Factual Attraction

Speaking from the heart is not necessarily a good idea, particularly if the person you're speaking to is listening from the head. 

It's a risk after all. You go out there on a limb and   -  yes, there you are, out on a limb. Like a snail without its shell, like a baby bird with no feathers, while the chilly winds of reason whip about you.

Poets need to remember, I suppose, that not everyone is a poet.  That words don't count, or can't be nearly precise enough to take us where we want to be. As Margaret Attwood said, "the Eskimo have fifty words for snow because it's important to them; there ought to be as many for love".  But there aren't, not even for Margaret. So what hope is there for the rest of us?

Let's stick to the bare facts, then. Stop that romanticising claptrap right now. Bring on the maths and physics, the evaluation and the objective test.

And don't gaze into her eyes like that  -  it doesn't mean anything. The eyes are not the windows to the soul: they are organs for converting light into electromagnetic impulses.

Simple

"Life is short. There is no time to leave important words unsaid."

Paulo Coelho

Be

Life is a series of moments all called now.

We don't know how many of these moments we have left. How many of them do we miss, thinking about the past, worrying about the future? How many of them do we waste doing nothing worthwhile? How many are ruined with unkindness, unpleasantness? Ticked away in boredom?

I know I'm alive when life takes me by the hand, grabs me by the throat, makes my heart skip a beat, kicks me in the guts, looks me in the eye and says: game on. I want to feel the blood rushing, the world spinning, to stay up all night, to stay in bed all day, to be all used up when I go.

I want to live rather than exist. I want to sing not whisper. I want to be the flame, not the moth. Dance with me.

Tumble

Thirteen years since she died and I still miss my Granny.  She was wise - not in a mysterious way, but with a straightforward, olden-times, common-sense approach which seemed hard-wired to fundamental truths.

I was thinking today about some advice she gave, a long time ago now. "Never", she said, "fall for someone who isn't there to catch you".

I didn't listen to her, and look where I am now. So would anyone listen to me, if I dispense some good old-fashioned wisdom myself?

Neolojism

So it turns out that Brian Sewell (who according to the Daily Mail is "posher than the Queen") is not as one might think a sexless neutered artwerk who lives entirely in the realm of the cerebral. In fact he claims to have shagged more than 1000 different partners in a quinquennium. He's the king of the casual pick-up. Who knew?

I also learned a new word from this article. Quinquennium. Words like this are the stock in trade for Mr Sewell, who I am sure bewildered his bus-drivers and engineers and hod-carriers with such pretentious and abstruse vocabulary before inviting them up to see his etchings.

Quinuquennium isn't a new word, it was just new to me, but I could guess its meaning due to my useless, pointless languages degree.  I also came across two new and easily-guessable words this week. Oh how I love new words! And I particularly love these two.

They're two of the one-day courses we offer at the college where I'm a governor. And before you get excited, they're sold out until Easter. We already had a thriving beauty treatment curriculum, and a great line in henna hand-painting for weddings, so we've jumped on the latest bandwagon to offer sessions where one can learn how to vajazzle and twattoo. Popular for honeymoons, holidays, parties (....?) and first dates. This makes dating sound quite scary these days, if that amount of effort is required to get ready.

I looked up these terms on the internet to see if there was a suitable picture for the blogpost. Trust me, there wasn't. Imagine a plucked turkey with some biro drawing on it, and a few stick-on sparkles. It's not very nice - you'll only upset yourself.

However, if you'd like to join a waiting list for one of the courses, let me know and I'll book you on...

Desolate

So finally we have a diagnosis for my nephew, five years after he lost the ability to walk, then to speak, then to swallow, then to move at all.  We were hoping for...... I'm not sure what we were hoping for exactly, other than we were hoping for some hope.

What we are offered is a scenario devoid of hope, and yet also devoid of certainty (bar the eventual outcome). What will happen next? And when? And how fast? And how long might it all take? Will he live until his next birthday? Will he make to 10, to 18? And with what sort of quality of life will he have?

I'm the oldest child of the three of us. I'm supposed to sort things out, support everyone else. And there is nothing I can do to fix things, nor to console.

We are inconsolable.

Gastronauts

"The first time I ate testicles was in Afghanistan".

I'd only just switched the radio on, but already I was gripped. Turned out he was talking about lambs, rather than Abu Ghraib.

Apparently meals should be an adventure (snail porridge, anyone?) you should eat olives whilst stroking a pieces of silk ribbon, and have oysters whilst wearing headphones that play sea-sounds.  I was about to turn over to Kerrang when they started talking more seriously about Marinetti's Manifesto of Futurist Cooking. Now this was really, really interesting. You might not admire his politics, but his fellow Italians hated him much more for his assertion that pasta should be abolished as it causes lassitude, pessimism and a lack of passion.

The presenter introduced a fatuous food-freak who said that children would find meals more exciting if they had made a custard-powder flame thrower first. Maybe so, but I know quite a few kids who would not eat custard as they already know it will kill them for certain, flame-throwing or no.

I couldn't wait to get home and consult the interweb to find out more about Marinetti. I found this description of one of his meals, and wondered if there is anywhere one could try it.

One Futurist dessert, called Italian Breasts in the Sunshine, features almond paste topped with a strawberry, then sprinkled with fresh black pepper. This is one of the few palatable dishes in Marinetti's Futurist Cookbook.

Another entry in the cookbook describes a Tactile Dinner. Pajamas have been prepared for the dinner, each one covered with a different material such as sponge, cork, sandpaper, or felt. As the guests arrive, each puts on a pair of the pajamas. Once all have arrived and are dressed in pajamas, they are taken to an unlit, empty room. Without being able to see, each guest chooses a dinner partner according to their tactile impression. The guests then enter the dining room, which consists of tables for two, and discover the partner they have selected.

The meal begins. The first course is a 'polyrhythmic salad,' which consists of a box containing a bowl of undressed lettuce leaves, dates and grapes. The box has a crank on the left side. Without using cutlery, the guests eat with their right hand while turning the crank with their left. This produces music to which the waiters dance until the course is finished.

The second course is 'magic food', which is served in small bowls covered with tactile materials. The bowl is held in the left hand while the right picks out balls made of caramel and filled with different ingredients such as dried fruits, raw meat, garlic, mashed banana, chocolate, or pepper. The guests cannot guess what flavor they will encounter next.

The third course is 'tactile vegetable garden,' which is a plate of cooked and raw green vegetables without dressing. The guest eats the vegetables without the use of their hands, instead burying their face in the plate of vegetables, feeling the sensation of the greens on their face and lips. Each time a guest raises their head to chew, the waiters spray their face with perfume.

Between each dish the guests finger the pajamas of their dinner partner.

Play with your food. Want to play with me?

Alternative Armour

I'm a small, nervous person hiding inside someone else's body that I don't even recognise. How did that happen?

Desperate measures are required. Plans are being laid. I am running out of time for everything, everything.

Elastic

I like to say I have no regrets - that I am the sum total of my collective experiences, and that the choices I made have made me who I am. 

But I guess I do regret one thing - and that's the way some things turn out to be choices, without me ever realising I'd chosen them. There are things that happened by default, by accident, that I never would have chosen if someone had asked me to.  This is the story of the main one.

It's about a boy. Isn't it always? 

We were at school together. We were chalk and cheese, in a lot of ways.  He was rugby, I was reading. He was bravado and I was was brains. Yet there was something there, always something.  We liked each other, we really did.  He was cocky, funny, popular. I was none of these things. Heaven only knows what he saw in me, but we had a connection.  Any chance we got for a snog, we'd grab it.

He was easy to spend time with, in the boring days of summer when we had no money and all we could do was lie on the grass at the edge of the cricket pitch next to the squash club, talking shit and smoking with the rest of them. I didn't go out with him - he never asked me. I'm not sure I would have done, at school, for the simple stupid reason he was a few months younger, and therefore in the year below. Even in my nerdy swot uncoolness, I understood that a younger boyfriend might be social suicide.

It was ok because I was saving him for later.  I was saving him for when he left school. He was leaving before me, going into the army. After that it would be ok to go out with him. I was just waiting.

Stupidly, I didn't account for the fact that once he was in the army, he wouldn't be around any more, and that when he was around he would need to do family stuff. Stupidly, I didn't account for the fact that once he was in the army, and I was at university, his leave would not match with my end of term dates.  

I liked him even more after a few years. We wrote to each other a bit. We saw each other, Christmases mostly, when everyone else was around too. There was a sexual connection sparking between us, sometimes you could almost see it like a Ready-Brek glow, I was sure, but we never had much chance to follow it through. 

It was ok because I was saving him for later. It was ok because I fantasised about him. A lot. Not that he knew, but it kept him in scope.  I wanted him so, so badly.  That part he knew, that part he felt too, at that time. We only managed to get it together on one occasion. I say that casually but I could still tell you every moment. I could tell you the smell of his neck, the weight of him pressed against me, the cold at the small of my back on the cold hard centre-circle of the playing field. 

Then suddenly it was later than we realised. He was going out with a nurse. It was serious. Everyone said she was lovely. Well fuckit. I decided to marry one of my friends, and the last time I saw him was at my wedding. He brought a basket of flowers to the evening do.  It was a shame to leave them behind so we sat them on the dresser of the honeymoon cottage in Cornwall. They stared at me in silence and I already knew I had made a mistake.  Not because I should have married him instead, that isn't what I mean. Just that I shouldn't have married a man who couldn't eclipse my fantasies of a different man, even on our honeymoon. 

Then we were barely in touch. Maybe there wasn't a connection at all any more. I heard where he was stationed - Belize, Kosovo - and I always managed to find out that he had made it back ok. I wondered whether he thought of me like I thought of him. Pretty often.  He was my favourite fantasy. I wondered whether he sensed I was thinking of him, whether he got a brain-itch, a cock-twitch? I got divorced, but he was happy, married, kids. I left well alone.

We had a little flirt by email, for a couple of weeks, a few years later, then he disappeared off the radar. Lately I've been thinking about him more, since a strange coincidence put me back in touch with his brother. I didn't ask about him - I was afraid to give myself away. Only knew that he was "doing all right". I scoured the internet but he wasn't to be found. What would happen if I tracked him down?

1. He wouldn't remember who I was. I'd imagined a connection, an attraction that was completely one-sided. That would be awful.

2. He would remember who I was, but not remember any connection. He would have forgotten all that flirting and kissing, the superb once-in-a-lifetime sex. That would be awful.

3. He would remember who I was, and be angry I'd got in contact, tell me to leave him alone. That would be awful. 

4. He would remember who I was, and it would all be there, just as it was.  And we would be older and bolder, and determined to follow through. That would be awful.

Actually I'm lying, that would be brilliant, I expect, that last option, but you can't save someone else's husband for later, can you. Can you? 

He's the one that got away. He's the one regret. And for that, if for nothing more, he holds a special place. 

Love in a Minor Key

George moved to America after the war.  He moved there with his friend David - they played together in a band and wanted to find their fortune.

David eventually married, although George never did. He worked in a series of dull day jobs in Philadelphia, the city where David lived. Then moved to New Jersey when David's moved there, and worked in a sugar refinery until he retired, playing jazz piano in clubs in the evenings.

George lived alone until he retired. Over eighty now, he resides in a nursing home after a stroke last year, the last-but-one of the seven brothers.  Dad, the youngest, goes regularly to visit him and has arranged for him to play the piano every day for the other residents.  Dad was clearing out the last few things from George's apartment - only a few cardboard boxes of items to show for a life, and mostly records.  A few of them were George's own recordings from before he left England, with his trio.

"What's this?" dad asked, holding up a big old reel of tape.

"Oh yes," said George. "That's my Songbook. I haven't been able to play it since about 1975, it needs a reel-to-reel player and no-one has one any more".

Dad brought it back to Britain, took it to a specialist company who made it into a CD: George singing and playing 25 original songs. It's recorded in someone's living room but the piano, and the quality, and sound balance are good - it could have been recorded yesterday.  Heartbreaking lyrics, imaginative composition, faultlessly played. Go back to the 1950s and remember this is a man who played sometimes with George Shearing, who jammed at Ronnie Scott's.

Some of this music is just too wonderful to sit on a CD in my house, and the untold story behind the lyrics of unrequited love makes those minor chords even more poignant. What shall I do with it, I wonder?

Season of Mists

Maybe it doesn't have the bright-green, brash optimism of spring, but autumn is perhaps the most beautiful season after all.

Five geese are flying in perfect formation alongside my train as it rolls through the green and gold of the Chilterns, and I stop my thoughts to notice this, the purposeful dark V through the orange of the leaves against a clear blue sky.

Every regret, every "that was the last time I....", every "now I realise I will never...." will be exorcised with a new, good thing to look forward to. I will have to manufacture these, conjure them from my imagination and hope that with an alchemist's spell, with a magical sleight of mind, I can convince myself that a trip to the Thames Barrier is just as good as a month of Caravaggios, pasta and horny sex in Venice with the Man Of My Dreams.

This could work, right?

Five things I will do this autumn.

1. Walk the path in the Chilterns
2. Have a drink at the Prospect of Whitby
3. Use my voucher for a farmhouse breakfast
4. See Little Venice and walk along the canal
5. Visit the church where my dad was a chorister

Lots of good things are yet to come.

Diminuendo

I suppose we have to reduce our expectations. I'm no mathematician, but I understand the Law of Diminishing Returns and I see that life slips past the point of the curve where things are going to get better.

We have to find a way to live with the fact that the best is not yet to come - it has already been and gone. Hope to goodness we enjoyed it at the time, even if we didn't recognise it for what it was.

One way to manage down the hopes, but without spending the next 25 years sunk in grey despair and disappointment, might be to recognise that perhaps the very best times passed unacknowledged, but there are still good times ahead. We will appreciate smaller joys much more than we did the greater ones, as our wisdom - albeit acquired too late  - has shown us that these moments need to be savoured and cherished.

Perhaps the art is to find happiness in the small details?