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

Today is the anniversary of our mother’s death.  I was more sad about it yesterday than today.  Having some thoughts about her epitaph and why I have been so far reluctant to do this.

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

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

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

Yes.  Last thing at night and first thing in the morning as I wake in my cosy bed, I was thinking about the Big Issue seller I see every day.  yesterday he was stamping his feet and looked pale.  He told me he’d sold four papers all day (this was around 4 pm) – which gives him £3.00 profit.  So here’s what I say to you:  Buy the Big Issue every week.  And if you can’t buy it, give the guy a donation.  If you can’t do that, at least give them a smile, a square of your chocolate, something.

OK?

TTFN

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.)

It’s a four-letter word.  You can’t live with it, you can’t live without it.  What is it?

WORK.

folk!

By oak and ash and elm

by something something something

the Woodcraft folk are we

Last night, a Woodcraft extravaganza with all the Woodcraft folk across the city giving performances. Some were uneven, some spot-on, particularly a climate-change film made by Holly’s group in which Ruadhan starred as a manic scientist.

We were supposed to bring food, so I’d stopped off at a Sainsbury’s local which hadn’t been there last time I visited. (Sainsbury’s are going in for these unmanned tills, which seem to need constant supervision from staff. I don’t like them because they’re really noisy and will lead to staff redundancies.) When I arrived I not only had to walk all round the school twice in order to find the entrance which, like the entrance to the Museum of Thought in one of my stories, is practically underground, I then approached a guy behind a table and asked him where I should put the baguette and hummus I’d brought.

I don’t know if you’ve ever known anyone like this guy. I’ve known him for years, though only as a nodding acquaintance – nonetheless, he’s the kind of person you can have a really good impression of through being with them at groups, on committees, at demos, and so on. Anyway, this guy makes a virtue of incompetence. Not that he is incompetent, but (which is worse) he pretends to be because – I imagine – he thinks it’s endearing. I once knew him to bring a violin to a home ed group in order to lead some singing. He walked around with this violin for a while, so everyone thought, “Great! He’s going to play!” When the time came for the singing, he put it to his shoulder, flourished the bow, lowered the bow to the strings, and played just one note. Then he let the violin drop down by his side and started singing. So last night when I asked him where I should put my food, he said, and I quote:

“I don’t know anything, really.”

Aaargh!

On the plus side, we saw Margaret, whom I haven’t seen for years and who is always a fund of useful information – besides being a very pleasant person to chat to. Also successfully avoided a couple of people I really didn’t want to talk to. So – good!

Steve wants to make dinner for me tonight. Sounds good. Also, Holly and I are going to Leicester College for their open day.

Have a good day

TTFN

How are we today? I’m having a late start as we are going to see Holly in some Woodcraft Extravaganza. For those who don’t know, Woodcraft is a sort of alternative Brownies/Guides/Cubs/Scouts/Sea Scouts/Women’s Land Army/Salvation Army – erm, anyway, it’s vaguely hippy-ish and Holly loves it. She’s been going since she was four or five and is now one of the oldest.

Yesterday I didn’t seem to get too much done apart from reading through my stories and feeling that they were not good.

Daniel and I have reached Series 8 of Friends – the one where Rachel is pregnant. I started to write a series of limericks about Friends. It went:

It starts with a Rembrandt or two

who say that they’ll be there for you

a fountain, some jiving

a bride who is skiving

‘cos everyone says she’s a shoe

The idea was to write a verse for every series. I’ve got a few more verses in the pipeline – the difficulty, particularly in the early series, is finding a main event. Also, as Phoebe discovered, nothing rhymes with “Chandler”.

Ah well. Enjoy your day. And sing, Bing, sing!

TTFN