All I really want is a cuppa coffee

When I look at this photo I feel so cold and wintery and I remember how cold I was sitting on the station platform the day I took yet another photo of my shoes, but I also remember something else...the hot coffee warming my hands. I've been meaning to write for a long time now about the joys and tribulations of loving coffee so this morning I got up in my chilly house and made a cuppa joe and here I am.

My coffee loving began (probably like most people) as a teenager. I had a very cool (insert *and also very nerdy*) boyfriend who was a total coffee whore. He had all the typical symptoms of drinking way too much but he introduced me to the silky black liquid and I fell in love with the heat of it, the roasting smell of ground beans, the way the grounds sifted like volcanic silt in my hand, the swirly milkyness of a good cup...

Flash forward to now, more than 15 years later and I've been through many hills and valleys with my brew. I went from the dangerous edge of drinking too much and not sleeping to a total (yes that's right) total boycott of it for years. I needed to claw back my life from all the time coffee takes--time where you sniff the air, time for sitting and musing, time for chatting with friends for hours over cups, in short, time not doing much work! So I had to give it up. I kept telling myself it was for the best. Coffee and I said our goodbyes and we went our separate ways.

But over the past 2 years, coffee has snuck into my life again. I believe I can pinpoint the origin of my boycott's collapse to three key moments.

1). November 2008. Campus of an Irish University. I'm visiting my friend while she's studying. And I'm on campus enthralled with what I'd forgotten. The ebb and flow of student life. All the people around me going for coffees. And my friend and I meet up in a cafe on campus. She orders a black coffee. I sniff the air and go for a healthy herbal tea. The whole time I'm drinking my tea I'm thinking of coffee, the bitter joy of it on my tongue, the warming tingle in the tummy, the satisfaction of just one... I cave in and have one, two coffees while my friend has two black ones, and I experiment with the milk options I'd forgotten--latte, cappuccino, the bliss of froth and a got milk mustaches.

2). September 2009. Bookstore Cafe in Macon, Georgia. A friend and I meet for a two-day catch-up, halfway between her house and my family's. We riffle through mags and consider buying books, all the while sipping coffee. It's so easy and familiar, it's so relaxing and tasty. This friend too is a coffee connoisseur and she knows her blends. I follow her advice and try a coffee I have never tasted. And I'm hooked!

3). September 2010. Cottage in Sussex. Staying for a week at a friend's house. She's a long-time coffee lover and in the mornings I watch her ritual. How she scoops more grounds than I'd have thought a good thing into heat-holding mugs. How she tips just a splash of water into the cafetiere, just enough to cover the grounds. Then she times it. Meticulously. This is like watching a wildlife program when you're not sure if the reptile you're seeing really can climb a tree with pincher toes--a new thing, the process more clever than understood before. The timer dings and more water goes in, the timer reset. By the end of it all, I'm sitting in a sling-back chair on her patio with the most giant mug of coffee imaginable and the world feels right again.

I've digressed so far into coffee daydream now I can't remember what I was doing before sitting down at my laptop to write. Perhaps that truly is the point, all that stuff I tried to give up earlier in my life when I was under the misapprehension that living is all about doing. Now I'm not sure about this at all. I suspect life is all about time where you sniff the air, time for sitting and musing, time for chatting with friends for hours over cups. Now coffee and I are back together to stay. It's not an affair or a quick love-in, but, I hope, a full-on life-time partnership.

Take a listen to this song, while sitting back and sipping your morning or afternoon cup. I found it while looking for songs about coffee. I totally understand that angst in the singer's voice! Enjoy

Everything looks better in gold and green

It's taken me three hours of being awake today to realise it's Thursday and that it's Thanksgiving in the US...talk about a dreamy-head!

I was going through my photos to find something for today's blog post and I found this one. It was, strangely enough, a post box I saw in the middle of nowhere a few hours from where I live in the UK. I was walking through a lovely forest of birch trees and all the leaves were gold gold gold falling around me and just as I thought--this reminds me of the US-- I came out into a clearing and saw this U.S. Mailbox. Another moment of disorientation. But I kindof like these moments, when I least expect it, and I have no idea of where on earth I am, except it's somewhere in the world and I'm there.

So it's a great day for giving Thanks, no matter where in the world I am. Happy Giving Thanks day.

I crack diamonds, write you a poem

Last night I went to see an event called Corresponding Poets: Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. As the event started, I settled into my seat and looked at the 6 people on stage, wondering what it would be like. Over the course of the evening, some of the people read poems by Bishop and Lowell, some discussed the poets' lives, with the focus of the event on the copious letters the two wrote to each other over the duration of their lives.

As I listened I remembered many things I hadn't thought about in years, since I was an undergraduate in the US. Listening to Bishop's poetry, even the poems I know off by heart, the rhythms and images in her words brought me back near the beginning of my journey as a poet. It was her poetry that led me to experiment with writing, her poems I was set as models in my early writing classes. And it is often her poetry I return to now when I want a really fantastic poem to read. The evening inspired me to go home and write (the best I can ever really hope for!) but it also inspired me to go home and read, again, what I hadn't read in years, and to explore other poems by the pair that are still new to me. I want to share the opening poem of the evening, an Elizabeth Bishop poem I had nearly forgotten about:

The Fish

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled and barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
--the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly--
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
--It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
--if you could call it a lip
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels--until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.

We can dance in slow motion

Yesterday was an entire day on the move...in very slow motion. It was one of those days where no matter what you do to try and hurry things, the world can't be hurried and nothing will go any faster. My long journey to London began just before lunch when I arrived at my station only to be told that the train I'd been aiming for was cancelled and the next train running late. I resigned myself to this and got a nice hot cup of tea to placate myself, then went to wait in the icy wind barrelling along the station platform. When the train did arrive, all seemed well at first and then, two stations out the announcement came--severe delays ahead, we'll hopefully be making progress soon.

Then, by the time I arrived, the tube was having delays so I went for the bus. Long queue but I waited patiently and finally managed to get a seat. We were about half a mile down the road when a tall thin elderly man stood up and started shouting at the driver, waving his arms around and generally bitching about everything but most of all, the inadequacy of the seating on the bus. The situation escalated to the point where the driver had to call for help and we waited, stationary...

Finally underway again, the driver mentioned on the loud speaker that there were serious delays due to redirected traffic and the student protest in the city. By this point I was texting friends and trying to get someone to contact my point of origin (I had no phone number for them) to let them know I was now running very unfashionably, and even a bit awkwardly late.

I finally arrived at my appointment, the journey having taken twice the time planned. On the bus back I climbed to the top deck and watched the red taillights strung ahead of us indefinitely like a line of red remembrance poppies and I decided to just chill. Suddenly, the golden leaves on the ground at Green Park looked even more beautiful, the eyes of the man beside me looked even more turquoise, I saw rows upon rows of shiny new guitars in a music shop we passed, a woman with neon purple hair smiling. And on the slow train home, packed and with disputes in the air, I chalked the whole day up to slow motion. I noticed that everyone around me had laptops and ipads and netbooks which meant they were staring at screens instead of looking up and out the window as the train drifted through the orange fire-ball sunset over the Thames, the silhouette of skyscrapers, and as we moved away from the City, planes circling low into the amber light.