for some people but we aren't those people". Wish I could remember exactly how that line went. I bet I'll go and look for it on YouTube before I know it, and then I'll miss sauna because nipping into YouTube always seems to take hours of my life. But yes. Yachts and sandwiches and studies and interests and achievements and stuff it may be, only we aren't those people.)

I wish I could remember (something else that's coming up in my mind via some associative process) what book it was in and by whom, but there was a thing I read (years ago) where the writer posed a question, a "what if" - what if life moved backwards, and we disappeared, in the end, into the mental abyss of infancy and ultimately, back into the womb, would the final separation, the final parting, the final good-bye to those we love be any less painful. I am thinking about that now, playing with it in my mind (never really known whether I thought very highly of this particular "what if", but it has stuck on the mind, at least the skeletal framework of it), in a "yes, just think, we would live backwards, we'd come together from the various dust particles and ashes and what not, to, to - what is the opposite of the verb "to age"? Enyoungen? To enyoungen and enyoungen until finally we'd disappear up our mothers' birth canals no, better not write that, someone is bound to feel quite sick reading it, and then slowly disintegrate into cells which would become particles of her body, and all told it doesn't sound much different from the disintegration and disappearance into the ground.

The magpies have been coming in ones and twos so far this spring. Fine-looking birds they are, actually, magpies, shiny and handsome and graphically stylish. I wouldn't mind having one, and then I'd know where Sorrow would be, it would be waiting for me at home.

This Post Is About Orgasms, Take Two, aka The Second Coming. The Anniversary Edition, Including the Final and Ultimate Truth on the Matter at Hand.

Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra
trafitto da un raggio di sole:
ed è subito sera.

(Salvatore Quasimodo)

(The author of this blog would like to thank all her siblings-and-partners-in-crime, who came and exposed themselves, so beautiful, so naked, so poignant, so funny, so brilliant. Thank you. You made my earth move, you changed my life.

She would also like to point out that the idea for an anniversary post was put into her head by someone else. Bloody poets.)

This post is about everything. And love.

I started this blog about two years ago. Happy Birthday, blog girl. It is quite safe to say a fair amount has happened in these two years - when I started blogging, I was married in the tropics, now I am divorcing in the Arctic (okay, near enough, and it sounds good).

Now before y'all hasten to lace your congratulations with commiserations I will categorically state that this is not a miserable state of affairs, at all. Being a divorcee in the Arctic clearly suits me, is much more right for me than the other option, because I am if not happy (for what, pray, is happiness, and do people seriously expect to achieve it as a permanent state of affairs?) at the very least the shape of my life is a shape that fits, if you see what I mean.

(I am here reminded of several lines from some Finnish poets - names forgotten, sorry. One says something to the effect of "Life is given to you so you can decide what position you'd like to be dead in", another "Life is made that way so you wouldn't long to come back too quickly", and a third states that "Just as the visitor starts to feel at ease, it is time to leave." The last is a bit startling, because I am rather feeling at ease in my life - even with the pain. The pain, in fact, is okay, has been okay for quite some time, it's the sticky immobility horror that is still bad to cope with. Time to shut up in these brackets.)

So yes. My life is a shape that fits, and it's surprising to me, really, how difficult it's been getting here - although to be fair there have been times before now when my life has fitted me okay and I've given it up, either through choice or necessity. I have clutched various instructions and users' manuals on life in my time - and I'd bet I'm not the only one. They tend to state very standard guidelines, though - if you're from a cold country with miserable weather, fantasise about warmer climes, please, if you're single, hope for a relationship. And so on.

I don't mean to sound miserable or embittered here. For I'm not, gentle Reader, most emphatically. Spring has returned, bringing with it birdsong (the other night when I was on my way to the sauna, the blackbird gave me a single and piercingly lovely wolf-whistle. I interpreted that as A Very Good Sign (hello, sis). Put a spring in my step, I can tell you that for free), things that grow, and light - all good things I appreciate greatly (nothing wrong with seasonal change, though, and autumn and death-moon and all that are fine too when their time comes). But there is a certain unnameable something, a wistfulness that the return of spring stirs up in me. Particularly, I suppose, the light, that unreal light of Northern summers which seems to glow from the inside, more and more the later it gets. The further into spring and summer we get, the lighter the light becomes, in both meanings of the word, a weightless other-worldly light which makes you feel like something will come, some redemption, darkness and death are no more, Heaven will surely come unto the earth, and the feeling builds up and builds up with the light, and I can't help myself, can't help my body and soul responding to it and believing the feeling, even though this is my forty-first spring (although only my thirty-first of these my native white springs of such painful beauty. As it is, existence owes me ten more springs, wouldn't you agree? And so, once I'm dead, I will come back for ten more springs. Yes). But alas, maybe it is my age, maybe it is my nature, but while I allow myself, once more, to believe it, can't help but believe it, once again, one more time, I also know it's not going to happen, it will build up and build up and never peak, for just as you think it will, it turns and though it is still lovely it is already descending. I tried to explain this the other night to someone who, miraculously, seemed to get me despite the garblational pig's ear I made of it.

So yes. This blog is two years old, and - probably rather by coincidence than by planning - it has had a fine birthday present from the one-and-only Montag (whom, incidentally, I urge you all to visit. He cares about stuff, and is poignant, funny, angry, amongst other things, sometimes alternately, sometimes concurrently, so there's something for everyone over at his house). Although he is stupefyingly prolific on his "main" site, Montag also has another site where he posts a poem a week, because he fasts and writes poems weekly, for peace. And the present for my blog girl, gentle Reader, was a poem, dedicated to yours truly and my sisters. This is a special and fine thing and one I cannot hope to match, so I'll just say thank you again, Montag, and here - have some trees. I believe you have a liking for them.




(So, if you got this far, gentle Reader, thank you for bearing with me. To all those who have gone on at me about putting up a new post, you've only yourselves to blame (love you really). I feel it may well be I'm pretty much written out for a good long while to come. But another anniversary is also approaching, so I may have to return before too long for a few words on the Second Coming.)

I come from the land of the ice and snow

I have always liked the look of snow on trees, particularly at night, the intricacy of the fractal filigree of it, the lack of colour forcing the attention on the form.

It is also fun, when walking in the snow, to measure your footsteps to match those of someone else who's walked the same way before you, but opposite to them, so in the end the tracks left by you and the unknown other give the impression of someone in an odd pair of shoes having bounced, two feet together, all the way down the footpath.

So I thank Ms Dogot for taking me out walking in the night, for giving me these wonders. When she makes dog snow angels, they end up looking like Oriental characters, and I wish I could read the messages she is leaving.

If you would choose music for a black-and-white slide show of your life, what would it be? Would you always choose the same tune?

Sometimes,

quite often really, the words of others say what you'd say yourself, if only you found the words.

This poem is by the Finnish-Swedish poet Edith Södergran. The translation is mine, and unfortunately from the Finnish translation only - because I'm too bone-idle to look up the Swedish original.

LIFE

I, a prisoner to myself, say thus:
life is not spring, dressed in light-green velvet,
nor a caress seldom received,
life is not a decision to go
nor two white hands to hold you back.
Life is a tight ring which imprisons us,
an invisible circle we never cross,
life is a close happiness which passes us by,
the thousands of steps we are unable to take.

Life is to despise oneself
and to lay immobile at the bottom of a well
and to know that above, the sun is shining
and golden birds fly through the air
and the days shoot past swift as arrows.
Life is to wave a short goodbye
and to go home and sleep...
Life is to be a stranger to oneself
and a new land for everyone else who comes.
Life is to neglect one's happiness
and to reject the only moment,
life is to believe oneself weak and not to dare.

About a dog

When she first arrived, she was depressed. I know, because she was withdrawn and didn't really want to eat. I know how that feels. I tried a couple of dog foods but wasn't going to go down the "try every one in the shop" route. Someone who has great psychological understanding and empathy suggested I eat from her bowl first, and it worked. (I didn't really, you understand, I just pretended, for her benefit - "yum-yum-yum, top dog eats first, your turn now". I'm vegetarian.) It worked, for a while, anyway, a few days. Then the depressed blank look at her bowl returned. I started to feed her from my hand. I still have to do it sometimes, and although when my son feeds her, she will devour her food without worry, when I feed her she likes me to stay with her and scratch and stroke her shoulders while she eats. If I go to another room, she'll follow me with a worriedly-wagging tail, instead of eating. I don't mind, actually, although obviously I want her to feel confident and settled enough not to need me for emotional support whilst having her meal. But the truth is, I love being there with her, squatting by her side, scratching her, feeling her all strong and furry and alive, her eagerness for life, shot through with the uncertainty that puts an ache in my new and growing love for her.

During her first three weeks with us, we had a few days of snow - four or five, which looks to be the extent of it this year. She has a way of snuffling the ground, following the scents and smells she detects, which was very endearing from the start - and a relief, as apparently many dogs with a dog-pound background can be so traumatised they don't use their noses anymore, and have to be taught and tantalised to do so again. Her sniffing became a reason to fall in love with her when snow arrived, for she would poke her nose in it and create the sweetest dog-nose shaped holes with a snuffle-sniffling movement from side to side. She would then look over her shoulder at me, as she does, checking that I'm there, that all is well, that she is a good dog, and she would have snow on her nose and love would well up in me. It was also when getting carried away in the snow to the extent of forgetting herself that she would suddenly, out of the blue, make the first clumsy playful love-lunges at me, coming out of the withdrawnness that was characteristic of her during her first days with us.

During her first visits to the local dog park she was so worried about having me off the leash (and thus easily lost) she would walk with her nose to my knee instead of running about, stopping when I stopped, walking when I walked. She has grown brave now and will romp with dogs much bigger than her with spirit and gusto, but she comes when I call her and usually straightaway (although I wouldn't trust her when rabbits, hares, squirrels and the like come into the picture). She got told to get lost at first when she tried to get into my bed with me in it (although she is always allowed on it, as long as I'm not in it. With me in it, it's invites only), and consequently will only grace my bed on weekend mornings, even if I invite her - but she does come and kiss me first thing in the morning when I roll over to turn off my alarm, except this Monday, when I was terribly down. Poor innocent creature, she feels my moods and takes them all upon herself. Her life will not be an easy one.

I've had her a month today, and, as is the case with babies and lovers, I cannot fathom I haven't always had her, that there could have been a life of not having her. I love her. I've waited for her for eleven and a half years. She's my dog.

North Finchley on my mind (and Palmer's Green, too)

I turned twenty-one there.

For my birthday, I got a bonsai tree. They were a new thing then, and I loved it. I couldn't keep it alive for much longer than a year, if quite that - it died of either too much or not enough watering, I can't remember, and I took it to the bonsai shop to be fixed when it was clearly dead, and the woman at the shop gave me a dirty look as to a murderer, and said something on the lines of "I told you not to plunge it to water it - I remember this little tree".

I think we went to eat at an Indian for my birthday - one of our two favourites, either Rani's or Jai Krishna's. Rani's was probably in Finchley, and their starters were to die for. We became such regulars I was awarded first a gold and then a platinum card, which gave us ridiculous discounts. We took the office Christmas party there once, I think that's how I got the platinum card. Their business really boomed later, and they enlarged the premises, but I seem to remember it impaired their food. It was coming out of Rani's, after a meal to celebrate a friend's birthday, that I saw the full moon had been and gone and I hadn't had a period and I realised I was most likely pregnant. I was, with my firstborn. But that was later. Two years later.

Jai Krishna's was a little further away, maybe Stroud Green (does a road named that exist in London? I don't know. Maybe I just made it up now. It matters little). Their food was even stranger - once, I had "Idli Sambar", it came in two bowls, one had a red liquid, the other one a grainy cake, and the waiter gestured at first one and then the other and said "Idli - Sambar - Sambar - Idli". The taste experience was so alien - lovely, but completely alien - that I felt the process needed a new name, it couldn't really be called eating. They had no alcohol license, but you could nip into the off-licence across the street for a bottle of wine or some beers. They would charge you fifty p corkage charge for a bottle of wine. I can't remember what they charged for beer corkage.

Around that time, I had my waist-length hair spun into dreadlocks - spindled, I think the term was - by a friend of a friend (in fact, the same friend from whose birthday party I was coming when I realised I was pregnant). She worked at a hairdresser's. She did my hair at her house, but she charged me for it anyway. I hated my locks at first and loved them later and hated them again much later. I don't have naturally curly hair and had to work on the things for ages before they really set - months. It taught me the technique of making dreadlocks with distinctly Caucasian hair, and I did it for a few friends who wanted them, later. I didn't charge them anything, though.

It was almost exactly this time of year, we had a big Hallowe'en bash, fancy dress and everything, in the back garden that was the biggest I have ever had, it stretched out and became a weird orchard/wood/common and none of us really knew where our bit ended. For once, everyone actually turned up in fancy dress, it was pretty good, and someone asked us if we'd want to take on a stray kitten they'd found - we had just given away the last one of my hand-reared litter named after the Beatles. The kitten arrived a couple of days later, in terribly starved and manky condition, and I fell in love with it instantly. It was named Punch, and after a day or two, I found him limp and weird and obviously very ill but purring louder than any cat of such a diminutive size should have been able to, in his cat litter tray. I carried him to the vet's on the High Street. They diagnosed him with meningitis and didn't give him a very good chance of surviving. I was too upset for words, but one of the people we shared house with asked if it was contagious to humans. Punch pulled through, though, and became the big little kitty love of my adult years. He loved me more than any one of my other cats ever - I would wake up in the morning and he'd be purring on my chest, dribbling onto my face, and he'd climb onto my shoulders and fashion himself into a muff around my neck when I was studying. Later, when we'd moved to Palmer's Green, he disappeared and was never found, even though I left notices on every lamp-post in the area. One person only rang me, and he was offering me kittens from his cat's litter. I didn't really want to face it at the time, but he probably got run over on the North Circular, or became chicken chop suey at some less-reputable Chinese.

A gruesome North Finchley tale (this one owes a lot to Cusp)

Many years, almost two decades ago, there was a street person in North Finchley called Horace. He was a black guy, friendly, rotund, in his thirties, maybe, it's so hard to tell, as I've said before. I call Horace a street person, although I don't know whether he had a home he slept in or whether he spent his nights, too, somewhere in the nooks and alleyways and shop fronts of the high street. He certainly spent all his days there, usually parked in front of the shops - what were they, I find myself wondering now, trying to remember - Sainsbury's, probably, Woolie's, certainly, maybe a Boots - it is a long time ago. Horace spent his days outside the high street shops, greeting the people walking past, the people of the neighbourhood. He seemed to know just about all of them by name. Yes, said my boyfriend-of-sorts at the time - we'll call him Mr B------n, it may or may not be his real name - you tell Horace your name once and he'll remember it forever. He remembers everyone's name. Let me show you. Alright Horace, he called out - except because it was Nawf London, he said "awrigh". Awrigh Mr B------n, Horace replied. Horace was beaming but I didn't tell him my name.

Sometimes, you'd hear a great big shouty racket from the high street, really loud, it carried right the way inside the shops, down the street, I swear if the window was open you could hear it at our shared house down one of the side streets, although it was a good few houses down (and here I note I cannot remember the name of that street, it is gone, and this fills me with a nostalgia for the unhappy young adulthood year I had there. It was the room where I hand-reared the kittens named after the Beatles, and where we had the burgundy walls and, on one of the walls, a camouflage netting with weird things stuck to it - an inflatable duck, other similar items of interest, and the orange light bulb and the chest of drawers I painted alternating the drawer and knob colour between lime green and pale purple (I know, I know), only to discover as some of the white paint the thing was painted in chipped off that it had, at some point, been exactly the same hue of purple, before me, and the huge garden down the back, which just went on and on and where we had that Hallowe'en party where Dave Allen got so out of it he spent the evening walking around looking for an ashtray because he didn't want to stub out his fag on our carpet). Sometimes, you'd just suddenly hear this shouty racket, loud, upset, but not really threatening (and I am easily frightened by violence and detest confrontation). Ah, people would say, including the boyfriend-of-sorts whom I was about to swap for the man who was to father my children, ah, it's only Horace, someone's wound him up again. How? I asked. Oh, if you say "heads" to him, he really goes mad. Shall I show you? No, no, you're alright, don't wind him up, please, but why "heads"? Because

one night, some guys got the idea to wind Horace up a bit, they pushed him around, punched him a couple of times, frightened him, they stood in a circle around him and said, Right Horace, we're going to toss a coin. If it's tails, we'll let you go, but if it's heads, we'll kill you, and they tossed it and caught it and stood around him, in a circle, and chanted heads! heads! heads! heads! heads!...

and twenty years on, I hurt for Horace, and send this post out there to apologise to him for what was done to him, although it wasn't me, although I couldn't have stopped it, and thank Cusp for saying something in a comment thread that triggered his memory in my mind.