Let’s go fly a kite.

A gratifying number of people have enquired why it is exactly that I’m leaving Picturehouse, the group who have provided me with so many great memories, a wealth of experience, occasionally the warm thrill of confusion - that space cadet glow, one might say - and the material for Do You Do Any Wings? (still available at http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/do-you-do-any-wings/1087266 in case you didn’t want to scroll back through three years of bloggery). 

For some reason, today’s answer wasn’t the usual “Well, er, time to move on, new challenges, baby on the way, that sort of thing….”, I simply said “Have you ever flown a kite? You know how you get up, and it’s really blustery, so you get wrapped up all warm, and you go out and run along trying to get your kite in the air? You’ve put the thing together, you’ve unraveled the big ball of string, you’ve seen it crash into the ground a couple of times, but then when you finally get it aloft it goes soaring away, you can just about control it, occasionally it crashes again, but then you get it flying once more, and it’s swooping, dipping, swirling - it’s exhilarating, exciting and you think it’s the best and freest feeling in the world, and you vow to come back on the next breezy day and do it all again?”

“And you do. And again, and again. And then one windy morning you wake up and you look out of the curtains and you can see that it’s great kite flying weather, but you don’t really want to put on all your warm clothes and find the bag with the kite in and unravel  the string and stomp up the hill, even though you know this time you might  have the best flight ever, you think that you may just stay in bed this time? Well, that’s the feeling I get now”.

”I think that’s the most stupid metaphor I’ve ever heard” she said.