Lunacy

It has been a difficult day after a difficult weekend. I am blaming the howling gales that have been relentlessly tearing down our street and, of course, the moon. Saturday and Sunday lurched from being fraught to fantastic to fractious and I feel rather wrung out. Matt probably does too, given that I began the day with a spaz about not being able to find Radio Four’s Today programme on our bedside radio. I am not keen on the idea that I am someone who cannot function in the morning without routine but I do get a bit twitchy if I can’t hear the soothing tones of “Auntie” first thing.

It turns out that the radio had not been maliciously tampered with. The dial had not been accidentally nudged. My beloved husband had not, of course, sabotaged my early morning listening. Moreover, he was not actually directly responsible for the 24 hour strike by 11,000 BBC journalists and technicians which resulted in the radical changes to programming and thus my numpty confusion.

I apologised when I realised what a feckless imbecile I had been but still it was not a good way to start the week.

M x O +Bh (H + R) x S

I am very sad to hear about Kylie
but slightly strangely cheered by the idea of this

Baishakhi Mela

Spent Sunday celebrating the Bengali New Year in our neighbourhood… took a few photos …

Tentless encampments

So, it has been a bit of a strange week.

Today, I overheard a scruffy man with too many teeth say to a woman dressed all in black velvet, “How was I to know it would be full of hair?”

Yesterday, in our decidedly urban garden, a smatter of leaves landed on my head. I looked up and was somewhat surprised by the undercarriage of a rusty grey squirrel.

On Sunday, instead of asking if I needed any help, the assistant manager in a shoe shop vacuumed around my feet. Her colleague tried, unsuccessfully, to find the other half of the sandals I wanted to buy. He called Hoover Girl over to the storage shelves to help search and she told him he was “a useless twat”.

On Saturday, I dreamt about hedgehogs and rain tanks and rooms without walls.

On Friday, I received a text message from Auschwitz.

On Thursday, I asked a group of job candidates to do a presentation about themselves, which included naming their favourite film. One lad had chosen the movie Seven and illustrated this on a flip chart by drawing a (crap) picture of a severed head in a box. I won’t be inviting him back for a second interview.

On Wednesday, I received a cheque from the solicitors dealing with my uncle’s estate. I thought I’d be thrilled to get this unexpected boost to my finances but I just felt sadder than ever. I have heard people claim this before - and never really fully understood it - but I can honestly say I would give back all the money in a heartbeat to spend just one more day with him.

Niece and nephews

We get drunk, by accident, on Saturday and stay up chatting in the kitchen of our tiny flat until the early hours. The next morning Jack, aged 8, asks why everyone was shouting all night about voting.

There’s masses of pink blossom in drifts all over the tarmac outside our building. Ben, aged 5, inspects the area and says, “It’s nice around here. Like a wedding.”

Aaryanna, aged 2, stands in the doorway with her little muddy coat on, hood up. She has a woollen scarecrow doll under her arm and is ready to leave. She watches her brothers walk away, to go home to a different town, to their different Mum and starts to cry, “I miss my boys.”

Downtown

Tonight the sandstone steeple of the nursery looks starched against the pale blue sky above Shadwell. A flat up and down ironing board of a man with a tonsure and tassels of coarse brown hair combed forward to his eyes and ears stands outside the old Mercury building, hands on hips, surveying the drug rehab centre opposite.

This is where the Battle of Cable Street was fought in 1936, when the good people of London’s East End pushed back the fascist march of Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts. “They shall not pass”.

Two silver cyclists, all angry helmet and Lycra, bump over a discarded shoe sole. A madman bobs his head by the Doner kebab sign and tries to direct the traffic. Plastic carrier bags are stuck to the pavement by patches of rain, reminding us that this is April, not California.

And here now canvassers for the ‘Respect’ party tell the Muslim electorate not to vote for local Member of Parliament Oona King, a black woman, because she is Jewish.

Ducks in a row

My head is being pounded and disturbed by the weird and the woeful. A man in Essex gets his nose bloodied by a frozen sausage thrown in through the window of his moving car. A pretty girl writes about being hung by a chain around her neck for 80 days of rape and torture by a Belgian paedophile. Punchable nuns. Graffiti on a wooden board in Leman Street: ‘Minty Burger’ makes me smile. Kittyhawks. A majestic fuck. Pope Schmope. Hardliner. German. I don’t care.

My heart is on a big wheel soaring up above the lights of the fair until I go over the rise again and sink slowly down into the dark of the greasy, clanging machinery.

There’s a little blue and yellow striped school tie with grubby neck elastic lying on its back in the gutter next to a broken plastic fork on Woodseer Street, near where a shiny man stopped me to find out if he was heading the right way to Brick Lane. I wanted to ask him how he got to here and where had he come from and why was he going there and when had he first thought that maybe he was lost.

Leaving work, full of muddle and grief, I heard birdsong on the staircase and I don’t know how when there are no windows and the concrete and bricks of the office are flanked by more concrete and bricks of more offices and roads thick with diesel and commuter commotion. But there it was. Tweeting and warbling. Filling out all the crushed space in my chest with primal joy and colouring the empty magnolia walls with paradise.

Aye aye

I want one of these ...

Hee

My Dad, on the subject of the marriage of Charles and Camilla:

"I don't think it'll last."

Airports

Our returning flight from Nice landed at Luton Airport at 11pm last Saturday night. We had a good laugh about the fact that it is called ‘London Luton Airport’. Don’t be fooled, folks! Luton is way beyond the M25. To make things worse, the plane flew right over central London, tantalising the passengers with the beautiful giant circuit board of landmarks and neon and countless bustling lives. And it kept on flying… away from the bright lights, away from the bridges and the sparkle of the Thames, away from the intricate sprawl of the suburbs and into the dark emptiness of unpopulation.

No one really wanted to be arriving back in the UK at that time of on a Saturday night. We ached to be home on the sofa with a glass of wine and a bunch of happy memories. But as Tom Waits so rightly says, “if it’s worth the going, it’s worth the ride” so I dug deep to find the patience to enjoy the final leg of the journey.

I was panicking a little bit about the retrieval of our bags. We had suffered a small delay by being in a long non-EU passport queue for immigration control, on account of Matt being a Johnny foreigner and all that. I snuck him through with me though (oh the irony of demanding priority attention for the man in the wheelchair, who was actually the only passenger able to queue whilst sitting down… I didn’t notice us getting any dirty looks but I bet there were some) and rushed to Carousel 2 which was heaving and grinding its way around its own bends endlessly. I waited for a while, staring at nothing, shifting from foot to foot, rather grubby, increasingly eager to get to bed.

There was a tannoy announcement to say that the luggage from the Malaga flight would now be coming out on Carousel 2 as well. Passengers from genteel Nice convulsed and shrank as the lumpen masses swarmed towards the conveyer belt.

A woman standing near me, who had – by definition – just returned from a foreign holiday (in the French fucking Riviera no less), who was obviously well-dressed, who was with friends and/or family, who was well-spoken (and presumably educated to a reasonable level), who looked healthy, who was clearly not starving or being bombed or tortured, this woman actually had the nerve to say out loud, “This must be what hell is like”.

I have said many, many such stupid tasteless offensive things in my middle class life but that did not stop me from despising her with every fibre of my hypocritical sleepy being.

I befriended the beleaguered father next to me. We had spotted him in the French departure lounge and joked about him being tranqued to obliviland in order to deal with the stresses and strains of having five rambunctious children. He and his wife appeared to be very indulgent parents putting up with all kinds of shenanigans from their brood. In person he was more pleasant than I had expected, although I did cringe inside when he encouraged one of his daughters – who looked about ten – to try to work out the speed at which the belt was moving so that she could calculate the distance it would travel in one rotation. It was nearly midnight, for fuck’s sake! As the time dragged on, it became clear to me that this poor guy was hanging on by a thread. Completely worn out, struggling to keep his wriggly family in one place, worried about leaving bags behind, concerned that his children were tired, as desperate to get home as the rest of us and all the while he was determined not to get grumpy. So, my heart went out to him when his little girl looked up at his wan, puffy face and said, “Daddy, what’s a world war?”

A dedication

Jez has a head shaped like an anvil. He combs his hair with a pork chop.

Jez is quite handsome and always dresses immaculately.

Jez tries to be cool and show off about carrying condoms but he muddles up his slang and calls them ‘jimmies’ instead of ‘johnnies’.

Jez once got whiplash when someone flicked a raisin at his forehead.

Jez recently explained away the strange fridge odour by telling the entire office that it was down to his ‘salami deodorant’.

Jez needs constant attention.

Jez can eat six inch long cream cakes in one mouthful.

Jez had an Uncle Pod and an Auntie Vim.

Jez sent me the only text I got on the day of my godfather’s funeral, saying that he hoped things would go as well as could be expected.

Jez shakes constantly. He blames the caffeine but is quietly terrified that he has Parkinson’s.

Jez doesn’t get drunk, he gets ‘sloshed’. He uses words like ‘twerp’ and reads first edition romantic literature in the noble savage tradition.

Jez fancies Sandra Bullock and listens to Boney M.

Jez went out with Dorothy a couple of times. On their first date, she announced in the pub that she didn’t want to drink her pint because she thought the bar staff were trying to poison her. Instead of dismissing her as being totally doolally, he offered to swap drinks and let her have his pint, which touched her beyond words.

Jez has mental health support needs that I am not qualified to work with. I think he may have Asperger’s Syndrome.

Jez’s Mum died when he was little. He makes jokes about it but misses her terribly everyday. His computer passwords are always variants of her name.

Nice

I spent fucking WEEKS trying to find a cheeky last minute deal holiday that guaranteed being suitable for Matt. It was a pain in the arse but that's another story [and one which has resulted in us deciding to launch a website for travellers in wheelchairs - more about that later.]

Planning the trip with our dear friend Jobi, we all agreed on some basic requirements:

Being able to have a drink outside without freezing
Being able to roll around without having to resort to cabs or public transport
Being somewhere photogenic

And Nice delivered all that and more by the shedload. What a gorgeous, surprising place it is. Full of art and energy and all the best things about France.

Some of my photos are here in the Cote d’Azur gallery.

Now that we are back, I am trying to get organised to write a bit more regularly. Apologies for all the big gaps, if there is anyone out there still visiting Thunderglades.

Damn my whorish highly-paid day job with its constant and unreasonable demands.

Balls

Tip Little and Poodle Murphy are at the vet’s today having their nadgers removed. I’m feeling rather traumatised about the whole thing (although, to be fair, probably not as traumatised as they are).

It was bad enough having four mental cats trotting around after me all morning, demanding food, which they weren’t allowed in advance of the operation. Then there was the anxiety over the very questionable sturdiness of the cat basket; there were parking dramas and payment problems - the vet, who sounds like Morgan Freeman, wanted the money up front but all the cashpoints were busted up. I had to traipse the length of the Bethnal Green Road. By the time I got the fat wodge of cash and made it back to the surgery, Tip and Poodle were shaking like little black velvet sacks of terrifiedness. When the vet said, “You won’t forget to pick them up, will you?” I nearly burst into tears. Yeah, like I won’t be worrying about them every minute all day.

I do feel a bit bad for the kitten boys that when we first all got in the car to drive up to there, the Tom Waits song that just happened to be playing was “I Know I’ve Been Changed”. I wonder how long it will be before I can listen to that again without thinking of cat castration…

Starlings swarming over Brighton Pier on Thursday evening 

Old Peculiar

So last night I was discussing some strategic management issues with my fabulous deputy, Kitty L’Amour.

A shadow fell over us and we looked up to see Jez, The Mighty R standing next to my desk, holding an open black folder and a pen.

“I’ve already started writing the ticket – it’s not my problem, love!”

Kitty and I stared at each other, confused and a little frightened. Just as I opened my mouth to ask what the fuck he was talking about, he continued (quite forcefully), “Just pay the fine and appeal later.”

Turns out he wanted to be a traffic warden for the day.

Matt 

Sunday's hill 

Brizzle

This week has been decidedly iffy. Cold, grey, soggy and with few bright spots. And I am not just talking about the weather. Last weekend was good though – hanging out with mates in Bristol.

We went to the zoo, where they have blue frogs the size of a teaspoon scoop. There were lions but some chavette was banging on the glass.

Her mate squawked, “What yer fuckin' doin’, Kels?”.
“Oim just tryin’ get ‘im a look at me!” shrieked Kels, manoeuvring her kid’s pushchair violently.

I thought I would be disappointed that there weren’t more of the larger animals but there was a wonderful time to be had looking at all the little creatures in Twilight World, the Insect House, the Reptile House, the Aviary, the Aquarium …

We arrived excitedly at the otter enclosure – firm faunal favourites with us all – but the cute little beasties were nowhere to be seen. Just as we were about to walk away, one scampered out with something white in its mouth. A second otter emerged, also carrying some white booty, which turned out to be rat. Our group watched in horror as the otters proceeded to tear the rodents limb from limb. They started by biting off the feet and then chewed their heads until the skin came away. Next came the evisceration. The dark red insides of the rats opened up and organs slipped out over dirty wet white fur onto the rocks. As we ogled, dumfounded at the brutality of the natural world, a family with small children approached the enclosure and the adults joined us in looking aghast. The kids of course pressed their faces to the glass and stared blankly, confirming - without question - my assertion that all youngsters these days are utterly desensitised to death and gore (due to the bifurcate evils of TV and video games, obviously).

I had the idea that otters only ate fish but the keeper told us they will take down a seagull, if it happens to stray into their pen on the scavenge.

All in all though, it was a lovely outing with some hilarious moments:
Gem: “Oh, oh! Look at those torpedo speedo things!
John: “Gemma! They’re PENGUINS!!”

And there were pockets of magic… like walking through tunnels underwater whilst the seals swam upside down above us; like miniscule toads kissing each other a dozen times; like the leaf-cutter ants making fungus farms; like the beetles that shone like Moorish jewels; like the Picasso fish; like the Postman Butterfly which feeds sometimes on the salty tears of alligators; like just being with best friends in the thin February sunshine, on a freezing cold day, laughing.

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.