Nasim Marie Jafry's Blog, page 24

The poetry of dementia

My Danish stepdad is (gently) forgetting his English as his dementia progresses and  last night he, quite fabulously, referred to fish fingers as 'fish pins'.  Lamp posts are now 'light poles' and lifeguards are 'sea rangers'. My mum has been ill and  as we waited for her having out-patient tests yesterday, he said: 'She is no ordinary, everyday human being of any kind, she is my wife.' Tautological, but wonderful (and heartbreaking). Later, my mum and I were chatting about how...

Tagore & Virginia

One of my friends is big on Tagore and when I told him I'm into birds now he mentioned the tiny poems Stray Birds. I dipped in - really dipped in, just read fragments - but found it all a bit sentimental - almost like 326 spiritual greetings cards, the kind you find in New Age shops - though these are translations, so maybe something is lost.
This one's a gem though, number 2:


'O troupe of little vagrants of the world, leave your footprints in my words.'
And I love this, from Virginia's essay '...

Now

I can now -  I hope - tell the difference between a blue tit, a coal tit and a chaffinch.
And I love that Skotska skata is Swedish for Scottish magpie (my stepnieces told me.)
Also, they have never heard of The Bridge , the new weekend Scandi crime drama. I find it too choppy (no pun intended), I can't really follow, but the scariest thing so far is one of the characters has been wearing a wig all along - with no explanation. She tore it off in a fit of anger after finding out her (late) hu...

Lipstick turns into green eyeliner

ME gives me crazy dreams, cinematic, and it's a boring sin to tell your dreams to others - unless they are actually in them - but I'm telling you anyway. I was enrolled at an Italian university and needed photos, there was a booth across the road, and I put on lipstick but it was not lipstick but green eyeliner, no matter how many times I tried to smudge it off and reapply. Eventually, I said to the booth woman, I don't care, please take the photo anyway and she was not happy. I've started re...

Gangsters

Saw some gorgeous birds in garden today, was sunny all afternoon (freezing out of sun, though). I've borrowed binoculars, amazing how much more you can see, rather than just blurs on a branch (though they wreck your arms). I watched a blackbird in profile, high up on a fir tree, its eye glinting and beak orange like a cartoon, opening its mouth to sing over and over. It seems ridiculous but I'd never thought of birds opening their mouths to sing, I thought they just made chirpy noises (like w...

Fine and dandy

I was in the supermarket a few days ago and my shopping was more than I thought it should've been. The checkout woman looked at the till screen and drew a blank. I said, I'll check it when I have the receipt, I'll need to sit down first, and she said, No, you can do it here, love, and I said, I can't, I need to sit down to check, I'm chronically ill - my head had shut down - and she said, Oh, tell me about it, I'm never away from the doctor's just now! I'd heard her tell the previous customer...

Goodbye, Penguin Book of English Verse!

This is why Kindles are good: there is no glue.

I hate throwing out my uni books, but this was getting ridiculous.

Osamu Dazai, La Vie Murmureé

Some things just speak to you and you want them straight  away, having discovered they exist. This is how I felt seeing the trailer for La Vie Murmureé (The Whispered Life), a French documentary about the Japanese writer Dazai. I'd never heard of Osamu Dazai. I watched the clip a few times, it just hypnotised me. I wanted to know more about this writer, who killed himself when he was just 38. I could find no info on the DVD in France (or UK or USA). I know Scott of The Friday Project - m...

Damp

Writing on the good and bad of Kindle, Fictionbitch says: My whole life has been wedded to the physicality of books and their shelves, the way they sat beside my bed on the little white bookcase my parents bought me, or on the planks and bricks I set up in my first-ever flat...' I love this, it resonates so much, the connection we have with the physicality of books (and book shelves!). This weekend, I was reading Teju Cole in the bath and afterwards the book was damp with crinkled pages, and...

Guffaw

This made me guffaw.

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