Bitching about Timeline, and bidding goodbye to May

Much to my own dismay, my Facebook was recently updated to the new 'Timeline' style. Ever since they introduced this I thought it looked confusing and pretentious - especially the 'cover photos' which tend to either show some holiday scene (look at me, I go on holiday), some modelling shots (look at me, I'm gorgeous) or a photo from a night out (I am soooo coooool and drunk). Well I chose the holiday scene, but enough on that.

Timeline got me thinking about the passing of time, especially as we reach the middle of 2012.

May saw the return of my more natural blonde barnet; the beginning of a heavy addiction to fake tan; my first driving lessons; some serious raiding of rubbish skips; visits to my boyfriend in Yorkshire; the loss of my grandmother; my last workshops at college before I go to University.

June is going to begin with my grandmother's funeral in Scotland; followed by a detour to Yorkshire; returning to tutoring; my nineteenth birthday; interviewing for an exciting summer job opportunity; finishing my Final Major Project, assembling the show and having it exhibited; and a second exhibition organized by Bear on a Bicycle Records, which will be at Truck store on Cowley Road; finishing up at college for good; and sorting a summer holiday out!

It's been a self indulgent blog post, but basically, I'm feeling pretty happy with progress.

And here's a shameless plug for the 28th June, be there:

Breakfast Blog, take two

So it was over a month ago that I wrote "Introduction to Sunday Breakfast Blog" and have since completely failed to deliver the Sunday weekly breakfast reviews!
It wasn't a Sunday, nor has it been a week, and the photos I took were terrible, but I'm going to have a short crack at this.

On Monday morning I was running late to college on account of staying up until 3:30am and subsequently failing to wake up. A busy day in sculpture awaited me, and I was too aware that if I didn't eat a good breakfast then I would probably scream at somebody.

Breakfast objectives:
- Tasty
- Filling
- Healthy
- Cheap
- Central Oxford
- Situated somewhere I won't look like a total loser eating breakfast on their own

Not too hard then.

Having enjoyed a tasty muesli, banana, honey and yoghurt breakfast at Mortons on New Inn Hall Street whilst tutoring on Sunday, I decided it would be a safe bet, but for variety (and with it safe in mind that the aforementioned cafe doesn't do any cooked items) chose their Covered Market location.
The menu in this cafe has your standard breakfast bits - toast rack, that nice muesli thing, porridge, full English/veggie full English, but I decided to risk it and ask if I could just have beans on toast with some scrambled eggs. They were very compliant, and after 10% student discount it only set me back £2.61 - only 11p more than the cereal option! As a poor student this got a massive thumbs up.

(It must've been good - I practically demolished it before remembering my camera!)

Due to the covered location, this cafe is quite dark and intimate - exactly what you want if you're battling the hangover from hell, hiding your morning-after-the-night-before hook-up from the light of day, or, like me, just plain exhausted and not ready to admit that the sun's come up.

My only criticism is that the breakfast arrived with white toast. I tend to avoid carbohydrates most of the time anyway, and especially the white ones, but the penniless artist in me forced it down anyway. My mistake - next time I'll just ask for brown, or mushrooms and tomato.

Mortons have delivered brilliantly all-round this week though, as I tutored four hours of drawing lessons upstairs in the New Inn Hall Street cafe (during quiet times) and the staff were kind to let us stay so long. They also do the most wonderful carrot and orange cake, which I recommend to anyone feeling a bit naughty.

Until the next time, or a few times after that!

Something like an eulogy

This weekend I lost my pen pal.

I don’t receive an awful lot of post, and when I do it tends to be nothing more exciting than a bank statement. For as long as I can remember I have written letters to Joan in Scotland, and she has written back, as her poor hearing meant we didn’t have much luck communicating on the phone.
Joan is my grandmother, but she’s never been “granny” – it sounded old and unfashionable, and she was never either of those things.

Despite being a few weeks from her 91st birthday, I rather naively imagined that Joan would never die, or at least not so soon. I’m a little fuzzy on dates and time frames but I understand that she was in hospital, I wrote to her, she wrote to me, she came out of hospital, I wrote, she wrote, she went back in and it didn’t strike me as very serious, I wrote, I wrote, then the doctors said she was dying.
It didn’t seem possible. I hadn’t made the visit I thought about for months, she hadn’t met my boyfriend, I hadn’t sent her a photo of my new blonde hair colour (her response to my ever-changing do was that “Gentlemen prefer blondes.”) Selfishly, I wasn’t ready for Joan to die.

The day after the news, I got the train to Dumfries, meeting my dad during one of the changes.
When we got to the hospital, I knew the second I caught a glimpse of her that Joan wasn’t the woman I had known anymore. No possible description could avoid sounding shocking, and the image haunts me. Joan was much better than the pain she would have been in without the morphine. I only stayed in Scotland for a little over 24 hours – there was nothing I could have done besides making peace with what was going to happen. The doctors had predicted, before my dad even called me, that she might not make it overnight. Defiant until the end, Joan surprised them with an extra week.

Joan died overnight in hospital at the start of the weekend, and the news was a relief to me. Like I said, Joan was better than that hospital. Before, I never had any feelings about the afterlife, but now I am completely sure that she is once again the laughing, smiling, well-groomed, anecdote-sharing, perfect-English-speaking, strong woman who I knew. I have never been surer that somewhere else, someone is getting hell for saying “me and him” rather than “him and I.” And they don’t know it yet, but they are bloody fortunate for it.

I could write forever but I shan’t.
With my love as always Joan. See you later.


(I know it's not very trendy to like James Blunt's music, but something about this song makes a lot of sense to me right now.)

Frank Turner wrote this song after his grandmother died. Whenever I have listened to it before, it makes me feel closer to my other late grandma. It makes the whole thing feel a little less sad.

Quitting Quitting

Today a slight problem of mine was brought to my attention in a heated conversation with my boyfriend:

Kat - I don't want to learn how to drive anymore - I'm not good at it, I can't afford a car and I won't be able to drive in London anyway.
G - You sound like a brat.
(Silence until Sheffield.)

(My face)

It's like a punch in the stomach - when somebody tells you something you probably knew deep down but didn't want to admit.

When I was a kid my parents signed me up to a lot of lessons. Tennis, ballet, piano, swimming club. And you'd think that these days when it comes to the 'extra-curricular' section of my CV I'd have an endless list of medals and conquests. But you'd be wrong.
See, whilst I was signed up, I never managed to stick at anything too long. I remember my first (and only) Irish dancing lesson, at what must have been about six years old. My mum was sat next to me, and the 'big girls' started to dance around the hall partnered with the younger ones so skillfully. Upon seeing their confidence, I told my mum I couldn't do it, I wasn't going to join in, and I wouldn't go to the lessons. Why? Because I was scared that when it was my chance to get up that I'd be rubbish at it.

Over the years I've cut away any commitment to skill, and apparently I didn't even notice. Within art I cut down on my observational drawings and painting when I became aware of how much better other people were compared to me, and now I often opt for strange conceptual ideas, safe in the knowledge that it's a strong point for me.
But when I start my Fine Art degree in September, there'll be someone who can do that better too. And if I creep away, then I can't really imagine what leg I have to stand on.

I don't want to be a quitter, especially when I'm only letting myself down every time. And even if it took having to silently hate my boyfriend for twenty minutes to learn a lesson, then it was worth it.

Because I, Katrina Buchanan, refuse to quit anymore. And even though I'm shit at steering and I stall all the time and I drive at about 2mph in the very centre of the road - I am going to get better - and George, I hope you enjoy this - about as better as a female driver can get.

Buchanan out.

So tell me, where do I find the crap?

Dear people, I've said it before and I'm saying it again - where is the crap at?

Currently making small/medium sized sculptures from found materials, this is an example of how it would look if I could find the goddamn materials. These aren't materials I found, but borrowed, from a cupboard at college.
Old tubing, planks of wood, scraps of metal, glass, tape, grit, cutlery, fabric, chairs, tables, skateboards...

I've started to think that refuse skips would be good places to find items of a reasonable size, for no cost, and no extra environmental impact (no one wants them anyway).
If anybody (preferably near Thame/Oxford) has a neighbour with a skip outside their house at the moment please let me know.

Alternatively if you happen to be one of the wonderful people with a garage of crap they haven't got round to chucking out, let me come play in it!