Darling

In another room they were baking, mulling wine.
I was warm with cloves, melting butter, demerara,
and wearing your pyjamas.

I have been reading through the archives of  Julia Darling's blog. It is heartbreaking. But also full of beans. Beans and personality and the odd typo. It makes me think that the internet can be used for good things. Julia actually writes (in 2002) that 'apparently this kind of a diary is called a BLOG... derived from web logs. Mmmm'.

I was directed to it by my tutor as we were discussing my dissertation - illness, women, poetry. I knew the name Julia Darling from somewhere, but only in a vague kind of way. She was a novelist, playwright and poet. I say 'was' as she died in April 2005 of breast cancer. The blog is the diary of her final three years, and she documents her writing and her changing body and the people around her and the many projects she enthused about.

I read and read and read it through straight after my tutorial. And lo and behold, she lived in Newcastle. She was at the centre of the whole North East writing scene. She talks of all the theatres, art galleries, streets and hospitals that I know oh so well. She mentions people I am familiar with, and the town I grew up in. It turns out my mother met her more than once, and she was very good friends with friends of ours. This makes it so much more real, the tragedy more cutting... Mum can picture her in the Queen's Hall Arts Centre wearing a turban and chatting away to the arty types of Hexham. Full of energy and getting stuck in to the last. The blog is brimming with people, more than just the characters Julia created in her writing. She left school young and writes from not a formal but an intuitive background. She tries to 'go into the space where poems are made every day' and enters 'that pleasurable made up world that I control absolutely'. She gets to the truth of  a thing.

'The streets in the real world are much colder than in my made up one'

Studious as a butterfly in a parking lot

My, my, and only part way in to a fully-booked poetry fortnight...

Tuesday was a sweaty workshop after a busy day working in a sixth floor greenhouse that grows books and books. I was introduced to some mind-bending new stuff by a UCL alumnus, a tour de force of a young poet who has a voice I would love to hear read the shipping forecast, or even the dictionary. A John Ashbury opening, then Timothy Donnelly* providing the delicious meat of the language sandwich, and finishing with an ekphrastic poem by Brenda Shaughnessy...

Would I dance with you? Both forever and rather die.

It would be like dying, yes. Yes I would.

Then off to the post-workshop pub, where I chatted about the Unthanks with the girl who had charted the whole of the folk music movement, plotting it along her bedroom wall. I admitted my poet girl-crush, and listened to Kelly Clarkson belting out a song I seemed to know the words to.

Wednesday saw the Eric Gregory Award winners reading at the Betsey Trotwood, a favourite old ale pub that draws in poets. I bumped into the tiny oh-so-connected online magazine editor who studies T. S. Eliot and Renaissance drama at PhD level, who is the girl who published me first (the poem of he previous post...ahem) and who loves Barbara Trapido as much as I do and will get to chat to Zadie Smith any day. Roddy Lumsden, our host, was chuffed, nay - made up!, over a Scot winning the prize for the first time in seventeen long years. The two toasted this with scotch just before the wee poet had to read his set. One winner had just got back from his honeymoon, and two others are engaged. Everybody is getting married. The Scot is tying the knot in three weeks which has brought about a bout of death poems. I sat with a short American with a trust fund who flies from programme to programme (literature, painting, poetry), country to country, and said he'd take me to New York in his suitcase. I think he curls his eyelashes. He recently broke off his engagement to a girl who was at least a foot taller than him. They had been seeing each other for seven years. He gave her New York; he has the rest of the world (though he hates Paris, thinking it barbaric. Apparently there is more culture in Cornwall). He never reads his poetry out to anyone, and he doesn't want to publish anymore. He claims to have no ambition. He is on an endless quest for beauty, seeking all things beautiful. He effused that men are wholly inferior; all he does is to worship women. As we parted, he told me he'll see me in heaven. Or hell.

Then it was a Thursday ZINE launch. The zine is a visual masterpiece, in colour or black and white or any way one cares to eat it up. We sellotaped poppies into the introduction; they are now caught between pages and re-printed over and over. Familiar faces read, and the beautiful tattooed lesbian rapped in a knowing middle-class way that blurted quite beautifully. A cold pint, free of charge and all the more satisfying for it, kicked off the evening.

He had the final lines of Dover Beach running through his head all yesterday, as I had a book drop down on my head. My face is now scarred by book spine. Today I drank hot chocolate and tried not to cry as I read of Elizabeth Barrett Browning dying in Robert's arms.

...from Browning some 'Pomegranate', which, if cut deep down the middle,

Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity.

* By God, 'Pansies Under Monkshood: A Folly' is the biggest treat. the moist / rot monitored with heart... And the most intelligent thing - you don't even realise it's ABABABCC. Then you spy it, and are like 'Whoooaaah!'.

Unpacking the MPDG

“That bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations
of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life
and its infinite mysteries and adventures.”

The above describes the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Kooky and quirky and oh so pukey. This is pretty much the best Wikipedia entry I've come across on anything ever. And everyone should definitely watch this video.

So even our offbeat role models live purely "to lift a gloomy male protagonist out of the doldrums, not to pursue her own happiness.” Great.

What came out of the Dordogne

A woman with the loveliest name made me rose and violet creams for my birthday. Chocolate-coated crystals of over-the-top Romantic perfumed confectionery that should be eaten whilst reading novels and lounging in a silk kimono. The unusually-named woman and I had chatted about this sugared symbol of high romance in the past and she had remembered my gushes. Plucking them from the fridge on a hot day at work before meeting my parents in the evening for a warm drunken night put me in mind of an old poem. A poem that I wrote years ago when I was brimful of fancy. I read it now and scream inside my head: 'Edit! Edit! Cringe... EDIT!'. Here are the opening lines:

Veils in parade, each clutching rosary beads,

Rubbed between fingers like strings of pomegranate seeds.

Then this is the section where I was obviously dosed up to the eyeballs on sugar and escapism and 1920s glamour that I had only read about:

Both chocolates and kisses are exchanged by flush-faced girls,

Rose creams and violet creams and hazelnut whirls.

The lipstick prints left hanging in the air beside rouged cheeks

Linger like faint perfume of female mystique.

Other choice lines are:

Mata Hari dances wild, in her robes of gypsy russet.

Men glimpse flashes of gold, flashes of gusset.

The decorated mime artist, with cuffs and collar frilly,

Deeply downs champagne from the trumpet of a lily.           

And then towards the end comes the height of excessive, pretentious poesy. I use French and everything. For goodness' sake:

 

They laugh at others en francais, monsieur et mademoiselle,

Judging if each debutante resembles bête ou belle.

The party is invaded, by barbarians vain and louche,

Starved for entertainment, guzzling amuse bouche.

And I hadn't even read any Ronald Firbank or Zelda Fitzgerald at this point. They were to come later, and they did actually starkly expose the absurdity of such a sense of whimsy. I still adore them both of course.

 
I wrote this poem one summer on the car journey back from the Dordogne, where I had been holidaying with my family (and a boy named Budzak). The holiday was filled with devouring a biography of Lydia Lopokova (the Bloomsbury Ballerina who danced with the Ballet Russes and ended up living across the street from where I lived for my first year in London), smoking weed with teenage boys, sour expressions from my hollowed cheeks, a skinny love for everything I ate up with my eyes, delicious lychee liqueur, reading Middlemarch in hammocks, and being wedged in the back of the car on the way home with my youngest brother feeling delirious and silly and happy and half-asleep-dreamy. That's when I wrote a first draft of this long spiralling flight of fancy in clumsy couplets. I can't believe it was all the way back in 2008. It is so cringe. But was, and still is, so entirely me with my head in the highly scented pink clouds.

I think the most absurd yet useful thing I can come up with is having a tattoo of a moustache beautifully inked along the inside of my index finger so I could put it up to my philtrum and be moustached just like that. Ta da.

I had bottled Crabbies and his special quesadillas for my pre-birthday feast after a day inside the colours of Miro.

My Great Aunt sent a card for a twenty-one year old boy. But I bought yet another thrifted 90s shift dress for my collection, and spent a day with poets. The gloriously intimidating and glorious editor of The Poetry Review gave me postcards and past copies. I bumped into our rather sun-leathered former Poet Laureate as I walked through Bloomsbury and chatted about his trip to Korea and him meeting his wife's aunts and uncles.

Pints of Czech lager, halves of strawberry beer, chatting politics and Dr Who in a Shoreditch pub where an elfin girl with a black woolly hat served us. Then a brick cave of a gig venue, where smoke, laser lights, and LOUD swallowed us. Three Trapped Tigers. Every mortal should be made to see their drummer play live. Such FEATS he pulls off. Mystifying. A gin and tonic for 'the birthday girl' then hummus pitta with two forks on the bus back home. Biting the end off the big green pickled chili and spraying the insides. We went a bit mad with the lemon, but after the gin it was pretty perfect.

You peel my eyes.

You flay my heart

as we shed our skin

and make dust.

And now it is the first day of summer (well, close as damn it), and I ate surprise chocolate cake and have a mini bottle of pink cava chilling in the fridge. And I am unwrapping butterflies.

Bracelets of thy hair, rings, gawds, conceits, knacks, trifles, nosegays, sweetmeats

Earlier in the week I want to see a Shakespearean COMEDY. At a secondary school up at Edgeware Road, Year Seven performed A Midsummer Night's Dream. 

There was tissue paper and glitter everywhere, and a whole tree crafted from cardboard and sparkles and streamers and probably a tonne of pva glue. It was seriously beautiful. The children had created the set, played the specially written score, made their costumes (or asked their parents to make their costumes), and learnt the whole unabridged wonder of a play. 

I have been to countless countless productions of this most popular of Shakespeares, and I wrote an English A level coursework essay on 'the dark side of A Midsummer Night's Dream' (thinking I was edgy and controversial. Or something). This was probably the best I have seen. I literally cried with laughter at one point. An actual tear ran down my cheek as I watched Thisbe swoon. I hooted so loud the little girl in front swivelled in her chair and stared at me fixedly for the following two scenes. The kids threw themselves into it, crying 'You cankerblossom!' and injecting the two couples with the adolescent energy they should exude. Hermia was unbelievably pretty, and understood every word she was saying, delighting in 'Thoughts and dreams and sighs / Wishes and tears...' 

The glitter encrusted 'love in idleness' was rather phallic, secreting liquid over eyes, I totally coveted the tweed and woolen outfit Peter Quince was wearing, and a few fairies stomped rather than floated, being twelve-year-olds with changing bodies. Puck looked about four, light as feather, and face painted all splendid. The strong London accents, often going at quite a pace, rapped rather lyrically. The fairy glade was sublime and I want to hang out there. There may be a 'dark side' to the play, but the kids were blissfully innocent, and I laughed like a foghorn.

It has taken me until this week just gone to get my Holga colour films developed and scanned. I took the photos last summer.


Hampstead Heath / LRB cake (with The Guardian) / Brighton Station / Tufnell Park bedroom



And now it is pretty much this summer, and it is odd to look back to these months last year and think that it was not so long ago. And odd that normality is now bagels and bagels and a Pepsi Max a day habit (though sometimes Apple Tango) and using ee cummings as a verb. I must cummings some poems. And also write some questions to a poet who loves much that I love, so I'm using this project as an excuse to daydream about the bleached film palette and adolescent summer of The Virgin Suicides, and lots of other awesome girl things.

http://peonymoon.wordpress.com/2011/04/17/sophie-mayers-the-private-parts-of-girls/

We never should have walked across the heath to Keats’ house.

You never should have read his letter to his star while breathing next to me.

We never should have bought two winter postcards, I his watercoloured frail face,

you his sweetheart silhouette.

Now I watch you sleep I see a death mask.

I watch you hard enough I fancy life.

O for a beaker full of the warm South!

A week of champagne flutes and popping corks.

Pink fizz at a book launch in the book-crammed downstairs of a West London second-hand bookshop. Bottle drained into my glass over and over. Followed by a fancy dinner I don't really remember apart from hot and delicious, hiccups, and lovely company. Then the worst hangover of my life the next morning. A curled up in a tight ball on my bed with my hair still soaking from a rather shaky shower kind of hangover.

Glasses of prosecco for a birthday after work and before I read at the poetry evening I'd been waiting for, held in the upstairs of a tavern. I was one of six children, reading with my five 'siblings' and our 'father'. The 'father' who used to teach me about homosexuality in British and American poetry of the 19th and 20th century. Now he has a Faber collection the colour of mint choc-chip icecream. My face burned to match my red trousers as I read, and I was told later that I was dressed like Katherine Hepburn. Audrey was always the Hepburn I was drawn to, but Katherine has a sharper tongue, and I'm starting to wish I was more like her; all barbed for protection and witty as hell. So my face was red, and my hand was blue, darker at the nails, stained by diluted biro ink from earlier in the day. Godiva Blue as the South African said. Well, I'm no naked woman on horseback, but I think I know what he was getting at. Romantic tragic heroine, with death at her fingertips. 

Champagne after a confirmation, the service taking place in a school chapel in Brighton. The choir in school uniform, proud mothers in Hobbs and Boden. A sermon mostly about sheep, and I holding back as the congregation took communion. All the wine that has been blessed must be drunk, so the chaplain downed the last of it. I was shown around the old school, all grand and flash where robes would fit right in. Giant paintings of past headmasters lining the dinner hall, especially commissioned and bright, surreal, bold, reminiscent of those Soviat realism portraits. Then drinks on the lawn back at the house, with grandmothers in resplendent purple velvet, a salmon platter, so much asparagus, tomato garlic basil, pavlova, apricot cake, almond maccaroons, the richest chill-set biscuit and dried fruit dark chocolate cake that rivals my mother's chocolate mousse, and food babies. Gin o'clock and dozing to Countryfile with Matt Baker. 

Boozy week.

Eat the Music

I've been reading Rosamund Lehmann over the past week - a romantic name to suit her romantic works. Her first novel, Dusty Answer, is written from the perspective of young, passionate, ever-so-slightly absurd Judith Earle who comes out with gushings like 'Oh how ridiculous, how sad, to have made one person into all poetry!' and 'You might write a book now, and make him one of the characters; or take up music seriously; or kill yourself'. She has, of course, large dark eyes, is incredibly studious, and loves to swim naked under moonlight. She falls in love a lot. But I'm sure she's every girl who reads the novel.

I'm also reading 'Birthday Letters' by Ted Hughes, despite the embarrassing effect of it bringing me to tears in public. But the more remarkable birthday thing of note is that Kate Bush is releasing her new album this month. My birthday month. I don't have a girl crush on Kate, rather I love her. This may sound like Judith Earle, but the thing is Kate is totally awesome. I heard her on Front Row a few days ago, and she is so straightforward, so matter of fact and the opposite of flighty when it comes to her work. And she loves her family and home life more than any music melodrama. And she's using the prose of Joyce in one of her songs. I love her unexpected accent (south England all over) and that she was known as 'Ee-ee' in her karate class because of her squeaky war cry. I could go on and on about all her lyrics, melodies, music videos, record sleeves, outfits, her whole art... I want to be her, let's leave it at that.

All Tomorrow's Parties

Though funds may not be glowing with health, this summer should be a treat as I blew my cash on festival tickets.

I don't need exotic beaches or fancy cocktails. I do need awesome bands and warm beer.

 

The weekend before Hop Farm in July, we're going to tie dye big t-shirts in his garden, creating our uniform for going back in time. Chrissie Hynde, Lou Reed, and PATTI SMITH. In the flesh. I can't quite believe it. And all washed down with cider so sparkly and yellow like the sun.

Then we travel to the End of the Road in September. A Dorset land of Joanna Newsom fairies, Laura Marling pixies, Best Coast wave surfers, Emmy the Great story tellers and Sam Amidon folk legends. Tents and organic vegetarian feasts and bare legs covered in gooseflesh. And not thinking about the imminent deadline of my dissertation.

In the meantime I have evenings such as Flame Proof Moth playing at a night put on by a guy named Frog Morris in a bonkers pub in New Cross to keep me going. They sang songs about selling carpets and how women should be in charge. The drummer had a missing front tooth, and I drank cherry cider and wore a fire-orange dress. But soon I'll be in the open air and dancing to Patti.

Jolly Follicle

I returned to London and my lost purse was returned to me. This is the second time this particular purple purse has come back after being stolen/mislaid. Boomerang purse. I had to sign for it beneath the big bold print of LOSER at the Barbican. Can't argue with black and white...

Felt a bit of a loser today as I walked through City after work, passing all those suited and booted flexi-timers in ties. Under my arm I was carrying a big pile of poetry books, returning them to the Poetry Library on Southbank, wearing my red trousers with turn-ups (I turned them up off the cuff...) and guzzling from a can of IRN BRU. You can take the girl out of the north yada yada. I've also taken to wearing my hair in a silly little topknot on a wonk. Not like the sea of bobbing topknots that crowd the vista of my commute through East London. Not a Shoreditch topknot. No.

On the subject of poetry and hair... A guy I know went punting for his birthday when he lived in Cambridge studying for an MA in English Literature. All his female friends arranged their hair like Virginia Woolf without telling him [like in the famous and softly beautiful image; the one I use as my pretentious profile picture on this very page in fact]. He loves Virginia Woolf. I think this is rather wonderful. High Romance.

BY GOD, BUT THE SIMNEL CAKE

Back at Ingleside for a week so I steal Dad's cardigan. It's dark green with coloured flecks, oversized, and has 'Town Wear' embroidered on the label. My mother bought it for him years and years ago for Christmas, but now makes that look whenever he wears it. Best I have it really, to give it a good home. Especially as I may have mopped up a little mojito with the cuffs on girl's night out... I am a person who wears their father's cardigan on girl's night out in toon, where everyone is orange and clad in tiny sparkly things I can't describe and speaks with the most lovely vowels you ever heard. I also wear it with wellingtons in the woods.

I try to write about a poet who is all hell bent for the heart but get distracted in my old room that has all changed yet is still so familiar. It's exactly how I would have liked it when growing up here if I had actually listened to my mother and not been such a brat who insisted on hanging a hammock above her bed. There's the painting on the mantelpiece of a sheep that looks like it's wearing a big knitted jumper made out of its own wool. According to my farmer uncle who came for Easter lunch today 'sheep are the new chickens'. As well they might be, considering two plump chickens were lunch. Plus all the trimmings. I love trimmings and the logistics of dish navigation and serving negotiations when there's eight round a six-seater table and everyone has a wine glass.

I've started The Land of Green Ginger which I've read a million times, though had read to me more. Dad doesn't know how I'll do the voices when on the megabus back south tomorrow. I'll have to do them in my head. Boomalakka Wee is my favourite.

Two things have made me smile today. Firstly, an interview with bonkers Jilly Cooper who says the word 'soppy' a great deal and spouted this heartening gem: 'I'm not a real writer because I get drunk at parties when I should be observing things'. Secondly, with the smile more sickly, is my mother's simnel cake. It's like exquisite death. She didn't leave room for marzipan ball Judas on top. He would have just been eaten up anyway. Sweet almondy disciples.

Stolen Love Behaviour

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

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

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

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

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

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

My So Called Decade

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

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

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

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

SPRING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MY LIFE (I wish)

Muffling Out

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



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

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

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

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

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

Head in a cloud of darlings

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

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

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

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

Away to a Domus Aurea

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

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

ILOVEKEATS

and

AWESOME

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



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