You're probably figuring out that the most productive things you need to do in life, you cannot do alone. Yet at this moment, you may not see how you can collaborate, nor can you sense how that might affect you. Indeed, your focus is still decidedly inward, where it belongs. But time is moving, and with it, your sense of identity. A variety of factors will help you shift the energy in your life and help you go a long way toward both developing and focusing your mission. You don't have to do much - just do what feels right every day, give the planets a chance to work their odd little miracles.

Jonathan Cainer this morning for virgos ... I had to smile almost completely chimes in with advice given to proponents of The Artists Way. At the moment I'm trying to institute a new regime of self care. Proper home cooked meals, vegetables, adequate sleep etc. Its a slow movement towards my goal of taking better care of myself.

Jory Des Jardins

great blog with even better blog roll.

make your own traditions

have a Buy Nothing Christmas

the barfy postcard project

hop over to visual chronicles to join in!

Life lessons

~ Life can be one big "do over" if we want it to be. It's never too late to make a dream come true, if even just a small piece of the dream.

~ The most powerful transformations can begin by doing just one kind or compassionate thing a day. Do one nice thing today for someone you really dislike...not for them, for you.

~ An attitude of gratitude will lead to plenitude.

~ Fear is a great motivator...if I get up off the couch long enough to allow it to be.

~ Pity parties don't get the credit they deserve. I think of them as a celebration of bottom dwelling. If I've reached the point where I'm throwing myself a pity party, there's nowhere to go but up.

~ Once I stopped thinking of depression as the enemy, it began to lose its power over me. That doesn't mean I stopped getting depressed--it just means I reframed it. Now I'm able to experience it without the accompanying fear. I've lived with depressive cycles long enough to understand that they're just that--cycles. I'll tumble down again...but I'll rise again, too.


from Life lessons

save the cameo

Our second last traditional purpose built cinema has its owners just put an application in to turn it into a superpub. Go here to get involved in saving the Cameo.

I've been going to the Cameo for over 10 years to see films, meet friends in the bar, go to film-makers events, and even meet and knit with my Stitch & Bitch group. Its a total part of my life. I love the atmostphere in the Cameo. Every person who works there loves film. It exudes film culture from every brick. If it goes our lives will be pulled even more into the banal, top down corporate life. The range of films we will be able to see in this city will be more narrow. Our cultural life will be definately poorer. Please sign the petition and write to the planning department if you live in Edinburgh. Please circulate the link to any people you know with Edinburgh connections.

i love this country sometimes

land of eccentrics - meet Rob the Rubbish

Hugh's

sex and cash theory

or grow your own trust fund.

cats in sinks because its monday

Selftaughtgirl's

good karma birthday

the craft

MANIFESTO!

via caterina

notes on surviving creatively a job for money

1. Use the commute for thinking time.
2. Stay in the present don't put everything onto 'when this job is over'. Keep seeing friends. Take pleasure in what you can even if its reduced to shocking pink post-it notes.
3. Do something creative everyday even if tiny. Phone someones or email someone about your project. Knit at lunchtime. Do post-it sized drawings.
4. If you can't get out at lunchtime - take a stack of postcards with you to the canteen and catch up on correspondence with friends.
5. Journal or do 'morning pages' its an exercise in saying 'Here I am' 'this is who I am' an affirmation of self when most work does the opposite.
6. Try and stand outside during your breaks to get natural light on your face even if for a few minutes to ward of SAD.
7. A nice pen always cheers me up.
8. Eat as well as you can. Double your cooking amounts and take in left overs. Almost always more nutrious than bought in a canteen and cheaper.
9. Invest in a treat for yourself. During one henious job in the docks (in the payments dept!) I would leap onto the first bus every Monday night and go to a cinema which had a half price ticket deal and see two films one after the other. It was indulgent. Indulge. Think of what that would be for you. A double cream hot chocolate... a bubble bath?
10. A warm cozy scarf and pair of gloves for waiting at bus stops.

away....

in Galway visiting friends. I love travel - the getting of distance from where you are to where you are going. Taking yourself along for the ride. I find my perspective on the life I've just left crystalises. I start to think the unthinkable. The truths I've been talking myself out of.

Hummmm travel isn't always comfortable.

Meanwhile the joy of catching up with friends, making new ones with adorable red haired toddlers, slowly browsing in superb secondhand bookshops, slowly sipping tea and writing postcards.

Here's where I visted yesterday

Retreat to Advance

I've been on a retreat these past two days - an enforced retreat. I was so tired on Monday evening I stayed home the day following and went to the doctors.

I closed the shutters lay down in my 'retreat space' futon and pile of blankets. Turned on the heating and shuffled out every now and again to reheat sausage casserole and read a bit of an Ian Rankin novel I'd borrowed from the library. The cats made themselves at home on top of me. Last night I stuck on a chicken to roast which I picked up on the way back from the doctors. Heaven ... comfort food. Watched a bit of TV. Today the cats had retreat cabin feaver and fought with each other over my innert body. I then graduated to women's magazines on the sofa. Luckily I'd had a shower and got dressed when I heard a banging at the door. It was a policeman making enquiries as my neighbour had died 'in suspicious' circumstances. Ian Rankin comes to my door. Yikkes and as a friend kindly pointed out I have no alibi...

However I feel SO much better. I was at the so tired I could weap stage on Monday night. Sometimes to STOP just everything is what is needed. Leaving our life for a bit helps us to pick up the thread again.

Serendipitously info came from Dhanakosa who offer buddist retreats and of course the Arvon Foundation have wonderful courses for writers.

Lorraines' blog about

tackling National Novel Writing Month - Get It Written

the relaxed urbanite...

more soon....

Goths

knit?

Interview with Jeffrey Yamaguchi

Lux Lotus: What inspired 52 Projects?

Jeffrey Yamaguchi: I would have to say my love of projects. While this is definitely about the actual process of making a creative project, it is also very much about how project-making fits into my life -- how making a concerted effort to make something unleashes my creativity. Everything that goes into a project, no matter how exhausted or frustrating it might get, deep down, where it counts, I feel energized, and I can tell my creative impulses and desire to make stuff just gets stronger. And this energy - I truly feel it course into all areas of my life. This idea of project-making, this is the underlying inspiration behind 52 Projects. The perhaps more straightforward answer would be that I have had some terrible jobs in the past, like pretty much everyone, you know, and being creative on my own terms through my own project-making efforts, that really provided me with an important outlet - I actually felt like I was accomplishing something of worth, and that feeling in turn helped me get through the day to day, and in the long run, sort of bend and twist and churn out a situation that was more ideal, closer to what I wanted to do with my life. This is an ongoing thing, of course. It will always be "ongoing."


more here

I'm currently waiting for my copy of the book which is on order at wordpower.

I nearly forgot

its National Novel Writing Month. It isn't too late to sign up!

More about it at the Guardian Blog

article about Sark

aka Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy

Happy Samhain!

cough cough

Sometimes you just have to put your foot in front of you one at a time and ignore the big picture.

Not been a good few days.

Cough cold thing seems to get better but then I get felled by excruciating tiredness. Ah and the coughing fits whenever I exercise or move from one atmosphere to another...

A very dear friendship of mine going back to university days might be over.

I've been adjusting to a new job with a long commute and an early start.

The clocks have changed! Winter is coming!

Yesterday I felt so overwhelmed. I could have happily crawled into a hole and hid there coughing away.

Not an option as I had to do two applications for this morning. After meeting my producer returning home at 11am and doing the next application I went to bed at 1.20am.

I know doesn't exactly sound like self care does it? But I cancelled a swimming date tonight. Promised myself to go to bed at a decent hour for the next week and rest properly next weekend. I also removed the anxiety about suspending my exercise programme until I get well. Just one thing at a time. And my big thing is getting better.

Glorious link

Dawn of the Knitted Dead
in honour of Halloween.

Start where you are

I once had a student in a group who burst out petulantly 'I can't be a photographer because I can't afford to go to Egypt'. Actually it turned out that these were the least of his troubles. Recently I saw a Craig's list posting from the US a publisher wanting photographs of the very city this person did not think worthy enough to photograph.

Start where you are. If you are a photographer carry your camera with you at all times and film and take photos of your communte. Join together with other photographers around the world about their commute and you have a website, a book, or an exhibition in the making. If you are a writer take a pencil and some index cards you can write notes on and stuff into your pocket - writer Anne Lamott does this - as you go around your daily business. Feed your writer side by asking the people around you about their stories. Other people's stories feed your stories. I'm working at the moment in a situation I'd rather not be in but even I manage to send an email or phone someone at lunchtime to inch a project along day by day.

Start where you are - do not put off what you want to do by imagining some perfect set of circumstances where by if they existed you would magically become creative.

Ian Hamilton Finlay - Inverleith House RBG

I have a genius for visiting exhibitions on their last day or in their last days so it always seems a waste to blog them for people who can't then make them

Last Saturday while developing this cold I went to see the Ian Hamilton Finlay exhibition at the Botanics. I've been to ses Little Sparta the place he lives which has been turned by him in the last 30/40 years into a sort of living artwork due to diligent 'avant gardening'.

Here are some of the sayings I liked most on the walls.

Friendship is inclination
Aquaintance geography

The late night shipping forecast is a kind of High Church Weather Service for radio listners.

The art of gardening is like the art of writing, of painting, of sculpture, it is the art of composing, and making a harmony, with disparate elements.

He who lives alone is always on sentry duty.

The wind roaring in the night, is both stranger and friend.
Of course these were all beautifully typographically designed and painted onto the walls.

Earnest Duffer to Genius: Vincent Van Gogh

Did ever an artist have a less promising start than Vincent van Gogh? People love to imagine that if only they had had the chance to see Vincent's early work, they would have recognised his talent, coddled it, saved him from neglect and his famous suicide. His genius would have been - well, just obvious.

But if one thing seems apparent from the big show of Van Gogh's drawings that opened last week at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, it's that anyone could have been forgiven for looking at his early work and passing it by. Perhaps no artist who got as good as Vincent has ever started out so bad. Not just bad, but worthy bad, which is (if anything) worse. Even today, you'd hardly want one as a present, unless it was from someone you didn't want to offend. Those dogged, I-share-your-suffering images of ground-down peasant women and Dutch cloggies grouped around the sacramental potato, done in glum, awkward homage to Jean-François Millet and English social-consciousness painters such as Luke Fildes, all testify that sincerity, on its own, is not an artistic virtue

Fascinating article on Vincent Van Gogh- the myths and the sheer terribleness of his artistic start

bits and bobs

"There's a secret. If you put in the effort, the universe has a matching grant program. And it'll meet you halfway every time."

From Crossroads Dispatches please go and read this great blog posting.

Discussion on Starbucks and fairtrade coffee.

~~~

Adjusting to my new job. Must must get camera fixed so I can capture this new landscape.

It amazes me how many jobs which are 'very busy' actually have vast swathes of free time. Busy? Snort! Not compared to how full on and in the moment being creative is or the way the phone rang off the hook in my last job... ah well will have to think of creative uses for these pockets of time.

Night People - free film screenings in Scotland

I just got this emailed to me from producer / director team Claire Kerr & Adrian Meade

Like to see a FREE sneak preview of a BAFTA nominated movie and get the
chance to win tickets to the glamorous BAFTA Scotland awards event on Nov
13th at The Raddison Hotel Glasgow?

HERE'S HOW - Attend a FREE sneak preview of "Night People" a new Scottish
movie being organised by BAFTA. Scotland.
(To see a trailer and for more information on the film please go to
www.meadkerr.com)

Audience members who would like to vote for Night People also have the
chance to win free tickets to the Bafta audience awards night by texting
FILM NIGHT PEOPLE and send to 81800

IMPORTANT INFO: Screening Tickets can ONLY be purchased in person at the box
office. (It's not on their behemoth of a computer and phone system)

VENUE: Night People is playing at CINEWORLD cinemas at 8.00pm THIS WEEK in
Aberdeen Monday 24th Oct
Dundee Tues 25th
Falkirk Wed 26th
Edinburgh Thurs 27th
Glasgow Fri 28th

Mary Jane Butters

MaryJane Butters is a force of nature. She bought a farm in Moscow, Idaho in 1986, hoping to live the rural life of her dreams. It was tough going, but she found some unconventional ways to finance the farm: she started a “Pay Dirt Farm School,” in which would-be farmers can pay three grand to spend a week tending beehives, planting crops, and chopping firewood (you heard me—people pay her to chop wood); she began selling packaged, quick-prep organic meals, and she sold shares in her enterprise to a group of stockholders.

Oh, and she runs a bed-and-breakfast, grows her own biodiesel fuel out of mustard greens, and sells her eggs and produce through a community-supported agriculture program. And she publishes a glossy magazine called MaryJane’s Farm, which is a gloriously disheveled mixture of recipes, gardening tips, advice for decorating the henhouse, and ads for her organic food.

Sound familiar? Clarkson Potter, a division of Random House, thought so, too. They ponied up $1.35 million for a two-book deal, and many in the industry speculated that Butters would be the next Martha Stewart—the organic, dirt-under-the-fingernails, version of Martha, the one who you believe might actually do all that cooking and farming herself. And unlike Martha, there’s no need to worry that an ill-advised call to a stockbroker would land her in trouble. MaryJane was recently quoted as saying that, much to her accountant’s chagrin, she hasn’t even opened a savings account. And she’s turned down TV offers so she can stay on the farm.

Her first book, MaryJane’s Ideabook, Cookbook, Lifebook, was published this summer. I was reading it in the garden last week when my chicken Eleanor jumped in my lap and stuck her beak right into the book as if she wanted to read along with me. That’s when I realized that I was having a farmgirl moment, and that between the egg-gathering, the worm-farming, and the berry-picking, I’ve been having farmgirl moments for a while now. Have I become a MaryJane devotee, or did she just happen to come along at the right time?

MaryJane’s world is not perfect, polished, or unattainable. (On the website she offers Farmgirl Chapter kits for people who want to organize local groups of farmgirls; those requesting the kit are warned, “The cover letter in our Farmgirl Chapter Kit says there are 10 posters included. We didn’t get around to making those posters, so please don’t think we left them out.”) So she doesn’t get around to everything. What do you expect? It’s a farm. She’s busy.

The new book, like her magazines, are an odd blend of clippings, stories, and craft ideas. Enter MaryJane’s world and you’ll meet a woman who embroiders pillows with the alphabet, in the style of an old-fashioned sampler, then underneath she stitches these lines: “My mama said for me to do this—it would be fun—it was not.” You can find out how to “sass up” flip-flops by adding old plastic clip-on earrings. There are ideas for making purses out of old calendars and contact paper, and lots of recipes involving Jell-O molds. MaryJane’s in favor of eating salad for breakfast (just add hard-boiled eggs and chunks of apple) and she likes to wear aprons because “they separate your outside self from your inside self.”

What I love about this book, and the magazine, is that woven through them I hear the voices of women like my great-grandmother, who was all in favor of darning socks and building your own “outpost” in the backyard where you can camp in the summer. She, too, would have called the campfire meal you’d eat out there—roasted potatoes and johnny cakes—a “hobo dinner.”

And when MaryJane wrote that women love chickens because “putting chickens to bed every night satiates our clucking, nurturing nature,” I was sure I was hearing one of my own aunts, who would have guessed (correctly) that I make a point of putting the girls to bed each night. They settle onto their roost, tuck their beaks under their wings, and let me scratch their necks and whisper to them for a few minutes before they fall asleep. Those are the kind of farmgirl moments I live for.

~~~~~
from dirt by amy

Mary Jane Butters

creative activism

from swirly girl

SOME GREAT WAYS TO GET IDEAS

Sit down with a big sheet of clean paper and a marker and write down everything that comes to mind. Don't dismiss anything. The stupidest of ideas often lead to brilliant ones; so just let it all pour out. (I make my living creating journals from vintage scarves. Imagine how stupid it might have sounded to someone the first time they heard: I think I'm going to make something out of old cloth that people have thrown away. But that silly thought might have led to: wow, old scarves are really beautiful, I wonder if I can figure out a way to use them for book binding?

Go shopping. Make what you don't see in stores.

Go shopping. Make a better version of what you see in stores.

Ask your friends, co-workers, strangers on the streets, anyone with eyes and a wallet what it is they'd like to spend their money on.

Go to the flea market and look for old ideas that can be reworked.

Go to the museum. Read magazines. Look at billboards. An idea can come from anywhere.

from Pamela Barsky's 'How to start a creative manufacturing business'

no guarantees and I'm staying in doors

it was a crazy idea the way I'm feeling to think of going outside so been living off leftovers and websurfing. I love this from Laurie R King
There ain’t no guarantees in the writing business. It’s scary even to mention the possibility, as if failure is a demon summoned by voicing his name, but it’s very true, it’s waiting just outside. I’ve got sixteen books out there, sold a couple million copies, had titles on the New York Times list, and still, every day I feel the cold draft at the bottom of the door. My accountant talks about SEP accounts, and I think, well, that may be necessary. My husband asks if we’re going to have the money for some project or another, and I have to tell him I don’t know.

You’d think I would be the last person able to function with that degree of uncertainty in her life. I’m a fairly structured person; I like things more or less tidy; it annoys me when people are late, and annoys me enormously when I am late. How can I blithely sail into the end of the year not knowing how many zeros will be on my income return the following?

In part, I think, it helps to sneak into the whole writing-as-income thing backwards. When I started, my husband was earning well, and my income was supplement—for example, my advance from Sweden bought central heating, so we only had to use the wood stove when we wanted to. (It was a Scandinavian wood stove, too: I liked the balance of events.) By the time he retired and I was earning with some regularity, it was too late to remember that my earning was at the whims of fortune.

So how do you keep on, feeling that cold breeze moving around your ankles?

You keep on the same way you keep on with whatever book you’re writing: one word at a time.

It helps a lot to be an efficient compartmentalizer, which I am. I focus on what’s at hand, put aside the less pressing and those things I can’t do anything about yet, and try to sweat about only those things I can change. I may not feel I can do anything about the quality of my first draft, but I can certainly move on with the quantity, so I keep writing. I can’t do anything about the state of the publishing market or the tastes of the reading public, but I can keep writing, so I do. I can’t do anything about the overall plot or character development on the manuscript that’s sitting on my desk at the moment, because my editor would kill me and the mortgage company would repossess if I said I needed another six months on it, but I can do something about the copy editor’s wrong corrections and the occasional clumsy phrase that catches my eye, so I do.

I suppose it’s something like the Wright Brothers must have felt. Long, painstaking, mistake-strewn months when you can’t even see the body of what you’re building; then the slow, exciting coming together of wings and wheels, props and flaps; and finally the moment when it’s all together, when you climb in, pull down your goggles, and mail it off to New York.

It’s an exhilarating fifteen-second ride.

And then you pull up your laptop and get started on the next one.

Pumpkin Mania !

over at Hoarded Ordinaries.

I'm felled by a cold. Its been raining for three days. I'm off to stock up on chocolate, buns, and sunday newspapers.

Wherever you are be there totally

Stress is caused by being "here" but wanting to be "there," or being in the present but wanting to be in the future. It's a split that tears you apart inside. To create and live with such an inner split is insane. The fact that everyone else is doing it doesn't make it any less insane. If you have to, you can move fast, work fast, or even run, without projecting yourself into the future and without resisting the present. As you move, work, run - do it totally. Enjoy the flow of energy, the high energy of that moment. Now you are no longer stressed, no longer splitting yourself in two. Just moving, running, working - and enjoying it. Or you can drop the whole thing and sit on a park bench. But when you do, watch your mind. It may say: "You should be working. You are wasting time." Observe the mind. Smile at it.

I know when I read that and then applied it, it truly rocked my world.

Wow... I've got to do something I don't want to do I will have to do it at least until Christmas (45 days) will this make it easier I wonder?

Ivy is here

she is a writer and she has a blog.

I adore this quote from her blog

The purpose of our lives is to be happy.
—Dalai Lama


yes

yes


YES

Deadlines

are sometimes a good thing.

I'm starting another temp job tomorrow so I've got a list of things to do TODAY while I've got the time. Julia Cameron is wise when she counsels against the belief that you need unlimited bolts of time to be creative because of course one doesn't cut into it.

Crafty goodness

After my picasa strop I'd better post some links.

Angry Chicken makes me want to take up patchwork and quilting again. As I have bags of wool lurking around my sofa not a good idea.

The Quilts of Gee's Bend - inspiration from the source of quilt making.

Perhaps because there is an autumn tang in the air my thoughts turn towards cozy quilts.

Wee Wonderfuls is full of wonder crafty wonder

Naturally Nice has a great blog entry about making fabby envelopes from magazines.

Words to Eat By makes me feel hungry.

Beware Piccassa upgrades. I clicked on the upgrade and now Picassa sticks a massive logo beside each picture. Sorry picassa you are going to have to go.

temp heaven and hell

Blog silence due to a two day temp job answering phones. My instincts twitched as I went in through the plush modern reception. My instincts were right - sick company syndrome! I spent my time inbetween phonecalls jotting down figures on post it notes for various job creation schemes pour moi which would not entail temping.

However I have had heavenly temp jobs with lovely co-workers. So its a toss up.

Temp jobs don't just stimulate thoughts of escape. I've been quite creative with mine. Free photocopying... knitting a blanket at lunchtimes instead of reading 'OK'. Meeting friends for lunch. Nipping to the post office to post off video tapes. Writing notes for articles and book outlines! Do do lists for creative work out of work hours. The trick is to remember that you are 'not just a temp' have a life and soul outside of the job.

In the end I discovered a fellow temp was an English teacher/photographer so inbetween calls we strategised on how to get an exhibition for her work. Even the most dire situation can bring up gems.

But he's famous!

I've been running (up or down? I do not know) to London recently. During one trip we stopped at a restaurant and the children exclaimed that our waiter looked exactly like the lead singer of Belle & Sebastian. But that is impossible they added.

Why? I asked.

Because he is famous!

Lots of famous people have regular jobs.

But that is impossible!

I stared at them in amazement. They have met scores of people who are well-known for their creative work, but still need to keep their day jobs. I reeled through examples, and eventually they understood.

But if my kids don't get it, what about the rest of the world? This is a simple concept: fame and fortune are uneasy bedfellows. The amount of money a person earns from a book, album, or art very seldom has anything to do with the importance of the work.

from Bee Lavender

people marching to the assembly point on the Meadows. Note lack of traffic on South Bridge!

g8 sign

check out

Jennifer Louden's website

protesting baby

Faith, creativity, being in the moment and stirring the universal energies

This has just come out of having a coffee with my friend R in Starbucks yesterday.

~~~~
At the end of August at the end of my contract for my summer job I decided to change the way I normally do things - to take a leap in the dark. I decided I needed to get a six month contract to support my lifestyle. To this end I started to search for jobs and contact agencies - inbetween I caught up on my social life (neglected for two months)and tried to get a creative project moving. So for 4 weeks I've been parking myself in my producers office 3 or 4 days a week - we with the help of Google puzzle over websites in Norwegian - phone people and in all have been working hard at every contact we've unearthed to get what we need for this project. Result bugger all. Of course things really are in the early stages and I'm still hopeful that something will happen - we have to keep on keeping on. Meanwhile I'm keeping body and soul together doing some freelance work for a friend. My underemployment being a boon for her trying to finish an important component on a project she has to make some headway on. But the uncertainty is getting to me, applying for jobs, not getting them, keeping going with the creative stuff with no guarantees. Then worrying that I will get jobs but then not have time for the creative stuff. You can imagine the onslaught of niggling worry.

My friend R is in a similar position. Former burned out silk painter she took a leap in the dark a year ago after doing The Artists Way with me and committed to a year long course to train to become a freelance photographer. She's just done her last session and all the students were talking about what stage their fledgling businesses were at. The course had a strong marketing element which is great. Many former students have gone onto make good livings but fitting all the components together and believing that there will be the paying customers out there and in the meanwhile keeping body and soul together is a huge matter of faith that 'everything will work out'.

I too need to just keep on putting one foot in front of the other and to worry less about the what ifs then whats and why whats which float around in my head.

In the meanwhile all my badgering of poor producer. Yes many of my meetings with S involve prodding him. Yesterday he gloomily said he'd applied for a course in high level training / networking which he heard about in the course of our international phoning/emailing but hadn't heard back and he was sure that he hadn't been accepted. So I prodded and badgered and made him look at the websites of the other courses available (I'm a strong believer that getting yourself out there is valuable and brings returns not always obvious ones). I left him in peace to meet R. Late last night I got an email from him saying he had been accepted on the first course!

I do believe that we have to go out and stir the universal energies. This has been in fact what we have been doing this month. The problem is that you have no idea of what the results will be when you do it. I know I've done things thinking 'this will be good for me' and they haven't where as others have had amazing results. By the way stirring the universal energies doesn't seem to be dependent on the 'upbeat positive attitude' thing. Doing it anyway - that application, email, phone call is the important thing. Doing the action and the mind will follow.

Reconstructed Mind

I've found her blog again!

National Novel Writing Month

is coming in November - yes the annual write a novel in a month challenge is back!

Dawn Revisited

Imagine you wake up
with a second chance: The blue jay
hawks his pretty wares
and the oak still stands, spreading
glorious shade. If you don't look back,

the future never happens.
How good to rise in sunlight,
int he prodigal smell of biscuits-
eggas and susage on the grill.
The whole sky is yours

to write on, blown open
to a blank page. Come on,
shake a leg! You'll never know
who's down there, frying those eggs,
if you don't get up and see.

Rita Dove from On the Bus with Rosa Parks

Its National Poetry Day - if you send an SAE to The Scottish Poetry Library (NPD), Crichton Court, High Street, Edinburgh you will get a pack of poetry postards back.

Bee Lavender great name great blog.

... the future for the art world is on the land. Don your cap and get your welly boots on, because it's the farmer now who holds the key to not just the countryside idyll, but contemporary art. The future for art galleries is now to be found in the huge expanse of grain stores and byres that litter the countryside of Scotland.

More at Artwork Scotland - I'm hoping to visit Skateraw this weekend. I've had a soft spot for Mr Demarco as an ex-flatmate of mine related to me that his rather stroppy cat called Anna got fed up with her humans becoming part time lodgers at her home so she put all her belongings into a kerchief and hopped over the wall to live with Mr Demarco and seems very happy and loved.

Like artistic and literary movements, social movements are driven by imagination. I am not speaking here only of the songs and poems and paintings that have always been part of movements for political and social change, but of the movements themselves, their political ideas and forms of protest. Every important social movement reconfigures the world in the imagination. What was obscure comes forward, lies are revealed, memory shaken, new delineations drawn over the old maps: it is from this new way of seeing the present that hope for the future emerges.

Susan Griffin

Everything is connected

For you, the brilliantly obvious theme of today's solar eclipse is self-respect, which is just the miracle you need. This is the one issue on which your whole life, and all its successes and failures, have hung in the balance. It's not easy changing our ideas about ourselves. They are written deeply in our character, often below where we can see them working. Often, we don't know they're there. Yet you really are being relieved of false information that simply has not served you. And this will make room for many possibilities that serve you very well - possibilities you have never considered before.

From Jonathan Cainer this morning.

Wow ! so relevant in the past year or so I have been shedding so many ideas about myself and turning so much of my past recieved wisdom on its head. One of the big things is I've updended my ideas about money and how much I need, how much I deserve, and how much I can get. I've only just beginning to peel away the limiting views I have about money in my own personal case. What has changed me hasn't been books but actually listening and taking on board what my best friends are saying. That is that I am valuable and have value to offer. So even though I am broke at the moment I don't feel broke or as broke as I would have felt previously because I have faith that I will find the right thing to earn me a decent amount of money.

George Szirtes

the poet and translator has a blog - link from my friend R

Another writers blog Dogpoet.

lack of posts

can be blamed on 'Hello' I've been trying to finish posting my G8 photos and seem to manage to get one or two up per week.

In the meanwhile I've been busy slogging through the unattractive parts of being creative. The parts which people who sigh and say 'I wish I was doing something creative' don't want to be reminded of. In this case pouring over websites in Norwegian trying to make an educatated guess at the websites owners business and contacting them and then waiting and waiting and waiting for a response. My grumpy cynical and defeated side says 'And you know what we'll do all this WORK and then the reason why we are doing it will be taken away.'

Note to self devise a creative project which is not dependent on anyone else having to say 'yes' to. No permissions needed.

Inbetween I fill my days by looking for work, doing some freelance work for a friend, and sorting out the dreaded tax.

I've been consuming much culture recently and have decided that I need the input of the very best. Its all very well to see something and think 'I could do better than that' but its even better to see something like a magnificent meal and know its something you want to work towards.

To this end I saw 6 films by Eisenstein, Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery and reading My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk.

I'm filling myself by walking beside the sea and today after seeing to my defrosting fridge I'm going to write a wish list of things I'd like to do before Christmas. This is the time of year which most feels like a new year to me.

Jan Phillips

from nun to photographer, muscian and teacher.

people listening to speeches, music and a live link to London's concert

people queuing to get on the march

Discardia - a new holiday

On Discardia

Need some inspiration to get you through the weekend's nesting projects? Dinah Sanders invites you to celebrate Discardia, a floating holiday which, in her words, "doesn't involve obligations or expense or overblown expectations of specialness. It does not require you to interact with people whom you do not wish to interact with. In fact, it doesn't require you to do anything."

Instead, Discardia, like Apartment Therapy, is about getting rid of the stuff you don't need in order to make room for the stuff you do love. "Discardia," Dinah says ,"is the time to get rid of things that no longer add value to your life, shed bad habits, let go of emotional baggage and generally lighten your load." Happily, this iteration of the holiday runs until October 3rd.

More info at Apartment Therapy

Sychronistically enough I'd already decided to put some unwanted books for sale at Amazon

I liked the wide age range of protesters.

Welsh Dragon against poverty

Reading Frenzy

This looks like fun and while supporting a great cause (unsung heroines who keep spaces alive for artists and writers) can get a stash of reading for the dark nights ahead.

Free Film event - Ideas Factory

My friend Stuart is hosting the evening devoted to films made with Machinima technology (gaming programmes) on the 22nd Sept 7pm at the Cameo Cinema Edinburgh.

more pictures of Make Poverty History

over on Street Photography. I like this one in particular.

banners tied to railings on Princes St Gardens

the G8 leaders came on the march as well!

there in all their glory

the end of the march

sumptuous adventuring

I'd sent out an email inviting friends to go and see a film with me on the evening of my birthday.

4 people turned up but the evening was so lovely none of us could bear to be stuck in doors. We opted for a walk instead.

We went to Arthurs Seat* and walked for about an hour around its middle circumference, admiring the views to the city, sea and hills. A large fat half moon hung like in a Chinese watercolour to the East.

After an hour it got a bit chilly so we went to Prestonfield House Hotel for tea and had a wonderful time sitting by candlelight in a room with 17th Centuary wallpaper made from leather and using the pinkest powder room I've ever been in.

* a hill casually left in the midst of my city

Calling all Petes

Peter Trainer is starting a blog project called the petecollective

yay !

Laurie R King one of my favourite detective fiction writers has a blog.

On Friday I met Michael Nobbs for coffee at Spoon Cafe.

Nay !

2 days trying and I've still failed to upload my pics of the Make Poverty History march ...

tomorrow is my birthday

I used to ignore my birthday and drift along expecting 'something to happen' on it. Usually by my poor mother. Now I know this is a ridiculous atttitude to have towards ones birthday. It is up to ourselves to make sure its celebrated in the manner best suited to ourselves.

I've developed a determination that the birthday celebrations should be spread out over several days and that one should TELL people its your birthday. There is no point in not telling people and then having a strop about them forgetting. Let us give up being passive and become active participants in our lives.

So yesterday I went to Glasgow for the day - I did a whole series of activities 'just for me' lunch at the Czech Tea room (yummy moroccan soup) drawing in my notebook, browsing in second hand bookshops, browsing in gifite shops, giving myself full permission to buy magazines at Borders, very expensive cleaning cream at Neal's Yard. Finally I was fitted for two new PRETTY bras. I came home and had dinner with three friends (Roast chicken - sadly its roast chicken weather)watched a documentary with them. Today I'm off to see an exhibition with a friend, then go and have dinner with my parents (my mother has a birthday close to mine) and I've invited 10 friends to join me in watching a film on monday night. I'll go early catch a film before the one I've planned to see with them, have dinner in my favourite Edinburgh cafe inbetween.

All these activities may not be to your taste but they are to mine. Life is too short not to make the most of it.

the world's oldest photograph?

here via kottke

You don't want to have to answer to the past, right? It's a waste of time. Nor do you even feel like rebelling against the way things used to be or rejecting the stale old expectations people would like to hold you to. I don't blame you, Virgo--especially now, as you enter the frontier zone where the possibilities are limited only by your imagination. The way I see it, it's your sacred duty to shake off all the sacred duties from yesteryear as you go forth to create the future.



*

If I ever produce a self-help manual called The Reverse Psychology of Getting Everything You Want, it will discuss the following paradoxes:
a. People are more willing to accommodate your longings if you’re not greedy or grasping.
b. A good way to achieve your desires is to cultivate the feeling that you’ve already achieved them.
c. Whatever you’re longing for has been changed by your pursuit of it. It’s not the same as it was when you felt the first pangs of desire. In order to make it yours, then, you will have to modify your ideas about it.
d. Be careful what you wish for because if your wish does materialize it will require you to change in ways you didn’t foresee.

from 'FreeWillAstrology'

~~~~~

This blog has changed its purpose... bet you didn't know it had one any way? I originally started it as a place where I could direct students to interesting links. Ah ! that's why she links to things she has no interest in.... and in the long run build a market for my courses without having to do the hard work of tramping around putting out leaflets. Well obviously that didn't happen in that I found that I still had to do the hard work of putting out leaflets and never quite got the hang of promoting this blog. The only time this blog has had a traffic spike is courtesy of 'Photo Friday'!

Well its September the rains are lashing down my kittens refused to leave the house this morning when they saw the wet and I'm not about to promote a class this Autumn. I've decided not to teach again for the time being. As soon as I took that decision someone phoned me from Glasgow asking me if I was going to do a course. I'm not entirely sure why I don't want to teach anymore. Perhaps because I need to teach myself, perhaps because I don't need the status of being a teacher perhaps because folding 2000 leaflets and distributing them makes me want to curl up on the sofa.

I've also changed in the last year or so... and its been hard to reconcile those changes with being a 'teacher'.

What has changed? I'm much more aware of the gaping holes within people and am so aware that people are in the mindset that somehow being creative will solve their career problems, make their mother love them and finally finally make them comfortable.Were as once you have created your thing - you are the same person with the same hang ups but you have a few songs under your belt.

Or they can't be creative because then their parents won't love them any more (pretty conditional love in the first place?)

The idea that there is the one thing you will do and be instanteously brilliant at - if only you could find out what it is. Yes there is flow sometimes but also all those shots were the horizon was wonky (not in a good way) the entire rolls came back blank and kept on happening. Things only got better after about 100 x 36 exposures...

Its hard even when you have built in support (producer) you still have to go out and push and prod to make things happen. Yes YOU have to Make Things Happpen. (I've always wanted SomeOne Else to make things happen).

Do what you love and the money will probably not flow in but you will have to work out a way to get money to do what you want. Yes you might want to do a series on Gypsies in Romania but you will also have to do weddings to support it. The time I would have spent marketing my class will be spent filling in applications so I can have a decently paid job which will give me paid holidays so I can do what I want and pay off my debts.


So my blog has turned from a marketing tool to an assemblage of links about creativity and other stuff and my photos when 'hello' allows.

Now I don't have to keep it up every day perhaps I can relax. Offf to get some breakfast.

quick round up

My friend Hendrix-Cat sang on a pop record!

I went to Skye for the night to show my friend from London the West Coast of Scotland and to take the train from Glasgow to Mallaig 'one of the great train journeys of the world'. The 6 hour trip much elivened by taking a flask to make real coffee with those individual coffee makers which you pour hot water through and 'mini bottles' ie 1/3 sized wine bottles which we knocked back in tin mugs while whizzing through the spectacular scenery. The return trip to Mallaig with an apex ticket cost us a ridiculous £35 and the ferry was £5 return and we shared a room in a bunkhouse for £14 each - great value.

If we could bottle island air we could make a fortune.

I've got photos but I've not been to process them yet.

When we were at Waverly station we stocked up on newspapers for the journey - terrified I would be without reading matter I picked up Orhan Pamuk's 'Snow' on the basis of the blurb and cover. A beautiful, poetic, haunting and political book filled with images and characters what will stay with me a long time.

I saw John Adams Opera The Death of Klinghoffer done by Scottish Opera as part of the Edinburgh International Festival. Superb and very moving.

Bicycle Film Festival

How else could one possibly go to London's first Bicycle Film Festival than by bike?
I wasn't the only one. By 7pm last Saturday the stands and railings outside the Cochrane Theatre, next to Central St Martin's College in Holborn, were chock-full with bicycles. But, apparently, this particular location is notorious for bike theft. So it wasn't very reassuring that one of the first films up that evening was a short called Bike Thief.

full article here

Official Website

I know where I am Going!

I saw this fantastic film last night as part of the EIFF Powell retrospective. About the 3rd or 4th time I've seen it. I spent my summer holidays on the Isle of Mull where it was filmed. Andrew Macdonald the grandson of Emric Pressberger who wrote it says one should never love anyone who doesn't love the film.

sorry for silence

I've been working - not on creative projects. And really when you work 12 hour days and weekends things like posting do really get dropped and keeping up friendships the little routines like swimming, decent food. Luckily it should be over in a week so my skin may recover.... in the meanwhile I re-found my lomo camera stuck it in my bag and have been taking photos again. Trying to find a tiny small space for creative acts. I've uploaded some old ones while I await the processing of the new ones.

lomo party 2 2004

lomo party 2004

quick links

Girl on a Glide

my current work

the film Festival directed by Annie Griffiths of The Bookgroup TV series. Wickedly funny and on the spot. The invasion of the 500,000 has started.....

cinema lomo

lomo glasgow

neals yard london

Serendipity

I escaped briefly from the office and had lunch at the Filmhouse. Just before I left to go back to work - I noticed the poet Gerry Cambridge. I hadn't seen him for years he told me that a new edition of The Dark Horse was out and he now has a website.

nb must write post about the importance of connectedness to be creative...

100 ideas from Keri Smith

1. Go for a walk. Draw or list things you find on the the sidewalk. 2. Write a letter to yourself in the future. 3. Buy something inexpensive as a symbol for your need to create, (new pen, a tea cup, journal). Use it everyday. 4. Draw your dinner. 5. Find a piece of poetry you respond to. Rewrite it and glue it into your journal. 6. Glue an envelope into your journal. For one week collect items you find on the street. 7. Expose yourself to a new artist, (go to a gallery, or in a book.) Write about what moves you about it. 8. Find a photo of a person you do not know. Write a brief bio about them. 9. Spend a day drawing only red things. 10. Draw your bike. 11. Make a list of everything you buy in the next week. 12. Make a map of everywhere you went in one day. 13. Draw a map of the creases on your hand, (knuckles, palm) 14. Trace your footsteps with chalk. 15. Record an overheard conversation. 16. Trace the path of the moon in relation to where you live. 17. Go to a paint store. Collect 'chips' of all your favorite colors. 18. Draw your favorite tree. 19. Take 15 minutes to eat an orange. 20. Write a haiku. 21. Hang upside down for five minutes. 22. Hang found objects from tree branches. 23. Make a puppet. 24. Create an outdoor room from things you find in nature. 25. Read a book in one day. 26. Illustrate your grocery list. 27. Read a story out loud to a friend. 28. Write a letter to someone you admire. 29. Study the face of someone you do not like. 30. Make a meal based on a color theme. (i.e. all white). 31. Creat a museum of very small things. 32. List the smells in your neighborhood. 33. List 100 uses for a tin can. 34. Fill an entire page in your jounral with small circles. Color them in. 35. Give away something you love. 36. Choose an object, draw the side you can't see. 37. List all of the places you've ever lived. 38. Describe your favourite room in detail. 39. Write about your relationship with your washing machine. 40. Draw all of the things in your purse/bag.

to be continued...

you know all the nice weather we've been having

sorry

I

decided

to

have

a

braai

at

the

beach

which

is


why

the

temprature

has

plumeted


sorry

sorry

must feed kittens so a quick post

Long but quick at the same time week since my return from London.I have a huge list of things do do and no energy to do them in.

Tidying house for a kitten visitor. Feeding said kittens who have been ill and are on a strict regime which has not gone down well.

Forgive me life seems very at sea. Expanding with possibilities but at the same time taking calls from friends who have spent their evenings helping evacuate tube carriages. Dancing between these two states is exhausting. Time to water plants, hang out washing, centre oneself with the mundane.

Artist Residency

Edinburgh's Embassy Galleryis calling for submissions to its communitti artist in residence programme. More details at their website.

Jeanette Winterson on Frida Kahlo

We are obsessed by celebrity, alive or dead, and our determination to raid the personal lives of those who achieve something affects both men and women alike, but for women there is a special problem. Creative women in all the arts find themselves explained by and reduced to the circumstances of their lives in a way that men are not. It is a fear of genius, of a women’s genius, that no matter what we create, it is ultimately down to autobiography, the world of the very small. A sideways glance at Jane Austen, the Brontes, or Virginia Woolf, will remind you that the connections between their life and work are treated very differently to the connections apparent in the life and work of Wordsworth, Dickens, or DH Lawrence, Men, it is assumed, shape the world, shape taste, shape sensibility. Women are shaped by their circumstances and from that, sometimes, make art.

Kahlo’s intense representation of her own body put her on the side of ‘women’s work’; personal, partial, confessional. Even her re-valuation by feminists in the 1970’s positioned her as an interpreter of private experience. She was speaking to us – to other women, about physical pain, sexual rejection, medical intervention, marginalisation, family life, gynaecology. Her paintings were small in size and carefully defined by their own concerns. Where was the big wide world of her lover Diego Rivera, with his vast political murals?

Full article here.

Waiting for the London train

London Interlude

Not my normal trip.
On the train down the two minute silence was observed and half an hour before we got into London there was an appeal for anyone with information to go to the police at Kings Cross Station. At Kings Cross as I walked towards the bus stop to Highgate I came across a fenced off area which was being filled with flowers an other tributes, flags from football teams, pieces of paper, a sad one with ‘the killing of innocent people is a sin under Islam’ signed Bengalis from Leeds. There were lots of cameras and photographers milling round.
I was the last person to squeeze onto the 214 bus. Absolutely packed, we passed several busstops without stopping to the fury of the people standing there. Eventually I managed to move a bit further along the bus. As I stood there I thought about the people standing beside me, The man next to me had a staff badge from Moorfields Eye Hospital. I wondered if he was working with the victims of the bombings. Other people I eyed up and wondered if they could be potential bombers.
At Highgate I fled onto Parliament Hill. Stifling hot, the sun beat down. I slapped on sunscreen bought at the Body Shop in Kings Cross. Made phone calls home. Work quiet thank god! And I hadn’t permantly destroyed the excel sheet formulas… kitten feeder left message.. and I called back. I sat and watched life go by. People seemed more normal away from the urban morass of central London. A man with a Glaswegian accent and two young boys came by – they hadn’t picked up their fathers accent and spoke middle class North London. I speculated that the father had come south to further his career and had stayed. Two late teenagers walked by Boy ‘She’s so RICH – it’s great’. Man on mobile phone ‘I’ve got a meeting at the BBC at 12 tomorrow’.
On Friday I too the C2 bus to town. My hostess meanwhile had got her bicycle out of storage, swearing that she might be a genuine cockney but would NOT be going by underground again. About a third of the journey in a Muslim girl I would say late teens sat opposite me with a black scarf around her head. I was intent in looking out of the window – when I looked back over she had taken off the scarf and was busy putting on make up with the aid of a mirror, she then rearranged her hair. By central London she had I felt ‘de-Muslimified’ herself. A group of young Italian teenagers invaded the bus a few stops before I got off. Their teacher an anxious middle aged woman ran beside the bus as she couldn’t get on shouting ‘Pic-a-dilly Pic-a-dilly’ to the students inside. I told S about this later and she said ‘But that bus doesn’t go to Piccadilly. For all I know she’s still probably trying to track down her errant flock.
I worshipped at the sign of Libertys again then walked to Soho to meet my friend B for lunch. Afterwards I went to the Photographers Gallery and the Portrait Gallery. At 5pm I started to walk towards Embankment Underground station to cross the bridge to the South Bank. As I walked down Charing Cross Road two fire engines attempted to get through the traffic and failed. As I got to the narrow street leading towards the station I found it blocked off by police and barriers and was advised to walk along the Strand to get around the diversion. I crossed at the next bridge down and could see as I walked over the large swathe of the Embankment cleared of traffic and the jam of vehicles behind. While I was looking they allowed the free flow of traffic again.
From then on my trip was less eventful though the slowness of the transportation system in London is to been experienced to be believed. 95 mins Highgate to Westminster on Sat morning… I saw the Frida Kahlo exhibition at the Tate Modern on Friday night. It was extraordinary to see an exhibition of artworks where the artist has used pain so directly in their creativity. I reminded me about how consciously I have been avoiding this possibility in my own works. People where visibly moved when looking at the works. On Sat I met another friend B to do a walk about Shakespeare. We ended up at the George the only pub owned by the National Trust for England with the nylon 70’s carpet carefully preserved… we then went to the Brough Market to have lunch sitting in Southwark cathedral grounds. After lunch we stood for 2 hours watching The Tempest at the Globe Theatre. Amazing building, wonderful acting but my legs begged for the play to be 45 mins shorter. It was agony.

Now I’m back it feels a bit like a dream.

checking in

Still here... working like mad, appear to be developing RSI. Interesting that inbetween working at a mad pace I've been able to keep pushing forward my current creative project. One email at a time. One contact at a time. Reading an application guideline or even simply just printing it off. Small steps towards things. Its not even that I'm amazingly gungho about it - often I despair and think 'this sounds like pants who would fund this' but just because you have these kinds of thoughts doesn't mean you can't keep on putting one creative foot in front of another.

~~~

Off to London tomorrow. Have a major terrorist incident must travel. Its a family tradition. We took to the skies after Lockerbie and 9/11. I'm going by train and my aim is just to connect in with friends who live in London.

home made lemonade

Its so hot I just made some

Ingredients
lemons
water
sugar

Method
Squeeze lemon (s) add water and sugar to taste. Refidgerate

Danny Gregory on Drawing

Dear H______:
Think less. Draw more.
When you draw a thing, see it just as that. Not a head, not perspective, not crosshatching, just pure observation as if you've never seen it before. The more preconceptions you bring to the drawing, the shittier it will be.

Clear your mind, and start drawing what you see. Start anywhere. I tend to start in the upper left hand corner because I am right handed. I move across observing, recording, until I get to the lower left hand corner. Then I am done.If my subject is sufficiently complex, this will take me a half hour or more. I go as slowly as I can stand to go. But I don't know how long it is usually; my left-brain has no sense of time. As I draw, I avoid evaluation. I avoid thinking of the purpose of the drawing. I avoid commenting on what I am drawing, even in the quality of the line.

I am empty and the drawing fills me up. Drawing is meditation, not production. Drawing is entirely in the present with no attempt to create context.Do not think about style. Add shadows as you see them. But better to avoid shadows all together and stay engaged with the contours of things. When you have done that for months, even years, then add shadows and crosshatching (My pal, d.price has been drawing for a dozen years. Only on his trip to New York last week did he decide to start concentrating on the effects of light. He still almost never uses color). For now, none of that is important.

What matters is to see deeply and let your hand respond.And if you start at huge length before you draw, you risk becoming bored, or forming mental notes, theories, ideas about what you are seeing. The reason to let your hand and pen take over is to shut the hell up, silence the internal voice, the endless chattering of the mind, the distractions, the pointless pontificating that insists on meaning for the meaningless. The moment does not need meaning or context. It just is. Drawing is about reaching for pure being. Not making pretty pictures to put in frames and on websites.

The world doesn't need more pictures. It needs peace and connection. It needs people who can accept reality and don't feel compelled to control their environments.

If you can look at a boot, at a rotting apple, at car's worn tire, at an old man's foot, and see it for what it is, without value or judgement, can see the beauty and particularity of the thing, you will find peace. You will avoid being covetous. You will be happy with what you have. You will accept others more readily, will see the sunshine on a cloudy day.Life is a wonderful business, though fools blow up London tube stations and sell each other crap and waste time with gossip about movie stars.

If you can draw, you will always have a place to go that is beautiful and honest and true. As you sit in an airport you will find pleasure in the folds of a crumpled lunch bag. As you bide your time in a doctor's waiting room, you will find peace in the arrangement of the shadows on the wall. Even without putting ink on paper, you will be able to slip in to Drawing Mind.

The point is not what your lines look like or how accurate your crosshatching might be. The point is not the drawings on the page or the pages in the book. The point is not the opinions of others who love/hate/ignore those lines you made on the page. The point is not the money you make selling your work to galleries or publishers. The point of practicing your craft is not to rise in the rankings of those who draw. It's not to have your style dominate (sorry, Dan!). The point is to more easily gain access to the moment, to the deeper more peaceful recesses of your Self. The point is to live as well and as fully as you can today, right now, whether your pen is in your hand or not.
The point is to See and to Be.
Your pal,
Danny

I'm still around

Life has been very disrupted in Edinburgh due to the sporadic demonstrations/bomb scares/security lockdowns. Working beside the Japanese Delegation hotel hasn't helped either!

In between I've been working hard, playing hard and rescueing kittens from toilets. I'm meeting my producer this evening to talk budgets and strategies but first we go and walk on the beach as the weather is so gorgeous. I'm determined to work, be creative, and enjoy my life. Also moved up the agenda is finding more ways of being involved in the work to create political change for the better. Going on the Make Poverty History march on Sat was very life affirming. Whatever the outcome of the G8 I am buoyed up that there are so many people who care and will keep on caring.

Meanwhile the next issue of The Beany is out.

photo friday - used

Win free e-coaching from the Independent

by Fiona Harrold

Did you see me on telly?

I was there

Tired feet from queuing, thirsty, we should have joined the ice cream queue before joining, a little sunburned but a good day.