Smile. Your Cheeks Become Apples.

Bus journeys, conservatories, and APPLES. Oh my.

He has a huge house with a dark-red womb room and sofas and an apple tree dropping this year's glut. It's the girl house. The boy house is next door, attached but separated by the colour - blue for a boy, with a boy face above the front-door. The girl house has a girl face, smiling, welcoming.

But I have astronauts and planets and stars and THE WHOLE OF TIME AND SPACE on my floor. Win.

And beautiful Victoria Park, lush with leaves and lush-as-formed-by-Geordie-lips. Where warehouses seem to breed, populating the area with nonchalant artsy coolness. A bakery called Loafing, where the brownies are piled high, the wooden tables are well-sanded, and many a Guardian shall be read. Walking to Broadway Market, London Fields, Museum of Childhood, strolling strolling all over East London, even marching to Roman Road. Cycling to Columbia Road Market on Sundays and bringing back sunflowers in my basket. So sickening the sweetness eats itself up and becomes stomachable. More than stomachable. Lovely. A taste I am learning to acquire.

I make a promise however. I will eat an apple from the little garden at the back of the big girl house each and every time I visit.

MOOD

I bought myself a mood ring.
So now I know what mood I'm in.

I bought it from my mad relatives' bonkers stone shop in Bridlington.

It's good that it tells me how I'm feeling. It mostly tells me I'm 'very happy'. Dark blue does not mean I'm feeling blue. Apparently.

A rainbow ring that knows things.

All flails have grease on the balls

'Stop! Let us behold the VISTA!'

Coast, coast, and some more coast. And dramatic pauses, in which to APPRECIATE the vistas.

I appreciate all the jet (not jet-packs or jet-engines, not this time...) that could be polished and shaped into two-pence pieces, useful for the arcades. I'm more addicted to the glorious tackiness and so-called 'faded splendour' rather than any gambling thrill. Though we do win a spiky rubber bouncing ball named Steven. With a 'v'.

I appreciate the warning in the church (distorted and squished onto a wooden board as though the preacher hadn't thought through the word spacing, so instilled with righteous venom was s/he): 'Keep thy tongue from evil and thy lips from speaking guile'. Words to be heeded. And listened to through ear-trumpets linked to the pulpit mouthpieces, introduced when one Reverend had a deaf wife.

I appreciate the Anglo Saxon princess named Hild. I bet she was an armoured beauty with balls, who would think glass slippers, crystal tiaras, and long golden locks both impractical and ridiculous. And she would have slept on something far more character-building than my luxurious princess-bed at our coastal cottage. A cottage where I cannot indulge my inner Catherine Morland - we don't find mysterious chests that suggest murder, rather mini-action figures, chewing gum and cigarette lighters. Whitby Abbey is where Catherine can reign free however. Spying sunlight through the windowless arches, where the GOTHIC is shot to a level beyond. To a level of heavenly-hell, where the eye is drawn...

I really appreciate Ancient Warrior of Scarborough, where 'all flails have grease on the balls'. Thank goodness for that.

I appreciate the lovely man that was Alfo Lieth.

So we pause and appreciate the vistas. Not all of us pause in our verbal discourse however, leading to the gripping whodunit creations soon to be on our bookshelves: 'Nicholas Kirk and the Case of the Missing Consonants', and the sequel, 'Nicholas Kirk and the Absence of the Fingerspace Application'. *Spoiler* The plot of the former will involve bloodcurdling murder, Rabbis and rabbits.

I appreciate Cagoules most of all.

[Mr & Mrs TREAT]

Thought Foxed

I MUST REMEMBER TO MEASURE MY HEAD. [For the forthcoming mortar board.]

I think my head may have stretched like elastic, about to snap, but my brain shrinks. Shrivelled by estate agents viewings viewings spelling my name over and over K-I-R-K phone calls ring ring ring constantly coming from my now psychedelic screen, cracked like my nerves. Making me shout about the Simon Amstell concept confusion and flail when cooking cheese sauce.

The phone calls also bring baking bagel smells and a whole community of Orthodox Jews. Stamford Hill, skullcaps, ringlets that swing on many ages of men. Wearing black, but not all doom and gloom when I answer and it leads me here.

The purple jumper has been found. Rain cannot enter bandstands. I drink Cava from plastic cups and laugh with boys and go back to being adolescent when my best friend lit my hair with a cigarette lighter to see what happened and cheap cider drove us to spin like dizzy ducks. I return to eating my Barbican Picnics. All this means that I retain my blood as the estate agent vampires suck suck suck it out of me. They suck like Marina Abramovic does when she discovers her Death self, inhaling another's exhaled air for a full seventeen minutes. Then she passes out. I pass out into her firestars and scrubbed skeletons and stomach-piercing rose thorns as respite from the ringing.

[Marina and her Death self]

Other vampires beckon. Original vampires of books, where books will be read and blood will not be drained, but flow, cheeks flushed by Whitby winds. My stake can be left behind for this better sort of vampire.

Stasis

We bought three bunches of statice on Sunday morning at Columbia Road Market.

Flower-sellers shouting like in My Fair Lady. Throwing their voices hoping that we will throw our money back. A boy being trained up by his parents long in the trade. He is loudest by far. Me with my camera, photographs of petal clashes, views down stalls, two friends outside Wes-Anderson-New-York-style buildings with stoops. Looking out the window of the second floor of a second-hand bookshop, reading blurbs to a backdrop of 'twenty stems for a fiver!'. Discussing and lusting over sweetpeas, a term of endearment I often use, smelling yummy and reminding her of oysters in bonnets. Wandering on to Broadway Market for chai tea lattes and the Observer and being told off for sitting too far out into the street on unstable chair legs.

We buy three bunches of statice, though I want a thousand. A whole sea of statice, blues and purples, with little splashes of yellow like tiny fish fins. At first I hear it as 'stasis'. Stability. Not a word I have been applying to times of late. But this is a suspended moment. Staring into statice.

Split between two vases on our freshly table-clothed kitchen table, it looks as though we picked our flowers out in the field only that morning.

My megabus bag is full of Kafka, histories of God and Irish poetry.

FOR GOODNESS' SAKE

When all I want to do is write like Los Campesinos.
About punctuation - ellipses, parentheses, correct apostrophes - boys, girls, and accelerated readers.

And I want to kiss this:

FRUIT

Picking raspberries. A raspberry for each year, month, day, for each moment away. But I eat them. They are tasted, then gone. One for the bowl, one for me. Staining my hands as I pick. Blood smears. But the butchery is over, and the taste is now sweet, only sometimes tart. Over my cotton dress, that I wish was muslin, I wear your hand-knitted cardigan, worn most when pregnant with me. You tell me I look pregnant in it. Slouchy space to fill with raspberries, all mixed up like Eton Mess. We hold out for blackberries, as the brambles were not cut back this time.

Still wearing the cotton thrift store dress, I go on my first proper bike ride in six years. No time at all, when it comes down to it. A blip just like the bumps I test my suspension on. Warbling over these bumps is instinctive. War cries not quite Red Indian. Bridge pit-stops, half pints and opportunities for you to Tell Me Things. Mostly bird-related. Birdseed and binoculars on the way back.

The Week After the Weekend Before

I met the Serial Schmoozer, who is apparently also an Expert Tweeter, and learnt that there is such an invaluable Business Thing as a Power Clasp. A Hand Clasp of Power. And a Power Stance, which is even more mind-blowing in terms of sheer poser POWER, and must only be attempted when safely at the head of an executive table, sitting in an ugly leather chair.

Anyway, the Serial Schmoozer schmoozed all about augmented reality. At me. At length. A great deal of it went over my head, but parts captured me and basically sounded really COOL. Like you could have a club night in a an awesome hipster venue, where everyone has to wear a plain uniform of black trousers and a bright white t-shirt. So far so dull. But then everybody puts on special glasses (over-sized, black-rimmed, faux-geek, ultra-hipster, natch) that use the technology of augmented reality to reveal the actuality of avatar outfits. Projected onto the white t-shirts. They could be Superhero costumes, or butterfly-colourful, and ultra-glamorous and over the top. The glasses change everything. 'Meh' to marvellous in the blink of an eye. You can be whoever you want to be. Everyone would jump to do this for one night only. Very Cool Idea.

Schmoozing has been a bit of a theme. Lauren Laverne ( LaLa, light of my life, as shiny as the Northern Lights, blooming and bursting of belly) doe-eyed at camera-flash Mercury Music Prize announcements in super-slick basements. Stemming the flow of my rising gushes with free fruit juice the colour of crushed rose petals, downed from gleaming glasses. Company tabs, strong americanos, iPads, Blackberries and James Bond meeting rooms flanked with an intimidating terracotta army. Carl Barat swigging from rum-bottles, slurring his words, wearing a wife-beater and causing mosh-pit nostalgia of four years ago amongst the achingly-cool crowd. He rocked out a number with his actress/indie-publisher/artistic-director/poet/singer sister, the stunning tattooed lesbian, who was my first schmooze. My first personal schmooze.

Carl sang the same Libertine song as I saw Pete sing separately only a couple of weeks or so ago. This was astounding, but made me sad. Seeing them sing it separately. Pete sang it better. That's my penny's worth at any rate. I'm dizzy-pleased that I am in a position to even proffer it.

Aside from this unreality, this schmoozing and silliness, I have been in a mind of moons and gods and kissing-corners and disappearing kettles. Where I fear I feel more at home, for better or worse.

Weekending

We buy our first ever lottery tickets together - he gets frisked for ID - and we both choose 15. The one number we get right.

I feel like a teenager, a fifteen-year-old, all weekend. Sitting in attic rooms, talking of old love affairs, watching a lovely sex film about humans and humour and fragility and frigging, telling jokes about Spaniards who sleep with goats, making CDs late into the night, eating greasy Chinese takeout, laughing at cartoons before bed, rummaging through charity shop treasures, learning how to fold paper into envelopes for future correspondence, having his mum make us a yummy dinner like I was going round for tea...

Beach hut vibes and seagull song and cries from the three-legged cat poke through my regression blanket, and I pose by Hardy's statue, wax lyrical over peaches (T.S. Eliot and Keats), discover an old black&white photograph of a quaint family with funny facial expressions, eat a sugar-crusted Eccles cake from a warm slab of wood for a bakery-breakfast, sticky flaky sweet, flaking and sticking to my chin and cheek. I drink apple juice from local apples and pink tea that smells of rose gardens. I want to pet the wicker pig whilst I read in the conservatory. I borrow the electric-blue toy accordion and make grand plans of sound in my head. I find a Murder She Wrote board game at the car boot sale and photograph Angela Lansbury because the idea makes me laugh. I am still fifteen. I hang out, I am a teenager. This is what weekending should be. Taking time out from my twenties, and going back to the best of teen years.

On the train back to my twenties, there is a cow on the track that halts my journey. The cow is absurd. I like it. I like that it pauses smooth progress. And that it makes me smile on my way home.

Dark Night of the Soul

A most excellent, awesome and affecting work of art has come to light. Into the light from a Dark Night.

A collaborative album of epic proportions is now out there in the ether ready to encompass all those of receptive intelligence with sound waves. Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse present Dark Night of the Soul. And it is not only these two minds of musical genius involved. David Lynch has produced a book of photographs to accompany it, as well as featuring on the actual album. DAVID LYNCH. Yes. Along with Julian Casablancas, Iggy Pop, The Flaming Lips, Scott Spillane of Neutral Milk Hotel, Nina Persson of The Cardigans, Jason Lytle of Grandaddy and... stopstopstop, I can't take the amount of favourite people from favourite bands ALL TOGETHER ON ONE ALBUM.

What makes the whole project all the more poignant and emotionally stirring is, of course, its posthumous release. Mark Linkous, aka Sparklehorse, committed suicide in March. I only discovered his distinctive soundmaking a little beforehand, becoming slightly obsessed as he sent me to dream for lightyears in the belly of a mountain. He has such a lovely voice, steeped in sadness around the edges of his song-smiles. His vocals appear on the song Daddy's Gone on the album, which has lyrics about making cakes - absence and comfort and loss and yummy joy within one song and summing up Sparklehorse as a whole. More heart-wrenching still is Vic Chesnutt singing Grim Augury. Chesnutt also committed suicide, in December. The tortured lives of artistes...

But Pain is a lively treat of a track, with Iggy Pop at his energetic best. And the finale, the title track, featuring David Lynch, is just beautiful. Pink Floydesque, haunting and thought-drowning sinking sighing.

Listen to the whole album. Please. http://www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=104129585&m=128112377

There were problems with the release due to disputes with EMI, but it's now set to be available from July 13th. Thirteen is unlucky for some. Unlucky Mark Linkous. Unlucky, lovely Sparklehorse. But lucky us to be able to experience such a creation.

Diddley bo diddley bo ALL THE TIME

Festivals are all about shuffling into spaces. Playing people tetris.

They are ALSO about dangling Converse from bags, everyone singing along to 'Lola' on a Sunny Afternoon lalala, children sitting on their daddies' shoulders, Pete Doherty's ballerinas, remembering my teen love affair with 'poetic' Pete and his London vowels and disregard for committed consonants, pretending that Seasick Steve is my grandad or, better still, my red wine-swilling story-telling buddy, weaving weaving through the crowds whilst looking at my socked feet and holding onto a hand, acting out Ballad of the Thin Man with expressive eyes and literal dance moves, forgiving Bob his ravaged gravel-voice as he can still roll stones and stands firmly in rock, following the flame-filled lanterns overhead with our upturned faces, guessing the suit and number of an abandoned playing card lying under dancing toes that pull foot-tapping shapes, discovering that Davendra has lost his beard but not his dulcet-delicious tones, drinking cider two cups at a time as stray hay sticks itself to bare legs, smooching to Mumford and Sons though claiming it's to the sight of horizon hand-claps, planning to make our own diddley bo, battling with hat-hair that actually sits best when unkempt in Kent...

And they finish with a zig-zag parade through emptied cups and polystyrene debris, aweary beatific and aweary, and dosing on a coach as a Denzel Washington film plays in the background of my half-asleep songs that I take with me from Hop Farm.

Fanny Brawne can only 'flirt and sew'. I think only of 'wool and fairies'.
We both love ribbons and bows and triple-pleated mushroom collars.

And Keats.

But, oh God, the dead butterflies.

Smudging My Rouge

So she's a consumptive prostitute and he's an idealistic naive who constantly witters on about some vague concept of 'love'. But they get me every time.

I went and saw Moulin Rouge five times when it came out. The only time I have paid money to see the same film more than once at the cinema. I cried each time. I had to choreograph a piece for ballet a year or so later, and I chose the Roxanne Tango music to arabesque and pirouette to. My meticulous tiny tutor with the scraped back black bun and enormous kohl eyes did her best not to bat an eyelash at the fact that my inspiration happened to be damned ladies of the night... I bought the soundtrack and listened to it a million zillion times throughout teendom.

And this weekend I sang 'Come What May' at the top of my voice whilst painting a room in Hampstead, wielding a paint roller and wearing duck egg blue-blotched leggings. We tried to split the parts (are you a Nicole or a Ewan?) but ended up belting out both, swept away by the heady paint fumes and the melodrama.

We watched the film the next night, following my purchase of red satin Satine shoes. It has been years, but I know every word. Except I noticed the line about the 'tantric cancan' afresh, which I had perhaps previously skimmed over...

It is ridiculous, over the top, implausible (how does Christian not end up with TB too?), infuriating, completely fantastical. Etcetera, etcetera. But I love. And weep and bawl and get covered in snot. It's 'Come What May'. That's what does it. A secret song, just for the lovers. Spoken, whispered, sang like a lullaby, given full lung power as it crescendos over the theatre.

Typewriters, sin, red lipstick, Toulouse Lautrec and a secret song. Yes.

The Amazing Misadventures of... Rectumface aaaaaaand Snaggletooth!

Wheelers and dealers of embarrassment and mortification, imprinting London with chaotic Converse footprints, and taking on the city one madcap antic at a time.

Coming soon to an attic above you.

Little House on the Prairie is a charm. A charm of my little girl days, that is all plaits and pinafores and bedrooms in barns and perfect fathers and Sunday afternoons in a half-remembered memory montage.

It is a mix of Laura Ashley, the Amish, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. I wore my Little-House-on-the-Prairie-dress, aged seven, at my parents' wedding. With a quilted floral Alice band.

Parents that spoil me rotten fifteen years later. Yummy meals (now sincerely enjoyed, and not before time) and high-tops and Nancy Mitford and nostalgia and invitations to my best friends and studying fine and fading Renaissance drawings and saving me from lovely-but-scary camp dressers at Hobbs who try to insist on red dresses that just aren't me. London travel and Robin Hood/Princess Bride/Neil Gaiman geek chat and bringing me Barbara Trapido and impromptu semi-embraces on the tube and indulging my fascination with Gordon Square worms. Being the perfect antidote to staring out the window on the number 4 at midnight, with an adoring young couple sitting behind me, listening to a mix tape over and over as it takes me both years and seconds to get home... They spoil me, and I try not to love it.

Then, on the Sunday afternoon, I track down the best chocolate ice cream London has to offer, with The Observer in my hand and a fellow intrepid ice cream seeker by my side. The scoop is studded with ginger and topped with a thick layer of hardening chocolate sauce, eaten with a wooden spoon, melting into a space that is also filled with a new floral romper suit. A romper suit with a Little House on the Prairie lace bib detail and puff sleeves. I wear remnants of the past on my sleeve, around my neck, and on my chest.

It's all about Alan Rickman's voice

I eat sausage sandwiches and read Mrs Dalloway. And discover that Barbara Trapido's thumbs bend backwards, just as mine do.
I am asked to kill a wasp at work, I don't think twice, I murder it with a rolled-up Times. I am a vegetarian. And awful.
I have cheesecake for breakfast and drink Red Stripe with boys.
I explore a wizard's attic, in which a wizard sleeps. He must not be woken. He gets grumpy and his spells go awry. We turn like a pair of wind-up toys in a closet of mirrors.
I am followed by Leonard and Suzanne and Marianne wherever I go. Followed to all the best places.
I carry a purple delphinium. She would buy the flowers herself...
I think about writing poetry in which occurs 'in about the proportion of cherries in a cherry-cake, certain words that she described as "of a smouldering nature", such as loins and lovers, the root, the seawrack and the shroud.' Then laugh like a car-horn, and draw half a moustache instead.

I hang daisy-stamped gowns and lightning bolts in my room.

I think about fairies and wool less and less. But fall over my feet and my thoughts more. And use 'I' far too often. Ssshh. Less 'I' and more silent eyes.

Doves and pomegranates/And peacocks with a hundred eyes

I turn twenty two and wait to use my toothbrush...

Then later I watch Mary Poppins, lying on my stomach in a button-up floral all-in-one. A spoonful of sugar makes the growing old a little sweeter. A french-plaited dungaree-clad girl sugars petals for me, and meringues softly peak all over the kitchen.

Strawberries turn to coulis, seeping into cotton, and chocolate cake is sliced as I become militant over paper plates. We're all beneath a patterned sheet, parading inside a Chinese dragon, and begin to run down Parliament Hill, tripping over our extra wool and licking our lips after the final macaroon.

Words are wrapped in music: proverbs and rhymes in parcel-taped manuscript paper. The perfect present is bound up in the Guardian Review, both Amy Pond and Shakespeare. The glitter-stickered accompaniment shows two old ladies, black and white, wearing hats, me in fifty years... Appletiser and Muriel Spark poetry from a second-hand bookshop in Hampstead are sparks of thoughtful loveliness.

Sitting on the floor, amongst the many chair legs, finishes an evening and makes me feel five years old again, seeking out and drinking the dregs from wine glasses left out by parents' party guests.

MAD DOGS IN SUMMER

(a summery summary)

I actually used this phrase when talking to a dog-shackled stranger in scorching church grounds today... In fact, this was the ONLY thing I said.

Purple Riot

THERE ARE NO KNIVES FOR CUTTING YOUR THROAT. I MAKE

MOCCASINS ALL MORNING.

Aging, faded, scuffed, delicate, purple and cream covers of slim Anne Sextons.

I took out two lovely narrow volumes of her poetry from the library. Because I could. Because I was free to do so. And they have irresistible covers.

And contain irresistible poetry...

The parasol girls slept, sun-sitting/their lovely years.

Once you read Lohengrin and every goose/hung high while you practiced castle life/in Hanover.

...the brown mole/under your left eye, inherited/from my right cheek...

My favourite is 'I Remember'. One long sentence of summer perfection. I won't include line breaks.

By the first of August the invisible beetles began to snore and the grass was as tough as hemp and was no color - no more than the sand was a color and we had worn our bare feet bare since the twentieth of June and there were times we forgot to wind up your alarm clock and some nights we took our gin warm and neat from... old jelly glasses while the sun blew out of sight like a red picture hat and one day I tied my hair back with a ribbon and you said that I looked almost like a puritan lady and what I remember is that the door to your room was the door to mine.

One of the collections has $3.95 stamped on the top corner. $3.95 for a bunch of poesy... that will never wilt.

She also kept a scrapbook. ADMIRATION and ENVY. She started it when she eloped. It began with a photograph of her and her betrothed, Kayo, sitting in beach chairs. She labelled this 'us' and taped in the key to their Virginia Beach hotel room... "the young bride pastes in laundry lists, gin rummy tallies, her husband's apology note after their first fight. She also starts to write poetry: romantic rhyming couplets and letters, ripped from a magazine, that spell "Bleat, Bleat."

She begins the collections I borrowed with letters from Schopenhauer to Goethe, or Franz Kafka to Oskar Pollack, or a harrowing extract from 'Macbeth' [All my pretty ones? Did you say all? O hell-kite! All? What! all my pretty chickens and the dams in one fell swoop?... I cannot but remember such things were, that were most precious to me.] Or dedicates them to Kayo.

But she writes to the reader. And to herself. Therapy. It did not save her, but it reads beautifully.

So long and thanks for all the Antony and Cleopatra, Nightmare Abbey, beat poets and nonsense words.

HELLO dancing, and quilt races down the stairs, and big fat novels and slim poetry volumes, and whole days spent at the Islington cafe with purple sofas and banquet tables and candles lit at 5.30 and a scorched ceiling from flames and warm chocolate cake and colourful nudes on the wall, just reading, reading, reading...

HELLO Star Wars sleepover, and Rome day, and guilt-free Guardian perusal, and picnics, and hammocks, and actual cooking as opposed to pouring cereal, and Tina We Salute You, and exploring Dalston and Brixton and London, London, London...

HELLO Hop Farm, and ale, and Davendra, and Laura, and Steve.

HELLO miles and miles of smiles.