sticky brain

My brain feels sticky, unfathomable, messy and rough at the edges. I've been staying up late, celebrating birthdays and summer and working hard, burning the candle at both ends. Swimming in the cold, frisky waves every single day. Salty skin. It's the early evening, the dusk is here, the in between soft time. One child sleeping, the other transfixed with French Moomins. I am debating on another late night with a good film and TV dinner with my loved one or a sandwich and an early night with something trashy to send me to sleep instead of ploughing through another psychogeography book. I am thinking about bodies, sewing, land art, skin, spinal cord accidents and mapping ourselves with time, shaping the path, tracing the journey, relaying the lines of our story.

a holiday boat

We're at home not working, and being. Unplanning days with attitude - drifting, moving, pottering and hanging out together- we're on the beach, mussels and chips with friends, dancing, laping up two types of miso soup ( one dark like treacle), we're narrowly missing rain storms whose drops catch our ankles as we scoot indoors. We're teething, screaming, washing, tidying and thinking that two kids are good but quite hard work. Today we took a bath with me and my girls in the tub together, bubbles, giggling and pink limbs in splashing water. I wrote paragraphs, sketchy and rough about sewing and bodies, made Tunisian chickpea soup with a squeeze of lemon, ate feta cheese with baguette. We drank coffee and white wine and tea and munched fleshy dripping flat peaches and wished for tiny sweet shortbread biscuits. We got cross, got happy, laughed, moaned and sighed with happiness. We finished the evening on our sofa which has transformed into a bed; a holiday boat on which we are all sailing.

swimming in the sea

The wind blows us onto the beach, propelling forward limbs, whipping clothes and towels against sunburnt skin. We undress hurriedly, ever watchful of the darkening sky- half blue, half black. As we put on yesterdays damp swimming costumes sand storms sting our pale naked legs. In the distance rain paints grey stripes on postcard beaches, it is coming. The sea is covered in tiny choppy waves, each blue triangle tipped with whitish foam. It is rough, choppy, the water milky emerald green and dark dangerous blue. We run in- through the chill and the sudden cold and suddenly we are laughing and swimming caught in the exhilaration of the wind and the sun and the water- intoxicated by nature.

space time

Baby is asleep, I've been writing - filling pages with black scratching squiggles, ploughing into the virtual paper of the screen. Space and time are on my side- everyone will be here on Thursday night. Two more empty days to fill with a thousand dreams and thoughts and sentences: words that have started to flow. This morning was hard, jagged and stammered as the writing started, stopped and blustered with the discomfort of new shoes. Off to bed now to wake up later, wish that it was morning now, but can't write all night with a baby.

green

What I love most is the green. The hue of the visible spectrum lying between yellow and blue. I could drown in the emerauld sea of the leaves of the trees. Sea green, sage green, bottle green, chrome green, pea green, yellow green, dark green ,light green, jade green, chartreuse, olive-green, Paris green, teal. The green of the trees and the grass. The green of the pleasant land. After several hours inside the forest I feel decidedly green. The green, verdant, raw, grudging, gullible common isle. La Grande Bretagne, my green island.  

back back back

Back to the shape of the seashore which curves like a cat's whisker in the sand. We are home and sit on a concrete step and look at the sea, smelling the month of August. The appartement is empty and eerily clean and I am fuzzy from airport security and too much family. We have spent three weeks sleeping in other bird's nests, floors, sofa beds, guest rooms and spare spaces; bed-hopping, swapping, ducking and diving and not quite sleeping enough. For now we are divided, two at home, one in green, another in the city. Next week we will be reunited. I must, will, have to write this week. I shall catch every moment of my baby's slumber and scratch black onto the white of the screen. Illuminate my thoughts. Structure. Work. Do.