london: 1969-1974  work & days: a lifetime journal project       - water caustic from Trapline London section intro When London begins I'm 24, newly graduated with an honours BA, recovering from three months in a body cast, and in London with my film professor, who has left his wife. I'm wildly unsettled. I've decided I want to make films, but my route to that work is obscure. Peter is pressuring me for committment and I resist without knowing why. I've been sexually lost since leaving Greg, trying people out at random, struggling to discover how to be with someone without giving up what I most want to be. Queen's friends already in England, Don and Olivia in Oxford and Greg at LSE, are struggling too. It's 1969 and we feel it our mission to reinvent everything about the way a life is lived. I stay on in London when Peter goes back to Queen's and I'm there until New Years Eve of 1974. Five and a half extraordinarily rich years. My son Luke is born in December 1970. I find the women's movement the next year. Spend many weeks with a Western Sufi Order khanka in Surrey. Read in the Westminister Art Library, the British Poetry Library, the British Film Insitute Library. Make notes in museums. Travel in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, France, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Morocco, often hitchhiking alone. Learn to throw pots and lay bricks. Begin to garden. Go through five more lovers. Study hundreds of films and write a thesis in the Slade film department of University College. Begin to haunt London Film Co-op screenings. In September of 1972 the International Experimental Film Congress is held at the National Film Theatre. It galvanizes me to begin a film and I leave London with an Arts Council of Great Britain completion grant and the uncut footage of what will become Trapline. The era [unwritten so far]   London   The mid- to late-20s