dreambirds, dreamboats, etc.

Good lord. Evil moebius dream. In between a somewhat interesting New Year's party simultaneously online and in a series of swanky flats belonging, among others, to wytchfynder, I seem to have spent endless time photographing birds. Specifically, photographing birds which were perched on the fibrous matting liner of the hanging baskets in the courtyard outside my bedroom, stealing fibres for nesting material. (This much actually happens. The starlings love the matting and spend lots of time in pairs and trios uttering muffled "woot!" and "twee!" noises through beakfuls of fluffy stuff, trampling the hapless pelargoniums and giving the baskets a sort of involuntary Afro. The depredations are quite epic: any day now the plants themselves are going to fall through the naked wire in a shower of unsupported dirt).



It was a good New Year's party, with fireworks and everything and that slightly blurry focus which suggests the presence of acceptable degrees of alcohol, but dammit, every now and then I'd click on the wrong button and the whole thing would fade and I'd be photographing birds. Starlings, yes. Then a whole bunch of little glossy humming-birdy things, and several sparrows, and a pair of burrowing owlets (very cute), and a toucan, and a spotted eagle owl, and eventually a gosh-darned ground hornbill, which is perfectly ridiculous as the basket would never support its weight. And as if it wasn't enough to keep ducking out of the party for a new avian vignette, the photos were terrible, blurry at best, and frequently lacking any trace whatsoever of actual bird. (I have to admit that this is also a fairly realistic detail given my general absence of photographic skill).

I variously attribute the endless and baffling nature of this dream to the fact of book club last night (excesses of wine, giggling and drunken sessions of romantic Odious Comparisons); the extreme heat, which is leading me to sleep with the French doors onto the courtyard open for the better admittance of evil hanging basket vibes; and Rupert Everett. I came back from book club with his autobiography, which I incautiously started reading before going to sleep, and from which I had to reluctantly prise myself at about 1.30am when the unnatural headlock exerted on my skull by my headboard rails showed signs of actually detaching my neck from the rest of my spine. He ain't a half bad writer: the book has a sort of fragmented, frenetic energy which is simultaneously revelatory, funny and incredibly sad. It reads almost like a caricature of a promiscuous gay lifestyle, interestingly detached from any real emotional content (I suspect that's self-protection), but with the underlying thread of a continual and rather desperate seeking-out of sexual encounters. The writer seems lost, looking for something, but you're never quite sure what. I can't decide if he's a cynic, a tragedy or a total bastard (possibly all three), but either way the name-dropping is something else. Anyone who can treat a fling with Ian McKellan as a sort of youthful and immaterial passing fancy has to be credited with serious attitude.

I actually did some book-updating yesterday, in a vague, desultory sort of way. Rupert Everett notwithstanding, shall attempt to do better today. Work worky work work work.