Reading the Signs

Far North

2009-07-09T13:01:00.006Z

Here is the lovely house where we stayed. Like mine, it is on the edge - but in this case it is hard by the sea rather than forest, these windows look right onto it. It is cloudy in the photo, but we sat underneath the umbrella in bright sunshine, to eat and to read and write.

This is my new best friend - a border collie called Flora who goes every day into the sea, either to swim or just stand and look out to sea, meditating on the horizon or watching trout leap from the water. She is both intelligent and hyper-active and, having no sheep to herd, needs four walks a day and is inclined to chase the chickens if she gets bored. Not the kind of dog that I would be able to keep, more is the pity, but it suits Ms North perfectly for when she is not writing and teaching she is walking with Flora and both are in their element.

Here is the beach that is right by the house. The photo was taken very late at night, it never really gets dark here in summer.

And just to prove that the skies really were (mostly) blue. A view from the side of the houses across the river. The place is a small hamlet, there are no shops to speak of, unless you count the hut that sells bedding plants and motor oil. We ate fresh mackerel caught by someone who goes out in his boat every night to fish.

While we were there, Ms North saw one of her poems published as one of the runners up in the Mslexia poetry competition - and the next day a letter came with the news that her children's story has been shortlisted for the Kelpies prize. She will be reading from it at the Edinburgh Festival, when the results will be announced - and perhaps (nudge, nudge) update her blog with all the news. Auspicious? I should coco.

So I am back to my own particular edge and rather missing the granite beneath my feet, but fired up for something or other, and thinking about new strategies for doing more of what I want to do - the usual damnable restrictions notwithstanding.

all points north

2009-06-30T15:59:00.003Z

On Sunday there was a family party chez Signs, given exclusively for the family members of Mr. Signs, as many as could be gathered on that particular day, some of whom I had never met and he barely knew. There were about eighteen of us in all, Mr. S being disappointed that more were not able to come, and me relieved. While they looked at old photograph albums and generally caught up with each other on the patio, I put finishing touches to the buffet, drank spritzers, rolled a couple of Golden Virginias and lectured the daughter about the evils of alcohol and cigarettes.

The day before, I had discovered that some of the attendees were extreme vegans, so no chance of cocktail sausages and tinned pineapple chunks with Gouda cheese cubes on sticks, or a vat of Coronation chicken. Googling vegan fingerfoods was useless, it all required making from scratch. But still, I am now in love with Discovery fajita powder and wholemeal wraps. You just sautee a large quantity of veg, add powder - and wrap. Tinned chick peas and assorted beans are also, as everyone knows, a good vegan thing – I uncanned and mixed with with “oriental” tahini dressing (made up on the hoof). There was also bulghur wheat tabbouleh, sushi and guacamole dip with crudités plus other things for carnivores and fish-eating, gluten-avoiding vegetarians. In the end there was far too much food and I offloaded a quantity onto my lovely vegan neighbour. I used to do this sort of thing a lot but am out of practice, not just with the catering side of things but gatherings in general, unless they have some clearly defined focus such as choral singing or poetry. It has to be said that I am no longer (was I ever?) a party animal – unless it is a party where I can sing Bohemian Rhapsody on karaoke. Just saying this in case a couple of people look in and wonder if I was just pretending to enjoy myself at the garden party the other week. No, look, I am contradictory. I am not a party animal but sometimes go to parties and have a lovely time, especially if someone else is doing the food.

I could complain about the heat but won’t as the weather is due to change soon and then I will be complaining about the rain. In any case, Mr S and I are going to Caithness the day after tomorrow to stay with Ms North and partner in their lovely house on the beach where you can sit in bed and look out at the sea. Ms North and I will be doing The Writing while Mr. S explores the terrain, reads and relaxes. We also plan to eat, drink and talk to seals. There is one who has recently taken to hanging out on that bit of beach and I am hoping s/he will stay around and let me come close enough for some eye contact.

Whenever I go to my hairdresser she asks me where and when I am going on holiday. She and her husband have about seven a year so no sooner has one holiday been taken than the next is within sight. You must like Scotland a lot, she said last time. Because you keep going there, don’t you? Yes, I do. And I do.

Midsummer Invocation

2009-06-24T22:56:00.002Z

Today was the Feast of St. John and midsummer’s day. In days of yore, and even more recently, if you happened to go to a Steiner school, there would be bonfires lit and people would jump over them for luck and courage, and to frighten off the evil spirits. I have no lit bonfire but want my measure of luck and courage, and to give the message that any spirits whose intentions are questionable have no place in the house and being of Signs. One can but try. So I have lit a candle. It is just a humble IKEA tea light as I am out of beeswax candles (on which I tend to stock up in the autumn), but a flame is a flame and the village Wise Woman once assured me that wherever a flame burns the forces of the will are strengthened. I suppose this could work for good or ill, depending on whose will forces are uniting with flame. The salamanders (fire elementals) are neutral in the sense that they will go to work, whatever. So I resist the urge to call on them and the angels to smite my enemies with a great smite and such a thing would not in any case be seemly.

There was a yoga teacher I once knew briefly. I forget what kind of yoga – I was very keen at the time but I didn’t keep it up. What I still remember, though, are the words with with he began each session:

may all beings who live on the earth be free from fear.

Just that. It feels to be as much of the essence now as it did then.

I interrupt this show to tell you that

2009-06-23T19:07:00.004Z

I hired a couple of detectives and now have conclusive proof that our dear friend Anna FomP has been abducted by alien nuns and is living in seclusion somewhere on a remote island, but which remote island I am not at liberty to reveal. My informants did, however, go undercover and take this photograph - there's Anna on the left, just after being forced to take her vows by the mother superior. She is now known as Sister Boffinata of the Journals. And below is the cave that she sleeps in, it's actually one of the more luxurious ones. The thing about this particular order is that they are very big on Lent. So big, in fact, that it's always Lent and never Easter, which means that they are always doing penance of one sort or another.

Anyway, I'm sure you'll be grateful that I've kept you up to date with the situation - well someone had to. Do her a favour and pay a visit to her house. Word has it that if you make a big enough noise the sound will reach her, even in the murky depths of the cave.

I Capture the Sweetshop

2009-06-22T13:02:00.003Z

Every so often I try to get myself organised so as to be a little more productive than I am. This doesn’t usually work out very well because Malignant Entity hears about it and sabotages, but still: I have sometimes managed to do certain things that I wouldn’t have done if there hadn’t been some kind of plan or readjustment made. The plans and readjustments are not always the active kind, often they involve cutting out something else and usually the something else is given up unwillingly.

I sometimes read the blogs of writers from the land of focussed productivity and it is like pressing my nose against the window of a richly-stocked sweet shop. I want very much to taste the sweets I see, can almost feel the buttery slide of a striped peppermint humbug or the fizz of a strawberry sherbet in my mouth. But twixt them and me is fixed an impenetrable glass wall through which I can only look, and my pockets have only small change. The looking, though, is better than nothing and I still want to know there is a world out there and in there.

I wrote those two paragraphs last night and suddenly realised I needed to sleep. Now I see I have been rambling about sweets and clearly I was having another blood sugar swing and jars of sweets are in any case not the best image to stand for the actual doing of things, but let it be. So, I have a sequence of poems I would like to complete and a number of writing-and-process sessions scheduled. I have completed bits and pieces that I plan to put inside envelopes and send somewhere. I am waving a protracted goodbye to Shrink just as we were in danger of actually getting somewhere, but the driving was killing me and the writing, so that’s that. Back to the square on the board that isn’t quite square one or Go To Jail but isn’t much further on the road to capturing the castle either – and look, I am coming up with crappy images again, I could never stand Monopoly, probably because there never were any castles there to capture, and I have never been much of an entrepreneur.

I should go. Because otherwise I might begin to list the various things that are cluttering up the fragile soul space of Signs and then this would become a confessional blog, which is not necessarily a bad thing, just as confessional poetry is not necessarily a bad thing (and if you are Anne Sexton it is a very good thing indeed – for us, I mean – it didn’t save her). But I think if one is going to do the confessional then there’s no merit in being coy, it needs to be done properly, hammer and tongs and hell for leather, so to speak, and if done in the right way it is not (as everyone always fears) self-indulgence but something big and generous, and one takes one’s hat off to the blogger who does this.

No really, I should go.

Wodwo

2009-06-17T21:40:00.007Z

You no longer exist, Wild Man of the Woods. But every time I go into the forest I expect you and am startled by your absence. How can it be only me here – me and my kind, in recycled rubber shoes, padding across the forest floor where nothing runs, hides and seeks but a few grey squirrels?

There are deer also, they venture out at night and get killed on the road. But what would you do here? The forest is not as large or wild as it once was and you too might wander onto the road, get caught in the headlights, your face for a brief moment illuminated, before the crunch. We read signs that tell us to go slow, there are deer and sheep. Another sign might say Caution: Wild Men of the Woods.

You have made yourself a garment out of bracken, deerskin and black bin-liners, something to protect you from the cold, perhaps. Around your neck there is a bone attached to a piece of string, bird feathers in your matted hair. Where is the mother that raised you – or were you suckled by the wolves? We do not see those either, and their absence is as loud as yours.

Alone in the deepest part of the forest where even the forest rangers seldom go, you squat on the thickest branch of an oak and open your mouth. From your throat comes the call of a woodpecker, and sometimes the long howl of a wolf.

One day some children find you – a brother and sister out with their parents for a Sunday walk, an autumn adventure with flasks of apple juice, peanut butter and marmite sandwiches. The parents are a little way behind and do not see what the children see: a wild and hairy man squatting on a branch, his genitals exposed, grey feathers stuck into hair the colour of rusted leaves, eyes like the big round letter O in their alphabet book, and inside the two Os it is black and shiny with staring. They stop and look, you stop and look.
Mum! Dad! shouts the boy.
You’re a funny man, says the girl. Are you a troll?
Dad! says the boy, Dad!

And then your nostrils flare, you growl and you are gone, disappeared.
He was here, say the children when the parents arrive. He wasn’t wearing proper clothes, I saw his willy, says the girl. The father pretends to have a look: well now, I wonder where he could have got to. The mother lays down a blanket for a picnic.

I’m not pretending - he was real, says the boy, and he will keep saying it, even when he grows up. There will be the story of a wild man in the forest. His parents are pleased he has a vivid imagination.

When they have gone, you come back and sniff the ground where they were sitting, pick up a half-eaten sandwich, put it into your mouth and spit it out. You go to your secret place under the Yew where there is a stash of berries.

Later you will kill and pluck a bird.

bohemian rhapsody

2009-06-16T08:46:00.003Z

Back into the forest on the weekend, a friend from London staying with me. We visited my tree, I think it is a Yew but am not absolutely sure. It is huge and ancient, with roots that spread out like gnarled but elegant fingers. I am not ashamed to adopt a tree companion. We have a proper regard for each other. With each meeting I become more tree-like and the tree looks increasingly human, so there is some essential exchange of energy going on.

I think the apple tree is going to survive as only a few branches have the burnt-to-a-crisp leaves, the rest are ok, and I can see little newborn apples dotted around that look as though they have a good future ahead of them. Some of them will eventually become apple jelly.

I had another occasion to perform, at my friend’s garden party on Saturday – spot of karaoke in the marquee. Bohemian Rhapsody, it was. I have always wanted to belt out scaramouche, scaramouche, will you do the fandango - thunderbolt and lightning, very very frightning - Galileo! etc. Obviously I wasn't doing it completely on my own, but it still took guts.

And yesterday, as if the heavens opened in reply, there was thunderbolt and lightning, and a clattering of hail, followed by hot sunshine, which has continued into today. It being the birthday of Mr. Signs I should expect nothing less, as he has decreed that the sun always shines on the day of his birth. Sceptics might say that it is fortunate his birthday falls in mid-June, but he maintains that it is all to do with having the right attitude. I am, as ever, reading the signs.

bashing on (because sorry, I really can't think of a title today)

2009-06-12T16:03:00.006Z

Well, that was good. One of the benefits of building up to doing a reading is that it makes you polish things up a bit and think about the various themes you are working with. It may sound a bit fey, but that isn’t always clear – at least not to me – when one is writing the poems. It is the work itself that tells you. I had the pleasure of reading with Sarah Salway and Julie Corbin, I was nicely sandwiched between the two, and I see that Salt writer Vanessa Gebbie (whose short stories I’m coincidentally about to read and who I briefly talked with last night) has written about the evening on her blog. Chuffed. And lovely that Daughter and a couple of dear friends were able to come, despite difficulties thrown up by the London tube strike.

Thanks to those who commented in the previous post, and – wouldn’t you know – as it turned out I didn’t have time to read the poem. But your efforts were not wasted! It was one that was almost headed for the virtual bin, but I have decided that Version Two will stay, and in the fullness of time (how I love that phrase, so adaptable) it will find its place.

Yesterday was also the day that Son did the last of his finals exams which, because of the R.S.I. (which became Tennis Elbow and then something else) he wrote entirely on a keyboard in a room with (his words) “all the other cripples” – may the angels bless their endeavours. So now it’s party-time for him, and a space with nothing scheduled but whatever it is he fancies doing.

And today is the Signs wedding anniversary, which we almost forgot (though Mr. S swears he didn’t). No chance at all of my cooking anything, we’re going for a curry. I am almost excarnated with sleeplessness but in that Mickey Mouse kind of state where you can keep walking on air and not fall into the ravine as long as you don’t look down. Tomorrow a friend is coming to stay, there is a big bash of a party we have been invited to, not usually my thing but it’s hosted by one of my lovely weekly writing people, there will be beautiful music and ambience and I will enjoy.

Have a good weekend yourselves, Peeps.

Laters.

The Nation Decides

2009-06-09T22:44:00.002Z

Oh this is ridiculous. Poetry reading coming up on Thursday and I’ve decided I need to rewrite most of the poems I planned to read, which obviously isn’t going to be possible. Also, I haven’t got any funny ones. Well, I have got one, but it’s about how to turn yourself into a poisonous snake so won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. And I have decided I want to take the opportunity to get in a few M.E. poems – two of them are ok, but there is one where I can’t decide which version works best.

So, dear Reader Peeps, this is where you come in: I’ll put up both and you decide which one gets your vote. I could also do with a decent title, if one suggests itself to you. Thanking you in advance for doing a beleaguered Sign-reader a good turn, and – who knows – I might do the same for you one day.

Version One

I am your litmus paper, if you like;
watch my colour turn from live to nothing
and that should tell you something.

I am your singing canary, let’s say,
that goes before you into darkness,
and when the music stops, you know.

I am closer than you think.
You may have sensed me:
a coldness in the limbs;
the odourless lips of a still-born rose.

I am trying to tell you things,
but I only have this language:
a bloodless complexion;
this deathly silence.

Version Two

I am your litmus paper, if you like;
watch my live colour turn to nothingness.

I am your singing canary, let’s say,
that goes before you into darkness.

I am closer than you think.
You may have sensed me.

I am trying to tell you things
but have only this language –
a coldness in the limbs,
this deathly silence.

rolled purples

2009-06-06T20:34:00.001Z

There is something about being cold in summer that is much more chilling than being cold in winter. Another day of the claustrophobic and cold white sky weather. Sun seems well and truly blocked out, rain is on the way, I have just switched on the central heating. I grow old, I grow old, I will wear the bottom of my purples rolled – which reminds me, there is more T.S. Eliot on the box tonight. It clashes with a film called Signs, but what do I need to watch a spooky film about crop circles for? The Signs are spooky enough in my own front garden: there is something wrong with our beautiful apple tree. Some of the leaves have shrivelled and look burnt to a crisp. The tree doctor says if it is caused by insect infestation it will survive, if it is our deadly enemy Honey Fungus the tree will most likely have to be cut down. We lost a silver birch last year to that. This comes hard after the loss of our cherry tree,

two weeks it flowered in my kitchen, the scent of it painful,
like losing a sister,
like taking a bride from the altar, husbandless

– a snippet from work in progress. I observe that when I write about beauty it usually comes with pain and I also observe that I don’t write many funny poems, or if they are funny then it’s not obvious to anyone but me (someone did once say I had a kind of sly humour but neither of us were sure if that was a compliment).

And back to the trees: our next neighbour but one has cut down an ash tree. I’m sure there was a good reason for it but it has quite changed the view when one looks out of the window at the back of the house. There is always a tree issue in these parts, the forest is all around us and everything that is not forest wants to be. What with that and keeping the elementals happy one has one’s work cut out.

It has been a difficult week, I’ve been myaligicmusclebound and mainly housebound – without the former the latter would be fine in my little house, albeit with compromised view, but my neighbour (not the hot cross bun one) has had scaffolding put up by the side of his house which is hard by the side of our house. There have been days of banging, scraping and raucous banter, and I am spoiled with so much silence and birdsong, not used to the noise.

Certainly it is time for the rolled purples.

June

2009-05-31T21:02:00.001Z

Ho hum, I’m really not sure that there is much of anything I particularly want to say. I particularly don’t want to say anything about: a) the business at Oxford concerning Derek Walcott and Ruth Padel, the whole thing has been yuck and I really can’t bring myself to care who they appoint; b) the media circus business with Susan Boyle and the Britain’s Got Talent frenzy; c) the fact that the intensely boring and depressing Big Brother is about to go into its tenth year.

Good, that’s got those out of the way. We can talk about the weather obviously – it’s been great here in Blighty and even a cold winter-lover like me can’t help but feel as though something potentially splendid and redemptive has finally come and announced itself after the god-forsakenly chilly spring we have had. So, well, but as we’re all mostly agreed on that there probably isn’t very much more to say except that it is worth bearing in mind that (it being England) weather will probably be changeable. But you don’t need a sign-reader to tell you that, you can watch the BBC weather forecast.

I have got a list of things for June jiggling about in my brain. It is the cat’s birthday on the 8th. - she will be fourteen. I used to make an effort and stick candles into a tin of Sheba and sing happy birthday to her but she didn’t really appreciate the gesture or seem to mind when I forgot. The Signs wedding anniversary falls on the 12th, the birthday of Mr. Signs on the 16th and we are having a Signs gathering extraordinaire (his idea, I blame the therapy training) later in the month – members of his side of the family, many of whom he has not seen for years and who I have never met. I will not yet allow myself to think about this. Son of Signs clobber will all be coming back to Signs Cottage from Oxford at some point. There are poetry readings to attend and a book launch. Oh, and I will be giving a poetry reading on the 11th that I am feeling strangely nervous about.

I’m sure there was something else. Yes, a creativity day chez Signs. You will be wondering what a creativity day is: well, it is a day on which we (me and two of my long-standing writing cronies) get together and create, in other words we write stuff. We do this regularly anyway, but on a creativity day we do it for longer and with knobs on. And food.

What I always say is, when you have nothing to say, write lists – which is basically what I seem to have done here. I have been very restrained actually, there is much more I could have added to the list. I’ll be back when some of the items have been ticked off.

Have a nice month.

Repetitive Strain

2009-05-27T12:35:00.001Z

Yesterday Son of Signs sat the first of his finals exams. Instead of sitting in one of the magnificent halls in the University of the Dreaming Spires he was in a dusty room set aside, with keyboards, for those who have repetitive strain injury and are therefore unable to handwrite. There were a couple of anxious days when he appeared to be up against a wall of no-can-do and demands for doctor’s note (on a bank holiday weekend). But then the senior tutor sprang into action on his behalf and lo, there were possibilities, including the services of a scribe should he have wanted that (he didn’t). Plus, he saw a decent nurse who didn’t just chuck him a tube of ibuprofen gel. RSI is common in Oxford undergraduates who are building up to finals, May sees so many wandering around with the telltale white arm slings, that it has become something of a joke, until you actually get it yourself – three days before the beginning of exams.

The thing about children growing up is that you can’t march in and deal with things on their behalf any more. Otherwise I’d have been in milord proctor’s office with a sawn-off shotgun and a plethora of potent curses, obviously. This kind of approach does often bring about results. But on the other hand one also risks making enemies and alienating people so it’s good to have other strategies at the ready, such as who do you have to f*ck to get the necessary equipment/piece of paper/antibiotics or whatever it is that a particular situation demands. Shotgun and curses is more my style, but I can also do gracious beleaguered lady gratefully grovelling, and have done to good effect. I never said I was proud.

I have got a new, blue (second hand) office chair as the other one has been wonky for a long time. It cost £100 but we got it at the “special price” of £90 to take account of the scratched paint on one of its black feet. I have just looked online and seen that we could probably have got something similar, new, for the same price as it is an older model. Sometimes it doesn’t do to dwell on things. I will also not dwell on the fact that my posterior and coccyx seem to be missing the old wonky chair and find this one a bit bruising.

I continue to dwell on the issue of how I can establish a workable writing routine given the lengthy periods of recovery needed between one activity and another. Given the unpredictability of my condition there is no solution that readily offers itself but I will not cease from mental strife nor will my pen or keyboard rest easy till I have built – actually till nothing. I just find that if I am not writing I do not rest easy, nor do I wish to. Today is a recovery day, though, and perhaps a catching up on reading day: short stories (Runaway) by Alice Munro for the book group next week.

Next year in Jerusalem.

- or just imagine you are a teapot

2009-05-22T22:49:00.004Z

All I can give you right now is teapots. You can take your pick from a mouse, a cupcake or a basket of fruit teapot and imagine that you are sitting somewhere near to one of them eating a toasted teacake with butter, somewhere in the middle of nowhere anyone (apart from those in the know) knows about, and you are sipping your Earl Grey tea from a china cup which has just been poured (incomprehensibly, given the circumstances) from a stainless steel pot. All the interesting teapots are just for show. Imagine you are on your own, with a notebook, writing words about teapots and toasted teacake.

If you are looking in here for the first time - hello. I do other things apart from teapots and teacakes so feel free to trawl around the labels on my sidebar and look around. But on the other hand, there are worse things to contemplate. I should tell you that in my own home I have a standard Brown Betty which does the job nicely, and a very serviceable cafetiere of the usual kind. I have always liked coffee best but tea is on the ascendant.

I am going to the Brighton Festival tomorrow, up the Smoke again on Sunday.

Back anon ere May be out, most likely.

Rose of Signs

2009-05-16T08:12:00.001Z

I am going to the Smoke today, staying with my daughter who has just moved into a flat in the East End, which is where she began her life over 23 years ago. It is her first time living alone, but she is near friends and has the company of her trusty piano, which once belonged to my father – it’s essential in her life for both work and pleasure.

As usual (when there is planned activity afoot), I slept very little last night. But there is a substantial quantity of sleep in the bank from previous nights, and this may see me through. In any case, I feel stronger than I have for a while and there is a strange and fragile elevation, which belongs to the morning.

There is a red rose growing outside my house. It wasn’t there last year and I can only think that the biodynamic gardener who occasionally comes to help keep things from getting over-wild, put it there, took a cutting from the back garden. The look and scent of it is so intense I can hardly take it in all at once, but it will not last long.
The fact that from one day to the next things change sometimes seems nothing short of miraculous

"all by yourself in the moonlight"

2009-05-14T12:21:00.004Z

It’s really dire when it comes down to blogging about blogging, isn’t it? Perhaps it’s akin to writing poems that are about writing poetry – some publishers actually include that in their submission what-not-to-send guidelines, but do I care? I wrote one of those and not naming any names but a certain ex-editor of Poetry Review thought it was brilliant, which just goes to show that you should always write whatever you want to write and people will either like it or they won’t.

Having said that, I’m not about to say anything brilliant and insightful about blogging here, I’m just going to reflect a bit. This is really why I began blogging in the first place – to reflect about creative process, life and stuff, I had no particular agenda and was open to whatever might emerge, as long as it was clear (it probably wasn’t always) that whatever did emerge of a personal nature was not a plea for emotional support, reassurance or advice. I appreciate all (well most) comments, but the ones that please me the most are those that either take some kind of pleasure in the words I’ve put up, for whatever reason, or those that take off and turn into real conversation/debate or a bit of seriously playful nonsense. Regarding the latter, there have been some truly exquisite times in the comments section where we have made it up as we went along. I do like that kind of thing, and remember how when my daughter was little the games she liked were always about making things up – creative play in action, not knowing where it might lead or what may unfold. That’s actually the way I tend to write, for better or worse – it does sometimes help to have a map of where you might be heading; novelist writerfriend, if you are looking in: I am working/planning to work on this.

So, but: I have M.E. and have said as much in my profile. The fact of this is so huge and affects so much of life that not mentioning it would really be like trying to hide the elephant in the room. This is a place where I have sometimes lamented, spoken about the loss that comes with a condition such as this, but I have also on occasion stood back and simply looked at what it might mean in terms of creative process, how one thing might affect another. Having it has perhaps made me more of a “ditch poet” (one who looks at what is close up and near by) than the other kind of writer I might have been.

It has recently been levelled at me that I tend to sit on the edge of debate about M.E. – that I don’t get involved with the ‘dirt’. This is quite true and is worth thinking about. On the one hand I could say that it simply doesn’t draw me, it’s not what I do nor do I think I would be as effective as many of the people whose names appear on my sidebar, so I leave the activism to them and will sometimes lend my voice in support and offer appreciation for their efforts – we would be significantly the worse off without them. I was that kind of feminist also. I never went on marches, never put myself in the line of fire (writing a couple of poems for Spare Rib really doesn’t count) and I benefitted from the work of many brave and energetic women. It wasn’t laziness or cowardice, it was simply not the kind of thing I did, my gifts, such as they were, lay elsewhere and I never felt informed enough about particulars to offer something significant to any debate. The support I did give was more of the “ditch” kind.

I don’t offer an apology. I come here to do what I do and I don’t have an agenda so sometimes it’s a bit of this and a bit of that, and occasionally I shine a torch when the moment feels right and the fire is there to do it. Also, it was never my intention to be an M.E. blogger in the sense of that being the primary focus. If I had severe M.E. this might very well have been the case, but I am, as a blogfriend recently put it, sometimes “on the shitty end of moderate” and at other times just moderate – one of the more fortunate ones therefore. If I write about M.E., the point (for me) is really about the writing of it, whether the words are working in the way they should and giving utterance to something or other. I don’t always know what that something or other is when I am writing it – that goes with the territory of reflective practice I reckon.

I wanted to put up a youtube of “All By Yourself in the Moonlight” by the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band from years back but can only find the original song they took it from. Bonzo’s version had rude words and was funny, but this will have to do:

Sick Potato

2009-05-11T21:42:00.010Z

I would like to put up a post for ME/CFS International Awareness Day, but guess what? I am having a bad patch. Last year’s post still stands, I reckon, and I am wondering what else there is to say – perhaps this: that you can have the illness for a long time and still fuck up, as I have done over the last year, by overdoing or refusing to listen to myself because there was something I wanted too much. Thus far I have refused to face up to the fact that regular driving trips of any length make me ill. I have now been given conclusive proof that this is so. Mea maxima stupidissima. The previous post was a cheat, I had it in reserve, but the cupboard is bare now. I have notebooks full of words but sometimes reading through them feels like looking at a blueprint of loss. Other times the words are a stream that becomes river and the river overflows, is always in danger of overflowing and there is no defence, you just have to carry on building and planning, living as though there were no catastrophe imminent, as though you were not hearing the rumble of thunder that warned of a torrential downpour, believing in the spaces of sky, the clarity that burns everything back to blue. I echo myself and the many others, sounds trickling into the stream. Our voices are legion.

I will just have to give you a snippet from everyday life on the Edge where there is a shop that sells biodynamic vegetables and fruit. It also sells hand-dyed silk scarves, soaps made from olive and hemp seed oil, skin creams made with essential oil of rose and lavender and books about how to grow your vegetables according to the rhythms of the moon. I always meet Patrick there. He is an imaginary character who has materialised off and on for several years and I have grown quite fond of him. He rifles through the discounted fruit that is bruised or over-ripe, examines the black marks on a golden pear, weighing up the consequences of spending less money but risking a mouthful of disappointment where there should be juice. The apples are perhaps a safer bet, but even with those you can never be sure once they are past their best.
“It’s a nightmare,” he says, “a bloody nightmare.” His pessimism reassures me and is constant. We are living in the last days and there is a sense of companionship, of us both being in it together. Never mind the rumblings, the catastrophe is here and we are in it. This brings its own kind of illumination which gives a sense of purpose to the day. It is, as he says, a bloody nightmare, and our task therefore is simply to get through it heroically and with a bit of panache. Everything that happens to Patrick is a sign of the imminence of the end of the world as we know it, he is a sign-reader after my own heart. There is only one thing he will not pronounce on, and that is his illness, my illness, the Condition. If you ask him how he is, referring to his state of health, he will smile ironically and say, “musn’t grumble,” then turn his attention to a pock-marked potato as though apprehending a culprit.
“You see what’s happening? The seasons are fucked, there’s too much rain or none at all, and nothing can grow any more. Look at the size of that! Ever seen a sick potato? You have now.” He pushes his metal-rimmed glasses back up to the ridge on his nose, from where they keep slipping.
“And you?” he enquires. “How you?”
“Same,” I reply, “musn’t grumble.” He nods vigorously, as though I had made a very interesting point, even though all I have done is to echo him.
“That’s right,” he says, “that’s the way, we carry on – have to. Who else is really in the know but us? Bloody nightmare, but what can you do.”

I feel like a hero navigating some spectacularly dangerous terrain and he and I are, for a space, comrades in arms against the terrible thing that is manifesting right now in the withered grape and the yellow sere on a cabbage leaf.

Peeps and Comrades - greetings to you from the edge.

Thank you, Rachel.

..

chemistry

2009-05-10T06:19:00.002Z

I woke at some ungodly hour thinking about stink bombs. I can explain. At some point in the next couple of months we will have to find a way of clearing out the loft. Son will be arriving home with all his stuff and though he will come and go, his stuff will need house space for a while. Therefore some things will need to go loftwards, but loft is full and, apart from Signs children's art works and old soft toys I have gone blank and can't remember what is up there, apart from a 1960s chemistry set (unused) my dad gave me for Christmas one year.

It is still in its cardboard box, everything in its place: the glass vials of blue, yellow and red crystals, the pipette, a thin pamphlet of instructions, unread. On the box is a picture of two children, a girl and a boy, that remind me of my Janet and John early reading books. She is neat and wholesome in tight plaits, he is smart and keen, short back and sides, holding a vial up to the light.

It was the Enid Blyton books about girls’ boarding schools called St. Clare’s and Mallory Towers. All human life was there, but there was no complexity. If you were a girl who liked to be pretty and neat, this was what you manifested in all you did. Ditto if you were good at lacrosse and team games. The sensible girls who held the social structure together never did anything reprehensible and if one of those did, say, utter one small untruth or throw a paper dart at mam’zelle in the heat of the moment, she would suffer the purging effects of inner remorse until all was made clean again. She would in due course be made head girl. There was the fat one who ate too much, stole other peoples’ tuck and was lazy, the shy one with problems who would be taken into the protection of the sporty one and go on to develop some artistic gift such as playing the violin, and then there was the odd-ball, slightly out on a limb with a touch of the Tomboy about her and cheerfully self-sufficient who was tolerated and indulged by the rest because she was a decent sort and frightfully clever. She played practical jokes and got away with it. She had a chemistry set. She made stink bombs. She might set one off on a particularly auspicious occasion when parents and teachers were gathered together and the girl no-one liked because she was so vain and up herself was about to make a long speech no-one wanted to hear. The stink bomb sent everyone rushing outside onto the lawn to have their cool lemonade and cucumber sandwiches and the clever, naughty girl was severely reprimanded but the headmistress had a twinkle in her eye. The twinkle followed this girl around like a charm. She could write her own script. She could duck out of things she didn’t want to do (embroidery, hockey practice), she could build a crystal radio set and make stink bombs. She had a secret tree house in the grounds where she kept her treasures: old medals, stamps and coins, a daily journal like a kind of lighthouse keeper’s log book; her chemistry set. When the school goody-two-shoes found out and reported her, it was goody who got the flack for being a sneak, not clever individualist stink bomb-maker. And when the time came for a heroic act, she would come and save the day – rescue the new first-former from the blazing fire. Decent.

More importantly, she had a life that was her own, one that I coveted. I possessed a journal, all I had written into it so far was the words for Raggle Taggle Gypsies but I could work on this. The boarding school would come and with it my chosen persona. All I needed was the chemistry set. I must have flicked through the pamphlet once at any rate. There was no reference to stink bombs. You could mix one substance with another to make something else happen, melt the crystals down and make a large one. I was not interested. But still, I had it.

My boarding school was not like St. Clare’s or Mallory Towers. People were less fathomable. My own nature too was a mystery to me. I was not brave, clever or charismatic or resourceful enough to learn how to make a stink bomb. I read books and found that reading about such things was more to my taste than putting them into practice.

But still. The box has come with me, moved from place to place for decades. The crystals have congealed and hardened. The pink on Janet’s cheeks has faded and John seems altogether insubstantial, as though touched by a wraith from the land of Mordor. There is a yellow and a blue that is never seen on children’s packaging any more, not even in Eastern Europe. The set is what we might now call long past its use-by date; untouched, yet still touched by the glamour of its original promise. I'll never bring myself to open it or throw it away.

bad face day

2009-05-08T17:54:00.004Z

ok, I won’t beat about the bush: I’m having an ugly day. Just so there is no confusion, it’s me that is looking ugly, not the day, which has turned out to be a bit of a stunner after a very cold and miserable start. I tried to ignore the creeping ugliness and want to assure you that I am not given to endlessly looking into the mirror as life is just easier that way, but I bump into myself every time I go into the bathroom (mirror above the wash basin), sit down on my bed (mirror on dressing table opposite) and walk into the living room (full length mirror on side wall as one enters). And then there are bits of mirror in supermarkets (I have been doing the shop) that catch you unawares. Before we go on, can I just tell you something? When Mr. Signs and I were first courting his best mate espied me at the window and said, “who is that sultry Levantine beauty”? I have probably mentioned this before, it is one of the things I trot out now and then, because I’m not meaning to brag here, but it seems that there have been moments when I might have been considered a bit of a looker – not that I enjoyed it as much as I could have because I never thought I was. Truth to tell, now that I am in the late summer (shut up) of my years and there is a little less in the looks department than before, I actually appreciate myself much more. But not today, even though I am wearing the Purples (shell suit trousers, cashmere top, purple-winged faux antique dragonfly brooch).

I can’t put my finger on what exactly is wrong, and my thoughts (in case you were wondering) have all been, if not beautiful, quite respectable and even creative – I spent the morning writing some meandering thing about getting lost in the forest and though it is unlikely to walk away with the national poetry prize it is all grist to the creative mill and not deserving of this physical thing that has been laid upon me today. I know that M.E. godbastard is not pleased with me for having gone out on a forest walk two days in a row, he is humming around my system like a hive of angry wasps, has painted my face a greener shade of ecru, drawn bags around my eyes and carved wedges into the two vertical lines on my forehead. And what is it about one’s hair that always goes on strike and flattens itself horribly just when you need barnet support?

Fortunately I do not have to show myself to anyone but Mr. Signs this evening, and in his eyes I am never anything less than loveliness personified; or if I am, he has the exquisite courtesy never to tell me, and on a day like today I will have the exquisite self-control not to ask.

wild things

2009-05-07T10:24:00.005Z

People still don’t really know about Edge Village, the surrounding countryside - or the forest, which is ancient, huge (the largest free public access place in the south east) and famous for Winnie the Pooh and his mates. People scratch their heads when I tell them where I live and even those who are half an hour’s drive away, in Lewes, usually barely register the place and mostly haven’t been there. If it weren’t for the Steiner school and college, which does continually attract incomers, no-one would know about it at all. I could go for walks in any number of places, get myself completely lost and feel quite sure that no-one would be likely to pass by. I keep this idea in reserve for when things get too much. But what often sustains me when things do get too much is this idea that I live on the edge of a wild place, but it is a wild place where I feel kindred. Even when I can’t actually get out into it, I know it’s there, the forest, just close by.

The bluebells are everywhere now, in a week or two the bracken will have obscured them. I still haven’t got the hang of my digital camera and don’t seem able to capture the exact quality of light, may have to take on board that taking photographs isn’t going to be my thing but am tempted to get a digital photograph for idiots book before giving up.

Raising a Glass to Carol Ann

2009-05-02T21:30:00.003Z

Well I was going to let the weekend go without mentioning the laureateship , but now I find I don’t want to do that. The reason is Carol Ann Duffy, she and I go back a long way. Granted, she is very probably not aware of my existence, but that hasn’t stopped us having a relationship. I remember coming across a poem of hers in the newspaper before her name became well known, tearing it out and putting it in the drawer of my bedside locker, memorising it without trying to. I bought every book of hers, lifted out poems to take to the classes I was teaching so that I could prove to the poetry-shy that poems could be both accessible and good, that you could write out of strong emotion, that poetry didn’t have to be clever. I think that Mean Time is my favourite collection, but all of her is good. I found Rapture, which won the T.S. Eliot prize, full of imperfection (many of the poems would have been picked to pieces by the kind of poetry workshops I was attending), but glorious – and perfection in poetry has never interested me. I thought it was something of a triumph that it won the prize because if she could do this then so could the rest of us – write imperfectly, from the heart and with that kind of lyrical intensity that is so often (or used to be) put down as being just “confessional” women’s writing. Yes, times have changed.

On Newsnight Review last night she spoke powerfully and looked like a high priestess. Poetry, she said, comes out of silence as much as anything else – this in response to Andrew Motion having apparently gone dry during his period as poet laureate, because of the pressure and lack of privacy. Andrew would write again, out of the silence, and all manner of things would be well.

The sonnet, she said, was like a prayer. I had thought of the sonnet as a song, an utterance, a raindrop that reflects the whole garden, but never a prayer. The poem that I tore from the paper and learned by heart was a sonnet she called Prayer, and it goes like this:

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside the radio's prayer -
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre

be done by as you did

2009-05-02T10:51:00.003Z

I have done it again: overdone it; and now have to undo the doings that I did, and also but not only dismantle the commitments and say goodbye to Shrink, which in psychoanalytic is usually a long, drawn-out goodbye but will have to be a little less so. It’s a pain in every sense. I now know without a shadow of a doubt that I cannot do regular driving trips of any distance, it’s madness, I should know better, I do know better. My bones and muscles are not happy, actually they are furious about something or other (the driving seat, the desk chair?) and I should have seen an osteopath this morning but cancelled. Too much. Brain hurts, I am dizzy, an unhinged marionette, excuse me rabbitting and do feel free to wander off while I talk to myself, but if you are still here and interested:

Today: there is poetry workshopping, it’s a once monthly group and I’ve let go of so much else I want to hang on to this one.
Tomorrow: nothing in the day but people coming for dinner, this has been planned and re-planned for months. Chicken tagine and fruit fool, can prepare in advance, but.
Monday: niece is coming for the day (also planned and re-planned), needs to be collected, picnicked, taken to a local May fair – nothing loud and brash, more of a garden party plus with people dancing around a maypole, tea and cake, arts and crafts.
Tuesday: shrinky (see above), and later a dear and much-travelled friend coming to stay for a couple of nights, can’t re-plan this as she has work to do in the area and anyway. I’ll have to say that I won’t be up to any conversation until
Wednesday: nothing planned, but.

Yesterday I wrote 1,000 words and it felt good. But afterwards it felt like I was doing the browbeating, heavy, leather, resurrection shuffle. But without actions and music.
I am somewhat unravelled, reader, the yarn is everywhere

fresh from the words

2009-04-29T07:22:00.006Z

A stunning early opening to the day: sky a deep, improbable, midsummer blue; trees and lawns lit up and light-reflecting, yet the spring wedding is still white blossoming on the fruit trees and my body registers that it is cold. The photo doesn't catch the luminescence, but I'm putting it up anyway.

There is a crystal clarity that sometimes comes in the early hours, even to such as me who wakes after feverish sleep with a sense of foreboding gathered in the limbs and around the heart. I am doing too much of one thing and not enough of another. I am needing to take stock, revise, begin again. Thank goodness that there is always this possibility, as mornings like this remind.

I’m putting up a Morning Has Broken youtube (it’s kitsch but its kindred and it’s Cat who is still good – or he was then), and I was having a bit of trouble because the only decent vids I found had subtitles that put “fresh from the world” when it should be “fresh from the word”. One letter, but a world of difference. But this one will do. Listen to the tremor (it's good, Cat) and the words - yes - by Eleanor Farjeon.

Streams

2009-04-25T14:53:00.001Z

It was at this time of year that the earth acupuncturist first came here. He is also a cranial osteopath and I went to see him on recommendation, as one does, in the hope that something or other might shift. He had two cats that worked with him. On my first visit the orange one jumped onto the bed where I lay waiting for treatment and sat on my stomach and the black one sat on the window sill close by my head and stared at me. On my second visit the orange cat sat by my head and the black one took up position on my stomach. I like cats, I said, on the point of asking him to move them. But he said they were his assistants and told him where he needed to focus. He had thin fingers that clasped my head and smelled of pepper and herbs. He had long magician’s hair and grew his own marijuana in earthenware pots. He liked to visit the houses of people with my condition, he said, to do a little work there, make sure that everything was healthy. He would charge a fee of fifty pounds.

When he came for the appointment he went first to the apple tree in the garden and stood underneath its blossoming branches where he took a tin out of his pocket and rolled a cigarette. He was having, he said, a sacramental smoke before beginning the work. He came with long metal rods which he stuck into the ground at various angles outside our house on the rough, unmade road. The neighbour’s children came to look and asked him what he was doing. He said he was making the road better but when he came inside he took me and my husband aside. There are black streams underneath the house, he said. The metal rods were to neutralise the negative effects and I would feel better soon. I told him about the underground rumblings in the other house in London. He nodded and said that he would have expected as much because that was what happened with people like me. You choose to live on the black streams, he said. You don’t know it, but you do.

It goes like this: we choose to live on the black streams in order to take the darkness and make it better. In doing this we use a great deal of strength and many of us become sick, unless we are cats. Cats, said the cranial osteopath, always sit on the black stream points in houses and if properly attuned will sit on a person’s weak meridian fault line so a healer will know where to work. His cats, for example, had properly located the line of my caesarean scar which might appear to have healed but appearances are deceptive. My cat always lay on my side of the bed which was directly over the black stream which ran underneath our house. The cranial osteopath couldn’t at that time (though he did subsequently) enlighten me as to what it was about a stream that made it black, or why people like me would choose to live above it, but I am artistic and I can work with metaphor. Do the black streams run in people too?

People keep telling me there is a reason for things that happen. I would like to be comfortable with this. Of course I understand that if you smoke two packets of cigarettes a day for thirty years you are more likely to get lung cancer than if you never smoked, that if you fall into a stream you get wet. If this, then that. Consequences. I know someone who puts her trust into something called the Universe. It knows why the lighting struck her house and shattered all the glass in the window frames and why her son fell from a tree and broke his leg on the first day of the morning of the holiday she had saved for a year to afford. She believes that the Universe knows what we need and that we are rewarded if we put our trust in it.

I don’t, but never mind. The streams are clear now. I picture them running like veins beneath the ground’s surface. Dark or light, I tap into them.

2009-04-22T20:08:00.001Z

The mother of colds has gone – rather quickly, as it happens, considering how dramatic and volatile it was. In its wake, spectacularly aching muscles, but what does one expect? Things are as they are and I would perhaps say more were it not that Digi has said it all in her excellent post where she gives her take on what “recovery” might mean. We live as we are able and in this way it becomes possible to seize the day.

I met with two of my local writing friends today, to unblank the pages with our words. We have done this every week for many years now and it has become an extraordinarily precious (in the good sense) activity. I have lifted out poems from what I have written in these sessions. But quite often the words are shared only between the three of us, and it is good – intensely so. In honour of the birthday of one, I made rock cakes. The name does not do them justice as they melt in the mouth. Alongside, a pot of very strong coffee (half real, half decaf). I take my pleasures seriously.

A flurry of phonecalls from Daughter of Signs, as she has been flat-searching and found a place in Dalston going (relatively) cheap because, according to the agent, “no-one has any money now” – though it still costs a tidy sum. The upshot is that she will be moving there in May. It will be her first time living alone, but she will be near friends and she will have her piano, which is her constant companion these days as she is writing a musical.

I have just sneezed again. Time for a bath in Weleda pine bath milk, and some collected poems by Marina Tsvetayeva. Mr. Signs is watching The Apprentice. I think Sir Alan will have to do without my company tonight.

Beavering

2009-04-19T13:56:00.002Z

I have got the mother of all colds. Well at any rate, I have got a cold. For me this is a Good Sign as my bonkers immune system usually overrides such things, but not in a good way. I am glad it is there in all its manifestations today rather than yesterday.

Yesterday my first ever writing friend came for the day. We used to live around the corner from each other in Hackney and laugh about how one day we would look back and talk about how we used to live around the corner from each other. It didn’t seem quite real that time would shoot on in the way it has done and we would no longer be wheeling our babies around on Chatsworth Road, sitting in the Three Sons fish and chip shop, spending mornings drinking very strong coffee and reading out the latest of what we had been working on. Her novel is coming out in August and she is busy working on her second. I am working on how to keep my writerly head above water at all, or how to dive deep without drowning, or how to carry on driving without lights. Friend likes to draw her ideas out on very large pieces of paper and began showing me how it could be done (even though I only had A4). While I talked, she drew, scribbled and jotted, then she stuck the pieces of paper together with sellotape. It is a strange thing to see what is going round in your head set down as a visual thing, like a map with arrows pointing to where you might travel.

The daughter is beavering away at creative projects, writing a musical, son is beavering away at working towards finals (getting up at the crack of dawn), Mr. Signs is beavering away at his second career, training to be a psychotherapist, while continuing to work full time and going to art classes. Everyone who is doing anything of anything that amounts to real work is beavering, apart from Mrs. Beaver here who is trying to keep one foot in front of the other. To work creatively you have to be more than a bit obsessed with what you are doing and let the Daemon in. The Daemon is elemental, it is what it is and cares nothing about whether you have a cold, your general state of health, your domestic issues or anything other than the work at hand. If you are not able or willing to accommodate, it will bugger off and find someone else who will.

I can feel it roaring around the house, seeking entrance. Excuse me while I go and hide under the bedcovers.