Workbound

Two Red Bull and four Stella cans with carefully crushed midriffs hug the kerb in the residents car park on Underwood. A camper van with a German licence plate is parked next to a knotted black bin bag with mysteriously large, sharp-edged contents and a browning apple core nestling on top.

At the sharp corner of Deal Street and Hanbury, the bin men meet the street sweepers. Brooms and shovels clipped to the sides of their lorries pass within a whisker and I wonder if they are rivals.

A lad in a Royal Mail van shouts “’ello gorgeous!” out of his window and waves at me with a cheeky, fat grin. I know him from years ago so it doesn’t really count. I can’t remember his name.

There’s stencilled graffiti on the cream wall of the Bank of Islam “I love flat D”. The musical note or dream accommodation? I am staring at the billboard poster advertising the new iPod Nano trying to decide if the model was chosen for having a gigantic hand.

The lights inside the Post Office are on but the door’s locked, causing great consternation out front. A lopsided woman in pale blue, with telephone pole legs and a wheeled tartan shopping bag, is twittering incomprehensibly to an oval brickie wearing thin metal-framed glasses squashed to his forehead just above his eyebrows.

On Hooper Street, I hear someone sniff but can’t see another living soul.

The fire alarm is rattling at Magenta House. Hundreds of suits stand in clumps outside the building, smoking urgently and trying to work out if they are cold or not. The bells stop and a murmur of staff make their way back indoors with practised sullenness.

A short pink guy in bright stripes, draws hard on the last of his fag butt and gently throws it into the road with a long smooth movement of shoulder, never taking his eyes off the remnant of his smoke. He sighs deeply and turns around to climb, very slowly, the steps into his office.

Cusp by Robin Robertson

The child’s skip
still there in the walk,
a woman’s poise in her slow
examination
of the brightly coloured globe, this
toy of the world.
Is there anything
More heartbreaking than hope?

The Bank Holiday

We went to the seaside.

Poem of the Week

The Heron by Paul Farley

One of the most begrudging avian take-offs
is the heron’s “fucking hell, alright, alright,
I’ll go to the garage for your cigarettes”
cranky departure, though once they’re up
their flight can be extravagant. I watched
one big spender climb the thermal staircase,
a calorific waterspout of frogs
and sticklebacks, the undercarriage down
and trailing. Seen from antiquity
you gain the Icarus things; seen from my childhood
that cursing man sets out for Superkings,
though the heron cares for neither as it struggles
into its wings then soars sunwards and throws
its huge overcoat across the earth.

Two weeks on...

More bombs in London.

More of London

I am so in love with this city right now. Some photos from Saturday…

London "post 7/7"

I have been very happy to see Londoners out on the streets in droves since Thursday’s bombings. Yesterday I took a few photos in our neighbourhood.

"A letter to the terrorists, from London"

Exactly.

WTF?

So yesterday a stranger came up to me and said, "Nice head".

Glastonbury

you have gotta love the British weather

Trying not to anthropomorphise

Jehesius!

In other animal news, Poodle caught a bird last night. His first. An ickle sparrow that was still twitching as “Murdering” Murphy rushed towards the garden door to the flat. I managed to shut it just in time but then spent a very uncomfortable hour as Poo toyed gleefully with his prey on the deck before disappearing with Tip. When they returned they were both licking their lips and paws and seemed a whole lot older and wilder than before.

38

It is my birthday on Saturday. This will be my 38th summer.

Stuff makes me happy.

My mostkin, my everythingness. Mum, TC, Minnie, Madge, Tip Little and Poodle Murphy. The fish. Tom Waits. The garden. Ben. Aary. Jack. My camera. Our new hall floor. Chalk pastels. Wearing black. Chinese with Jobi. Ray Winstone. White wine. Kodo drummers. Gemma. Kandinsky. Barbeques in Paddocks Lane. Galway. Jesse’s leopard. Mint jelly. Withnail and I. Short Cuts. The Cote d’Azur. Mark Brown. Jolie Holland. Tucson Zoo. Scars. Honeysuckle. Silver. Stained glass. Climbing Croagh Patrick. Fairy lights. Yellow. Geek Love. Art shops. Chillies. The Raindog Nation. Couscous. Ted. Dad’s mulled wine. Chagall. Jeff Buckley. Drinking Merlot in the kitchen with Ian and Dom. Solveig. Chanel sunglasses. Brick Lane. Velvet. Where the Wild Things Are. The Guardian. Thunder. Steve Buscemi. Picasso. Pinstripe. Poppy fields. The Sihn Lee. The Chimp. John’s Yorkshire Pudding Game. Walking Holly. Rocket. Our Tom Waits’ wall. Coffee. Shopping with Kitty. Bone Machine. Roath. Clean bedding. Hot chocolate. Cary Grant. Berlin. Louis de Bernieres. John Lurie. Hettie’s chicken. Flying. Gin and grapefruit juice. Phil’s mercury dustbin. The Morgan Arms. Hog & Andy. Dilbert. Manhattan. Mull. Rain. Whalerider. The Times Literary Supplement. Beer and postcards. Shaved heads. Portraits. La Wally. Walking the Malvern Hills. Tattoos. Dandelions. Football. Irish pubs. Tarka Dall. Spitalfields Market. Meeting Anders and Peter in the Tiergarten. Orange roses. Springsteen. Eddie Izzard. The Mediterranean. Tulips. Asparagus. Deadwood. Bats. Water. Birthday parties. Loving. Being loved. Laughing. Living.

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 ...