Herald

For Christmas, she gave him the city
Wrapped in a tinsel of fairy-lights
Bank baubles twinkling at the wharf
The Shard above as a guiding star
In a firmament of planes and satellites.


Pigeons can be puff-chested angels for today
As the river rolls its slow deep carol
Pumping a hundred hydraulic hearts
Energy flows beneath the pavement-skin
In tunnels tangled with candy-twist cable.


Music is in the bow of every crane
Tube tracks click out the Morse-code beat
A rhythm of barges along the canals
In the noise of streets, the quiet of empty churches
Just for him the city sings its joy.

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?

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?

Inside Out

We sat in a coffee bar near Blackfriars. It's closed down now. He was telling me he had starting seeing someone else, fallen in love with her: it was the last time we met.

"The thing is" he said bitterly, "I never really felt I knew you. You never let me get close. We had some fun times but there was always a barrier that I couldn't seem to get through".

The truth can cut right to the bone, can't it.

But how well can you ever really know someone? How close can you get? Maybe there would be a series of tests a person could progress through, like levels on a video game. What newspapers do I read? Am I right or left-handed? What colour are my eyes? What would I order in a restaurant? Where did I grow up? What do I like to dance to? How do I like to be touched? Could you recognise me in the dark, just by the smell of my skin?

Do we ever really know someone else?

Missing The Point

I am Ravenspurn: once of importance but now eroded away to nothingness.  I am having so much of myself lasered away that soon I will be hollowed out, delicate as a blown robin's egg.

The looming sensation of dread at the resumption of healthcare indignities various is something I am trying to fend off - I imagine it like a shadow falling over life, a blocking of the sun.  And I'm not the only one, of course not. All of us are beginning to crumble, one way and another. Our Achilles Heels are showing themselves.

Parts of the coast are falling away, but East Yorkshire will still be East Yorkshire even if Spurn Point becomes Spurn Island in the end.  Ravenspurn that town of old is now reinvented as an oilfield. So I suppose even with parts of us cut out - cervixes, knees, gallstones, breast lumps, lengths of intestine, whatever  - we're still who we are.

Whoever we are. Whoever I am.

Ache

I try to live in the moment, honestly I do.  I try to be still and present and mindful, to concentrate on the here and now.

Sometimes I do this so well I lose myself. There is no sense of time passing, just a feeling of now, and now, and now.  And I wonder whether that is how to be happy: not to analyse, or reflect but simply to smile and say "now, I am happy", not wanting to be anywhere else.

It's the in-between times that are the trouble.  When there is nothing happening. When mindful turns to mindless. When the worries start creeping in. What if that was the last happy moment? What if that was the last time?

Is it ageing, this fear of the last time? Or is it a different angst?

My happy moments seem afterwards unsubstantive.  Are they the last rays of a sun setting to grey dullness and a slow fade to black? If I held those moments, turned them over in my hand, would they crush to nothing? If I laughed too hard, shouted with joy, sighed with regret, would they blow away entirely?

Was there anything there at all? How could I be sure?

I want to mark these moments when they come now, recognise them. I don't want to be too shy to speak the good things, while there are any good things to speak.

Escape Route

Can you imagine it? A situation where a wild, passionate, adventurous, free-spirited poet somehow becomes trapped in the life of a boring management consultant. It's like a sort of modern-day Grimm Brothers fairy-horror.

If it happened to me, I know just what I would do.

It would be important not to get found out otherwise disaster of an unspecified nature would strike. So I would button myself tightly into my business suit and play the role to perfection. Then every time something happened that seemed as if it might elicit an inappropriate response (anger, tears, falling in love, belly laughs, multiple orgasms, writing, getting drunk, dancing) I'd wrap it up quick and put it in a box.  Lock it up, lock it down, file it away.  Then get back to being Appropriate.

Boy oh boy there would be a lot of boxes stacked up there by now, if it were me.  I'd bet some of those boxes would have stuff banging away, rattling about, trying to break out. Keeping them all nailed down, that would take some time and trouble: all that authenticity, that vibrant, messy, noisy lifeforce,  wanting to escape and see the light of day.  It would be some job, holding it all in.  I'd get tired of it, I expect.

And then what would happen?  I don't know the rest of the story.

Ripping Yarns

I skived off work this afternoon and went to a workshop: How To Write Erotic Fiction.

It's pretty much exactly two years since I went on a writing workshop - the first one I'd been to since university. I determined to start taking my writing seriously - and started this blog to exercise my writing muscle.

Now I've been published twice in anthologies, done a number of readings, and feel able to introduce myself (in certain circles anyway) as a writer. This is where I was going.  This is where I am supposed to be.

Although I'm not entirely sure that erotic fiction is exactly the correct destination  -  it might be more of a fun diversion.  The woman running the workshop was called Mitzi (my porn-starlet name, how funny....), an American who writes mixed-genre fiction, including the erotic (and with a call out right now for submissions to her new anthology). 

She had some useful reflections on this kind of writing, and the differences between the horny (=good) and the porny (=bad).  I remain to be convinced about this distinction, as sometimes real life scenarios can be very exciting precisely because they are porny. Nonetheless, I did agree with her that a writer should be clear at the outset whether she is aiming for a two-handed or a one-handed read. So to speak.

Personally, I feel there's a time and a place for everything.

We had to do a couple of writing exercises, then read them to the group. Writing something erotic is one thing. Reading it out to a group of strangers in a genteel county-town hotel in the middle of the afternoon is another thing entirely. However I did not find it as embarrassing as I still do to read my poetry in front of friends. Isn't that strange?

I realised with both the exercises (one inspired by a postcard of an Egon Schiele painting, on a write-up of someone else's fantasy picked out of a hat) that I was taking longer than everyone else to get to the money-shot.  I am not sure whether that made it more exciting, with more of a sensual build-up, or whether that just made it rubbish.  I might write up what I wrote, and seek e-verdicts, what do you think? Horny? Porny? Or just dull dull dull?  I mean, obviously I've written about sexy stuff before, but is it sexy? And who gets to be the arbiter of that? (Now there's a job...)

I've got another workshop on Thursday, and a reading of my poems on Friday.  Some of the poems are quite sexy, but I've not had the chance to read many of these in public - it gets complicated. A genteel tearooms in the middle of the afternoon is not the place to start, either.

Defining Features

  

To what extent do we define ourselves by the things that other people tell us? If we hear the same stories about ourselves often enough, they sound so familiar they start to have a ring of truth. And when they come from a voice of authority, they arrive even the first time we hear them with the stamp of firm fact rather the fluff of opinion to be taken or brushed aside.

Of these tales we hear, what do we decide and take on board and what do we ignore? Do some of them strike an immediate chord, so we allow them to strike home and set up residence in our definitions of ourselves? Or are they insidious, creeping under the carpets, fingering their way through the patches of soft mortar in our self-protection, winding their way in to our minds like poison ivy?

When you know a little bit about people, the truths they tell you about themselves don’t always seem to be quite right. It makes me wonder.

“I’m unlucky in love”, he frowned. Doomed to be unrequited and never get the girl I wanted. Did he believe his own story so much that he married a girl who wasn’t The Very Thing, having convinced himself that what he wanted was out of range? Did he meet the right girl, but still feel dissatisfied because if he had managed to snare her, she must by definition, be wrong?

“I’m never satisfied”, he said. And it became a self-fulfilling prophesy, as what he had never felt like it was enough, because he couldn’t recognise contentment when it wrapped its warm blanket around his soul.

“I’ve never really loved anyone, never been in love”, he confessed. He gave it lots of other words: infatuation, fondness, friendship, affection, respect, lust. Madness, even. A rose by any other name never smells quite as sweet, after all.

“I don’t love my stepson as if he were my own blood-child”, he told me. He didn’t expect to, because he was told he wouldn’t. Love only blossoms in your heart when you give it permission to grow, after all, when you acknowledge it and welcome it and nourish it.

“I’m hard to love”. Accepting this as fact, she has formed relationships with a series of men over her life who are (pick one or more from this list):

• Too logical and scientific to fall in love with anyone
•  Too much in love with themselves to give any of it away
•  Too convinced they can’t fall in love to consider the possibility
•  Too careful to run the risk of opening themselves up to a complicated love-affair
•  Too in love with someone else
•  Too shy to talk about their feelings

Is it possible to write new stories for oneself? I’m a writer, after all, how good would I have to be to convince myself? I know I have the power to convince other people to believe new stories about themselves – but only because these stories are true anyway.

Tell a man he’s fantastic in bed, and it makes him hard. Tell him he’s hard, and feel him get harder. Tell a man he’s interesting and he will open up and fascinate you with things he’s never talked about to anyone before. Tell a man he’s funny and he’ll relax and make you laugh.

Tell yourself you’re easy to love, though, and it’s still subject to supporting evidence. Isn’t it. No-one will fall in love with a darky, rusty, undersea machine. Better never to find out.

Isn’t it surprising the lengths that people will go to, to fit into their own story? Well, me at least.

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...

Here Be Dragons

I'm in uncharted territory now. Places in a relationship I never thought I'd be. Places for which there is no guidebook.

You'd think asking around might help. After all, I'm hardly the first person to find myself in this situation, any of it.  But when I speak to other people, the best they can offer  -  for all their good intentions  - is something along the lines of: "I was there. It was shit".

What to do for the best depends on your perspective. A kick-ass feminist workbitch like myself wants to be independent, lead a life of integrity, hold out for someone who thinks she's The Very Thing.  A kind concerned loving mum like myself wants to do the best for her children and see if they can make it through childhood with their family life intact, and without too many emotional scars. You see the problem.

I've had my Period of Shittiness. I've resigned myself to the shitness of things, and got through the Period of Resignation. I went through the phoney-separation and the Period of Bridget. And now, well, I don't know what period I'm in.

I think it must be a sort of Captain Cook or Christopher Columbus sort of period. Should I find out more about them before I name my latest life-stage after them? And even then, I'm not sure. I feel they set out with more excitement and optimism than I have.  Maybe I'm more like someone who's forced onto a journey. Convicts condemned to Australia? Irish people sailing to New York during the potato famine? I'd like to think of a journey into the unknown that has a reasonable likelihood of an eventual positive outcome.

I know. I'm going to call it the Period of Map Making. What do you think?