![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ashlymeHello DW. I've missed you. I suppose it's high time I started writing here again. I gave up for a while due to ropy mental health and the feeling I'd not got much life to write about anymore. Working on fixing that.
I'm on Universal Credit now - I had started a seasonal retail job at the start of December, but they gave the shove after a five-hour shift without even taking my bank details or a filled-in tax form, then I found out I wasn't eligible for Jobseekers Allowance. Six weeks without benefits... I was lucky that my parents had given me some money earlier in the year. I cursed the business who took me on more than the people at the jobcentre. Anyway, that's the state of play now. I think I've got used to being pretty much unemployable.
I've been spending more time at my parents' in Catney lately: the greenness and quiet have done me more good than the city. Mid-January I was walking back from the pub in the village. There's a cricket club in a blind curve of road about five minutes from the house. And there was a female buzzard caught between its wire fence and the hedge. I was inches away from her: this impression of a yard's width wingspan, blurred coffee-coloured feathers, impatience, rage. I stepped a bit closer, wondering how to help free her without either of us coming to harm, when she just burst out of the hedge. The most credit I can take is that maybe I startled her enough to break free. She didn't go far; went to perch on some netting over the pitch. There was something magnificent in the way she hunched over watching the ground; if she reminded me of anything, it was Sidney Paget's drawings of Holmes. I could have watched her for hours but cars were bombing past and there are no pavements at all on that part of the walk; I've seen her from my bedroom window since then. I wrote in my notebook:
Fallen in love with the music of Benjamin Clementine recently; he might be one of of the most extraordinary performers England has produced in a very long time. I can hear shades of Anohni and Nina Simone in his voice, and there's something of early Hammill/VDGG in the keyboards on his second album.
Some good books read over the last few weeks: Richard Mabey's look at the history of botany The Cabaret of Plants; Where Poppies Blow by John Lewis-Stempel, a sometimes grim, often funny study of the Great War, the British soldier and his relationship with nature; Dave McKean's graphic novel Black Dog: The Dreams of Paul Nash. Currenly reading E. F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia novels, which are wonderfully waspish.
I'm finding my way back into writing again (slowly). There's an article on Cailtin R. Kiernan that I've been putting on for ages that I'm finally making inroads on. And some new stories. The Somme Beauty, based on a nightmare I had a few years ago about a butterfly that thrived in the trenches and hospitals of WWI; and Waiting For The Moon, which might be part of a little cycle of tales about a freelance arts journalist coming up against the numinous in modern-day England. Wish me luck!
I'm on Universal Credit now - I had started a seasonal retail job at the start of December, but they gave the shove after a five-hour shift without even taking my bank details or a filled-in tax form, then I found out I wasn't eligible for Jobseekers Allowance. Six weeks without benefits... I was lucky that my parents had given me some money earlier in the year. I cursed the business who took me on more than the people at the jobcentre. Anyway, that's the state of play now. I think I've got used to being pretty much unemployable.
I've been spending more time at my parents' in Catney lately: the greenness and quiet have done me more good than the city. Mid-January I was walking back from the pub in the village. There's a cricket club in a blind curve of road about five minutes from the house. And there was a female buzzard caught between its wire fence and the hedge. I was inches away from her: this impression of a yard's width wingspan, blurred coffee-coloured feathers, impatience, rage. I stepped a bit closer, wondering how to help free her without either of us coming to harm, when she just burst out of the hedge. The most credit I can take is that maybe I startled her enough to break free. She didn't go far; went to perch on some netting over the pitch. There was something magnificent in the way she hunched over watching the ground; if she reminded me of anything, it was Sidney Paget's drawings of Holmes. I could have watched her for hours but cars were bombing past and there are no pavements at all on that part of the walk; I've seen her from my bedroom window since then. I wrote in my notebook:
Fallen in love with the music of Benjamin Clementine recently; he might be one of of the most extraordinary performers England has produced in a very long time. I can hear shades of Anohni and Nina Simone in his voice, and there's something of early Hammill/VDGG in the keyboards on his second album.
Some good books read over the last few weeks: Richard Mabey's look at the history of botany The Cabaret of Plants; Where Poppies Blow by John Lewis-Stempel, a sometimes grim, often funny study of the Great War, the British soldier and his relationship with nature; Dave McKean's graphic novel Black Dog: The Dreams of Paul Nash. Currenly reading E. F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia novels, which are wonderfully waspish.
I'm finding my way back into writing again (slowly). There's an article on Cailtin R. Kiernan that I've been putting on for ages that I'm finally making inroads on. And some new stories. The Somme Beauty, based on a nightmare I had a few years ago about a butterfly that thrived in the trenches and hospitals of WWI; and Waiting For The Moon, which might be part of a little cycle of tales about a freelance arts journalist coming up against the numinous in modern-day England. Wish me luck!
no subject
Date: 2018-02-03 01:16 am (UTC)I'm glad to hear from you again.
- I had started a seasonal retail job at the start of December, but they gave the shove after a five-hour shift without even taking my bank details or a filled-in tax form, then I found out I wasn't eligible for Jobseekers Allowance.
What the hell, no. I'm so sorry.
There was something magnificent in the way she hunched over watching the ground; if she reminded me of anything, it was Sidney Paget's drawings of Holmes.
I love the likenesses you see things through.
And some new stories. The Somme Beauty, based on a nightmare I had a few years ago about a butterfly that thrived in the trenches and hospitals of WWI; and Waiting For The Moon, which might be part of a little cycle of tales about a freelance arts journalist coming up against the numinous in modern-day England. Wish me luck!
I very much want to read both of those. Luck!
no subject
Date: 2018-02-03 02:34 pm (UTC)It's good to see you too. Sorry I've so crap at keeping in touch, I've meant and meant to send you an e-mail.
*What the hell, no. I'm so sorry.*
The irony is, all this palaver has landed with an advisor (they're calling them "job coaches" now, cough cough)) I get on with better than the last one, who was very pushy in a creepy smiling way. I shan't miss her.
*I very much want to read both of those.*
You'll get them this year!
no subject
Date: 2018-02-03 09:36 am (UTC)Good luck! (And those both sound very interesting indeed.)
no subject
Date: 2018-02-03 02:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-03 04:48 pm (UTC)