Thunderbirds Are Go!

As a part of new anthology inspired by icons of popular culture, I have been asked to write a poem about Tracy Island.

This is giving me the perfect reason to watch episodes of Thunderbirds in the name of research. The series has the most thrilling introduction of any programme on the telly, and is certainly one of most exciting things ever to emerge from the Slough Trading Estate where it was filmed.

My childhood was steeped in the world of the Thunderbirds. I watched carefully so I could learn how to be like Lady Penelope, with her fancy clothes and her perfect flawless skin, not a freckle to be seen. Even today I could tell you which brother pilots which vehicle, the special features they have, and of course the way they launch. The pull-back of the swimming pool as Scott shoots TB1 out of the underground hangar, up past the diving-board with a boost of his rockets. TB2 is the green transporter, so wide the palm trees have to drop down to let it pass on its runway - which pod will it take today? TB3 the big orange rocket that bursts up through the circular observation deck, TB4 the undersea rover and TB5 is the orbiting space station.

Growing up on Tracy Island has made me experience the world the wrong way round, like looking through from the back of the screen into the room. I knew all about the Thunderbirds before I knew much at all about anything else beyond the end of the garden.

Here was my first Virgil. James Bond's villains, in cheap imitations of the original island lair, have already been thwarted by International Rescue, Sean Connery wishing he were Scott. Emma Peel in The Avengers was copying Lady Penelope's style. Frank Lloyd Wright modelled Fallingwater on the Tracy Island house. Star Trek is a tribute, of course. And imagine my delight to discover only recently that the Mercury astronauts were named after the Tracy brothers!

I was not sure at first whether the Thunderbirds were real people. However I was reassured that they were actors not puppets once I saw that, on close-up, they had human hands.

Now back to my research (zooms off on a personal hovercraft towards her magnifcent pink car).

This blogpost is brought to you in Supermarionation.

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).

Bookworm

I was gifted a subscription to the London Review of Books, and already I don't know how I ever survived without it. I inhabit a house of books: they sit like the photographs as a record of a person I used to be, a person who read a dozen books a month, gobbled them up greedily - the haute cuisine, the junk food, the snacks, the banquets; my bookcases a smorgasbord of food for thought.

Now when the London Review arrives, it reaches out, reaches back to the Ur-me, that girl who used to have such a busy, buzzing brain. I was so smart, once. Switched on and chock full of ideas. Now I am like one of those abandoned mining towns in Alaska, living amongst the ruins of myself. And then this clever, challenging publication appears on the counter and I feel those old circuits flickering as if they might still come back to life.

One of our au pairs once decided to surprise me while I was away on holiday by rearranging all the books in the house by colour as it "looks nice". Not a reader. I have never been able to reliably find anything since. I am thinking of arranging them by linked themes, so that only people who have read them would understand why they were together.

Curl Power

So I did the thing that women always do in a crisis: I changed my hairstyle.

I’ve also changed my hairdresser. Doing these two things in tandem is a high-risk strategy at the best of times. At this time in particular, I’m under a significant amount of stress and therefore entirely unqualified to take even minor decisions like Galaxy or Dairy Milk. Undeterred, I decided to become a new woman. Well, the same woman as before but with better hair.

“Is it a wig?” asked the Tweenager. Concerned as I am about her, I still felt it appropriate to make a sour face and ignore her.

“Woah” said the Teenager. “Whoah what?” “Nothing. Just woah”.

I’m not sure they like it.

So not I’m not sure I like it either, even though I was really pleased when it was just done. I’ll tell you tomorrow whether it’s turning out ok. And if not, since I’m feeling rather unhinged from stress, I can always do a Britney. Not in the serial-marriages-live-in-a-trailer sense. Nor in the look-amazing-in-school-uniform-number-one-hit sense. Or even the sexy-air-hostess-toxic sense. Just the head-shaving part. Britney, Sinead O’Connor and me. Now where was that strait-jacket?

To Write Love On Her Arms

All that pinprick that you thought was pain, all that inconvenience that you thought was misery - it was just a light warm up. You think you know sorrow, you think you know fear. But nothing prepares you for the day you come home early to find your daughter trying to hang herself. And you hold her in your arms as she howls her misery and confusion, you whisper the lie that everything will be ok. And as you hold her you see - something - and later, much later. when you pour her a bath you see the soft skin of her arms is sliced and hacked in a tally of despair.

She needs you to be strong, and you have so many things to sort out now. So you ignore the sink hole which has opened up inside you as you fix appointments and look at new schools and try not to blame the school, the bullies, the advent of the internet. Because you know what is really to blame. You are.

And you have never cut, but you know the feeling of the pain building up, and the thoughts swarming their sinister hum in your head, and the dark things trapped inside that mustmustmust come out, and you know what to do to find that sigh of release. You write.

You write your one sided conversation, carving your lines into the soft blank space.

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.