Merry Christmas

From California. Contrary to the picture, the sun hasn't been shining while I've been here - yesterday was the first day we had, and it ended oh so soon. But I took advantage of the weather to drive through Golden Gate Park and see the new De Young museum which recently opened. A Meuron-deHerzog building, it's a copper-clad moden building where there was once a neo-classic pillared (and dangerously unstable) museum. It's an interesting building, but with too many awkward corners inside and they've not yet figured out how to elegantly use the big open spaces.

It's a bittersweet holiday. Lovely to be home, visiting friends and family, shopping, relaxing, eating, eating, drinking, and eating. But my grandmother's been slowly dying and my mum flew back for the last week to see her. We're now waiting for her to slip away, hoping she's comfortable. We know my grandmother's ready, and my mum says that she's prepared as well - I can't imagine it's easy and I hope she's not being brave for our sakes. Last year we lost my uncle at Christmas so it's all a bit sad, really.

To help out, I'm doing all of the cooking. A standing rib roast, cioppino, mash, asparagus and cherry pie for dessert. Hopefully it will all come off well.

Not much more to do at the moment, but to wish everyone a happy and safe holiday season.

An old-fashioned wedding?

Today same sex unions became legal in the UK. Same sex couples now have the same legal rights as heterosexual married couples over next of kin, inheritance, tax benefits, etc. It's a joyous day - I just need to find a man ...

Lunched yesterday with Jana who, despite battling cancer, remains sharp, gossipy, insightful and great fun. I drank too much wine, however and feel sluggish and unwilling to get on with the work I have to do.

The freelancing continues. I'm working at Agency for a few days this week and meeting with headhunters and a couple of agencies. Hopefully will have more work lined up for January before I leave on hols!

Left hanging?

Sorry about that.

As most of you know, I was made redundant (laid off) from Agency.com last month. It wasn't a complete surprise as we'd had a duplicated creative structure for more than a year, but it's always a blow to one's pride to be told one isn't wanted anymore. Still, it's all very amicable. They were very fair and I'm likely to be doing some freelance work for them. In the meantime, I've been meeting with agencies and other people about freelancing. It's a bit scary, but something I think I should try. And it's an interesting experience to market oneself after marketing others for so long.

So if anyone needs a experience designer / strategist, let me know. Please. No really, please!

All in all, I'm actually upbeat about it. And I've had a good break from work for the first time in my life. People I speak to are very optimistic about me finding something else - it's a very buoyant marketplace. So hopefully I won't be hocking my possessions anytime soon.

Kelly's right. This is a big ball of suck ...

Perilous times ahead

Tuesday morning I make a potentially life-changing presentation. Can't say more than though, and not just because of the cloud of tequila I've been under ever since finding out. But Tuesday all will be revealed - as either high drama or low comedy.

Why Maxine's smelled of cheese

Every week someone on my team presents something they think is a 'great idea'. We do this to look outside the medium for inspiration and to give each of the team experience in presenting. Recently, Miranda chose to present the work of American photographer Cindy Sherman. In her early work, Sherman used herself as a subject to create an implied cinematic moment that didn't really exist. In other words, she dressed like Marilyn Monroe, but wasn't impersonating her. As an exercise, we took some of the Sherman's photography and made up a 'background story'. It's neither a critique of Sherman's work nor an attempt to guess what she was doing, rather it was inspiration for a narrative that each of the team would invent.

This is mine:

Maxine’s smelled of cheese.

Rumour was that before the war, Maxine’s, the notorious meeting place of Paris’ rich, pseudo-intellectual and bored, was a cheese shop. And on the nights when the air wasn’t thick with smoke or cheap perfume or vomit, one could trace the faint ancient smell of whey and moldy curd. Newcomers to the salon would involuntarily sniff the air, unsure if the source of the moldy smell was the aging building or the aging Maxine.

It was unlikely Maxine noticed their reaction. She’d long been in the habit of graciously but dismissively greeting the ever-changing crowd, unless they were young, handsome or vaguely interested. For Maxine, her salon was less the heart of artistic Paris and more a marketplace for a stream of endless, inexperienced lovers who shared her bed but who fled when the morning light revealed the thick smear of makeup on the pillowcases, the wild frizz of her chemically black hair, the undeniable age imprinted on her naked body and the discernable smell of fromage.

And so the evenings flew by, and the crowds, invited first to distract her from the pain of losing her beloved Claude (a man who though being a gifted and generous lover had the gall to die in his own wife’s bed) stayed so long that she scarcely remembered what it was like to be alone. Except in those first hours of the day when she would get up and wash the memory and smell of last night’s lover away, tame her frizz into the stiff helmet of bobbed hair, and reapply the war mask of powder, paint and perfume.

It wasn’t until she was finished with her ritual rearmament that she noticed the shocking and curious sight of the young man sleeping, half wrapped in her sheets, spread territorially across her bed.

“Who the hell is that?”, she thought and finished her cigarette.

Deep thought for the day

'What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning, with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?'
Karen Blixen