shadows of echoes of memories of songs

I've not had any caffeine for two weeks now. A combination of things made me decide to give it up for a while: sleeping badly (not so much having trouble getting to sleep as never actually feeling rested after sleep); persistent stomach pains which I figured probably wouldn't be worsened by giving up coffee; and a conversation with a colleague over breakfast (at a conference) where he claimed that my excessive coffee-drinking was part of some kind of subconscious death wish. Add to all this a vague probably-more-superstitious-than-anything feeling that it's worth 'detoxing' occasionally, or reminding myself that I can do without these things, & you've got a temporary caffeine fast.

To be honest, I haven't noticed many effects (apart from the hideous withdrawal headaches, which weren't as bad as last time I did this and went away after a couple of days). I do seem to be sleeping more, but part of that's because I've had coughs and colds (and tonsilitis!) for the whole of that time, and my sleep is more like a cold-ish flu-ish sleep -- total oblivion punctuated by occasional surreal and upsetting dreams. I do feel a bit more awake when I wake up, but I'm not sure how much of that is a placebo effect. The main effect, though, has been that I'm getting through the millions of boxes of herbal tea in the cupboard at a much faster rate than I have done for the years that they've been there. And when I say years, I mean it; some of these teas have moved house with me four times. The other week I decided a Herbal Tea Audit was in order, and took them all out of the cupboard and put them in order of best-before date. I wasn't surprised to find 2005s and 2004s in there, but the 2001s and 2000s were a bit worrying, and there's a packet of vanilla tea without a best-before date which I know for a fact I bought in Mauritius in 1998. It still tastes, um... okay.

Anyway, I've been drinking the herbal teas in date order (with the exception of the vanilla tea because that's actually just flavoured black tea, i.e. it's got caffeine in) and have so far finished off the ends of boxes of sage tea, mistletoe tea, lemon and ginger tea, 'Ayurvedic detox' tea, and I'm now onto 'Dr Stuart's Tranquility tea'. It's a fascinating voyage through a very limited spectrum of flavours (not enhanced by being a decade past their prime, but I know what these teas tasted like when they were new, too). Basically there are three types of herbal tea: stuff that tastes like spices (so I suppose that isn't really herbal tea at all, it's more spiced tea); stuff that tastes like leaves; and stuff that tastes like hibiscus and cardboard. I don't really bother with the third category at all any more; it all suffers from the Um Bongo effect (if you mix more than two fruits together in fruit juice, you end up with Um Bongo, whatever fruit you use; see also the 'brown effect', whereby if you mix more than two colours of paint together, you end up with brown, whatever the colours). Whether it's blackcurrant and vanilla, cranberry and orange, or anything with the word 'zester' in the name, it's 80% hibiscus and tastes like slightly fruity paper. It's the sort of taste you'd get if you ate the box that strepsils came in. The second category includes mistletoe, vervain, St John's Wort, lemon balm ... however interesting the herbs sound, the resulting tea invariably tastes like sucking hot water through a lawnmower bag. (Sage is the one exception to this rule: sage tea tastes like sage, all meaty and earthy, and has a wake-up kick to it like a cup of coffee.) The spicy teas are far more interesting: cinnamon! Liquorice! Cloves! Sweet-savoury Christmas-puddingy smells! Chai! Incense and Glastonbury and big floaty tie-dye scarves! (Not tasting of all those things, of course. Tea that tasted of Glastonbury would be horrible. Though I suppose some of the leafy-tasting teas -- notably, stinging nettle tea -- do actually taste of mud.)

Then there's mint tea, which doesn't fall into any of those categories, though I suppose it's closest to the leafy-tasting group; and I've seen a worrying trend for mint tea to be combined with other stuff. Chamomile and spearmint? Why waste perfectly good mint tea?

The one thing they all have in common, though, is that they all bear virtually no resemblance to tea.

Not a poem, just a list.

Morning gloom.
Stomach hurts.
Team meeting:
interesting plans.
Phone calls.
Email backlog.
IRC messaging.
Shopping trip:
cycle ride,
bought stuff.
Quick lunch.
Committee meeting:
long debates.
Brief chat.
Dark already.
Volunteer shift:
book shuffling.
Crazy people.
Cycle ride,
home again.
Baking time:
burnt gingerbread.
Stomach hurts.
Throat hurts.
Evening gloom.
Pointless blog.
Bed time.

I said I'd do one blog post a day this month (and I have averaged that so far, despite missing the official deadline last Thursday); I didn't promise they'd all be on this blog. So for today's entry I'm just going to point to a post on my other blog.

I suppose this also serves as a launch of the other blog. Please be nice to it, it's still quite new. :-)

Continued from Part 1.

( Oxford revisited )

Good grief, I didn't realise I'd gone on so long. To be continued, if anybody (including me) can bear it...

juggzy asked: So, this is a question for all the girls on my F-list, and anyone else who has tuppence to add. What are your stories. What made you apply for Oxford or Cambridge, or what made you not apply? How did you feel if you did or didn't get into Oxford or Cambridge?

So I started writing about this, and all the background and the side issues and everything, and somehow just didn't stop. This is going to have to be told in instalments, and it's probably only of interest to me, but hey, that's the self-publishing revolution for you.

( How I got to Oxford: Part 1 )

Part 2 to follow...

Leonard Cohen
The O2, London, 13th November 2008

I didn't actually know the songs of Leonard Cohen that well, apart from 'Hallelujah', and 'Bird on a Wire', and 'Famous Blue Raincoat', and all the other ones it turned out that I did know (many more than I thought). So I didn't really know what to expect, except good songs. But not knowing what to expect means having to listen more attentively to everything, because you don't really know which bits will be the good bits.

I'm not going to do a proper journalistic review. I'll leave that to people who know what they're talking about. But there were nearly three hours of non-stop good bits, good bits made almost entirely of words.

The band was a lot more smooth and shiny than I expected, less about the simple acoustic guitar and more about the backing singers with glossy voices (though one of them did play the harp as well, and the other two turned somersaults in one of the songs); all very polished and pleasant, and with some amazing guitar solos... but I'm not trying to do that sort of review. For me, really, it was all about the lyrics. And the voice -- so incredibly deep, with a texture like rough stone that's been warmed by the sun. It's a voice that sounds like the feeling of being touched.

And I didn't expect to be touched like that. I didn't expect so many poems (with and without music). I didn't expect 'A Thousand Kisses Deep', spoken over one shimmering chord, or the refrain of 'Anthem' uttered like a prayer. The right words can reduce me to wordlessness; the right combination of the sacred and the sexual can bring me to my knees. I don't want to shatter it by trying to explain it.

We missed the last train back, got the coach, arrived home at 3 a.m. All today I have been dazed and tired and had a sense of nameless longing, a sense of something just out of reach; as if there's something solid in my mind which I can touch but not see, something which my fingertips know intimately but which I don't have the vocabulary to translate.

It feels as though the house is falling apart in sympathy with my body, or my body is falling apart in sympathy with the house, or perhaps we are bound up like oak tree and ivy, growing and decaying together.

My tonsils swelled to clog my throat (antibiotics have helped, but I am still full of cough and cold), while the drain in the bathroom sink filled up with grime until it couldn't swallow anything either. I spent my two days off work shivering with feverish cold, while the boiler constantly hovered on the brink of not working, the pressure gauge always reporting near-zero, the house never quite heating to a comfortable temperature (despite the double glazing fitted earlier this year) without the use of the electric fire. The switch for the electric shower stopped working (though it was replaced). The sealant around the bath has decayed again (though my grouting seems to have mostly survived).

About a week ago, the inner oven door spontaneously shattered (the light indicating that the hob is switched on had long since crackled and popped into oblivion when it got water in it); my stomach hasn't been well for a few months now, forever crackling and popping in its own horrible ways, though nothing has yet exploded.

If once a month the house starts to hurt all over, it manages not to complain. The lock on the front door is sometimes as stiff as my back, though, and the noise from inside and out probably means that the house never sleeps properly either.

And nothing will ever conclusively fix either of us: we will just go on patching things up around the edges until we move, or stop moving.

I feel as though I missed the party — well, I did miss the actual election party we were invited to last night, feeling just too rotten to go out into the cold, but I probably wouldn't have stayed up all night anyway. We watched the first couple of results come in on the BBC's live feed (live blogging! tweets and emails from Have Your Say people! live videocast!) and then went to bed, setting the alarm to 7am so that we'd catch the on-the-hour news.

We woke to the sound of cheering.

monkeyhands says pretty much what I wanted to say about the result. It does feel like the future; it feels as though the world has, literally, changed overnight. Change has come.