The occasional usefulness of annoying things which can lead to marvellous encounters

In this case - unbelievably useful and very marvellous.

I suppose most of us suffer from insomnia from time to time - or a lot, or never. There are people, like Mark (husband) who reaches a seemingly profound sleep after a few seconds, his hands announcing the waves of slumber as his fingers twitch as if still on the piano's keys from the pieces he has played throughout the day. However, he experiences his insomnia in the early hours, often waking at four or five - five has become quite a luxury . . . 

I have phases when I drop off like a tired dog to stay asleep for a good seven hours (perfect for me) but more often it takes some time to switch off my mind, or I'll wake at the fearful three in the morning when all fairly manageable problems distort into a theatre of darkness and I lie awake staring at the dim outlines of the beams above me adding the fact that some of them look distinctly bowed and surely unable to support the floor's weight upstairs . . .

If the non-sleep is very stubborn I'lll try migrating to a sofa or another bed - if there is no B and B guest in it.  :0) I used to try sounds of thunderstorms, crackling fires, and meditation - which I still use a lot, but more as a daily routine whatever state my mind is in. Then I discovered audiobooks. I've always had a stock of comfort CDs such as Lord Peter Wimsey or Dickens, but The CD format is not ideal as the disc has to be changed, and not having got as far as an audible inscription I had a meander about on Youtube to see what was on offer. 

One of the first books which presented itself in a fateful way was The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, read by a certain Steven Red Fox Garnett. Fateful as this was one of my childhood go to books, its text and visual imagery so incredibly atmospheric; a comforting story of gentle triumph played out against a backdrop of wind-wuthered moorland and beautiful gardens - the perfect antidote to my life in grimy North London. As soon as I heard the Mr Garnett's voice I was mesmerised, listening to the whole book - without dozing off - and then again on subsequent insomnia nights more as a comfort blanket, waking briefly, lulled by knowing where the story had got to and then extending a finger to stop the recording if I felt sufficiently sleepy.

I keenly checked what else Mr Garnett had recorded and was excited to find he had completed Dracula in its unabridged form - a feat! This is an extraordinary work, the voices utterly believable, just the right amount of music and snatches of sound effects to add to the tension. I found the voice of Van Helsing to be incredible coming from the reader's 30 year old vocal cords, not a wisened, elderly Swiss doctor from the C19th.

Other favourites so far:  a wonderfully creepy rendition of Lovecraft's The Colour of Outer Space, and Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlett. The voice of Sherlock is spot on with again, just the right amount of background sound effects - hooves, grandfather clocks, old typewriter, chinking plates, etc.

So . . . I got to thinking about my own books and the fact I am not writing much for than the odd blog post currently due to a face pain thing which allows me only short bursts on screen - not conducive to writing as one never knows if one is about to be stabbed in the jaw bone/teeth/scalp, etc, making concentration on a storyline somewhat fractured. 

I wondered if Mr Garnett might consider reading Londonia, or any other of my works, and thusly contacted him. It took a while - he's busy, and probably suspicious of such offers, but finally we got there after he read the copy I sent him, and he was duly hooked. He's made a great start, deciding to work on the narration first and then add in all the voices and sound effects/music later. Even just listening to the narrated chapters without dialogue is extraordinary for me. All those words I'd partially forgotten, hidden in the pages of a book that I wrote, edited, re-edited, proof read, sent out to agents, and which was finally published by the marvellous, Tartarus Press.

Mr Red Fox has an impressive catalogue of titles ranging from children's favourites such as the Velveteen Rabbit and The Little Prince through to a recent and impressive recording of Alice in Wonderland, Animal Farm, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and many more. I'm proud and very excited to think of Londonia being added to his list, and am more than looking forward to how he will tackle all the voices - of which there are many. 

His YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@redfoxvoice/videos

I am putting together a crowd funding for Londonia as an audiobook and will re-blog when it's up and running.

 

Cake, chocolate and raspberry tarts.

Here's a lovely picture of Mark's birthday cake, for once not created by himself, but by a fancy shop in town. The Sydney Opera house, chocolate sculpture topping was worth a couple of days of puritan vegetable soup, 6,000 calories a wave I should think.
We very rarely go in Pujola: once a year at Easter to buy something for Ezra, mainly as it's a chance to gawp at the array of beautiful chocolate eggs, fish and chickens all done up with bright satin ribbons. Occasionally I might call in to buy a jam tart as theirs are better than any others I've ever tasted.
My Aunty Lily (featured as the Queen a few posts back) used to make raspberry jam tarts. I'd love to be able to say that they were delicious, that I would crave the sound of her ancient biscuit tin being taken out of the pantry. Alas not.
Out would come the tin: "Here, my darling, I've made tarts! I know how much you love them." They were almost ceramic in their hardness, the jam burnt to the bottom of the pastry in dark, Dracula pools. Aunty Lily and her musty smelling front room with the three bar electric fire; 1950's red and black curtains, Daily Mirror and Players No 6.
We would eat the tarts, drink tea and then she would heave herself out of her chair muttering about where the cat had got to. I would shrink into my own chair, embarrassed, knowing the words she was about to yell over the back garden.
The back door would creak and she'd stand there, calling for the huge monster cat: "Nigger, NIGGER, Nigs, where are you?"

Good hair day

I don't know what to say other than how perfectly delectable.
Came across this on someones else's 'musing' blog, sorry to borrow your image . . . But I had to.
My hair is a continual mystery. About once a month I really like it; its just at the right point of fullness, sticking up in the right places, not too floppy and thin looking. Then today, for example, I have mad static hair which has developed a strange tendency to stray to the left.
I found an electric comb-brush-dryer thing in a cupboard left by a guest and attacked the hair with it. Worse.
Short is good, but the feel-good factor lasts about three days and whatever the hairdresser did eludes me as I try to recreate the style. The twenties bob thing was good, but high maintenance. The worst was definitely the perm I had, in the eighties . . . enough said. The weirdest was a white-blond teddy-boy quiff that somebody at a hairdressing school on Tottenham Court Road decided I should have. Dracula black made me look ill, and bright red was short-lived.
When I was about seven I had long golden hair but with sort of Rasta dreads underneath as I was such a tomboy. Since then its just kept getting shorter. Someone did offer me fifty quid at college to shave my head and be photographed - think it was January, and we lived in a student house with a loo that froze over, so hair seemed to be a good thing to keep.
Sometimes I cut my hair myself. Occasionally it works really well, but usually it looks as if rodents have needed nest material.
I do remember a brilliant Eddy Izzard sketch about hair and squirrels in the night, I might try and put in on here. Anyway . . . So back to today: short-ish with a vague aspiration to have a long romantic fringe that I can look out from in a mysterious way . . .