Today feels like Christmas can fuck off. Have really not been feeling it this year. Hey ho. There’s always next year…
Christmas…
Necklace Gold Dream
I went out for a Christmas meal last night at the stellar Non Viet Vietnamese restaurant located at the section of Sauchiehall Street near the M8. Great food was had with Birdy and Michelle as fellow dinner guests.
Michelle gave me the most wonderful gift – pictured below. I was knocked for six by it. Such a lovely thought out present.
Demotivation…
I feel low today. Demotivated. I feel like I need to do something but I can’t conjure up the energy within myself to do it.
I think it’s a little bit of “be careful what you wish for.” Jim had been quiet and the past couple of days I found myself wishing he’d post something. Especially in light of Terry Hall’s passing. Years ago I’d freak out if he went quiet. I’d start to doom think – begin to worry if he was okay and start to be concerned something had happened. Of course it never had. Then I would be scornful of myself for caring so much and give myself a telling off. “Jim’s as fit as a Mallee bull” as the Australian colloquialism goes, “dinna fash” – as the locals say when appearing to fuss or stress over nothing.
Then yesterday he posted with his review of the year/“best of” kinda post. Mr “I don’t look back” seems to have at least reviewed the past 12 months. I do wish he’d stop with this “never look back” business. It gets a bit tiring after a while. It’s always said with this air of superiority that grates on me. Like, he feels “a better person” for this perceived lack of desire for nostalgia tripping. Except he constantly contradicts himself with it and cannae even see it.
Good luck with “never looking back” while writing your memoir, Jim!
Without even thinking, I replied to his post. It’s something that has been such an unconscious response that I did it without any second thought. Until after I had posted it and thought “Oh, you fool! There you go again. Straight in with a response. As if he’s waiting on your response. HE DOESNAE CARE! WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO GET THAT IN YOUR THICK SKULL?!” I guess I could have deleted it. Or just responded on my blog instead but the action was so spontaneous – as it has always been that I just initially didn’t stop to think.
Then I keep going back to the post to see if he has liked or responded to anyone else. Feeling a weird sense of relief that he’s responded to no one at all. I don’t feel alone.
I keep thinking about the person who described Jim as “esoteric.” It’s a good description. I think about it in relation to Jim’s previous post in which he talked about the fans being “our tribe.” But there are those who are within an “inner circle.” They’re the REAL “tribe.”
I loved feeling involved. A part of it. If not right within that inner circle, then at least able to delude myself I might find myself in it one day…or something like that.
It was always just that sense of wanting to matter.
Today is the winter solstice and a lot of people are sharing the SM song Solstice Kiss. My mate, Birdy, sharing a photo of her signed CD – “Solstice Kiss Birdy.” A reminder that I was not “worth it.” That, combined with the weather and the disappointment in myself for STILL desiring that sense of exchange with Jim that long passed – eating me up inside.
These days it feels like I write AT him, not TO him. It has ALWAYS been one-sided. It very rarely was two-sided. I have held on to those little exchanges for so many years. It’s ridiculous. And just when I feel like I am getting stronger and getting over it, a few days like these are enough to bring me down into a spiral.
Wishing for a word from Jim. Terry passing away. Telling myself that Jim will be fine – he’s fit as a fiddle! A word about Terry from him would be nice. I think of “Skin” (Tony Donald) and Alan McNeil and the contemporaries of his that have left us and I get maudlin. That time for us is precious. It’s nearly Christmas.
He posts. Present for a moment, then gone. It’s solstice and there are no kisses. Not even a like…or anything. And I have to try and stop myself from wanting to “talk” to him, because it’s absurd and it doesn’t matter. “It doesn’t matter to you, it matters to me”, to quote Bono’s line from So Cruel. I think it is probably just about my favourite U2 song. Certainly is from my favourite U2 album.
I have a Christmas dinner meet-up tonight. Birdy and I are out with our friend, Michelle, to have tea at a local Vietnamese restaurant. And I am trying to get myself in the mood. I don’t want to be the wet blanket tonight at the tea. I have been looking forward to this meal and the “girl’s night out” for weeks…and now that it’s here? I just want to stay home and curl up in bed.
So…in essence, one must be careful for what one wishes for.
Tomorrow is the last Kerrsday before Christmas and … oh, Lord is there something visually splendid coming to the Priptona Weird blog! Look out for that! Other than that, it’s gonna be a quiet old Christmas and I should probably just bury my head in my uni study because, there ain’t nothing else doing.
I wish I could write something good…
First 79, Now 80!
I received my mark for my assignment this afternoon. I honestly was not expecting it until the New Year. I always feel ssoooo nervous when the email notification comes in letting me know that my mark is ready for collection.
I can see the mark before I actually collect my tutor’s assessment and feedback. Again, as I arrived to the page to collect, I see a score of 80 and I’m just bloody stunned!
I can’t really go into any more detail than that. I have to be careful with what I discuss. Once again I am incredibly happy with my mark and fully understand and realise why I was deducted marks – or not scored as highly – for certain things I didn’t do right or shouldn’t have done.
Overall my result is really good and I got very positive feedback.
The tough stuff is to come next year. Tough in that these are the subjects I am doing my diploma for – English Literature and Creative Writing. I have William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre to tackle next with 600 word essays to write on each one of them.
In the meantime, there is some stuff happening with the house that’s going pretty crappy. When one part of your life seems to be going okay, other areas will be crap. It’s always the way!
I must apologise for the disruption to the blog today. I was sorting out my domain linking and changing over the blog’s theme to something I liked more. I hope you like it too.
Lastly, here’s another bit of Kerr Christmas fun. Yes…Jim will feature here now and again…he’s unavoidable. I’m more comfortable with him featuring here than my personal stuff and uni stuff featuring on the Simple Minds/Music blog.
The Relief Of Making It Over The Finishing Line In Time
That’s another assignment completed! Two assignments completed by Christmas! That’s pretty good going. I’m not sure when we’ll get our marks back, but I guess it won’t be until the New Year – probably the middle of January. Maybe at the end of the first week of Jan if we’re lucky. Either way, I won’t be stressing about how well I did. I’ll just relax and enjoy Christmas and think about the next phase of the module to come. It’s all down to the nitty gritty next because we’ll be tackling the English Literature and Creative Writing topics in the New Year and into the spring. I’m feeling quite a bit nervous about it. Will I really be any good at this? Who knows. In the meantime – IT’S CHRISTMAS!!!!
One thing I will say is that for one part of my assignment we were asked to write a short piece about a portrait that we’d recently come across. With the image above in mind – just one of my bedroom walls adorned with an endless array of Kerr portrait photographs, I seriously contemplated doing this short piece about one of my photos of Jim but I became waaaaay too worried about how that might reflect on me to the other students and decided to make a different choice. All for the better, I think! Which one of the Jims would I have chosen? Well, to have made myself a little less like a woman of 52 acting like a girl of 12, I probably would have gone for one of the photos of him on the stage performing. Our task for this part of the assignment was to write about what we thought the portrait’s purpose was. I’d have had a better justification of explaining the purpose of a photo of Jim on a stage than I would have of one of the promo photos of him.
It’s all irrelevant now anyway but, yeah…talk about spoiled for choice had I gone with my initial idea of choosing a photo of His Kerrness to go on about. Lol
I’ll take a final look over the assignment tomorrow, make sure it’s all reading right, the word count is correct, references are correct and…in she goes! And then the next assignment is just under a whole two months away. Phew!
And When I’m Not Studying….
For uni. I’m studying this fine creature…
Sigh. (This one fell under the “where do I stick it?” dilemma. It was too much fun to just keep it on the SM blog, hence it ended up here as well. Jim Kerr under my tree? Yes, please! And thank you very much!*)
*not gonna happen in a month of Sundays… or Kerrsdays.
The Slog
Every assignment feels like a slog. I’m now at 800 words of a 1200 word essay and I feel like I am just stretching it out for word count sake. The topic we have been given – it’s art history. This could easily be put into a 1200 word essay if it was a painting we were conducting a visual analysis on – but it’s a print and so there isn’t really a lot of information that can be discussed in the visual analysis. It’s all contextual and I am sure it will need to be a 50/50 split between the content of visual analysis interpretation and contextual information.
I really feel as though I have my work cut out. I naively thought through this whole block of art history study that I’d find the going for this essay good. That I had plenty of material to go on and it would go quite well. Now I’m here and…damn! It really isn’t as straightforward as I allowed myself to believe it would be!
I’m not starting to stress, yet. I know it will come to me. I have over a week left to submit it and I’m already two thirds into a written piece. It’s all good. But, yeah. Not as easy as I was kidding myself it would be a week ago!
And GEEZ LOUISE Glasgow is fucking coooooold right now! Yikes!
Anyway, I must go before my fingers fall off from being exposed trying this post out.
Ta ta!
So, Why The New Title?
I was just bored of Antipodean – The Right Side Up. It wasn’t really relevant to me any more and I wanted something different. Something that would represent my life as it is right now, with university taking the main focus but also something that evoked being where I am in the world too. In heraldic terms, the unicorn represents Scotland, and with Glasgow being the heart (if not the capital) of Scotland – and it also having MY heart – the wonderful alliterative draw of “University & Unicorns” revealed itself.
Unicorns are also mythical beings. Only looking at the Wikipedia entry did I see this association with “entrapment” and how unicorns are depicted on tapestries in which virgins, fertility and love feature. The poor unicorn is a sucker for a damsel in distress it seems. I guess there was something fantastical and romantic that appealed in the idea of the unicorn, and that heraldic link to Scotland only served to strengthen that allure.
I guess I could have just as easily called the blog “The bird that never sang”, in relation to the city crest of Glasgow, but “University & Unicorns” it is. I like that it blends fact and fantasy. Objectivity and focus with myths and dreams.
Perhaps I should have gone for “The dreamer that wants to move mountains”?
Nah! That would be too much of a nod to Jim Kerr and the stuff he spouts. Although I like the ethos behind “only dreamers move mountains” – I’m pretty sure he doesn’t see me in any way as “kindred” to him. How very dare I?! What have I ever moved? What worthless dreams do I have? They may be worthless to him, but they are not to me. All that I have to do is prove it to myself. The only validation I need is of my own worth to myself. Today, I am worthy! I am “worth it” – and I never needed to hear that from Jim Kerr. I needed to hear that from Larelle Read!
Welcome to… University & Unicorns!
Hello Again – Let Us Reintroduce Ourselves…
This blog has been dormant for some time and…I’m not entirely sure what the impetus for this is…but let’s run with it.
And since this blog has lain dormant for so long, and there may be new people who are coming to have a gander at it, then let us reintroduce ourselves.
My name is Larelle and I run a blog called Priptona’s Simple Minds Space. As you may have deduced from the title, it is ostensibly a Simple Minds blog (*cough* Jim Kerr *cough*) and broader music blog. That “broadness” just kept on creeping into the personal more and more, especially during the pandemic when not a lot was happening in the music scene, especially when it came to Simple Minds. This past year has changed that. My personal life has changed in the past year also. This resulted in so much blending of the personal and the SM fan blog becoming somewhat blurred.
Last December I enrolled into the Open University to take a Diploma in Higher Education in English. Creative Writing was the pull. I want to be able to write better. I want to be able to use language better and express myself better and I am hoping that Creative Writing will give me the tools I need. It may eventually lead me to somewhere else…who knows?
I’m now about one third of the way through my second module of my uni diploma. I have four modules to complete before I get my diploma – roughly another two and a half years to go.
The last time we “spoke”, I was still living in Luton with my Other Half, Em. At the end of 2019 there were some dramatic life changes that happened. Within the space of a few days we moved to Glasgow (after a whirlwind search to buy a property here) and my mum passed away. I spent Christmas 2019 in Australia, praying I would make it out there in time to be with mum. It wasn’t to be and it is something I still probably haven’t fully come to terms with.
At that point I felt relieved for Mum, I still do. The pain she had been suffering for years was over and she was in peace. I was also starting life in a new city, in a new part of the country – a new country! Just a few months into life in Glasgow, Covid struck and the world went weird.
After a year, my coping mechanisms began to falter and … I dunno what happened, really. Shortly after settling into life here in Glasgow, and before the pandemic really took hold, we took in two rescue cats. A brother and sister called ASAP – a grey tabby, and Sultan – completely black (I had wanted a black cat for YEARS). These were the names they had originally been given by their owner, although their foster carer had been calling them Oscar and Sheba. I didn’t like either Oscar (I couldn’t have a cat with the same name as one of my nephews! Lol) or Sheba (I much preferred the name Sultan – especially that she was female and having a female cat called Sultan fucked up with gender norms. Lol), so decided I’d stick with their original names. They had been named after rappers. ASAP was after A$AP Rocky (I think is how you are meant to spell his name) – ASAP being an acronym for Always Strive And Prosper, which I thought was really cool.
I hold my hands up in admitting I rushed in to getting the cats. They were young. Less than a year old, and I told myself I would get mature cats. Cats 7 years+ because they were harder to re-home. But no one seemed to want ASAP and Sultan. They were awaiting re-homing for MONTHS! They had been with Cats Protection since early December and it was nearing the end of February in 2020 and no one seemed to want them.
Long story short we got them and they were lovely but not without their problems, esp. ASAP. After about 15 months with us, ASAP developed a urinary tract problem. The timing wasn’t great. Em was going through a bad mental health period and when ASAP required emergency veterinary treatment, things came to a head. We made the gut-wrenching decision to return the cats to Cats Protection. This doesn’t really explain entirely what happened. And I feel an enormous amount of guilt. I still miss them both so much. I pray they are in a new loving home (I do know that they did get re-homed. I kept an eye on the Cats Protection FB page until I saw they were re-homed) and are having the most wonderful lives. I wish I could have continued to provide that for them.
Those months after weren’t that great for me. I felt relieved that the stress of the babies (I always referred to them as my babies. I still do.) was gone, but Em was in a mess and I wasn’t much better. Other things that used to be a comfort, namely the music of Simple Minds and Jim…just Jim as a kind of focus, muse, someone who would lift my spirits or have me believe in myself and being a force for positivity wasn’t really there for me. And when that happens I tend to start believing that he just HATES me and I stew on it and it just becomes my everything. And I know how incredibly sad that is! Like, for me, as a human being…to express how much this man means to me like that. I was incredibly low. Just sitting here thinking about it. Writing about it. Yeah…it’s not good.
University has been a fantastic diversion and focus. Of course, it doesn’t always work. I still have many of those hang ups. I still think FAAAAAR too much of Jim. But I am working on trying to not have him be the focus of EVERYTHING and instead just be the focus of fun. The man he was at the beginning. The man who rekindled that teenage swooning girl. The one who has the absolute hots for him circa 1979-1984, with particular emphasis on 1981-82. The man I first *really* saw in 2014 (from 1979) and went “Holy fucking shit! That’s Jim Kerr?! Why did nobody tell me how fucking HOT he was?!” Eight years on and….I’m still obsessing! And man…what a journey! Never thought I’d get to meet him a million times over. Never thought, for good or bad…that he’d end up knowing be my name and have a face like a Russian winter every time he sees me, as if he’s thinking “Oh, fuck. Here she comes. HELP!!” In one respect, the notoriety is fun. In another, I miss the days when he seemed happy to see me. But that’s all my doing, I guess.
I can’t regret anything though, can I?
It’s an endless roller-coaster. Just recently I had another massive wobble. It involved the new Simple Minds album and personalised signings. I’ll leave it at that, as I don’t want to go over old ground. It is what it is and whether I have done my usual thing of over-analysing and misinterpreting or Jim really has finally had enough of me and wants me to take a fucking hint (short of a brick being thrown directly at my head, I tend not to see the obvious…but boy can I get fixated on and over-analyse stuff that actually ISN’T there!) – I need to just keep things in perspective and focus on the uni. “Get a life” – as they say.
So, where are we at now? It’s early December, 2022. I am, as I stated earlier, about one third the way through module ‘A112: Cultures’. This module is run through the Arts and Humanities faculty of the Open University. I started study in January, 2022. I have already completed module ‘A111: Introducing the Arts and humanities’ in which I scored a 75% mark, which is a clear pass (10 percentage points off a distinction mark – I can’t tell you how happy I was with that result).
A111 gave us a broad look at the arts and humanities subjects, so we worked through art, art history, classical studies, creative writing, English literature, music, philosophy, and religious studies. My choice of continuing on into A112 was solely for the Creative Writing aspect of it. The first 4 weeks of the new module was focused on Classical Studies and I really struggled with that and didn’t engage with it very well. Also, I was having my latest ‘Jim wobble’ so that didn’t really help. Despite that, I did really well with my first assignment of the module and scored a 79 mark.
And, well…I think we’re pretty much up-to-date. Of course I am hoping most posts won’t be quite this long in future but I may just rant from time-to-time for the catharsis of getting things off my chest. I’m not sure I still want to even call the blog “Antipodean – The Right Side Up” anymore. I used to feel like I was literally “the right side up” for being on the other side of the world. It was a pun I liked as the word ‘antipodean’ means ‘two places diametrically opposed to one another’ or ‘something that is the exact opposite or contrary to another’. My father-in-law, Gilly (Gilbert), used to say I was from “Upsidedownland” and so…. being here I felt I was “the right side up.” These days, I don’t know if I still ‘feel’ The Right Side Up…
What I call this blog instead, I know not. I will give it some thought. In the meantime, hello! Thanks for reading, and please be warned, I may talk about Jim’s nipples from time to time. Lol
Adios, amigos!
