September 6th

This came in quite handy today.

The Fifth Day Of September

I am cheating here. I saved a draft of an empty post, so I could do a retrospective September 5th post. But that was four days ago now. (I am writing from the future.) I am going to write some instructions for myself.

1. Take an umbrella to work.

2. At the bit in Wolf Creek where the bad man slices the girls fingers off, leave the room. You really don't want to be thinking about "a head on a stick" every time you see cutlery.

3. Don't forget about the jacket potato!

I hope these help.

Emma from four days in the future. xx

September the Fourth

Home is coming together. The tiny map envelopes will hold the Home badges. I can't find any Home-themed biscuit things as yet, though. At the minute, actual home is weird, because Biff is in the process of moving out. This has been Time Travel House for such a long time, from when TTO was just a record label and Biff and The Mr were screenprinting, badge-pressing, racket-making maestros. And then I hijacked the name, deciding TTO should have a small publishing imprint, and convinced Biff and Nath that we could take over the world. So Time Travel House changed, became a place for stories and binding and bone-folding, a place of stamps cut from erasers and flower paper torn into deckle-edged rectangles. This latest incarnation is one that fits with the character of the house. I'm sure some tasks will undoubtedly be 'outsourced' to Biff's new pad, and I'll be sad about not hearing the crunch of the badgemaker through my bedroom ceiling, but the core things, like the Mythbusters sewing circle and the walk-round-the-table collating will always be part of this old house. So i think things are going to be okay.

September 3rd

Today, I took a lot of painkillers (see yesterday) and made lots of tiny envelopes from old maps. I have a crush on my tiny envelopes. I am going to carry one in my pocket all day tomorrow. I am going to maybe keep some painkillers in it, and my locker key, which I will have to take off the plastic fob so it fits inside. But that’s okay, because my locker key falls off the fob at least once a day anyway. The fob is almost superfluous. Its only purpose is to make the key harder to misplace.

I got Shane Jones' chapbook I Will Unfold You With My Hairy Hands in the post. It is a thing of beauty. It has a cover of textured card, with a print of two trumpeting angels. The title is printed in red. Inside, the endpaper has green roses on it. The paper it's printed on is lovely paper. It is all beautifully written. It feels sparse and important and true. So far, I've read it twice. I keep picking it up and looking at it and looking at the pages and reading bits over and over. I want to write a review but I don't feel I can 'do it justice' right now. I'm going to read it again. Included in the parcel was Walden Book by Allen Bramhall. I haven't read it yet. It comes in an envelope with a print of a branch and a sticker that is stamped with the title and author's name. Its cover is a map. In a strange turn of coincidence, a couple of days ago, I was thinking about where I grew up, and I remembered a rock I'd sit on in the middle of a stream, writing bad poetry, trying to emulate Thoreau. And today I get this book. Spooky.

On The Second Day Of September...

...I managed to convince myself I have Lupus.

The First Of September

September is my favourite month. When I was at school, a friend and I would write screenplays and the boys would all have 'exotic' (i.e. made up) names like Tember (from September) and Tober (from October). Influenced heavily by The Lost Boys, we were going through our spooky/vampires phase. It lasted a good few months, and served to inspire many plot ideas and daydreams. It passed. But I'm always reminded of the silliness when September comes around.

I have been very sporadic with this blog of late. I think I had a crisis of confidence, of sorts. But September is my 'doing' time, and so I have a plan to 'do' something every day and write about it. Maybe I will set myself tasks (of things I want to do). Or maybe it will just mean that I'll write something here every day. I'm not sure yet. Maybe it will just be a mix of both.

Sally wrote something about waiting for your life to start, and I can't get it out of my head. There's a sense that I should be doing more. But I can't decide what, and so I do nothing. Option paralysis. But not this month. This is my doing month. Bring it on.

No Point In Not Being Friends 2: The Aftermath

I really enjoyed no point in not being friends. The basement bar felt like a ’70’s porn lounge, resplendent with red velvet curtains and curved walls. That, or a dungeon. But it was cosy. It was also incredibly busy. Lots of people had showed up. I always get excited by the fact that people will go out to a place just to listen to stories and poems and tales. I was nervous, too, (for a change) even though it was nice and dark. I read a story called Dancing In The Dark, which is an homage to Bruce, but isn’t really. He might like it, though. Everyone was nice and I even got a couple of laughs, which were unexpected but made me happy. Everyone who performed was ace. I am going to try and poach some people for TTO things in Derby. Chris Killen read some of his chapbook Paul Simon, which is a work of literary genius. Jo Bell was brilliant and engaging as usual, and also offered a hefty dose of Derby(shire) solidarity and support. And Sam Pink was beamed in live from Chicago (or his dog was, and it wasn’t exactly live) to read Move In With Me. You can watch it here. You should watch it. It’s good. I think he’ll get a lot of takers. All in all, it was a brilliant night. Sally and Chris did an amazing job of bringing it all together.

I just came up with the title for this post, and I actually google image searched ‘dead swans’. I feel awful. I am not going to use the picture I found of some dead swans. I found an almost comical one of a dead swan propped up against a tree with a passive-aggressive sign round its neck. But it made me sad. I’m still smirking at it though, and I feel terrible about that. Bad Emma. I think it’s just that passive-aggressive notes are one of my smirk triggers. So it’s unfortunate for the swan and the writers of the swan’s sign that they chose to take that particular route. Did they think that people would think the swan wrote it?

Getting back from Manchester, I felt kind of dazed. A lot of that is the three-hour bus journey. The Transpeak does exactly what it says on the tin. No motorways for this bus. It winds its way through the green hills of the Peak District, picking up speed in the valleys and old ladies in the market towns. Even though I find it exhausting, I still really enjoy the bus journey between Manchester and Derby. It gives me a lot of time to think. I stare out at the hills and cliffs and sandstone cottages and I think of all the lives I might have had and the ones that are yet to come.

I got back to Derby and power-napped for an hour. And then I went to Nottingham with friends for a gig. I was too tired to go, but I went nevertheless. I pretended I was watching Springsteen, and that I was in the eighties and the only things that mattered were singalong choruses and fists punched in the air. I thought about the thing I always think about at gigs, how when the band are playing and everyone’s caught up in that, I feel the greatest solitude and the greatest sense of belonging, all rolled into one. I'm going to stop now before it gets any cheesier.