So, after much blood, sweat, and thankfully no tears, here is the video that Laura made, with a little help from me.

For the non-Spanish speakers, what the child says at the beginning is: “And what if we’d been born somewhere else?”

And what he says at the end is: “Cooooooooooooooooool!”

I hope you like it.

And yes, I drew my portrait.

This has been the cause of much of my busyness, now I have other excuses.

Today’s poem didn’t get off the ground, but yesterday’s was good, all in Spanish (so no previews – heavy proof-reading required), it is about a princess (are you spotting a theme here?) who finds a surprising flower, and ends up becoming a journalist.

More stuff to write, but too many 0ther things to do.

So, ciao for now.

I may have been somewhat foolhardy and promised some kind of proper blogging a few days ago, and look what happened. Busyness crashes down.

Among other things last Friday I started what I hope will be an occasional job working at a nursery (of the people kind) – looking after little little people. My colleagues tell me I’m nuts, and I must admit it was a little shock to the system having a normal two-day weekend again (I’m spoiled, I know). But it was a challenge and a lot of fun to work with a different age group – we had seven 1 – 2 year olds. It didn’t come to me straight away, I’ll confess, talking in Spanish to such little ones, but I worked my way into it, I think, and we did a lot of knocking towers over, scribbling, crying and comforting, singing silly songs with actions, making a mess and reading stories. A Friday well spent, I think.

Tomorrow I’m going on a school trip to an art gallery.

Today’s poem was called The Animal Doctor. It’s another girls one, this time of the fairytale variety, again with a princess, and set in a Medieval realm which anachronistically has speech therapists. It is about the perils of treating your vet badly. No snippets I’m afraid, as it’s too disorganised and sprawling – stretching to six pages of spidery writing in my moleskin – it’s the longest I’ve written in a while and took the whole metro journey home.

More blogging should resume tomorrow.

Yesterday’s poem was one of the Stories for Girls ones, it doesn’t have a title yet, and it starts like this, with a great deal of thats:

That slick swamp of elements
That don’t quite knit together
That shape the night so dark
That even scent’s extinguished
That all that remains is touch

And an excess of touch at that
A continuum of points of contact
Cannot be touching without kissing
Without kissing no plunging into
Waters as dark, as warm, as this night

…
and ends with an oil slick.

Oh, and the poem I wrote today was called Somewhere Else But Here, it is a sequel to Nowhere Else But Here, and it has birds exploding in it, also references to Howard Hughes and swords into ploughshares.

The birds in brittle feather explosions
We see snapped right out of sky
Their songs are frozen droplets
That shatter into splinters
On the ground as hard as iron

The reason I’m writing so, despite today being a little warmer, is how bleedin’ cold it is in the flat. I love that the toilet steams when you pee, and this morning, while shaving, I could barely see the mirror for the clouds of water vapour my breath was billowing out.

ok, this is ridiculous, on the same day the right click button on my track pad and the left click button on my mouse have broken, so now I have to do two-handed mousing.
What, seriously, did I do in a previous life to so incur the wrath of the gods of technology?

This is not strictly speaking mine, but it’s a part of someone elses’ project that I’m helping out on a bit at the moment. Work in Progress.

Last night I found myself in my first actual botellon, I believe I’ve mentioned these before, it’s when kids drink in the street, they’re pretty common round here. Anyway, I find it quite fun that the Spanish, who complain vigorously of the cold, and at this time of the year are so thoroughly wrapped up warm (I want to use a spanish verb here which means well coated) will willingly go and sit on a cold pavement in the middle of winter in the wee hours of the morning and drink iced drinks – weirdos. Anyway, we had the incredible luck that we moved on seconds before the police arrived on their comical little mopeds, which could have resulted in a hefty fine – and even worse for me as I go around without identification, so I don’t want to be stopped by the police – that’s another instant fine.
I’m such a criminal.
Happy days.

I also wrote a poem today called Ligne Maginot which is mainly about wasps and adultery, but also, obliquely, Israel/Palestine, and it contains the line: “Hang our washing on the Siegfried Line.”
More fun and games.

Geek Post

When I made the pictures for the recent The Trembling using QR Codes (like a barcode but can store more information) I thought I was being wilfully obscure, I hadn’t heard about QR codes until I started researching methods of storing information to be optically read by computers, and there are lots and lots of different formats out there, I chose the one that fitted my aesthetic ideas. However, maybe I wasn’t being as obscure as I thought I was, just in the last couple of days QR codes have popped up in my RSS deluge a number of times. There’s this artist who cross stitches giant QR codes, this musician who ponders on their promotional use for his new album, Microsoft have a new alternative, and then there’s this, making QR codes that play music.

A public health warning for you all.

Beware of mixing blu-tack and wild flailing in your sleep.

Many are probably aware that I’m known to be a violent sleeper. Well last night I went to bed and there was a small lump of blu-tack stuck to the bedside table for safekeeping. When I awoke this morning it was to find no blu-tack on the bedside table, but plenty smeared across the sheets, embedded in the pillow, wrapped around the headboard and matted in my hair.

Have you any idea how difficult it is to get blu-tack out of fabric? I think I shall be sleeping in a sticky patch, of the blue kind, tonight.

Marginally related – I was woken up by a phone call, now it was a sensible time to call, and not a sensible time to be asleep, but still – why do we all sleep with our phones on, that’s just inviting our dreams to be disturbed.

Just so you can time me I’ll break one of my rules. I’ve started work on two follow-ups to The Trembling. One has the working title of One Punto Stop and will be dense, obscure, rambling, and in Spanglish, as an antidote to The Trembling. The second is currently called Stories for Girls and it will be one part poems for or about real girls and one part cheesy fairytale type things. The first of this second sort I wrote today and it is called The Princess and the P. I am trying the trick with doing the titles first again. Here is one of the first sort, that I wrote for my little sister:

Sarah’s Stories

Sitting on the frayed edge pulled out where
Moonlight meets the sunlight just departing
And married to the seashore’s gentle
Incoming vibrations implanted by the strange
Lights appear in photos but in dusk, never.

Taking the hand of the silvered boy and lead
T’ward where dawn is breaking over
Unquiet hills, little hills, downs undulating
Letting that hand become dead to the world
Small warmth and blinking, blinking into the light

And you were the teller of stories
That dawn that daytime that afternoon
That evening you spun words into sentences
Sentences that were awkward that repeated
That birthed Chinese Whispers

Circling over the sundial of the lawn,
The ticking of watches running in the dry
Dry desert pyramids insignificant and in
The tent in the desert the girls take tea
Into the night see a new set of stars

Take each other’s hands and make promises’ll
Last a few years. You. You were behind a dune
Dreaming something strange, fragile, unseen
Bound down to the ground by the expectations
Of those same stars you don’t yourself see

And so you. You need not worry on the
Frayed edges your mind consumes you. You
Don’t need to perch on the brink nor plunge
Down into those tales waiting some tall some
Beating like with circulatory systems or undead

Undead as the willing fallen friends, as the
Forests made to unrenewable resources
And some of course little gems. You, sitting.
Sitting on the frayed edge pulled out where
Moonlight meets the sunlight just departing

Well, I don’t know what it was like in the centre today, but out in school land (40 minutes metro ride north) the sky was snowing its pants off again.
In classic English (perhaps not Spanish) tradition, the school heating was non-functional. A few of the kids were missing, but most were there, bundled up in Eskimo coats and woolly hats. I couldn’t say what the temperature was exactly, but as I was writing this in the staff room my fingers were losing all feeling.

To add to the bemusement of the day (bemusement probably largely due to only two hours sleep, don’t ask) we had four new student teachers arrive to start their PGCE placements,that is, actual PGCE placements, as in they’re studying in Canterbury, they have GCSE Spanish and so they’ve come here. Nuts.
We have no idea what to do with them.

Yesterday I finally got rid of the beard, a long overdue and thankless task.

I was quite excited to discover, while I was doing it, that for the first time my moustache is long enough to form a little daliesque ringlet, what fun!

It’s not quite the Assyrian magnificence to which I aspire, but I won’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Unfortunatly, only one side was long enough to do it, and so I had to give it a little prune. With any luck by the time it grows back both sides will be equal and I can look delightful.

I had quite successfully, up until this point in life, failed to ever go anywhere near a singstar. Tonight I failed, and proved that I was quite correct in avoiding the insidious contraptions. To put it mildly, I suck.

The fun thing about doing it with Spaniards, to English songs, is that they don’t know the words and hilariously mumble and umble into the mic, mumbling and umbling, it must be said, that is much more tuneful than my properly enunciated words.

I think in future I shall continue to steer clear.