Music

I'm not at all musical. Living, as I do, surrounded my professional musicians, this has become something of a mantra. I consider myself to be a civilian.

But I am musical, of course, in the sense that I have spent my life absorbing it, as we all do. I listen, I hum, I mull, I (God help me) might even do a little dance if nobody's looking.

And of course I am aware, as we all are, that there are songs, pieces of music that prise us open and leave us vulnerable or exuberant or bewitched. When they materialise from the depths of a playlist I become transfixed, transported... but, agh, I am invariably alone when this happens and thoughts, if not shared, either wither or fester. And if I write them down here, it doesn't feel so much like I am talking to myself, which is an important consideration too.

Rather than limit myself to the paltry eight tracks that are allowed by the fabled Desert Island Discs ("Yes Kirsty, my luxury item is the Internet.."), I'm going to start jotting down the important ones as they occur to me. Where possible, I'll include links to Spotify, which you can get for free in the US and UK. Sometimes I'll be trying to safeguard a powerful memory against accidental deletion, sometimes I'll just want to share something special, or rant momentarily.

I won't loftily dangle the promise of esoteric gems and eclectic range before you - there'll be a depressing amount of '90s Britpop I expect - but hopefully what I can do is demonstrate my own connection with each piece, the thing which makes it mine. I don't know where we'll end up, but it'll be more than eight and less than everything.

(You're probably not allowed to take the Internet, but someone (Nick Hornby?) took his iPod. My luxury item would actually be Salisbury Cathedral, which poses other problems I suppose..)

Sometimes I feel like this...

For good or ill, Captain Haddock was always the character with whom I identified most in the Tintin books.

(Hergé's Red Rackham's Treasure is brilliant and well worth a read, even if the ending is a little.. lacklustre. It's available to buy here.)

A Sense of Place

If History is not what happened, but what you can remember, then Geography is not where things are, but where you left them.

A good thing about the US is that towns and cities stay where they're put. Atlanta, Georgia; Lincoln, Nebraska; Denver, Colorado. You may not be able to point to them on a map, but that doesn't mean that you don't instinctively know where they are, and they prove to be very reliable. Sadly, this is not true of many other places around the world. They've obviously drifted, or meandered off while nobody was looking, like members of your family on a shopping trip. And there is a hard-core cadre of distinctly unhelpful places, proper wrong'uns, who've been bugging me for years.

Why on (Google) Earth, for example, is Billericay in Essex with Basildon and Chelmsford when it should obviously be in Ireland? And Staines, which should be in Essex of course, turns out to be in Middlesex, across the other side of London!

Why do Dungeness and, good grief, the Isle of Sheppey, persist in being in Kent when the western coast of Scotland is clearly where they both yearn to be? It's maddening. (But I have to share with you that there is a tiny place north of Dungeness called Lydd on Sea - if that's not overweening ambition I don't know what is..)

Britain seems to be full of mis-places. Tring in Hertfordshire is another place that sounds like it wants to be in Ireland, as is - of course - County Durham.

Small fry, you may think: British idiosyncrasy. Well, how about a whole country? Oh yes, where's Suriname then? Not in West Africa, tucked up in the Gold Coast. No, not in South East Asia either. It's in South America of all places. What is it doing there?

Perhaps I'm just showing my ignorance, but sometimes geography is deliberately unhelpful. Why Bologna and Boulogne? Is it really necessary for them to be so similar? And FOR CRYING OUT LOUD have you seen how many Guineas there are? It's bordering on obsessive. No wonder the post is always getting lost.

Until this can all be sorted out I suppose I'll just have to muddle through. Now please excuse me - I need to GoogleMap my car keys...

Shouldn't I be doing something more useful? Like checking Facebook?

Sigh, and there's sooo much more..

Coupon Code

Consecutive Vowels

Convincing

Mutual

Starlight

Conditional Risk

XKCD

There are hundreds of wonderful cartoons over at XKCD; a mixture of wit, romance, wisdom and adventure where sometimes simple images capture complex ideas and emotions.

When I find one I adore, I'm going to embed it here, just so I can find it more easily next time. Please remember that all the credit belongs to Randall Munroe at XKCD.com.

Here's a couple of the ones I've fallen in love with so far.

Alternative Energy Revolution

Wasteland

2009 Called

Flying Cars

Narrative is all.

Storify is a website that allows you to write your own by collating nuggets of the internet. Here's one I made which amused me...

Transitioning

Six weeks is a very long time to spend anywhere, but I've been back in the UK long enough now that America seems like a bizarre fairy-tale rather than a memory, as if my brain can't allow both places, both homes, to exist at the same time. Our house, our street, the stores and schools in Houston, have all become faded, sun-bleached images during my stay, just as, when I am in Texas, Britain seems faint and distant, reduced to radio and telephone voices from behind a curtain of grey drizzle inside the mind.

On Monday we'll be climbing back through the wardrobe and swapping realities once more. I'm keen to get back now. It's been wonderful being in Britain, renewing memories not just of friends and family, but of the land itself - but this has clearly been a visit, a rapid-fire series of blissful Hellos and bitter-sweet Goodbyes. Normal, the day-to-day calm of Nothing Much and This and That, is now in Houston and that's where we need to return - for a rest as much as anything else.

Whilst we've been here we've covered as much ground as possible, racing about by train and car. We've been up mountains and down mines, hugged the cliffs and beaches and tramped about the very middle; we've soaked up the museums of London and got soaked in country fields. Everywhere we've mixed hugs and handshakes, laughed and talked, restoring and renewing connections and relationships.

Today, on my back from our last stop, our last visit, the rain cleared and the plain old familiar M4 got splashed with late afternoon sunshine. The trees, the yellow-green of the fields, glittered, flicking past on either side; the road itself shone silver. Everything shone, wet with light, and I wanted suddenly to miss the exit, to keep on and drive into the never-darkening summer sky.

There's just packing left now, and then back to normal.