who only by moving can balance

... because I have just made P read it, and then we stayed up til 1am talking about it, and I haven't talked about it here yet because Too Many Feelings, which I will now attempt to sketch.

(Spoilers within!)

( Read more... )

It's a facsimile copy of Nairn's London, bought from the Graun bookshop because of course, and the blurb is

'A record of what has moved me between Uxbridge and Dagenham', Nairn's London is an idiosyncratic and intensely subjective meditation on a city and its buildings. Including railway stations, synagogues, abandoned gasworks, dock cranes, suburban gardens, East End markets, Hawksmoor churches, a Gothic cinema and twenty-seven different pubs, it is a portrait of the soul of a place, from a writer of genius.

The Graun review features the line It is a wonder in itself. Compact – 280 pages with index – and yet enormous in scope, it is a detailed vision of a city, and what a city should be like, that has never been bettered.

They've met me three times.

1. I got home to find a Terrifying Letter From The DWP... letting me know that my DLA's been autorenewed through to 2016 without me needing to do anything about it. :-)

2. I am now down to two half-written poems in the stack - one's a villanelle and will be hard; one might grow up to be a sonnet but is probably going to just be my usual style of thing.

3. Domestic bliss: doing the washing up while P curled up on the sofa with my complete works of Donaghy (he of Machines and Midriver), dipping in and out and reading me bits.

4. Swedennn. Snow and sunsets and AMINALS and RIDICULOUS FOOD (the ridiculous round thing with the whole in the middle, of which I have eaten approx my own bodyweight with butter and cloudberry jam over the past few days; ditto pepparkakor; ditto ajvar; I am a predictable human with predictable tastes) and exciting new food! Semla were not a thing I had previously consumed. (hahahahaha yes I win "simnel" is indeed finest wheat flour, semolina, which means semla is too, surprise)

5. Poking around etymonline.com after triangulating through all our mutual language; the -lic of garlic is in fact the same word as leek, and the Swedish for onion and (with modifiers) misc allium, and the German for misc allium. (Spem in allium, etc etc.) We were pleased.

6. Being helpful at my mother. :-) I mean, it is deeply weird to be grown-up enough to be helpful when it comes to casting an eye over CVs etc, but pleasant! Also she e-mailed me about pirates (and did not give me any updates on the rugby).

7. ... Elementary, though, okay. ELEMENTARY. SHOW.

8. Useful work done! Retweaked abstract (hopefully I'll be able to submit it tomorrow) for baby's first talk; did a quick blitz on an area I wasn't terribly clear on the specifics of and needed to be, wrote myself a summary, and have some questions for discussion with my supervisor; did an extremely sketchy first pass on the thesis outline I'm required to submit for my 21-month assessment, and slightly to my astonishment realised that it... continues to approximately make sense?

9. Mush. (SUCH TEENAGE.)

10. I am really really enjoying hair-adornment in the shape of tulmas courtesy of khalinche - they're beaded, and I reckon they're kind of like blue roses and P reckons they're kind of like a peacock and either way they make managing my hair marginally easier when it's hanging down in a braid, and are very very pleasing when I manage to arrange them either side of a bun. Sensory misc. Yes. :-)

-- is partly because I'm pulling fairly long days for the next fortnight (finishing up chemistry this week for five days of machine time next week; teaching Tuesday mornings and throughout Fridays), partly because I'm reading a pile of books, partly because of guiltknitting (nearly done!), partly because I spent this weekend being utterly teenaged with facesfriend (and also eating and sleeping a lot, hurrah), and partly because I will be spending next weekend with P in Stockholm, where we will probably read a lot of poetry and watch a lot of Elementary and spend less time out of the house than we ~ort~. Much affection to you all and apologies for commenting less than I'd like. <3

I am curled up on a sofa in a bay window overlooking the Ouse, on which lights are reflecting, listening to P remind himself how pianos work. His parents are through in the kitchen putting together dinner (I helped with food last night). We bimbled briefly through town this morning - along a stretch of the wall around the minster, via a cafe that served us pistachio-rose-cardamom cake - and I spent much of the afternoon napping while he caught up on marking at his desk. Over breakfast I managed to actually help with a couple of Araucaria clues - P's mother had been saving the crossword for the next time he was around. This is proper lovely.

On Friday, I didn't make it out of bed until about noon, then threw myself through the shower and such as P was due to arrive. I then flumped about pretty uselessly until he prodded me out of the door and onto a train and basically dealt with getting me to the picnic that was M&C's joint stag/hen do. We stayed until 6ish, and I think I then maybe napped? But we collectively got some work done, ate another meal, and I introduced P to some of my current favourite TV and also some poetry I hadn't waved at him before.

Saturday he again took responsibility for getting us out of bed and out of the house for breakfast and in enough time that I could do the necessaries at work, we spent a bit more time than intended hanging around at the V&A, and then wedding. He & Nik took charge of making sure I made it from the wedding venue to the reception; after an hour or so at the reception I made it home, where rysmiel provided incentive to make there be dinner and spend the evening being vaguely human and useful.

Sunday rysmiel left early for their next thing, P & I woke up late (around noon), then I think P took charge of making sure we ate and I mostly spent the afternoon/evening asleep because I was wobbly as all get-out, to the extent that I stayed in bed rather than going to the Prom I wanted to (P went to the thing himself, I stayed horizontal and slept some more until I got well enough that I could get the breadmaker going for ill-advised late-night baking, and then I rearranged the kitchen some in ways I didn't really think through at all that resulted in me having to do a controlled fall in the pantry because I'd lost the ability to stand again).

Monday, again, P took responsibility for getting us out of bed at 11amish, phoning in a lunch booking and route-planning to get us to & from the place, and then for getting us out the door in time for the Prom (to which we did both make it). Also for organising dinner.

Today he left at around 8.15am. It is now 2, and so far I have managed to sleep through the fortnightly lab meeting I'm supposed to e-mail reminders about for the second time running, brush my teeth, and eat yesterday's leftover curry. Also check my e-mail. Smallcousins are having a summer party I really want to go to, but the idea of finding my way to Liverpool Street and then managing a train is daunting enough that I have not yet actually managed to get out of bed properly or shower or anything.

This is kind of why I need a carer. :-/

On Friday evening we sat on a fifth-floor balcony under darkening skies with cheese and bread and fig jam and alcohol. I dangled my legs through the railings and admired the railings across the way. We talked and talked and talked some more. I gave him the selected works of Neruda I'd picked up in the branch of Foyles at St Pancras on my way over; I note with sadness that it shuts at the end of the month. (Still in England, barely outside London, the train passed a field of red double-decker buses that had been put out to pasture.)

On Saturday we ate at an intriguing vegetarian restaurant recommended by a friend (welcome to identify yourself in comments, just wasn't sure whether you'd be okay w/ naming <3) who was very kind about texting back & forth enthusiastically over the course of the morning. The afternoon we spent at the Louvre, where I was very fond of dragons and the cuticles/lines on a Nisus&Euryalis; and there was a tiny gallery of watches about which I was very excited because there was actually a set-up I'd never seen before -- watches with inbuilt sundials + compasses, presumably so that when they wound down/went too badly out you could establish the time in order to correct them! (Really, really excited - I've visited enough horology galleries to be genuinely surprised to come across styles of timepiece I haven't met before.) Said gallery also featured a very nice implementation of the hourglasses-displaying-subdivisions thing -- instead of a rack of 3-4 hourglasses to be turned simultaneously, it was a column of glass blobs that (one infers) emptied sequentially on the quarter hour. AND there was a gallery of scientific instruments and tiny portable armillary spheres, which always make me happy.

In addition there's currently a formal-gardens competition going on -- Notre Dame and a few other associated places seem to have decided on a theme of "The Illusion", by which they mean they've dumped a bunch of 5' tall mirrors in flowerbeds, which is fascinating if slightly creepy.

AND in the EVENING, after a route home via the confusingly-named Luxembourg park that to its credit contained an excellent brass band, we had EIERSCHWAMMERL. I was staggeringly excited to find them at the shop round the corner from P's, because they are very difficult to get hold of in any appropriate form at any appropriate price in the UK, but I got to do all the appropriate things with respect to frying them in butter with garlic and then drowning them in parsley, and lo it was good :-) (At same said stall I was delighted to find that at least in some parts of France the thing I would call Zwetschke is a questche! Not sure which way the etymology goes but will have a go at hunting it down.)

And then TODAY I slept a lot and then feasted well for breakfast (both mornings P popped to the bakery around the corner and returned with a bag of fresh croissant & pain au chocolat while I murbled around still being asleep in bed; it was great) and eventually we left the house; we walked past bookshops & coffee shops & through parks & the Musee d'Armee (nice dome!) & paused to eat fresh bread & fig jam & Selles-sur-Cher, which is my favourite goat cheese and much more readily available in France than in the UK; and ended up at the Musee d'Orsay, where I fell in love with the giant clock faces as architectural features on the top floor and also suddenly got the point of art galleries in front of le jardin de Monet, les iris -- or at least, I suddenly understood why someone might want to just sit and stare at a painting for hours. Additionally: lots of very nice stuff in the Art Nouveau exhibits, and once we got chucked out we hung around on the bank of the Seine to see the Tour de France go past -- P sort of felt he ought to, and so did I, as I'd ignored it in both Cambridge and London and it was right there and due to go by pretty much as the museum was closing...

... and that, having skipped over a fair amount of the intervening raspberry-and-pistachio-ice-cream, was that; I waved at the Centre Pompidou, managed through cunning overscheduling to fail to make it to Etat Libre d'Orange's flagship shop, for which my wallet no doubt thanks me, exclaimed with delight over a very great deal of architecture and a large number of flowerbeds, was delighted to come face-to-face with ponies, swore a lot about how much I hate people, was very glad I'd taken the wheelchair with me, and ate cherries. I continue impressed by how thoroughly pleasant it is to travel by Eurostar with chair - flat rate gets you business lounge & business premier & actually genuinely tasty food on board, so! I was happy and will do the thing again in the future.

Yes. Good weekend. No work, lots of reading of books, good company. Good.

1. TOL & TOG were just round the corner from home tonight for a show, so via Shenanigans involving me forgetting that Hammersmith isn't actually a single station they stood around in the sun with me for a bit before they vanished in to show (which twitter suggests was as good as I'd expect from Penn & Teller) and I got hugs and sunshine and stern looks about eating enough and bullshit about science and a brief discussion about the point of painting, and having left the lab it was fairly easy to pick up dinner on the way back in. (And on the way out I stopped off at one of my ridiculous corner shops and acquired stacks and stacks of emergency chocolate.) (And while on the topic of polymer chemistry and feeling vaguely contrite about the extent to which these people look after me, sebastienne talked sense at me and I continue to feel better.)

2. We are tonight providing accommodation, as we occasionally do, for waifs & strays with appointments at Charing Cross Gender Identity Clinic. Because, fundamentally, we're a trans-positive household a fifteen-minute walk from same, most of which involves walking through a rather nice cemetery, and consequently this is a concrete thing we can do that is helpful.

3. My supervisor appears to continue genuinely pleased with my labwork: we're trying a different introduction system with the mass spec this time around and the ion beam is stable and as of 11.30pm, every single data point from the past two days is usable (where with the introduction system I had been using, I was getting maaaaybe 50% usable data). Or, to put it another way, my chemistry has been fine and my tuning the machine up has been fine (she's popped in to check a couple of times while I was elsewhere, which I know about because she's told me after the fact that she had a play around and didn't change anything because it was spot on) (though I should really have retuned before putting tonight's overnight run on but if I had I'd've ended up locked into the building and that is no-one's idea of fun, and in any case the machine is pretty much rock-solid -- I've lost a tiny bit of sensitivity but nothing that should be a problem, and I'll tweak it back up when I get in tomorrow), it's just the ways in which these are fundamentally finicky beasts that are not actually under my control. Also, supervisor tends to rise early, so me leaving work at midnight means that when she gets in at 7am she can swing by the basement, have a quick poke, and make sure everything's where it should be, and set another thing going if necessary; and then by the time I rock up around 10am it's ready for me to have a poke again.

( lots! )

P told me he'd never seen me looking as comfortable and happy and relaxed as the evening I spent lying on a beanbag in a living room, with my polymer around me and fed.

He also pointed out that I can now walk through ticket barriers at tube stations without breaking stride as I swipe my Oyster.

---

There's something very soothing, very calming, about sitting on a Piccadilly line train, stationary in the dark, above ground, with the rain on the roof and windows, as the District line tumbles by above.

---

Back when I first started seeing this counsellor, I talked about how I felt I was repotting myself, giving myself more soil and more water and more space.

This evening, we talked about my grandmother's garden: about the sacred rockery, planted to remind her of the Alps; about the camellias she grew from cuttings; about the parsley and the redcurrants and the strawberry patch. About her garden as her sanctuary and as nourishment and as roots and as legacy, and about her garden as changing and organic and growing.

And we talked about it as something - an idea, a seed - that I can carry with me.

I think perhaps that I am now large enough, strong enough, that I can be planted out.

... I'm sorry this is a thing I'm genuinely bad at, so what I am ACTUALLY going to propose we do is play the "which animal would you cross with a dragon and why?" game.

HERE ARE MY CURRENT FAVOURITE ANSWERS:

• Dragon crossed with a weevil. Because it's a tiny, adorable, pocket-sized lighter.
  
• Dragon crossed with a giraffe. Because neck. And patterns.
  
• Dragon crossed with a squid. Because squid are adorable, okay, and also TENTADRAGON and also how would the motion and fire-breathing even work, I don't know but I want to find out.
  
• Dragon crossed with star-nosed mole. It was the tentacles that made me think of it; sorry. Prehensile flames? :D
  
• Dragon crossed with striped pyjama squid.

YOUR TURN.

ETA: here are a bunch of drawings of animals crossed with a hyena.