Positivity found

Amongst the tedium of my often depressing working day in cashdayjob I often find moments, and occasionally entire days, which stand out as beacons of positive thought. This was one of those rare days. Read a great blog entry this morning, which I have now lost, that spoke of 'platforms'; using a mundane job or a bad situation as a base from which to climb to another level. I have posted about this before and quote (or maybe paraphrase) again the Alanis Morrisette line "You gave me a platform from which to jump beyond myself". I keep coming back to this and was so inspired to hear someone else write on the exact subject; reminds me of a friend in New York who is an actress waiting tables and myself in Edinburgh, an artist specialising in food retail. The world is full of those who try to take positive elements from the jobs they are forced to do in order to pay the bills. Today was perkier than usual for me because I had the imminent sale of a painting to jolly me along; it was reserved yesterday in Ritchie's gallery, and I was also entertaining myself attempting to come up with a name for a potential business venture. Hours of fun in that one and I have enough potential titles for a lifetime, or a few LPs worth of songs. Still to beat my new favourite, rediscovered while listening to Bowie last night; from the first line of "Eight Line Poem" - 'Tactful Cactus'. Funnily enough, there is a film production company in London called.. Tactful Cactus. Someone else was bound to get there first, its just so good. I would also, of course, like to retain my originality without resorting to hero worship or plagarism; so that kind of makes the going a little tougher as there are a lot of clever wordsmiths out there. Luckily, there are also a lot of words...

This evening I tootled off to the Marchmont Gallery in my finally mobile and MOTd car; the fact that Marchmont resembles the Arctic Circle was a minor drawback, but I managed to secure a space after a very spinney three-point-turn and a very close encounter with a wheelie bin. Its a great little gallery and does that thing really well where there are loads of little interesting bits and pieces as well as paintings and ceramics, so it is all too easy to find yourself leaving lighter of purse. I was adament not to squander the money I had saved on a slightly-less-than-expected car repair bill, but I ended up coming home with a tell-tale bubble wrap package of embossed ceramic tree ornaments. They are now on my wall as they are far too cool to be limited to December and I can't have a tree anyway due to the destructive/playful instincts of Twig the kit. My angels looked great in a few locations around the gallery and I felt positively proud for once, my usual self criticism deserting me briefly... a warm glow on another freezy night.