Stolen Love Behaviour

I'm writing about Love Poetry and it's rather going to my head (though I suppose it's actually intended for the heart). I carry the John Stammers anthology of Love Poems around in my bag like some lovesick schoolgirl. But it holds the whole history of love (well, back to the Renaissance at any rate).

'To see her is to love her'
[Burns]

'heart over-ripe at the core'
[Duffy]

'suck my red heart white, I will, because I love you'
[Glenday]

And then I found this, outside of the anthology, just stumbled upon it...

The photos have become either before or after I met you.
And after I met you looking at myself became me looking at myself pretending I was you looking at me hopefully falling in love.
And now my clothes are the clothes I've worn around you or clothes you've never seen me in or pictures I've sent.
And all the places I took you are now the places we've been.

My So Called Decade

A gig night and I chose no booze. Hanging out with my youngest brother, dancing like kids to Palace of Justice playing 'Hormones', wearing my longest high-waisted skirt and a cropped crochet cardigan. SO NINETIES.

The nineties were awesome. Patterned leggings, plaid shirts, crop-tops, multi-coloured hair, oversized band t-shirts, Doc Martins. Plus Blossom, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Clarissa Explains It All. Melissa Joan Hart's wardrobe is amazing and I want it.

And of course, the nineties gave us Clueless. The only film other than The Princess Bride that I know all the words too. Brittany Murphy delivers the most cutting line in cinema history: 'You're a virgin who can't drive'. She punctuates it with a pout. I used to watch this film over and over at a friend's house when I was like nine. I had no idea it was based on Austen's Emma. I just knew that Cher and Josh should be together, and that I totally dug the outfits. Clueless is the sole reason I use the word 'sporadically'.

Dancing around in my crochet cardi got me thinking about My So Called Life. Classic nineties teenage angst. And criminally only one season's worth. I had to track it down on the net to watch it again. Claire Danes before Little Women. Her voice-over narration is spot-on brainy yet 'troubled' fifteen year old; 'School is a battlefield. For the heart'. I love how she dyes her hair Crimson Glow and how she stabs at her food during a family meal while her head is saying 'I cannot bring myself to eat a well-balanced meal in front of my mother' and her ridiculous crush on Jordan Catalano ('I just like how he's always leaning. Against stuff'). And I love wild Rayanne.

SPRING

They are not long, the days of wine and roses.

Only I took hyacinth bulbs when I went to Devon at the weekend. The most beautiful place I have ever stayed. They own the land, the woods, the fields, the lake they call a pond. Stones throw from Dartmoor. The tree at the entrance had only just blossomed. The woods will be covered in bluebells (like in 'I Capture the Castle'). The mismatched, still over-woolly sheep come up to the windows and lick them and stare, herons take off by the lake, buzzards hunt, Chudleigh and Coco the spaniels are spoiled rotten. As am I. I read 'The Last Battle', drink local cider before lunch, fall asleep in the sun, have wine with everything, contemplate offers of sherry, sip champagne as we anticipate dinner. One of their own lambs spiked and studded with rosemary and garlic, a devil to carve but delicious to gaze on. And cheese souffle, which was always my favourite, even before I became vegetarian. The cheeseboard at lunch: brie the size of my head.

And the books, the books. By genre, and alphabetical, lining all the walls. A few first editions. The children's rooms with all the classics. Sitting on my feet, reading Noel Streatfield on the sofa.

A bookshop event, with wine, nibbles, and the guy who came on his motorbike all the way from Sussex, with whom I had the education conversation. Wearing a young gentleman's jacket draped round my shoulders all the way back after dinner when it got chilly. I would have thought this dreamy when fourteen.

Absentmindedly skimming the Times over halved grapefruit and coffee and apricot juice to die for. I had to neglect, though not forget, my Guardian roots for a weekend.

Then we played corners in the car on the way back home. Juvenile. The engine overheated just outside London.

And now it's like I'm underwater in my head, all bunged up,blocked ears, full of cold. It came on just before I saw Bowerman's Nose on Dartmoor. A nose made of piled up stones. It's breathing in all the fresh air, while I'm clogged with phlegm in the city.

MY LIFE (I wish)

Muffling Out

When looking around charity shops I always leave the jumpers till last. They're the best bit, the treat at the end. But these woolens may have to be saved for winter now. I had to buy plimsolls yesterday. It's getting too hot for laced-up converse and faux-fur topped ankle boots. The tattoo on my inner ankle is getting an airing.



The nicest thing about spring Sundays is listening to Cerys Matthews on the radio in bed as the sun shines in through the conservatory windows. And we had the first barbeque of the year today. So much meat, a couple of singed eyebrows, a whole guinea fowl and lots of bright partially charred plum tomatoes. My vegetarianism was sorely tried. But red peppers and beer are fine alternatives to blood.

My blood is fairly sluggish at the moment. I hope it returns gushing soon. Like when I used to have blood taken and the nurse would say it was slow, so I would pump my fist and out it would spurt in time to my clenching. Perhaps it is too blue at present. I need to be tickled pink. Just as Johnny Flynn sings, however twee he may be...

Tickle me pink
I'm rosy as a flushed red apple skin
Except I've never been as sweet
I've rolled around the orchard
and found myself too awkward
and tickle me green I'm too naive

Pray for the people inside your head
for they won't be there when you're dead
muffled out and pushed back down
pushed back through the leafy ground

Time is too early
my hair isn't curly
I wish I was home and tucked away
when nothing goes right
and the future's dark as night
what you need is a sunny sunny day

Head in a cloud of darlings

After hot home-made quiche, rhubarb crumble with cream poured from a stolen half-pint glass, and two top-ups of red wine, we took cabs to the theatre.

Set in WWII, with vintage costumes, upholstered armchairs, and a screen above the scenes for when aircrafts fly right at the audience, we watched a real Hollywood actor play an oldschool Hollywood actor. James Purefoy plus a whole tub of brylcreem*. And a Pole attempting English, a battleaxe hottelier, and a Katherine Hepburn outfit to die for. So many 'darling's and 'duck's and rationed breakfasts, and lashings of pink gin. Though red wine for us in the interval. It ended in a good old sing song, rallying up to face the war together. Flare Path, written by Rattigan when he himself was off fighting, and first performed whilst the war was still on. Repressed fear, trauma, sound of not-so-far-away bombs. Yet so much jolly hockey sticks enthusiasm.

We all piled through the stage door after curtain down. Invited for champagne with a cast member backstage. A 'Darling' the spit of Joyce Grenfell. On the way up we passed Jeremy Irons. On the way out we passed the paparazzi waiting for Sienna Miller. And I wore my vintage Dior jacket the whole night. High life.

* I have been in love with James Purefoy forever. Mansfield Park, A Knight's Tale, Vanity Fair, and, best of all, Marc Antony in ROME. I prefer him with less brylcreem, if I'm honest.

Away to a Domus Aurea

Away for a weekend in Brighton, so I walked from Hackney Wick to Liverpool Street Station on Saturday morning. I saw a skinny man, more-than-middle-aged and denim-clad, dancing in the street between Broadway Market and Columbia Road. He was outside his open front door and Cyndi Lauper-esque music (80's pop, girlish voice, catchy as hell) was blaring, and he had some moves. Wholeheartedly in his own shape-pulling world as the sun shone.

In Brighton on Sunday we saw a little girl dancing to a rock band playing outdoors. She was on her own cobbled stage, swinging her arms, folding her spine, making her own rules of motion. I would so much like to be like her. Then in The Lanes we watched four long haired and/or dreadlocked music-makers who had a double bass, banjo, snare drum and guitar. The percussionist had a tambourine around her foot so as she stomped the beat jangled. They even played The Belle of Belfast City. Brighton seems to be always sunny, and is offbeat with singalong rhythms. I became twelve again and bought beads to make necklaces. We sat in a patch of park as some teenagers lit up a spliff nearby, and I spelled out words on yellow string.

ILOVEKEATS

and

AWESOME

Then later, after a time of board games and educational DVDs that were originally VHS on the history and art of Rome and rounds of tea and pleasantly scratchy blankets, we played Octodad on a laptop. Octodad is an octopus who disguises himself as a dad in order to spy. It's not entirely clear what he's spying on. He wears a suit, writes in his journal using his moustache tentacle, and has got himself a human wife and two human children, whose suspicions he has to keep at bay. He looks like this:



He needs a banana to form the moustache on the mannequin he's trying to make. He will use the mannequin to distract the wife while she's having a romantic dinner with him so he can escape to the basement to get her a 'gift'. We didn't find out what the gift is. He can only get the banana (and also escape from the sushi chef who is hunting him down) if he carries out a series of tasks, which seem to mostly consist of clearing/throwing objects onto the floor with his leg and arm tentacles, and protecting his 'daughter' from spiders. When he 'walks' he looks like he's dancing. Dancing like the man in the East London street. Like he just doesn't care. Octodad is pretty cool.

Huswiferie

I spent Saturday afternoon at The Geffrye Museum, and it was charming.



Despite this beautiful Museum of the Home standing slapbang in Hoxton, there were groups of visitors that reminded me of the National Heritage lot from home. As I walked through the entrance garden I saw these folk all huddled on benches, drinking from their thermoses and eating homemade sandwiches made from wholemeal bread. It was a gloriously sunny day, yet I definitely spied some anoraks. In contrast, once I made my way inside the permanent exhibition I came across a few archetypal Shoreditch hipsters. Achingly cool. Asymmetric haircuts - check. Patterned wool jumpers - check. Cut off denim shorts - check. Oversize clumpy 'workman's' boots - check. A charming place can appeal to all sorts, especially when it's a stone's throw from Hoxton station.

The walk through the rooms from the 1600s to the 1900s is a time-travel treat. It follows 'the middling sort' through all domesticity. Information boards on 'The Middling Sort and Gardening', 'The Middling Sort and Politeness', and so on. And there are pretty little watercolour paintings of gardens and rooms by women with names like Beatrice and Matilda. Most of the furniture pieces are authentic, and therefore cannot be touched. However, there is a wooden replica of one from the 17th century, which the public can sit on. It has a sign above it saying 'You might find that sitting in the chair makes you feel important, and no doubt this was the intention'. I felt important. I was also introduced to a curious fellow called Gervase Markham. He was a writer in the early 1600s, his main subject being 'the mystery and science of huswiferie'. One pearl of wisdom from this evident campaigner for women's rights was that women's clothes should be comely and not cut with toyish garnishes. Oh, and that they should always be pleasant to their menfolk, suppressing rage and frustration, and forever smiling sweetly.

The garden reading room smells of flowers. It looks over the herb garden and topiaried hedges, is lined with wicker chairs, is fringed with pot plants and gardening books, and has a blue-green mural on one wall, which looks like a scene from The Wind in the Willows but with added peacocks. This room is right behind the chapel. A whole chapel inside a house. Along with cherubs, there are skulls up above.

In the sun-shot tea room I drank hot chocolate and listened to a terribly 'proper' English dame (she looked and sounded like a loud-voiced dame, though I can't definitively claim she was) speaking impeccable French to her Gallic guest, pressing the fish cakes upon him. 'I can't recommend the fishcakes enough, they are awfully good fishcakes' etc etc. The Frenchman ordered chicken.

It turns out I visited this museum when I was three. I don't remember it. And I can safely say that I didn't learn much from Gervaise Markham, as I used a broken hoover rather ineffectively over at the beau's, and didn't leave the house at all except for tinned rice pudding and a jar of jam. Lovely Sunday.

A sad tale's best for winter: I have one / Of sprites and goblins.

The most recent tale from my Mondays is the Shakespearean tale of Winter. In this case, Oxford undergraduates putting on the play in the late seventies. Our storyteller was in love with a woman who was playing Hermione. He couldn't bare to be separated from his young lover so joined the cast to 'keep an eye'. Or rather 'be with her', as he later edited. The role that does not require actorly talent in much measure is that of the bear. He took it. Hot and blind in his costume. The bear famously knows when to exit, but it isn't clear when it enters. He'd loitered for some time, then his cue came and off he went, sweaty and unseeing. He stumbled and tripped into the wings. And lo, his first review resulted. 'Andrew Motion as the bear was languid.'

It is not Winter now. Thank goodness. Blossom-heavy branches are scraping the upper deck as I go about my week. And everything seems less languid, more liquid. I found myself looking at a photograph of Fanny Brawne's engagement ring, given to her by Keats. I found myself thinking that I should like to have a ring cut exactly like that, a precise replica made, for when I get engaged. Then I remembered that I am never going to get engaged. That I find marriage absurd. That the notion is ridiculous, and that I'm merely a sucker for pretty jewellery. And a wholehearted sucker for Keats. It's OK, I can drink cold beer later and later now it's lighter.



And I have to write and write, for deadlines and for finger-strain. So 'I shall begin by setting myself magic objects to write on: sea-bearded bodies...'

Be what you would seem to be, or if you'd like it put more simply: Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.
[The Duchess]

Curious that I bought cider, not lager, before the ballet. But no matter. Flushed rosy velvet whatever.

Special effect screens in the theatre often irritate me, but spiralling alphabets, falling down rabbit holes, growing/shrinking doors, and scattering playing cards work well for SPECTACLE in an opera house.

Home Sweet Home was stitched on a backdrop, words as tall as me and over an embroidered cottage. The needlepoint rose to reveal butchery. Pigs in copper pots: carved up rumps, severed heads, ears and snouts as kitchen clutter. A tiny fireball woman wearing aprons, wielding an enormous butchers' knife choreographed into recklessness. All pig pink and oven hot. Then a Victoria sponge trampoline and teapots like wheelbarrows. Tutus shaped like playing card suits: diamonds, hearts, clubs, spades. Voluptuous flamingos (as busty as ballerinas can ever be), roses reluctant to be painted red, and raging Tamara Rojo, an ever-striking carmine caricature. Alice in lavender, kicking out fouette after fouette. The axe swung down to signal the interval with a droplet of blood like an upside down heart on the blade.

Jack and Alice danced a pas de deux, all long lean limbs, their muscles forming a heart. HEART MOTIF.



Bit of a wonderland week. I saw a man have a fit on the bus so I summoned sirens. I had bad dreams that made my body hurt, as though my insides were being dragged out through my ribcage, the ghost of nightmare gripping my bones after I woke. I smelled of someone else for a day, wearing their jumper, wearing their skin. I ate pancakes with blue cheese and mushrooms late at night and saw a picture-book crescent moon over Mabley Green. And I watched a marvel of a ballet.

Poetry is a form of autism. My tutor mentioned this today.



O Lord. I am her. I am cycling in Cambridge, I am cooking eggs in my Newnham room, I am writing strange, hot-worded letters to Richard Sassoon that I never send, I am at the party, knocking back brandy, biting Ted's cheek as he kisses my neck, making blood run down his face. I am waiting for this man-god to create and destroy.

All this on the bus. I must end this obsession. But I'm only half-way through. I think I'm reading in great chunks, hungrily, but I must actually be nibbling, going slow to stop stomach ache. It makes my head ache.

Plath Heart

A dress of green velvet that to the touch is how I imagine an invisibility cloak to feel. A box made from embroidered roses, into which I can whisper worries through the gaps between petals. Presents hailing from a Hexham charity shop and The Biscuit Factory respectively. Two of my favourite places in all the world, not just Northumberland. Plus two women eating two croissants each across the table from one another. The elder let the younger finish her ice cream too.

I am reading the journals of Sylvia Plath and I am obsessed. I want to bite my lip and hug myself at the beautiful true prose and also die a little every time I turn a page. She writes of how she loves to pick her nose, of the smell of beer and cheese sandwiches, of men and women and writing writing writing. I know it's going to break my heart. More so because I think of the very real person sitting there (propped up by pillows in bed, listening to the night weather outside at times) writing of her very real feelings, her very real life. Though in Lady Lazarus she claims to be like a cat and have nine times to die, suggesting she has nine lives, she only had the one. The intelligent, fascinating, consuming one documented in the journals.

One of the epigraphs in her original notebook is a Yeats quote.
'We only begin to live when we conceive life as Tragedy...'

Life's too short not to spoon out the jam jar

An evening in Leytonstone, so far out my shoes pinched at the thought of it. But the two of us tracked down the pub that seemed to have been plucked from the north and winched in among little cottage-like terraced houses along a back road. The pub was putting on a band. An aging Irishman with lambchop sideburns introduced Dan of Green Gables. Two thirds of a favourite band (The Wave Pictures - every song has some sweetstuff in it I swear: jam, ice cream, marmalade, sugar and syrup. A sweet-toothed set-up) have brought in Dan on violin to create this side project. They sound like The Wave Pictures, but Dave is on acoustic rather than electric, Franec is on mandolin, and the violin escalates it all to mesmeric heights. I was wholly in a trance throughout 'I Saw Her Hair Between the Trees' (and not only because the title bears resemblance to my favourite O'Hara line). One of the most beautiful things I have ever heard and only two feet away as we sat at a little round table - big enough for only a couple of pints - right up close. Franec and his round face of cheek and beard, and fast mandolin hand. They told jokes between songs to fill time as they were worried they didn't have enough material. I must stop falling in love, and falling in love so frequently and completely. Dan with his secret-smiling and shy not-quite-looking-at the audience, and occasional spontaneous foot stamp as he raises his bow. I'm a sucker for wool grandad vests. He struck me so truly, I think, because he was merging inside my head and in front of my eyes with a character from a just-read novel. Finn from The Magic Toyshop, also red haired, who dances to a fiddle, and with whom I also fell in love. Only one beer and all drunk on folk in Leytonstone.

throbbing temples

I walk and it is grape dark and I am so drunk on moonshine I see stars over London.

I've never been one to suffer from hangovers so something has changed. Stiff bones and increase of neck clicks. My bus bruise from last night is blossoming. Plate of watercress and tzatziki followed by many many biscuits as a test cure. Late to work due to an accident on the Old Street roundabout. Jogged from Shoreditch. I sweated past scattered bike helmets and ballet pumps in the road...

All this after an anthology launch in a basement of gloaming light/dark. Red room, canned Red Stripe, burning oils, high on aromatics, hearing disembodied voices float over heads, woozy poetry. Magic wine, refill and refill of red. Oh, and pastel cupcakes. Singing along to a man and his guitar:

If you're going home in a London ambulance, I'm going home in a London ambulance too.

Bread Pudding/French Toast

I am the content of a mania I can observe

Sundays should always be Sundays, and Sundays mean brunch. So my flatmate and I ventured to The Counter Cafe, a place making a name for itself despite being marooned out in the wastelands of Hackney Wick. Apparently the Victorians used to refer to the East End as 'The Abyss'. It is grey, drizzly, completely deserted... Empty streets, industrial estates and abandoned warehouses make up this hinterland. But brunch is delicious in the abyss. My flatmate plaited her hair around her head and wore a fork earring in one ear, a spoon in the other. We bought the Observer on the way. We were served by a troupe of lovelies: a lanky guy in a lumberjack shirt, braces and big boots, a strapping Australian chap in a sleeveless sports shirt (at odds to February chill), and a girl with two-tone braids and a tattoo up her neck. The best coffee I have had in many a month, and french toast piled with fried banana, toasted almonds and mixed berries, with a mini jug of maple syrup on the side. We may have followed this heart attack plateful with a brownie, split between us...



From moreish meals to moreish prose. I have started reading Angela Carter. People are forever telling me to read her, saying I will love her. This makes me wary. But I began 'The Magic Toyshop' on the bus the other day. I was wholeheartedly unsettled and completely in love. The first line is 'The summer she was fifteen, Melanie discovered she was made of flesh and blood'. This is a recent obsession of mine. She goes on to write of posing for Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and a great deal of bread pudding. I have strong feelings on these things. I adore bread pudding, but this was hard won. There was a time when it symbolised true horror. Melanie thinks similarly. Bread pudding and Pre-Raphaelites are definitely plots on my life map. I want to read 'The Bloody Chamber' next. Vampiric appetites, oh yes.

Doll House

Flat discussion about Country House Novels, and creating a display for them in a bookshop using a large doll house as the focal point, as an interesting object to illustrate the theme and on which to arrange the books. Three days later: FATE. Discovery of an abandoned doll house outside our block by the bins.

Sky blue with a beautiful lift-up tiled roof, open fronted, studded at the sides with little windows. In need of a bit of a spring clean but otherwise perfect. We can use tester pots of paint to touch up the places looking a little worse for wear, and to detail climbing plants, vines, butterflies, perhaps a cat by a windowsill. (Not with nail varnish. I attacked my mother's childhood doll house with the stuff when young and stupid. Iridescent pink chimneys did not go down well). We can set up scenes from the novels inside it. Atonement with Briony watching lovers by the fountain and, later, rape. The Pursuit of Love with the toasty Hons cupboard filled with Radlett children chatting about naughty things. And, though not a novel, we could go to town with Ibsen.

Harold Pinter laughed

'Henry Green, mid-century novelist and miserablist, read in a French newspaper of a motorcyclist who wore his jacket back to front in order to keep out the chill wind as he rode. The motorcyclist then crashed and flew onto hard tarmac. He was knocked unconscious. Another man drove by and stopped when he spotted the unconscious motorcyclist. He saw the back to front jacket and thought that the motorcyclist's head had twisted right round in the accident. So he wrenched the head back into what he thought was the correct position, killing the motorcyclist.'

They all laughed and I said O God.

Black, white and grey areas.

All smiles.

I've read the poets and the analysts / Searched through the books on human behaviour

I was watching and listening to a boy that I am most used to hearing sing in basements. I was wearing my shirt that is very Vanessa Bell - a shirt I can see her having worn, and a textile she may have designed. I was with a lot of the people who had been my own Bloomsbury group. The boy sang a Nick Cave song. He sang

I loved her then and I guess I love her still
Hers is the face I see when a certain mood moves in
She lives in my blood and skin
Her wild feral stare, her dark hair
Her winter lips as cold as stone, I was her man

But there are some things love won't allow
I held her hand but I don't hold it now
I don't know why and I don't know how
But she's nobody's baby now

I also want my worry dolls. Tiny Guatemalan limbs, brightly coloured dresses and trousers, hand painted eyes and half-smiles, lying together in the little woven drawstring bag. Tucking my worries under my pillow.

You floor me, even on the roof.

I'm staying six floors up, sleeping in a white bed in a white room, with black-haired animals. I listen to the voice of Edith Sitwell reading her poetry and reggae and drink more than one cup of tea. I like tea again. We make Jamie's pasta, even though we hate Jamie. Hacking at fresh lasagne sheets, trying to make vague approximations of tagliatelle. Parmesan, basil, egg, oil. Bowl, fork, spoons. Sleeping with the spaniel, who almost purrs when he snores. Being woken by a cleaner coming in with her key (I didn't know it was her day), hastily pulling on clothes and trying to avoid dog, dog, dog in my face. Being surprised by a window cleaner on pulleys at the bedroom window - more surprised by how normal, even banal, it must now be for him, seeing into people's bedrooms so very high. Returning from discussing termite queens and the clicking off of wings, and thinking of honeybee queens and the trailing body bits of drones, and a beautiful poem about the Menae written for Keats. Returning to spin on the roof in the wind and dancing with the dog on hind legs and all of London blowing around us up on the 6th floor.

Hum of Men

He speaks in metaphors and wears braces with collarless shirts and has the most lovely kind voice you could ever hope to hear in your whole life. You would believe him if he told you Everything Is Going To Be OK. I always end up staring at his silver wedding ring. He writes of my father (according to my mother).

Andrew Motion listened to a four hour reading of In Memoriam in a freezing cold church and was moved to tears. It is two hundred years since Hallam's death, so Motion and Hollinghurst organised the reading. I am reading Hollinghurst now - The Swimming Pool Library - and so far it's all cocks in beautiful prose.


I love the faces in this photo. And how it says JAMES BROWN really big behind us. Tufnell Park rock bar. I miss those tufnell trees that breathed through their spectacles.

My Beautiful Launderette

I have always wanted to go to a launderette. I think they would be the perfect setting for a play, or a film short. Whirring sound, smell of soap powder, sitting with strangers watching laundry go round and round.

Hanif Kureishi and Stephen Frears knew the potential of launderettes. Lovely film.
Richard Thompson also knew. 'And I fell in love with a laundry girl who was working next to me. Oh she was a rare thing, fine as a bee's wing'. I heart Beeswing. 'There was animal in her eyes'.

Anyway, I have now been to a launderette. The sharpness of soap powder got up my nose. But it was warm, and the noises were comforting, and the drums were huge, and we were high. Reading Alice in Wonderland in a launderette on Green Lanes. Dive into the drum, rather than a rabbit hole, and fall through laundry world, where the odd socks go.

We took the enormous bag back along the road between us, our hands plunged into the hot clothes, the way Amelie does with barrels of beans at the market. Made the house smell of clean.

Transcript

IT'S THE BASS LINE IN YOUR MIND. IT'S A SEXY WAY TO CRY.

The following is a transcript of an email I received at work yesterday. I was writing out the same marketing spiel over and over by hand in biro, the words lodging themselves fast. This was my rescue:

Islands
- Return to the Sea

Preamble: Once upon a time there was a band called the Unicorns. They lived in Montreal, Canada, and were very happy. They wrote and sung songs about death. Of note, and worth a quick glance before we embark on Islands, is a little look at the lyrics of the final track of their only album, Who Will Cut Our Hair When We Die?. The song is called Ready to Die and the lyrics are as follows:

I woke up thirsty on an island in the sea
I woke up hungry with hungry cougars surrounding me

I hit the soft spot on the soft spot on my head
It made me tired so I sung from my bed

I'm ready to die [x4]
A sword, a switchblade, any way you cut it
I'm not afraid, I know I'm going to get it

Oh maker! (of such fine products
As palm trees, and the dead sea)
Don't pardon me, there's nothing rude
Things conclude, things conclude

As I slurred that chorus, the ghosts got bigger
Small sounds like a drill
The death sweats suit me
A death threat provides a thrill

I've seen the world, kissed all the pretty girls
I've said my goodbyes and now I'm ready to die.

They broke up and then a few days later a few them got together as Islands and put out the album we're about to listen to, which is a cracker. It's called Return To The Sea and starts 'I woke up thirsty the day I died'. It's very good.
(Hit Play All and give me a heads up when you're ready)

AND IT WAS GOOD.

700 Penguins

I have joined the Poetry Library. 5th floor, Royal Festival Hall, Southbank. Small but perfect. It houses reference and loan copies of poetry from 1912 onwards. The librarians are mostly lovely inoffensively-attractive males. There are even big bright floor cushions in a corner for children, where they can sit and read, or be read to by their parents.

A section of the shelving is movable, adjustable. There are big wheels and a lock system on the side of them. There are notices up reminding browsers to check that there is no-one between the shelves before they start moving them together. I can imagine having a romantic tryst with some young, bespectacled, tentatively-bearded poet amid these claustrophobic shelves, our hands touching as we both reach for Ted Hughes.



It's not love's letter that poetry holds,
but the charm of the love that drew it forth
from the silence...

I try to get lost in this library. Or at least in the words in this library. I try. I succeed in getting lost in the 700 Penguin covers. The 700 book-worlds that were a gift and make me stare and stare and escape.

Root Canals

I remember once in London the realisation coming over me, of the whole of its inhabitants lying horizontal a hundred years hence - Tennyson, quoted in Audrey Tennyson's notebook.

We finally did it. We ventured out for a Sunday walk. New River Walk. London Canal Walk. Joining the two. Breakfast in a Turkish caff in Turnpike Lane, along the Harringay Passage, New River (neither new, nor a river) to Islington, following the canal all the way to Victoria Park, mugs of hot chocolate in Hackney Wick. Nine miles.

Mud and empty cans of special brew and old bras and condom wrappers to begin. Then smooth paths without barriers by the waterside, and not a soul passing that didn't either jog or cycle. Boards that showed routes and painted leaves punctuating length of London. Cold hands, bumping bags, rain mists. My hair was rats tails, my feet sighed when de-socked.

And then we'll sit
in the shadowy spruce
and pick the bones
of careless mice,

and spitwipe the blood from your chin
and fingerpluck the sleep from my eye.

Photos by Alice

An 83 year old lady went on holiday to Gibraltar with her middle-aged son who has Downs syndrome. She went to the casino, gambled like there was no tomorrow, and they disco-danced together. That night she had an asthma attack, was able to call for help, then died. I think this is the way to go. It was the night of September 10th, 2001.



I am back on the 236. I love this route. Through Finsbury Park, Stoke Newington, London Fields. I love to go to Yasar Halim in Green Lanes, buy pastries and bread stuffed with spinach, or feta, or sesame paste, go get the bus and and eat from my paper bag all the way home. A satisfying kind of queasy. Heady.

Peeling dried PVA off fingers, waiting for ripened brie to run down the side and into our mouths, making sound effects in throats following frittata, and actually having a PROPER SUNDAY. This is life after essay. So long Sharon Olds, farewell Anne Sexton, you wonderful double images. Hello lovely brunches, how-do-you-do pub in the afternoon.

New huge woolen cardigan from a Hexham charity shop, red trousers, red tights, red smarties that turn my lips red.

And I've read my blank pages of unwritten essay so many times that I make poems instead.

You are all nose, child, now that you are man.

More bone than soft edges, you have grown.

You like that you can count your ribs today.

All I see is nose, the nose that leads you.

It is Roman, like the obverse of a coin.

More Hadrian than Nero. Please.

Build walls tomorrow. Don’t let them burn.

Weekend of a beginning

Pretty much the last thing I did in 2010 was fall down the stairs on the bus. Top to bottom. I was on the phone, and the person on the other end was still talking talking as if I had not just tumbled into mortification, tumbled into a very bruised knee.
I took my bruised knee to the Worcestershire countryside. Art on white walls, mirrors everywhere, the land outside still recovering from snow, a dog named Lola, a cat named Tatiana, and lovely people, old and new, welcoming. A night out on the tiles in Pershore, with real ale (Ale Mary), requests to be less rowdy, free buffet, bringing in the new year down on the decking at the bottom of the pub garden by the river Avon. Tankards were thrown into the dark waters, pub signs were very nearly stolen, the boy travelled home in the car boot and warmed his hands on other people's faces. I said no to Moet. Projectile vomit across the room, red from wine, hitting my handbag, rubbing his back. Mopping at after three in the morning. A New Year's Day of Dr Who, putting mobile phones in the washing machine, tentative walks, competitive Articulate and the Best Tart Ever. A thick wodge of Christmas cake to send us on our way a day later. Tasty January. I hope it will taste of fresh air and toothpaste. Brushing my teeth always makes me feel better.

socks and pants

The liiiittle-TINY-chiiiild, governments on shoulders, and not abhoring wombs.
Christmas Cake Icing Fail. Made it into a Christmas Creepy Paedophile Cake. And I was redeemed by the Ginger Hedgehog.
I may heart Hareshaw Linn, but our woods are ours. And beautiful. And WHITE.
And SOCKS and PANTS are awesome. Whatever Sandi Toksvig claims.

Oh la!
Elizabeth Bennets and Mary Crawfords, skinny mochas and a snoring Coco. Gin at lunchtime. Gin to distract from trains of thought (trains that may not take me home tomorrow...). Ice and lime and the old flirts on the phone, and the postcard from Jordan finally arriving, 'la'!
A lovely day with the foxes.
Et vulpes tecum sit!

Searching Nightingale Wood

It was all enough to break your heart and Viola began to cry.

Hearts turned inside out. Heads stringing words.

"tempest" popular shrek the killers tye tribbett broken dark blue elvis .... noel there you'll be viola solo we are the world what child is this when the .... kreisler george gershwin piano gibbons girlfriend gliere great balls of fire ... we aim for deck the halls dhoom dreaming with a broken heart

Blue blue electric blue

ill

I sat down and watched the Blue Peter Christmas Special. It has been years and it has changed. A friend was singing on it (full-grown adult I must add), but I watched the whole thing. One of the presenters was leaving, it was their last show. There was a best-bit montage. We emoted. I felt that I had only just got to know this boy-man who was now being untimely ripped from my life-slash-infequent-televisual-viewing. He looked like a Shoreditch Hipster. This is what happens when you ignore a show for a time. Also, they put a baby in a bucket to create a modern-day Nativity scene. Where is Matt Baker and his lovely Northern tones? Where is Stuart Miles and Anthea Turner and botched Blue Peter 'makes'? Where are all the Tracy Islands? Though the badge on the friend's grown-up-coat's lapel is covetable.

I followed this with Rupert Goold's MACBETH. The most awesome of poetry. Soviet, lifts, the Lady's cheekbones, blood spatters, Irish Porter, hubble bubble nurses dancing on corpses, Patrick Stewart's bald severed head. I always dread the Macduff family slaughter and this was killer. All My Pretty Ones. If this had been on the big screen I probably would have suffered cardiac arrest.
UNSEAMED FROM NAVE TO CHOPS.

It is Jane Austen's 235th Birthday. And Colin Firth has publicly dropped his support for the Liberal Democrats.

[Paoulo and Francesca, Inferno]

I slipped on unseen ice a week ago and no eyes blinked. It was my tailbone that bore the brunt. But once dusted off, the shock moved up without me knowing. Tailbone to breastbone and a week of dull ache and old-woman moans. Sneezes are the worst, but the saddest thing is that it hurts to laugh. And not like when I used to get exquisite shooting pains in my shoulder when I giggled too damn much with best friends in boy-postered bedrooms.

Gianciotto pierced Francesca's bosom with a rapier, spearing both her and Paulo, flesh close to flesh, splintered bone.

I think I'm Francesca.

Holidays whilst still at work. Christmas holly-days.

Tying gold ribbons around winter tree-imprinted books with cheesy Christmas tunes on a CD that cost £2 in the background and looking out across mildly snowy London. St Paul's all misty like in Mary Poppins, 'feed the birds, tuppence a bag'.

Christmas decorations up at Yasar Halim on my stocking-up-on-supplies Saturday morning. Do you want tinsel with your tahinli? Baubles with your borek?

Big house in Clerkenwell, camping out, pretending to be grown-ups. Actually buying the Observer. Terribly, terribly middle-class jaunt to Waitrose, half-price bubbly, puff pastry for a pie we make for supper, vegetables that look like spring in a saucepan, wine time at just after 3pm (is the yardarm over the whatsit?). HIGH LIFE.

Reading on the sofas about the Mitfords and how I could stay where they lived and breathed and endured the childhood I inhaled from Nancy's novels.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2010/dec/05/mitfords-chatsworth-derbyshire.

They may have been everything I turn my nose up at - awful snobs, hunters, the odd fascist, I could go on... - but, oh, romantic countryside lives and jolly adventures. And who am I to talk, residing in Clerkenwell and shopping in Waitrose. I need a tulle drop-waist dress and chaise longue and cigarette holder, and cut-glass vowels to make my wit that bit sharper as I chat and lounge and wait for a sherry.

O

The way he says 'I love'

A short o, I lov

A short o, shaped like a mouth

No ifs, no buts, say NO to all the cuts

UCL Occupation, Day 5

Between the meetings, discussions, updates and proposals, we dance a ceilidh. The caller is a music teacher from SOAS, heavily moustached, the other side of middle age, and wearing a bright knitted jumper. He sings in Italian. He sings a song about wallpaper that hails from Bethnal Green. We dance to his fiddle. We all get hot, not bothered, for an hour or so.

But there is something to get bothered about.
But you have to dance too.

Fabric

Mixing florals, mixing patterns,

I want to wrap myself in prints

and create paisley damask distractions.

Textiles tailored for straightjackets.

The busy shapes fail to tessellate;

they cannot fool my senses.

I wrap myself in prints

as fingers wrap themselves around

the cross-stitch strings inside organs,

plucking fingerprint beats

and pulling pulling gentle persistence,

undoing what was sewn.

Beneath cotton hibiscus bruises

I see the imprint of you.

At work I've been building forts out of boxes and books and brown parcel paper. (Plus dogs.)

Outside of work I have been trying to build forts out of gingerbread lattes and mince pies (Sainsbury's, sub par and too soon really). I've only managed a fairly flimsy cave of imagined tarpaulin.

Oh. I must read Tom Paulin on Elizabeth Bishop for class.

Such stuff as dreams are made on

Rainy November Sundays, complete with a little thunder, are for catching up, pubs and museums. Not dusty, musty, boring, compulsory family-day-out museums. But museums of EVERYTHING.

Before a warming latte, we walked to Primrose Hill, by way of Chalk Farm, and found a curiosity. The Museum of Everything. Carnival, circus, fairground, gaudy clowns, marionettes, married midgets, bearded ladies, woman-mountains, stuffed animals, two-headed lambs, tiny leathered dogs, claustrophobic tunnel of boxing squirrels at eye-level, all moth-eaten, dog-eared, the frogs and toads were the worst, I could barely look...far from Beatrix Potter is Mr Potter's stitched up anthropomorphic menagerie, yet not a load of cock robin. Scientific Automatic Palmistry - place coin in slot, read your girdle of Venus and follow your second life line...

This little Sunday life was rounded with strawberry cider.

Edmund Clerihew Bentley

A shame Jane Austen
Never got lost in
Jilly Cooper's fiction;
She'd be baffled by the diction.

Write me. Write.

Anna who was mad,
I have a knife in my armpit.
When I stand on tiptoe I tap out messages.
Am I some sort of infection?
Did I make you go insane?
Did I make the sounds go sour?
Did I tell you to climb out the window?
Forgive. Forgive.
Say not I did.
Say not.
Say.

Speak Mary-words into our pillow.
Take me the gangling twelve-year-old
into your sunken lap.
Whisper like a buttercup.
Eat me. Eat me up like cream pudding.
Take me in.
Take me.
Take.

I love Anne Sexton. And then I find that she had an aunt named Anna
who went mad. She thought of Anna as a mother. She watched her 
slowly go mad. A knife in the armpit.

Suet pudding and mashed potato, red woolen fingerless gloves, my orange Autumn coat that smells of old ladies, breathing clouds of Heaton weed, flame leaves trodden into tarmac, donating giant sparklers to children, jumpers that have to have sleeves rolled back and almost reach my knees, piling up books for my bag, new poets (to me) and old favourites, the beginnings of a bird poem (don't hold your breath), sitting on a bench between two man-brothers watching cranes to counter hangovers, wine and Downton Abbey and baklava before midnight. AND ACTUALLY READING A NOVEL.

I am eating all and sundries at the moment. Because I have an appetite? Because a person ALL full is better than a glass half empty? Because I can? What I most crave is a home-cooked meal at my home in Northumberland. I could dine for weeks on this. One of these meals could keep me going more than any amount of snacking, masticating, attacking like a gannet can when I'm away for too long. I am eating so much and so frequently because I am trying to re-create that fullness I feel when in the kitchen by the Aga reading the paper and being told to 'not to smack my lips'. Half-cream hot chocolate heated on the hob with friends, topped with cheap whipped cream that scares him, is most excellent in Autumn. But it acts as an appetiser to the weekend feast.

Guide to Being a Grown-Up

buy a pumpkin. take out its guts. disembowel it. save the seeds for toasting and adding to a questionable soup-stew. cook porridge in the pumpkin, with milk and apples and cinnamon. spoon out the porridge-pudding when steaming, each eager feaster manned with their own teaspoon. scoop the semi-soft pumpkin flesh, making perfect circles. play with a sparker-lighter, throw shards of spiky light. burn plastic-coated business cards in the holey pumpkin-husk out in the garden. add lighter fluid and burn some more. add phlegm-soaked tissues of ill people to the flames to try and burn burn burn the damned plastic. conduct a voodoo ritual around the burnt-orange, orange-flamed pumpkin. sing 'Burn Baby, Burn' into the dark. smell satisfyingly of lighter fluid all night, the stench stuck to wool jumpers.

a pumpkin should come with the keys to a starter home. they are for grown-ups.

That Night

My bed in white sheets, strewn with jumpers not all mine. Laptop, notebook, neat-angled. Sock-toasties and balled up in pyjama bottoms eating rhubarb pie and reading all my theory and criticism. Go go biro: myth touch history, sift through whatever flotsam washes up.

Then Ted cuts to the quick.

My love-life grabbed it. My numbed love-life
With its two mad needles,
Embroidering their rose, piercing and tugging
At their tapestry, their blood tattoo
Somewhere behind my navel,
Treading that morass of emblazon,
Two mad needles, criss-crossing their stitches,
Selecting among my nerves
For their colours, refashioning me
Inside my own skin, each refashioning the other
With their self-caricatures,

Their obsessed in and out. Two women
Each with her needle.

I find nothing in my life that I can't find more of in books. With the exception of walking on the beach, in the snowy woods, and swimming underwater.

That is one of the saddest journal entries I ever made when I was young.

Mary Reufle

Iambic Pentameter

As I blow dust across the table top
and stack up boxes, counting to myself,
the boy, the gentle man, who hails from far
South Africa reads. He reads aloud, him to me,
from Romeo and Juliet. Sonnet.
The one with pilgrims, all about true love
and that. A bore but for his accent soft.
He counts the iambs and considers well
the metric feet. Oh, I confess I would,
and do, consider more than just his feet.

Two Perfect Two-Liners

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet black bough.
Ezra Pound


My mind insisted on words
having been promised the imagination
Thom Gunn

The Rape of the Lock and taxidermied moths make for insect eroticism.
The stuffed ones that once flew have beautiful names that spur me on to write again.
Victorian obsessions with death and biology and discoveries becoming preserved and pickled appeal to my darker side. Skeletons and stuffed specimens now molting crowd my head with moth balls. Write to get them out.