Hampstead Heath

Went to Hampstead Heath on my own yesterday, getting off the tube to a soft, constant rain; after plodding rather miserably through some suburban-looking cul-de-sacs, I walked out onto the heath. It's the strangest place: a cultivated bit of countryside, dropped into the city, where for a moment there is silence, shiny blackbirds picking through leaves, trees with acid-green moss streaked with rain, and you could be in the middle of any rural shire. Only the occasional distant siren suggests that there is something beyond the mud and fields. Then, walk up a small hill and the towers of the city rise out of the mists like some settlement from Oz.

Reading the city

London is a shouting city.

Being a country girl at heart (although if anyone thinks being a teenager in the depths of the countryside, with one bus a week, and miles of fields between you and, well, anything is romantic they have been seriously misinformed) my eyes sometimes ache for green fields and a night sky so clear and black it's as though you are standing at the edge of space.

Every possible surface in London screams to be read. Adverts exhort you to indulge in razors, in books, in 3-for-2s, in 'genuine pre-ops'. Signs inform you where to sit, where to park, where not to chain your bicycle, what to recycle, to turn left, to not enter here or there. Restaurants and bars beckon you in, warning notices keep you out. Even the people are blazoned with brands and logos. There are a thousand road signs whispering of Victorian commerce and ancient byways.

Words are my thing, I get anxious without a bedside book or even a cereal packet to read in the mornings, and a stop-start bus or broken tube is inhuman enough with your face wedged against someone else's shoulder and their handbag in your spine without a book to carry you away. But sometimes, there are too many words.

Plans and projects

In tune with the new year, I am planning a new venture to overturn the world of handbag-crazy women's magazines forever, but as usual I don't want to say too much in case I jinx it. In any case, a web nerd is squirrelling away right now and people (real people, not just me using pseudonyms) are writing things for me.

I was inspired over the weekend by this magazine . Please buy a copy or at least donate - no just buy a copy. It's really well written and funny, and advertising free, and so reliant on people with taste and morals, like you.

Ahem

... so I have come back. Apologies to my readers, all two of you or none of you probably by now, but have been distracted by various things, notably work, and Christmas, and generally being a bit lazy and insecure about posting anything I have written up on the world wide web.

But new year, new start, and one of my many and varied resolutions is to 'write more', so back to the blogface it is.

One of the things I have been mentally blogging about is Twilight. I went to see the film on Tuesday, having read the book in about two train journeys, and then crowbarring myself away from the follow-up in order to delve into Mr Obama's The Audacity of Hope. The books are addictive in the same way a giant tin of Christmas biscuits is: you know you should stop at one or two, and you know they're bad for you, but somehow you can't stop...

The film was overdramatic and silly (witness Edward's look of nausea, including hand clamped over mouth, when he first meets Bella), but as well as being unintentionally funny, is also witty in its own right, and if lacking the tension, violence and gore a horror fan might expect, compellingly unfurls the relationship between E&B. And the lush, rain-soaked and yet forbidding landscape is austerely beautiful.

Plus it produced in me the uncomfortable feeling of being 17, or rather looking back at myself at 17; the gawkiness, the thrilling highs and devastating lows of believing you are in love with someone at that age, the cliques and rituals of school - even the boredom of school. I can't remember the last time I read a book, or saw a film, which included homework and chemistry lessons.

And although Mr Pattinson isn't quite the handsome dangerous vampire of my imagination (ahem), I found his hexagonal pale little face and bulky adolescence affecting and believable. And Bella less irritating than she could have been. But then, I'm just jealous

Ribbons and things

I haven't posted about any crafty activity for a while, mainly because I haven't done any, but am getting stuck into Christmas present making at the moment. My little room is gloomy and cold, but there is something so absorbing about sitting and making things with my hands, that carries me away into my imagination, or whatever the radio is burbling on about.

I also found the most amazing haberdashery in Portobello yesterday, I can't remember the name, but it was a proper old-fashioned place. I had a nice little daydream about living in some pink-painted Chelsea mews, and spending all my money on ribbon.

I have also been thinking, unfortunately, about Georgina Baillie (of the Sachs-gate affair) who seems to be creeping into Metro-style gossip pages with worrying regularity. I don't want her to be famous, simply because she wants so much to be - she was even in the Guardian over the weekend, choosing her books of the year. She chose, and I can't work out whether this is with a sense of irony, or a lack of self-awareness of quite bintish proportions, Russell Brand's My Booky Wook, helpfully pointing out his suspect treatment of women.

Against my will, I do quite like the fact that she is quite unashamedly goth though. I also went to Camden over the weekend, and was disappointed that the place where I used to go as a chain-bedecked teenager is just a tourist-thronged market of mass-production stripey tights and slogan T-shirts. Apart from Georgina, where have all the goths gone?!

This is England

I watched the aforementioned film last night. As anyone who knows me, knows, any film that doesn't have a montaged dance-training scene doesn't usually come onto my radar, but I had read good reviews and thought I should educate myself.

I found it really disturbing, not so much because of the violence, although it was brutal and often unexpected, but because of its vision of an England that exist(ed) on the periphery of 'normal' society. The skinheads are disenfranchised, anarchic, chaotic, but also seductively stylish and loyal (up to a point). I was a child during the Thatcher era, and so have never really understood the extreme emotions, the hatred and rage, that her actions stirred up. My knowledge of the Eighties is more of a second-hand, nostalgic one, similar to the (ironic) use of 'Tainted Love' blaring out of a radio at one point- New Romantics, kids dressing up like Boy George, a mum with enormous glasses and perm like my mum had when I was a child.

It was also touching and spikily humorous and affectionate, and left me thinking about the nature of masculinity and sexuality and identity and integrity, and of art's capacity to be politically more effective than any number of dry treatises or speeches.

Meep

Ok, this is not a proper post, but this blog is possibly the cutest thing I have ever seen...