AngelBread.: Karen's House.

HEY GUYS.

For those of you who don't know, I was born in, and lived for the first four years of my little life in Liverpool. Yes, my mam is a scouser, and I suppose I am too at heart, except the accent is long faded.

Karen, my Godmother and my mother lived right next to each other on Marmaduke Street. Their flats were demolished not so long ago to make way for new accommodation, but since the tories have seized power once again that's not going to happen.

Needless to say there's nothing there now but a field full of daisies pushing through the rubble.

Karen lives literally two minutes away from Penny Lane.

...which is a huge disappointment. It is pretty much, a junction and a burnt out pub that looks like a toilet.

Also: Strawberry Fields is a gate.

I'm allowed to say these things cause my family are Mickey Mousers;)

From the mouth of Mother:-

"I adore the way that plant just registers on your retina"

On the train up to Lime Street I finished reading this amazing book called Your Presence Is Required At Suvanto. It's about a Finnish asylum in the 1920s full of rich, indolent and mentally unstable women. Everyone I start telling about it immediately jumps to the conclusion that it's about the horrors of electroshock therapy, "girl interrupted" of the past sorta thing. Well, it's not. It's lovely. And something about Karen's house made me reflect on the atmosphere that the author describes.

No, Karen's house is not an asylum,

just a place full of respite.

Go into the bathroom, first, you've been journeying all day, and observe the memory of almonds in the surroundings.

A religious print is propped, gold and gaudy at the bottom of the stairs (which you cannot walk up barefoot, as you will undoubtedly splinter).

The house has an air of being both incomplete and wonderfully whole simultaneously.

It is as though, in completing every aspect of the house, it would cease to be so lucid, so on the edge of something.

The air is also thick, syrupy - drowning even the most alert individual in a kindness induced coma.

The radiators are eternally blazing, reminding you of their glow whenever you walk past in a daze.

It is not possible to sit on the edge of the furniture, the pillows are too steep, and, besides, your feet won't touch the floor and you may appear faintly ridiculous.

Daylight brings with it fragmented rainbow, stuttering blindly through the stain-glass which occurs at every window.

You find yourself anchored to corners.

And, oh goodness, the flowers, flowers, flowers,

the food, food, food.

A real house with heavy doors and parquet floors and a clock whose tick replaces that dull ache in

your molars - in your skull.

Tiredness is customary here, welcome, one could say.

A handful of raspberries, juice marring your fingernails.

Jersey Royals, from a brown paper bag (skins still on and thyme).

A pitcher of milk, sweetened with nutmeg of course, allows the insomnia to dwindle.

Lone pictures hanging on thickly painted walls remind you that you are not in a non-space, and that thoughts can arrive in isolation (sporadic and artistic).

This, you decide, is a place of burning solace, made all the more apparent by your mother's friendship with it's owner.

Two women, faces turned towards the window at a complete angle, so that they both resemble cameos worn most fashionably around the neck.

Two women, who stand slowly against the tall ceilings, baking for forty minutes with silver spoons.

Voices like little glowing things wrapped in something that insulates.

Like pale moths blundering against muslin.