Woken by the moon

A perigee full moon
Yes
You can see it
I can see it too
Let's share it
With everyone

May, the most pretentious month

2) 'A claim, by implication, an unjustified one' so says Chambers.

This is May, full of promise with flapping blouses of cloudy blossom blowing delightful expectation into our eyes.  We hardly notice brown crunchy daffodils making way for fresh green vanity bursting like silent bullets all around.  Oh yes, much promise accompanying mad birds and high white cumulus scudding the wind in painfully blue skies.  Where is the grey now? What is making people smile like lunatics at the same folk they'd have scowled at two days before? How can we resist such a show to draw us from our stuffy interior existence, casting off clouts like there's no tomorrow, let alone the end of the month. Ah me, how we display our need for Spring.

So, starting the pretentious month, halfway through, I cast off my mental clout and pretend to engage with life well lived: Karine Polwart singing 'bout her birds with birdlike precision, two barbecues (one warm, one freezing) and an immersive historical experience at the Mary Rose Museum preview.  And all that finished off with a Sunday evening Tweet-fest with the Design Museum's #fontsunday - this week, fonts on books. Well, who could resist - maybe four entries might have been overdoing it - so hard to choose between Calvino's Invisible Cities, Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick and Mark the Match Boy - truly - then two of my favourite other-worldly, Eastern European covers and my very, very favourite St. Augustine. Not, yet, oh no, not yet.

Yep, I have joined the list people.  Of course it's 1) 'Foolish vanity or pretence, self importance or affectation' but it's also grabbing some of this wonderful life and the wonder of what it has to offer and just bloody well taking it.

This from Karine Polwart: Follow the Heron at Brighton's Komedia, where I did not see her but someone did!  She really does love tweeting too.

Pretension will always catch one out

It

is not a preposition !

Death's other kingdom

Silence, heavy, hanging. Damp as a foggy wash day, hung the heavy silence, shrieking with the unspoken as they carefully moved around each other’s brittleness.  Carefully, carefully not touching the edges; the intense tango of a dreary Sunday afternoon.  Despite the potential of glassy acreage letting in the world, nothing less than a sonorous doorbell would break the spell.  This self-inflicted muteness could only be penetrated by a witness.  But who would brave the tension long if they came a-calling?  And if some guileless, breezy caller did come, would the hastily proffered offer of thick coffee - something stronger perhaps, an aperitif - afford sufficient respite from the piercing unspoken knowledge that too many days like this will break them?  Too many years left to shift and slide around.  Too many weeks - too many Sundays and too long - feeling that silent chill creeping into veins and bones, killing them softly as softly as all the atrophies of age by a lingering, suffocating, damp, heavy, silence.

Udaipur

Some things are good

When a beautiful girl goes to work in India what happens at home?

I'll tell you, her mother's thoughts go with her; calmly smoothing anxiety away so the space can be filled with pride and, occasionally, the last remembered view the day she left in her car.  Waking every morning, wondering a parent's care.

Until, news flits through space and time - all reassurance.  News that food and drink is brought to her desk by servants, on the hour, every hour; that she has a car and driver who takes and waits; that she feasted on the roof terrace of a six star hotel restaurant under a starry sky accompanied by Indian music and fabulous food;  that every evening she dines on a three course meal. That the work is progressing well. And that she loves the beautiful crazy place she's in. Of course she does, she knows how to look.

And then the photographs start to arrive.  Clever girl to tell her mamma about the food, eh?

Start spreading the news

Well not leaving today but have a full six months to be excited about the Upper West Side, Jazz at the Lincoln Centre, Columbus Day Parade, Prohibition, MoMA, the Guggenheim, Beacon Theatre, Central Park.  Am I excited?  Just a bit.

Cocktails, live music, neon, indigestion, sore feet, yellow cabs, exaggerated greetings, world renowned gourmet temples (whatever they are), cheese from every corner of the world (I believe it) and, yes, even Little Italy.  She put in her finger and pulled out a plum and said 'what a good girl am I.'

Oh and Chihuly at the Botanical Gardens...