I might be being a little premature with this one but I love the design!!! and I want one!! It's an ecopod and looks gorgeous, cute and even a little funky.. trouble is it is a coffin! so hopefully I wont be occupying one for a while... but its ideal...made of paper and lined with feathers!!! and suitable for a woodland burial... now just have to find the suitable woodland

Monday and it's raining, really feels like the end of summer today... and it's cold! Very different from the weekend...

Had a Greenpeace 'workshop' on Saturday to go to ... met more lovely intelligent committed people... interesting conversation with someone who makes documentaries (Channel 4 9.00 Wednesday) and was at Cambridge, someone else was a 'home and away' addict and that was hilarious... haven't had a H& A conversation for ages!!!! (Alf Stewart is still my man!!!!) Anyway, the course was, for me, more about confidence building than anything else.. I have never been good at pushing my ideas and beliefs on people... well unless I have had too much to drink and they are close friends.... !! .... tend to think that all are entitled to their own opinion and why should they be remotely interested in what I have to say.... so this was good for me... as talking to people on the street is a very different skill to a class on map skills! So it was good.. I learned that it's more to do with Greenpeace core values and remaining calm..

The evening was interesting! I managed to be late! Well I'd had a few beers in Islington and then the Northern line was seriously delayed, not a good combination! Managed to get the food done with the excellent help of R and then The Esperanza people started arriving... food was eaten which is always a relief when you do the cooking!!.... good company!!! Looking forward to the next one in a month's time! Even enjoyed sunday, getting the place habitable again and relaxing with a newspaper and a content smile on my face............

Reading an interesting book about time ... Pip Pip by Jay Griffiths... hmmm it's written in the style of feminist polemic that I haven't touched for a few years.. that sort of playing with words and themes and vast repetitions that can get a little tiresome... such as

"Modernity's definitions of time, time accountancy, the digital clock with its flip blip for the flitting split second - the same split second- is a thing of no moment. When it comes to defining time, only the oceanic need apply. Time is simply too exquisite to be entrusted to anyone else. Only the oceanic, the Montaignes or Joyces, Shakespeares or Rousseaus, Eastern Philosophers or children. They know their now, they know the really wild vibe of the present is this; now is the only time when the moment can meet the eternal - and they know that the moment is momentous. "

a bit wordy indeed but getting further into the book I find I am re-thinking time and recognising that it is an ideological concept.. this whole linear thing.. I can remember as a child of about 8 deciding that the calender should be drawn as a spiral rather than as a linear progression as for me it all seemd vastly more cyclical...

the words are back .. and how....... so much going on in my head I don't know where to start.. so will start with a much neglected area of this blog...... recently read books...... haven't added to the list in ages and have only mentioned a couple of recent reads (James Frey and Xinran) and as I have been reading books at a rate of knots recently I need to mention a few good ones.... Bill Bryson's 'A short history of nearly everything' is exactly what it says on the cover!! But the really enjoyable thing about this book is it doesn't dumb down anything, unlike most TV documentaries nowadays, this book treats the reader as an intelligent being which is lovely and he certainly covers the history of discoveries and inventions methodically and in his amusingly anecdotal style. There will be something new for anyone who reads this book and some concepts are clearly and delightfully explained. Another romp through the sciences is Nature via Nuture by Matt Ridley.. this time looking at the old battleground of N vs N but showing the inextricable links between the two.. a sort of genetics needs environment needs genetics needs environment arguement... well put but also what amused me about this book was I suddenly found myself siding with some evolutionary psychologists ideas!! An idea previously abhorrant!!! I had always assumed (yes I know I shouldn't !!) that EP was making assumptions from the perspective of the culture we are in... ie that EP explains today's behaviour by the assumed behaviour of prehistoric man you know the idea of Man the Hunter, Woman the Home-maker, without actually having any clue about what relationships between genders was actually like... it could have been made up of female groups with offspring with only transitory visits from male groups perhaps ?? That could explain the phenomenon of group female oestrus... any way I digress....So I ended up following Ridley's argument and generally agreeing with it and then realising it was based around evolutionary pyschology.....and my assumptions about their assumptions were wrong!

Thought this was funny.. mainly because I have no 'decade'!! Obvioulsy I am just too confused and my influences are spread thin.....





what decade does your personality live in?


quiz brought to you by lady interference, ltd

anyway thanks to Damien for this one

Nine days away!!! and the reason? absolutley none... other than I have run out of words........ nothing to say.. weird....... nothing has happened, I have thought nothing........ created nothing....... talked about nothing.... hmmmmmm it's not good!

discovered a gem at the weekend!!! It was a really hot few days, one of those weekends when you need to be on the beach or on the lake at the ski club.. dead hot and I was in the middle of London! Clara suggested a Ladies Pond so after a brief look at it on the internet.. where there were one or two references to lesbian activities (?!)... we headed heathwards Saturday lunchtime... it's bit of a trek... but it was lovely being on the heath and walking through cool tree-shaded pathways.. the ladies pond is hidden away behind trees and shrubs so it is very secluded... there are grassy areas to sunbathe and the pond itself to swim in... swimming eye level to a nesting moorhen was a delightful thing to be doing on a sultry afternoon.. the water was absolutely frreeeezing... quite took the breath away but after swimming for a minute or two I warmed up a bit... I haven't been in such an all female environment since I left an all girls grammar school when I was 13... but it was lovely and calm, if there were any lesbians there they were not the predatory sort and it was quite delightful indeed... so went slightly browner with a pleasing absence of white bits... lovely

webstats.... it's interesting to see that Delilah is being read.. and thank you to Astrofish for sending a number of people this way... Love what it says about Capricorns worrying on that site! At first I wanted to say.. 'never! me? I'm such a chilled person!' but remembering the week prior to Glasto.. when I was heading off into the unknown on my own... hmmmm yes must admit to worrying a tad overmuch about it all!!!!! anyway the point to this posting is to ask people to leave the occassional comment... even maybe get a bit of a conversation going between you ?... that could be interesting.... would love to hear from you...

Whilst walking to work this morning I was pondering the new banksy statue that has been put up illegally in Clerkenwell Green… must go have a look at lunchtime…. It shows ‘justice’ as a prostitute and I was thinking how true this was and remembering my one experience as a witness to a case that became rather public… as I was thinking about what happened I realised I am still very angry about what occurred… the experience left me with a bitter taste of British justice indeed.

Simply what happened was we had a party where a number of friends, and friends of friends, turned up… much drinking of cocktails ensued and at some point a friend having had vastly too much to drink went to bed. An acquaintance ‘looked after her’ as she was vomiting and then he raped her… trouble was he didn’t think of it as rape… she did, she was unable to give either consent or to say no and in her eyes she was raped… the court saw it differently… the ‘chap’ was a handsome and intelligent rugby type from a very good family, who could afford the best defence, she was an attractive and intelligent woman but a single parent… he offered no defence, said he was too drunk to remember… so in effect didn’t deny it?? It was said in court that she ‘dressed provocatively’ yet in my eyes she wore what we all wore… jeans and a shirt?? Traces of his DNA were found on her clothes and in her hair but other DNA was also found on her clothing,(she had, though, held a friend’s baby earlier on that day?? And we all do the air kissing thing on greeting) It was implied that this DNA might have been from ‘other men’ and that she was flirting at the party… haven’t we all flirted at parties???? Anyway the outcome was he got off and to me this says that any drunken person, male or female, who falls asleep in someone’s bedroom at a party is just not safe from rape, and that he is a particularly dangerous young man, as he couldn’t remember, he could well do the same thing again after drinking?? She has since left England and hopefully is getting over it?? I am still angry… maybe writing this will assuage some of that anger at our justice system…maybe?? Maybe it just colours my view of the world …and of the British justice system… so I will go see Banksy’s new statue and read the words he has written on it…TRUST NO-ONE


Oddly when I checked the webstats on this site I see that someone arrived at my site through putting ‘banksy clerkenwell’ in a search engine… !

It's got to the point where there's almost too much to write about so I don't know where to start...

headed off to Cambridge last wednesday, having borrowed my brother's car, so had that lovely sense of freedom that having your own motorised transport brings... the weather was glorious it seemed that finally summer had arrived... I'm struggling though with the state of my flat as it really is horrible... filthy, broken furniture, doors with holes in... probably the worst flat I have ever been in .. and it's mine!! I am horrified and know it will be a massive task to get it back in shape...

anyway.. headed off to Cherry Hinton the site of the festival...put up the tents and had to head back into town for an interview with an agency... the reality of returning to Cambridge is becoming more apparent as each day passes and I still haven't really come to terms with it....

Thursday evening and I had a date with a chap from Guardian Soulmates... it had seemed like a good idea earlier on in the week but actually it was a disaster... I was enjoying being with J & J and then saw this chap that, sort of, matched his photo but, well, he obviously is massively photogenic! I nearly hid but realised that that was just too cowardly so went and introduced myself..hmmmm sometimes you just know immediately that things are a bad idea and this was one of those times... I made a feeble excuse and departed for the company of my sons.... they were really good company all weekend... funny... sweet and quite caring!!! I was really very proud of them which is a lovely, lovely thing to be able to say... Neela and Michael arrived the next morning and we found a spot for all three tents.. Sacha and Mia seemed to settle in well to festival life... the music was fairly much in the background.. I made one foray into the main stage to see Loudan Wainwright, mainly because I had seen him 31 years ago and it seemed approprite to see him again... trouble was though, my music tastes have changed a bit since then and his songs hadn't, so I just heard one song and headed away... it was a really sociable festival...the sun shone all weekend!! Sunday night we all drank a little too much but it was friendly and happy.. the people with deckchairs and territorial issues seemed to have faded into the background and we all said we would return next year!!!!