Sorry the site went down for so long over christmas. The downside to hosting my site on free university webspace is that it is subject to the whims and vagaries of sysadmin who go on two week holidays.There were so many things I could have written about, and each time I checked to see if the site was up my idea evaporated in a puff of dissapointment. But here we are now, in the ever-changing present, and I am not really writing about much of anything at all.

Consistency is comforting, however, and not saying much of anything blends in with our very quiet holiday, during which we didn’t go out much or do anything exciting. At first I felt twinges and prickles of guilt. We’re young and hip, dammit! We should be shaking our booties in nightclubs and having cocktail parties in our livingroom and having the most fun possible in every single moment. But then I relaxed and picked up a paperback and laid on the couch and melted away into the world of poets and paris. (Enid Starkie’s biography of Baudlaire. Very highly reccomended, but there is no picture of the cover on Amazon which caused some confusion as to whether I should break the continuity of my books section over there on the right.)

Of course, even through our holiday of non-events, there were events that happened. Happenings sloshing over from other people’s lives into the calm pool of our own. Sisters fighting with each other, friends going travelling, other friends coming to visit us on their travels. A dress-up day at work means I decide to go buy a hot pink feather boa. A friend from tom’s university days comes to visit and now we are committed to visiting Glasgow in the not-too-distant future. It’s actually quite difficult to do nothing. The tides of time have a forceful current.

The still and misty grey days spent on the couch and sitting at the kitchen table looking out onto the street have been creatively blank, but seeds have been dropping into my mind like silent parachutes. While I wait for them to germinate, I wash the saucepans and hang up the laundry and wipe the breadcrumbs up from the counter. In the long, dark evenings of rest and reading, my mind sinks into an armchair and the stillness expands with a deep sigh of satisfaction.

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