This blog has moved.  I’ve got a real website.  With, like, my own domain name and everything! So take note and update your brains: this blog is now officially (and only) at www.aliteralgirl.com.  Thanks!

–Miranda

Yet once it was the busiest haunt,
Whither, as to a common centre, flocked
Strangers, and ships, and merchandise

–From Queen Mab by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I’ve got a cold.  Outside, the world is soggy, and inside, my spirits have been dampened by my own self-pity.  I tried to turn my phone on today and couldn’t.  It appears to be hibernating; no longer interested in being the vehicle for my pathetic communication with the world, no longer interested in alerting me to text messages from 02 and phone calls from the bank, no longer interested in taking snapshots of autumn leaves.  If it does decide never to work again, it will be a shame in more ways than one.  I depend on the device; more than I thought I possibly could.  All my photos from Dublin will be gone; speaking of which, with what will I express my photographic creativity?  How will I wake up in the mornings, now that my alarm clock has gone to sleep itself?

But that’s not the point, really.  The devices we rely on are replaceable (though expensive).  The point is that I’m in self-pity land, sniffling on the couch, feeling a million miles away from everyone else.  There’s a funny thing that happens when I’m ill; suddenly, even as I’m walking past the pub on my way to the shop to buy some soup, I have a sense that I can’t connect with anyone.  There’s a wall, or, more accurately, a screen, a pane of fogged glass.  I can see out into the world but I can’t interact with it, not wholly.  I can smell the warmth and the spilled beer from the pub but I can’t go in.

All of it is self-constructed, of course; none of it is serious.  But here I am, barely through October, already longing again for summer.  I haven’t enjoyed the crispness of the air this year as much as I usually do; I still feel that it should still be August.  This isn’t so much to do with the damp English summers as it is to do with my calender for those precious few warm months.  Being that busy made the time pass too quickly; I still feel as if I’m trying to catch up with myself, with the days and months which marched doggedly on.  I’m connected to everyone, everywhere, all the time; I spend hours on the internet, can email my parents in California or send a message to a friend around the corner in the same amount of time.  But somehow I’ve lost a sense of being connected to myself.  At a certain point today, cycling home–and maybe this was just the cold speaking–I actually had this sense that I was floating along, that my tires weren’t really touching the asphalt.

Mostly, I just need to write, which I haven’t done in too long. And until I do, I’ll probably continue to pump out these anthems to my own frustration, so I hope, for your sake as well as mine, I sort it out soon.

A cloud of witnesses.  To whom?  To what?
To the small fire that never leaves the sky.
To the great fire that boils the daily pot.

Yet lend the passing moment words and wings.

From “A Fanfare for the Makers” by Louis MacNeice

I woke up on Saturday, and I was depressed.  A friend of mine recently posted a quote on her blog from Breakfast at Tiffany’s:”The blues are because you’re getting fat or because it’s been raining too long. You’re just sad, that’s all. The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you’re afraid and you don’t know what you’re afraid of. Do you ever get that feeling?”  Which is exactly what happened to me.  Not  a latent, lazy sort of sadness, a seasonal affliction, perhaps, but an active force, something come over you suddenly and without warning, and possessing every atom of your body.

Being in Dublin didn’t help; it made everything worse.  I suppose I came here hoping to claim immunity from trivial worries and the sadness of shorter days; but of course the trouble is always that travel is not escape (Alain de Botton writes brilliantly about this, about “how little the place in which I stood had the power to influence what travelled through my mind”).  We always hope this when we go somewhere new: either that the unpleasantness and banalities of everyday life won’t follow us, or that we’ll become someone different in the context of a different space.  But travel is not some magical process of transformation.  At best it’s a state of mind, a way of revising our views of the world and ourselves, of exploring and watching; but it’s never the answer to all of our problems, never a method of erasing anxieties, and to a certain extent this will always be a disappointment.

What I forget, in times of minor woe, is that it’s actually freeing to know all this.  I sat in a Dublin café with the man.  I sipped my tea listlessly; I picked at my omelette; I listened to the children at the table next to us, who shouted and screamed and cried and laughed and dropped their toast on the floor and hugged their fathers and smiled at us and ran circles round the entire place.  I told the man I felt unhappy today, but that I didn’t know why–was it to do with my continual battle with my anti-anxiety medication, my desperation at being stuck in a job that a monkey could do, and do better?  Probably not, I concluded.  It was really all about money, which depressed me even more, that such a stupid thing–a philosophical construct–could make me stare so glumly at my empty plate.

It’s not a good city to worry about money in, Dublin.  Things are expensive here.  You can’t even drown your sorrows without taking out a small loan.  And the trouble with me is that once I start worrying, it’s nearly impossible to make me stop.  Even paying the small lunch bill caused a tremor of pain in my mind.

I could easily have wallowed all day.  We walked through St. Stephen’s Green, along the autumnal edges, where leaves were falling most heavily and we could avoid the stink of the pond.  A trio of teenage boys sat playing their guitars; a pregnant woman passed, with flowers in one hand and a man’s arm around her.  Lots of infants ran rampant, with parents trailing behind in helpless pursuit.  A few other lovers held hands.  I felt unoriginal and uninspired; and then I felt the whole world to be unoriginal and uninspired.

We went down Grafton Street, watched a man sculpt a sleeping dog out of sand, listened to Irish bagpipes and Beatles songs.  Past Trinity College and Temple Bar, we crossed the Liffey at O’Connell Street, into the great expanse of boulevard.  Like an abandoned Oxford Street, it sits with its handsome buildings, cheap storefronts, its absurd width and pockets of shoppers.  Gaggles of spotty teenagers in unfortunate clothing (sweatpants and faux-leather jackets, athletic shorts over leopard-print leggings with pop socks and sneakers) chased each other in zig-zags, shouted after one another, spilled their soda, lit cheeky cigarettes.  It was a glorious sun-brightened day and everything looked grey.

We went and sat at a converted church, now a café, bar, restaurant, and nightclub, overlooking an empty concrete square, a few gravestones stacked up on the fringe.  I sipped more tea.  I wanted to wallow–this is the thing.  There’s something delicious about a good wallow, most of us know this, but I was in danger of slipping from healthy wallowing into the realm of desperation.  I played with my spoon.  I said to the man: maybe you should go to the film without me.  I could sit and get some writing done. I could sit and feel sorry for myself.  He said, don’t be ridiculous.  But he said it so convincingly, and probably in a few more words, that I loosened my stranglehold on unhappiness, briefly allowed myself to consider the possibility that this was just a passing phase, and agreed to meet some Dublin friends for the afternoon showing of Zombieland.

I should mention a few things now.  The most important is that I don’t like zombie films.  I don’t like horror films of any kind.  The gorier they are, the more they make me cringe; so although it’s a comedy, and I knew, going in, that it would be funny, the title “Zombieland” didn’t bode well.  Also, I hadn”t been to the cinema in over a year.  I’d forgotten how overwhelming the endless dark corridors, the escalators, the giant bags of popcorn, the bad carpets and the flashing lights are.  I’d forgotten the thrill of anticipation; the movie-theatre smell; the crunching of bags and sipping of soda.  I’d forgotten how much I like to see the previews!  I’d mostly forgotten how huge those big screens really are.  The first few moments of splattering zombies were very, very intense.

Then something strange happened.  I started…what was this feeling?…to enjoy myself.  Really?  Yes.  I laughed at the jokes and started to feel affection (of a certain kind) for the characters.  I forgot how funny I myself was feeling; how unreasonably low, how inexcusably self-indulgent.  I had wanted to sit around like the ghost of some bleak, damned writer; to mope over coffee, to shiver outside in pursuit of quality people-watching, to envy everyone that walked by their freedom and their carefree smiles.  I thought I needed that; but what I actually needed was something else entirely (it always is, isn’t it)–in this case, some good company and a zombie comedy.  We came out into the city; we smiled, we laughed, we ate an impromptu dinner, and the evening turned to night and even if it wasn’t something I couldn’t have done at home (or maybe it was, maybe that’s the point of all this, that the travel state of mind was somehow both responsible for my mood and necessary to lift the cloud), I was grateful for the power of it.

So, I’m in Dublin.  It’s been awhile since I’ve written anything on this blog (let’s be honest: it’s been awhile since I’ve written anything, period).  I did write a post a few nights ago.  It was all about how I walked by a big semi-detached house on the Iffley Road on my way to the pub and heard a weird screaming noise that could have either been someone in pain, or someone having sex, or else a fox experiencing some kind of excitement.  The post was witty, it was hilarious, it was beautiful and brilliant.  And it got mysteriously deleted.  So I’d like to say that I’m suffering some sort of WordPress-induced post-traumatic stress syndrome; but mostly, I’m just lazy, and a little busy.

And now I’m in Dublin.  We’re staying in an almost-swanky 70s concrete-block hotel.  It’s huge; I mean, it takes us ten minutes just to get to the elevators from our room.  We got a good deal on the place, and I’m not going to lie: I like it better than the funky hostel alternative.  It makes me feel more adult.  We get free shampoo!  The duvet is fluffy and white! There’s internet access and instant coffee!  The lobby has one of those über-shiny faux-marble floors!  Mostly it means that I can fart in bed and walk around naked without worrying what other people might think of me.

It’s weird, being here.  I keep having to remind myself that I’m in another country, that I travelled to get here.  There’s no jet-lag or language barrier, no fog of exhaustion; no sense, really, that I’ve left one place and arrived in another.  It’s almost like being in an alternate-universe version of Britain (apologies to the Man for stealing his analogy)–the same markers (chain restaurants, high street shops, uniformed schoolkids, semi-chic businesspeople) but everything slightly, gently, almost imperceptibly different.

The pubs.  The pubs are beautiful; they’re warm and packed and full of life and beautiful, bright-eyed Irish girls, old men with red cheeks.  They’re also almost horrifically expensive, which proves, I suppose, the determination of the drinking culture here–in a country less devoted to its cups, the 5 euro pints would surely drive drinkers either underground or to other pursuits.

It’s nice to be in a city, a real city.  In Oxford we’re spoiled by beauty, and in London overwhelmed by the sheer scale of things.  But here I’m reminded of Boston, which is manageable but bustling, charming but grimy.  Walking through St. Stephen’s Green I feel I could easily be in the public gardens next to the Boston Common.

In other news, it’s mostly been cloudy, or almost-cloudy, a few rare shafts of sunlight turning the trees to gold.  I’m glad.  In my mind Dublin is a cloudy city; always a little cold, a little grey, so that the warmth of a pub is necessary after a long day’s wandering.  If a thin mist wants to fall, all the better.  As I’m writing this, of course, the sun has come out, cast a glorious light over the dark brown stones, and I’m tempted to revise my opinion: it’s a city made to be seen in yellow evening light.  But I won’t, because then I think of Joyce’s Dubliners, “The Dead”, the winter chill, the darkness after the party, the drizzle and snow.

Anyway, more later.  If I spend the entire trip holed up in internet cafés I won’t get to see the city.

I didn’t win a free trip to Sydney. I’ll write more about that soon, but for now the details are unimportant.  What’s important is this: on Thursday, after the news was announced, we decided to un-celebrate with a pint in the Rusty Bicycle.  Some people might call it “drowning your sorrows”, but I was in a celebratory mood.  After all, it had been several months of hard work and anticipation, and good things (including a hamper full of Australian junk food) had come of it.  Moreover, it’s Autumn, and there’s nothing nicer on a chilly October evening than to have a glass of cider by the radiator in your local.  There’s something about the slow and inevitable descent of these months into darkness and ice that makes me want to play with time–I feel constantly as if I both want things to speed up and slow down, as if I need more hours in the day and to rush through the damp mood that comes over me when the leaves start to fall.  The only appropriate place to think thoughts like that is at the pub.

When the pub closed we walked the 20 yards home and invited a friend in for a pre-bed cup of tea.  But by the time we’d got to the kitchen we’d all decided we didn’t want tea.  The only other option was the bottle of elderflower champagne I’d bought in Devon to celebrate the successful completion of my MA.  The problem with buying a bottle of booze for a specific reason, of course, is that you then let it sit around, certain that no moment is special enough to warrant opening it.  And here we were, a month later, the unopened bottle on the rack reminding me of the uncelebrated occasion; here we were without a free trip to Sydney, with time doing dances around us and the trees in the garden getting naked.

So we opened it, for no good reason.  Which in a way is the perfect way to celebrate.  On cold Thursday night, after midnight, with your alarm already set for work and no particular worries or ambitions weighing you down.  In coats and hats we sat outside and drained our glasses, and of course the elderflower champagne didn’t taste as delicious as it was supposed to, but made us deliciously light-headed anyway.  Then we ate the rest of the sausages I’d made for dinner, and spread cheese on stale Ryvita, and plotted and planned.

Could I have arranged a better way to mark the completion of a degree than this?  Elderflower champagne, autumnal chills, conversation, creative energy, and the birth of a potentially very exciting idea.  How’s that for an un-celebration?

Over at the Send Me To Sydney blog, things are winding down after an amazing and exhausting few months.  The time has nearly come: tomorrow, the winner of the Awesome Tour of Sydney will be unveiled (I’m nervous just thinking about it!).  It’s been a hell of a trip; I urge you all to check out my final post, a literary guide to the city, which in many ways was my favourite challenge response.  I also encourage you to check out the competition, who are listed on the sidebar of the Sydney blog–some great creative thinking has come out of this project, and it’s worth looking at how eight bloggers managed to approach each new task differently.

Finally, thank you all for reading, for contributing with comments, ideas, drawings, laughs, and support.  Thanks to the fantastic guys at 1000heads and Tourism New South Wales for coming up with this crazy idea, and then inviting me to be a part of it.  And here’s hoping (please please please please!) that I’ll find myself wandering through Sydney in the not-too-distant future.

The blog’s not going anywhere, so visit www.sendmetosydney.com to catch up on all the old challenges, read the latest entry, post your own thoughts, and, of course, to learn the results…

Where’s the line between supporting yourself and driving yourself crazy?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

Supporting yourself: I mean, doing the minimum to pay your bills, your rent, your pub landlords.  I do not mean doing the minimum to simply survive.  I consider supporting yourself to be survival + luxury, of a sort.  The luxury of a pint or two; the luxury of buying a new pair of boots when your old ones disintegrate (I know a lot about this; I’m dealing with the loss of my favourite old pair); the luxury of not waking up in the middle of the night every month coated in sweat wondering if your rent cheque is going to bounce, again.  That kind of luxury–not the business-class, designer shoes, king-sized bed kind.

Supporting yourself to this degree shouldn’t be–and generally isn’t–difficult, provided you’re content with your work; or at least, not actively aspiring to do something else.  If you are actively aspiring to do something else, things become complicated.  It suddenly becomes tempting to think that if you cut a few hours at the office here and there, you’d have so much more time for your art (or whatever it is that wants your time more than endless phone calls to the IT guy and empty lunchtime chitchat).  And of course, you could cut a few hours.  You could tighten your belt.  You could avoid the pub at all costs, wear jumpers with holes (which are sure to come into fashion at some point, anyhow), eat like the mythical starving college student, swear off travel, bookshops, wine–whatever it is that you sink your money into.  With all that inherited time, you could make something great.

It doesn’t work, of course.  I know it doesn’t work, and there are plenty of people ready to remind me when I can’t remind myself (try him if you need it spelled out in plain and ever-so-slightly annoying English).  I know it doesn’t work from experience.  I’ve had several spells of voluntary unemployment, and here’s what I did: I bought things.  I burned through several thousand dollars worth of savings.  Then I avoided going hungry by cutting out every pleasure I could think of.  I worried.  I sweated.  I cried.  I lived off credit cards and desperation.  I picked fights with everyone, especially the poor sod who has to live with me and who doesn’t, as a freelancer, make enough money to keep both himself and his book-buying girlfriend afloat.  I’ll tell you what I didn’t do, in any of those intervals: write anything that made it all worth it. It turns out you can’t just cut things from your life and carry on as you were before.  (And I obviously can’t cut the pub: it’s where some of the most inspiring and exciting collaborative things often happen).

I’m certainly not sitting on three-quarters of a novel because of the times I didn’t work.  I’ve got my 60,000 words because I did something stupid a few months ago and took on two jobs (one of which I genuinely love) and a full-time Masters, and then when I got home, or to the pub, I sat and wrote.  Was it some form of inertia?  The effect of the MA?  Or was I simply motivated by how much I did not want to have to make photocopies for a living anymore?  Impossible to tell; but I can say with some confidence that being able to buy the occasional dress on eBay and order takeout Chinese helped.  Perhaps after all, it’s simply about focusing your energy, using it not for fretting but for creation.

I know all that.  But still.  It’s tempting.  What I wonder is, where is the point at which temptation becomes distraction?  At the moment I can just about bear my photocopying job with a pained grin, but on bad days I sit at my desk fantasizing about artfully worded letters of resignation.  The thing that always stops me is that simple little thought: support yourself.

So.  Here’s what I want to know.  (It’s okay if there isn’t an answer.  In fact, I doubt there is.  But I want it to be talked about anyway, because I think it’s important, and because I’m selfish enough to hope that with enough talk I might be able to find an answer for myself.)  Is there a way to support yourself, as an artist/writer/musician/dancer/thinker/collaborator/whatever, that balances survival with intellectual stimulation?  Or is that friction between want and need part of some necessary process in the early days of a creative career?

Let me know.  Or don’t.  But do think of me if you’re ever in need of a writer/researcher with a background in politics and literature who hates photocopying and big, boring, black PCs.

I’ve been back at work for three hours.  I think that’s enough, really, don’t you?

It’s such a rude re-introduction to the real world.  Hulking black PCs, lists and lists of menial tasks.  I can’t see the surface of my desk for the piles of shit on it.  Mostly it feels like an interruption of happy routine.  I like being able to read at midday, work on my book after lunch, write a blog post whenever I feel like it (so I’m writing this now just to spite the working world).

The funny thing about a really good holiday is the depression that sets in after.  This morning I threatened to avoid it altogether by nearly sleeping through all my alarms.  Now I’m staring with some chagrin at the huge map of Oxford across from my desk, thinking I probably should have slept through all my alarms, and thinking also that I’m nostalgic for something which is barely over.  The freedom.  The blue skies.  The delicious meals.  The cider.

On a more positive note, I’ve returned from holiday feeling spiritually refreshed (please contain your derisive snorts), and oddly empowered.  I have this niggling sense that I am, after all, in control of my future, and if I don’t want that future to necessarily include being paid to stare at a wall and occasionally file things, I may actually be able to do something about it.  It’s a good start, anyway, and until we can all move to a commune off the East Devon coast and sustain ourselves on creative endeavors and home-grown vegetables, it gives me incentive to keep going.

The other nice thing about coming back from a vacation is the lingering effect of “tourist eyes”.  When you go away–even if it’s just a few hours south of your usual haunt–your vision (both literally and metaphorically) is temporarily altered, and there’s a precious period of a few days after your return when you haven’t quite readjusted and you’re still seeing things in a holiday-way.  So I’m enjoying wandering through Oxford.  I’d forgotten quite how much I take it for granted.  Xander and I even dipped into the Natural History Museum on Saturday–just because we could–and spent a blissful half hour feeling like 19th century explorers.  (There is something, we find, irrevocably Victorian about a Natural History Museum).  We just don’t get that in our natural state of being.  It takes a trip–a big one, a small one, a physical one, an emotional or mental one–to make us remember our surroundings.

Strolling the busy streets of Musbury.  Ben looking tipsy and Xander looking authoritative.  Neither was either.

Did I mention the band that opened for Ben was called “Itchy and Scratchy”?

Ben Walker vs. the River Cottage Chickens

A real, live, authentic River Cottage Chicken.

Geeks.

The man himself, Mr. Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall.

Down time with Xander and Ben.

He was a big hit with the kids.

Oh you know.  Just hanging out.

This handsome fennel-seed salami caused Ben a great deal of distress, and Xander and me a great deal of amusement.

Heading back to the cabin.

We’ve seen some fairly spectacular sunsets.