Watch me smile.

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I'm little, red headed mess, more hair than mass or sense. All I really want to do is make something magical and show the world and have it be proud of me.

Saturday 21 February 2009

Chasing Lights.

I'm sitting in my usual computer spot - inbetween the radiator and the settee, thinking DO SOME ART DO SOME ART DO SOME ART DO SOME DAMN ART, NATALIE ROSE HILL. And my Mum keeps saying it too. And my uncle Michael, which is kinda random because he's living in my sisters bedroom even though he lives in Australia. Lucky sod. So, off today I went to Hastings, one of the best places in the world possibly. Daddy took me to Aunty Queenie's house (coolest name in the whole entire world?). She has the best house ever. And now we've just got home. I love driving home in the dark. I made my dad listen to Scott Mills and then fell asleep, chasing cats eyes and letting the road marks hypnotise and seduce me into dreamland.

I think it's weird that people think that I'm rich, just because I speak well and have nice clothes and have hobbies like doing art, or going to art galleries, and because I had my very own dressing room before we moved and because I've moved to 13 different houses in 13 years.

I'd like a hug. Give me a hug? Because I love you, I really do. And I thought it really sweet when you said about the bubblewrap, which is why my whole blog is even called bubblewrap, apart from the fact that my favorite song is called bubblewrap (youtube it - I can play it on the piano.) but the song and what you said are practically the same message. I hope you know that I'm talking to you, because I know that you like to read my blog alot, which is also nice.

So, I guess what I'm trying to say is tar me dar.

Tuesday 17 February 2009

Colour Makes My Heart Sing.

Here I sit, alone, in a little house, in the middle of a middle class town, sitting on the end of a cul-de-sac behind the spar and listening to S-club.
I listen to passing adolescents singing too high and too flat to a song written by some dude my Dad knows which my Mum, if she wasn't at yoga, would say had a lovely message, so:

Don't stop, never give up, hold your head high and reach the top. Let the world see what you have got - bring it all back to you. Dream of falling in love - any thing you've been thinking of. When the world gets to tough, bring it all back to you.

I have two pieces of mail waiting for me from when I got home this morning. One is a small package, a cuboid about the size of my big hand, maybe a bit bigger, and as deep as my little hand. It has yellow wrap with my name and adress on a small label in the corner. In the middle, in assorted colours is a big caption saying "Colour Makes My Heart Sing." Wow, I'm totally making a mental note to order from this place more often. The other is a rather proffesional looking rectangle. You know the sort, the ones that you use when you're trying to make a good impression on someone, so something in your brain tells you to fold your letter into three because yeah, that ought to give a good impression. Damn, I hope it's what I think it is.

I turn to the package first. I know what it is. I just thought it would have come quicker, but I'm not complaining, at least it got here eventually. I don't want to rip the beautiful, perfect packaging so I tear at the sellotape and stick it to my Mum's coffee table and carefully unfold the yellow sheet around the white box with the company's signiture paintbush logo on it and another "Colour Makes My Heart Sing" and I flick the switch and slowly open the box. I gasp at the beauty of it and take off my Vanessas to get a better look.

And, damn, theyre right. Coulour really does make my heart sing. Twelve little boxes of colour gasp back at me, just begging me to let them re-arrange and mix their beauty on my new acryllic paper. On the top of the case it says in the same style as the other captions "The Building Blocks of Beauty" Once again, they're right. I have bright blue, black, dark geen, brown, Bright green, tan, beige, red, yellow, orange, white, and a dark blue. It's comforting to know that I cna do magnificent things with these colours.

I put the paint back in its box and, since my Mum, who would tell me that my eyes look pretty when they totally don't, isn't in, I decide to leave the Vanessas off. I get the mood right for my next letter, make a milkshake, put on my favorite song (POV by McFly - I have to say I prefer the acoustic version of which I can play the whole of on piano (listen, you'll be impressed with me)if you were at all interested) and sit down in front of the letter, praying it be what I've been praying for all this time. I get my self comfortable on the hairy brown rug and sit and fidget for a moment. I finally get the guts to open this letter and yes, it is from who I hoped. Down the left side of the letter is capitalised "THE BRIT SCHOOL." underneath, is written:
"Applicant Name: Natalie Hill
Strand: Visual Arts & Design

Meeting date..."

NEED I SAY ANYMORE?
Bcause I am super happy and one can only hope that this adventure has just started.

So, here is a girl, alone at the end of a super dry cul-de-sac, throwing on her talking shoes, white cardigan pink scarf and of course, her Vanessas, running out of the door to treat herself to some Marks and Spencers own brand cola and possibly some new Frankies, because she painted the last ones so dark that they look more like Rochelles.

Monday 16 February 2009

Choo, Choo; Train Of Thought Coming Your Way.

My last blog has made me realise a lot of things. I've had the night to think about it, between drawing the most hugest picture of R-patz, as the crazy girl from Sugar magazine calls him and then claims that he is "swoonsville," which I'm almost sure should be a place, not a person. So, again, I drifted away on one of my trains of thought that could no way be followed had it been verbal, as I would have skipped bits out as my brain moved with such velocity through the motions of "R-Patz" and then developed once again my northern accent as the words tumble out of my lips with no means of pause. And yet again, there goes my train of thought, somewhat poetic. And in case you didn't connect, which I know that I wouldn't have, "R-Patz" is supposedly the bad-ass name for the rather respectable Robert Pattinson, who is total hotness, or swoonsville, as one might describe, but I don't know if I can actually fancy him because I found out the other day (from Rubey, the obsessed northerner who spends her Sundays researching her crush of the week and then reports back to me for some reason as I, as a girl, try to multi-task, doing some food-tech whilst consuming information being fed down from Leeds that I know will only ever come useful if I were to go on Junior Mastermindand have my specialist subject as "Rubey's Crushes," for example I know all of McFlys full names (Daniel Alan David Jones, Dougie Lee Poynter, Thomas Michael Fletcher and Harry Christopher Judd) and their birth dates, ages and star signs (March 12th, 22, Pisces, November 30th, 20, Saggitarius, 17th July, Cancer, 23 and 23rd January, Capricorn, also 23), Thanks Rubes. (and there goes another train of thought.)
Anyways, Rubey tells me that he has a double barrel surname (Thomas-Pattinson), and my steps are Thomas. So he might be my secret step-cousin or something. So would that be incest? Elly Wood says no. Fair enough.
So, my Mother's gone to pick up Grandmama Bridget to take her to the home Grandfather Thomas was living in to pick up his clothes as he sadly pre-deceased the living (obviously) and eventually died on Friday. And Grandmama, being her usual evil self, well she would, wouldn't she? Yes, the funerals scheduled for my birthday. What a crap birthday. Well, don't blame me when I become a goth. She's left a note and two pounds in twenty pences on top of my portrayal of R-Patz.
So here I am, defying everything. Because you can't put yourself in a blog, which is just what I've done, on my massive mission of edification which has somehow ended as a mission of self destruction which I don't know how to turn back. I'm like those tortured artists, the ones I've always loathed and despised for not making an effort which I never understood, which is probably why anyone even liked them in the first place. And it's a silly thing to be liked for, which is probably why I make such an effort, which is probably why it works out.

Sunday 15 February 2009

The Edge Of Sanity.

On my little pink thing I use as a stool to substitute my shortness lies a square brown book. It seems heavy but fragile and on it the words “NAtaLIe rOse HILL” and a rainbow are printed on in the glitter glue I begged Tandra for last Christmas. It’s really heavy and smells like my Vera Wang (my scent, if you didn’t get that part) and it always throws me back, because I always forget about it until I lift up the pink thing to get my secret stash of Oreos, lift the top off, and hear something fall off and thud on the floor. Because, or maybe in spite of the fact that I can never quite stop it from falling, I’m really protective of that book. Anyways, once you open the cover, you realise that it’s actually the cover that’s the heavy part but the pages are light as a feather and are filled with the most beautiful things that I could ever dream of and basically, this is what makes up me. All those old McFly, Busted, Son of Dork and even Hear‘Say tickets glued in, pictures cut out from holiday brochures (when they still did them) of places that I wanted to see, pieces of bubblewrap and wrapping paper that I kept from my favourite gifts and, later on, a documentation from when I was ten telling myself that I’d found that I was really good at art, with loads of drawings on it. So I think: this all makes up me, this IS me, right? And that’s why I love and cherish it, and this is why, in all that I crap on about in the about me section about loving, hating and missing, this is the only way I could ever keep these memories, because I don’t want to let it go. Because people don’t understand just how much I’ve been through, and I have the thing that everyone wants, for reasons unbeknown to me. I have a reason to be depressed. I could let everything I’ve seen overthrow me, buy a load of cats, put on a ripped wedding dress and live in a windowless log cabin in the middle of nowhere. There’s some kind of classy front about it, the glamour, that pit in your stomach that makes you so sad that you don’t know how to contain it, makes you hurt yourself and other people until it eats you alive. I’ve seen too many people go down that road to decide it’s for me, even if I’ve looked over the side, even dared myself to dive in for it. The edge of sanity. But this book is, quoting Emma Coull, “something constant in a world of endless change”, because it reminds me of who I was before the faeces hit the fan, which I know for myself isn’t entirely a good thing, and that’s why I want to keep it.
Maybe this is what my parents think of me, especially my Dad. No, not crazy overprotective book girl! I have the cover, even if it isn't hard or heavy, but once you open it, all the tiny little pointless peices of me eventually fall through the cracks, one by one as the crappy glue i used to hold it all together unbonds itself and you as the reader have to stick it all together to make it better for me again and I just can't do it because I know what the glues sticking together, and it ain't pretty. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the story of my life. It explains everything if you look deep enough into it and it kind of makes me want to cry, just because I'm so needy and this time there isn't anyone to stick it all back together.
Maybe that's because he's the one who fell apart.

Wednesday 11 February 2009

Let Him Die.

When I'm old I'm going to die. Maybe even when I'm younger. But lets not tempt fate. The reason this came about is that my Grandad, Grandad Tom, is dying. I don't just say this, its happening. He's been dying for fifteen years but he's just not allowed to die. Even though he's in so much pain, he can't make it stop. He went into the hospital dead, but they recussitated him, gave him two hours to live and put him in the little back room they put people to die in. He's got that rattling in his throat people get when they've been given a life sentence.
Why can't we just let him go? Its not helping anyone, being constanly on call. But Grandma Bridie
Just. Won't. Let. Him. Die.
She's made them put him on oxygen but won't let him get morphine because that'll kill him. Almost as if he's not being killed already.

Its typical. She has this slow, painful way of executing everything, her husband included, I guess.

But when you've got nothing, a hundred pound giro, a dying cat, four unsympathetic children and a tumble-down house slap-bang in the middle of Shootings and Stabbings that you won't even leave through the fear, I can understand, no matter how selfish it be, why you'd want to keep the only one whoever really and truly loved you in your long and unforgiving life.

Beep. Beeeep. Beeeeeep. Beeeeeeeeeeep. Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep. Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee...

Snow


The snow is beautiful, the way it gathers and wilts the flower petals, the way it covers the bumpy gravel evenly, the way its covered my feet, frosted the eye-lashes framing my wide eyes and how its somehow dampened the inside of my slightly ajar lips in the few hours I’ve been standing here in shell-shock. It’s so beautiful it makes me want to look up to the heavy purple sky and laugh out loud. Or cry. I don’t know which.

Wednesday 4 February 2009

Paint Me A Picture.

I like to draw.


Its one of the only things that I can truly say that I'm quite good at. Its one of the most edifying hobbies that I could know and I think that you should try it some time.


And heres what I'm trying to say, even if it sounds super duper weird. When you're trying so hard to draw someone, you have no choice but to look at them, like actually look at them, and draw what you see. You know every bump, every flaw shown, basically everything. I've spent two and a half weeks perfecting one of my best friends jawline, and I think that finally after about a year and a half, I can understand them. I can understand everything. And thats it. I've come to terms with my friends death and even though I know that he can never see their perfected jawline, which makes me sad as hell, and I'm still manically sad about him, I can finally face the fact that he's gone, but I'll always have this to remember him by:
Joe.