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!