5'10" ish, of the female gender, blue eyes, my own breasts, hair and teeth, long awkward limbs that do things I didn't ask them to.

I live in a tiny flat in a tiny town in Cornwall, with my boyfriend and our three-year-old son, Oscar.

Shy in person.  Very English, in an eccentric, old-fashioned kind of a way.  Constantly embarassed by my nerdyness.  Outspoken and outgoing in writing and within my own head.  I think of myself as an introverted extrovert.  Perfectly happy dreaming my life away.  Full of ideas, hopes, visions, horrors and fears.

I love exchanging with other passionately individual and creative people, of any age or sex.  I prefer snail-mail always, but I'm happy to exhange short emails.  I absolutely LOVE postcards (and they are a neat and simple, personal way to start a penpal exchange, I find)... I prefer them with scenes from your town... I'm not a postcard 'collector' in the pernickety, filing-cabinet, alphabetical-order sense of the word... so I don't want them neat, I want them written and scribbled all over, drawn on and rained on and bent and smudged please!

I like to swap things and exchange gifts:  Cards, magazine cuttings, stationary, artwork, things I can use in collages, CD mixes etc...  I love to get things relavent to other people's towns (like newspaper cuttings, postcards, brochures...) and will reply in kind :-)

I write long, rambling letters full of convulouted ideas and stories, which don't always make much sense, so be prepared to be confused!

NOTE:  I'm very happily attached and I'm NOT looking for a relationship or anything of that nature, so please don't waste your time and mine.

I hate having to say all this, and I know it's going to be ignored by the main perpetrators anyway, but I'll put it in capitals just incase you're skimming through and catch it: 

NO, NO NO!  I DO NOT WANT TO 'CHAT'... it's utterly pointless and boring and depressing and usually means you're not intrested (or interesting) enough to actually have a real friendship or that you just want some grubby, revolting internet flirt for ten minutes ... If I wanted to chat, I'd walk down the road and ask a stranger about the weather forecast or the price of stamps or something... 

Thank you!

Also, please at the very least introduce yourself before trying to add me as a friend.  I get friend requests of this nature daily and it's frankly rather irritating.  If we've not even been introduced, your request will be ignored... And pleeeeeease, don't just write a message asking 'How r u?'... because that just makes me want to punch you in the face ;-)

My true love is the English language.  I have recently finished my first novel and I am tentatively starting another.  At my current pace it might take me the rest of my existence and my very last breath to complete as I am incredibly fastidious but also very easily distracted.  I'm also working on a couple of short stories.  I love all forms of art and design.  I have several unruly collage books and notepads on the go, I draw and paint and take photographs.  I am a vegan and love nature and animals (and even people, sometimes).

I work in a charity shop, but this is merely a front to cover up my dangerous addiction to second-hand books and clothing.

LOVES:  Music; Morrissey; Live Music; Poetry; Poets; Prose; The Written Word; Art; Artists; William Morris; The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; Dante Gabriel Rossetti; John Everett Millais; Keats; Shelley; Byron; Robert Graves; Dylan Thomas; Deco; Art Nouveau; Gustav Klimt; Alfons Mucha; Antoni Gaudi; Museums; Galleries; Trees; The Night Sky; Cats; Bats; Bees; Butterflies; Birds; Seasons; Weather; My Little Family; Ancient Greek Myth; American History, Culture, Art And Literature (particularly of the Deep South); Edward Hopper; Norman Rockwell; Al Parker; 40's and 50's Advertisements; Existentialism; Elegance; Wit; Oscar Wilde; Lewis Carroll; Louis Wain; Postcards; Photography; Hats; Clothes; Shoes; Jewellery; Handmade Things; Leaves; The Sea; Beaches; Pirates; Shipwrecks; Handwriting; Letters; Green Things; Long Baths; La Petite Mort; Films; Film Noir; Humprey Bogart; Lauren Bacall; James Stewart; Robert Mitchum; Tom Waits; Guitars; Nick Cave; Candles; Fruit; Dreams; Cooking; Soup; Being In Bed (alone or otherwise); Matches; The Moon; Tea; Crisps; Coastal Towns; Paradoxes; Contradictions; Idiosyncrasies; Harmony; Dischord; Other People. 

LOATHES:  The Dark; Meat; Reality TV (especially music 'talent' shows); The Limitations Of The Human Body; My Neighbours; Rudeness; Abuse; Misogyny; Politics; Txt Spk; Liquorice; Doctors; Crassness; Pop Stars; Journalists; Busy Crowded Cities; Horror Films; Chick Lit.; Guttony; Money; Other People.

I Had a Dream, Joe:



Morrissey, The Smiths, Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds, Tom Waits, Birthday Party, Joy Division, New Order, Leonard Cohen, Eels, M. Ward, The National, Siouxsie And The Banshees, Current 93, Sparks, The Slits, X-Ray Specs, The Blackheart Prosession, Smog, And Also The Trees, Cranes, Mogwai, Einsturzende Neubauten, Mum, Dresden Dolls, Antony And The Johnsons, The Cure (pre Wild Mood Swings but including Bloodflowers and a few songs from 'The Cure'), Chameleons, Echo And The Bunnymen, Nick Drake, The Psychedelic Furs, Bauhaus, Mr. David Viner, Jaques Brel, Nina Simone, Elvis Presley, The Clash, Portishead, Beth Gibbons And Rustin' Man, Nico, Joni Mitchell, Richard Hawley, Roy Orbision, Cat Power, David Bowie, Low, Prokofiev, Saint Saens' 'Carnival Of The Animals', Chopin's 'Raindrops', Ravel's 'Bolero', Mozart's 'Requiem', PJ Harvey, Einsturzende Neubauten, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Smog, Sufjan Stevens, Emily Haines, Blanche, Wildbirds and Peacedrums, Elliot Smith, Soap & Skin, Mercury Rev, Horse Feathers, The Handsome Family, Joanna Newsom, Noir Désir, Kate Bush, ... There are many, many more which I'm sure I'll add as they come to mind.

Inland Empire, The Big Sleep, Wild At Heart, Wings Of Desire, Donnie Darko, A Taste Of Honey, The Big Lebowski, Fargo, Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Pan's Labyrinth, Ghostbusters (1 & 2), Withnail And I, A Lonely Place, The Third Man, Lolita (With Jeremy Irons), The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, The Lady From Shanghai, High Sierra, The Night Of The Hunter, Alice In Wonderland, The Jungle Book, The Sword In The Stone, Barton Fink, D.O.A, Adaptation, Lost In Translation, Blue Velvet, Down By Law, Some Like It Hot, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Punch Drunk Love, The Wedding Singer, Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, Momento, Labyrinth, The Graduate, Harvey (with James Stewart), North By Northwest, Vertigo, Naked Gun, Airplane, Wall-e, Mr. Bean's Holiday, Gilda, Brick, The Life Aquatic, Watchmen, There Will Be Blood, No Country For Old Men, Charlie Chaplin Films: Circus, Modern Times, City Lights, The Great Dictator, The Blob, The Wild One, Låt Den Rätte Komma In...

I don't really watch television much.  I really only watch comedy or the odd documentary on art or history... sometimes I'll watch the news... but more than fifteen minutes of news and I have to be held back from throwing myself down the stairs.

I love Twin Peaks.  Louis Theroux.  I like Curb Your Enthusiasm, anything with Reeves and Mortimer, Father Ted, Black Books, Never Mind The Buzzcocks.

Radio:  I love radio four for documentaries, poetry and film and arts programmes; radio three for when I'm writing or drawing (classical, jazz, swing etc) and radio two in the evenings can be quite... interesting.

Vadimir Nabokov, Franz Kafka, Edgar Allen Poe, Ernest Hemmingway, Frederick Douglass, Rudyard Kipling, Nick Cave, Herman Melville, Mervyn Peake, Mark Twain, A S Byatt, Patrick White, Charles Baudelaire, Byron, P B Shelley, Dante Gabriel Rossetti,  Christina Rossetti, George Meredith, John Keats, J P Sartre, A. A. Milne, W B Yeats, Lewis Carroll, Lucy Ellman, Carol Adams, Suzanne Cleminshaw, Margret Atwood, D H Lawrence, Goethe, Tennyson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Seamus Heaney, Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch, Truman Capote, Oscar Wilde, Edward Gorey, Edward Lear, R. D. Laing, A. E. Housman, Dr. Suess, Robert Graves, Louis Mc Niece, Samuel Beckett, Tennesse Williams, Robert Louis Stevenson, Dylan Thomas, John Betjeman, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Harper Lee, Alexi Sayle, Fernando Pessoa, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Cyril Connolly, John Steinbeck, Alan Bennett, Virginia Woolf, Muriel Rukeyser, Evelyn Waugh, ... Again, this is by no means an exhaustive list.

(From 'The Lotos-Eaters') :

'...The charmed sunset linger’d low adown
In the red West: thro’ mountain clefts the dale
Was seen far inland, and the yellow down
Border’d with palm, and many a winding vale
And meadow, set with slender galingale;
A land where all things always seem’d the same!
And round about the keel with faces pale,
Dark faces pale against that rosy flame,
The mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters came...'

- Alfred Lord Tennyson

"I love life so fiercely, so desperately, that nothing good can come of it:  I mean the physical facts of life, the sun, the grass, youth.  It's a much more terrible vice than cocaine, it costs me nothing, and there is an endless abundance of it, with no limits:  and I devour, devour.  How it will end, I don't know..."

- Pasolini

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinion, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation." 

- Oscar Wilde

Oh the irony.