sunny cold winter days. so much to do, sitting on the chair in my room; big bay window with its view of patchwork welsh brick and slate and hill and washing line. following the sun by leaning degrees as it moves through the motions of morning, from pane to pane, trying to store up some warmth, listening to bob dylan with my head on my knees in a copper curtain of hair. this bright red guitar, & chrysanthemums once more coming up fiercely. the town empty and beautiful as it always is somewhere at the back of my mind. shifting focus between the cold pale blue of the sky & the warmth of my life. the delight i still feel in this place, in myself. even (not letting on to) two days of weeping in copious waves for a friendship i thought i had lost -through no fault of my own- but which turned up without the smallest inkling of ever having been misplaced, or mislaid. stupid impersonality of text messages & people never sounding in writing as they do in or about their person.



generous glugs of mulled wine, red, made sleepy & hearing scilly phrases in the shipping forecast to laugh at. being shored up against the cold wallpaper, in bed, by a blond head and by snores. jeff buckley, pink floyd, the last waltz, pj. what derrida has to say about death (or had) & reading against the grain of medieval wills. mold & damp & the droning chanting warming voice of dylan thomas, constant radio4, ghost stories of m.r. james and j.s. lefanu. knitting & unraveling. earl grey, sir edward tea, chamomile, ginger, green, and yorkshire. student-being & drinking too much, in good hats though & dancing, talking to middle-aged people who never managed to leave aber. the awful poetry of our lecturers & writing again & learning & forgetting german. paths among red bracken in the woods, narrow paths from our back door among bushes, with still the remnants of frost-dried blackberries; rain-wet dark welsh slate against bright bright green moss. the welsh market on baker st. the olive branch on sundays, watching the people pass in the rain & hearing all the greek tunes that i thought were turkish. the over-warm arts centre & tea after class & the hurries of essays. warm red carpets of the national library with their arrangements of lilies. making up ridiculous stories about the names in lidl, dining in style at rheidol restaurant with its overwhelming collection of household christmas decorations.



the last three months especially have been punctuated by narcissism. i've had no internet since july, so i'm sorry i haven't been able to keep up with you very much. leaving for shrew tomorrow & maybe liverpool for new year's. i hope you are all gorgeously thriving as always. xx

i'm leaving ankara in a week. no more pubs in apartment flats, where you ring the bell and someone answers the door & you sit on a balcony facing other balconies where people live & there are nibbles. and no more cheap wool either. :(
i'm going to be in freiburg for 3 weeks, then i'm going to england & then hopefully wales. a bit sad to have to give up the part of my holidays that involved lying stupidly by the aegean for days on end, but ah well.
what are you all doing? i'm not going to have regular internet access until at least october, so talk to me now!

today i woke up from a vivid dream of an electric blue electric guitar. oh, it was a darling.
emails from my little cousin make my day because not only are they ridiculously spelt, they also include little parenthetical explanations, like: “hope u get 2 gurman on time next time. soz (soz= sorry)2 here about the bus moving”. i've been reading about the Rechtschreibreform & thinking maybe one way of spelling is too few.

still shouting english profanities at cars that spatter me with mud & transport offices who casually tell me the bus is always 5-10 minutes late. and i still love the view from the classroom, of the toppermost dome & the four minarets of kocatepe rising out of boxy dwellings, pencil-like but hazy and soft in the fog. some days i sit next to an imam; he looks exceptionally like everyone else. i'm doing well in tests & homeworks, although i am not yet allowed to do fun things like give in to an impulse to use zeugma. buying rounds of tea at break, however, one can.

after class, much time spent in cosy cafés with friendly acquaintances. but there are some simple truths to consider: 1. too few people inspire or amaze, when it is perfectly within their grasp to do so; and 2. it is utterly impossible to listen to anyone when pink floyd is playing in the background.

this is for niche, with apologies for taking so long:
sitting around in nargile cafés, and high-up terrace coffee shops with friends i never thought i'd see again, the weather considerably mild, with not a “soupçon of snow” as a boy recently wrote me. they were telling me of the mounds of pasta & chocolate they had consumed last night, and sharing marshmallows out of the mug. i like girls who are honest about eating lots. früh early grey, the city full of fuck-all holes and diversions. i've signed up for 10 weeks worth of german lessons at the goethe institute, and i get to be very ungermanly late to all of them. waiting for the bus i practice counting, i made zweihundertachtundsechzig the other day. if the lights are red i can get off the bus before it turns all the way up into dikmen st. then i wend my way at a sort of skip walk jog along the front of parliament which has this stupid two-level pavement, and the guards like dolls in glass cases. then across what seems to be called 'atatürk square' although what it really is is a strip of hard stone seats flanked by road. the fountains are frozen over and the outdoor heaters are never on. down the steps of the underpass where there is often a man playing the kaval, with what i think must be a yearning for his village - i will give him money one day - up the 25 steps on the other side and then i'm rather winded and walk past the wool shop, the two kurs-books bloody heavy. skipwalkjog along bakanlıklar and then up three floors of the goethe institute, stripping off gloves and hat and coat and scarf as i go along, with a quick "morgen" to the receptionist and "kolay gelsin" to the man who's always sweeping the 34th step as i pass him. and usually very out of breath into the classroom at 9:21.
grammar has become an obsession, and constantly thinking do i know how to say this? even in english. it is fantastic, a rush. but shocking how many adults have no idea about words and will make the simplest -de/da mistake and the equally simple -ki mistake, and forget to write the question word separately and screw up their sentences; i haven't had a single email in weeks without these errors, and it's like a scratch in a record.
designing a website for a woman who asked me for “pastel southern france colours” which are apparently dead greens and flat reds and such. how could she look at eyes all day, lovely dark glassy eyes, bright blue eyes with flecks of yellow, blurry eyes and myopic eyes but eyes that look so bright and clear and ask me for such awful colours? we met in a hotel lobby and just about the second thing she asked me was how to spell “coffee” and she pushed the plunger down and ordered the receptionist to close the door because there was a draught. the first was would i keep a secret for her? and she took a drag on her cigarette. sort of knowing to be madam and that if you were kind instead of honest you would be doing oddjobs for her until she retired to the south of france, i assume.
anyway, she scrolled through endless sections of her gargantuan CV, admitting that she had not updated the list of all the meetings she had attended since 2005 when she just got fed up. i sat there in my coat not particularly giving a fuck if my fingernails were dirty or she thought i would be in my 30's and blonde (was this because her husband recommended me to her?), but that my hair colour was nice and suited my eyes, just wondering how i was going to look at beige long enough to code it. and did she, somewhere in the depths of her vaio, perhaps have a few bytes set aside for a list of fun things she had done?
doing other people's work is slow death. i'm lots of irresponsible youth and won't return phone calls and care naught about tardy emails or for professional people who may be pulling their hair out. i'm a sucker for pretty hair. the lovely haired girl i talked to at the philosophy seminar is fairly the reason i am taking german now; we had lunch at leman the other day and talked about language of course, and how she is leaving soon for berlin, reading silly comics off the wall and table and placemats. nearly talked to a schoolboy on the bus yesterday because he had the most perfect curls, almost symmetric like morris wallpaper. don't think i have seen a properly blond boy since i came to this greybrown city, but life is good when you can write pretend postcards from hamburg with sentences that work out, and end in sein.

in 2006 i...

- ruined my taste in music
- graduated (my first academic achievement... ever)
- had a great summer in aber
- got a job for the first time
- realised i will die if i have to work steadily for longer than a month
- watched the mighty boosh & two pints of lager... for the first time
- knit 3 hats, 2 shawls, oodles of phone cosies & a few scarves
- really hated the fashions. please no more footless tights/leggings + ridiculously short skirts this year!
- travelled around wales a little bit
- held a beach party
- got a macbook <3
- stayed up all night talking lots & lots of times. bestest fun
- realised it's not that difficult to talk to strangers
- kept in touch with more friends than i'd ever imagined i would

music:
arctic monkeys
the killers
berlin
the doors
janis joplin
edith piaf

some things i want to do in 2007...

- learn german well
- learn to carry out a basic conversation in 10 languages (i want some scandinavian languages in there too!)
- meet ppl from lots of different countries
- travel! for goodness sake
- do an MA in aber
- dance dance

not really into the xmas spirit.
all i know is that i haven't started knitting any new year presents yet.
instead, i have knit 2 hats... for myself.

oh, and i've fallen victim to myspace, so add me if ye please.

//

i have invites for macheist if anyone wants. it's fun & it wastes time.

i was woken by an earthquake at 4:30 today. oh joy.

( procrastinatory survey. i have so much work to doooo... )

who is your favourite alcoholic poet?

1. i am very very bored of translating school websites.
2. when will summer come?
3. i am dreadfully looking forward to a 5-hour derrida seminar this saturday.
4. does that make me very odd?
5. cardies on 3.5mm needles take a bloody long time.

lyre.vox.com < just in case everyone decides to migrate there like they did to lj. although i don't see the point. there are ads at the bottom of every blog, and frankly i'd rather wait until personal wikis become the next big thing. anyway, i have two invites if anyone wants.

i switched to a macbook a couple weeks ago. some of my favourite mac things at the moment are:
- moleskine icons! heee.
- the cocktail widget
- big bang backgammon
- front row (whoosh!)
- exposé
- the ability to multi-task! omg omg!

BUT, things that annoy me no end:
- THE KEYBOARD! no pg up or pg down keys, no delete key, and no end and home keys. there are keyboard shortcuts for them but some of them require two hands which is useless.
- and i'm still not buying the one-button mouse thing.