castine.

the house sits high on the peninsula, and down the hill past the birches and pines you can see the inlets of water weaving in and out of the coastline. the snow is falling thickly now, and it begins to obscure the view of the water. the world outside becomes a composition of grey and white and we sit inside, cozy and warm. a purple mug of tea, barack obama next to the Bible, and each of us in our own world. one with a book, another tapping at a laptop, and me at this table.

i imagine buying a house here, an old shingled victorian house. a porch extending all around, columns supporting a second floor bay window, seven gables dotted on the roof. i could let it out in the summer, and spend winters here writing. the town of castine is small. no traffic signals, no police. just several hundred people who all know each other, living and raising children in this quiet place. there is a small school with just 60 students from age 5 to 13, a small town hall where meetings are held and votes are cast. a harbor that has known a vital and staggering past, but now sees only summer yachters and students from the local maritime academy. the local children play baseball on the remnants of an old english fort that has known bloodshed and death.

but could i? i could stare at this landscape for hours at a time, watching it change before me. every second it changes, the snow becomes too heavy on on a branch and it drops with a fat plop onto the ground, the harbor vanishes behind a silver screen of snow, the sun is obliterated in a grey sky. only the single birch tree set on the hill below the house stands firm, tall, unchanging.

and in that time, i wonder if my imagination and my mind have also been working, churning. probably not. i still struggle to write. i like to imagine a little ramshackle cottage at the edge of the sea somewhere. somewhere where i can be quiet and still, but my fear is that i'll enjoy that stillness so much that i won't write and that is my greatest fear: that my wish for the place and time to write will be granted but that it will have proven useless. that i may as well have stayed in london and sat myself in a quiet pub somewhere with my laptop and not wasted the time and money getting to wherever i got to.

though of course that isn't the reason why i'm in maine. i've come to sit and talk with darla, and it's been such a good time of conversation and reflection. this house seems to sit at the center of a giant snowglobe, but luckily we haven't had to be turned upside down and spun around for the snow to flurry down like it's doing now. i'll be sad to leave tomorrow, but there are so many things i look forward to, this christmas not the least. all this talk about years past makes me eagerly anticipate the years coming.

on not knowing everything

it turns out it can be useful not to know everything, and it's a skill to be able to resist google-ing or wiki-ing something you don't know as soon as you realize you don't know it. yes, i have an iPhone. but sometimes it's just nice not knowing.

on the train from putney to waterloo yesterday afternoon, i found my eyes were too tired to read (john stott's 'basic christianity') and there wasn't enough time to listen to the latest 'this american life' podcast (an hour long program). so i started thinking about the word 'edible.'

edible. edible, adj. edible...ness? edibility? n.

is something edible because it can be eaten, because it is meant to be eaten, or because it is beneficial to be eaten?

i wondered about this because i was doing a stationery order for the office. usually i wait to order stationery until there's a 'free chocolate box if you order over £100!' offer. i'd successfully done this last week, so i thought i'd try again yesterday. the small print, after all, only said '1 per order' and not '1 per customer.' but alas, sam informed me that it was 1 per customer after all. sensing my disappointment, she tried to cheer me up: 'i could send you some free batteries! how about 50 batteries, aa and aaa?' i told her the aaa's might come in handy, but not the aa's. 'sorry, i'd have to send you all of them. that's all i can offer you - nothing edible, i'm afraid.'

on the contrary, i thought. surely batteries are edible. they're narrow and slick enough to swallow. but then i thought no, edible means they are made for eating. but not everything is made - mushrooms can be edible, but lots are poisonous (my friend jon and i discussed this at great length during a walk on the heath last weekend) - therefore, inedible.

so by the time the train was pulling into waterloo (only 15 minutes from putney) i was satisfied that edible means (as merriam-webster confirms) 'fit to be eaten' or, as my brain put it, 'meant' to be eaten.

in general, thinking about precise denotations, subtle nuances and etymologies of words makes for fun entertainment when you're passing 15 minutes on a train.

adventures in korea

day 1: land. rent mobile phone. take bus to bun-dang. get picked up by my aunt who - after asking after my health, the flight, etc - asks me if i want to go shopping, cos if i want to go shopping we must go now! i say i don't need to but she asks if i'd like to so i say sure and we stop by her friend's shop. acquire two dresses. back at auntie's house we re-heat some delicious miyeok soup. so, so good.

day 2: get up to alarm at 8am, fall back asleep. auntie wakes me up at 11, saying mummy's friend is going to pick me up for lunch at 11.30! time to get up. mummy's friend and her daughter yunji come by and we go for a yummy lunch. not typical korean food, but korean nonetheless, and good too. nambu bus terminal. one ticket for namhae, please. don't get on the wrong bus! my mum warns on the phone. on the bus i'm sat next to a frail man who can't stop weeping, but i can't do anything about it. mummy picks me up from the bus station and she looks great :D

day 3: drive to nearest big town, jinju (pearl). get my hair done. shop. pick up some big sticks. go home and use the sticks and some yellow string to try to prop up the corn stalks that fell over in the heavy rain the night before. ama makes it look effortless while i'm standing there on the uneven soil just trying to keep all the bugs off me. i'm sent off to weed the grass around the putting green. demoted.

day 4: weed some more, fighting off the giant ants, spiders, grasshoppers and whatever else is lurking in the grass... help mum clean the guest rooms upstairs. drive over to the german village and house/garden land next to it. strange place - each house supposedly has a different national theme, and the appropriate kind of garden. we passed french, dutch, korean, japanese and finnish houses, but they all sorta looked the same... my dad came home in the evening with a new lawnmower, so we started mowing the grass and doing some more removal-of-unwanted-plant-just-cos-they're-not-pretty-enough-or-because-we-didn't-plan-for-them-to-be-there. then we visit a couple my parents know fairly well in the german village to give them an apple pie my dad picked up from the new costco that's opened up in busan. they have a new kitten.

beginning again

i stopped blogging when i realized i'd stopped writing in my journal. i assumed i was diverting all my sophisticated, abstract thoughts to the web rather than paper.

then i realized i just wasn't writing full stop. i've since begun journalling again - though not as faithfully as i was a few years ago - and i thought i'd have another go at blogging.

first blog: i leave for korea on sunday. i'll be there for ten days, visiting my parents and going on a blind date that my aunt set up for me. i might as well humor them, i think.