The Solace of Objects

Charmed Life is a little exhibition at The Wellcome Collection. I wandered in on one of their Thursday lates. And yes, there is a Montaigne quote to kick things off. It seems that the soul…loses itself in itself when shaken and disturbed unless given something to grasp on to; and so we must always provide it with an object to butt up against and to act upon. Objects help anchor the soul.

There is a great deal of soul-anchorage going on in a calm, cream room of the Wellcome building. Displayed in a glass-topped horseshoe-shaped table are the gathered charms of Edward Lovett. He lived in Croydon in the late 19th/early 20th century, worked at the Bank of Scotland, and was fascinated by all things folkloric - charms, amulets, superstitions. He collected trinkets from all over London, from various origins and traditions, and treasured the objects and their meanings. Although he was himself dismissive of the idea that amulets could work as effective magical objects, he did make his younger son an amulet to wear against the dangers of the front during World War I. Unfortunately I was unable to find out if this protection was successful. Having just read and watched Birdsong I sincerely hope it was. Stephen Wraysford, protagonist and odd husk of a man, survived it and he was forever playing games of chance and carrying packs of cards, even if he did admit he pretty much made it all up.

The collection is a feast of horseshoes, shark’s teeth, a mole in a bag, a sheep’s heart pierced with nails, glass sea horses, coral and all manner of tiny treasures. There is even a lobster claw with a silver Virgin Mary inlaid into the base.
The charms have a very physical relationship to our bodies: the dead weight of a horseshoe above a bed, the pointed end of a belemnite ‘thunderbolt’ will prick fingers, a glass sea horse will snap easily in our hands if mishandled. Dangerous beauty, protection laced with threat. Belemnites were called both thunderbolts and Devil's fingers, so strange and talismanic were these fossils of squid-like sea creatures now extinct.

Each charm holds power and wards off some kind of evil or encourages goodness...
Fabric-covered horseshoes against nightmares.
Tips of rabbit’s tongues against poverty.
Acorn forms against lightning, as oak is home of the Thunder God.
Two acorns strung together as a cure for diarrhoea.
Twig of elder to cure warts.
Peony seeds for epilepsy.
Carved frog bones for fertility.
A witch cake made between the first and sixth of April every year to ward away witches.
Circular stones with holes for tying to a cow to prevent fairies stealing the milk.
Phallic iron door handles to avert the evil eye.
Wives of fisherman kept a dried seahorse on their breasts to facilitate the flow of milk.

And the many tiny shoes made out of all conceivable materials represent the path of life.
I'm very glad my own shoes led me to this cornucopia of charms. The necklace I wear most often is made up of a gold chain gifted to me by a bride when I was ten-year-old bridesmaid, a small and empty gold locket that used to belong to my mother, and an unashamedly faux-gold elephant pendant I received from a lovely quaint French girl who lived with us for many moons a few years ago. My charms. They hold so much weight it's a miracle my neck doesn't break. Miracles, and the fact that I never step on pavement cracks.

Mooning

I've been getting in too deep again. I wrote about them for a little project, and I thought it would be OK this time. I thought I'd move on quick, pretty well unscathed. But Ted and Sylvia always get me. Before I know it I'm listening to him read Lovesong over and over on youtube. I have a compulsion. It's the spider bite smiles, the promises that take off the top of his skull which the lover makes into a brooch, the heads like halves of lopped melons. It's Ted's voice free from any finalising tone, just stopping in the air, at the last line: In the morning they wore each other's face. I had to find the antidote to this heart-wrench.

So from lopped melons to moon-whales. I went to the children's section of the Poetry Library and took out a copy of Ted's Moon-Whales to pull myself out of the myth and just be a kid who likes words and weird things. I also wanted to look at some pictures. I picked out the version that is illustrated by Chris Riddell. His artwork is so distinctive and immediately takes me back to me being the dorkiest of kids, nicking The Edge Chronicles that were ostensibly bought for my brothers, my favourite being the Twig trilogy. His full-page Moon-Whales illustrations that spread out and into Ted's poems are rather moon-magnificent.

Who couldn't escape from an overwrought Ted rut reading about a Moon-Haggis with its 'crazy/Cruel hiccup'? Precisely. There is a moon counterpart to everything. Moon-flowers, moon-weather, moon-illnesses, moon-witches. Everything a kid can see and hear and feel and imagine. The Moon-Hyena shrieks 'laughter of dark hell,/Mad laughter of a skull'; it is wild and a little scary 'yet it is so full of love and joy that sing it must, or bust'. Interestingly, John Burnside wrote that his totem animal is the hyena only this week. Ted's totem has come to be the fox, though I think he has much more of the badger about him.

Moon-Whales is all about horrors. Perhaps not quite the antidote I foresaw. But Ted forces these horrors into rhymes, into songs. They don't all have happy endings but they are undauntedly, unwaveringly curious and quick, celebrating the odd and fantastical. The world is seen through a moon-mirror. It is dark and mad and funny and peculiar. It is not just for children. 

'I'm in the photograph'

My housemate left sweet treats on my bed in exchange for reading his essay on the use of pronouns as spatial metaphors in Italian postmodern literature. I had scribbled exclamatory remarks and circled commas in purple ink, and for this I received a French Pepsi Max and a snickers. My absolute favourite things to eat and drink. I was pleased as punch.

While he studies European languages, literature and films, I am both loving and loathing being without classes, reading lists, essays and writing about the minutiae of some poem or other that lies on the sidelines of most sane, normal and levelheaded people's realities. So I develop little obsessions, consciously or otherwise. My current obsession is Francesca Woodman. She was an American photographic artist, creating works thirty years ago. Her black and white images are often described as surreal, which I can understand, but they are also hyper-real and raw. They appeal to me because they are so so seventies, romantic, with shades of Picnic at Hanging Rock. Woodman was the daughter of two artists, had a spell at a boarding school, often stayed in her family's second home in Italy, studied in Rome for a time (where she made several sequences of images), and then lived in New York. Covetable life aesthetics right there. Her photographs are all forests, graveyards, tombstones and long hair. Gothic and ghostly. More often than not they feature female nudes, like spectres or corpses, sometimes cropped, frequently Francesca herself. Real bodies, feminine and frank.

She was a dedicated journal writer, and she would often incorporate her images into the notes of her life. Spiky writing scratches the surrounding margins of stuck-down photographs. 'Bunny bun I'm in the photograph come fetch me if the mood or a rock should strike you'. A message to her boyfriend Benjamin.

from the Tate Collections website

Naturally I would not be so obsessed if there was no darkness or tragedy involved. A suicide attempt in 1980 was followed by a period of psychotherapy and medication and recovery. Then she was refused a grant she was hoping for, her bicycle was stolen, and her romance with Benjamin continued to sour. She jumped from a roof in New York, aged 22. Her body remained unclaimed at the morgue until someone identified her clothes, as the fall had rendered her face unrecognisable. Her body had been used in so many of her photographs as something interesting and beautiful, captured forever in light. Yet she destroyed it, made herself unidentifiable. One of her early images features a Victorian tombstone bearing the words 'To Die is Gain'. Hmmm.

I am currently watching a documentary about Francesca and her family, made in 2010, on youtube. Stuff of obsession.

'I can be cruel'

Eating Chinese takeout and watching Labyrinth with housemates in my bedroom is the greatest thing anybody can do mid-week. Cotes du Rhone, prawn crackers and fairy tales set in the 80s: a holy trinity. Labyrinth is an all-time favourite film of mine, and mostly stars Jennifer Connelly's covetable waistcoat/billowing white shirt combo and David Bowie's crotch. The ball scene is such fantasy, and is my fancy-dress theme of choice, and a black and white still of Sarah in her Princess dress among the masked guests is my desktop background. Jareth the Goblin King has an absurd mullet, indecently revealing leggings, a beautifully painted face with wicked eyebrows, and is oh so seductive. Classic villain material. 'I have been generous until now and I can be cruel' he tells the wide-eyed, desperate Sarah as he teases and dominates. Yet he is ultimately weakened by her. 'I ask for so little. Just fear me, love me, do as I say and I will be your slave'. David Bowie as one's slave, imagine that.

I have a thing for fairy tales. A somewhat unbridled thing. I grew up with so many old and dusty, embellished and illustrated compendiums, filled with stories from all traditions, folklores and far-flung lands. Tom Tit Tot and Mossycoat and endless old crones. Tomes of dark, dark imaginings. Of course there have been whole libraries written on the histories and psychological meanings of fairy tales, not to mention the many variations of the many tales, so I won't blather on like a wild bore. Suffice to say that Angela Carter is the Mistress of the genre. I reckon she probably loved Labyrinth too. Though that film does have a sense of the ridiculous, and for all that Angela can be over the top and grabbing of the juggernaut, she is never ridiculous. All is carnal and pure guts with Angela. Her stories are blood and moons and wolves and whole histories of storytelling.

'A dozen husbands impaled a dozen birds while the mewing of gulls swung on invisible trapezes in the empty air outside'

The Bloody Chamber, the title story of my favourite Carter collection, is set on Mont St Michel, that fated fateful place. My family and I would visit nigh on every year when I was younger. Castles and cobbled streets. It became mythic as the years went on and I was for a time less blood and guts, more disappearing flesh. Like something Angela would have conjured, vampiric appetites were sucking away happiness and histories so I was skinny and sad wandering along cobbles in a straw hat. [Angela was anorexic as a teenager, leaving a legacy of appetites and hungers and, especially in her novels, most excellent descriptions of foodstuffs. At one point in a short story she describes a vision of 'anorexic trees', which is a beautiful evocation of winter I think.] My brother bought a t-shirt bearing the island's image the last time we were in Mont St Michel. It is one of the few t-shirts I didn't steal. Mont St Michel was a little too close to the bone, so I felt weird about having it close to my actual bones.

I have been loaned a book entitled The Uses of Enchantment: The Meanings and Importance of Fairy Tales by the fairytale-named Bruno Bettelheim. I am looking forward to sinking my teeth into it.

O Gerhard, I am rather taken by these. Photographs of your life in the late 90s squigeed with oil paint. And your first wife as a spectre on the stairs. You can keep your enormous abstractions. I'll carry these as postcards.

9. Nov. 1999



Ema (Nude on a Staircase)

 [Gerhard Richter postcards. £1.18 well spent]

Mr Martin

I managed to catch the John Martin exhibition at Tate Britain JUST IN TIME. Not because the whole world is going to end in an apocalyptic inferno, swallowing us sinners once and for all, but because the exhibition finishes in a matter of days. And thank goodness I did make it. I bloody love his drama.

I was reading about how his paintings have inspired the atmospheres, set designs and landscapes of films such as Ben Hur, Blade Runner, Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. (Interesting that Martin is one of my mother's favourite artists in all the world, and not my father's...) I would actually go so far as to say that gazing at The Last Judgement triptych is just as engrossing and awesome as watching the original Star Wars trilogy back-to-back. There, I said it.

It was very odd to see this blockbuster exhibition taking in the big bucks down here in London. Martin was born just along the road from me in a small town in Northumberland, and much of the vast, craggy, damned apocalyptic vistas of his paintings come from my homeland.

[As a side note, when a very young man in Newcastle, Martin was placed under an Italian artist who went by the brilliant name Boniface Musso. As another side note, he also had what the exhibition described as 'tragically insane' brother named Jonathan who set fire to York Minster when in a fit of madness. It was a bit of a scandal...]

I noticed as I hugged the walls that the majority of paintings and etchings were on loan from archives in Newcastle and the Laing Art Gallery. We used to go on outings to this little art gallery all the time as children; it was a frequent treat. I remember seeing The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in those kindly surroundings for the first time when very small, so the painting seemed even more monstrous. Not being a good Sunday school scholar, I first experienced tales like Lot's wife being turned into a pillar of salt as she dared to look back at the burning ruins through his compositions. I love that the paintings have such ambitious and ridiculous titles as Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still upon Gibeon. But there is a sense of the ridiculous to all these enormous canvases. Biblical, Miltonic, epic in scale and colour and narrative. The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum is so, so red, brooding with ash clouds and glowing with hot lava, and Balthazar's Feast is probably the most lavishly over-the-top painting in existence.

The Last Judgement triptych hilariously went on a money-making tour from 1854 (Martin's death) until 1870. The paintings were sensationally put on show in galleries, music halls, and commercial and civic spaces, with accompanying lectures, evening viewings by gaslight, and breathless advertising campaigns. They even travelled to New York and Australia.

The Tate attempted to emulate the spirit of these tours by creating their own atmospheric light show of the triptych. In a dark showroom the audience stared as spotlights, blurrings, and lightning bolts hit the paintings, illuminating figures such as the whore of Babylon. A deluge of voices told the terrible tales and described the vivid scenes, all resonating from different directions and seemingly thickening the paint and stirring it up with their words...lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became as blood/And even the stars of heaven fell into the earth...For the great day of his wrath has come; and who shall be able to stand? (Revelation 6:12, 13, 17). Just a gentle accompaniment to a little picture we all know by the name of The Great Day of His Wrath. Not for the fainthearted. It will one day hang on my bedroom wall in the crimson-swathed castle I will own and reign over satanically. The castle will of course be a castle in Northumberland. And it will not fall to ruin like all of those palaces, cities and structures in Martin's works. It will be red-hot and strengthened with canvas and oil and the odd Biblical quote to keep it in check.

Enargeia

I read a borrowed 1950's Penguin paperback copy of 'The Blessing' by Nancy Mitford on my bus journey back home for Christmas. Towards the end a glamorous, powdered, female French aristocrat throws a party in Paris. The theme is famous parents and famous children, with guests having to bring along a trussed up son, daughter, neice or nephew. Never before had children been at such a premium...legal adoptions were hurried through at a rate never previously known in the department of the Seine.

The party becomes the talk of the town, and the upper crust turns up fully kitted out. Very soon the famous parents dumped their famous offspring at the buffet and left them there while they went off to dance, flirt, gamble, or gossip with other famous parents. The children happily stuffed away with cream and cake and champagne, all of which very soon combined with the lateness of the hour to produce a drowsy numbness. Every available sofa, chair, and settee now bore its load of sleeping babies; they lay on the floor round the edges of the rooms, under the buffet, and behind the window curtains. The grown-ups, all set for jolly evening, waltzed carelessly among their bodies. The party doesn't end until 6am.

Ingleside doesn't have parties like that (well, only on very special occasions...) but it does have ALL the food, ALL the booze, and all the waterfalls on very rainy, very beautiful Christmas day walks. A brother and I had been to pick up the meat from the butchers. SO MUCH MEAT. We had a sword fight with the obscene sausagemeat batons, and dripped blood all over the table. I didn't get the meat sweats as I am a vegetarian, but I did get the rich trimmings sweats. And the red wine sweats. Dad went on a booze cruise (in his car to Majestic Wine) so we will be able to deck out a whole Cathedral with stunning wine and champagne stained windows using the shattered glass of our empty bottles. These tasty panes may even keep the howling winds out. As we sang the nine lessons in carols inside our ancient Abbey on Christmas Eve we heard the winter weather circling the towers, haunting the rafters, heralding the onslaught of chocolate coin showers, epic cooked breakfasts, and sweet mullings of spiced alcohol.

The most hilarious present of Christmas day was a tile bearing the legend 'Home is where the heart is!' - the exclamation mark is the best bit. Perfect to hang above Ingleside's Aga. And I have my new Angel of the North mug to take down South, reminding me of my roots, cheering me with his open wings, looking like a big old dirty flasher. I love Geordies. I am the only true one in my family, having been born in Newcastle. Aye man. But instead of drinking Newcastle Brown, I'm drinking raspberry beer and reading new poetry from Alice Oswald. She writes of dead heroes in her version of The Iliad, and she is my heroine. Her book is the colour of Christmas - bright red, with 'Memorial' picked out in green. I'm so greedy for her words. And greedy for enargeia. Ancient critics praised The Iliad for its enargeia, which translates as 'bright unbearable reality'. This version, trying to retrieve the poem's enargeia, takes away its narrative, as you might lift the roof off a church in order to remember what you're worshipping.

Artist, Shaman, Witch Doctor

I was in The Dover Bookshop in Covent Garden again this weekend. It sells copyright-free images. Nobody owns these images anymore so now people like me can buy them. There are images of every conceivable thing, as well as collections of beautiful illustrations by the likes of Arthur Rackham and Aubrey Beardsley. While I was pawing the cover of a Gustave Dore illustrated edition of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a white-haired man also stroked the title page. He asked me if I knew it, referring to the poem. O Coleridge! I wittered that I had studied it and loved it. He told me that it was the first book he ever bought when young, though the copy was not half as beautiful as the one before us. He was a very smiley man. The agonised soul with the albatross around his neck between the Dore-embellished pages may be rightly placed in this shop, as Dover Publications (who produce most of the items at the bookshop) is owned by a printing company which, among other things, prints Gideon Bibles. Trivia.

I have been in Covent Garden quite a bit of late, enjoying a very well-attended and cosy anthology launch at the Poetry Cafe and having a late dinner out at The Ballerina with my mother. I love that little Italian, with its hanging ballet shoes and hot ricotta pancakes and tiny tables so perfect for a gossip. We had also been to the Grayson Perry exhibition at the British Museum that day. The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman. I wanted to touch everything, all of it so tactile, colourful, ugly and beautiful. A man-sized visual feast of a ship was strewn and studded with casts of many objects from the museum, collected from many countries and eras, created by many unknown hands. It made mum cry. I was very struck by the little love tokens too. They are small silver discs, about the size of a coin, and bear engraved words and pictures of arrow-struck hearts. 'No heart so thru as mine to you'. 'By hammer and hand all arts doth stand'.

My notes from the day

This past week I happened to watch a TV show in which a delight of a stoned young woman headily remarks that 'there's this pollen in the air that smells like kissing'. This made me giggle then swoon a little. I also discovered a saying: 'kissing is in season when gorse is in bloom'. Well, one can always find some flowering gorse. It is getting colder and there is not a whole lot of pollen about, so we may have to make do with snatched mistletoe smooches and Eskimo kisses.

New Project

So it's not quite frosty yet, but I have a perpetually split lip that floods and crusts with blood and red wine in equal measure as this season's festivities start to kick in. And I'm clumsier than ever; crashing into things, tripping over the edges of rugs, falling over my own feet. Yes, my own feet. The greatest irony of my life is that my first name apparently means grace (though I think more in the religious sense), and I was born on a Tuesday so should really be full of grace. The stars must have skewed their alignment or something as I emerged into the world with my foot all twisted up and awkward. A sign of things to come.

However clumsy and cold it gets outside, we have a thing of humming pleasure in the house. A projector lives in the attic bedroom. The attic is deep red with one white-papered end; the whole wall a screen for whatever we fancy. We lie on the comfiest floor-mattress ever and look up. We are in the scenes of what we watch.

We watched Pina, a film by Wim Wenders about the choreographer and dancer Pina Bausch. Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost. Dance for love. Dance for love. She danced as though she had a hole in her tummy. What treasure lies within our bodies, to be able to express itself without words, and how many stories can be told without saying a single sentence. The music and the physicality of this film, with its dance sequences so varied, so wild and quiet and loud and mesmeric, is all-consuming when viewed real close and big in a bedroom. It wasn't in 3D, but we were right there, wide-eyed.

We watched Alien. I had never seen it before, a sacrilegious admission, and this had to be rectified. Ripley and her heroics are fierce, she is role-model material, constructed from steel and sense. The darkness and fire made for nail-biting viewing, and though we were lying against pillows, we were really in the spaceship being voyeuristic members of the Nostromo crew. The alien was a disappointment I must say. From some angles it is a cross between a house plant and a dolphin. I like the cat. It is a survivor.

We watched sections of The Endless Summer, a 1966 documentary about surfing (surfumentary?). Two wholesome sun-tanned young American men chase an endless summer around the globe on a quest for the best waves. The cheeky-chap narration is hilarious. A woman's green bikini top is referred to as a 'chest protector'. Watching scenes from this sunny, bluesky, bluesea, golden sand film will stave off winter blues for sure.

Another use of the projector is to be a LAD and play video games. Play them noisy and really, really big. I tried to be a LAD for a bit, but ended up reading Vogue instead. Which is something I never do. But it was given to me so I didn't have to pay the extortionate retail price, and it had Tilda Swinton and Miranda July tucked between the gazillion adverts. It reeks of mixed perfumes and is about as heavy as the textbook copy of Chaucer's works I used to lug around. Well, almost.

I'm told that porn is pretty intense on the projector too.

Charles Lamb once told Coleridge he was especially fond of books containing traces of buttered muffins.

The literary quarterly magazine I work for (the one seven floors up with the panoramic skyscape of London's landmarks and an office dog with a better hairdo than any human I have ever seen) had a readers' day at the lovely Art Workers Guild in the heart of Bloomsbury on Saturday. The building is run by a woman in a matronly smock who is the spitting image of Clarissa Dickson Wright, though, I think, rather more attentive and with a shinier, healthier glow. Almost one hundred subscribers, white of hair and keen of mind, flocked to be shown where to put their coats and where the loos were by a rather excitable me. I had got the bus in first thing with my eyes all swollen and uglified, which was so not cool for the likes of Penelope Lively and her distinctive specs. I thought I may look pained and fragile, which would be appropriate for the talk on the Romantics later. But it turned out that Sue Gee was rather in awe of my outfit, using hand gestures and open-mouthed silent expressions to make this known to me at the sidelines of the Great Hall. She asked where I had got such such pretty things, to which I was forced to admit in mumbles that all items were from charity shops...

The day was a success of lots of tea cups and copious hot tea, overcoming dodgy slides of beautiful wood engravings that illustrate Victorian classics, the Romantics abroad with their reveries in Lake Geneva, perching on steps at the edges of a very red room plastered to the rafters with portraits of the great and good, anecdotes aplenty about all of Graham Greene's fascinating relatives, and the most amazing cakes piles high on a gingham tablecloth. Oh my, the cakes.

Frances Donnelly is a writer, an expert on the aforementioned Greene, a contributor to the quarterly review and works for BBC Radio 4 (!). She also happens to make beautiful, rustic, masterpieces of cakes by the delicious, and hefty, batch. She loaded the heaving table with coffee and walnut rounds, Victoria sponges sandwiched with fresh home-made raspberry jam, chocolate buttercream slabs, apple crumble wedges, gluten-free orange slices, a monstrous four-tiered lemon curd cake and sugar-dusted lemon drizzle squares while wearing her pinny, covered in icing sugar, hair wild and eyes bright. Then she removed the pinny, put on her spectacles, and sat down with her notes to prepare the rather compelling talk she was going to give to the seated mass. She is a dream wonderwoman. And she smiles. I want to be her when I grow up.

The metaphorical cherry on the top. Masterpiece.

Not only was it Observer Food Monthly this weekend just gone, which is a joy in itself, but it was Observer Food Monthly CHRISTMAS SPECIAL. So great. Salivate. Sunday is my favourite day, made all the better by food porn. And Nigel Slater included a mustard-heavy recipe. I love mustard more than most. And this recipe is the bomb because it doesn't involve many ingredients or much effort. I don't really do cooking, so this is my kind of thing. It is just butternut squash, onion, a pint of double cream, salt, pepper, and four heaped tablespoons of wholegrain mustard, baked for ninety minutes so it is all gloopy, with a slight crust, and seriously mustardy. Total drool. Thanks Nige.

This girl is a winner

Mustard is so dreamy, though not in a soppy dreamboat kind of way, as it has bite. Bite, not pep, because pep sounds way too American cheerleader, which mustard is not. Me and him got through two large jars in a month. And that is not unusual. When we have roast dinners (or, indeed, any dinner) at home, I always have both wholegrain and dijon in dollops, and your run-of-the-mill-though-still-sensational English stuff too obviously, if there's any going. A guy I knew once bought a big tin of the powdered stuff which he would mix up into a paste. I think he only bought it because the make was the same as his sur-name. I saw a list of the world's oddest, most niche museums in a paper the other day. There is a mustard museum in Norwich. I do not think this is odd, I think it is a Grand Day Out. I of course checked out the Colmans Mustard Museum online. Visitors can 'discover beautiful and historical mustard items'. Intriguing. They can 'find out how Jeremiah Colman started his mustard empire'. Educational, and also brilliant that Mr Colman's first name is Jeremiah, a fine name for a mustard. And they can 'sample a range of delicious mustards'. Which is the whole point, I would say, of going to such a place. Whenever I have been to Norwich it has always been really sunny. Without fail. Now I know that it's because they have a big old yellow mustard sun shining over it all the live-long day. Yum, mustard sun.

WHAT WE DID

A whole month has passed and I have been quite out of the norm and right into a loch. Turns out my Great Uncle Michael counts bats. And sometimes newts. So going off to count birds was pretty much inevitable. Genetically speaking. We arrived in the very middle of the night, in fact just after, with loud suitcases and torches that probably woke the whole farm with light in windows and made birds make screaming haunting sounds. We fished the key from a moss-covered fairy tree-stump outside the front door. I thought there could be someone in the other bedroom because there was a toothbrush already in the bathroom. So I whispered while we opened wine and toasted the beginning of Operation Scottish Adventure. I was less stupid in daylight. Toothbrush mystery remains unsolved however.

A lot happened in the quickest month of my life, and I don't want to be a borelord, so I did some journal trawling and picked out little passages. I've added authentic and genuine photo evidence so it's clear I'm not making the whole thing up. SO...

Where we were

Bogbean, bruised knees, blue lips, hot hot baths.
Reading Anais Nin erotica all the time, and Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach in one evening on the sofa.
ELUSIVE BITTERN (that we failed to see - I don't think it was elusive, rather a phantom)
Home from home - the flat has Pride and Prejudice on VHS. White shirted Darcy all wet from the lake. And Emma. And Persuasion. And A Little Princess (!!). PERIOD DRAMA.
Faffing with the cairn as the ducks laugh.
In a canoe on the loch, pulling up reeds by the root. Boat of vegetation. Cold wet hands in workman's gloves. Wading in water, getting stuck in mud, weird to walk on land again. Splashing water over dry-suits and hang them on the line in the dark ducket, heavy feet swaying. So creepy.

Contraption

Cold Comfort Farm characters, but with Scottish accents.
I have bruises where my kneecaps used to be. Purple, stormy and tender.
Bogbean sounds like something out of Roald Dahl. No beans but sometimes flowers and always tentacles.
Lapwings sound like tuning a radio, like interference.
Peeing in a stream then eating sandwiches sitting on a wall by a bridge in Kirkton of Kingoldrum. The best sandwiches - brown bread sliced thick, cheese, lettuce and so much mustard.
Neeps and tatties and vegetarian haggis with mini bottles of red wine at The Three Bellies Bray on a Friday night.

Haggis, neeps and tatties

Scrambled batter with damson jam for breakfast.
Mink Raft Day is the wettest. Clay and droppings and so much rain. One thigh prickled from nettle stings, the other from a barbed-wire scratch. Fingers crossed for no tetanus. My bones wet and shaking. Then both thighs prickle from heat: heater right up close blowing hot air. Cider With Rosie, smell of very old paperback, eating malt loaf, a ginger nut and a clementine in bed. I feel like Chistmas. It is still raining.
Grilled cheese and mustard and beans on toast, tumblers of whisky. My cardigan has yellow wool flecks in amongst the green that look like mustard splodges. This has been a week of yellow mustard that bites at my nose.
STELLA FOR £2.20!! A WHOLE PINT. A Stella and a Snickers is the most amazing thing.

Hobgoblin and Stella

Wearing dry-suits is like being a Power Ranger.

Clearing away mermaid hair. Silver fishes in the tangles. Uncombed mermaid hair clogging the loch plug. Takes too many throws of the grapple, so we wade through plaited mass, undo the braids.

Torso deep in swamp and weeds/lying in a hot bubble bath, getting all clean and listening to The Velvet Underground's Femme Fatale.

He made gratin in ramekins - ramekin gratin ramekin gratin.

RAMEKIN GRATIN

Exploring is the Best Thing. Wake to wind and rain in the dark then it's dry-suits in bogs and swamps, finding dead cygnets and wood all bitten by beavers. Up to our ribcages in swamp and rain and mud and mist.

Hanging binoculars hammer my bladder.

Dry-suit slung over a rake handle and held between us like the fruits of a day's hunt, like stag or boar, or a person if we were cannibals. We hid it under an upturned wheelbarrow under a bridge, the feet sticking out like a dumped dead body.

A dark walk home after getting drunk and the English aristocrat who thought we were roe deer. 'I saw legs'. He didn't invite us to his manor to drink brandy.

Cow

'The terrible truth is I think we're coming down with colds' and the pheasants shrieked.

MUSHROOMS HAVE GILLS

Corduroy hands. We are forever making corduroy hands. Skin printed from being pressed in legs.
BRAVEHEART. A Mel Gibson production with bad hair and blood. They may take our lives but they will never take our freedom. Watching William Wallace hung, drawn and quartered while eating chocolate raisins. Hollywood Scotland. I wanted something epic with our lentil soup.

Rigor mortis rabbit with jaws clamped around a root, and an ice cream sundae as big as my head on Halloween.

Peach Melba

The kettle is boiling a lot quicker here than in Scotland which is kind of blowing my mind along with making my tea more promptly.  



Wow

 

In bed with Laurie Lee

'She was, after all, a country girl; disordered, hysterical, loving. She was muddled and mischievous as a chimney-jackdaw, she made her nest of rags and jewels, was happy in the sunlight, squawked loudly at danger, pried and was insatiably curious, forgot when to eat or ate all day, and sang when sunsets were red. She lived the easy laws of the hedgerow, loved the world and made no plans, had a quick holy eye for natural wonders and couldn't have kept a neat house for her life'  - Laurie Lee's mother in Cider With Rosie

'Then she took off her boots and stuffed them with flowers. She did the same with mine. Her parched voice crackled like flames in my ears. More fires were started. I drank more cider. Rosie told me outrageous fantasies... For a long time we sat with our mouths very close, breathing the same hot air. We kissed, once only, so dry and shy, it was like two leaves colliding in air' - Rosie and Laurie in Cider With Rosie

Warm afternoon wrapped in my dad-sized wool cardigan and elephant bed-spread I'd brought with me from home, after being soaked to the bone while out checking mink rafts floating in burns and barbed wire slicing my thigh. SO COMFORTABLE despite the stinging. Delicious orange Autumn, citrus, butter and ginger.

Orange Everything

PROPER AUTUMN at last. We now have an October without the Indian Summer. Piles of leaves and new brown Doc Martin loafers with yellow and black striped laces. And I made the perfect Autumn dinner dish. A Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall recipe and so so rich. Orange sweet potato gratin with crunchy peanut butter. Layered creamy garlicky ten-pence-piece-thick slices, with dollops of peanut butter mixed with lime juice and a dash of oil running through the middle, all heated up in our oven that howls and whistles when the grill is on. Melty velvet and the most comforting thing. I think someone like Martha Stewart would approve. She has a magazine dedicated to Halloween which has a picture of a girl with home-crafted butterflies attached to the corners of her eyes on the cover. A Martha Stewart Halloween, what a wonderful thing. This is one of the costumes:



Bee Hive Plaits

We have been eating a lot of honey that came from rooftop hives in Clerkenwell, mostly in hot water or lemon and ginger tea. Staving of illness with sweet and runny honey that has hints of citrus fruit. But I'm soon headed for Scottish midges rather than Clerkenwell bees. And for wetland birds more than anything. Living by the Loch of Kinnordy for a month. Me, him, the birds and October.

NEW HOUSE. A perfect house with wooden floors and so much space and so much lovely old furniture and crockery. It has a name not a number, and crawling vines, ivy leaves, orange-coloured pear tree seen through my window, overgrown garden that we will hang lanterns in. I have a four poster bed with pink and yellow drapes (so high and with two mattresses like the princess and the pea) and a closet as big as my old room I swear. He has fairy light lips above his bed that take up the whole wall in one big smooch. Piano/guitar/singing filters down through the house. Turkish flatbreads and hummus and supersized cans of chickpeas from across the road whenever we want, which is always. Triple-stacked slabs of gingerbread tied up in bags, a cross between bread and cake and excellent for breakfast. Doughboys cooked in stews and rollies and beer and mismatched chairs in kitchenSLASHdining-room. We move mattresses up and down stairs, in and out of attics, and belly-flop onto them. On a final visit to the old flat I buy an outfit for £2.50 from a Hackney charity shop called 'The Charity Shop'. We go on a group trip to an intimate acoustic FUR gig in Kennington for Ethio-jazz and cello and words that rhyme, innit. Woah, such quick, awesome words. And we have an Autumn that thinks it is Summer. But it is still Autumn in the mornings.

I finally watch Twin Peaks (!!). Audrey's sweaters and, good God, the lined up doughnuts.

I WANT THIS



'It is her name I have sung'

Fox and 'follow your heart'

MOVING HOUSE. So I'm picking at blu-tak in my blue box with its bright light and flying daddy long legs (plural). I find my ACDC t-shirt and a 3D flamenco dancer postcard sent from Spain over a year ago. The three of us roomies have pink fizz and too many cookies and brownies, taking a breather from cramming cardboard.

Clearing up and clearing out. There is a hummus explosion in my bag. They'd said my new phone shouldn't even be near water vapour (that's what killed the last one, apparently) so thank goodness my umbrella bares the brunt. That and my library copy of Lachlan Mackinnon's Small Hours. Thick chickpea paste between pages. I won't be able to look the sweet beardy Poetry Library man in the eye when I return it. Though maybe I'll pay to keep the copy. It is so good.

Part two of Small Hours is the Book of Emma. Prose poems with no commas that remember dead Emma, a girl he went to university with. They attended modern poetry lectures together. She left an impression that he turns into ink. Full of coffee, wine, books, the Bodlein library, her novel under her bed, thinking of her 'vanishing for whole days to blaze away' on her unfinished masterpiece. 'She was brilliant'. That is how the book begins. It ends with this:

LIV
Envoi
So little book go tell them all.
Oh Emma

So Chaucerian. But Oh Lachlan too, as it is as much his book as it is Emma's. 'As a courtly lover Troilus becomes a better person because of his love for Criseyde. It was like that but without desire. Oh lucky poet.'

A lucky poet he is indeed, with his links to Woolf and Lowell. And the own links he makes to Hardy and Graves. A lucky poet, but a good one too...
'We saw the outside of Monk's House then went to the field my distant cousin Virginia Woolf walked through on her way to drown herself in the River Ouse... Her novels have always quickened claustrophobia within me.'
'Robert Graves had the lyric poet's habit of falling in love. It seems he truly believed that each girl was a literal incarnation of his muse. Poets have believed madder things.'
(And on Hardy) 'Overcome with grief he wrote the Poems of 1912-13 which are his great achievement. In them he talks to a ghost. Her name was Emma. Emma Lavinia Gifford. Your name was Emma Smith.' He then talks to Lowell about Hardy's women.

'I fell in love. Moonstruck. Mooncalf.' he writes about another girl. He is not in love with Emma. She is different, on another plane.

Emma is as follows: 'A nunnish ardent mind perhaps. Indeed she looked quite like Anna Akhmatova as her lover painted her. Aloof and tall. Half nun half whore Zhdanov screamed. Emma had lovers but she was not promiscuous.'

'Like some weird elementary particle you flicker in and out of some being. You are given and you are taken away. You are not named. Emma.'

She fell off Lundy island. He names her. She is remembered. 'You are an open wound in me'.

While packing up my life into boxes and bags I finished the new Hollinghurst tome. It is all about poets and legacy and biography. It was heavy and awkward to carry around. Interestingly these things don't get lighter the more I read.

Life Drawing

Held in an arts factory that looked like a church crayoned in primary colours. Run by a cliche of a lovely woman in black clothes and eyeliner, with scarves in her hair and 'statement' necklaces hanging in her bosom. All eyes on the shaky man who either chose bizarre strenuous poses or looked like he'd fancy a nap. Made me wonder about him - where does he live, who are his friends, does he have any friends, is he a middle-aged cat man, why does he do this, does he model for the money or to get out for an evening or for the good of aiding the arts scene of north London or for the thrill of being watched naked? He had an interesting body. He shut his eyes and I thought about what he might be thinking. I got a bit bored so started to add words to my sketches, along his pencilled outlines.

Thanks to work for the borrowed pencil, and to the guy who did energetic charcoal drawings for the big sheets of paper.

...A poem unfurled from you
Like a loose frond of hair from your nape
To be clipped and kept in a book. What would stern
Dour Emily have made of your frisky glances
And your huge hope?  

Wuthering Heights, Ted Hughes

...The one upright
Among all horizontals. 

Wuthering Heights, Sylvia Plath

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath

Bright Star, John Keats

Rambling Man

Dessert

 FRENCH WEDDING. Red wine out of tumblers while sitting on my parents' bed. The best hangover-cure home-made yogurt for breakfast with a rainbow of such jammy conserves at our B&B with window shutters. Visiting marshlands that weren't 'marshy' enough, and a cathedral with a shrine of tiny shoes, and a market made up of rotisseries - turning, browning, mini-chickens. A charmingly drunk 80 year old maitre d' who was an expert on chicory (endives) and pushed champagne like it was going out of fashion. A woman named the little-girl-romantic Delphine. Pungent goats cheese piped into plastic shot glasses. Feather wedding dresses, marshmallow kisses between men, desserts in a dozen flavours of delicious eaten crosslegged on the lawn so I flashed my pants, perfect figs - 'the food of the gods'. Nine hour party of feasting, drinking, dancing and the macarena. French sweets, a different kind for each table, Carambar nostalgia and filling his pockets with pear-flavoured lozenges as we left. I kept my freshblood-red high-heels on ALL NIGHT, the blooms of rose clusters hiding my blooming, swelling, red toes. Kicked them off and slept like a log at four in the morning.

WELCOME to the beginning of the End of the Road

We travelled to the END OF THE ROAD. Four days of sleeping on slopes and mulching grass. Such good song-writing - Laura Marling, Emmy the Great, Allo Darlin'. The enigma that is Bob Log III: a man in a helmet, wearing a blue velour jumpsuit, using stolen telephones as microphones, getting people pregnant with his guitar tracks, requesting girls to sit on his knee, and making fun infectious, so joyously pleased with himself. Jessica Larrabee of She Keeps Bees playing as if she really was playing for herself, for the exhileration of it, so like Patti Smith. The Growlers taking me to Californian beaches and into a Hunter S Thompson novel. Frozen yogurt infused with elderflower and honey, burritos, nachos, potato wedges, soup heated on the stove between tents, GIN, wine-bag babies, so much warm flat beer from cans we drank all day everyday. Rolling tobacco, zipping sleeping bags, putting up tents in the dark and being prickled by stinging nettles. Fainting in the sun while listening to tUnE-YarDs, hitting my head, being carried by two boys either side who entered my dreams as if they were men I didn't know, feeling so heavy I thought I really best wake up and help them carry my dead-weight body. Sitting in warm hay as we all talked and talked and drank hot brandy cider. Fairy-lights and lanterns and paper birds strewn in woods, discovering a dreamland at night with Midsummer Night's Dream people-visions hanging and lying and sitting in every bower and nook and glade. An Oxfam stall on site - it was that kind of festival. A sunburnt/blushed face and patches of peeling skin now I'm home. And Bloody Marys for vitamins in the pub where Virginia Woolf used to drink to celebrate the end of my dissertation.

BEST WEEKENDS OF MY LIFE.

'Now a major motion picture'

For two days I was a cliche. I was a woman reading David Nicholl's bestselling 'One Day' on London public transport. It made me really self-conscious. But then I got into the novel, and all I could think was 'I must read and read and not stop until I finish'. A guy at the back of an empty no. 30 on Thursday night tapped and tapped my chair saying 'Excuse me' for a good long while before I realised he was part of reality and I was too and that he was trying to ask me the time.

In my defense, I needed narrative after Stevie Smith's 'Novel on Yellow Paper', a novel so evidently written by a poet...

But now I've finished 'One Day'. Phew. I finished it all alone in my flat, a snivelling wreck, a tear stained mess in pyjama bottoms and my UCL hoodie now dyed pink in the wash. I have the flat to myself and have so far: drunk down a bottle of pear cider in five minutes last night, eaten cereal out of mugs, listened to the cool neighbour's music come through both my window and the gap under the front door - summer classics that deny the rain, well and truly sustained my Pepsi Max addiction... I rashly bought 12 cans the other day, thinking this would save me money as I buy at least a can a day anyway. But it means I guzzle it pretty much continuously. I may make things out of the empty cans: a truck, a dress, a rehab centre for those who abuse caffeine, phenylalanine and fizz, my DISSERTATION.