Rosie's Travels

One of my guilty pleasures is checking out gossip sites for celebrity tittle-tattle - Perez Hilton, Holy Moly, Popbitch and Go Fug Yourself. Although they get a lot of readers, how much influence do these sites have on the big corporations? We may find out soon, as Perez has declared he will no longer support any of Sony BMG's artists on his site.

We KNOW that our support can help their artists, some of our favorites,
immensely. We hope alienating us was worth it for Sony BMG!

Every other
label out there wants to have us as a friend. It really makes us question the
business practices of Sony BMG that they would rather have Perez as an enemy.

Their loss!

And, though we may never write about Leona again, we
still love her. Always will. Same for Xtina. And J Lo. And Adele. And Ditto.

Our heart is sad.

My question is, will Sony even notice this? Will it get picked up by the blogosphere, or will it just be quietly forgotten?

As Joanna Lumley sensibly pointed out in her very wise Guardian interview yesterday, we survived perfectly well without these sites and magazines before they became so prominent, and we certainly can do again!

Finally, I'd like to share my soundtrack for this week: Robyn's "Who's That Girl?"

Labels: blogging, guilty pleasures, Inspiration, Joanna Lumley, Perez Hilton, recommendations, Robyn, sharing the link love, Web 2.0

A quote that moves me because it seems to sum up everything I've been through so far:

"Being Human 101: Make Mistake, Apologize, Fix Mistake, Learn From Mistake, Live a Bit, (repeat)."

From Megan Wallent, whose site describes her male-to-female transition in a way that is elegant, throughtful, and calm.

I just seem to make more mistakes, more frequently, than most. Ho hum.

Light dawns even at the lowest points, though, as I put my intentions out into the world and gradually, from unexpected corners, people respond.

I've been corresponding with a sympathetic writer who emailed me after I left a comment on her blog. Another friend has sent me a link for a job she thinks I'd be perfect at. Finally, out of all the CVs I've been sending, I have one definite and one possible interview for next week. And I've volunteered to help out at a couple of things ... more details to come if I'm accepted ...

And Project Snapshot 2007, for which I interviewed 3 Australian writers here on this very blog, has won the Ditmar Award it was nominated for. I am, officially, award-winning - a fact I have already added to my CV, and a certificate is on the way. I may have to take a photo of it. I have never been award-winning before, except when I was part of a winning pub quiz team and marched proudly home, bearing in triumph a tin of amaretti biscuits that no-one else fancied.

Congratulations to everyone else involved, and particularly to my fellow artiste, and to Alisa, the guiding genius behind Asif! Twelfth Planet Press, and so much else. Meeting such interesting people is inspirational. I don't know quite where the energy for all their projects (reading every Australian specfic short story published during the entire year, anyone?) comes from. There are some people, though, whose influence spreads wider than they realise, and who put good things into the world that didn't exist before they thought of them - and I'm grateful to know them.

Reading Patry Francis' words also puts me into a frame of mind that is at once thoughtful and grateful for the things I take for granted.

I think my advice for anyone going through a period of self-doubt would be to find somebody to say yes to you. About anything. When you feel helpless and as if your skills are not valued ... make an offer, whether it's lending a book or making a cake, and see how much more energised you feel when someone accepts it. No-one is going to call you up and request that you do them the honour of writing for them. You have to keep making those moves, and maybe one in ten or twenty or seventy-eight will say yes.

Experimental baking is making me happy ... as is granting wishes.

Labels: a good day, ASif, cooking, friends, grand plans, Inspiration, jobs, life lessons, Patry Francis, volunteering, writing

To follow on from yesterday's post, I discovered another Obama fan-club song. I've always found gospel music emotionally stirring, even though it's a long way from the restrained British hymns I grew up with.

What an exciting time to be in the US! Best of luck for Super Tuesday, everyone!

Labels: conflict resolution, Inspiration, Obama, politics, USA, Web 2.0, world music

I came across this video today. It's a rousing, inspirational clip setting a speech by Barack Obama to music. All those celebrities, actors and musicians are very fervently, earnestly, reciting a political speech. Obama's delivery has definite echoes of preaching (notice I say preaching, rather than the British equivalent, giving a sermon.) This is a uniquely American artifact: no other country would make this without sending it up somehow (I have no doubt that some YouTubers are creating parody versions as I write...)

I have to admit, my reactions are mixed. On the one hand he's discussing an epic narrative, a nation's journey, and it is stirring stuff emotionally. On the other hand ... this is a politician, people! Not the President or Prime Minister, just someone currently in Opposition. Can you imagine this reaction to one of David Cameron's speeches? Or indeed, to any speech by a British politician?

We Brits are perhaps too cynical. I admit that parts of the video are slightly toe-curling (well, anyone who closes their eyes as they warble, shaking their head and staring off into the middle distance has me narrowing my eyes and retreating to a safe distance) but isn't this a fascinating outpouring?

I'm reminded of my reactionary A-Level History teacher, who for two years endeavoured to get us to think analytically about the history of the United States. We looked at the idealistic plans of the white settlers, the twists and turns of the colonies gradually becoming a country, and the way the language of idealism and manifest destiny would be used to justify horrific policies. What would the Founding Fathers think? We discussed Bill Clinton's potential impeachment desultorily, with detached interest: for most of us, I think, America was an exciting place we hoped to visit some day.

During uni I went to live in America on an academic exchange programme. I graduated. I travelled, living in many different places. I came to realise that the news I read and watched and heard was overwhelmingly influenced by the decisions of the US government. After these interminable Bush years - like the Howard era in Australia, or the endless corrupt Tories here in England - anything would be an improvement.

I'm dedicating this post to Mr Davies, wherever he is now. I didn't understand all the points he made at the time, but I've often thought back to our debates. It has to be uniquely American to create something like this - about politics!

Labels: cultural contrasts, history, Inspiration, Obama, politics, USA, Web 2.0

This is a special post in honour of a new writer, Patry Francis. She's just published a book, The Liar's Diary.

Her story is here, while this is the LitPark post I came across via Neil Gaiman's blog, explaining how the online community established this carnival in her honour.

I haven't read her book yet. I don't know the woman personally. But I'm deeply touched by her 25 years of waitressing while dreaming of this book, writing in her spare time, and believing that she had more to offer than just the day job she happened to do. So many times when I've been working one of my random things-I've-done-merely-to-make-money positions - all of which I try to do as well as I can - I've been typing away, or building walls, or trimming fish, or stuffing envelopes, or picking grapes but in my imagination I've been stringing together sentences, crafting turns of phrase, imagining paint and fabric and drawing and collage coming together, mentally stepping through a dance routine, thinking about what spices I might add to the next batch of biscuits, plotting the next leg of my journey, knowing that I am more than just what my hands are doing at this moment.

We all have imagination, and dreams, and grand plans. I even had to create a blog tag for "grand plans", they seem to come up so often. Patry Francis followed her dream, and although she's going through a personal time of great trouble, I salute her courage and her determination. Best wishes to her, and to everyone involved in the Carnival!

Labels: Carnival, grand plans, Inspiration, Patry Francis, Web 2.0

It's been an interesting few days.

On Saturday, Mum, Dad and I drove up to Coventry to see my sister competing in a Ladies Division 1 canoe polo tournament. She's been playing for over 10 years, captaining the GB Ladies Under 21s, and even getting into the GB Ladies squad. However, she'll be away in Botswana for two years, so this was really our last chance to see her play. It was pretty hot sitting up in the viewing gallery of that huge pool, but great to get a view of the action from above the pitch. As with all sports, from above you see the tactics in play - how certain players try different attacks, or work together to set up defences. She got one scorching goal and made some great saves, but the standard was very high overall. Things have come on a lot since I watched her and her friends training by sprinting up and down the cold muddy waters of the canal, before I went travelling!

On Sunday, we made marmalade. We're in the three-week season of Seville oranges, too tart and ugly to eat but perfect for marmalade. It's a long process: boiling the whole fruit until soft; scraping the pips into one saucepan to be boiled up for their pectin, the natural setting agent; scraping the mushy fruit into the liquid-filled main vat; scraping out the pith and stringy bits; chopping the hot, moist peel into fine shreds; adding sugar, lemon juice and chopped fresh ginger and keeping this vast concoction at a rolling boil for hours until it reduces by a third. We made 16 large jars full: that's a lot. Today I delivered a jar each to our neighbours - those on one side will reciprocate with mincemeat for mince pies at Christmas, while those on the other side will share the illicit Limoncello they made from an Italian recipe. This is another great thing about being back at home - being part of such a great community!

Last night I went into London to meet up with friends: the travel companion I journeyed through Romania with, now a scientist and celebrated dancer; a girl I knew a long time ago from a drama group who now has a job so exciting I still can't quite believe it; my wonderful cousin Anna, always up for fun in the big city; and some new acquaintances who were keen to have a go at something a bit different. We arrived at the celebrated 100 Club thinking a little dubiously, "Is this it?" There's a modern skyscraper built on top of an ancient basement jazz club. Once through the cream and brown foyer your clamber down a dark staircase and into a sweaty, red-painted slice of authentic Old London Town.

There were well over 100 people there - a few more women than men, as should be expected. What I hadn't appreciated was that so many would be in costume! High-waisted baggy trousers held up with braces seemed to be the norm, along with two-toned shoes and debonair hats and hairclips. We started with a casual class, learning individual Charleston routines and then putting together a sequence with a partner. As the band, King Groovy and the Horn Stars, took to the stage, we began attempting to do these routines ... to the music.

The - frequently - rather fast music.

To covers of Glenn Miller, the Andrews Sisters and other 1940s classics, we had to take a partner and endeavour to sashay across the crowded dancefloor, in time, without treading on each others' feet or twisting ankles while doing the Suzy Q. This, for me, was easier while looking down at my feet and counting under my breath, occasionally sharing an anxious glance with an equally timid new partner. Of course, when you look down at your feet, you're much more likely to crash into other dancers. Well, it's a good way to meet people! You tend to learn best when dancing with people who are slightly better than you, and there were certainly a lot of experts around. The ages ranged from teenagers to spry old dapper chaps in their 70s and 80s, one of whom wiped his perspiring face with one towel and mopped his armpits with another as a courtesy before escorting me to the dancefloor.

A great time was had by all, and if I were living in London, rather than out in St Albans, I'd love to go regularly.

Sometimes you read an article that's so inspirational, such a breath of fresh air, that you sit back in your seat thinking "Wow! That's what the world should be like." That was my reaction to this: we need this guy to come and run the British trains!

As part of my getting-ahead-with-Web 2.0 mission, I have signed up for Google Reader and am adding RSS feeds from the various blogs I like to catch up with. It was amazingly easy: all my questions were answered by this video, Common Craft's Guide to RSS.

Labels: cooking, dancing, family, Inspiration, sport, Web 2.0

These guys did a journey of the sort I'd definitely be interested in doing - exploring the UK slowly, in depth, taking their time and having chance encounters with archaeological celebrities. Who should they encounter while recharging their milk float (definition added for the benefit of confused readers who buy their milk in shops) but an archaeological luminary,

none other than Phil Harding from Time Team, who was soon regaling us with
stories of the only other person he'd ever come across who owned a milk float -
our unofficial patron saint, Keith Moon.

In other news, a huge box of postcards kept by Mollie have turned up. Most of them are from the 1950s onwards, from family holidays, featuring comments about the weather. However, there is also a treasured packet dating from around 1900 - 1910. The few that were posted are dated between 1904 and 1906. Excitingly, they feature theatrical stars such as Ellaline Terriss (not the same person as Ellen Terry - although there are a few of her as well), Edna May, Seymour Hicks, Henry Irving, Wilson Barrett, Maud Jeffries and various other intensely glamorous characters.

There are several featuring Mr C. Hayden Coffin giving us his dandy highwayman pose, his American newspaperman impersonation, and demonstrating many other ardent stances in a manner that seems to me the epitome of high camp. I promise to scan some!

It's as if people sent postcards several times a day - I suppose there were several postal deliveries, and no telephones. Some are rather peremptory, like this one (with an image of Mr Seymour Hicks as "Dickie" and Miss Ellaline Terriss as "Blue Bell"), which could have been penned by Lord Peter Wimsey's mother:

Dear G,

I sent the goloshes off this afternoon by maid. I don't think they are much
good.
Hope you are well. With love - Mother.

Goloshes! Maids! I am charmed. I imagine these read in the perfectly clipped tones of a dowager duchess.

There is also a very repressed, suitably inhibited one-sided British love story, tantalisingly played out ... if only I knew how it ended! More to follow soon.

Labels: British history, Ellaline Terriss, English eccentrics, family, goloshes, Hayden Coffin, Inspiration, milk floats, Time Team, travel

My great aunt Mollie has died. She had lived with Alzheimer's for many years, and spent the last eight years in a nursing home. A former nurse herself, she looked after the other residents, reassured them if they had to go to hospital, and was a firm favourite among the staff for her sunny nature. Apparently she used to believe she was living in a serviced hotel! It was always a pleasure to see her, her face wreathed in smiles, happy to have a visitor even if she wasn't certain who we were.

Nursing homes get a lot of bad press, but I won't hear a word against this one. One carer even came in on her day off to sit with Mollie's head in her lap, even though she was on morphine and not necessarily aware of her surroundings. It's an image that touches me profoundly. When Mollie passed away, all the staff were there with her.

Dad and I took Grandpa up to see her one last time, and I'm very glad we did, reconnecting with one of Dad's cousins who I haven't seen for years. But as I write this, we're trying to find out what kind of a person Mollie was. No-one is sure where she was born. We don't know quite which hospitals she worked at and when. Our memories are uncertain, half-remembered scraps of fact filled out with supposition. What we remember of her is her welcoming smile, the polite way she wouldn't smoke in your house, and her genial good humour. I remembered the last, triumphant line of Larkin's poem, "What will survive of us is love" - and despite his tentativedoubt in the penultimate line, it's that conclusion that stays with me. I suppose our family are "the endless, altered people," looking back, rather than reading her past. But her "remaining attitude" is the "final blazon" - it's love that survives.

So, in tribute to Mollie, a lovely person I never knew as well as I'd have liked to, I give you "An Arundel Tomb."

An Arundel Tomb

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd -
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would no guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the grass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-littered ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

- Philip Larkin

Labels: An Arundel Tomb, family, Inspiration, kindness, memory, Philip Larkin, poetry and spoken word performance, relationships, tribute to Mollie

The pig is finished, save a few coats of varnish! Jane painted his face and belly in different shades of green to really highlight his chubby features. He's grinning so widely and sharing the joy so much that his eyes are squeezed tight shut. (Yes, somewhere along the line he stopped being It and became Horatio, the cheerful soul.) It actually didn't take very long to paste our cut out fruit and flowers across his torso. Originally we'd planned to use footprints, either ours or smaller ones from Jane's kids, to represent our theme, Walking in this World, and show the journey from the fertile earth to the starry skies of the imagination, but they would have added another complication. So we thought we'd trace a path in flowers. But they looked so gorgeous against the green that we just had to extend them, so whichever angle you view Horatio from on the totem pole, you'll see them somehow.

He also has a cheeky strawberry on his tail, and a flower like a bindi on his forehead, which gives him the look of a Buddhist philosopher. Our final idea was to create "grass" with the green raffia Jane had left over from another project. Once soaked in the same wallpaper paste we'd used for the papier mache, it became really soft and pliable, we could wind it around tracing the flower shapes and linking them all together. I got a bit carried away and round it around the legs as well. It was ... therapeutic. Then I took a step back and wondered whether it was a little too much - but the pretty contrast between the mid-green body and lime-green twine! Horatio: half-pig, half-tortoise, all-joyful. He brings a message of love, peace and environmental awareness.

And the brilliant adaptation of a hanging basket thing ...

I went dancing again last night and feel absolutely shattered. I'm getting more coordinated, but moving your ribcage in a diamond shape while stalking seductively across the floor and doing perfect sinuous snake arms is almost too complicated to coordinate. Rubbing my tummy while patting my head, I can do - and tapping one foot on a drum pedal while beating time with one drumstick I can also do - but trying to add in a different rhythm on a cymbal makes it all fall apart.

I've been seeing some pretty interesting movies at the Film Festival, but am sadly behind in writing them up. In DB this week, this article is about the very inspirational Raw Dance Company.

Labels: belly dancing, creativity, Inspiration, Raw Dance Company

Labels: feminism, friends, Inspiration, Laura Hill, poetry and spoken word performance, television