Up Yer Bum!

It's an odd, hermit-like existence being a blogger. I've been a blogger for so long that it somehow helps me to justify my life as a struggling writer. Whenever anyone asks what I do (dear reader, for a long time, I was a Hollywood publicist) I can always throw up the blog as an example of something creative in my life as it does seem to be months between readings of short stories.  Unfortunately, blogging has become a little bit of cliche. Everyone blogs.  Everyone mocks us. My blog started in May 2004 so I can just say a big eff you to all the haters and meanies.  I used to be self-conscious. I used to worry. And now, I don't.  "Up yer bum" as Emily Lloyd was fond of saying in "Wish You Were Here." It's part of my life, ugly bits and all. 

 My beautiful blogger award from Backwards in High Heels!

So this morning to hear that Tania Kindersley of Backwards in High Heels had given me a Beautiful Blogger Award, made my little heart flutter and made me feel slightly less alone in the world.  I am enormously grateful.  Thank you very, very much.  I'm not someone who ever wins anything (not even the RE prize at school although I did win a car detailing from KIIS-FM in 1986 for identifying the opening bars to "Jack & Diane" by John Cougar Mellencamp) so this is quite thrilling.

The lovely MTFF had previously nominated me for a Beautiful Blogger Award and I'm afraid I did not respond adequately because I wasn't sure what to do. My apologies and thanks to her, too. If you haven't read Motherhood, go immediately. (Why this isn't a book already flummoxes me.)

Also, Liberty London Girl should be mentioned, because without her, I wouldn't have met all the other lovely bloggers that I now follow. As I've said before, she's the glue that holds us all together (and she does lead an awfully glamorous life).

The rules are that I must in turn nominate 10 or 12 bloggers, which may be difficult as we tend to be a tight group.  The blogs I love are listed on the right hand column.  Dip into any of them.  They are as eclectic as my tastes.

If I am pressed to pull out just a few, I would like to bring your attention to these FIVE blogs:

1. The Errant Aesthete: As beautiful a blog as you will ever find.  Her taste is quite exquisite. The photos breathtaking.  And she's a fan of gazpacho.
2. 43rd Year: Full disclosure -- the woman who writes this blog is one of my closest friends in Los Angeles. She has a HUGE job in real life, but somehow manages to write with such honesty and wisdom about her life as a new wife and stepmother to two teenage children, about birth and death and happiness and friends and enemies, that she leaves me awestruck. She started the blog on a bet, to overcome her fear of writing.  It rings its truth to the rafters.
3. A Bloomsbury Life: Every time I dip into this blog, there's something I want. Isn't it terrible? It's what marketers call aspirational, but this about old china and embroidery and Persephone books and living in Hollywood.  She's a true eccentric and as obsessed with "I am Love" as I am.
4. simmer till done: Marilyn is a pastry chef, mother of 14 year old, a pastry chef and a beautiful writer.  Her tweets are the most delicious of anyone's and I'm addicted to her recipes. Plus she lives in Kansas and I'm thrilled to know someone, other than Dorothy, that comes from Kansas.
5. North Stoke: My secret treasure trove that brings me back to England, to tumuli and old churches and hedgerow, to rivers and meadowsweet and Sissinghurst.  It's where I go whenever I'm homesick.

And then I'm supposed to write 7 things about me that people don't know:

Tjøme -- my favorite place on the planet

1. The first boy I was in love with was Billy Stockings. We were 10.
2. I sang the Faure Requiem in the Royal Albert Hall when I was 15, with my friend Ophelia and the Massed Girls School Choirs of England & Wales. It is still my favorite piece of music. Harvest for the World by the Isley Brothers and Vaughan Williams' The Lark Ascending come a close second.
3. I heart trees. Trees are my church. I know that sounds dorky.  My father was a tree man. Nothing makes me happier quicker than either being around or climbing in trees.
4. On my first date with my husband, the Maharishi, we picked magic mushrooms in Christ Church meadow, Oxford, and then listened to the U2 WAR album in abject terror. We've never looked back.
5. This is my favorite place in the world: Tjøme  
6. I detest my extremely curly hair and suffer from post-traumatic stress remembering how matron made me dry it in front of an electric space heater so that it stuck out horizontally like Bozo the Clown when I was 15.  I don't think I will ever forgive her. On another occasion, when I was 14, I was kissing a boy at my friend Sophie's party, and he ran his hand through the back of my hair, dramatically, as if we were in passionate scene from Bonnie & Clyde, when his hand got stuck in my knotted frizz and Sophie's mother had to help him detach it.
7. My favorite sandwich is chopped hard-boiled egg mixed with sweet, skinned tomatoes, salt and pepper on white bread and butter.  My mother made them for summer tea parties when we were small and there is no better taste in the world.

 Miss W is very happy in trees

(The Maharishi just came home from work and found me sitting at my desk, with the lesser & greater spotteds at my feet.
"How are you holding up?" he says.
"I'm great. I just won a Blogger Award," I say.
"Oh, that's great, shall we get it framed" he says.
Love him.)