Tag: creative

WWW Wednesday, 6/03-19, Welcome back, Creativity

Hello and welcome to another WWW Wednesday!

I’m feeling creative these days, and thankfully, there are a lot of projects I can channel that creative energy into. I’m working on a cross stitch piece for a workshop I’m a part of, I really want to write again (I’m just not sure what), and I’ve just gotten my hands on some exciting new books. So what better time to do a WWW Wednesday post!

WWW Wednesday is hosted by Sam at Taking on a World of Words, and anyone can join the fun! All you have to do is answer three simple questions (“The three Ws”):

-What are you currently reading?
-What did you just finish reading?
-What are you planning on reading next?

I am currently reading:
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare

Cathy and I went to see this play broadcasted at the Cinema in Winchester last winter, and I loved the intrigue, the confusion and the strange and wonderful characters. Yesterday I found it for £2.50 in a little Swanage book shop, and I’m working my way through it now. So far very good!

Blurb:
Variously melancholy, lyrical, joyous and farcical, Twelfth Night has long been a popular comedy with Shakespearian audiences. The main plot revolves around mistaken identities and unrequited love. Both Olivia and Orsino are attracted to Viola, who is disguised as a young man; and Viola’s brother, Sebastian, finds that he is loved not only by Antonio but also by Olivia.
While offering broad comedy, Twelfth Night teasingly probes gender-roles and sexual ambiguities.

I just finished reading:
The Hat by Selima Hill

This isn’t the sort of poetry I usually read just for fun, but we had another one of Hill’s books, Jutland, as a set text for a poetry module last year, and I do really like her style. It’s playful and witty and truly bisarre. I think I’ll have to read it again, though, to really get under its skin!

Blurb:
Selima Hill’s latest collection, The Hat, is a disturbing portrayal of a woman’s struggle to regain her identity. Her story emerges through a series of short poems, often related to animals: how she is preyed upon and betrayed, misunderstood, compromised and not allowed to be herself. Like all of Selima Hill’s books, The Hat charts ‘extreme experiences with a dazzling excess’, with dark humour and surprising combinations of homely and outlandish.

Next, I’ll be reading: 
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

A reread of an old favourite; I love Neil Gaiman’s books and the strange worlds he creates! I read this the first time when I was fifteen, and keep coming back to it, for the rich character gallery, the edge-of-your-seat moments and the biting dialogue. Chris Riddel’s beautiful illustrations are also a reason for why this book is a work of art.

Blurb:
Nobody Owens, known to his friends as Bod, is a normal boy. He would be completely normal if he didn’t live in a graveyard, being raised and educated by ghosts.
There are dangers and adventures for Bod in the graveyard. But it is in the land of the living that real danger lurks, for it is there that the man Jack lives and he has already killed Bod’s family.

So these are my reads right about now. How about you, what have you been reading lately? Have you read any of these, and if so, what did you think? And if you’ve got a WWW Wednesday post up today, pop a link in the comments and I’d love to have a look!

I hope you’re having a wonderful day,
-Andrea

One month down, Eleven more to go

It’s February 1st today, and January felt like it lasted a year.

I started this month at home, with Harvey visiting from England. From then and until now, I’ve moved flats and gotten settled, started up a new semester of my BA, found out that I really really enjoy my degree, received marks and got As on all my exams (!!) and with some lovely people, I’ve done a lot of work, both at uni and outside of uni.

Last year I filmed a second everyday, from January throughout July. A lot of stuff happened during those months, and I love to look back on those clips now – to see how much can change in a short amount of time. Watching the days slip by as seconds also really do put things into perspective.

This year, I’m gonna try again, and this time I’ll see if I can do a whole year, now that I’ve proven to myself that I can do six months.

So, without further ado, here’s my January! It may not look all that eventful to you when you watch it, but it’s been a good one.

Hope this first month of 2019 has been kind to you!

Have a wonderful day,

-Andrea

“Sophie’s Adventure”

In lack of proper wine glasses, we improvise with teacups,
and as the shutter of a Polaroid camera goes off,
she’s pouring rosé,
small, pink oceans, bubbles and light storms in our glasses.

We’ve made a cave of my uni room,
filled every nook and cranny with silly laughs and fairy lights,
hot chocolate scented candles,
and unfamiliar words in both our languages.
Words we hope’ll make sense
when English just doesn’t cut it as our middle man,
when the words of home become impossible to translate,
– so we let her German paint pictures in the air,
and Norwegian show off all the words it has borrowed;
we meet in the middle.

There are some things you just cannot learn in your home country.

Dreams are dreamt up tonight.
Plans for all the cities that are yet to be seen,
Northern Lights still to be chased,
the cross stitches of who we’d wish to be one day hopefully coming together.
Everything navigated in between sips of pink and the idea of fairy story cities.    

There are no thoughts that cannot be put into words,
no words that cannot be sown into these blankets,
and the four years separating us don’t keep our musings from dancing,
from twirling,
from harmonising to the same melody.

Because, in the strangest way, it’s like she is me three years ago,
just with a dollop more maturity it took me an extra year to obtain.
Alone in a new country,
figuring it out on her own.
We talk about being lonely;
we talk about that empty feeling of evenings on your own, beating yourself up for not living your adventure abroad to the fullest,
and of the nights that last forever, where you’re surrounded by friends and this new country feels like where you were supposed to be all along,
We talk about how that’s okay.

And we agree that on those days, whether the sunset reaches us before we’ve even gotten out of our beds,
or if 4 am finds us in the middle of a favourite song,
we’ll pour the rosé in our tea cups again,
raise a glass to ourselves and our empty rooms
and celebrate.

There are some things you just cannot learn in your home town.

Because there are so many people to meet,
so many friends to make, hands to shake, eyes to get to know.
So many languages to learn, so many wines to taste and teas to test,
so many pictures to take, that need their own space in an album somewhere,
or hung above a bed,
the memories of your own fairy tales lulling you to sleep.

So many stories, of the adventures that are waiting.
So let’s raise a glass to that.

-Andrea

“Old Harry Rocks”

Written on the 21st of October, 2018.

The hillside is full of sheep.
They graze the grass we walk on, they don’t mind the steep slopes
and the cliffs.

The villagers call it a mountain, everyone else calls it a hilltop.
I want to call it an adventure.
Everyone we meet are prepared with hiking boots and walking sticks,
we are armed with sneakers and half a sausage roll.
This wasn’t where we thought today was gonna lead us.
Four hours up and four hours down,
we scale steps carved into the hillside,
past trees that have grown into each other
to seek refuge in numbers
from the sharp sea air,
gusts coming in from the northern sea.

Beneath us, Swanage wanes away.
The bay grows smaller and smaller,
until you could fit the entire town between your thumb and ring finger,
lift it up and put it in your palm.
Maybe that’s what I’m trying to do;
Lift Swanage out of its little nook between the hills and the unforgiving ocean,
nestle all the teacups and barefoot walks along the beach
into the crook of my neck,
keep it there to remind myself of the times I’ve felt like I belong here.

I clutch your hand in mine,
feel your nails against my skin.
In front of us, the terrain evens out.
Two chalk rocks stand side by side,
broken away from the hillside, they hold each other up.
They’ve been standing since long before the town came to be,
just as the town will be here
long after I have left.

-Andrea

Journal #13, The magic of the Ginger Bread

The sound of family that haven’t seen each other for too long fills the living room. Bright smiles, Christmas socks and the smell of gingerbread cookies in the oven. Gingerbread dough is snuck into mischievous mouths, tongues stuck out at whoever dares point it out – quick fingers coated in flour and butter, sticky but sweet tasting, just how these December days are supposed to be. It’s the annual family gingerbread day, where we bake enough cookies to carry us through the winter; when the house smells like cinnamon and cloves and ginger and dark, shining syrup; when the stereo churns out Christmas song after Christmas song, every single one linked to a memory, a party, an evening or just a moment.

Worries about presents and that last exam are gone as the third musician of the night sings songs about chestnuts and fires and Jack Frost nipping at noses.
These Christmas traditions are things we all share. The Christmas Crazy that sets in every December 1st and makes young and old suddenly crave satsumas and mulled wine and all the other things you never even think about during the other eleven months of the year. The Christmas Crazy that sometimes leaves you running about endless shopping centres, but just as often reminds you to sit quietly by the window to listen to the whispers of snow gently falling.

Eleven people are gathered around the table, cups of coffee and tea are lining the window sills. The table isn’t for coffee cups, the table is for working. There shouldn’t be enough room for everyone to roll out their dough, to stamp out gingerbread angels and stars, but there always is. Around this table, there is room to grow, there is space for everyone. An evening like this one gathers us all, and around this table there is room for quirks, for habits and traditions, for the weird and for the wonderful, for emotions, for the happy.
We sing along, we dot our noses with flour. We taste the cookie dough and revel in the smell wafting from the oven. Everyone’s hard at work, and like every year, Christmas comes running when we invite it in.


Like every year, the magic of the Ginger Bread ensures that the Christmas fairytale stops by our house too. Like every year, the Christmas Crazy ensures that Christmas hangs up its coat and takes off its shoes, and makes itself proper at home.

-Andrea

WWW Wednesday 14/11-18, Poetry and Quiet Nostalgia

I’ve been really getting back into poetry lately; I love the little breathing space it provides in an exam-centric week. I’ve got my first of five exams this semester in about two weeks, and the nerves are starting to properly set in! To combat the stress, however, I’m trying to schedule one hour of reading time every day, either in the morning before uni or at night before I go to bed. So far it’s been working, and it’s provided me with a couple of books to talk about in this week’s WWW Wednesday post!

WWW Wednesday is hosted by Sam at Taking on a World of Words, and anyone can join the fun! All you have to do is answer three simple questions (“The three Ws”):

-What are you currently reading?
-What did you just finish reading?
-What are you planning on reading next?

I am currently reading
Date & Time by Phil Kaye

I started following Phil Kay’s poetry in 2014 but have only now managed to get my hands on the physical copies of his books. I love the cover on this one, and in it is written so many of my favourite poems of his. It’s a quiet collection, yet incredibly inventive and strong. It “explodes with imaginative scope, intelligence and feeling” and is one of those collections that you want to read slowly so it never has to end.

Blurb:
Date&Time is a vulnerable exploration of the distance between memory and lived experience, between the speaker and the reader, between how we see ourselves and how we see our lovers, our friends, and family. Through poems that are as wry as they are heart-breaking, Phil Kaye’s work is unflinchingly honest as he considers the chronology, or rather achronology, of love and loss.
“Phil Kaye does not simply walk us through the door of the past, he asks the reader to assist him in taking the door of its hinges. I am so thankful for this collection. It gives us all a new vocabulary with which to consider who we have been and who we are becoming.” -Clint Smith

I just finished reading
A Light Bulb Symphony, Poems by Phil Kaye

A mesmerizing choice of words, sentences that sing themselves off of the pages, emotions too big to fit the 10p font. This is Phil Kaye’s first poetry collection, and it’s just as strong as his later works. His writing is elegant and sincere, as he writes about his memories and his life, family and loved ones, the small things and the big things and all the things that make up a life well lived.

Blurb:
The book doesn’t have one, but I want to show you some excerpts from one of the poems in it:

“Ayekaye – For Aurora”
It’s days like this I wonder what I’m doing
3,000 miles away from the only person
whose skipping stone heart
leaves ripples that sounds just like mine
when they lap against the shore.

[…]

I keep all your cards
like Magic Marker prayers.
I hang them up around my days
like Post-It notes that read, “Live.”
Because you made me believe in ice cream for dinner
and Disneyland on a school day.

[…]

So the nights I need you the most
I take a pocket full of skipping stones
And off the New York coast
I listen to you breathe.

Next, I’ll be reading
the five people you meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom

Ever since 2013, every year when November comes around I have to pick this book up. It’s been read and thumbed through, thrown in my bag and forgotten on the bus multiple times, dropped in the bath and accidentally splattered with tea more times than I can count. There is something in this story that I always gravitate back towards, something quiet and intimate, something kind and forgiving. A book about how everything we do affect something or someone somehow, how our actions can change someone’s life without us even knowing it, and how small acts of a stranger can have a massive impact on our own lives. It’s a celebration of the goodness in people, something I think we all need to be reminded of from time to time, and therefore I make sure to read it once a year, at the time when the days are darkest and the weather the most dreary. A book I really, really recommend.

Blurb:
All endings are also beginnings, we just don’t know it at the time… An enchanting, beautifully crafted novel that explores a mystery only heaven can unfold.

So a week heavy with poetry and nostalgia; it’s wonderful all the stuff books can make you feel.
Have you read any of these? Or any of Mitch Albom’s other books?
If you’ve written a WWW Wednesday post today, please leave it in the comments, I’d love to have a read! Or if you just want to chat books, I’m always here for that, too!

Have a wonderful day, until next time,
-Andrea

WWW Wednesday October 10th

And it’s Wednesday again! Life’s a bit hectic at the moment and I’m not getting as much writing or creative work done as I’d like to, but nevertheless, this week’s given me one of the better reading experiences I’ve had in years! I’m properly falling in love with books again, and there’s no better feeling in the world.
All will be revealed in a couple of paragraphs, so without further ado,
welcome to another WWW Wednesday!

WWW Wednesday is hosted by Sam at Taking on a World of Words, and anyone can join the fun! All you have to do is answer three simple questions (“The three Ws”):

-What are you currently reading?
-What did you just finish reading?
-What are you planning on reading next?

I am currently reading:
Mirage by Somaiya Daud


This book gives off a clear fairytale-esque space opera-vibe, which got me proper intrigued from the get-go. I’m only a couple pages in, but I love the language and the tone, and the intricate world building is really clever. My copy is also beautiful with sprayed purple pages and the cover is breathtaking! So excited to get further into this!

Blurb:

“The crown of Dinah had been stripped from me, my face changed, my body broken. But I was not a slave and I was not a spare. I was my mother’s daughter, and I would survive and endure. I would find my way back home.”
In a star system dominated by the brutal Vathek empire, sixteen-year-old Amani is a dreamer. She dreams of what life was like before the occupation, and of receiving a sign from Dhiya that one day she, too, will have adventures and travel beyond her isolated moon.

I just finished reading:
Rubiks kube og den femte beatle by Hans Olav Hamran


This is the book I was talking about in the introduction to this post, one of the better reading experiences I’ve had in years. I found it on Monday by a coincidence, and both started and finished it that same evening. 312 pages just flew by in about four hours.

It falls perfectly into this little niche I adore and that I’ve talked about previously; Scandinavian urban life and the lgbtq society, in the 60s and 70s.

Set in my hometown in the late 70s, at a school a lot of my friends actually went to some thirty years later, it depicts the town my parents would have grown up in. The main character also has a summer house in a little hamlet with about 2000 people, the exact same place my family used to have a summer house, and now ultimately have moved to! I recognized so many of the places and concepts and both the story and the characters in this book are really well written. I started reading it and could not put it down, and even though it deals with heavy themes like un-diagnosed (and badly diagnosed) mental health, lgbt rights in small towns in the 70s, adultery and alcoholism, it was also an inherently hopeful story, about friends figuring things out together, spontaneity, new relationships and following your dreams.

I feel like this book will be pushed on a lot of people, and I’ll definitely give it a reread myself in a bit.

Blurb (translated):

What do you do when you’re the only one at your school who likes The Beatles?
Anders can’t wait to finish secondary school, he’s dreaming of the freedom only a moped can provide and is irredeamably and incurably in love with Julia. But life had been so much easier if he wasn’t the very last person at school that listened to The Beatles. Why couldn’t he just be a KISS fan like the rest of them?
When Anders wakes up to the news that John Lennon has been shot, a goal forms in his mind; there are only three of them left now, he’s going to meet the rest of the Beatles. Along with a mildly alcoholic teacher, he flies to London where he finds crazy punk rockers and closed gates, and even sneaks in to a gala event at a James Bond premiere, just to get a glimpse of his heroes. And maybe, just maybe, these Beatles adventures can cheer up Mum, who’s not always able to get out of bed in the morning.
A novel about growing up and being true to what you believe in, no matter what everyone else tells you. A story about being different and about how hard it is when you can’t tell anyone about what’s difficult at home.

Next book on the list:
Whuthering Heights by Charlotte Bronte

Okay, so this one is a big maybe. I’ve started this book so many times and never really gotten into it, but I found a really cheap but well-kept copy in a charity shop, and the quote at the back totally got me, so I figured I’d give it another go. Might be nice as an October read, now that we’re getting a little closer to Halloween. I really liked the Penguin Classics cover on this one too. Here’s to hoping I actually get the dialogue this time! Wish me luck, haha x

Blurb:
“May you not rest, as long as I am living! You said I killed you – haunt me, then!
Caught in a snowstorm, Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange on the bleak Yorkshire moors, is forced to seek shelter at Wuthering Heights. There he discovers the history of the tempestuous events that took place years before: the intense passion between the foundling Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, her betrayal of him and the bitter vengeance he now wreaks on the innocent heirs of the past.
Emily Bronte’s novel of impossible desires, violence and transgression is a masterpiece of intense, unsettling power.

So these are the books I’m dealing with this week! Now that we’re well into October I’m all here for curling up in my reading nook with my books, and there have been a lot of great reading sessions lately, as already mentioned. Busy weeks and lot of uni work only make these moments of reading even more important! A nice way to let your mind focus on other things and not just on achievements and learning and goals.

What are you reading right now? Have you read any of these? And what are your thoughts on Wuthering Heights? If you’ve written a WWW Wednesday post, or just want to talk books for a bit, please pop a link or a few lines in the comment section below! So excited to hear from you x

Have a wonderful day,
-Andrea

“Grandfather Sea has new eyes now”

The water is a mirror, I’m scared to break the surface,
but our boat just glides through the waves like it owns the place.
On the sea surrounded by sleepy gulls and my grandmother’s handwriting was not where I thought I’d spend my evening, but I’m glad I’m here.
My grandad is steering, like he always is.

Grandfather sea, the saltwater man.
I’ve written poems about him before, said he is like the ocean he grew up next to;
only now do I understand how right I was.

He’s not made of salt water so much as shaped of it,
unpredictable and stormy, wondrous and wild.

I look at how he grips the steering wheel, trained hands that know how to navigate rocks and isles and deep velvet oceans.
It is in his fingers, his eyes, his back,
like riding a bicycle is in my legs.

I used to compare him to the sea;

His heart forceful like the waves, voice quick like sea foam, all excitement and loud words and dark coffee spluttering in a coffee maker.
Now I see the ocean in him, in the pull of the currents towards his home.
I see the sea in how he glides through the ripples, I see the waves in his mind as tension in his hands.

He looks at old horizons with new eyes, navigates charted waters without her telling him where to go.

The water is a mirror, I’m scared I’ll break the surface,
but his surface is one i’m just starting to chip away at.

I went out for a little trip on the fjord with my grandad the other day, and had some time to reflect as we were … driving? We talked about stuff you can only talk about when there is water all around you, and we sat in comfortable silence, silence that felt like home. It all made me think of a poem I wrote about my grandad in my first year of uni, and how both my voice and his focus has changed a lot during the course of those three years, and especially this last year; a year filled with permanent changes that have affected all of us. All of this reflection resulted in this work-in-progress poem! I hope you like it!

Have a wonderful day,

-Andrea