Butterflies

Saw lovely, blue butterflies in flight today. Don't think I've ever seen blue ones before, not like these anyway — small triangles of bright, summer-sky blue — like little chips of sky — fluttering above long, green grass at the back of a churchyard. And, for a change today, the sky was almost the exact same colour. Yesterday's hailstones almost don't make sense. So, for the first time in weeks, I'm just about to take my bike out and hope that if the clouds darken I can cycle faster than them.
Thanks for all your comments...It's great knowing people are still reading and really interesting seeing where you are all from.
A

...like bookends

I was thinking of my old bookcase today — a wood-worm-riddled, junk-shop find that I got from outside a shop up near Leeds just after my last year at college. Somehow I'd managed to hang on to it through countless moves over the years. Until the year before last, when all my belongings in storage were sold-off without notifying me, when I could no longer pay the bill and didn't have an address for them to get in touch to let me know: everything from diaries to cutlery to washing machine to a triangular piece of the Berlin Wall I'd hammered off myself, to every photograph I'd ever had, to that lovely, dark-wood bookcase, went.

It was wider than most bookcases, mahoghany or a dirty oak I never knew how to tell, with four shelves — a larger one at the bottom for dictionaries and atlases and all my old Law textbooks, the three others bowed under the weight of an ever-changing hoard of paperbacks that I loved taking out at random, sometimes just for five-minute reads one after the other, tuning into the sound of all those distinct voices while pasta boiled or toast burned, unconciously getting the rhythm of the voices in my head until they were familiar, before snapping them closed, blowing the dust off another and spending time in other company and another world. A wooden pelmet, with three carved spirals along it, grey with clogged dust, came a few inches down over the top shelf and one of the front legs was shorter than the other requiring a wad of paper wedged in to stop the wobble, and it smelt of the dark oil I occassionally used to clean it and the damp Woods from where it once must have come.

In January every year, as close to the New Year as I remembered to do it, I used to clear all the books from the top shelf, wipe it down, and only fill it again with any book I'd read from that date on. It was very satisying from month to month watching the top shelf fill up again, as much as the ones beneath it, almost like watching a child grow; and seeing it so empty at the beginning of the year was always a good incentive to get to bed early to crack the spine of a new book, and form a good habit for the rest of the year.

I thought of that today, because I just did it here on the unwonky Ikea bookcase I bought as a replacement last year. So far there are only six books on it, not good for April. But hopefully passing it every day on my way out the door will shame me into reading more.
Hopefully, in the not too far distant future, there will be space on it for another one I have written myself.

Black swans and cravings

I saw a pair of black swans yesterday. I had no idea swans could even be black - let alone seen one before. They were smaller than white swans, and completely black, with long red beaks. These two looked like they were preparing to build a nest as well, in underneath a curtain of long, green tassells of weeping willow down at the edge of a pond. One of them shovelling up bits of reed and dried leaves and grass with their bright red beaks, the other shaking it all out into loose piles.

Apparently it's a phrase too, a noun: 'a black swan'. Didn't know that either.

One week until Lent is over and I can eat chocolate biscuits again. It's all I can think about recently.

Endings

I've finally crashed through a barrier. I finished reading the endings of several books I've had on the go for what seems like months, and it's a fantastic feeling to have finally done it. It was almost a psychological block. For some reason, I just wasn't able to finish them. But in the last few days without even thinking about it I found myself opening them at the bookmark, curling up somewhere and, one after the other, reading on until the last page. Pure joy.

One of them was the 'The Snow Geese' by William Fiennes, which is a book I had with me in one of my bags in the car all that time. Needless to say I wasn't in a state of mind to read much then, but I haven't been able to finish it since either, and I don't know why. I loved it from the start, for all sorts of reasons, one of them being the close-up-ness of the writing, he doesn't pan out much, he has the lens right up there, close to whatever he is describing. So if he writes about a woman in a long red coat wearing a black velvet cloche hat you see her standing there - very visual, you can 'see' everything he writes about as he travels halfway across the world following migrating geese to their nesting places and his own internal compass leading him back home. It wouldn't be for everyone, it's a very slow, quiet, but evocative, beautiful, beautiful book. Maybe it was because I had it in the car with me that finishing that one felt so momentous; it felt like I was finishing more than just the book, like I was finally drawing a line under things.

But the book I finished a couple of days ago: 'Eat Pray Love' (which curiously is also a travel book, of a sort) - and which definitely wasn't one of my favourites, her voice began to grate and it dragged on in places — is the one I keep thinking about. I woke up thinking about it this morning. Always just one thing she said at the end of the book about all the changes she has gone through by the book's end, how much she has grown as a person. And she said something which has stayed with me...About her growing as a person, she used the analogy of an acorn becoming an oak tree, and says the way she has come to see it there isn't just one force at work (the acorn pushing to become an oak tree) but two (also the oak tree being there already somewhere willing the acorn on to become the oaktree it already is - on some plane). She says, what if it's not just her younger, weaker self pushing on to become the stronger one she ended up as, but what if the woman she was always going to grow into was there already (somewhere) drawing her on to become her — The older you already there somewhere waiting for the younger you to push towards it. I may have got that idea a bit muddled - I've read a few other books in between — but it was something like that. And for some reason it felt like a powerful idea that I hadn't heard expressed like that before; and for some reason it stayed with me. So I thought I'd put it here. Because I woke up thinking of it again this morning: of the person you will finally become, being there already drawing you to become it. It's a strange idea to get your head around, but like words, what we imagine can be very powerful - and it's fun closing your eyes and imagining who that person you end up being might be — who you'd want them to be! And once you have an image of them in your mind to then push yourself to become that person that you end up being ('knowing' that they are there somewhere already drawing you to become them anyway) - walking towards them thought by thought, action by action, until you are the person you were always meant to be. Sorry...way too heavy for a blog. Rain is blowing across the windows here again.

One fire and a funeral

I drove up to Camden market this morning to see what damage last weekend's fire had caused. I'd heard about it on the news at the time but at that stage they weren't sure how much damage had been done. Since then I've been out of London mostly, and the only news I saw was Sky news one time, with one very solemn report from India saying, 'The famous Camden Market in London has been reduced to ashes.' So I thought I'd better go up and have a look for myself.

I was expecting the whole place to be charcoal, all those places I used to go to when I was living in my car to be gone — but it's nothing like that. The Hawley Arms pub is destroyed, and there's half a row of boarded-up shops, and some top windows in the flats above blown in, and all of the stalls down the side, on the pub side of the canal, are gone. But it must have been very contained. The rest of the market, and the rest of Camden looks pretty much as it always has done, as buzzy and grubby and raunchy and edgy as it ever was when I was sleeping in the car and used to go down there to the Stables market across the way at the end of days I could afford to, for the cartons of hot chinese food being sold off cheaply for a pound. If anything, the soot and smoke stains and burnt-out shops, and the feint, lingering smell of woodsmoke mixed into more recent smoke from joss sticks and hashish layered with the stench of rancid canal water and new leather from the tiny squeeezed-together S&M shops and car fumes and sweat and cheap, fried street food, just add to the atmosphere.

If the wind had been in the other direction that night though, it would have been a very different story...really would have been hell down there. It would have taken something that random. As it is with lives.

I went to Andrew's dad's funeral on Wednesday, very sad.

The buds are opening on the trees again. Today, for the first time this year I saw branches flecked with pale pink blossom.

DS

An hour ago a friend of mine's father died; his name was Douglas, he was a good man. Maybe while you're passing this way you'll say a prayer for him.
x

Life seams...

I am sitting here trying to catch up with emails. Lots of them in the last few days are from readers in Asia.. I had no idea my story would end up in an article over there and be read by a 16-year old student in Singapore or a man in Pakistan...how bizarre is that! But over the last few days emails have been coming in from people who have read the article or read my book all those thousands of miles away, telling me how, although they might have very different lives, they have been able to relate to my story in some way.

I have spent the last hour dipping in and out of some of their blogs, reading about their lives and cultures, being reminded that people are essentially the same wherever they come from, the same fears the same dreams...
Some of their blogs have pictures, or some are so vividly written that I almost feel I have swapped worlds. Then I look up from the virtual world of my computer screen and back out through my side window, here in my real world, out at the London skyline — from this distance all the scaled-down, matchbox-sized landmarks stretching across from the towers and cranes of Canary Wharf and the dome of St Paul's along to the long misshapen pole of the Post Office Tower, and there, slowly turning through the trees, the big, bright bangle of the London Eye poking up from somewhere down on the Thames. I look back to the computer, at Shing Yi and her friends at their reunion, in a restaurant somewhere in Singapore, smiling out at me from the screen and I can't help smiling back at how this world wide web we are all now in is making the world so tiny...at the great possibilities of that...at how it was a blog and the people from around the world that came to read and give me encouragement on it every day, that literally saved my life in the end.

As I wrote that I just remembered something about Asia, some connection to when I was in the car. While I was sleeping across the front seats of the car in the laneway all those months, at one point, I can't remember exactly when, but at almost the coldest bit of it I seem to remember, there was an earthquake in the Philippines, catastrophic destruction; every morning I'd turn the key in the ignition to listen for a few minutes on the car radio to news of the mud slide disaster — to how whole villages had been wiped out, and generations of families gone overnight. Morning after morning there would be reports of how many more homeless people there were now in these villages in the Philippines each day. The Phillipines had always seemed a milllion miles away for me before, tiny squiggles on a map, just a name; but during those weeks I felt such a connection to them somehow. And as the traumatised voices of survivors filled the car each morning, or accounts of them given, telling how they had not only lost their homes and all they had, but had lost their people too: mothers, husbands, children, friends, grandparents, lovers, all gone in an instant, it made me realise how lucky I was in a way. I know that sounds bizarre: I was homeless, on my own, had broken down, and was living in my car and I thought my own loss seemed unending, but it made me realise that I didn't have to deal with the enormity of their loss all at the same time, not only were they homeless and had their dreams wiped out, but some of them were having to deal with the grief of losing all their loved ones at the same time. It was near the end of my time living in the car and I had almost shut down completely, but somehow something far worse that was happening over in the Philippines got me thinking again, and got me feeling something other than my own pain.

I used to sit there in the car under the trees those mornings shivering, eating whatever I had left over from the night before for breakfast, before I drove off to the hospital to have a hot shower in their basement, and whenever I thought I couldn't manage for another day or another moment I would think of all those people who had had their lives blown apart and say to myself 'At least you have a car to sleep in, Anya, they don't even have that.' So what many of you have said in emails about my story making you see your own problems in more perspective, I can understand. I don't think anyone's problems are really bigger or smaller than others', but I know that feeling. I know it because waking up to news about the disaster in the Phillipines all those mornings is what got me through some days too. It taught me that there is always something better, but even when you think things can't get worse, there is always, always something worse happening somewhere. What was happening all those thousands of miles away in the Philippines was much worse than how I had ended up, living in my car...at least I had a car to sleep in, and access to a blog to tell whoever might stumble across it one day about my story. I never realised that a journalist from the New York Times would be the one to stumble across it — and from that hundreds of people would read my blog and that there would be a book and then this, or that one day I would be out of the car, and that again the Philippines would come into my story. It did yesterday, with a man leaving a message here on my blog saying simply 'I am from the Philipines, thank you for writing your story.' I'll probably never know, but maybe he was someone whose life was torn apart by that disaster that time, one of the ones I listened to in the sleeping bag laying in the car...the ones whose voices came into the car those mornings to show me that I was still a whole lot luckier than some. Maybe he was part of the invisible weft of my life, as others through connecting with this blog or my book have become, and I part of theirs. I'm not quite sure what I'm trying to say here, it's just that sometimes you think you start to see the seams of life — meanings and purposes behind things, and how everything is connected. It comes, it goes — and I don't think anyone ever does ever quite see them, but I hope I never give up believing that they are there: that somehow things are connected and for a purpose and that there is some design in all this, some method in what sometimes just seems like madness.

Book in Singapore

I have been told that in Singapore you might find my book in MPH, Borders
or Kinokuniya stores?

If not, and from anywhere else, you can order it from Amazon by clicking on the link over at the side of the blog (the one under the pink book cover.)
Hope that helps...Let me know if it turns up anywhere strange though!

Goldfinches

The birds I saw were goldfinches - just been sent pictures. If I figure a way I might put them up. Very cute.

Off to a painting class...yet again in rain.

Antidote to grey

Woke up to bleak, grey, drizzly skies again today. Everything, even the grass and, in the mist that hung over everything, the trees, looked grey today. I stood at the kitchen window, in the new, pink bathrobe I got for Christmas, eating cereal, staring out at what could have been a scene straight from an old grainy, Sunday-afternoon black-and-white. Definitely a day for thinking about going straight back to bed... But for a while I stood there, chewing mindlessly, watching a pair of magpies hopping about next-door's lawn. Then just as my eyes adjusted to all the grey, two tiny, colourful little birds flew through the drizzle onto a birdtable in the garden at the other side. I don't know what they were, but seeing them there among all that grey made me smile. They were soft, minky-brown little things, with flashes of yellow on their breasts and bright red faces. Tiny like tits, but not tits...Beautiful splashes of colour brightening up the monochrome. There was something quite clownish about them. Their faces looked like they had just been dipped in bright red paint...And, on a morning like this morning, just before they flew off again skimming the hedges, it was easy to think they might have been designed just to bring a smile on the greyest of mornings.
It worked for me this morning...don't know what they were, but must look out for them more often.