Shorts and Observations

The place for all the briefies including the moments of real-time observation of the world around us.

LITTLE THINGS I LOVE, PT. 4

| sophiekemsley

This month I decided it was time to finally address a few ‘niggling‘ things around my flat. You know the sort of things I mean, those things which in their current state aren’t ideal, but will just ‘do’, especially for the sake of saving pennies. Several of these things had been on my ‘list of things to sort’ since 2018, like having the ill-fitting loo seat replaced and painting the kitchen anything other than the dreary shade of brown I’d moved in to, but none had ever felt like a priority until I finally caved this year, and it was fully worth it. A few minor changes have lifted the place up a lot, and again reminds me of the importance of the little details in life, the cement between the bricks.

‘Little Things I Love’ is about celebrating these little sensory things even more. I have already done three of these kind of posts over the years and they are among my favourite to write. We all know how testing and nasty the world can be at times, that’s why these things matter even more. The previous versions of this post are available here, here and here. So here we go… the latest little things I love...

…the notably enlarged shaft of sunlight that fills the room after rolling up the blinds by just an inch or two…

…the first moment that the sunshine reflects off a freshly-formed puddle following a rainstorm…

…books with well-creased spines – a sign of having been read and enjoyed over many years, a permit to do the same…

…running your fingers along the back of a thin piece of paper that’s been imprinted all over in biro on the other side…

…strangers holding open doors for others… (I know that some find this an insult, but to me it’s just a harmless indication of people noticing other people and just wanting to make their day a little bit easier)

…when the sky looks like this, and makes everything glow within its path…

…random, innocent, ‘wtf’ humour. For example, I love that there is an entire Instagram account for somebody who takes their Henry Hoover on road-trips with them and photographs ‘Henry’ at an array of landmarks. There’s another which only ever posts the same moving image of Miffy the Rabbit with a different musical backdrop each time, which I find equally hilarious. I would love to meet the people behind these accounts. If I ever did, I’d buy them a beer. In fact – make that five beers. In further fact – just take anything and everything you want.

…a fresh bag of crisps and pot of dip on a Friday night…

…brisk walks when the music, scenery and heart-rate are all in a state of fantastic alignment…

…when people use quaint, old-fashioned phrases like “full of vim”…

…the particularly thick, fluffy feel of a brand new sweater…

…aimless wanders round Poundland. Nothing you want, everything you need; great deals on toiletries, and random snacks that you didn’t think were real / still available…

And plenty more, but they’ll be within Part 5 🙂 What are the little things you love?

Song of the Day: More Fatter – That Night

Fun, catchy indie-funk tune from California that was recently ‘recommended’ to me by Spotify and which I’m fairly sure will feature highly on my ‘Unwrapped’ towards the end of the year as I’ve had it on repeat pretty much ever since.

BUS-PLORATIONS

| sophiekemsley

A few weeks ago, we had our Summer. It was admittedly a little short-lived (though whilst large swathes of the continent are literally burning right now, maybe that’s nothing to complain about), but it was nice whilst it lasted.
One weekend, the local bus services were all running for free, and it made sense to make the most of this offer. I took a bus ‘out into the sticks’ and wandered around for hours in an area I’d otherwise only be able to get to by car, and maybe wouldn’t even have thought to go to at all.
There was something quite liberating about all of this; being able to look out the window properly during the journey there, not having to think about where to park, and not needing to worry about finding a walking-route that would get me back to my vehicle (plus the financial and environmental benefits of course!). In every way, this was a day to really feel free and explore.

There were some beautiful sights to take in. The vibrant purple hues of foxgloves flashing in otherwise eerie ancient woodland. Meadows spanning miles, peppered with the fluttering of families of Red Admirals. A freshly shorn sheep hydrating itself as it sipped from a trough. Tidy topiaries in the back gardens of homes which I’ll never get to own, but like looking at.

Eventually, taking heed from the sheep and feeling the need for some hydration myself, I went to the local village pub. Here, I was greeted with a warmth that was in-keeping with the day’s weather, and a lady telling me the tale of how her cute dog – that was sniffling around at my toes as we spoke – had been coming to terms with recently losing an eye. I then experienced another benefit of having caught the bus by being able to refresh myself with a beer whilst doing some writing in the pub’s pretty garden, before returning home.

All in all, a nice, easy little adventure for a Summer’s day, and I’m excited to do more ‘bus explorations’ in the future.

Song of the Day: Russian Red – This is Un Volcan

This is a beautiful new song by a Spanish folk singer whose real name is Lourdes Gonzalez. She’s been around for about 15 years now and has produced some incredibly emotive and listenable pieces, the kind you keep on loop and keep finding new layers to the more you listen. One of her earlier pieces, ‘My Love is Gone’, is another favourite of mine for similar reasons.

MUN-YAY-NITY

| sophiekemsley

Whilst idly scrolling through Insta recently I came across the above sentiment, and it instantly resonated.

That same morning I’d found myself getting way more excited than is probably normal about the delivery of an Amazon package containing a grout reviver pen (though I would still challenge anyone unconvinced by this to buy one and see for themselves their power to transform the bathroom…), and then about eating a hot-cross bun with some nice blueberry jam I’d recently bought.

I realised at this point – and not for the first time – that I’m probably pretty boring. But the nice thing about getting to your late thirties and being a bit boring is that you don’t really care whether you are or not.

It’s a bit like that moment during the nights out of yesteryear when you would finally get to take off an uncomfortable pair of heels after teetering around awkwardly all evening, and put on a pair of trainers instead. How much more comfortable you would feel from the change of footwear more than compensated for any loss to presentation that may have ensued. When we shift focus from the big and exciting stuff we notice the magic in all of the things in between, and often feel way more comfortable for having done so.

Life is short. This club does permit trainers. Do what makes you happy.

Now, I’m off to continue grouting the bathroom tiles and marveling at the difference a simple little stick of grey paint can make. Mun-yay-nity 🙂

Song of the Day: La Strada – Mean That Much

A song that just sounds like March. Maybe it should be called Mean that March. Ho ho.

AWE-TUMN

| sophiekemsley

I often hear people say that of all the seasons, autumn is their least favourite.

It’s cold. It’s dark. It rains.

None of those attributes would win first prize in a beauty contest, and eating ice-cream is nowhere near as thrilling (though it doesn’t prevent one from trying to find out).

But I am going to take a brief moment to defend autumn, and push it a little further up the perch.

I spend a lot of time walking around my hometown each evening as a way to get the steps in when working from home. There is something beautiful about this place during any season; the biting clarity of a winter sky adding fine outlines to chimney-tops, bonfires burning by the duckpond on balmy spring evenings, and bright red sunsets at 9pm in summer.

Come autumn, the walks invariably take place in the dark, I return with wet feet, and the town is very quiet.

And it can sometimes take a little longer to spot the scenes of brilliance, but they’re still there: golden reflections dancing off the water below, and Victorian lamp-posts illuminating the paths ahead. Deep-fried fish and vinegar floating through the air, and televisions lighting up living rooms like discotheques.

The glow of anticipation for impending festivities, and watching people chitter-chatter through restaurant windows. Cat-shaped silhouettes sprinting along the tops of fences, and smoke lingering in the air from bursts of colourful fire. The dazzle from the fairground as it visits for the weekend.

There are a lot of awesome things about autumn.

Everything has its place.

Song of the Day: Philip E Morris – The Polka

Spotify recommended this song to me. Philip E Morris is a Swedish composer who specialises in fusing electro beats with traditional, older songs. I can’t admit to knowing quite what’s going on in this piece but I like it, and it jazzed up a recent supermarket visit to listen to it. So there we go.

A CANTERBURY TALE

| sophiekemsley

During a recent rainy Monday morning, I popped into Canterbury Cathedral, a UNESCO world heritage site near to where I live.

My car was having its MOT nearby, and with the rain showing little sign of abating, I was hopping from place to place for shelter. The coffee crawl was fun to start with but by about Americano number four I wanted to head somewhere a bit different, and looking out the window towards Cathy’s Bell Harry tower, I felt inspired to be a bit of a tourist for the day, and made my way over.

I have visited the Cathedral tonnes of times over the years. It has played a notable part in our family history, and there’s so much more I could write about it beyond the content of this post, but those can be stories for another day.

Instead, for now, I’ll just tell you a little anecdote about a particular tile in the photo above, the tile with the reddy-orange stain on it next to the black rug.

During one of my first visits to Canterbury Cathedral, in the early 1990’s, I was too young to really understand anything beyond a very basic, watered down version of history. I knew that the Cathedral was famous for being the site of the murder of somebody called Thomas Becket – who had clearly irritated somebody (King Henry II it turned out) – and that it had attracted many visitors due to the belief in miracles which took place at the site after he was killed.

It all sounded quite scary and gory to a seven year old, like what might happen on Eastenders or one of Bowser’s Castles, but nonetheless it was intriguing too. As we walked around the particular area where the famous assassination had taken place, my older sister pointed down at the reddy-orange stain and looked at me with a grimace:

“That’s the stain from his blood when he was killed.”

Suddenly, a scary story became scarier and my infant self felt a shiver down her spine. Numerous questions abounded within – will we see his ghost? Will we have our heads chopped off too, if we stand here too long?

Well, evidently we didn’t, as I sit here writing this almost thirty years later, but there was certainly one long-term impact of this narrative which has made me look incredibly foolish over the years, and that’s the fact that it was only an embarrassingly few years ago that I realised that my sister hadn’t been telling the truth about the unusual stain on the floor.

It had absolutely zip-all to do with Becket, not then, and certainly not ever! I have lost count of the number of people I have given this misinformation too over the decades since; no wonder my Religious Studies teacher didn’t look overly impressed as I shot my hand up in class during year 10 as we learned about Becket, to tell a bunch of nonplussed teenagers of what they could see at the Cathedral.

And there’s an interesting lesson in all of this I suppose. Not to believe everything you’re told, for sure, but on the flipside I ask myself: would I have found the Cathedral as interesting as a seven year old if it weren’t for my sister’s gory story? Probably not. Would that one piece of stone still make me smile and recall memories of a family day out in 1992, thirty years later? Definitely not.

So yes. There’s a lot of history in Canterbury Cathedral. And that small, almost invisible speck, is mine.

SUNSET

| sophiekemsley

The sun sets every day.
No matter where you are,
No matter what you’re doing.
And it’s been doing so for billions of years…

The sun sets as people dice onions, dust cupboards and stand in queues. And as they fill up petrol tanks, buy yoghurt and watch the news.
The sun sets whether you’re happy, hopeful, scared or depressed. No matter how your day went, that orange duvet permits you to rest.

And it never gets any less impressive.


Yesterday evening I met with a friend and was due to head home at around the same time the sun was due to set. The original plan was to get home as quickly as possible – calling in at Sainsburys to pick up a sandwich – and curl up in front of the t.v whilst devouring it.

Even though I was feeling peckish and daydreaming about supermarket aisles, something prompted me to head to the nearby hamlet of Conyer instead, where I could take a short stroll along the creek in the springtime evening sun.

As I walked, what first appeared to be a blazing bullet hole in the distance gradually blossomed into a marbled blanket of pink, orange, peach and purple that cloaked the entire sky. It felt like one of the most tremendous sunsets I’ve ever seen, an evening of magic for which I hadn’t paid a fortune – but instead had the fortune – to enjoy.

As I walked around in wonder, I thought about how easy it would have been to miss this. I thought how about how I could have easily been swapping sunsets with sandwich aisles at that very time, and how much of a shame that would have been. I’d never have even known what I was missing out on, and that ignorance too, would have been a shame.

I marveled at just how much richer my day had become simply from enjoying a show that has happened every day since time began, and wondered how many of the previous episodes I’d lost to dicing onions, dusting cupboards, and standing in queues. And I know that I’m not alone in that, as I only saw half a dozen others during my walk, out of thousands who could have been there. Yet despite what could have been perceived a lack of interest, the show went ahead anyway. I liked that.

I set myself a personal goal for the Summer: see more sunsets! Give that splendid show an audience more often! I think I’ll enjoy this one, and suggest you do it too!

Song of the Day: Dosh – Um, Circles & Squares

I am very much into instrumental music at the moment whilst working on a number of different projects. I find it much easier to keep focused on what I’m doing without the shift of mental direction that lyrics can enforce.
Dosh is a multi-instrumentalist based in Minnesota and this is a nice, whirly, almost meditative piece, which is great to study to. I bet it also sounds good whilst walking underneath a sunset 😉

The House

| sophiekemsley

Do you have any of those fleeting, pixelated memories from very early childhood, which you’ve not necessarily been able to place into the context of anything else?

I have a vivid one in which I’m stood in the doorway of my grandparents’ house in August 1989 (I only know the date because my mum has kept a family diary for decades). I’m saying goodbye to some relatives as they leave a family party. I remember it because I heard the word, “fortnight” for the first time. Through a wound down car window, they said they’d see us in a fortnight, as they drove away in their beige car. It made me think about forks and knights, and I needed my siblings to explain its real meaning. There are many other memories – all just as fleeting and fragmented as that one – from that particular house, and they always seem so mysterious and magical. Maybe just because the wider detail, and explanations, are missing.

Over thirty years later I often walk past the same house, and from the outside it looks exactly the same as it did then. The same front door. The same lion-shaped door knocker. Same bricks, same roof.

I expect, and want, to be able to ring the doorbell and be embraced by my grandad – still in his ’70’s – and a plume of sweet tobacco smoke from his pipe. Behind him, I expect to see puffy maroon sofas, wooden cabinets stacked with crystal sherry glasses and toby jugs, and pale green lampshades with tassels on the end that I can jiggle between my thumb and forefinger. I expect to smell a joint of meat being roasted in an oven.

But I won’t, because it’s 2021 and somebody else lives there now, and they probably wouldn’t take too kindly to a random 35-year old woman knocking on the door expecting to find 1989, turquoise walls, a cream cake, and some relatives who left us a long time ago.

Plus, I need to hurry home and send an e-mail about an urgent matter. One which I doubt I’ll be recalling within a pixelated memory in thirty-two years time. And what time does Morrisons close during the week?

Time is a very, very strange thing. I am always pretty mesmerised by old buildings such as this. Those which have seen so much, and changed so little, plonked within a society that zips along and changes so frequently by contrast.

They’re building more and more new houses here in Faversham. But I’m glad they’re keeping the old ones too.

What buildings make you feel this way?

A beautiful drawing by my very talented mother

Song of the Day: Smashing Pumpkins – Beautiful

My challenge to you is to listen to this song and not fall absolutely in love with it. Beautiful by name, stunning by nature. It’s the final minute of the song and it’ll do things to you. And even if you’re not a massive SP fan (I’m not) you’ll be so thankful this band exists.

C-19 Internal Monologues Part 10: Looking Back & Moving On

| sophiekemsley

The situation is far from over, but in recent weeks we have been furnished with a growing number of returned liberties that incite a mixture of trepidation, excitement and relief.  We are no longer locked inside, reliant on Zoom calls to socialise, or fearing that every time we go out for exercise we have to keep within one hour and be on the move at all times else be condemned by strangers spying out of windows.

There is so much more we are “allowed” to do at the moment and – whilst many of us are still reluctant to pile into the pub and overdo it – it does feel pertinent to appreciate and make the most of finally being able to do some of the things we missed so much.  Of course, provided you’re wearing gloves and keeping the hand sanitiser close by.

Many are quick to warn of a second-wave, and they are right that the threat of that is very real if people don’t adhere to the guidelines.  But do you know what?

I really don’t want to hear about things like that anymore.

Because it’s all well and good worrying about it, but if this pandemic has taught us anything (it’s actually taught us hundreds if not thousands of things) then it’s that life can take us by surprise, and be cut short any time.

Apart from all those wise folks meticulously scrubbing their hands and wiping their keyboards in January, pretty much most of us didn’t believe this pandemic would prove to be anything we should worry about.  We carried on.  We went into places. We saw our friends and family and greeted them with hugs. We booked holidays and dreamed of big things for 2020.

Then suddenly all of these things were snapped away from us like a plaster being ripped from a fresh wound – sudden, leaving a lingering sting – and we had no idea when we would be able to do them again.

Four months on, and there are still a vast many things are waiting for.  Hugs.  Meeting with friends and family without worrying about the number of households present.  Feeling truly safe.  Feeling truly free.

March, April and May in particular were three very distressing months for us all and I think the longer term mental health impacts of that time will ripple across society for years and decades to come, not least for those working on the front line or those unable to say goodbye to loved ones.  I’m also fairly sure that the majority of these mental health impacts won’t even manifest just yet, but in time, when the reality of what we have all experienced really sets in.

But there is also a danger that we will do ourselves even worse mental damage by avoiding, through fear, the time we have to spend with those we care about.  I find myself being marginally more concerned about this at the moment, than the virus itself.  Three months away from loved ones is hard enough – but manageable – but how much longer should we abstain from making new memories?  Time is so precious, the pandemic taught us, so does it really make sense to spend infinite amount of it zipped away?  To me it doesn’t.  I think we should be making the most of the time we have with people, but balancing it out with keeping safe.  Not overdoing it by engaging in hedonistic displays of mass boozing and bathing, like a scary proportion are.  Just having company, and appreciating the sheer ability to be able to spend time with people, is good enough for me right now.  It also helps that the weather is good and we can spend this time outdoors within nature; which is not only safer but beats the sterile environment of a restaurant chain, where we might otherwise have met, any day:

IMG_20200720_225804_208

To this end, this chapter may well be the last of my C-19 Internal Monologues, because even whilst the situation rolls on I’m not sure I want the topic to form the underlay of all my future posts until it stops.  This will undoubtedly be thing the defines 2020 for all of us but it’s time to let other things play a part in the year now too.

I think it’s time to Look Back & Move On.  Carefully.

 

 

C-19 Internal Monologues Part 7: F-unfair

| sophiekemsley

Recently, I haven’t felt the inclination to write as often as I did when the crisis first broke out, which I suppose is indicative that the situation has seemed to reach some kind of plateau.  We are still in lockdown and the numbers are still staggeringly high, but perhaps we are getting used to this now.  The adaptations we needed to make to our lives are becoming the “new routine”.

“Emotional roller-coaster” is a metaphor frequently used to describe the past few weeks for each of us.  There have been some very low points, but also plenty of encouraging examples of humankind and communities coming together.

Promptly followed-up by more low points.

Then more hope.

But the problem with roller-coasters, though, is that if you stay on them indefinitely, you will get dizzy, and sick.

Over thirty days into the official lock-down and myself – like many – are prone to feeling a little bit fed up.

That’s not to say we disagree with what we are doing and why we are doing it.  I would far rather remain in lock-down and get this sorted for good, than race out under a false start and experience thousands more needless deaths.

But, I am still getting a bit tired and a bit weary of being on the roller-coaster at all.  Especially when it’s one none of us needed to still be on; kept here by a mechanical fault that wasn’t inspected thoroughly enough before they opened up the fair to swathes of thrill-seekers. A failure to adhere to basic hygiene on the other side of the world, or a leaked experiment in a lab (or whatever theory you choose to believe.  My jury is out, to be honest.  All I know is that I’m extremely annoyed by whatever the source is).

Whatever you believe, this pandemic could – and should – have been avoided, and I think that is the most infuriating part about all of this.  Millions of people all over the world have sacrificed their lives, their jobs, their homes, their relationships and their mental health, for something that didn’t actually need to happen.

And I’m not sure any kind of penalty will ever be enough to atone for that.

And so yes, whilst on the whole we may be “coping”, whilst we may be keeping “strong” as we get used to our new normal, I think it’s critically important that every now and then, when we feel a little queasy from the many twists and turns, that we remind ourselves that we are experiencing a global trauma that will impact on each of us in very different ways, for years to come. And we didn’t need to be.  And so it’s perfectly okay to feel piffed off about it every now and then.  Even to cry about it.

I’m looking forward to whatever day we can finally get off this roller-coaster, and head towards something else at the fair which has much less motion.

The candyfloss stand would be perfect.