Tip Little 

I'm blaming the planets

So today is turning out to be a little bit weird. The pond and the bird baths had frozen over so I started the day feeling like some kind of farmer tending to the needs of my land, breaking up the ice, feeding all the animals, checking the water supply. There was a robin in the garden, first one I have seen in months. Rather a cliché that it showed up on a snow day, I thought. Everyone was wearing funny hats because of the weather, and walking gingerly.

At lunchtime I fell down the stairs. It was my own fault - I was writing something in my Moleskine and stepped down onto the landing about three stairs higher than the landing actually was. My fall was broken partly by the side of my face, which is now throbbing like a bastard, and my bosoms. I smashed into the handrail, twisted my ankle and produced a delicate snot bubble in my left nostril all in one ungainly swoop. Luckily, I managed to stop myself from crying with the pain and humiliation by thinking how amusing it must have looked on the CCTV cameras. But, on arrival at the ground floor, it was really no surprise to find that our ludicrously crap security guard Keith had missed the whole thing because he was rearranging the contents of the charity snack tray on the reception desk. Feeling decidedly shaky, I went for a walk by the canal and along Wapping Lane. As I came through the gate of the graveyard, a spooky woman leaning against a gigantic window in Gun Wharf waved at me as if we were old friends. There was almost a pile-up outside the office as a bus (the slinky kind that Matt so dislikes) careered down the wrong side of the road trying to get into the right turn lane. The oncoming cars screeched to a tyre-smoking halt and cacophonised while the bus driver indicated his contempt for the pint-sized vehicles in his path by doing spastic octopus impressions and cursing silently, or so it seemed from where I was rooted to the spot, horrified that - for once - I empathised with a BMW driver.

Somehow I got back to the office in one piece, where I now sit with bruised boobs and an aching jawbone. Everyone has gone to a party. There’s just the humming of the printers, the occasional siren from the Highway and the heavy pressing quiet of a room suddenly empty.

The Day Today

I got about 55 minutes sleep last night. Mice have reclaimed Admiral House. The weather is alternating between blizzard and blue skies. Matt shaved his head off. The kittens now have collars and name tags which they keep kick scratching. I got a letter about our modest charity donation to Tomas Tomas signed by Tom Waits (although possibly not in person). The Mighty R has some kind of diseased skin patch, which he keeps claiming is just where he has “itched” (sic) himself. The envelope containing the collection for Anatole’s leaving present has gone missing from Jez’s desk. The office is divided on whether or not he should be bollocked. I appear to be the only one defending him.

Pushing an elephant upstairs

From Private Eye’s “Dumb Britain” this week:

Steve Wright’s Big Quiz, Radio 2
Wright: How many days are there in five weeks?
Contestant: Don’t know.
Wright: Give it a guess.
Contestant: Sixty.

BBC Radio Devon
Presenter: Name the artist born in 1776 in East Bergholt, Suffolk whose paintings include The Hay Wain and Chain Pier, Brighton?
Contestant: Van Gogh.

The Weakest Link, BBC2
Anne Robinson: Mount Everest is in the autonomous Chinese region of Tibet and which other country?
Contestant: Nicaragua.

And from MoreFM, Christchurch, New Zealand
Presenter: What’s another name for Cosa Nostra?
Contestant: Ummmm…. Amnesty International?

And while I am at it… here are some choice picks from Pseuds Corner:

“I have no quarrel with Einstein.” Simon Jenkins, The Times

“These South African wines embody the spirit of reconciliation.” Roger Scruton, New Statesman

“Sideways is beautifully written, terrifically acted; it is paced and constructed with such understated mastery that it is a sort of miracle…. Audiences at the screenings where I have been present may have heard something like a fusillade of gunshots from the auditorium; it was the sound of my heart breaking into a thousand pieces.” Peter Bradshaw, Guardian

Lapis Lazuli

I dreamt about an armadillo and rattan and prune yoghurt
And a tanned, tattooed Tony Blackburn, in bed with a man.
Our garden was full of cheeky rats.

My head pounds, ringed with sweat
Cracked with dehydration.
I thought that my house had a sand bottom,
But apparently it is easier to make room in my heart
For the things I fear
Than for something that doesn’t even yet
Have a name.

We are coming ever closer.
My hectic splashes
Running off the edges
Over a beautiful, bright background of you.

Decidedly under the weather

My face is squeaking. Every time I breathe out it sounds like a door hinge in the upstairs flat needs to be oiled. My wheezechest burns with a hundred thousand needlepricks sewed drum tight into a bursting leather bag. The neighbours are out-shouting each other, an angry baby is bawling its head off and the sky is suddenly blue with candyfloss clouds bobbing sheepishly behind the chimneys. When I cough too hard I almost wet myself and my ears hurt. I am basically a bubbling head of snot and think it is best if I return to my bed with a bottle of Gee’s Linctus until it is wine o’clock.

Who fucking cares?

Heh.

Actually, the best laugh I have had out of this whole Charles and Camilla thing was listening to John Prescott on Radio 4 this morning. Ed Stourton asked him what he thought about the royal engagement and Prescott replied, “I think it’s a good thing – it means Charles will have less time for fox-hunting”.

In the neighbourhood

The blackbirds are building a nest in the ivy bush by our pond. Tip Little and Poodle Murphy sit on the windowsill, carefully watching all the activity, twitching and swishing their tails, shoulders up, ready to pounce, if only they could get through the glass. Minnie crouches at the foot of the ivy staring up but is soon spooked by the wind and waddles indoors.

A cruddy Tupperware box has been ditched with some old clothes on a chair by the bins. Inside is a half-eaten brown bread sandwich.

A group of middle-aged black women cackle infectiously and talk over each other on Underwood Road before heading in to work in the social services family centre.

An egg-sized growth protruding from the thin hair of a young man begs me to stare at it on the Commercial Road.

People have their hoods up, shoulders hunched into the wind, umbrellas out. The windows of the Codfather fish and chip shop have steamed up.

A lass checks her Hijab in the silver cracked windows of an old pub.

Two policemen patrol the streets on tall, beautiful chestnut mares. The men have luminous yellow jackets and flashing red lights on ankle bands. A gang of 15 or so Asian teenagers yell abuse and make noises to scare the horses. “TOSSERS”,“FUCKING CUNTS”, “WANKERS”. The police pretend to ignore them, muttering to each other to save face. Farther down the street someone opens their front door high up in the block of flats to shout “PIGS” before going back inside.

A sign in the barbershop window advertises the special price of £5.50 for something undisclosed. The 50 is written very, very small.

Outside the Post Office, a sleek Mercedes with blacked-out windows idles on double yellow lines.

A white-haired man coughs long and hard at the top of a tall ladder. His paint can wobbles.

A fat man leans against the park railings laughing into his mobile phone.

One of the local street drinkers hurries down Backchurch Lane. His straggly white beard is ginger-streaked with nicotine.

I walk past a short, stocky man who has worked on the markets in Whitechapel for 40 years, pushing carts and goods around for the stallholders. For as long as I can remember, he was always seen with his dog, a huge shaggy German shepherd. Now outside his council flat he wears a donkey jacket and a woolly hat. He is flustered and in a high pitched voice shouts at the ground where his pet used to be, “I keep not being able to find you! I don’t want to have to fucking worry about you”. He shakes and shuffles in tiny steps and is fighting back tears.

A Happy Anniversary

Four years ago to the day, I was cuddled up with Matt in the LAX Hilton spending our very first night ever together. I had known him for two months, in contact by email and then by phone, and we had seized the moment, deciding to have a holiday together before he was dragged off to prison.

I phoned my Mum from Heathrow (in one of those I-might-die-in-a-plane-crash-and-I-want-to-say-a-proper-Goodbye-and-I-love-you-just-in-case moments) and she was very outwardly calm, bless her. She asked me (casually), “So how well do you know this bloke you are going all the way to America to meet?” “Oh, we go back centuries”, I explained (casually), convinced that would reassure her.

In retrospect, I can hardly believe that I flew 6,000 miles to take a vacation in the desert with a strange man that I had met on the internet, but at the time it seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

I befriended a British actor during the flight, a warm, fascinating man called Tom Lockyer. He was rather charmed by my story of falling in love with Matt and before we each drifted off towards Passport Control in Los Angeles, he gave me a hug and wished me all the best. Back in London a few weeks later, I tracked Tom down through Spotlight and wrote to tell him that it had been a delight to talk with him and that everything had gone perfectly with Matt. He emailed me straight away and said that he had actually been in the arrivals area when I came through the gate. He had seen that very first moment when Matt spotted me, grinned and rolled towards me with a single red rose on his lap. Tom wrote: “I'm so happy and feel very privileged to have been there to witness such an amazingly romantic meeting. I wanted to cheer, but didn't!”

Of course, I only had eyes for my baby and hadn’t noticed Tom so it was a bit weird to find out afterwards that we had been observed but it made the surreal more real as well.

The holiday was magical in a million ways, 11 blissful days in Palm Springs, until I had to come home. I have no idea how I managed to make it down the walkway to the plane, knowing that it would be at least another two years until I could see my man again. And some days I still find it hard to believe that he is really here in London, in our flat, just a short walk or a phone call away and that he is the last thing I see before I sleep and the first thing I see in the morning and I can cuddle my beloved all night, every night.

Yesterday

We took a wander around Chinatown and I snapped a few photos...

There are even some pics of the ENO's Coliseum as mentioned in my previous post. It is all coming together!

History is just one fucking thing after another

I was slightly confused recently to spot some Alan Bennett CDs in the window of a local shop. The store is the Bengali equivalent of a 99p shop. I know this because underneath the elegant Bangla script on the painted sign across the shop front, it says in much smaller letters “99p shop”. Most of the merchandise seems to be household goods - cheap kitchen roll, stacks of scouring sponges, cut-price 2 litre bottles of pop which all look like they would glow in the dark. Anything purchased is handed to the customer in a blue carrier bag, which might as well have been made of wet stressed tissue paper. And the clientele are exactly as you would expect in such a store. Minging. So what the hell are they doing selling Alan Bennett CDs?

Bennett wrote up a very entertaining diary of his year in the Times Literary Supplement in January. Here are a couple of entries…

April 22nd
An absurd direction from the ENO management requesting all employees at the Coliseum to cease from calling each ‘darling’ and indeed from touching one another at all or using other terms of endearment.

News of this is gleefully received at the National Theatre where copies of the directive are given to everybody arriving at the stage door and announcements over the tannoy take on a husky intimacy. ‘Sweethearts. Could we have two of those delightful electricians to the stage of the Cottesloe. Hurry, hurry, hurry. A bientot.’

October 11th
Stephen Page (Faber) and Andrew Franklin (Profile Books) come round to take delivery of the manuscript of Untold Stories, a collection of diaries and other memoirs which they are about to publish jointly next September. It’s in a big box file with some of the stuff in manuscript and the rest as printed in the London Review of Books. Opening the box Andrew remarks that it’s a long time since he’s seen one of these, manuscripts nowadays generally coming in the form of a floppy disc. For my part I hope they don’t notice the smear of jam on the box, the odd grease spot and even the faint odour of milk, a consequence of the manuscript being put regularly in the fridge for safekeeping whenever we go away. I used to keep my manuscripts in boxes on the floor of the kitchen but about twenty years or so ago I had a burst boiler which flooded the kitchen and ruined half of them. I told Miss Shepherd, then living in her van, of this disaster. 'Oh dear,' she said mustering what she could in the way of fellow-feeling. 'What a waste of water.'