Settle for somebody who will bring you flowers: not just for birthdays and anniversaries, but also, just because. Somebody who will move all your spiders. Somebody who lends you books with the page corners folded down and scribbled notes in the dust jacket like a portal to their thoughts. Settle for a person who will hold a constant umbrella over your parade.
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Those who have been single for a long time will know that you gather up exes. The significant others who actually, in the grand scheme of things, turned out not to be so significant. Things didn’t get serious for long enough to cause a full-on heartbroken split from when things end, and most of the time you don’t meet the prerequisites to be banished from each others lives.
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You don’t hear about the hours they spend memorising freckles. You don’t hear about the time they bought a pair of socks from Joy The Store at the train station – full price! £8 on a pair of socks! – so that you wouldn’t have to re-wear a pair. You don’t hear about the picturesque night they practised slow dancing when they got in from the club, an endeavour that ended with their first perfect kiss timed miraculously with a Bright Eyes chorus at sunrise, a moment so utterly cheesy it could have been a scene in a John Green novel. Continue reading
I sometimes feel as though my life is like a parade of people I used to know. Most of my friend pool has been in my life for quite some time, and at this point I have a fair number of exes to run into; friends of friends; other peoples housemates; ex-colleagues; a pal from “back home”, somebody’s cousin who was in town for the weekend. The list goes on. Continue reading
Aren’t sunsets wonderful? I wanted to share these photos from Prineville; many are just from my Aunts garden but there was such a gorgeous light in Prineville every day we were there. I tried to capture the beauty and stillness. The sunset seemed to last for hours and every evening we were drenched in this stunning golden light.
My family has had ties and connections to Oregon for about 5 generations now and on this trip my Aunt took me to visit certain key areas where ancestors of mine were born, married, buried. It’s strange to think that we live an entire life and eventually get distilled into a handful of places and sentences. “Hers is the fourth plot from the left. She liked playing the piano and was a big animal lover.” “His birth entry is on the second page. He had grey eyes and everybody mentioned his big smile.” We’re left to fill in the gaps with our imagination. Maybe when our generation is gone it will be different, and we’ll leave acres of mundane photos and comments strewn across the internet that our great-grandchildren will never read.
Continuing my Oxford adventures from my last post, I thought I’d show you a few things from inside the Museum of the History of Science. Given that flash photography wasn’t allowed some of these photos have turned out rather strange but I like them. Whilst I am very interested in many branches of science I can’t say I’ve ever really stopped to contemplate the history of science before. Amongst the many thoughts I scribbled down in my museum notebook (it’s a thing…) was “In 100 years everything new to us will be archaic”. It’s fascinating to think that whilst we may think we have a huge scientific understanding of the world around us in the present day, in the future scientists will look back at our time and think “oh how quaint, they didn’t know about the (insert future scientific discovery here)” in the same way that we look back at globes featuring only half the world we know today or periodic tables missing most of the elements and think how much we know now.
I particularly fell in love with the pocket sundials (above; how beautiful is the star shaped one?) and there was an interesting accompanying text about sundials and clocks. With a clock or watch, we set the time and do what we can to ensure that watch/clock will continue to keep in time; they are timekeepers. My watch frequently needs rewinding or a clock may need a battery change in order to keep up with the time again. A sundial, provided it’s in the right place, will always tell the correct time according to the sun; they are timetellers. I think as technology advances there are always qualities unique to the older technologies that get left behind. I thought of film cameras and digital cameras: completely different branches of technology that achieve the same outcome. I think I much prefer film cameras, and I’d rather have a timeteller than a timekeeper. What about you?
TAPE PARADE 