It has been a while since I have blogged; apologies for that, if it makes any difference to you.

Have just been to the pub with cell-mates (of the non prison variety) which was fun (very amazing individuals, I do think); though today I have been generally feeling ‘flannel-like’ which is my preferred adjective for that slightly limp and flat and energy-less-ness, though I don’t know why this is the case because generally things are going quite well. In the scheme of things. It’s the end of term, no pressure in nearly any form and I have a bit of a creative burst going on. The latter makes me very happy. Maybe it is because I have been watching films and reading and thinking lots; it means that there is a constant stream of visual images in my head and ideas, some of which I then want to write stories about; the sum effect is feeling very interested in everything and full. Although this afternoon when I retreated for some creative time I just fell asleep which was sad but perhaps necessary. I guess I’m emotionally still (perpetually?) quite all over the place, and I find this very unnerving (although wonderful and good and real at times) – it’s just that NOTHING fits easily into category names and things can change so
much from one minute to the next. How confusing! I used to thinkthat emotions were just the fluffy edges on thoughts, now I have no idea. Even if they are technically a part of us they seem to have a life of their own and be quite capable of disrupting anything and everything at
a moment’s notice. What a to-do. What are they, after all? Are they really really necessary?

Anyway, above all, what I want to do at this present moment is to go to Scotland. I have been really desperate to go for a couple of weeks now. Not sure why. The mountains, the wildness, the space, the beauty…. Open fires and roasted chestnuts in a wee little cottage in the highlands near a castle and a loch - can I go, can I go???

I
looked out of my window on our street this morning, and it struck me
how very an odd a phenomenon the HOUSE is. Isn't it strange that we
choose to live in these little concrete boxes, most of which are very square and really quite obscure looking if you forget what you are used to seeing (especially the ones spattered in tiny pieces of stone, in my opinion); and especially that this should become so bound up in our identities. My house, my space, our house, community space, their house, our street...

Think how bizarre they would look to someone (eg an alien, a time traveller) if houses hadn't evolved the way they have. Well, I suppose that's true of anything, like lamposts or church buildings or forks, but houses seem particularly strange to me. They seem to have their own personalities, don't some of them look like faces? Play a game where you walk down the road and imagine what kind of person they would be. Some look sad and others grumpy, some aloof. And of course with curtains shut they look asleep.

Apparently (according to the newspaper) a lane is the most expensive
place to live. We used to live down 'Woodsford lane' (which lead to
Woodsford); it had a stream and a wood at the bottom. Apparently it
wasn't a very nice house (it took us 10 years to sell it, maybe because
it was number 13) but it was a wonderful place to live. Though the wood
turns out to be a lot smaller and less mysterious than it used to be. I
think street is a very good name - it makes me think of a cobbled place
with children bowling hoops down it and toddlers on the pavement. Are
all avenues tree-lined?

Here are some odd houses:

This house was built by a mad lady called Sarah Winchester, whose
husband made guns that shot lots of native Americans. After his death a medium told her she had to keep working on the house to keep the
spirits of the Indians from taking revenge, so she built in hundreds of
winding staircases, some leading nowhere to confuse them; winding
passages, hidden rooms, and thousands of chandeliers and twiddly bits
with the $20 million she inherited.
http://www.weirdus.com/stories/CA03.asp

This is the 'world's safest house.' I think it looks like a space lizard.

http://www.tdrinc.com/tsuihs.html

This is an igloo hotel. I'd quite like to stay there...

http://arcticinuit.free.fr/2001/jour/Hotel%20Igloo.jpg

There is also an octagon house at the bottom of my road built on a very
small plot of land. The people went bankrupt building it though, and
had to sell it to someone else...

First thing: Imagine if we had no imagination.

What a bleak (impossible) thought. I don't know what imagination is but
I know that not to have it would be my idea of hell. Perhaps suppression of the imagination is a kind of torture... certainly people do it to others; perhaps we do it to ourselves.

Second thing: Faith is a curious kind of madness.

That is what I am thinking. Religion is easy, easy-come, easy-go, easy
as a comfy rocking chair even when it's steely hard, because it's safe
and it holds you and you can stay where you are; but faith is dizzying,
ridiculous, terrifying. And then, faith in constructs is one thing; but
faith in a living moving person - what is that all about? God, you keep
moving, changing, frustrating my efforts to keep up - how am I supposed
to respond?

Feel entirely like I'm on a metaphysical freefall. For once I don't think I
feel afraid by it but it is still unnerving; because I can't see what's coming or what the consequences of my thinking might be, because things seem to be spiralling undone like loose knitting... The one thing I am committed to doing right now is following my 'gut' (but it's in my chest, high up on the left, not in my stomach) because a) I think it's my spirit linked up with God's and b) I think it's tugging me closer to Jesus, the person, and I want to find out where on earth he is because he isn't in the pieces where I used to think he was. Also c) it's the only way I know to be authentic.

But, then I think - what if I'm wrong?

My friends are questioning, frustrated, doubtful too. Some of them are confronting it, some of them will soon. I don't know how we will respond. I just have inklings.

One last thing, the sky – how is it so amazing? I can't think of which is my favourite kind of sky; I think I like it best because it's never the same. And it's always beyond, in so many ways. It has so many moods so many suggestions so many hues, it won't be predicted, it feels like inside and outside at the same time. It can't be tied down and I love it.

If only.

One day.

I am sitting 'working' in my newest favourite place to work. It is called
CB1 (most cambridge residents will be familiar with its bigger, slightly upbeat sibling, CB2) and it lives on Mill Road, that wonderfully cosmopolitan charity-shop-infested hidden-Aladdin's-cave-filled
obscure-international-food-haven off which our own wee street is
located. Oh lovely Mill Road. You don't really fit in Cambridge, do
you...?

It is orange and red and yellow and woody on the inside, has a slightly
dusty and worn feeling, and is wedged all around every wall and corner space with bookshelves, which are jam-packed with paperbacks, hardbacks, comics, papers, sellotaped boxes of scrabble oh and a small garish porcelain house. It makes me think of a cheery bakelite kettle. Above the bookshelves are old sorts of little computers and kitch typewriters and there are lots of adverts and other bazaar-ish items dotted about in things, on things, under things. I would expect to find plastic frogs and packs of fuses and magnetic letters in the drawers. The stools and chairs and cups and saucers are mismatched and slightly chipped but cheerful. You coldn't fit another table in here if you tried. You can just about see a thin haze of hot chocolate steam and cigarette smoke hovering around the ceiling. There are lots of paper and plastic flowers in vases; some in a mug..

There are eight of us in here right now, and *no one is talking.* What
a miracle. I have brought my essay and books in here with my laptop
(and wonderfully, there also happens to be wireless internet); and am
working in the company of a spattering of other bookish types, some
rather colourful characters, some very normal looking newspaper bods
indulging their eccentric sides.

Oh I know it's just another form of branding; that my orange leather
armchair with its three threadbare turquoise seat cushions has been
shopped in from Sally Ann's expressly because it has notchmarks all
over it and the posters clash with the walls on purpose, but for the
moment I am very happy just to soak in the warmth of being here on the other side of the window from the frost outside and sup
on my chai as I chew on with Contemporary Accounts of Current Social
Change.

Mmmmm.







And in came a man carrying a sleeping bag in a carrier bag with a a cobweb tattooed on his face and just wished us all a very merry christmas. And then he gave the children 50p each and told them not to forget to put their stockings under the fireplace, or they wouldn't get any presents, unless they didn't have a fireplace which was another matter.

I think perhaps he is Father Christmas in disguise.

Now everyone is talking.