An official SIISTUPH, as laid out here

I am two blocks away from home, turning the corner next to the chicken-wired playground full of middle schoolers on happy school break beating the crap out of each other, when I realise I have remembered the vague location of the particularly pretty staircase I am setting out to see, but forgotten the name of the street. Or the local history book I read it in.

I’m about to turn back and get it, but, seeing as it’s taken too long to get out of the house anyway, and there’s a woman sitting on a stool enjoying the sunshine and lazily watching me walk up the street toward her, and if I turn on my heels and head back the other way, she’ll think me very strange indeed. I will find it, I’m sure, I think, and carry on, turning right at the lady, then left up the next road, mainly to avoid the library I’ve been meaning to go and work in for weeks now.

I head up Douglass for a start. It’s a street that isn’t coloured in on my ‘where I have walked’ map of San Francisco’, not at this end, anyway and I manage to get a few blocks along it, passing a pet shop with a bored-looking parrot inside it, and a woman outside it fixing a ‘LOST’ poster to a lamp post. I’m crossing to the next block when I hear a squawk overhead and look up to see the unfamiliar silhouette of a bird. It looks like a parrot. Which wouldn’t be unheard of. But I can’t help but hope it’s the same parrot releasing itself from boredom behind the back of a remarkably prescient posterhanging lady.

Another block of Douglass that I have walked before, and then another that I haven’t, and I’m part of the way along another before I notice a dog the size of a horse standing in the back of a flatbed truck, waiting to pluck the head off my shoulders with his giant slathering teeth. Slathering? Teeth? Well, if any teeth can slather, these ones do, dripping with terror the texture of dribble. I wonder for a minute why I haven’t been tipped off sooner by a pile of headless corpses lying at the angry horse-dog’s feet, but write it off to some enslaved miniature cleaning crew hiding under the truck … as I take a sharp left and head up Alvarado to Hoffman, a street I’ve only ever crossed before and which turns out to be disappointing, coming to a sharp end in collision with the swoop of Grand View Terrace as it kneels down into a dip in the hillside to allow buses to climb up on its back.

Round the corner of Grandview, I’m almost led off down an Alley called Acme, narrow between tall buildings and dropping away toward downtown, with the transamerica pyramid framed right in the middle. A young woman and smaller boy are jumping down stairs near the bottom of the second stretch of alley. I make a note in my diary to do the same if I happen to come back this way.

Up to Market, and there debate whether I should press the button and risk inconveniencing drivers or just find another way around that might lead to more interesting adventures anyway, while taking pictures of another smaller staircase called Mono (but with more than one step, otherwise that’s just a curb) and weighing up the pros and cons. Eventually two men happen along, identically grey-bald and round-spectacled, identically clad in too-tight spandex speed-walking gear, identical in whining nasal pitch of conversation and everything, in fact, apart from the fact that one of them looks pale and drawn and as if he might die next week and the other stoic and pursed of lip and like he hasn’t slept properly in a year. They push the button and we all cross the road.

On Clayton, I’m tempted by a long, shabby-looking flight of stairs called Iron Alley, but too rule-abiding to completely ignore the STAIRS CLOSED NO EXIT sign painted in foot high letters near the bottom.

Up Clayton and over a road, where a beautifully tended communal neighbourhood garden squeezed onto a flatiron wedge of pavement is made rather less beautiful by enough netting to keep out whole herds rampaging pestilent vandal trout, and laminated signs politely but firmly requesting that people not enjoy the garden too tactilily, or at too close a quarter. On the walkway, two neat neighbourhood gardeners lean, one on the wall and one on a broom, no doubt on their designated shift to mind the communal garden and shoo along any malingering greenfingers. I shuffle around their pile of dead leaves and away.

Suddenly I am excited by the sight of the end of a staircase tucked behind a wall - like the sight of a toe sneakily poking from under a curtain - promising untold adventure (or in the case of the toe, a leg). Across the road, and onto a staircase garden, covered in trees and vines planted and upkept by the neighbourhood gardeners, and renovated recently in memory of another, I notice, leaning down to drink from the public fountain they’ve put there in her name. The dog fountain bubbles away happily at ankle level, distributing a wet trickle of cooling water to my walking shoe. The person-height one releases a small pop of air and a small weak pipe-burping sound. ‘Pem Bertonplacelady:’ I tributise in my head - ‘Keen gardener. Dog lover. Inveterate prankster.’

On the second block of Pemberton Place stairs, I pass an older gentleman coming down. We smile. I wonder how many times he’s walked these stairs. Not today, just generally. In his life. In the life of the steps. At the top of the next flight, a woman watches me from the window of her house. A house which sits to the side of some stairs that would seem to lead straight on from the Pemberton place ones but don’t, I presume, belong to the public in quite the same way. I sense if I don’t hang a right, she’ll pull out a gun. So I do, and she doesn’t.

I skim the corner of a road I’ve already walked, Tank Hill on my right, Twin Peaks boulevard off to my left, pass some people in their young twenties pruning trees with dreadlocks and colourful tattoos.
I don’t know, these hippy trees, eh?

The gardener folk seem quite cool too, so I put my head down and walk fast, in case they notice I am pink around the edges from exertion, unpierced and/or painted and with no definite career plan, and therefore far less cool than they are.

On Clarendon Way, on my left side, giant houses skirt along inside of the road, looking out from under lowered brow down on Haight Ashbury and the Panhandle. On my right side, perched on the edge of Down, are habitations that look like tiny wooden cabins … until you catch a glimpse straight through, and realise they’re modern palaces inside, all unassuming to the front door key, then dropping their big glass undercrackers to the world spread out beneath them.

Rounding the corner as Clarendon rounds the hill on the West side of the city, I suddenly realise I’m far closer to Sutro Tower than I originally realised. I am excited by this.

Sutro Tower is a monster antennae that stands on top of the tallest peaks in the middle of the city looking like a catching mitt for an alien craft or a three-pronged fondue fork for God himself. I’ve grown very fond of it, and you find pictures of it, dotted through my flickr stream, from every different angle, in every different light and at varying proximity. Suddenly, it’s rising above me, an all powerful, if slightly static, skeletal robot of doom.

For once I wish I had someone with me, so I phone my beloved, working in the office at home. “Sutro Tower is brilliant from up close” I say “I think we should call it: ‘THE CRAW!’ because it sounds more like an evil alien robot that way.”
He agrees to this, and I hang first up, then a right, because the rest of Clarendon Avenue is winding downhill in an unpromisingly dull way.

After a few steps, and passing two other solo walkers who exchange hellos and smiles and nods, I turn a corner and stop. And wait. And notice nothing at all. There is no real noise, not nearby. The wind ruffles treetops high above, and cars can be heard winding boringly down boring Clarendon Avenure some way off behind me, but here, there is nothing. Nothing but a row of identikit houses, painted inwhite and jaunty yellows, browns, oranges and blues. Neatly manicured hedges sit cut into lollipop branches, framing the side of each yard, where iron steps with open risers lead up to screen doors, latched and in front of frosted glass doors.

Forest Knolls, says a sign. I have never heard of Forest Knolls. I’ve read local history books and local guidebooks and books about local guidebooks and spent hours devouring maps of this city, and I don’t remember a single thing about Forest … what was it the sign said? Knolls. Like it doesn’t exist.
There are no people.
There is no wind.
There is no sign of people even having been here recently, apart from the perfectly trimmed and prim nature of it. I have a slight concern that I’ve died and been transported to Stepford, but a beep from my phone and a jaunty message telling me that someone isn’t in London isn’t enjoying whatever they’re watching on television informs me that no, I’m basically still alive. I’m not saying there wouldn’t be twitter in the afterlife - just that I shouldn’t think I’ll get reception there. Not on my network.
Reassured I’m not dead, I amble happily down the street, whistle a happy tune and plan the quickest way to get home, dress up in my finest vintage dress, get back here and set about pretending I’m a character in Mad Men just by standing around looking decorous.

I turn onto Warren Drive, and all of a sudden the Golden Gate Bridge pops up and waves at me from the other side of the park. I take a picture, since every time it creeps up on me like that I feel I should, for the sake of feeding my intrinsic not-from-hereness. It glows with pride and gratitude, with maybe a hint of coquettishness. I tip it a wink, and promise to take another picture next time I see it.

Walking on down Warren, sets of subsidised-looking apartments are set back from the street. A car backing out of one at 0.02mph nearly takes me out, in another three pigeons are staging some kind of public orgy on a balcony balustrade. I’m not saying that the street is a den of iniquity in an otherwise spotless part of town, but if that’s NOT the case, the joyriding reversing-nurse at no.446 and the pigeons outside no.490 might not have received the community newsletter.

A block onto Lawton, I get led off by 8th avenue, which seems to have rebranded itself Windsor Terrace, though only for a block or so. Rabid individualism, everyone building houses as unique and impressive as they desire and can afford in the space they have to work with makes walking the streets of the Sunset district more fun than I ever expected. You’ll be walking along any normal street with a ragbag collection of houses and then come across one with several turrets, clad in florescent crazy paving. With gargoyles.
Windsor Terrace may have more trees than some, but otherwise it fails me. I was hoping for at least some battlements. Perhaps a neo-romantic Tuscan-style villa (with gargoyles). I got hedged suburbia. Bah.

On to Morega, and along a few blocks, past a Lemon-and-lime tree, closed-down grocery stores, and the same UPS man 5 times. I tell you, they may say they’re fast? I appear to be faster. I looked back for him when I hit 13th, while taking a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge, who was glowing with a deep red sense of self-admiration at the end of a long avenue and a couple of parks.

Just after Funston (which is where 13th Avenue should be), some stairs came. but unremarkable ones, so not, I assumed, the ones I was looking for. I bounded up them, hoping to find the next. At 14th I found another brief flight of stairs, and bounded up them too, embarrassed when the only thing I found at the top was a doctor on, I assume, a post-work-walk. I tried my best to give off an air of healthfulness and rightful-living. I may have been here 18-months, but I’m still so scared of the health insurance system that I secretly apparently believe that if a doctor looks at you and can see you’re not feeling well, you might have to give him all the money you’ve got for telling you so.

I realise technically that would be called mugging, but that doesn’t convince me that it isn’t possibly true.

Up the stairs to Grand View Park - a Park with View so Grand that half way up the third, steepest flight of stairs I catch sight of the Inner Sunset laid out below me and have to hold tight to the railing to stay vertical.

At the top, I catch my breath, and keep catching it, as I look out over the ocean, down the coast to the bluffs before to Pacifica, across Golden Gate Park and The Richmond to the Marin Headlands, over to The Presidio, and then, turning round, to the rest of the city, or all of it that isn’t blocked out by the mountain I just came over - Pacific Heights, Russian Hill, Nob Hill, Haight Ashbury, Lower Haight, The Western Adddition and all of the bits down toward Downtown, North Beach and the bay. I catch my breath, and keep catching it. I try and take a picture of it all made of fifty pictures of it all. It will come out very much paler than the thing I am looking at, predictably.

[bigger version here]

The thing that is crazy is that the park I’m standing on - tiny, in footprint, but bloody tall, called Turtle Hill, apparently, locally - is a sand dune. It every time I look down at the city below, it’s the sand I glimpse on my shoe at the same time that blows my mind. That this, 200 years ago, is what almost everything I can see would have looked like. And here I am, 35 blocks from the ocean, standing on a sand dune oasis flooded by a sea of city.

It feels deeply weird.

I slowly make my way down a staircase on the other side of Turtle Hill. Not the pretty staircase I came on a walk to find mind you - when I get home I’ll discover that I’ve missed that one by mistake - which is nice, because it means I get to come and find it again another day, by a different route.

Instead I find a wooden staircase decorated, curiously, by a small pool of faded but recent blood faded underneath a mid-stairway bench. I follow it, trying to work out if the the bleeder went up the stairs or down, sustained the injuries at the scene or elsewhere entirely, and other such important questions, but halfway through doing so remember that watching a lot of crime procedurals is not the same thing as being a forensic detective, and head down the stairs.

Meaning to head down toward main roads and the shore, I get led off, and find myself intrigued and confused by a sudden rash of white picket fences, and homes behind them that are like tiny state capitols and governors mansions and plantation estates and god knows what else - the size of any normal three-bedroom detached house. And I wouldn’t be so intrigued by them if every one of them doesn’t have a tiny scale model of itself sitting just to the left of the front door, like an extra-large mailbox, or a super-super-boast. I try to to take a picture, going slowly up the walk. But there’s a lady going into one of the houses, and I’m scared she might get cross.

Curling up the road, knowing there is a bus I can get somewhere near by that will take me to a place I can transfer to a bus home, I pat my pocket and check for the transfer fare, which I have. This is good. It means I know I may get tired and hungry at some point and need to go home, and am sensibly going preparing for that.

Sadly at this point, as ever, I get lost.

Or rather, I happen upon a particularly attractive staircase and go down it, to avoid a labrador coming the the other way. Then find myself going up a completely different one, to avoid a particularly angry looking chihuahua.

I skirt a whole new and different park I didn’t know existed and, rounding a corner, down a stairway called Oriole, where I find a thing that makes my heart explode with joy for the fortuitousness of it:

And then along another street and, finding the self same street I know my bus line home is named for, I am glad. See, buses are called things like 47-Van Ness, because they may go down other streets, but they go down Van Ness the longest, and the 24-Divisidero or the 48-Quintara do the same. Sadly, by the time I turn onto Quintara, it has about fifteen yards of dead end road left to go. The bus either turns of before this, or this is some kind of Harry Potter situation I have simply not prepared for.

Down through the other streets I don’t recognise the names of - pulling my little moleskine san francisco notebook out of my bag, I turn it round and round to get my bearings, and come to grips with nothing much more enlightening than the fact that somewhere around here, two otherwise strictly north-south avenues meet. I hadn’t realised that they did that round these parts - I thought it was a much more vanilla system in the Avenues, all bisecting verticals and horizontals and no question of same-avenue relations. Still, there they are, 9th and 12th, together, and openly so. I’m really pleased for them, of course: I just worry about the people around them. The ones who try and call their local takeaway and request delivery at the meeting point of two apparently parallel streets It’s hard for them, you know? They need pizza.

By this point, however, so do I.
I can see the fog rolling in. It starts with a vague haze over the sun, then a more general darkness over the Sunset district (it is, I should mention to my dear reader in the motherland, one of the districts in San Francisco where the sunset is most often completely hidden by fog) I’m getting cold. I’m standing in the middle of what looks like the poshest neighbourhood I’ve ever seen, and yet it’s entirely inhabited, as far as I can see, by Mexican-American 40-year-old men with flatbed trucks and paunches and a passion for DIY. Or I do until they all start getting in the trucks and leaving.

And then I realise. It’s a neighbourhood so posh that no one who lives here during the day is visible during the day, and no one visible during the day is visible at night. They’re all off at golf or lunch or tennis or the spa or botox. I’ll probably never see them. Which is good, because they’d probably wonder how I got onto their estate. And why I look a bit tired.

I find a street I think I recognise, and then a street I realised I definitely do because I KNOW, yes, finally, that my bus comes down this street.

Of course this is the killer point. The point that anyone would know tow watch out for if they were with me, but they aren’t. It’s the ‘I might as well just…’ point. Since I’m at the bottom of this road but have never walked up it (only caught the bus), I might as well, because then I can colour it in on my map. And besides, I know there’s a garage at the junction up there and I can spend my bus fare on a bottle of pop.

And once I’ve walked from there toward the most direct route home why then … I might as well veer off to the right and take in a few new roads and a couple of new staircases, because what’s the point of going down the same road home, even if it does happen to be my road?

You’re beginning to see why no one will walk with me, I imagine. And why I won’t write guided walks.
Three extra stupid-gradients later, two up, one down, and one last staircase, I get home, and reconsider the statement I made earlier about not needing much for lunch.

And then I eat the cat.

I’m kidding.

I only eat the sofa - I let the cat get off it first.

Those are the pictures, and the map. If you click on the full pictures on the flickr set you can seen captions and explanations and such.

All through the winter it rained and rained and all the very earnest and dedicated plans I had made to ‘walk all over the city come rain, come shine’, got quietly and mumblingly edited down into ‘come shine or shinier’. And reasonably so: it is difficult to get up and down hills when you are partly porous, fighting against a fierce drizzle and the knowledge that when you get to the top the only view you’re going to get is the inside of a miserable mizzling fog.

So with two whole sunny days on which I have happened to be free in the last couple of weeks, I’m going to walk properly again.

I’ve talked about the fact that I like city walking here before: about liking being an urban explorer, scaling staircases and pounding up pavements in order to get to know San Francisco. But I’ve never worked out whether really go into the individual walks or routes. I was trying to work out why, and I think it’s simply that:

a) This isn’t a guide book, it’s not a travel page in a newspaper, it is my blog. Which should really just be the outpourings of my tiny curdled mind.
2) There are other places I can do exact route recommendations and such if I want to, that are much better suited to doing those things. More about these later sometime.
3) I don’t really take walks that anyone else wants to do.

I know that last one sounds a little oh-woe-is-me-selfbeatyuppy, but it happens to be true. And I’m completely fine with that.

My idea of a route is this:
step one pick one place I would like to get to or see.
step two: head toward place, taking only streets I have never walked along before to get there.
step three: change direction if there appears to be a dog on the next block, and try and work out a way around it.
step four: Get to place identified on map.
step five: find way home, again employing the new-road-usage/dog-avoidance rules.

And steps that get added into that like
extra step a) If you come across a staircase, go up it. Or down it. But up better.
extra step b) If too many of extra steps a have been achieved, step four can be followed by a bus home, with the bus fare and transit map cleverly placed in my bag for this frankly quite frequent occurrence.

And while that sounds quite simple and reasonably pleasant, I can assure that most of the people who have been with me while rounding the 27th corner and going “OOOH, LOOK! There are stairs three blocks that way!” would reassure you that it gets tired. As a technique. And tiring.

Thus, darling reader: I walk alone. I know that sounds like the plaintive cry of a particularly flatulent porcupine, but it isn’t, really. Because I’ve discovered it’s one of the ways I do my best thinking, and get to stop multitasking and just look around at things that will probably end up being useful in some piece of writing farther down the line. And the way I see things - this is a matter for another post, probably - is that I basically write them in my head, describing them to myself, and mulling over them and perfecting the best way to describe them, until the next thing I see, and then I go off on that tangent instead, and so on. It’s basically like an internal version of the walking plan (and a metaphor for my life in general, most likely, but we’ll leave that be).

Thing is, I never actually come back and write down the things I saw, because I’ve had it stuck in my brain that to do so, I’d have to do a fully fledged guided walking tour. But of course I don’t. You’re not going to take these walks, and even if you do, you’d do it your own way. So I should just write them up as I do them, so I don’t forget all the little things that there are.

I always take a small (slightly elderly and ailing) digital camera and my phone, so this, dearest reader, it what you might find from now on. I’ll do walks and do my thinking and my writing in my head, and then I’ll draw up the route I took, and put it on a map, and I’ll upload the pictures from my camera and package them up in a little flickr gallery, and download the words from my brain and spill them all out on here, and then at least I’ll be able to remember where they all are.

So that’s my plan. Because I love these Super-Impulsive Idiolectal Solo Tangental Urban Photo Hikings (or SIISTUPHs for short), and I needed to think of a way to structure this. Good. Well that’s that then. I just wanted to have this post to link back to when writing non-guided informationally-useless walk-writings in the future.
That is all.

A. I don’t know. And that’s the problem

There are many things to be considered in deciding what the next move will be for me and my beloved. Looking for work in some country or other is the main one, obviously, and working out the vagueries of visas and intricacies of insurance and such are also important factors.

But there are other more important ones, like the fact that if we do stay living in this magical San Franciscoish place rather than moving back to the magical motherland, I am, at some point, going to have to start dealing with dollars like they’re real money.

I have no idea why it’s such a mental block but for some reason, the fact that all American currency looks basically the same, in size and shape and colour and such means that I basically think of them as all the same. When your twenty dollar notes are folded into your purse along with your one dollar notes, and they all pull out at the same time and look alike, then it’s understandable that you might start spending them the same. This is a VERY BAD THING.

Imagine it, friends at home, imagine if ten pound notes were the same size and shape as tuppence pieces. That would be, and I think we can all agree on this: a bit of a headfuck, and potentially quite dangerous. And granted, the difference in value between the ‘Merkin values in question are not quite as dramatic as all that but friends, over a long enough time? They might as well be.

Because when you start thinking of them all the same, they how to do you convince your stupid brain not to SPEND them all the same?

When you get used to just sticking your hand in your pocket and pulling out whatever green piece of floppy paper is contained therein to pay for whatever it is you’re buying, madness, ruin and eventually having to sell both your livers to pay for an extra crust of bread at the debtor’s prison canteen is the only real eventual end to the story.

I am not sure how to rectify this. I have tried complaining, loudly, to anyone who will listen, but I ran out of those people quite fast, and
a) If they were also ex-pats they didn’t seem to care much and
b) If they were natives of this land (whatever that might mean) they told me that I was being crazy, Of COURSE these notes all looked different, couldn’t I see that the ten had a yellowish hue and the five had a big purple five printed in the corner? Which was missing my problem. It’s ones and twenties. Ones and twenties, that shouldn’t, by any means look the same: do. And that’s just madness.

So I think I will start drawing monsters on all the twenties that pass through my hands. Big red and orange monsters with terrifying teeth, in felt tip sharpie pen. On the one dollar notes I will draw bunnies. It might be slightly illegal, but I figure that if I do it for long enough, assiduously enough, perhaps everyone else will join in and, before we know it, all of the twenties in circulation in these United States will bear a monster, and all the ones will have images of grazing bunnies along the bottom. And perhaps one day, when you go into a shop and ask how much that nice hat in the window might be, the shop owner will tell you that, because there is a sale on, he’s only going to charge you a monster and four bunnies.
And that day, I will feel at peace.

It’s a far off dream, I know. But I think, together, we might be able to get there.

I missed posting on Valentines Day. I don’t want you to think it was because I was ignoring you, or trying to find the right words to express how I hoped you felt or did not feel about having (or not having) someone to celebrate (and/or not) the day with, or because, worst of all, I am secretly in love with you but trying to find a way of telling you so.

I’m afraid it is none of the above.

I was too busy cleaning.
Yes.
Cleaning.

Because we don’t do valentines day. We don’t.
We talk every year about whether we do celebrate or don’t, because it’s hard to hold on to your principles about how it is better not to celebrate it when everyone else is having a very nice time ACTUALLY celebrating it. But nevertheless, my beloved and I do not celebrate Valentine’s Day.

Do not get me wrong: Valentine’s Day is a nice day to celebrate if you do (like Christmas) and I very much believe that people who like it should own their right to like it just as much as they say they do, or, in fact, as much as they actually do (the gladiatorial nature of mass-media comment boxes MAY have had an effect on my ability to state my case and stand by such, I won’t deny it) - I just don’t like to ceelebrate it.

I just have a very strong approach to valentines day because, in a very spoiled way I don’t like the concept that I only get to have ONE posh special meal ONCE a year. And flowers once a year? Declarations of affection only once a year? I do not like this mandated affection-giving. Screw you! I’ll do that whenever I please, every day, if I so wish… but NOT on your dedicated day. I rebel against your insane ‘affection-giving’ timetable, you pleasant-stuff-nazis. You’re not the boss of me, etc.

So instead we did other stuff. And really this deserves its own post but…

Well, this is what constitutes a perfect valentines day to me:
- We woke up late, after a bunch of crazy dreams, with cats sitting on top of us.
- There was porridge. (There should always be porridge) for me, I don’t know what he had (flakes of some kind I think)
- I have a thing about antique photo booths at the moment, and I’ve found several links to places those can be found in the San Francisco. And what I want, in the long run, is a big picture made up of lots of strips of these, marking a time, and a place, and a project.
- And I also have a thing about walking, and a thing about city staircases, and so planning every walking route to take in the most hills possible…
- so you have to feel a bit valentinish about a man who will walk four miles over ridonkulous hills just to get this (of four) pictures.

- And then we went home and did a big spring clean, scrubbing floors and polishing windows and emptying cupboards and cleaning out drawers.

And, yes, perhaps I have a six-and-a-half-year-relationship idea of romance. But if that’s wrong, I don’t particularly want to be right. Because it’s the happiest and most perfectly suited relationship I can imagine. Here are some (only about 15%, the amount I’ve taken pics of, in mosaic form…) of those other stupid pics from my silly collection.

And ALSO: I get to demand presents and meals and flowers every other day of the year, whenever, whyever. Because that’s why we foreswore Valentines in the first place, personally….

ANYWAY.

My point is:
I wish that you, my lovely readers, had a lovely and constructive Valentines day.
And I actually do love you, so there. Because frankly: you’re my longest relationship ever.

And I hope you had a nice Schmalentines Day, and you are lovely, and that is all.

I woke up this morning to find quite the best comment ever (apart from all YOUR comments, obviously. All your comments are wonderful and I relish every one. Yes, you. You there, you’re brilliant, you are) sitting in my inbox waiting to be moderated.

And I link to it here not to mock the commenter, nor to belittle her point (though ‘proof of existence by volume of things appearing in google images’ is not a research method that will hold any academic water past graduate school level) but because it is completely and utterly charming.

Seriously - Go to this post right here, and then once you’ve got the basic idea of what it’s about (something very silly) then scroll down to the last comment - or rather the last comment that isn’t me - and then tell me you don’t wish you were ten again, and with such beautiful certainty and commitment to setting some silly person on the internet straight about the indubitable existence of fairies.

I go into my day feeling thoroughly chastised, but quite jolly about it.

I was starting to attack a list of titles my lovely readers made for me last year, but the first one I came across was 10 favourite things to do in San Francisco, and since I actually got to do one of my favourite San Franciscoey things - rummaging in the sunshine among the stalls of the biggest flea market I have ever seen (more than 800 stalls of kitchy vintage goodness, ladies and gentlemen…) which happens on the first Sunday of every month in Alameda, an old air base with a stunning view of San Francisco across the bay - you can get there by car or by ferry (+ free shuttle bus). So, I can tell you what I picked up there, then.

Actually no. What’s the fun in that? Far better to show you the things I didn’t buy - because as much as buying stupid useless things just because they’re amusing is of course my primary goal in any shopping ever, it is a pursuit for happier economic times than this*.
_{*Although having said that, I did come away with some little towelling cuffs for your guests to put around their glasses at parties. An original 1950s box of them. Because when am I going to happen upon THAT kind of luck again?}

Anyway, the things I didn’t buy included:

An awful lot of golf memorabilia - this on the left being a particularly fine example. It is a chubby gentleman in brightly coloured clothing doing what might be considered the splits, touching his nose against a horrifically badly painted golf ball. I don’t know if this is something that actually happens often in the game of golf, but if it was, it would certainly explain why golf is so popular.

There really isn’t any logical reason why something called a ‘BLUSHING WILLY’ should still be funny to a 33-year-old woman, but it was.
Not enough to buy, obviously. Just enough to photograph.
Heh heh heh.
It says willy…

 

IS this (left) a Lava Lamp? Is it really? Or is it a slightly strangely shaped specimen jar that you might find on the shelves of a lab that does some kind of work with middle-sized animal foetuses.
The more we looked at it, the less my friend A and I could decide. Because SURELY no one would put a lava lamp that disgusting on a stall and expect it to sell for real cash monies. You might as well just go home and cough up some mucus into a pint of fizzy pop and watch it trying to decide whether to sink or float for the next hour.

 

This (right) was a game that I would have bought for the name alone… but didn’t because I not only don’t have room for it, I really can’t think of a set of people I would feel comfortable proposing a game of it to. And I feel quite confident in saying that without even having read the instructions. Without, in fact, even pulling the box out further to see more of the picture. Just the idea of shouting “Hey! Anyone for a spot of SWIVEL?!” into a room makes me blush.

Still, I do feel that it stood a better chance of being fun than SOB (left).
“SAVE OUR BEUROCRATS: Object of the game:” says the sales blurb at the bottom “to go broke and go on Welfare with the help of government boondoggles, grants and ripoffs.”
Yes, nothing like spending an evening having an economic and political rant levelled at you by your board game.
There was no question here that S.O.B was a game unafraid of taking a hard line on whatever side it was they represented. I just couldn’t for the life of me quite work out which side that was.
Well, I could of if I’d opened the box, I think. But I was quite scared that the whole game was going to start shouting at me if I did.

And then there was this, which was possibly my favourite thing of the day (that I didn’t buy, I mean) something unique and special and brilliant NOT because it has a funny name or because it is suggestive of something else entirely, but because among the pieces of art that someone might consider hanging on their wall here, above the saint (possibly Jesus) and to the side of the scary wooden mask (possibly made in China) was a thing I couldn’t even vaguely explain the aesthetic or practical point of:

Yes. It’s eight 3d half bananas made of wood (or something), painted black and stuck on a pink background, surrounded by a blue frame. And if anyone wants to tell me why, I would be grateful. Even Jesus looks like he’s having his patience tested by it.

If, by the way, anyone wants it, I can probably go back and get it for you. Because I’m pretty sure it will still be there next month.

So last week, as I mentioned - before I went almost completely silent for an entire week - I had set myself a project to watch, catch up with and blog my way through and entire five seasons of some show or other.

And I’m glad I did, for several reasons, which I thought I should note down here in case I needed to remember whether it was worth doing in the future. Because it was.

Basically, my brain needed resetting. And there are not very many ways of doing this, but I happen to know that one of them is just writing. Writing writing writing writing writing.

Which is stupid, because one of the signs that I needed to reset my brain was the fact that everything I was trying to write was simply expanding to fill whatever space I had. So whether I was trying to write a long post for little red boat, or a short post that I was going to get paid for, or an email to my mother, or whatever it was - I would sit here and distract myself with a billion other things until it had taken me 12 hours to slog my way through 500 words, none of which - I would be convinced - were the right one for saying whatever it was I wanted to say.

And part of that is not being able to focus on finding a thing to write about, and part of it is not feeling very sure of myself and my ability to think tangentially after a long process of having my confidence kicked about to the point where I only felt like I could write the most basic of things - and I wasn’t even any good at that. So I sat down and for about a week I just wrote. I caught up with this TV show, I wrote my way through 103 episodes of it (about 74 hours of television in all) and I drew pictures and wrote little scripts and enjoyed myself immensely (to begin with) and slightly less so (when I realised I was going to have to wake up after four hours sleep and watch 14 hours of telly in a row to hit the deadline I had imposed on myself).

But I did it. And when I woke up on Wednesday morning and went out into the bright sunshine, I was enormously upbeat and happy and springlike, and it was only partly because I realised that one of the great things about forcing yourself to watch 14 hours of brain-melting science fiction fantasy adventure is that any day when you do NOT have to watch 14 hours of it after that suddenly feels airy and open and blossoming with spare time.

But it did teach me some other things, which I should be careful to note, because if my writing-brain needs resetting again, a marathon event proved to be a handy way of doing this.
The other things it taught me were:
1) I can set myself ridiculous deadlines and meet them, and not give up.
2) I can launch something and publicise myself like a confident person and not be scared.
3) If I give myself licence to do so, I can be as silly and as tangential and creative as I like, I’ve just not been in a situation where I’ve given myself licence to do that of late.
4) If I want to, I can easily write 50,000 words in a week. They may not be the greatest words in the history of writing, but they will make sense, be readable, and up to 73% of them will be spelled correctly.
5) The basic, little things don’t have to take me hours to do. I just need to focus, and then I can leave more space for the other things I really want to write.

And that’s it, really. I just really wanted to make a note of that somewhere. Because I just felt so elated and full of energy the next day after doing that, I wanted to make sure I had taken notes on how and why that worked for me, so that I’ll know in the future.

Writing short stuff on here. That’s what I need to get down to next.
Not sure how to do that, though. Oh, hang on. … I’ve got an idea.
I’ll be back with my idea tomorrow…