Old notes and tiny truths

another new place to settle into

Morning folks

How are your January’s faring?

We have moved! 9 months after moving in with our friends whilst we house hunted, we finally moved into our own place last weekend. It is full chaos but really lovely to start to get settled in another new area.

new beach, new room, no couch

Like many people, I spent most of the Christmas holidays ill. Starting with my husband, there was a domino effect which knocked all 4 of us out, one after the other but taking up the whole month of December, and a bit of January. Nothing unusual, just another weird patch of non-time. We had a lovely Christmas Day nonetheless, but the rest of it felt fairly un-festive; surrounded by our belongings and general Christmas detritus, all of which needed packing up for a house move at the start of January.

I don’t consider myself the best at parenting/wife-ing people through illness, I get impatient and a bit fearful. My particular batch of lurgy took me out of most of Christmas eve, Christmas day and boxing day proceedings, i.e. the payoff for all the list juggling and mental load-bearing of December. But, it did give me plenty of time to read people’s end of year lists and trawl through some recommendations.

I spent a very contented 4 hours watching ITV’s “Nolly” starring Helena Bonham Carter as Noelle (a leading lady of Crossroads fame who was axed for being ‘difficult’), whilst the rest of the family headed back to Bolton for the Christmas Eve rounds. I made myself go out onto the beach for some fresh air and collected 5 more stones with lines on to add to my collection.

I gathered up various ‘albums of the year’ (whilst obviously feeling very sorry for myself) and listened to a few from start to finish. I was caught off guard by one in particular; Lisa O’Neill’s “All of this is Chance”. It probably got me just at the right time, with my head fairly empty and dull from being in bed for days, but it properly dropped me, in particular her song “Old Note”.

Naturally, I went down a bit of a wormhole and tried to find more stuff. I listened to her NPR Tiny Desk Concert LINK and she introduced Old Note as her way of trying to capture the way everything communicated before there were words. The song certainly felt like that to me; ancient and guttural. I think the lyrics are really beautiful.

A star ran rings around the star before me

And spun and swooped and sank in rock beneath me

And mirrored what I’ve carried since I met me

And shot me back into the ground below me

In her desk concert, she talks about how she tries to write small true things, little truth ditties, each day. She shares one, saying that she is trying to be less precious and send things out into the world before they are properly polished.

I love this. It chimed with where I am at, which is to say, dithering and not committed to any particular creative process right now. I don’t mind too much, this house move has been all consuming and I have needed to put everything into that. But the wheels do come off slightly when I don’t have a consistent practice.

Never knowingly under-thinking; I’ve been thinking about what I want to do creatively and why. I have some ideas about the how and the form is starting to coalesce around the edges, but the why remains fairly consistent, whatever the form. The why is pretty much simply to hear myself think, and to scrape at the truth of things as much as is possible. I don’t pretend that I hear only my thoughts because we are permeable creatures. Everything gets in somehow, and so it should. But the creative stuff is just a means to get to the heart of what I make of it all it as best as possible. So, I loved the idea of Lisa O Neill’s small truths and have starting writing some down myself whilst other plans fall into place.

Here are a few of the less private ones:

8th January 2024

[on me dragging the kids out in the freezing cold to watch a starling murmuration at Leighton Moss]

When there is nothing to buy on offer, the kids argue much less, I am less shit, and they will spend a crazy amount of time trying to crack icy water puddles rather than bartering for what they can get out of me. Do this more, even though it feels like a pain in the arse to drag them out.

9th January 2024

Lisa O’Neill’s ‘Old Note’ was the truest thing I heard today. That and Bonnie Prince Billie’s ‘Like it or not’

18th January 2024

[on the new contemporary dance class I started]

Go back, even though it feels uncomfortable; there is something here that you need.

No ground breaking revelations, just the something that felt true to me that day at that time. I will be interested to see what sort of picture builds over the year.

A very small invitation to play this week- what tiny truth would you write about your day? Could you collect them up for a week and see what they tell you? The key for me is to keep it to one or two sentences. It is supposed to be tiny after all.

As ever, thanks for reading. Hope you are keeping well and do share any of your tiny truths with me!

Much love,

Em x