Spending Time with Henry

I'm going to have a go at one of those liberating, rambly posts that I used  to enjoy writing.

It's 00.35 and I should have been asleep 1 hour ago because my body is fighting a cold virus (quite successfully) and I am unable to function mentally right now. Text looks wrong, I can't string proper sentences together and I keep forgetting how to spell halfway through words.

Today, as with yesterday and the day before, I spend every single free moment of my life cleaning the house. My birthday party will be on Saturday and I have friends arriving from Thursday onwards and basically sleeping in EVERY single room in the house. This means that the spare room, to which all of my sewing and knitting paraphernalia has been relocated over the course of about two years had to be CLEANED OUT. This took me an entire season and a half of Peep Show to accomplish, and even then it wasn't/isn't done. I am quite proud of myself for managing to organise all my fabric and wool. It's quite a feat. I should really take a photograph.

Then there's the spare front room, into which all of my clothes, books, jewelry, junk, stationary, crap, bits and things had been transferred at Christmas so that my brother and sister in law could have my bedroom. Happily that is tidy now, despite having Lucy on Skype for a few hours while I repeatedly cried "What am I doing?! What am I doing? I don't know what I'm even doing!" because the enormity of my task was just ridiculous.

Tomorrow, I will clean my bedroom, the bathroom, the hall, downstairs and put the Christmas decorations away.

And so, my friends, I have once again come to these conclusions:

1: I have TOO MUCH BLOODY STUFF
2: I don't understand punctuation well enough
3: .......................


OH MY GOD I'VE GOT AN OVERDUE LIBRARY BOOK AND IT IS STRESSING ME THE FUCK OUT.

BongBong

Usually at this time of the year I'm all excited about the challenges of the New Year's resolutions. This year I'm finding it hard to get started. Apart from bringing the doggie for daily walks and trying not to swear, I've not had a chance to have a go of my other ones. The problem being that the Christmas period doesn't just suddenly stop on the first of January. My sister is still staying in our house and I know that if we have to go out to do anything (eg, buy food, meet a friend) it will inevitably take all day.

The first part of my day is pretty good. I get up, I eat, feed and walk the dog, come home, shower. Standard morning fare. But you can't just abandon everyone in the house to go composing in the music room. For one thing, in my house people will listen which is annoying and interrupt which is beyond annoying.

We were supposed to travel to Northern Ireland to visit a friend for three days but I just sort of put my foot down. (Very carefully...) I really do want to go visit Margaret but my run up to Christmas literally went like this:

CUMBRIA -> AMSTERDAM -> BERLIN -> EDINBURGH -> CHRISTMAS


I'm tired. And worse than being tired, I feel I'm behind on my actual life. Until I get some time on my own and space to get things done, I know I'll just feel panicked and stressed. I make a to-do list before I go to sleep every night for the next day and I find that I don't have the space to get anything on the list done. Time for piano practice has run out as I have a lesson tomorrow. Oh well. In at the deep end, I suppose.




It will be interesting to spend time with the woof on our own for the first time. My dad, sister and I were invited to lunch at our friends' house on Saturday. Their son-in-law just happens to be some kind of champion dog trainer and we just happened to have Millie in the car so we got a lesson in heeling and staying and sitting. We're also going to train her to poo/wee on command. (The word is "bongbong." You say it every time they go so they make the association. Amazing.)

I'M LOOKING FORWARD TO TOMORROW, YES, YES, YES!!!

A celebratory gif. My friend Jonny made this of us in the graveyard in Edinburgh:


lol @ Elaine getting hit with a snow ball on the right.

One Step Ahead of Myself

Bonjour, mes amis. Merry Christmas!

It's that time of year again; time for reflective entries where I think about the type of person I'd like to become and ways I plan to get there. On the plane on the way home from Edinburgh, in a bid to distract myself from my fear of falling out of the sky, I made a list of resolutions. Not one of my resolutions is weight related. I think that's progress. My healthy eating and positive habits are just life now, I will continue to lose weight because I've changed. I don't need to put unnecessary focus on it.

It's mostly career-related, this list. That's fairly amazing when you consider that this time last year I didn't have a clue what I wanted to do. I thought event manager. Funnily, that's still part of the package.

I'm not sure if I've written about it here yet, but I've decided to pursue being a singer/songwriter. My core of family and 2 Cork friends have been just really supportive. As in, no one has tried to talk me out of it. When I told Martha she very calmly said, "Yes. I think that's probably right." As if it'd been staring us all in the face. I suppose in a way it had?

So my resolutions are as follows:


__..::  Write and/or play music every day.

__..::  Record three albums.

__..::  Record one Wizard Rock album.

__..::  Become an inspirational performer. (Totes easy, guyz.)

__..::  Achieve the next grade in piano.

__..::  Spend time promoting myself.

__..::  PLAY AT LEAKYCON!!!!!!

__..::  Book at least one live show of my own music.

__..::  Write more letters.

__..::  Gain an acceptable level of French. (Be able to hold a conversation.)


Before the 16th December I honestly thought that the Snow Ball in Edinburgh would be my last Wizard Rock show. I thought I was finished writing music about Harry Potter. Being there, spending the weekend with my friends, meeting new friends, singing, drinking endless tea, singing, hugging, eating porridge and singing.... It's just reminded me what friendship can be. It's reminded me of why I got into it. It reminded me of how amazing people can be, how you can have a group of friends around you who look out for you and care for you the way you care for them. It's something that I encountered twice in America and something I don't think I've ever really encountered in my own Irish life. It's incredible. And so, I feel inspired to keep doing it. Until I have to stop...

I'm not the kind of person who will keep flogging a dead horse. When the time comes, I will stop. If I'm not inspired, I won't write. But the people in the community, especially here in Europe and Scandinavia just surprise me with their warmth, their support and their willingness to give of themselves. When I see someone come from Norway or Germany to come to a Wizard Rock show that I'm playing at, it really amazes me. And no one is horrible. We don't seem to have any drama over here.

Okay, I need to stop gushing. Long story short: ♥

Here are some photos of what I got up to...


SONIC SCREWDRIVER!!!


Cathrin, Ellie, Laura, me, Lucy





Singin' at the Snow Ball.



Snowball fight with Kylie in the Tom Riddle Graveyard.



I wrote this.


I didn't write this.


My voice was fairly wrecked by the time I came to these two songs so please don't judge. D:

HPFTW

HARRY POTTER!
HARRY POTTER!
HARRY POTTER!
HARRY POTTER!
HARRY POTTER!


HARRY POTTER!!


I'm so inspired right now! I need to be singing! <3

Seriously?

An example of a time I wanted to be taken seriously

I am quite confident that I don't take myself too seriously. As I go about my life I literally police myself about it. Recently though, I've worried that I try too hard not to take myself seriously. Perhaps I should start, because if I don't, who will. It's possibly a symptom of what we in Ireland consider a very Irish mentality. We don't like to make it seem like we're anything out of the ordinary. We would like to make it seem that what we do or what we have achieved is just a trifle, that it was nothing. And if anyone acts like they worked hard for what they have, we consider them to be snobs and tend to be suspicious of them.

"Ireland is a nation of begrudgers," is a phrase that is tossed around quite freely here. And it's true. And I often worry that if I were to just explode my sense of containment, to say the really arty, stupid things that come into my head, people would think that I'm assuming another personality and doing it for attention. The reason I've been thinking about it more recently is because I want to be an artist. There is, obviously, a type of artist that is very coy and cunning about everything that they say. I would at least enjoy a period of unpoliced freedom to say and create whatever I like.

I'm always drawn to song-writers who don't follow the rules. Marina and the Diamonds, Regina Spektor, Elbow, Florence and the Machine, Lily Allen. In art class at school, I used to detest when I was making something I was excited about and my teacher would tell me how to fix it and what I shouldn't do. It's that age-old argument of "What is art?" At that point I just wanted the freedom to explore my abilities and what worked and what didn't.

That's what I want now. I'm writing all these slightly absurd lyrics. (One song is actually inspired by the Absurdest play "The Sandbox" by Albee.) And songs about the change that has happened, the way I understand my brain, the people I know and how I feel about what's occurring (<---pop reference!) Even though the speed at which I'm turning out complete songs isn't what I'd hoped, I'm still getting into the lyrics which I always found the hardest part.

In the end, if I start Tweeting or blogging completely teenage things and just seeming a bit pretentious, please don't hate me. I probably won't even get past my self-preservation reflex anyway, but I thought I'd just jot it down... in case.

Not a Slacker!

(At the risk of sounding American:) I HAVE TOTALLY NOT BEEN SLACKING OFF!

I've written a LOT of sets of lyrics and thought an awful lot about things. Tomorrow I'll be back in the music room and it will be fabulous.

It's interesting, this project. It's particularly interesting that ALL my lyrics are about the time in life when you are young and expected to understand what the heck is going on and who you are and what you want to spend the rest of your life doing. That time that I hope I'm coming out the other side of. So, I'm going to write some music for those songs and choose something else to write a song about. Last night I forced myself to write about something else. And I was quite happy with the result. But let's see how it is with music. :)

When I'm out and about, of even doing something as mundane as peeling carrots, I seem to have these great sparks of inspiration for songs. But I forget them almost as soon as I'm finished what I'm doing. Ah, so fickle is the nature of creativity.

OKAY SO BACK TOMORROW AND WITH LOTS TO SHOW ;)

Bumpy Road

I am extremely unwell. All my energy today went into doing work-work. (As opposed to work.) At the moment I am going to concentrate on battling this chest, throat and sinus infection. But hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to write again. Listening to myself rasping on the last two recordings is driving me around the twist!


Naturally I'm really inspired at this time of not being able to write. ;)

I am enjoying this spoon's face.

<3