The wind was so strong yesterday that I thought the bus I was in might tip over. Rain was clattering against the windows, and I was alone on the top deck. Saturday morning.
All night the storm had been loud, rattling every door and hinge in the flat so that it sounded like banging. I thought someone had broken in, and resolved to just wear my earplugs, thinking if I was going to get murdered during the storm there wasn’t much I could do anyway. Do murderers murder in storms? Too much true crime.
I left the flat around half nine, without coffee or breakfast, using two hands to push my plastic umbrella against the wind. Very quickly, I realised the weather was so bad I couldn’t be out in it to walk more than a minute or two, so I jumped on the first bus I saw.
Even walking the 100 meters or so between bus stops on Rye lane was enough: I marched down the street, underdressed for the cold in my red coat and thin tights, buffeted by rain, before hopping on another bus to Dulwich.
The bus creaked and arched. I arrived in Dulwich around 10:15, meeting Carrie at the station, and we exchanged exclamations about the storm, before ducking into a trendy looking cafe up the street to warm up.
We were going to the House of Dreams, which is an artist’s house, lived in but periodically open to the public, in Dulwich. The front garden, which is covered with multicoloured and individually painted tiles, was slick with rain as we went in.
Created by artist Stephen Wright, the house is intricately decorated with the discarded minutiae of everyday life: bleach bottles, broken mugs, dolls and toys etc. There’s a childlike kind of attention payed to the smallness and uniqueness of things that are usually forgotten or overlooked by us adults: the texture of a bottle cap; the indentations on the underside of a mug; the bright plasticky allure of pez dispensers.
It reminded me a lot of Joe Brainard’s I Remember– which I mentioned in Reading 5- in the way it pays this very specific attention and lends a sense of importance to lost and forgotten things from childhood. The smaller, more closed in world inhabited by children.
Most interestingly, the artist and his husband were there in the house to answer questions about the artwork. Both were very friendly and, as you can probably imagine, very quirky.
Stephen had been decorating the house since the late nineties, with different areas constantly being worked on and evolved. Though, it was impossible to tell which areas were newer and which were older. All of it was spotlessly clean from dust. Carrie and I talked about how much of a cleaning job it must be.
The storm was still blowing when we left. I got the bus home, bought a tin of tomato soup and a baguette and ate it around 1pm before getting back into bed for several hours.
In the evening I went with Glen to go and see Fanny and Alexander at the BFI, which we’d been anticipating for weeks. I really enjoyed it: I don’t think an over three hour film that I’ve seen in the cinema has ever passed that quickly for me.
The film, like the House of Dreams, has a really strong sense of how malleable and alive the world can seem as a child. For the main character, Alexander, his world is inextricably animated by his imagination, such that nothing is every quite as it seems.
The world of Fanny and Alexander is a wintery Sweden in the early twentieth century: covered in thick layers of snow, with horses clattering over cobbles and warm lights in the windows. Like Hamlet, to which the film constantly alludes, Fanny and Alexander is undoubtably an indoor film. Everything takes place in the enclosed domestic spaces necessitated by a long winter in northern Europe.
In an early scene we see a nude statue in the house move its arm to gesture towards a young Alexander, bringing a sense of the fantastical and the unreal to everything that follows.
There is a real warmth to the whole film, even if it goes to much darker, more disturbing places than I anticipated it would. By the end, standing over all the cruelty and suffering we see in the second act, is the power of art to transform, the imagination to create, and human connection to get us through the winter months.
Last weekend I went to see Charli xcx in Birmingham with Molly, which was brilliant. We both got the train up after work, meeting at Birmingham International all dressed and ready for the gig.
It felt like just the right time to be seeing her- the year of BRAT summer- and we felt lucky to have bought tickets before the album had come out. We’d heard online that standing tickets like ours had been reselling for up to £1000.
We got an okay position in the crowd- sort of in the middle- and had an amazing time dancing to all our favourites from BRAT, though ‘Mean Girls’ and ‘I think about it all the time’, were sadly missing from the set. It was very hot and sweaty, and we wore sunglasses the whole way through.
Afterwards, we crammed onto a train back to the other side of Birmingham to stay in my hometown for the weekend. We had a fun time there, and there was the feeling that Christmas had already settled in deeper there and earlier than it had is London, as is often the case in smaller towns in my experience.
In February of this year, I went to see All of Us Strangers at the Peckhamplex. When the film finished and the credits rolled I sat there frozen, unable to get up. I was speechless, I couldn’t even think. My friends motioned for me to get up, we left and went our separate ways home.
I could only think that I needed to get myself home- and straight away. My jaw was aching slightly, I had goosebumps. For the next few hours I believed in art in one of those intensities that I feel in only very special moments.
I sat on the bus, trying not to think too intensely about anything in particular, not even the film. To have tried to analyse it, to take it apart, felt like it would have killed what was a very precious and fragile thing.
As the bus rolled through Brixton, I imagined myself carrying home what I had seen and what I had felt home in my brain, pristine like a crystal. I thought of it: a purple crystal, hovering serene in the centre of my brain, and tried not to make a sound, or make any sudden movements. As if I were too quick, or think too much I could drop or lose it. I knew I couldn’t think about it.
I just felt it as a dull, hollow euphoria in the front of my brain, an absence of thought and a feeling of preciousness. That my life was a precious thing too.
I thought so intensely for Harry. I wanted to kiss him all over. I put on a few songs by Beach House, songs I used to listen to as a teenager, when everything seemed to be in warmer colours. I remember listening to ‘Take Care’ over and over again after first seeing Blue is the Warmest Colour in 2013, and how around then I started to believe that love was possible.
I took myself home, carefully, as if I had gotten too drunk. Back in Clapham, I took the lift up to the third floor to my flat, unlocked the door and went straight to the shower. It wasn’t late.
I’d been at work in the office all day before the film. I stripped off my sweaty bodysuit. The smell of my sweat had changed from the hormones.
I was living with a group of strangers, they were all shut up in their rooms for the night, or at least I imagined so. I stood in the bathroom and looked myself undressed in the mirror, as if drunk.
I saw myself, my shoulders, pale in the mirror. My hair, still straightened, in a full face of makeup. The radiators were going. Everything was warm. I slept very well.
It’s my last week in my office next week before we move to a new one in February. We’ve been there around a year an a half. I’ll miss the pretty dark bricks on the buildings opposite, and walking from St Pancras on bright mornings.
I’m going to call this one winter interlude. I haven’t been reading much, and didn’t really want to tackle any big topics this week. That doesn’t mean I’ve not been having fun though, November has been another great month for me.
Christmas will be here before I know it, and I need to start buying presents. I’m looking forward to it. My life is going to change. I feel it.
8/12/24
Freya-Onions-report 
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