Unless mine eyes doth deceive me, I believe it’s the 20th September.

It’s been exactly twelve months since I decided to find money in London.

I found 21p about two hours ago – this brings my total to:

£9.72

In case you’d like to know what £9.72 looks like – take a look at this:

Yes, I took a picture of my findings.

Not only that, but I did more:

I even have some favourite coins:

I didn’t so much find these as rescue them. Aww just look at them. Neglected for who knows how long.

AND THEY SAID IT COULDN’T BE DONE – THEY SAID THAT I WAS MAD!

MWAHAHAHAHA…

Well, I now have five days left of my finding money on the streets of London in one calendar year. It all comes to an end on September 20th.

I did intend to spend the found money on something kitsch but you know, I’ve grown quite attached to the collection.

In addition, I genuinely don’t believe retailers would accept some of the coins from me. For instance, I found 5p a couple of hours ago against a wall. I only noticed it because it was circular, not because it was silver which it most certainly was not. I was doing some gentle stretching exercises and waiting for my GPS to connect to a satellite prior to my going for a run. I happened to look down and saw something in the mud. I extricated it and found it was 5p but it had obviously been in the mud for a while as it was almost totally black. Would a retailer accept that? Some of my other coins have been battered and bruised after lying in the road for a lengthy period of time and are barely recognisable as coins. I shall take a picture of my found coins on the 20th.

The (silly) thing is that I now feel quite protective of these coins. They’ve been neglected and I found them. Some of the finds have been so bizarre that it’s almost as if (as NG stated last year) the money was finding me. For instance – Going to Regent’s Park in the middle of a field, doing some stretching exercising after a run, looking down and seeing 5p by my feet. Another time, I was carrying a heavy shopping bag and needed to put it down. I walked for about 20 metres to to find a suitable location to put the bag down and get out of the way of other people on the pavement. When I finally stopped I saw next to my bag 5p.

I may as well mention some bad points:

Last week I found a £5 note at Angel tube. I picked it up and placed it in the middle of my Oyster Card wallet. I carried it for a while and then put the wallet in my bag only to discover that the £5 had somehow slipped out. I had it for about ten minutes at most.

I saw a 20p piece at the top of an escalator repeatedly nudging the teeth at the top were the metal steps go under, at London Bridge. I couldn’t pick it up as it was rush-hour and bending down anywhere in a fast moving crowd of the type seen at a main London station is not a good idea, let alone doing it on a moving escalator.

Last Saturday I saw 2p on top of a bus-stop when the bus I was on stopped there. I seriously considered getting off the bus and jumping up when no one was looking and giggle maniacally afterwards. In the end though I stayed on the bus.

There was 1p at London Bridge behind some temporary metal railings (behind which some building work was taking place) for at least three weeks. I walked past last week and it was gone. It taunted me. TAUNTED ME IT DID!

LOST, all lost!

I’ll compose another post on the 20th with my final total.

Hey, hello Oobely-boo. I’ve been away for a bit but now I’m back.

Well, hi Lix, where the fuck have you been?

Oh you know, busy and stuff.

No.

Well, I got a Facebook account and got wrapped up in it.

Oooh, you two timing…TWO TIMER!

Well, Facebook is addictive. You can stalk your friends and everything and chat to them and catch up and stuff and play inane games and take stupid quizzes and oooh, all sorts.

Will you add me as a friend so we can chat?

Err, no! I don’t want to be stalked by you, you nutter.

But hang on, I’m you.

Yes. I don’t want to be anywhere near you. Goodbye.

Ha, did you see what I did there? Penny Chews? Penny Tubes? No? Oh never mind…

Disaster!

I have had some laughable money finding experiences over the last week.

As I run up to the final few weeks of my twelve month experiment in finding money in London, I am getting search-crazy. Mistakes and cracks are starting appear.

To sum up:

I found four one penny pieces in two days. Great stuff.  These I put in the special compartment in my bag prior to safe transference to my found-money-box at home. When I came to do this I discovered that there was a hole in my money compartment and two of the pennies had fallen out. Oh no!

Why was this a disaster? Well, I am a lazy human at times and when receiving change from purchases at tills, I sometimes just throw the change in my bag instead of putting it in my purse. Here it accumulates in the bottom of my bag and every once in a while I empty it.

It’s like finding treasure!

Well, any coins falling through the compartment in my bag that houses my found coins goes straight to the bottom – to join the treasure.

ARGH! Two of the pennies fell through and I didn’t know which ones they were.

I couldn’t just pick any two pennies because they might not be the ones I found. I want to buy something purely with the money I’ve found. It’s not about the amount, it’s about the coins themselves.

So that was two coins I’d ‘lost’.

Yesterday though, I found a two pence and twenty pence piece. WOOOOO!

Thank you money.

I was on the Tube on Wednesday night going to my book club at Tottenham Court Road (yes, I joined a book club – that’ll last long!).

I was standing up. It was sardines. Anyhow, I looked down the aisle and sawa shiny one pence. Hmm, thinks I – how can I pick it up amongst this crowd?

I decided upon a plan of maneuvering myself along the aisle to get closer to the coin and then pick it up when the train stops. I had two stops in which to do this before TCR. Chancery Lane and Holborn. In earnest, I started my plan. I walked inbetween people making excuses and apologising and was soon standing near the penny. I looked down and saw a SECOND penny, half obscured by a man’s shoe. Wow, this could be a two penny haul. But how? How to get the two pennies? I couldn’t bend down on the moving train, pick up a penny and ask a man to move his foot so that I could get the other one.

To bend over on a moving Tube is to invite falling over, complaints from other passengers due to lack of space, bags falling off shoulders and whacking people. RIGHT.Chancery Lane came, and went. Some people were standing over the coins – picking them up would mean asking them to move. I will pick them up at Holborn.

At Holborn, come what may, I will pick up the pennies.

If you’re thinking there’s a happy outcome to this story, I’m sorry, there isn’t.

The train pulled in to Holborn and a raft of people got off and scores got on. No chance of bending down in an aisle for pennies. The train was now really packed and in the 90 seconds or so it takes to get from Holborn to TCR, I could not rescue the coins.

This is now the second time I have broken my Golden (and only) Rule: If I see a coin and it is safe to pick up, I MUST pick it up. However embarrassing it may be.

I have failed. I shall diminish and go into the West, and remain Lix

Here are some pictures of plants taken at the same time with the flash on and then off.

The contrast is amazing I think:

I got up early on Saturday and did some milling around.

Before that though, here’s some pics I took on Friday of a nice cloud formation.

London Saturday:

Miscellaneous:

Well, I tasked myself today to get ten interesting pictures whilst I was out.

I was going to have a day in the National Portrait Gallery. Rab told me that there was a Gay Icons exhibit on there and I thought it sounded interesting and decided to do that instead of going around the main gallery

From the NPG website:

Title: In the American West: Richard Avedon, Photographs 1979-1984

Author: Laura Wilson

ISBN: 0810959283

Quite simply, my favourite book. Its actually a collection of photographs taken over a five year period in, as the title suggests – the American West. I came across this book about ten years ago when it was in the possession of my friend D. I coveted it ever since! During a  ‘clear out’ a few years after I first knew him,  D very kindly gave it to me as he knew how much I prized it.

Its a book I come back to time and time again.

Roberto Lopez, Oil field worker.
Lyons, Texas, 09/28/80

Charlene Van Tighem, Physical Therapist
Augusta, Montona 06/26/83

James Kimberlin, Drifter
State Road 18, Hobbs, New Mexico, 10/07/80

Myrna Sandoval, eighteen year old, and her sister Claudia, fourteen year old.
El Paso, Texas, 04/20/82

Clarence Lippard – Drifter
Insterstate 80, Sparks, Nevada 08/29/83

Richard Garber, Drifter
Interstate 15, Provo, Utah, 08/20/80

Benson James, Drifter
Route 66, Gallup, New Mexico, 06/30/79

Avedon’s method was to place his subject against a large sheet of white paper and photograph them with a Deardorff (means nothing to me!), a large camera similar to those used by portrait photographers.
Avedon ‘chose men and women who work at hard, uncelebrated jobs, the people who are often ignored or overlooked’. It is though, the drifters who amaze me. Who are they? How have they come to be where they are? Where are they from? Where are they going? What stories could they tell about their life drifting from place to place?

For me, these pictures are mesmerising on their own, but along with an explanation, they become something more.

As Laura Wilson explains –

‘On August 22nd, 1980, we were eating breakfast at Keith’s Lunch and Breakfast in Provo, Utah. A man sat facing us, two booths away. He was gaunt and dirty. He gestured, rolled his eyes, crying as he talked to himself. It was difficult to tell his age. He looked different than the local people in the booths around him. We wondered how to approach him. But when Avedon introduced himself, the man was glad to talk.
His name was Richard Garber. Months before, he had come up from the south to look for work in Utah. He talked about losing his car. It had been impounded for a parking violation and had no money to get it back. His life was painful, he said, and he wanted to die. He went up into the mountains, alone, for four weeks. He had no food. Once he heard the whine of a train whistle as it snaked along the Utah Valley. He hated the sound. “A train whistle is the loneliest sound you’ll ever hear.”
Just that moring Gaber had walked down from the mountains. He had tried to telephone his mother in a distant state but was told she had been put in a mental institution. He was standing on the corner of Center Street, next to the post office, when a man gave him some money for breakfast at Keith’s.
In front of the white seamless paper, in the shade, with only a thin jacket over his ‘Mardis Gras’ T–shirt, he shivered.’

Makes me tearful every single time I read that.

An amazing piece of work.

Yes.

I haven’t been blogging for a few weeks now and I’ve come to discover about myself that I blog in the same manner as I treat a whole host of other things – namely, flitting between keen interest and total apathy. I do have a sort of bi-polar relationship with life in this regard.

I get bored.

I think perhaps Hunter S. Thompson had the right idea. Or certainly, an idea. Why try to eke out a life of attempting to stay fit, stave off the inexorable tide of old age when you can get wasted and high every night, have some wild times and then kill yourself at 50. He died from a self inflicted gun shot at the age of 67 having said that he’d lived 17 years more than he intended to.

He said that he would have felt totally trapped without the knowledge that he could commit suicide at any moment. Even though I’m not suicidal I can totally empathise with that statement.

I get bored.

Being the confused and bored sinecurist that I am, I don’t achieve much in life as my main aim is, well, I don’t know what my main aim is in life. I bimble and mill I think.

I’ve not been running for a couple of months now and it’s getting to me. I use running as a way of being outside, being on my own, being challenged by the elements, looking around, recharging my interest in everything. I’ve had a really unlucky run of injuries and ailments that started with my tearing my calf muscle. I then pulled a muscle in my neck which took weeks to heal properly, then (and still ongoing) aggravation of the muscle that runs over the outer section of the hip causing it to swell and cause bad pain. Finally, I have a trapped nerve in my upper inner-thigh. How incredibly frustrating. So much so, I cannot fully elucidate my feelings of frustration here.

I have at times just felt like giving up and crying.

Hmm, so what else have I been doing in the past few weeks?

I went to see a play at the National Theatre called ‘Time and the Conways’ which I thought was very good. I enjoyed it enormously.

I moved to South London. I now live in Brockley which although leafy in the part I’m in, is incredibly dull. I said I would give it three months and I shall. I shall then reassess my position.

I went to Saddlers Wells Ballet with Holwah to see Romeo and Juliet. I really really enjoyed it.

I started playing five-a-side with the boys from IT again but had to stop due to my injuries and a niggling persistant thought that the boys didn’t really approve of a girl playing. I suspect it’s a male-bonding thing. I think it best if I just let them play on their own.

I have beaten my money finding target of £5 by quite a long way. I am not going to give the final amount away until the deadline in September.

I joined a film group

I joined a book club

I have made some lovely friends

I was attempting to grow my hair but I  got sick of it’s unruly nature. I let it have its own way too much and how did it repay me? It became a mop! So now I have a number four shave and I feel so much better. Despite the stares I get from people who I suspect, think I’m some kind of militant lesbian, I like having my hair short. It’s not a statement. It’s not an attention seeking gimmick. I like my hair very short.

D and S got a kitten on Sunday. She is about three weeks old and has been given the name Monkey. We’ve only seen her in total for about one minute as she has taken to hiding either behind the sofa or behind some books on the bottom of the bookshelf. This is apparently normal and we should let her come out in her own time. I was talking to D this evening when a little furry black ball of fluff with big eyes and big pointy ears peeped out from behind the sofa. Monkey stared at me for about 15 seconds until I said ‘Helloooo’ in that tone of voice that I usually save for babies and then disappeared again.

I’ve probably done some other stuff.

I think I’m back in the blogging mood.

My last money news was that I had £3.96

Well, my simian friend let me give you an update. My finds since then have seen me pass the £4 mark!

BUT.WAIT.

Coming home from work yesterday mulling over my goal of reaching the promised land of £5 in 12 calendar months I looked in the road and saw something black. It was too circular to be a squashed bottle top (the scurge of my money finding adventures) so I decided to check it out. I bent over to get a better look but still couldn’t make out what it was so I decided to pick it up. As I reached for it I noticed some tell-tale ridges around its rim and realised with immense glee that it could only be a £1 coin. And indeed it was. It was thick with oil and dirt. I think this was why no one had picked it up. It just didn’t look like a coin. Actually, it didn’t look much like anything.

I have to say that I have rarely been happier. Finding money is excellent. I was about 200 metres from home and I simply could not stop smiling. I hoped D and S were in so I could tell me of my good news that I’d reached my £5 goal after months of toil (yes it was toil!). They were in but as always, did not share my joy when I skipped in, merely telling me that I am a criminal for not handing in cash that I’ve found! Splitters!

I found 5p in Brighton a couple of weeks ago also. I have mixed in with my collection the money that I’ve found in Birmingham, Brighton and Coventry. What a quandry. Now I can’t buy some piece of kitsch tat with money found purely in London.

In total so far – the money I’ve found amounts to -

£5.28!

and NG said I would be lucky to find £2.00!

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Go me!

Let’s sing -

Sunny day – Sweepin’ the clouds away,
On my way to where the air is sweet.
Can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street.

Come and play, everything’s A-OK
Friendly neighbors there that’s where we meet
Can you tell me how to get
How to get to Sesame Street

It’s a magic carpet ride.  Every door will open wide.
Happy people like you.  Happy people who.

Like a beautiful sunny day sweepin’ the clouds away
On my way to where the air is sweet
Can you tell me how to get,
How to get to Sesame street, how to get to Sesame Street,   How to get to . . .