Mellow fruitfulness

See, I can't stop this now. My month is over and yet I continue to blog. Although I'm not forcing myself to go anywhere new anymore. Nonetheless, even going to the same old places, things have changed. Autumn is coming, can you feel it?

I went to my parents house today to pick plums from their tree. I feel there may be a plum clafoutis in the offing.

On the way home, I spotted a protest outside the town hall. I don't know if you can tell from the picture, but there were about the same number of police officers as protesters here.

From a quick google, I think they're protesting about this story - that Barnet Council, with one of the highest council taxes in Britain, has decided to cut just under a million pounds from its sheltered housing budget this year. It's a good cause, one worth protesting.  For all that I think Hendon is nice, I do feel Barnet Council is in general useless. Perhaps they're just not doing a good job of informing me of all the wonderful services they provide, or maybe I'm just being stupid in not appreciating the parks and clean streets more, but whenever I encounter the Council they seem to be asking me for money to park in my own road, or cutting down the services I actually use (I'm looking at you, library opening-hours).

While I stopped to take this picture (parked safely at the side of the road) one of the police came over to see what I was doing. Or, as they put it, to "ask if I was OK". I was a bit puzzled by this, and by the - it seemed to me - rather excessive police presence for a small peaceful protest about care home wardens. Are they spending council tax on police standing around watching senior citizens instead of on care wardens to look after them?

And another thing

I have been very impressed by how the (extremely mild) social pressure of blogging my adventures has kept me going out to new places every day, even though I sometimes didn't feel like it. I can't help feeling that I could use this in other ways. I'm still thinking about how to do it, but I expect I'll think up some other similar fun commitments in the future. I think it's a very good thing to have something *fun* on your to-do list every day.

Welcome to September

Well, I did it. Went to wander around Hampstead today in a celebration of newness that is quite surprising when you consider that I was at school in Hampstead for seven years.

First, to Fenton House, a National Trust property up a steep hill near Hampstead station, which has beautiful gardens you can look at for £1 and ancient apple varieties from their orchard for sale in cardboard boxes at the front. The scent of these apples was absolutely intoxicating. They smelled like fresh-pressed apple juice and cider, like the summer sun filtered through leaves into their flesh.

Then to the gorgeous Everyman cinema to see Moon. The cinema doesn't really count, because I've been there before, but I haven't been to *that screen* before, so maybe it counts anyway? But if you haven't been to the Everyman, go - they serve food and drinks at little tables to eat while you're watching the movie, and if you have someone to snuggle up with there are sofas for you to do it on too. Or if you just like sofas. Also Moon is proper old-fashioned ideas-based, thoughtful, absorbing sci-fi.

Finally, a little treat for the way home, from a patisserie I used to pass by all the time when I was going to school but never went into:

And now I'm done. Well, there will be some posts reflecting on what I've learned this month. But I can say this: while I don't want to carry on seeking new places at quite such a pace (for one thing, I've missed going to some old favourite places), I don't want to give up. So I think I am going to commit (or commit to try) to go to a new place *twice a week* from now on. Which is a lot, really, as an ongoing committment. But I've loved this so much.

I must go to bed quite soon, but as a final thought, here's something I was reflecting on today.

We live in a world created for us by the industrial revolution and the Victorians. The industrial revolution meant that most of us were no longer working in the glorious (alright, often rainy and cold) outdoors anymore but in clattering factories or offices. The Victorians brought us the suburbs and the idea of the commute. Buy a house in the suburbs with a little garden, travel from it every day to your office and back.

But the Victorians also understood that man cannot live by home-and-office alone. Many other innovations in our society date from their time: public parks, municipal baths, libraries, cafes and restaurants, public museums, galleries and even public benches. They understood that these spaces are necessary, to provide us with the variety and sense of interest in things outside ourselves that we no longer get naturally from the changing seasons of the agricultural year.

At the start of August I thought that my problem was that, as a writer, I could too easily spend whole days indoors, never going anywhere. But now I think that it's not much of a solution even to go into an office every day and come home again. In the past 40 years or so, many of us have replaced the variety given by street-wandering, public-space-using, municipal-facility-visiting with the variety offered by the different screens in our homes: TV, computer, mobile phone. And much as I love my tech, it's not as good.

So I've come away from my little project with a deep sense of probably a very obvious point: it is extremely important to leave the house very regularly and go places that are not your office. We need to experience the changing world around us with our noses and our feet and our hands, not just our ears and eyes through a screen. I don't think there's been any very profound change in me over the past month except for this: I think I have had more moments of happiness. Which is pretty big, in a small way.

So probably everyone else in the world but me knew already about the importance of leaving the house. Anyway, I know it now. Happy September :-)

Sigh

The past few days I've been mentally composing the blog posts I might write when August is over, maybe summing up the project, picking my best-of and worst-of lists. And until today, the worst-of list was topped by The Warrington. But today hit a new low.

I went for a wander around Camden Town. Which is something of a pit on a Sunday, but in a fascinating way if you're willing to be fascinated. There are so many sub-cultures represented in such a small space, from the juggling shop where I heard someone say "I live to skate; when I skate it's like the world disappears" to the goth/vampire stalls where I saw a girl with amazingly intricate hair curls pasted to her head and face with gel. (I did take some pictures but my mobile phone is currently refusing to sync with my computer; when I sort it out I'll post them.) And there was a shop with a giant mirrored Buddha in the front window, amazing.

So I was feeling strangely peaceful surfing through this world of other people's interests and passions, when I stopped into a cookware store. Where the woman behind the counter decided to tell me what she thought was wrong with my body, and that *she had the miracle solution*. So I told her she was being offensive to me, put down the items I was planning to purchase, and left. As a warning to others, therefore, I would advise against going to the Reject Pot Shop in Chalk Farm, unless you enjoy that sort of commentary from strangers.

Sigh. This sort of thing is quite shocking, in a way. I remember being really horrified when an Asian friend told me about the casual insults thrown at him on the street because of his ethnicity. And Athena Stevens has a great post about how people try to *heal her* in Starbucks. Who *are* these crackpots and wankers? What is going on in their brains?

The good news, I suppose, is that only a very small minority of people in the world are this kind of tosser. Got into a lovely chat on the way home with an Italian and a German student, both of them trying to communicate with each other in broken English, not getting much further than 'you like pizza?' but both going at it with much goodwill.

Why do we go back again and again to the same places? Because we know we'll have a good time there, we know it's safe. New places and new people are often something of a gamble. But the truth is the gamble very rarely backfires horribly; most people are full of goodwill. Last day of August tomorrow, and I'm not even looking forward to all this being over. It's been enriching.

Imperfection

So I decided to myself that today I was *not* going to go anywhere new. It was a decision kind of inspired by that Navajo idea of including a deliberate flaw into their textiles. Nothing is perfect, and it's good to remind oneself of that I think, especially if you work on creative projects. Nothing kills a creative project faster than the desire to make it 'perfect'. There is no perfect in creativity. Paul Valery said "a poem is never finished, only abandoned" - when you write you have to get comfortable with calling your work 'done' even though you can still see the insoluble flaws in it.

So this was my plan. It started out fine: hanging out at home, doing some tidying up, had a little nap. But then... I ended up going out for coffee with a friend in the evening. And we went somewhere new. The friendly, open-late Cafe Mocha on Golders Green Road.

So I failed at imperfection. Does that still count as imperfection somehow?