wendy house

This is the end of short trains,

they will be terminated,

only long trains from now on.

Those French are both assertive and sizist.

The homeless slept on the streets by the monuments. Belongings stocked in supermarket trolleys. The open-top sightseeing tourist bus roll by as the rain clouds gather and the homeless sleep in the warmth of the daylight.

I saw several cardboard cities around the inner Paris suburbs, groups of homeless helping each other. Hiding from the weather, not from the public.

At pedestrian crossings the homeless sat silently on the floor holding out used paper cups containing a few coins.

Early evening In Paris, in the company of a recently married couple, leaving our hotel in search of the Tour Eiffel. Will we walk? Will we ride bus 63 then 24? Will we take the metro? Do we want to get there quickly or have a beer first?

The map with the metro and bus routes rustles she checks routes and numbers. The map never leaves her hands yet the decision making is clearly mutual. I chip in ‘Hoorah’ when having a beer is thrown into the mix then comment that I don’t mind how or when we get there.  

The discussion takes minutes, it’s like an elegant dance. If alone I would already be sat in that bar drinking a beer, watching the world go by, listening to people and relaxing. In their company I am happiest to be stood on the street corner listening to the uncovering of each others values, finding out what works best for both of them,  together.  It’s sensible, practical, sometimes funny, time consuming. It’s love. I am watching love happen and glad to be temporarily touched by it’s closeness.

My understanding of a couples’ love has been changed by not having lived in it for over a decade.  I’m not speaking of the love of family, friends, my recently departed Matrix or her remaining companion. I’m speaking of the sharing and merging of selves. In my last decade there was the too-sluggish death of a rejected love, skirmishes into sexual relationships, the love of close friends and cats.  My view on the love between a couple is now mainly drawn from strong memories of my 4 very different loves from the last century, watching and listening to others, and the stories told in books, films, blogs and newspapers.

The loves that I see shining brightest is in sharing the detail of living. Things like shopping for food, preparing a meal, deciding how to spend the evening. All show love. Maybe those of you who are living in love find this odd when the passion and joy in the laughter, warmth, smiles, praise, sex, and scents can be so wonderfully intense and engulfing.  I can find laughter, warmth, smiles, praise, sex and scents in my life. When I’m with friends and family there is also the mutual knowledge of sharing the detail of life with someone who has gradually built an understanding of what works.  When the passion and the detail meet with another single person, this is the couples love. Not part of my life.

We stopped for some golden beers before taking the Metro to the Tour Eiffel. We danced through the park basking in the glory of the tower’s golden night-time plumage.

This post is dedicated to Paris, the traveler, her first love, her husband, and the memory of Matrix.

Matrix

Rest In Peace

She had a perky, chirpy, well travelled life from the back streets of Southsea through to the suburbs of Seattle and back to the UK. We spent 15 years together. She will be missed by Sampo and I.

There will be a 7 day blog posting silence in respect of the silence your absence brings into the wendy house.

…bring bring…   …bring bring…

Hello, wendy house speaking, how can I help you?

can I speak to wendy house please

yep, that’s me!

Wendy?! you sound so different on the phone, all soft, I thought someone else must have answered

even my parents don’t recognise me on the phone, don’t know what happens

you’ve got a nice phone voice

who am I talking to?

A paper printed sign in the groundfloor window of a small redbrick terraced house who’s door opens directly onto the street. The house has probably beeen reposessed, the people who lived there evicted. The notice probably fulfills a legal requirement. 

The notice says that there are things in the house that will be chucked out if their owners don’t pick them up within 7 days of the date on the notice.   It says this in a language that is no longer spoken by lay people in England – using words like chattels and herein. If I suspect that the people evicted from this house have a literacy level below average then the wording is difficult, if not impossible, to understand. Almost as if the ‘Agent’ doesn’t care whether the person who’s belonging are in the house understands that they need to promptly pick-up their stuff.

Sad.

All my adult life I’ve popped into restaurants, cafes, bars without being accompanited by another person.  yes, ALONE.  Iet out in public alone.  Somehow I’d managed to miss that this is not something people easily do.

Then Mr. London Street wrote a blog post encouraging his readership to eat alone. He mentioned that this doesn’t instantly appeal and may be stigmatised. At first I was baffled. What is this stigma? Why would someone not want to eat in a restaurant alone?  I thought, poor chap I wonder what is wrong with him to make him think and feel like that.  Then his readers comments showed he was describing something they recognised and understood.  A shared experience for many, though not all, of them.   

If eating alone in restaurants was once difficult for me, I’ve forgotten it. I have noticed how being a lone customer in a restaurant has changed over the decades. In the early 1990′s staff would show me to a seat out of sight, towards the back of the restaurant. As if a woman eating alone in a restaurant was indeed stigmatised.  In those days, with my mobile phone, book, and note pad I was happy with good light, good food and some table space for sketching. Now, in the naughties, I am more often seated near the window, as if the sight of a single woman eating in their restaurant is a positive thing.  Still happy with my notepad, handheld, book and now with a digital camera.

I drop by Mr. London St‘s blog occassionally because his writing appears to tap into something that his readers empathise with and admire. He lives in Reading town, but not in the same place I live.  He often writes things that his commenters empathise with, but I don’t. Consequently, his writing often makes me feel unique, even special. 

Excellent.

Poppy has always had a length inferiority complex. Her short legs make her shorter than the average cat. She wanted to be 2 inches longer. Poppy and my blog posts have both been called short. I tried to explain to her that it’s only the tall cats that make her feel short. It’s not a problem, its an asset. But Poppy feels pressured to be like the other cats.

Poppy’s daily health routines involve at least 10 length stretches to help her reach her desired length. My daily writting regime involves one blog post, approximately 3 paragraphs long. 

Sometimes I stretch to 4 paragraphs.

Or 5.

me: your glass and my glass together make a full glass!

you: And an empty one

me: I can go to the bar with the empty glass and get a fresh pint in it

you: so you get a fresh pint and I get left with the warm mixed up 2 half pints

me: hmmmm..  probably best that you keep your current half empty glass.  I’ll drink my half then we can go our own ways

It’s time for plant rescue.

Plant rescue is just before the perenials begin to die for the winter. The local garden centres sell the dying plants at half price.

All year round I rescue plants from mumzies garden, she just volunteers to pull them up then pots them for me to take home. Honeysuckle, virginia creeper, oriental grasses, small alpines, her garden is gradually reproducing in mine.

In the US it is an exclamation of disappointment.

In the UK it is a noun describing someone’s sexual proclivities. 

It still makes me laugh when a US friend writes bummer on my facebook status giving my English friends something to snigger and smirk about.

vet: she’s got a very good quality coat for a cat her age

wendy: you don’t think euthenasia is the right choice?

vet: I’d feel uncomfortable with PTS, but given her age and heart condition it should definitiely be considered

wendy: good, lets not euthanase her

vet: call me tonight if things dont improve

wendy: no pills?

vet: no pills, the injection should solve it

Everywhere there are uniforms. Uniforms for

• Empowered girliness – high heels, short skirt, proudly displayed cleavage
• IT safe corporateness – khaki cargo pants, branded baggy t-shirt
• London tube commuter - black and grey tailored and ironed outfits
• Healthy person - fleece, neoprene, goretex jackets and bouncy footwear
• Cyclist – lycra overdose, wrap-around glasses, go-faster helmet
• …..

There’s rarely an instruction manual for these uniforms. Working out what’s best is all too much for me. I’ve jumped ship and tend to opt for wearing comfortable clothes that make a token gesture towards the uniforms. Not excelling in displaying any 0ne unifrom, but partially there with all that needs to be conformed-to for social acceptability.

On a good day I’m slightly quirky. More often I exist somewhere in everyone’s experience of visually bland stylessness. 

Apart from my hats.

Thomas’s turning was accompanied by a squeak. Not a mousy squeak but an evil squeal. It’s possible he may be unsafe to drive. We trundled off to the garage where I left him with the mechanics for diagnostic tests.

Both Gordon Ramsay and my niece are well known for the liberal use of anglo saxon swear words and tantrums. In an attempt to be safe and not gay I’ve made several excursions into emultating their trendy linguistic, emotive, style.  For example

wendy: when can I have my mini back?

mechanic: are you missing your mini? (wry smile)

wendy: Fuċk, am I?! (stamps foot)

The mechanic understood, but 

I went on to fuċking fail

to maintain a modern fuċking focus

on using one fuċking word

Fuċking fuċk. Fuċked (fuċk)

Meanwhile,  Thomas pootled out onto the garage forecourt with the stone that caused all the squeaking surgically removed from his disc brakes. Phew!

tall colleague: it smells like electrical equipment burning in here

wendy: OH No! The last time someone smelt something that no-one-else could…

colleague:  …it happened just afterwards

wendy: everyone out of the building

tall colleague: which electrical equipment should I torch first?

wendy: smells like rain

my colleage looks outside the window at the blue sky, looks back at me, raises a single eyebrow slowly then  the edges of her mouth swing out while her lips furl from her teeth revealing the cheekiest of grins.

wendy: I know, it sounds a bit bonkers, but this room just does smell like rain to me, can you smell it?

colleague: no (laughs, then, about a minute later)  OH MY GOD. WENDY! Look out the window, its raining!

A cloud above the building that we couldn’t see was dumnping its load with avengance, rain against blue skys. To me the smell was overwhelming and kinda sexy.  Apparantly the other people in the room couldn’t smell the rain through the building walls.

On planet wendy we not only smell the future coming we often hear then trip-over it too.

i suffer from mental health

is there something wrong with me

why I love England #14:  nearby seaside

when you live on a small Island, small like Britain, everywhere is near the sea. The furthest place from the sea in Birtian is only 70 mile away. Sea birds, like these guls in Tiverton, can be seen all over the Island. English people on the island grow up with the seaside only a day trip away.

I love day trips to the seaside.

I first heard of the Park Hill estate during my undergraduate environmental psychology classes in 1986.  The architect’s, Ivor Smith and Jack Lynn’s, vision for a high rise estate to replace sprawling slums in the northern English city of Sheffield with “Streets in the Sky”. Streets in the sky would recreate the strengths of the communities which had flourished in the back to back slums and provide improved living conditions at a bargain price. Taking people out of small, damp, Victorian terraces where  kids played in the streets and giving them streets in the sky with views over the city, inside toilets, covered walkways, balcony’s where children could play and neighbours could chat, with room for attractive open park land around the high rise buildings.  Smith and Lynn’s designs were heavily influenced by Le Corbuiser’s Breton Brut as evident in his Marseilles Unité d’Habitation. Breton Brut became known in Britain as ‘Brutalism’,  simple functional form. They wanted to build in a sense of neighbourliness into these functional spaces.

These changes were intended to improve the standard of living for people now living in a slum area locally know as ‘Little Chicago’ in the gangster era.  The Park Hill estate was completed in 1961 with 995 flats that could house over two thousand people overlooking Sheffield city centre. Front doors opened to a 12 ft wide balcony, a street, that runs right across the estate over bridges between buildings.  Milk floats could trundle from door to door along streets named the same asthose in the original slums they replaced.  People that were neighbours in the slums were rehoused next to each other. 

Worthy, admirable intentions

When built,  the social ideal didn’t happen

The estate soon became known as Sheffield’s San Quentin. The failure of the original design vision has been blamed on many things including

• easy access routes for muggers
• poor sound insulation
• the streets being open to the inclement Sheffield weather
• the building’s ugliness
• the poverty of the occupants

In 1998 Park Hill became the largest grade 2  listed building in europe.

This centruy English Heritage, Urban Splash and Sheffield city council have been renovating Park Hill.

It’s difficult to tell from the publicity what is being changed to make the project work  as a successful place to live this time. A recent BBC TV programme about the renovation focussed on English heritage’s aesthetic and structural requirements for preservation not mentioning any changes to the space aimed at improving the occupants expereince of living there. The programme made the vision appear less social that the original. So what will have changed since it first opened?  It looks like the renovation will be

• It’s prettier with bright rainbow colours
• occupants will not all be council tenants, some will be home owners and some shared ownership. They will be a different socio-economic mix
• the streets will not be open to the Sheffield weather
• living there comes with the kudos of living in a classic listed building

 OMD sang Electricity

OMD quickly earned a favoured position in my teenage heart when I first heard Electricity. This song reminds me of home, of warmth and comfort. Most of all reminds me of Dad getting excited about Pylons, happily ethusing.  His excitement is contagious.

Dad started work for an electricity supply company in the early 1950′s.  Exciting times for an Engineer specialising in supplying electricity to the UK.  Building infrastructure, planning routes to lay cables and overhead lines. Dad is still passionate about the details of the tools of his trade.  He has photograph albums dedicated to Pylons.

He’s recently returned from a trip to China. He treated us to the holiday photo’s on the family TV. Amongst the photographs of temples, rivers, mountains, village streets were numerous photographs of pylons. 

Whenever I see a Pylon, transformer, dam, or insulator I think fondly of Dad.  How his face lights up and he starts talking about what’s interesting about this particular thing, its age, its construction process, its location or ability to withstand high winds.

Not only is his excitment contagious,

I now find myself taking photographs of Pylons whenever I go on holiday.

Many is the time when a rogue glass door has given me a nose bleed.

Looks like the Pope will be visiting to sort-out this door’s naughtiness. Meanwhile the glass door’s nefaious intentions have been temporarily quashed by the addition of instructions, at nose height, to BE AWARE. 

I am loving the message to ‘Be Aware’ on the entrance to a church.

The stylist listens to my verbal description of the multi dimensional experience that I hope she will be able to create

I actually like it as it is now,  can you make it even more like Rod Stewart in his longer hair days,  sort of shorter on top, whispy, and longer underneath, exagerrate how it is now?

like a mullet?

errrrmmm, yes, YES! a MULLET, I want a mullet with a sort Noel Fielding feel to it.

 The stylist is confident, calm and clearly caring about making sure people around her get what they need, or want. She trusts that I know what I want. I do. The stylist lifts my hair and shows me how much she plans to cut off from where then guides the intern who’s about to wash my hair on what to notice and how to deal with it.

 there’s a lot of it, but its fine…

It’s fine, my hair is fine, yes. I like that, mighty fine, mighty boosh

I’m a one girl phobia

I’m a hidden soldier

New year really started in the bathroom of a 3 star hotel 45 minutes walk from Notre Dame. Not midnight amongst the Europeans singing, hugging, kissing and drinking. A houseparty of strangers. A strange flavour of tonic water.

It wasn’t raining, but the clouds seemed to crowd right into the bathroom mixing with the steam where the taps ran water into the bath as quickly as it ran out the plug hole.  I’d tired of scrubbing. Red and wrinkled skin from hours of soaking, foaming.  Sometimes if was difficult to tell if this was real or a dream.

The effects of the spiked gin and salty tears were gradually wearing off, being replaced by a profound silence and a kind of numbness I’d never known before or since. I drank more water. Sometime I would have to leave this room, through the one door back to the bedroom. Have to look into his eyes and see all that had happened the night before reflected there. All his questions and apologies, all his needs and regrets had to be faced.  There wasn’t enough room for me to run with the water down the plug hole.  Watching the water spiral down I wished as hard as I could to either wake from this dream or slide out with the water.

Slowly, precisely and with the conviction normally reserved for reprimanding criminals I turned the taps off, rose, dried and dressed myself. Blew my nose. Drank more water.  Closed the window. Composed, upright, dry faced.  In the privacy of my mind I could hear the applause and cheering for a well excecuted restoration job.

 I walked out of the bathroom

the snow is cold and fresh, lets go out on the downs and make love, I really want to make love outdoors, please…

I knew the pull of making love in freshly fallen snow.

But not with him. We weren’t even friends, let alone lovers. Once I would have considered that all part of the fun.  I’d learned the hard way that strangers with a sense of vitality, of living life to the full, seemed to come in a package that perversely included a need to possess, control.  To own you in a way that breaks legal and moral boundaries, that breaks skin, bone, hearts and noses.  I’m more cautious now.

Masturbate or find another partner, I’m not interested

 lover: you’re a very visual person

wendy: I’ve got two eyes and I like to keep them peeled lest I start to loose things and fall over more than normal

lover: no, i mean you like to make love in the daylight, outdoors

wendy: that”s so much more than visual. Thats the breeze drying the sweat on your back, smell of the dew on the grass and the leaf mulch in your hair, the shiver from the scatchy snow on your buttocks.  That’s not just visual, that’s living.

lover: that will take me a while to get used to

But he never got the chance to ‘get used to it’ because I wasn’t patient enough to be waiting for someone in their 40′s to learn how to make love out from under cover of darkness, sheets and comfort of artificially sprung surfaces.  There are times when throwing caution to the evening breeze is exhillerating and worthy of a plunge

Office manager (OM): Have you got your keys?

wendy: yes

OM: your phone?

wendy: Oh, let me check, yes

OM: your power cable?

wendy: YES! I remember packing that one

OM: your wallet?

wendy: yes

OM: your jacket?

wendy: I didn’t come with a jacket

OM: are you sure?

wendy: yep, I’m sure

OM: OK, so I’m not going to be getting a message tomorrow asking me to find something and mail it back to you?

wendy: that’s right, I’ve got everything I came with and more. I wish there was someone like you in my home, I miss having someone check that I’ve got my marbles before I leave my home. Paper checklists aren’t quite as much fun

knock knock

neighbour: hello, I live opposite you over there

wendy: hello

neighbour: is your cat ok? the black and white one

wendy: I think so, she’s quite old and has a heart condition. Not as active as she used to be, why do you ask?

neihgbour: we were worried because we dont see her sitting on your bedroom window like she used to

My neighbour was worreid because her 15 year old cat had died recently.  She knows how upsetting this is. She thought that maybe my cat had died and I needed someone to check that I was ok.  How sweet is that? I love my ‘hood

the first and only text message waiting on my phone when I woke that morning read

my position has been eliminated

It didnt read

• I’ve been made redundant
• I’ve lost my job
• They’ve got rid of me
• They’ve cut my job

No words of anger, no tremors of fear, no tissue of tears.  Just the 2 words which feel like they are being pretentious because they have 3 or more syllables.

position = job

eliminated = cut

excerpt from an email:

When’s your first novel? Bet you could combine the intellectual challenge of a Will Self novel with the creative wackiness of Terry Prachett!

this qualifies the sender as a friend for life.