The colour thirty

Yesterday I spent an hour with a tattooist preparing a new design for my back. There are modifications to be made to a design pre-made and bought somewhere else. Two dragons twine around a central wooden spike, their fire breathing into a yin/yang style hoop at the top. One dragon is black and red, and the other grey and blue. The rest of the design is great but the blue dragon doesn’t work well, the tattooist and I agreed, so it’s going to be coloured burnished yellow – gold – instead. When trying to isolate the right colour, I desperately wanted to say “the colour thirty.”

In my mind, the connection between numbers and their colours is often so profound that I ignore the name of the colour entirely and just refer to it by the number my mind has chosen to shade it. There’s no mathematical association, no emotional one; it’s just that it’s easier to say “oh, that’s the colour seven” than it is to describe the colour seven to anybody else. I only wish everybody else knew what the colour seven was, or for that matter the colour thirty.

I’m going to be thirty tomorrow, and the tattoo, although we don’t begin work until November, is almost symbolic of that milestone. Thirty is the colour of a desert sunset, the breaking hard ground of the Namibian or the Mojave Deserts. It’s the colour that shines through my windows on evenings when the clouds split apart and allow the sun through after a stormy day. It is the colour of my apartment at night, when there’s only the standard lamp by my table to light it. I love this colour although I never wear it; it’s perhaps somewhere in the shades of my red hair, though.

Liaison once remarked that the scars on my wrist were my first tattoos. I once read a friend writing that tattoos are symbolic of how one feels at the time of choosing them, what stage you are at in life, written upon the flesh. In that sense, the original scars could be no more fitting than any tattooist could conjure; just as real and vital and painful as the emotions I felt at the time. Now, I am a wholly different person. It’s hard to believe I was ever there, in that place, and at other times it feels as though it was yesterday. Now, anyway, I prefer tattoos to symbolise where I am in life and what I’m doing with it.

Thirty feels as though I’ve just joined adulthood for the first time. I don’t know what it is about our society but somehow the whole of the twenties now seem like an extended adolescence. It’s taken this time to find my feet and realise I really don’t actually have anything to prove to anybody – not even myself – which is a massive relief. It also feels like the end of an era, as so much has ended and begun in the last couple of weeks it’s very disorientating. Perhaps that’s why my mother’s card struck such a chord in me. The idea of finally fluttering outside the box – which never suited me anyway – is incredibly apt.

The perfect birthday card

My mother sent me a parcel from their trip to Bath and Devizes, including a green shawl and matching glass earrings. It came with a card, one that I shall probably put up somewhere so I never forget it. Those people out there who love Edward Monkton, it’s in his series, and it’s very appropriate for my life right now. The front shows a box containing many little butterflies. There’s a hole in one side of the box, and one of the butterflies is fluttering free outside. The caption reads:

“Why do you fly outside the box?”

“I fly outside the box because I can.”

“But we KNOW the box. We are SAFE inside the box.”

“That, my friend, is why I leave it. For you may be SAFE…

… but I am FREE!”

The Butterfly of Freedom

Enter puppydom

I spent Monday recording podcasts for weeks, maybe months ahead of time. I’ve left the details to Dan the Producer, who is deciding when or if he moves to two chapters per episode. Not that you’ll notice anything other than longer episodes.

At last, I met the fabled puppies.

I forgot how incredibly active and happy puppies are. Constantly. Everything is thrilling to a degree that requires all of their attention and interest all of the time. They run around as though every leg is controlled by a different brain, none of which are talking to each other. It’s a miracle they move in reasonably straight lines at all, but they do.

They like attention. If one of them gets picked up, the other has to be picked up too. But if it’s a different person, then the first puppy thinks the second puppy is getting something the first isn’t, so quarrels break out over who sits in whose arms and who gets to eat Dan’s beard. Or my hair. Because they like hair. And carpet. And twigs, and dirt, and specks of dust, and just about anything they can clamp their jaws around (and a lot of things they can’t). They also both sound as though they’ve swallowed stockbrokers’ mobile phones, making this strange vibrating grunting noise most of the time. I half expect one or the other to break out into full-blown ringing.

They have also stolen the hearts of everybody around them, including me. Watching them, it occurred to me that anybody who’s seen two or more dogs together cannot hold on to the argument that animals don’t have their own personalities, and that we impress our own values on to them. They react differently to people, behave differently. One is quieter than the other, shy to approach, less likely to bounce. The other more likely to bark, more excitable, with her own ideas about the world. It’s also a reminder that whatever happens in life, it pays to be like a puppy – almost infinitely happy about everything, resilient to the point of bouncing back every five minutes, and completely ignoring the news.

Festival fever

Next week, it’s Manchester’s Literary Festival. I haven’t been invited to this one, since I’m unpublished and just doing this myself. I’m not quite sure what I should do yet, but I know Something Should Be Done. It’s probably just a great chance to hang out in a bookish way with other bookish people doing bookish things. The library is probably doing a lot of things and I know people through that, so I might see if Dan and I can’t do some podcast-style activities around the place during the ten days of the festival.

One of the things I won’t be doing is playing the Aspiring Author. There is nothing more embarrassing than being introduced to an established author as “aspiring”. I’m not aspiring; at the moment I’m perfectly happy podcasting Amnar and it’s taking off very well since we finished Gamesfest. I really don’t want to come across as desperate for a recommendation to an agent or to push a manuscript under somebody’s nose. I’ve had it done to me, and I know how embarrassing it is to have to tell somebody you don’t know that you can’t recommend their work, for whatever reason. Unless it was somebody I knew very, very well, and loved their work, I wouldn’t do it. I don’t see why somebody should do it for me.

I like the festivals because I like the atmosphere. I’m really hoping this cold but beautiful weather holds and I can sit out and enjoy the whole thing, watching people go by. Usually, Manchester festivals involve people who bring food and drink stalls into the various squares, and I keep a look out for the Spanish paella stall that’s pretty much always around whenever the city does something special.

I have been staring wide-eyed every morning at the rate the downloads have been going up. I keep thinking this has to stop sometime, but it doesn’t. It’s good. I’ve asked Dan the Producer to get us a better forum, because the one we have now isn’t really up to much and I find it unusable, so I’m not surprised nobody else has tried, really. The good thing is, more people are signing up and listening, which is always good for me.