Waving to the gods

There’s a flat disc moon and smoky clouds racing over the Highway. I lick my lips where cold sores threaten and keep on with this thirst, even after all those plastic cupsful of warm recycled water. My voice is just a shadow now, whispers closely guarded by sore, swollen glands. We went to Europe and came home with new comrades, with email addresses written on beer mats, with newspaper reviews, with precious priceless tickets, usher-torn and pocket-crumpled. I see pirates, when I close my eyes, and pork pie hats and prostitutes, so much skin skimped by negligee and luminous shocking pink bikini accents. Slow motion curls and confusing gestures half beckon half threaten rolling from their elbows to the tip of a long savage painted fingernail. Fond friendships weaved themselves into our dark couple after a chance meeting in the Tiergarten, and on Onion Burger Street and at the bar, over drinks, outside the theatres, at airports. We recognise each other, by hats or red lettered black T Shirts, by breathing, and we smile and ask who-are-you? and then kisses and cuddles and knowing hearts that look right into each other and a big fat surge of elation to be here singing and laughing with kindred souls. I can still recall the first warming taste of Indonesian food on Damrak: galangal, lemon grass, coconut, sambal kacang, nasi goreng. And later jenever and beer kopstoots to thaw us out again. I cried in the Westens, in the Carré, in the Apollo and on Platform 14 of Amsterdam train station. A woman called Susan, who had dyed her hair orange, comforted me with rubs and gentle words. She kissed us when we left. And I cried in the Trout, in a shopping centre in Hammersmith Broadway, when people that I’d never even met before this summer told me that they love us and that this all matters.

Armistice Day

The lick of a leaf fallen
Drustle under trees,
Stomach-churning splats
Of shall not be swallowed
Ramadan spit
Stuck to the underside of tissues
From the last bad cold bout,
Take-away box gifts for rats,
Mice, flies, pigeons peck at party puke
Pebble-dashed around the pubs,
Sodden cardboard cartons, bones,
Butt-ends, can flats, fag packets,
Fireworks, beer bottle, smashed
Hubcap, mattress, toothbrush, teabag,
Trampled paper plastic gutter poppy,
And still the stone speckled
Pavement sparkles in soft,
Stunning Autumn sun.

No flowers

I have spent a not inconsiderable amount of time recently mulling over the fact that, depending on the context, I pronounce ‘cerebral’ in two entirely different ways. It is pissing me off.

I feel lousy today. Jesse’s funeral was a very bleak affair. We arrived far too early and had to suffer 20 agonising minutes of hushed, tearful contemplation, trying to look everywhere except at the coffin. People kept telling me to be strong which was rather perplexing. I felt strong. Certainly strong enough to let out a damn good cry without anything terrible happening.

We had some awkward moments when we got to the church, trying to work out the best place for Matt to park his wheelchair. Matt wanted to leave it up to me. I wanted to make sure he felt comfortable. The vicar said we could sit anywhere. He said that he hoped we would not be the type of people that sit at the back. He said that yes, here, a few rows from the front, would be fine. Then he said that Matt should be aware that he would have to move out of the way when the coffin was carried down the aisle. So sitting there really wasn’t fine. Christ! We are BEREAVED. We don’t want to have to make decisions. Just tell us where to sit where we won’t be in the way. Matt cannot possibly be the first wheelchair user to ever come into this church. So we ended up in a weird corner, at a strange angle, too far away from my Dad and brother. I tried to hide my face behind my hair so no one could see me crying and dribbling snot but it didn’t really work. I tried to think of funny things to stop myself blubbing but that didn’t really work either. So I just hung on tightly to Matt and tried to keep in mind that Jesse had been very poorly and this was a release for him. He had survived to an impressive age after all.

My uncle had insisted that the service be the strict version from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. Being an atheist and all, I didn’t really expect to be very impressed by the whole Christian pantomime but I was a bit disappointed that the ceremony did not strike a single chord with me. Its brutal and somewhat terse take on the suffering we all endure in life, with death being an ‘enemy’, just reinforced my sense of estrangement from the church. The vicar’s microphone was not working properly. He faded in and out of amplification, sounding stilted and at times comical. Jesse would have been furious (and might even have called him a berk).

Hats off to the pall bearers. Jesse was a very large man and must have been somewhat of a challenge for them. They hid the struggle well and managed to keep the jostling to a minimum (although they did nearly back into a candlestick at one point). The mourning and weeping continued at the graveside where we shifted uncomfortably, getting cold, on soft wet grass. On request, I doled out the apricot coloured tissues that I had swiped from Mum’s kitchen to a couple of the other sobbing females and wondered if their tears had taken them by surprise.

There was some respite when my cousins shared some of their memories of Uncle Jesse. I laughed (probably far too loudly considering we were in a churchyard) when they told me about the time they all went to Plymouth, accompanied by a dear old friend of his who didn’t eat very much. Jesse, on the other hand, loved his food. He practically lived for his food. They stopped for a hearty three course lunch and then, a little later, for a cream tea. On the way home, Jesse insisted that they find somewhere for supper. His friend felt unpleasantly full by this stage and tried to refuse anything further, which made my uncle very cross. Ken ordered something light and just pushed it about his plate to keep up appearances. Jesse was not fooled and announced in a loud and peevish voice, “Mr Stevens, you are eating like a damn sparrow!”.

We all squeezed into a small room in ‘the Plough’ in Prestbury to eat comfort food and put the wind back into our sails. Matt and I read up on the ghosts in the village (reputed to be one of the most haunted in Britain) and shivered at the idea of dogs and horses going berserk outside the spooky cottages next the pub we were in. Later we moseyed up Mill Lane hoping to spot some phantoms or at least see some dogs/horses going berserk but all we saw were falling yellow leaves and raindrips and cobwebs.

The rain got heavier as the afternoon dragged on and was nothing short of torrential as our trusty Slipper carried us towards London, back to another world. And even though it was only yesterday when they tautly, painfully, lowered dear Jesse into the ground, it suddenly seems like he has been dead a long time now.

Rocket Science

I have that woozy cast adrift feeling normally associated with Monday mornings. It's cold outside. My car is covered in rust coloured leaves fallen from a tree with slices of white bread around the base of its trunk. People are hatted, hooded and scarfed. There are lots of fat hands in small pockets. Red paper poppies on chests everywhere.

Some of my day has been spent in contemplation of how very peculiar it is that we have a part of the body called ‘the small’. Much of my day has been spent feeling completely fucking disenchanted with everything.

I did learn that a team of Japanese sociologists and psychiatrists have come up with what they claim is the perfect chat up line: “Rainen no kono hi mo issho ni waratteiy-oh” which loosely translates, if my magnificent grasp of the Japanese language serves me correctly, into “This time next year, let’s be laughing together.”

British chat up lines are more along the lines of:
“Nice legs – what time do they open?”
“Here’s 10p, darlin – ring yer Mum and tell her you won’t be home tonight”
“Is that a ladder in your tights or a stairway to heaven?”
“Do you work for the Post Office? I thought I saw you checking out my package”

There’s not much in the small ads of the latest edition of the London Review of Books but this deserves a mention:

“Tonight I’m off to Baton Rouge to have sexual intercourse with Josephine Baker. Tomorrow I’ll be back in Chichester, waiting for Holby City to start. Archeologist and perennial folie du jour seeks F to 98 for high-kicking sequined frolics. Box no. 21/01”

Er... I don't really know who Josephine Baker is but I guess that's why they invented t'internet.

Tonight is Guy Fawkes Night and there's already a lot of popping, banging and whizzing over the city. I was once a juror for an armed robbery trial at the Old Bailey. The defendant was as guilty as fuck but he had fine counsel and we had to acquit. At one point, the defence lawyer really pressed his client's girlfriend (who looked about 12) on how she could be so sure that she was with the accused on the night of November 5th - thus proving that he could not possibly have committed the crime. She came over all shy and giggly and explained that she remembered the evening extremely well because it was the night that she had lost her virginity. The unctuous lawyer smiled - rather pervily, I thought - turned dramatically towards us and smarmed, "So... it was fireworks of ONE kind AND another..." What a git.

I am very happy that this week is nearly over. Just 7 more days and a funeral to get through and we’ll be living la vida loca on a 12 day Tom Waits Extravaganza.

Trying to be a great neice

I visited my great aunt last week. She is in a nursing home in a small village called Steeton, just outside Keighley in West Yorkshire. A sign by the side of the only road into Steeton, reads “Welcome to Steeton. Home of the Steeton Male Voice Choir.” The home is big and seems to be a hotbed of geriatric militancy. My great aunt, who has always been forthcoming with her opinions, had made a window in her busy schedule that day to air her grievances at the residents’ meeting but, when I got there, she was fast asleep in a dusky pink velour armchair, looking much smaller than when I last saw her.

Lillie is 89 and very distressed to have been involuntarily relocated from the house she has lived in all her life. But she was putting a brave face on it and is much perkier than I had expected.

One day she had come across a “big black African man… very good looking” rummaging around her bedroom drawers. When she asked if she could help him at all, he said he was looking for her bra and knickers. My aging spinster aunt, understandably taken aback, asked why. “Because I am going to give you a bath… come on, love!” Lillie, bless her, took it all in her stride and afterwards told Mum, “Ooh, it were a right grand bath!”

Not everything in the home seems to be as satisfying as being bathed by a big handsome man. Lillie decided to vary her diet one morning and ordered the 'poached egg on toast' for her breakfast. When the meal actually arrived it was nothing but a poached yolk, with not a speck of white to be seen, plonked, breadless, in the middle of a large white dinner plate.

The health authority has been assessing Lillie’s abilities to look after herself, before deciding whether to let her go back to her own house again. She has had to prove that she can wash herself standing up at the sink, from head to foot, and that she hasn’t lost her marbles. She got ten out of ten on the intelligence test, which included having to write the word ‘world’ backwards. Lillie thought this was very pedestrian and told the assessor that she could not imagine anyone not being able to do this. “You’d be surprised” came the jaded reply. I'm not surprised at all! Nursing homes are seething with vague old codgers for whom mild dyslexia would be the least of their problems. There’s a lady in Glenside who sometimes stops my grandpa in the corridor when she’s zimmering towards the bathroom and asks in a quivery voice, “Is this the way to Newton Poppleton?”

One of the key parts of the competence assessment involves checking whether the patient can make a cup of tea for themselves. It is so good to be in Blighty!

Hump Day

Wednesdays. Bloody Wednesdays, eh? ‘Hump day’ according to Trixie, who knows about these sort of things.

I missed what Ms S V Strunckel predicted I might have in store this week but the chaos she foresaw for the last seven days most certainly went off big style.

Manchester. Christ. A city which seems to get further and further away from London every time I travel there. I failed miserably to tempt my husband to join me on my business trip. The idea of languishing in the car while I long-windedly blathered out a sales pitch to a brown corduroy-clad client with a surprisingly weak handshake just did not appeal to him for some reason.

And so the motorways stretched out before me like an endless grey roller coaster ghost track. Despite me leaving Wapping at lunchtime, the autumn night came in swiftly and caught up with me before I’d reached my hotel. I was tired and totally fucked off. Our trusty car, the Slipper, looked like a student bedroom, having got messier with every near-fatal 80 mph CD change and a flimsy carrier-bagful of entirely nutrition-less road snacks.

The hypnotic horror of repeatedly driving round and round Manchester’s inner ring road, trying to find the entrance to the car park of the Malmaison hotel was shattered when Mum called my mobile phone. I yanked the Slipper to the side of the road and sat on double yellow lines with the clicking of the hazard lights deafening me in the dark. This was a first – I usually seem to think that it is a good idea, and, in fact, clever to drive whilst talking on my mobile. I patiently justify this, to anyone who will care to listen, by explaining that the Slipper is an automatic car and therefore does not require two hands at all times to be safely and successfully driven.

Listening to my beloved Mum’s fraught voice, I felt a million miles away from her, from Matt and from my bastard hotel. I was temporarily homeless in the grim North and nothing seemed quite real. Mum told me that Uncle Jesse was very poorly and that things looked bad. The details just pricked at the side of my scalp without really sinking in.

In the Malmaison, I was given a small single corner room, which had been put together at very strange angles, its Feng Shui all on the piss. After eating gratinated comfort food and watching some rubbish television, I fell asleep hugging a pillow-Matt and woke just before 5 am, about when Jesse died, feeling like a breath of air had been knocked out of me. Walking to the car park, I saw a red pencil, capped with the blue lid of a ballpoint pen, nestled in the gutter next to the kerb and wondered, for far too long, why was it like that and how had it got there.

My (great) uncle Jesse

I had an uncle once who had a sausage dog draught excluder. He was my great uncle, actually. On my dad’s side. He had a very tidy garage (unlike my dad). He lived in a bungalow, which smelt of Tupperware and cold tar soap. My uncle very much liked to watch tennis on the television but he would sometimes say terrible (unrepeatable) things about the players. When we were little, my uncle made everything fun. He would often give things to me and to my brother. Ordinary things that would seem like treasure to us. He would talk in funny voices. I thought he was a wizard. At the weekends, my uncle would drive me around the countryside, helping me to find good things to draw for my art homework. My uncle was very patient and very encouraging. He drank milky tea and holidayed in Malta. He told me he had been in love with a lady who married someone else whilst my uncle was posted overseas by the army. My uncle’s vegetables had to be well-cooked. He could always be persuaded to have second helpings. According to my uncle, women shouldn’t mow lawns or become priests. He always had a stash of boiled travel sweets (those ones rolled in icing sugar) in little tins in his car. There was a compass on the dashboard. My uncle insisted that he could never eat garlic (although he didn’t seem to mind it in the chestnut stuffing at Christmas). He had five different sets of coffee cups stored in a table drawer alongside dark brown sugar crystals in a china lidded pot shaped like a sack. My uncle was born into a huge family, which, he claimed, could be traced back to the king of Bohemia, pre 1526. He always smelt nice. My uncle was a solicitor. He wrote up my first will, which was (implausibly) witnessed by a widow and a magician. He was a keen sportsman and an exceptional badminton player until the onset of arthritis ground him to a halt. And when he couldn’t move anywhere much anymore, when his walking sticks and flat caps lay untouched in his den, my uncle travelled in his dreams, always talking up big plans to go away somewhere. He loved to be by the sea. He yearned constantly to be in Norway or Portugal or Torquay. My uncle was of ample girth, a colossus. My uncle was a Freemason. My uncle helped me to learn to drive and sometimes fell asleep in the car. I took this as a compliment. My uncle was almost always in pain but only occasionally grumpy. He called me ‘flower’ and loved me dearly. I loved him back big time. He made me feel special. My uncle was always there. Always somewhere I could find him. And then my uncle died last Wednesday when I was very far away and worrying about someone else. I miss him terrible much.