I went on a writing trip to London last week and started a couple of new songs! Very exciting to be working with someone I haven't seen in ages and has a history of brilliance. I can see the images in my mind as the music tells it's story so now I have to go for a long drive and come up with the lyrics. The songs are really playful and summery and I've woken up humming them for the past few days!

My plan is to get away after Mother's Day and give them my full attention.
The flowers look and smell amazing and everyday will be busy now so the songs will have to take a temporary back seat until Monday.
I love having something to work on!

I've sold three paintings too, which is wonderful. One day I'll have a place to paint where I can make as much mess as I like and get lots done. Actually last summer was great because I painted in the field and apart from a couple of kamikaze flies, it all went rather well.

Ok I want to read a bit of my book and switch off. Last night I dreamt about spiders. They don't bother me at all but in my dream there was a huge one and it was up to me to capture it. It got away and I followed it into a huge area filled with millions of spiders of all different shapes and sizes. Some were really wierd looking. Then I woke up. I just found out that spiders represent femine power. I dreamt all my teeth fell out the night before I went to london last week, which means lack of confidence, so maybe the trip was even better for me than I thought.

My sister is distracting me with cherry ice cream. I'm trying my best to stay off dairy but....cherry ice cream!! Got to go!!

My friend Dave Toase took these the other night.
So beautiful!

 

Romance is still alive!

St.Valentines Day in the flower shop was great - lots of happy men (and a few ladies too) wanting to surprise their loved ones. It was exciting and exhausting and I slept half of Sunday and then went up onto the fell to the comfort of the quiet and the soft earth under the fir trees. The cold was biting but I have a new wooly hat!

Oh check this website out if you're into photography. Absolutely beautiful!

www.emineceylan.com

Sometimes I get lost in what I'm doing and it feels like a good thing and sometimes I feel like I lose my self, which I think is not always a good thing.
Today I felt a bit fed up and wanted to escape. Escaping was out of the question though so I got on with filling buckets. I thought the way to get through this, if not to get away from it, is to change or accept it.
I couldn't change it but I knew I could at least do a couple of star jumps and get myself out of this mood.

Once I stopped fighting with myself and against the moment I was in, I felt better.

Maybe that's the trick, to not get too deep into it and glide along a bit. Let things be what they are and skip like a stone on the surface sometimes. Do what we need to do but don't 'become' it.
But when you are doing something and you become the doer of that thing, in a way you are part of it. If you are at one with it on some level you must be buzzing with it. If you were a colour and the thing was a colour and you were making it become something else or even more of itself would the colours not be mixing and would the vibration of the two parts meeting not be the same or similar, would they be a mixture of the two colours.

I know we are more than one thing. I know we are parts of the whole of everything. I just wonder sometimes what it is I'm supposed to be doing and then I think the doing isn't that important and it's more the being.
When I remembered today to be in the moment I felt really alive again. The flowers are so vibrant! When I close my eyes all I see is roses.

The Dutch guys brought us three deliveries of flowers to cut for Valentine's Day. They look beautiful and smell delicious!

My favourite flower today has to be the palest pink avalanche rose. They look like a garden rose - big heads and masses of petals! Like the kind my Grandad grew but his smelled amazing especially the deepest red, but these are soft and pale and feminine.

My friend Dave took a photo of a lovely cross we made using carnations and snowdrops. We were going to photograph it on the cobbles but the cloud didn't move.

I looked at the sky again when we brought the flowers inside and saw the starlings in flight. I love them! The feeling it gives me! They moved as a circle swarming this way and that and then swooping down, what a rush!

I went with my friend Dave to see Antonio Forcione in Manchester at the Royal Northern College of Music last night. I've seen him twice before, years ago. If he's playing near you I recommend going!
He was amazing - as were each member of his band. Absolutely brilliant!
www.antonioforcione.com

I mentioned it in the news section the other day but forgot to say here that I've put three new songs on myspace, they are first recordings so by no means the finished thing.

www.myspace.com/stephaniekirkham

"Why" "Charming Man" and "Caught Between Two Worlds"

I've written a bit about them on the forum...

Last week I dressed up as a Princess for the day!
The photo will be used to advertise days out at a Castle and when I have a copy of the poster I'll put it up on here. I think they might photoshop some little birds flying around me, children, knights and ofcourse the castle in the background.
My brother would probably ask when am I going to grow up, but I'd say maybe never and anyway I had a lovely day! It was a welcome change to wearing five layers of clothes and wrapping flowers!

It snowed overnight, the sun is out and I have a day off! Wonderful. I'm taking my sisters dog up onto the hills to sing to the trees and collect more heart shaped bits of fallen bark. I'm making a picture with them and when it's all glued I'll paint it. I remember my Grandma saying she still felt like a 15 year old girl inside. I know the feeling!

A friend of mine lent me a book called 'These is My Words.  The diary of Sarah Prine' by Nancy Turner.

I haven't read a story book for years but thought it'll do me good to lighten up and also to escape now and then.
I started reading it today and haven't been able to put it down. (other than to make carrot and corriander soup)
It's made me smile and cry and really get a sense of what life must have been like for a young girl travelling across America with her family in the 1800's.

I'm grateful I'm alive here and now that's for certain.

I went to London last Friday for the weekend with my mum and we saw Chicago at the Cambridge Theatre and had a wonderful time! The dancing and singing is amazing! The songs are brilliant! I bought the dvd today because we both just had to see the film again. I can't get the songs out of my head.

We looked round around the shops, (I nearly came to blows with an assistant in the Levi's shop but remembered to breathe and walk away) met probably the nicest shop assistant ever in the rug department of Liberties, (he made up for the crazy lady earlier that day) bought my niece a beautiful pink dress from China Town and rode the buses every which way around the centre, saw a fox run along the front of Buckingham Palace and spent Sunday having a good look around Camden where my mum bought an old but very nice pickle fork.

It was great! Just what we both needed before the madness of Valentine's Day is upon us.