Category: musings

Categories
musings poetry

Rate My Late!

Rate My Late – Buy Your App Here!

The trouble with Late is that she can’t exist on her own. She’s not a thing to point at, to put on a mantlepiece, to dress up with pearls (fake) or a sympathetic diamond (real).

Late requires clocks, calendars, appointments, cycles, physiology, intent, heartbeats.

Late needs lovers, children, employees, unprotected sex, traffic jams, a fatal collision on the M6, a flat tyre, a lightning strike, a network outage, a forgotten password, a printer out of ink, a dead battery.

Late loves unreliability, pompousness, disrespect, people who don’t read the time, people without phones, without watches, without effective chairs (the people, not the furniture).

Late wants capitalism not socialism.

Late wants liars not truth seekers.

Late wants socialites not loners.

Late thrives on wankers and low tyre pressure, on mislaid keys and handbags left in cafes, on getting on the wrong bus and buying a last-minute soya chai latte while running for a train.

Late is normally with Wait. But not every time. Sometimes Late shacks up with Early.

Early is anxious, Early doesn’t’t sleep well.

Early is fatal with safety catches and red traffic lights and dynamiting derelict housing association towers.

Early is fatal at baking Victoria sponges and making mayonnaise. And sex.

Early worries. Is Late under a bus, in jail, got a better offer, been tasered?

Early has Velcro instead of laces, studs instead of buttons, and a purse always full of just the right change.  

Early has spare bus tickets, tampons, a water bottle, tissues, lip salve and a wad of toilet roll all to hand.

Early pants and sweats and waits and swivels on bar stools and is talked to by waiters and memorises menus and bus timetables and is hated by her late friends, really hated.

Early hears secrets at the end of other people’s meetings, catches mistresses leaving management offices, learns the lives of cleaners and clicks her fingers click click click.

Early doesn’t need a dinner plate, eats out of saucepans, and has never eaten her lunch off a table in her own flat, never, never as Early must eats on the move when she can.

Early is thin and in a rush and bites her nails and forfeited the last question in her final exam, what with the need to get the right train home.

Early is pinged and notified and sent reminders on apps apps apps.

Early is ANXIOUS with capital letters and no full stop. 

Early didn’t arrive in a bulrush basket. Early exploded out after ninety-seven minutes of labour at thirty-five weeks. Early is small and fluttery and clings to edges. If Early could crawl back in and cocoon to full term she would.

Heh Early! Take some deep breaths, love.

Early waits for Late like we watch Planet Earth. Squatting behind the couch with fingers over our eyes. Lion stalking Zebra, creeping creeping, ready to pounce and bloody. Early is black and white striped with a fly-blown swishing tail.

Early is rushing for the ad-breaks to make a cup of tea and always misses Lion’s final gouge or Zebra’s just in time escape. Early cannot stand to know what happens in the end. Ever.

Early is not a completer finisher. Early is so fast off the blocks she’s constantly disqualified.

Early turns up to fetes while the bouncy castle is still flaccid flat.

Early attends the funeral of the earlier corpse.

Early witnesses the wrong wedding and throws confetti at the wrong couple.

Early stands shivering on empty platforms and Early leans shivering in empty ballrooms.

The trouble with Early is that she can’t exist on her own. She’s not a thing to point at, to put on a mantlepiece, to dress up with pearls (fake) or a sympathetic diamond (real).

Early requires clocks, calendars, appointments, cycles, physiology, intent, heartbeats.

You can see where this going. Except on the App.

There is no Rate My Early. There could never be a Rate My Early.

Categories
blog memoir musings

On touch

I am lying on the floor wrapped in a blanket with my back up against the sofa. On the sofa, a friend sleeps. On the other side of the room, another friend sleeps on another sofa. The room is full of soft filtered light only found in east coast dawns. The light has a filmic quality about it. Translucent gold. It is my room so I should really be in my own bed. The friend behind me dangles his arm down, brushes my shoulder. I put my hand up. Our hands touch. He takes my hand. And holds it. Our fingers tighten. I feel his warmth in my palm, along my knuckles. In my heart. I am holding hands in my dream and I never want it to stop. It is Tuesday the 18th May 2021. Hugs are now ‘allowed.’

I am having a parcel delivered. It is in the time of covid. The delivery man has climbed three storeys worth of stairs. He is pink and puffing. I put my hand out to take the parcel from him. Our fingers touch in error. We both take a step back. Our eyes implode. The parcel drops onto the floor between us. He runs back down the stairs. I hear the beep beep of his app. I lift the parcel and I go inside and I wash my hands. I am careful not to touch my face for at least an hour afterwards.

I am on an Internet date, maybe seven or so years ago. It is the third or fourth time we have seen each other. We are walking along Queen Street on a cold dark afternoon. We are going to a bar in the East End. The man says something about my reticence, that I am always holding back. I laugh and I frown. I say, I can do it, really I can. I take his hand. Look I say, I can do it. He releases my hand. He doesn’t want to hold my hand in Queen Street. It takes a while to bounce back from that.

I am on the 21 bus, going to a medical appointment. It is in the time of covid. I am trying not to look at the other passengers. It is only the second time I’ve been on a bus in a year. I am listening to Bob Dylan’s Red River Shore, My lips move along with the music. Some of us turn off the lights and we live in the moonlight shooting by… I feel a hand on my shoulder. It is the man on the seat behind. He is asking me something. I am shocked at the touch. The man hasn’t meant any harm. I see the man again on the return journey. That makes us almost friends.

I am on an isolated beach in Sydney. I am alone, it is the late 80s and I am young. A man approaches me, older than me, maybe in his forties. He offers me a massage. I do not want a massage but I do not know how to say no. I did not have the anger in me then, the anger I have now. The man uses some sort of lotion. On my back, then lower. He slips his hand between my legs. I get up, confused, frightened, mortified. Gathered my things together. Walk across the hot sand towards the bus shelter in my flip flops. I wait for ten minutes. The bus does not come. The massage man stops in his car and offers me a lift. The car is silver grey, low-slung. The man is blond, over-tanned. I shake my head, no, no. The bus will be here soon, I say. He insists. I get in the car. I am terrified but I get in the car. The man does not touch me in the car. Nor does he mention the massage.

I am in Germany with my partner. We are staying at his mother’s house. We are in bed. I don’t speak or understand German. I am anxious and discombobulated. I never seem to know what is happening. We go to bed. I need him to hold me. He doesn’t. Maybe I don’t tell him about my needs. I expect him to be psychic, or at least perceptive. He turns his back on me. Rolls towards his edge of the bed. We never do get over our cultural differences.

I am a wee girl, just a baby, still getting about in a pram. I do not let anyone touch me. When a pair of hands come down towards me I open my mouth and scream.

I am holding hands in my dream and I never want it to stop.

Categories
exercise musings

Endings

The bed was just as it always was. Military corners tucked in tight. The coral stain on the pillow half a purple sun.

That’s it, I suppose, he said.

Anyway, you always said I drank too much, she said, draining the glass. It was a lie and she knew it and he knew it.  

There’s always yesterday, I said.

You knew that of course. You had always known. Even though you weren’t there. You’d never been there. And that, you would say if you were here to say it, was the whole point.

She kicked the gull’s skull into the sea. It tumbled, recovered, and right way up, bobbed out into the grey sheet of the outgoing tide.

The surviving shoe lay upside down in the hall for the longest time. For several years, the new owners of the house still felt it unlucky to move it.

She had something important to say, she said, gesturing to him to sit down on the boulder beside the well.

Everywhere, all about her, the stench of singeing songbirds.

He chuckled. He’d been right, the flat-earther, right the whole time.

Tuesday seemed as good a day as any for all of them to stop crying.

He dipped one end of the oar into the water. Felt the heavy stickiness of it in his palms.

He would get another puncture that day.

Maybe the prices would rise tomorrow. Maybe they would fall. Either way, she still had the tractor.

And so this story, with its fully pronounced end and final full stop, was never about life at all.

Categories
musings poetry

blue

I take the kettle to the sink, flick open the lid, turn the tap on. The tap is stiff, needs fixing but of course I’ll never fix it. I never fix anything. The bulbs from the two hall lights died within seconds of each other three winters ago. They sit, after a friend who is good with his hands took them down for me, gathering dust and guilt, on a piece of white paper on the upside down printer’s drawer that operates as a table in the living room. The printer’s drawer, in turn, sits on the Iranian carpet I bought in Wellington out the back of a white van from three men with warm eyes, in grey anoraks and beige sweaters, cash only. It was a lot of money in those days, that carpet. I ummed and ahhed and ummed and ahhed before offering around 80% of the asking price. They accepted immediately. Exchanged smiles with each other and slammed the van doors shut. Drove off with a surely illegal puff puff of diesel exhaust. I spluttered, and kicked myself for months afterwards. The reds of the rug have faded now, but the blues have stayed. Staying blue, stalwart, true.

I fill the kettle just under a third full with whatever temperature the water happens to come out of the tap. I can see it’s just under a third full as it’s an eco-kettle, transparent, or would be if I cleaned it. A third full is enough for a mug of hot water with a mint sprig and just enough water for the hot water bottle I keep on my knees eight months of the year when I’m not moving. The hot water bottle has printed the pale thinning skin of my stomach and thighs a pink tartan cross-stitch. It would be hard to explain this pattern to any doctor or nurse. Sometimes I tell people about it and they laugh and I laugh but I don’t show them the pattern. The hot water bottle is itself reddish pink, which is ironic in a way. Feeling its way onto my stomach and leaving its mark. Staying pink, private, stalwart, true.

I flick the switch on the kettle. Kristine gave me the hot water bottle and the cover seven years ago. She was dying of a cancer that started in her eye and worked its way down to her stomach and everywhere else. She knitted during her various therapies as she thinned and misshaped and she knitted me a hot water bottle cover. She said the pattern was easy and she didn’t need to concentrate. Green and blue and yellow and pink, sock wool, I think they call it, so that when you knit the socks they come out stripey. The stripes are a kind of miracle. I cried a little when she gave it to me. Held it to my cheek. It was rough smooth, two plain two pearl, and smelt of lanolin. There was no miracle for Kristine.

I pinch the top of two mint sprigs from their glass on the window ledge. Drop the leaves into the mug.

Neither was it a miracle that the moth babies ate Kristine’s hot water bottle cover three or four years after she died and I spent three months working up the courage to drop it into the bin in the kitchen. The bin was a Christmas present from a lover who lived here once. We agreed on the bin present so it wasn’t as bad as it sounds. The bin was after Kristine’s eye cancer but before it woke up and tore her apart.

In the meantime the moths did what moths do and bred and flew and travelled and bred and flew and travelled and the moth babies moved onto other precious articles – a Mediterranean blue cashmere sweater once owned by a now dead aunt – and a black Icebreaker t-shirt – a present from Bronwyn in New Zealand. Bronwyn took me on a tour of Christchurch after the earthquake, after I’d been to my father’s memorial tea party in Hobart, and showed me what was left of the houses that weren’t insured, and the houses where the owners refused to move out despite being in the Red Zone.

The kettle boils, spitting bubbles at its lid and I turn it off just before it turns itself off. I like to get ahead of the kettle. In my mind I’ve mixed up Bronwyn’s two categories and I imagine a family living under a blue tarp under a street sign, in amongst the hebes that have shrubbed up over the leftover roads and paths, so that even the people who should know, the lawyers and the surveyors and the engineers, no longer understand what they are looking at and they spin around and around, pointing and gesticulating at the street with no houses, no sheds, no BBQs, no trampolines, no swimming pools, not even a roof tile, until they leave too fast and moist-eyed in oversized black or navy SUVs with official logos branded proud white on bonnets and boots.

Moths are efficient eaters of memories, especially the hand-knitted variety. I pour the boiling water into the blue handmade mug I bought on the west coast of Ireland on a camper van holiday. I buy pottery and hand-knitted socks on every camper van holiday. It’s become a thing. Sometimes I keep the socks for myself, sometimes I give them away as presents. The blue of the mug is the same blue as the still blue in the Iranian carpet. I hold the mug to my chin. Inhale the fresh mint. I put the mug down, twist the stopper out of the hot water bottle, pour the rest of the boiling water into it, and reseal the bottle. Kristine’s husband, Kenny, told me never to pour boiling water into a hot water bottle. That it perishes the rubber. I don’t know if that’s true. It sounds kind of true. Like it could be. Me doing to the bottle what the moth babies did to Kristine’s hand-knitted cover.

I carry the hot mug and the hot rubber bottle, which of course doesn’t resemble a bottle at all, through to my study. Place the blue mug on my desk, plump up the cushions on my seat, and sit down. I hug the bottle on my belly. It burns a bit. Adding a bit more pink. Private, stalwart and true.

Categories
blog musings

9th April 2021

On this day a ninety-nine year old man dies.

On this day someone receives an AZ vaccine shot in the arm in a drive-through out of town clinic that should be a university.

On this day rich old white men line up to talk about a dead rich old white man.

On this day someone orders My Struggle – Book 1 by Karl Ove Knausgard translated by Don Bartlett.

On this day Masterchef is cancelled because a rich old white man is dead.

On this day someone orders Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez.

On this day someone has an online physiotherapy appointment in their study and the therapist pulls green curtain screens around herself.

On this day a dead rich old white man doesn’t displace the Friday Archers because covid replaced the Friday Archers eons ago.

On this day some red white and blue flags are flying at half-mast.

On this day someone buys cocoa butter formula with Vitamin E.

On this day someone picks up a prescription of small blue pills.

On this day rich old white men are still going on and on and on about a dead rich old white man.

On this day someone prepares an omelette with three free range eggs and a teaspoon of plain yogurt.

On this day someone wonders about the side-effects of the AZ vaccine.

On this day someone measures out new dental-care biscuits for a cat.

On this day someone places bets on how long rich old white men will go on and on and on and on about a dead rich old white man.

On this day a family that lives in a big house is grieving.

On this day DMX dies, aged 50.

On this day organisers of a secret Paris dinner say ministers did not attend.

On this day scientists are talking about clots.

On this day politicians are telling lies.

On this day 382 people are estimated to have covid in Edinburgh.

On this day there is golf.

On this day a 3,000 year old ancient city is discovered in Egypt.

On this day rich old white men are still going on and on and on about a dead rich old white man.

Categories
musings poetry

Take your seat

Present resonance happenstance heretic feather wick fourposter troll poster Animal Kingdown Jacki Weaver live from the Apollo Take your seat Jacki Weaver matriarch and septic tank Jacki Weaver sea shanty plea bargain double take triple vision seven million viewers can’t be wrong, I am not a cat I am not a cat, Imagine a string from the top of your skull to the ceiling feel the ground solid at your feet sleet sheet meat world beating supernova sputnik vaccination wars chores mores laws truth twisters mouth blisters Cornish wafers strawberry pastries sunlit uplands cornucopia of utopias, look at the unicorns look look look you’re not looking hard enough up there in the knot snot your lot will never be happy Your mind wanders that’s what minds do shoe slow flow crow more snow so much snow Keep your spine away from the back of the chair now, breathe wreath bequeath underneath the eaves bats or rats chewing on hats or cats I loved that hat wore it to the garden party Princess Ann only three feet away still have that hat or do I forced to flee up a ramp so many charity shops cops mops strops five dead six including the suicide Focus on your breath coming in through your nose exposed at the window is anyone looking adjust your slump the bump in your thoughts tripping on fallowed furrows Bring your mind gently back to the breath escort it cavort it import it, stop the steal stop the steal, time porting is not a word teleporting television the neighbours watching day time tv Jeremy Kyle must be a repeat repeat repeat repeat after me fake news fight like hell Bring the breath back all the way down and all the way back breathe into your toes your fingers no snow on that roof climate murderers, Feel the pause between the inbreath and the outbreath cat on the mat the perfect leap of faith from the cat that flew yes flew from the sill to the bed rocket man sprocket men nothing good ever comes of self flight height Feel the present stay in the present instant coffee instant noodles instant rice Uncle Ben instant thrill instant pill instant gratification edification eradication Agent Orange pretty instant burning of peasants, with you in a moment momentito nice Bring your mind back to your breath present pheasant plucked and razored the led pellets removed and turned into anklets bracelets Pretty Priti and her desperate servants of doom hostile environment battle bus what happened to our money all of our money to donors moaners rewarders shysters, Bring your attention back to the breath one hundred thousand dead we did everything we could we’ll wrap our arms around care homes Use the silence now for your own practice now now no you didn’t didn’t at all liars liars dead on fire ideas as clouds push them through a show of strength body bags shopping bags at least the dog jacket shop is still open must keep the economy moving defence immense clouds sewing seeds of need instant pleasure dead in an instant he wouldn’t have felt a thing died instantly hit and run the definition of being present.

Categories
blog musings

Of mice and butterflies

The Earth is nothing but phlegm spat out by the Sun, and our immediate solar system a whirlwind of boulders. There is no “delicate balance”. Said A. E. Samaan.

Amen to all that.

The shill, he, and it is almost always he, is paid by vested interests to emit clouds of confusion about the science or economics of climate action. This uncertainty creates a smokescreen behind which polluters can lobby against measures that cut their profits.

Wrote Damian Carrington in a newspaper that carries large glossy adverts for large glossy climate-busting child murdering SUVs.

The illusion of confusion, confabulated by a BBC insisting on balance.

For information specific to your area, please see products issued by your local Weather Service office. Near the coast, the surge will be accompanied by large and dangerous waves.

On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologise for the climate scare we created over the past 30 years, wrote Shellenberger in his 1,700-word article.

Since all 21 of the letters of the alphabet that meteorologists use were exhausted, they began using the Greek alphabet to name storms.

Britain’s leading climate change sceptic, former chancellor Lord Lawson, has admitted that humans are causing global warming. Headline news in 2016. In other news that same day, Donald Trump was confronted by a pastor in Flint. Five months later, the Michigan Civil Rights Commission concluded that the poor governmental response to the Flint crisis was a “result of systemic racism.”

Shellenberger, who may or may not have sold his soul to the devil but either way was trousering something somewhere from the big boys bad guys. At least that’s what some folk said who were also big boys bad guys.

Twenty six. The tipping point. A Wiki rabbit hole starts with Prometheus. And ends with the erosion of the Acropolis. The Final Act, Acropolis No More, is still to be written, entered, and verified.

That could have been prevented by men in suits. If only more women had been allowed at the table. And children.

Knowledge was power. Now it’s a blue tick.

Lords a-leaping can claim £162 per day while isolating from corona virus. Even climate change deniers.

WWUS74 KLIX 281550 NPWLIX

URGENT — WEATHER MESSAGE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE NEW ORLEANS LA 1011 AM CDT SUN AUG 28, 2005

…DEVASTATING DAMAGE EXPECTED…

The wider Athens area has been hit hard by deadly floods and forest fires over the last decade.

Hurricane Maria. 3059 dead. 280kph wind, category B.

Would it matter what category brought the world down and broke your neck, both upending and ending you? Or how many other upended and ended were scraped out of the cloisters? Less dead means more chance of individual infamy. More dead and you, plural, become history. Until you’re outdone by the next bigger one. And the next.

We humans can only manage so much doom scrolling at any one time.

The record-breaking 2020 hurricane season produced 30 named storms.

In 2005 there were 28 named storms. Thirteen: Hanna, Isaias, Laura, Marco, Nana, Paulette, Sally, Teddy, Delta, Epsilon, Zeta, Eta and Iota, became hurricanes. Six: Laura, Teddy, Delta, Epsilon, Eta and Iota, became major (Category 3 or stronger) storms.

Was Hanna a more common name for a daughter than Iota in 2005? Based on the analysis of 100 years’ worth of data from the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) Baby Names database, the estimated population of people named Iota is zero.

Denial, Despair. Destruction. Death

If Death comes first, Denial is irrelevant. Or irreverent. LOL

It’s not even our most serious environmental problem. Said no climate striker ever. Said a lot of boomers. Most of them with bitten nails and unseemly suits.

The world’s five largest publicly-owned oil and gas companies spend about US$200 million a year lobbying to control, delay or block binding climate policy.

The economy stupid.

There was nothing to be gained “by embracing disinformation on the other side” Prof Kerry Emanuel said, maybe while picking icing off a donut, maybe not.

Environmental injustice is donut shaped. You can check for yourself on any map.

Grifters earn a living by grinding out contrarian articles for right wing media outlets. Do they believe the guff they write? It doesn’t matter: they just warm their hands on the outrage, count the clicks and wait for the pay cheque. Wrote Damian Carrington.

Robert Carrington is a kindly man who keeps a dozen white mice in a gold gilded cage with red velvet beds and a small but perfectly formed orange chaise longue for his favourite, the mildest of the group, Languid Lily.

Climate scientists are fixing the data to show the climate is changing.

Chaos. Crisis. Collapse. Relapse. Repeat

Onward Christian Soldiers marching as to war.

Egomaniacs are disappointed, frustrated people whose careers have stalled and who can’t understand why the world refuses to give full reverence to their brilliance. Desperate for recognition, when it stubbornly refuses to arrive, they are drawn to make increasingly extreme pronouncements, in the hope of finally being proved a dogma-busting, 21st-century Galileo. Wrote Damian Carrington.

Robert Carrington is a generous man who gives every guest a white mouse to take home with them in a pretty white box with a gold ribbon. Holes are punched in the side of the box ensuring plenty of ventilation.The female mice wear red velvet bows. The male mice are adorned in soft yellow smoking jackets.

In Wales, emergency services worked overnight to prevent flood water damaging an industrial estate where a crucial part of the manufacture of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine takes place.

newid yn yr hinsawdd

The ideological fools are utterly blinded by their inane, no-limits version of the free-market creed. The climate emergency requires coordinated global action, they observe, and that looks horribly like communism in disguise. Wrote Damian Carrington.

Robert Carrington is a happy man who lets his white mice out every full moon to cavort in the east dining room on the red and gold gilded rug.

Climate change deniers will tell you that more people die of the cold than heat, so warmer winters will be a good thing. Vulnerable people die of the cold because of poor housing and not being able to afford to heat their homes. Society, not climate, kills them.

Does that make us all killers?

Look at the snow the planet isn’t warming.

The canary is dead. We are at the top of Niagara Falls, Tina, in a canoe. There is an image for your viewers. We got here by drifting, but we cannot turn around for a lazy paddle back when you finally stop pissing around. We have arrived at the point of an audible roar. Does it strike you as a good time to debate the existence of the falls?  Wrote Barbara Kingsolver in a rather grim but beautiful book about butterflies.

Categories
blog musings

On Promenading

There’s an art to the promenade. Promenade as verb not noun.[1] You can tell the class of a person by their use of a word. Non-creative types just call it a walk. Old fashioned sorts go for a stroll.[2] Auntie Vera was very fond of a saunter. Uncle George grumped a march. And Wee Ed the Heid, who delivered muckle great piles of hand-caught mackerel in his shifty wee red wheelbarrow until he was well into his seventies, well he just called a stride a stride.

Do you need a promenade to take a promenade? Not necessarily. You could, with a low-hipped swagger and a lean-right-back on your built-up yellow cork wedgies, sashay down Edinburgh’s Leith Walk. But Leith Walk, the one with the tram works that recently turned up in a transport conference in Stuttgart in a side event on Brass-Necked Incompetence and National Beyond-the-Pail Embarrassments, is a discomfiting digression that is best left for another time. Stick to the Promenade for your promenading.

What to wear. December, Edinburgh. You’ll need winter beach attire, accessorised by a small pinch-nosed pooch in a pink puffa jacket with strychnine breath and a hissing Bauhaus smile.[3] The pooch is essential, as is the pompom at the far end of your very bright hat. The pompom, large, and heavy enough to lopside your gait, may be acrylic or uranium but must have a heft of glitter and a hove of spangle. If you can carry it off (and not everyone can), you should ensure the colour of the pompom matches the pinch-nosed pooch’s diamante satin (with nylon reinforcement) infinity lead.

What to bring. Bring a life. Bring a job. Bring a career. Bring a family. Bring a fucking big television. Bring washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. And then bring money. Bring loose change. Bring notes. Bring a plate for the dog liver cake, sold out of a Tupperware box at the bratwurst van by a French tart and his Belgian lover, Frite. Bring a plastic bag bright enough to be very seen to throw into the nearest naked tree once you’ve picked up the pooch’s shit (for it will shit, it is guaranteed to shit after that deep and intense shit-brown liver cake).

What to drink. Once you’ve packed your pompom, your pinch-nosed pooch and the coins for the dog’s liver cake, remember your hipster-right-on-recycled-reconditioned-reconsidered-redacted-restructured-subcultured-keeps-all-drinks-piping-hot-easy-grip thermos flask. There’s a choice of refreshments on the Promenade although I recommend you avoid the Coconut Psalm Scratch House what with the furore over #BaconButtiegate (£7.50 – are you having a bloody laugh, mate?) and the inability of the queue to stop snaking around the corner and coiling and curling all over the bike stands. If you insist on the Coconut Psalm Scratch House, for the grand price of £3.50 they’ll drop a tea bag into your hipster-right-on-recycled-reconditioned-reconsidered-redacted-restructured-subcultured-keeps-all-drinks-piping-hot-easy-grip thermos flask and splash some boiled water onto it. Feel free to bring your own beverage.

How to stand when buying stuff. During these testing times of covid, you will notice many stickers beneath your feet. These apparently random lines of police tape do not generally denote scenes of terrible violence, even where they are splashed with blood. Stand on said tape and wait for your turn. An even temperament is required for this task. Turn the other cheek to avoid being smacked in the face by the unmarked virus stewards whose reinforced petri dish eyes can spot a hip over the line from seventy paces. It is not considered polite to let your pinch-nosed pink puffa-jacketed pooch piss on the social-distancing ticker tape so if it does happen for Christ’s sake be discrete. Step onto the piss and distract the person in front of you with exaggerated exclamations of how exquisite their sawn-off legged cork-screw tailed dachshund is what a lovely baby blue coat it’s wearing did you crochet that yourself?  Be careful, though. You don’t need a new best friend for life, especially not one that crochets for he who crotchets may well macramé and he who macramés may well have been in prison.[4]

How to wild swim. Don’t. Be ready with excuses. Arm yourself. Make a list and have it at the ready. Stick a couple of arguments in the pocket of the pinch-nosed pooch’s pink puffa jacket. Just in case. No, you’ll never get used to it. No, you don’t need a snake oil cure for your crippling arthritis. No, it absolutely won’t be lovely once you’re in. No, your endorphins don’t need a rush, they never need to rush, they’re just not that sort of polypeptide. No, wood smoke is not hygge, it’s dangerous particulate matter that skewers your bronchioles and gouges your tinted contact lenses and the smell will destroy your vintage almost porous patina sheepskin flying jacket that you got in the sale at Harvey Nichols the day you couldn’t stop crying and so you spent six hundred pounds that you didn’t have and god that felt good that felt really good.

Where to park. DON’T BRING YOUR BLOODY CAR. There’s a climate emergency you bawbags.

[1] In Havana, the promenade, the noun not the verb, is called the Malecón. Reminds me of the word maleficence.

[2] Stroll is an ugly word. And stroller is even uglier. I prefer buggy. More friendly, bug-like. Like Auntie Vera’s eyes when she saw her husband Alistair, aged fifty-nine, snort his first line in the downstairs guest toilet on the pretext that he was just popping in to change the peach hand towels for the lemon ones, they went so much better with the new Axminster.

[3] This whole thing about breeding dogs to prevent them breathing really gets on my wick. I look at people with these dogs and I half close my eyes and I put my hands around their throats, press my fingers sharp into their tracheas, watch their pale brown watery eyes bulge until they pop, then slowly release my fingers. It’s a fantasy I have on each one of my promenades. One day I fear I may mess up my fantasy and I will leave the Promenade strewn with my idiot victims, their dogs released from their infinity leads to ponder and puff and pant and postulate their way across the sand, their owners gasping their last.

[4] Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with prison. Nothing at all.  I’m a firm believer in rehabilitation. It’s the baby blue crotchet coat on a dog with no legs that’s waving the red flag here.

Categories
blog musings

November Summaries

Unelected official wrecks country. Its citizens are not concerned for his eyesight.

Man with fake tan tweets coup from private golf course.

Plague exacts revenge on grave-digging serial killer. His name is more famous than those of his victims.

Woman trafficked liquid cocaine in breast implants to Europe. It is not known if she preferred the new breasts or her own.

Whole nation puzzles over victory song sung by tone deaf footballers after penalty shoot out.

Company from Rotherham plans to extract oxygen from moon rocks. Ian Mellor, CEO of Metalysis, has seen the moon but has yet to do a site visit.

Categories
blog musings

Why I Write

I am not a lover of similes, homilies, courtesies. Metaphors are my thing. Metaphors and tragedies and magic. Not card tricks or scandalised women climbed into boxes who aren’t cut in half by saws or even swords. No, the magic of marvellous realism. The art of the impossibly strange invading the lustrous detail of the ordinary. And while I have read many of the translated Latin American works of this genre, I don’t set out to fumble with the surreal. Rather, the surreal emerges through my lack of ability to story as I struggle for a fitting end to an unravelling or a spoiling that will leave both the reader and the author pondering. Did that woman really just turn into a crow or was it simply an extended metaphor for her apogee?

Why metaphors and not similes? Perhaps it’s their assertive nature. Written on a yellow post-it pinned to my desk. Never use the word perhaps. ‘Love sieved out of me and I brushed it up with a pan.’ How much neater and more assured this is without the fuss of a like or an as. Why use a metaphor at all? I could write ‘I stopped loving him.’ But who would pause even for a moment to care about that? And, as a writer, why waste time on the anodyne?

I write because I can. Beyond that, I’m not sure. But I know how I like to write. It’s all about the craft. Crafting sentences, rhymes and alliterations. Subverting structures. Twirling words into the whimsy of the where-will-it-go wound-up toy. A contumacious of clichés. Spinning paragraphs like tops. (See what I did there?). Rhythm rhythm I cheat to its beat. I once had a best friend, a cinematographer and film maker, who insisted that he wasn’t a creative. What he achieved, he used to say, was simply a result of being diligent in his craft. He’d be even more insistent after two pints of Burnside and a packet of salt and vinegar. He’s dead now, his bowel cancer too canny for the finest of our white coats and my name is badges. But his words are survivors. And so am I.

I’ve had my share of grief. So I’d expected to write about it. But it doesn’t work like that. Instead, without conscious deliberation,  I’ve turned my attention to repression, suppression, and auto-suggestion. I write resistance with a lower case r. Catriona plants seeds in a shed in a kingdom that has banned gardening. Samuel buys a clapping machine to save his family’s palms from the blistering of obligated applause. I write the absurd. Tetraplegic Maisie has a healthy leg removed from her pet dog Peg. Elderly Janet, having murdered her two brothers fifty years ago, buys a pet cloud and keeps it in her bathroom. I’m on episode 51 of that one.

I dig deep on motivation. Why did Jeremy become a flat earther after his brother died in a car crash? Why did ten year old Scaredy Mary participate in the vicious assault of her classmate Speccy Four Eyes?  Silver filaments of mental illness vein through most of this geology. Lorna, who doesn’t speak after the break-up with her partner, is saved by a beaver resplendent in a red turban. Geoffrey, a Home Office Minister, is banished to a remote island in the Arctic Circle and is forced to shack up with his conscience, a walrus called Brenda.

If a stranger were to read all of these pieces, could they determine they were from the one author? Do I have an authoritative voice?  That is for the reader to judge. I suspect I am more of a shapeshifter. A changeling with magpie gilt.  I peck at whatever I’ve just read that beckons and glitters. I write in the first person or the third. I write in the past or the present. Sometimes I pour the words out with such breathlessness that a sentence ends up a paragraph long. At other times I use one-word sentences to haul the reader backwards into a juddering screeching full stop.

I read Ducks, Newbury Port (2019) and produce a piece called Marmalade, liberally flavoured with ‘the fact is.’ Cormac McCarthy sends me off on a moody filmic binge. Raymond Carver pares me down, scraping the flesh off until I get to the marble chill of the elementals. John Cheever has me spying on my neighbours. Tim Winton coaxes me into the characterisation of landscape. And Liz Lochhead, with her lyrical and lol Scots, brings me to my knees with ‘I wiggled tapselteerie, my heels were that peerie’ in Almost Miss Scotland (1991).

Covid_19 has closed my writing in and boxed it up into claustrophobic angst that rails against the state and seeks redemption in chrysalids, or crocus buds, or the dandelion softness of a young dunnock chick. The virus has also exploited and exposed the weaknesses in my writing. Where I must and can do better. I can murder a darling with the best of them. Edit out the superfluous without a twinge of dismay. I can spot a point of view inconsistency from thirty paces. What I cannot do, and this a pathological cannot, is complete a work that is more than around 4000 words.

Jeremy is 70,000 words in, but still on the ice-breaker, slicing through the Antarctic in search of The Edge. Geoffrey is 5000 words in, but still on the beach, waving at a boat that may or may not stop to rescue him. Sometimes my problem is plot in these longer pieces, but more often it is structure and my struggle to choose the most appropriate tense.

When writing in the past tense I loop endlessly between the simple past, the past perfect and the past perfect progressive if my story is not linear. That looping eventually results in a mid-air stall and I hang there, the blood rushing to my head, until I’m forced to pull down on the stick and coast back to safety. And abandonment. My obsessive attention to detail that doesn’t matter is to the detriment of detail that does. I write because I can never finish.

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