The morning after

Today I was described as a beautiful mess. I didn't know whether to take it as a compliment or not but it will definitely teach me to a) not forget to tend to my hair before leaving the house b) remove last night's make up c) not lie with Maggie in a melancholic heap on the studio floor looking up at the ceiling whilst the new first years come round and see you in the grasp of varying emotional crises d) try and avoid being hungover as it inevitably leads to an alarming dependence on cherry coca cola and orange ribena and everything else I can't really afford.

I will return to cultural things soon. Honest. I have a bookshelf of untempered pages, an art gallery section in Timeout requiring some much overdue attention and a new studio space which is very definitely going to be the proud owner of a coat hook. I also has some minor flashes of inspiration involving thread when I was struggling back from Asda with some baguettes.

To Sophie

Happy Birthday! I hope it is filled with less sexual innuendos and more cake.

Cold

It is getting dark at seven in the evening and I am awaiting winter's onslaught. My iPod battery died when the sky was fuzzing into twilight. There are galaxy caramel fingerprints on my keyboard and I woke up in a pile of orange peel this morning. I have £3.76 in my bank account and a library fine that knocked £18.60 out of me. I am typing in my dimly lit room and feeling a sense of melancholy wash over me. I blame Barthes.

'The Ghost Ship

errance / errantry

Though each love is experienced as unique and though the subject rejects the notion of repeating it elsewhere later on, he sometimes discovers in himself a diffusion of amorous desire; he then realizes he is doomed to wander until he dies, from love to love.'

A Lover's Discourse.

Scribbles

Grey

Rainy, miserable. That means only one thing. A day indoors with a really badly made cup of coffee (a skill I need to master), the internet and my den's worth of books at my disposal.

Having watched The Boat That Rocked for the first time I have become attached to the soundtrack. One problem, I'm trying to read about Brechtian theatre and be generally productive for lectures starting. This is impossible when I get so emotionally involved in Procol Harum, Cat Stevens and Otis Redding, they make me want to lay back on my bed and contemplate life. I'm sure Brecht and the Kinks are pretty incongruous anyway. I have become worryingly attached to my earphones recently, so much so I get slightly annoyed when I'm not travelling on public transport on my own, thus meaning I can't block off the world and form a shit soundtrack to the sights of Peckham that crawl on by.

Work. After three months I have managed to set up my scanner. Impressive work Ann-Marie. It pretty much follows my daydream reverie about clouds and patterns, also the idea of forming something as a whole and creating multiple possibilities for it. Blah art talk. So below are a few things I have done, I'm not inventive enough for titles.

New Favourite Song

Up on Melancholy Hill

There's a plastic tree.

Are you here with me?

Just looking out of the day of another dream.

Yes yes and yes

Greg Eason

Twix fino

What a day for going Cass Art shopping and buying yet more things that will probably prove fruitless, for drinking coffee, trying out the new twix bar (like milkyway rolls without the nice bit) and doing the guardian crossword, for getting excitable in hannah hood's and maggie's veritable trove of art books and walking home to peckham laden down with canvasses. It makes up for the interesting men I met last night, one of whom told me I should go to mass more often, the other berating me with stories of his married life and his erectile functioning.

Art wise I am dreaming of clouds and pattern and coloured stickers and silkscreening over etchings. Aquatint and immaculate pencil drawings. I had one of those nights where I couldn't sleep for ideas, that would obviously be the night where I had no pen to hand so they have all disapparated and are floating around my inner creative purgatory like millions of little pixels needing to find each other to seek clarity. I also may do something with pixels. Good work.

Caffeine High

Post Bestival Blues. Well, they have materialised in the form of yellows and greens, thanks to Tesco's finest cold remedy capsules stock full of caffeine and paracetamol that I am knocking back, probably going a long way to explain why I feel it is appropriate to be blogging at two in the morning about nothing in particular. That's always the way. Four Tet were amazing. I lost my voice during Mumford and Roxy Music and got a bit emotional. I'm listening to Fever Ray now and trying to remember how everything was just right and how the music was so intense. Bombay Bicycle Club's acoustic set was one of those moments when you realise everything is just so good. Or at least you think so until you turn round and see your housemate conked out on the grass. I have realised that I am an old woman in a twenty year old's body, or at least I thought as much until I got embroiled in the most ridiculous mud fight ever and allowed my Captain Scarlet clad brother to water pistol red bull and vodka directly into my mouth. I should really have gone as a Mysteron circle and stalked him the entire time. Snow White was a bit obvious really, though not as obvious as the ridiculous amount of Where's Wally's. Turns out they were all quite easy to find. I have never camped in such luxury, having never really camped at all it wasn't much of an achievement but I never realised how much difference a blow up bed can really make. A big enough difference it seems to attract housemates who should be sleeping in tents opposite but get so attracted by something inflatable and flowery sleeping bags that the double became a tad cramped. It was fine though, we had late night chats as we watched the stars. There were more stars in the sky that I have seen for a while. The most I have counted in Peckham at any one time has been eight. Really and truly. There's probably so much more I could talk about, like the first night where I was pleasantly surprised to see strangers smile warmly at me, until of course remembering that I had my face painted like a mannequin (of course I meant a harlequin), but what I can remember so explicitly are the car rides. Intermittently waking up from sleep to find the sky at different stages of lightness, stretching towards dusk, twilight, until being basked with a charcoal grey tinged with orange from the street lamps, looking out at the motorway and being a child again and pretending that the car isn't actually moving but the whole world is moving around a static car and the motion is turning the roads and the trees and the hedges into differing striped blurs, wanting to do a Wolfgang Tillmans-esque thing and take pictures of the sky at every hour and create a colour chart for hours of the day.

Caffeine makes me use the word 'and' too freely.

And apparently makes me forget about paragraphing. We'll just let this pass as a stream of consciousness.