But anyway, I am back.  Or, for the sake of truth in advertising, bits of me are.  Health has decided to stay on in London; Brain is wandering, lonely as a cloud somewhere over the Indian Ocean.  And Heart… well who knows where Heart is.  Enigmatic thingses, these Heartses, as has been discussed previously, and will be again no doubt. In the radio silence, between the last post and this there was London, which was too heart-filling and heart-wrenching to do justice to in my current state of nervejangle.  And there was Venice.  Which was deliciously, shockingly, shout-out-in-sheer-surprisely-COLD.

It was helpful but reserved people, it was indifferent food. It was that sort of everywhere-allover-beauty which causes your eye to not know where to alight, but to flit instead from this thing to that, as if with ADHD. It was a fantastico exhibition on Japanese tinted photography from the 1890s.

And it was this shop, which Miss Pimperlicious and I discovered while meandering one day, she with her jet lag, me with my streaming cold.

It was a glove shop – an orgy of Glove, the Whole Glove and Nothing but the Glove.  They had them in shades of marigold, sunflower, primrose, turmeric and saffron.  They had marron, cerise, blush, marshmallow and  rose geranium.  I was in utter agony choosing. I wanted yellow.  No, I wanted pink.  Oh, but I had to have green. What about one of each?  In the end I got these

Miss P was able to wrestle me out of the door only when we discovered they did mail order.  And they were cheap!  Soft and buttery and tight-fitting and cheap.  Quite where I am to wear them, living in sub-tropicana as I do, is a little beyond me, but I Had To Have Them.  You understand don’t you?  It was simply impossible to leave without them.

But enough of such fripperies – to serious matters.  By which I mean houses.  You know, that being the (putative) point of this blog after all. Because we have arrived at a watershed.  Today, as it ‘appens.  And I am totes out of my little box with the stress of it all.

To give you the gist, we have had some builders’ quotes for the work on the Regency Wreck.  The additional work we wanted on top of the statutory repairs – you know, the Juliet balconies, the glass roof on the Jungle Lav, and a few holes in walls here and there –   will cost us over half as much again as the Quantity Surveyor’s report.  And that’s the cheapest builder.

And at the same time, our present house is up for auction.  At 6.30 this very evening!  I know!  I shall have to go drunk, or drugged, or gagged.  Mr Pimp will have to shove me under the chairs at the back of the room to keep me from gibbering and shrieking. And that’s not all.  It seems that while we were away we missed an Official Edict wherein all potential house purchasers were promised fire-sale bargains.  So we are hearing a lot of ‘oooh lovely house, quite gorgeous, love the thises and thatses and would really love to buy it and, bee tee dubs, we’d like to pay you one and sixpence because that’s, uh, where the market’s at these days’.  Why, I ask you, could the universe not have organised things the other way around, with the RW coming in cheaper than estimated and the current, much beloved house, selling for way beyond?

Honestly, I think I prefer fanning around foreign climes, buying gloves.

But if you have a second, spare us a thought at 6.30 this evening?  I’ll be the one in the straightjacket.

Another post (forgive me!) without much houseyhousey content,  though we do have Moroccan rugs and we do have riads.  A post also without much by way of oomph – that having been knocked out of me  by a particularly vicious bout of food poisoning courtesy of Mssrs Queasy Jet. I have been rolled utterly flat.  Imagine, if you care to, a Tom and Jerry moment.  Catering Dept – I salute you – gentlemen and ladies all.

But anyway, starting at the start, one misty moisty morning last week we left the Dorset hollows for the airport.  The early morning fields were wreathed in rolling mists, the sun just heaving itself up from off the edge of the world to hang heavy and flat and white,  a slice of opal burning quietly away there.  Almost another moon really.  And the trees were ghostly echoes of themselves, looming out at us from the edge of the road. It was an English morning of such perfect spectral beauty I would have liked to be suspended in it forever.

But no! There were places to go and adventures to be had,  and so by means of a car with dodgy brakes, a bus, a plane and a taxi (all this via a lunch at The Prince Albert in East Grinstead - surely the very worst England has to offer – where by rights we should have got food poisoning but did not, escaping instead with only shell shock and perforated ear drums) we found ourselves in Marrakesh.

And oh!  Marrakesh!  Or as M’Sieur F said “Marrakesh …minarets , mountains, mint tea, mules, medina, mayhem ”.  But I’m not up to such an elegance of concision (or alliteration) because, dear ladies and gents of the jury, what you have before you is a one woman campaign to get everyone to shift their harrises on over to Morocco.  Truly.  An encouragingly eclectic crowd went with us on the plane – people on cougar holidays, people on smoking holidays, people on boys’ own holidays. Something for everyone.

We stayed here, at the Riad Awa (I found it at The French Eye).   I would definitely suggest you try it.  A minimalist riad – not an oxymoron at all.

And our room:

I had a somewhat dangerous conversation with Henri, the owner, on the last morning.  He told me he went to Marrakesh on holiday in 2004, and within three weeks of returning to France had sold all his assets and moved to Marrakeh.  Aaah.  Be still my roving heart.

And I am ashamed to say (or should be, but am not really) that a  galloping consumerist frenzy overtook us while we were there,  and we became quite the regular denizens of the souk.   The souk, let me tell you,  is at one and the same time completely bonkersbarmy and utterly civilised. Really, Marrakesh IS the souk.  Slap me if you want.

We were obliged to buy carpets, of course.  That’s axiomatic, isn’t it?  And anyway, the Regency Wreck had had a two day photo shoot with Harpers Bazaar just before we left and the dosh was burning a hole in its pockets .  We could hear it calling for carpets across the dark fields of England at night.  Honest guv’nor, no word of a lie.  So if you look at it that way it was ineluctable.  Our moral duty in fact. And while fulfilling said moral duty I discovered a talent for bargaining that I didn’t know I had. There were the scripts of course – the charming carpet salesman script and the naive tourist script, but there was plenty of room in for a lot of ad-libbing and somehow it always managed to feel personal.  And when all is said and done, that’s really all I care about – the personal.

And so it transpired that we bought this

and also this, to keep it company

They were made  by a  middle-Atlas tribe with, apparently, a penchant for abstract motifs and wiggly lines which meander into abstraction. We were told many stories about those lines.  They represent the tribal tattoos the women have on their chins.  They are the river in which the rugs are washed.  Or the meandering thoughts of the women as they knotted them.  They came from the Mrit people.  From the Azilal. From somewhere else I can’t remember.  In the end is it so important to know?  They came from Morocco.  They were made by hand. Probably women’s.  They are not new.

But if you nudge the carpets, the food, the shining hotels, the riads, the snake charmers (oh yes), the men in their fezzes (indeed), the cloud of amber scent which drifts forever behind you and clouds the senses – if you gently shove all that to one side, it was the people, really. It was the old lady in full veil who leant forward from her horse and carriage to say “bonjour Madame” to me.  It was the old boy in his jelabah and slippers who promised his wares were ‘as cheap as chips’.  It was Said, the maitre d’ from the Amin Riad, who, learning it was my birthday, disappeared and came back with the chef, the barman and a cake with a candle in it and all three of them, shuffling from foot to foot like giggling schoolboys, sang Happy Birthday in a mix of English, French and Arabic.

Am I allowed one slightly negative note?  This being a blog and all?  It was the donkeys.  And the mules.  The ones who pulled the vegetable carts and the banana carts.  Some of them were sad and rather thin.  As sad and thin, I suspect, as their owners’ wallets at the moment. Morocco is not having an easy time of it.  Walking past the Sad Banana Mule one evening I put a sketch plan to Mr Pimp – we will move to Marrakesh, buy and renovate a riad and run a donkey sanctuary out in the country. You know, in between doing the Regency Wreck, moving back to the UK and all. He didn’t say no.  He didn’t say yes, either.  But watch this space…

So then, we have left behind the Uhstrayan summer, where each day is hammered flat  by the heat, and instead find ourselves slap bang in the middle of the English winter.  Where the cold sends tendrils up into the bones, where fingers are refugees up stretched sleeves and dewdrops are a democratic nasal vernacular. Where doors tap fretfully in their frames all night and outside, crows fall silently out of bare trees.

The other day I asked Mr P’s mother, as we toiled along the street and the wind hurled around the corner to slam into us and then through us, whether this really was, as she had earlier described it, a ‘mild’ winter.  She was thoughtful for a moment and then said ‘well, I suppose there is a bit of a nip in the air’.

Maybe I’ve gone soft.

But even so, and at the risk of little men popping out from behind bushes with straightjackets, I do prefer being cold to being hot.  I love the almost-death of winter and the spare but vibrant splashes of life – you know, the winter jasmine blazing away like tiny yellow stars, and the little clumps of viburnum huddled in ice-cream colours on their black branches. A little goes a long way.  Just enough hope to keep you trotting on.  Maybe it’s the Calvanist in me but I like good things in manageable doses.  I find endless exuberant abundance a little unsettling.  Like being at a feast when you’re full.

And if the little bits of colour don’t do it for you, then maybe the small, everyday battles might.  Because there are victories to be won here. If you can manage to haul yourself out from under your pile of crocheted blankets  and dress and launch yourself out against the elements, if you can withstand your nose being sliced off, your ears scoured out with ice, your toes nibbled at by mice, if you can do all that and return with your daily needs then there should be no stopping you.  Why not conquer a mountain or two?  A small and distant principality?  There really isn’t a lot of difference once you get going.  Me, I must confess to a fondness for the winter here. At least, having survived it, you know you exist.  In the Australian summer it always seems slightly conjectural.  But that’s all getting a bit ponderous.   Madam, cease and desist! Put the existentials down and step away.

So anyway, this is where the mildness or otherwise of the winter was debated, at the very top of this hill (and, actually, around a small corner, but cut me a bit of slack). Pretty innit?

We are presently staying in a village that was the model for Marlot in Tess of the Durbs.

In fact I once sent a letter to Mr  Pimpernel, addressed it to Marlot and it arrived!  British posties, we salute you. Think yellow stone, lichen, high hedgerows.  Think, Mr P said in the yowling wastes of early morning jetlag, think a pimple rising from a marsh.  All around are villages with names that are ancient and completely beguiling.   Ryme Intrensica.  Wyke Champflower. Piddle Trenthide.  And my all-time favourite – Queen Camel.  Imagine!

Tomorrow,  Londinium, ‘ome of me ‘eart.

(And if you don’t believe me about Spitalfields, take a look at http://spitalfieldslife.com/, which is a true delight).

Right now I should be packing, stuffing things willy nilly into my bag.  Piles of clothes mushroom at the periphery of my vision but here I am instead, at my machine.  Odd – when I have time draped in folds around my feet I can’t get a post together but when I’m on my way out of the door it becomes The-thing-which-cannot-be-put-off.

The highlight of this last year was buying the Regency Wreck.  This time next year I want to be living there (oh, dangerous thingses, these predictions).  The rest of this year has been one of drudgery – an attempt to cobble together the right conditions for health and recovering still (STILL!) from the psychoanalytic training – my sense of humour is not yet inflated, my sense of joy still fugitive. At the end of it all I feel a little colourless, a little pressed flat.    These last few days a poem by Denise Riley has been blowing around inside my head.

As iron sharpens iron

I sharpen the face of my friend

so hard he sings out

in high delicate notes.

A struggle for mastery to most speak

powerful beauty would run any

attention or kindness clean out

of town in angry rags.

Ringed by darkness the heat pulsates.

And power comes in like lightning.

A lion in the room, fair and flowing

twists with unsparing eyes.

Whitely the glance runs

to it and away.  But let it

talk its golden talk if we

don’t understand it.

Grabbed by remote music

I’m frightening myself.  Speak

steadily as is needed to

stare down beauty.  That calms it.

Denise Riley

In this coming year I hope for a lion in the room.  A pulsating heart. Some powerful beauty to try and speak.  For you I wish whatever it is you need and much of what you want. Happy New Year!

And then it all died away and left me in peace.  When I see the colour now – in bits of detritus from that time, a chipped bowl, a stained dish – I look sideways at it with oblique glances, the way people look at past lovers.

And then for a few years there were no grand passions.  There was (and still is) black and all its attendant courtiers.  Bathrooms, studies and bedrooms have worn ebony, charcoal and blackberry garb, but those are undemanding, calming colours and so it has been more of a peaceful co-habitation than  a full-scale invasion.

But recently a surprising development has been taking shape. Pink – a soft powdery pink, a thing of no outline, no more than a murmur  or a haze really – this has been creeping up on me steathily, like a cat with buttered paws. It thinks I haven’t noticed, but I have. My eyes seek it out and when I find it I am soothed by it, as if it brushes my internal organs softly, in a downwards motion. If you knew me away from this blog you would know how distinctly un-pink I am, but there it is.  We don’t seem able to choose our invaders, but I am sure we can get something from them.

So anyway I’m putting it here, a flag in the sand, so that when I return from my travels I’ll find it and be oriented (or maybe not, but I hope so).   I can see it in the Regency Wreck – in the first floor room, a gesture of something other in a plain grey room.  A powdered brush maybe, in the hand of a Quaker.  A rustle  of silk.  A blush of the fanciful (does you good).

(I do, for once, have the references for these last three pictures, but I’m buggered if I can find them.  Underneath the suitcases, lists of instructions to Ms Pimp, dogs-who-sense-something-is-afoot, passports, thermal underwear, trousers which need mending, cameras which need charging, canvases which need painting, books which need writing, camels which need watering, rivers which need fording, houses which need building, and elephants which need grooming. Ets which need cettering.  So I will post at some later, calmer date).

I would like to say thank you to everyone who visits this blog and listens to me rabbiting on about the house and sundry assorted etceteras – I can’t think why you do but I’m very glad you do.  And thanks especially to those of you who leave comments – they mean a lot to me.  I hope Santa brings you good things (good by your own definition).

For a moment there, I thought I’d be writing a post to say that our present house has sold.   A pair  of judges (a bench of judges? a wiggery? a gavel? an inn?) took a fancy to it on the second open day and made an offer there and then.  But it didn’t quite blow our skirts up far enough and so there was a bit of a negotiation-shuffle back and forth for a few days.  In the end they seem to have floated off.  So nup. We are now trying to be brave and believe another, better, offer will come and are busy boffing down the anxiety that is melting internal seams.

So with stress levels soaring and new strains of madness erupting, what did we decide to do?  Go to the farm and rusticate for a while? Bathe in chlorophyl?  Watch the grass grow, be eaten by cows and grow again?  Not on your nelly.  On Saturday we are galloping off to the UK for a month, where we will careen up and down motorways visiting family and being busy. Harvey Nicks sale.  Liberty.  And that clear, ringing winter cold that feels like being in a bell jar.  And then, when we’ve done that for a while,  we’ll come back and have more house viewings. Rinse and repeat until either sale or defeat is called.

Now then.  To serious matters. It seems to be convention in blogland to have Christmassy vignettes  and corners of one’s house festooned about the place,  but what with the quite dangerously anal level of cleaning that’s been going on around here, not much Christmas titivating has been happening.  But that doesn’t matter because  I had the forethought instead to arrange for the Inside Out crew to come and  do a few snaps of the Regency Wreck.  Happy Holidays!

And after all the fuss and palaver of the preceding months, other than a requirement to take a photographic record of the house in all its ‘before’ gloriousness, there are no conditions, nothing has been denied us. It feels rather strange – almost too easy.

For all my striking of attitudes about not getting an upstairs bathroom, it seems all three bodies are unanimous that we shall have one. Not to mention the opening in the dining room wall so that we can stroll in leisurely fashion out into the un-garden. What’s more, we’re at liberty to demolish the bubonic lav which takes up a quarter of said un-garden (I kid thee not – it is that small). Also granted us is a modest opening between kitchen and dining room. And the guest shower room with its smokey glass roof – if you come and stay, I can offer you starlit nighttime ablutions and the best lav-side view you could wish for. And if all that were not enough, the Juliet balconies, which were intended as the sacrificial items on the wish list – maybe they should be called the Iphigenia Balconies? – we got those too. In fact, we got all of it.

Powers that be – we thank you.  Everso ‘umbly.

Of course there ain’t going to be no work on the house anytime soon because, despite solemn oaths, (Not-So) Esteemed (At-The-Moment) Architect has not finished the tender documents, nor produced a builder from his hat. Stern words are scheduled for next week. And to be strictly honest, even if he had, the collapse of Mr Pimp’s mine means we don’t have the mountain of dosh needed for the work anyway.

And so, as a consequence, our present house has been primped and rouged and bundled onto the market somewhat earlier than we intended. In fact our first viewing was yesterday, and it was a somewhat disaster-strewn path leading up to it. The washing machine died utterly on Thursday, the boiler on Friday (luckily it was resurrectable, at exorbitant cost).  And the day before the viewing our very nice cleaner did something very nasty to the floor which seemed, bizzarely, to splalm a thin layer of grease over the entire, glossy, re-coated surface. It took us much frantic mopping and a great deal of scrubbing at midnight, then dawn, on hands and knees in pyjamas and dressing gowns to remove it – finishing, oh, what, a very spacious twenty five minutes before the hoardes (six groups) came streaming through the front door.

And the reward for all our sweaty endeavours?  A cold shower, natch, the boiler still being broken.  I swear there’s a correlation between cold showers and heart attacks; they are she-ocking. But anyway we got there,  rather in the manner of an Ealing Comedy.  And we are launched now, bobbing along on the unpredictable currents of the Sydney property market. If you see a paper boat sail past, please wave. Oh, and if you’d like to buy it at an exorbitant, inflated price (in the cause of heritage works, of course), please wave wildly.

So anyway and anyhow, this is one of the estate agent’s photographic offerings of our present house – the least distorted and most representative of a typical estate agently schleckshun. What is it with those wide-angled lenses?

But enough of all that – Mr Pimp is, as I type ,winging his way back from Singapore (the silver lining in the cloud of financial collapse).  As well as that,  our house is getting ready for sale  in the next couple of weeks, and there are paint pots and wet dogs and steam machines all tumbling chaotically towards the deadline.

So, by way of buying myself a plot of peace, here are a few pictures from my ‘dark room’ cache.  And the common denominator?  Stillness.  Do you see leaking roofs, spooned floorboards, chipped paintwork, spiders’ webs, torn lampshades, fly-blown blinds, dying plants, grimy tiles or grubby grouting – all clamouring to be seen to – in these photos?

Do you see gob-spattered walls courtesy of Remington Pollack?  Gouged floors courtesy of his smaller, more anxious friend?

Do you see the army of solid burghers all come to fix said ailments – the estate agents, the painters, the gardeners, the house washers, the floor sanders, the window cleaners?

No, nor do I!

I see acres of calm space.  I see a modicum of intersecting lines, but not so many that they intersect thoughts.  I see a bed on which it might be possible to read a poem, where each word might inhabit its own unrushed space and images unspool at their own unrushed leisure.

(The interesting question, with all this yearning for peace, of course,  is why I dream of one life while busily making another one entirely.)

Could I live in this house?  As work on the RW gets closer (whatever you do,  don’t mention the money with which to do the work!) the style becomes a more pressing consideration.  At the moment, it seems to boil down to this – whether to dress the house up or down.

I’d love to credit these pictures but the only annotation in my file is ‘voorhaven’ which is, to say the least, a bit mysterious.  So, usual apologies for usual slack tartishness. It looks very Belgian, though, don’t you think?

Edit -

Thanks Jo.

My favourite thing of all is their cyan ware – an ancient Dutch/English technique which allows them to imprint the silhouettes of weeds found in central london on ceramic pieces.

Or see here – a vimeo clip of them making a blue ware vase.  Oddly beautiful. And the circular and rather strange piece of music melted my bones and poured them, molten, into a dreaming pool.

We’ve been in a floundering pool here, plunging up and down between hope and despair –  Mr Pimp’s salt mine having gone suddenly, shockingly and spectacularly belly up last week.  No warning, no forecast, no prognostications of doom. One minute the company was fine, the next it was gone. One minute we were trotting along, the next we were two cartoon people, the ground gone beneath our feet, frantically pedaling thin air. A thing of perception and rumour, the corporate world.  No more, really, than a house of cards.

The phones between here and there have been ringing red hot. First there was no hope, then there was some, then none again, then a tad, a sliver, a wraith.  Then none whatsoever, for ever, without hindrance or let up.  In the end the receivers were called in and that seemed so final we expected him back any minute, home again, home again, jiggedy jig.  Now he’s staying there a month.  Then, who knows – there are rumours this morning (more rumours!) that someone might buy this dead company, wind it up and set it skittering across the table top again.

So where does (what’s left of) my mind go for solace in the middle of all this lunacy?  Why, to sculleries of course!  Not sculleries as they have become in modern parlance – pantries, or laundries, or even just kitchens by another name – but those shadowed shivery hidey holes where you stuff your scullery maid or channel your own, buried under mountains of greasy pans and potato peelings and plucked feathers.  Me,  I am an inconvenient mix of the house-proud and the slattern, and love the idea of a sequestered ante-chamber where grungy goings-on can poked away.

In my trawlings I found these, and felt that funny house-love/longing/lust/acquisitiveness.  It’s those half-glassed walls that do it for me.  Secret and not secret at the same time.  Revealed and enclosed…this begins to sound a bit kinkay.

This is Plain English’s Osea Kitchen (though theirs looks to be more of a laundry.  Socks – stylists own):

And this is a house on the market in London: I am trying to decide how it would actually, practically work, to have to go into another room to wash pots etc.  Whether it would be practical, really, when it came down to it.  And whether I could do it without losing my beloved stone arch as entrance into the kitchen, complete with steel and glass pivoting door.  Picture of which I would post but for the fact that my new Mac had a fit of conniptions last night and is now withholding pictures.  It never raineth but it poureth.  Time for a stiff gin and a lie down.