There is a blog dedicated to the late great romantic Mr Gainsbourg, and they liked my melancholy little drawing

Spreading the scribbling!

Je t'aime!

Gerald is oline! Check out the million giraffe project here.

A day of organising pictures. Woken up far too early by an unfriendly sit-on lawn mower. Aching from yesterday’s exertions. Transfered my notes on sleep and PMS from my diary to calendar I found… wondering if perhaps I should be doing something about it. Training again later (woopee) and I am going to draw a few giraffes for this guy.

Clover is back on form.

To my complete amazement I managed to pull hungover self out of bed, take a shower, feed myself and get my ass into town to train capoeira this morning. Further to this, it was actually great fun! Spent a large portion of the time standing on my hands, and a fair del playing minute long games with Jens and Nikki. After an hour I had completely forgotton about the elephant sitting on my eyebrows. Then off till Bäkby to purchase some more creepy crawlies to feed this currently hyperactive frog. Cooked and ate a delicious salmon and new potatoes lunch while reading some more Svensk HP. Laundered, swept, cleaned the bathroom and washed yesterdays dishes. Sorted out my month’s reciepts, drank tea, and browsed a few fun websites. Had an impromptue website planning msn meeting. Repeat the cook and eat part, and then did this for www.thescribbleproject.com.

Some things are impossible to explain.

People are complicated, therefore life is complicated.

Where DO we, and where SHOULD we draw lines?

Yesterday I went kajaking for the first time in more than 10 years. It rained so hard there was nothing we could do but down paddles and close our eyes.

Sometimes things are simple.

When we returned our keys the cafe was closed, but they made us tea anyway. When we checked the bus time table we were offered a lift back to town.  And when we watched we all agreed with the mad man. We were 15 minutes into the film before we realsied we had the commentary for visually impared people on aswell as subtitles. We all just thought it was an unusual style of narration!

Up, down and arround. I don’t know where it stands. But it’s fizzing. Har varit i stan med Marth, Amanda, Krull, Rodde och en massa om annan folk som jag har inte träffat innan. Drack inte så mycket men min huvud känner konstig i alla fall. Pratade mycket svenska. Det är bra övning, men när musiken är för hög mitt hjärna vandrar. Jag känner som strong man eller våt duk. Både två tror jag. Det är så skönt att vara med dom. Det är alltid lugnt och enkelt. Bekvämt. Det är därför jag känner stark. Och det är varför jag skulle stannar… men ingenting är statisk. Det år så tråkig när inget växlar, hur som helst, det finns flera känslor, och folk, som jag vill ha det samma. Nästa året ska Marth till South Afrika med sin pöjkvän. Vet inte om de kom tillbacka. Jag vet inte hur länge tid Mahgol, Constance and Zaro kan vara ett levande del av mitt liv. Mareike har redan åkte bort… Och Tobias?

Vart ligger jag?  Och jag undrar om… vadå?

This is so silly!

I’ve spent a large portion of the last two days drawing little mosquitos trying to work out how I can build a decent looking wooden one. A quick google search demonstrates that the large realistic wooden insect toy market is to say the least,  unsaturated. There is a glut of unusually looking plush toys however, most with stunted wings and one with eight legs. Arachnid mosquitoes? Now that is something to be phobic about! I did come accross this beauty though.

Oaxacan mosquitoes. Damn things are always on the peyote!

Forget singing, that’s the business! The lake was warmer than the air and the rain so heavy I was just as wet when I got in as when I got back out again. Some pleasures are there for the taking.

Today has been a relatively slow day. I woke late, feeling sluggish. I planned to visit Vallby friluftsmuseum but the precipitation was rather too off putting. I worked my way through a few exercises in Swedish grammar, answered some mails and thought about painting. Didn’t manage to do anything though. Cooked some soup and stewed apples. Felt restless. Uncomfortable in my own skin.  I decided to take myself down to the water. Soaked to the skin by the time I arrived, my bike wheels spinning through puddles six inches deep.  I didn’t even bother with my glasses. Left them on the cistern at home. Great sheets of liquid between me and the sky. It’s funny how grey suddenly takes on a thousand new lives.

When I got home the cat lady was out on her balcony.

“Hej! Vart har du varit? Har du varit att plocka svamp?”

“Hej! Vad sa du?”

“Har du varit att plocka svamp?”

“Nej… jag gick och simmade. Jag tycker om simmar i regnet”

“Å”

It’s the first time we’ve ever spoken.

There was an email from Daisy when I turned my computer back on. I miss her.

The Snargits

The funny thing is, it has been.

Considering the familiar mood in which I am currently treading water, it would be easy to slip back under, into the panic which used to overwhelm me when I found myself in these situations. i.e. extended periods of solitude.

I suppose it is something you get used to. In many ways I have been solitary since I started secondary school. Or before. I’m never sure.  I used to seek my own company because I enjoyed it. Later, I sought it because it was the only company in which I felt at home. Now? Well now, it is something I value greatly. But we can all have enough of a good thing, right?

I wonder a lot about Mr Jack Ramsden. I wonder what he saw, in his world. And I wonder WHY he chose me.

If I am perfectly honest, I have next to no recollection of him. None at all from when we lived on the boat. I can’t remember his face. I can’t remember his voice, or smell, or even where his boat was in relation to ours. Except that it was farther up the pontoon. Closer to land. Everybody’s was. I remember the day I painted his boat though, because he gave me a shiny fifty pence piece from the Isle of Man. At the time it was one of the most exotic, exciting things I could have wished for.

Later, when we moved back up to Orkney, I remember being so irritated, so bored, by being asked to write the yearly Christmas card… but maybe I was older then? I’m not sure.  I just know that the next time I saw Jack I did remember him. I think I must have been 11 or 12. It was before I started secondary school anyway. At least I think so. He decided he wanted to give us his racing sailing boat Rocket. (Everything is R’s with this man!) We stayed with my aunt and drove to his house in the borders on a grey afternoon. The sun came out while we were there and a heron flew over the river. I was thrilled because I had made a paper-mache heron at school. His house smelled like mouldy canvass, old man and damp digestive biscuits. There was a thick red pile carpet on the living room floor and papers on top of the television set. I didn’t like it there. Before we left he opened the door to his bedroom. The curtain was drawn and dim yellow light slid over the walls like spilled orange juice. There was the 50p picture, framed in cardboard and wrapping paper.

I was 17 the next time I saw Jack. It was the same house, on the same kind of day. Quite possibly the same papers on top of the television, and the same damp old digestive biscuits.  But it was mine, and Jack was a stain on the kitchen floor. He was also the mountain of dead flies on the windowsill. He was the buttery walls, like set lard in a two week old frying pan. He was even the sticky sweet smell of death that came off on your hands every time you touched the door handle.

Jack Ramsden was a police officer once. He had been a family man. Once. I’m sure he wasn’t always one to seek such solitude.  At some point, I do not remember when, he had been badly beaten by a group of youths. He had spent some time in hospital. It was in the newspapers. I know, because he kept the cuttings, and as we cleaned his death marked house we came across them. After that his marriage broke up. He lost contact with his daughter, and he started spending as much time as possible on his boat. He would leave and not tell the neighbours, but not before he had tried to make himself as unpopular as possible. He did not wish to be attached.

There was nothing unusual in Jack disappearing without word for weeks at a time. Nothing strange about a few flies on the windowsill and a pile of mail at the door. The garden was never attended, and the car never left the garage, and the lights were never on…

Jack died on his kitchen floor while warming a pastie in the microwave.

It took ten weeks for anyone to notice he was gone.

I had not given him a thought since the ordeal of writing the previous year’s Christmas card.

The day after my final high school maths exam the phone rang at about 10:30am. I was asleep, but the sound of it roused me. Mum answered and I remember hearing her talking, sat on the stairs, but I couldn’t make it out. I waited for her to finish before I got up.  I wandered into the kitchen, not yet completely awake. Mum said “Do you remember Jack Ramsden?”

This man, who had meant nothing to me, except the smell of mouldy sails and damp digestives, had given me his life.  The police had broken down the door when a  neighbour complained of the smell. They had found his decaying corpse leeching under the cupboards.  His solicitor was notified, his will opened and the call placed. Mr Jack Ramsden had appointed my mother  his executor. I was the sole inheritor of his estate.

That day, I sought solitude. I sat in the long grass by the strainer post in the corner of a field and cried until my breast ached. It was cold, there was no colour in the sky and the wind was blowing through my fleece. I was naked. I was angry! How dare he! Why hadn’t he shared it between us? My brother and sister! My dad! Why the fuck did I deserve this? I was already alone!

How CAN you feel good when you are living of the bounty of someone elses life? Someone so desperately lonely he left everything to a little girl who painted pictures.

The last thing we did before we left his house was scrub Mr Jack Ramsden off the kitchen floor. The health and safety officials had been to remove his body. They scraped him off the floor with shovels and dumped the spare sand and rubber gloves in the bin outside the back door. How good are you going to look after ten weeks on the lino? It certainly wasn’t an open coffin funeral!

It took me 7 years to say thank you.  Or at least, to mean it. The first five I spent every day wishing that there was some way I could get rid of this money. I wanted to share it, with my family. Give it away, there were a million people I know more worthy. I wanted to wake up one day and be diagnosed with some incurable disease so that I could spend it and enjoy myself without shame. I watched the people I worked with struggle for cash, my sister finance herself through university, my brother… oh my brother!

The next year I spent trying to find the will to justify using Jack’s money to enjoy myself. Nej! Less, to do something with my life! I owed it to him not to become a replica scrooge, marred by a failed relationship and verbal torments.  I continually found myself in a situation where I mistrusted, felt used, and the need for isolation. I was becoming everything I was terrified of. Essentially, him.

Shortly before Christmas last year I had one of those days that only seem to happen to people who like stories. By some great unknown power I had managed to catapult a cup of hot chocolate onto my laptop, get stuck on the 12th floor of a building with no functioning lifts, fail to set of the motion detectors for two different sets of automatic doors, miss two buses, a train and my slot in the laundry room. However, this was the first day I was really truly grateful for everything that Jack had given me. In view of the chocolaty laptop situation I took my sorry ass off to Stockholm. I had no plan, just to move. To be surrounded by people. Anonymous. Shortly after sun set I found myself at the top of a hill, overlooking the islands to the North. It was so beautiful I stood there and cried, humming the Jupiter theme from Holst’s Planet Suite. I was so damn grateful for the opportunity that man had given me. I wouldn’t have been there without him.

Somewhere in the back of my mind that chocolate marred day I made a decision. I decided I wanted to go and see a therapist. I needed to talk to someone about all this, because I just wasn’t coping. That was the last time I spent any considerable time alone. Since then I have been at school, training, socialising, exhibiting… or visiting the said therapist!  And that brings me back to today.

I had started to despair a little because this summer seems so long. And I foresaw it all as one great stretch of loneliness. Sometimes it is easy to forget that there are people, and with each coming year there will be more. Finding your feet takes time. Finding your friends can take a life time, and I suppose that is why so many people never move.

Another man said to me once, that I was “wandering the earth”. When he said this, and I realised how much this virtually unknown man’s words meant to me, I realised how like Jack I had become.

I do not wish to wander forever.

Today I thanked my therapist, I emailed the job seekers service, I serched for psychology courses at university, went to the shop, cleaned out my frog cage, sat on the balcony and read in Swedish, cooked dinner and ate with a friend, watched a film, painted and drew. I was glad just to get out of bed this morning.

To my mother and father, brother and sister. I care.

To the people I have met, and loved, and left. I remember.

To the people I am meeting now. Don’t let me give up too easily!

To Mr. Robert Allison. My feet are planted. Thank you.

And to Mr. Jack Ramsden? I appreciate it, and I will do my best!

R.I.P.