I don't know what has changed, but something is up.  Maybe it's the time of year, maybe it's that I've started to be more productive in the last week or so, maybe it's falling in love, but something has definitely shifted in me and I'm not sure what the next right thing is to do.  So I present myself to you, dear friends, once more to give me a shove, a poke, a thought or two to provide me with direction.

See, I'm all of a sudden, seriously considering settling at least for a while.  I've become aware of it in the last 24 hours.  It's not that I've run out of options - the process just works, I will keep moving if I need to, I have somewhere lovely to go tonight and tomorrow and the weekend's shaping up nicely, but I found myself thinking yesterday that I wouldn't mind if they guy I'm house-sitting for this week didn't return tonight and instead just let me stick around for a while.  It's  certainly not an attachment to this particular place.  The area I'm in is my idea  of the worst North London grimness in fact.  But somehow, I could put up with that.   I think the tide has just turned, the wind has changed direction, or some something that means it's time to change mode.

That's what it's not.  What are the elements of what it is?  I mean what's important to me at the moment?

That time of year.

This is a change-y time of year for me.  A new term.  New exercise books, just as the leaves are turning and the wind is picking up and the sun is lower in the sky and the clouds are greyer and streaky and the rain isn't refreshing any more it's just cold, cutting pinpricks of annoyance.  Time to snuggle up.  Time to sit with a rug on your knees in front of the fire and lose yourself in a good book or sit around with good friends and chat about life until it's after midnight and  you all should be asleep but, nah, let's have some tea and toast.  Not a time to be out on the road, looking at stuff, or even out on a railway platform sipping a Cafe Americano.  Time to put a big pot of water on to boil and make some chunky vegetable soup.  

Being more productive. 

In the last week or so, I've found my ability to write again.  It's just not been there in any substantial way for months.  In fact for a couple of years now, I've resisted any sort of structure around it.  I know that I do my best work when I have some routine, something to do, a couple of thousand words to knock out each day, a couple of musical numbers recorded, a bit of videoblogging or podcasting, even if it's just as practice.  Nonetheless, I've been unable to sit with anything like that for a while.  I've been restless and found it very easy to just do something else instead.  Since I was in Oxfordshire though I've managed to do Morning Pages most days and scribble some notes and stuff as I've gone along.  It helped somewhat to open up my to-do list and notebook on the wiki.  I've also been able to do more admin-y stuff, clear up the crap. Then yesterday, I just sat down and wrote 4,500 words, yes I even used the word count to check out how awesomely productive I'd been.  Never mind if it's all baloney, I allowed myself to just sit and write something structured and purposeful and hey, perhaps I'll even share it with you sometime.

Falling in love

I said (to Laura) about a month ago that there's nothing particularly drawing me to be in London except Laura.  Since then a whole bunch of other things have drawn me to London. Bah! Universal Unconscious!  Stop taking everything so literally!  Except that... Oh shut up.  Listen, fat boy, stop trying to avoid writing about being in love you big sop-bucket.  It wasn't supposed to be like this.  I was all ready to disappear and be an eternal itinerant and then someone pops up who says she'd really miss you if you weren't there and then you think, well blimey, yes I'd miss her too, I just...  y'know, just never thought you would, I mean, anyone like you could.  I mean I'm a tired, middle-aged, walking apology for not having quite fulfilled my potential and you, you... oh you.  So yeah, there's  someone who I want to be near.  We neither of us need to be constant companions right now, that's one of the plus-points, we both like space as well as deep closeness.  It doesn't mean that I have to take a lease on a flat in SW-somewhere but if I were to take a croft in the Outer Hebrides it would make things difficult, uncomfortable, unhappy, unnecessarily hard work.

So tell me internet, what next?  Where next?  I had a nice idea about perhaps doing a Social Art Residency in Worthing in collaboration with the lovely Dan Thompson.  Doing a residency in a *town* rather than in a building or for an individual institution.  Being there and helping build the social infrastructure that I talked about in this post.  But I've struggled with writing a proper proposal, something that people could fund.  Perhaps that will get easier if I can stay in productive flow.  Or maybe there's someone nearby who needs a house-sitter for a chunk of the winter and my productivity will go in some other direction.  I remain open to all opportunities as ever.  You know where I am.