i don't care what none of y'all say, THEY ARE ADORABLE

• so adorable i originally typed 'omg src'
• i want ALL THE MERCH
• how can you not look at those little poses and think 'justified ancients of mu mu'?
• they are called WENLOCK and MANDEVILLE i.e. one of them is named after a pub and the other after an hospital, broken binge-drink britain there
• SOFT TOYS; CHEW TOYS; KEY RINGS; PHONE CHARMS; ALL OF IT
• pretty much the only thing reconciling me to the logistical horror that is going to be these olympics
• no lie

To keep me distracted while chopping orange peel for marmalade (for four hours plus? i definitely started before seven) I watched first Robinson in Space (possibly funnier than 'London'? also, blimey, 1995 eh) and then... Initial D: The Movie. Oh, man, that film, so so satisfying. I have suddenly remember the years I spent transfixed by Edison Chen's koan-like stupidity, before the whole photo scandal thing happened and he lost all his acting and blogging-about-designer-sneakers contracts. :( Poor Edison Chen. It is hard to be you! Especially when you are required to play the most intelligent character in the entire film.

I am now divided as to whether to watch initial d: battle stage or internal affairs ii. cars going downhill fast to the strains of nineties eurobeat? anthony wong chau-sang, number one on my husband list for all time? it's a quandary.

right, i'm headin' out and i hear the year is too: oh, my dears, I wish you each individually the most excellent last night of 2009 a person could possibly have. 2010, dudes! If we don't make it awesome, no-one else will.

- snow
- an arab strap song: 'you drink whisky like you drink champagne / [.......] twice as well.' Still cannot work out if it's real or not.

I wonder if I can bully myself out of the house and down to Calvert 22 in time to catch Abderrahmane Sissako's "Octobre"? It's a beautiful short: it'd be a good way to ease into today and its anticipated pleasures. If only I could... leave the house... (okay also finish this bit of writing).

There are so many rules in my head regarding politeness and directness, delicacy and transparency, good faith and bad grammar, that a single simple email takes half an hour of something approaching physical pain.

(edit to add) sometimes i think really all i would like in life is to be able to write some sentences without wanting to punch myself, in general that would probably be some kind of boon, it would at least make me a little easier to live with all things considered.

The cat died, very early this morning, at the vet's: we'd left her there for a blood test, because for the past three days she'd been moping around, staying in one room, not barrelling up the stairs or jumping up to sit on beds or windowsills, barely eating or drinking - and then all in a rush she started collapsing, crying out, pissing blood. She was fifteen years old. Her name was Mew, and on the grounds that this was a dreadful name I'd called her Mishi for years, but somehow I kept backsliding to the common name. She was a tortoiseshell: little and pretty, noisy and self-possessed. She'd never sit on your lap for more than a minute, and only when you were sitting at a computer and trying to type. She liked to sit on delineated spaces, a towel on the end of a bed rather than the bed itself, a folded shirt on the ironing board, one particular arm of the bench in the garden. She used to wake my mother up in the middle of the night by climbing across her to drink from the glass of water on her bedside table, purring luxuriantly. She talked all the time: she would come into the room, announce her presence, miaow and miaow with seeming urgency, and then wander off to sleep somewhere. She demanded a tithe of every meal eaten in the house. She had white whiskers on one side of her face and black whiskers on the other side. She never learnt to use a catflap. She used to sleep on my bed, and sometimes even come when I called.

She was my favourite of all cats.

I meant to do a couple of things yesterday - work on a translation, maybe replace the inner tube on my bike's back wheel if feeling particularly calm. Instead I read Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall.

It's good-- I didn't love it as I did A Place of Greater Safety, but there's more action in APOGS, more grand sweeping happenings, a greater passage of time and more extreme characters, more extremes of ideology, more romance and more drama. To a simple, melodramatic soul like me, APOGS is hugely appealing: you coo, oh, Camille, oh, oh, Robespierre, and everyone goes to the guillotine except Saint-Juste it feels like and you feel savagely satisfied and sad*. Wolf Hall is politics, trade, religion: the ideological differences are more nuanced, questions of conscience and pragmatism, loyalty to ideas and religions and persons. A lot of it reminded me of nothing so much as Dorothy Dunnet's "House of Niccolò" series (I haven't read the Lymond ones)-- something very similar in the way Dunnet wrote Claes and Mantel wrote Thomas, their quickness with language and logic and ledgers, politics and trade, their backgrounds and battles and households and even their women. Slightly too similar. I'd fill in a thought of Cromwell's with something of Niccolò's: I suspect I came away with the sense that his textile-trade background had been more fleshed out than it was because my brain supplied details, or a general feel, from Niccolò Rising.

I feel sort of awful mentioning this, but it was with a growing sense of shocked hilarity that I read this interview in the graun with her the other week. Shocked hilarity because-- well, the ancient Greeks believed in this disease called hysteria, right, where a woman's womb starts wandering around her body causing phantom pain and suffocation and madness. And then you read about Hilary Mantel suffering terrible pain, and doctors thinking it psychosomatic and her mad and prescribing her things that give her severe anxiety attacks, and this turns out to be because of a disease where cells from the womb start appearing in the wrong places, and, oh god, that's... hysteria. Only real. How terrifying.

And now to translate, to translate.

* Historical fact is not a spoiler ok.

Things that do not get old: requesting books online, knowing that they're going to take about an hour to get to the a&a reading room, which means you can shower, get dressed, wander down and be there just in time.

HI DERE BL I ♥ U

tonight tonight, lambeth north's own horse bar:



let's dance, my dears, and freak.

I finished some exams on Wednesday! Then I had an all-day hangover on Thursday! Now I'm going to spend some quality time ON A TRAIN: I want to read "Grimey" Simey Reynolds' "Energy Flash" but even though the new edition came out in 2008 it appears to be available in no bookshops? Which is pretty shocking. I've sneered about SR's constant self-promotion of late and maybe I was wrong to. If your stuff's getting shifted off the shelves this soon after its publication, what else can you do except keep making noise in the hope that you'll hype someone into shifting it back?

Aside from cursing my sore head, washing up, and drinking coffee, I also saw PATTI SMITH yesterday. Patti Smith! She is simultaneously embarassing and amazing, like your best beloved slightly crazy aunt. As part of this role as yr aunt Patti she managed to get A Silver Mt Zion (missing one of the violinists?) sharing a stage with Geoff Barrow of Portishead - which is fine, you say, normal, expected indeed - and also Flea. Flea out of the Red Hot Chili Peppers! With ASMZ! best supergroup ever, where by 'best' i mean 'most likely to sound really good but then distract you into giggles every time you realise that Patti Smith has managed to convince Efrim Menuck to be in a band with Flea'. But yeah no surprises that ASMZ's general "sounds a bit like a hurricane" and Patti's poetry and folk-rockiness go well together even if it never quite gelled into abandon. Plus she did a song about the Iranian elections! Yr aunt Patti: topical!

Right right on with the day.