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.

Stolen Jumpers and Stuffed Marrows

Gin is a devilish drink*. The spirit that harbours dark spirits. But these are soon exorcised (on the bus, orally) and good things can result from knocking back such evils. Like the jumper he found in his pocket. A large jumper folded into a small pocket. A man's, and bearing the date of a dear friend's birth. A jumper that I wear the day after the night before, following the march through the London of Important Buildings, where condom balloons fly and bounce off shiny, bald, liberal heads.

When odd things happen, when chickens lose heads, and when surreal seems to be the norm, I concentrate on little things. Like how I always sneeze when I pluck my eyebrows. Concentrate on little things, and make big things out of Sunday afternoons. Stuff a marrow with bright colours (add mince for the carnivores) and eat with friends whilst listening to Radio 4.

* Though Jilly Cooper gets hammered on sloe gin with her daughter, which sounds sublime. I would like to get a bit silly and giggly and very very tipsy with Jilly. And sloe gin conjures a gentrified countryside idyll of old. Nectar rather than noxious.

Changing Gears

[Me putting a Harry Potter hex on the Provost]

Graduand sounds rather grand, but now I am a Graduate. Unfortunately Anne Bancroft was not involved in this initiation, despite me having the same nose as Dustin Hoffman.

Now I am a Graduate, I am also a grease monkey. I change inner tubes in the hallway. I re-connect the chain when it comes off over hills. I smudge my A-Z, clothes, bare legs and face with oil. My hands are bathed in the stuff. I curse like a trooper. I get a boy to 'deal with the bike' when not even my Barbie bell can redeem it that day.

I construct bookshelves by myself. Bang bang bang. After watching the women on Madmen. I bake bread pudding. But fork it cold and straight from the souffle dish into my mouth. 'Anna, don't smack your lips'.

I drink Turkish coffee and buy a spinach-stuffed borek. Sweet sludge and savoury stodge.

I invite Iris Murdoch and Alan Hollinghurst to bed on a Sunday morning. We all lie in together.

I read Style magazines and munch apples collected from wind-fall in the conservatory as he types. Tap tap tap om nom nom.

I witness the perfect death of a villain in Castle of Cagliostro. Crushed between clock hands at the top of a tower as it strikes midnight.

Graduates wear red lipstick, become wimpy tomboys, get covered in grease, wish they were a Manga cartoon, and eat in an unladylike manner. I thought this would be enough to attract Anne Bancroft. Maybe I can do without her. I have left-over bread pudding in her place.

Organ Playing

London was upturned topsy-turvy yesterday. All those who usually dwell underground, beneath the streets, came out into the sunlight and were blinded by it. Dazzled, startled, so the streets became barmy. Sirens, buses screaming right by stops, crammed crowded like the trains in India. Roads jam jam jammed. The monster ignoring the zebra crossing was the beginning of it all. [I should have been wearing my zebra leggings, to hammer home the safari road safety]
After being run over, the city became skewiff along with my flying shoe and crisscrossed nerves.

I gave the boy with the East-European Face an East-European Stomach. I made it with sausage carved from solid meat and herrings in mustard and spiced cheese curds. We ate dinner in a restaurant wearing indoor slippers and inside-out shirts. Men sang Marvin Gaye, thinking him a hot-blooded hunk of male meat. Women knew better, secret-smiling and shaking heads. Hot-blooded males. Tepid results.

Today the tubes are running again, pumping, pulsing under city skin. I listen to witchy playlists [http://fraeuleinzucker.blogspot.com/2010/09/something-wicked-this-way-comes.html] and add REINBOLT to the database. A bolt of rain? Lightning that got damp, then sodden, round the edges as it passed through the topsy-turvy atmosphere of yesterday. Lightning teardrop. Today it rains and Mumford and Sons don't sound so bad with their hands and their hearts and their eyes in every song. They sound laughably familiar. Bodies. Tangible flesh.

Plated flesh food is gifted to us from lovely neighbours. Tempting me with tasty smackerals of aromatic dead animal, filling the hallway, and then our home, with 'mmmmm...' Grilled fish and meat curries. Caribbean blood, string vests, wide smiles. They are large loud solid. Alive! We give them thick sweet honey in return, though they are sweet enough.


[intestine sock]

My shoe flew through the air, no substance to it, but my foot has a thick skin. It is the meat that matters.

Breakfasts in Victoria Park Village. Lunches in Soho Square. Dinners in Turnpike Lane.

Wine in Hackney Wick. Ale on Highgate Road. Gin and tonics in Kilburn. Red Stripe in Brick Lane. A pint in a plastic cup in Clapham.

Take-away tea on the 236.

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.