Current mood:	happy
Current music:	Small Change - Lodger

Smiling
Spent today in Valentines Park, which I barely even knew existed before this week, but which is big and beautiful and contains a rather odd mansion full of art and fancy dress and the odd Victorian fixture, as well as being home to baby frogs (one of which some small children inadvertently squashed after we pointed them out; that's the problem with trying to share the joy of nature). Then ate pizza and watched The Little Norse Prince, an early Ghibli animation by the guy who isn't Miyazaki, and who hadn't found his style yet when he made this, and which frankly made no sense whatsoever though we think it *might* be a figurative biography of retrosoup. And walking home afterwards in the solstice gloaming, I was already thinking about how the sky gets so unbearably beautiful at this time of year that it's almost tragic, when the fireworks started. Maybe reading Donleavy's Darcy Dancer on the Tube helped, but I realised on my journey's final stage that I was ablaze with that pure and synchronised misty, mysterious clarity that I got the first few times I drank, all without having touched a drop today (though who knows what effect that orange squash might have had? I don't normally touch the stuff these days). Whereas what I get from booze these days is more...comfort, maybe conviviality?* Not sensations to be scorned by any means, but it helps to remember these specifics when one is in the business of emotional engineering, and aren't we all?

*It varies further drink by drink, of course. Consider Saturday when, between a picnic on the pink wine (and horror stories) and a Prom on pints (and mainlined eighties), I had a couple of bottles of a cider called Green Goblin, and found myself suddenly wanting to go to bridges with blondes and/or subvert the intelligence institutions of the USA.