mr bon jovi

happy birthday to you
mr jon bon jovi!

(photo from cakecentral dot com

nb your head is made of rice cereal treats)

in case you were wondering, jon,

i have been an appreciator of your work since 
nineteen ninety four

when 'always' was number two in the chart

and you looked like this

(and i looked like this)

i thought your song was lovely.
especially the bit about
'i'll be there till the stars don't shine
till the heavens burst and the words don't rhyme'

i threw the hat of the boy i liked over the playground wall
in to the building site next door that year.
that's what i knew about romance.
(sorry callum.)

anyway.
now that i'm older and wiser i realise that your song is maybe not 
quite so lovely.
 all that crying for you and dying for you 
that you promise to do might be a bit much.
especially if she's moved on and you're spying through the curtains.
creep.


people play 'always' at their weddings, jon,
they play 'always' at their funerals.
is that awkward for you if it's not what 'always' was meant for?


maybe they haven't seen the music video?
maybe they missed the part where the lady-faced philanderer  
streams some inappropriate almost-lovemaking with 
keri russell 
live in his living room 
and gets caught by his sexy burlesque dancing girlfriend
who throws a bag of groceries at them and runs down the street with no shoes on
until she finds a sensitive long-haired artist in a polo neck 
who gives her champagne
and paints her soul
and makes sweet sweet love to her in his minimalistic apartment 
until the lady-faced philanderer finds them 
and stabs the painting in the face 
and blows up the apartment 
and spends the rest of his life clutching at ghostly mirages of the sexy burlesque dancing girlfriend, 
his heart heavy with regret.


it's not much of a wedding song
when you look at it like that.
i'm still an appreciator though, jon.
many happy returns.

(please enjoy this fine showcase of nineties denim and gratuitous explosions.)

wise things that lupe fiasco has said in my dreams (part one)

last night i dreamt that i was on a steam boat
and lupe fiasco said to me -


"never plant the seeds of your happiness 
in someone else's garden."

thanks lupe.
ps you're cool

the chai man

last year i spent two months in india

(they were in fact two of the best months in the history of months).

five weeks playing with playdough and paint at a special school in kerala

and three weeks on buses, trains, planes and rickshaws 

having adventures from south goa to jaipur

with three english maidens i found along the way.

 here is a man that we met in ooty.

(ooty - short for ootacamund. 

a hill station in the state of tamil nadu.

two thousand four hundred metres above sea level.

very chilly. very green. 
the place where we discovered spicy cheese
and the holiness of the cow.)

the man in ooty had a tea shop.

he made us chai. and jam sandwiches.

(after three weeks of curry and ambiguous fruit items there is not much four english girls crave more than jam sandwiches)

he could not speak any english,

and we could not speak any tamil.

he boiled the milk in heavy saucepans

and served our tea in glasses that were not bigger than egg cups.

when he was not boiling he was sitting,

sitting in his wooden chair and looking at the heavy-uddered cows outside his window.

his brown jumper reminded me of my poppa and the knitted things that my nanna makes for him in english winters.

i wish i could have asked him things.

things about his grandchildren.

and his town.
and his tea.

he seemed like a man that's been in the world since the beginning.

like one of those gnarly trees that's been around for thousands of years.
yes.
if he was a tree he would definitely be this kind of tree.

 

a thought:

sometimes when you are a long way from home you see something that makes you think the world is small and all the same.
like a mcdonald's. 
or a black labrador.
but sometimes when you are a long way from home you see something and it doesn't seem 
that this world and the one you knew about before 
can both be real. 
foxtel and car insurance and lady gaga
in the same world as 
the chai man in his wooden chair
and the street cows outside his window?


i still wish i could have asked him things.


ps thank you lucy roome for letting me use your photo of the chai man.
you are very pretty.

an introduction

"they're bad and they're good," said pod. 

"they're honest and they're artful - it's just as it takes them in the moment. 

and animals, if they could talk, would say the same. 

steer clear of them, that's what I've always been told. 

no matter what they promise you. 

no good never really came to no one from any human bean."

("the borrowers" by mary norton)

hello.

and welcome!

to a place dealing with the business of humans. 

the bad and good. the honest and artful.

and all the living, loving, saying, doing and dying that we get up to.