Smelling of Burnt

It rained all day on Saturday. Big heavy wet rain. We finally tackled the visit to the launderette to purge the winter quilt of Minnie pee. It was a fairly grim experience, not helped by the dark fucking relentless weather. To avoid eyeballing any of the pissed-off people using the decrepit washing machines, I tried staring out onto the Bethnal Green Road. The shop opposite is “Trotter’s Jewellers – Buyers of Gold and Silver”, which if their sign is to be believed is “Number 1 in the UK for Bling! Bling!” Depressed by the view, I turned my gaze back towards the humming, rattling, whirring machines. Our tumble dryer was overheating. I noted the warning next to the coin slot, “Remove clothes from dryer as soon as it stops. This keeps wrinkles from setting in and reduces the possibility of spontaneous combustion”.

We got home soaked to the skin and with the quilt now just smelling of Burnt.

Monday again. According to Shelley von Strunkel, this week’s eclipse will throw everything into chaos. Great. I’ve been sacked by my doctor. After 15 happy years, the boundaries have changed and I am no longer in the Tower Medical Centre’s catchment area. No one wants new patients, with the NHS on the verge of collapse and all that, and the surgery I have been sent to has a kind of gloomy eastern European feel to it. The sallow reception staff are beleaguered to the point of having hiccups. They’ll take me on for now, if I complete a questionnaire and wee in a jar, but I may need to find a new practice soon. I’ll try not to get attached to the new GP. My last one was an absolute diamond. I'll miss him.

I exit the new health centre cheerlessly and walk slowly to work, feeling that familiar start-of-the-week numbness. The Whitechapel market is frantic and there are hordes of people weaving all over the place. I pass by old graffiti – “I love you whitever your name is” and new graffiti – “Bitch Magnet”; past the Lahore restaurant where the balti is so spicy that it once made Dirty Birty cry; past an albino girl in big orange glasses resembling a Spielberg alien; down the streets behind the hospital where recorded announcements boom out from futuristic devices attached to lamp posts urging visitors, in a male voice from the 1950s, not to leave valuables on display in their cars; past carpets of pigeon droppings; past the cheerful yellow and blue Ludlow Thompson Beetles; past several discarded five-gallon cans of vegetable oil; past hundreds of thousands of office workers having a nervous crafty fag outside their buildings; past “The Codfather” Fish & Chip shop; past the feckless edgy eye-contact youths on the steps of the Look Ahead rehab hostel; past the posh nursery in the old gothic church; past the smokers outside my office, past Keith, the laughably ineffectual security guard, into the lift up to my floor. I say hello to everyone, sit down at my computer and log on. Almost instantly I stumble across another hilarious example of how the world is going completely stark raving mad.

The demise of vulgarity

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No hasty pudding

They say that there is a very fine line between "hobby" and "mental illness”. So I will try not to get too carried away with re-publishing amusing small ads.

Some are just irresistible though… This time brought to you care of the Framley Examiner, a publication which our old mucker “Mad” Stu (who is nothing if not tall) drew to my attention, many moons ago.

Check out such classics as:

Cock like a telegraph pole, shoulders like an otter. Is this you? Box FE8951

North Sockford, good-looking professional male, 34, WLTM genuinely caring lady who will not swallow my heart whole and then shit it out onto a raging bonfire of spite. Box FE8411

Met at Paul Weller gig. I flirted. You sang and played acoustic version of “That’s Entertainment”. Who were you mystery man? Box FE8799

Private dancer, dancer for money, WLTM any other squaddies from the 24th Framley Fusiliers for fun, friendship, maybe war. Box FE9891


More here.

Missing the "interview cycle"

London is very dark today. The Pickle is swathed in a wet cloud. All the scowling worker faces were half hidden under hoods or books or brollies or briefcases as I rushed to work in the rain, clutching my broken umbrella. Everything was moving in rivers, shuddles, drips, thick speckled air. The caretaker for the Rise building was on his knees picking up sycamore propellers from the drive leading up to the gates. I caught his eye as I passed by and smiled. He looked embarrassed.

Another cat has gone missing from a house by Shadwell Basin. Isabella. There are fading signs on the trees. I read the muffled words, with neither sight nor sound of another living creature for as long as I stood there. Her sister was lost in July. “Neither were known to roam”. Their owners are devastated. The autumn leaves are silently filling the canal, scurried by ground gusts, landing like ducks on the abandoned surface of the dull lemon water. I found the birds further along the path on a black lily pond. Busy, happy ducks, calm and serene, with orange withered angled legs. Flappy deformed feet perfectly still then paddling like crazy then perfectly still.


I had a little dream that isn’t going to come true.
There is no interest in my idea.
I’m dejected, rejected, wishing I had never even asked.

The world’s gone mad. Between reckless acts on Ebay and this.

It has been a bleak day. It is definitely time to go home.

My teeth are quite lovely

On Saturday, my husband received a letter from the United States of America. Pretty cool, getting written to by an entire nation. It was an innocuous letter – something about medicare premiums. It was not related to the furore over the Guardian Clark County campaign.

The response to that has been predictable.

What I really want to know is why the Americans think we Brits have such bad teeth?

The latest British buzzword has been revealed and I have never even heard of it. Sigh. I did learn a new real word today though: lusophone. I am definitely not a lusophone. My beloved friend Jiz will concur. We tried to learn Portuguese on an ill-fated trip to the Iberian peninsula some years ago but it sounded rather like Russian and, within moments, the Learn-A-New-Language-In-No-Time cassette was hurled into the back seat of our MX3, never to be listened to again. Jiz, bless her, took on the mantle of conversing with the natives. Her husband (Haggis) and I just thought it was clever to ‘speak the lingo’ by prefixing every English noun with ‘El’ and ending each word with –os ("What a beautiful el churchos!"). I am ashamed to say that we also took advantage of Jiz’s good nature and ingenuous willingness to translate for the group. Haggis pushed her one conjugation too far however when he sent her to the bar to get a pint of Guinness and instructed her to “ask them if they could keep one in the pipes” for him. The subjunctive was never a strong point for Jiz or me. In any language.

“But what’s the latest news about wine?” I hear you slur. Well, we all know that red wine (“in moderation”) is good for us but did you know that high altitude grapes have more antioxidants because they are exposed to more UV? Argentinian reds, grown at more than 1km above sea level are the way forward, apparently.

Just remember, the first one’s always free. Cheers. Salud. Slainte. May your homes always be too small to hold all your friends.

Better than being dead

The Mighty R just chuckled evilly and emailed me this:

Teen's dying wish

Much more importantly, I read a wonderful piece about the inimitable Sir John Mortimer in the Times from last week – A Day in the Life

"Even when you've lived a long time, you don't feel much older than 11 inside. It's just that the bits fall off, which is ghastly but, on the whole, very much better than being dead."

Winter's coming...

I’ve decided to model my sales and management techniques on Al Swearengen (Ian McShane in Deadwood). He just has a great way with words.
“Here's my counter-offer to your counter-offer: go fuck yourself.”
“I want to know who cut the cheese. ”
“Don't play that shit where you make me drag your words out. Declare, or shut the fuck up.”
“I ain't pissed off. I'm in fucking wonderment. I'm waiting to be kept happy by another fucking fairytale.”
“In life you have to do a lot of things you don't fucking want to do. Many times, that's what the fuck life is... one vile fucking task after another.”
“Get the fuck out of here, doc. I'm working on my deployments and flanking manoeuvres.”
“Get a fucking haircut. Looks like your mother fucked a monkey.”

The meteorologists (charlatans) are predicting an extremely cold winter.

It is time to prepare. In some parts the world, of course, this might entail setting beaver traps before the swamps freeze to ensure a supply of warm winter coats. Or checking the roof to make sure there are no holes and it’s secure for the burden of snow. Collecting fuel. Making sure there is plenty of food and shelter for the animals.

For me, it means digging through a cupboard to find a woolly hat and taking the cat piss quilt to the launderette.

Whilst I was in Arizona, Minniecat went through a rather disturbed phase and decided to relieve her anxieties through the medium of wee, all over our 9 tog winter quilt. She made patterns and everything. We avoided tackling this particular domestic niggle by cramming the offending stinky duvet into a bin bag and shoving it on top of a wardrobe. Now, apparently, is the time to face up to our laundrily responsibilities.

They closed down my art course, as I knew they would (paucity of students). It is very sad. I arrived at class a little late on Tuesday to find some bloke with a geet big wooden staff, stark bollock naked, in an almost biblical pose. We got to sketch this strange chap (and his nude bollocks) from nine different angles around the studio before being packed off home for the last time, with all our work in a big plastic wallet.

I suppose it suits my itinerant Gemini nature to jump from one project to another without commitment so I am looking at it philosophically. According to Shelley Von Strunckel, this week has been all to do with “multiples eclipses of the Sun, volatile Mars and your ruler, Mercury”. Ok then. Explains the guy with his cock out.

LRB Small Ads

The latest winners from the Personals section of the London Review of Books:

You were tanked-up on absinthe at the Rimbaud discussion in the LR Bookshop. The curl of your hair and the hole in your tights led me to believe it was neither the first nor the last time. But my god did I love you. Man, 42. I’m afraid next time I won’t be able to lend you the taxi fare home. Box no. 19/10

Put a sock in it! Now two shots of rum. OK, some fresh-squeezed O.J. And some Lego. Surrealist cocktail-maker and bar-fly guerrilla (M,35) seeks lady-friend to sample the chewiest Bloody Marys and the messiest kitchen work surfaces this side of the Humber. Box no 19/11

“I was in the war you know”. These and other tales of mind-numbing emptiness from incontinent father (81) of ‘ungrateful turd’ of a son (46) stupid enough not to change the locks on his Barnstead semi back in 1991 when his wife and kids were still with him and nursing home saving schemes had yet to go tits up. Kick me at box no. 20/06

Either you’re Diane Lane or you’re not Diane Lane. Don’t toy with me. Man, 71. Likes Diane Lane. Box no. 19/09

Too Small Boots

My boots are too small.
They were made for someone else’s feet
And a very different sort of terrain.
I have blistered heels.
My toes might as well have been run over by a large car
Full of an entire family of fatties.

I wear thick climbing socks
In an attempt to stretch my too small boots,
And also to make them feel a bit more at home.
This is Whitechapel. Not the Dolomites.

We traverse the Commercial Road.
But it is not a col, impassable due to heavy snowfall.
There are no dead mountaineers,
Perfectly preserved in the ice.
Just some dog poo and
Bones from a Halal Perfect Fried Chicken
By the gate to Altab Ali park.
The only Via Ferrata route is on the DLR.
No Sherpas. No pitons or crevasses or crampons.
There’s no need to abseil in Whitechapel.
Or hike across screes or glaciers.
This isn’t altitude sickness. It's just a slight headache.

But we are making the best of it, I and my too small boots,
Glissading whenever we can on wet leaves.

In spite of the pain and strong sense of not belonging,
We complete the ascent of the North Face
Of the steps up in to the office.

EC3

Something is blinking on the bank
By the cement block track where the
Docklands train rattles away.

Drizzle smudges London-grey
And apricot eyelashed streetlamps.
A yellow tie choked albino man
Waits for the traffic,
Frowning to stop the rain blur.
Outsize umbrella arcs of dripping colour logo
Bob on Seething Lane,
Crutched Friars, Savage Gardens.

Head down, watching office boxes
Upside down in wetsheen slabs,
I’ve got a belly full of fear,
£55 and a moleskine in my pocket.

Making many mental lists of the great
reasons why I’m angry
which are getting shorter
all the time.

Gravel on the road

I am surprisingly upset by the news of Christopher Reeve’s death. I remember being in a dark paint-peeled bar in New York with Dorothy the night they wheeled him out for the 1996 Academy Awards. She yelled out, “YOU ARE ONE SICK NATION” and, apart from being incredibly embarrassed by her outburst, I didn’t think I cared either way.

But it seems I do.

Part of it is the tragedy that someone with such influence, so determined to walk again and who had campaigned tirelessly for stem cell research has just suddenly gone. Maybe all he ever did was give false hope to a load of people with SCI and his passing is just the cold light of day on a sad, quiet Monday morning.

There’s a chill wind here in London today. It has blown the top layer of rubbish off the bins’ weekend overflows, nudging cartons and bottles and bags down streets in a happy, grubby dance. Songs from Real Gone are still chugging and clanging through my mind like a train of demonic echoes.

Our trying-for-a-baby appointment came through from Barts. We will be attending the Centre for Reproductive Medicine on November 29th. The address of that wing of the hospital is, rather alarmingly, ‘Little Britain’. Apparently the health authority does not fund fertility treatment so they have sent us a list of 'general costs' for our 'attention'. Almost everything on the list sounds like it has come from the future. Transvaginal ultrasound scan. Follicle tracking. Semen cryopreservation (annual storage fee £134). And frankly, it is all a bit avian. Egg collection under sedation. Assisted hatching.

There is no charge for counselling.

My father's shoes are missing

Good grief. I have just discovered that someone I met at university once or twice through some mutual friends and who is just half a year older than I am, is the director of the new Wyndhams Theatre play, Bog of Cats. “Leading a cast of 11, Oscar winning actress Holly Hunter makes her West End debut in this powerful and poetic tale.” Directed by Dominic Cooke. Good on him. I have totally wasted my life.

J is complaining that his waistline has thickened. He is now 32 and a HALF around the middle. He’s off to a wedding tomorrow at a golf club in Rickmansworth. My brother told me that he once arrived at the self same place in a tatty Ford Escort and was thoroughly embarrassed to be parking his car next to all the shiny brand new swanky Jags and Mercs and Porsches. Welcome relief then when his mate Dave screeched up in the work’s dirty white Bedford van emblazoned with the company name and slogan: “ Watford Blinds – if you don’t use us, it’s curtains!”

Dad has lost his best shoes. A complete mystery.

What the hell is an iPod?

I always thought Donald Sutherland was British. But he’s actually from Canada. Which is where Kitty is right now. She absconded, leaving me in a state of high confusion. And now there are deadlines looming and I am being asked questions that I don’t understand, let alone know the answer to.

My head is full of Real Gone and I am totally smitten but going quietly insane at the same time. The repeating songs aching in my brain are alternating between Don’t Go into that Barn, Sins of the Father, Hoist the Rag. It is wearing me out. Feels like drug addiction.

L called me last night, full of excitement that he has taken out a lease on an apartment in Barcelona. He furnished it with the help of Ikea and was in hysterics to hear exactly the same conversations take place there as you can hear in Croydon or Brent Cross.

Her: “Waou – this is ONLY ten euros….”
Him: “We’ve already got one of those”
Her: “Ten euros – you can’t go wrong for ten euros… isn’t it lovely?”
Him: “But we don’t need one”
Her: “TEN EUROS”
Him: [gives her a weary look]
Her: “Well I want it. I am going to get it. It is only 10 euros, for fuck’s sake!”


We watched the Cold Mountain DVD after M fixed some inexplicable technostrikes which, bizarrely, hit the computer, the Sky box and my phone. The film made me cry, big time, but it also irritated me rather because some of the accents were all over the place. Mind you, we both got teary just watching the trailer for Seabiscuit and promised each other that no one else would be invited to view it with us so we could weep with impunity.

Someone just explained iPods to me and now I want one.

Hurtling over planets

Today my mind is full of nostalgia and thin shivery ghosts. Seems like a good day to start writing everything down before it slips away forever.

Years from now

You stand at the powdery edge of the ocean, squinting at the trembling horizon. Cliff birds wail and hoop, flecking the filmy air. You catch sight of ancient skies and roses, ponds in granite and gorse and grains of pollen, dandelion and deserts, meadows and mice and mountain streams. You fly over estuaries and elephants, shells and snow and trees, tapestry of rock, quilt of fields, mosaic of flowers, to eat apricots with angels. Sea spray rises, sucking back through pebbles. A mossy forest carpet creeps towards the gorge, plummeting blue-green and wiry. Swans cross the tundra, under a kaleidoscope of stars. Grizzled dust is moved off by dragonflies, with titian wings, to tributary and steppe. You glimpse ocelot, chameleon, pelican and ape. Anemone and marble recline, trembling, in wild water. The sidewinder is kissed by the gentle maw of a zephyr, whilst you are skimming over thunderglades and poppy clouds to tilt continents with gods. You witness wind shaping milk dunes and a reef silenced by the screech-owl. In thrall of starfish and goblins, you gaze at empyrean, painted heights. Voles dance in tiny, darkened pond-holes as you make rain with the ghosts. You soar with the prophets, mercurial and boundless, over iguanodon and mule, minotaur and lobster, gryfen-wolf and bat, glacier and peachwood, jet and flint and loam. Flash floods scoop up your cradle, ready for the new century. And you can hurtle over planets, with your alchemy of dreams.