Mosaic: £6.00

Whimsical statements fall from my mouth like leaves from trees: once exhaled they pause momentarily before gently floating into a fanciful abyss, never to be seen again. “I must take up dancing again…” drifts another brown and withered leaf…. “I’m definitely learning Spanish this year, definitely” – a bit more defiant, a chestnut falls like a brick to the floor. “Oooh, come see my patio, I’m going to do a mosaic!”

The last statement isn’t so much a falling leaf but belongs to a forest of fallen trees; I’ve been pronouncing mosaic intentions since I don’t know when. And I’ve had visions of myself bent over my chipped china oeuvre, meticulously working on my new-age-meets-Renaissance vision of pale blues and creams, ever since I set eyes on the abandoned concrete space sitting beyond my French windows.

So when I casually tossed aside another mosaic-on-the-patio-remark, I was quietly delighted to watch D pick it up and pop it in his pocket. A few days later a batch of old blue, cream and patterned tiles arrived – they’d been kicking around D’s garden. And sure enough the tiles sat for a while eyeing me up, getting in the way, egging me on to actually do something. And on Saturday we did.

I confess: I litter my life with obstacles. Despite what you may think, I’m actually a hyper-realist and this itself makes me a hyper-fantasist: when you anticipate every perceivable obstacle nothing is possible, so retreating into fantasy becomes the only option. In other words I’m not a doer. D, luckily for me, is.

Having popped round the corner to pick up some cement (yes it is that easy), and having popped it into a bucket with some water and mixed it up, a bit like mixing cake mixture, (not that I would know, baking being a whole sub genre of my whimsy nature), we laid the cement.

We had settled on a snail, in honour of the lady on the top floor. Having looked up snail drawings online and found one to copy, (yes I am that artistically challenged I must copy cartoon snails), we got to work. She took up the best part of the day, and we pretty much made her up as we went along. My flatmate, S, donated an old mirror she didn’t care about, (though she was still drunk from Friday night), and I decided my life-long collection of beads needed putting to work. So our mosaic has tiger’s eye, coral, turquoise and amethyst, as well as lots of other pretty beads that have been gathering dust in the corner of my room over the years.

All finished we stood back and admired our work. Sometime this week I’ll clean her up and invite people around to admire the artistry, “Ooooh come see my patio, I’ve done a mosaic” I’ll say. Perhaps I’ll even bake a cake to honour the occasion….

Birdcage, 80 Columbia Rd: £3.00 a pint

My friend C never sings, at least not in public. She loves singing but is too afraid to do so in front of anyone. And yet she’s one of the bravest people I know, someone who routinely impresses me with her ability to take on life’s shit. Because sometimes life is shit and that’s when we should sing loudest.

Unlike C, I sing at every opportunity, I sing loud and clear(ish) and completely tunelessly. And I don’t really care what people think, I ignore the pained looks and shushes because singing is important to me. I realised this more than ever, loud and true, on Saturday night.

At the Birdcage pub on Columbia road they take singing seriously. Having reluctantly dragged myself down there after a heavy Friday night I had no idea what was in store. I had expected a trendy part-gastro-part-wannabe-oldman pub – another clone of the overpriced, overnice, over subscribed lot that litter Bethnal Green and Shoreditch. And yes there were a fair few haircuts with skinny legs hanging off them. There was even an androgynous barmaid who wouldn’t have looked out of place in Vice magazine. But there was also, to my sceptical delight, a family: landlord and landlady John and Teresa, publicans for 19 years and married for 36. Childhood sweethearts. And every Saturday night they host karaoke.

To begin with I wasn’t entirely convinced. Our table was right next to the stage and it was loud, we were shouting above ourselves to be heard. This all changed. Within half an hour the following happened: a man, who looks like your uncle, serenaded me with a traditional Irish ballad, over dressed highlighted blondes, who looked like I did once, had me green with envy as they strutted their bits to Dolly Parton, the table next to ours made friends with us (when did that last happen to you in London?) and a true English gent, old enough to be my grandfather, wooed me heart and soul with his operatic rendition of Snow Patrol. (Later when chatting him up he told me his name is Bill and he’s part of an opera group who sing regularly at the Birdcage on Saturday nights. He also told me I’m too pretty to be a journalist. I love him.)

But back to the pub itself, it’s a proper pub. Nothing fancy, no exposed beams, the toilets leave much to be desired and there’s none of that fake salsa and nacho nonsense encroaching on valuable drinking time. A pint costs 3 quid. My friends and I felt as though we were in a village pub, we all agreed we’d never have guessed we were on the same street as the achingly hip Columbia road flower market, complete with its oysters and celebs – I saw Alexa Chung there once.

But back to the singing, oh my god. Bill, my new sugar daddy, sung Snow Patrol and it was beautiful. Our new mates on the table next to us chose songs for each other; she got Oops!…I Did It Again, he got the Me and Julio Down By The School Yard (one of my sister’s favourites) and they sounded great. We even got a rendition of Crazy Frog which sounded weirdly identical to the song. Girls who couldn’t have been older than 18 sang Jonny Cash’s Daddy Sang Bass, how cool is that? Needless to say by the end of the evening everybody was up dancing and singing, and singing loudly. I kept on catching people’s eyes and they’d catch mine back and smile.

I’m definitely going back and I’m going to take C next time. I know she won’t get up and sing but I’ve no doubt she’ll sing along loud and clear. It’s her birthday next week and she deserves a good sing song more than anyone, she’s the best friend a girl could have.

Birdcage, 80 Columbia Road, London, E2 7QB

The Living Room: Donation

 Photo: Alan Davies

I can get a bit disillusioned at times and find myself sinking into a fantasy world of 60’s summer love and beads, wishing I’d been born three decades earlier. This isn’t helped by breakfast TV or magazines pelting me with updates from failed celebrity relationships. I’m not being sanctimonious here; my disillusion comes, in part, by my wanting to read about these worthless marriages and allowing myself to passively absorb hollow morning television.

I confess: I am an active victim of the celebrity culture that has taken over everything at the expense of anything worthwhile. I like Cheryl Cole, I love the X Factor and I devour Heat magazine regularly. But I also fantasise about living in a time where people come together naturally to make real music, poetry, love… happenings. Dark bohemian cellars free from mobile phones, overpriced beer and ‘celebs’. Where poetry is revered, food is wholesome and the people are beautiful. In my fantasy place eccentricities are applauded, pretension is absent, music isn’t manufactured and b-sides still exist.

Of course I know full well that the grass is always greener, and I always want what I can’t have anyway. I also know that I’m incredibly lucky and that my fantasising is itself a self-indulgent symptom of the incredibly privileged position I am in…

Every other Thursday, in a warehouse in Bow, there is a happening – proving that beauty can exist in the most unsightly of places. At The Living Room singers, hula-hoppers, beatboxers, poets, and much more, take turns to take centre stage and delight their audience. Donations on the door lead the visitor through to a wonderland where going to the loo means a psychedelic portrait and strangers offer to share their armchair with you. People smile at you dancing and stay quiet to listen. Everyone can have a say here and, more importantly, everyone has something real to say. Last week I watched a Frenchman hula hoop whilst telling an erotic story that involved fish and stripping. Later I was almost deafened by a friend who, unbeknownst to me, makes music so gloriously heavy it left me wondrously dumb and panting for more.

But the quality of the acts at The Living Room is not what makes it so great. Rather, it is the palpable sense of community and support that pervades throughout. The lack of competition and showiness upstages the performances themselves, transporting you away from the dog eat dog world of London town and putting you, reassuringly, in the present.

Mix Tapes: About £1.00

I’ve started job hunting and I can’t stand it. Rather than fill out applications I spend most my time thinking up stuff to do that won’t cost much, nor upset my mum. I’ve agreed to go ‘willowing’ at some point this week – that’s making structures out of living willow - despite being as nimble fingered as a Labrador, and I even went to the library the other day, despite being a compulsive book buyer with a shelf stacked full of unread books.

Whenever I find myself faced with a substantial block of empty time I start conjuring up wonderful projects and life enhancing achievements. In the past these have primarily fallen into categories:

1. To get super fit, (not aesthetically, god’s taken care of that one already and I’m not into surgery), but fit in the original sense, like I should be. You see, just as I have a friend who believes she is tall when she is actually 5ft 2, I believe that I’m really fit and that actually, if push came to shove, with a little training, I could run the London marathon tomorrow, no worries.

 2. To become arty. Now, this one has always proved the harder of the two. The last time I attempted it was when I hauled a massive wooden cable reel home from Soho to Bethnal Green. You know the big wooden ones you see lying about by train tracks and on building sites. Basically giant cotton reels. I lugged one back, spent a day cleaning it up, another day sanding it down, ripped out the central bit that held the bloody thing together and decided that I was going to make a coffee table. And of course I told everyone about it- was bragging about my new table within minutes. And of course I never made it. The thing just sat precariously propped up against my bedroom wall, causing 60 quid’s worth of damage. I got a bill for trying to be arty.

So clearly big projects are not my thing, mix tapes however are. Everyone should start mix taping again, it is sooo much fun. When making a mix tape you can truly indulge your musical library, unconfined by having to listen to anything new. You get all excited working out what to put next and wondering if the lucky receiver will like it as much as you. Before I go any further I should confess that I actually use disks and not tapes, but I do use nice white ones which I draw pictures on and I recommend you do this too. Boys I understand if you’d rather not.

 So although I don’t have a job yet but I do have a new found appreciation for my iTunes and I will start running soon, I just need to make the soundtrack first.

The Waste Land at Wiltons Music Hall: £15.00

It felt fitting. On a bleak January day, with New Year’s decadence still revenging, I set out to hear T.S Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land.

I hadn’t left the house all week. London can piss off with its snow. Snow looks rubbish in London, looks dirty and shameful- is a sheepish nuisance.

And January is the cruellest month anyway- not April- is a cruel waiting game. Waiting to break resolutions, waiting to lose weight, waiting for money, waiting for delayed trains.

But most of all waiting for spring – for April- for Eliot’s:

cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

The Waste Land begins bitterly and develops savagely. For me, it is a disturbing attack on humanity; its heap of broken images strip me bare and leave me with nothing left. With nothing to hold on to. Tragic confusion prevails. Read alone again and again I’ve tried to hold on to its countless references, tried to make sense of what is, undisputedly, one of the greatest poems in history.

Watching it being performed in the historic Wilton’s Music Hall I hear it for the first time.
Jess and I cry from start to finish.

And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

And I accept what I’ve known all along; that January is about fear and nothing else. That London is no waste land, there is no dry sterile thunder without rain. In a back alley off Aldgate East, I can sit in the world’s oldest and last surviving grand music hall and watch T.S Eliot be performed as though the actor’s life depended on it.

London has it all if you look hard enough.

Shantih Shantih Shantih.

Caveman Bill: Free

Caveman Bill film still.

Do you like caves? Into the Wild? Robinson Crusoe? Grizzly Man? Rousseau? If you’ve answered yes then perhaps, like me, you have a slight perversion towards solitude, hermits; the dream of shutting yourself out somewhere. Running away or running back to where it all began.

Caveman Bill is currently on exhibition at the Hackney Recreational Ground in Shoreditch- I know, I didn’t know it had a ‘recreational ground’ either. Bill lives in a cave in the freezing Yukon district in Canada. He’s lived there for 15 years and isn’t talking about leaving. Tom Wolseley is an artist who met Bill, visited his cave and left his camera. If you head down to Hackney Road, just opposite where it meets Columbia Road, you’ll see a disused shipping container. Step inside and you enter Wolseley’s cave. On the wall of his cave is a video projection of Bill’s cave.

So far so what? Was my initial reaction when I first arrived. It took me a minute to get it. The projected footage is a 360 degree pan shot that endlessly circles Bill’s cave whilst Bill narrates its contents.

You don’t see Bill, instead you see the minutiae of his day to day -his caveman existence- which in many ways isn’t that far off ours. His gentle voice is hypnotising, slowly you are drawn into his life as he chats about his nephews (who made him the calendar), his electronic bug zapper, his bleaching toothpaste, his stove, inherited from 2by4 Bob, his chisel which he uses when the snow fall is so great he can’t get out.

The more you watch the more you want to know, the more you want to visit, the more you want to meet Bill, or at the very least see Bill. But you never do see him.

Wolseley’s work is about debunking myths; how you tell stories and how you add stories to objects. Listening to Bill identify his objects the illusions behind them fall apart. Bill’s stuff is just another guy’s stuff. Bill is just another guy.

My dad lived in a cave once and sadly it is one of the things I never asked enough about. Similarly with Bill, you can’t really get enough, perhaps because the enough isn’t really there- because he’s too similar to us? I’m not sure. Perhaps the dreams left to us by people, books and films are just dreams? (I almost went mad reading Robinson Crusoe, it is that boring, I couldn’t find the dream.)

But Bill is an enigma who has captivated me completely and I’ve started fantasising again about running off to a cave somewhere.

So the dream then is very much alive. Go see for yourself and go see alone.

Power cut: Cost of drink in a pub

There’s nothing quite like the moment a machine fails.
A click followed by silence.
The knee-jerk reaction that it’s something you have done.

Flat battery because you left the passenger light on all night. You blew a fuse. You didn’t wire up the tele right. Never is it the machine.

We had a power cut this morning. Monday, 7am, alarm screaming, I reach for the bedside lamp and nothing. I switch again and again and again and nothing.

It’s an old lamp, a vintage sixties thing with a dodgy foreign plug, I bought it at a carboot. It must be the lamp.

But no, I reach for the main switch and nothing. Some daft bugger’s tripped the switch. I go through the freezing house, floor by floor trying every damn switch, looking for the fuse boxes and nothing but silence. Really cold silence.

It is of course quite simply a power cut. By candle light I dress. By candle light I make toast (grill not toaster) and coffee (stove coffee pot and not cafetiere). I drink my coffee and eat my toast watching the garden wake through my French windows. No radio, no bright lights, no looking at emails or morning news whilst I breakfast. Me, the windows, the garden, some birds, a squirrel and the dawn.

When I return at 5pm there is still no power. I decide to go to the local library. As I ride up to it I change my mind and decide to go to a cafe. Again I change my mind and go to the pub, (inevitable), where I write this. My pinot grigio is delicious and the landlord charming. An open fire roars next to me.

Power cuts aren’t so bad after all. And they’re absolutely free.