Year's End

For last year's words belong to last year's language

And next year's words await another voice.

And to make an end is to make a beginning.

~T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding"

I have a flourescent green Post-It sticking to the side of my screen at home. It's been there for over two years (I have very messy office - "creative", I like to think). Scribbled on it, very small, is a list of ten things I jotted down on a train, thinking about what I'd like to have achieved before I die.

As it's the time of year to be thinking about resolutions, I thought I might consider this list as one inspiration. For in 2010 I do intend to be inspired rather than ground down. The signs are already good.

So here it is, to be pondered.

1. Learn to tango
2. Visit India
3. Visit Venice (done this now, so I need to replace this one)
4. Play Lullaby of Birdland on the piano, no mistakes (getting there...)
5. Write a novel
6. Be size 12
7. Be on TV
8. Visit New Zealand
9. Learn to do tumble turns
10. Own a Chagall

Which of these should I focus on in 2010? Number 10 is going to be highly unlikely in the current business climate. Numbers 2 and 8 also look unlikely. I refuse to acknowledge that the recurrence of 5 and 6 for a number of years now indicates anything other than work pressures....

Crush

Schadenfreude is an unappealing emotion, I freely admit. But I couldn't help feeling a frisson of excitement at the news that Susan Sarandon is unexpectedly back on the market.

I have had a crush on Susan for about 25 years now. At first it was silent, guilty. Girls don't fancy other girls, right? Not if they like boys too? Everything was very clear cut when I was younger. You were straight, or you were gay. Or you were David Bowie.

I like the fact that these days it seems to be far more acceptable to blur the edges. I could rave on poetically for hours about her creamy skin, her lovely eyes and smile, her fantastic breasts, how she exudes sex....but such an ode might be in poor taste. And/or unnerving for those people who have categorised me into a different, narrower box.

So I'll just confess that she has featured regularly in my fantasies since a weekend of impressionable coincidence when I saw her one evening in her full splendour in the Rocky Horror Picture Show, followed the next day by watching her being seduced by Catherine Deneuve in The Hunger....... (oh to be in that scene....)

If you're not sure what to do in this flat dead period between one party and the next, a day in bed with Susan isn't a bad option. You could try Bull Durham to complete the set (Susan and a younger Kevin Costner, on the kitchen table....).

Anyway. I had resigned myself to merely aspiring to Be Susan when I grow up - but now it seems she's single again, who knows?

Surreality

Ever have that feeling you're adopted? Sometimes it's less of a feeling, more of a vain hope. In many respects I'm too much like my parents to pretend they picked me up from a church doorstep an hour after I was born. Although when I was about eight, I did go through a phase of pretending this, and telling my friends, and claiming my name was Perdita - the lost girl.

I am thinking of pretending this again, based on the conversation we've just had.

"You still like books and reading, don't you?"

Yes, I do. (Does anyone stop liking reading, I wonder?)

"There's a book we were thinking you might like. You said you liked that book about the place up in Yorkshire at Sutton Bank, and we thought of another one you might like".

Well, could be interesting.... cautious curiosity.

"It's by a lady dad knows. And she's from Yorkshire. So you'd like that."

Hmmm. Possibly.

"It's about butterflies. Someone in the shop said it was good".

"Yes, and you like supporting Yorkshire so this is a Yorkshire book. And it's by a lady dad knows. She writes a lot of books, they have names in from right round Sheffield".

Scared, now. Buying a book on the strength of that? Hmmm.

I unwrap the scary, parent-recommended, lady-that-dad-knows book.

It is The Peppered Moth, by Margaret Drabble. In case you hadn't already guessed.

Poptart

Miley Cyrus is a replicant. She was invented as part of a joint marketing project by Disney and Harvard Business School, and is genetically cloned in their Innovation Centre.

Focus groups have developed the optimum snub of her nose, curliness of her curls and the length of each eyelash. Her voice, however, has been taken from a forty year old soul singer, and the springiness of her dancing is due to the injection of a very small amount of Tigger DNA. This also accounts for her constant cartoonish cheeriness.

Her support act last night was her big brother's band. Her little brother was playing rhythm guitar in her set. Her dad is in the TV programme. The middle part of the show featured an extract from her film coming out next year. A long extract - about ten minutes. And it formed the backdrop to two subsequent songs. I'm suprised they weren't selling advance tickets there and then - text this number now.

We'd paid £250 for the tickets, but they'd had another £80 off us before we sat down (T shirts, programme, parking, hot dogs). It's a sophisticated machine, for sure.

They are grafting hard to get it right this time, after the Britney/Jamie-Lyn Spears family extravaganza crashed and burned so horribly. They are working on cloning a V2 Britney (going back to the plaits and mini-skirt jail-bait look which made the dads google her as often as YouPorn) whilst in the meantime, Terminators and Blade Runners are hunting the V1 Brit across the trailer-trash wastelands of America to take her out before she does any more damage.

If you don't believe it's a sinister cult, try watching 10,000 little girls, mesmerised and with shining eyes, line dancing in synchronisation.

Pop it, lock it, polka dot it,
Countrify and hip hop hip.
Put your hawk in the sky
Move side to side,
Jump to left, stick it -
Gliiiiiiiiiiiiiide.

Terrifying.

Blades

Hold on......don't go for the early bus just yet....

In the style (?) of the northern teams we know and love so loyally, I am attempting to pull it out the bag in injury time. It looks as if it may even go to penalties, but that might be exciting.

The brainchild and its scummy mummy are possibly sturdier and more resilient than they might look after all - momentary crises of confidence nothwithstanding.

Brainchild

The brainchild is in a bad, bad way.

Which also makes me wonder what the point was, of neglecting my otherly motherly duties to nurture something which is now so sick and brings no benefit.

Touting this thing round for adoption is more than heartbreaking. Who would want such a ruin, such a shadow of its former glory?

I simply do not have the confidence for a confidence-trick like this.

The market has fallen to pieces. I am exhausted, just exhausted with the haul of it. I am too old. I am too tired. There is no work to be had.

However. I guess my job now is to go down with the ship. Fuck.

Bedrock

Some things, you can't collect later in life. You had to be there, grow up in a particular kind of place, go to a certain sort of school, see a sky the hard grey of the limestone, the sheer stretch of a windy beach washing, washing away.

The words of anger, sorrow, love even - they don't have a resonance until I hear them spoken with soft, short northern vowels. And where we come from, understatement underlines the sentiment.

I'm becoming ever more conscious of the spaces in between, the silence as well as the words. Some things we say, some things we don't. I hear them all.