Ivan Vasilyevich changing a job

Another classic title, somewhat more upbeat musical direction...

Irony of fate, or enjoy your bath!

The above is possibly the best film title I have ever heard... I have been wallowing in the strange atmosphere of Soviet era film songs - kitsch melancholia is a strange phenomenon - the lyrics to the second last song in this selection from the above film are quite quite beautiful in their bizarrely lost in translation way... and there's grey and snow and tower blocks, but somehow I get the impression the film could suddenly become a comedy... It's a juxtaposition I love in the Russian psyche sometimes...

Tirau, New Zealand

Whilst trying to track down photos of this amazing corrugated iron castle in BC, Canada (I couldn't find any...) I stumbled across this. The town of Tirau in New Zealand celebrates the local tradition of building in corrugated iron by... building giant buildings in the shape of a sheep and a dog. I for one am very happy that they have chosen to do so...

Russian criminal wooden castle skyscraper

Oh yes - I knew this would happen if I started researching outsider architecture again. Stumbled upon this via fenrisjaw.blogspot.com doing a search for wooden castles. Nikolai Sutyagin began building this in a small north west Russian town before going to jail - it's still somewhat unfinished and foolhardy but you've got to love the unveering dedication to his dreams... Locals say it's an eyesore, but the Romantic in me wants to see it as a doomed folk art version of Kizhi island churches... God I really should be editing my novel...

Pod house of Rochester

I've always been a fan of outsider architecture (at some point I will write a longer entry on the subject) and America really does have some gems, from castles made of scrap to modernist utopias jutting out over gorges with carousels inside. One day I will take a road trip round all of them. However... today I am celebrating houses that look like natural objects and in Rochester, NY there is this rather splendid pod house that somewhat resembles mushrooms. It also has an air of treehouse, which for someone who's spent rather too much time dreaming of one day building their very own Ewok village, this can only be a good thing...

Also, talking of mushroom houses, I found a very good mysterious funghiesque building on an island in Belgrade...

Heart of Armenia

Wandering Tbilisi

Tariel was from Sololaki, but his blue eyes echoed how he did not really feel like that. His father was Svan – from the high mountains of Svaneti where hair and eyes were paler and people lived at the feet of peaks built by myths as much as nature. His mother was Khevsur – the eastern mountains near the Chechen border. They held their myths in more delicate ways – stitched them in cloth so no one else could really understand what they had been through. When Tariel walked the crumbling streets of Sololaki, Tbilisi opened up before him to show a grander view – the distant mountains where his family really felt at home. The secret stories that were hidden there.

His eyes caught me when I first saw him – they shone from his face as if lit by a strange light that understood more of this city than anyone else ever could. The troubled history and how it was changing. He seemed to know that more than most – not a misplaced optimism so much as a realisation of the grander scale of things – what Georgia had once been and how short a couple of decades were in the history of the world – they were but seconds – if that. I was scared for him that his life was simply the same. His eyes lived it so intensely I was not sure they could keep it up for a lifetime of the length normal for most people. I think the idea would have bored them – they were so eager to see elsewhere.

Sololaki was one of the oldest neighbourhoods in Tbilisi. Balconies weighted with years of plants and extended families heaved over the crumbled streets as they wove their way down to Rustaveli and Freedom Square. Courtyards filled throughout the day with shouting children and ejected footballs at ill-timed passers by. Tariel’s apartment hovered above one of these courtyards. Was walled with smashed glass that reminded me of greenhouses, that given a life of their own had grown with the greenery – crawled across the front of the building to catch the light that fed them more – encouraged them on despite the shattering and wood splintered with the weight.

I was walking past when I first saw him. He was wreathed in running children, they spun around him in a whirl of laughs and jumping. Trying to erase his stillness, but somehow it just emphasised it more. He stood like a lighthouse – those eyes beaming out a ray that made me feel like I could no longer lose my way despite the chaos around him. I was transfixed.
“Gamarjobat.” I winced a little at my stilted Georgian greeting, but he smiled. Didn’t move, but there was something in that smile that moved him more than steps towards me would have. I smiled back before carrying on down the road.

The Paper Cinema

My friend Nic has a paper cinema. It is just that - beautiful cinematic worlds created in paper and animated live sometimes to the backdrop of music by lovely friends... Here are a couple of pics, but you can find out more at www.thepapercinema.com

Cornish Hedgehog

It appeared one day behind our telly and now is part of family life...

When I built an imaginary city for William...

Birthday flowers...

Mist ghosts...

On the way to Kazbegi - Georgian Military Highway.

Alternative tree house

Sea Of Glass

The further you are...

"The further you are, the closer a dream of you caresses my soul, as untouchable as rays of the sun, unassailable as Eden. If you are now not the one I think you are, then let my damaged heart be wrong, for it needs you like the white angels need heaven. Allow my love to burn this strange pleasure that fills a sea with waters of sadness. Allow a belief in the delirium which is a miracle of love, a holiday from truth."

Galaktion Tabidze (1891-1959)

A day is not a day in eternity...

Lines from Prologue

The sky cried honey that day, when I thought I saw you in the river.

The droplets that weighed your blue eyes closed like Roman coins, shot sparks into the Thames. Reflections.

You looked beautiful then.



(From We lay here slowly sinking, 2004).

Little Lana Riding Hood

The most magical photo of my friend Lana in Moscow as a child... I think we would have been friends had we been the same age and known each other then...

Stories from Mount Kazbek

In honour of my impending journey to Georgia I thought I'd write about the most famous of the Caucasus Mountains - Mount Kazbek. In the Kazbegi region of Georgia this mountain is a place of legend not only in Georgian culture. It is locally believed that at the summit of the mountain rests Abraham's tent (or an inaccessible citadel) within which sleeps a child in a cradle held up by unseen hands. There is also thought to be a sacred tree surrounded by treasure at its base that allows only certain people to see it. But the mountain's mythic quality stretches to further reaches of the world as this was where Prometheus was chained by Zeus to have his liver plucked out daily by an eagle. However there is a Georgian legend with similarities to the tale of Prometheus - the legend of Amirani, and it is this wonderfully bizarre tale within which one can see a lot of the foundations for the Georgian psyche that I would like to tell here. This summary is copied from Peter Nasmyth's wonderful book "Georgia - in the mountains of poetry":

"Amirani was born in a dark forest, the son of Dali, goddess of the hunt. He grew up displaying prodigious strengths and the capacity to outdrink and outeat three ordinary men. During his first quest for treasure he encountered a three-headed monster who, just before Amirani slayed him, begged the hero not to kill the three worms that would come from his mouth on his death. Amirani agreed. After he'd dispatched the monster, the worms grew and were transformed into three dragons: white, red and black. Amirani killed the first two but was swallowed by the black dragon, leaving his brothers to cut him out from its stomach.

Amirani then began his quest for a beautiful maiden called Qamari - 'covered in silk as gold as sunbeams,' and 'so beautiful even the sun daren't look at her.' He found her in a magnificent celestial castle suspended from the sky by a chain. Cutting the chain, he entered to find Qamari in the middle of her domestic chores. Begging her to run away with him, she agreed - but only when the dishes had been cleaned. Amirani stared to help her but quickly lost his temper with a dish that refused to stand upright and smashed it with his heel. At this point all the other dishes cried out in alarm and rushed up into the sky to alert Qamari's father.

A terrible pursuit and battle ensued. At one point, hearing of the deaths of his two brothers, Amirani committed suicide (by cutting his little finger), only to be bought back to life by Qamari, who discovered a magic herb after listening to the advice of a mouse.

After Amirani had rid the world of nearly all its dragons, monsters and wild animals, he finally threw down the gauntlet to God himself. God warned him of its futility, that it constituted a punishable offence, but Amirani stuck doggedly to this quest for omnipotence. So answering the challenge, God plunged a stick into the ground and asked Amirani if he were man enough to pull it out. Amirani wrenched and wrenched but the stick had secretly sunk roots deep into the world and refused to budge. For punishment Amirani was chained to a pole sunk into the side of Mt Kazbek. As he struggled to free himself, each day God sent a raven to feed him a piece of bread and a glass of wine. In his fury Amirani would hurl a stone at the raven, miss and knock in his pole ever more firmly."

Things written about me I cannot understand

ČITANJE I RAZGOVORI O POEZIJI - u organizaciji Trećeg trga, večeras od 21 sat u prostoru Casa Garsia (Beograd, Kraljevića Marka 19): Alis Medikot (Alice Maddicott, London), engleska spisateljica koja piše poetičnu prozu kao i scenarija za TV serije za decu. Učestvuje u mnogim zanimljivim literarnim projektima kao što su Minijaturne knjige koje su postale svetski projekat, kao i projekat Sakriveno blago, koji je 2007. urađen u saradnji sa londonskom opštinom Kenzington... Piše i imaginarnu knjigu putopisa i radi na svom novom romanu, drugom po redu. Živi na relaciji London-Kornvol-Bat i mnogo putuje

Of car dens and tree jewellery...

The trees started glinting – catching the sun and throwing it back at me. I looked up to see what was causing it and saw a pile of stuff. Got up and walked towards it – jumped up to knock it down. A load of my belongings fell at my feet – an old pink paisley eiderdown that had been my gran’s, a pile of necklaces and a picture my little brother had drawn me of our old house. The Spanish moss brushed it towards me – hung as if mimicking the willow trees I loved so much, weeping. I crouched down and gathered it all together. Picked it up and walked back towards the car.
I took the eiderdown in first. Pushed its soft quilting into all the crevices in the back seat. Made a nest. That’s what it felt like I was doing – nesting. I curled in a ball on my side to test it out. Started to drift sleepily so I knew it was okay. Then I sat up and poured the bag of jewellery out in front of me. Sifted through my old necklaces and shiny baubles I’d collected like a magpie since small. I leant out the unhinged rusting door and hung some green glass beads from a branch. They caught the sun and glinted just as pretty as any emerald would be. Like precious eyes they reflected all that sparked around them - twisted softly in light breezes.
I strung them all up then. Draped them haphazardly in clusters drooping down like metal beginning to melt. The whole tree sparkled, weighted in glass and metal. It was not that easy to tell what it looked like from the outside though – the sun might catch them glinting in a certain way, but this was my den – it was inside where it really shone. Necklaces hung like coloured icicles around the roof. If I sat up too quickly they caught in my hair – clinked together like drinks at parties or children’s xylophones.

(From my novel "Farewell for you are changing")

Elusive Butterfly

I love Bob Lind and I wanted to put some old footage up - I tried to find "You should have seen it" the best heartbreak song for those who've done the dumping in the world, but I couldn't find it. "Unlock the door" also eluded me with its perfect line "the way your fingers touched me as I lit your cigarette, is not the kind of feeling I find easy to forget, but now you've faded back into the crossword puzzle night and left no hints of how you feel to shield me from the light." However his arguably best known song "Elusive Butterfly" was available in abundance, but I like this performance best, though mainly for the truly surreal stage set I have to say...

Sea Tractor!

I recently had the most blissful day on Burgh Island, but sadly the tide was low so we could simply walk to the beautiful art deco hotel rather than take the sea tractor on stilts. This short clip shows said intrepid vehicle pushing its way through the incoming waves. And there's a nice view of the hotel. This one's for the lovely Michael.

Chevalier of the Order of Loneliness...

Galaktion Tabidze was one of the greatest Georgian poets. A symbolist and loner who sadly killed himself in a mental hospital in Tbilisi in 1959, after he, but sadly not his wife and friends, avoided Stalin's purges. His funeral was attended by tens of thousands and as a national hero the Georgian church official forgave him the sin of suicide. Here is a youtube video someone has made about him...

If anyone knows where I can get his poetry in translation let me know...

New hobbies for spring part two - bluebell woods...

It's almost my favourite time of year when the bluebells come out and the landscape feels like it is breathing out new life (and they're my favourite flowers along with wild poppies). In folk lore bluebell woods were seen as dangerous places - faeries were said to live in the flowers themselves and this was in the days before they had wings and were pretty - the days when they lured you to their domain with distant music and short-glimpsed dancing never to return again... I've always thought they were the most peaceful, beautiful places on earth - many a teenage afternoon was spent roaming the countryside then falling asleep for a blissful nap in the middle of them...

Latin Hip-Hop (and that's as in ancient Roman language)

Ista are trying to make Latin cool by the medium of Hip Hop (as if it needs that - I have long known Latin was cool - but hey...). Oh and even better, they are German... Click here to listen!

New hobbies for spring part one - waterfall bathing...

Delhi 1938

This is another great film for the BFI archives - I love old tourist films - there's an amazing one I once saw on late night bbc of Beirut in the '60s which I've never managed to track down again, but this one of Delhi in 1938 is also extraordinary...


On the subject of India here is an amazing panoramic shortfilm of Calcutta in 1899:

1940s Tibet

This beautiful old footage is kind of poignant in view of current events... Includes footage of the current Dalai Lama with his family as a child...

Places I want to visit: Lalibela, Ethiopia...

I also have a particular fondness for the outfits of priests in the area:

Places I want to visit: Samarkand, Uzbekistan...

Come on WIlliam and Lana - you know one of you wants to come with me...!

Songs for Springtime

A proper west country band - that one's for my big brother who I first stole that album off when I was 11.
And this one's the song of Spring when I was 14 and in love for the very first time...

Love in the Yellow Mountains

I have always wanted to visit Huangshan in China as I thought it was the most beautiful place in the world - the strange rounded mountains with pines clinging like tinsle in a swirling soup of mist. But the hopeless romantic in me loves this story as much as the landscape's beauty. Couples come to this place and lock a padlock engraved with their names on this chain, before throwing the key into the valley far below. In this way they can never break up - they are locked together in love forever...

Recipe for Siberian Punch

Three bottles of champagne, one bottle of vodka, half a bottle of brandy, four glasses of curacao, sugar, sliced apple, grated nutmeg, the zest of a lemon: soda water (if desired). Stir well and set alight!

The building cried glitter...

Demolition by fireworks - sometimes we should learn something from Las Vegas...

My secret garden 2004