Sunday 31 July 2011

Discovering bears at exhibitions...


Today me and Katie jumped down from our cloud and went to an exhibition of local artists. There I found this painting, The Bear is a Forest, by Jenni Saarenkyla. It reminds me of the photo below that I found once, of a house in Norway. I want to live there one day. Maybe if I live there I could invite the bear in and feed him honey. N x x x

Friday 29 July 2011

My socks are now stuffed with fluff


"Hoist up yer sails, Eagle. We're goin' on 'oliday!"

...ohhh, summer breeze...

"gee, the veiw up 'ere is much better than down on  yer stinkin' feet."


Looks like he came too late for bird food
-K xx

Wednesday 27 July 2011

Where are you orbiting to, my little planet?

A freckled and frivolous cake there was
That sailed on a pointless sea,
Or any lugubrious lake there was
In a manner emphatic and free.
How jointlessly, and how jointlessly
The frivolous cake sailed by
On the waves of the ocean that pointlessly
Threw fish to the lilac sky.

Oh, plenty and plenty of hake there was
Of a glory beyond compare,
And every conceivable make there was
Was tossed through the lilac air…
                             From Gormenghast


Mervyn Peake


I’m thinking a lot about surreal poetry. I like crazy things – they seem to make more sense to me than the world outside my window. Like Edward Lear or Lewis Carroll or Mervyn Peake – my own rhymes are nonsensical. That’s why I love writing them. Poetry is perhaps not what they are. Rhymes more like, like Nursery ones but a bit more…wrong. Defective.
     I want to learn how to sew and embroider, so that I can start making my own li’l fabric books. They will be small, childlike, and have a button and a loop and inside will have a few pages with writing sown into them made out of the short ditties I do, with patchwork fabrics and laces. They won’t be perfect, because it’s me making them, but they will be a bit tatty and hand-stitched, with prints of Katie’s drawings or flowers or silhouettes of cats. They will be ragged books of defective rhymes for deranged li’l dollies. Or ragged ditty-books for defective dolls: depends which way you look at it. The sort of thing Coraline would’ve had to read, if she’d ended up living with her Other Mother forever…
     I get bored easily, and impatient with my dreams because they don’t materialise by morning. But for now I will imagine this sort of thing inside a tatty book:

Lily fell into a pumpkin head
And the pumpkin head was red.
It beat like a heart,
Soft like a pillow,
And moaned in the wind like a weeping willow. N

Sunday 24 July 2011

Lullaby...

My quiet buffalo whispers a silent song,
seeing that in my eyes something's wrong.
His horns hold my head up to the sky
as he mouths me a sad lullaby.


Persephone, she loves the moon,
she rattles her tongue like a silver spoon.
Her mother-bear softly kisses her eyes
and sings her a sweet lullaby.


I've died of a chrysalis wedged within my throat
and my body's wrapped up and burns in a boat
that drifts on the backs of butterflies
whose wings hum me a soft lullaby.

(it's really REALLY scary putting stuff like this up!) this ditty was loosely inspired by Bat for Lashes song Moon and Moon, and Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan. Because of the anthropomorphic bears, really. I thought it up on my walk to work, which gives me enough time for my thoughts to wander, but not enough time to come up with something long, or like a proper poem. But I don't care; I like things that rhyme. It's simple, and it makes you feel happy to hear it. So when I've thought of a few lines I repeat it over and over in my head so I don't forget, then I type it in a text and save it to my phone. There are MILLIONS of um saved on my phone. (I can't text and walk. I bump into things or step in dogshit.)

Broken Butterflies and Button-eyed Bunnies









Anne Sexton - 'Her Kind'


I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.

                      from Staying Alive anthology
                                                                           N

Thursday 21 July 2011

Tuesday 19 July 2011

Bagpuss, roe deer and ectopic heartbeats

You know when you’re meant to go shopping for ‘important things’ and you get easily distracted by something less important but far more interesting? Well, that’s how Bagpuss happened into my life.

Since flying the coop I’ve been focusing on the necessities – washing up liquid, a new bin, water filters, food that isn’t quite so yum but keeps you alive – that a distraction was bound to occur, especially after having spent all of this month’s wages on a new bed and secondhand furniture, and cans of paint so that my room is now so red I feel as though I’m living inside the right atrium of a heart. Or at least that’s what the fumes led me to believe. Anyway. Enter Bagpuss. Actually, firstly I’m walking through the Sovereign Centre on my way to Wilko, when I slow down to take in the window display at Naomi House. And there, on the wall, is the sweetest sketch of a roe deer among stray branches. So without hesitating I go inside and browse first (I’m not likely to step into a charity shop with one thing in mind, and not browse. 

These places are where all my money goes.) and then out peeps Bagpuss, off the top shelf, and I almost pull a muscle in my neck reaching up for him (much to the delight of an elderly gent who comments to his wife something along the lines of not since his baby granddaughter has he seen someone reach out for a cuddly toy with so much conviction as I did just then. Amusing.) There were many aawwwws at the counter when I arrived with the scruffy mog, followed by a volunteer sharing a tale with me about her dead Siamese who used to hiss at the door whenever someone would ring the bell; and just in case I didn’t quite get what cats do when they hiss, she demonstrated with her own very frenzied hiss. Scary. So I fled with Bagpuss and the roe deer, who now have homes on a cushion and on the wall of my atrium respectively, safe from the crazed hissing lady. Bagpuss meows every now and again, which initially kick-started my ectopic heartbeats again seeing as no-one was near to give him a squeeze, but I’m used to it now. Unfortunately the battery must be old, as he sounds like he’s drowning, but he looks happy enough. N

Nina says...


My...it's so very PINK upon this cloud!

Monday 18 July 2011

Katie took a photo...

Meet our little visiter- 
This is a fox that often comes to nap in our garden. She doesn't bother with the birds and the bees, only wants to see what they're eating.

Sunday 17 July 2011

Nina says...

I have written a book called 'The Thicket Dwellers' (think The Borrowers only a bushier house with rabbits from Wonderland, a ghost and two deranged sisters - yes it is slightly autobiographical) that I am currently editing...very slowly...since life has a bad habit of getting in the way... I'm too shy to read any to you now - maybe someday when this cloud isn't so new and strange. But for now I'll read you a li'l ditty I wrote that (sort of) accompanies the story...

Hoar frost is more brittle and unkind than snow.
The Thicket Dwellers craft me a place to go
within the dog-rose and the bramble ditch,
and feed me frozen berries and river fish...

Welcome to our cloud...