Five, alive

I’m still alive, but sunk deep in domesticity and now, work. So by way of keeping my presence here active, here is a writerly pentacle in which I’ve been invited to participate.

What was I doing ten years ago?

Ten years ago I was flatting in Bryndwr with a houseful of fellow postgraduates. These were good, rowdy, late-working times of what then seemed like high drama but which now has lost some of its pearly sheen to memory. I had the front room of a villa, a space large enough in which to work and moulder alike. I bought a giant desk, ex-DSW, from the City Mission for about twenty dollars, and sat in the shallow arc of the window while I annotated all of Robin Hyde’s published poetry. We also used the large kitchen and dining area, with a table that easily seated twelve people, to throw dinner parties whose dishes were experimental in nature. There was a constant coming and going of acquaintances.

During this time I was also suffering from gallstones and a broken heart, both of which were chronic afflictions associated with my peculiar genetic and emotional inheritance. Each eventually resolved itself, but only one by surgery.

Five snacks I would enjoy in a world where I need pay no mind to their energy or nutritional content:

1. Mixed nuts, no salt, heavy on the Brazil nuts
2. Soft cheese at room temperature, crackers optional
3. Coconut ice, which has never tasted as well as it did in 1983-4
4. Eccles cakes, although one is usually sufficient
5. A bowl of Cold Soba and condiments

Five snacks I enjoy in this calorific world:

1. Mixed nuts, as above
2. Fruit, usually banana or sliced apple
3. A slice of toast with olive oil spread and vegemite
4. Dry muesli eaten by hand from a cup
5. Diet cola–for shame, but it forestalls the growth of appetite

Five things I would do if I were a billionaire:

I would do the things I love to do now–be idle, read, drink cups of tea, watch films, listen to music, peruse blogs–and supplement them with things I would do more of could I afford it: swan about the world in style, sport an expensive, and possibly very tall, coiffure, fill my house with Norwich Terriers, and, presumably, buy art on the open market and start up a charitable foundation with a leftist socio-political lean.

Five jobs that I have had:

I have taught music, English language, literary studies, film studies and preparation for university studies. I have worked in a library, photocopying interloans for distribution elsewhere. I have played in string quartets for weddings and other folderol of the middle classes. I have copied tapes for language students. I have been a church organist and choir director.

Only for my most recent stretch of teaching (at seven years, a very durable stretch) have I been paid a salary rather than wages.

Three of my habits:

Fretting, revisiting, ruminating.

Five places I have lived:

I have lived in fewer than five places. I grew up in Sockburn, flatted at the aforementioned house in Bryndwr, boarded with a young mother in Bishopdale when the Bryndwr flat broke up, moved back to the family home for a year when my PhD funding ran out, then bought my own home, also in Sockburn. From here I have zigged and zagged all over the world, but never stopped long enough anywhere to be able to claim I resided there. I lack peripatesis; I in-dwell here like a taproot.

Five people I want to get to know better:

One never knows, really. I can look back at the last few years and say how much I’ve enjoyed corresponding with and meeting many of you, and I expect that this will continue. I tend to refer in conversation to my online friends as a subset of my friends in general. You are real to me.

At the same time, I’m looking forward to getting to know Señor Mojito’s family, in a structured way and at a manageable pace. There are people, too, whom I already know, whose company is like a joyful project and out of whom the weight of years draws more and more.

I am looking forward to getting to know my future puppies. The emergence, over time, of a loved animal’s characteristics (and I expect one can include humans in this) is a multi-faceted delight.

And, reading the proofs of an article on Robin Hyde which is soon to appear in a book about the same, I felt glad that I have still to re- and re-re-read so much of her work. A poem that I’d thought I’d analysed to death yielded up new possibilities unexpectedly, Kitchener’s Sudanese enemies running to help the Great War’s victims of gas attacks:

Lest Omdurman, Arabia,
Bewildered fling their weapons down
To aid the trapped and choking tide
Penned in the phosgene’s taken town. (”The Paladins” 9-12)

From Mixed Nuts to phosgene gas; a short strange trip. Here is the same meme done by some of those whom I read:

• Deborah (who tagged me)
• Art and My Life
• Make Tea Not War
• Satsuma Salad
• Martha

If I have missed anyone, please let me know in the comments and I will add your response.

• ETA Amy at Pretty Pretty Pretty
• MeganWegan
• Sas