a fish on a bycicle

thick woollen socks

2010-11-29T18:57:00.005Z

....yesterday I bought a duvet, thick and heavy......for the sofa.

Outside the world is white and brittle.

On the mornings where the boy has woken early and we have stepped out shivering, briefly for him to pee, the pale lemon sunrise has been chasing whorls of mist along the river ahead of slowly evaporating shadow.

(When I was younger I thought I knew that jack frost was real. I thought I knew that he was a small child, naked and pale and encrusted in a silver white frigid anguish and made to roam the world of winter night by his guardians; blind, ebony granite, spade handed giants....spreading cold crystal agony like pearlescent leprosy across the roofs and stubble fields of my childhood (that came from I know not where, except perhaps my mother who had a fearful trove of myth and love of gothic horror)).

Later we walk and the boy plays amongst the fallen, frosted leaves. He seems to have a new lease of life, a joie de vie, a second wind that I share on chilly mornings like these. There’s something in the crunch and crackle of one’s footfall, the way that the semi solid air and oh so fragile sunlight hurts your nose and ears and lungs if you take too deep a breath that has.....quality. Yes, that’s it, quality.

Quality (to me, in this shape) is the precursor to the realisation that what you observe is the world as you alone see it.

From a passing train window a passenger in warm, upholstered comfort would not see the slender poplar avenue in the enforced monochrome of this chill day, guarding a path of virgin white. This is mine, my context, a moment just for me.

On the way home we lay a little rock upon the cairn that we have started for Charlie. Toffee sniffs the foundation and wees on a corner, an emotion that Charlie would have applauded. I spend just a moment remembering what a smashing, cracking and awful little git he could be and how much he would have torn up the silence of this day.

I’m already thinking of tea, and toast, and my snug, warm, stupid spaniel...

..and our new duvet.

good boy Charlie, you're still here while we remember you

nut allergy?

2010-01-24T18:22:00.003Z

Huzzah

I made it...

It took a while, but I finally accomplished a 'yet'.

Comitted, sectioned, confined to bedlam, removed from the public domain..

It's official folks, I'm bonkers.

I'm writing this on the communal 'puter in the community room of my ward in the local 'sanitorium'

Gives you a nice warm glow doesn't it?

ps I'm not very good at it yet, some of the other inmates terrify me

2009-12-07T22:23:00.004Z

which was an (honest) attempt to describe a seizure...apropos of nothing.

And it was an end and a new start, a jumping off point, waking up to cold white lights, fuzzy faces and the sweet, cloying smell of disinfectant...prone, frightened and empty. As good a place to throw your guns on the table as any.

Strangely, (for me), my mind has been turning to matters of faith recently. I had thought I had it all figured out That one need look no further than self reliance. Reason was king, accident and entropy his generals. Acknowledgement of otherworldly beings benign or venengeful or universal master plans diminishes the inherent responsibility and culpability of my response to my own being.

And yet, I can't explain beauty.

It's so....unnescessary.

I have no need for it.

The transmutation of light into signals that my brain can picture in order to navigate through life might be as sympathetic to my soul as the sensation of pain if I put my hand on a hot plate...

But it's not. It allows for beauty, and awe, and slow silent wonder.

As does the transmogrification of air waves into Bach or the mute etherial, dreadful beauty of a huge space trapped in a vaulted cathedral.

I have no need for beauty. But without it I would be a bitter husk.

This is where we live now.

twinkle twinkle little star..

2009-10-07T20:02:00.003+01:00

...there's a cherry tree, in full blossom, weeping snow flakes onto the the sheltered lawn. Just a hint of breeze. A lilac sky through purple painted trees, and a transparent silver salver of moon catching swooping swallows in its arc...

Presque vue, a mote of light flits and sparkles amongst thick, tangled lower branches of the furthest trees. Dancing in the gloom, a faery light, an animated dew drop in a mobile spiders web.

It glides and hovers, pulses and darts, gaining substance and size.

I watch. Holding my tea.

Is it getting closer, or just larger? Bigger I think, as it sparkles now with two facets and flits behind the chestnut's bole to re emerge larger still.

For a moment I swear it looks at me as I look at it. Disconcerted I look away, briefly, and see the sun reflected in the shallows of the old stone bird bath on which I shall shortly break my tooth.

'It' is now a ball of light. A whisper, floating upwards, gaining separate sparkles as it rises. Like a transparent sphere filled with icicles it flashes and sparks in the sun as it emerges from the trees.

As large as a tennis ball now, hesitating, slowly turning, sniffing and seeking, it's for me, mine, I know that now...and I am transfixed. No longer able to look away, despite a rising panic I watch in dread as it peels away from the high branches and drifts slowly, so slowly, down to where I sit.

Still it spins, still it sparkles, but no longer grows. It has no need, it augurs a huge sufficiency of power...and dread.

Through the cherry blossom it glides, not between the blossom but 'through' the petals, no ghostly transmutation this - but without transition, existence without substance.

Closer now, just yards, and I feel mute terror, snarling, wide eyed, bladder relaxing terror. There are words too,I can read them now. Banners with messages from hell that speak to me only, horrifying threats to my soul, that flutter around the relentless flashing orb.

Within arm's reach it moves rapidly to my right and I think of respite, sudden salvation, as it curves around behind me. But still my eyes are riveted as is my body, welded in place, and try as I might I cannot but follow it, straining, straining inhumanly, beyond the limit of flexibility I feel muscles tear in my neck...

This is the sort of thing...

2009-03-31T22:10:00.006+01:00

...we have to put up with.

It’s not easy. Having said that it’s easier for me then it is for the boys. I can at least just walk, I don’t have an imperative compulsion to wee on something every few yards. It amazes me that they aren’t completely dehydrated by the end of the day, I imagine walking into a pub dragging two hairy husks behind me.

I imagine a lot of things. That’s the beauty (and the curse) of having oodles of time and space and no one with whom to share it (spoil it), one’s mind wanders and you’re allowed the room to indulge yourself fully in your own brand of jibberwaffle.

I’m stuck somewhere in my noggin with a half formed thought that the river is somehow allegorical, that I’ve passed my wicket gate and am on my own ‘straight and narrow’. It does appear to cut across (my) life, and if you’ve walked far enough, the where you’ve been, are, and where you’re going become blurred – blurred sufficiently for landmarks like bridges to become significant.

There are times when I feel I want to catalogue, to commit to memory, to burn sharp pictures of the abrupt end of woodland and the step forward into dappled sunshine, the gaping, forbidding mouths of dark pitch, echo less tunnels or even the sheet of sleety rain seen approaching across the wind.

But there’s no allegory here, for surely any simile should serve a purpose? I might so purposelessly compare Charlie’s bladder habits with April showers as the river with the habitual drawer of my life.
Eventually we’ll come to the sea, that’s all I know – at least I think I know that. Follow a river and you’ll reach the sea?

And now I need the sea. I’m full to overflowing with leaf littered pathways beside glittering moribund water. Sick of foppish beauty. I long for the brutality of open water on spring tides driven into rock and stone by bitter winds.

Do you ever dream of hiding tight behind the log, by the fire lit, in a whistling westerly shrieking it’s curse to the plume and spume of dying waves?

Life’s taken a turn for the gentle, and I don’t like it.

oh,

2009-03-02T22:52:00.000Z

I nearly forgot, Kristie, you make the mail all better.

Thanks.

I are...

2009-03-02T22:20:00.002Z

...a nonny mouse.

That’s me.

A face amongst faces, a blur. Now you see me now you don’t. A smudge on the psychedelic hysterical cornucopia of life.

My blue heaven, my fantasy….come true.

The world is so giddy with possibilities I hardly know where to start.

There’s not a single person I know, ipso facto I can’t offend any of them (at least not with anything more than the most fleeting of misgivings). I might begin to speak, eve’s drop, debate or divilishly just plain listen and simply walk away without an so much as an‘excuse me’ if the conversation becomes even remotely boring or bothersome.

The dogs and I can walk to our heart’s content or sit and procrastinate with the languid dipping ducks in the leaf strewn pond if we wish, and gaily doff our caps with a cheery, affected “I say, what a splendid day!” Or walk on by in sulky silence if it suits our churlish mood.

Yesterday I sang all day. On Sunday we sat under a new moon on the low stone wall of St. Peters cemetery (wherein, solemnly interred, lie many of the most boldly named dead people I know; the Cluckbuckets (including Ethel! indeed), Alice Sparkles, Hugh D. Pugh, Stanley Gumpett and Fanny Growcock (would that the latter two had met and hit I off, I should cry with laughter for a week if I ever met a Gumpett - Growcock)) and barked our own chorus to the evening gritstone walls and high, dull, dead eyes of the West Clerestory – until other canine voices (and who knows, perhaps the odd human one too) joined our clamour and we fled giggling to the river.

On Saturday, in the main, I worked a long but ad hoc and part time shift in the local bar. There was live music, and fun and drunkenness and too few glasses and rather poor (though I admit it myself) service at times, though always cheerful. And I was asked if I were gay by a lady even older than myself because I had apparently spurned her advances – though I still don’t know what form they had taken. Perhaps it was her propensity for lubricating her copious bossoms in the drip tray on the bar when asking for a drink, or more likely when she demanded a pen and paper – on reflection maybe, to write a saucy message and telephone number – and I happily informed her that there was no need to write her order, if she spoke veeerrrry slowly I was sure that I probably decipher her dialect no matter how gin sodden her vowels might be.

On reflection tomorrow I might try being gay. They do seem to have such fun.

Now, if I might also open mail with such anonymity then my existence would be truly idyllic. Although I no longer live in my old address I am still naïve enough to have it redirected to whence I may occasionally retrieve it. Who knew that there were so many peevish people in the world? One would think that the scant pounds and pennies that I owe to various once-well-heeled and vigorous institutions would be, so far as harassing me, below their dignity in view of the many trillions that they now owe us. If I were they I should certainly move out of that vast glass-house before casting sharp, bitter little rocks in my direction.

Hey ho, a-nonny-no and bollocks dipped in raspberry sauce – they’ll have to catch me first.

seen a ghost?

2008-12-13T14:35:00.008Z

flying pigs
sleepy wet dogs
faery lights
frost
cold, wet and windy nights viewed through the window in the glow of an open fire
a duvet on the sofa
sweet chestnuts and marshmallows in hot chocolate
a ring without a finger and a small, crushed golden heart

what evokes the season in you?

gypsy

2008-09-30T14:14:00.002+01:00

Allow me one more dip in the plunge pool of self indulgence. A swallow dive, not really, a swan song more like. After all if you can’t be self indulgent on your own blog, where can you?

Does it annoy you too, that people seem to just talk at you, not with you? As if you were just a sounding board, a solid surface for them to reconfirm their own views by reflection. Apparently one is sufficiently interesting (or more likely just conveniently docile) enough for the speaker to voice their opinion to, but not interesting or charismatic enough for them to wish to listen to your considered reply.

I breathe in to speak. They continue to talk…implacably, continually….as if they had gills, like a Jehova’s Witness on speed. I give in.

A small thing? Yes perhaps. But they add up. The small rudenesses, the simple polite informalities that evaporate in the hustle and bustle, the inconvenient tiny truths of busy urban life all add up to make you want to shout and swear and hit out to burst the bubble of anger that’s welling up inside…..it’s not just me is it?

No more. Soon. No more.

I don’t know how to describe it, but I feel (and I think I know that this is how some survivors do feel) like a crash survivor. I’ve survived my own crash, and even if it was metaphorical it felt very real. And now, no minor irritation can bother me, I have no time for annoying trivia, I have – quite literally – held my hand up to people who have kidnapped me and my ears and stolen my time to say “no”, life is too precious.

But it’s much more than that. There’s no melodrama here, just a growing acceptance that I am dying slowly, like a tree perhaps in unsuitable ground, withering from the inside out. I have no illusions that I’m different in any way to all of the other hunched shoulders intent on our daily grind, weaker than most perhaps, too sensitive and less able, but I have begun to wince and ache as the protective enamel of my soul wears thin. It will kill me to remain here, of that I am sure, spiritually and eventually physically too. It’s a process in progress.

Everything else is simple common sense then in the context that I genuinely have nothing to lose.

It occurred to me to ask your advice. I have more genuine friends here then ‘out there’, but there’s really no need, it would just be rhetoric. So I thought I’d just let you know so you don’t think I’m under any illusions or fantasies of hermitic bliss, that I’ve thought this through – especially since the boys are coming with me and it won’t exactly be idyllic for them either.

There’s plenty of wilderness here still, especially in the North. And I can withdraw in planned stages – with equipment, resources, food and tools not to need to take unnecessary and foolhardy risks. There’s a small reservoir of money to draw on for essentials and in case of emergency, and of course there’s all of the time in the world….to find a place suitable and sufficiently out of attentions way to settle and build.

At the moment I am in a state of growing anticipation and horror, made very real because I know that I am actually going to do this.

keep the swelling, lose the pain

2008-09-18T21:18:00.003+01:00

Have you ever,

howled in woods?
whinnied and nickered,
pranced, danced, shied
and cried and generally
made a great fuss...

At least there was no one around, be thankful for small mercies. And there was me, and the boys, enjoying a long walk in the woods on a beautiful autumnal morning full of great grey almost trees hesitating in a slow lazy mist.

And then I stuck my dick in the nettles.

Not just like that you understand, rather I went for an alfresco wee and was distracted by Charlie scratting around in the leaves behind me.....and then I stuck my dick in the nettles.

It hurts. You can't imagine how much it hurts. I don't want to describe how much it hurts because then I'll have to remember....exactly how much it hurts.

The only 'tiny' crumb of comfort is that it also swells up.

you'll never guess but...

2008-08-20T21:52:00.003+01:00

Where a river floes, where people are apt to gather to the source of traffic and commerce, of liquid life.

Great cities, gritty purposeful towns, villages becalmed in seas of green meadow, divided by arterial waterways, green, brown or sparkling brook that give and take in measure the ingredients and effluent, the fish and fowl, and crop and cooling balm to set the form of white hot steel in shapes we know and need in clouds of screaming, scalding steam.

All edges in the land, the mighty crinkle cut, where once great glaciers wove patterns in relief or soft stone slipped and slid, warped over under, layered, thrown up in laval anguish. The land lent gravitas by movement now set in stone.

We are drawn to edges.

We are drawn to boundaries. To cliffs, to river banks, the gates of mountain ranges, the beginnings and ends, the exclamations of mineral vocabulary.
Perhaps we stop and stare and whilst we do so put down roots. Or we come here and go no further, define our life by a boundary we did not set but perceive as fate, a natural given, a literal perceptible border about that which we might consider known and therefore ours.

And build, and often prosper, comforted, in our place.

But boundaries have two sides, by definition they divide, a division which invites the naturally inquisitive and inventive to connect. And so we build.....we bridge.

"Bridge".

Too small a word.

Too small a word for herculean iron of Victoriana or gossamer suspended ribbons, spider trellis, gothic multitudinous arch or square ribbed stalwart cage that leaves what I know, where I am and disappears like a lover’s promise into hope filled otherness beyond.

...lately I’ve been thinking about bridges.

starry starry night

2008-07-17T22:46:00.007+01:00

I remember years ago climbing in Glencoe (Gleann Comhann in the celtic tongue), being happy to be alone with the sparkling granite and soft dew lapped moss. At night, weather permitting, to lie outside the tiny tent under star speckled skies so clear that the milky way shone and sparkled, a moonlit brook coursing across the firmament. A million miles it seemed, from the smoke and smells of the city and constant ambient light that obscures so much more than it illuminates.

Later in the year, in the autumn months to glimpse with awe the southern veil of the aurora borealis, swift tendrils of smoke high in the atmosphere as if lit faintly from within, fleeting across the sky, constantly changing, wisps that glow into life then fade to nothing in the blink of an eye.

And although I’m not a morning person, the mornings were the best. My dispute with morning is the sudden rush of information, the tv, the radio, the letters (bills), the drudge of pre work routine, but mostly the people and their bland cheerful or surly, aggressive stupid faces. Alone in this tiny tent the information stream is slowed to snail’s pace, a manageable trickle where half in, half out of sleep many questions may be answered before emerging fully into the world; where am I, does it hurt anywhere, what’s that taste in my mouth, is it raining....

Then luke warm tea and a damp fried egg roll all cooked on the smallest gas stove imaginable, sometimes in the sunshine but more often sheltering from the rain or sleet and occasionally snow in the lea of the zippered tent door. Sometimes in the sunlight, sometimes pre dawn, always when your bladder yells at you that it is time to start the day.

Once, on a crispy cold morning at sunrise through a yard tall thick mist that rolled down the steep mountain face, around my tented island to a sea of grey in the valley below, to glimpse reflected in the azure blue above - another mountain - reversed, hanging like a giant stalactite, peak down from the roof of heaven. It’s one thing to understand the science (a layer formed between warm and cold air rather than a gradual transition between the two forms a mirror reflecting objects beyond the horizon), but still it’s difficult not to think in terms of one of God’s chandeliers.

The tent is a little larger now, but not much, I have to carry it after all, and there’s more to carry with the boy’s stuff too. At night we start apart, but pretty soon there’s a wet nose draped across my neck and invariably we wake up in a tangle. There’s no climbing now, we are better (as a team) at rolling hills than sharp inclines. It’s more complicated, still fun, but in a different way.

We go away as often as we may, I’m still a man of leisure you see, and it’s beginning to get on my tits.

mellow yellow

2008-05-11T20:25:00.010+01:00

You asked for it, well, more precisely 3 of you did.

The boys are well in a fit, wet nosed, streamlined way due to an almost overabundance of exercise.

They deserve it, and I’ll give you the gory details….

I’ve been off work you see, am still off work….which if you can remember is what I had intended, to run for the hills clutching my savings and the proceeds of a house sale….but it didn’t pan out quite the way I had intended.

If nothing else, life is full of irony. I’m a devout agnostic but I really am beginning to hope that there is a god because he has a wicked sense of humour. After many years of being employed as the team’s ‘corporate good time’, our (no longer) entertainer of clients, drunk, cheerful provider of diversion, I’ve been sacked because it all finally bit back.

Of course it’s rather more complicated than that. For the majority of my life I’m just fishy boy, I live of life of moderation. Over the past 18 months something has changed. From time to time I’ve been prone to ever increasing fierce and destructive binges….I don’t (didn’t) know why, I would just withdraw and drink, pursue oblivion. The last was the worst.

I’ve been given help and am busy finding an answer at present. I’ve been aware of a gap, an almost absolute vacuum of memories in my life from around 13 to 18 years old. My ‘trick cyclist’ (cockney rhyming slang for psychiatrist) is convinced that the key is the suicide of my 10 year old brother and subsequent loss of my parents and grandmother in the following 12 months. I appear to have simply refused to accept it as my reality and indeed I remember locking the door, as an act of closure, without tears and a palpable sense of relief, and leaving the house, where by that time I was alone, without ever looking back. I was 18 years old.

She says it was inevitable that the emotions I denied then; guilt, remorse, anger, grief would eventually come violently to the surface…and I would have to deal with them. Well they have and I tried, but as far as ‘dealing’ with them is concerned I’ve made a pretty rotten fist of it. I can see, as she helps me to unravel this, how it may have affected so many fundamentals in my life…I’ve been in love and loved, but I live alone, terrified to let go, to be myself and allow myself to believe I deserve….so that ultimately I don’t. It’s actually a very easy way to live, there’s no risk and no possibility of pain.

This last binge was by far the worst. I woke up, (I’m still trying to work out the day never mind the time), to the faces of my best friend and the young lady from the kennels (I’d had the sense to deposit the dogs at the onset, rest assured they were loved and well looked after), at my bedroom door. They’d broken in and I wasn’t sure if they were real or dream phantoms. I think they saved my life.

I’d taken myself to bed 28 days previously and in the latter days had only arisen to use the bathroom and to buy more scotch.

If you're squeamish don’t read on.

My friends were treated to quite a sight. The bedroom floor was strewn with bottles, nearly 40 it appears, and dishes of half eaten food, mouldy now, and I’d vomited in them too as in the end I simply couldn’t tolerate solids. I’d neither showered, shaved, brushed my teeth for at least 2 weeks or eaten in 6 or 7 days, nor drunk anything other than whisky almost throughout the period I’d lain in bed. 28 days.

28 days living life in 15 minute segments punctuated by 2 hours of sleep (the trick here you see is the search for oblivion - one is aware that the scotch is the problem, but it’s the only thing that that will warm your stomach, bring relief, for sufficient time to drop off to sleep for the next 2 hours….) until the only thing in your world is the search for peace, no sense of time, only the rising panic as the bottle begins to run dry - please god it’s 2pm and not 2am, I have to sneak out ashamedly to buy more. Never look up, never meet others eyes.

I remember the look on my friends faces as they peered in through the bedroom door, the disgust, the shock, and I was horrified at myself in the reflected mirror of their eyes.

To their absolute credit they stayed. I was coaxed slowly out of bed and taken to hospital. The physical effects of that kind of self abuse become obvious slowly, experimentally. Lack of muscle mass meant I could hardly walk, skin like parchment, broken veins and the overall appearance of a badly treated scarecrow…..and these are just the outward symptoms, less obvious but more immediate were the damaged liver and subsequent rampant jaundice (I had turned into an Umpa Lumpa).

We (or rather they on my behalf) wonderously found the right person to speak to. Since then I have had clinicians and lately psychologists and all types of support and help thrown in my direction until I’m dizzy.

I haven’t had a drop to drink for a month, not by dint of willpower, because I simply don’t want to, or need to, and I think it rather confuses them - but this is me, the real me, the binge is over - at least for now. My only night terror now is that it will happen again, I can’t guarantee that it won’t, and I won’t know why so that’s the objective now, to understand and find a better way to deal with an ’episode’.

On the bright side my liver is quite recoverable and the only lingering physical problem apart from recovering strength is a mild dose of glandular fever.

I’ve not felt so relaxed for many, many years. No job, no income, no sweating the stuff I can’t do anything about.

I brought the chaps home 2 weeks ago and we made a spontaneous decision to immediately go on a camping trip. It was wonderful. The ‘Cotswold Way’, 8 days and 120 miles through the heart of England, hilly paths through green meadows and ancient forests, cold bright sparkling streams and all the colours of late spring in the wild flowers and blossom…..Charlie and Toffee were in their element. We camped wild in the woods, off the path, lit a fire in the evening and ate like kings on sausages on sticks and toasted crumpets…

We may go to the sea soon (very soon), while we can, it helps to remind me of what's important.

Old Possum's book of Practical Dogs...

2008-02-20T14:56:00.004Z

(Or very impractical dogs...)

like small, snarly, gittish dogs

or dozy dogs

or dogs that make most excellent pillows?

walking backwards

2008-02-13T11:30:00.001Z

This weekend I had…..Christmas.

Yes, that’s right, we have Xmas whenever we like here in the pond. I’m planning to have Easter sometime in the summer and Shrove Tuesday on your Labour day so that I don’t feel left out.

And Valentine’s, as usual, will be indefinitely postponed.

Christmas was delayed primarily by dint of the fact that when the rest of Christendom celebrated I was pathetically unaware of what day (month…indeed planet) it was.

This weekend I shall enjoy letting in the New Year (tall dark stranger out there anyone, with own piece of coal and pocket full of salt?). I supply the whisky, you bring the luck.

As an aside I can heartily recommend Xmas shopping at this time of year, it’s far less crowded and considerably less expensive in the sales – I did rather well, even if I say so myself, which may not be a surprise to you since I am after all buying presents for me – but that hasn’t stopped me buying entirely inappropriate, tasteless or just plain ugly gifts for me in the past.

So there.

This year I will free style. Not sweat the small stuff, like dates. My birthday is on ebay with no reserve and I shall call the chief rabbi this afternoon to discover if I have irrevocably timed out on my bar mitzvah.....

I've lost my marbles part ii - let us speak of many things

2008-01-25T16:50:00.000Z

My shrink wants me to write, in a very particular way. Whatever I feel in that instant, my thoughts, feelings, intuitions, hopes and fears, whatever comes into my head. I am supposed to keep a daily journal of this ‘stream of consciousness’. I’m struggling with this. Am I so structured, strictured, why do I find this so damned hard.

Of course at present I have the concentration span of a mayfly, but this is the opposite of concentration, it is intended to be free flow….a release, the putting down of mental burdens on paper to release them from the prison of my mind. But I can’t, I’m second guessing myself all of the time….

Instead my mind wanders back again to a time line. I need to know what happened and when, where I’ve been (in my head), in fact how long it’s been because this blurred and jumbled tapestry of time is killing me. I feel nauseated by it.

I think, only think mind, that the last time I was in the office was December the 20th. I have a recollection of going home and returning with the dogs and resigning and weeping and driving home with some vague intention to pack and leave for god knows where.

In the weeks before that I remember being admitted into hospital twice, once with my heart and them with pneumonia, a revolting surgery under local anaesthetic and an accident on the motor way, in the replacement Bongo (I’d had it for six whole weeks). I remember the latter because it was dramatic, turning round and round before smashing into the central reservation, I remember Charlie floating past, across the windscreen and looking at me quizzically en route. Thankfully the dogs were both shocked but uninjured.

After that is chaos. I have not the least idea what happened for the first week, I think that I must of slept mostly which balances the equation neatly considering the sleep that I can not find now.

Christmas and New Year were, well, just days in bed, not significant land marks on the featureless terrain of my calendar. I don’t remember shopping, although I did, of visiting the doctor, but I must have to renew my prescription, of changing the bed, doing the washing, eating…..but there’s evidence of all of these, clues cast around the kitchen and bedroom. Perhaps the shoe elves paid a visit? I wonder if I ventured into the living room this past month.

I mentioned that doors are unlocking on memories I don’t necessarily want. I’m not sure I’m happy with this version of me, what nerves this damned psychiatrist is exposing. Well there are other by product too.

We walk, a lot.

There is a path through the park lined with venerable sycamore so closely packed that they touch and tangle overhead and with their neighbours. We are on the 10pm shift, the pre snore potty run that the dogs have grown used to. It’s dark and we are alone.

And I am seeing ghosts.

It’s not as if I believe them but I can’t deny what my eyes reveal to me. Here comes an ethereal glimmer figure on a bicycle.

Imagine a pool or pond under a glabrous moon and the plop of a tossed pebble, the ripples, not seen, but inferred by silver and dark shadow. These were the wheels on the bicycle. The figure was made from similar stuff, transparent, a waif defined by haze and shimmer.

He rode past and gaily waived, I waved back.

A dog, a canine wraith, ran around and around the bole of a dark sycamore, its stardust tail tick tocking.

And from a round open litter bin clouds of pitch billow, far darker than the night, like bin bags, shards of midnight ripped and gathered in a fierce wind.

I’m unmoved, the dogs race amongst the trees and puddles and there’s nothing here to convince me that I should even quicken my step.

Whatever this twilight world is, whoever occupies it, means me no harm.

I've lost my marbles part i - sweet dreams

2008-01-19T17:23:00.000Z

The bed has begun to breathe again. Rhythmically. In out, in out, it ripples in and out under my bum and back. I can hear it too, over and above the light breaths of the person by my side. Even though I’m alone, I’m not afraid, neither the bed nor the stranger are threatening, only there.

I lie with my eyes open, I think (I shall check in a moment) and watch the blinking red light on the ceiling. It swirls into the shadows and vibrates briefly in the corner of the dark bedroom before returning to the centre as I focus.

My eyes close, I think, and I wait to need the toilet again.

If I relax my grip on my thoughts and allow my subconscious to be the keeper of my night soul then anything can happen, unbidden thoughts will run riot. So I try to keep a measure of control, waking dreams.

A single daisy sandal sits atop the privet hedge by the gate of 56 Poplars avenue.

A few doors further down an elderly man stares incredulously at the bright red child’s sweater hanging from his guttering.

In the gutter by the pavement outside his garden is the child’s arm that once occupied it.

All down the street clothes and limbs litter the roadway, gardens and roofs as people emerge from their houses to stand aghast or sink to their knees and weep.

Poplars Avenue runs parallel to Canal Street, 3 roads down. Even so the terrific, terrible blast had dislodged roof slates and shattered windows. As they sat inside on a sunny Saturday afternoon the huge explosion had come as a complete surprise and most wandered outside in semi shock to confirm that they were indeed survivors.

The 6th of June, the day of the Ryland summer children’s fete There may be a war on but it will not dissuade the altruistic owner of Rylands from throwing the regular annual party for employee’s children and other less fortunate children of the borough.

There were games and sandwiches, fizzy pop and jelly and hats, and all of the children in their Sunday best.

Two days earlier the German pilot had dropped his half ton mine 2 miles further up Manchester Ship Canal. A waste in terms of his mission, it was intended for the harbour of Liverpool, to wait in the gloomy, turgid waters for a passing supply ship or perhaps an inbound troop ship from the USA. He may have been put off by the flack, or it may have been a mechanical failure, but he dropped it eventually on his return journey.

Canal’s do have slow currents, prompted by the opening and closing of locks downstream - and slowly but surely the mine made it’s way with the flow towards the centre of Warrington so far spared the worst of the blitz.

The mine made contact with the metal hull of a barge offloading at the pier of Rylands, only 50 yards from the seated children, and 20 yards from the finish line of the ongoing egg and spoon race, the egg and spoon race.

And 500 lbs of high explosive went about it’s ghastly business with ruthless efficiency.

Across the canal for 7 streets down people watched or found clothes and miniature human detritus flutter down out of a dumbfound smoke blacked sky.

I don’t want to but I glance at the clock. 4 am.

No worries, I may sleep yet.

But I shan’t so I try to take stock once again because even these black dreams are better than the bizarre offerings my other unconscious selves have to offer.

I think about the morning when I will get up and try to brush my teeth, and vomit because my gag reflex is accentuated. I don’t mind, oddly it settles my stomach for a little while, long enough to force down a little cereal, a few spoonfulls…..it’s just that I regret that my dental hygiene is going to pot.

It normally takes around 4 visits to the toilet in the morning before I feel confident enough to rush the dogs out of the house for our regular walk in the park, I will have a 30 to 45 minute window before the toilet cramps begin again.

I can delay this by filling a hip flask with whisky, it warms my stomach for a few minutes and has saved my embarrassment (and underwear) in the recent past.

Momentarily I am confused and try to concentrate, it suddenly seems important to remember whether yesterday was Christmas day, or is it today, and I eventually decide it is tomorrow. Why am I relieved? Because I have not missed it? I laugh to myself which disturbs the no one next to me who sits and gets out of the bed and leaves the room - and although I am not scared I hope I will not have to use the toilet for a little while after all.

I try to concentrate on the morning ritual, on the 8 pills I will take and the order I will take them in.

And listen to the music, to the back beat of my life, the rhythmic base playing in my pillow. At least this was an accomplishment and not another mystery. I had worked this out. At around 3 am the previous night I had become enraged that my neighbours were still playing reggae so loudly that I could hear/feel it in my pillow. Eventually plucking up the nerve and the need and had slipped into track suit bottoms and gone downstairs to complain. Only to find out that it stopped. 3 times I did this, with the same result. And 3 times when I got back into bed the beat remained in my pillow.

I lay there for a very long time before I understood that the beat was in my head. The beat of my heart, the pulse, the rushing of blood through the veins and arteries in my neck. I was hearing myself live.

If, only if, say, I give up on any notion of sleep (and why not, even though my eyes are full of grit I have not slept these previous 3 maybe 4 days or nights), I may get up briefly and call for the dogs. After all if it is Christmas day tomorrow we could wake up and greet the dawn together, it’s the only treat I have for them.

I close my eyes for a moment as the bed takes a deep breath, and see a tiny white shirt floating down from the sky.

through a glass darkly

2008-01-17T18:05:00.000Z

I’m beginning to understand that memory is like a Russian doll, leastways memory that has been suppressed.

So much of what I (we?) remember seems to belong to someone else, as if I were reading about an alternate me in a novel. The memories are woolly, vague, assumed almost. So imagine my surprise when my psychiatrist began to unlock doors for me, onto whole dark vaults of specific memory.

Some are good, more are not - I’m sure I’m supposed to feel grateful but I feel rather as though I’ve been handed a box of spiders, and a key.

Apparently this is the way to deal with suppressed memory, suppressed grief, slowly but surely unlock it.

To be honest I’m not so sure.

I think I was happier mad.

2007-12-06T22:27:00.000Z

And we can lie here, under the patterned sheet of slumber that will not meet our eyes and dream of tiny armies moving across the folds and turns of red paisley, the valleys and the wrinkled highs

And all the time, like osse, the painted face of the opal moon sails across the bleak stark sky. In meadows where the nyad and the dryad plot, they do you know, they contemplate what we can not….and the mistletoe grows and clutches hard around the bowls and stems of elm, and birch, and walking….under this moonlit, sparkled, dew dripped sky, the myrah, (you know them milady), who have no sense, no face, no eyes

When this long night is done, and one can turn the faces of small dogs away from a fire that singes chin hair and crackles too loud, too long. When it’s done. Will I be glad to be safe abed under warm, paisley patterned sheets

If you think this is self indulgent, up my bum as it were, can I add that my surgeon removed my right testicle today, under local anaesthetic, and it stings a bit

we want a shrubbery

2007-11-29T20:18:00.000Z

drum roll.......drrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr......

ladies and gentlemen, introducing, for your entertainment, your consternation, amazement, bewilderment and stupefaction, the one, the only walking, woofing, wagging grow bag.

yup, Toffee's in the wars again.

He's had grass seeds growing between his furry toes before, but who'd have thunk that he'd get one lodged in his ear. That's right, in it, down deep and rooting into his ear drum....it was the leaves and sprouts that gave it away, not tangled in his hair, but somehow attached.

Actually it was more comical, (unless of course you're Toffee), than that.

He shook his head so violently that he burst a blood vessel in his ear. By the time I saw it in the morning it looked a big hairy balloon on the side of his head.

The upshot of which is that the vet has drained and cauterized it and put a criss cross pattern of stitches in his ear so that it can't happen again - and of course removed the offending shrubbery.

And Toff - has a shaved ear and will spend the next two weeks with his head in a bucket.

He's looking a wee bit post anaesthesia at the moment?

bed head

2007-11-20T21:00:00.000Z

My achievements for the past few weeks are very quick and simple to list.

I've read.

Lots.

"Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition"

"A Pirate of Exquisite Mind"

and finally, finally finished Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon"

Something to be proud of eh?

I've been confined to bed again you see, but fortunately at home this time. After years and years of being absolutely bullet proof I'm forced to admit mortality, or at least susceptibility. I had thought for years that no self respecting virus would come within a thousand yards of me, that any sensible ague would look for a more robust host. And then, oh bugger, when they come they come in force.

I'm blaming it on biorhythms or just being at a low ebb, but the pneumonia was completely unexpected and knocked me bandy.

For four, (five?) days, I surfaced for just long enough to visit the loo or get a glass of water, and once a day, in extremis, I put on as many clothes as humanly possible and took the dogs to the park - like a walking, coughing, muttering, shivering mobile sauna, shuffling around a circuit of the outer path, I must have resembled a pedestrian Oxfam parcel.

The first time I went to the doctor I couldn't actually wait long enough to be seen. I had to go home, to bed, to steel myself for another attempt in the evening. I've never actually felt anything like this, I thought I'd felt poorly in the past, but hot, cold, hot, cold and then asleep on the toilet.

It's a hell of a way to lose weight.

And the poor dogs, what amazing company. I now have an intimate knowledge of what dogs do during the day, and most of it involves snoring.

Though I did have a dream one day that I'd passed away and they were eating my leg.

Sounds like I’m moaning doesn’t it? I just don’t have anything else to tell you.

2007-11-07T00:37:00.000Z

I was going to write. Not of things past but in the present tense, the real immediacy of life.. I just had to stop to go the toilet...but I find I'm writing and smoking and trying to make caps all with my left hand...because I've just woken Charlie up from his snorting slumber and forced him under the covers next to me...and he was pretty pissed off, so I'm having to rub an hairy ear with the other hand at the moment.. I wanted to tell you what it's like not to want to get up in the morning, but I suspect that very few people need to have it described, and that life is...about beauty, not about ugliness, so at the very least share some, plagiarism of course, but beauty nevertheless...

It is Spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the
cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courter's-and-rabbits' wood limping
invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing
sea. The houses are are blind as moles (though moles see fine tonight in the
snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by
the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows'
weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.
Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and
pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the
fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen
and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with
rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glow-worms down the aisles of the
organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked of the bucking ranches of the
night and the jollyrodgered sea. And the anthracite statues of the horses sleep
in the fields, and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wet-nosed yard;
and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly, streaking and needling, on
the one cloud of the roofs.

You can hear the dew falling, and the hushed town breathing.
Only your eyes are unclosed to see the black and folded town fast, and slow,
asleep.

And you alone can hear the invisible starfall, the darkest-before-dawn minutely
dewgrazed stir of the black, dab-filled sea where the Arethusa, the Curlew and
the Skylark, Zanzibar, Rhiannon, the Rover, the Cormorant, and the Star of Wales
tilt and ride.

Listen. It is night in the chill, squat chapel, hymning in bonnet and brooch and
bombazine black, butterfly choker and bootlace bow, coughing like nannygoats,
sucking mintoes, fortywinking hallelujah; night in the four-ale, quiet as a
domino; in Ocky Milkman's lofts like a mouse with gloves; in Dai Bread's bakery
flying like black flour. It is tonight in Donkey Street, trotting silent, with
seaweed on its hooves, along the cockled cobbles, past curtained fernpot, text
and trinket, harmonium, holy dresser, watercolours done by hand, china dog and
rosy tin teacaddy. It is night neddying among the snuggeries of babies.
Look. It is night, dumbly, royally winding through the Coronation cherry trees;
going through the graveyard of Bethesda with winds gloved and folded, and dew
doffed; tumbling by the Sailors Arms.

Time passes. Listen. Time passes.

Come closer now.

Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets in the slow deep salt and
silent black, bandaged night. Only you can see, in the blinded bedrooms, the
combs and petticoats over the chairs, the jugs and basins, the glasses of teeth,
Thou Shalt Not on the wall, and the yellowing dickybird-watching pictures of the
dead. Only you can hear and see, behind the eyes of the sleepers, the movements
and countries and mazes and colours and dismays and rainbows and tunes and
wished and flight and fall and despairs and big seas of their dreams.
From where you are, you can hear their dreams...

medicine balls

2007-10-11T12:02:00.000+01:00

Sorry if I’ve been uncommunicative for the past week or so, without any conceit I understand that I have some very genuine friends out there who deserve better than silence….

It’s going very well. I’m back at work, taking things very slowly for the time being. I get the impression that while I am looking down, eyes are looking at me that swiftly look away when I look up. That’s fine with me, because I know that they’re watching out of concern.

The dogs are home too, so I’m surrounded by furry friendship. I’ve even got into a rhythm with all of the bloody pills….and it’s been a wonderful opportunity to catch up on my reading.

See you soon!

x
Col

still here

2007-10-02T22:52:00.000+01:00

i want to go home now

im just so fucking fed up being constantly connected to somw machine or other and drinking thru my arm

and the nightsare the worst, this ward is bedlam, the noises, each one lasrs a year id give anything forclean sheets peace and quiet

and my dogs

tick tock

2007-10-01T00:30:00.000+01:00

Just so's you know. I was admitted into hospital last Tuesday via casualty with blood pressure approaching 200 and a completely arrhythmic heartbeat and rate in excess of 160 - ie a disfunctional heart. The technician was impressed, she seemed to think the pulse was a casualty record. I on the other hand was just terrified. I'm typing with the hand not attached to the drip at present. Keep you posted.

in the news today

2007-09-18T13:30:00.000+01:00

my Bongo, the replacement after the last one was trashed by the old gentlemen.....

Well, we had an accident. My back tyre blew out on Sunday evening which sent us careering down the road backwards at 70 mph....into the central reservation from which we bounced across three lanes into the hard shoulder...dogs flying around the cabin, crunching, crashing, ear splintering noise.

And then we were okay. Shaken and stirred, but happily alive.

We spent the night in the van, with some very strange dreams, and were recovered home yesterday via the vet, just to make sure - you know.

are we nearly there yet

2007-09-14T10:34:00.000+01:00

I am generally blessed with the gravitas of a circus tumbler, but I can't seem to help myself from voicing an opinion about this....

....watching, listening to the debate (why in gods name do we insist on calling it debate, as if there were some doubt?) on ‘global warming’ with fascinated horror and I can’t help feeling that we are seeing the problem and the consequences from a uniquely distorted vantage point.

There are many good reasons why we (on the whole) would appear to be futile arbiters of our own fate:

Cigarettes, alcohol abuse, drugs and all manner of hedonistic choice oriented indulgences – which are apparent no-brainers and yet still we continue to make poor decisions, this’ll kill you if you continue, oh well never mind I’ll take my chance….should really make us despair of the probability of making wise choices concerning something as apparently intangible as the health of the planet if we can’t even make them on our own behalf.

Successive generations who have been aware of the damage that humanity has been causing to its environment have failed to pay little more than lip service to it. And let’s be very, very clear about this….this is legacy. What we leave for our children, these children that we will die for, drive to school and fight tooth and nail to drop off within 5 yards of the school gate to protect them from the bogey man and other manic, purposeless traffic…these same children we will leave a world in slightly, perhaps profoundly, worse shape than when we inherited it. They will receive, courtesy of us, new areas of the sea which once teemed with life but are now fished out, areas of levelled, arid tarmac where once fertile jungles grew, a substantially reduced ice cap – along with ice bergs in some very unusual places, changing currents in the oceans and the atmosphere and new, unpredictable weather patterns. My imagination and knowledge aren’t sufficient to do more than scratch the surface.

Have you heard of global dimming? It’s a phenomenon that is indicative of the contradiction between our knowledge and concern and our remedial action. Essentially rain tends to form around particulate matter in the atmosphere, humidity metamorphoses into droplets by the simple expedient of dust. Our ‘pollution’, at it simplest, comprises two components, gaseous and material by products. We have become very much better at reducing the physical detritus of our daily lives escaping into the atmosphere than its gaseous counterpart.

The result being that whilst we still throw unconscionable amounts of carbon monoxide to the heavens, we have vastly reduced the amount of ‘dust’.

Which is unfortunate. Air currents have taken this dust, in the past, over areas of Africa, where rain is a rare commodity and infrequent blessing, it has seeded clouds and whilst not wholly predictably provided seasonal rain – this dust has provided sufficient catalyst for airborne humidity to coalesce into infrequent, life giving rains.

Our wadis aren’t wadis any more. They don’t flood. They are just dusty ruts.

This simple expedient has actually aided and abetted global warming rather than alleviated it. Aren't we clever?

And will we, (will you?), deny the next generation of global super powers? More to the point will they deny themselves? We don’t appear to have a particularly convincing argument: “I say Mr Chinaman, I know that we have spent the past the 30 years in an orgy of manufacture and self indulgence and I do quite understand that at the time you had to do with a village bicycle with no seat and tyres – and now that it is within your grasp to have everything that I have, would you mind terribly not having a car, or a fridge, a computer or cell phone because you see you are going to finish the job of fucking up the environment that I started. I’m very sorry but I know that you will understand the need for a little self restraint, after all you’ve never had any luxuries in the past”.

I think not.

So the outcome is, in my humble opinion, inevitable, but not the outcome that is most often mooted. We won’t destroy the planet. We will not bring about the death of mother earth. What we will do is continue to alter the balance of our current continuum, we will cause changes in sea currents and trade winds with consequent and cathartic changes to the global fundamentals of climate. We can’t help it, we can’t stop ourselves.

And what will happen is that the earth will throw us off. We really should have no conceit over this, it’s like two fleas arguing over who owns the dog. We are, as most species are, here by main part accident and adaptation. We don't have a Willy Wonka gold ticket to survival. On the contrary, on the whole we are quite fragile beings, a great many of whom choose to live on boundaries, by the Oceans, or conversely, when inland, in areas which have far too little water to naturally sustain (human) life.

Climate change will hit us hard. At some point it will hit us so hard that we will cease to be, at least ‘be’ in the civilised sense that we ‘be’ now. It’s possible that a small number of us may adapt and survive….but there will be no going back. The earth will change and throw us off, shed us if you like. It will evolve and we will be left behind. Perhaps it will be the chance for some other species to dominate, or perhaps the eco system will relax back into a more dynamic society of creatures. Of course it is unfortunate that we will take many other species with us as we shuffle off this mortal coil. The changes that culminate in our demise will affect many other communities too, not least all of our domesticated animals (there's a double whammy here because the world will not only be rid of us and our noxious emissions, but also a truly spectacular amount of cow-fart) …but what the hey, too little, too late, we will sink without a trace.

So. Don’t worry about it. You will not bring about the end of the world you little weed...

It will bring about the end of you.

en vacance

2007-09-10T22:06:00.000+01:00

Dirty old river, must you keep rolling

Flowing into the night

Amazing. The impishness of your mind, the stuff it comes up with…

People so busy,

makes me feel dizzy

Taxi light shines so bright

Cramped, stiff and huddled in the corner. And cold. My god, it was a hundred and four degrees earlier. 104 !!!

But I don't need no friends

Shoes, I need shoes…ruby slippers, I wish, I wish, I wish I were in Camden. Is there actually any loo roll in here, ironically, I mean can I use the toilet if I have to?

As long as I gaze on waterloo sunset

I am in paradise

Yes, paradise. Chocolate bars locked in the car. I have the ubiquitous bottle of wine though, and a torch, and a good book…..a beach towel, a completely redundant mobile phone, a pillow made up of rolled up t shirts and….this stupid bloody song revolving in my head.

It’s going to be a long night I think.

And why not, I am after all….on holiday.

Still, on the bright side this is by far the most salubrious, well kempt public lavatory that I have ever slept in. (Maybe by dint of the fact that they won’t allow you to sleep in the loos in the Ritz or the Café de Paris, unless of course you are very posh or terribly rich). I did once wake up in a windmill on a crazy golf course, but that was just impaired judgment.

I have had to sit and listen to numerous friends and acquaintances prattle on about the “adventure holiday” that they’re about to embark on, that they’ve described with such gusto and awe that Livingstone or Hilary would have been impressed – only to discover that they are taking an organised scuba diving course in the Red Sea. Or to Mexico to see the temples…but they will be staying in Cancun.

You see there is a real skill to this. Adventure, at least in my eyes is born of an utter disregard for basic research or forward planning. Consequently my ‘holidays’ often resemble huge, complex practical jokes that I seem to be playing on…myself.

Oregon is a dream. An ancient, rugged coastline of bays and jagged, broken rock spines, sea spray mingling with salt mists and sudden chills on a summers day. A haunted coast of lighthouses and children’s laughter and solitary red kites fluttering in pale blue late summer skies.

I will never forget falling asleep to the sound of the Ocean’s swell just 50 yards away over the sand and the salt tang smell of woodsmoke from the embers of a beach fire – or the way that the great boles of sea scraped giant redwoods lay like the bones of Leviathan scorched by the stars – or indeed walking out to the balcony, naked, to stand under the moon with a glass of wine – to feed my soul – straight through the screen door. (We don’t have them at home you see, as I was trying to explain the shattered remains to the maid the next day).

When I was a boy we’d play “if I ruled the world”. And if I ruled the world I would live in Oregon, in a boat moored to the jetty of a small working port, and I would want for nothing, no ambrosia this morning thank you.

But unfortunately some bloody idiot invented maps, and they sell them to bloody idiots to me.

People like me have no sense of scale, no sense of consequence, no common sense.

Every day I look at the world from my window

But chilly, chilly is the evening time

Waterloo sunsets fine

Maps are full of exotica, erotica, evotica to the travelling spirit, cartographic pornography... San Francisco ( I could tell you about San Francisco meets Fish, but I’m rambling enough as it is), the Sierra Nevada, Yosemite.

Did you know that there are only 5 motel rooms in the whole of Yosemite, and apparently on Labour Day weekend they fill rather quickly? Me neither.

Fortunately by now I have become accustomed to my lack of foresight, nay stupidity – such that the boot of my car resembles a fridge stocked for a party of alcoholic 5 year olds. Even in the tiny boot of this two seater rag top I managed to secrete away enough wine (that’s what the Napa valley is there for?) and chocolate biscuits to keep a small army of diabetic drunks on the move for a week.

And a toilet roll.

And now I’m vaguely comfortable. That is my arse is completely numb. It’s only 10 pm and the light of my torch is beginning to turn a vapid wee wee yellow, and I know for sure that I shan’t want to go out in the night.

I couldn’t park the car any closer than 50 yards from the tiny log cabin rest room, and I haven’t heard the grumble of a single RV for at least a half hour now. I expect they are all corralled and picnicking mightily in some snug park somewhere, hooked up to electricity and comparing sanitary cassette.

I tried to bring everything I would need in one go.

So, the usual presleep routine, check that the door is locked (rather bizarrely I have left my shoes outside the door in case, perchance a stranger should want to avail themselves of this ‘convenience’ during the night), fluff up my t shirt pillow and adjust my blanket….there, that’s nice…..a sip of wine……nighty night……

Terry meets Julie, waterloo station

Every Friday night…..

who's that knocking on my door

2007-08-22T15:58:00.000+01:00

I don't know why but recently I've been waking up with monotonous regularity at around 4 am.

It's very quiet.

It's very dark, despite the ubiqitous ambient light of London and I've found it is quite impossible to roll over and go back to sleep.

Strange what thoughts and dimly lit dreams occur to you in the wee small hours? By a process of trial and error I am now well educated in the vagaries of my subconscious and it's obstinate reaction to conscious demands - put simply, my head will think and display whatever old crap it likes. If I lie and try to think of the colour blue I'm as likely to get a slow motion video of a rhinocerous anally assualting a cartoon traffic warden as a cool soothing azure hue. It appears that the vivid imagination of childhood has not been lost after all, in fact over the years I (we) have accumulated a myriad images and characters that can be assembled in an infinite number of outlandish scenarios....perhaps it's just that I (we) have become better at filing them. That is until the doors become carelessly unlocked and the inmates come out to play?

So I'll get up. Go to the fridge.....not tea, ooo no, this me.....pour a glass of wine, open the back door and sit with my feet on the fire escape stairs in my shreddies and peer into the night. It's not long until there's a pitter patter of nails on stone and a rrrrrreeeeeeooaaaarrrrrr as Charlie's curiosity overcomes him and he'll stretch and snuffle up to me. Toffee never does this, Toffee could sleep in a washing machine on the spin cycle.

I saw the sun rise like this earlier in the week and whilst my locale is not some rural idyll, the early morning mist rising out of the trees and gardens of the urban sprawl has its own ethereal beauty. Or maybe I shouldn't have gone back to the fridge.

It's not the end of the world, whatever it was that woke me up generally dissipates after a while and I can go back to bed and catch another hour. In fact it's almost like having a lie in.

But it's amazing what you think about sitting on the step, in the pre dawn silence.

I remembered being a child and being scared of the dark. I was never scared of the dark outdoors, the night seemed comfortable with the trees and fields and hedgerows of my youth. It was only indoors, at home, when the lights went out. The countryside dark, of pitch breathlesness, where one could lie in bed with eyes open or shut or wave a hand before your face and it mattered not. Utter sightless night.

Now I push the covers away, but then....the little boy who was me would tuck his chin into the blankets and not a single extremity would stray from under the bed covers lest it were touched by some malign cold hand. And in the dark, the paucity of sight was more than made up for by acuity of other senses....there were bats in rafters, the soft susuration of the breeze in the garden oak, the creak and groan of old furniture cooling before the ash of the evening's fire...all were just cause for consternation and goose bumps. I remember laying abed terrorized by a mouse. He lived in the loft along with my father's seed potatos and the rumble-thump as he rolled them to his nest over individual rafters sounded for all the world to me, then, in the dark, like the scrape and footfall of some fiendish ghoul on the roof.

One night when walking home from where the village bus used to drop me, over a mile from my front door, up hill and along tree lined roads bordered by fields and not another dwelling - that night walking home in the early winter gloom a patch of mist detatched itself from a hill top copse and came curling down the hill, to spill over the wall to the lane which had been cut in below the level of the surrounding field....for a long long moment the earth and I stood still within a bitter soaking cocoon of grey.

And I didn't turn a hair. There is no malice in the earth, no threat in the clearing wisps that reveal a starlit sky. It was only when I found home and was put to bed with a kiss goodnight that I had any misgivings and, after a cautious wait, quietly opened the bedroom door to whisper call for the cat.

So Charlie and I sat on the step last night. We saw thin ribbons of cloud sidle east towards the first glimmerings of dawn. We saw the bathroom lights of early risers and a fox in the shadows of a neighbour's garage, we chuckled when Charlie farted and at the gurgling rumpus of the Toffee monster's rabbit chasing dreams.

And when I went back to bed, because of some compulsion I don't understand, I tucked my fingers, toes and nose under the duvet.

bye bye baby, baby bye bye.....

2007-08-16T15:07:00.000+01:00

I don’t like mornings.

I don’t like Mondays.

Any distraction to the jaded humdrum helloo to the week is welcome (obviously that’s a figure of speech – a distraction in the form of say, shutting your willy in the fridge door whilst trying to extricate the milk and simultaneously disentangle your bath towel from the ironing board would be very unwelcome. But that’s a different story).

Around 10.30 then, the earth shattering kerrraaaang and accompaniment of screeches and breaking glass was greeted with general glee in our office. The impact, of whatever the hell it was, was substantial enough to make the building tremble for a moment…..ah, be still my beating heart, what fun.

People raced to the windows and then to the doors. A car was slowly revolving, on it’s roof, in the middle of the road three floors down. It looked grotesque and vaguely…comical, only in as much as that’s not how you normally observe cars, oddly…naked.

Outside a crowd had already gathered. The car had stopped spinning and lay morosely, glassless, at the end of a 20 yard swathe of red and black detritus and deep scratches in the tarmac. Already you could hear sirens in the distance. The police would arrive first and hopefully an ambulance shortly thereafter.

Despite the obvious draw of the car (wreckage has a particular magnetism?), the eyes were inexorably drawn to a frail figure sitting on the kerb. An old man, surely a lucky bystander looking dishevelled but very middle class, who sat wanly by the side of the road cupping his besilvered head in liver spotted hands.

He was surrounded by a whole host of would be first aiders offering various and conflicting advice….no doubt he wanted a cup of tea. In English middle class folk lore a cup of tea is the panacea, the cure all, one can grow a new limb after just a few sips of hot sweet tea.

I was wondering what maniac, what boy racer, what act of stupidity had nearly taken this elderly man’s life so early on a Monday morning. Whether he was on his way home with the news paper or on his way to the Post Office to collect his pension. I was also curious as to why no none of the bystanders were particularly interested in the car, after all if there’s one thing more magnetic than fresh wreckage, it is fresh carnage.

And then a worker from an adjacent office said “silly old sod”, not to me, but to himself.

It transpires that this elderly behemoth had been in the process of parking his car by the corner. He needs sticks to walk. Without switching off his engine he reached across to the passenger seat to get his sticks, opened his door and went to get out of the car. Apparently he slipped and his leg shot out in reaction and jammed full square on the accelerator pedal….

One eye witness likened it to the start of a Grand Prix. The car shot out into the road with a squeal of tyres and accelerated madly – until it made contact with a parked car. The manic pensioner and the parked car met three quarters on flipping the moving car into the air perfectly to land on it’s roof and slide a further 20 yards. The parked car, which I only now noticed, was a total utter wreck crushed at the front and shunted violently backwards into a tree.

The police did arrive first as is their wont. And then an ambulance, and a fire engine and eventually a tow truck.

The car was salvaged, and so was the little old man. He must have sat by on the kerb for some twenty minutes waiting for the ambulance whilst being gently questioned by the police officers. In all that while he didn’t utter a sound and he looked utterly, utterly defeated.

He looked so pitiful when finally they loaded him on to the ambulance, and I sat on the low wall outside the office smoking a cigarette….and thinking just as well, because otherwise I would have beaten him to death with his own sticks.

For demolishing my car.

it's my round, again

2007-08-15T12:00:00.000+01:00

On Friday the 24th of August I'm flying to Oregon.

Anybody want to meet for a drink?

big dave

2007-07-30T17:18:00.000+01:00

I don’t really need any more pets.

The boys are a great sufficiency thank you very much. In the past I’ve had a small ginger tom cat (who packed a bag and left in disgust after suffering the nightly humiliation of a great lolling spaniel tongue bath once too often), a hamster who shuffled off this mortal coil with a soft plaintive thud one evening, and fish….fish who mysteriously decided to leap from their tank on to the floor, an experiment in aquatic Darwinism perhaps or misplaced piscine optimism, that went disastrously wrong.

And I’ve never really had much time for birds. It’s not that I mean them any harm, I’m not ‘anti’ bird….it’s more ambivalence really, they just don’t do anything for me. If I were in a zoo I’d walk briskly through the aviary to get to the lions, tigers, monkeys, even the creepy crawlies. (Except for penguins of course – but I don’t count them as birds, after all they can’t fly?).

In fact the only bird I’ve ever really taken a liking to lived in a pet shop that I used to frequent and swore like a trooper at anyone that passed its cage. It was parrot, a venerable old bird with a wonderfully disgusting vocabulary and a strange aptitude for saying just the right thing - “Oy, f#cking put it down!!!” or “lard arse!!” were always good for a laugh at the discomfort of the uninitiated.

So, follow me, yesterday, to the park, in what was London but we now call the Thames flood plain.....and there in the long wet grass was, what at first glance looked like a discarded blue ribbon biscuit wrapper, but on closer inspection turned out to be a budgerigar. It didn’t look well. It flapped and rolled over and sort slipped, slithered deeper into the grass – not in an “I’m going to take off and fly in a moment” kind of way, more in an “oh bugger now I’m upside down” fashion.

Now as I mentioned, I’m not a huge fan of the genus but what the hey, I don’t particularly like to see any creature suffer. So I waded in to the grass and reached down to try to gently extricate it. It wasn’t as easy as I’d first thought. Of course Toffee and Charlie wanted to get involved and the budgie wasn’t as grateful for my attentions as it could have been. Obviously it wasn’t aware of my motives, so I forgive it, for all it knew I was going to feed it to the malevolent toilet brush (Charlie) that was so excited he looked like he might soil himself at any moment.

Several aborted attempts later, accompanied by lots of ‘pep talks’ to the dogs (“look just sod off for a moment!!!”) and the poor little thing was almost completely submerged in the grass – but at last, I managed to fold it’s wings and cup it in one hand.

It was tiny, and sodden. And it bit. The little blue budgie fit easily and entirely in one hand and gnawed away on my forefinger. It was quite endearing really and just on the edge of being painful, tiny as it was it wasn’t going to be done in without a fight.

We finished the walk holding the budgerigar. The dogs obviously thought it was a ball of some kind and that at any moment I was going to throw it for them. The budgie itself remained stolidly attached to my finger although I thought it relaxed a little when I stopped gently cooing and tried a different tack with a “pretty Polly” (so I’ve called it Dave, just to keep it on it’s toes).

In the van, the only thing to do was let it loose. I couldn’t exactly put it in my pocket could I? I did briefly consider the glove box, but that seemed a mite cruel considering its experience over the past hour or two.

So there you have it. I don’t have a cage at home so now Charlie, Toffee and Dave are roaming the plains of chez Fish in freedom. Opening the door onto the yard for the boy’s morning ablutions is slightly more complicated than it was. I expected to hear the flutter of budgie wings as it made a dash for freedom, but it was busy exploring the bathroom.

And birds aren’t so unpleasant after all…except they really do poo a lot don’t they?

do me

2007-07-12T16:22:00.000+01:00

What a strange phenomenon, the psychometric test?

Every time I take one of these, and I’ve been tested all over the place thank-you-very-much, it makes me think about the ink blot test. I can’t be completely sure, but I would imagine that the average psycho or socio path isn’t completely bereft of common sense, in fact, more likely, they are possessed of a certain, intuitive cunning. In which case when they are shown an inkblot by the friendly, inquisitive psychologist and asked to say what it reminds them of, they are hardly likely to blurt “a baby impaled on a pointed stick”, even if it does in fact resemble nothing other than a baby, impaled on a pointed stick. Instead, they say with practiced gravitas, “a carnation”

It’s much the same with psychometric testing. These things are apparently, by juxtaposing a series of intuitive questions, supposed to provide the interrogator with an insight into what really makes you tick – your psyche.

But they all seem such blunt and transparent tools, like the ink blot test, a series of questions in the form of:

“When faced with a crisis at work, what role do you play in resolving it?”

a repeatedly strike a colleague with a metal rule whilst shouting “fucking sort it out bitch”
b provide calm authority and enlist the skills of key colleagues to find a solution
c dither
d hide in the toilet until it all blows over

Shall I answer honestly, mmmmmmm let me see, no I think I’ll plump for b since the results of this test may have some bearing on my scramble up the corporate ladder.

Really, one would have to be a complete imbecile or a corporate lemming to answer truthfully, unless you are of course the perfect employee – which means that all of your work mates are going to loath and detest you when the results of the test are made public.

I just put down a mixture. I want people to think I’m flawed….like everyone else.

underneath a spreading chestnut tree

2007-06-04T21:56:00.000+01:00

The house was perfect, as if painted into the surrounding garden of blooming rhododendrons and azaleas. So white in the sunshine, set in it’s green idyll, it was almost too bright to look at.

The dogs sniffed on the low picket fence and shuffled, glanced up at me nervously or impatiently I don’t know, because we had stood there for a very long time. They were on the leash while I stood mesmerised by the canary yellow door, the same canary yellow door.

It’s very still here, there’s a hush, and in keeping with the hush we were still and quiet too, like visitors to a church where we might feel embarrassed to break the silence. Maybe they felt it too, certainly Charlie’s strident yap would have brought the walls and roof of this brief enchantment crashing in.

It was still inside too. No emotional tide here, no turbulence, nothing rising to the surface, unless of course a reflective calm emptiness is an emotion in itself.

And then there was a cause for embarrassment, a flutter of the living room curtains (note to self, what ‘was’ the living room) and a half concealed face that glanced briefly and then withdrew. Which precipitated a decision that I‘d hardly considered, whether to knock on the door and see who answered, and say….whatever came to mind.

We put ourselves in motion and half way down the gravel track were saved the awkwardness of finding the first words. The canary yellow door opened onto a man very similar to myself, in build, in height, in age, but with a full beard who stood, not aggressively, but defensively and said, “are ye looking for the camp site”.

I hesitated, it didn’t (doesn’t) seem fair to involve others in ones personal melodrama. I should have said yes, but what I said was, “I’m curious about the house”.

“Very curious if you ask me”

“Yes, I’m sorry”

“Weel it’s no for sale if that’s what your wanting”

“No, no, not at all…actually…in fact…well, I used to live here”.

If I thought that might placate him it didn’t do the trick.

“I’m sorry” I said, “I didn’t mean to disturb you” and turned to walk away.

We had almost made it back on to the main drive, this is the gatehouse you see, at the end of private road that sweeps up through the woods to the Fergusson family home…

Glad to be back facing the sun now, with my back to the yellow door, when, perhaps curiosity got the best of him and he called.

“What’s your name?”

Without turning “Colin, Colin Deed”

And the door slammed shut.

His wife caught us up about a half mile down the lane. She was driving a small white van and pulled over just beyond us. She looked worried, almost ashamed as she got out, in fact her first words were “Sorry, so sorry” in that lilting Scots accent that instantly made you believe her and regret that she was saying it and not you. I knew immediately who she was as she stumbled in the long grass by the side of the lane and stood holding the edge of the open van door.

“I know you” she said.

“And I know you”, and tried to smile winningly and at the same time remember her name.

“I’m Mary”

Yes, (thank you God!!), “Mucculloch” I blurted

“MacCutcheon” she offered quietly.

“Yes, of course” I agreed “MacCutcheon, how are you Mary”.

“That was my husband Weir that ye just spoke to and he was awfee rude, I’m so sorry”

“Oh no really, it’s me that should be sorry, after all I did stand there and lurk for a very long time”

“Still, whatever, he knows you, though you’ll nay remember him”

And we had a conversation, the conversation that people who haven’t seen each other for nigh on 25 years have, full of vaguely remembered shared acquaintances (at least to me) and what they were doing and who had children and how many and who had gone bad, mad or run away in the night. (Mary was the daughter of the couple who had owned the Post Office in the local village, the epicentre of gossip in any small Scots community).

And then we stood there for a moment and smiled vaguely, and suddenly she asked the question I think she had wanted to ask all along, blurted, almost fearfully….”the house Colin, the house…

I left her to finish it for herself, I didn’t want to offer anything if she were only going to ask if it suffered from rising damp.

…is it, well…okay…?”

I knew what she meant, had done all along, “It’s fine Mary, truly, it’s fine. You live there, it’s warm and cosy and welcoming, and....you live there…you must know that”.

“I know” she said apologetically, “but even so, poor wee Stewart, how old was he Colin, thirteen, fourteen?”

“Twelve”

“Oh no, poor wee man, do you know why….no of course ye don’t, I’m sorry”.

“Well one thing’s for sure, it wasn’t the house Mary so never think that”.

“We look around the garden sometimes and, well you know…”

“And you needn’t worry about that either Mary, my brother and I cut down the tree too, and burnt it to a crisp, it isn’t there now”

She brightened, and we made brief farewells.

“I’m glad” she said as she left “the garden’s beautiful”

I waved goodbye as she drove away, I suspect she’d take the fork on the hill and drive the long way round so past the kennels we didn’t have to see each other again if she turned around. I understood that.

I had not been back there for nearly 30 years, the house where my family lived for many years after my little brother was found hanging from the tree in the garden…and where eventually I carried them out, one by one, in boxes through the canary yellow door.

Although it was a beautiful day and the dogs loved the freedom and the fields and I amused myself remembering stiles and gates and individual trees - somehow I suspect I won’t be going back again.

I’m writing this in the corner of the sofa while Charlie and Toffee eat my pizza crusts. This ill conceived weekend seems a lifetime ago already. I’ll be posting this without ever rereading it so please excuse any bad grammar and spelling mistakes.

panda boy

2007-05-24T17:05:00.000+01:00

there is, (at least here there exists), in summer, a variety of tiny black fly who’s apparent purpose in life is to make a beeline for any moist bodily orifice. They’re incredibly annoying. So small, it hardly appears to have wings at all, a blur, a mote of dust almost – and yet relentless, no amount of waving and flapping will dissuade it from doing it’s utmost to pursue a watery grave by dissolving on your eye.

Which is, I understand, apropos of nothing.

Except perhaps that I admit that I don’t understand everything, or everybody’s, motivation.

Friends and colleagues can still take me utterly by surprise with seemingly random and unfathomable acts of selflessness and wild abandon in almost equal proportion.

Acquaintances I don’t expect to understand.....indeed I don’t particularly want to. I have neither the time or inclination to try to interpret the why’s and what fors of the chaotic jumble of characters who impinge on daily life while you’re simply trying to get on with it. Smiles, angry faces, politeness, unpleasantness even nuance all register, but don’t affect – maybe we all do this, I think we do, but I suspect many people are more sympathetic to their surroundings and it’s population than I am, they have more empathy.

But, when it comes to your friends or to people that you work with day in day out, one would think that even if they act in a way that appears out of character that one could at least fathom a motive upon further consideration?

Well, not so actually.

Quite who it was then that decided to coat the ear cuffs of my telephone head set in black marker pen ink will no doubt remain a mystery.

hairpins and dog legs

2007-04-17T14:48:00.000+01:00

Please don’t misunderstand, my absence hasn’t been due entirely to honing my dog parenting skills – but the ongoing saga of Toffee’s rear end has been one of defining elements of this year.

Just to keep you up to date: He originally had replacement cruciate and cartilage surgery not long after Xmas. That, unfortunately, was not a complete success, which eventually entailed another operation to remove a wedge of bone in lower leg, consequently changing the angle of his knee to relieve the pressure on the ligaments. Which seems to have been a success, all of the plates and pins seem to be holding together very well.

The problem being that having spent so long hobbling around, convalescing and slowly recovering on his left leg – that his right knee collapsed under the awkwardness of his movement and the general strain. I could have wept, it happened while we were out walking, without any warning, and I watched it literally crumble under him.

Sure enough, the vet confirmed that he had ruptured both cruciate ligaments in his right knee (pointing out, bless him, that it was actually better than he’d hoped since it was a sudden collapse and no damage had been caused to his cartilage).

Here we are, post op again. He’s actually doing rather well, albeit that his arse end appears to have been borrowed from a much skinnier dog. He’s not allowed very much exercise so while his bum and rear legs have wasted away he has tended to get heavier elsewhere…..so, to add insult to injury he is also on a diet.

Do you know, when we go back to the surgery for regular check ups and x-rays, he wags his tail?!!

He’s either developed Alzheimer’s too or has masochistic tendencies, or as I think I already understand, he is a big bag of stupid-love covered with fur and that as far as Toffee is concerned any attention is good attention.

(And, not that it’s of any concern whatsoever, except that it’s an excitingly large figure, Toffee’s insurance covered the first £2500 of treatment, but it has cost a further £4500 thus far, and the meter is still ticking – since the conversion rate is US$2 today I’m fairly confident in saying that equates to $9000. He is without doubt, the single most expensive thing I have ever owned apart from my house).

In other news:

I must (must) stop cutting my own hair.

Blogger lost my profile when I (Jenn that is) pushed me over the cyber cliff into Beta (as it took me an age to master the instructions to my VCR I won’t be doing anything too cerebral with a new profile).

I found a pair of suede brogues I like so much I bought two pairs.

I had a birthday and tried to sell it on e-bay, I was offered £1.20.

My motorbike works again, whoop whoop, so now I can spend warm Sunday afternoons killing enormous quantities of flies at ridiculous speeds.

Today I discovered sushi (tomorrow I will endeavour to un-discover it).

Note to self, receipts ARE important.

a steady hand

2007-02-21T13:18:00.000Z

Thank you Jenn. Just to prove I'm not a complete imbecile and I can handle the new blogger...bring it on...a few photo's of Tallinn for you.

And you thought I was just boozing, tch!

Where in the world is Estonia?

2007-02-15T18:09:00.000Z

Hi all. It's Jenn...The Upbeat Divorcee.

Our traveling Fishy is out and about but wants you to know all is well. He's in Tallinn...you know...in Estonia?

It's about 8 PM there, cold (by his standards), quaint in a Hanseatic kind of way. So far, he has negotiated lunch and is managing not to stare at the girls (who all seem to be astonishingly pretty). Next, he's off to the old town where he's told the bars stay open to 4am, cool!

Toffee is doing much better and taking a well earned break from Colin - at the spa (kennel). He starts hydrotherapy next week and, personally, Colin thinks he'll take to it like a dog to water....

(I feel a little guilty because when Colin returns, he's going to have to switch to the new Blogger...I used his one shot at the old one. I take full responsiblity if I've goofed it up something awful.)

a study in blue

2007-02-01T12:35:00.000Z

Toffee says thank you.

We don't know the outcome yet, there's a way to go, but we'll keep you posted.

cold toes

2007-01-24T14:24:00.000Z

The oddest thing.

The world was softly spoken we woke this morning. Too quiet even for duvet deafness, the snuggling in between eiderdown and pillow, the space where warm slumber meets the new day, where we test the air with our nose and allow those other senses to slowly emerge from their repose.

Today, instead of the insistent rumble and throb of hurly burly morning progress there is a hush of traffic as if through blancmange...and children’s voices too, usually drowned by the din of violent cars, are plainly audible laughing and shrieking beyond the window.

It’s cold on my nose as I burrow back into the covers. The window behind me radiates cold, and beyond the shutters, beyond the window pane, the sky’s cool grey is tinged with amber.

It’s snowing outside.

Normally I would be ecstatic. Even the grey humdrum of the city looks better for a sprinkling of snow – but mostly, because we so seldom have a reasonable fall. It is exciting to walk with the dogs, to watch their excitement at a new terrain. It’s exciting for me too, having grown up in the countryside of Scotland, to slip out of urban thrall after work - back into the wellie boots of youth amongst snow laden trees, with my boys, on a quiet, frigid night.

I wish it were that simple. Unfortunately one of us, Toffee, is still not well. He had his stitches removed last night along with further x-rays and a thorough examination. (He makes me proud, and rather humble. Whilst other dogs are causing chaos in the hospital waiting room he sits or lies, watching the world go by with big brown placid eyes. He’ll tolerate no end of pulling or twisting, man handling of an obviously sore joint, without a murmur of protest. I didn’t teach him these manners, they’re in his nature).

So for all that has already been done, while not wasted has neither worked. He has arthritis in his knee it is still too weak to support the load of any normal exercise. The surgeon spoke to us about a solution which involves removing a wedge of bone to change the angle of the knee and consequently the strain on the surrounding ligaments. The whole is then put back together and reinforced with pins and plates.

Apparently if it works, it works well. And if it doesn’t, (which is unlikely but possible) it can go very badly wrong.

Toff and I had a good long chat about it and we decided that he’d rather run again than spend his life walking on a lead. So…..next Tuesday.

There’ll be other snow falls.

of rabbits, in dreams

2007-01-10T21:30:00.000Z

I'm home.

Thank you for your well wishes, feeling a little dopey at the moment so I think I'll have a snooze.....but see you in the park soon!

ps 'scuse my bare bum.
x

The Toffster

paint your pallet blue and grey

2007-01-08T22:08:00.000Z

It’s been a while.

I’d hoped it might feel like a comfortable shoe that one could slip back into, but it feels rather more like an stiff old shirt, ill fitting and a little too tight around the collar.

So here’s to a happy, healthy new year to everyone before I forget, and a brief review of the events of the last few months by way of explanation and apology to friends I’m doing a bloody good job of not deserving.

Essentially I have been gone because at the end of last year I disappeared, figuratively, into a revolving door of travel and corporate entertainment, living out of suitcase, drunkenly, always packing, laundry, sleeping fitfully 'in transit' or dropping my poor boys of at the kennels, to the point where I…how can I describe, “lost balance” I think, forgot what was (is) important, even necessary, and then the wheels simply fell off. Just for a short while but terrifying nevertheless. I know Clotho by name, I held hands with Lachesis for a short while and turned away just in time to hide from Atropos, but I'm sure I smelt her breath and it was sweet and I was sorely tempted.

Just an incident. A lesson I suppose I couldn’t have missed.

So mostly since then I have been trying to immerse myself in what is self evidently important, friendship and the health necessary to enjoy them.

I had a great New Year in Minneapolis, I have to tell you that Sandra is amazing, the hostess with the mostest, kind and great fun (Laddie really is that beautiful and noble in person). Jenn is wonderful, truly upbeat, and with her friend Shelley the four of us just had one of the happiest, funniest, joyous nights I’ve had in an age. And I was honoured to meet the diminutive 4th of those blythe spirits and fell head over heals for a tiny, beautiful, shy girl with a spectacular grin that lit up the room when she deigned to eventually grace us with it.

And now it’s back to work, for a while at least, back into the revolving door but with a full battery and a better perspective.

Spare a thought for Toffee, he’s been in agony with his knee this past six weeks and he’s finally going to go for surgery on his cruciate ligament tomorrow…it’s by far the most important thing going on around here at the moment.

He's lying with his head on my lap as I write and I just want to tell him it's okay, you'll run again.

armpits, and life...

2006-11-08T14:46:00.000Z

Prithee what news of this muggly mulch of friv and splu that we call home?

Well, we've furtled in the evening mists and under the gibbous moon, lost, found, now you seem now you don't, I've fallen in a hole.

Barfed great swathes of onerous pricklies up bathroom walls and hallway carpets ("what made me eat it dad?", " well he did, he made me, it was stuck to his nose").

Woken in the smelly used sock of Bacchus' laundry basket amongst the fetid rummage of the previous night's debauch (far too often than is wise or strictly necessary).

Slept fitful churning...grumbled, gnashed and gurgled through troubled dreams of giant rabbits, swirling smoky overcrowded clouds of crows or old cheese sandwiches fallen behind overstuffed sofas, each to our own as is our want.

Gyred mightily and sprung sprightly from a standing start, involuntary aerobatics to accompany each whistle and banshee screech and pyrotechnic thud of light in the November night sky, "I don't know dad, I don't know why, it's louder in my head", bladder bursting jet propelled impropriety at every starburst shell or blast-it-to-buggeration-super-grenade-repeater, damn you Fawkes you were a fucker, we'd piss in your hat if you were here.

Made tea, in quantities to fill an effelumps bath, or ship a ship to Mandalay, and left said tea as tasting sad.

Been a single, furry ball, too may legs, too many heads on the fireside rug.

Frosted, toasted and roasted all in a single day.

Called it a day

Called it a weekend and then a week.

Call it a what you will, it's what we do.

mia culpa...so shoot me

2006-10-31T19:49:00.000Z

I want to say this simply, so please for once grant me the power to be clear.

I wrote something on Sunday which I looked at afterwards and felt so ashamed of I had to remove it, like looking at a side of oneself that you don't recognise or worse, that you do recognise but don’t like..

What I wanted to write about was how lucky I am. To wake up to the very epitome of glorious autumn, a crisp day bathed in late summer sunshine. The snuffle scruffle bum walk and stretch and cold nose in the ear from a Charlie, and a Toffee who loves nothing more than to drape his neck across yours, (if you've been silly, or drunk enough to leave your bedroom door open). To roll over and find the half a bottle of Taittinger, that you managed to smuggle out of the night club and all the way home on the tube, on your bedside table. A hairy hug, a sip of champagne, a piping hot shower, aspirin and scrambled eggs - what could be better. what more could a man want?

Nothing, really.

You see, we get to do pretty much anything we like whenever we want to. Of course I have to work but that's just about the only thing that gets in the way of sheer hedonism. We walk, we laugh, we are as tidy (or not) as we want to be, as punctual, shy, selfish or gregarious as our mood takes - sometimes we go out for a whole Sunday, lunch and all, without even taking a bath or brushing our teeth.

It's an agreement. A trade.

Because there are other things that we don't do anymore. In short we don't look for happiness beyond that which we can generate and sustain for ourselves. There are no external influences, nothing beyond this tiny, compact, introspective microcosm that has any impact on our (my) selfish existence.

Now that’s where it starts to go wrong, that sounds maudlin, regretful, but it’s not supposed to, that’s certainly not how I feel.
My only reservation is an inkling, a small persuasive voice that’s muttering that there ought to be a point. More point. Is a beautiful day still beautiful if you don’t share it? Of course it is? The Pearl Fisher’s duet is a small parcel of bliss that could stop yor heart, as evocative as the top of a baby’s head. A thrown stick and a puddle, the smell of new cut grass on a warm breeze.
Is it wrong then to want your world to shine? That’s not to walk through life oblivious to the mundane or the ugliness, but not to settle for less, in…anything.

What joy, what bliss, what ho, what's the point. You don’t find what shines by collecting lots of things that don’t.

And it's no big deal. That's the mistake I made on Sunday when I thought I might write something that might help me to understand. The mistake being of course that there is nothing to understand after all.

It really is a matter of 'so what'. Who actually gives a jaundiced squirrel? Once in these past three years I have made the ridiculous mistake of imagining that the hand that touched my face might stay there, but she was simply a friend of a friend caught up in a moment and doubtless too much tequila....gone in 60 seconds, a butterfly touch whipped away on the chilly night air, so transient that it was just my imagination. Stupid, stupid. Sex, important? No. The hand on your face, the fingers in your hair....or lack of them.
That's the knack of it.

I forget

2006-10-26T12:40:00.000+01:00

It must be age related. I have a memory like a sieve these days. It's like living in the twilight zone.

One particular problem is remembering birthdays….my family in its entirity consists of 3 people - and I regularly forget their birthdays (occasionally their names). It’s not as if I ignore them, I genuinely like them, but I end up sending them a gift and card at completely the wrong time in a fit of anxiety, because I’ve convinced myself I’ve forgotten (I once notoriously sent my niece her birthday present 2 months early – but I did get the day right).

It happens in the blogosphere too, I have consistently arrived late to the party and left behind numerous combined, belated congratulations and apologies.

Damn it I like you, I want to get it right.

It’s not a matter of just telling me, if you tell me today I will have forgotten tomorrow (I am as retentive as a chocolate teapot)…so, I’m going to be terribly anal and write them down, I shall make myself a “Birthday Book”.

But you’ve got to tell me when your birthday is (yes you!)…privately by email if you’re shy, or publicly in a comment (who knows, maybe other people might find it useful too?).

And then, if you don’t receive your Birthday wishes promptly it’s final proof positive that I am indeed completely pointless (as if that were needed).

presque vue

2006-10-23T18:41:00.001+01:00

sitting on the beach wrapped in a blanket. Huddled behind raised knees, listening to the waves, listening to the crash and grumble of a million smooth stones tumble and jumble with each inward and outward motion of the sea.

The slate grey sky is indistinguishable, inseparable from the sea. Distance is a tunnel, a funnel, a grinding machine into which all the colour of the world has been poured and washed and abraded to a gun metal base.

The wind carries spray and dirty wisps of spume beyond the reach of the retreating tide, further up the beach, to where I sit, wrapped in a blanket, huddled behind raised knees...sheltering from the cold stiff breeze and the threat of rain in the leaden air.

But I am not cold. Not a bit of it, I'm basking in the summer sun, as bright and cheerful a day as ever was. There on the top of the hill, staring down the lane, beyond the great oak to where the hill steepens and falls a half mile of helter skelter, pell mell, catch me if you can. The sun is warm, but more warming still is my bright blue pedal car and the anticipation of streaking down the hill away from the haunted house-not-home on the hill.

In my mind's eye I can see me. It is the summer holiday and the boy that I am watching is eleven years old. The summer stretches into the distance, for ever, beyond imagination. The sky is the bluest blue, somnolent, serene, the grass was never greener, long stalks of barley sway, susurrate softly whispering secrets to one another with each breath of air.

He is a creature of the outdoors, a town boy relocated into the Scottish countryside. Every day is an adventure teeming with discovery. Walking in the tall pine woods on an endless bed of fir needles, up to the ancient standing stones on the top of the hill, or down by the river across the shallow salmon run into the fields beyond where there is a lake, sunken, hidden from view by a ring of holly.

Anywhere other than indoors. From the moment that breakfast is finished until tea time and then straight out again until night fall, avoiding the musty gloom and great thick walls of the house on the hill, and the child within that cries “mummy”, but not from need, from dread. (We (my family) share a space with this tiny terrified phantom, but not a place in time. His dread and far too audible laments are somehow locked in the walls of the house like a recording on tape which is occasionally triggered by who knows what so that we can all relive his anguish. Or at least I think 'we' do for my parents will not discuss it).

On the beach the sun is setting. An unlikely skein of geese honk forlornly and bustle along the beach, easterly towards the first evening stars. Out at sea clouds appear like purple loaves, flat bottomed, I see reclining knights on the tomb lid of the horizon finally marking the division between sea and sky.

In the barn the boy has heard, amongst last years hay, mewling and shuffling - in the far corner behind great discarded, rusting farm implements whose purpose is not obvious. A brindle cat with kittens, five noses, ten closed eyes and twenty tiny paws in a single ball of fur, black, white, black and white, she looks back contented with her pale amber eyes and flexes her claws in and out against the surrounding straw as the kittens snuggle and suckle.

She is lying in a comfortable bowl of hay on the seat of a tiny, blue, pedal race car. I have not the heart to move her and her family, but my mother will, she’ll bring her inside and find her a place that’s warm and dark and safe in the pantry and give her milk and kitchen scraps. It’s deceitful of me I know, she was happy where she was, but I wanted that car.

The car is tiny, the wheels which were once solid metal discs with white rubber rims are chipped and freckled with rust, there is a small white steering wheel, everything else is blue, powder blue. It must be very old, an antique perhaps, like no ‘modern’ race car, but shaped like a sausage with a long bonnet with the seat forming the rear and only with some pushing can the boy squeeze his bottom down onto it. There’s no room inside the car for legs so they poke out in front, or more comfortably crossed over the bonnet beyond the steering wheel.

It’s strange (is it strange?) that sound takes on a different quality at night. Is it the diminution of one sense that heightens another? Or is it simply that the tide has turned, have I been here that long? But the mutter of the sea rolled stones seems more brittle now, and I feel cold, the damp chill has begun to seep through the warm folds of my blanket.

But still, with my eyes closed I can see a summer’s day. I can remember the other me carrying the car across the cobbled yard to the top of the hill. It’s nearly half a mile starting between the house wall and the corner of the great outhouse on the edge of the courtyard. Nearly half a mile of hedge lined lane with no other purpose, no end other than the farm house, not a home, perched on the hill at the edge of the forest.

I am (he is, we are at that moment) eleven years old. There is no doubt what I will do, not a moments hesitation. I sit the car down on the very brow of the hill and tuck my feet up, crossed, on to the bonnet. Down the hill the great oak beckons, swallows swoop and dive above the barley, butterflies dance in the briar and as I look up a dragon fly zig zags across the lane like a sparkling green automaton. For these last few seconds I am the only thing in my world that cannot fly. But not for long.

The car is so small that I can reach the ground with the palms of my hands and I press backwards, rolling us forward on to the first gentle slope.

Slowly, ever so slowly at first, we begin to roll. There’s a rasping, grating, rusty exhalation from long unused bearings and we are off. Yard by yard, picking up speed, faster and faster, a sideways glance confirms that the hedges that are now rushing by are beginning to blur. Faster and faster. There is a sound of wind and rush and hurry now.

We are only half way down the first relatively gentle segment of the hill, beyond the oak it angles down. Faster and faster. I can see over the false horizon of the half-hill now, the lane disappears, but I can see the fields below beyond the road that the lane will intersect, beyond that the gravel track leading to the stone hump back bridge across the railway.

Faster and faster. I can steer but tears are streaming from my eyes. Under the branches of the great oak we flash, we are a blue streak now, there is no car, I have wheels. Screaming half laughter half terror, faster even faster, the world is a blur, no stopping, no brakes, nerveless fingers and a rictus grin, crying, laughing and howling like a loon.

No tractor or caravan on the road pleeeease today. However did I think that I would stop this tiny blue juggernaut? We shoot out of the lane, the embodiment of coruscating, sparkling blue glee, across the road in a flash and onto the gravel path opposite. Showered with stones, holding hard, gripping the steering wheel with every ounce of petrified strength, up the incline of the bridge to an eventual halt in the grassy bank on the other side. Slowly unclenching numb fingers and face, unbuckling legs and backside to unfold into a wobbly, unsteady upright to look back up the hill and begin to unravel the sheer idiocy of it.

I cannot see the house.

And there is one other thing I know, immediately, I will do it again. And when at night I lie in bed and strain not to hear that child’s torment, I will cover my head with my pillow and think about the blue car.

On the beach I stand up. My bottom and knees are stiff, fingers crack open from unconscious balled fists. With the blanket draped across my shoulders I stoop to pick up a stone to fling into the sea and wipe my eyes.

I remember the blue car. But I don’t remember him at all. It should feel like me, but the memory I have is….the memory of a character I have read in a book, or the memory of a film. It should be me, we should be me, the same, he should be vivid like the car but somehow he's not, we became...separated.

But it was our blue car.

Of rolling over to find you when its quiet....

2006-10-13T16:58:00.000+01:00

For each of us a season.

The back door is open and chill coils of mist spill down the jambs to the floor to eddy and pool. But not too far, its too warm in here for you, soon you'll be reconstituted, twinkling droplets on the coir strands of the mat. Fresh from the bathroom in a towel, making coffee and enjoying the counterpoint of cool and snug warmth, I can see you, plod plod plodding up the rear steps. Brown-wetter-than-normal-nose first you appear out of the foggy shroud little by little and stand on the threshold, half in half out, writing nonsense with your tail to ask, "did I hear a dish being filled dad, was that the cupboard door?".

"Yes it was chuck, now go and fetch your dozy mate". And these are the 5 minutes I keep for myself in the morning, sitting in the kitchen watching Charlie delicately pick at his breakfast while Toffee sets at his with such gusto that his whole body seems to clench and fragments of kibble ping and ricochet off the walls.

Today our sounds, the slurpings and munchings, the ping of the kettle and rattle of the spoon, are more precise, resonant almost, our aural colour, since the world outside is quiet wrapped in a blanket of thick muffling fog.

To wake up on a foggy autumn day is to wake up and discover that you are deaf. To lean out of bed to wipe a hand across the window to see the world confirms that you have also lost the faculty for colour. The world outside is shades of grey, and suddenly, shockingly visible cobwebs an inch from your nose. The fog has permeated the glass, a misty osmosis beading the inner surface and the little river that I have formed runs down my arm and drips, coldly onto the bedside table.

It's too early to get up, too late to go back to sleep. There's a warm snug nest in the middle of the bed and cooler spots for toes on either side. Four great fluffy pillows to make soft walls, to cocoon until this bleary eyed splutterfly emerges into the world. So comfortable to lie there, so quiet and utterly peaceful. A short distracting day dream of a soft warm bottom sleepily resting against my leg, a freckled shoulder and slender neck draped in tussled hair, framing the smell of blissful contented sleep...I miss you (whoever you are)...

...no time for loss. There is no time to concentrate on what is not.

A different bottom, a bony bum with tail, bumps against the bedroom door accompanied by a loud, stage sigh, "pfffhhhhhhhhhh" ("are you ever getting up"?). How does he always know when I'm awake? I'll leave them in their separate space each night, tucking them in with a brief tummy rub, Charlie on his beanbag and Toffee in the corner of 'his' sofa. But every morning when I get up and open the bedroom door a large brown inquisitive eye will peer into the room and the patch of hallway floor immediately outside will be warm. And we'll sit outside for a moment and play rough and tumble, on my bare bum on the cold wooden floor, and it's good, it's great.

That's a part of why I like this time of year - beyond the colour and quality of light, the crunch of leaves and the feeling that everything is somehow richer, readier, complete - there is also coolness. It's no longer a world of dull warmth, (the summer warmth where every surface feels the same), but a dappled landscape of temperature, a place where fingers and noses are cold and toes are as snug as a bugs in a rug. When I'm warm I'm simply warm but when I'm cold I have choices and surprises and the opportunity for the mundane to be small delights, thick socks, soup, sunshine on a woodland walk, even a proffered smile is more warming on an autumn day.

It's an evening for wellie boots and a torch lit scramble I think. And tomorrow a lie in, and perhaps a day dream before the alarm bum strikes the door and says "come out".

Of knots in string...

2006-10-10T19:28:00.000+01:00

I don’t get it….sorry that’s true, but misleading. I’ll start again…

I don’t understand, after all I’ve looked after my body. No, really, I have. I’ve been taking copious amounts of alcohol for years simply as a preservative. And I did hear that a glass of red wine is good for you so, ipso facto, a couple of bottles must be full of goodness?

Following the advice of some of the greatest medical minds (of the seventeenth century) I smoke, not because I enjoy it, but to protect myself from common evils like the ague, dropsy and melancholia.

My doctor once told me that if I wanted to stay healthy I should ‘observe the Mediterraneans’ and I have. Closely. I am happy to report that I can now distinguish between a Croat and a Greek from a distance of 75 yards. (I once studied a particular Italian young lady for almost half an hour before her boyfriend offered to take me outside and help me to rearrange my spectacles).

Why then is it that bits of me seem to be abandoning ship at the moment. My poxy bloody knee, or at the least the cartilage thereof, has decided enough is enough and has hung up it’s clogs. Damn you tiny piece of my anatomy, how dare you remind me that I actually need you in order to get from my bed to the bathroom (it’s usually some time after I’ve woken up that I become fully aware, I’m not used to the application of sharp, unexpected pain to startle me into existence).

So, as much as I normally dislike them, I thought I’d write a list, along the lines of, “12 things that are wrong with me”, or maybe “12 more reasons I live alone” might be more apt:

1. One of my eyes doesn’t work, at least it works in the way that a kaleidoscope works.
2. I can’t decorate for toffee, I can do the big bits but the little fiddly bits fill me with dread.
3. I smoke and I drink probably far too much.
4. I can be as much fun as a wet Wednesday evening.
5. I’m impatient, if I want something then I want it now.
6. I have an unfeasibly large penis (far too big to be accommodated comfortably).
7. I am prone to exaggeration to the point of lying
9. I find it difficult to concentrate.
10. I bore easily
11.

(You are very welcome to suggest additions to the list of things that are wrong with me if you think that I've left out anything particularly relevant or ghastly).

So, there you have it.

Fish.

Boned.

Oh do shut up...

2006-10-07T00:06:00.000+01:00

Every now and then you’ll be involved with, or overhear the conversation that begins, “I wish I’d lived ‘then’, life was so much simpler", and every time my jaw drops in the face of such stark idiocy.

‘Then’ can cover a multitude of sins according to the nostalgic whimsy of whichever plonker comes over all misty eyed at the time. At this point my eyes roll up, because I’m certain that more often than not the main reason that life was simpler 'then' was simply because there was a distinct lack of choice, and indeed considerably less of life to complicate.

There seems to be some particular affection for the Victorian period. It must have been smashing. A time of 'family' and moral standards, (did you know that it was quite commonplace to deposit the product - babies that is - of the illicit union between the master of the house and a ‘downstairs’ maid in the Thames?)...but that’s an aside.

I always try to imagine where I might have fitted in to a past society relative to where I am now. I might have been lucky and had a job in a bank or I may have been a salesman, toting my wares in a suitcase from business to business or even household to household. God forbid I would have enlisted into the burgeoning army arriving from the countryside to man the fires and jennys of the industrial revolution.

I might have married, we might have had children. If I did work in the mill I would have been working for 12 hours a day, and like everyone else in the same situation I would have had a whole half day to do with as I please – polish my clogs I suppose. And my wife would have worked there too, a slave to the machine. The children, when they were young, would have been left at home, stunned senseless and inert with a dose of laudanum from the crack of sparrow fart until late evening.

Ah deep joy, the simple life for me. No supermarkets, no prevaricating between these beans or those beans, which loo roll to go for, air fresheners, do I need the 2ft roll of cling film or the 30 inch roll, none of the daily folderol and flimsy….nooo, actually hardly any choice at all, or nutrition for that matter. I don’t need to worry about what to do with the kids at the weekends, we’ll do as we always do and go down to the shore of the Thames to scavenge coal, what fun! There’s not a thought in my head about their education – what in god’s name would they want one of those for, I can’t read or write or do ‘guzintas’ and I put bread on the table every week thank you very much. And my pension is the furthest thing from my mind, after all it’s unlikely I’m going to live beyond 40, what a blissful existence.

As if our daily lot in the factory weren’t dangerous enough, (Arthur lost an whole arm to the furnace yesterday and he’ll never work again, of course he’ll never get paid or masturbate again either), there’s a whole host of really exciting diseases out there just waiting to experiment with my body; rickets, whooping cough, dysentery, cholera (we don’t have sanitation at home as such, well we do, but we call it a bucket), diphtheria, there was even a rumour of a spot of plague up on Cheapside last week – and whatever viral exotica the rats and the fleas bring with them to Canary Wharf from distant corners of our most excellent and apparently far flung empire. There’s something called the "‘flu" (I think)coming in from India next week, I’m sure we’ll all enjoy that .

Of course our favourite nights are in the winter months where we hunker down, as a family, under the blanket with our broth and think how lucky we are to have salvaged enough faggots of wood for this meagre fire. On Sundays we can hear the chimes of Bow Bells summoning the toffs for the evening service and we chuckle – we chuckle because we know – we know that they are struggling through the cold night air made thick as treacle by the smoke which pools and swirls, unable to rise in the frigid air, our own dear smog – and for once, unprotected by their windows, they are as susceptible as us to the great leveller, consumption, the grim reaper of our age. So we laugh, unless one of us coughs, which is an awkward moment.

I should not want a tooth ache though. The man a few doors down died not too long ago from a toothache. He was afraid you see, too scared to visit the blacksmith, so he endured the pain as long as he could, he picked and picked at his swollen gum until it looked as if he had a pigeon egg in there, until eventually one night, wracked with agony he had his wife strike it with a chisel – and out it popped! Too late, too late, his blood was poisoned and the fever took him away. Never be afraid of the blacksmith is my motto, better a fast, clean pain than the torment of leaving a rotting tooth. Easy for me to say I suppose because I only have 6 teeth left now.

I did hear tell that the old Queen has wooden teeth, imagine that, who’s ever heard of such a thing, they’re pulling our legs.

And back in the pub my eyes un-glaze and I pop back into the reality of health care and fresh food, and the simpering idiot is still extolling the virtues of the ‘simple life’, and I think oh do shut up...Dickens was wasted on you.

“Anyone fancy a pint?”

Moirae..

2006-10-03T22:14:00.000+01:00

I feel at a really low ebb. It’s no biggy and I know it won’t last, the sort of thing I can normally cure with a glass of wine and an almond slice – and I have no excuse after all, I’m tucked up in the corner of the sofa with a pair of pooches fast asleep next to me (Charlie is draped across my foot at the moment and he’s dreaming, chasing rabbits, twitching and “ruffle-scruffing” in his sleep).

Nevertheless, all I can think of to write about are the things that have startled, saddened, sickened or simply scared the shit out of me today:

They are, apparently, trying the case of a six year old girl who was taken from.her.bath (she was told to be quiet or she would be hurt), driven away, sexually assaulted, raped and then returned to the edge of town, naked cold and god knows how petrified and told to face the wall whilst her abductor made his escape. The accused is apparently a 37 year old male neighbour.

Today I discovered the identity of the neighbour who appears to think it is okay to put whatever household rubbish they have accumulated the previous day into a plastic carrier bag and leave it in the street. We have urban foxes, the bag is ripped open and the contents strewn across the pavement so that the rest of us have to walk through a hideous mess of someone else’s domestic detritus; chicken carcases, vegetable matter, empty cans, even used nappies. I know because I met them depositing today's offering, and having had quite enough of tip toeing down the street with the dogs I confronted them. “Why?”…but I couldn’t communicate my disgust because we didn’t share a language. I could only point and look horrified.

Apparently I have one of those faces whereby people appear to think it’s okay to ask me how I feel, nod, and then tell me, chapter and verse, exactly what is wrong with their life.

The two Irish men who I met tonight walking a whole flock of lurchers who spoke to me at length about I know not what. You have to be careful in London, let’s face it you have to be careful in any big city. I couldn’t understand a bloody word that they were saying, they might have been extras from “Snatch”, and while they seemed friendly enough I was worried that I might nod or smile or look disinterested at just the wrong moment. That and the fact that Charlie fights well above his weight, unlike his dad he’s scared of nothing and there was a very real chance that he might pick a fight with one of the scary, hairy hare coursers.

That the North Koreans have announced that they will test a nuclear device, And that it is apparently our fault (those of us who have them already) because of course they find it threatening. Why oh why anyone in their right mind would want to threaten North Korea UNLESS they appear to be a belligerent, nuclear threat, I have no idea.

I burnt my dinner.

And no, I’m not forgetting that the Amish are trying to conduct their grief with whatever dignity they can amongst the bright light of the world’s press. And that they, probably more than any of us, will never understand that the eventual furore will focus – not on gun laws – but on heightened security for schools.

This world gives me the heebie jeebies at times.

All I know is that Clotho spins the thread of one’s life, Lachesis measures its length and Atropos will inevitably, eventually sever it.

So I shouldn’t wish for sleep but on the whole I’d rather today just buggered off...

make hay while the sun shines!

2006-09-22T20:15:00.000+01:00

The blog genie is letting me post photos (whoop whoop) so:

Rio

Stavanger (Norway)

an orange...

2006-09-22T20:06:00.000+01:00

....bathroom seemed like such a good idea at the time.

Now where did I put those aspirin...

in the event of gas....

2006-09-18T21:37:00.000+01:00

I don’t where to start.....it’s been a while.

Which could be the opening line for various different subjects, so let’s draw a veil over the more sordid possibilities and move right along.

Out of the last ten days I’ve spent three ‘in transit’. I feel like a sort of person-parcel, sent second class, and I’m just grateful that my baggage arrived at the same time and places that I did. There’s nothing more comforting and refreshing than a clean, crisp pair of undercrackers at the end of a long-haul.

Any kind of ‘hauling’, long or short, is made all the more tedious now by the heightened level of security at all of the international airports. At Heathrow the security status is now Dildocom One, meaning that anyone attempting to smuggle such apparently life threatening artefacts as toothpaste or lip balm on or upon their person is promptly marched into the car park and shot. The bodies are hung from the top storey in the manner that farmers display dead crows to dissuade other vermin.

And of course they take anything capable of lighting a cigarette (why oh why do I never remember to pack a stone and flint in my luggage) so that when I arrive in the good old USA with two tiny little hours before I have to board my connecting flight – instead of heading for the transit lounge I brave the incredulous stares of passport control, customs and security (“how long are you staying?”, “one hour and fourty five minutes”, “excuse me?”, “I’d like a cigarette” (“but you b#stards, in your infinite wisdom have decided to criminalise poor f#cks like me who are paying the price for having bought a pack of ten when we were twelve years old and have neither sufficient will power or time to break the terrible burden of habit portrayed by the rugged, lariat-wielding, heroic yet coughing and spluttering Marlboro’ man who just a few years ago epitomised everything clean and wholesome and American – may I go now, we are using up the time that I would rather spend killing myself?”, obviously - unsaid), I smile and try to look just a little pathetic, but genuine.

London, Miami, Sao Paulo, Rio – Rio, Sao Paulo, New York, London. I was graced with a whole row of empty seats, an inquisitive person (who I scowled at and sneezed on), and a very (extremely) large lady from Buggered Hut, Wisconsin, (I thought she said) who damn near suffocated me during a troubled sleep. I sat determinedly for ten hours pressed against the cabin wall while her fleshy elbows rose and fell like enormous pink metronomes. I didn’t pee the entire time, and I’m sure I went a whole hour without exhaling during lunch, which she ate with gusto accompanied by a gale of crumbs - while I deliberatley picked at my food and to her consternation took a bite out of everything (each of 3 crackers) even though I had no intention of finishing them.

I had hoped to meet someone in Miami, but I couldn’t make myself understood over the noise of the bar I’d managed to find, and my mobile was acting up – but probably just as well because no one wants to spend time with someone who has spent ten smelly hours on a flight and has a lit cigarette in every bodily orifice.

(Is it just me or do aeroplane farts have a particular and nauseating odour? Is it the food or the re circulating air, or perhaps the effect of pressure differentials on passengers intestinal tracts. Whatever it is it’s loathsome, and it’s viral, it starts with a single trouser cough but soon after there is general botty burping and the resulting reek would send a Victorian sewer cleaner out for air).

Lawks, I sound like the grinch don’t I?

Rio is amazing. I knew it would be but I didn’t know in what way, I was just prepared to be none specifically flabbergasted. But I know now: It’s so vibrant, so full of life, there’s a joie de vie that’s almost palpable.

I’d been told to be careful, it could be a dangerous place. To be sure, I’m certain that if I’d walked through certain areas with my camera in one hand and mobile ‘phone in the other I would have been mugged – and just as sure of the same outcome if I’d have walked through some areas in London, or any big city for that matter.

Obviously I was spoiled. I stayed literally twenty five yards from the Copacabana, where everyone played during the day and promenaded or exercised on in the evening. I wasn’t exactly thrown in amongst it. Nevertheless the joy and carpe diem spirit of the people is obvious. I was talking with a young lady in a bar one night and asked her “is it still beautiful to you?”, “what?” she said. “Rio, is it still beautiful?”. She looked nonplussed for a moment and I thought I would have to explain (thank goodness her English was far better than my non-existent Portuguese) that I meant that sometimes people who live in a place can be inured to it’s beauty and she said “of course” as if it were an idiotic question. Of course it was. So we had another Capirinha which is remarkable a combination of life blood and jet fuel, makes it impossible to be unhappy - and absolutely should not be drunk by the pint.

I could have spent the entire time on the beach. But obviously I was there to work, so I found a compromise, a rhythm. The conference I attended was an hours coach trip away (I spent every day glued to the window), starting at noon and finishing at eight in the evening (night drops like a stone at six pm). So every day I dragged my sorry behind out of bed, laundered and fed it, and spent two luxurious hours on the beach before putting on a suit.

It was in excess of 35deg some days, completely devoid of air conditioning and stuffed to the rafters with outrageously beautiful women who’s sole role in life appeared to be to take your business card and make you sweat. (At one point during the week I recalibrated, for two days I had been thinking “she’s beautiful, oh and so is she, oooh and her” until I realised that in order to make any progress at all I would have to discard the simply ‘beautiful” and only spare a glance for the ‘absolutely stunning’ – I think it was after I walked into a concrete pillar).

And it was hot. Fortunately it was quite dry too so there was no sweating, but what with the ambient temperature and the visual stimulus my underwear simply melted one afternoon and slid down my leg into my shoe (and they ask us why we wear dark blue suits?!).

Home now, with two dogs fast asleep and snoring gently on the sofa, it all seems so very far away. Well..of cours..it is.

(And as per usual, the blog god will not allow me to publish photo's).

Cap'n Grumpy Guts

2006-09-07T13:28:00.000+01:00

please give me the strength to be, at the least, civil.

Two ten hour flights separated by a nine hour stopover in Miami on the way to Rio....not to mention a 4 am start. If the person next to me on either flight introduces themselves cheerily and chatters away - I will bite them, I will.

I am the long haul grinch.

(Still no internet at home so I hope you are all safe and well out there).

poo, with a light dusting of sugar

2006-08-30T16:33:00.000+01:00

I’ve just arrived home after ten days away in Norway to find out that the my internet connection at home will be kaput until at least the 12th of September (by which time I’ll be off elsewhere). Which is a bit of a bugger.

So no blogging from me then. But I’ll try to say hello in other ways if I can.

Mind you, I’ve plenty to occupy myself what with tidying up all of the mess I left behind, finding out who I owe apologies to and getting to know the two strange, emaciated looking dogs I found in the house...and all.

oh poo

2006-08-19T12:04:00.000+01:00

it's lunchtime, i've just woken up, on the sofa. one of the dogs has been sick on the carpet and i'm wearing charlie like a hat....i wish somebody would come round and shower me, or maybe put me in the washing machine...

duck soup

2006-08-15T22:37:00.000+01:00

My friend Derek owns a house on the beach in Peranporth, Cornwall. You can walk directly from the door, past Cathedral Rock, into the surf. This weekend there were a houseful of guests, they came from all over, a congregation to enjoy some company, a few drinks, a little surfing and some general dolittle. And I fell in love.

I think we all did. With Georgia.

Georgia is a smile, a turned up nose and gentle freckles, a shock of blond hair and a guileless, simple charisma that melts the heart. “Pass me the…” she’d say “Can I have a…”, and we’d feel pleased to be asked. “Pick me up” she said, and I put her down, eventually, three days later. Georgia is four years old.

It’s strange what keys exist, what doors open to unexpected draughts, what negligible force it takes to persuade.

I managed to broker a deal this week, the best deal I’ve ever done, and I’m renowned for waking in the morning surrounded by the slops of the previous night with a signature in my hand.

This one is for me though. I handed in my resignation, a year’s notice - more than enough time for them to find someone to take my place, and plenty of time for me to galvanise myself, or rather us, to travel. To go look, and find out.

(ps Any suggestions on where might be a good place to spend New Year in the States?)

having trouble sleeping? then we'll begin...

2006-08-07T22:04:00.000+01:00

Does it ever occur to you to wonder how the future will look back on the USA? In some future history, how will the States be portrayed?

I suppose in many respects that will depend on who is writing the text books.

We (in Britain) have become apologists for our past, for the misdemeanours of our Imperial antecedents, in many respects simply for having the audacity to make the most of the opportunities that were presented by the circumstances of the time: The introduction of banking (thanks to the Dutch entrepreneurs of the East India company) which facilitated the building of a huge fleet of merchant and naval vessels, the industrial revolution, the dreadful domestic conditions which contrived to convince people that they may be better off trying their luck in the "new world".

This did not happen over night. The 'progress' of Britain into the Indies, the Americas the Far East and Australia was made against a back drop of almost continuous war with Spain and France and the politics of the blockade and siege.

What in fact is "Empire"? Are we currently living in the days of the American Empire? If empire is a global sphere of influence dominated by an individual nation, then yes, we are certainly witnessing a stage in the development of the Empire of the USA.

Historically 'Empire' is forged by more than political will or force of arms. It is true that we associate many empire states with charismatic individuals, Genghis Kahn or Alexander the Great, who wielded political might or were the figure heads for religious fervour and associated 'divine' conquering armies. However it is probably fair to say that most of these individuals were the product of their times, who catalysed a ground swell of popular opinion, a swelling feeling of outrage amongst the common citizenry of the time against their poverty or ingenuousness of the current aristocracy. Whether it be by fomenting religious belief or a sense of being chosen by the their plight, such people are easy to manoeuvre into a fighting force.

One overriding precondition for Empire is culture. Culture in as much as it is a belief by a people in whatever principles bind their society together. Their laws, practices, tolerance of religious belief, which lead inevitably to the expression of the people in terms of arts, education and philosophy. Consider if you will the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Moors all of whom were warlike in their own proportion, but all of whom, after making war, made peace. The geographical spread of these Empires encompassed culturally diverse peoples who were not necessarily simply overrun and 'cleansed' of their existing social structure. Within the overriding ethic of the 'invaders' there was an absorption of local knowledge which fed the arts and strengthened rather than weakened the whole. Probably the most visually impactful outward appearance of this is the growing sophistication of architecture associated with the progress of an empire whose territory is expanding to incorporate different cultures. The Moorish temples and strongholds of southern Spain are subtly different to those of North Africa despite the builders probable desire to faithfully emulate the buildings from whence they came.

This is Empire in it's ascendant.

There seems to be a point where a civilisation begins to turn in on itself, where the cultural influences reach their zenith and are replaced by personal financial and political machinations which begin a spiral downwards in to decadence. (Ring any bells?). There is a difference between entrepreneurial guile coupled with an overriding moral sense or principle which funds growth, and the need to amass wealth, power and influence as an object in its own right. This is decline. It is fragmentary and the cause of inward focus that loses the impetus for growth needed by Empire and eventually fundamentally flaws it's ability to defend itself from external threats.

The Romans never successfully returned to the 'blissful' state of Republic. It's not as if they were crucially overstretched, but they had become a decadent society in so much as their politics was centred almost exclusively around the struggle for survival and inheritance of their Caesers. Nero was by no means the first (or maddest or deadliest) or most self destructive of their Emperors. Succession to the throne by a string of self absorbed rulers had dire consequences for all of those who had formed each previous government. There was generally a cull of the unlucky administrators who had been loyal to the previous Emperor (governors of vassal states, chancellors, ambassadors and generals) to the extent that the Romans eventually effectively decapitated their own administration. (Do we learn? It seems not. There are plenty of comparisons in recent history, although possibly not on the same scale, but Pol Pot and Idi Amin certainly spring to mind).

When the Mayflower arrived in America it did not bring the first settlers from the UK. A settlement had already been established in Virginia. In Virginia the chances of surviving (quite apart from the difficulties of making the voyage) the first year were pretty much 50:50. Departing to America was not for the faint hearted, and indeed the Mayflower was not simply crowded with religious refugees seeking a place to enjoy freedom from persecution. There were more 'adventurers' than Pilgrim Fathers, more people that thought that they stood a better chance of scraping out a living from an unknown soil than the fields from which they had been dislodged in Britain. The population of America grew in no small part because of fish. Thousands of barrels of salt fish were exported from the early British settlements. Make no bones about it, these people came to survive and hoped to prosper, not simply to die whilst maintaining their beliefs.

Puritanism and profit were institutionalised by the Massachusetts Bay Company, and they also discovered the importance of a third ‘p’, procreation. Unlike Virginia the population of Massachusetts swelled rapidly to nearly twenty thousand in the first 15 years of occupation. And they could hardly deny the existence of an indigenous population of American Indians.

(Did you ever wonder why “Indian”. It’s very simply that the British came to India before America, so anyone of a coloured background who couldn’t provide an understandable term for their race became an “Indian”).

The native population was tolerated, but once the numbers of settlers swelled and new land was required, well the story is well told no doubt. But of probably 5 million original inhabitants in 1500 by the 1800's there were less than 250,000, ravaged as much by disease, diphtheria, smallpox, influenza as clashes with their new hosts.

The great paradox of the first ‘civil’ war (there was of course no America at that time), was that by then the New Englanders who fomented it were amongst the wealthiest in the British Empire. In 1763 the average Briton paid 26 shillings in taxes, whilst the average New Englander paid just 1 shilling.

So why a revolution? It must have been at the very heart of the “American’s” conception of themselves, a struggle to break free from an evil empire? A creation myth perhaps?

And what relevance does this have? It is simply the formation of a state, of a nation. Not all nations that have aspired to Empire have made particularly noble beginnings. China has enjoyed thousands of years of cohesive civilisation, prior to which the land mass that we call China was inhabited by a myriad feudal and constantly warring kings and nomadic tribes. The American civil war had a similar effect to the 'combining wars' of the Chinese Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi, bringing together not just two disparate beliefs and geographical areas into one cohesive state, but probably more like at least four (independent California and Alaska would probably have thrived if the larger USA had not been formed).

It is not until after the 1st great war that the United States of America could properly be called a “superpower”. Following the 2nd world war, the fall of the former Soviet Union this status had been confirmed. The USA fulfils almost every criteria to fill the vacancy for Empire: A dominant nation state with immense influence on the peoples of other nations around the world. Protective of its own borders whilst (rather than using “tax” as the instrument of it’s power and wealth) securing preferential access to commodities and necessary raw materials combined with prohibitive trade juristiction. The USA is the cornerstone of the global economy, at present the US$ is not founded on the country’s actual industrial production or balance in trade, it is an arbitrary value, a license to print money, conceded as a right by other countries to a dominant force. This will change, and the change will be breathtakingly rapid for those who live in that era.

So what of cultural exports? There is no doubt that the USA has had a cultural influence on the rest of the world. Without being frivolous there exists a global determinator of wealth which measures how long an individual has to work in any particular society in order to afford a “Big Mac”. It is not America’s fault that it rose to its power in an era of astounding scientific progress hastened by two world wars. That America has presided over the race for space, witnessed and driven the development of engineering and electronic marvels, and turned so much of the technology to the most altruistic avenues of science is to its credit.

This is also the era of communication. We are all so well informed so abruptly that criticism is inherent in our current society in a way that it was not even 100 years ago. (In the 1700’s it took 4 to 5 months to send a message from London to an ambassador or general in Hong Kong). War is become a spectator sport, politics are short term and fragmentary. We have always voted with our feet, whatever policies within a manifesto suit us we will choose. But within that process everything, EVERYTHING is become immediate, because we choose government that can not fulfil its promises to its citizens without a tendency towards Imperialism. There is absolutely no way that the USA can continue to remain a financial giant without interfering in global politics.

Perhaps that’s the difference, the pendulum is shorter, perhaps rise and fall are now just decades apart?

the river

2006-08-03T14:40:00.000+01:00

the sun has set behind the wooded escarpment beyond the black glass of this wide sweep of river. The trees along the ridge are silhouetted against a red mackerel sky as if in the embers of a great fire. It is a memory of the midday sun that crackled amongst the branches leeching sap from their cracked, desiccated skin earlier in the day. Now they stand solemnly with arms uplifted refreshing themselves in the cool, moist evening air. And the river winds its way around the foot of the hill in slow whirling eddies, like mercury, without a gurgle or apparent ripple.

The sky is changing quickly. While the filigree of fish bone clouds ride high in the pale blue and rose sunset - towards the East the sky is blackened, and great boulders of purple and flint are building thunderheads roiling up and out like billowing smoke in the rafters of a vast vaulted cathedral nave.

The willow rustles in the cooling breeze. The leaves of Rhododendrons and Azaleas dance an arrhythmic jig to nature's metronome, the first pitter patter of rain drops that presage the coming storm. A moor hen clatters across the leaden flow of the river into the shelter of the reeds. On the other bank, what human activity had begun to be observed by back lit windows is now obscured as shutters close to keep the warm light in - and the unruly elements out.

Somewhere in the distance the storm has already begun, a dry rumble of thunder rolls faintly over the hill like shifting barrels in a farflung cellar.

All this time I've sat in the garden, the grotto of a bistro, under a red slated veranda peering out through the vines and bourgenvilla and the swelling scent of honeysuckle. I'm freshly laundered, dusted down and showered after a day of chateau spotting down country lanes and occasionally across fields of cattle on a creaky rented bicycle. I'm tired, pleasantly achy and still tingling from the scorching sun, but now I have an aperitif. A glass of achingly dry sauvignon sweating icy tears and I'm comfortable and happy with my wine and utterly enchanted by the changing flavour of this countryside.

Rather incongruously, since I am the only person here except for the lady serving at the bar, two men in short leather jerkins and ruffled white shirts have begun to play guitars and sing melancholy songs in strong nasal inflections. I have some French but the local patina has made it so difficult to understand, for me, that I can barely order a simple dinner and their song is lost on me except for the occasional word or phrase. I think it’s a love song, but I’m not sure, it may be about the loss of a favourite goat. Perhaps they’re the same thing.

This is the valley of the river Loire. Winding its way West and South below Paris towards the coast the Loire is an area of lush green, full of arable land, farms and villages. Thunderstorms are common here in the summer. The afternoon sun is intense and the wide green basin cups and holds the heat in a breathless cauldron. Any sea-born cooler breeze is driven up quickly to condense and form the frisson of electricity at the heart of a breaking storm.

There are great towns, Tours, Chartres, built around cathedrals visible for miles across a thousand acres of corn and sunflowers, but the real Loire is found along it’s tributaries where the Noblesse of France, the nobility, built there chateaux. They are excruciatingly beautiful, like Cinderella’s castles, set high on hills, or obscurely behind thick walls along gravel drives amongst the shelter of dense woodland.

Always though, like most things human, we are drawn to edges, to the boundaries of the physical landscape, and the chateaux are drawn to water – to the banks of the Loire.

I’ve been drawn to Saumur, to one the grandest, most ostentatious chateau of them all. It stands above all else dominating every aspect of the surrounding town, where the Loire is bridged, twice, courtesy of a narrow island separating its flow in two.
That is where I sit now, on the island, in a small restaurant in a grove of apple trees found by descending a set of narrow railed stairs on the stanchion of the central section of the old stone bridge. Apparently I can get home later by a quicker route as some others will be rowing a boat a little upstream towards where I am parked for the night. The conversation completely exhausted my French and I left happily with my glass and a last “merci” to sit outside and watch the storm.

The beauty of it is they do not think I’m odd to want to sit outside and watch the elemental fury unfold. I’m joined by others, some who stay and eat as I do and some who came out for a brief glimpse as dragons fight for possession of the sky above, as the heavens boil and transform the picturesque beauty of the chateau across the river into flickering still shots of Dracula’s castle.

It is mesmeric.

I exchange knowing looks and nods with people at neighbouring tables. Sometimes after particularly violent coruscations, when the lightening shrieks through the sky with an audible dry crackle immediately followed by a stunning, shocking boom we, who’s hands had shivered a moment ago, raise our glasses in a toast – out of respect for the gods of thunder and our grandstand seat and our acceptance, conscious or unconscious, of their implacable power.

Later that night two men pole the boat to the far bank. I sit in the rear, (holding a bottle of the excellent sauvignon with the cork removed and replaced for my night cap), with my other hand drifting in the water. There are two couples returning home and the jongleurs, who are not singing anymore, all watching the stars as they reappear from behind the scudding remnants of the storm.

We scramble up the gravel of the shore and say our “au revoirs” and thank you’s to the boat men who fade slowly, back across the river, into the shadows of the island.

I will sit on the shore for a little while I think and just enjoy it for a moment longer.

sorry, I've been lazy

2006-08-01T22:09:00.000+01:00

or rather laissez, laissez faire...

doing this

here:

it was just good to breathe, really breathe,

tell you later

on the laying of ghosts, part the whatever...

2006-07-20T15:22:00.000+01:00

may I say....

I'm dismayed to know that there's anyone who may think that there is any greater ethic, higher principle or better 'me' hiding inside some fabrication that I choose to show the world....

....there's no riddle to me at all, nothing deeper than whatever it is you see - it's not a wall I hide behind, it's simply that there is nothing else. This is the best I can do.

Do you think I live alone because I choose to? Because no one has ever found the key to unravel the mystery of me? Really? Utter rubbish. Tosh. Quite the opposite. Whoever may have been in my life that I have thought might be my heart’s desire has discovered what I already know.... that there really is nothing of any import to find out. It must be a disappointment, but not something that I couldn’t predict.

If you look at me and it seems that you cannot tell what I am thinking, there's nothing enigmatic going on, it is most likely because...I am not thinking.

I'm happy like that.

I get by on it.

if you go down to the woods today...

2006-07-18T14:25:00.000+01:00

"Hello", he said and stood up from the long grass in the shade of an ancient sycamore.

"I've been sitting here for hours....it's nice and cool".

Shoulder length grey hair fell in matted tresses from under a stained, wide brimmed canvas hat. Some of it caught in greasy wisps against stubbly cheeks and chin. Rheumy eyes looked not at me, but into the distance, from under restless white thicketed brows. He was tall and spare. His head sat on stooping shoulders and was made of mottled leather as were the hands that signed incoherently as he walked and talked. He was not a thing of beauty or suppleness, in motion his arms and legs appeared unconnected, forced under duress to comply, a gargoyle detached from a high church parapet and given awkward articulation to walk among the living.

"You shouldn't sit on the grass" he said, "you get worms, they get up your bottom" and added almost wistfully "it happened to me once"

He came forwards in short rushing uneven paces, jerkily, a marionette controlled by an inept puppeteer.

"Or rocks, because then you'll get piles"

It was a hot day, a sultry afternoon with not a breath of air. Toffee had been chasing crows and lay temporarily exhausted and panting forty yards away while Charlie stood by me, to attention, watching this awkward apparition approach.

As he came out from under the shade of the tree it became clear that what I had mistaken for a dappling of light and shade on his shirt and baggy trousers were in fact a multitude of stains. Within three yards of us now, I glanced down at the assortment of wild barley and burrs that had attached themselves to his shins and saw that he had made his own sandals out of canvas shoes, and that his feet were scaly, bruised and decorated with toes too long in the nail.

Still he came forward, stumbling finally to a halt, too close.

"Is this your dog? I like dogs. I like tv too". Close enough to see a rime of spit at the corners of his mouth. "I like wild life programmes".

"I know a lot". His arms fluttered before him as if inhabited by moths. But instead they were apparently inhabited by cumin seeds sewn randomly and shallow beneath the skin of his exposed forearms.

"You think everything is trying to kill and eat everything else in Africa?" He looked up and seemed to see me for the first time. His eyes rolled and he blinked and looked at Charlie, and then back up to me, and behind a milky film I saw his eyes refocus. "No!" he proclaimed, "not so". "There's a truce, down by the water hole. There’s a no mans land where everything is safe, so they can drink you see", and he looked at me, asking me to see.

"The lions and the cheetahs, even the wild dogs, they all know, they know that the deer have to drink or they'll die". He hesitated, "and those big wapapotamuses" they're lazy, they just lie there".

He leaned in.

He leaned in and bled a whiff of old sofa into our shared space...old sofa, burnt umber and an ill kempt fridge.

"But not the crocodiles, they’re sneaky they are", he confided. His chapped lips pursed as he breathed in, a susurration of air through dry leaves. "Bastards".

"They're sneaky bastards". "I don't like them at all".

I'd shuffled back, a foot or two, but he leaned in to occupy the space.

Over my shoulder once again he asked "Or are they alligators? I never know". The milky veil descended over his eyes as he rummaged in his attic for the answer.

"It doesn't matter, it's the same thing anyway" he said a moment later. And slowly he stooped, bending at the knee, descending in front of me to hold out a horny hand towards Charlie. "But I like dogs". "They like me too, don't you girl", as he stretched his fingers towards Charlie's shoulder.

Charlie grumbled his dissent, and twitched backwards on stiff legs.

"Feisty one" said this animated bundle of firewood in clothes, unfolding even more slowly towards an upright attitude,

"That's good, feisty is good".

"Feisty makes the world go around. Princess Margaret was feisty. I liked her a lot. She was a good looking woman, not like the Queen, and she had bigger tits". All delivered in revelatory staccato. "I met her once. She came to the home. Well, not really met her, but I saw her".

"We had angel cakes that day"

Simultaneously I took a step back and looked over my shoulder towards Toffee, still lying stricken in the grass. I tried to whistle but my lips were dry, so shouted instead. "Toffee! Toff, Toff!!"

"We should go", I said, "they're getting restless".

He glanced and saw me, but heard not a word that I said.

"Everything needs everything else. There are little fish that feed whales, and little fish that stick to sharks and eat the bugs, and little fish that penguins like, and then killer sharks eat the penguins. If we didn't have any silly little fish then we wouldn’t have great big ones like whales....you know?"

I nodded sagely.

"To'off!!" and then a little too shrilly "Toff!!". "We really must be going", I almost pleaded, "we don't have long and the boys really look forward to their walk".

"It's the same on land too". "Never kill a spider, they eat flies". "I don't know what ants do for us, but you can bet it's important, they fit in somewhere - never kill an ant!"

"I won't" I agreed "Toff, Toff!!" urgently now.

"Excuse me" I said and shuffled sideways and began to walk. "C'mon Charlie".

Charlie came and so did he, shuffling along beside me with an exaggerated gait. "I came on the bus you know" he said, "all the way from Islington".

"They let me on the bus for free" and I didn't doubt it.

I was striding now, and slowly he began to fall behind. I wet my lips and whistled and Toffee stumbled wearily to his feet, shook his head and suddenly, as is his wont, bolted for the bushes at the far end of the field and crashed into their midst without breaking his stride.

Sweating slightly I slowed down and, in my stride, nudged Charlie conspiratorially with my foot.

Business as usual, walking, weeing, snuffling and walking some more.

Except for a distant voice behind us which shouted one last time "Lovely tits!"

enough...

2006-07-10T20:35:00.000+01:00

so long as the things that you love are happy, then that suffices

doesn't it?

goodbye and thanks for all the fish....

2006-06-22T21:41:00.000+01:00

Tell me if this makes sense:

I was sitting doing my thing in the office today when my gimp said, apropos of nothing, “you don’t like me do you?”

I’m used to being subjected to him giving voice to obtuse, random corners of his mind so I wasn’t particularly perturbed…I’m pretty sure he knows full well that I detest him. (Although on reflection he seems to think that everyone else thinks he's a hoot).

It was just too good an opportunity. Honesty is the best policy? So I told him. I told him that no, I don’t like him, that in fact he makes my skin crawl, that he represents almost every human quality that I despise; ugliness of spirit, crassness, sexism, racism, complete self indulgent absorption, the attention span of a may fly…in fact I went so far as to suggest that I it thought it may well be down to him being at a different stage in evolution to the rest of us. Either lagging well behind, chimp like, or well in advance – perhaps he’s superseded us and was now the next stage of humanity, the corporate twat.

Actually I ignored him. I couldn’t bare to look at him.

But.

It’s symptomatic of the way I’m feeling at the moment. I hate this. If you’ve met me or read this it will probably have become apparent to you that I don’t have an anchor. My sole responsibility is to the dogs. In every other respect I do whatever I please within the limitations of my income.

My job sounds wonderful if you describe it, simply put it involves a huge amount of travel and getting drunk with people when I get there. I’m the corporate good time, and they pay me to do it.

Sounds pretty good doesn’t it? Stop whining boy? (Except that it spills over into my life, I can’t help it, my cup literally runneth over).

I can’t complain about the salary either, the partners look after me very well. But I don’t think I’m ever going to be rich, filthy stinking rich, rich with a big house in the country to retire. I’ve had my own business fail on me in the past which landed me in (HUGE) debt, and I’ve made lifestyle choices, most of which included spend it now – tomorrow is another day.

So I was considering retiring now.

Why not?

Ugliness hurts me, it’s an almost physical hurt and there’s so much of it in the city. I feel like my soul is being slowly but surely eroded. There’s so much anger here, and spite, so much needless thoughtlessness and intolerance it’s almost palpable, there’s a miasma of crippled, abused emotion in the air.

So I’m beginning to think quite seriously about cashing in my chips. Pooling every penny I posses and then slipping out of the door one morning with the few possessions I really need and the dogs of course and leaving. We’d go to France first and Spain, and….well, there’s no rush, we’ve all the time in the world.

I’m not sure what I can do to earn a crust, I doubt whether I can get part time jobs as the local lush - but if we are happy we can survive on crumbs, so long as there’s petrol when we need it…and wine, of course!

Take a look at my Bongo, (it's the Mazda Bongo, the third one down) I’m going to buy it on Saturday.

the magic caravan (the end...thank goodness)

2006-06-19T21:42:00.000+01:00

Well the the rough draft at least, it still has to be edited by my mate Pam...

They ate breakfast together in a cool, stone floored kitchen. Great sizzling slabs of bacon, fried eggs and buttered toast accompanied by steaming hot cups of tea. Stanley cooked himself seconds but the boys were stuffed.

While they sat and Stanley busied himself at the ancient stove in the corner they chattered about what to do, where to go, the obvious stumbling point being that they had no idea within 50 miles of where they actually were at present. Stanley sat down around the table with them bringing a great pile of fresh toast and the tea pot, and joined in. "See now" he said, while liberally buttering a round of toast. They watched, fascinated as he bit off the corners and began to trim down the sides unevenly with his teeth, not entirely sure of what it was they were supposed to 'see'. When Stanley was happy with his molar machinations he held up the remainder of the toast, and with butter running down his fingers, declared "that's Devon that is" pointing at his masticated marvel. "Yoir 'ere", he pointed vaguely to some point in the centre, "Cornwall's thataway, Barnstaple's up 'ere on the coast, and Dartmoor's over in that direction. That be a nice drive", he said contemplatively, "but you don't want to be gettin' lost up there". And promptly popped the entire county into his mouth.

"Or else", he said over his shoulder, as he stood to clear the dishes, "you moight want to stay 'ere for a day or two".

Breakfast was free gratis, there was something so simply friendly in the gesture and the manner that it was offered that brooked any suggestion of offering payment. They washed the dishes together and tidied away the plates and then retreated into the bar. They lit cigarettes and Stanley found a pipe and packed it. "What would we do?" asked Derek.

"Well, here's a thing, do you fish?"

""Not much" said Colin, "but where".

"There's fish in pond" said Stanley, "and I've got rods you can borrow"

"Sounds good to me", offered Derek glancing out of the window onto what was becoming a beautiful day, "a lazy day".

And Stanley sealed the deal with the offer of a packed lunch.

They pottered around, Derek and Colin collected the few glasses from the previous evening and cleared the fire while Stanley made for the kitchen. He came back with a brown paper bag containing doorstop cheese and onion sandwiches and a stone demijohn which he filled to the brim with cider. The fishing rods, although so far unnoticed, had been obvious all along, pushed over the low beams of the bar. He brought them down and shook one gently dislodging cobwebs and dust, it was all set up ready to go with a float and hook held on to the spool of the reel.

"There's only two" said Colin

"That's roit" said Stanley, "Oi aint got time to be arsin' around fishin' av Oi?". "Oi've a business to run, now bugger off and enjoy yornselves!"

And so they did.

They sat on their sleeping bags on the gravel down by the pond and idly whiled away the morning. The little floats on their lines never so much as bobbed nor twitched, not a sign of biting fish. They neither knew nor cared what they were fishing for and only vaguely hoped that whatever it was that it liked cheese. The first few attempts at casting in had been a failure as the bread that they had originally used to bait the hooks had fallen off in transit, but when they experimented with little lumps of cheese from the sandwiches it stayed put and landed with a soft plop to sink below the sparkling surface.

The morning was warm and hazy, the caravan - now a dusty grey - sat amongst it's own meadow of tall grass where butterflies flitted amongst wild poppies and fennel and the only sound was the soft drone of the occasional bee. The stone flagon was soon opened on the premise that the pub was only a few minutes away if they should run out and the temptation, which they succumbed to, was to simply lean back and doze. Derek sat up to take a swig and peered out across the pond. He saw the rusty truck roof and it's three snow white occupants lazily sunning themselves, and a thought occurred to him: If he were a fish, then the submerged nooks and crannies of the truck would be a fine place to be. Momentarily enthused by his own genius he reeled in his line, replaced the cheese with a fresh lump and stood to cast out.
He took aim and watched the cheesy morsel on the hook arc through the air, it looked to be a good shot and he waited for the plop, but there was none. Instead the line landed on the roof of the van and stayed there held briefly but calamitously by the insubstantial float. Just long enough in fact for the nearest of the ducks to take an interest, reach out its neck and gobble up the cheese.

"Bollocks" he muttered. Not initially registering the extent of the problem.

He gave the line the slightest of tugs and was vaguely alarmed to see the ducks head move fractionally towards him. He pulled a little harder and the duck, eyes open now, extended its neck in his direction.

He gave Colin a dig in the ribs with his foot, "washamara?"

"Erm, we may have a problem"

Colin sat up, "why are you pointing at that duck with your rod?"

"I'm not pointing you tosser, we're attached"

"Ah" grinned Colin "then yes, I'd say you do have a problem".

At around this point the duck stretched it's wings and uncurled onto it's feet. It had so far been gazing at them without appearing to be overly concerned, but as it began to move so its head began to swivel against the tension of the line. It decided to pull back. Derek was still talking to Colin and hesitated momentarily before compensating for the sudden movement by his feathered adversary in this little tug of war. They looked over and saw the duck, clearly distressed now, decide that enough was quite definitely enough. With a flap and an ungainly waddle it made for the water. Unfortunately it made for the water in the wrong direction. Its dash and Derek's slow reactions flipped it up over and onto its back, where it flapped around like a wild thing, quacking up a thunder, spilling white feathers into the air and the other two ducks into the pond. Somehow it found its feet and, making the connection between the boys on the shore and it's own discomfort, tried once again to exit in the opposite direction - with similar results.

They both looked on, mouths open, at the commotion on the tin roof until at last Colin said "drop the rod, drop the bloody rod".

But Derek didn't think that was a good idea, an instinct told him that the rod would float and that the poor fouled foul would only drag it around the lake. "No!" he said without explaining.

"Well cut the line"

"No we have to get the hook out!"

"Oh yes right, of course, and the cheese? - do you want the fucking cheese back too?"

"We can't let it run around with 20 yards of frigging fishing line hanging out of it?!!"

And after a long pause, Colin agreed, "Guess not" he said, "unless you fancy a unusual kite".

They quickly came up with a rudimentary plan while the duck's thrashings ebbed and flowed atop the van. The route to the right around the pond offered the shortest distance from van to the bank, so Derek started to let out some line. For a moment the commotion ceased as the duck, given scope to manoeuvre, slipped over the side only to start a cacophony of quacking complaint as soon as it hit the water and its progress was again impeded. They both set off down the bank, Derek slowly but surely retrieving the line and towing the struggling duck ashore.

It took an age. They got it to within a yard of the bank where, on inspection, a ragged hole in its beak and the offending hook were clearly visible. Fearing to cause further damage Derek simply held it there while Colin edged towards it in the shallow water. It eyed him warily and scooted from side to side, he put his hand around the line and inched towards the beleaguered bird and wrapped one hand around it's neck.

The duck must have thought that this was the final stroke in some devilish plan to end its life. It thrashed his arm and face with it's wings making an awful din, it's neck was surprisingly slender under the thick white feathers. Colin was sure it must surely do itself a damage when suddenly Derek appeared by their side and held down first one and then the other of its wings, still keeping a firm hold of the rod. Colin quickly wrapped his free arm over Derek’s hands until the duck was held in the crook of his elbow, its neck still held in his hand.

Together they retreated up the bank.

"There, that wasn't so bad was it" said Colin to the duck.

The duck stared back at him balefully as if to say, "No? Well you fucking try it then".

"Hold it up” said Derek, and Colin did.

Derek approached slowly, not knowing if the mangled mandible caused the duck any physical pain or not, but not wishing to alarm it further. He got within inches, and reached to swap his hand for Colin's around the creature’s neck. In the instant that Colin released his grip the duck's neck sprang forward and it attached itself to Derek's face, biting his top lip fiercely with its beak.

"Trust you to catch a homosexual duck" said Colin.

"not phuffin phunny" phaid Derek.

Derek slowly reached up, wrapped his fingers around the back of the ducks head and gave it an experimental tug. It stayed fast, and brought tears to his eyes. What's more there was the unmistakable bitter taste of blood in his mouth.

Colin lowered his head and peered at them both. The duck appeared to have Derek in a death grip, there was a steady drip of blood down his chin and a very determined look in his feathered friend's eye. He motioned upwards with his hand and lifted the duck to accommodate Derek as he slowly rose form a crouching positions.

"I think it's a stand off" said Colin

"puff" said Derek

"Twat" offered Colin

"nooo puff" said Derek and pointed behind him in the general direction of the pub.

It took a considerable time and much discomfort, (for Derek), to negotiate their way to the pub. Each slip or misplaced step, and anything that the duck mistook for a further threat on its wellbeing, was accompanied by a muffled complaint from Derek.

When Sydney emerged to Colin's shouted, "Syd....Syd!!" he was greeted by a very strange sight indeed. There in the front door was a boy, holding a duck, holding another boy holding a fishing rod, by the top lip.

"Don't want none o you circus types 'ere" he said, stifling a laugh.

"Just help me get this frigging thing off his face"

Stanley came for a closer look. He saw the jagged hole and the hook still connected to the line and immediately understood what had happened, though not exactly how the duck had become connected to Derek's face.

"Oi thought you were going to fish", he said, "not duck, that's a different sport altogether". And then added. "Don't look too happy do 'e"?

"He's had a bit of a rough day" said Colin

Stanley thought for a moment and then with an "Oi'll be back in a tick" went off to the kitchen. He came back a few moments later with scissors and a teaspoon and knelt on the floor to examine the full extent of the predicament. He was not overly concerned with a steady but slow drip of blood from Derek's chin, he was in no imminent danger of bleeding to death. Slowly he reached out and circled the line in thumb and forefinger a yard from the protagonists faces. They both followed his movements with a wary eye to see what he had in mind. He brought this hand up towards them, slowly, ever so slowly and nipped the line twixt finger and thumb six inches from their faces. The scissors, in his other hand appeared stage right, moving again very slowly, so as not to startle, where they opened fractionally and then closed on the line with a soundless snip. Stanley put the scissors down and held the rod and nodded at Derek who released it so that he could put it gently on the floor.

The feathered fiend evidently thought that the scissors had been wielded with a more sinister purpose and crapped over Colin's elbow onto the floor.

So far so good. With the steady solemn hand of a surgeon Stanley retrieved the spoon from his breast pocket. Holding it by the handle he offered it inch by inch towards the beasts beak where a slight gap, the width of Derek's flattened lip, was evident between the upper and lower bill. Ever so gently he tried to introduce the spoon into the gap but the duck, sensing a threat to the quid pro quo, immediately clamped down harder on it's hostage. Derek let out a startled groan and the drip of blood increased to a small steady flow.

Stanley retreated and stood up, scratching his head he muttered "Well Oi don't know, Oim flummoxed".

Just at that moment a child's voice from the vicinity of the doorway chimed in, "Stick a pencil up it's arse!".

Those who could, being Colin and Stanley, turned to look. A tiny befreckled urchin with a flop of blond hair stood all of four feet tall in the doorway. The ragamuffin wore baggy short trousers, a threadbare t-shirt and incongruous oversize carpet slippers. He was grinning from ear to ear obviously enjoying the show and repeated his advice again, "a pencil, up the arse".

"The duck's arse?" asked Colin solemnly.

"'Course" said the child equally seriously, "don't be darft".

So far Derek had been unable to declare his feelings about the antics of the past hour, due in no small part to having a large aquatic bird attached to his lip. It hurt, it hurt like hell. After an initial numbness every small movement hurt and bar having the bird instantly and painlessly removed, Derek's next requirement for a relatively happy existence was for everyone to be quite, quite still. He would happily feed through a straw until the duck slept or even passed away. It is a common syndrome for captives to build up a rapport with their captors over time, an empathy based on shared perspective. He had become certain that his lip was being held hostage by the duck, it being convinced that some mortal blow would befall it the moment it let go. And so they were balanced, precariously. The child's suggestion of introducing something into the duck's bottom filled Derek with horror. He had stared long into that beady black eye, he had learned to admire the stubborn will of his assailant and knew full well that an anally offended adversary would exact a terrible toll on his lip.

To make his point understood by the group Derek very careful raised his right arm and extended the index and middle fingers.

"Shame" conceded Stanley, "it sounded loik a good idea to me".

"Anywise Tom, where's yorn pa?"

"Oim ere" said a bigger version of the child.

"Get moi bloody slippers home you little sod", and cuffed his son around the head raising a puff of dust.

"Aw da', oi want to watch" said the boy, and retreated behind his father and stuck his head out from behind the jamb of the door.

"Looks loik yor in a roit pickle"

And before anyone could explain, or indeed utter a word, the Wurzel Gummage figure produced a (well used) handkerchief from his shirt pocket and dropped it over the ducks head.

Deprived of it's view, and consequently of any impression of immediate danger, the duck lessened and quickly relinquished it's grip. Derek who had been unconsciously pulling away, stumbled back, tripped and sat back on the floor. Now unimpeded, blood welled up in his lip, covering his teeth and ran off his chin in a steady stream giving him the appearance of a startled but well fed vampire.

Stanley worked quickly. He put his hands under the handkerchief and with a deft flick retrieved the hook outwards so that the barb did no further damage, "take he round the back and let the poor little blighter go" he said to Colin, who did.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Later they sat around the fire chortling over mugs of cider. Closer inspection had shown the cut on Derek's lip to be deep but only a quarter of an inch long and had stopped bleeding almost immediately when, much to Derek's dismay, Stanley had dabbed it with iodine. Drinking cider was fine, but he had to be careful when he laughed. They amused themselves conjecturing on Natty's demise and decided that he had stopped to tie his shoe lace, or dropped his lighter, but he'd obviously stooped too low, too close to the pond and been dragged by the nose to a watery grave by the duckfiend.

By common consent they retrieved their sleeping bags and spent the night on the bench seats in the bar. They left the next day, with a packed lunch, waving from the car to Stanley who stood smiling, hands on hips, in the doorway of the "Sign's in Cellar".

the magic caravan part iii

2006-06-14T21:56:00.000+01:00

Look, I'm sorry. I know this is dragging on a bit, it's boring me too, but it's a true story and I've started so I'll have to finish. Just one more bit after this and you'll see the point, I promise. Incidentally, blogger has decided I can't add pictures so no light relief there either:

They looked at the caravan, and then at Stanley.

Stanley had a very simple way of avoiding any further discussion in the matter, he excused himself with a hearty “Good night” and crunched off, chuckling, the way they had come.

They watched him retreat along the edge of the pond and turn up the bank towards the orchard where his torch flicked into life momentarily illuminating the old apple tree which stood like a sentinel at its border.

Derek dropped the sleeping bags to the ground and sat on one of them looking forlornly out over the pond.

“Does it look like rain to you?”

“No, it looks like a pond” replied Colin.

“Nobody likes a smart arse…..I was thinking we’d be better off sleeping outside”

“Oh yeah, that would be lovely, we could build a little camp fire and keep watch in case the rotting corpse of Natty makes a reappearance, covered in pond weed and duck shit” suggested Colin morosely.

“Chuck us a can” ordered Derek and Colin duly obliged.

The unmistakable sound of click splffft twice in quick succession was followed by glugging noises, loud, theatrical burping and then the sound of two further cans being opened.

“I mean how the hell can you drown in twelve inches of water?” asked Colin.

“You can drown in an inch of water if you try really hard….or maybe he was eleven inches tall”

“Maybe it’s locked?” suggested Colin helpfully.

“’Course it is” mocked Derek, “I imagine it’s chock a block with valuable mole skins” and then “fuck it, I’m going for a look”, forcing himself to his feet a little unsteadily.

He stumbled up the slight rise towards the caravan. The moon behind him , although bright, cast no shadow of his on the dull surface of the caravan but it did illuminate the mist that sat on the high of the bank, caught by some lip, which eddied and pooled around his feet.

Derek didn’t hesitate but walked directly up to the side of the van and then, puzzled, stood for a moment looking for the door. It wasn’t obvious. The entire caravan seemed to be made from dull, dark rust and when he reached out a hand and brushed the surface in front of him it felt rough, like emery paper. He traced a finger to the side and felt an indent in the surface and followed it up and then, refocusing, the door was suddenly obvious. The handle was a flap like affair set into the surface and he curled two fingers into it and pulled. The caravan seemed to rock slightly towards him and then, with a small screech and what felt like the suction you would normally associate with the door of a refrigerator, the door opened towards him spilling forth a miasma of mothballs and sickly sweet mildew into the fresh night air.

Colin observed the whole performance from the safety of ten yards. From where he watched Derek seemed to have been coaxing the door open, as he traced his finger across and then upwards, almost magically, perhaps whispering some ancient druid spell of entry. As the door opened there was a soft “plop” in the water behind him and he raced up the hill in a jangle of beer cans to join his friend.

“It’s a bit whiffy” said Derek as Colin nearly bumped into him.

“It’s a bit dark”

“mmmm, cosy”, said Derek making the most of Colin’s obvious discomfort.

“Let’s go back to the car” which was half plea, half serious suggestion.

“You can if you like, but I don’t really fancy finding my way through those bloody apple trees without a light……”

“Smarmy twat” was all Colin could muster.

And so they retrieved the sleeping bags and stepped tentatively up into the tiny tin toadstool, Derek first of course.

It was a single room. Derek stood in the doorway and as he moved to the left to allow Colin room to join him the caravan rocked alarmingly under his weight. The wheels and axle which had been hidden by the mist obviously ran directly through the middle of the little caravan, through the centre line of the doorway.

“Pissed again” said Colin and entered to the right, whereupon the caravan corrected itself and swayed in the opposite direction. Derek walked to Colin, and it dipped further to the right, and then they both moved quickly across the centre line and the floor lurched dramatically downwards in that direction.

“Wicked” said Derek, “we’re going to spend the night in a tiny theme park”.

“Welcome to Nattyland?”, suggested Colin, “enjoy the ride. Keep you hands inside the carriage at all times and don’t go near the water”.

The caravan was a single room. Small windows to the front and rear (although there was no way to determine which was which) afforded just enough light to distinguish a sloping roof but gave no clue to the ‘décor’. The single most overpowering and obvious quality was the overriding stink of mothballs coupled with the syrupy sweet undercurrent that Derek had encountered earlier, and which now on reflection made him think of apples, overripe rotting apples.

The floor was smooth, carpetless and hard, and other than themselves and their few possessions was completely devoid of any feature or object. Derek opened the bag containing his sleeping bag and, holding the hood, swept it out across the floor soliciting a small puff of moonlit dust and a gentle rocking. Colin did the same in the other direction, with similar results. They sat together and flipped off their shoes, and wriggled into their respective nylon cocoons accompanied by the nauseating rock and roll of the van.

“Excrement” muttered Derek, “I need a wee”, and went through the process in reverse.

“Chuck us a fag” said Colin, “and a beer”.

Derek stood, silhouetted in the doorway, directing a silver stream of urine into the night. He fumbled in his back pocket and tossed the cigarettes over his shoulder in Colin’s general direction, where they hit him square in the forehead and skittered off into the gloom. Colin followed them, squirming grub like across the floor and sat enfolded in his bag to light one. The flame from the lighter briefly revealed what appeared to be dun, dirty brown flock wallpaper in a strange asymmetric design, but nothing of any real interest.

Eventually they slept, dreaming dreams of ocean swells and sailing boats, of hammocks and summer breezes as the slightest movement or readjustment caused their dark bower to gently dance.

“Thish ishn’t my tongue”, said a voice next to Derek, “it doeshn’t fit”

Derek reached over and felt around and sure enough found the face belonging to the complaint. He grabbed the top lip and pulled it towards the nose, soliciting an “Oww!!” and then his hand toddled off to the left in a wide arc encountering two full beer cans in their plastic lattice by his side. Deftly, for a man who has just awoken, he single handedly separated them, sat one on its base and pulled back the ring on the top. He opened his mouth and simply poured, soaking his face and the hood of the sleeping bag, but managing to get a reasonable amount in his mouth too.

He repeated the exercise with his arm reaching awkwardly behind his head and was gratified to hear a startled grunt which quickly subsided into gentle gargling.

“’sprin” said the voice this time. “aspirin”.

“Pocket” muttered Derek, and after a short pause the figure behind him began to bum crawl towards the door.

“Arse pocket in my jeans” said Derek, “I’m wearing them”. He felt around lifting his backside off the ground and located the packet in his back pocket, so far he’d only used one arm and he used it to propel the painkillers at the prostrate shape in the doorway.

It was morning outside. The light that scythed in through the crack in the doorway was bright and golden in contrast to the bleary green dimness that occupied the rest of the van. Slowly adjusting his neck, at every moment expecting a lance of pain from sleep stiffness or the previous night’s excesses, Derek looked down along his body to the window. The glass was completely covered in moss, dark and smooth where it was thickest, more brightly green at the edges where the sun made some meagre ingress, but nowhere transparent. More than anything else it resembled a badly kept fish tank.

He rolled to the side in time to see the figure in the doorway, head thrown back, dispatch two aspirin with a swig of beer and then unadvisedly lean against the door, which opened and deposited him on his back on the ground outside. For long moments the feet of the figure encased in the sleeping gently flapped like the disembodied nether regions of some unlikely sea creature before slipping sideways out of view.

Derek rolled over and attempted to re enter the land of nod, but was eventually forced to recognise the overriding imperative of his bladder. With a groan he struggled from the open end of his sleeping bag in a process that, in nature, results in the emergence of a delicate, beautiful butterfly but in his case gave birth to a hairy dishevelled gargoyle.

With a flop he sat down in the doorway resting his feet lightly on his friend and surveyed the lie of the land.

The land was indeed brightly lit and unrecognisable from the moonlit demesne of the previous night. The pond sparkled and glittered under an early morning sun that had risen behind them and now peered over the crest of their caravan. It was a big pond too, roughly oval and 30 yards across at it’s shortest span to the opposite bank from where Derek sat. And obviously quite deep, in the middle was what appeared to the roof of some kind of small truck, perhaps the original conveyance for their sleeping quarters, which was now submerged to the tops of its glassless windows providing a sun trap for several ducks who sat placidly on the tin platform.

Beyond the pond a small rickety wooden shed stood on the far bank in a patch of dusty earth amongst long uncultivated grass and beyond that a large unkempt hedge over which, vague and rippling in the early light, were the hazy purple outlines of low distant hills.

Derek breathed in savouring the fresh country air, sans eau de mothball, and immediately fell back into the van in a spasm of coughing.

He lit a cigarette and dropped an empty beer can on what he hoped was the lump formed in the sleeping bag by Colin’s head. It was.

“It’s too bright”, came a muffled voice.

“I need to go poo” said Derek, simply.

“Well go poo”

“Where?”

“Frankly my dear I don’t give a shit”

“I’m going back to the pub, the loo’s outside remember?”

And eventually after a few strategically aimed kicks and some plaintive wailing Colin was separated from his bag and, armed with their toothbrushes, the pair ambled back towards the pub.

It was a very short trek, completely devoid of the mystery endowed on it by night. The orchard was bright, airy and no more than rustic, the twisted trees took on almost comic shapes by the light of day. In just a few minutes they stood outside the lavvy which leant against the rear of the pub. To Derek’s delight there was toilet roll too, albeit the crispy shiny kind which he conveyed to Colin through the wooden wall.

“Hurt’s yer bum” he shouted.

“Does the trick though” replied a familiar voice from an open window in the side wall of the under the sloping eve of the pub, “you’re up then, I didn’t think Oid see you this side of nine o’clock”, he sounded genuinely surprised.

“When yer finished whatever it is you’ve got to do, Oi’ll get us up some breakfast”.

a nomadic tribe called Colin...

2006-06-12T16:59:00.000+01:00

It's the 12th of June.

How on earth did it get to be June already. I feel like Rip van Winkle, I went to sleep just the other night, it was March, and now it's mid-bloody-June already. Stop the world I want to get off.

So, Greece.

Greece has it's own schedule too, everyone seems so laissez faire about life in general and especially deadlines and the passage of time. Certainly if you order something in a Greek restaurant it's not a good idea to wait until you are hungry, chances are that it won't arrive for a very long time and it's quite likely that it won't be what you ordered either. So just chill, order a bottle of wine not a glass, and if you insist on ordering a Greek wine then make sure it's either a). expensive, b). very, very, very cold...otherwise you might taste it and that wouldn't do.

Ferries, by far the easiest way to get around the islands, and also their commercial life lines are notoriously unpunctual. I once caught a ferry from the port in Piraeus which was stunningly on time - only to be told that it was actually yesterdays ferry. The timetable had eventually righted itself by virtue of being progressively 2 hours later each day for the past 2 weeks or so.

So why in God's name the taxi drivers feel the necessity to hurl themselves ferociously into traffic at mach 3 I'll never know. Unless of course it's some genetic trait that only taxi drivers have - part lemming perhaps? (I'm a bad passenger, I sit in the back seat sullenly refusing to offer any further distraction to the gormless maniac who is apparently happy to negligently damage me. I also have an imaginary steering wheel and brake pedal that I use to will us around corners and other road users).

I spent the whole of last week in stinky, sweaty, smelly Athens, 32 deg, no air conditioning and a dark blue suit. I lost so much liquid that my eyes made a rasping noise when I shut them.

Prior to that I spent the weekend with friends on a boat on the Norfolk Broads - a lush green fenland dissected by a network of canals, sprinkled with bright, thatched villages hardly accessible by car and beautiful old pubs. The whole experience is conducted at a wonderfully indolent pace of 3 miles per hour, just the ticket for a drunken, miserable fart like me.

So I desperately need to get some washing done, all three of my pairs of underpants are dirty (I hesitate to say "soiled"). You know it's 30 degrees here in London too? In an extended period of hot weather my place begins to resemble a fire brick, we're British you see, we don't do air conditioning. The air is hot and leaden. The dogs, who are panting continuously, have managed to find a relatively cool spot on the quarry tiles on the bathroom floor, so I leave the door open for them - I'm half inclined to leave six inches of cold water in the bath for them while I'm at work.

And I will apologise now, but there's a small matter of the World Cup going on at the moment, so reports from chez Fish may be intermittent, at least while England are still in it.

pass me two of the blue ones quickly...

2006-05-31T16:13:00.000+01:00

flippin 'eck. Everything seems just a little bit unglued at the moment.

There was a 'friendly' International football match last night (that's soccer to you heathens), in the last stages of England’s assault on the World Cup (please, please let it happen in my life time). And I belong a rag taggle group of fans who've watched 4 successive World Cups (bear in mind the World Cup only comes around every 4 years), 4 all too early exits, every game live (even those in the early hours of the morning) from the same smoky corner of the same dingy pub. We've hugged, cried, screamed, shouted, lamented, raged at the referees and the injustice of it all and thrown our beer heavenwards in rapture after scoring a goal or defeating an arch enemy.

It was a bit of a dull game last night.

Still I managed quite a respectable hangover and was propelled towards the bedroom carpet all too soon this morning by the alarm. I'm fuzzy at the best of times, but on mornings like these the world appears to me through a glass darkly, very darkly indeed. Somehow I manage to simultaneously feed the dogs, make tea, fish a towel out of the washing machine with my toes and minister to my headache by bashing down a couple of aspirin.

Except that I noticed, on the way out, feeling a lot better after a shower and extensive oral hygiene that the packet said "Nytol" and not aspirin, which wasn't exactly what I needed.

Consequently I felt right at home this afternoon waiting in line to renew my road tax in the local Post Office. "Post Offices" in the UK dispense stamps, pensions, rubber bands, packing tape and biros. They are also the Grim Reaper's waiting room, constantly occupied by the elderly, infirm and permanently befuddled, who spend their remaining coffin dodging hours waiting in line for a form, which they return to the back of the queue with...to ask for a pen, or another form, or to weigh their colostomy bag on the scale, or advice on the right blend of loam to grow artichokes from seed.

I rocked and reeled with the queue and had a little hot flush where I thought for a moment I might go down under the shuffling ranks of rubber footed zimmer frames.

And this is on the end of a 'Bank' holiday, a long weekend, which means that Sunday had potential for a late night too.

That's not to say I've not been "good". I have. I've done my chores, been on some very long walks with the dogs, caught up with friends, sanded the bathroom walls, begun to paint and even weeded the garden (deep joy).

What's more I got to meet Sandra, who is adorable and fun and great company, as she and her friends were spending a week packing in more to do in and around London than the average Londoner will ever accomplish in a lifetime. Goodness knows where they found the energy, but I would never have been able to keep up. Even after one very gentle evening - and it can't possibly be the beer, (we drank sociably and responsibly, the very epitome of gentile restraint and decorum I tell you!!!) - I put it down to the impromptu and very relaxing head and neck massage offered by the demented, infinitely camp, engaging and quite deranged, French, ('but I was an Inca in a former life'), jongleur in a crowded cobbled courtyard of a pub.....that caused me to slump over my desk in a dead coma the next day. (Thank you Yvonne for the tea, and the discreet nudge).

I must be getting old. Go leave me in a Post Office.

Oh, and ironically, as I could sleep all day but couldn’t catch a wink last night elle gave me the gift of poetry to keep away the night sprites

the magic caravan (part iii)

2006-05-22T22:25:00.000+01:00

They stumbled to the car to find what they needed for the night. Derek fumbled in the dark, in the boot, for the sleeping bags and meagre toiletries, tooth brushes, paste and aspirin while Colin recovered eight cans of lager and a packet of “Jammy Dodgers” from the back seat.

“Breakfast” he declared.

“Breakfast of Kings” agreed Derek.

A beam of light swayed across the yard and paused at their feet, followed by footsteps in the gravel. The light twitched to the right, along the length of the pub, then back, beckoning to a pathway in the overgrown grass.

“Oi’ll show you the way” softly as if not to wake others, though there was not a single light elsewhere in the village to suggest a sign of life.

They caught Stanley up at the corner of the building and it was a surprise to see that he held a large torch and not a lantern on a bent stick. He shone it down the side of the pub where an alley had been formed from the overhanging trees which met the wall by the eves of the sloping roof. The torchlight gave the impression of walking in a dark green tunnel, it’s arc of light moving with them as they went, over short soft, mossy grass.

Stanley led, they followed, out onto a small lawn overlooked by the sightless glazed rear facing eyes of the pub. Through an overgrown arch in a ewe hedge they emerged, as the moon appeared from behind a ruffle of cloud, into an orchard. It was a bright moon sailing high in the sky, not yet full as if the quirky smiling face were wearing a flat cap at a jaunty angle.

Stanley turned off the torch revealing rows upon rows of twisted apple trees, dark and grotesque, writhing shapes given preternatural semblance of life by the moonlight that dusted their uppermost branches. They stood for a moment, their breath making plumes in the chilly late summer night air, and the trees breathed back.

“Do you get many pixies?” asked Colin in a small voice.

“Not since the war” said Stanley, breaking the spell, “they was all rounded up and deported, funny pointy-eared little buggers”.

They all laughed a little too loud and Stanley set off again picking his way through the groping trees.

In a very short while they passed the last of the old apples, the largest, looking like all the world as if it were lifting its gnarled and twisted limbs to bathe in the light of the moon. The ground sloped down slightly feeling grittier, less grassy under foot towards the edge of a large, gently sparkling pond.

Imbued with an ancient animal urge, wherever man meets water, Derek tucked the sleeping bag in his right hand under his left arm and stopped to pick up a flat stone. He stooped, bent at the knee and skipped it across water. “Splat…splat..splatsplatsplat" it went followed by a dull thud and then a sudden great caterwauling “Quaaaaaaaaack, quaccck, quack, quack quack!!! and a furious flurry of wings.

“It’s a duck pond” said Stanley sagely and quite needlessly.

“Shot” whispered Colin.

Derek mumble a "sorry", fidgeting with his baggage and followed them just twenty yards along the bank to where Stanley had stopped. He pointed, “here we are”, at a dark shape standing ten yards back from the bank.

The boys looked at each other sharing an unspoken thought, the cramped comforts of the car suddenly seemed so much more inviting.

Caravans come in all shapes and sizes, from those towed by geriatrics and sadists who seem interminably lost, to the enormous comfortable semi-permanent habitations of those who disdain “package holidays” but are happy to spend two miserable weeks in a large tin can.

This was a beast of a different colour, literally. Oxidised, blackened, formerly galvanised tin to be precise, it reflected no light, a tiny, squat mushroom of darkness suspended on a cushion of rising mist.

They stood transfixed, appalled.

“You’re havin’ a giraffe” complained Derek.

“It’ll do for the noit” said Stanley.

“Its derelict, I mean look at it, it’s falling apart”.

“T’aint that bad” said Stanley chirpily, “old Natty lived in it for years”.

“What was he, the local hermit?” asked Colin blackly.

“No, the mole catcher”

“Perfect. That’s what it is isn’t it, they got their own back and smothered him in a ginormous fucking mole hill?!!”

“Don’t be darft” said Stanley, “if you want to know, he drowned, roit there in the duck pond….”

The boys turned to look at him and Stanley stuttered realising his mistake.

….dead drunk he was” smiling a little cheesily

“Timing”, said Derek, pausing for emphasis “is the secret of comedy”

the magic caravan (part ii)

2006-05-16T15:39:00.000+01:00

Derek stood alone by the bar while Colin went to relieve himself, appropriately, in the toilets at the rear of the pub.

It was really quite dark in the pub by now. The small windows to either side of the old iron shod wooden door were leaded, the panes had run with age, like wax, thicker towards the bottom, glass being after all a liquid, drawn down inexorably with the passing of time.

Time lurched in small fragmented moments as the setting sun, it’s graceful arc interrupted by the unevenness of the window panes, made slow progress towards the dusty sill.

Through the windows to the side of the pub, equally dusty and misshapen, it was already night. Not yet pitch but dark heraldic blue, cerulean with a promise of stars.

Dust hung in the air in shafts of skimpy light. The corners of the room were vague and cast in shadow and from behind the door, ajar, by the bar came the sounds of a soft continuing struggle.

With a sudden squeal of hinges a figure emerged into the quiet of the bar. Or at least, accompanied by an exhalation of dust and cobweb, a bottom appeared, a very large bottom clad in hairy britches bulging and gyrating under the strain of towing the rest of the figure with which it was connected into sight. What finally appeared could be loosely described as a man but appeared to Derek to be more likely a Narnian giant.

“That’s better” broke the spell as Colin came back in through the front door, “time for a refill”. And took two steps into the room, adjusting to the gloom, before standing rooted and transfixed like Derek who was still motionless at the counter.

“Fucking hell” he muttered.

“Evenin’” said the figure, “Oi’ll be with you in a tick”.

The man was huge. He moved at a crouch to avoid the beams on the low ceiling though from the various lumps and protrusions on his head he had not always done so. He hauled a keg, a very large keg, by sheer brawn backwards through a lifted section of the counter in forearms as thick as thighs. He wore a check shirt with the sleeves loosely rolled to the elbow under braces for his britches and huge shoulders worked mightily below it. Heaving and pulling he settled the barrel below the counter top and with great gnarled hands brought it to a halt and then turning, stood to face them.

“So, what can I get you?”

“Taxi?” suggested Colin in a whisper.

The boys plight was now revealed in all it’s Shelleyesque horror. Great tufts of ginger hair protruded from the open vee at the neck of the strangers shirt. He was almost as wide as he was tall and had it not been for the additional height of the ceiling behind the bar all above his shoulders would have disappeared in the gloom. Derek, just feet away on the other side of the bar rather wished it had. The man’s head was roughly the size and shape of a very large turnip, for which it bore some not inconsiderable similarity in terms of texture and colour. Except there was a flush of beetroot in the cheeks and a shiny polished pate be-smattered in liver spots or large, dark freckles.

This 'head' had obviously been completed by a child who’s crayons either could not or wilfilly would not stay within the lines. Nothing of proportion in the eyes or nose or mouth, or of colour, that bespoke anything that might suggest itself as a human characteristic but generously worked as a whole to complete a fascinating, ruddy face.

This already outlandish countenance was framed in dusty grey and wheat wisps of hair, (hair that also protruded from the ears and nostrils in bushy profundity and equally formed a bristly awning for surprisingly shallow wells wherein sat large rheumy eyes). Most remarkable of all were an enormous pair of bugger grips extending bushy and uncultivated from ear to jowl, pale and darkening towards their tip, like the poorly groomed ends of a donkey’s tail. They yelled “danger, yokel!” more fiercely than any flat cap or clay pipe.

(A note to the happily uninitiated; bugger grips are overgrown, thicket like sideburns so named because, as rumour has it, they provide leverage for an uphill gardener intent on entering the rear porch).

The turnip spoke again, “What’ll you ‘ave, this oint a bloody public urinal you know?”.

“Bitter” said Derek, “two pints of bitter” finding his voice and a crumb of comfort in something he knew how to do.

“Nope”, said the hairy apparition, “no beer”, rolling the vowel of the “beer” around the room as if it had wheels.

“erm, larger then”

“none of that either” Sasquatch replied, “not much call for it”.

A fact that neither of the boys had noticed before suddenly became apparent. There were no taps at the bar, no hand pumps of any kind, nothing at all to indicate that the place sold alcohol in any shape or form not even, in fact, a single bottle or optic.

“Well what do have a call for?” chimed in Colin from what he hoped was a relatively safe distance.

“Zoider”, “there’s a lot of call for zoider”.

“Two pints of that then please”.

“Oi think you’d be better with halfs, that is your motor outside” the hulk suggested in such a way that brooked no refusal and bent, doubling at the waist, behind the bar.

Derek took the opportunity to catch Colin’s eye and mouth “what the fuck?”. Colin just shrugged and made a small open armed gesture with his arms and nodded imperceptibly over Derek’s shoulder to indicate the re emergence of Big Foot from behind the counter. It held in it’s giant hairy hands two pots of pale, cloudy yellow broth that sufferers of sclerosis would recognise as urine but which they were obviously intended to drink.

“Ta” said Derek and sipped on his. It was warm, tangy and quite sharp, it was still and not at all sweet and despite the suspension of soft apply curds was all in all quite pleasant. He downed half of it and smiled brightly at his hairy host who looked back at him from the advantage of considerable height with a knowing look and rueful shake of the head. “Oi ‘ope your droivin” he said to Colin.

Three glasses of cider later they sat on a bench seat by the fire. By the fourth, Colin sat on the bench while Derek occupied the dusty space under it.

They had discovered that their host answered to the surprisingly unprepossessing name of “Stanley”, and he in turn, had discovered who they were and most of what they were about. Stanley turned out to be quite affable in a gruff sort of way, not talkative but not indisposed to answering questions and adding a little humour. When Colin had asked the name of the pub he had told them straight faced “The signs in the cellar”. “Yes but what does it say” asked Derek. And he had explained how, in 1958, there had been a tremendous storm which had ripped, bodily, a limb from a giant oak standing in the green opposite the pub. “It’s still there” he assured them although it was far too dark outside to see it now. That limb had carried the pub sign, ‘The Oak Tree’, and in deference to the venerable and injured giant the sign had been removed to the cellar and never replaced.

At which point Derek said “Ahh” softly and slid slowly down and off the bench like a pint of treacle as the cider closed circuits in his head.

Stanley left him there for some time content that he had, for once, a little company. “Two more please” said Colin.

“Oi think he’s all done”

“You’d be surprised”

“All roit but he can’t stay there” said Stanley bowing to the barrel behind the bar, “Oim goin to loit the fire”.

Colin delicately tapped Derek in the groin with his foot, enough to stir him, and Derek slowly uncrumpled. Looking vague at first and then, in fact, refreshed for his short stupor he struggled across the table to reach his glass and looked very disappointed to find it empty. “It’s on the way” Colin reassured him.

Stanley retuned with two half pint pots in one hand and his very favourite thing in the whole world in the other; a gas poker. It was Stanley’s toy. He loved to light the fire with it, in fact he would light the fire simply because of it whether it was warm or cold. He’d lit bonfires outside, made toast, tried to set fire to a cabbage and on one occasion made a particularly nauseating cup of tea by immersing it, dangerously, in the kettle.

The poker was attached to a gas bottle and when lit Stanley adjusted the flame by means of a little knob from a rosy glow to a cold blue flame which he then plunged into a gap between the logs settled on an old iron pig in the grate.

Sparks crackled off the bark and they all watched in admiration as the first red tongues of flame licked the sides of the sappy, seasoned wood.

The smell was delicious, adding flavour and tang to the musky stone scent of the room. And the fire, as it rose and gathered and warmed them became a relentless, unavoidable soporific.

They next awoke to the sound of two full glasses thudding into the wooden table by their faces.

“Bert’s bought you a drink” said Stanley gesturing towards a shadowy form in the corner. On inspection, and adjustment helped by the light of the fire, Bert revealed himself to be clad in a dun woollen suit and be made up almost entirely of creased leather, an octogenarian weir lizard sporting a bulbous, pitted nose.

“He wants to know if you play dominos?”

And so they sat for hours in front of the fire, playing rubber on rubber of dominos for glasses of cider and losing every single game. They lost with good humour, beaten soundly by Stanley and Bert who was obviously a savant. With a flourish he would reveal exactly the right domino to stump them or win the rubber and gurn at them with a smile which appeared to be made of two uneven rows pickled peanuts.

Eventually his constitution could afford to win no more. His cup, or at least the pewter jug that the boys had kept replenishing, spilled over and he pushed himself slowly back from the table.

Laboriously he rose and leaning on the tables edge spluttered “arglebarglemorblewhoosh” by way of a well natured parting speech and slowly and deliberately staggered out into the night via, it seemed, every piece of furniture in the room.

They sat for a little while, silently except for the crackling of the fire and the chink clink of the dominos as Stanley replaced them in the box.

“Car” said Derek.

“Have to” agreed Colin, who knew that Derek was thinking exactly the same, it was time to lie down for the night and they’d sleep in the car as they often had in the past.

As if he knew what they were thinking, before they had chance to issue thank yous and farewells, Stanley interrupted this groggy exchange:

“O’course you won’t be droivin anywheres tonoit, and Oi doubt you’ll be pitchin that tent o yorn either”

“Still", he said, "thee’ll not be sleepin’ in the cold….”

And he bent closer and almost conspiratorially told them his plan;

“…..there’s a caravan out the back”

I feel sick

2006-05-13T18:59:00.000+01:00

If you’ve met me you’ll know I’m not the most reliable person in the world, in fact if you’ve been reading this for any time, you will have reached the same conclusion.

I’m not. I’m a bit of a gad fly. I have friends when I want them and ignore them when I don’t, apart form the dogs I come and go pretty much as I please. I’m not well off by any means, but there’s sufficient income to allow me to indulge myself in whim and folly to keep me happy and all in all it’s a comfortable, happily selfish lifestyle.

Except that there’s one thing I miss, a part of me that isn’t fulfilled, at all. I miss children. I’m broody.

I always thought that I would have children, actually I thought I’d have lots of them.

This isn’t an option for me as I understand the process. It is apparent that you need a significant other to make children, which quite clearly doesn’t appear to be on the cards. And I’m not so self absorbed as to wish to adopt, although it is an alternative, because I’d prefer to think that for every child in need of adoption there must be better prepared parents than the single parent alternative that I could offer.

So the route that I took was that of fostering. Short term fostering for children that come from a single parent family say, who’s parent needs a break, or is perhaps hospitalized or simply transient short term care for children with difficulties or special needs. It gives me the opportunity to be with a child, to share a big, unused bubble of love with somebody who may need a feeling of security.

I’ve worked on this for some two years now. I’ve worked with my coach and mentor, been to the meetings, had all of the gory details the what ifs and why you should nots explained to me without any lingering doubt. But as yet I’ve never been offered the opportunity, even though I know (though I was disbelieving at first) they need people exactly like me.

And so I called my mentor, as I do regularly to simply chat, but this time with a question, “why?”.

And she shouldn’t under any circumstances tell me but she did. Somebody has said something. Someone has said that I’m not reliable, that I keep late hours and I come and go irregularly, that I drink, that I have people round to my house and we are rowdy, and that , most awfully, perhaps I like children but for the wrong reason.

She can not ignore this information, it’s said, it can’t be unsaid and is now a matter of record.

Only my ‘friends’ know about my wanting to foster, and you of course.

Who would do that, and why?

the yellow peril

2006-05-12T13:54:00.005+01:00

I spent the evening sanding the kitchen walls. Which is unusual for me, preparation is usually anathema. I simply can’t be arsed, can’t wait to change the scenery and slap on the colour. So the final two hours, the last thing I did before going to bed, were spent slapping on the fresh paint on the long plain wall so that I would wake up to a cheery new colour.

It’s probably already been mentioned that I’m not at my sparkling best in the morning, In truth I hardly noticed the freshly painted wall, in any case the kitchen doesn’t get a lot of sunlight in the morning.

I went through the usual tedious routine of trying to make sense of my world in the mornings. (I have a strange relationship with inanimate objects. Packets fall on my head when I open cupboards, I stub my toe on a protruding mop handle, and for some reason will find a sheet of newspaper sticking to the sole of my foot. There’s a perfectly rational explanation, I know, I simply don’t put things away properly, I just jam things into gaps in the other clutter from where they, or a neighbour, eventually escape and fight back).

So, wrestling with the kettle, and absorbed with the food label that had become attached to my hip I called the dogs for early morning ablutions.

It takes three goes. They lie in. The first call is polite “c’mon guys”. The second call is more forceful, half way through the first coffee “Oy, come on!”. I need the in the yard you see, before I go for my shower. Eventually I have to go and poke them with my toe and force them, ruthlessly, out of the door.

So, I’m squeaky clean, freshly laundered, smelling of lemons, with polished teeth and mouthwash fresh breath. Standing at the door actually enjoying the sunshine this morning, wrapped in my towel, because having got the little sods out I now have to coerce them back in with promises of breakfast. (Goodness knows what my neighbours make of this routine).

Then, and only then, did I notice that I now have a beautiful, doe eyed, brown, and white Springer Spaniel.

Who is bright yellow down one side.

Sod it, tonight I’m going to paint the rest of him purple.

wahay!!

2006-05-09T20:22:00.000+01:00

I can see!!

Now will somebody cut my bloody fringe please?

the magic caravan (part i).....

2006-05-07T21:32:00.000+01:00

…come the end of the long summer, with two weeks left to the beginning of term.

They’d worked hard and despite a frenzied, prolonged period of drunken debauch they’d managed to save enough for a…a two week drunken debauch, elsewhere. A road trip.

Unfortunately they hadn’t saved enough to fix Derek’s car. The MOT confirmed their worst suspicions, Derek owned a useless lump of dilapidated tin with a wheel in each corner, rather than something that could be reliably described as vehicular transport.

The solution was simple, they stole Derek’s fathers, and left a note.

It was a beautiful old blue Zephyr, with fins and bench seats, and a tank that held 20 gallons of petrol. The cavernous boot took all the clothes (6 T shirts and one pair of underpants each) they’d need for two weeks, a tent, sleeping bags and various camping paraphernalia – and the rear seats held a copious amount of lager in cans). Perfect.

Cornwall is a long drive from Manchester, almost due south, and boring too. Miles upon miles of motorway, until at last the motorway runs out below Exeter and thankfully gives up to country lanes.

They’d wiled away the tedium of the first part of the journey by making slow, steady inroads into the mountain of lager on the rear seats. And talking jibberwaffle.

“So what did you tell Janet?” asked Colin.

“I told her I was going away for a couple of weeks”

“And she was okay about it?”

“Not exactly”, said Derek “She wanted to come too”

“Oh dear”

“It’s okay, I told her she wouldn’t enjoy it”. “How did I know?” she said. “I told her I’d make sure”.

“I don’t think we’re going out any more”.

While Derek drove Colin studied the map. There was no plan, he was just looking for places with funny names, as good a destination as any to head for he reasoned. But looking down in a car isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and a large quantity of tinned warm lager and a full bladder wasn’t helping to dispel the nausea, so he rolled it into a ball and hurled it into the back seat. Bugger it, we’ll go blind.

They drove and drove, powered by lager, crisps and chocolate bars, denying the need to pee or stop for any reason, heading progressively deeper and deeper into the country side, south west according to the sun. It was a question of tacking like a boat under sail, what looked like a way south would angle unexpectedly and they’d have to find another lane, occasionally a dead ending in a farm, to continue to head in the direction they generally intended.

Here, in Devon, the countryside is ancient. The hedgerows and venerable ash and oak have seen the Romans, the Normans and the Cornish Kings come and go. There are trees, markers in the landscape and in history, that are mentioned in the Magna Carta. The sky is as old as the as the rolling hills and copses, the air is thick, rich and azure, the sun does not burn as brightly here, the redolence of the atmosphere prevents it.

They were oblivious to it all.

Sometime around 7 o’clock they, by dint of mutual need to toilet, decided almost telepathically that they needed to find somewhere to stop and pitch the tent.

An hour later, in the glooming, with the trees casting short, fading shadows above, they were still travelling down tiny lanes, denied any view or clue by the bordering hedges. There was a growing air of desperation in the car. The beer consumption had slowed dramatically partly due to distended bladders, and partly because of an ‘incident’ a little earlier when Derek had braked suddenly and the massed ranks of empty cans had hurried forward under the seat and lodged themselves in the front foot wells, and under the pedals. Looking down Colin thought there were quite an impressive number, and suffered a mild cramp in his stomach.

Eventually, in extremis, they rounded a corner into a village green. A tiny hamlet, with a scattering of houses set back arbitrarily from a stone cross in a junction in the road. More importantly there was a pub.

“Fancy a pint?” said Derek and added, ironically, “I’m parched”.

“Dry as a nun’s tit” said Colin

The pub door opened with a squeal of hinges, into a dun brown room, marinated in memories of wood smoke. The floor was stone, the windows, tiny, were leaded and let in only sufficient light to make out the shapes of the tables and the forms around far wall. The bar was unoccupied, there were no hand pumps, or any visible bottles or glasses, no ashtrays, or bar towels, and more to the point, no bar staff or customers. A large ginger cat emerged from a door, ajar, by the side of the bar and walked sanguinely between them towards the still open front door.

“Dead loss”, said Colin, “I hope there’s a loo though ‘cos I’m bursting”.

“You could go in the bloody fireplace and no one would know” said Derek.

“Oi wouldn’t do thart if Oi were you”, said a gruff male voice from the other side of the half open door. “The toilet’s outside, roun' the back, an’ Oi’ll be with you in a minute”.

tbc...

turn off the light...

2006-05-01T04:05:00.000+01:00

Ladies and Gentlemen, members of the press….

I had a day drinking healthy liquids and a little workout in the gym. I swam in the pool and had just an hour lozzocking in the sunshine round the pool. And then, feeling horrible (my god, I’d forgotten what an abominable place the world can be without a pair a beer goggles), I went to the mall - along with, apparently the entire population of Houston.

New sunglasses were the order of the day. I get through sunglasses at the same rate that other people get through bic pens or Q-tips. The Dutch are currently embarking on a plan to reclaim a square mile of land from the sea by mounding my mislaid sunglasses into a 10ft high dyke.

In Houston it seems you can walk into a restaurant naked so long as you are wearing the latest Prada eye fashion.

It may be me, but Houston doesn’t really seem like a place to wander around in. Apart from anything else it’s far too bloody hot and humid for someone who comes from a slightly more temperate clime, and I hate making a squelching noise when I walk. The insides of my fat little thighs chap after a while.

And it’s even less photogenic than I am so I won’t inflict any pictures on you, unless you’ve a fetish for concrete, in which contact me privately, (well, any fetish for that matter).

how shall I compare thee

2006-04-30T04:18:00.000+01:00

I’m bad.

I haven’t read anyone, or written a thing for what seems like weeks.

Unfortunately there are times when you have a choice to either do it or write about it? And I feel a little like “man in a suitcase” at the moment. Not that I’m complaining, I just feel like a bit of a boob for not sharing it is all.

So just in brief for the moment: I’ve been to New York and met friends. Met friends and made friends I hope, (though I’m afraid that may be a moot point with Melissa and Kristie). I’ve been hugged (and remarkably hugged back) by Jessica, met some remarkable people including Jen and Brando - please don’t ask me to do links for the moment, I will I promise when my body clock allows me to tell my arse from my elbow.

(Melissa quite likes a beer!)

I left a particular (yes you! and I can say that becaus you'll never read this) part of my heart in New York, and various bits of other organs including my kidneys and liver in a state of destitution. I never really learnt that very grown up trick of enjoying one's self in an adult way, in moderation. I’ve always had a child like capacity for fascination with something enjoyable, if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing to excess. So despite making it around all of the major landmarks and visiting the Met, the Guggenheim and the Museum for Modern Art, I also managed to fall dead asleep in Central Park for 3 hours and slightly longer than that on the subway. I arrived back in my room after “TequilaCon” at somewhere after 9am on the next day.

I took a horse drawn carriage ride around Times Square with a complete stranger and a jug of vodka martinis at midnight. I cannot remember her name, or in fact any details, and I’m sure she will have blanked them from her memory. I’ve been to Harlem, by mistake, walked higgledy piggledy like a lost boy down back streets (I didn’t do it on purpose Mel and Kristie - if I’d got the messages I would have appreciated the help).

If someone could tell me who this is I would be eternally grateful (please ask her if she has my bloody ‘phone)…

And I’ve been an utter rotter as a dad too. The boys were liberated from the kennels for 48 hours before they were deposited again. (Long enough for a trip to the vet and the good news is that Charlie’s eye is looking slightly better).

At the moment I’m in Houston, it’s 10.30pm, which means 4.30am at home, I think, so if this post makes little sense then at least it’s short…

…and to quote a young lady after I asked, “how was it for you?”

“mercifully brief” she replied.

I must go down to the sea again...

2006-04-18T21:46:00.000+01:00

“The Bank Holiday” is a great English tradition. Generations of children have been packed into cars, buried alive under the great mounds of household flotsam and jetsam deemed necessary to spend a few days in the country and driven, groaning and complaining all the way, at interminably slow speed along overloaded highways, to some damp destination that their parents think is ‘interesting’.

Not to be outdone I threw my ‘children’ into the car along with the tent and camping paraphernalia and drove for six hours to the coast. They deserve it you see, they’re dogs, they shouldn’t be cooped up indoors, no, they should be cooped up in the back of the car. So many, many hours after we set out we, found our pitch. It’s just as well really as I had absolutely no view out of the rear screen by then as they’d rimed it with half an inch of dog’s nose splufter. I’m glad we were in a field, I don’t think we smelt very nice.

So, all in all we’ve had a refreshing few days beach coming, reading, cooking bizarre meals on the primus stove and drinking lots of local beer with local people with one big eye in the middle of their forehead, (“Oo aar, av’ you met moi sister-wife?”).

Charlie’s little plastic bonnet came off so he could play on the beach. It was a practical measure as he was doing a good impersonation of a bucket dredger. I’ll offer you one piece of advice if I may, never throw a tennis ball in to the sea for your spaniel, if your terrier is wearing a plastic bucket on his head. The results might look hilarious but I’m pretty sure it’s less funny to your dog who is currently doing a head stand in a foot of salt water. Ah well, you live and learn?

On the Charlie front, we’ve discussed a few options with the vet. One is to surgically pull down a membrane from inside his eye lid and effectively sew his eye shut to give the cornea a chance to heal. The other, less palatable option is simply to remove the eye. But they’ll have to fight me for it – at least convince me that it is absolutely the best thing for him, because I’m going to kick up a hell of a fucking stink (excuse my French) before I let that happen.

For my part, well I’m fine. It’s nothing I need worry about any longer.

It was a pretty unpleasant experience though, conducted under local anaesthetic. It’s a very peculiar feeling, chatting to the nurse while some other faceless creature hacks away (I’m sure I do him a disservice by describing the surgeon’s handiwork as “hacking”, he certainly did neat stitches) at your bits.

And it must be a good sign that I’ve started to pick at the stitches?

Do you think that if I pull the wrong one the whole bloody mission will fall apart and I’ll lose the other two?

my name is Charlie..

2006-04-12T21:33:00.000+01:00

and I'm the Easter numptee.

My dad was going to say hello, but I bit him in the typing finger. It's the same one he uses to stir his tea, pick his nose, and squirt that yucky poo in my sore eye...

sorry

2006-04-05T16:47:00.000+01:00

It's all a bit of a fuzzle around here at the moment, so I'm going to love you and leave you just for a little while, and catch up with as soon as I can....

x

on the naming of toes

2006-03-31T12:20:00.001+01:00

It was my birthday yesterday.

This is what happens on Colin’s birthday….

Small irate dog has an ulcer on his eye (courtesy of the cat who assaulted him years ago).

Large stupid dog, feeling left out no doubt, has a case of the electric shits.

Colin’s doctor opines, suddenly and alarmingly, that extra testiculari are bad, and (even more alarmingly) immediatley hits the phone to enlist the help of (any) local surgeon to remove said stellar objet d’art from bulging scrotum (I apologise if you are tucking in to a bowl of Cheerios at the moment)..

Colin sits endlessly in waiting room reading “Vogue” for surgeon to eventually shake him by the genitals and say “come back on Monday”, because it’s “my anniversary you see”, and he’d like to skip off and take his good lady to Quaglino’s….he has a reservation.

Colin finally plucks up courage to ask girl-at-a-distance out, for a little dinner and perhaps a few drinks

And inadvertently calls a lady in America instead. Just a slip of the thumb, but thank you Jessica, it was nice to say hello?

Yours truly wakes up in bathroom at 9.30 this morning wearing a Spaniel as a hat, and a message in lipstick on his forehead which reads…”X”

Thank #### I’m mellowing with age……

hello my name is Kili....Kili Manjaro

2006-03-29T15:32:00.000+01:00

So, you know the whole interviewing malarky….

Well I’m involved with that at the moment. Interviewing for two new tele sales people to sell subscriptions for our publications.

I’ve involved our new sales manager, he will of course have to manage them. And I’ve positively laid the law down, made it quite plain that the ideal candidates will be those who fulfil the criteria, in terms of skills, required by the job.

There will be no relevance afforded to any physical aspect of the interviewees. I made it very clear. We will not be fatist, racist, gingerphobic, wavy toothitist, or even anti one-big-eye-in-the-middle-of –the-forehead….our ideal candidate will have a good telephone manner and be motivated.

Imagine my embarrassment then, when a lady who was at least 7 feet tall (over a certain height to me everyone looks 7 feet tall) with a robust figure of I’d say at least 250 lbs should be introduced by my secretary..

“This is Helena”

We stood up. I was far too close. I could no longer see her forehead, but stood rooted, like a rabbit in the glare of approaching headlights, staring through the v of her cleavage directly into her nostrils.

She was obviously quite fastidious in the nose department.

And she interviewed extremely well too (once she sat down and I could hear what she was saying). For a ridiculous moment I had thought she might yodel.

My sales manager seems very impressed

How can I tell him that I’m scared of heights.

it must be Monday somewhere

2006-03-28T22:00:00.000+01:00

I’d like to tell you about Singapore.

It’s a beautiful place. Incredibly green, which is hardly surprising considering the humidity, coupled with the heat, it all gets a little too much and the air throws off the excess liquid like a thrall sometime after lunch, and anyone used to the clime walks unconsciously, not unhappily, in the downpour for a few sodden minutes..

Whilst yours truly turns instantly into Curly Sue.

The people are friendly, it’s a safe place. Bear in mind here that capital punishment is probably preferable to spending 10 years in a gaol in Singapore, on a mat, with a bucket and no air conditioning - reformed prisoners must look like very old prunes.

That cabs are as cheap as chips.

About dinner in the Long Bar of “Raffles” (google it do), of Singapore Slings and finding the room where Raffles himself shot a Tiger under the billiard table.

Of the gentleman in the purple plush suit outside my hotel who used to pat my bottom while I waited for a cab, and who I naturally assumed was the concierge. Or Orchard Road, or the Thai market or Crab Key, where an unfeasible amount of Veuve Clicquot was ordered by a bluff, blunt, sweating and extremely lovable ship owner from Hull. I can’t believe that six Englishmen have been so drunk on half pints of champagne since we borrowed Hong Kong from the Chinese (“pretty little island Mi’Lord?”, “too bloody hot, shut up Jenkins and break out the good stuff there‘s a good man”.

Or indeed of Orchard Towers, a short step from my hotel, opposite “Muddy Murphy’s” the ubiquitous Irish bar. The Towers being affectionately known by one and all as the “four floors of whores”.

But I’m not really thinking about that.

I’m looking at the links on my blog and making a connection I hadn’t made until last night. Can you see it?

Sometimes there’s truth in a throwaway comment. More truth there, most likely, than in a constructed thought, it leaves the person who issues it as intuitively as it arrives at the person who receives it.

No criticism is implied by the observation, but nevertheless, you suddenly see your appearance, if not necessarily your motivation through other eyes. And if it arrives, as it did with me, from a friend and some one who’s opinion I value, then it sticks.

Ever wanted a mirror, to see yourself as others see you?

Dad's home

2006-03-27T20:56:00.000+01:00

so we get a bath...

oh pants.

I'm in Singapore this week

2006-03-22T12:17:00.000Z

which is nice

shout or whisper

2006-03-14T20:50:00.000Z

Okay I admit it I have sinned, doubly, “twist” I said, not “stick”.

I stole this from woman and passed it on to Melissa and Kristie, and Di (incidentally it’s Di’s very first post) even before I’d even done it myself.

I’m not really that big on meme’s but I loved this idea, it intrigues me, I want to know who other people's were said to and in what circumstance, so please if you read this and haven’t already done it consider yourself tagged.

List ten things you want to say to people you know but you never will, for whatever reason. Don't say who they are. Use each person only once:

1 Why are you laughing? We’ve known each other for years, and you’ve still not said anything funny.

2. Here’s a notion for you, wash occasionally instead of just using cologne.

3. It doesn’t matter what I say does it, you ‘re going to hear exactly what you want to and interpret it as a personal attack?

4. I fell in love with you the moment I saw you, I love you still and I always will.

5. Why did you have children if you don’t like them? One might have been an accident, but he others? What the hell are you anyway, just an angry gland on a stick?

6. Why is it always my fault that it doesn't fit properly? Have you considered the possibility that you have a vagina like a clown’s pocket?

7. Do you think you’d still exist if there were no mirrors?

8. Tell me honestly, write it down if you need to, is he mine?

9. Yes I am drunk, people do this occasionally for fun, and no you see, they are actually enjoying my company, apparently you are the only person who thinks I’m an arse, perhaps if you had a battery of your own and stopped following me around so you can criticise me…..

10. It was me, I’m sorry.

two's company....

2006-03-12T22:05:00.000Z

It’s as if a veil were lifted.

Two days of complete sobriety. I think it must be a similar sensation to that experienced by people who have recently given up smoking. Except that it’s not only affected my sense of taste and smell, (mind you I did find myself feeling awkwardly bloody starving at a christening this morning which is an unusual experience as I don’t normally have much of an appetite), but the world seems a bit brighter, less vapid, more in focus. I don’t like it at all (it’s unnerving).

Why? Why this sudden onslaught of sensibility? Well (if you’re eating dinner, or of a sensitive nature then you might prefer to blog off now)….

If you’re a man, or indeed you’re a woman who has slept with a man, you’ll know what Neanderthals we can be in the morning? No matter how civilised we are, when we sleep we are dragged to a place in a cave a with a flickering flame, a thousand generations ago where we idly cuddle a club and pick at parasites in the fur on our bum while we snort and gasp our way through slumber. In those few blissful moments between sleep and awareness, the twilight world, we still exist in our prehistoric state before we fully comprehend the soft pillow and chime of the alarm.

I’ve seen women make the transition between sleep and wakefulness gracefully, blooming into a new day with a flickering of the eyelids, a purr and a smile. You’re a lady you see, made of sugar and spice and all things nice - even should you fart a little while you stretch, it’s not the cacophonous racket that we make, more of a squeak than a fanfare to greet the new day.

What tends to happen next to the male of the species is a lot of scratching, bottom and belly scratching mostly, which I think is probably a genetic hangover. My Spaniel still does it, he wakes up and straight away puts his foot in his ear and waggles it about to rearrange the tangled fur in there.

And every morning, almost involuntarily, unconsciously, we check to see if our testicles are still there, to make sure that the bollock-elf hasn’t stolen them away during the night. (Italian men do this once every five minutes, draw your own conclusions).

So on Friday morning I went through the whole sordid business of slipping unsalubriously back into the waking world. With a scratch and great deal of rubbing at the dried spittle in the corners of my eyes, and the usual mild panic and pushing at the baboon on my chest, I followed my instinct and my hand went to check on the family jewels.

And I discovered I was rich.

Bear in mind this is an involuntary action. There’s the same result every day, you don’t hear men mutter, “good, still there”, it’s a bit like alarming the car, we know we’ve done it but it’s reassuring to hear the “beep beep”? So I spat out the pillow and rolled over testing knees and elbows for signs of rigor mortis, and knocked, as I always seem to, the open book by my side off the bed perilously close to the glass of water by the bed….before the message from my fingers finally arrived at my brain. Something was different, something had changed.

Something that required a more thorough examination. It was almost immediately apparent what the difference was. How should I put this, picture if you will the contents of my scrotum…..no? Well let’s say it’s a miniature solar system, just the two planets of relative size, the earth perhaps, and venus, except today when my universe had suddenly gained a moon. Not a full grown planet, but a substantial celestial object nonetheless.

I lay and worried for a bit, then switched on the tv and retrieved my glass of water. Then I checked again, with the same out come, One…two…two and a half.

mmmm.

Time for coffee and shower and the rest of the morning ritual completing the transmission from knuckle scratching Neanderthal to urbane, civilised man about town (yes I’m laughing too!). All accompanied with the affected nonchalance of a person denying an urge to give in to mild panic.

My doctor’s surgery is on the way to the office and I arrived at 8.37. The waiting room was already full of coughing and sneezing adults and leaking children. It’s a shared practice, the receptionist asked my name (three times between ‘phone calls), and told me that my doctor was away on holiday. I told her that I thought it was rather urgent and she offered me an appointment with the locum next Wednesday. I told her that I didn’t think it would wait that long (by my estimation if I went to bed one night and woke up with the something the size of a cherry in the morning, if it grew exponentially, by the time my appointment arrived I might have to return with a wheel barrow), she said it was the best she could do. I told her it was delicate, she said there was a lot of influenza around. I told her that in that case I would sit in the waiting room with my scrotum exposed and show it to a doctor if they passed by. She said she would see what she could do….

Some hours later the good lady doctor asked me what appeared to be the problem, and I suggested that she might like to put on some gloves.

I have a fatty cyst, it’s completely unattached and quite unremarkable. Absolutely nothing to worry about. Boy, did I feel silly?

Not in the least.

Except that when she offered me the prescription and said not to drink alcohol I nodded gravely and completely ignored her. Generally the problem with drugs and alcohol is that alcohol is a diuretic, it makes you pee a lot and dilutes the efficacy of the drug – but whatever the hell it is that she gave me really doesn’t agree with booze. I was a naughty boy (and I think my last act was to email as much to a friend).

So, I’m enjoying a second childhood, I’m sober and I have a pocket of marbles.

If music be the food of love, then I'll be sent back to the kitchen..

2006-03-09T21:07:00.000Z

Tagged, or more likely "outed" by the luvverly Melissa!

Apparently I'm supposed to show a little of myself in the form of seven songs I'm listening to right here, right now. My taste in music is eclectic, rock, pop, blues, classical and some of it is downright embarrassing too, so I won't go there. The easiest way to do this is to offer a sample from the CD's that are currently loaded on the system in the car, stuff I listen to every day...

Push the Button - Sugarbabes - I love the Sugerbabes - and when I first heard this I was really disappointed , the first impression was complete bab (yes that’s a word), and then it grew on me

Hollerback Girl - Gwen Stefanie - Don't know why and I don't want to analyse it , but it works - k?

Rendez-Vu - Basement Jaxx - it's just in the blood, feels like a throwback to my Northern Soul

Perfect Day - Lou Reed - "you're going to reap just what you sow"

Clair de Lune - Delibes - Simply beautiful

Concerto for two Violins- JS Bach - Mozart was a prodigy, a maestro and constructively impeccable - but Bach was a genius

Alison - Elvis Costello - I play the album and flick between this and Diving for Pearls, and go somewhere else, somewhere warm and good and slightly moist in my head for a little while

I’m supposed to tag seven people….I’d be intrigued to know what these people are listening to:

Miladysa
"Aims"
Aimee
Wendy
Deadly Female
Rick
Shephard
Anne

can’t count, won't count…

Allow the little children to come unto me

2006-03-09T13:32:00.000Z

They may have to sell some property to pay the bill. Poor things.

Bad priest, naughty priest!!

1, 2, 3, 4, 5....

2006-03-08T21:03:00.000Z

It seems to me that one of the chief joys of blogenstance is reading your friend’s posts, learning about their lives, their good times and trials and tribulations and sharing their views – and occasionally finding that one of them has helped you to unlock a door in your mind.

It could take the form of Rick, who introduced me to the notion that racism is in fact an artificial, mental construct. Something I now believe and almost, almost understand, I’m still wrestling with the mechanics.

Or Wendy, who is sweetness incarnate and has been struggling recently because she is intuitive to the extent that the ‘connections’ she observes are so acute that coincidence just isn’t a good enough explanation.

And it’s what Wendy wrote recently that that struck a chord with me. What she seems to be describing is something I believe in utterly, and part of the overall belief system I hold. It’s not a completely developed ‘science’ of beliefs – it’s just the essence of what I think of as the truth:

That life is a wonderful accident, that we are in fact a remarkable, walking, talking, thinking, speaking accident of physics. There is no grand plan, no higher force, only nature. There is nothing that is ‘super natural’, only things that we don’t understand.

We connect with our world through our senses. They are remarkable but not mysterious. But we are also apt to other influences that we can’t explain, moments of what we call intuition. We’re aware of being watched, most of us have had an experience where we knew that the telephone would ring moments before it did, or heard a silent voice warning us of danger to ourselves or a loved one.

Have you ever been a room when your cat has hissed and spat at a spot on the wall, just like all the others, and then fled the room? Unnerving isn’t it?

I’m sure that what we are experiencing is a residual trace of another faculty that we once possessed which I would choose to call ‘perception’. A sense that we probably still possess in full measure, but that we have subverted as, over the course of time, we have come to place more and more emphasis on the accumulation of knowledge.

Our other senses provide us with a information that’s both good and bad, our eyes see beauty and ugliness in equal measure, and though we might not like what we see, we are not perturbed by how we receive the message? So imagine looking at a tree that appears to be perfectly healthy from the outside, that’s the message that you receive from your eyes – but at the same time you 'perceive' a canker deep inside it.

Unfortunately, if there was a conflict between our senses then we have tended to rely less and less on our intuition.

I believe that we have lost a perfectly natural gift that allowed us to connect more intuitively with our surroundings. After all radio waves travel through walls, light travels immense distance in an imperceptible moment, and we believe in (but can only prove in theory) subatomic particles and a brown matter that fills the spaces in the universe that we can’t otherwise account for.

Is it ‘unnatural’ then to suppose that the general health of a person might project itself to a loved one over a distance? Or that we might sense an impending accident, sense the storm coming, know the mood of a friend, loath a cheerful stranger or know a friend in an unlikely appearance – isn’t it possible that we are simply receiving a signal just like sight but on a different wavelength?

At least that’s what I believe, that it’s a great loss, and if you do happen to be highly intuitive then you should consider it a gift and indulge it.

And if you’ve not dozed off by now after wading through ‘the world according fish’ you might like to say hello to Anne, who’s lovely.

flattery will get you everywhere

2006-03-07T14:17:00.000Z

If you will allow me an addendum to the previous post….

I wasn’t disappointed, just taken aback for a moment. I’m no angel, but it’s not as if I had a master plan to talk the young lady out of her underwear either – it was just quite unusual to get on so very well, and talk so freely with a person you’d just met?

My gay friends are, on the whole, far friendlier, more open, interesting and generally more sensitive than any person I’ve ever been accused of being.

So I’m going to regard it as a compliment!

has anyone seen my mojo

2006-03-06T22:04:00.000Z

And Toffee says, enough already, go to bed.

It was a friend’s birthday on Saturday and we all congregated in a bar for a few drinks on Saturday evening. The night was planned, her boyfriend had organised a club in town, and we were all on the guest list - I do like a plan, (that some one else has made), taxis were laid on for 8.30 and the only thing that required any thought at all was how to avoid Eric-the-Bore and Mandy (straight hair and wavy teeth).

The best laid plans of mice and men…..

This was one of those moments that you find out how popular you truly are. I am apparently less popular than the combined charms of Eric and Mandy. I only popped to the loo, it was a matter of minutes, just a quick timothy and some dabbing with toilet tissue (pale jeans), oh and a moment to admire the wit of some wag who had written something other than an obscene offer and a telephone number on the toilet wall: “Oedipus - ring your mum!”

And while I was in there, in those few short minutes, the taxis had arrived and decanted my friends into the city.

Which was nice of them I thought.

So I toddled around the town, a beer here and a beer there, on my own private pub crawl. Until eventually I bumped, almost literally, into some other people that I knew. They were just getting ready to leave for a night club in Hoddesdon. I should say here that Hoddesdon isn't exactly renowned for it’s night life, in fact it isn’t really renowned for anything, except perhaps for having more zimmer frames per capita than any other town in Hertfordshire. But what the hey, it seemed like a very good idea at the time.

I’m always a little bit apprehensive about provincial night clubs. The people there seem to try just a little too hard? The dress sense in most London clubs is relaxed, everyone there probably spends the entire week in business clothes be they men or women, so the weekend is an opportunity to relax and dress down. In Hoddesdon it’s completely the opposite. But it was fine, it was good, the people were friendly and the doorman gave my jeans only a cursory glance before nodding me in.

I admit to be a bit of a nomad in places like these. I find it difficult to stay with my group for the entire night and tend to toddle off on my own for long spells. On one of these little forays I got to talking to a young lady by the bar. We laughed and joked and shared a drink, and danced (for my part badly - I do a good impression of a washing machine on a spin cycle, even when both knees are working properly), and then we laughed and joked and drank some more.

I thought it was going rather well actually, look at me everybody, I’m a babe magnet, we were getting on like a house on fire. We moved to a quieter corner, and she leaned in and said “you know, I really do enjoy the company of gay men, it’s so non threatening if you know what I mean, so nice to just have fun….”. Well, my head was bobbing up and down, and I laughed as I nodded in agreement…

…when I realised she meant me.

Oh poo.

fish face

2006-02-28T21:49:00.000Z

That’s a tired little face.

I’ve got used to the wrinkles, I call them laughter lines because I’m vain enough not to want to want people to think that a passing rhino slept on my face. Besides the puffiness of the bags under my eyes works in my favour, a natural balancing effect.

The company I work for is a publishing company and PR agency, and a large part of my life is involved with our own PR. That is entertaining the poor devils who apparently seem to think we know what we are doing and provide us with the money to do it. Actually that’s unfair, we’re good and we give a damn, every single person who works in that company will go the extra yard…in my case the extra gin & tonic. It’s something that’s just evolved, I seem to have a knack for it, even if that knack often simply comprises staying conscious long enough to pay the bill.

We work in the shipping industry and most of our clients are – well, it’s like an old boy s club, you know, one of those dreadful stone age industries full of moustaches and secret handshakes, entourages, dull ties and nepotism. It’s also full of Scandinavians, Greeks and Japanese, who like to visit London and enjoy them selves on a rather grand scale.

Today, for lunch it was the Danes, our Viking friends, who appear to think it’s quite suitable to drink eight pints of Guinness from midday to three, although I’m guessing, just guessing mind, that they are fast asleep in their hotel rooms by now.

It’s not that I had any intention of keeping up with them you know, but you have to at least show willing even if a few of mine ended up in the potted plant in the corner.

So I’m sorry, if when I returned to the office and you were the recipient of an email, it seemed a little dull witted.

As we say were I come from, “I’m goosed”.

when the bee stings

2006-02-27T22:02:00.000Z

Soup is great isn’t it?

Soup is comfort food, nourishing and warm, there’s nothing better on a cold winter night.

I make great soup. Freshly chopped leaks and spring onions, sweet potatoes and yams, borlotti beans, chick peas and chopped fine beans and a handful of spinach towards the end, just to blanch it.

Then I add a can of soup, because I haven’t worked out how to actually add flavour yet.

But it’s scrummy with a big hunk of fresh bread.

Soup is good. Hot toasty dogs in front of an open fire are good. The tops of babies heads are good, fresh towels, crisp laundered bed sheets, a glass of rioja, hot buttered toast and tea…well, you get the picture. These are a few of my favourite things.

Lower down on my list of things to do when it’s raining outside is sitting in the middle of an astroturf pitch trying to bite back tears. Whoever it was that was charged with designing the soles of astro shoes was definitely overqualified. Make them grip they told him or her, and they did. If they’d told this person to design a condom the finished product would have been a microscopic mesh of carbon fibre and ruthenium capable of withstanding twelve atmospheres, deep space and being fired through a toilet wall without spilling a single tadpole.

Unfortunately this particular savant got astro soles instead. So when my meagre body decided to change direction with all of the feeble acceleration that I can muster, it was glued to the floor with the same coefficient of friction as a formula 1 tyre. Something had to give and it was my knee with an audible clunk.

On the bright side, I’ve found a comfortable way to sleep with it, but it does involve a lot of pillows and contortions, a sort of page 27 of the single man’s guide to the kama sutra…last night the covers rode right up over my head while I was asleep.

Maybe the soup was a bad idea on reflection

what the...

2006-02-25T10:38:00.000Z

I woke up this morning, crumpled and stiff on the sofa, panicky and breathless due to the large panting, idiotically happy spaniel on my chest...and my first cohesive thought was - "Tippi Hedren"

Wha..?

Suggestions on a postcard please.

caveat emptor

2006-02-24T11:10:00.000Z

I have no idea what Kristie was looking for when she found this but I read it yesterday, and I still don’t know whether to be horrified, or laugh, so I’m going to settle for doing both.

At least I got a new word out of it, the “navus”, navel to ass.

All I’m saying is be very wary of what you sign.

anyone for a food fight?

2006-02-21T16:51:00.000Z

Getting older was never a thing that occured to me to worry about. Let's be frank here, I never expected it to be an issue.....

If some reason it did ever cross my mind I then I'd think it might be rather fun. From what I've seen one's autumnal years are filled with a whole host of opportunities for mischief. There's endless scope for frightening small children; getting too close and shouting at them v.e.r.y s.l.o.w.l.y as if they were deaf or hard of uderstanding, poking them with bony, liver spotted fingers, or demanding to know if they've seen your glasses when you are quite clearly wearing them. For engaging very busy looking business people in futile conversation on street corners, or chatting to the ticket sales person at the local train station about train times on a Wednesday afternoon three months hence of a service to Belgium out of Waterloo, while a queue of rush- hour suits mewl and tap dance behind me. I might wear a hat. Or better still wear a hat and drive. And I will certainly purchase a pair of fawn trousers to which I will add a damp stain to the crotch for when I travel on the bus. I will purchase a bottle of "eau de urine", I've never actually spotted it in a shop, but I'm sure it exists.

One thing I shall not be doing is eating "convenience" food.

I like to cook, in fact I thoroughly enjoy it. The very act of preparing something that I will find good to eat is relaxing and fulfilling. There's a sense of anticipation, and a glass of wine, maybe a few olives, and some music all add to the occasion...because that's how I feel about it, that dinner, even dinner alone on a weekday evening, if provided with a soupcon of tlc, should be a small but worthwhile occasion.

Conversely sometimes I just can't be arsed.

When the washing needs hanging and the dog's are wet through after a walk in the rain, or the bed needs changing, it's open the bills day, or I've just had a particularly long day at work - then I succumb to the celophane wrapped allure of something from the chiller cabinet. Something bland but microwavable, warm and quick.

Well, that's the theory anyway. The reality is that convience food is anything but convenient. After I've pierced the cellophane cover on my "pasta a la slop", it goes into the microwave for 4 minutes. I'm instructed to stir it at this point, and then return to the microwave it for a further 2 minutes. I'm not instructed to remove the lid so stirring seems to be out of the question, unless I'm supposed to stir it with a toothpick through one of the tiny perforations - so I shake it instead. It's hot, so I yelp and drop it onto the kitchen floor. Still, that seems to have done the trick, the contents have certainly been rearranged. When I turn my meal the right way up only a tiny amount of the liquid has escaped and I can see that some of the caramalised edges are now in the middle - good enough. During it's second spell in the microwave I open my packet of 'ready prepared' caesar salad...in order to prepare it. There's a knack to these bags, a knack that I don't possess. I pinch two folds of bag on either side of the serrated top and pull, gently at first and then with more force - it splits unexpectedly an inch to the left of the seam, all the way down to the bottom spilling my lettuce and a smaller bag of croutons on the floor. I step back looking for the croutons and find them - with my foot, they're actually quite large and very sharp, it's like finding a 3 - pin plug in a stockinged foot. My lettuce is now hairy and I find a colander to wash it. In the meantime the microwave has gone "bing"so my pasta must be fully cremated by now.

There's another, separate sachet of caesar sauce, with an indent where I am supposed to tear. Do they think I'm stupid, naive in the way of the sauce sachet? I approach it with scissors and take off the corner with a satisfying snip, and then as I squeeze it over the lettuce and croutons the indent gives way in any case, covering my thumb in white, sticky sauce as if I had taken a time out to masturbate before opening the wine.

My meal is fused to the inside of the carton. There's a tiny flap on the cellophane lid which, presumably, I am to use to tear it off. The carton is too hot too hold so I place it down on the counter and scald two fingers trying to grasp the tiny lip on lid - eventually, bored with the whole thing I simply slash at it with a knife and pour the contents into a bowl I should have warmed while I was distracted by the enchantment of arielly inclined lettuce.

I did eventually sit down with a glass of wine, hunk of bread, hairy caesar salad and a bowl of rapidly cooling pasta gloop with added fragments of cellophane. I enjoyed the bread.

So my question is: What will happen when I get older. Will I have to prepare every single meal from it's basic ingredients, or eat out every day of my life? Actually scrub that, it's more wide ranging than just food. So, so many packets and packages of household goods seem to be deigned with scant regard to the end user. My fingers are not in the best shape I know, but god forefend an elderly person faced with a "resealable" bag of dog biscuits. "Pull tab tear here" my arse, what with - a pair of pliers? "Reseal by pressing and running fingers along red line", not in a month of Sundays!! I've buggered it completely already trying to open it. Or something as simple as pulling open the ring pull on a can of beans, the instruction should say, "flip up ring and pull, and then bleed into contents".

Somebody, somewhere is obviously charged with the responsibility of designing these packages, and one might have thought their brief would include terms like "ergonomic", "ease of use" and "user friendly". Are they impish, derelict or just simply divorced from the real world? I'm beginning to think that they sit in offices, where they are fed, toileted and put into bed at night - to lead gay, playful and creative lives free of the clutter of any preconceptions about how their products will actually be used. Certainly none of them have grandparents.

If there is a hell then I hope that there is a room full of starving packaging designers and shelves upon shelves of beautiful fresh food - they wouldn't have a f#cking clue.....

of tantrums and tents

2006-02-16T22:08:00.000Z

Last night Aeolus stalked the skies of suburban London.

To lie in bed in the early hours of the morning as the god of the winds plays havoc amongst the trees and garden gates along the street, rattling roof tiles and ripping clouds from their moorings to scud across the sky.

To lie in the dark as moonlight, like steam, billows across the walls. To hear the wind turn the corner of the house, and feel it draw its fingers across the window panes…

Is, strangely, comforting I’ve always thought. To be cosy in bed when wild, wild elemental fury unleashes itself on the ordinary world outside is a feeling of being cocooned, safe, warm and glad. It’s the perfect time to roll and find a warm drowsy figure next to you, and perhaps make some love in the joy of sharing a nest in the storm…

…alternatively you could do what I did, and open the bedroom door, and let the dogs in. And so we lay, at 3.30 this morning, by candlelight, hairy bottoms and wet noses (not me!!), and a glass of wine and listened to the storm swell and rise, to driven hail and the manic clang and clatter of Aeolus’ chariot passing by.

I’ve had trouble sleeping recently. I’m late to bed anyway, but this past week, even when I’ve made it abed by midnight I’ve still been wide awake at 2. It probably happens to us all periodically, and I know better than to fight it now, so I’ll try to regard it as a chance to catch up on some reading. I’m perilously close to finishing Mason & Dixon which has defeated me for years.

The alarm will go at 6.30 come what may so there’s very little point in getting anxious? And, since it has happened many times in the past I refuse to lie there and let my mind run riot while my body tries to find a comfortable cool spot in a bed that is beginning to resemble a sack of seed potatoes. Trust me, unless you have nary a care world, never lie in bed in the dead, dread hours of the night and take stock of your life.

So I’m sure it was 4 or 4.30 this morning when I finally slid back and closed my eyes on Toffee’s rump.

It’s like the storm, it will pass, I know it will in a childlike way - because it always does. So it’s comfortable, my bed is like the thick walls of the house, a place of shelter.

And hopefully, when it does, I won’t wake up in the office with drool on my shirt…

May I use your dictaphone?

2006-02-15T22:13:00.000Z

No, use your finger like everyone else.

I feel that apologies are in order.

I’ve been remiss, there have been so many people here to say hello and share things, and so many places that I would normally go to, to share your fun and wisdom, but I’ve just not made it of late. It’s just that I’ve been a bit pre occupied – and if you had the view that I have right now you’d see two sets of eyes staring reproachfully at me from the corner of the room, so I’m constantly reminded that I have priorities too.

Some time ago I stopped blogging. It hadn’t been what I thought it would be. I thought it was simply a place where I could have a rant and rave, to let out some of the bile anonymously and then simply walk away, sated. On reflection, perhaps it is, in fact it probably serves whatever purpose we choose – which leaves me floundering in a way. Because what I’ve found is that I’ve made friends here, really, genuine friends.

This is a matter of no small amazement to me since I’m incredibly selfish in that respect. I’m a user, I have any number of casual acquaintances that I can go have fun with and then, when it suits me, ignore. But here I’ve found people that I’ve come to genuinely care for, and I feel an obligation to, the responsibility of friendship. (Am I alone in this? Is this some anomaly in me, or is it a delusion that separation – the not really knowing the other – causes?). Or am I simply being up-my-bum?

So apology, part two (don’t worry, it’s only a two part series), is that I find I am almost congenitally unable to write what I think most of the time. Not when I’m doing this, but when I’m speaking directly to A N Other of you out there who’s decided that it was worth saying hello. I’m not sure whether it’s a simple lack of vocabulary, or concentration, but I find it difficult to reply to even the simplest message with any clarity. I look back and wince at some of the replies I’ve written when I think of how many ways it’s possible to interpret them, when a few simple words would have done. I believe I should sign messages Terry Fuckwit from now on, as a disclaimer.

So, you should know, that I still do come and read, more often than not in the early hours of the morning, but don’t always comment – as much for me as you, in case I come across one of my own comments and go into spasm.

On a different note, thank you for all of the offers of helmets. I do in fact have a perfectly respectable motorcycle helmet that I wear when I’m out on the bike, robbing a bank and taking a shower (I’m lying about the bank). By the way, did you know that a “helmet” in the UK is also slang for an idiot (wally, plonker, dipstick, helmet etc), and also the bulbous bit on the end of the willy that stops your hand from sliding off? No?...I thought not).

I’m afraid I can’t tell you any more though, because although I spoke to the consultant before the examination I didn’t see him afterwards, I have to wait for a letter. We did chat for a while though and it was reassuring that he didn’t look at me as if I had a large piece of broccoli growing out of my ear, or ask me if I was insured.

But – whether it was because it was Valentine’s day, whether it was a because she held my hand, or the uniform, or the fact that she laughed when I said “Goodbye Mr Bond” when my head disappeared into the scanner – I don’t know. All I know is that, embarrassingly, I had an outrageous dose of the hots for the nurse. It’s a very good job that they didn’t scan my whole body or they’d have found a very strange phenomenon below the belly button. (Golly it was warm in there!).

I can't be sure

2006-02-15T21:11:00.000Z

but I think they would have enjoyed Valentine's day..

I'm off to see the wizard...

2006-02-13T20:43:00.000Z

You can generally tell by the other players reactions. You’re sitting on the pitch looking dazed and stupid and the first people to arrive will tell you, just by the looks on their faces, whether you’re off to casualty again.

“Do you want someone to come with you?”

“No, I’ll be fine….do I really need to go?”

“Yes. It’s small, but it’s quite deep and it’s bleeding like a bugger”. (We really need to consider playing in something other than white).

I have a book in the car anyway, which is good because you know you’re in for a long wait. Casualty staff regard sports injuries as tantamount to self inflicted wounds, which I can understand, they work long hours and see some awful things so my little knock is less than urgent……I’ll sit there for several hours behind little Johnny’s be-panned head and the nervous looking man with the vacuum cleaner attachment up his bottom….for a few more stitches.

This time though I’m feeling particularly stupid. There’s no denying it, I really am a bit of an ass.

Tomorrow I have an appointment with a neurologist and a scanner for precisely the reason that I’m back in casualty, cumulative damage to the noggin. Over the years I have treated my head in much the same way that other people treat a favourite mallet or coal scuttle. I’ve tenderised it, to the extent where my fingers have been clumsy and numb at times, my left eye is a kaleidoscope and I wear a headache like a knitted cap.

The problem is that almost everything I enjoy doing, playing hockey, riding the motorbike, even just generally having a laugh with friends, involves some potential for further cranial abuse.

And I know (truly, I do) that I’m an ass for caring sufficiently to try to get something done about it –whilst at the same time putting myself in a position where I use my head to redirect hockey balls.

I just think it’s going to be embarrassing tomorrow when the consultant finds a neat line of stitches above my left ear.

I’ll lie of course, I’ll tell him I got a pot stuck on my head…