For anyone who was waiting with baited breath...Bangkok was sublime. I use "sublime" in the most conceptual and unconventional sense - for the streets are just as grimy, the air as thick and the Suan Lum stallholders as raucous as ever. But still, sublime. We lived like kings in a sweet (suite) two bedroom, and Joel stayed up with me til five in the morning every night/day. Sometimes five thirty. Late/early enough to have breakfast before we went to bed. Having Katie on the trip with us was...interesting. I don't do the whole strangers/acquaintances-come-along-on-holidays thing, but I would say Dave & I did a good job, on the whole, of showing Joel's baby cousin from America a satisfactory high-school-graduation-tour-de-Asia. We functioned very much like the portable headsets they loan you at museums; over-zealous at times, constantly talking&explaining, battery(food)-operated...yes, I would give us a 9 on the whole, maybe even a 10. Needless to say, Joel owes us big time. He has been paying our Cousin Entertainment Fee in mojitos and, in my case, working lunches complete with rides to and from SAM. Lovely.
I went into Borders yesterday, while waiting for Joel to pick me up for Beat!, with the sole purpose of picking up the latest edition of Cake (Bubs is a contributor this month! Give it up, ladies and fruits). I got pleasantly sidetracked by Winterson's new book, and left with two purchases instead of one. When certain writers publish new work that it slipped your mind to check the release date of, it's like someone announcing a newly minted public holiday, when you stumble across aforementioned publication. Christmas coming early, to be less bizarre about it. Winterson's newest offering is The Stone Gods. I am enthralled and completely taken, already, at 57 pages in.
" This new world weighs a yatto-gram.
But everything is trial-size; tread-on-me tiny or blurred-out-of-focus huge. There are leaves that have grown as big as cities, and there are birds that nest in cockleshells. On the white sand there are long-toed clawprints deep as nightmares, and there are rock pools in hand-hollows finned by invisible fish.
Trees like skyscrapers, and housing as many. Grass the height of hedges, nuts the swell of pumpkins. Sardines that would take two men to land them. Eggs, pale-blue-shelled, each the weight of a breaking universe.
And, underneath, mushrooms soft and small as a mouse ear. A crack like a cut, and inside a million million microbes wondering what to do next. Spores that wait for the wind and never look back.
Moss that is concentrating on being green. "
What a way to hook a body.
I think part of the reason why this Blue Planet enthralls me so is the fact that I have been slowly running my fingers over the contours and landscapes of a new Planet, myself. It is beginning to take on the familiarity of home but still has enough surprise in it to dazzle me.
xx, be well.
