Having a coke with you is more fun

we are drifting back and forth between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

I heart O'Hara

Such Sweethearts

I want to be shot into this video like an arrow from a bow. The target being the awesome party where The Archie Bronson Outfit are rocking 'Dart for my Sweetheart'.

It has everything a lovely perfect party should have. With extra BEARDS.

Black and white makes pretty much anything look cool. But the fact there are brightly coloured felt tip animations puncturing the grainy monochrome makes it SUPERcool. Seven shiny reasons are successfully depicted (which is no mean feat) and with medieval figures! At one point they float through psychedelic colours and out into SPACE. 'Take you how only I can'. And I always love Roman numerals - boring maths elevated to classy Classicism.

The whole thing looks ultra modern, yet also like seventies New York. It becomes colour once the heaving, seething party gets started, but looks like a home video, like faded polaroids. All just jamming in a room, chanting, chanting... DEEP voice/girlish infectious yelps. Closed eyes/WIDE eyes. The best bit is when there are colour shots of girls wound up in fairylights, then it goes dark, the fairylights twinkle in this darkness, then it goes back to black and white. Cool.

And there's a glimpse of a girl holding a goose. As I said, everything a lovely perfect party should have. I want to combine archery and Archie... SHOOT ME INTO THE SCREEN. Into the awesome scene. Let me join the sweethearts please.

The run up to the ‘xams (ZAMS! – like supercool sci-fi lasers in a comic strip) has, for better or worse, come to equal ---->

Burns upon papercuts, being (un)cool enough to refuse proffered cigarettes, acting all childish NOT child-like, mocking the myopic, chilli-red window glows heating conversation, meat-free meatball feasts, monitoring vegetable patch construction, imagining Bounty women on beaches (wearing scarlet lipstick if the Bounty is dark chocolate), floral long culottes and Indian-print harem onesies, dwelling on outfits for professors of poetry in motion, passing a Dr Who mini-tardis and becoming part of an episode as an enormous rusted box is pulled from the Thames – space ship? gigantic Doomsday book? bigger brother of the Discworld Luggage?, ice lollies, Birthday stamping, profanity stickers, horizontal popcorn and poppotatoes, biro-scrawl tattoos on the backs of hands, bawling loudly, weeping silently, hearing woodpigeons everywhere, sherbet dib-dabs, writing BAD poetry… And hating bibliographies.

But also loving Antony and Cleopatra, The Sorrows of Young Werter, The Tempest, re-visiting a favourite novel and the actual process of READING. Opening the covers of a book need not be akin to opening Pandora’s box. I HOPE.

Curiouser and Curiouser

'Come, there's no use in crying like that!' said Alice to herself, rather sharply; 'I advise you to leave off this minute!' She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it), and sometimes she scolded herself so severely as to bring tears into her eyes; and once she remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people. 'But it's no use now,' thought poor Alice, 'to pretend to be two people! Why, there's hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person!'

I address myself, just as Alice does, still in the habit of thinking there are two of me. But I keep on taking bites from the Eat Me cake, making myself bigger and bigger, more solid and visible.

And vaguely respectable. Sort of.

But it's hard to be respectable, and not to fly away in a clumsy whirlwind, and have a good grasp of proprioception (this, put simply, is the brain’s knowledge of the relative positions of the body’s parts - the seventh sense), when body parts grow, retract, lengthen and shorten according to how much mushroom is nibbled.

Yet I think I would remember where I keep my body parts, irrespective of reliable proprioception. I trust them not to wander. But maybe this is my mistake...

They crash into things whether I know their whereabouts or not. Maybe they should rearrange themselves into something infinitely more elegant and graceful. Quicksmart. This is the only way to make me even half a respectable person. Though I would have to sacrifice some beautiful bruises.

How my heart leaps! But hearts, after leaps, ache.
I can’t help feeling Romeo and Juliet, frustrating as that is, but perhaps because of Prokofiev and the effect of necrophiliac ballet, making my heart leap then ache.

I am always complaining or talking about the weather. My penny’s worth that is worth nothing. Penny chews now cost more than a penny, so I struggle to chew the fat.

Butternut squash, sea monkeys, spectacles, enseamed beds of rank sweat.
Record sleeves, sleeve fights, sleeves that cover my hands.
I throw wine, I throw coffee, I allow my nail varnish to chip, I slice up my hands with paper ever since the blood blister popped.

And I brush my teeth. I am always brushing my teeth. It's more fun to brush teeth with someone else. After we sugared our apples. And failed to stew our tea in the proper way. I like tannins.

And there is a new Barbara Trapido book coming out. And it has a ballet dancer. And it will be read after exams. In the sun. In floral dungarees.

And the smell of barbecue is still on jumpers and sheets. I hope I can bottle the scent and keep it.

How'd you like them apples?

At the moment my head is like a one of those fruit machines you put change into at the arcades, with my eyes being replaced with vertically spinning pictures of fruit.

I'm tracing fruit through the ages...
Eve and the apple.
St Augustine and the pear.
Keats and the nectarine.
T.S. Eliot and the peach.

And now, most prevalently, Jeanette and her oranges, and Rita and her rubyfruit.

'Fruit salad, fruit pie, fruit for fools, fruited punch, Demon fruit, passion fruit, rotten fruit, fruit on Sunday. Oranges are the only fruit.'

Jeanette, I beg to differ. Oranges are plentiful, granted, but they are not the only fruit. Especially in literature. Especially in lesbian literature. And it's turning me into a fruitcake. (Similar to a nutcase, but nuts are not fruit, and therefore not allowed.)

There are also cherries on icecream that are like Greta Garbo kisses. And banana splits, topped with fat cherries bordering on the obscene (that comes crashing down on a misogynist's head). And two raspberries that are ordered alongside a fond female friendship. And Melanies who look like melons. And dried and pickled fruits librerally sprinkled over breakfasts and novels as women age...

And the grapefruit freak. A man who likes strangers to throw grapefruit at his naked body. It has to be a different person every time. He gets off on it (every citrus squelch is described). Fruity.

And of course the famed Rubyfruit. What juicy gossip.

All this fruit has been driving me mad in the attic. Fruit as a feminine and feminist symbol. Gilbert and Gubar would approve.

I think the madness started as soon as I came home, where there are SO MANY grapes on offer. No wonder grapes are associated with ill people. Eating them is like popping pills. Addictive.

People can get lost when diving into fruitbowls, sliding down the spirals of orange peel. Let's hope this fruitcake phase proves fruitful.