Meet me on Half Moon Street (with somebody else’s money that we can spend)

I think another urge to this blog is I've been so obsessed by the "spiritual/poetical" in the last year, which all started (maybe) after being taken by the novels of Hermann Hesse when I was far too young for it to be sensible. Not that it's been bad. But something sad (but beautiful) (and secret) that happened recently has led to me wanting to calm down. Even in my writing: to write about real everyday stuff, and my life, is a need. I feel over the last two years of living in the city the thread that made everything so simple and wonderful had just run a little thin, and I'd like to make it thicker again.

Tonight I'm in Cardiff, my housemates/friends are going out for a dinner but I can't afford it. I'd like to go but plan on staying in, watching the snooker, which has kept me busy for the last few weeks of being ill with a cold, then ear infection. I'm thinking about giving notice on my room at the house on Albany rd, Cardiff. I love it here, the house is beautiful with lots of the original features, woodwork and glass, with high ceilings that I love, and I now have two grainy, warm paintings of Old London to put up on my wall in my room, which go perfectly with the long Chinese rice-paper scroll a friend sent me a couple of years ago, which is spread across two walls in order for it to fit in.

If I gave the house up I'd miss it, and miss having the space it gives me away from home. But it is a bit of an indulgence at the moment considering that I don't even work in Cardiff, only spend weekends and the odd weekday here, and am paying 260 pound (no pound sign on my laptop :( ) per month for rent, and need to save as I'm hoping to go to university in the summer.

The best advice I've had so far is to leave it a month or two so that I know more about university (I've applied to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London), but that would mean a couple of months of guilt at not saving. I'll see what happens, but have to decide in the next few days whether to stay another month, as this month's rent is due and I have to give notice now if I don't want to hang on here any longer, and pay next month's. Another reason I'm delaying it I think is incase the London university doesn't accept me and I end up going through clearing and, maybe, studying in Cardiff, which is an outside chance. With this being my first house away from home, I've been spoilt, and it'd be hard to find a place as good, and as cheap, in such a nice a street, with such a well-positioned moon! (see post below)

Had a nice night out with friends here last night, catching up on everything as I hadn't seen everyone since the Christmas break. Spoke to Doctor Will for ages on film, a girl who used to live at the house, who likes her indie music more than my other current housemates, has just moved back in, and she was out with a friend of hers, Jess, who I spoke to of pagan culture (she had a the pagan emblem tatood [subtly] on her shoulder and had an interesting pagan upbringing in the historic Welsh town Machynlleth!), so that all made me further hesitate on giving up the house. Back home I'd miss that sense of newness I get here.

Today I listened to a radio program I downloaded ages ago off Connie's blog, lots of wonderful female lyricists and a magic old-style Pop song by a band called The Orchids (not the more modern indiepop band), but a 60s girl group. Connie mentioned how good it is that back in those days 14 year old girls in bands could actually look like fourteen year old girls, and this song has that pure expression and joy that has been sadly lost in "pop" as the mainstream now has it.

Listening to Connie do her program filled me with excitement at what's ahead too, if I did get to London. It'll be great to just live permanently in the city, as a student, not having to go home to work all the time, and there'd just be an endless amount of things to pursue in the spare time. I'd live the DiY dream. I feel I came to Cardiff very naive, needing to learn some harsh truths. I needed some dreams to break so my real ones could come through stronger (I spent a shocking few months at the end of last year as a promotions manager of a club here, which broke most of what was breakable). I could just give myself up to studies and let everything else happen outside of that, knowing that my future is being taken care while I'm doing it. If that isn't an embarrassing thought.

Meet Me On Half Moon Street

The title for this blog comes from a song by Tap Tap, the other band of Pete and the Pirates' singer Tom Sanders. Check them out... I also use that title I think as when I’m out at night in Cardiff, invariably coming home from a gig, walking back down the long, straight road to my house, if the sky is clear there's usually a low moon that looks like it's sitting there at the end of the street, which I can follow right to my house. There was one last night, and it made me sentimental. I'm soon to be leaving Cardiff for new adventures, and the memory of the moon on the long walks home will always stay with me. I'll probably never again have as perfectly a placed moon to follow home at night!

The impulse to write my own blog here came when I read my friend Connie's this morning. I often pop on to see what she has to say at (continuing the moon theme)
http://merelythemoon.blogspot.com/. This morning I read her latest news and followed a link from her page to a page from Laura, who I know distantly in Cardiff as the singer from yet another band worth checking out - Silence at Sea. Connie lives across the Atlantic from Laura and myself in Cardiff, and a love of DiY Pop music made the triangle.

It went like this...I fell for Connie's band The Bossettes when I found them online a few years ago, and Laura's band, Silence at Sea were one of the first bands I fell for after starting to come regularly to Cardiff from the mountains of home. (Knowing that music like that was being made was one of the major things in making me want to come here from home.) Connie used to do a radio program called University Underground in Pennsylvania. One day I sent her a song from Silence at Sea, which soon after she played in her program, and it made my day today to see that Connie and Laura have since become good friends, sending each other handmade items in the post and all. The magic of DiY Pop and the internet!

This blog is also in thanks to Connie for some helpful advice that she and her boyfriend Jason gave me recently.