Miss V’s Halo Slips

On Friday several things happened: the battery on my music playing doobery went flat, there was the mother of all storms and I went to the African evening at UNESCO.

Let me tell you about the mother of all storms first. There I was probably reading all your blog posts and the sky which had been an ominous grey all afternoon turned a bruised yellow before dark black clouds rolled in. It was like sitting in a world with all the lights turned off and it made me smile because I knew something spectacular was to follow. A crash here and a flash there and the heavens opened pouring sheets of liquid onto the dry pavements. It was like my own personal light and sound show taking place around my head. Of course, I then had to reassess what I was going to wear to the African evening but the lesser rain gods seemed to know my schedule because the downpour eased off a little just before I had to peg it down to the metro in my bright red raincoat.

Anyway after getting into the UNESCO building and going up to the 2^nd floor, the 7^th floor and back to the ground floor we found the event. We had kind of missed a good part of it but the thing that impressed me the most was a troupe from Uganda (I think – I have a terrible memory). They played this giant xylophone type drum and they had had to construct a stand for it out of a banana tree. They came from some tiny village in the middle of the boo hoos and had never left their village let alone got on a plane and flown to Paris, yet when they got on the stage they were born to be there. The 13 year old singer dancer absolutely stole the show as his voice filled every corner of the auditorium and he jiggled his hips like crazy. They were fantastic...

But meanwhile the storm was dying down and things had been going on at home... or so I thought when I put two and two together and came up with five.

On Tuesday I grabbed my music playing doobery and pressed play and nothing happened. Did it get fried while I was charging the battery on Friday?

This morning I woke up with a list going through my head: The Doves, ELVIS COSTELLO! Badly Drawn Boy... zzz... Tom Waits... zzz... Leonard Cohen, The Kinks, The Rolling Stones... zzz... The Smiths... Rufus Wainwright... Joy Division (but that’s alright because I bought Unknown Pleasures)... The Buzzcocks... The Jam. Then I went to water my new basil plant and discovered it had taken an almighty battering on Friday night (and Sunday, and Monday). Oh man! I thought, my plant got battered and the doobery got fried.

But you know you have to have hope. So I took all the various bits into work and after the Server Guy and the Server Guy’s Boss had stopped running around like Blue Arsed Flies and had had a wee breather I sidled in waving the poor sad blue doobery thing at them. “It’s dead. Is there anyway you can get all the music off even though it’s dead?”

To cheer myself up I went and dropped my ticket off at Colleen’s for the concert I’m too whacked to go to via the pet shop. I walked up the hill even though I’m shattered just to get a glimpse of two dozing Siamese kittens and a sleeping Labrador puppy and the bunch of Yorkies and Scotties that were using him as a pillow. On the way down the hill I realised I had missed a call. So I called back. “Yeah, your doobery is fixed.”

“What?”

“It was stuck.” Even the kittens woke up and started leaping around with joy.

So why has my halo slipped even though I’m no angel? Well... you figure it out.

Not such a bad thing after all

It turns out the break from writing wasn't such a bad thing after all. Every other time I've had a break of this length of time I've just completely lost the story or the characters have also run away for an extended holiday and never come back, but not this time.

In the interim I did flick through the notebook and decide that I needed to develop certain characters a bit more and that the beginning was kind of weak. So when I finally got back to it that's where I started; at the beginning with a wee bit of character development.

Next I was planning on carrying on where I had last stopped writing, but to do that I had to re-read the six chapters I had already written. My conclusions after this read through was: OH MY GOD! How confusing is this? What the hell is going on? So that's good, right, because if I had just happily kept on writing it would have just kept on getting more confusing.

There was a wee moment there on Sunday night as I was making a cheese sandwich when I had that 30,000 word 'Oh my this is crap' feeling, but that quickly passed as I came up with a completely alternative plot. As I brushed my teeth I realised that the alternative plot line would mean that I needed a new notebook and to start all over again. As the tooth paste dripped from my aghast mouth a completely different beginning popped into my head and I quickly finished brushing so that I could go and scribble it down.

So yesterday after almost paying the entire Tax bill for my arrondissement (I got a bit carried away with filling in figures in boxes and it was only after I was estimated a 14,000€ tax bill that I went back and realised I was claiming I had a double income!) I wrote the new beginning. It's something like the 7th beginning, the 1st one now being somewhere far past the middle! Anyway, the important thing is it cuts to the chase and means that I've been able to cut (and will be able to cut) a lot of unnecessary telling later on and eh... I like it.

The other thing I realised over this weekend is that research is fun, but then you don't have to put it ALL in. I had more or less realised that before when I had stopped myself writing a long description about a sledge, but I definitely realised it this weekend as I mercilessly chopped paragraphs here and there.

So I'm now up to 22,000 words ish although that will probably go down rather than up as I edit the first bit to fit in with the new beginning.

Presenting...

From the beginning I decided that some of Shameless’s lions were female. I actually chose her name last Tuesday, but I didn’t really have time to fully research it and do some variations until today. I knew that I wanted her name to mean fire, but according to my in depth research it actually means fire soul. The name is apparently Gaelic, but I could only find details of a Cornish saint who somehow become all embroiled with King Arthur and had the power to bring people and her cow back to life!

So the name began as Endellion, sometimes spelt Endillyon, the Saint is Endelienta, but I liked the Cornish variant. So please welcome to my blog:

Endelyn

The fire within burns vibrant on her skin,
tattooing vague patterns of blazing dragons
across her flank.
Wild imaginings bursting forth,
swirling to indefinite
beginnings, middles and endings.
Prowling forth into uncertainty,
her radiance undiminished,
her force yet unrealised,
her soul a rich muse
of consciousness.

Copyright, 2007. Verilion

And please click here to go and say hello to some of her other pals, and here if you would like to adopt a lion. They're very good really. I have to admit that mine takes up a little more space on the sofa then I would like, but she's very amiable to snuggling and she's got a purr like you wouldn't believe!

Update

Super quick update to say that The Pimple Continued has been updated again. I have added:

• Jamie and The Special Beans
  - my entry in the GBA(s)F#2 contest with 'Growth' as a theme.
• Putting up the Garden Fence - a poem that popped into my head just before that fateful Champion's League Final last Wednesday.
• Silence - This was inspired by Inspire me Thursday, but I missed the Thursday to post it.
  

My goal for today is to fill in my tax return (which is a bit scary because I have to delve into the Cupboard of Crap to find two specific pieces of paper!), name and rightfully claim my lion, add yet another bit to the beginning of the book and maybe do a bit more of the middle, eat.

Not a moan (really)

This post is not going to be a moan. I started moaning on Thursday and it just grew and grew until it became a Woolly Mammoth that threatened to stamp on me. And then I went to Castorama and calm was restored momentarily as I wandered down the small hand tools aisle more times than was strictly necessary. In keeping with Saturday being eye-candy day, I may make this particular aisle a regular part of my Saturday routine.

So I decided not to moan, which is a bit difficult because all these things happened this week:

• I had a headache all week
• My back was threatening to join in with the headache
• My idea of buying a wreck in Brittany and rebuilding it was nixed by the MEN (and Jane, who jumped up and down all over my poor trampled idea the next day just in case I was thinking of reviving it!) (But after the trip to Casto yesterday I did momentarily consider it again... ‘All those Saturdays in the power tools aisle’ I thought then realised ‘All those Saturdays not writing’ and forgot it again)
• I’ve already neglected my poor adopted lion by not naming or writing it a poem, but I’m working on it.
• Some of my colleagues really let me down this week in a week when I really needed their help
• Liverpool lost the Champion’s League Final
• I wore a stripy green and yellow top the next day to cheer myself up and people took the piss all day:
• I left my jacket on the bus
• My red notebook hasn’t been out of my bag for weeks

And it’s that last one that’s really getting me down. So instead of writing this post that’s what I should really be doing.

And my Tax Return; mustn’t forget to do that!

Who am I?

I’ve been a wandering, a wondering and a dreaming this weekend. The dream was stepped on, crushed and ground away as the MEN stood around and spoke FACTS to me this afternoon, so I came home and uploaded my photos and wondered some more.

This weekend I tagged after my folks to visit family and then we went to Brittany to meet a woman who shares a passion with my mother. They are both into genealogy and through this they have discovered that way back when they share a common ancestor. As they both became animated by names and dates, ancestors, national archives and the rather bizarre Latter Day Saints database[1] I suppose it became clear that not everyone shared their enthusiasm. “Aren’t you interested?” I was asked as I was about to sneak out for a fag. Well it’s true that I’ve not really paid much attention to that which puts a sparkle in my Mum’s eye and it’s taken a stranger to reveal this to me.

I’ve always looked at my family at this bizarre bunch spread far and wide around the globe, some of whom I share a birthday with and others that I have never met at all. My immediate family was shaped by a culture that was so alien to me that I spent my childhood shouting loud and clear: THIS IS ME. But in the end who am I? On a microscopic level my journal continues to explore this question everyday. Then there is my family, my friends, my colleagues, my students. And then complete strangers; who am I to Monsieur J. Blogue the everyday Parisian on the streets?

It is a question I have posed since I left England. You see in England I was just another person who made up the multi ethnic melting pot that is London. In Mexico I was told by my hairdresser that if I kept my mouth shut I could pass for a Mexican. In Spain, the same thing, people spoke to me in Spanish first and then when the blinking became impossible to ignore they would finally venture to ask: “¿No entiendes?” The last time I visited my island of origin I was told that I couldn’t be from there because I was too pale!

It’s weird, everybody is from somewhere, but where am I from? South west London or a tiny little island that is a barely a dot on the map? And in the end up until the 1600’s the only inhabitants of that tiny little volcanic dot were Dodos; everybody there came from somewhere else. And somewhere else is kind of all mixed up in me: the British and French settlers, the African slaves, the Indian and Chinese indentured labour; they are all in there somewhere.

I’m not sure that I am interested in the dates and the lines joining me to her and him to them, but I do like the stories. What made John Edward leave England and travel all those miles on the East India trade route to that island? Who were his lovers? Give me the juicy details. Which of his children stayed and who left and where and why did they go? And an interesting question is what happened to the women? In all these lines, where did their stories lead when they lost the name that binds us all?

The picture is of the Moulin arrangement of Megaliths in St. Just where I was this weekend. I thought it was kind of appropriate. Also check out the lucky Liverpool Sweet William piccie in the side bar, I’m pulling out all the stops for Wednesday!

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[1] The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints apparently has the largest collection of Family Tree history in the WORLD. Why? Now that’s another really interesting story.