Wake Up Call

So I woke up and I thought "that's enough". 

I have been so sad I nearly died of it. And it was so tough I wished I had. And it is still really, really hard, a lot of the time. 

But I am divorced now, in a new house, with a place in France. I need to get on with the rest of my life and take advantage of all the changes I've had to make by carrying on and making some more. 

And I thought about starting a new blog, but then I figured I'm still me, and it's all part of the same journey.  I summarised the most recent rollercoaster ride in the previous post.

I'll just keep pedalling. 

Desperately Seeking

The producer of the Rocky Horror Show died this week, and newspapers did that thing they do where any story even vaguely connected with the film gives them an excuse to publish photos of people in their pants. 

I'm not averse to this - on the contrary - due to my lifelong girl-crush on Susan Sarandon. Not only is she smart, cool and beautiful, but I really admire the way she has lived her life.  She campaigns on the issues she believes in, she only dates younger good looking men, and she doesn't give a shit what people think of her. 

I like the fact that she is naturally beautiful and she works it. You don't get the impression that she's putting her amazing breasts out there, over and over, because she's the victim of the system, or wanting approval.  She knows she looks gorgeous and she gets 'em out there with confidence, with defiance, with panache.  She was courting controversy again at the start of the year by turning up at an awards ceremony dressed like this: 

She's 69 years old. She's stunning - and she's till full of mischief. She knows she's going to upset a lot of people with this outfit, but it secures her continued position in the spank-bank of a lot of others.  

See her - want to be her. 

Sisterhoodlum

It was International Women's Day yesterday. At the current rate of progress, if we are to achieve social, economic and politic parity we only have to wait another 117 years. That's not a global statistic, that's just in the UK.  It seems hard to believe doesn't it? And it's a fact I want to ram down the throats of all those young girls who say there is no need to be a feminist because women are equal now. 

Women are supposed to help each other, work together to raise one another up. I think over the last 30 years or so, a great many women have forgotten this (if they ever knew it).  There is so much judgement, so much running--down of one another. Women like Katie Hopkins are the 21st century wicked witches. 

I feel I have a responsibility not just to make my own path, but to make it wide enough and solid enough for others to come with me on the journey, not just behind me but alongside, arm in arm. Taking up the whole pavement like the Sex In The City girls. They were good friends, weren't they? All different, but tight, loyal. 

I've got girlfriends like that. Without them, I'd never have survived. I can count them on the fingers of one hand - but who needs more than four corners anyway?  I am truly blessed. 

Day. Break.

Takes a while, doesn't it, to get the hang of this life-malarkey.

A man can wake up one morning with a hard-on, and two fried duck-eggs smiling up at him from his plate like twin sunshines.  But not that much later, the paramedics can't resuscitate his dad, and he has to take a drive through the hills to a place he's never experienced before. 

So how can we make it bearable, this long slide from the light to the darkness?  Let's dance through the dull drag of days - hug and help one another, work and write, flirt and fuck. Do something - that's the thing to do. 

A time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and time to dance. 

Measuring Up

Coffee spoons are not the only the way to measure out a life. I find that hopping from one nice thing to the next, and trying to ignore the boring or bad stuff in between seems to work out ok for much of the time. The lily pads of life, perhaps. 

It's harder to make this strategy work when you know it's a hell of a jump coming up from one nice thing to the next, and a long and perilous leap in between. I expect this is why I burst into tears this morning, sitting in France and knowing I was about to head back to the grim, grimy grind of the drear dark days. 

Leaving the holiday from life, with the golds and rusts of the trees, the smell and the tread of soft wet leaves underfoot, the last low rays of the sun before it disappears for months - oh it was hard. Who would want to come back to all of  -  this?

I have been dropped off from the ferry and have already done 5 hours of work on the journey. Now I am in a Travelodge, alone (of course) and contemplating a week where I won't have a moment to get my head up. 

I sometimes doubt that I will be able to see through my plan.  But you know what? I've had a little rest and so I'm not ready to quit just yet. Look out world, I'm still kicking.

Brainbox or Braindead?

Ladies, it appears we fall into two simple categories. No, not Tits Or Tushes, it's a different taxonomy.

The very use of the word taxonomy gives a clue about which group I might fall in to: Women Who Think Too Much. As opposed to the other group: Women Who Don't Think Enough.   Men also fall into two parallel categories, based around the type of woman they would prefer.

I bought my sister a self-help book once, actually, called Women Who Think Too Much. Perhaps some of us do have a tendency to over-analyse sometimes, but the only self-help book I've ever bought for myself was entitled Shut Up And Move On, which gives you a flavour of my general approach to life.

However, if you are a woman who is seldom troubled by thoughts of any kind, there is a new product on the market designed just for you. It's an eTablet for laydees, with a pretty pink background and pre-loaded with all the software you need (love that word, soft-ware, sounds like kittens and snowflakes and clothing all put together, mmmmm). Apps cover yoga, shopping lists, recipes, perfumes and weight charts, plus of course the indispensable technology to help you track the timing of your monthly visitor. How did we manage these things before? I have no idea, I can't remember (duh - women are like goldfish). 

This eTablet is for women who are "confused by technology", and therefore also good for women who have been lobotomised.  Personally speaking, I am continually confused by the bewildering array of rectangular things in my handbag. Are they all bars of chocolate? Is it a tiny teeny TV? I hear ringing and I hold the white rectangular thing up to my ear - oops, it's a pantyliner again. God, I'm always doing that. 

Like many conversations with women, there is a serious point somewhere within all this chatter. The pinkification of products, the dumbing-down of technology for a female audience, is really worrying.  It's an insidious, pernicious new variant of gender-discrimination and it's creeping in under the wire in the disguise of responding to consumers. Not just small gadgets either. If you want a really good laugh, have a look at Honda's new girl-car. Simply perfect. Comes in any colour you want, as long as it's pink.

Cover Story

A woman over 40, like a book, does not deserve to be judged by her cover.

Like a good book, she might not give any hint from her dust jackets as to the delights that may be found once you get started.  She might play on your mind all day so you can't wait for the evening to start the next chapter. She will make you laugh out loud, fill your eyes with tears, make you fidget on the train with inappropriate erections.

You might find you can't put her down, and have to stay up for hours past your bed time, hungrily devouring page after page of her.

Valentine

The road to the bonfires of hell is paved with rose-petals, they say. Who are these "they" people, I wonder? With their authoritative yet obscure pronouncements.

Happy Valentine's Day - and don't slip over on the squished roses bleeding their perfume under your heels as you skip along the merry path, dancing to the devil's best tunes.

What's In a Name?

There is a book in the LRofB by an author called Wolfgang Palaver.

I wonder if this is an extravagant nom de plume for someone who couldn't bear to be called Arthur Cackitt? Or whether he moves in a milieu where this kind of name would never raise a stifled snort of disbelief? I'm always amused by silly names - it's probably a mark of my pleb-ness.

Billy Connolly says his definition of an intellectual is "someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger".  My own definition is probably someone who can hear the name Virgil without thinking first of Thunderbirds.

I am thinking of inventing an alter ego - more than a pen name, as I might live her outside of the page. But she will certainly have an exotic, exciting, interesting name: the female equivalent of Wolfgang Palaver. Crossing cultures and continents, redolent of explorers, concerts and dusty villages all in one flowing curl of signature. 

(Sweeps thinking cap onto head with an extravagant twirl).

Death Becomes Him

Just how dead is Sean Bean?

I always picture him full of life, pulsing and throbbing with it. (Well, actually, I usually visualise him giving Joely Richardson a damn good seeing-to in the BBC version of Lady Chatterley, and wishing it was me).

But if you take a wider view across the breadth of his oeuvre (as opposed to looping re-runs of the sexy bits of Sharpe and Chatterley), he doesn't do too well at the staying-alive part.  In fact, more often than not he dies. In a lot of different ways.

Turns out I'm not the only person who has noticed this. Someone has gone to the trouble of mashing this video of Sean's last gasps - dozens of them. If you're having a bad day, reassure yourself that it's not as bad as some of his.

Compulsion

There are a couple of things I simply have to do.

One of them is get fit, the other one is get writing. These things are particularly important given that the thing I've been working towards for the last 20 years has led me, via a very roundabout route and a large amount of graft, back to the place I started.

So I'd better strive at something else, otherwise the overall outcome of my endeavours will have been pointless.

I can't be trusted to get on with things without some sort of external encouragement, targets, goals. Maybe at least I have learned how to understand myself, if nothing else.  Therefore I have set myself two challenges.

The first is a six week poetry course. I've just finished a two week poetry course as a sort of limbering up, and come up with 3 pieces I quite like. This longer stretch should get me back in the writing saddle, so to speak.

The great thing about poetry is that it doesn't require the same amount of sitting down that, say, a novel would dictate.  Most of it happens inside the head while doing other things, and as long as there is the possibility to jot or record a voice memo, it doesn't always interfere fundamentally with the daily timetable. Writing a poem is a bit like waiting for a plant to grow. You can get it started, sow the seed of an idea but then it has to do its own mysterious thing in the dark before it's ready to begin emerging.

Even so, I thought that I should offset the temptation to stay on the sofa drinking comforting red wine while my poems mature in the aged oak barrels of my brain, by also signing up for a fitness challenge. 5 x 50 will commit me to covering 5k a day for 50 days, running, walking, cycling, swimming or a combination of these.

Truth be told, it's not that much of a challenge on the days I'm exercising anyway - 5k is my standard running route. It's a kick start for the sedentary days though, as I will have to go for a walk for an hour or get on the exercise bike in the evening.  It can only do me good.

My brave little hero nephew has just had an operation which will leave him in plaster from hip to ankle on both legs for 7-8 weeks. And even after that, he can't walk anyway. So I thought the least I could do is be grateful for the ability to get about independently, and do a bit of extra walking in his honour.

In between, I need to fit in my work. Less said about that the better.

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.

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?

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.

Utopiate

How likely is it, at our age, at this stage of life, that the best is yet to come?

Doesn't seem all that likely, does it. Although perhaps I am basing that on a bad combination of ageism and hunch.  Maybe we should interview some really old people, and see what they reckon.

But if the best has been and gone, is it worth bothering? Chasing dreams and following rainbows, wanting love and laughter, passion and adventure, is that crazy? Aren't we all supposed to be mellowing out by now, settling down with pipe and slippers and beginning in earnest the slow alcohol-blurred slide towards hazy blandness?

Well, I have news. I am still kicking.

It may be the final death-throes of my high spirit, but I am making an attempt to do some new stuff and refresh things. Because one thing I'm certain of is that the best of my life as it currently stands has been and gone. So I'd better go stand somewhere different.

How does this manifest itself? Well, the running, for a start. I'm up to 28 minutes a session now. Ponderously slow, but I can speed up as I get better.  I've signed up for an erotic fiction workshop, got another reading coming up and a poem coming out in an anthology next month. 

I am working with the Pet Poet on a new set of material which will include singing, dressing up and burlesque (yes, we're signing up to learn that too...) Boggling. I know. Our plan is a simple one: to develop a set of material to sell to festivals, then spend next summer lolling in tents and hobnobbing in the backstage areas of various muddy places.

I am thinking of signing up for some advanced driving lessons, and have two night-time sponsored walks coming up in the next two weeks. After that, walking plans include the Grand Union Canal, the Pilgrim's Way (with the Poet and a new set of Canterbury Tales written on the way), and then why not the Via Compostela, or the Appian Way?

Rage, rage against the dying of the light...

Watershed

I've been doing some thinking. A lot of thinking. There have been a lot of things to think about.

And then when I was done with the thinking, I did some deciding. That part turned out to be easy in the end. I reached a turning point  -  last night, actually. It's time to move on, and leave behind what's holding me down.

I said I was not waving, but drowning. Further out than everyone thought. I should have added that I was drowning because I was being pulled under by a person I was trying to save.

All I have to do is decide to swim away. Not a hundred miles away, just beyond arm's stretch. A few strokes will do it. And already my head is free and I can breathe again.

Meanwhile, there's inner re-branding going on.  I'm not going to be Hard To Love any more. I'm going to be adorable, gorgeous, sexy, warm and fun to be with. How's that for a start?

Happy birthday to me. Here endeth the Period of Bridget.

Free

I'm beginning to think, yes, I can do this, it can work.

I know it's easier to think that way when I'm away here, in a quiet apartment, by myself, not actually in the house eye to eye, nose to nose.  But the sense of freedom I'm feeling is unfamiliar after so long. It must feel like this to come out of jail after a long sentence.

• I don't have to keep checking in all the time by text to explain where I am, who I'm with, what I'm doing
• I don't have to gain permission to make commitments at weekends
• I don't have to keep endlessly texting so he can triangulate against my original plans
• I don't have to keep explaining, justifying reassuring
• When he starts bullying or shouting or arguing, I can just ignore it

In fact, I can just go about my life like a normal person, and not feel like I'm under some sort of Stasi observation programme. I just hadn't realised how much this was weighing me down. No wonder I was depressed and crushed.

You might wonder why I was allowing that sort of regime to prevail in the first place  -  it's a good question. I'm not sure there's an easy answer other than my desire to make things nice, keep everyone happy, make him happy.

He is the most dissatisfied person I have ever met: I finally realise nothing can please him. And it's a relief, to realise this, and be able to stop thinking there was just that tiny little thing, that bit more that I could do, that might be the bit that made the difference.

He can please himself now.

And if he's going to cherry-pick the bits of our life he fancies, well so am I.

Irony

The Shirts section of my super-efficient three-section laundry trolley now holds twelve shirts, and is stuffed to bursting. He's gone away until Thursday night (3 more shirts...maybe 4 if there's a dinner). He's going to run out of shirts.

Hahahahaha....

Irony. Ironic. Ironing.

Dry Dock

I used this image recently in a Pecha Kucha presentation I was doing (pretentious, moi?) It’s the offices of a computer gaming company, and they describe it as a “steam-punk submarine”. How very timely – I am needing to revamp my submarine as it seems to be headed off on a new and rather exciting journey. This place looks like fun happens in here, doesn’t it?

Are you wondering why I’ll still need a submarine? I thought that would be obvious. I’ll need it to enable me to negotiate the reefs, the shoals, the shark-infested waters. There is some tough territory to get through on this new trip, and there are a number of things I will need.

I will need ports, havens, places of sanctuary. I will need friends to keep me company, give me encouragement and lift my spirits along the way. I will need the correct fuel (can a submarine run on vodka-shots and cheesy pasta? Probably not, I’m thinking). I will need portholes for perspective. I will need a hard outer shell for protection. I will need Polaris missiles, as a deterrent but also as the ultimate sanction if that is required. I will need my own space, my own time, the chance to learn how to please myself again, rather than constantly trying to please someone else.

I need to be brave and I need to be bold. I would also like to become brazen, beautiful and breathtaking. As opposed to becoming bulimic, bitchy, bitter, bedridden, babbling and burnt-out, for example.

I need to keep my spirits up. My plan is to make my newly funked-up sub a party place, selected invitees only. It’s going to be a blast, I’m sure of it.

Glass Houses

When I read and loved this poem a couple of weeks ago, I didn't realise it would turn out to be about me.

Tempered (Jo Bell)

I won't bore you with what happened on the first and second days. You can leave that to your imagination. But I made it through to the end of yesterday, bloody but unbowed, and thought, "You know what? Actually I don't give a fuck. He's been so mean for so long, that not having to try and please him all the time will be a great relief".

And I did what all women do after they've been dumped or duped. I went to London and got my hair done.