On spring

I had a funny weekend, the kind where all sorts of things come apart and come together - mainly because I saw a bunch of people I've not seen for a long time, or had the sort of conversations I've not had in a long time, and remembered along the way the importance of honesty and candour and kindness, and how vital people are.

On Friday I went to a club in Brighton called Casablancas, which is one of the places I went in my teens and early twenties, and was oddly pleased by the absence of nostalgic feelings. I was bought apple-flavoured shots and syrupy liquors, and watched fascinated as people flung themselves around while dancing, colliding into each other. I was happy to see it and happy to leave.

On Saturday I sat on my sofa - at various times throughout the day - with a few of my favourite people, and wore blankets and talked and felt some real washes of peacefulness, which weren't constant, and which were sometimes notable for being the opposite of other feelings, but was grateful for them.

On Sunday me, Laura and Jackie walked through town feeling untethered and bumped into Eva, who we have not seen in such a long time, and who was delightful as always. I walked home in the rain just scooped out with tiredness but oddly energetic.

It was a weekend but it felt like the start of a new week.

Co-incidentally, it's now Spring.

Weekly round up 3

- My album of the week is the new Warpaint LP, which is really their first album as far as I’m concerned, as I never really listened to their first – just the odd song on a radio that sounded to me (possibly incorrectly) like they were trying to do a The Cure thing. I caught them live at End of the Road this summer, where they sounded a bit rusty, but listening to this now I can see what they were getting at; a big, spacious, deep, lazy pop vibe. It’s a lovely lovely album, I think – a bit like a lot of the stuff I used to listen to when I was a teenager.

- This week I overheard some kids on the train discussing which parties would be in the next coalition. It made me realise how quickly things change, or at least how little the young know. Already for a lot of people in the country, a coalition is a normal state of affairs, what one might expect from a government. Perhaps they’re right, now, but it wasn’t long ago that coalition politics was just ‘a foreign thing’.

- My eyebrows join up in the middle. I have heard this discussed as a major problem (although more as a general rule than in reference to my own). Sitting in a barbers this week, with a slightly distracted guy gutting my hair, I had to do that thing for a moment of staying completely still while he stared into my eyes, fixing my fringe. He trimmed it a bit, then rocked back on his heels, staring at me. He leant forward, hacked another clump of hair out of my eyes, and then, as if on an un-quashable impulse, lurched forward and neatly snipped a path through the small patch of forest which sits atop the bridge of my nose, separating my two brows for the first time in many years.

We both pretended nothing had happened.

Sunday round-up #1

- With Christmas finished, we finally took our tree down yesterday, and Alec helped us return it to whence it came. This year we bought our tree from Gill’s Home & Garden store on Western Road, Brighton, and we were pleased to plump for a living tree. We returned it to the shop and it will soon be taken back out to a forest and re-planted. Our tree was called Paeater, Tree of Courage. [Moment of respectful silence].

- Sad to read of the death of Elizabeth Jane Howard this week. At first it seemed that all the coverage was going to concentrate purely on her relationships with other people rather than her work, but this has been steadily redressed over the last few days – with several beautiful articles emerging in the press. She was a great writer and hugely underrated. The appreciation in the Guardian is particularly worth reading, as is Martin Amis’ eulogy in the Mail.

- I watched ‘American Hustle’ this week, which I thought was absolutely great. I’m horribly out of date when it comes to cinema, I’m afraid. I follow quite a few film buffs on Twitter and am permanently perplexed by references to famous actors who I had no idea existed (Ryan Gosling? Channing Tatum? I have no idea who these people are or what films they’ve been in). I’d never seen Jennifer Lawrence in anything either ’til I saw AH but I’m now a fully paid up fan – of Amy Adams too (who I’d likewise never heard of). They both act the men off the screen in a really involving, exciting, over the top film. Which is not to say the male leads don’t impress too.

- I also watched ‘Anchorman 2′, which was fun – but the only reason I mention it is that I watched it at The Big Scream, the baby-friendly screening at the Dukes at Komedia in Brighton’s North Laine. I was vaguely fearful that attempting to watch a film surrounded by yelling babies would be massively frustrating. It wasn’t at all – I barely noticed them except for the moments when Connie reached over and stole my glasses.

- If you live in Brighton, go and get a coffee in The Mad Hatter Café on Western Road. They’ll let you buy a suspended coffee while you place your order, and a hard-up coffee-fan can claim it at their leisure later. Ace.

- We spent the whole of the Christmas break in Brighton, and this week the last of our visiting friends departed, and a few who have been away returned. The most rewarding thing about 2013 was the contribution made by our excellent friends. The best days of the year have been those spent with Lynds, Anne-So, Rich, Vic, Alec, Connie, Sam, Laura, Ali, James, Anita, Jackie, Ollie, Dan, Alice, Ryan, Simon, Paul, Vanessa, Dan, Ant, Hedvig, Andrew, Sophie, Ruby, Harry, Claire, Gabs, Murray, Amy, Dan, Julie (and others). They’re a nice bunch.

An Error of Judgement

Last summer, when Dan came down from Reading for the weekend, the two of us set about doing some video work, as we often do when he visits. However, that day it was wet outside and we were short on inspiration, so we sat around for a bit trying to come up with a project.

Eventually, we came up with the following film. The title is taken from a (very good) Pamela Hansford Johnson novel, but the rest is really just a result of a bit of brainstorming and improvising. We needed to shoot the whole thing indoors, with only the two of us as actors, and we didn’t want to get caught up in dialogue as neither of us can act. Also, we didn’t want to spend ages doing lighting and sound and stuff like that, so the whole thing is pretty much shot run and gun, with just a little bit of extra lighting to help us in the hallway shots. Consequently the whole thing looks very scruffy, with plenty of bumps and whirrs caught on the camera’s in-built microphones, and a few nasty variations in light – but given that it took us about 2 hours to film, and then about the same time again for me to edit it together (this week, after the files had sat on my hard drive for six months) I think it looks pretty good.

I’m very interested in the idea of exploring what goes wrong after one person does something foolish; I’ve another idea for a film which I want to make this spring which concentrates on something similar. It’s easy, after all, to act without thinking.

Although not so easy to act.

An Error of Judgement from Jonathan Shipley on Vimeo.

Dream geography

I’ve been warned before that there’s nothing very interesting in talking about one’s dreams. People who analyse them are deluded and people who describe them are dullards. That’s probably true – but one’s own dreams always seem interesting to oneself, particularly if you wake like I did this morning, thinking, “bloody hell, that was vivid”.

A couple of fragments that I remember, to amuse myself.

I was walking through an altered Brighton – I assume I’m not unusual and that everyone distorts geographical reality when they dream. The Brighton of my dreams is pretty close to the one I inhabit when awake, except that some roads are louder, quieter, nearer, further away, blended or bent out of shape. My home is often different, although weirdly it’s rarely an amalgam of real places I’ve lived and rather somewhere quite distinct, a figment of my imagination. But when I dream it up – or at least, on the occasions when I remember it – I find I’ve done a good job of designing something really complete. I could knock on the walls.

I was walking through an altered Brighton – and it was a bit hotter and swingier; something of Lisbon transplanted to St James Street. People drank on doorsteps or cross legged on the pavement, people drifted diagonally from bar to bar. I walked to a camera shop (Jessops, I suppose, which has just closed down in real life, although there isn’t one in Kemp Town), and got invited to a party while I stared in the window. I crossed the road, and watched two men run at each other outside the Thai restaurant. One man was bent low, like a bull. The other man pulled a gun from his pocket and shot him. Then he pointed the gun at me, and I grabbed at a bit of loose wooden boarding which was nearby – quite calmly – and held it like a shield. He shot me through the board. I was carried away.

I woke up in a garden just around the corner, here in Seven Dials. It was New Year’s Eve and I had decided to sleep outdoors. It was a warm and balmy night. When I think about it, it often is in my dreams. I tossed and turned – in my dream – unable to sleep. So eventually I got up and walked through another part of Brighton (which is down by the seafront) back to my flat in Kemp Town. I slept there. After a while I rose and went back out onto St James Street and to an L-shaped bar which has never existed, but of which I dream, oddly, often. Downstairs they do cocktails and there is a small, tropical garden where you can stand. I think I dream about this bar twice a year.

I know what my dreams mean – they mean nothing. But I am intrigued by the geography of them. I often wake wishing for a map.

Ali Smith's 'Artful'

Just finished reading Ali Smith’s lovely, confusing, inspiring ‘Artful’, which I’m clearly going to have to re-read if I want to boast to people that I really ‘got it’; it’s a dense, fast-moving combination of intriguing fiction and literary criticism, and I read it as the former, not worrying too much about wringing every ounce of meaning from the many poems and quotations which pepper the text. I did pick out a few lovely things though;

“When human beings love they try to get something. They also try to give something, and this double aim makes love more complicated than food or sleep. It is selfish and altruistic at the same time, and no amount of specialization in one direction quite atrophies the other”.
EM Forster

There’s lots of Katherine Mansfield in the book, and lots of trees. I never enjoyed reading DH Lawrence, but I like Mansfield’s description of his ‘Aaron’s Rod’ as a tree, “firmly planted, deep thrusting, outspread, growing grandly, alive in every twig”.

And there was more nature in the following, which made me think of the ‘We are the clay that grew tall’ line in Melissa Harrison’s terrific book ‘Clay’, which I talked about the other day.

“Decay is the beginning of all birth … it transforms shape and essence, the forces and virtues of nature. Just as the decay of all foods in the stomach transforms them and makes them into a pulp, so it happens outside the stomach … Decay is the midwife of very great things!”
Paracelsus

and here’s Ali Smith herself, talking about something I’ve already mentioned:

“We do treat books surprisingly lightly in contemporary culture. We’d never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe that we’ve read a book after reading it just once. Books and music share more in terms of resonance than just a present tense correlation of heard note to read word. Books need time to dawn on us, it takes time to understand what makes them, structurally, in thematic resonance, in afterthought, and always in correspondence with the books which came before them, because books are produced by books more than by writers; they’re a result of all the books that went before them.”

That one’s pertinent.

Coffee with Eva

When Sam was over for Xmas we met up with our dear friend Eva in Brighton’s nice Marwood cafe. I am ashamed to say I hardly ever get round to seeing Eva, which is absolutely stupid, and something I must remedy in 2013.

Eva is terrific; we wished her well for the holiday season and she politely assured us that she had absolutely no intention of seeing us on Christmas Day, because she had an essay to write and also had ‘an onion and a pepper’ in the fridge that needed eating. If we did met up, she insisted, she would be unable to join in the festivities or pretend to like her presents. She also talked briefly about her new obsession with crime, her time in Turkey (when she was frequently mistaken for a spy) and her hatred of communism.

Eva is now in Greece where she is spending the next two weeks picking olives. I think perhaps she, rather than me or Sam, is the one with it all sorted out.

Flooded rivers

My parents have been flooded in for a few weeks up in Cambridge, meaning that when I spoke to my mum the other day she sounded a bit stressed.

“It’s been awful”, she told me. “We’ve not been out of the house. We’re both desperate to get out, we can’t wait for the flooding to go down! We feel rather trapped”.

“Oh dear. Is Dad OK? Put him on”.

There’s a rustling as my mum puts down the phone and seeks out my father. I hope that being stranded is not upsetting him too much.

“HELLO!” He booms. “Have you heard about the flooding?”.

“Mum told me”, I explain. “Are you OK?”.

“Oh yes!”, he replies, enthusiastically. “It’s very exciting!”.

Sometimes I’m more like my mum, sometimes more like my dad.

New Year's Day

When we finally made it out of Brighton on the first day of 2013, it was much colder than we expected and the light, which had been thrillingly rich all day, was already beginning to dip. So we only walked around Devil’s Dyke for half an hour or so, mindful not to slip in the mud and binding our coats tight around us, as if we might conjure an extra layer by wrapping them round twice. Of course I had a hangover and new (year) promises to keep, so the cold wind did its unwelcome job of battering last night’s boozy breath out of my lungs until I felt like this was the start of something new, not just a painful bit left over from yesterday. I felt less than re-born, but glad to be alive and idling into another year.

finally

I'm back at my parents' house in Cambridgeshire this weekend, where I am normally made to feel unwelcome by their distant, rather jumpy cat, Millie. This time round, however - perhaps spurred by the poor weather, which is keeping her indoors - she seems to be have adopted a tolerant attitude to me; not scampering angrily from the room when I enter, nor leaping a foot into the air when I extend a hand towards her.

And then, finally, a sign that, ten years in, I am finally beginning to win her over.

A gift!

uncontrolled aggression

Last night I was sat reading my book on my journey home, the train idling at a quiet platform - when I saw out of the corner of my eye someone running alongside the train. I heard his feet land heavily on in the carriage as he leapt through the closing doors, and then his bag land heavily on the seat opposite mine. He slumped after it, not red-faced but out of breath. He was young, handsome, in his mid-twenties, with long hair and a close-cropped, fashionable beard. The train pulled away and he began a familiar mime; patting his pockets, shifting in his seat, flipping open the lid of his canvas bag. It’s a spectacle I put on myself near enough every morning when I see the ticket-inspector approaching, wondering where I’ve put my railcard.

His movements shifted up a gear. I recognise that, too. It’s not just in a different pocket. It’s not here. I left my wallet on the bedside table, my telephone at work, my book on the bathroom floor. He began to search frantically, repeatedly, replaying the sequence as if he were a caged animal obsessively retracing a route. I fought to restrain my mouth from twitching into a smile, not because I took pleasure in his discomfort, but because I know the feeling all too well, and sympathised. Then he brought his fist down hard upon the plastic table, and swore. His bag, now thoroughly searched, turned inside-out, he flung hard into the adjacent seat. He swore again. And again. That flicker of a smile had long since disappeared and I tried to immerse myself in my book, shrinking backwards in my seat. Great.

His temper did nothing to abate. He thumped the table again, and punched his bag. He tilted his head back and let out a volley of curses. I began to wonder what he had lost. He pulled a mobile phone from his pocket and held it to his ear. So, not that. A moment later, he was talking, hissing, words tumbling out. His opening conversational gambit was “I’m really fucking angry”. His wallet, I suppose, or an iPod. House keys? He kept swearing.

As he muttered on, still occasionally slamming his head back into his head-rest in frustration, I fluctuated between interest and revulsion. It was a remarkable display of petulance from a grown man. It made me think how controlled I am. Over the years I have lost a quite absurd number of vital or expensive things, from spectacles to mobile phones to expensive gadgets. I don’t recall ever doing more than closing my eyes in frustration and musing over how careless I am. I honestly don’t think this guy was far from punching a wall. Or someone else. His girlfriend, if that’s who he was talking to on the phone, must have moments when she really wonders at his capacity for aggression. I’m not saying I don’t understand temper, and possibly he’d just had the worst day of his life, but it was incredibly unappealing.

In the end I learned from his call that he was upset because, running for his train, he had pulled his ticket from his jacket pocket and unknowingly dropped a £20 note on the station platform. I got off the train ten minutes later, glad of my even temperament.

the consolation of town planning

Sometimes a whimsical observation you read stays with you for days; this was the case with one of Wendy's recent posts over at her Wendy House blog. It was only a light-hearted quip on her part, but it struck me as the kind of playful, sudden thought that shouldn't be mistaken for a hackneyed one. I've heard the phrase 'relief road' a million times, but somehow never quite noticed it's charming quality. Wendy writes:

Here in the UK we have roads who’s whole purpose is to provide relief, relief Roads.

The pleasingly named Rose Kiln Lane is a Berkshire relief road. Roads that provide relief. A very pleasing idea.

Having a stressful day at work? Then visit Rose Kiln Lane to find relief.

Nothing more to it than that. But the phrase has stayed with me. If only the government really did build infrastructure designed solely to console.

Incidentally, I just bought Anna Minton's 'Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty First Century City', which I think will be an interesting read, and I hope to blog about it in the future. The Guardian review of the book, which alerted me to its existence, begins:

The important thing about a castle is not that it is comfortable, but that it is secure, which makes the Englishman's proverbial urge to live in one rather bleak. Against whom are we fortifying our homes, if not one another? We pretend that our property obsession is a lifestyle choice, but it could just be misanthropy: worshipping the private retreat out of distaste for being in public. If so, the problem stems from bad policy as much as national character. The British approach to managing urban space is utterly wrong, according to Anna Minton in Ground Control. Successive governments have conspired, Minton argues, to create environments that make people suspicious of one another. That makes them miserable. We are one of the saddest, loneliest peoples of Europe.

Sounds like it might be fascinating.

money makes the world go round

Strange going ons in the world of football. For those of you who have no interest; you're missing out - this is a peculiar and interesting season for a number of reasons - the big clubs are struggling, the smaller clubs are contracting and expanding, playing rich, rewarding football on the one hand and spitting out managers on the other. Adapting to face new commercial realities, and creaking under the weight of the grim hold that capitalism exerts on the game.

And old certainties are no longer quite so certain - I can no longer find it in myself to hate Sol Campbell for leaving Spurs all those years ago, for example, and I find myself inwardly applauding the dreadful Joey Barton for claiming that footballers 'are knobs' on Radio 4, of all places. Grand old clubs like Man City, Portsmouth and Notts County, meanwhile, have futures which are suddenly, truly, completely unknowable. Glory or bankruptcy.

This isn't the prelude to a review of the year in football or anything; just a few notes before I sling off a couple of interesting links I've encountered in the last few weeks. The first concerns the afore-mentioned Portsmouth, for whom every moment seems a drawn-out agony, for all that (actually) they have an OK team, who play nice football. Their problem is not that they look dead-certs for relegation (actually, that's the least of their problems) but rather that they tried to compete with the big teams financially and messed it up, before taking the hand of the first person who promised to clear up the mess without checking him out properly first.

If anyone wants to formulate an argument about capitalism ruining football, they should board the train to Fratton. Jamie Jackson, writing for the Guardian, delivers a damning indictment of Portsmouth's profligacy.

John Utaka was Portsmouth's record signing when he joined from Rennes in July 2007 for £7m. In two and a half years, he has become their record waste of money.

Utaka has started 31 Premier League games and scored seven times in all competitions. Since claiming five of those goals in his opening season the Nigerian's form has declined disappointingly. This season his highlight was scoring against Hereford United in the Carling Cup five months ago. Despite Portsmouth's well-documented problems – Avram Grant has only 17 outfield players, and is operating under a transfer embargo – Utaka has started only twice in the league, back in August. Not only was Utaka rejected by Nigeria for the Africa Cup of Nations that starts tonight, he did not even get into the 32-man preliminary squad.

Portsmouth are debt-ridden and threatened with administration. Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs served a winding-up petition on the club just before Christmas, and Portsmouth cannot find the £10m required to lift the transfer embargo. Utaka, meanwhile, continues to enjoy the rewards of his four-year contract on a barely credible £80,000 a week. If he stays to the end of his term, the total cost to Portsmouth will be about £23m. That would be enough to secure their immediate future.

If that tale of excess isn't enough to momentarily divert you from the small pyre of wicker bankers which you are absent mindedly building at your desk, a slightly more jolly tale from Manchester, where at Man City, meanwhile, things could not be more rosy since they shacked up with their own - somewhat more credible - Saudi sugar-daddy, and made the decision to sack Mark Hughes.

Football being football, they elected to do so in an entirely dishonourable fashion, and earned the condemnation of many in the game for their methods, but, football being football, they've won every game since (under the stewardship of the handsome Roberto Mancini), so everyone has forgiven them. Except for Mark Hughes, presumably.

Even I've fallen under the spell of Mancini. He's just so sophisticated. Look, here he is bemoaning the food culture at his new club. He wants the players to eat better before they run out onto the pitch.

"I will calmly make corrections to what they eat before matches," City's manager told the Italian newspaper Corriere dello Sport. "You need more chicken, pizza, carbohydrates. As well as a glass of wine, which isn't being served."

Brilliant! He wants his players to eat pizza and drink alcohol before they play!!! I love this man. When his time comes, I hope his petty, fickle, nouveau-riche employers treat him better than he did his predecessor.

And, more importantly, last night's game between Liverpool and Reading was just fantastic, fantastic stuff - a genuinely deserving smaller team, a huge team in a state of crisis, and a great finale. Here's Dan, rather pleased with Reading's performance.

the architecture of dreams

I've never been inclined to analyse dreams, or read too much into them. There are people, I know, who think they have great significance, that they are the key to unlocking great mysteries of the mind, or that they have a strange, totemic significance for the future. I don't think any of those things, nor do I spend much energy thinking of them. Most of my dreams are vivid, realistic, meandering, and easily forgotten; often within moments of waking.

A dream, for me, has no significance but as an insight into the odd physicality of the mind - I like to think of dreams as surges of leftover creativity and power. A light-bulb doesn't go cold the moment one turns it off, and nor does the mind. Once we drift into sleep I like to think of our brains throbbing on, unharnessed, no longer dictated by logic, until the detritus of the day is worked through.

What I do find amazingly interesting about dreams, above all else, is the incredibly lucid architecture they summon up. Take the dream I remember from last night:

It was set on the grounds of a University campus. It started in the canteen, where I was eating. From there, I moved through to a foyer and entered a newsagent, where I flicked through magazines and through a box of second-hand books which were on sale. I picked up a bundle of four books, which were banded together, because they were all academic studies of the band Bloc Party (of whom, incidentally, I'm not a fan, so I don't know where I dredged that up from). I then walked out to the open air and boarded a bus, heading off campus. I sat upstairs. A girl noticed my books and asked what they were.

Nothing there is interesting or insightful, but when I awoke, I awoke with an incredibly keen memory of the landscape I created. As an editor of academic books, I spend a lot of time on university campuses, so their layouts are familiar to me. I could have picked any one of thirty or forty campuses I know well in which to set my scenario. But all day I've been remembering, visualising the architecture of my dream-memory and I am sure of two things. Firstly, it was incredibly real (although it is a memory shot from a single angle, as if cinema), and secondly, it was a landscape of my own design. Bits of pieces of it no doubt constructed from real memories, but the overall picture was original. A place I've never been to, and to which I can never return.

I'm just flabbergasted, when I think of it, at the fact that when we dream we are able to imagine with such incredible, complex detail. I could draw a map of the dream and it would - and this is the depressing bit - probably represent the most concerted bit of creative imagining I've performed, awake or asleep, in 2010 so far.

How weird, and how exciting,

once in a blue moon

Last night was notable not just for being the start of a new decade, but also because it offered a rare opportunity to see a blue moon; the rare sighting of a 13th full moon in a calender year. Doesn't happen often, and, while it's no different to any other full moon, it somehow felt like a priviliged, mystical moment to be eyeing it as I walked home from Dan's party at four in the morning.

To all reading who I've not spoken to in person over the last 24 hours - Happy New Year.

meat after moral certainty

Sitting having breakfast in Billie's Cafe in Brighton this morning, Alba, Lyndsey, Dan, and I discussed foods that we can't - or rather, won't, eat. I was a horribly fussy eater as a child, forcing my poor mother to serve me up all sorts of deeply indulgent dinners as a way of encouraging me to eat. Like a lot of kids, the number of foodstuffs I rolled my eyes at was embarrassingly great - eggs, mushrooms, tomatoes etc. The one constant component of my diet was always meat, although I'm proud to say that I have eliminated practically all of my food-phobias in adulthood. There's pretty much nothing I won't eat now, with the exception of grapefruit (I know, weird). I like just about everything, including things I would have had a cheerful tantrum over when I was a kid - brussel sprouts, frog's legs, olives, avocados. I still eat an awful lot of meat though - too much to make ever becoming a vegetarian absolutely unthinkable.

Still - this article, by Neel Mukherjee, is pretty much beyond reproach. He's absolutely right to say that the intellectual and moral argument over the eating of meat is settled, and that vegetarians are on the right side of the debate. That I can admit this and at the same time admit that I'm still not tempted to abandon meat is evidence, I guess, of a certain moral cowardice. But it's tempered by the suspicion that attempting to live one's life by virtue of rational, intellectual moral arguments alone is ultimately fruitless; a never-ending quest. There will be many painful decisions still to be made once animal welfare issues are resolved.

And anyway, I'm much too thin as it is, so I need the sustenance. So there.

Back to the article - it's hardly an in-depth study of the subject, but I like Neel's candour, and his own admission of inadequacy at the end. Worth reading.

"To understand intellectually is one thing, to put it into practice quite another, a whole untraversable territory away. I still haven't been able to stop eating meat. In any restaurant, my eyes alight first, as if by an atavistic pull, on the meat dishes on the menu. In any dinner party I throw, I think of the non-vegetarian dish as central. I view this as a combination of weakness, greed and moral failure. Someone please help."

No need to help me - but I'm roasting a chicken tomorrow, so let me know if you fancy lunch.

taking heart

This week lots of the bloggers I read regularly seem to be preoccupied with relationships, ineractions; how we get on, and why. It would be nice to report that everyone is filing success stories - but original thoughts, confidential whisperings and admissions of failure are just as welcome. Wendy is dredging up the past over at her Wendy House; I don't think she's the only person with a story like this in her past:

We laughed together at his assertion. It was one of the most honest expressions of closeness I’d heard then or since.

After two weeks of dating that involved lots of

• laughter,
• sleeplessness,
• loud singing after dark,
• passionate debating of the relative efficacies of pychological theories,
• burning of incence, nicotene and canabis

He dumped me.

Easing the suprise with the phrase ‘you’re the only girl for me’ and explaining that he preferred boys. With hindsight, this explained the dearth in exchanges of bodily fluids.

20 years later. He’s still passionate, humourful, debating, smoking, prefering boys and I’m still the only girl for him. Only now there is even less excahniging of bodily fluids because the boy’s grown into a christian priest.

Over at his Potentially Eventually Funny blog, our eponymous author has been told he is a good listener. Instead of taking heart, he is coming to terms with some home truths. Honesty compels me to admit that I know exactly the instinct that he describes in this passage, and the truthfulness of it makes me feel ashamed. Still, it's good to know that I'm not the only one (and - disclaimer - it isn't all the time).

Anyway, my point is that I'm not a good listener - whether to females or males - I am simply quite good at finding something with which to agree on about their position and focusing on it. Or, alternatively, I am good at finding a positive in a situation and exploiting it to make it seem that the overall impression that the person I'm speaking to has is that 'everything is, or will be, alright'. I caught myself doing it automatically the other day. A friend (not you) started to tell me about an issue that he/she had in a work relationship the other day. Immediately I discovered that I was scouring his/her testimony for anything to alight upon as a positive or as a signal misinterpreted. I was simply looking for the most simple way of getting from A to B; from concerned / depressed / upset, to at ease / positive / happy. That is not being a good listening: at best it's prostituting my ability to rationalise interpersonal dilemmas in return for friendship, and at worst it's a technique to change the topic of conversation from something boring - other people's problems - to something interesting - my problems.

Perhaps because I've just been reading about the slow train crash which is the Copenhagen summit - a meeting beset by the failure of disperate communities to find a compromise for the greater good, Matt's observation over at his Zen Bullets Blog rings true today. Why Can't We Just Get Along, he asks?

Atoms work together to make cells. Cells work together to form organisms. Organisms work together to form societies, and societies work together to make cultures.

Getting cultures to work together seems to be the tricky one.

Agh. Yep.

leading up to tristram / folk music

Let me preface the next music post, which will concentrate on the best young musician I’ve encountered so far this year – Tristram - with the kind of weary complaint you’ll often hear from people who believe, rightly or wrongly, that they’re old enough to know better. The complaint is this: over my years of gig going (which, actually, I’ve been chronicling over here) I’ve seen enough scenes begin and end to have got pretty good at recognising the tipping point – where the joyful originality of the first wave of performers (who might decide to take as their starting ground the work of, say, The Kinks or the Pretty Things, Black Sabbath or Talking Heads) gives way to the clumsy, plodding fare of less talented followers; the second and third wave of artists who pick up a fashionable sound but wield it clumsily, missing the dynamic that made their immediate forebears effective.

The sound which has dominated indie rock in the UK and the US for the last few years is drawn – however unlikely this might have seemed five years ago - from folk (and, to a lesser extent, country) music; from Karen Dalton and Nick Drake through to The Band and John Fahey. And we’re now at a point where it is positively de rigour for every young band to have a xylophone and a ukulele, and to follow in the footsteps of the likes of Noah and the Whale, Jeffrey Lewis and Bon Iver by creating delicate, mournful and precise folk music.

There are literally dozens of musicians who do this terribly well. Too many. Take William Fitzsimmons, a hugely talented but underappreciated American songwriter whose new album contains a set of deeply personal, overwrought marvels, run through with a sorrowful beauty every bit as rich as Bon Iver’s. Or the likes of Fanfarlo or The Leisure Society, both of whom make lovely, homespun indie-folk which, for all their skill, may not be original enough to set them apart.

Others, meanwhile, do it really badly. There are a number of Brighton-based singer-songwriters, often to be found on ostensibly decent bills, whose crass, myopic takes on Dylan’s troubadour shtick are faintly agonising to listen to – the folk music equivalent of those awful, unimaginative bands – rhyming ‘treason’ with ‘reason’ - that briefly dominated the tail end of Britpop.

And then there are charming bands consisting of mere kids, who play far better than their tender years imply, and so unselfconsciously in the style of, say, Noah and the Whale, because folk music has been de rigour for most of their teenage lives.

Had I been 16 in 2009, I would doubtless be doing the same. But I was 16 in 1993, so I played in a grunge rock band. Three years later and it would have been different.

Scenes offer tremendous appeal to young musicians and music fans; they offer a warm, welcoming safety blanket and a spirit of mutual exchange and discovery. I’ve watched scenes from a distance (shoegaze, grunge), participated half-heartedly or over-enthusiastically in others (riot grrrl, britpop), and found something to love in nearly all of them. But every single one, in the end, turns to shit. The joy of discovering new music consists largely of finding beauty in unexpected places; the moment beauty – even genuine beauty – becomes predictable, it loses some of its shine. That day always comes.

In the meantime, however, the fact that it is possible to walk from one’s flat down to a local venue and discover, completely unexpectedly, someone as warm, wonderful and winning as Tristram, is a very lovely fact indeed. So, next music post: a complete recording of his live set – worth treasuring.

trains and tolerance

I've had bad luck with train companions lately. It's usually the case that, when someone sits in the carriage and cranks their headphones up to brain-damage levels, their thoughtlessness about the noise pollution is matched by a corresponding surliness, bordering on the suggestion of violence. Having suffered just such a companion last night - I boiled in silence - this morning I sat myself down and hoped for a peaceful commute.

At Hove, the noise pollutant boarded. I'd placed my bag, optimistically, on the empty seat beside me but readied myself to move it once I saw how many people were boarding the train. When someone arrived beside me I glanced up to spot a teenager on the verge of tipping over; hurrying to grab my seat and overloaded with a bag, a paper, a mirror, a drink, and several tubes containing glosses, creams and ointments. They tipped onto me as she sat down.

I retrieved them and held them out as the girl flopped into the seat, grinning apologetically. She leant forward, loosed her hair out of her pony tail and shook it, whipping my face as she did with a clutch of curls. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Seated at last, she poured her various belongings onto the fold down table, and began going through her bag, emptying further clutter - crisp wrappers, a mobile telephone - onto her lap. She turned and grinned again, conscious how disorganised she looked. From the bag she retrieved an iPod nano. I felt a familiar sense of dread.

The music, when it came, was, I think, Leona Lewis. It was cripplingly loud. Worthing, I thought. She'll get off at Worthing. She didn't.

What was odd, however, was that haphazard, clumsy, friendly way she carried herself. The big, apologetic smile, her inability to impose order over her spilling belongings, I found strangely endearing. In the end, having been gifted a noise-polluter to whom I wouldn't have felt self-conscious about asking to turn down the volume - I felt too fond of her to do so. Which is not to say that her music didn't annoy the hell out of me. It only goes to show I'm too tolerant.

szimpka kert, budapest

Rather than soak an experience in and then think about it, analyse it, write about it later, I'm going to have a go at transcribing my thoughts about the latest chapter in my Budapest adventure as I experience it, so consequently I'm crouched over my iPhone while I should be drinking in my surroundings. On the other hand, I am sitting in the pitch black.

A couple of people have mentioned Budapest's ruin pubs to me since I arrived, but it took my friend Laura recommending Szimpla Kert to me to get me in the door of one of them. The ruin pubs are essentially ad-hoc bars created in the space of one of the city's many ruined buildings. In Szimpla's case, it is housed inside a crumbling mansion, a haphazard sequence of rooms, some without proper ceilings, and a huge courtyard in the centre of District VII, the pock-marked, culturally rich part of the city that proved to be first a haven and then a prison for the Jews of Hungary during the thirties and forties.

Everything inside the pub is delapidated and decaying, but the extent to which the space, and the objects within it, have been repurposed is absolutely staggering. Each room has it's own character and is as cosy as the last, even if some are filled with broken chairs, upturned bathtubs and old televisions. The space I'm sat in the at the moment contains 13 of the latter, suspended from the ceiling, each showing a gradually evolving psychedelic image. Apart from the TV's, there is no lighting. So until one's eyes adjust, one is basically sitting in the dark. The room opposite, by way of contrast, is just a few seats and a wall, upon which films are projected. To my left, dimly visible through the archway, a room with ivy snaking across the mesh roof.I've really never been anywhere quite like this before - it is the comfiest, richest, most dramatic and at the same time most basic pub I've ever frequented.

It's absolutely wonderful, in short.