Here in Portugal, Agustina Bessa-Luís is one of the greatest authors.... and I had the privilege of illustrating this one. The first edition came out in 2006 in big art book format. And now this one, that I illustrated, which is in a smaller, more accessible form, and created in a really classy mid-20th century kind of book style, with cloth binding and hard cover, with my B&Ws inside. It's out now. It's a lovely object.
It's 20:10 and here's to a better year than 2009 for everyone. What an odd year that was. Some awfully good things happened (we moved, prof's big fat brick of a book was finally finished and got into the bestsellers and he has moved papers, this time to Expresso, I had a couple of nice jobs to do) and most of everything else was a speeding but damp squib, for us and an awful lot of friends.
This morning I saw a cedar tree with about 40 egrets sitting on it. I was driving past it on a main road so I couldn't take a picture, but it was so weirdly beautiful. My daughter was with me, she saw it too, so I know wasn't dreaming... and I was so annoyed that I hadn't got a picture of it, so I could stick it on flickr and say WOOOO, LOOK what I saw! and then I berated myself for being annoyed... ten years ago it wouldn't have mattered to me whether anyone else saw it or not.... I was enough. I think the internet needs to give me some space.
I'm going to spend a lot more time away from this internet thing this year. I need to go back to the drawing board in more ways than one. I may find that in a couple of week's time I have so much to write about that I go back to illustro-blogging daily, but I doubt it. I feel rather spent. Although my head is full, it is also stuck.... full of ideas and thoughts, but needing some space and time to get any of them out. I want to work on some bigger things, get a whole book done (god knows what about), get this house underway, work out where the hell it's all going. It has much to do with the utter chaos that has abounded since we moved into this odd and quite crap house that we shall hopefully be demolishing this year. The drains are abysmal, the lectrics are hanging by a forty year old thread, strange things happen when it rains, and it's full of the junk that I didn't have time to dump when I had to move us and 20,000 books all of a sudden in the summer. I'm de-junking this week. I used to live with an Aussie friend in London who used to say "I just going to de-spunk" when she was going to take a bath. This didn't sound wrong to her sweet young antipodean ears. Anyway, I'm not de-spunking, I'm de-junking.
Twitter has utterly done for my attention span, so that's going to be accessed only when I'm standing in a queue with nothing else to do, I am rather fed up with it. After six years of an awful lot of blogging, my site will probably morph into more of a portfolio site... everything will still be here, just different and there will still be things to be writ in stoney gibberish, but gosh, sometimes I do feel like I've said everything. The more outrageous or disgusting things I want to say or paint will go on Unkempt Women... which I created for just this eventuality, when a gel just wants to write from time to time or do something different. I'm not giving up, just going a bit easier on my non-internet-self
So here's to a gloriously creative ten past eight for me as well as all of you.
I'd like to have done a retrospective of the year of my stuff, but if the year is anything to go by, I won't have time to sit down and DO a retrospective before 2009 is finished (well, I invented me livin' draws, I moved house while 'im indoors finished his book, which, brilliantemente is at #12 in the fnac chart and #1 in non fiction- WAHAY!, then a load of stuff to do with this house, like THE BLOODY DRAINS and the BLOODY LECTRICS (but it's alright, cos we're going to knock it down and start again), plus a few nice jobs to do, plus the re-invention of unkemptwomen.com, and probably a load of other stuff I can't remember, ooh, like my tenth anniversary of living in this place we call Portugal) and the noughties are over..... SO, before I have to run off to the next child's school Christmas party of doom, and say goodbye to school runs and hello to two hungry daughters for a whole two and a half weeks, I shall just wish you all a lovely, warm, happy Christmas/Winterval/Schminterval and an optimistic 2010. Thanks for the visiting.
It's not just all the climate change denialists that are coming out of the woodwork, grasping at every straw to prove their point; nor the greenalists who don't believe that anyone can question their proclamations; nor the rest of us in the middle, who find it hard to be a reactionary for either side (how ludicrous to have SIDES in the face of such an important problem), worried that we will be laughed at if proved wrong; nor the detracting and pointless argument about whether this is man-made or not; nor the preposterous machinations that the politicians at the Copenhagen summit will go through to prevent them making a single damn decision, proposal, treaty, whatever. It's a big fat combination of all of us filling a big balloon of stupid.
[now, AFTER you have read this, don't forget to go and visit http://unkemptwomen.com that is has opened TODAY]
you know how sometimes think of something that irritates the crap out of you when you're sitting in a traffic jam or you're stuck in the loo or you're waiting for a bus, and then you remember loads of the things that irritate you and you just feel like getting it all down in a list in your blog will make you feel better? ... ... DOT DOT DOT ELLIPSIS
1. that horrible way actOrs read out other people's words, when it's a letter or a diary entry or a transcript of a foreign speaker, and they do that stupid faux faltering and stammering at the beginning of sentences.... a perfect example is Pat in the Archers who does that THING for her whole rôle.
2. People.
3. People who CAN'T agree with you, on ANYTHING... you converse with them and EVERYTHING you say they deny or negate or just say no, "The sky is blue today" "NO, it's a duckegg green", "So, you work for a living?" "NO, I work to commune with the universe, money is just a by-product" etc., etc., etc., Oh, bugger off.
4. Magicians, especially magicians of the "wwooooo, look at me being all mysterious and waving my arms about with a big hairdo" genus.
5. People, usually middle-aged women, who have to make a fuss about EVERYTHING when in long queues in shops or cafés.
*hypno frog* FORGET ALL REINCARNATIONS OF "UNKEMPTWOMEN" THAT LUCY HAS MASCARADED BEHIND FOR THE LAST FEW YEARS, THIS IS THE REINCARNATION THAT UNKEMPTWOMEN.COM WAS REGISTERED IN THE ETHER FOR, ALL THOSE YEARS AGO */end hypno frog*
On 7th December, I'm opening a brand new website. I'm telling you about it now so that I absolutely HAVE to finish it. This new website is a website full of big internetty WOMEN. They are quite UNKEMPT, mouthy, not-normal, and lovely. Every last one of them. Some of them you have already heard of. Some of them you haven't. Some of them will remain anonymous. All of them are writers, journalists, novelists, long term proven bloggers and/or artists.
You see, sometimes, I get an idea in my tiny mind and I want to blog about it, but that idea is a bit different from what I normally do - maybe it's me being SERIOUS, or maybe it's a recipe - sticking a recipe in the middle of my blog just wouldn't work. It would break the flow of idiocy... and that's what you come here for, isn't it? Sometimes, I just fancy being really REALLY disgusting. I did have a separate area for some comedy p0rn once, but it instantly got listed in p0rn listings along with my name. Since I published my recipe book for kids a couple of years ago, I do get some squidlets coming to my site. Obviously, squidlets and p0rn don't mix, so I had to shut down Harriet Hole and her Farm-Based Filth. I didn't do her often enough to justify her own website, but it would have been nice for her to have somewhere to do her business (I have a feeling she'll soon be back). I thought that MAYBE, other lady bloggesses and writers and things might feel the same. So, I asked. And they did.
Blogging itself has changed, too. So many of us just don't keep up the steady stream like we used to, much of the time because blogging has brought us real work to do....and as your posting rate goes down, so does your findability... findableness... er... visibility (living in forrin for too long does this to a girl's inglish).... some of us have given up blogging almost completely, but still get the occasional urge to put something somewhere and have it read. Just sticking it into a page floating about in space isn't going to have it read by anyone. Sticking it in a vibrant, buzzy, loud kind of website, populated by a disparate bunch of lunatics lovely set of ladies, however, will help it to be read. So THAT'S what I've turned Unkempt Women into.
You may wonder why it's just a WOMEN thing. Well, I keep hearing that the internet is chock full of men with hardly any women.... and that we're all housewives blogging in little support groups, saving each other from madness and suicide. This is utter HOGWASH, but the myth won't die, so I thought a loud concentration of the boobed sex will help to quash it.... and, anyway, "unkempt people" doesn't sound so good.
I'm not telling you who's contributing yet, because a. some will be anonymous, and b. the contributor list isn't complete yet... although we already number over twenty splendid lovelies, bursting with talented-bloggish-writery goodness.
So, there you are. http://unkemptwomen.com opens 7th December. Follow @unkemptwomen for reminders and teeth-kicking on twitter.
I've been dazzled these last couple of years by the new road planners' favourite thing of the Portuguese roundabout. There were never that many of them Portugal, and now there are ten in the space of nine kilometres on my little home stretch of the EN10. While they were digging up the road to make the new layouts, it was a death trap, not a metre without a pothole of death, but now that the work is done, the roundabouts do help to calm the traffic... of course, in some places there should be roundabouts and aren't any and in some places the roundabouts are a pain and a bit pointless, but I'm coming round to this more rounded-out road of ours.
BUT. BUT. Would SOMEONE (oh, I dunno, how much would a short infomercial by the gov.pt cost?), PLEASE, instruct the 80% of Portuguese drivers who don't think it necessary to touch the little stick at the side of their steering wheel on how to use those little blinky-blinky orange lights on the sides of their cars when they are going right or doubling back on one of the roundy-roundy things before someone gets SQUISHED .... it's turning me into a shouty-shouty sweary-sweary monster.
I hardly ever go shopping for stuff. Stuff that isn't food, that is. I hate it. It's enough to be a big breasted non stick insect to make clothes shopping a depressing and confidence destroying activity, but wandering round the shops in Lisbon is made all the worse for the shop workers who don't want to sell a girl anything if she's not famous, glamourous or one of her friends. Occasionally with a little time to kill, I walk round Lisbon shops, looking in windows, spotting little things inside and being tempted by little objects of shoe desire and the rare bit of clothing that might suit me or even fit me properly, and am often stopped in my tracks by sullen, grumpy, judgmental shop staff. I don't want to go in their shop if, as I've approached the door, they've just stood on the doorstep, smoking a fag, and given me the obligatory Portuguese "down to the shoes, up to the hairdo, down to the shoes again" scrutiny, followed by a scowl. I'm not going to give them my money. I'm not going to give them the time of day.... and there goes the beautiful pair of FLY shoes that I covet and might have bought on an expensive impulse.
In the last few years, there has been a marked change in treatment of the punter by shop staff here in Grand Lisbon, but it is mostly only where there are brazilians employed or in the multinational chains that this has happened, where you can tell there is a large corporate baseball bat behind the counter, saying "BE NICE OR YOU'RE OUT". Buying a phone is usually a pleasant operation now, or going into Natura to buy pseudo-ethnic stuff (if only it would damn well fit), and my favourite is the Nespresso store. You can almost feel the multinational force-field as soon as you walk in the door, and the staff treat we customers, we who have been sucked into the [delicious] Nespresso vortex of fashionable nonsense, almost reverentially. It pleases me, as I shoot in there to pick up my fix, dress
ed not as glamourously as the Portuguese deem to be respectable for an almost 40 year old, to be received graciously, GRACIOUSLY, by a young attendant, smiling, gently welcoming, head bobbing and with their hands clasped together, and not stuck akimbo on their hips, annoyed to be bothered by yet another someone who pays their wages.
Leave behind the big corporations, though, and you are lost to the grumpy misanthropes who don't like you, don't want to leave their mobile phone call for you, don't want to help you with anything and don't seem to want your money.
I've been looking for a newish car recently.... dreading it, as my only experience of car salesmen is in the UK, a bunch of pushier, more annoying, slipperier people one is unlikely to meet outside of an estate agent's office. But having visited several car stands in the last couple of weeks, it struck me that not one of them has tried to SELL me anything. I have a certain idea of what I want, but when I have gone in to ask the reticent looking blokes behind the desks looking at porn on their laptops if they have a fluffy pink three wheeler that runs on potato peelings, not one of them has said "No, luv, but I do have a velveteen green one, or maybe I can interest you in a car that has FOUR wheels? They really are fashionable this season...." or anything, just "no, we don't have one like that" or "yes. it's here" without even asking if I'd like a closer look or a test drive or to buy the damn thing.
It's a wonder anyone ever buys anything really. It's a wonder the smaller boutiques keep going. It's a wonder I have ANY shoes. Oh, I remember. I bought the last lot in Scotland, from a very nice Polish lady.
While I'm having a busy week finishing off illustrating a book, finishing off 'im indoor's website because it's about time he damn well has one, watching his booktruly fly off the shelves [ever the optimist - splendid book, especially good for christmas present for EVERYBODY - hint hint] as of tomorrow, getting used to my not whining about how he's always working on the damn thing, expecting that I will soon start begging him to start on the next one so that he's not under my feet all day, and drinking a lot of coffee instead of stuffing my face with my new found extreme cake joy [Lidl Mini Stollen - omg, marzipanny goodness], I leave you with one of me vids from earlier this year, because frankly, it's been too long, you need to waste three minutes of your life, and I think they need to be seen more. of. prepositions. dontcha just luv 'em?.
Men pissing in semi-public is a common sight around here (from time to time I also pass a lorry driver nipping off into the woods with a bog roll.... but that's a different matter that I don't want to think about). If I could wee standing up, with a little dignity, as opposed to squatting over the risk of being thistled or nettled on the arse with the likelihood of drenched trousers, I might well do it in the open, like the men. It would be a boon, actually, because my bladder is a faithless companion. I wonder, though, if I would feel compelled to seek out only perpendiculars to piss on.
There are miles and miles of unbounded roadside in Portugal, without fence or wall. So why do they seek out the free standing gateposts or trees to piss against? What's wrong with pissing into the grass? Or onto the asphalt? Or a muddy puddle? Or into sandy earth to make a muddy puddle?
p.s. Before any of you say it, I KNOW that, obviously, snow trumps walls, but we don't get that here very often. If we did, then they would.
This is the first halloween in this house and the first one away from the neighbourhood children that used to hold a black mass on this Forrin's doorstep. I'm celebrating with some halloweeny stuff here in the site, so I don't have to do it out there. It's too scary out there.
For a couple of years I started to think that the roads of Portugal, or rather, the highly fallable lumps of flesh that drive on them, were improving. I was wrong. I was driving less than I used to, and had become used to the fewer roads that I used everyday.
My kid has started going to school in Setúbal, 16kms from home. We leave home at 8.15, dropping her sister off first, then half an hour later, we're on the other side of the city and she scuttles into school, pretending that her mother isn't that embarrassing scruffy English one over there, waving and blowing kisses at her. The school run takes us down the EN10, which has had more [supposedly] safety measures installed on it in the last two years than one might think necessary. Roundabouts abound, barriers, little black and yellow sticks in the middle of the road, more radar speed sensors, the occasional policeman not just chatting by the roadside.
As a result of this new daily school run, my daughter is learning a whole raft of new swear words and unspeakable insults.
See these people above? See their number plates? Exactly. You can't, because they're so close up my arse. There is a kind of alpha-male-extending-to-everyone kind of shit still going on, that means that if they have a car bigger and younger than, say, MINE, they try and scare me off the road by driving so close that I just want to give up and cry (please don't think I'm a little old lady scared shitless driver who drives round at 40 all day... I'm quite a brazen speed freak myself, within reason). If they have a car that is [even] older than mine, they do the same thing, once they've spotted the woman in the driving seat. Then there's the new sickness of late middle age women who have come to driving late in life and have set up a cleaning business with a fucking Berlingo or something. They haven't a damn clue, and sit and gossip and smoke so close up my arse that I can hear the cackling.
There's no getting away from them. They're idiots and unfortunately, the idiots will probably be inheriting the earth, so I give up.
I kind of need a new car, not to get rid of my faithful 10 yr old Saxo, but as a back up now we're further out of town, but have been waiting as long as possible to get something as green as possible. But, no, sod it. I give up. I'm going to save the emissions produced in building a brand new car and get my self a second hand TANK. Nothing less. I can just mow the bastards down if they get stuck up my arse, by quickly nipping round and leaving my caterpillar track marks on their stupid unimaginative (if only they would IMAGINE what might happen if I HAD to slam on my brakes for a small hedgehog or snail) faces.
In the car on the way home from school the other day, my daughter and I got into a conversation about rabies... stemming from a question about taking pomeranian dogs in handbags on aeroplanes.
"So what happens when you get rabies then?" asked ten year old
"Hmmm... let's see, well, there's the going quite mad [you appreciate my clinical accuracy, don't you?] and the frothing at the mouth and then there's the hydrophobia"
"What's hydrophobia?"
"It's when you're scared of water, scared of seeing it and of drinking it."
I'm working on some illustrations for a book at the moment (see the current lack of blogging) and I want them to be the absolutely best I can do in a certain style, which is very drawy and very black and whitey.
Normally I hate, really really hate, when people talk about their work... it's so profoundly and painfully boring. I mean everyone from artists to sportsmen. They should be required to stay in their studios or on their sports fields doing what they are good at. I hope you appreciate that I hardly ever talk about the act of drawing, painting or illustrating....
"...and I draw my inspiration from blah blah blah blah...." oh shut the hell up, you boring sod. Just get back to work and be quiet.
But I'm going to break my own law because I have accidentally discovered a thing.
While I'm working on this book, I am surrounding myself with my illustration gods, for inspiration and guidance and something damn good to look at and with all this wonderfulness around me, I have happened upon this formula:
I've done it again, missed a HUGE milestone in my life... two days ago, that is, I had been living in this country for 10 years. A quarter of my life, half my adult life. Gosh and HOW Portugal has changed in those ten years. It really isn't the same place as the one I arrived in, with a two month old baby on a GO plane and the bumpiest landing I had ever had at Lisbon airport (until last month, anyway).
I'm not going to wax all lyrical and stuff and thing about it.
This ALMOST makes up for missing that spectacular storm the other week (when I was tending to a not actually vomiting 7 yr old, while that bloke I live with was upstairs admiring the amazing lightning strikes across the peninsula without saying a word).
Is this the weirdest sky you've ever seen? It's the weirdest one I've ever seen.
However you have found this brain dump of mine please note that:
a. this is a blog. It is a bit of fun. It is written on a certain day then left behind, I never go back and edit... ANYTHING.
b. before you take it upon yourself to tell me off for being misanthropic and awful, first, remember you might be missing something in my ridiculous writing, second, stop going out of your way to be offended and go and find some mermaids and fluffy things to look at.
c. then again, if you're moved to express your contempt of me, then good... at least I have moved you to SOMETHING.
