Make mine a nine.

{One}


{Two}


{Three}


{Four}


{Five}


{Six}


{Seven}


{Eight}


{Nine}

This is how recent days have looked, in part. These recent instagram captures tell of one tiny part of a morning, an afternoon, a day, a week. They don’t tell the whole, but they give you an idea, sort of. They are as true as they are misleading, and I think that is what I like about them best of all. They are misleading not because they didn’t happen, for they did, but rather because in them you don’t see that which happened before and that which followed. You see but a fragment. In the photo of Olive with her tile-matching ears, you don’t see the kitty litter crystals on the laundry floor waiting, wanting, needing to be swept up. Out of frame, behind Omar in the sun, giant piles of recently washed and folded clothing that will never make it to the cupboard before next worn. Instead, as they have always done, these clothing towers will stay in their makeshift place and we will awkwardly step around them to get to the computer. And once at the computer, dressed still in pajamas, we will check emails, send invitations, post invoices, grateful that what is behind the screen is not visible as we do so. And in the photo of the row of alumni courtyard blossom blooms you perhaps don’t get a sense that this was a space passed through quickly on the way to sit at a desk at RMIT where I quietly draw up feedback to painting students studying via distance, occasionally typing in rhythm to the photocopier machine’s purr-hum. Nor, for that matter, do you get a sense that the view of the yellow staircase through the bars is actually the view though the open window in the toilets. But, perhaps the beauty of any image is that it lets you make up your own story from the setting provided and that this doesn’t matter if it is correct. And some of the time, you’ll even be correct. It is the stuff of terrific joy to receive presents of paper ephemera from Helsinki and Cambridge (thank-you Olivia xo), and it is endearing to see Perce make himself comfortable in the basket of One-Gear-Louise’s brand new bike. It is exciting to receive a generous swathe of Liberty upholstery fabric for two balloon chairs and to think of what you can use the remainder for. This is, in short, the best bits, visually. Nine, plus a horse.

+ Philip Pullman, How children's books thrived under Stalin (the guardian)
+ Gary Pearce, Fight for the inner north (0verland literary journal)
+ My zine, A Catalogue of Bodies, in the hands of others
+ The happy recipient of a beautiful hand-knitted cowl (thanks Mum xo)