Silver Lining

If Klimt were a cubist

I woke up on Friday with an urge to sew.  Clothes, preferably.  Only, by the time I got down to the shed I couldn't be arsed to trace a pattern, mark a pattern, select some fabric, dye some fabric, all before I got to cut.  Cut, cut.  It's all about the cutting, you know.

So I chose a fabric I bought on ebay last year for no particular purpose.  It's loud and brash and I've never known what to do with it.  Cotton, with some lycra in (which has made keeping the edges under control interesting, at times...).  I grabbed it hungrily off the shelf and headed for the quilt shop.  Once there, I bemused the nice lady by selecting the loudest, leariest palette of fabrics we could find, and headed home again.

Simple squares were my aim.  Squares within squares, perhaps, to make it a bit more interesting.  So I began to cut my 2 1/2 " strips.  2  1/2" x 6 1/2", and 2 1/2" x 2 1/2".  I wanted a  nine patch of the feature fabric, and then the feature to figure in two squares of each of the other fabrics.  And then I would just mix up my complementary fabrics.  I did no design work, little preparation.  Just cut and stitch, cut and stitch.

It nearly came undone when I had enough squares (63, since you were wondering) and couldn't find a way of setting them that didn't give me a headache.  Eventually I settled on purples and pinks round the feature fabric, greens in the opposite diagonal corner, and yellows everywhere else.  It went together well, but needed a little je ne sais quoi.

A brief and unsuccessful hunt through the rack for some devore velvet I could swear I have somewhere led to a piece of silk velvet.  About 1m.  Undyed.  OK.  Rummage through the dye drawer.  Marine violet could be interesting.  So marine violet it was.  Prewash the fabric to clear out the preservative and dressing on it, then sling 3 tsp of dye into the drum of the machine, 4 tsp soda ash and 250g of salt.  Knock it all through the drum, bung the wet fabric in, and set it off at 60 deg.  Worked a treat and I had a lovely, lush, imperial purple piece of velvet at the end.

Emboldened, I decided to dye some cotton for the back.  Didn't bother to prewash this, though, and upped the quantities a bit (3m of fabric vs. 1m of fabric).  Put the fabric in dry.  Didn't knock the dye through the drum, either.  Result?  A slightly unevenly coloured length of teal cotton.  Very pleasing.  Not obviously uneven, like batik, but pleasing variations of shade across the piece.

Anyway, this quilt top has flown together - though poor DBO may disagree - and I'm about to start work on piecing the back - teal cotton with a chiffon strip, to pick up the sophisticated silk theme.  Oh, there's pictures down there in the quilt album, if you want to look!

By way of light relief, we went to Oxford last night to see Eels.  It was an incredibly good gig - the 'support' act was a film about Mark Everett's father who turns out to have been a groundbreaking quantum mechanic.  Surprisingly touching film, too, though DBO thought the science was a bit 'light'.  Odd, that.  I'd've thought quantum mechanics could easily be grasped by the average joe on the Oxford street!  Anyway, the set was incredibly good.  Stage dressed like a garage jamming session - rugs and random instruments lying about; and E and Chet on their own moving from piece to piece.  It's an incredibly good band with a hugely eclectic range of music.  They did the obvious (well, most of the obvious): Souljacker pts 1 and 2; Novocaine for the Soul; My Beloved Monster.  But not Susan's House or Mr E's Beautiful Blues.  Very moving version of It's A Motherfucker.  And a lovely version of the one whose name I can never remember - I'm Going To Stop Pretending??  But the show stealer was Flyswatter.  It's one of my favourite songs anyway, but they did a real WOW performance of it.  So now it's going round my head: Field mice, head lice, spiders in the kitchen...

Brilliant night.

We all just wanna be big rock stars

I love the little insights into childhood innocence that my children give me.

The other day, in the car, we were discussing what we wanted to do over the weekend.  Daisy was outlining her plans, which involved building a hamster assault course as far as I remember, when Dan piped up:

"I tell you what *I* want...."

"You want a kingsize tub big enough for ten plus you?"  I venture

"No, Mum!! I haven't got 9 brothers and sisters!!!"

Silly me.

In other news, I have booked myself on a reiki course next month.  Very exciting.

Tuesday's Child

Yesterday was a funny day. 

It began with being interviewed over the phone by a BBC News journalist, who wanted me to go into the Coventry studio to do a full interview about yesterday's story on back-to-work 'incentives' for lone parents.  Unfortunately, I was rather too busy working to flit into the studio - somewhat ironically, given the Government's determination to cast us all as feckless benefit frauds.  As I also was too busy to listen to the news for the rest of the day, I don't even know if they used the bits we did over the phone... Ho hum.  I wonder if Andy Warhol foresaw that we'd all be too busy to enjoy our 15 minutes??  This is really fucked up, though.  I thought Blair was going to create an inclusive society?  It seems to me that lone parents are singled out and labelled because they're easy to identify.  It's really time we began to value parents who stay home with their children, regardless of their marital status; and support people who want to get back to work, regardless of their parental status.

I spent the afternoon being star struck by being within touching distance of Anthony Sher.  Of course I didn't.  Touch him, I mean.  There are limits.  He gave a wonderful speech, though; about the importance of being true to yourself and not denying your identity.  Very moving.  I wonder how many people in his audience were aware of his courage and presence before they happened to find themselves in the same room as him?  I saw him in Richard III (can't believe they're trying to say that was in 1984!) and he was mesmerising.

DBO and I finished the day off with a trip to Wolfrun Hall in Wolverhampton to see Scott Matthews.  It was a wonderful gig; small and atmospheric, and his voice live is as entrancing as the album promises it might be. 

Normal Service

We're in the car, driving towards Sainsbury.  The radio is on.  Scott Mills is playing the Amy Winehouse cover of Valerie, by the Zutons.  I'm not sure what I think about Amy Winehouse - beyond Lord! That girl is fucked up! - but it's an interesting cover.  She did it at Jo Wiley's Live Lounge, and I suspect you can here it here.

Anywho, there we are, pootling along, listening to Amy singing Valerie.  And Daisy pipes up

"Mum, I thought this song was usually sung by a man?"

"Yes, it is."

"But this is a girl??"

"Yes.  She's just covering it."

"Oh...........

Why? 

Is he sick?"

I have been working all fucking day, you lie there sleeping your life away

You know how Saturdays are like buses?  You do nothing with them for months on end, and then all of a sudden you have to cram all those wasted Saturdays' worth of activity into a single day, to make up for it?  This was a Saturday of extremes...

Some time ago, I promised myself a day of just me, the muttley and the sky.  That day was Saturday.  We got up early. Not quite an alpine start, but it was Saturday you know!  We were on the road by 8.30am, and crawling through the narrow streets of North Malvern by 9.30am.  I found a carpark. Not so much of a carpark, really, more of a layby; parked the car and consulted my OS map (landranger 190, if you're interested!) to pinpoint our rough location.  Needless to say, my layby wasn't exactly marked, but knowing I'd just passed a phone box and looking at the tumbling crags looming above my bonnet, I guessed that I was roughly in the vicinity of the school.  We got out of the car quickly, shouldered the backpack and set off.  I say set off; really I mean I cast around for the scent of a path for a good couple of minutes - should I take the one to the right of the layby, rising steeply and stonily up the side of the rockfall, or the one to the left of the layby which was broader, paved and passed through the last vestiges of civilisation.  I chose the path most travelled, and ogled through the windows of the pretty cottages.  Once on the hills, we strode out, roughly in the direction of St Ann's Well, taking the slightly lower, leeward paths and skirting round the pointy pinnacle of the first hill.  The sky was broad and clear, the sun was up and twinkling on the frost, and we could see the full length of the ridge stretching out ahead of us.  It was a spectacular, cold, fresh day and I gulped in air and watched the muttley dashing eagerly from scent to bracken patch.

Past Worcestershire Beacon, we joined the ridge path.  The views were spectacular and if I had any grasp of geography I'd tell you precisely how we gazed over the plains of Worcestershire and Warwickshire to our left, and towards the distant blue smudge of the hills of Wales to our right.  Since my geography is dreadful, I'm guessing that's what we saw...

Highlights of the day included chatting to various other dog owners along the way; watching a pair of buzzards wheeling on the thermals over British Camp; making it to British Camp; realising my uphill legs had fallen off about a third of the way back; the kestrel hovering spectacularly just over my head while Muttley and I sat on the path to watch her; isolation, solitude, fresh air and open sky.  The cold snapping at my fingers; frost crystallised on the grass at my feet.

By the time we regained Worcestershire Beacon (via the summit this time), my downhill legs had fallen off too, and I had merely the faintest grasp of our precise location.  Which worried the muttley who was, frankly, exhausted.  Electing to skirt round the hill rather than force my hamstrings up another sharp ascent, I realised we weren't on precisely the same path that brought us onto the hills and I didn't know precisely what path we *were* on.  I kept the news to myself, fearing for a savaging of the ankles if I broke the news to Muttley.  I adopted the policy of looking down the steep slope of the hill, and identifying roads I had driven along to get us here.  Eventually, we rounded the final bend in the path and there were houses stretching up the hill in front of us.  Not, unfortunately, the houses we had passed on our ascent from the carpark layby, but I hoped they would be very close neighbours of those houses.  I pulled the map from my backpack to check where we might be, and crossreferenced my position against the girls' boarding school I found myself standing outside.

"Are you lost?"  A man sitting on a bench behind me, enquired.

"Um, not *exactly*" I fudged.  "I'm parked on this road, not far from here."

"My car's just here; would you like a lift?" he solicited.

Ummm.  Let me think about this.  You're sitting on a bench outside a girls' boarding school.  Would I like a lift?  Clue: No.  Thank you. 

I turned left onto the road, and was almost immediately greeted by the slightly alarming sight of a Morris dancer in full regalia flying down the hill on a bicycle.  I raised an eyebrow, in an attempt at a quizzical, worldly wise manner.  200 yards further up the hill, Muttley and I had to stand back and let a horde of them pass, all be-belled and jangly and indulging in their lewd practices.  Thankfully, the car was just past them and I collapsed gratefully into its embrace and drained the last of my thermos of tea.  We had been walking for six hours, and the Muttley was exhausted.

After a hot bath and a swift Chinese, DBO and I ventured up to the Arts Centre, to see The Buzzcocks.  I have to confess, I've never been to a bona fide punk gig before, but the Buzzcocks seemed like a good place to start.  It was a very entertaining evening - but for none of the reasons I might have anticipated...   The gig was entirely seated, which was the first oddity.  The audience was made up largely of people my age and above, some of whom had brought their children (of Dan's age and below) which made for a slightly confusing (and confused) audience.  Some of us had attempted to revive our lost youth, and dressed for the occasion.  I was particularly impressed by the portly man with grey hair which was desperately thin on top.  Nonetheless he had bravely spiked what remained of it, and sprayed a large blue patch.  The effect was somewhat ruined by the sight of the blue paint sparkling on his scalp...  Despite the spikes, the colours, and the odd safety pin, this middle aged audience was altogether too clean living.  No-one was bolloxed, slurring or swaying, and there wasn't a glue sniffer in sight.  The band itself were slightly uncomfortable - they were old and fat and saggy of jawline. 

Tony Barber wore black tracksuit bottoms and a T-Shirt which looked suspiciously chainstore and not at all punk.  He was embarrassingly like watching your grandad dance at a wedding.  They raced through the first half of their set, following the John Peel 'wrong speed' method and shouting far too fast, obviously keen to grab their cheque and get the hell out of there.  The sound mix was appalling, which was probably the most appropriate part of the whole experience.  There was an interval - an interval!!  At a punk gig!!!!  All kinds of wrong!!!! - after which, some of the audience had the temerity to dance.  But it was so muted to begin with, that I watched a man balance a tray of beers through the gently swaying masses.  Eventually, a woman with pink and black striped hair and a jumper to match, began dancing at the front of the stage.  This mostly involved jumping and waving her arms around, and looked quite the most authentic display of the evening.  A young member of staff tried to usher her away from the stage front, which led to a gaggle of middle aged pogo-ers fronting up to staff young enough to be their children in a hideously surreal inversion of the generation struggle. 

Shortly after this, Steve Diggle announced that it was someone called Simon's 40th birthday, and that the band would like to wish him "Happy Fucking Birthday; have a piece of this, yer cunt!!" with which, they launched into Ever Fallen In Love (or whatever it's called) and we could all go home.  It was surreal, and tragic, and surreal again.  I'm awful glad I've done it now, and I shan't have to do it again...

Musical Meme

I can't remember if I've done this before, but here it is (possibly again!) picked up from Franchini.

1.  What is the total volume of music files on your computer?

3.65 GB, consisting of lots of random MP3s, and 733 tracks on iTunes.

2.  What was the last CD you bought?

The last one I bought was Gil Scott Heron, Pieces of a Man.  I had lots of GSH on tape and listened to him a great deal as a student.  I've had a real hankering to hear his stuff again this week, so as well as converting my favourite tape I went to HMV.com and bought some.  He does wonderfully political jazz-funk stuff from the 70s,  80s and early 90s - was very involved in issues of black awareness, in the anti-apartheid,  and he wrote a beautiful song called 3 Miles Down about the miners.  Despite a vociferous conviction that young black men (and society generally) should resist the evils of drink and drugs, he fought - and lost - his own battle with the demons of drugs and is currently (I believe) still serving a jail sentence.  I was lucky enough to catch his Amnesia Express tour in the late 80s a couple of times.  I spent a memorable evening at the International II in Manchester, pressed right up against the stage of this tiny venue, and then backstage afterwards as I was covering the gig for the student newspaper.  And then again at the Brixton Academy on New Year's Eve probably 1988 or 1989? - another wild night.

The last thing I downloaded would be I Like The Way You Move by The Bodyrockers and So What The Fuss by Stevie Wonder.

3.  Song Playing Right Now?

Damien Rice, The Blower's Daughter from the O album.  And if you haven't heard this, then really, really you should.  It's quite unbelievably beautiful.

4.  5 Songs you listen to a lot or that mean a lot to you?

Well, at the moment the 5 songs I most listen to would be the first 5 on my running playlist on the ipod:

Good Luck, by Basement Jaxx (I put this first specially for the race on Sunday.  It just seemed funny at the time.  Difficult to run to, though...)

Devil's Haircut by Beck - nice beat.  It's easy to get a rhythm going to this.

I Like the Way You Move - Bodyrockers  - again, a nice beat.

I'm Afraid Of Americans - David Bowie and Nine Inch Nails - this is a fantastic song to run to.  In fact, it's a fantastic song to do pretty much anything to...

Milkshake by Kelis - another song that I think I run well to.

Tragic, really, isn't it?  I should get a life!  I couldn't possibly pick out just 5 songs that mean a good deal to me on a definitive basis though, it would be too changeable.  So this will have to do.

5.  Which 5 people are you passing the baton to?

Tricky.  Lots of the people I'd like to answer don't have blogs. Maybe we should add a "yet" in there!

OK, I'll throw down the gauntlet to:

Mr Jennic - it's about bloody time you got going, love.  Blogger is your friend :-)
AndyRitchiesHairline - oh look!  An excuse for you to make a music list - you should be in heaven!
Grumpy - go on, go on, go on.
Trepid Explorer - next time you have a quiet moment in the office, it'll give you something to do!
Hmmm.... shall I let the final place nominate themselves? 

Speaking of orgies...

I've been listening to Stevie Wonders' new single, So What The Fuss.  It's fab!  Really!  Features Prince and someone else, and is really funky and clean and catchy and thoroughly deserves to be to this summer what Mousse T was to last summer.

BUT.

There's a line in the chorus.  When he's singing Shame on Me, Shame on You, Shame on Us etc., the backing singers echo him, except at one point, I'm quite convinced they say shag shag shaggedy shag.

It must be something in the air.

I'm in love

With my new best friend.  She's called Candy.  She's small and she's pink and she has a white navigation wheel in her tummy.

I'm a very bad girl, aren't I?!

*Sigh*

This is what Noah Wyle looks like. 

Honestly!  I'm trying to move on, I really am.

I share! I share!

OK, enough people have now said "You went to see WHO?".  So,  here he is.

You can listen to an interview with Jonathan Ross right here.  But only till Saturday.   Do you see the Noah Wyle reference now, do ya? Do ya?  Click to embiggen and be pierced by blue eyes that are, erm, quite sharp.