A "Thinking About Time" Kind of Day

I’m always really surprised when the weather turns this cold. I feel like I’ve been caught out, like autumn has swapped itself for winter. Right now my hands are cold and numb and I’ll need to put on my hobo gloves in a minute.

Time is speeding up again. The last few weeks have seemed to last forever, but somehow it’s almost November now, and even though October has been full and crazy, I’m sure it can’t be the 30th already. Saw an interesting clip of a possible time traveller recently. I like to think it’s an actual time traveller, but the logical explanation is it's an "ear trumpet" and the person is hard of hearing. There must be some time travellers though. Someone must have figured out how to do it by now.

In a matter of hours British Summer Time ends, and we all get to travel back in time by an hour. I like thinking about this. That whole hour from 1am to 2am on Sunday 31st October, we get to redo. I have a feeling the hour will be a good one, based on the company I will be keeping. There are things I probably shouldn’t do. They are the things I want to do the most. We shall see.

I like thinking about how I’d live and what I’d do if I knew I could always go back and redo it, if I had the ability to stop and start and rewind time. Would I be more free if nothing stuck? Would I live a life full of risk and shameless abandon? Possibly. Or I might be just as likely to live with my hand on the snooze button, cosy and warm and forever in bed.

One of the reasons I always gave for wanting to be able to stop time, was so that I could read all the books I ever wanted to read. All the books. And I’m not alone on that...



...but what else? Maybe the fact that we only get one go at this makes the things we do more important. Telling someone you love them wouldn’t mean half as much if you could just rewind it and have it forgotten if it wasn’t reciprocated. We find a lot of who we are in those moments when we’re leaping over the abyss.

Yesterday I killed a cold, with effervescent vitamin C. Today feels like a good day. Maybe because it’s one of those “Time is being thought about/talked about/shifted around” kind of days.


Good things:

The Bugged launch in Manchester - reading to lovely people/reading with lovely and talented people/holding the actual book in my hands (also, Bugged getting a write-up on the BBC website, yeah!)

Fixing things myself - oh, I am so smart, and ever so slightly surprised

Raspberry-flavoured effervescent vitamin C

Doing my first post-Hundred Days book sculpture

The Panique Au Village film

Lots of planning and thinking and writing

Talk To Me About Love - a social experiment (the brainchild of Max Wallis)

Sexy music:




Lovely music

Thinking about linking to GWAR for the lovely music one

Preparing to erase an hour

Bugs, Books and Reading Out Loud

Behold! This is the contents page of the Bugged book! (I'm right at the bottom of the left page. Yeah! Note: all thumbs in the photos belong to Jo Bell. There's no way I can do nail polish that neat.)


And this is the cover. Sexy, no?


There are two launches, one in Manchester on Thursday 14th October that's part of Manchester Literature Festival, and one in Birmingham on Thursday 21st October that's part of Birmingham Book Festival.

I'm going to be reading at the Manchester one. My name is in the listing, so it's official. I'm dead excited. I like seeing my name on things that aren't asking me for money. Cathy Bryant, Valerie O'Riordan, Liz Loxley and Susie Wild are also reading, so I'll be in excellent company. I can't wait.

The First Star I See May Not Be A Star

Some music...



Some thoughts...

The moon these past few days has been amazing. And the sky has been so clear that I've been able to wish on the evening star (which yes, I know is really Venus and not a star at all, but I wish on it anyway) three nights in a row. Another birthday has come and gone and I don't feel any older or even particularly wiser, but I'm happy, and it feels important to be able to say that.

Someone else died tonight. It's 12:27 a.m. Sometimes I forget that every time the gate scrapes open in the night, it is the Body Truck bringing someone who has died in. We call it the Body Truck and it makes the people bodies, not lovers or brothers or mothers or friends. But just now I remembered it is a dead someone, and I let it make me a little bit sad. Because I know we all have our ways of dealing with the world, of shutting out what we need to shut out, but sometimes it's important to let these things in, if only for a little while. If only to see how we are shaped by them.

I will post less rambling things on here soon.

I am excited that there is a new story up at how men make love in the twentieth century. It is good.

I love mixtapes/cds.

There is a LOT going on.

I have a LOT to do.

Where did September go?