The clear sky a long-forgotten shade of blue.
Low sun no longer starkly white, unfurling yellow shafts between buildings,
Warmly caressing the face.
A lightness of step, free of heavy coat, bare fingers feeling no sting.
It smells like spring.

This time next month I’ll be on my way back from a long weekend in Rome. I took this in the fading light of a Saturday afternoon last February.

I haven’t been taking any photos lately, a situation I need to remedy, but in the meantime I’ll be dipping into my Flickr collections.

Since I’m trying to figure out the logistics of a trip to Israel soon, here’s a picture taken in the Kidron Valley (between the Mount of Olives and the Temple Mount) on my day trip to Jerusalem from Egypt on an eerily misty day last January:

As a mixed Afro-Caribbean/white Londoner I’m no stranger to The Conversation and I’ve been meaning to write about it myself. I’ve had a couple of variations of it recently and each encounter lingers irritatingly in my mind.

Some of the commenters on the Guardian piece seem to be missing the point, perhaps intentionally. “Where are you from?” is a perfectly valid question in the inane small-talk that fills the void of initial acquaintance, right up there with “What’s your name?” and “Where do you work?”

The point is not the question, it’s the response to the answer.

It’s the “Where are you really from?” as if you’re lying, the confused look in response to “I was born here”, the “You don’t look like you’re from London” on the highly odd assumption that Londoners “look like” anything when the city has been a hub of diversity for centuries.

It’s the tone that differentiates The Conversation from straightforward sociableness and curiosity, the stilted probing until the questioner gets a satisfactory answer, which illicits an a-ha, that’s why then.

It reveals something about the person’s preconceptions, I think, which country they decide I must be from. I’ve had everything from Morocco to India to Brazil to Egypt, to Ethiopia, which I thought the strangest of the many uninvited guesses. I suppose hearing I was born and raised in an outer London borough must be a bit of a let-down.

As much as I want to, I’ve never even been to Barbados, where my mother was born, although I’m working on it.

Unfortunately, The Conversation has happened so many times, I bristle even when people are genuinely asking the question. Clearly I can’t do anything about attitudes, but what I can do is take it less seriously.

By the way, today is my seventh blogiversary. (Yes, I purposely chose 03/03/03 to launch my domain.) I think this is the first time I’ve been blogging even semi-regularly enough to actually recognise it. I started this site when I was a university student spending too much time reading blogs and admiring their pretty layouts, and designing my own was the perfect tool of procrastination while coursework and deadlines piled up.

Since then I’ve dipped in and out of posting — some of the ‘outs’ have lasted as much as a year — but now I feel like writing here regularly and there are things I want to say. So at the seven-year mark it’s the start of a new chapter. Now I just need to find time to put together the new layout I’ve had mind for months.

As a coda to last week’s post on the Esquire profile of Roger Ebert, he made a moving appearance on Oprah yesterday test-driving the computer voice being developed by piecing together words from his DVD commentaries to sound like his voice pre-cancer, rather than a standard text-to-speech robot.

“Yes, “Roger Jr.” needs to be smoother in tone and steadier in pacing, but the little rascal is good. To hear him coming from my own computer made me ridiculously happy,” he says on his website.

To see him so happy, active and productive is inspiring.

The video is, of course, up on YouTube.

I have a big mouth. Which is ostensibly an odd thing for an introvert such as myself to say. The problem is sometimes I overthink a response to the point of not actually speaking at all, while other times I blurt a response without thinking at all.

And so, when a … friend? acquaintance? friendly acquaintance who is now becoming a friend? … said that she wanted to go to Rome for a long weekend and would go alone if she didn’t have someone to go with, I said something like “Don’t go on your own, I’ll come.” And then I hoped it was one of those conversations where things are said and forgotten and no more is said. The next time I saw her she was excitedly telling people we were going away together.

Now, don’t get me wrong — she’s a lovely person and I’m glad we’re becoming friends; Rome, from what I briefly saw of it one weekend last year, is wonderful; and I’m sure we’ll have a great time. I’m apparently incapable of turning down an opportunity to travel when there’s someone to go with. But even aside from my debt repayment kick, I have my heart set on going to the Middle East in the spring, before renewing my passport over the summer, thereby keeping the Israeli stamps in my old passport and ensuring I won’t be barred from travelling to large swathes of the Arab world for the next 10 years. Paying for an unplanned 4-day jaunt to an expensive tourist hub won’t make either of those things any easier.

And yet, I’m excited. Solo travel (which I may end up doing again in the Middle East — details at this point are up in the air) has its rewards, but there’s a lot to be said for having someone to share the experience, point out the sights to, and sit down for a meal and a drink with at the end of the day.

So, Rome will be my first trip of 2010…I wonder what else I’ll blurt myself into before the year is out.

I usually avoid reading anything in the “Torygraph” because it’s likely to put me in a bad mood (that applies double to The Daily Mail, known in journalistic circles as “The Daily Fascist“). But occasionally something will catch my attention on Google News and without thinking I’ll click on the link.

Case in point: There was a study out today about the effectiveness of group cognitive behavioural therapy in dealing with chronic back pain. The Telegraph’s lead?

Back pain may be all in the mind, according to researchers who recommend sufferers should seek psychological counselling.

Funny that, because the Independent article on the subject says this:

Zara Hansen, a member the research team from the University of Warwick said: “We are not saying back pain is all in the mind. It is very much a physical problem but the way you understand it affects the way you manage it.

Having suffered chronic back pain that became increasingly debilitating with my periods over the years and escalated to the point of sciatica, I’ve had my share of doctors and nurses suggest there’s nothing wrong with me except my desk job, as if I had nothing better to do with my time than subject myself to humiliation.

When laparascopic surgery a year ago removed bleeding endometriosis from my uterosacral ligaments (the sacrum being the base of the spine) and relieved the pain, I wanted to go back to those so-called medical professionals and give them what for. I often wonder how many other women have needlessly been condescendingly turned away with another pack of worthless paracetemol because their GPs and physiotherapists and orthopaedic surgeons haven’t done their research.

In the last year I’ve been able to work and travel like a normal person and — almost — forget what it’s like to be brought to tears trying to walk across my tiny living room. But last night on the Tube heading back from work I was suddenly struck with pain, not so much in the lower back but in the middle of my spine. It was there again as I sat at my desk this afternoon, and tonight as I stepped out of the building and walked down the street, shoots of pain from my pelvis down my leg caught my breath with each step and I hobbled towards the station, home feeling like a million miles away. Was that in my mind, hacks?

Yesterday I came across the beautifully written Esquire profile of American film critic Roger Ebert.

I knew of Ebert through my love of classic Hollywood, but I hadn’t been aware that he lost his lower jaw — and his speech — to cancer.

The article packs a punch with its phrasing and imagery throughout, but I was particularly struck by this:

He lived his life through microphones.

But now everything he says must be written, either first on his laptop and funneled through speakers or, as he usually prefers, on some kind of paper. His new life is lived through Times New Roman and chicken scratch.

And through the vivid technicolor of his recollections, as, for example, in two recent posts on his Chicago Sun-Times blog about his London. The London of Jermyn Street and Dickensian landlords and meandering walks.

Such a pleasure to come across the blog, not just rich with film discussion but sharp observations on news and politics, interspersed with snapshots of a life well lived.

The paragraph excerpted above goes on:

So many words, so much writing — it’s like a kind of explosion is taking place on the second floor of his brownstone. It’s not the food or the drink he worries about anymore — I went thru a period when I obsessed about root beer + Steak + Shake malts, he writes on a blue Post-it note — but how many more words he can get out in the time he has left. In this living room, lined with thousands more books, words are the single most valuable thing in the world. They are gold bricks. Here idle chatter doesn’t exist; that would be like lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills. Here there are only sentences and paragraphs divided by section breaks. Every word has meaning.

I’ve been doing some housekeeping on the back end of the site, upgrading from the ancient versions of Wordpress and the Now Reading plugin I’ve been running throughout my on-again, off-again relationship with blogging. It feels so shiny and modern back here. (Which is something I suppose, because on the front end I’m still long overdue a layout redesign and blogroll update.)

I have a couple of posts brewing, but in line with my ongoing attempts to get my financial house in order, today I want to talk about the fact that credit card interest rates in the UK have hit a 12-year high.

My main card provider recently quietly jacked up the interest rate on my account to 24.9% — that’s basically 50 times the BofE base rate. But that did me a favour, because it gave me the nudge I needed to transfer the balance from that and my second card to a 0% offer. I was hesitant because I didn’t want to open another credit card account, but not doing so has essentially had me throwing money away in interest on a monthly basis. The banks are reporting multi-billion-pound profits — they don’t need my hard-earned cash.

Coincidently after reading the above-linked piece in the Guardian, I got a call checking a couple of details to approve my application for the new account. (I read that somewhere as a money-saving tip — if you apply online for a credit card with a 0% offer and they say they need more info, give it to them because it doesn’t mean you’re not approved.)

So now my two card balances are being consolidated to one, saving me a few hundred pounds in interest over the coming months. It’ll mean some tweaking of my Wesabe and debt snowball/budget spreadsheet setup, which now won’t be as tidy as I would like in my weird random orderliness, but it shows the whole point of that setup is working — taking control of my finances and identifying ways to pay off my debts faster. Before, I wouldn’t have been paying enough attention to notice that my interest rate had changed; when my previous 0% offers expired I didn’t get around to switching, having the vague idea that I’d pay off the balances so it wouldn’t matter, and yet here we are.

It feels good to be taking charge of the situation and watching the balance fall. I’m so looking forward to pay day next week to tackle another chunk.

*my literal tidiness kick lasted about a week at the of last month…now I’m back to living in my usual clothes-strewn pigsty.