They’re onto me…

at Fenwick’s.  I’ve been using their toilets rather than go down to the market, which takes me 15 mins there and back.  I honestly thought they didn’t care but today I was followed by a security guard who nodded significantly at a member of staff as I went by.  So I guess I won’t be doing that again. 

I wrote some poems and thought I’d saved them onto the key-drive but they’re not there.  Except they are, but in a different format.  This drives me crazy – I keep running into problems because we don’t have Word at home.

I can remember three of the poems:

Genesis Triptych

1.

the female form

goes down a storm

tho’ Adam’s bone is still the norm.

2.

the man’s the default-setting

the woman straight to video

the buck that you must conquer

in your wedding rodeo

3.

we reproduce

you bring the juice

by Israel out of Syracuse

I’ve always thought that “ontome” ought to be a word in its own right – like “infamy” – you know, as in Kenneth Williams shouting “Infamy!  Infamy!  They’ve all got it – ” you know the rest.  In Carry on over the Rubicon, or whatever it was.  Ontome, ontome, they’re all onto me!  See?  It could work!

TFN (now drinking 50% less tea)

Normal consciousness will be resumed as soon as possible…

Meanwhile, here is some light music.

Remember Ian Macaskill? He was a manic Scots weatherman who, one day in the dismal summer of 1985, said: “I’m trying to think of something good to say about the weather. Meanwhile, here is some light music.” That was in the days before weather people had Personalities. He was the first.

A good weekend, although rather tired yesterday. On Tuesday I have what you might call a counselling session about our financial situation. I am unaccountably nervous about this, as though it will reveal cracks in my personality (with a small p, but possibly a large C). I don’t find it easy to ask for help with things – I like to sort them out on my own. But sometimes you just can’t.

I woke up feeling dislocated and not able to remember which of our family members are alive and which are dead. That’s not what you want on a Monday morning.

Have a good week – and think rich!

TTFN

PS  Speaking of the Scots, in Leigh, Lancs where I used to live there was a character called Scotch Colin (also a little manic) which in turn reminds me of Scotch Corner, which is no longer a corner but a huge bloody roundabout at the end of the M1.  The same thing has probably happened to Pooh Corner, but I haven’t been there for a while.

Second verse of limerick!

Here it is:

Ross is a dinosaur dude

Joey loves women and food

they hang out in a bar

Phoebe plays the guitar

ugly neighbour reclines in the nude

Ouf! as the French say

A terrible poem I wrote years and years ago:

The beer bottle is brown

It fizzes when opened:

Pschitt! As the French say.

It was a Haiku.

If you don’t know, there used to be a fizzy drink sold in France and it was advertised with the word “Pschitt!” plastered all over the billboard (to indicate the sound it made when opened) – much to the amusement of all English-speaking visitors.  I guess they’ve got wise to it now.

What would the English equivalent be?  Suggestions please.

I’ve taken to working in the reference library.  It’s warmer and quieter – and they have more computers.  Downside: they are much stricter about not eating and drinking – but actually, that’s better – if I don’t drink, I don’t need to pee.

In fact, the reference library is altogether a severer place to work: busts of Shakespeare and Newton (as well as other luminaries, all male) preside sternly over you as you work.  They all look very serious, though I fancy Shakespeare has a smile playing around his mouth, though that could be just because I know him.

Very tired today.  Slept badly.  Going out with Ruth tonight, to Sardaar’s as usual (we are blessed with many veggie Indian restaurants in Leicester) – and tomorrow, to the Ale Wagon with Peter and then back to his for food.

TTFN – enjoy your weekend

PS  Actually, as haiku lovers will have spotted, the last line doesn’t have enough syllables.

I had a dream…

Bad night, but a good dream – I dreamt I found a story of mine that had been published and which I’d forgotten about.  I was really happy, then wrote to the magazine asking why they hadn’t paid me.  The story, interestingly, was called Nineteenthly, which is Mark’s pseudonym on his blog and on the Half-Bakery.  So make of that what you will.  I know I will!

Half-bakery?  It’s a site where geeks come up with ill-thought-out ideas for inventions.  Geddit?  It’s easy enough to find, not so easy to leave (you can log off any time you like/but you can never leave)

I had a really good limerick this morning and now it’s lost.  Here’s a later one:

The age of the train

voice of the creep

winds in the lane

howl in our sleep.

(Remember Jimmy Savile?  I try not to, either.)

Reading Rebecca and for lighter relief, HPDH (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to you).  When, oh when will the film come out?

Short stories are coming on.  I am skimming Tracy Chevalier’s Burning Bright – which, as anyone even vaguely literary will know, is about Blake.  You know, Tyger, tyger, burning bright/in the forests of the night/what immortal hand or eye/can frame thy fearful symmetry?  Not her best, I think – the research is too obvious, hasn’t bedded in to the story.  Girl with a Pearl Earring – much better.  I wonder, though, whether she’s got stuck in a genre because that was so successful.

Compare and contrast with how a tiger when walking:

uses first legs one and three

then alternates with two and four –

and after that, there are no more.

RIP Spike Milligan

Button, button, who the hell is button?

I’m wondering whether “button, button, who’s got the button?” is like “Hunt the thimble”. This is a now largely-forgotten game which we played as children, where our mother used to hide the thimble. She was very good at this, proving the dictum that if you want to hide something, you should place it in full view. (Have you seen The Iron Giant? He hides in full view.) Anyway, this set me thinking about Jenson Button, who purports to be a racing driver. Whenever I hear his name my brain goes into that squirmy improbability-drive mode wherein I just don’t believe it. How can that be his name? That’s not a name – it’s a job description. It’s like a tennis player being called Servolan Volley. (Where was there a character called Servolan?)

 

Today I’m in the library again and could be taken for a Muslim convert as I’m wrapped in a headscarf against the cold. The windows don’t shut properly and the draught is freezing. I’m going to be reading Tracy Chevalier to see what kind of thing she might go for. Why? Because there’s a short story comp which she is going to be judging.

Have a good day!

TTFN

What’s wet and dreary and goes on forever?

A Sunday afternoon in November.  Ugh!

Anniversary of mother’s death tomorrow.  Sometimes you don’t remember these things consciously but feel really crap and don’t realise why until you look at the calendar.

It’s one of those afternoons where all my efforts seem frustrated – OK, I did manage to do some marking and put the velcro on the curtains (whih look good, by the way) but then the simplest of operations -ie attaching a document to an email – defeated me and I got very whiny and upset.  Turns out the button had unaccounatbly vanished.

Button, button – who’s got the button?

(Can anyone explain to me why this is a joke in America?  I have the impression it’s some sort of game but I don’t know.)

Mark was playing Mah-jjong on this laptop this morning and with unpardonable smugness, wondering whether it’s easier to match the pairs “if you can’t read the symbols”.  I showed great restraint in not bashing him over the head with the coffee-pot, I think.

I’m just rambling.  It whiles away the time.  I shall do my yoga shortly.  Have written a paragraph about my plinth experience for a magazine – no idea whether they’ll publish tho.

I’ve decided I’m just going to send stories off to magazinex, competitions, whatever, until I get somewhere.

TTFN.  If you’re somewhere hot, don’t feel too smug

it’s blog-tastic!

Waking up on a Sunday morning at 5.30 is not what you want. But there it is. At least I was able to see that Holly woke up in time for her paper round and ensure that we don’t get a plaintive call from Subash at the newsagents’. We fixed Holly’s bike yesterday – it had a startlingly tiny tear in the inner tube which could only be experienced in deep meditation, which made fixing it a bit of a bitch (by the way, this is the only context in which I consider the word “b*tch” to be acceptable – apart from the original, of course).

Last night Daniel and I finished watching Friends. Yes, we finally got to that episode where Rachel opens the door and whines: “I got awf the plane.” What will we do now? Get a life, I suppose.

Plans for today: write a couple of poems which have been swirling around in my head. Go to church (yesterday we went to Tomatoes – a free breakfast thing they do every other week and I talked to a homeless woman) – Oh! I was going to blog about Daphne du Maurier – don’t let me forget – and then I have some sewing to do. I have untimely ripped the bottom layer from an exquisite skirt which was much too long and put it on some curtains which were much too short. However, the skirt material can’t be washed with the curtains so – hey presto! – velcro. An ingenious solution, I think.

After that, I don’t know. No great plans for today. Oh – yesterday Mark and Holly went to see Zombie Undead at the Phoenix (the new Phoenix, of which more anon) in which Holly was an extra. I stayed home with Daniel, who is not yet ready for the zombie world.

Right. Daphne du Maurier. OK – confession: I avoided Daphne du Maurier until recently because my mum liked her. But before you judge me, please bear in mind that my mum also liked a load of utter tosh. Still – my mistake. Du Maurier hovers on the edge of greatness and at times crosses it. One of her editors says no writer has so consistently evaded classification – and she’s right. So read her. I’m reading Rebecca at the mo. Remember the Olivier film?

The new Phoenix is in the new cultural quarter, a brave and expensive attempt to regenerate a run-down post-industrial area of the city. However, the result is that all the buildings feel like warehouses. Plus, as I’ve said before, how DARE they not call the theatre The Orton?

Ok that’s more than enough for this time in the morning. Have a good day.

TT

Longtemps je me suis couche de bonne heure *

Bonjour mes petits brioches, et comment ca va? My spell-checker is going mad, though it’s interesting to see how many French words can also be something else in English (and therefore not underlined in that plaintive wiggly way.).

How am I? Well, I was feeling frustrated by my lack of progress, but starting to feel that I might be turning a corner, albeit slow and lumbering with many turns and reverses like a juggernaut negotiating a u-bend. There was once, in that loo-paper publication The Daily Sport (now, I think, defunct) a picture of an unfortunate obese woman with the caption “dumps like a truck”. The most unattractive sight in the world – a load of sweaty, overweght males laughing at a picture of an overweight woman.

 

For some reason yesterday I was thinking of Yosser Hughes. Remember Yosser Hughes? He was the character in Boys from the Black Stuff who went around saying to everyone: “Giz a job – I can do that.’ In the final stages of his malady he gave up and just took to saying “I am Yosser Highes” (If you’re not in the UK, Boys from the Black Stuff was about a bunch of unemployed labourers from Liverpool – and it was seminal TV. Really excellent.)

 

To Steve’s last night where we discussed his new girlfriend and watched Twelfth Night, the Trevor Nunn film with just-about-everyone-who-was-famous-at-the-time. I wasn’t totally convinced by Ben Kingsley as the fool (not that Ben Kingsley, god bless him, can’t play anyone he damn well pleases, just that the way he played it was a bit odd); nor was I convinced that Nunn was as happy on film as he presumably is on stage. I also found some of the dialogue hard to follow. But this did not make it a bad film. Not at all.

 

*This, if you didn’t know, is the first line of A la recherche du temps perdu I also went to bed early last night as I am feeling tired at the moment. Maybe it’s the time of year/maybe it’s the time of man/and I don’t know who I am but life is for learning

 

Ah, Woodstock! Where were you when you first heard that? I suppose, as the conventional wisdom has it, if you can remember, you weren’t there. (Oh, all right – I admit it: I wasn’t there. I was far too young.)

At the reference library today

Definitely need to think of some snappier titles for these posts.  Back to working at the library today as Mark seems to be better.  had an email from Artichoke, the people who ran the Plinth project, asking me if I would like to talk to some women’s magazines about my experience.  I said I would.

Working on my stories today.  Some of them seem very lame indeed, and all of them need lots of work.  The radio play is stuck at the moment – but when things are going well I get a real sense that it all works together.  Not feeling terribly inspired today tho.  Tired.

Have you ever noticed how few indoor seats there are?  If you want to sit and have a packed lunch without getting rained on, there are not too many options.

Reading a book called “Mezzanine” by Nicholson Baker.  It is something I read years ago and nearly bought for Mark, even though at that time we weren’t together.  It concerns the minutiae of life, the things we all notice on a subliminal level but don’t pay attention to, such as the nature of the hole in which you insert your straw in a cup of take-away coffee; and what happens to plastic straws when inserted in a cup of fizzy pop (not a problem I ever have to contend with) and how they have designed them to fit exactly into the lid so the straw doesn’t bob up and out of the drink.

I call it Proust for shoppers.

I am also reading Proust again, first in the English, then in the French.  I only have one volume in the French – in fact, it turned out to be the second part of  volume 5, La Prisonniere – and it starts, bizarrely, in the middle of a paragraph.  Took me ages to find it.

Took Mark ages to find the book, too.  It was my Xmas present last year.

I love Proust.  If I had a second life running alongside the first, I’d use it to read Proust, and write all my responses to him.  And  write down all the quotable stuff.  Actually, I’ve found you begin by writing the odd sentence and end by copying it all.

That’s all folks!  See you next time on the Muppet Show.