Gallant Duck

the catalogue:

current research
previous findings
bibliography
annotations

other branches:

erqsome

associates:

emmalene
fridayfilms
girlsdontcry
heelandlass
inkysoso
luvabeans
mitten
misspinkkate
onepinksock
schmutzie
smartypants
squeeky

outside associates:

accidental hedonist
bitter greens
dooce
fig and plum
fluid pudding
grumpiest girl
juju loves polka dots
knit, anne marie, knit
mighty girl
mortimers mom
one hot stove
parsley soup
postpunk kitchen
sarah jane
sarcastic journalist
super eggplant
vibe grrl
who were the bishops?

public interest:

16.02.07..12:36 pm

Hello! I very much suspect everyone has gone away; but if there is anyone left, wondering where I have got to and hoping I might return, I'm not sure what to say. I've kind of moved over to Typepad. I didn't mean to, it just happened that way. I'm sorry for not mentioning it earlier, it's a bit neglectful of me really.

But maybe, if you would like to, perhaps you could come visit? And maybe, you could stay a while? There are some pictures and I have a comments thing there too, so you could even let me know you've been!

In any case, the place to do any of that is here at http://erqsome.typepad.com.

I hope you're well.

ms meep, who is also known as emmms

19.06.06..6:43 am

My deodorant has melted. Rather than the invisible, silky sheen Dove promises, I've been getting fat, white globbies that have to be rubbed in each morning. Rather like most of the tourists in Cyprus. The thing that frankly perturbs me in all this is that my deodorant did not melt because of the hot, hot heat of eastern Mediterranean. It melted under the murky skylight in my bathroom. It's stained/bleached (inexplicably hard to work out which) the box of q-tips that sit next to my deodorant as well. The moral of this story is that the coating from years of bus diesel and Vespa exhaust is still no match for the skylight's ability to tarnish all beneath it. Do not undermine it's power, mortal! Thus spake the skylight, amen.

Matthew just got woken up by a yodel from the street below. No, I wasn't serenading him (like taxi's sitting out front and honking until a curtain flickers, that's not cool, especially at 6.30am), it is/was some kid waiting at the bus stop grooving vivaciously to the tunes in his iPod. He just did a moonwalk. A moonwalk. If I could start my day by moonwalking to a bus stop, I'd be officially the coolest. Too much coffee? people would ask wearily. No! I'd cry, eyes ablaze and raring to go. I moonwalked! I'm too hot for this place, that moonwalk reallt fucks your shit up.

For reasons known only to my subconscious, I wrote that entire last thing to myself in 1930s Jive.

Today I'm meeting up with Friday for some karaoke-a-gogo in celebration of her birthday and being in my sweet London.* I've no idea where, because I've no idea where Pablo plans on taking her; in fact, it might not be karaoke. Plans change fast in these parts.

My subconscious really needs to stop with the silly voices. Or I need not to wake up at 3am convinced the windows have been ripped off their hinges by the wind. Possibly also not dream of running out of sunflower oil and then waking up and going to check. (We have a near-full bottle, thanks for your concern. We have a near-full bottle, because I don't use the stuff except for baking. And I don't do that enough to justify it, either.)

*the word 'London' needs more syllables for that to work properly. I think we should take a concensus on that.

****emmms

12.06.06..8:34 pm

I tried to get some sleep last night, I really did. I managed to switch off the light at a reasonable hour, but it was too hot. Then the fan was on too high. and then a bus would thunder up the hill and into my flat. So I would get up to turn the fan down, but that made it too hot; I toyed with the idea of shutting the windows, but convinced myself that the hot-stuffy-and-airless would kill me. I consoled myself that Matthew was doing his damnedest to drown it out anyway by snoring. Finally when the fan was tuned just right and the buses made their way back to the terminal and Matthew finally responded to the kicking, I realised I'd become entangled in his legs. He had wound both of them around my own, with one pressed right up into my stomach, trapping me in place. So wound up by the buses and the fan and the inexplicably hot June night, I was oblivious to it until sweat started dripping from my suffocating knees and my feet were tingling from that lack of blood.

Eventually I managed to slide out from under him (not too difficult, it turns out, due to all the sweat, and fall asleep hanging off the side of the bed. So tonight I'm so tired all I want to do it laugh at celebrities. The depressing thing is that it's not that hard. The wonderful thing is Go Fug Yourself.

The whole need to get to sleep and sleep well was that I started my new job today. Despite being late to catch my train (commuting! How weird is that!), I was early in. And it was good. I like the people; I loved talking to adults all day; I really like what I'm doing. Typesetting! Editing! Checking proofs! Wha-ha! Even if I can't seem to do it! With luck it will turn out to be a stipend of starting a new job and having to converse intelligently with adults, however there is a certain sense of doom-laden self-loathing that appears to have accompanied me on my rounds today. The most frustrating thing is that I know logically what to do. But I keep losing confidence and double-checking my every move, which means that everything took twice as long as it ought to have done and I felt like a knob-end loser for most of that day. Surprisingly, it wasn't until nearly four that I realised I wouldn't be with the kids today, I was that busy (being a knob-end loser)

I ought to have known it would be the feeling du jour as it wasn't until I was on the bus that I realised I wasn't wearing any underwear. No bra, no pants. Wearing a flimsy wrap-around skirt. Knob-end loser.

More on Cyprus to come. I've not forgotten, I'm just knackered.

****emmms

10.06.06..11:09 am

We arrived in Cyprus about an hour later than we should have done - though, giving credit where credit's due, we did land a whole ten minutes before our suspected rescheduled arrival; our pilot was very proud of that - and to our great relief our cab drver was still there. Far from the burly, hirsute Cypriot I had been expecting, she was from Essex.

Our first night was spent with Matthew preparing his Best Man speech and me waxing my bikini line. Every now and then one or other of us would look up and wince, "That looks like it hurts, honey."

****emmms

07.06.06..10:29 pm

I'm well and truly back. I'm so back that I've begun working half-days at my new gig. And it's awesome.

I walked a grand total of five mile today without even trying, from Richmond to Twickenham, from Highbury to Angel, etc, etc. You know, now, that Twickenham is the most dire place in London. I will concede that it is perhaps unfair to dub it so. It's just that it is next to Richmond. It is next to the Marble Hill Parks. St Margarets is possibly worse, but you can easily avoid it in passing. Richmond, however, my word. My word. It is rather immensely beautiful. The bit of the Thames that passes under Richmond Bridge is possessed by unfair cleanliness. It's as though the teenagers of Richmond have better things to do. Altogether different to Clapton where I will be working until Monday 12th. Yesterday I had to call the police on my way home because a groups of feral youfs were packing and tracking in a park as I passed.