Black Carrot Secret Diaries

??

2007-07-15T09:44:00.000+01:00

Is this thing working again yet?

nope, let's go elsewhere...

After the party

2007-07-09T15:22:00.000+01:00

(I have re-uploaded my entire website, having discovered nasty code in the source for almost every page. The password is all changed and so things should be okay now, but can anyone who gets Trojan or Virus warnings when accessing anything of mine please send me a message and let me know?)

~

creepy meanish horror thieves

2007-07-08T21:49:00.000+01:00

Mmm, yes. I was right the other week. My site has been hacked into and filled with lovely virus thingies and meanness. If this blog disappears and reappears for a while it is because I don't know what I am doing while I fix it. Also, at the moment I am a bit drunk and my house is filled with very lovely friends and food to celebrate my book and I shan't really do anything about computer rubbish until tomorrow and I hope your computer doesn't explode or anything...

Calling out

2007-07-07T11:34:00.000+01:00

My accordion dialed 999 pressing on the phone in my pocket this morning, and all they will have heard was an emergency very similar to this one:

999.mp3

I'm embarrased and amused...
Hope I didn't kill a pensioner or something.

misguided tour-guide

2007-07-06T21:18:00.000+01:00

To counter my feeling that I've slept through the last two days (I really almost have), and the feeling that far too many people have far too many sads that can't be solved for now (self included) here is a little studio tour for friendliness and lonesome friday night's sake, whisky in hand:

It's so big I can't seem to manage to clutter it, but I suppose I'm not allowed to complain about that...

2007-07-06T21:07:00.000+01:00

2007-07-06T16:56:00.000+01:00

2007-07-05T21:50:00.000+01:00

...

2007-07-05T10:13:00.000+01:00

Another, quite fair review here.

Unleashed

2007-07-05T09:05:00.000+01:00

My storybook is published today.
What do I have to say about that? Maybe something later? I only have one copy myself so far, but I'm hoping some more might arrive with the post. For all I'm ambivalent about it, I'm very very proud too. This is the first review it has received (I've already linked to it once before).

I'm hoping to have people round at the weekend to celebrate, but they do keep saying they can't come. Oh well, somebody will turn up...

Meanwhile I really, really have to finish the first draft of the second one, though goodness am I distracted.

In other news, a nothing: This is the month I was going to leave this impossible city behind for a very different one. I even had my removal men arranged... A bright place I was going, as I sometimes remember, though I've filled it with fog and forget-about-it. Mostly I'm numb to the fact. And tremendously glad that I get to stay in this lovely house for now, and even share it with some properly great persons.

2007-07-04T22:36:00.000+01:00

Somewhere south

2007-07-04T20:11:00.000+01:00

I saw last night, from a south london attic, the brightest of bright rainbows (a double one, even) with forked lightning flashing in the centre and sunlit seagulls and pigeon flocks passing through. It lasted for maybe an hour or so, shifting across the houses oh-so-slowly as the sun set.

Also I saw muppets, but these aren't they:

2007-07-03T12:43:00.000+01:00

I feel very silly doing this

2007-07-02T20:04:00.000+01:00

Meh, I got tagged to write eight things about myself, which I guess I'll try to do just this once, but don't make a habit with the tagging, eh? I'm struggling to get any work done as it is, and it makes me feel silly though it isn't much different to the usual thing here...

1) I have a scar on the inside of my mouth from sliding down a wooden slide, in the playroom of the commune where I grew up, headfirst with a whistle in my mouth.

2) I had an extremely long list of embarrassing haircuts in my teens: Dreadlocks, braids, bright orange and backcombed, shaved on one side, bleached, shaved off completely, tank-girl style tuft... you name it. Now I have about sixteen, non-deliberate styles in a given day, many of which reflect my mood alarmingly accurately. Soon it will all drop out, though it doesn't show any sign of doing so yet.

3) The cadence of news reporter's voices, on radio and television, is one of very few things that makes me angry. I dislike any tone that hints towards my being told what to feel about a given report (mainly because it causes me to feel nothing but anger towards the reporter and miss the point entirely), and well, a lot of other stuff about journalistic style. (I probably only say this because I just watched some really awful reporting about the glasgow car-bomb, and it made me swear and mock).

4) I really really can't play the trumpet, though I tried.

5) I am distantly related to the Belgian royal family.

6) I cry every time I watch the Elephant Man ("You've all been so kind") and I cried at that bit when Sean Connery pops his head out of the canopy in Medicine Man and sees the destruction of the rainforest (I know, I know but I'm just being honest...)

7) The happiest and worst moments of my life both happened to me this year, and we're only half way.

8) My book comes out on thursday, and I still don't really think I'm a writer.

...

2007-07-02T13:31:00.000+01:00

(The Handsome Family)

(Searching for the Wrong Eyed Jesus)

"Discomfort and damage," "doom and discrepancy!"

2007-07-02T11:57:00.000+01:00

Melancholically clearing away the visitors bed, though the house will only be empty a short while.

That was some week. Beginning with Rowan's strange mind-cloud and hospital trip (she seems much better) and really only getting stranger. Rabbit-in-the-headlights stares all round. But also there was Mr Nick Denchfield and his little boy in matching Firemen's outfits, which is a picture I wish I had to keep. And very strange Turkish toys and quite a lot of little bright things and food.

I recommend Nicolas De Crecy's Glacial Period, as it was recommended to me a couple of weeks ago. Shame that you don't find the British Museum publishing such experimental projects as that. Yet. (Glacial period is an absurdist, post-apocolypse/new Ice-age catalogue of objects and art from the Louvre, published by the Louvre itself. It has a funny talking dog with glasses in, and an Etruscan Phoenix. I like Etruscan Phoenix's, there are some in the british Museum too... Nice nobbly antennae-like horns they've got, but I digress).

Swoon

2007-06-30T13:14:00.000+01:00

About (dear god) eight years ago a friend made a fair deal of effort to put me in front of an american TV screen that was showing Edward Gorey's intros to the PBS mystery show. He failed, (we were having too much fun and fishing and food on an island at the time).

Now another friend finally put me in front of them, and you can be too:

If

2007-06-29T19:03:00.000+01:00

If my head didn't hurt so much I might write something about dancing late in Soho clubs (of all places) with (very lovely) drunken theatre designers, and being alarmingly near to averted carnage, and getting ridiculously, homerically lost by the river at four in the morning.

I'd tell you about my beautiful Sandvik Stradivarius musical saw too...

tap tap tap

2007-06-28T12:32:00.000+01:00

I'm waiting and waiting but my musical saw doesn't arrive...

Blooming in the gutter

2007-06-28T11:02:00.001+01:00

I dreamt I was being whisked through the countryside in a long car driven by an old professor with shiny round glasses. The car had nozzles along the edge that sprayed a fine mist of water to keep the plants along the verges watered. A little tough on pedestrians, but on the whole a positive thing. The professor took me to see a friend, someone I know with a very inspiring and confusing sense of wonder. The friend was holding high office in a wide bed. It's strange the people that dreams bring back. Sometimes it is nice (this time), sometimes it is difficult (afternoon nap yesterday).

2007-06-28T09:51:00.000+01:00

2007-06-27T18:06:00.000+01:00

2007-06-27T12:15:00.000+01:00

I bin doin' me peenin's

2007-06-26T23:09:00.000+01:00

(A good friend of mine does the very funniest David Hockney impressions, but I suppose you have to be there).

Most importantly:
Click here for the very first advance review of The Trouble With Wenlocks. It is *breathes shortly* very positive...

I saw a heartbroken woman in the street crying and holding her golden handbag to her face. She even screamed.

And there is a stone lion next to Vauxhall bridge that has yellow lichen growing over its nose. In a great deal of years it might be fully covered in yellow lichen fur.

This afternoon {Edit: Yesterday, since this wouldn't publish then...} I had a pretty successful meeting about the book I may be doing with Michael Rosen, and saw, briefly because coffee and lovely people will get in the way of these things, the exhibition of Turner watercolours chosen by Hockney. A couple of the pictures are very beautiful, and all have a particular kind of innocence and wit which shows who chose them quite obviously. The new Hockney paintings on show above the staircase in the Tate Britain are more impressive than they'd seemed to me in photographs, too (though I was more excited about the Paula Regos that hung there before).

And I remembered and visited a secret garden that I know.

Yesterday Rowan had a turn and it was bit scary, but she's ok now. And my childhood home has been washed away by floods.

2007-06-25T23:23:00.000+01:00