dreaming

Hot Air

~ ERWhittington ~ 4 Comments

There’s something deliciously arrogant about going up in a hot air balloon. I’ve thought about it quite a lot, recently. I think hot air balloons have slightly been haunting me recently (a little more whimsically than the haunted feeling I had yesterday, when a man was following me; I’ve never felt so eerily looked at and visually pierced, and been so unfeasibly well-followed through the streets, though my racing heartbeat, albeit in a crowded place, quickly turned to rage and the content of his garbled words remain a mystery); I have seen them a lot, and not just in the sky.

Imagine the boldness of simply deciding to go upwards and leave all your friends and foes miles below (miles? I really have no sense of how high they go; my understanding of distance is roughly as lacking as my understanding of volume, which during my time spent mixing skincare products in jugs and decanting into containers, has been revealed to be alarmingly off*). You’re not even pretending to fly, or to be in anything particularly technologically robust; you’re just in a thing which floats, bigly, and drifting. You both marvel up there, I imagine, and are marvelled at; it is impossible not to look up when you see a hot air balloon dreaming its way through the sky. I have to admit I had an overly romanticised view of it, though; I thought they would be Continue reading →

On showering; or how I hold the world together

~ ERWhittington ~ 1 Comment

Climbing the grand steps of self-labelling, there are many levels to nudge oneself through (one is both a person leading the horse on a piece of rope, and the horse being urged to proceed through each narrow gate) before one can truly feel comfortable calling oneself ‘a writer’. There is the ‘I’m not really a writer unless I have published my fourth novel and won another prize‘ brigade, and on the other side of the scale there is the horse-before-cart, self-actualising, The Secret-loving, manifestation-willing, glory-expecting camp of those who enthusiastically consider ‘being a writer’ merely to mean ‘sometimes I think about stuff and definitely will write some of it down one day; it’s gonna be good.’ Somewhere in between, there is this trusty landmark: you can’t call yourself any kind of writer until at least one person has asked you where you get your ideas from.

When some people shower in the morning, I imagine they think about the way the water feels, how they need to replace the shampoo soon, or what they’ll have for breakfast. On one level, I’m doing all this too (luxuriating in bergamot and orange homemade body scrubs, etc.; though I definitely have already had breakfast; I wake up starving each morning and have to eat immediately) but on another level, while the water runs over my body, I’m merrily and involuntarily living several other lives in my head like an absolute weirdo. Continue reading →