I need a new computer

If I had a new computer at home, then I might actually do this more often. It's been a long time, what with one thing and another, and then I couldn't remember my password. Of course, saying I need a new computer is just another way of putting off doing things, and sitting in front of the screen all day for work doesn't really endear doing the same thing in the evening to me. But I'd like to.

And reading over the measly posts I've done, I'm going to revisit the idea of things that have given me pleasure over the last few days.

1. Getting up slightly earlier than usual, putting on some new CDs of French chansons and exercising to them. Which is mad, but fun. Most of them are pretty rhythmic and jolly and in the morning that's about all I can take.

2. Baileys. I've become tragically addicted to it again after about 20 years and it is just an alcoholic milkshake. But a nice one. It reminds me of college days, how sad, but that's the last time I regularly drank it. A fattening and bad habit to indulge in, but tough.

3. Going to a surreal performance at Wilton's Music Hall of Elizabethan miserabilism in the form of John Dowland songs, sung by a really good counter-tenor in a 'multi-media' presentation, by which they mean projections and the like. Actually it was very interesting - the layering of the Tudor songs, in a rotting Victorian building, with a 21st century setting (an office cubicle, in a suit, against back projections of a failed office affair). Bizarre but it worked. And the songs were oddly relaxing, despite their generally downbeat nature - lots of woe and dwelling in darkness and letting him die. Yes, well. Wilton's is a great setting for some really off-the-wall stuff.

4. Weirdly, given I mentioned something similar in my previous post, the odd throwing together of scrambled eggs with pesto and feta. I know - but pretty nice. I must be drawn to these posts after particularly stressful weeks in which I'm not able to do proper cooking. On the other hand, I did make a rather nice veg soup, which was pretty good considering it was thrown together at 7am on a Tuesday. The rest of the week was really downhil from here.

5. The book I'm reading, called 'Ring of Conspirators' by Miranda Seymour, about Henry James and his circle of friends, literary and otherwise, which is just a big gossip-fest but very well written and intriguing about Conrad, Stephen Crane, Ford Maddox Ford etc. And that several of them lived in villages where we lived sort of gives it another resonance. Specialist interest, obviously.

It's been pretty much nothing but the flat, the flat, getting reorganised, reclaiming the space. But in between, trying to focus on what's next and not get too distracted by the random. Or taken over by the specific. This article in the Guardian yesterday really set me thinking back over history and even drove me to dig out a book I've had for a while on the writing and mythology of the Declaration of Independence. So I'm going to try to read that, though it isn't quite light Tube fare.

Over lunch today I just went for a little walk to stop my spine from seizing up and of course ended up dawdling in the porn shop - really a branch of Soho Original Books, but the 'Adult section downstairs' neon arrow in the window made me rename it. I became engrossed in a book of Annie Leibowitz photos, a sort of memoir of her life in picture over the last 15 or so years. Apart from havinghaving a child at 52(!), it's the intimate pictures of Sontag that are really moving, mostly in black and white, especially when you know that for many of those years she was dealing with cancer. One sequence has Sontag in the bath, from the neck down, one arm lying across her body to cover the space where her breast once was. They are incredibly tender pictures. The spread of a contact sheet of pictures taken of Sontag laid out for her coffin, this time in washed out colour, her normally thick dark, trademark hair finally short and grey, in the long green pleated dress that Leibowitz had chosen for her lending her a medieval air, is hard to look at without tearing up. Since Leibowitz's father also died only six weeks later, again photographed, the latter parts of what looks ostensibly like a coffee table book require you to slow down as you turn the pages. It was a sort of unexpected gift on an otherwise ordinarily banal day of work and grappling with public transport that made me want to breathe more carefully and notice just how far out the leaves on the trees have come this spring.

One of those Fridays

By which I mean the 13th of course. So far today I've woken up too early, one of my colleagues has handed in his resignation and it's only lunch time. This whole week has been very distracted, probably to do with the work on the flat, so there are many things that I haven't yet done hanging around in child beggar kind of way. But at least the sun is out now and the predicted peculiar run of hot weather will really begin. Sadly I think I've missed the bluebell season down in Wiltshire where my friends have a stupendously gorgeous bluebell wood nearby, but the blossoming cherries on my otherwise dull road do make me smile in the mornings and the great sheafs of daffodils on every exposed bit of grass are cheering. The picture above was taken in Holland Park in mid-March - with the usual people in T-shirts having picnics and pointing at peacocks.

It is mad though - there won't be anything left for May. The next door neighbour's wisteria is in full bloom, which is surely wrong, if lovely. One day I shall have wisteria. Which is very much along the lines of one day I will publish a novel and live by the sea and be happy every after. Well, you gotta have a dream.

Found two great pieces on The Onion yesterday, this about the US having been an abused country as a child and this about the deliberation destruction of the Washington Monument. Does there come a point though where satire becomes a form of denial - if you engage in the satirical version of the world you have created, are you in fact distancing yourself from the realities you set out to satirise? Don't write on both sides of the paper at once.

What to do when you're flat is covered in dust sheets

No sensible person would be staying at their office on a lovely, unseasonably nice April evening, but since my flat has turned into a storage centre and decorator's paradise, sitting here resurrecting my blog is more appealing. So here it is. Why I am not quite sure. My boss is sitting not four feet away discussing the mayhem of the business. Meanwhile I am thinking of things that have given me pleasure, little pointless things, over the last couple of days.

1. The rather fantastic pair of cowboy boots a woman was wearing on the Tube last night, with large, maroon embroidered butterflies across the shins, decorated with cream and pink insets on the wings and a pink body. Normally I'd think such things utterly tasteless, but they somehow worked. Wearing butterflies on your feet.

2. The name of the Archbishop of Paris, which is Monsignor Andre Vingt-Trois. Cue much pointless toing and froing with my best friend about the unfortunate demise of the Vingt-Quatres and unholy triumph of the Soixante-Neufs. We also tried it in German and came to the conclusion that you needed to up the ante in both length and pedigree - so the Graf von und zu Sechs-und-Dreissig.

Of course the problem with games like this is that they are basically showing off, over-intellectual masturbation really, just because we can. But it's fun - playing with words and language. I now want to know how the Archbish got his name - at what point in history and why did a family end up with a number for a surname. Which begs the question - haven't I got anything better to do with my time than think about nonsense like this? But this is the nonsense that makes sense of all the rest.

3. Scrambled egg with chives for a late dinner last night. What a nice flavour.

All entirely trivial. But as putting off going home goes, pretty useful. Now back to see if the shelves are now as I want them, and trying not to get irate at the excess of space that was left on the first set. I'll get the hang of this at some point.