Bayeux Tapestry

The baby I lost in France would be eleven today.

That's the sort of thing I don't know whether it's better to remember or forget. I don't want to keep remembering it, but trying to forget seems wrong, careless, disrespectful somehow. And of course, trying to forget something is a guaranteed way of always remembering.

It doesn't feel like a terrible tragedy, because I was lucky and I fell pregnant again very quickly, so my daughter who came along later (instead? as well?) is eleven in July. And I don't feel as guilty as I used to for cursing the fact I had become pregnant when I had a three month old newborn and feeling afterwards that I had wished that other baby away with my curses.

So I don't think about it much, only when something pricks me. But I saw this on www.postsecret.com, my very most favourite website, and I thought: yes.  So here it is.  Not nice, but striking a chord.

Spotlight

Coughing all night.  Saturday morning. I am woken at 5.45am by a child who has struggled to get up in time for school all week.

"Mummy I am wondering about some things. You have to tell me". A bleary OK.

"How big is Pluto?"

The cartoon dog or the planet? Ah yes, good point. Every one does know a dog is dog-sized.  Well. Pluto is smaller than the size of a planet.  No I don't know what the Official Size of a planet would be (although I do know a girl round the corner who is a Space Fact-File and undoubtedly does).  But yes, it is indeed bigger than a sofa.  I think it must be larger than the moon but smaller than the earth. No I don't know how big the moon is. Or the earth. Yes the earth is larger than America. Obviously.

"Tell me again, what is a prostitute?"

I've told you this before. It's a person who has sex for money. No, it's not someone who works for the government, that's a politician.  Yes I know dad said they were the same but he was being ironic. Well, it's when you say something but you mean the opposite. Yes, it can be confusing, can't it.

"Why do so many girls like Justin Bieber and vampires?"

No idea. Really. I'm very tired. I don't feel very well.

Frustratingly, she still wasn't ready to go to Stagecoach for a 10am start.

Icy Blasts

It was the sort of week where I woke to a text informing me bluntly that Stuart will not be attending your meeting today as he died last night. Goodness, I thought to myself, might we perchance still be in the Period of Shittiness? Whoever would have thought it.

It was the sort of week where Ms Capable had an afternoon off sick, and another day when she asked for help. Heavens. The sort of week where YogaMan, the soul of calm and cool, swore and got angsty and lost his yin-yang equilibrium. It was the sort of week where NorthernBoy is too tired to go out for a drink on a Friday.

It was the sort of week where the Pet Poet, usually wreathed in smiles and extensive vocabulary, was reduced to shouting what the pissing hell? And the sort of week where Ms Superwoman had to go home at 6pm and lie down because she felt poorly, and then in a never-before instance of crapness, missed the fast train and will consequently be late for a meeting.

What is the world coming to?

The Lady of the Lake

Ladybower Reservoir is absolutely beautiful. This Y shaped lake nestled in the Pennines just like it has always been there was one of my favourite places when I was growing up. 

You turn off the A57 Just by the sign for Hope, and there's a road runs right along the edge of the water. It hugs the side of the shore on your right, and the wooded hill rises up sheer at your left.  There are several places to stop, and a pavement too so you can get out and walk. Such a lovely road, through such a beautiful place, must surely lead somewhere wonderful?

"It doesn't lead anywhere", my dad would say. "It's the longest cul de sac in Britain, I reckon. Why on earth would you make a lovely road like this, to nowhere? We paid for this magnificent highway through our flipping taxes, and I mean to get my money's worth".

You'd never guess it was a dead end. You'd never guess under that serene stretch of water is a drowned village, church tower and all. Memories and cottage gardens and footpaths only trodden now by trout.  There's just a locked gate at the end of the road, no track beyond, only thickets and copses.

And you just have to come back out again and get yourself back onto the humdrum lorry-grinding A57, and drive on from Hope through Hollow Meadows. As if when they named the places, all those centuries ago, the valley's fate was foretold.

Proze and Cons

It's been a while since we've had a Quiz of the Week.  Let's give it a try.

It's deadly serious this week. Well, more serious than some of the others you may recollect, including the obscene one which so offended our American reader. Ho hum.

So I need your opinion, whoever you are, regardless.  I'm coming to the end of my four month course of anti-depressants. And I'm still a right miserable cow. But maybe that's just me, and the winter, and the recession, and the brief-but-lost-ability to write good poetry, and the disappointment of involuntary celibacy and oh god, you know the rest...

Anyhow. Should I stop, carry on, have more, have less, cut my throat, self-harm, jump off Beachy Head, go postal with an AK47, lose control and go loopy or what? Please answer my quiz. I'm begging you. Over there, right hand side.

Enteroctopus Dofleini

The Giant Pacific Octopus is an ugly bastard.  It can have a span of 3 metres (if span is indeed the correct term) and every one of its suckers is can work separately.

You wouldn't think something so big and limber and sucker-y would have superpowers, but it has these on top. Not a mere one, but two.

Firstly it has the ability to change colour. There's a proper scientific word for this, chroma-summat, I'd look it up for your education if I wasn't so damn idle. It's not so much about blending in for disguise, it's about psyching out your enemy, it's about shock and awe. It can turn bright red when it gets mad.  And that's odd, because under the sea the red end of the spectrum is all leached out, usually.

They told me this when I was on a submarine journey under the Atlantic. Yes, really. Whilst on holiday in Tenerife, of all places. I mean, I just had to, didn't I? I didn't spot this octopus, because they live in the Pacific. Duh. Although I looked out hopefully, in case they go on holiday like we do.

The second superpower of the Giant Pacific Octopus is infinitely more interesting than the chroma-whatsit colour-me-beautiful thing.  It has the superpower of Squashing.  This tentacular spectacular, with its wingspan measured in yards, has a beak of around one and a half inches. This is the only solid part of its body: made of keratin, like lots of other interesting things (hair, and shark fins, and deer horns and suchlike).  It can squeeze its whole body through any gap where the beak will fit, by squishing its internal organs into an almost eternally long drawn out string, brain and all.

It can squidge through the tiniest hole into the hollow centre of a beautiful sharp and spiky coral reef, with only its malevolent beady eye peeping back out.  You would never know that something so dangerous was in there.

Time To Go Home

It was a writing workshop, in a photographic gallery. We had to choose a photo, look at it, make some notes about the picture. Then tell the story.  This is how it went.

You can't tell if its' in black and white or not  -  it could just be a day with no colour.

Cold, so cold the snow didn't melt all day, not a drop had fallen from the lower branches. Maybe higher, where the sun touched it.

The sun would have been low all day. One tiny bird.

When the sun drops behind that break in the cloud there will be no more light today.

Only a few leaves hanging on.

A knot of children, cold feet, arms limp now, were playing but now they're not. One boy heading off in a different direction.

They are so close to home, you can see the houses on the other side of the hedge.

----------------------

He was watching, enjoying the children playing in the snow, enjoying the noise after the quiet of his house with just the clocks and watching TV in black and white and nothing left to say to each other.  It was just before the time when an old man couldn't stand and watch a group of children any more without them being afraid, or calling him names or running away. Not so long ago.

And it had been such a beautiful day, so few cars on the roads, so quiet. Look up to the sky and it was an almost Mediterranean blue, cold and dry, crisp, and the blue sky and the sun making the world glisten as it reflected off the ice crystals dusting the branches like icing sugar.

He was wearing his old man's clothes, still the suits he wore for work, but twenty-five years later - and the shoes, and the scarf, and the hat with a small feather in the same colours as the tweed and a scarf which we called check but he called plaid  -  clothes don't last like that now. Even his name is old-fashioned: Ernest.

He doesn't have to go home yet because it's still early, and he will wait to see the sun drop behind those last few clouds and tea won't be ready until five, and anyway he is waiting to make sure that the boy turning away will not be left behind and lost. Because he is a father too, and although that was long time ago, he never saw his little girl at that age because he was away writing his lists of tinned food and socks as if we could beat the Nazis with the neatness of our inventories.

So he sat for a moment on the bench already cleared of snow by someone else earlier and daydreamed about the line of dogprints in the snow, and the boy and the dog... and the boy and the dog in Germany, in Berlin, in the snow, on a cold day just like this, and that boy was the same age as his Marion.

Then it was dark quite suddenly, and the way back wasn't clear, and he thought it best to stay on the bench and wait until morning. When the man came back with his dog at first light, he could speak his name, but he was so cold they could not warm him back up.

We were glad he had seen such a beautiful sunset on his last day.

The World's Your Lobster

Blue Monday, that's what they call it nowadays: today is supposed to be the most depressing day of the year.  I don't know how they work it out, and I'm so lethargic I can't even be bothered to Google, but it can't be rocket science, can it?

It's a Monday, in January. Far enough away from Christmas to have failed already at some of the New Year Resolutions and still feeling the flab of the festive season but having forgotten the fun.  Everyone is skint and drinking decaff and trying to stay off the booze, and inevitably it will be raining. What's to like?

Personally, I thought last Monday was worse. I had one of those days today where time seemed to fly, due to its scarcity in relation to the amount of work to be completed to specific clock and calendar tyrannies.  I was still reeling somewhat, today, from the spookiness of Sunday.

Now, you know I just don't do spooky.  Not usually.

I went to a poetry workshop. I was seeking inspiration, looking to improve and learn some new techniques.  It was in a photographer's gallery, and was about using photographs to spark creative writing: you might have noticed my interest in the juxtaposition of the visual and the word.  The first exercise we had to do was to choose one of the photographs and describe it.  Not in a poem, simply focusing on detailed observation of the physical.  Then we had to imagine what was happening just outside the frame, what might have happened just before, what would happen just afterwards, bring some imagination into the shot.  And I started to write.

Not a poem, no. Because you won't have failed to notice from my eternal whingeing, whining, bedwetting angst that I can't write any more.

Anyhow, moving swiftly on....(sob).... I started to write notes, a stream of thought, and suddenly it was about my grandad, and the day he died, and my mum. And I thought about how it might have been, that day that we never quite understood, and I felt sad for my mum and I sat thinking for a while about her, and grandad, and thought how nice it would be to see her and tell her what I was thinking.

Then we carried on with the workshop for a while longer, and she was still in my thoughts. And when I came out, there was a message on my phone saying, Hurry home, your mother is here. She had got into the car and driven 100 miles, unplanned, unexpected, unannounced, on the offchance I would be in.  She just felt she wanted to see me  -  couldn't really explain why.

I found it rather unnerving, but it meant I had the chance to read her what I'd written. It made her cry, which then made me think that perhaps I should have kept it to myself  -  but she said she cried because she liked it. 

If I could get it to coalesce into a poem, I'd be a hell of a lot happier. Maybe my Monday could make it all the way to violet, or even pink.

Clam

She'd been battened down for as long as she could remember.

She didn't mind. It was safe. No-one could reach her. And inside, it was just exactly how she wanted it to be: private, quiet, and writing on every surface. On the walls and ceilings and floors, the looped hand of ideas and thoughts and dreams. On the seats of chairs and the underside of tables, around the handle of the teapot, on the shells of eggs and the skins of bananas. In steam on the shower screen, condensation on the windows, in lipstick on the mirrors and in biro on the back of her hands, all the way up her arms to the elbows. Words and words and words.

After a long, long time she thought she wanted to be reached.  She came out, naked from the shell, and said "Here I am, world, this is me". And to her surprise, the world answered back, extended its hand, and she discovered that being reached was good.  She blossomed and bloomed in this unfamiliar sunshine, from tight green knot to white and yellow daisy. And all the words inside tumbled out, and all the ideas and thoughts and dreams flowed down her outstretched arms and into her pen and onto the page in perfect order, and she laughed out chapters of her novel, and breathed out a poem with every smile.

Then the world said the thing she'd always feared it would. "I'm sorry, there has been a mistake. All this wasn't for you  -  you can't have that. What were you thinking? Go back".  And she wasn't even surprised, and bowed her head and opened the hatch and went back inside her submarine. Ran her fingers over the familiar surfaces, worn to mother-of-pearl gloss under her touch. And she did not cry, because that is the way of the world, and no-one sheds tears over the setting of the sun or the fall of leaves in autumn or the melting of the snow.

She had thought that the words would still flow out of her fingertips, to be freed out from the airlock like underwater butterflies. But they were limp and dead, all the colour and flight leached out from them in the dark salty teardrops of the sea.  And she tried and tried, but the words were clogged to a standstill; leaves that fell in a red and bronze swoop of beauty but turned to dark sludge in the gutters.

And she realised that she had nothing to say, and no-one to listen to the whispers in the dark.

Chastening

I am lying in white sheets. The lights are off but the blind is open. Opposite is the blank back wall of a building, and an amber glow leaching upwards from the street five levels below. No traffic passes this narrow byway, and I hear no guests walk past in the corridor, no baths running in the distance, no phones ringing. I wonder if I am here in this hotel by myself. I wonder if something has happened and all the other people have left. I wonder if I am in here in London by myself.  I wonder if the whole city is empty. I wonder if this feeling is calm or madness?

If I lie still enough in the quiet, in the glow, I can feel your hands on my skin.  I can feel your lips brush mine, and now I can hear your breath, ragged, I can hear your heart thudding, I can hear your blood rushing,  I can feel you here..and it is my own breath ragged, my own heart thudding, my own blood rushing, rushing to yes, to yes, to yessss...

Nape

It was dark in the room, cosy with the curtains closed against the December snow. Eerie quiet outside as the weather was keeping drivers out of town. A different quiet inside as they kissed their private hello.

He stood behind her, close, pressed against her back. His lips were against the curve of the top of her shoulder by the edge of her dress. He stroked her hair upwards from the nape of her neck, and let it tumble through his fingers, slip through his fingers, fall through his fingers. Fall against his cheek, the fresh-washed scent filling his head. She closed her eyes and the afternoon and the room and the moment became the stroke of his hand and the fall of her hair, and the stroke of his hand and the fall of her hair, and the kiss on her neck and the stroke of his hand, and the fall and the fall and the fall of her hair...

Any Questions?

As I've said before, I know everything.

This is fortunate, as I have been asked a number of complicated questions in the last few days.

• Why do you look like you are wearing a life jacket under your clothes?
• When did you start growing a moustache?
• Why don't you make nice dinners like the other mummies?
• What is the best way a Barbie would commit suicide?
• If you do a really hard poo, can you break your bottom?

Any more? Come on.  I'm ready for anything, you little buggers.

Prozaic

Three months now since I started taking the tablets. Do I feel better?

It's hard to say. External factors beyond my control were the things that were getting me down, in the main. Anti-depressants won't solve the recession, unless you're a major shareholder in a pharmaceutical company (now there's an idea...) And I made my bed so I'd damn well better lie in it, at least until I work out a better plan.

Some of the issues that were making me feel low, I've worked hard to tackle them. Now they have been replaced by other issues instead  -  and so it goes.   It is lonely again at home now Christmas is over and the Literary Lodger has left, although the Broken-Hearted Sicilian has returned and is slightly less broken-hearted, with a mysterious smilewhich I plan to investigate in due course.

The Terrible Tweenagers are fighting raging hormones this week and so am I, suffering the impact of that dastardly plan of nature to synchronise the cycles of women who live together. What a bad evolutionary idea, it's amazing humankind progressed at all and didn't end millennia ago in some weeping family catastrophe.

At least everyone is back in the normal routine, and some semblance of stability can be restored. Not that I want things to carry on the way they are, but at least there is a rhythm to the week again now, rather than the formlessness of hanging around at home with no schedule and no bedtime and no meetings. It all feels rather like one long round of cooking and laundry and picking up shoes otherwise.

I suppose in the last three months, I have had some success of sorts. I did not jump off Beachy Head, I did not hit anyone, I survived Christmas, I came to work every day.  I've been dieting. I've been exercising. I've been working. I've been reading about poetry to try and refine my skills. I am trying to be good.

I have not been writing. It just won't come.

Sunday Night

Now, if watching me do the ironing was this good, I'd understand it.

Unfortunately it's not, but that didn't stop them all sitting in a row on the sofa watching me. they were watching a film too. Then when I asked each person to take their own pile of perfectly ironed clothes upstairs and put them away, there was eye-rolling. Sometimes I think I have three children, not two.

I'm not quite sure what I am for, in 2011.  And I'd be afraid to ask other people. I'd be frightened of the answers.

Sloathsome

It's that feeling of going back to work after Christmas. Fed up of staying at home, eating and drinking the wrong things. And fed up of being back at work with all the shit that entails. I'm sure fresh air and exercise would be the answer, and I'm trying, honest.  The Tweenage Tearaways are back at school today and everyone is back on the treadmill. Not that I've been off it really, with a Saudi client who wanted a project to a Jan 4th deadline, irrespective of a faraway religious festival in which he has no interest.

During the season of goodwill and bad feeling, I have written nothing. My blood is sludgy in my veins and the likelihood of achieving creative flow, or indeed any other kind, seems scant. I haven't exactly kick-started the year, but then I rarely do. Perhaps a gentler beginning will do no harm in the end.

I won't feel normal until after the weekend, don't think. The regular timetable will be fully resumed and I will have been on my first trip to London. I will breathe easier after that.

And I have signed up for a poetry workshop later this month, and been asked to take part in another reading.  I would like to develop a collection this year  -  if I can regain sufficient sparkle to write. I know what makes me feel confident and powerful and capable of anything.

And I know how I feel when it's missing.

Guessing Game

"This is my friend, he's having lunch with us".

"Cool!!! Way cool!!!"

"Yes as a matter of fact, he is cool. He has a really cool job. See if you can guess what it is".

"Wow! A solicitor!"

Erm. No.

"Marine biologist?"

No.

"Management consultant".

No.

"Shop assistant. Person who changes the lightbulbs. Postman. Person who licks envelopes. King".

No, no, no. Drama producer actually.

"Hmmppph. Since when was that COOL????!!!  Duh......."

Film Review 2011 #01

"So we saw this film and it was like, AMAZING. Although some parts were a bit boring.

"There's this guy in it, from School of Rock. Except he's not a teacher, he's like a postman, or a travel writer, or something.  And it's also about ginger-haired people, that Emily Blunt who is the the mean girl in Devil Wears Prada, not Cruella de Vil, the other girl. And her mum in this film is that Donna, the bride one from Doctor Who except now she has way bigger boobs. And actually she  is Emily Blunt's mum in real life too.

"Anyway the Jack dude has to go on a trip to the Ber Nooda Triangle, and a wave whips him up to a place called Lilly Pret, in the sky. And he is, like, MASSIVE! And everyone else is, like, really really tiny. Then they have a war but the bombs just, like, bounce off his chest? Which was funny.

"That's it really".

Petrified

I don't know how to turn my hot flesh to cold marble.

My blood stands still in my veins and no writing can flow. The Pause button is depressed, and we hang in a state of suspended animation on the screen of our lives, mouths open mid-sentence, conversation unfinished, the journey to map the private landscape interrupted, incomplete.

The only instructions I can find urge me to keep calm and carry on. So I write specifications for birth-simulation scenarios, and artificially squeeze out globs of wordage onto the electric page and no whisper of pain passes my life-identical plastic lips.

Ivory Flower

What is a piano if it is not played?

Is it still an instrument if its keys are not touched, if its rosewood does not resonate with the swell of a symphony or the twinkling flutter of a playful scherzo?

Already I am troubled with echoes of our music in the quiet empty space behind my eyelids in the dawn.

Twenty-Eleven

And another year begins.

And I am still here. How did that happen?

Anyway.

Simple resolutions this year (and perhaps more chance of keeping them?)

1. Be happy (I stole that one...thank you...)
2. Exercise
3. Write

Help me?