Dear Reader,
I may have lost you by now. Why would anyone check back in with a blog that has been left dormant for nearly 8 months? Maybe that makes this quiet return much easier for me. Knowing no-one's reading, kind of lets me off the hook.
I feel drawn to write again, perhaps because I'm undergoing as much of a battle as I was in Prague now that I'm back in the UK. Mainly because I can't seem to get things together enough to find a place to live in London. So I'm stuck living in the provinces, where the buses know no means of being a reliable form of transportation and the sun forgets to shine rather more frequently than I quite know how to handle. I have caught myself feeling simultaneously an outsider and ex-pat in my own country, and a duck getting back in the water when it comes to picking up on the latest literary offerings. Not only have I been familiarising myself with the regular columnists in the Times, Independent and Guardian but I've also found myself drooling over the latest anthology of writings about London that was shown off in a window of Waterstones that I went past recently. I say, 'went past' but I of course mean, went into, spent about half an hour mentally notching up approximately £150 worth of books while looking through and reading a generous handful of delightful tomes, and left, walking past the shop forlornly wondering how I can still be in this position of wanting more books after the number I have so far accumulated.
My latest obsession while in 'middle-of-nowhere-land' is the local library DVD collection. Namely the 'World cinema' section. I have already borrowed two French films for this week. Which is timely, because I now have some French-to-English translation work to do, about a letter of complaint from someone in a building in St. Petersburg. (I haven't looked at it in detail yet, so I'm still not sure why this piece of writing is in French, not Russian, but anyway, I'll get to it in due course.) And the film I'm starting with tonight is a French film by a Polish director - Pawel Pawlikowski, the director of 'My Summer of Love'. It's called 'The Woman In The Fifth'. With Kristin Scott Thomas and Ethan Hawke in it, it can't be bad. Unless it's bad in a 'totally annihilating all optimism' way. Which could still be kind of funny. Extremes sometimes just turn the corner into their polar opposite. It can happen.
Wishing you a darkly warm and comforting evening. If you know what I mean.
Ms. Platform Edge. X
