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10,000 feet up, I nestled, placid in the lap of beauty. Anticipating American Airlines’ ‘entertainment’ on a recent trip to Vegas (waterboarding has nothing on Aliens in the Attic, on loop), I pre-downloaded an emergency iPlayer kit, and duly found soothing visual balm in Matthew Collings’s BBC2 documentary What Is Beauty? amidst the epic transatlantic ugliness of blueberry-vomit upholstery, neon ‘home style’ packaging and frozen beef-jerky hostesses with Skeletor smiles.

For me, the real surprise in this shamelessly personal meander through enduring hallmarks of artistic beauty was Magritte’s The Reckless Sleeper. I’ve always thought of Magritte in the terms of AA Gill on Duchamp – a half-hearted hobbyist with a penchant for puns and bad jokes – but Collings’s GCSE-level review of the painting induced a radical re-seeing. Those precise objects, snug yet disembodied in their stony reliquary, simultaneously radiate menace stemming from their meaning, and calm stemming from their mass. Their complex symbolism co-exists painlessly with their self-sufficient beauty: they are laden, but also simply lovely. That balance generates a oasis of settled profundity where my over-analytical brain took pleasure and rest.

Not so Thea Sharrock’s production of Mrs Klein, in its final week at the Almeida. Here the eponymous Freudian analyst, a chilling yet seductively self-assured matriarch, ruthlessly mines every ordinary moment for its meanings and motives, from the death of her son to the competitive struggles with her professionally brilliant but personally stifled daughter. She creates an intensely stormy stage for a family drama where all the players are excruciatingly self-aware, but finds herself increasingly caught in her own web.

Zoe Waites (Melitta) and Clare Higgins (Mrs Klein) in Mrs Klein at the Almeida Theatre. Photo: John Haynes

It’s a barnstorming bit of showmanship from all involved but Clare Higgins’s leading performance in particular nails every one of Collings’s top ten laws of beauty: nature, simplicity, unity, transformation, surroundings, animation, surprise, pattern, selection and spontenaity. She plays Mrs Klein with absolute specificity, selecting and patterning her tics and rhythms to express an extraordinarily dense idiosyncracy of habit and character. Her twists of emotion and illogic ensure that technique never overwhelms humanity, but even as Mrs Klein surprises and delights us, we realise that every thought and action is wearily congruent with her tightly controlled schema. She’s a woman so trapped in self-knowledge she doesn’t know whether she’s awake.  You’ll leave with emotional jetlag, but it’s more than worth the ride.

As for Magritte, I’m armed with my woefully under-used Tate Members card and off to re-explore.

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I sometimes wonder if I suffer from apophenia (no, it’s got nothing to do with the flaky nails). The tendency to make patterns and connections between random objects and ideas sits on a tightrope between instinctively narrative-forming creativity and gob-foaming insanity, and I totter between the two.

Social media doesn’t help. As someone once said, blogging and graphic novels both necessitate a sort of writing in 3D: each word, concept and thing becomes only the entry point to a spiderwebbed cave of associations, interpretations, images and evolutions. This has always been the case – contexts and communions are constantly sparking in our brains – but now for the first time we can instantly and visually link to those paths, which in turn lead us to words and images with their own integrated avenues. Stay on the right side of the connectivity, and the dense web of artistic dialogue can develop a shape veering on the divine.

One amazing ideas web: the British Library roof, via Karen Roe@Flickr

And if you’re looking for someone to worship, my good friend Rich Galbraith is a digitally pimped superhero of creativity. He’s not only just self-published his own novel, Concrete Operational – a blistering William Gibson meets Hunter S Thomposon sci-fi adrenalin ride – he’s curated a whole collaborative media project around it, called Operation Concrete. Here’s Rich explaining it to another rather superheroesque friend of mine, James Whatley:

Music, art and literature, shaken in a futuristic ideastorm of artistry: this is connectivity as it should be, with a shot of wild ambition and a dash of gob-foaming insanity thrown in. Come and see and celebrate it this Thursday at 8pm, in Brick Lane’s Vibe Bar:

Apophenia, you idiot. My eyebrows are fine.

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Back in the early days of Blonde bloggery, I promised that I’d never be the sort of Juicy-wearing, Krispy-eating postmistress who diarised daily about her cats.

Of course, I didn’t say anything about cardboard cats.

It’s a little worrying that, of the two parcels that have plopped into my postbox this week, I’m most excited about my Flat Pet from Garudio Studiage (as you can see, the other is a brand spanking new MacBook Air). Yes, the might of Jobs is nothing compared to the lure of a near-neon ginger flat-pack feline for a Burmilla-owning country girl forced to live flea-free in a Shoreditch flat. Merlin (oh yes) has become my muse, my confidante, my travelling companion. As I type this from a conference in Vegas, he’s off cracking the nut in the Paris casino (look carefully).

As a child, I rejected computer games and plastic mannequins for cardboard box spaceships with bottle-top buttons. For years, my favourite doll was the tassel from the end of a curtain pull. There is something here about the simplicity of a cipher correlating to the freedom of the imagination, something that might apply to my new Mac too.

But that something is definitely less relevant than the uncomplicated joy of a portable, fake, flat cat.

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I’m sitting at my desk wearing an antique-gold coloured compass round my neck. It’s a little bit Northern Lights, a little bit mysterious Dickensian seafarer. It always attracts comments, and I have been known to call it an heirloom.

compass

I got it in a Christmas cracker. The chain originally bore a Captain Jack Sparrow pendant I bought from the Disney Store for a kick-ass Halloween costume.

My grandfather – the watchmaker, the jeweller, the man who knew beauty when he saw it – would be horrified.

I have a complicated relationship with jewellery. As a child it was a brattish instrument of power over my long-suffering older sister. We spent hours playing in the remains of Grandman’s shop where, with the tyrannical talent of a fledgling Mrs Slocombe, I transformed her into my lackey and every visiting family member or friend into an artfully tortured customer. I can still feel the sharp scree of skin-warmed gems skitter over my hands as I sweep them through trays of semi-precious leftovers. The soft slide of the blue carbon paper in the double-entry level ledger with the irresistible scent of dust and ink. The heavy, sticky keys of the receipt machine, each laboriously typed bill signed with a bitten-biro flourish. The prison-guard jangling of the ring-sizing torc, and the mild cruel pleasure in forcing cold circles of steel down demurring digits.

(My grandfather had unforgettable hands.)

And so for me, jewellery has always been about either family or play.

As for family, there are four pieces I wear regularly like anchors in my blood. From my dad, on my fourteenth birthday: a golden Russian wedding ring, miraculously still in situ despite many brief sojourns on the floors of clubs, under the wheels of buses, upon muddy tracks in fields and, on one particularly frustrating and fairytale occasion, in a giant stack of hay. From my mum, on the day I went to university: a self-made charm necklace, bearing two ancient coins, two tiny enamel crosses, and an engraved disc with the Lord’s Prayer; one of the coins and the Prayer were swallowed by the SU and a U-bend respectively, but it still shivers, denuded and loved, on my breastbone. From my sister, for my eighteenth: a simple multi-stranded bracelet of silver chains. From my man, one Christmas: my first diamonds, two, discrete and dancing on a silver thread.

All very elegant, subtle and womanly; but when I buy baubles for myself, the attention-seeking, story-telling seven-year-old takes charge. A big bronze initialled M from Broadway Market; an enamel and silver HB pencil pendant; an Untitled choker from Tatty Devine; that Christmas cracker compass, of course. And I’ve recently discovered RockNRose, a fantastical site full of pieces inspired by the likes of Alice in Wonderland, Jules Verne, mixtapes and Scrabble. I’m putting in an order for the typewriter key rings today.

rings

Oh, I’ve turned out messy, and materialistic, and vulgar, Grandman. But you always knew I would. And you’d like my stories, I think.

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I’m strewn across the towel rail, starkers. Arms outstretched, one knee arched and tummy sucked in for maximum ribbage. Sodden hair turned from Blonde to dark and suitably rattailed. Eyes closed, head lolled onto chest, profoundly piteous expression of transcendent pain.

Footsteps. Door. Laden pause. Faintest of sighs. Electric toothbrush whirr.

One eye opens. One hand creeps sideways and lobs damp hand towel.

Tootbrush stops.

‘OK, OK. Yes, very good. Juan Martínez Montañés, I presume?’

juan martinez montanezJuan Martinez Montañés: Christ on the Cross (“Cristo de los Desamparados”), 1617; polychromed wood; 185 x 160 cm x 46 cm (72 13/16 x 63 x 18 1/8 in.); Iglesia Conventual del Santo Ángel Carmelitas Descalzos, Sevilla

Are semi-erotic auto-crucifixion tableaux really that wrong? Why do the iconic poses of suffering so dramatically brought to life in The Sacred Made Real, the National Gallery’s new exhibition of Spanish religious painting and sculpture from 1600-1700, just demand to be emulated? As I paced the eerily lit, lifesize lineup of Biblical A-listers (Jesus, Mary, Francis, St John the Baptist, Loyola and co) so meticulously crafted from wood, glass, ivory, hair, cloth rope and bone, so precisely painted in sweaty matt tones, my fingers itched to stretch into pinioned position, and my back longed to bow in a simalcrum of delirious agony.

What is it, deep in our cosseted twenty-first century bones, that recognises these gestures and yearns to participate in the pantomime of cruelty, guilt, grief and overwhelming love?

It is remarkable how genuinely moving these works from another race, another time, an utterly other mindset are. In a culture where a hyperreal crucified monkey in a Marylebone church barely warrants a raised eyebrow, these four hundred-year-old religious sculptures are surprisingly powerful. Their every ivory tooth, hair eyelash and wooden welt glows with an irony-free sincerity which feels bracingly fresh in our post-meaning world.

They’re simply beautiful; many of the glowing, glistening, contorted bodies may have been modelled on classical kouroi. And, my attention-seeking one-woman passion play aside, the graphic violence done by these sculptors to saints and martyrs resists any pat accusations of titillating masochism. The ardency of the craftsmanship, the careful symbolism of each detail, silences any sensational snigger. Pedro de Mena’s Christ as the Man of Sorrows, his slender torso and sensitive face streaming with blood, with each droplet individually described and differentiated and felt, made me feel genuine pity and shock. Bear in mind this is a Blonde who can happily snack on a Pepperami in front of von Trier’s Antichrist. Who sees church as a place to get free oranges and sweets at Christingle. Who didn’t even cry at UP.

pedro de mena Pedro de Mena: Christ as the Man of Sorrows (Ecce Homo), 1673; polychromed wood, human hair, ivory, and glass; 98 x 50 x 41 cm (38 9/16 x 19 11/16 x 16 1/8 in.); Real Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales, Patrimonio Nacional, Madrid; © 2009 Photo Gonzalo de la Serna

The only contemporary artist who comes close is Ron Mueck; his distrubingly real yet otherworldly human figures such as Dead Dad give a comparable glimpse of our human potential and limitation, and prompt a similar squeeze of recognition that tightens the spine. But part of the power of the Spanish figures lies in their collectivity, the fact that they are characters in a cohesive and inter-influential canon of earnest intent and belief; the exhibition is curated with serious flair.

dead dadRon Mueck: Dead Dad (1996-1997)

It is however inexplicable that the shop doesn’t sell Stephen Hough’s haunting string sextet based on Tomas Luis de Victoria’s Requiem (1605), specially commissioned to accompany the works. But I suppose that provides even more excuse to linger longer, letting Hough’s lush soundscapes of grief and hope and worship stream through the scratchy, communally grubby headphones of the audioguide as you tour these chambers of torture and tenderness.

Go.

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What’s happening to me? Back in July, Ikeagate seemed to confirm my constitution as an incorrigible domestic What-A-Mess, merrily strewing puppyish chaos about my living space and passing off general clumsiness, laziness and muddiness as bohemian laissez-faire, but over the past few months I’ve slowly started to fold. Literally. I’m playing origami with my vests. I’ve bought 4 packs of those strange stiff shiny zip-up Komplement cartons and devised a clothing storage system so complex that I have had to print and laminate an identification key for my knicker drawer.

key

And that was before the arrival of The Shoe Forest.

19102009136

Oh, God, The Shoe Forest. The groaning pleasure of replacing the cream patent brogues on their designated trees. They salute me smartly in the morning,  those serried ranks of footwear, crying out to be chosen to grace the Blonde’s freshly showered feet and insisting that they, no they are the pair that will defy puddle, coddle pavement-sore ball, and generally look outrageously hot (in an unslutty way). And so I pop on the chosen two, and don a crease-free frock (crease free! Who would have thought ironing in front of Merlin could be so much fun!) and trip out into the mortal muddle of London feeling like a minor deity (minor, mind you. No uppity manners here.)

Where will it stop? I hit Shoreditch House on Saturday evening to unwind in a suitably louche manner after a day of nerdy orderment and ended up playing chess for three hours! Chess!

Chess!

I did insist on playing with four knights though, because I’d got a bit of a Merlin fantasy going, what with all that ironing. And then I kept on moving the prawns (nipply chess pieces) sideways, and knocked everything over reaching for the octopus (not a chess piece. This was what we were eating). All those neat little squares were really beginning to piss me off.

There is hope.

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Bear with me. We’re about to have a Paolo Coelho moment, but it’ll pass quickly.

Do you have the patience to wait til your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving til the right action arises by itself?

Lao Tzu’s ancient soundbite expresses a sentiment so bland it slides like lard out of my mouth, but the irritating thing is: he’s right. Patience is the lichen-flecked stone archway to happiness. It is the elaborately carved metal key to maturity. It is the delicately flavoured, zen-infused broth of bodhi that can nourish a species addicted to the Haribo hit of instant gratification.

And I am the worst kind of mud monster. No irridescent dragonfly of thought, emotion, or passing impulse can flit across the limpid pool of my mind without me wresting it to the ground and grinding intoxicating and self-flagellatory powder from its wings. My silt-free sea of serene selfhood has evaporated into a gritty puddle thanks to my buzzing inner frictions and fictions.

To whit, I can’t sleep.

I’ve tried yoga, traditional Buddhist chanting, and lotus-folded candle-gazing in an attempt to bypass my brain, but all I’ve achieved is stiff knees, incense headache and a vague sense of untapped rage. Then I discovered Meditainment.

Oh, I hate the fact that this works. I hate the idea that being guided through trite mental tranquilityscapes of the most pedestrian kind – beaches, spas, rural idylls, fathomless seas – truly brings me inner peace. But one thing my insatiate mind can loose itself in is a story; it will emotionally invest in the tiredest trope as a means of escape. So I’ve been listening to one of their 20 minute guided visualisations every day – if you see a dribbling Blonde slumped in the corner of Costa with her eyes closed at lunchtime, do not disturb – and I’m slowly learning to hold still.

me2

But I definitely need this ethereal Derek Lam one-piece to complete the look. Now.

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I don’t usually get very excited about products I can’t wear, but that was before I found the audio equivalent of Hussein Chalayan’s spring/summer 2010 Paris Fashion Week show. Simple, smooth, sexy, and just the right side of retro, my Vita Audio R2i DAB radio/iPod dock in rich walnut veneer is quite simply the best thing that’s sat on my dining table ever since David Gandy came over for naked afternoon tea.

vita audio

OK, he didn’t. But who needs David Gandy when you have John Humphrys sliding into bed with you every morning and whispering crystal-clear into your ear? I probably love Radio 4 a little more than a newly minted 27 year old should. I love the surprisingly edgy eclecticism of Woman’s Hour, when you’ve slid from ‘cultivating carrots’ to ‘celibacy as a weapon’ before you know it. I love the cheeky faux-innocence of Eddie Mair ripping chunks off pompous politicos on PM. I love, as I have mentioned before, Mark Lawson’s laugh. And boy, oh boy, do I love Book at Bedtime. Read to me, nanny, please.

A Good Read has always held a particularly special place in my Horlicks-crusted, middle-class heart. When Sue MacGregor invites her two guests to evangelise about their chosen books, the unexpected collisions and collusions of different minds and worlds can produce some wonderfully unexpected sparks. Books dissolve barriers, and thank God, because I recorded an episode of A Good Read this week with HRH MacGregor and Michael Mansfield QC. As soon as we started talking, I forgot that she is the classiest journo-broad around, he’s a world-famous human rights lawyer, and I… well, I am a 27 year old who fantasises about crumpet butter dripping down the thighs of David Gandy. The stories took over, and we were just three unlikely people getting excited about metaphors. It’s broadcasting in November, so get reading Suite Française (David’s choice), The Member of the Wedding (Sue’s) and The Vintner’s Luck (mine) and then we can all have a big old discussion about how right I am.

In the meantime, I shall be mostly found listening to this, very loud – very loud – on my shiny new toy.

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Books were, unsurprisingly, as central to my upbringing as fig rolls and three-hour tantrums. My mum spent hours reading to me both in her womb and out, and ours was a house full of eclectic things to read from AA Milne to Zoé Oldenbourg.

book Yes, that is what I’m reading. It’s not as bad as you might think. Ish.

Last week I rediscovered a small cache of some of the endless number of stories I wrote I was young. Most of them involved ponies (you can’t tell me you’re surprised), pirates (bien sûr) and noblewomen disguised as boys (ouch), but all of them are suffused with an unself-conscious pleasure and unbridled energy that reflects how I saw writing: as essential as climbing trees, making paper people or dressing up as boys. From my five-year-old self’s saga of a bear (he escaped, he got lost in a forest, he went back to the zoo; William Kotzwinkle would be proud) to my thirteen-year-old self’s tale of a Roman soldier pursuing vengeance in ancient Bath (still the best thing I’ve written to date. Seriously), my sense of entitlement to be a writer was unquestioned.

Of course, I’m well aware that this was a privileged scenario, and that the majority of kids grow up in a world where books are exotic and excluding beasts, trailing a scent of geekery or irrelevance or imminent boredom, and writing is something you’re forced to do at school. Yes, yes, Rowling and Meyer may have made impressive inroads – mainly amongst 28 year olds, in my experience – but are the teens gobbling these novels writing their own fledgling fantasies, or just hoping that one day they might be cast in the film?

All of which is why I was delighted to be invited to a party held by the charity First Story in Holland Park School last night, where some of the students read their own stories to a public audience. Founded last year by author William Fiennes and teacher Katie Waldegrove, in 2009 First Story has arranged and paid for fourteen writers to work as ‘writers-in-residence’ in fourteen different schools in London and Oxford. Focusing on ‘challenging’ secondary schools – those with at least 30% of students eligible for free school meals, and/or less than 25% getting five A-C grades at GCSE – the writers help students produce their own stories, organise readings of the work, and create proper bound anthologies to sell.

1st

It was bloody brilliant. The precocious poetry and humour of these kids proved what instinctive storytellers we all are – inherent masters of tease, native nailers of soundbites, embryonic imbibers of iambic pentameter. Every school in the country should have a writer-in-residence, no question. Kevin Prunty from Cranford Community College says that through the scheme “I witnessed a real sense of [the students’] inner growth, pride and achievement…the Cranford writers created positive role models and a sense that writing can be safe”. I love his use of the word ‘safe’. That’s exactly how I felt about writing when I was young – that it allowed me to loose myself in delicious and dangerous scenarios without ever having to feel afraid or ashamed. For kids only used to getting that release by diving into those scenarios in real life, writing gives them a very practical alternative; a positive channel for all that youthful energy and frustrated ambition. Anyone who has felt that wonderful, drained post-writing zen will know that it can be as physically cathartic as parkour.

But I also hope that these students’ families find ways to support their efforts at home, and that others will try to instil First Story’s spirit in much younger children. Writing only becomes a real, personal ally when you treat it with the casual, messy, brilliant insouciance that is the default for kids, yet so rarely applied to this ‘academic’ discipline. I want to see the smart notebooks become bits of scrap paper peppered with smeary HB; the beginnings-middles-and-ends become scattergun ideas and unfinished half-tales; and the act itself performed in gardens and bedrooms as much as at desks. Every child deserves the right to feel that words are their safe playground – and their ever-reliable playmate.

Now, off to watch reruns of Masterchef: The Professionals and Merlin until I dissolve into a dribbling stupor. What? Merlin’s based on Le Morte d’Arthur, right?

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Happy birthday, Blonde. I’m in a weird headspace.

mehair

In some ways I feel more at home than I ever have before – in this city; in myself; even in my clothes. But this week I’ve also been shivering in the cold winds of displacement and alienation. First I went to see Katrina, Jericho theatre’s moving promenade play at the Bargehouse based on survivor testimonials; then I started reading Irene Nemirovsky’s stunning portrait of occupied France, Suite Francaise (I’ll be discussing it on Radio 4 next month, but more of that pant-wetting excitement anon).

So my mind is full of images of massed, grubby, grasping humanity, and the masking and unmasking that happens when we loose the comfort of our context and our home. This has been a year of important events, and as Nemirovsky says, ‘Important events – whether serious, happy or unfortunate – do not change a man’s soul, they merely bring it into relief, just as a strong gust of wind reveals the true shape of a tree when it blows off all its leaves. Such events highlight what is hidden in the shadows; they nudge the spirit towards a place when it can flourish’. Flourish both lovely and not.

When we shed old, inflexible skins, we also end up feeling flayed.

It seems doubly ironic that my 27th falls at the end of Fashion Week, as I pass streams of hollow-cheeked, hobble-footed waifs traipsing along the Strand, heading back to their Shoreditch Warehouses, reality refugees hungover from the fervent shapemaking of the past few days. God, I love them: their stupidity, their waste, their flashes of Shakespearean brilliance spotted in a twisted seamless skirt or a military band of sparrow-coloured silk. Their masking and unmasking of what we wish we were.

mecrouch

I feel blown into relief, and it feels good. I feel melancholy and deeply glad. I intend here’s to opening and upward by ee cummings to be the motif of my next year. And I want to buy some new shoes.

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