under another sun

A day of unfoolish domestic contentment pottering about with Lorraine this morning and in the afternoon I met Sarah Barnsley a poet who teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London. Had a good chat in a cafe about poetry, writing and publishing. I really enjoyed talking to her. Robin was meant to join us, but cried off with a wretched cold but she and I chatted later. She is going through house moving stuff, and going through the standard frustrations with banks and so on. Probably prompting me to have anxiety dreams about property and selling and buying houses. Lorraine out tonight, and I spent a happy few hours working on some poems, reading poems and listening to the album Africa Speaks America Answers by Guy Warren on Spotify. At 9.00pm Avatar was on TV and I watched this, although stripped of the cinematic scale and 3D the thinness of the plot and dialogue was even more evident. Scandalous how much of Roger Dean's visual imagination was criminally imported wholesale and unac...

A family Sunday Nightmares, dreaming that I was grinding my teeth and woke up to discover I was in fact grinding my teeth. Another where I was trying to complete some important form and found I was unable even to write my name. Some snickering and weird stuff in the Twitten woke me up at 3 am too. An early start as I was going to travel up to Edgware today for a family Sunday lunch. I listened to my audiobook of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell - what an achievement that book is - in a carriage full of perky German students, and hungover Pride revellers. Mas picked me up at Stanmore station and after collecting Mum and Toby we all drove off to Wheathampstead, which is the other side of St Albans - a place that mum lived in during a former life in the time of the Romans. Here we went to the splendid Golden Elephant restaurant, which is in a very low-beamed old English building. In fact the beams are so low that one of them has black cushioning attached to it to prevent its clientele brai...