meander

[helenic]

I am not supposed to be writing this. What I am supposed to be doing is sorting out the clothes which currently sprawl from my half-open suitcase across my bedroom floor; I am meant to be doing laundry, packing for Student Cross and for next term, because I am only at home for another two days now, not including the week on pilgrimage, before I go back to Cambridge. I always intend to unpack properly during the vacation, put posters up, sort out my boxes of assorted useless - but important - personal things, but it rarely happens. I emptied the boxes of books, in a fit of industry, on my second day back, but the rest remains untouched. I delve into them when I need a particular thing and leave a trail behind me - small bottles from The Body Shop, rechargable batteries, cassette tapes, pens, an electric razor. The myriad smallnesses which, on the last day of term, are swept unsorted into boxes until I remember a notebook I need, my camera, my tweezers (I always panic when I cannot find my tweezers; I'm something of a compulsive hair-plucker). It's an odd mixture of organisation and chaos. I know the precise location of every thing in that mess of junk, I can find it in an instant, but then, absent-minded, I bear it off to whatever I need it for, scattering unwanted items as I go. Somehow, I never quite remember to either arrange them in my room or return them to their boxes; they remain on the carpet, and I know exactly where to put my feet so as to avoid them when I get out of bed in the morning.

Outside it is white-skied and rainy. The grass is very green. I drink tea and work my way through huge piles of ironing in front of Kenneth Brannagh's Henry V, go to folk clubs with my dad. My tin whistle-playing has improved immeasurably in the past two weeks; I'm much faster, have pretty much got the hang of Irish ornamentation, and have learned about fifty new tunes. I want to be good enough to take a whistle to Trowbridge and not be ashamed to play it. Perhaps at last I'll investigate some of the Cambridge sessions this term, which I've been meaning to ever since the summer of 2002, when the bassist of the Kate Rusby band recommended a number of pubs to me and I promptly forgot their names. I'll take the whistle with me next week as well; it's that sort of crowd. Real ale and Islay and lock-ins, songs like Come Landlord fill the Flowing Bowl and There's Whisky in the Jar.

I'm trying to make a list of things I'll need for pilgrimage. Clothes are always a problem. Jeans and corduroys are out of the question - when it rains (and it will) they stay wet and heavy for hours afterwards. I have tried skirts, but without much success. I have one pair of combats and one pair of jogging bottoms. Fashion is no object, but two pairs of trousers for six days of walking? I shall to go into the village tomorrow and scour the charity shops for some minging ones I can throw away once we get to Walsingham. Charity shops have been kind to me lately. The other day, in a Scope dedicated to books and music, I found a three-volume Complete Works of Shakespeare, a Dean edition dating from about the fifties in red faux-leather embossed with gold. There was a matching Crime and Punishment. When I got to the till I discovered everything was half-price, and apologising to the shopkeeper dashed back downstairs to the shelves of classics, returning with an armful: Roget's Thesaurus, Middlemarch, a new translation of Goethe's Faust, the Complete Works of Byron, the Penguin Book of Love Poetry. They came to a total of £7.25. I'm currently reading a biography of Casanova by Derek Parker. It's appallingly written; sensationalist, suspiciously sympathetic and entirely uncritical (the author's sole source seems to be the subject's History of my Life, the accuracy of which he doesn't think to question) but quite entertaining. I'm always intrigued by portrayals of 17th century Venice, however unlikely. It's the main reason I liked Cry to Heaven by Anne Rice. That, and the hot Catholic boy-sex.

Comments

[jisms.livejournal.com]

At boarding school, we used to have 6 day hikes now and then at least 3 days ones every week, and in the end I just forgot about spare changes of clothes and wore the same thing every day. Utterly disgusting, but easier. And more space for equipment. There's those um, waterproof trousers you can get, we used to have to have them... I don't know what they're called exactly, but you scrunch them up and the pocket on them becomes a tiny zipped up pouch that takes up an insanely small amount of space in your bag. That way you can live with one pair of tracksuit bottoms and not worry about them being uncomfortable if they get wet/muddy etc. Anyway, yeah!

I wish I had found something like that in a Charity shop. Once I found a first US edition of A Clockwork Orange for £1, that was probably the best thing I ever got. And once a really old textbook on Roman Law from the 1940's for £3 or something, which is quite good as I'm studying it.

[libellum.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've seen the waterproof trousers before. Don't own any though, worse luck. But it's a pilgrimage, not a hike - we walk on roads, so mud isn't a problem. When I used to go on guide camp I'd wear the same clothes every day too. I even slept in them sometimes. Getting up at 7am when it's fucking cold outside is much easier when you don't have to get dressed :)

I've never found any academic books in charity shops. Unless you count the bookshops in Hay on Wye, which I don't because they aren't for charity. You should go there though. Now that's the kind of place people should have pilgrimages to.