The road ran downhill into Spain

 Back in London. It feels like coming home. And back in Sussex - and at this time of year, when it's cold enough that there's almost a frost, but warm enough for you to keep the front door open to let the brisk and fresh November air come honestly into the house, it feels like Bloomsbury, like the film Sylvia. I want to go to Monk's House, but I don't have the car. I want to walk along the Downs, to read Woolf, I want to paint in the garden. (I can't paint).

The Christmas market is being set up on London's Southbank. When I'm working there in December, I'll go there to get mulled wine after work and listen to the buskers.

It is the Southbank Jazz Festival this week. I went into Royal Festival Hall, listened to some conceptual European jazz, including a French woman leaning on the piano with her elbows while a Japanese woman went nuts on a drum kit. There was a photography exhibition on at the same time, based on news photos of the past year. There was one particularly arresting picture of a man being gored at a bullfight in Madrid. The bull was white, and had blood running all down its legs, and one of the bull's horns was hidden under the swirling serge of his cape, and the other horn was going right through the man's chin and out through his mouth. But apart from the blood on the bull's chest and legs (and you couldn't understand where that came from, although you looked for the wound), it wasn't gory at all. The toredor looked in pain, yes, but his eyes were tightly shut as if he was on a rollercoaster, not as if he had a horn gored through his face. The horn came peacefully out of his mouth as if it were meant to be there, his lips wrapped around the horn as though it had the perfect dimensions to fit into his mouth. That man was back in the ring only four months after the goring.
I want to see a bullfight before they are banned. I don't know if I would have the stomach for it, but I want to see one.

'You don't like me as much as I like you'.

'I guess I've only just realised that you don't like me as much as I like you'.

You know you're an English student when you shudder and think, Oh lord, don't use the comparative. It's brutal.

In the meantime,

This is my new guilty pleasure.

ASS ASS ASS ASS ASS ASS ASS ASS

Pleasure implies hunger, but hunger implies hope

Once you haven't written for a while, it's harder to start up again.

So I did Edinburgh - and how! - and then I did Europe. Berlin > Prague > Vienna > Venice > Milan > Barcelona > Zaragoza > Pamplona > Paris. I have never had more fun in my life. I have never met so many people in one summer, I have never felt so independent or powerful, I have never been so stingy with money, I have never been on such long train journeys, I have never eaten so much Pan di Stelle in one sitting or bought salmon paste in a toothpaste tube.

I miss both Edinburgh, and interrailing. But I'm going back to Berlin soon. One of the things I realised was how mobile I am. It seems silly not to have been aware of this to the same extent before. But I met so many Americans and Australians (so many Australians) who would say enviously, 'But you're in Europe! You can just hop across the Channel and go anywhere!' And I'd never thought of it like that. So now I intend to spend money, not on going out, on Vodka Revs on a Sunday night, or on new clothes, but on travelling. So one of the first things I did when I got back to York and earned some more money was spend it on cheap flights to Berlin. Damn it, I'm going to see the world.

I miss meeting new people every day. Forming friendships that quickly, because you had to, because you were only in the city for a night. The generosity of strangers.

I think it's that time of year again - we're back to Autumn, and the streets are wet in the mornings, and the sky is white all of the time, and you can see your breath, and the tip of your cigarette burns the same colour as the leaves. So it's back to Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal, and a Hemingway biography and I don't have time to read as much as I would like, but I recently spent a small fortune on books and can't wait for the time to indulge in a big pile of them.

 'When we are out of love, how were we ever in it?'

'So on this busy morning I hope, my dear,
That you are also busy
With another vintage of another year;
I wish you luck and thank you for the party -
A good party though at the end my thirst
Was worse than at the beginning
But never to have drunk no doubt would be the worst;
Pain, they say, is always twin to pleasure'.

And Halloween has come and gone, as well. My favourite holiday of the year and I didn't really do anything because of rehearsals and being tired. I wanted to carve pumpkins, to make jelly and cakes and a Halloween punch, to make sugar skulls and a pinata, to put candles everywhere to light the dead back to earth.
We had trick-or-treaters, as well. I have never gone trick-or-treating, or seen trick-or-treaters in my life, having always lived in the middle of the countryside where the nearest person is really far away and anyway, everyone is just too conservative Conservative, and it's just not the done thing.

It was freaking awesome.

C Venues

Day Five in Edinburgh. And it's fucking awesome. The city is beautiful right now - I'm in an internet cafe with the sun streaming onto the street in front of me. We have the morning off (a blessing). I can't wait for the festival to start proper. At the moment all I'm doing is sawing and drilling (turns out I have mad skills with a drill - who knew?), which is leagues away from the admin-based Client Services work I'll be doing once the festival is underway.

I'm knackered, but I wouldn't change any of this. I have met some incredible people, had very little sleep, done a lot of drinking, spent too much money already (gulp) and learnt so much. Bring on the next 5 weeks. I'm writing down quotes as I go - not going to forget any of this.

It's summer. And this only means one thing. It never rains but it pours.

Right now it's gloriously sunny outside - hottest day of the year. I'm up to my eyes in work, rehearsals, books, plays, meetings, everything. It's the end of term. The play I'm producing has been cast, which is thrilling. I'm gearing up for Edinburgh, trying to work out where I can go travelling in September. Have been offered work in New Zealand but not sure if I have the funds to get over there, which is gutting.

I wish I knew what I want. I've got the whole summer ahead of me, therefore I want to be alone and independent. But sometimes people change that.

  Gerontion

Thou hast nor youth nor age
But as it were an after dinner sleep
Dreaming of both.

     Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
     Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
     I was neither at the hot gates
     Nor fought in the warm rain
     Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
     Bitten by flies, fought.
     My house is a decayed house,
     And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner,
     Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
     Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.
     The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;
     Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.
     The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,
     Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.

                           I an old man,
   A dull head among windy spaces.

   Signs are taken for wonders. "We would see a sign!"
   The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
   Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year
   Came Christ the tiger

   In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas,
   To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk
   Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero
   With caressing hands, at Limoges
   Who walked all night in the next room;
   By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians;
   By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room
   Shifting the candles; Fraulein von Kulp
   Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door. Vacant shuttles
   Weave the wind. I have no ghosts,
   An old man in a draughty house
   Under a windy knob.

   After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
   History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
   And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
   Guides us by vanities. Think now
   She gives when our attention is distracted
   And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
   That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
   What's not believed in, or if still believed,
   In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
   Into weak hands, what's thought can be dispensed with
   Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think
   Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
   Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
   Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
   These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

   The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours. Think at last
   We have not reached conclusion, when I
   Stiffen in a rented house. Think at last
   I have not made this show purposelessly
   And it is not by any concitation
   Of the backward devils.
   I would meet you upon this honestly.
   I that was near your heart was removed therefrom
   To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.
   I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it
   Since what is kept must be adulterated?
   I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:
   How should I use it for your closer contact?

   These with a thousand small deliberations
   Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
   Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,
   With pungent sauces, multiply variety
   In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do
   Suspend its operations, will the weevil
   Delay? De Bilhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled
   Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear
   In fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in the windy straits
   Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn,
   White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims,
   And an old man driven by the Trades
   To a sleepy corner.

                       Tenants of the house,
   Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.

 

Have you heard of Robert Mapplethorpe? He's a photographer whose work is currently being curated by Pedro Almodóvar in an exhibition in Spain. He died in 1989 yet his work still feels current: it's edgy and honest and - in my opinion - can't be dated. I personally love his portraits, his nudes. I'm always one more for the human form than for landscape or still-life. I think there is nothing more interesting to look at than the human body. 

I think I love the shapes he makes with bodies most of all. He doesn't let the models speak for the photograph; the beauty of the photograph does not rest solely on the athletic bodies of the men, or the slender, muscular frames of the women. It rests on what he's done with them, which is more than other artists who photograph or paint nudes do. He contorts the bodies, picks up the light in the skin tone, in the shadows cast by skewed limbs. He places them in interesting situations, yet the photograph is never cluttered but remains classical-looking. What strikes me most is the candour of the photograph, the lack of make-up or artificial light. Yet he does pose the models - but it seems to be out of an artistic and very real interest in what they the visual effect will be, rather than in order to make a statement or lead the spectator to some conclusion. His is a very accessible artwork - they can mean something to everyone, and he photographs across the spectrum of styles. I think his photographs are earthy and truthful, and that's what I personally appreciate in photography - not a reliance on the setting up of an artistic scene.

http://www.mapplethorpe.org/

   I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it
   Since what is kept must be adulterated?
   I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:
   How should I use it for your closer contact?

Jerôme Mesnager - street artist of those dancing, jointed figures I saw on the streets of Paris.

http://mesnagerjerome.free.fr/