Flittering

After months of travelling between Edinburgh and London, now I'm flittering.
There is so much to catch up on.

The kitchen, everything but a room to cook in (unless Offsprog One is making a portrait cake that covers everything with a fine, sticky film of icing sugar), is piled high with academic books and leads and wires of various sorts.

The first job I landed on was book-weeding. I trawled through them, opening each one at the torn-paper-strip bookmarks and collecting quotations into a file on my computer.
Many of them are cross references (often quite literally: idiotic statements by academics who should know better. Don't they realise that women read their books as well as men?).
I am halfway through that. I need to go somewhere else to do the rest of it, somewhere where there aren't bags of crisps and fresh cherries to tempt me away from the task in hand, somewhere where the sun shines in the windows.

Next, I landed on a pile of eBay stuff. I got to the third item and the photograph wouldn't upload.
I didn't want to get cross about that too so I flew off and landed on the washing, just about the only bit of housework that I don't mind, because it involves a machine that does everything.
You don't have to push it and pull it like the vacuum cleaner or struggle up the stairs with it, and you don't have to clash and clang dishes in and out of it like the dishwasher.
(I was remembering with my sister the first time I moved into a house with a dishwasher. I was too scared to use it and several months later I asked her to help me. Pathetic, really).

Then I flew to Tony Fletcher's book Boy About Town, which I found when I was tidying the bookshelves. It's an absorbing autobiography, just like Viv's book, although it stops before he even gets to the Sixth Form at school so it's more... childish, perhaps.
I met Tony years ago when he interviewed The Chefs (or was it Helen and the Horns) and I've got an original copy of Jamming with the interview in it somewhere. Tony was very young when he did the interview but it wasn't surprising; those 1970s times involved such a mixture of people and ages, from Vi Subversa who was in her forties and who had her 14-year-old son playing with Poison Girls (and us), to a group of 15-year-olds called The Underaged who came to be a support act with us once in Lambeth and were almost barred by the landlord before they played a note.

Next, I emailed to ask the Mad Professor to do a dub mix of Anarchy Skiffle. I wait with bated breath....

I sat in the back yard and watched honey bees. How exciting! There must be a hive nearby. There are not many flowers in the yard at the moment but the passion flower is looking ready to burst into bloom. Over here, bees!

I stood up at the kitchen sink and did some embroidery. I know that sounds weird but I was photographing it, and the kitchen is dark and the sink is by the window.
The camera pretended that the memory stick was full so I had to stop once the allotted hour was up, and I'm working out a trick to make the camera work again, because there is plenty of space for more photographs. It was time for a rest anyway.

Yesterday I flew to the common with a woman called Elena; we met on the tube last week, and she took some pictures under the trees. It was a battle against the sun and the pollen; I hope they come out. Her photographs are very beautiful and you can see some of them here: www.elenaheatherwick.com

I tried to throw away my old fluffy blue cardigan from Primark in Barcelona, but it looked at me with those sad old eyes and now I'm wearing it. Ho hum.

I looked at the Freddies of Pinewood rockabilly clothing website and imagined looking very rockabilly indeed this coming autumn. freddiesofpinewood.co.uk/

I hovered around wondering whether to paint bits of the house, but drew back from the smell of paint, at least temporarily.

This is called having an unstructured life. It's brilliant.