No Music Day

Don't forget now, tomorrow is >No Music Day. Remember, silence might be golden.

No Smoke Without Fire

I lift my finger to my nose and sniff. There’s no smell, no evidence of it at all. It doesn’t linger on my fingertip as it does in hair or cardigans.

I look at the cigarette fallen carelessly from the ashtray, grey speckles spreading across the table like a distant constellation of stars. I rub my finger in it again; make a smiley face.

Cigarettes reminds me of my family: of my mother sipping black coffee on the back step on dull afternoons, of slanging matches with my father across our Sunday dinner, of Alien Sex Fiend's RIP rising like a ghoul from my sister’s speakers every Saturday morning.

Both of my sisters smoke, as did my mother and also my father until he got diabetes in his Forties and gave up. Most non-smokers I know, given the choice, would extract their own lungs before taking a smoker as a partner.

But me, I love a smoker. The smell. The ritual. I feel as though I was born in a tobacco cloud. My memory of childhood is fume-filled, hazy, polluted with tar and matches. I can almost imagine my mother lighting up another Silk Cut as she pushed me out of her, sucking on it between the midwife's swearing and her own screams. Every night of my childhood she sat in her red chair by the living room window, watching the opening credits of Minder or Miss Marple, ashtray balanced precariously on the leather arm, nightie already on, hair in clips by seven o’ clock.

I like the faint aroma of smoke through chewing gum; the casual whiff of it on clothes. I love to hear the click of a lighter and watch a person’s face change as the cigarette end starts to glow. I’m intrigued by the necessity of it, the burden of it. Mum demanded fags throughout all three strokes. We tried to deny her, but in the end, well, it was one of her only pleasures left. I’d sit by her in the living room as it burned down in her fingers, until the end was a curly, grey beard. Then I’d nudge her and she’d flick it, absent-minded, into the ashtray and take a puff. For her, it was now less about smoking and more about feeling that thin paper between her fingers as she sang along to the Sheila's Wheels adverts. It was about being normal.

I am a terrible smoker. I take the tiniest puffs and choke if I inhale anywhere near the filter. In my parents’ day, smoking was what film stars and heroines in novels did. It was sexy. It was romantic - like driving fast cars and giving up the person you loved for the sake of international politics. Watching Godard’s Breathless recently, I noticed the film was shot almost entirely through a cloud of French cigarette smoke. I simply can't imagine Jean-Paul Belmondo’s climactic death scene without that final drag on his Gauloises.

Let me make it clear - I am glad for the smoking ban. It’s a bit like sex – I only want people I am intimate with blowing smoke in my face, giving me an increased likelihood of lung cancer. Strangers – you can forget it. However, in an increasingly vice-less society, where our experience is franchised rather than disenfranchised, where troubles are smoothed out by regular decaf lattes drunk in regulated chain-cafes, served at regular temperatures by regular waitresses with regular breasts, regular pretty faces and regular uniforms, smoking seems one of the last bastions of irregular, disenfranchised, real life.

Admittedly, Brighton still has its pockets of iniquity where sex, drugs and rock n roll (let’s face it, some of the most interesting things in life) still prevail, where rooms are filled with that unmistakable clog of youth and a few too-old-and-should-know-betters. And though I’m by no means saying that pleasure can’t be found in past-times that are healthy and wholesome (even I go swimming three times a week), I can’t help wondering if one day soon we’ll be reminiscing about an era of revolution, rock n roll, fags, booze, pub brawls and teenage rebellion as if it was some minor power failure in the endless conveyor belt of consumer progress. Counter-culture will be dead. Pop music will be dead. And all the old hippies, punks and ravers will be lying in unmarked graves.

Would we care? As with climate change, you may mock, say it’s all fantasy, a gross exaggeration. But the signs are already here, and it might not be that long coming. So, any last requests?

I thought so.

Sea-Swimming

I spent that summer dragging my blue and white dinghy to the seafront, eating hot pizza from the diner, rubbing salt into my skin. It had become almost a minor celebrity amongst my friends. We’d hold beach parties where the dinghy was wrenched across pebbles as guest of honour. We went racing up the Adur and huddled on Hove beach in the breezy evenings, comparing sea-faring stories and drinking beer.

Out on the waves, I’d watch Brighton dissolve into a spray of blinking lights, sunshine bouncing off Sussex Heights. The Palace Pier became a blue and white haze, tiny cable cars rotating in a blue sky. Inside, I felt more like the West Pier, crumbling slowly into the sea, inhabited only by starlings, cockles climbing over my limbs. I’d sail as far out as I could go until it was silent, a yellow buoy slippery under my hand. I rowed to forget myself, to forget what lay back at the shore. The last thing I wanted to remember was what was happening to Mum.

One afternoon, I went out in the dinghy with a friend. It was a clear spring day; the hottest April we’d known in Britain for years. He took control of the oars as I sank back into the black rubber, warming my face in the sun. We sailed out, the only people in the water. Soon we were going round in circles. My friend grimaced as the oars flapped like broken wings, the tide suddenly against us. After ten minutes of spinning, of panic, he eventually regained control and we slowly slunk back towards the shore, feeling shaken and stupid. However, in the distance, a lifeboat was already sailing towards us, a noisy helicopter circling overhead.

These were clumsy days. I grabbed life where I could, and fell through its cracks again and again. Thirty-three and sailing about in dinghies. Almost thirty-four and finally learning how to ride a bicycle again. I flew over the handlebars on the cycle path along Hove Lawns one bright September morning, trapped under a tangle of metal; saved by three old ladies with purple rinses. In some people’s eyes, I was practically middle-aged. But I felt like a toddler with a cut knee, wailing for my mother.

My vision of life felt crooked, bent out of shape. A part of me couldn't see the point when all it came to in the end was one plastic tube, a ventilating machine and your own flesh and blood too terrified to look you in the eye. So instead, I swam.

There was nothing more to be done for Mum to try and make her better, no more hoping, no more reassuring words. And the gruelling years of listening to her say, "If only I could just get up and walk to the television set; if I could just drive to the Post Office; if I could just make myself a sandwich; if I could just have your father back home again" were over.

The wheelchair stood empty in the back of her bathroom. The hoist now hung limp above her bed. She was far away now in another bedroom, attached to drips and machines, staring out of a window at robins that hopped about the bird-table and pansies sprouting up from the ground. Which was the bird, and which, the flower, I could never be certain she knew.

Her words had left her to a silent fate, a whiteness of language, the two sides of her brain in eerie silence. She couldn’t ask for anything she wanted. Maybe I hoped that finally the ghosts had left her.

I do believe that at times during that summer, Hove seafront saved me. Whether crashing bicycles or adrift at sea, lifeboat men booming laughter in my direction; down there, I was in the midst of life, in the belly of colour, light, sound. Some nights cycling home, I’d hear nothing but my own wheels on the tarmac, the sea stretching out before me like a beaten sheet of metal, the moon, luminous, wandering.

One time, I’d arrived back from a particularly harrowing trip to Wales to visit Mum. I’d seen things I’d hoped I’d never see in this lifetime, felt things I never thought possible. I undressed, put on my swimming costume and padded down to the shore. I waded into the cold water, parted my hands and swam. When I reached the buoy, I screamed like I never had before, my feet flapping beneath me, my cries carried off by seagulls.

The ideals of my twenties left me crashing and burning in my thirties. I’d become so tired of the endless bullshit, the friends who sharpened their knives, the disappointing lovers. How many men would pass through my eyes before they’d finally grow dark and tired, before I could no longer see, before the mechanisms of sex ground to a halt somewhere between my vulva and my upper ribcage? Before all that I wanted became too much, too impossible, dreaming even higher, craving even more until I was nauseous, an excess of life in the bloodstream, mainlining experience, unable to deal with its consequences?

I didn’t realise it then, but those long summer months of survival down at the beach, flitting from England to Wales and back again, were the preparation for a major change in my life. My ideals had swum away, no religion was going to prevent me from being alone and no lover either. The only thing that closed the gap inside of me was writing. It was then that I understood the world again; it presented itself in colours. I staked my game on it; I put in all my chips. And it was worth it, for those brief seconds when the sky was luminous again and I was permitted to walk on the inside of language. I saw my mother lying before me on her white, sheeted bed, and putting pen to paper, I could articulate my love for her more clearly than ever. Those moments, I was content. The rest was just a ticking clock.

Monday

I'm up late, trying to figure things out. Stuff that can't be figured. Hooray! Let's hear it for the stuff that can't be figured.

My mind hasn't made much sense of late, the epileptic fits getting worse since my last post. However, to my intrigue, my mind has become radically more interesting to me. Like a film I never understood before, now I watch it not even caring that the script is strange and the actors keep improvising.

Where did all the usual props go? Last Wednesday, I fell out of time, landing on New Cross High Street, clinging to a friend, unable to keep my eyes open, or even sit up, short-circuiting myself. After an hour, terrified, unable at times to stop myself from crying, I attempted to make it to the station, my friend at my side, determined to somehow get me home.

As I sat on the train, having finally got a seat at East Croydon after clinging to a window frame for forty-five minutes, trying to go with it... 'just go with it Clare', I wondered if this might be it. Surrounded by Ipods and copies of The Metro, late night workers with exhausted, sweating faces, I'd slip down this seat and never get up again. The book would remain unwritten. And all the obsession, all the love, what would it matter to me as I trickled away into white nothingness? A wonderful story. That's what my life would have been. A wonderful, fucking painful story. The End.

However, as the commuters gradually disappeared and night grabbed hold of me, the fits subsided and I came back into time again, and even felt the warm indentation of my body in the train seat.

The fit lasted three hours, but its after effects swam into my dreams the following mornings, banging inside my head whenever I walked out into sunlight and making me think I saw people I knew on the street who were not really there. I fell over things, knocked cups of tea flying, banged my knee. And I was so tired, I could have curled up on my couch in my dressing gown and not risen again until spring. When I lay face down on my bed and started dreaming, my mind became brilliant like the reflection of midday sun in a polished floor.

My mind is interesting to me. The fit was a terror, ripping through my sense of the world as being something I can stand on. Something that won't break apart when I touch it. But in the last couple of days, it has become a friend, opening a door in my world I never knew was there. This is the afterglow. Until again. And the fear boils up in my veins and takes it all away again.

The Drugs Don't Work

I’m angry. Hacked-off. Galled. I’m banging my fist on the desk, making pens and paperclips jump with terror. And why? I’ll tell you why. Because, according to a clever man with a stethoscope who sent me off like a milk carton on Tesco’s conveyor belt into a funny looking white machine that bleeps, I have epilepsy. I therefore take tablets for epilepsy. I therefore try to resign myself to a life with epilepsy. And yet, despite this diagnosis, (based solely upon the fact that I get deja-vu with my ‘funny turns’) the fucking tablets aren’t doing their job anymore, and I’m not even convinced I actually have epilepsy. Yes, Richard Ashcroft, the drugs really don’t work, and at present they do just make it bloody worse.

So what’s a girl to do? Since upping my dose, my turns have, in fact, increased. Apparently they have to get worse before they get better, so I have been waiting for that shiny day when the ‘better’ bit begins. But in the last week I’ve been back to having them every day, between 3 and 20 times a day, and now, it seems, I’m getting the ‘director’s cut’ versions as well – longer, scarier, consecutive. Last night I had my first ‘mega’ one for about eight months and I remembered how scary and exhausting it can be.

Now I feel cheated. After all, despite the many downsides of temporal lobe epilepsy, the upside is surely the far-out mystical experiences, no? I mean it’s one of the most talked about side effects. And I’m exactly the type – arty farty, sensitive with religious-obsessive tendencies, from an unstable background and prone to strange and ‘mystical’ experiences. I’ve a catalogue of them that would look good on any potential crackpot or guru’s CV. So where the hell are they? Where’s my compensation? Where’s my communion with God, my ascent into angelic realms, my vision of humanity as never seen before? Where are the flashes of genius? Come on… Socrates, St Teresa, Dostoyevsky, Laurie Lee, Neil Young, Ian Curtis… they were all at it. Then, despite it all, I’d at least get in some more good writing material. But no. When it happens I just feel like someone’s let off a hundred thousand tiny bombs at the same time inside my brain and then I need to lie down.

Patience is a virtue, allegedly, so I’ll just have to wait and see. La, la, bloody la. So if you see my eyes rolling ever so slightly into the back of my head whilst we’re chatting over tea, just ignore it, will you? Or if I call you at midnight telling you I can’t feel the top of my head anymore and my legs have gone funny, please don’t click to answerphone.

Grumpiness is another after-effect. So tonight, instead of tying myself to my Imac in the hope of literary inspiration, I’ll be eating my dinner watching back-to-back Peep Show. That’s the only kind of communion I can handle right now - Mark Corrigan in a bad jumper, a wealth of pitiful human suffering, and a piece of battered haddock from the Co-op. Oh, let the angelic chorus begin.

Oh the boy's a slag...

... the best you ever had, the best you ever had is just a memory. And those dreams - not as daft as they seem, not as daft as they seem, my love, when you dream them up...


I did my life back to front. I’m convinced of this. If my theory is right, then I am steadily regressing towards old age. By the time I’m eighty, I shall be happily hot-wiring disability carts and mixing crystal meth in with my Birds’ Instant Trifle.

Luckily for me I live in a city where such a regression goes by unnoticed. I’m camouflaged in the place that defines itself by its bohemian and hedonistic status. I can stay as young as I like, for as long as I like. I can work in my unstable, irregular job, have my increasingly peculiar writing habits, inhabit my strange social life and incestuous relationships and no one bats an eyelid.

Brighton is the Dorian Gray of the South-East. And I might think that because I now live in Hove, sandwiched between The Willows nursing home and Otello's, the organic free-range, local shop where they charge four pounds for a tin of Polish soup made from lard, that this might alter things. But it doesn’t. My anonymity here makes it even easier to disappear into my life, into my small attic flat where I can hear the waves at night if I concentrate really hard and no permanent lover enters.

Which is of course what I’m really getting to here. Stable relationships. Don’t you just love ‘em? Cosying-up of a Friday night with your fifth DVD from LoveFilm because, in a fit of Let’s watch all of Herzog’s masterpieces, even though we turned them all off half-way last time, you ticked the box “Unlimited’. And now you’re sitting there, wishing you’d gone for 40-Year-Old-Virgin instead of watching Klaus Kinski lose his mind on a festering boat with some monkeys.

I digress. So you’re sat on the couch, with your 2-for-1 pizza and your Ben & Jerry's, unable to move because of the twelve thousand calories in your stomach. And then, out of the blue, there’s one those inexplicable moments of deep affection. Perhaps one of you casually brushes the other’s ear with your mouth as you whisper into it, or one of you flashes a smile that says you doesn’t really care about Klaus, or the monkeys, or even that great story about Herzog getting shot during a live interview. No. You both know it. Because for tonight, and for the foreseeable future, you are each other’s and will be sleeping in each other’s arms (or at least within shoving distance) until dawn breaks.

Awww. I remember that. The days of long-term relationships. Now I know at least one person who might read this and proclaim “But you had a bloody relationship of two years up until just over a year ago!” I agree, and maybe I shouldn’t be talking as though I’ve not known that kind of intimacy for a decade. It’s kind of insulting to those who haven’t. And a lot of long-term relationships are far from happy. But it’s more that I’m interested in how, aged fifteen, I embarked upon a relationship that was to last nine years and then followed it up with one that went on for five years. And how, after they finished, aged thirty, my ability to sustain a relationship has been patchy at best. At the age when everyone else is either getting married, popping out babies or, in the least, mooning over them in Costa, I’ve been having ‘scenes’, ‘flings’, ‘things’, ‘goings-on’, ‘special friendships’ and the worst, ‘connections’. This is the kind of thing that should have disappeared in my mid-twenties along with living in communities, sharing boyfriends and thinking I could get Enlightened by having a nervous breakdown in India.

But I'm looking on the bright side. In fact I'm reclaiming my ever-increasing inability to move towards any kind of romantic stability, (as well as dignified job status, secure financial standing etc). After all, as numerous people have said to me recently, a slight twang of pity in their voices “Hey, it’s all good writing material!” Oh indeed it is. And not only that, I’m realising what my greatest fear in life is (apart from obvious things like tidal waves, climate change, choking to death on cupcakes, and all those other things I don’t want to tempt fate with by mentioning). It’s ending up stuck. Bored. Trapped. Claustrophobic. No way out, even if you know where the exit is. Like in Batman, when he's locked in a room and the baddie presses a button and the ceiling starts slowly coming down. I've been there and I don't want to end up like that again. Like the subject of this Arctic Monkeys song I quoted at the start of this post.

We all walk a wobbly line between sharing and loneliness, and we walk it whether we're in a relationship or not. And when does closeness turn to settling down turn to dependence turn to choking with indifference on your pork chop every Sunday? And at what point do we solitary commitment-phobes stop running?


You used to get it in your fishnets/Now you only get it in your night dress/Discarded all the naughty nights for niceness/Landed in a very common crisis/Everything's in order in a black hole/Nothing seems as pretty as the past though/That Bloody Mary's lacking a Tabasco/Remember when you used to be a rascal? …

Fluorescent Adolescent

click me!

Saturday

It's warm but blustery today, the kind of day I sit on the beach, but end up shivering. I woke at an ungodly hour this morning, to a small child patting my face and demanding Big Barn Farm videos. In the main, I’ve enjoyed waking up too early these last few weeks – it’s at these times I sometimes catch a whiff of inspiration that makes me crawl to my desk and write.

It's unbelievable to me that it's over four months now since Mum died. I always feel strange writing or saying 'Mum died' because that sounds so definite, so clear, so exacting. Of course it wasn't like that - pieces of her went missing every day. I'd set off searching for them with my torch and magnifying glass, but always came home empty handed. In the end, there was only a thin breath left, the warmth of her arm and a frightened look in her eye. She was a scared rabbit in the headlights of a car that never came.

Until four months ago. Most of the time I make myself forget. After all, amnesia is anaesthetic. But there are always moments when memory seeps through like an ugly stain beneath my newly painted wall. I searched for beauty and love in the situation, even after the end, to keep myself sane. And there it was, like one of Rilke's angels rising out of the blackness. But the ugliness, well, it's chiselled into my bones now like some kind of code, and no matter how I try to deny it, it's a part of who I am.

It shows itself in the most ordinary moments. I passed a woman in a wheelchair at the Brunswick Square Festival the other day - middle-aged, but looking much older. I noticed her limp, paralysed hand, the other making a fist around a Mr Whippy cornet. Sun scorched the grass. The woman had accidentally smeared ice cream all around her mouth and on the end of her nose. She looked like a ghoulish clown, a three year old going on a hundred. She was probably only fifty. Her weary husband pushing the wheelchair couldn't see her face.

All around people laughed with each other, dragging toddlers by the hand, sipping warm beer in the sunshine. The sight made me want to throw up. It made me want to cradle her husband in my arms. To lie down in front of them and ask them to run me over. Ridiculous, I know. But in flash, it was all there. Standing in that square, I was ridiculous and out of place. So were they, and for a few seconds I could love them.

I think I seek out situations and people that make it okay to feel such irrational things; that will lift the skin from my body so I might run a finger along the white bones underneath. Perhaps this, for me, is consolation.

I'm never quite sure what I want out of life, if it's what I think I want. To be honest, right now I'd be happy just to put on this old Lou Reed record and let the words drain out of me until there are no more.

Hot latte in Freemont

Seattle. Full of wide fridges and parking lots; lacking decent tea and rain. I wander down 34th avenue, not daring to cross. I still don't get this rule about jaywalking, or how come everybody in this city seems so well-adjusted. The waitress tells me her life story. I cross my arms and feel my upper lip stiffen. I guess I'm a true Brit, after all. I love the tall wooden houses, painted grey and white. I imagine Norman Bates lurking in attic windows.

I'm waiting for Jo to finish in the beauty salon. Today she's dressed in a grey vest that makes her hair stand out like silver. She is beautiful. She's nervous as hell about Thursday, lists flapping about her brain, wedding spreadsheets coming out of her ears. It's pointless me telling her all will be well. We've left William to get his hair cut and then we're off Downtown to watch men chuck huge fish across wet tables at Pike market and mooch about the waterfront. I feel clueless about Seattle, and my bearings are vague at best.

Correction. I am vague at best. I'm doing okay with the jetlag, despite having been up since 4.45am this morning. However, I do keep doing things like knocking my water over and spilling my cereal, and earlier I screamed at the top of my lungs when Jo disturbed me listening to music on my headphones. For several seconds I hadn't a clue who she was, or indeed, where the hell I was. I'm in an unfamiliar land, and yet, Brighton now feels unfamiliar. Crossing over, I still haven't arrived.

Oh Brighton, you can't help being what you are, can you? I blame you for a multitude of sins, mainly my own. You crystallise all that I do right in my life and all that I fuck up. I want to kick your pebbles into the sea and squash ice cream into your beaches.

I crave the green of the trees that line every avenue in Freemont. I want that green trickling down the back of my throat, flooding my veins, refreshing every tired, cracked bone inside me until I am new again.

All the World Loves Lovers...

Sun's out; the wind is fresh. A near perfect day for this time of year. A near perfect time for a cold-blooded examination of love. It's been a while since I teased out its feathers as I dip my toes in the icy river.

From time to time I do wonder about falling in love again - the Big-ee, a romantic dream fulfilled, end of story, credits gliding down the screen. But I've been wondering for some time, 'is that really my story?' I've had the violins, the orchestras teetering at the edge of the mountain, that sunset to end all sunsets. Sometimes nowadays I just feel like I've got better things to be getting on with.

And there's always after the violins. That morning when we wake to a turned back on a greying sheet, rain streaming the windows. When we realise the bird has flown. When the postman leaves the side door open and wind rattles through the house. It is colder than we've ever known before. And that cold seeps into our bones and leaves us shaking.

It's happened to us all. It's the point when you leave or you learn what it really means to love. I guess.

I've had the best and the worst. Maybe I lived it all too soon. Now the tape reel winds round again and I'm left wondering. Can I really fool myself into believing in true love? Isn't it like pretending the chopper of death isn't really coming? Can I really do monogamy again? Can I even be bothered with the story when I already know the ending? It'll end in tears as my Mum would say.

But none of this makes me unhappy. It may all sound dark and gloomy but in truth, right now, my heart is shooting up with the green buds and leaping about with the floppy-eared bunnies. The sounds of spring are all around me, and they're like music. But I still wonder about these things. Hey, I'd have to be blind as a mole to not.

All the lovers of the world cry 'We are different!' No you're not. You're just not there yet. At that point of truth where you test whether that love is enough or not. Nine times out of ten, it isn't, it can't be. It takes a lot to love. And not just willpower and an earnest heart. It takes a special something extra that can't be manufactured, cultivated. It's there or it ain't. I've had it. And I'm not sure I want it again.

Devil's Dyke

It’s the first heat of the year, all orange on my shoulders, glowing in my cheeks. Grass is soft under my hands; the hill is cows and lambs chewing on their mother's soft underbelly. We pass ponies, bumble bees, a shrew in the undergrowth. Skylarks. Kites bent high in turquoise. My back is hot, my face whipped cool by spring wind. I can see my breath.

It's majestic up on the hill, the yellow flowers of gorse bushes drawing blood on my finger. Then a pub with babies on strings, dogs with big fur, yapping; men guzzling plastic pints of ale. I nibble on oatcakes, basil leaves, and sometimes fingers. The land arches like a back; it folds like a handful of secrets.

Then I am walking back, lost, wondering whether to worry that I am lost. The moon is up on my left side. As long as it's on our left, we'll find our way home. But we're turning this way, that way... left, right, all about. I look up to my left and there it is... a snowy apparition in all that sunshine.

We pass horses galloping, erratic, tossing their riders. We pass the pylon and the path that disappears into nowhere. We pass the side of the hill that looks like skin. I want to stick out my finger and touch it, taste it under my tongue, bite it.

A six o' clock chill creeps under my jacket. Then we're back to bricks and tarmac and some man jogging. Gardens with fountains spitting tiny jets of water. A door slashed with Happy Birthday in a gold plastic streamer. Five children inside, sitting in the shadows. I stand, feet flat on the pavement, the sun once again blinding me.

It's the end of Sunday afternoon. I ride the packed bus the rest of the way home, sore muscles and something soft under all these bones. It radiates out from my clothes, this softness; it nuzzles up to other passengers. Of course, they never notice. I walk up a cold street. Push open the door. Slip into a warm pub full of people. Order coffee. Sit down; lift the mug to my teeth. Hot liquid hits my throat, sliding warmth into my chest. I feel it here in my belly.

Thursday

I had three ideas I was sure would work. First, I could barricade her into my flat. Second, I could barricade her out of my flat. Third, I could hide her Green Card. Once I realised that I'd not quite got the heart or the neurosis to put any of these plans into practice, I knew I'd have to resort to other tactics.

Jo was of course leaving for Seattle in the early hours of this morning, after five weeks in England, and the last eight nights staying in my flat. The bestest friend I could ever hope to have - after eleven years of love passing between us, five years of living together. I can't remember a single row we've had in that time, or a time I didn't trust her implicitly. My family, my sister, my confidante, my spiritual ally. And she was sodding off back to Seattle forever.

I decided "I shall be a rock, impervious to all emotion." I certainly wasn't going to be reduced to a blubbering mess. We had only one hour left before bedtime so my plan didn't seem too ambitious. I ensured that my Itunes played no music with an acoustic guitar in it or worse, a harp. Then I sat like a wooden post at the end of my sofa, pondering whether to just put on Eastenders and pretend she wasn't there. I even considered informing her that I couldn't get upset for health reasons. Since my recent discovery of two frown lines on my forehead, any kind of emotional stimulus that worsened them would be quite out of the question.

Then she cuddled me. The cow. We squawked like two chicks in a nest, tears flying out from our eyes and landing on each other. Tissues streamed between us like great, soggy clouds. I knew it was too late to lock her in my cupboard. Jo, my loveliest of all Jos, was flying the coop.

She left at 4.30 am, as I hunched in my bed feeling a strange ache in my chest. I pulled up the duvet as she scuttled round in the hallway outside my door, collecting up her things. Then I flung it open and we hugged, my eyes stuck together with tiredness, my hair no doubt standing on end.

Now there's a Jo-shaped hole in my living-room, but I'm imagining her winging her way across the ocean as I write this, towards her new life. It's a beautiful image. And I got a chance to say goodbye this time, to wave her off, to wish her well, and hear her close the door behind her.

Never underestimate the preciousness of true friendship. It's like family - it runs in the blood, it is a tract that crosses all land and sea, returning home, again and again, no matter the miles.

A couple of nights ago we watched Lars and the Real Girl. They played this Talking Heads song in it, and it's one of my favourites. So this is for Jo. It's nicely weird, especially towards the end.

Rear Window

Well, I can't even call this morning. It's lunchtime, and I've been at my computer for almost three hours. I've reached stalemate with the story I'm writing, which always happens around about now. If I'm not careful, I'll be propelled into a round of meaningless www.nonsense, and then it'll be five o clock before I've blinked an eye.

And I need to be at least halfway through my story by the time it's dark tonight, and the man with the black hair in the posh flat across the road has closed his laptop lid on the day and left the room.

I'm somewhat annoyed with him right now. From time to time I waft about my flat, eat lunch, sift through papers and not once does he look up and acknowledge me. He's been working at that window for a year now, and nothing stirs him from his work. I figured I'd strip naked in front of my window to see what happens, but I've worked out he's probably gay (he lives with a man who irons a lot... flimsy evidence, I know).

I feel comforted when my man across the road is at his laptop working. Sometimes he talks on the phone, but mainly, he perches over it, the screen lighting up his glasses. I'd like to think that perhaps he's writing a novel or a screenplay (hey, we could swap stories!), or is on his way to becoming the next Danny Boyle (he looks a bit like him).

But I strongly suspect it's work of a rather more mundane nature he's doing. After all, he doesn't strut and fret his living room, hand to forehead, looking like inspiration's just about to strike. He doesn't toss page after page to the floor, lips quivering with rage. No, he sits and he types and he stares at his screen. He doesn't even drink tea or coffee (I never see a mug beside him).

Actually, he probably IS a writer. Because that's what proper writers do nowadays. In olden times, it was okay to spend your life speeded up to the eyeballs, reeling about your flat (if you had a flat), trying to find your way to your cup of coffee through the heaps of papers mounting up on the threadbare carpet, waiting for mystical vision (or the drugs) to kick in. Nowadays, it's work, work, work; tap tap tapping into your Imac, sticking to routines, deadlines, structuring your sentences. No one roll of paper and a line of charlie for my man across the road. He's got it sussed. Hard work and a clear head gets you there.

I'm going to make another cupppa. Wait for the hot water to turn to brown syrup in my teapot. That's how I'll get through today. Mine isn't always a healthy life, I have to admit, and I don't think I can even excuse it by calling myself a writer yet without sounding hopelessly pompous.

But are we so different: him with his Habitat lampshade, me in my stupid furry slippers? I bet he's too posh even for Waitrose, and that he never cries at Eastenders. But if my man over the road can do it, then so can I, even if he never lifts his head and look at me. What would I do if he did? Would I really wave? Hold up a piece of A4 with a crayoned thumb upturned on it? Show him my new hula-hooping trick? Maybe. Or perhaps I'd scuttle off to the kitchen, caught out, and throw peas at my bin for a while.

It's a funny thing, this writing business, and we all need allies, don't we? Even if they are too preoccupied or shortsighted to acknowledge our genius, or just our fantastic leopard skin dressing gown.

...

I post this brilliant video in recollection of what was one of the only notable thing to ever happen at The Brit Awards (perhaps apart from the KLF machine-gunning the audience)... Thankyou Jarvis Cocker. Click the side bar, top video if this one doesn't work

Play from your Fucking Heart

Why Won't You Release Me?

I'll say one word. Duffy. Now some of you will have heard of her, and some of you won't. If you listen to the charts, watch TV, I'm sure you will have. She's been a scourge in my brain now for some time, and I'd hoped I could make her go away like a bad dream, but I see she's up for nomination at the Brits and no doubt she'll sweep the board there.

Duffy. She's Amy Winehouse with the crack sucked out of her. She's Otis Redding with a razor blade taken to his vocal cords. I hate her with a vengeance and yet, whenever she releases another godawful single, feel compelled to listen. It's like picking a scab.

I've nothing against her personally. I reckon she's quite a decent person. And she's talented in her own way. But what I do have something against is the 'creation' of her into some kind of banal icon; and I have a lot against those bloated media suits who made her the latest 'big thing", dragging her caterwauling onto Later With Jools Holland to infect my ears.

It's soul music at its lowest - all soul drained from its core. People love her songs because they're catchy, like a bumblebee in the brain. If you've never listened to many of the soul greats, you might even think they're the real thing. But they aren't.

I perhaps should have some loyalty because she's Welsh. But I'm afraid it doesn't stretch as far as this tiny singing puppet with a voice like a cheese grater. Am I cruel? Listen to Mercy, her greatest hit, and you'll be begging for it by the end.

I've posted a video of hers at the end of this post (click twice). You could easily mistake it for that Halifax advert. She cavorts about without any sexiness whatsoever as suited men hurl themselves about an airless studio. God save us all. What was that bloke out of Suede thinking when he announced her his protege?

Maybe none of this makes sense to you. After all, her songs are catchy, they have a habit of making you tap your foot, even if you don't want to, and she is kinda cute, isn't she, in a harmless kind of way, even if her face looks about fifty when she's actually only twenty-two.

But it's all that makes me weep about the music business; all that makes me lose faith in people's ability to detect a naff line when they're being fed one. When they decided to make her a star, the whole of the music business shifted in line behind her and opened their wallets. She's perfect fodder - a little hint of depth in her lyrics, a little harking back to the Sixties, all put together in a nice sanitised package. This funny little Welsh girl became a star. And now she's inflicted on me every time I turn on the radio. Once again, banality reigns supreme.

Modern Life Is Rubbish

Two things recently have made me realise I am getting older. When watching the corny What Women Want with Mel Gibson in it (itself an indication of a sad cinematic fall from grace), I saw him and actually thought, mmm, you're quite fit.

I have also started listening to Annie Lennox. Now she is someone who's always bored me shitless, with her 'meaningful' lyrics, her strutting 'strong woman' performances, her stupid bald head. Worse than Sinead O Connor, worse than Skunk Anansie, she led the troops of the skin-headed, mouthy, empowered yet surprisingly bland female, with no trace of irony in her lyrics or persona. She stood for everything I hated about pop music.

So it seems, despite my best intentions, I am creeping stealthily towards middle age. Mel Gibson always turned my stomach, with his hairy chest, and in the Eighties, his horrible mullet hairdo. Only housewives ever fancied Mel.

But now, in the wake of Iggy Pop gyrating about our billboards and TV screens selling insurance (how could he do that, why would he do that - answers on a postcard, please...), I realise that even I must embrace the middle of the road from time to time. I hit rock bottom a couple of weeks ago when I found myself crying to "No More I Love Yous" and had to admit - Annie Lennox is a damn good songwriter.

So if John Lydon sells butter, and Iggy Pop sells insurance, and most other pop stars who haven't had to perch upon the pedestal of 'anarchy' 'rebellion' 'integrity' or 'debauchery' are busy selling their small souls, and further, I am listening to Annie Lennox, what is left of the crazy rock n roll dream? Poetic excess? Can you imagine Bukowski selling pheasant in Harrods, Rimbaud down at The Groucho Club spouting off about his latest line in aftershave?

I have little hope left for our culture, for myself. But when finally I see Patti Smith endorsing Macdonalds, or Morrissey advertising the latest IPod, then I truly will give up the ghost, and write modern culture off as the mediocre rubbish it so dangerously comes close to being.



ps Someone just pointed out to me that the only reason I fancy Mel Gibson in What Women Want is because he is cross-dressing. Hurray! My old identity is intact. Now I feel better.

Woodvale Cemetery

There are still some secrets about Brighton I'm only just being let into. After ten years since my arrival into this strange and eccentric city by the sea, this greatly excites me.

Today, I learned about Count Eric Von Stenbock, "Scholar, connoisseur, drunkard, poet, pervert, most charming of men," as WB Yeats called him. He was also remembered with affection by Aubrey Beardsley, Symons and Lionel Johnson (although they thought his poetry was drivel). Many of his verses concerned his doomed love for a Berkshire youth, Charles Bertram Fowler, who died of consumption at the age of 16.

He was alcoholic, Catholic, Buddhist, homosexual and overall degenerate, and most interestingly of all, he lived in Withdean. Mental illness dogged him throughout his Thirties, but, since he was a Count, when escorted (as he was at all times) by a dog, a monkey and a life-size doll, everybody had to greet them with according courtesy.

In Eric's mind, the doll was his son, and he referred to it as 'le Petit comte'. Every day it was brought to him, and when it was not there he would ask for news of its health.

On April 26th 1895, on the same day that Oscar Wilde faced the first day of his trial, Eric died. Drunk and furious, he'd tried to strike someone with a poker and toppled into the grate. He was buried in Woodvale Cemetery in Brighton on May 1st (the day Wilde's jury disagreed and was discharged), his heart removed and sent to Estonia, where it resides in a church at Kusal.

At the time of his death, his uncle and heir, far away in Esbia, saw an apparition of his tear-stained face at his study window.

Oh Eric, I applaud you. There's nothing quite like being a rotten poet with a taste for life-size dolls and the Divine.

I love Brighton cemetery. It's been far too long since I was last amongst the tangled ivy, my trainers squishing in the mud. Angels rear up at every turn, the lettering on headstones turning to rust in the dew.

Today, I peered into the small, simple plot where the Sisters of Mercy (nuns, not goth band) lay crammed in, heads to tiny feet. I also saw (thanks again to my knowledgeable friend) the resting place of the first man ever to spot Antarctica.

Tonight, I am very happy in my polka dot dressing gown and leopard skin slippers, listening to Debussy and generally avoiding starting my new story about a man who is perpetually late for everything. Mmm.

There's nothing like the dead to raise the spirits!

Boogie Woogie

So I’ve just looked here and noticed that my last post was the end of September. Oops.

I'm hungover today, and haven't managed to do anything constructive yet apart from a few hundred words of writing homework. Mainly, I've been tidying up my recently returned computer, hula-hooping and watching repeats of Project Runway on TV Shack. Classy.

I'm surprised how rubbish I do feel today, when I wasn’t even particularly drunk by the end of last night (don't raise your eyebrow - I really wasn't). It seems to be that the less often I drink, the worse I feel the next day when I do.

Last night was partly a lot of fun, and partly a bit underwhelming. One highlight was the talented stripper, Leanna. She looked fantastic and did remarkable things with a bottle of vodka and some red stack heels. The low point, however, was definitely the Rick Astley impersonator. Never Gonna Give You Up. Oh, I wish he had, drag king or no. I felt like I'd regressed twenty years, and was now standing in a real, live, gay cliche.

Another highlight was a good bit of disco dancing. I get tired of anti-disco snobs – you know the sort – if it’s not The Pixies or an ‘upbeat’ Smog number, they think it’s tacky. If anything progresses to Chic or, god forbid, Sister Sledge, they’re out the door. To me, disco, even some tacky disco, is such a pure expression of emotion in music – hands in the air, strut your stuff kind of joy.

They played one of my favorite disco numbers, Yes, Sir, I Can Boogie by Baccara. I still remember dancing to it in a hotel disco in Mombassa, aged five, thinking I looked like one of the glamorous, raven-haired women from the band (despite the cropped hair, Clarks sandals).

College is good – very good. It's all the things I thought it'd be - challenging, intimidating, stressful, tiring, annoying and overwhelming, and I have to say, I'm greatly relieved.

Before I go, I have to say last night's dancing was nothing in comparison to what these cool cats are doing. Kids today could learn a thing or two. Yes, sir.

Monday: train to Brighton

I'm on the train, having just left Birmingham Moor Street, heading for London Marlebone. After several days of balmy Indian summer, I pass through a rain soaked Birmingham, drizzle sketching out its streets, a familiar greyness suspended in the ether.

I can feel my mood shifting as I edge nearer to Brighton; a heavy feeling in my arms and legs, a sinking inside my stomach. I look in my rucksack for the armour I need to face my life back home. I find hoodies and a hard-backed book about a complicated love affair.

I left my sisters on the tiny village platform, and watched them shrinking as the train drew away, their round arms raised, faces smiling and sad. My lungs surged with feeling as I sped past houses, yellow coloured fields, more houses. This is territory I have known so well. I have chartered this journey for the last twenty years.

I'm uneasy. As I made the journey back home to Wales last week, my speech was still blurry, my experience filtered through a tin can. The preceding weeks had taken their toll. But having seen Mum for myself, stable and much as she was before this latest emergency stay in hospital, and having been home with my family, a little bit of myself has returned. There is a little bit of Clare back in place.

So uneasiness lurches up through my throat, determined as I am to not go back to where I was when I left Brighton last week - sucked in, spat out.

So I sip my tea, plan my strategies; write here. I even have biscuits in my bag. Life isn't so bad. Mum is still alive, I have sisters who are loving and brave, who fight their demons and cut my hair, make me cheese sandwiches. Who always tell me the truth about myself.

They sit chatting in the fading evening light out on our back yard, staring at the apple tree and the flowerbeds, flicking ash from their cigarettes into the cooling autumn breeze. They never sit for very long. In a flash, one of them will be up, dragging something around the garden, pulling out a hose, raising some clippers, re-arranging the shed. They like to keep busy.

It’s then that I feel most like the baby of the family that I am, with my writing, my hula hoop, my desperate need for a new haircut. Watching and feeling and thinking and turning it over, all of it, again and again.

I got my haircut. I watched the dark pieces fall to the ground and with every snip felt a little bit of myself coming back to life. I am still arriving, in whatever this new place is. I watch dead wood fall, hear the doors closing.

So I want to get my head down, start my course, let those who really care, come to me, and the rest, I'll watch them take off like birds into a cloudy sunset. Throw a stick and see what comes back to me.

Despite the Twinings label, the tea is disgusting. No amount of sugar can mask it. Drizzle hits the windowpane and I'm returning to Brighton stronger, but more wary than ever, to a town cursed by too much sunlight, by too many options.

I might feel alone, but I'm not alone; I feel scared, but I'm not weak. I have lost, but then... life culls what it needs to; it does some of our dirty work for us.

I watch crows taking off over cow fields, and feel the love of my family, the ones still there. I feel the greenness of the passing fields, my hair against my neck, a brightness still behind my eyes, and for now, that's more than enough.

Friday morning: back home

I sit up in bed on a cold autumn morning, and I can see that the sun is shining, the clouds are moving. This is the first morning in a couple of weeks that I've woken up feeling even vaguely like a human being, with a still beating heart, and perhaps even a future and a purpose. It's a feeble flicker of it, but it's there.

Mum has stabilised, at least for now. The doctors still aren't sure that it was definitely another stroke or whether it was a fit that made her lose consciousness like that and her breathing so laboured. As usual, it's a deathly mystery. And I guess that means, after preparing for the end, once again, after going through all that trauma, we're back to where we've been for the last two years. Waiting.

So when next week comes, I'll be winging my way back to Brighton. Sunny, happy Brighton. Home of the creative and free-spirited. It sticks in my throat like too-sweet candy.

I'd like to run away from Brighton, up sticks and sod off to London, where my course begins next week. But I know that won't happen, and that instead, it's the swallowing of reality of life in Brighton for now, of waiting for things to change.

I stare into my crystal ball and don't like what stares back. I remember the forces around me that are good, the ones who care. I see the tree outside my window is still standing, waving its branches at me. It is solid and still growing.

Monday

This morning, as I inhaled a cloud of pain and breathed it out again and said No, I will change my life, I will not let the cloaks of recent events take me down, and I rang the electricity board, and I unpacked my new mini laptop and prepared for the launderette, I got a phone call. It was the phone call. The one I’ve waited for two years. Perhaps.

Mum has been rushed into hospital again today, this time with breathing difficulties. But she went to sleep and didn’t come out of that, and now we’re all playing the waiting game again to see if it’s another stroke, the one that’ll finally take her, if she’s finally able to swim to freedom, away from tubes and machines and the same view of squirrels and daffodils from her bedroom window.

Today, for the first time in my life, I lost the power of speech. I'm a good communicator. But today, my brain shut itself down, and the world span backwards, and my mouth no longer said the words I wanted to say. I slurred my way through this afternoon, this evening, a personality I no longer recognised, in a world all too familiar. That blurry world. Where walking forward feels like going backwards, where I blink an eye and am filled with terror. Where I suddenly notice the moonlit sky or the glassy sea-water and I feel like heaven is exploding right inside of me.

I am used to being split open. I even get accustomed to it even, and find joy in what I discover inside - the hidden jewels, the rapture of knowing what really matters in this life, behind the masks and the craving, the need and the games. I can hold it in my hands for an instant and know it’s worth everything.

As I cycled slow as a snail towards the Meeting Place today, I saw a little girl with her dad on Hove lawns, just learning to walk. She turned as she marched with wobbling legs away from her father, her face lit with an incredible radiance - sheer exhilaration, unadulterated joy coming into being. It's hard to accept, but true nevertheless, that what lies behind that little girl’s smile is the same as what lies behind my Mum’s closed eyelids, and what will take her, if not now, sometime soon, away from me forever.

What a magnificent beauty of a terror for us all to live with. It makes me want to love all the harder, dance all the more fiercely, hold what’s precious in the palm of my hand and never malign it. Then it makes me want to crawl under a bush and stay there forever. We are idiots, and that makes us all the more human. We throw away the best things in life and usually we learn the hard way.

I hope I'm learning. One day I will finally no longer call myself a victim. One day, maybe tomorrow, I will reach out and see all this is my making, not my breaking. And that forgiveness is always, always, already there, at every turn.

Thursday morning

I woke up too early, after little sleep, to the smell of sea salt coming through my open window. I stirred, felt my skin against the sheet and a small stab of wonder in my belly. It surprised me to find some joy on this too early a morning, when life hasn’t been too kind and I really should still be fast asleep.

Maybe it was something to do with the weather, or feeling the sea so close at hand. This relentless shitty weather doesn’t bother me much. In fact, it is a relief to see summer slip away without any final words to say to light up these September days.

Summer is so obvious. It wears its plumes like a peacock. It is without subtlety, without irony. I end up feeling so much pressure to live in summer – to squeeze its juice out to the last drop, to run in its sunshine, to muck about under its blue skies. These last months have largely been such a washout, that’s rarely been possible. It’s been cloud and relentless wind, with the odd peep of sunshine in between. So I’ve been let off the hook, and I felt this morning, as I have on many mornings these last few months, happy that I no longer have to try and be happy.

I’ve always loved the rain. I don’t like grey skies, or damp cold, or that wind off the sea that bites into my neck and makes my face scrunch up. But I often welcome the streaks of wet coming down the windows of my flat, the sound of car wheels rolling through puddles, and the calm dripping from the gutters after the rain has died down.

One thing I do feel a little cheated of, however, is autumn. Summer being a washout is one thing, but autumn? Autumn is for shifting colour, for the last flood of warmth on skin, for picking berries and getting muddy trainers before curling up to watch the sky turn first amber, then red, then pink from my living-room window. It’s not meant to be just a continuation of drizzle - non-descript and apathetic, each day the same as the last, uniformly wading into winter. That’s simply underhand.

I'm not looking forward to this winter. I really don't know how it'll be. Although there is at least one major new beginning for me, I feel people I love dissolving around me like water into mud. Consequently, I feel very alone, only myself to rely on. Someone told me recently that life is giving me a chance to dig out the weeds, the old dead stuff, so that new plants and flowers can bloom in the spring. To let go in order to bring in the new.

But if I look out at my garden, it seems pretty empty and forlorn, and spring feels a long way away. Maybe that’s what all this rain is good for. To make it all grow again. I hope so. Bring it on. I don't want to make anymore mistakes.

It seems like everyone can feel Autumn in the wings right now, waiting to step on-stage. It's a peculiar feeling, the end of summer, especially in Britain where it hasn't even really begun yet. So I'm cramming in all the summer I can before it disappears, and am off camping for a couple of days tomorrow to Devon. I've got my new sleeping bag (with fleecy toe-warmer) and my ridiculous plastic crockery, so I'm all set.

It'll mean I've actually been away for most of August. I spent a week and a half in Anglesey on what promised to be a paint job from hell, but which turned out to be a rather fun and slightly loopy adventure in bits, once I'd got used to having no water, shower, cooking facilities or a proper loo. We were doing out the most incredible three-storey house on Rhosneigr beach, and both the house and the location were absolutely stunning.

It inevitably pissed-down for the whole time we were there, and a black rain-cloud followed us all the way back in the van to Birmingham, where the sun came out, giving the impression that in the North it really only does rain, especially in Wales. It was sunny all the rest of the way home.

But, as we set out yesterday for our boating trip to Barcombe, near Lewes, clouds hovered darkly overhead and it seemed that we were doomed once more to bad weather, and that perhaps summer really is already over.

It mizzled as we set up camp under a tree, but in true British style, it didn't stop the fun in any way. We drank a flask of coffee and some Pimms and munched on bread, cheese and salad, before taking off up the river to experience the stillness and the swans. Then hula-hoop was brought out, and I am very happy to report that after a bit of practising, I am now mistress of the hoop (it's been whirling round my waist on and off all night, and my stomach muscles are killing now).

Wisely or foolishly (I can't decide which) we then jumped in the river, which felt a bit like jumping into ice. My body parts froze instantly and it was so cold that for about a minute, we all just swam around just with shock on our faces. Then my body started to feel like it was actually boiling, tiny electric currents swimming through my circulatory system.

Thank god there was tea on the stove and a huge slab of blackberry cake to warm us up afterwards.

Morning

I went out and bought white flowers. Brought them back. Sat them on my table. I resolved: I no longer want to live in somewhere with an air of mild depression, where the carpet crinkles under my foot, constantly shedding anxiety. I said: I have built a pretty fortress, a sanctuary of steel and concrete, where I can rest away from harm, but where I am always alone.

These flowers make me happy. They honour the whiteness lighting up parts of my mind. They cherish the rain pounding inside me, and open like my springtime would, if only I’d let it.

I’ve been away from home a long time. This soup is thick and I am hungry. I'm craving sustenance, a liquid to keep me alive. My body is thinning, as my mother's thins, and will thin, one day, to nothing. That’s the day I give her back – my earth, my body, my shrine, my home. But I cannot wait until that time to start the letting go, for my own body to separate from hers, to find itself among the brambles, slightly cut, with the rain beating on it again.

I came from her body, it is no surprise that hers became entangled in mine, or that it becomes me who is lying there in that nursing home bed, flaccid and paling into the vacuumed air. It is no surprise I don’t want to let her body go, or that I compare my own flesh to hers every day – see my arms fattening as hers do, lines appearing in my skin as hers wrinkle, my thighs plumper as hers slacken under sheets.

When her body transformed the first time, from healthy and normal to deadened and useless, I loved it even more. As the metal of the hoist came nearer, we let out nervous laughter, held the bar steady, trying to make sure she didn’t fall any more times than she already had. We all did things that broke us and made us bigger by the breaking.

But it isn’t me in a hospital bed, in a calm and shallow nursing home, waiting to die. I'm not yet 72 years old. I've not yet been a mother. I touched her body like it was a precious sculpture when I was little, when she was so beautiful. And I see no difference now - still beautiful, still wandering in her mind, inaccessible, all-giving. But the earth is taking her, and I won’t let it take me with it. My time isn’t done.

My body is abundant with grief. It yelps up my spine and faces me in the morning. It's a beautiful and peaceful thing, my body, when I accept it. At night, I dream I’m covered in mud, and that starlight is eating me – creeping up my toes, into my creases, nestling through my hair like sand over moon-stained beaches. Backed onto a cliff edge, I throw back my arms and laugh. I give my mother back to all that made her. My own child will survive if I learn how to look after her.

My friend said to me Go back to that place, back to where you felt safe. So I walked up the drive to the Poor Clare's Convent and knocked on the door. The windows streamed light through them, the benches were hard and I could hear the nuns singing for Jesus.

This is the place where saints surround me and I can, for once, look my mother in the face and say It’s okay, Mum, and mean it. Cause I saw another face in hers. Taking my coat back out into the world, I am not the same person as when I entered.

The white flowers live for all of us. They bloom, shrivel; they give off scent while they’re still living. We can make this life more beautiful. Let’s do that. Let’s make it better than it could be. Make it bloom.

Fuck, it's too late tonight, and it's too early in the morning that I've got to be on that train to Cuckfield. And it's way too late to be posting now. So what am I doing here?

This is how it is at the moment - everything's either too late or too early, either gone or not yet arrived, in between. I don't know where the fuck I am. I like it in some ways. But then the pressure builds up, and I JUST WANT SOMETHING TO HAPPEN - somewhere, somehow, and end all this watching and waiting and holding and sitting and not fucking running anywhere. Not tearing across the beach at four in the morning with an answer in my hands, blinded by moonlight. Not whistling up at the moon, calling down the night. Not making shapes with my hands I recognise, and that others can understand.

Shit. And, to my calamity, they've chopped down my favourite hydrangea bush on my road. After me blogging about it and all. Bastards. After me passing it and noticing it every day since I've lived here, I passed today and it had been chopped down! An ugly sign had taken it's place, the whole front garden flattened. I felt fucking furious. Don't you realise that's my main way back to my past, don't you realise where it took me? I could have shrieked at the imaginary builders. Then I realised I needed to get a grip.

It's a thin line. I make strenuous efforts to maintain a grip on my life, on myself, on things. And it's a pain in the arse. Losing my grip is one of my greatest pleasures. I skid across the ice. I start wailing about lost hydrangeas and realise that things that should seem insignificant mean more to me than what is apparently important in the world. So, I get a song in my head, and it means more than anything else existing at that moment in time - friends, family, life, death, love, food, etc. The petals of that flower become everything.

Sometimes, when I realise this, I get a vague sense that perhaps, just perhaps, I am losing my grip on reality. I let myself shudder a bit, then it passes. I don't have to change because mainly, it makes me happy.

Hi, How are you?

I'm good, if not somewhat vulnerable this morning. I was in London last night to see one of my biggest musical heroes of recent times, Daniel Johnston. It was a bit of a dream line-up, with support from Jad Fair, Mark Linkhous (of Sparklehorse), Scout Niblett and James Mcnew (of Yo La Tengo).

After short sets of their own, and Daniel coming on briefly for two songs alone, they all all took to the stage together, like a bunch of escapees from the nearest psychiatric ward. Then we were blasted with pure fucked-up rock n roll bliss for the next hour.

To see Daniel Johnston still alive and standing in itself is quite an experience after all he's been through with his health/mental health. But the force of his songs was punched through a hundred times over by his live performance.

This man's beauty is palpable - it shook with his hands as they struggled to hold the microphone, rolling with his huge belly over his jogging bottoms. His set was sublime, twisted, anarchic, sensitive, tender and vitriolic, and his 'backing' band smiled at his lyrics as they played along.

I hope there are many years ahead of Daniel Johnston in which to write and play. I'd post this directly on here, but it's not working for some reason, so instead, here's a link to one of my favourite D.J. songs.

Dream

I'm waking up from a dream. In this dream they are banging drums and blowing horns. Ribbons dance in the wind, the moon is yellow through stiff branches. I am clothed in rags. What happened to me that I ended up here, at midnight, naked beneath my wet clothes, on a starry night filled with strangers? Where are they taking me?

It is morning and the sun is rising. The bed feels warm and my skin is warm and the clock beside me is ticking. It's seven o clock. What happened to me in those trees? Why does my memory fail me?

Something is coming back. I see a lake. On that lake is a boat, and in that boat, is a boy. He is without oars, floating slowly back towards me. Now, he is the one in rags; he is the one naked and damp-skinned under his clothes. But he knows what he is doing here, and why he must reach me.

I walk down the bank, wade into the dark water to meet him. Up to my knees, to my thighs, I go in waist-deep. He moves towards me, as though on air, as though skating. His hair is brown, his eyes grey-green. Looking into them is like peering into the lake. Unsmiling, he reaches out his hands, and I go towards them. I am cold to his touch, the scent of seashells in my nostrils.

That little boy, who never grew. Who remains under the sky on a cold, starlit night for as long as I forget him. Always forgiving, as only children are, a pair of arms to welcome me back. I climb onto the boat, wet and shivering, my hair, a black shroud around my shoulders. I hold him close to me and feel him shake.

My boy, one day, a man, born of a woman, given by the ground and stars. Leaves form his brow, soil stirs in his limbs, bees make his laughter, lavender calls his sleep.

He reminds me of who I am. How I became a mother. How I am always a daughter, chasing an invisible father through countless clearings. And how a boy was lost inside myself; how he still beats with my own heart under the skin, where bone and muscle meet and give way to blood. I'm back again, with my son, with my brother, with the one who made me.

Thursday

It's been sweltering all day today. Now, the sun's finally gone down, but a heat remains, sinking into the walls of my building, blowing warm through my open windows, caressing my back.

I'm home after almost a week away at Buddhafield Festival. I've returned to the computer several times today trying to begin to describe my time there, and each time I've gone away silent, empty-handed, a Zen stick pounding on my brain.

Perhaps there's just too much to say, or maybe it won't let itself be verbalised, this shift in myself that's turned me inside out. All I know is that my soul, my heart, has returned, and I see quite clearly things that before stood submerged in damp fog.

The heat from my body is rising like an aura. Outside, I hear male voices. There's a gentle breeze on my skin. I wonder where I'm heading with all this life inside me - rustling this way, snuffling that. I can only follow my nose.

And right now, I find that I am glimmering with the waves, I'm out with the fishing-nets and seaweed. I'm lost, but this time, I don't mind. I welcome the tangles of my life that wrap like balls of wool inside Grandma's knitting bag. Summer finally has arrived.

...

Firday, I mean Friday

So I survived a somewhat crazy weekend in London. Loosely speaking, it involved London Pride, lots of dancing and sweating too much, Neil Young and a psychopath threatening to throw me out of a car. Nice. And I didn't even have a cup of tea all weekend to steady my nerves. Now I'm back in Brighton dossing about since work has hit a sudden drought.

can't really enjoy this time off as I'm panicking that I won't be able to save enough to pay for the MA in September. I'm also panicking that I have to move out of my flat in September. And that the elusive book I am meant to be writing will remain forever so. A nice trio of anxiety to keep me going on this warm summer's eve.

So, to take my mind off that, and to distract me from getting a real life, here's some of what's been interesting me this week.

If you haven't yet seen DiG! , the film by Ondi Timoner, do so. It's been out for quite a while now, and this is the second time I've seen it. The meteoric rise of impossibly cheek-boned Courtney Taylor and his Dandy Warhols, whilst the arguably more talented Anton Newcombe and The Brian Jonestown Massacre fuck it up over and over again is addictive and moving to watch.

I also watched the Studio Ghibli film, Nausicaa: Valley of The Wind, an epic and, at times, psychedelic tale of warfare between humans and insects, punctuated (somewhat distractingly) by the young heroine's tiny skirt blowing up about every 3 seconds. Is it wrong, I wonder, to ogle a cartoon character, especially one of dubious age?





Apparently it's a cult film now, and it's definitely worth a watch. The graphics are less slick than the later Ghibli films, which adds to the charm, and the story is just as far-out and eccentric as the best of them.

Music-wise, I've been back listening to The Seeds again. I used to be mad on them when I was about 14, but the obsession didn't endure the shift from vinyl to cd, and so they've been out of my life for some time now. They're pure magic.

Friday night

My street's ablaze with colour at the moment. The hydrangeas two doors up have sat, crisp and mottled for months, like old maids perched by the side of the road. Now, suddenly they've erupted into pink, purple and blue life, turning into something resembling a mild acid trip.

Seeing hydrangeas seems to short circuit something in my brain, sending me into a peculiar kind of rapture. They remind me of my Grandma more than any other flower. One glimpse of them takes me back to her garden again, and to her, brown skirt to her knees, hair firmly in place, picking a handful of peas or mint. There she appears, sturdy and loving, in her small, perfectly kept patch of green at Southview.

I'm not great at understanding the anatomy of things, at labels and the naming of parts, at decipherable wholes and the bits that make them up. I generally have a much more impressionistic experience of life. So it took me almost 34 years to learn that the flower I felt so ardently about was even called a hydrangea.

But I knew how those flowers made me feel; I knew the quality of the air in those summer days when I played on the wall. Every single day for the last two years I've touched the hydrangeas growing on my street, lightly, with my fingertips, as I've passed. And been immediately back there again.

Tonight, I walked home on the other side of the street, feeling like the wind was blowing me down towards the sea, pushing me out into a night where seagulls gather in a sky lit by boats and stars. And I wondered about all the flowers on my street; I wondered how come they are not made of blood, as we are, but of something different. Because our lives are not so dissimilar, and our beginning and our end all converge at the same place.

A rose feels the force of nature in its petals, trembles with the weight of the rain. It stretches its stalk away from the muddy earth, towards the sunlight. Tonight, I imagined every flower, every leaf trickling sap. I imagined salt water falling down from each one, red blood spotting the pavement, and a curious wet emerging from in between each petal. I imagined mucus-streaked stalks. The liquid of life washing across flowerbeds, over walls, out onto the empty grey pavement.

On a night like tonight, how I wished they would, how I wished the flowers would do their blood-letting and their weeping, their loving and mating, and I could walk through their rivers of their living and growth and disintegration.

Perhaps then I could finally see manifested the desire that's pumping through the veins of this world, through me, seeping out through my pores, winding through the channels of my mind, enveloping my tendons.

Otherwise, that which fuels everything that we do, the very axis on which this planet turns, remains as invisible as the air we suck on. We can almost pretend it doesn't exist, and that the world can be containable, reasonable somehow.

But I can feel it in the wind that's rattling my windows, in the heat of this evening, in the hum of night-time. It's everywhere I look. And it's in my heart, tinkling like that empty beer can rolling past my window. I am trembling with the force of what makes me, and will break me every time.

New petals generate, old ones die, and I proliferate. And if you think I'm being over the top, if you doubt it, look out of the corner of your eye and you'll spot it, always, sitting there in your living-room, drinking your coffee, planning your next move.

I don't know what to do with all this desire inside. It's as strong as that sea out there and as fragile as those petals. Me. Silly me. Messy, bloody, somehow growing. The world never did come to terms with itself, did it? And nor, yet, have I.

Homecoming

Monday is my new writing day, and naturally, I've spent the morning making pea soup, washing-up, re-vamping blogs, going to the doctors... anything but writing. Even this is a bit of a cheat, but I'm telling myself it's a way of easing myself into the avalanche of imagery that's waiting in the backseat of my mind, and that on some level, I do not want to face.

I often feel caught somewhere in between childhood and here. There are days when a rose's scent or the dark green of a climbing ivy is enough to make me ten years old again. When dappled sunlight on glass makes time spin. As I grow older, this seems to be happening more and more. As I reach an age where there's no doubt that I'm clear of the boundary of youth, I feel myself increasingly as I did before I even knew what puberty was.

I want to go home. Of course, I know that home doesn't exist any more. The home I knew is now occupied by strangers, a couple of kids, cars I don't recognise, pets I don't know about. It is re-vamped and re-constituted; lawns mown in straight lines, fences properly put up, the house walls now a yellowy white. Of course I hate it, the sanitisation of our rambling family home. The pruning of its madness. The killing of its dreams.

But more than this, I realise that where I want to return to exists mainly in those same parts of my brain that it always did, not simply out there, with the grass and the beetles, but in the home of my imagination. When I remember my childhood, it isn't the real conversations I did or didn't have with my mother. It isn't how I felt when my father walked in a room.

It's the solace of the cherry tree, how I hid under it to feel protected. It's how I ran with rain on my reddened cheeks in a frail white nightie, around clumps of lavender, over wilting delphiniums. It's the crumbling grey brick of the convent wall as I crept unseen against it, chalk on my t-shirt, shielded by dark hedges. It's sunshine through poplar branches, and the rooks lining up on a cold winter's evening. It's the swoosh of crusty leaves around my ankles as I ran up our drive from school. It's the call of the wood pigeon, ever-etched in my synapses, that will never go away. When I awake to the memory of back then, it's a garden I always go back to.

And this garden is as alive for me today as it was back then. It is an Eden in my eyes as I feel its leaves against my skin, the grass between my fingers, the chill of evening air drawing in. Growing up took me out of the garden and into the world, it eroded the pathways leading back to the home of being. As an adult, I know I can't quite see what I saw in the veins of a dying leaf when I was nine years old. How that leaf glowed with it's own essence before me as I turned it over in my palm.

But writing takes me home. Perhaps that's why I do it. It takes me by the hand and leads me back through the shrubbery, up the winding tracks, over the wall to a vegetable patch and to toes peeping from under rough brown cloth; to where the nuns are all singing, blue eyes to heaven. My hand is small, my fingers long; my shoes are wet and muddy. I rub my eyes and I can see again.

Saturday

Oh, a lie in this morning, what bliss! I screeched to a halt outside my flat at 7pm last night, tumbled out of the car and lurched up my stairs, banging into walls as went. It had been a hard day's work. I quickly got changed, threw some mackerel down my throat and headed out again for town, and more specifically, the new Sex And The City film.

I was never really a Sex And The City kind of gal. The Louis Vuitton hangbags and Manolo Blahniks didn't really do it for me when the series was on TV. Nor did Carrie with her endless romantic disasters, her horrific dresses and her knock-knees.

So, as I bumbled into the cinema, I was anticipating at best, two and a half hours of light relief and a few chuckles, to ease my stressy day away. However, when I peeled myself off the seat as the final credits rolled, I had to concede: I'd been utterly riveted.

The acting was at times unconvincing, and I physically winced in moments at some of the lines. Also, the insanely rich and glamorous lives of these four women, though in some ways attractive, ultimately I found hard to relate to, and, at times, slightly distasteful (upon leaving New York Fashion week, two crabby, ugly women spit anti-fur slogans at the mink-draped foursome, before venomously hurling a red ink bomb, to which Samantha utters with glee "Don't ya just love New York!").

But behind the high heels and the penthouse apartments, was a real depth of emotion between these four characters and their lives, and I found their stories both gripping and easy to relate to. Themes of love and forgiveness wove throughout the story, and the depth of loyalty between them was endearing. I'm now utterly won over by Carrie Bradshaw, though still not sure about Mr Big with his oil-slicked hair and monosyllabic declarations of love, but then you can't have it all...

So I was completely steam-rollered when I got home last night. Every night this week it's been 11 o clock before I've rolled in to my flat, which, after scraping super-glued wallpaper off air-deprived stairwells for 8 hours a day, as I am at the moment, has been a bit much. I swear I found wall paper up my nose last night.

So I'm off somewhere green and rivery today, to find a little peace and quiet and, of course, tucked away, a tea-shop.

Sunday

I'm a little hyper tonight. It's taken two episodes of The L-Word to calm me down. Given things at the moment, that isn't perhaps the most obvious TV choice for calming down to. However, last night I watched Kes in an attempt to cheer myself up. Who ever watches Ken Loach films to cheer themselves up? Weirdly though, despite the squashed hawk and the coal-mines (or in fact, because of them), it worked.

I'm blabbering. I think it's because over these last few weeks, and particularly over these last days, my life seems to have done an unusual u-turn. Subsequently, the whole shape looks different.

The most recent of these is the unconditional offer I received from Kingston University to do an MA in writing. Suddenly, I have a direction and something to work for, as I hoped - and a structure to hold it all together. I am saved from the potential future I saw for myself - floundering in my flat, trying, frustrated, alone, still alone in it all.

In addition to that is the decision I've made to write a book, and finally, absolute clarity over what that book must be about. These two things alone have turned life a very different colour the last couple of days, and the wheel of myself is, yet again, turning.

These last weeks have been as hard as a fist to the stomach. I've lost half a stone in tears alone. I've been as confused as a dancing bear under bright lights. I'm sad and I'm lonely, the empty spaces stretching out where once someone filled them with love and with tenderness.

But, as is often the way in life, little chinks of light appear, unwittingly from the corners of the room. A spray of lilies breaks out into bloom without me noticing. Somewhere, a blackbird is always singing. What I mean to say is, the unexpectedly brilliant has occurred.

And so I catch small smiles turning up my mouth, and a new feeling in my chest, very different from the one that's been nestling there for a while.

God Seizures

I'm back from the doctors. I think I can trust him. He's taking my 'funny turns' seriously, which is more than the neurologist did, refusing to dismiss them as panic attacks. He is referring me back to both cardiologist and neurologist. He's not convinced it's heart related though, but that it's neurological-based, which is what I've always felt.

He tentatively said he thought it might be migraine. I'm not that convinced, but after having ten 'turns' in one day yesterday, I'm willing to consider anything. When I read up on various diagnoses, however, it is still simple partial epilepsy that fits my own symptoms most exactly.

Whilst I was looking into it on the Web, I came across this, The God Helmet.

This is so far out, and the implications so unsettling. As someone with a history of both strange or 'religious' experiences and also fit-type experiences (I think I came virtually convulsing out of the womb), there's something in it that doesn't entirely shock me. There's something very 1950's Sci-Fi about it, but the prospect of 'mystical' experiences (and hence a lot of the basis of religion) being neurologically locatable, is intriguing.

It's no surprise that when Richard Dawkins underwent one of these experiences, he felt nothing (I wonder what would make him feel something). As someone who describes spirituality as a 'virus of the mind' and faith as a maligning disease, I mistrust the obvious blind-spots of his scientific materialism.

One thing I do begrudgingly agree with Dawkins on, however, is how faith and 'spirit' can make religion impervious to criticism or rigorous analysis from either outside or within. Religion has such a massive vested interest.

When I think about Roman Catholicism (which contains much beauty in some of its ideals), it has such a huge investment in ideas of humanity, womanhood, manhood, family, birth and death and ultimately 'the soul', that anything challenging this investment is quickly pulled apart and conceived as heretic, aberrant, or 'other'. Or else it turns a blind-eye.

For as long as Catholicism has existed, homosexuality has been on its black-list. To validate it would be to throw all that the Church believes in as 'God's will' up in smoke (or so Church authority would have us believe). It demolishes the Church's position on marriage, conception and the family. Sexual union is meant to be between a man and a woman, married and in a state of grace and love, and for the purposes of conceiving a child. How can that underlying premise of Catholicism stand true if it in any way validates homosexuality?

So Catholicism makes its bitter choices, time and again. I often wonder what happens when someone is actually intersex, having both sets of female/male physical attributes/genitals?


There are two choices - preserve the authority of that religion and cast out those who don't fit in or embrace the differences and feel religious edict unravel.

I don't like the alternative - science-based, materialism-based, consumer-based, psychological-based hard conviction. It's not that different from a religious one.

I've been looking for a God for a very long time. One that's free from its own ideology, that is unmediated 'spirit' or reality, that doesn't need 'belief' in a whole set of proscribed values or rules. I either haven't found it yet, or if I have, I don't know it yet.

It's ridiculous to denounce God. We all have religion, even old Dawkins, whether its science, consumerism, politics, self-help, romance, drug-taking, music, poetry, activism, money, drink, solitude, chaos, death, family, work, self-harm... It's impossible to live in a God-less society.

But that is a God of surety, of belief. What about the more mysterious one, the one the saints talk of, and people like Dawkins despise? The one we can't capture? That defies description, is beyond conception? The one I'm always looking for, that always escapes, or isn't really 'there' to seek in the first place.

I touched it as a 'Buddhist'. I touch it reading both Derrida and St Francis.I touch it with poetry, music, and also sometimes when I look in my Mum's eyes. That's the only faith I know. And it's intermittent, inconclusive, and very scary.

Saturday

One of these mornings, you're going to rise up singing.
You'll spread your wings and take to the sky.
Until that morning, nothing's going to harm you
with your daddy and mommy standing by...

It's eleven o'clock and my chest's tight with a series of toxins. My body is trying to rid itself of a virus that's creeping unseen through my lungs, throat, lower belly and back. I am fighting off invasion from armies that are marching up my bones.

It is half-way through the weekend and I'm less mournful than I could be. I'm more a balloon, floating far South on the breeze, catching sight of the needle as it pushes through my rubber. I'm sinking slowly with the sun.

And summer is a ghost doing its rounds. I pride myself on my skin's paleness and wear eyeliner to enhance my tiredness. Vampiric, I cower behind car fenders whenever clouds threaten to leave the sun uncovered. I pray for rainy days. I watch myself and others tripping over, time and again, wearing clown's shoes - floppy and ludicrous. And I remember the dull ache of when I got it somehow right, and began to walk properly. When ecstasy left.

Where're the dinghy days, I wonder? Days when I was salty with sun and sadness and I pulled my flaccid boat to the beach, just to keep myself from sinking. When the sea was a home, a bed to lie in, a friend, a screaming companion in blue and green; a rage of sunlight, seaweed tangling my toes. It made the memories of Mum swim somewhere further out, somewhere deeper I didn't have to go. Out in the waves, alone, flapping my arms like a seagull, I gave into the sky and floated.

That was the year when I couldn't take in what was happening to her. The year that the sea-front kept me alive. How strange then, that this year I say: keep me out of the light, keep me in a mossy cavern where I can hear the trickling water. Where I can just lie, and listen.

Bank Holiday

Twenty to midnight. This is the last thing I should be doing. But I'm here, at this screen, fingers fumbling over buttons.

So this is the crux - I find myself at that place, the place of no return, where I am scattered to the wind a thousand times over, waiting for the pieces to blow back into a self again. I tried to hold it, and I couldn't. I tried to keep it in a shape that still looked pleasing to the eye, that could bathe my ears in a comforting sound. But it broke out, and now we're all running.

Looking at it another way - it's a late night, after a hard weekend, following a tough break-up and too much alcohol. Hardly surprising if my heart's on the floor (better sweep it up with tomorrow's litter). Another day blinks at me, and we all find a way through.

In a week it'll be two years since Mum's final stroke, two years that she's been lying staring out of that goddamn window, without a thing we can do about it. Two years since I last heard her utter a word, or since she looked at me and I could say "Mum, I love you" and know that she hears me. Two fucking years. So I'm parentless, childless, a plastic duck bobbing on top of the bathwater.

It's also, unbelievably, almost six months since David died. I can't really think about him, but the loss works on me in inexplicable ways, twisting my life in its hands.

Today I walked with friends through caverns of green, emerging into sunlight, down lanes, unwinding, winding. A sip of pale ale, a search for cream tea, heat and damp, rain and warm. England at its most omniscient, its most lordly; giving of itself; springing into skylarks, whooping over hedgerows. Breaking out the wheat fields into dappled joy.

I know the grace that surrounds me, the friends who love me, friends I could not do without. So I sit and I listen, watch summer run its course, feel it lean in and whisper. And everywhere buttercups offer themselves up to us, as they tear across Sussex meadows.

And I remember, how two years ago, I stood on the bank of a Hawarden stream, gathering posies under the hazy blue sky. I made buttercups into a shiny yellow fist, took them to the hospital. Behind white curtains, under the rhythmic pulse of the ventilator tube, I placed them in a vase for my mother. They were the yellowest things I had ever seen.

My sisters and I gathered around, clucking and fussing. And if she ever opened her eyes and looked our way, we smiled. I might have shown the buttercups to her, placed them under her chin till they glowed. But she was a closed, quiet flower, petals sleeping - a perfect stalk, returning underground.

Small Mercies

Get up, walk about, sit back down, sit back down. Get up. Sit back down. Sip rum. Rub the soreness in my temple. Get up. Walk over to the window. Watch the street running like treacle below. Don't feel regret. Don't feel anything. Not yet.

I dreamt of chasing Noel Fielding up dead-ends and through back-streets because he said he'd sell me a T-shirt. Ended up in a cellar with a fat man. I watch videos, and more videos. Re-fire ambition. Remember the dream. The one that always returns. Sit down, make myself remember. Think. That dream was always what got me worst. On a bleak winter's day, coming round the corner, in a grey duffel coat and a scarf. He didn't look at me. Always was me. I edge the mirror out of the window. Smash. Hear it splinter.

Put on I-Tunes. I only want to hear sad tunes. Listen to the Specials, remember the Eighties, how I grew up too fast. Thank god for small mercies. Where'd I have been if I'd actually got what I wanted.

I'm as good for it now as I was then. Clueless, torn, gluing words onto an A4 ring binder, hoping for it to make some sense. Pretending I know what I'm meant to know by now.

Outside someone is shouting. Fuck off, you cunt. Fuck off. YOU CUNT.

Thank god for small mercies.

from my desk

I am calmer today, but not much. The sun is behind me, trickling through the back of my skull, past my retina, into what I see. And I see a shiny screen pretending it is my life, a mass of letters and symbols making out they are me.

It's so soft, this sunlight. It's casting gold onto the wall, nudging against a shadow of purple flowers and green stalks, against my pink curtains. Curtains plump and pinched in the middle like two old ladies. But their colour's gone sepia, it's just a fading simulacrum.

It might sound stupid, but I can feel how blue the sky is behind me; I can feel it bathed in its 8 o'clock glow. Children are shouting. Traffic is coming, going... then suddenly a motorcycle. My stomach is growling.

I could almost believe that the world is still, moving only silently, a little way this way, a little that. A smooth stalk growing steadily towards its sun. That we all will sleep soundly in our beds tonight, and wake tomorrow to a fresh, dewy morning.

How dull, these things I fantasise. How dull, the mechanism of peace.

Bank Holiday

It was back to work yesterday after a gorgeous Bank Holiday break. Happily, however, I'm taking a couple of days 'off' again to finish these dreaded MA application forms.



I turned 35 on Sunday, and my birthday was one of the happiest I've known in years, stretching over three days. Saturday night turned into a joyful return to the Spiegeltent for the end of Guilty Pleasures, where we danced drunkenly with dressed up gangsters and their molls to Islands In The Stream and Guns N'Roses. I'd considered staying in and being maudlin over my approaching birthday, with only BBC Iplayer for company, so I'm glad I didn't give into such drabness.



Sunday, we drove to Steyning for cream tea and a walk up the hill, then to The Windmill for drinks later in the evening. The weather was balmy and lush, the first swathe of warmth we've known this year. There was a flutter of rain in the evening, but even that felt enticingly warm.



Monday was even hotter, with bright sunshine, and I pootled off with George and Bob to find the end of a local hippy festival. When we arrived, we quickly bumped into familiar faces, all high from their weekend. Some of the more eccentric Buddhafield Order members were even there, blissed out, no doubt, by all the donging of bells and raising of empty skulls to Padmasambhava himself they'd been doing in their late-night Pujas. We then lay by the glistening lake at the bottom of the hill and drank tea till it was time to leave.



From there we ventured out to the Bluebell Railway, something I've wanted to go on ever since I arrived in Brighton almost ten years ago. Winding our way through the patches of bluebells, and past the lush green fields, we returned to the tiny station, replete with Station Master and some interesting luggage.







So today I'm home, distracting myself from my application forms by blogging and watching too many spectacled bears. I've noticed my Paddington Bear crush has not abated over the years, refreshed recently after Bob and I came across a picture of him in Oxford. He's such a cool and chaotic bear, it's no wonder he used to make my heart flutter.

Oxford

I went to Oxford this weekend. That means spires, cobbled lanes, book shops and lots of clever sods cycling about in loafers and mismatched shirts. It's elegant, rich with history and tradition. And packed with posh people.

I felt clever just meandering through its streets, as though the brilliance of the sunlight bouncing off church windows was enough for my IQ to soar by at least 20 percent. It's a timeless place, which might explain why some of its students haven't arrived into the 21st century yet, seemingly lodged in a moment somewhere between 1985 and 1998. Voluptuous 18-year-old girls toss their long locks and strut, minx-like, in ruffled skirts and white heels. Every one of them is pretty, with the kind of glowing skin one only gets when one's daddy earns over 300k a year. Perfect and shiny, they pout with red-lipped confidence.

These are the kind of girls I loathed at school. They had horses and upturned collars and got into The Smiths in 6th Form because they'd finally clicked on, five years too late, that Morrissey was actually cool. In turn, I got ousted from the Duke of Edinborough Award project (selling hairbands) for having a 'bad' attitude, and never got to read my favorite Carol Ann Duffy poem in the poetry show because it was about the Holocaust and had the word 'piss' in it. Ah, poor me. I championed the cause of the fully-fledged, chip-on-shouldered outsider and never went to the balls or rowing or indeed any of the things on offer at my rather posh school. I took Ecstasy instead.

It's funny how old memories re-surface. Oxford resembles a much larger version of my school. But what I find walking thorough its streets is not what I found at school. The tradition, the rules, the ethos suffocated me, left me feeling a fraud.

We stayed in a suitably unglamorous B&B, to contrast with the elegance of the city. Three facts about Bronte Guesthouse - it won the National Hanging Basket Of The Year Award in 1995, it had a sock (yes, a fucking sock) hanging from the bedroom ceiling, and there was a particularly disagreeable something or other lurking under the bed.

I didn't want to leave. I wanted to move to Oxford and do an MA in Creative Writing and grow my hair again and start wearing flouncy skirts and saying 'Yah' a lot. Actually, that last bit isn't true. However, for all my reactions to the upper-class privilege that's so present in a place like Oxford, making it cloistered, perhaps, from reality, there's a part of me that adores it. It's more than just because it's pretty. It has serious, weighty myth.

I got back and found on the internet that the deadline for applying to the Oxford MA had gone. Damn. I could just see me in that black cape.

Back into the world

I've just cycled home from town. It's the first time in a long time that I've cycled home at night along the seafront. Being there felt like I'd left the television on low-volume for weeks, and finally just realised and switched it off. The fuzzy static in my head stopped - it was just my humming wheels, the breaking waves and the night all around me.

I put Kurt Wagner on my headphones. His voice felt like warm fingers stroking my tired brain. That particular Lambchop song reminds me of driving around in circles in Boston at three in the morning, my eyes dry and wide, high on sleeplessness and adventure. A white house appeared through the trees - unknown, hallucinatory. Life was very much like that drive to Boston back then - exciting and painful, turning corners that were never quite the right one.

I've missed cycling like this. The seafront used to be my constant companion, back in the days when I had things like free time. Passing one of the shelters looking onto the beach I spotted a life-size, stuffed penguin, just sitting there - part-comforting, part-menacing. As I stopped to take its photo, it sat there sizing me up, its beak high, fake furriness protruding from every seam.

I'm on a mission to not lose the sparkle that Andalucia gave me - the shine I felt on the inside, just walking through its streets and sleeping in its beds. So I'm currently putting certain things 'into motion' with my life, trying to keep the aliveness alive. It's no surprise to find myself back on my bike, then, and back in the silence that's Hove seafront at night.

I had numerous great ideas and snippets of posts to write about my holiday, but they all passed through and away before my fingers had even hit the keyboard. Maybe they'll come back and I can write them. It was such a good time, and the memories would clutch at me if I let them.

Thursday 3rd April - Granada

I watch a film without sound through a sheer net curtain in a dimly lit restaurant. The Moroccan boy's face on the screen is a mixture of pain, ecstasy and conviction, as the film veers from colour to black & white then back again. There is violence, dancing.

I’m thinking about Jacques Derrida - Algerian, teaching in Paris, deconstructing his own identity and life. I look at the painting on the rough brown wall - a group of Arabic women, clustering together. One of them is staring right at me.

I can't escape the fact that England has lost itself.

We drink fresh lemon and mint and we eat prawns, avocado, peppers, hake. I slurp orange blossom water and nibble at strands of carrot. The man running the restaurant looks like he should be mates with Leonard Cohen. They should be perched on plastic chairs outside, gurgling on a pipe, discussing Islam and tobacco.

I'm in a good place.

I woke up this morning from dreams that felt serrated, that cut me as I stirred. In them I’d witnessed all manners of catastrophe and ruin. The Whitehouse had been bombed – rock-stars and Hollywood actresses were stumbling to save their lives; grenades were thrown in.

Bodies flew from a glass building, people stumbled about, limbs hanging off. Those running away were shot, and a lone man walked away from the scene holding a gun. Moving onto another group on some steps, he sprayed them with bullets, then did it again, to make sure no one was left alive.

I woke up knowing dark things exist that are too big for my mind to let in, and that evil has a tangible feel to it - a smell, even. Then I walked off for breakfast at Plaza Nueva. Taking one sip of lemonade, things began to swim... I was fainting, sweating, nauseous.

Granada has got into me like sun rays through skin.

And so... in order to quell the intensity today ... I must avoid coffee and bullfights... dark women with intense eyes... golden, crucified Christs... churros con chocolate and dark men with intense eyes. I must not give too much thought to babies, sexism, gender, marriage, duende, sexuality, Rimbaud, my mother, David, my age, my thighs, my father or any of my exes.

Or the fact that I'm never sure what the right thing is anymore, or how much that even matters...

I shall do this at least for today. I see there's too much of me here, in Granada. It’s too much like something inside me - I see my face in every wall, down each street. I see ghosts in corners, sipping ron miel in ornate bars. I wonder who I've become and why I'm here.

And what to do with all this useless beauty.

In a dream the other night, C turned to me, angry, and said "People who live through archetypes, who treat myth and story as if it were more real than anything else, who can't live without a Muse, who get their meaning from magic - they're just victims of underlying psychological neurosis. It's all just narcissism."

Remember that ultimate moment of completion that you waited for? That longing to return - that untold promise of salvation, of umbilical love or grace? To recapture a lost heaven you knew was somewhere in your bones (god knows you longed for it until you could almost taste it, till you could almost feel it wriggling between your fingers and thumb... in the shrine room... in that bed... in that aeroplane...)

It came and went, every time. Through the fog of all those loves, the friendships, the drugs, the religion, books, laughter, sex, the incredible landscapes of existence... life rolled on regardless, blessing them all, taking them all away, each bearing the sign of their own dissolution, each imprinted forever in the sky.

This great, sad, immaculate machine, gathering no dust.

Pampeneira

The sun is quietly setting behind the hill. We arrived in Pampeneira this afternoon, my soul feeling like it was plunging into dead seas. Still, the music on my headphones was enough to make anyone laugh (I would dance on NBC and say 'George Bush shook hands with me', then I'd go and choke on a cock). Such a perverse contrast to one of the most exquisite landscapes in Europe.

Climbing steadily up into the safe palm of the Alpujarra mountains, I wondered if rest and peace might be possible here, now we were away from the intensity of Granada, with it's eyes, it's glinting moon, it's endless doorways.

Of course, I suspect that the spectre is still looming up at me over and across these mountains, with its too many sides to me desiring to live.

At six we drank coffee and walked down to the river.

All This Useless Beauty

It's at times such as this she'd be tempted to spit
If she wasnt so ladylike
She imagines how she might have lived
Back when legends and history collide

So she looks to her prince finding he's so charmingly
Slumped at her side
Those days are recalled on the gallery wall
And shes waiting for passion or humour to strike

What shall we do, what shall we do with all this useless beauty?
All this useless beauty

Good friday arrived, the sky darkened on time
til he almost began to negotiate
She held his head like a baby and said
it's okay if you cry

She wont practice the looks from the great tragic books
That were later disgraced to face celluloid
It wont even make sense but you can bet - if she isnt a sweetheart
or plaything or pet - the film turns her into an unveiled threat

Nonsense prevails, modesty fails
Grace and virtue turn into stupidity
While the calendar fades almost all barricades
to a pale compromise

And our leaders have feasts on the backsides of beasts
They still think theyre the gods of antiquity
If something you missed didnt even exist
It was just an ideal -- is it such a surprise?

What shall we do, what shall we do with all this this useless beauty?

What shall we do, what shall we do with all this this useless beauty?

Almeria

I'm off to Andalucia tonight. Thanks to the clocks going forward, looks like I'm not going to sleep at all tonight as the bus to the airport effectively leaves at 2.15am. Packing a bag and taking off always leaves me in a queer state of excitement, nerves and restlessness, liberated at leaving everything behind. It feels bit like breaking up with someone - in between all the grimness, I see this chink of light opening where the world is again - big and exhilarating.

Andalucia is the place of lovers and break-ups, leavings and beginnings, loss. I first went to Andalucia five years ago with my then long-term lover; on the following trip I walked its streets alone, trying to get over him. On the next trip I broke up with someone just hours before I left for a plane to Almeria, and then fell in love inside a bullring in that same city.

I've rattled precariously up mountains in a bus, someone else's head on my shoulder, fallen cars strewn below me on the way. I've felt the sun on my skin for the first time after a long winter and got drunk on honeyrum in Granada. I've smoked way too much wacky-baccy in a yurt in the middle of the desert. I've let myself be driven home by a pissed madman blaring out Smoke On The Water at ear-piercing volume on the stereo. I've watched mock cowboy shoot-outs on dodgy film sets. And I've been inspired to write, following Lorca's footsteps like a besotted idiot in and out of Granada. I've made it my myth, kept it close, tried to chuck it out, but it’s always crept back inside.

Now, I'm going back, and sharing it with someone else.

I've been thinking about my friend David today. I try not to think about him most of the time. I usually only do so when I see someone pass me on the street that looks like him, and I freeze, feeling a little bit of him back alive again. Then I realise it isn't.

I got flashbacks today to the funeral - images in quick succession - flowers being tied into the wicker coffin, his wobbling father, too many brave words and something crushed in every person in that room who knew him. There were pictures on the Buddhist Centre wall - pictures of a life I never knew - him with his girlfriend, with his baby, dressed up in make-up and a bandana (he was never that frivolous when we were friends), the intimacy of his new world and all the new relatives who loved him, who never knew him as I knew him. And I never knew him as they did. I'm crushed, whenever I think of him.

It's wonderful to be leaving things behind, if only for a couple of weeks. I want to be able to look at my life from over the other side of the water. Get some perspective, get my head straight. I’ll write in my notebook, and maybe even post. We’ll see.

Easter

I got soaked coming home on my bike today. I was tired, grumpy and cold, and I didn't want freezing rain seeping into my clothes and brain. But when I finally stopped fighting it and pulled onto the final stretch of pathway by my road, it was bliss.

It can have a humbling effect, rain, washing away all the rotten muck, inside and out. It leaves you soggy and humbled, wide-eyed, eyelashes dripping on the ground. I feel like I lose about twenty-five years from my face when the rain’s coming down on me, and I’m left squishing in my shoes, smiling to myself.

It feels appropriate that tonight the rain is pouring down, covering the streets, clogging up the pavements. It’s sliding off the sides of houses, tapping on windowpanes. But even rainwater isn’t pure anymore.

Where is purity to be found these days, in myself, in this world? When life and the world gets so complicated, when there’s so much inside everyone struggling to live and be heard and assert itself; hating and loving, trying and failing, willing itself into existence and back out again, giving and taking. Where is the fresh clean water, the air flowing through?

What is purity anyway? Is it even a thing in itself? Pure good, pure evil, pure anger, pure as the driven snow, as the best cocaine. Something without blemish or taint, uncracked, incorruptible.

I guess I think purity’s wherever there's love and kindness. Love and kindness are beautiful, humbling. Every time I come across them, I'm stopped in my tracks.

It’s no coincidence I’m wondering about these things on Good Friday. I’ve heard the story of Jesus’ crucifixion many times during my life (mainly as a child), but I can’t picture the weather at the time. It probably was stormy and the sky went black when he died. But I can’t believe that at some point it didn’t rain. It must have rained after he died. To wash all that pain away, to purify such terribleness.

It is finished. That’s what he said just before he died. It is finished. It never was.

I’ve been listening to this old Timmy Thomas song a lot in the last couple of days. Back in the Acid House days of the late 1980s, it was one of those ‘end of the night’ songs that truly reminded me of that pure urge that was there inside me in the first place, that made me want the drugs, the dancing, the ecstasy... the skewed religion of it all. It feels appropriate somehow to share it tonight. Happy Easter.

Evening All

I'm just back from work, The Libertines full blast on the stereo. Sometimes ear-bleedingly loud music is the only antidote to being nice and accommodating to annoying customers all day. It's either that or go and brick a few windows. Now that's a pleasing thought - Charlie and I in full Clockwork Orange mode, bouncing bricks out of his car window at unsuspecting people in their living rooms, eating their tea. One can but dream.

To be honest, today at work hasn't been all that bad. It's just that the necessity of replacing my real personality with some kind of Smooth FM version of myself has kind of got to me. Today, I just didn't want to have to give a shit. I didn't want to have to pretend to give a shit either.

For a while now, I've come to take note whenever The Libertines lurch back into my life. Their return usually indicates a chaotic and unhinged part of myself screaming for attention. Perhaps it's partly my way of dealing with a relatively clean and healthy lifestyle, free from drugs, excessive drinking and promiscuous sex. And the flatness that sometimes brings.

Sometimes it feels like a 'healthy' lifestyle isn't always that healthy for me. It can chop off the top and the bottom ends of my experience, leaving me with only the middle. That middle bit is a great place for getting things done in, for living a productive, grounded, conscious life etc. But without those top and bottom edges getting a look in, I know I'm fucked. I become just a chunk of myself, and everything goes a bit middle of the road. Life starts sounding a bit like a Razorlight song. And that's bad.

I've done all the meditation and the counselling; I've danced it out and I've talked it through, I've drawn pictures and befriended my animus. And it's never changed a thing. I still feel the same way I always did. Because certain forces won't be made rational, they don't ever let themselves be understood.

So here's what I know tonight, for what it's worth. You must obey the Gods. If you don't, they get angry. Then your life caves in. Also, if you can't always live your life close to the flame, or even in it - at least don't let it go out. Because once that's fizzled, whoever you are, you're fucked.

I’ve nothing else to write tonight, really. I'm just going to go think about what I just said, listen to music; maybe sleep.

The Untimely Return of Mrs Fillyjonk

In my last post I misjudged the power of Mrs Fillyjonk's prophecy.

We got a phonecall yesterday to inform us that, despite telling us that the flat in Bevendean was ours to rent, giving us the forms, and most importantly, making us put £300 deposit down on it, the agents had given it to someone else. Fuckers. So our little dream place has vanished as quickly as it came.

Oh Mrs Fillyjonk. I bow down to your wisdom, and worship at the altar of disaster!

The Fillyjonk Who Believed in Disasters

It was a mild and motionless summer day, exactly right for washing carpets. Slow and sleepy swells came rolling in to help her with the rinsing, and around her red cap a few bumblebees were humming: they took her for a flower.

Don't you pretend, the Fillyjonk thought grimly. I know how things are. Everything's always peaceful like this just before a disaster...


Bob and I have been taking it in turns to read to each other. He's been reading me Tales From Moomin Valley; I've been reading him Enemy of God. His book is about strange creatures that live on the outskirts of the imagination; mine is full of bloodthirsty Christian saints and people getting bits of them chopped off in horrific ways. It seems fitting somehow, a mutual exchange of what we each crave a bit of.

Last night he read me The Fillyjonk Who Believed in Disasters. I cried at the end (quietly, into his jumper), partly because it's brilliant, and partly because it reminded me of, well, me. It's good when that happens - you can spend hours, weeks, years, driving yourself crazy trying to find the key to understanding something about yourself and your life. Then a little story comes along and you go That's it. There I am.

If you can, I think you should read this story by Tove Janssen; it's terribly clever and very beautiful. To crudely summarise: a fillyjonk (Mrs Fillyjonk) is seized with a nameless fear, a sense of approaching disaster she can do nothing about. Then, when a real calamity strikes, it has unexpected consequences...

Bob and I are moving in together. We are moving to a weird house in a weird place. It's called Bevendean. It sits on the side of a hill and is surrounded by badgers, foxes and men shouting at their dogs. Though I am nervous about such a move, I am not half as nervous as I've been for the last year, knowing that the move has to be made, but not knowing how or where or if. So I've clung to my flat like a lifeboat on a very windy sea, and weathered all its quirks (windows being blown out), eccentricities (rainwater cascading through roof) and overall quaintness (nutter in basement who nicked my Daniel Johnston cd). But now it's time to let go.



I can take my teacups with me. And my birdcages and spotty dresses too. Unlike the fillyjonk (fingers crossed), all my belongings do not have to go swirling up to heaven, carried up in a tornado. But you never know.

I'm not sure about the rubbish piled up in the backyard at this new place. I'm not sure about the 'funky' decor. I'm certainly not sure about Bob's new running joke ("You're Bev, I'm Dean!"). But I am sure I've absolutely made the right decision, and that we will be happy there. And that once a 'disaster' has finally arrived, sometimes it's a lot easier to deal with.

I'm tired of waiting for the next tornado to rip through my world, and of the beating in my chest that comes with it. Of never feeling like I can be happy because, if I let myself, something awful is sure to happen. I can clatter my teacups and buy a new teapot, but I know the storms outside that are pounding to get in. They're big, and, like you, I am very, very small.

But, fuck it, I'm not going to wait any longer for the winds to carry me off. I'm upping sticks and moving out, to a magnificent and weird place, to somewhere new. I am certain Mrs Fillyjonk will approve.

...

Yes, I thought I could lure you in with my karate-chopping nun picture; it never fails. Of course, this was a deliberate ploy - my thinking is that by showing you a picture from my new Nuns Having Fun calendar, somehow it'll make up to my more avid readers for the fact that I haven't written in over two weeks.

Secondly, I'm doing what I do every few months - and trying to convince readers that I'm not just some morbidly obsessed, writer-y-type, always banging on about her mother dying and how life is full of loss and disappointment and mediocre television game shows such as Deal-Or-No-Deal (though one day I'll share with you the esoteric side of D-O-N-D).

No. I'm also a fun-loving, light-hearted kind of gal, who can take pictures of quirky things around her flat and share them with you, dear reader, and therefore is always capable of more than just long blog posts full of beauty and woe. So here's a picture of some sweets. Aren't they lovely? Straight from the mouth of God. Well, Elephant and Castle, to be precise.



Jesus Sweets. Mmm, Strawberries and Cream. Oh, ok, I've just spotted the words 'mourn' and 'burden' in there, so... ok, here's a picture of a Basset hound instead. This is a dog I hope to one day own (after I have all my other dogs), and whom I aspire even more, in old age, to becoming like. Yes, it sounds fucking weird, I know, but I want nothing more than to become like a Bassett hound. Ohh, the saggy nobility of it.

Thursday evening

I've been grateful, of late, to notice small slivers of daylight still hanging in the air as I walk up Church Road, even though the clock has already struck five thirty. These tiny shards of optimism, breaking through the winter chill, warm me, and offset the heavy feeling I've had of late, the feeling of dark birds clustering at every street corner, following me home.

I can't quite separate out these last months into any tangible order; they've been a peculiar mixture of sadness, hope and bewilderment. These last few weeks have been no different, and I'm driven by the feeling that some things in my life are finally coming together, whilst the rest of it unravels.

After a drought of money and work for the last year or so, a couple of weeks ago, I suddenly found myself standing in an avalanche of decorating work and some writing work too. I could finally allow my dreams of a trip to Andalucia to surface again, as well as my vision of spending money on a new pair of jeans, a pair that I actually like (and isn't from some knock-down store or passed onto me by a charitable sister: wrong size, full of holes).

But I've not quite been right since that last trip home to Wales in January. The strain and enormity of my experience there cast a strange shadow over everything when I returned to Brighton, leaving me disorientated on buses, forgetting where I was headed to, my head spinning in all directions as I walked past cafes or spoke on the phone. A flooding in my heart, a weirdness afterwards, a feeling that my consciousness was leaving me in some way.

I realised the other day that this wasn't simply a case of me being a bit overwhelmed, but actually something very physical was up. For the last four months this strange feeling in my chest and my mind, a swamping of my senses and a disturbing feeling in my body has been coming and going, depending on the time of the month and how tired I am. Due to everything else that's been going on, I'd just seen it as another wave in the sea of unsettling experience, and got on with it. But over the last few days it's worsened, and I've had to face some facts.

So, following a conversation with my sister, who is utterly convinced that I'm epileptic, since my symptoms match hers exactly (she is epileptic) I've been back to the doctor for referrals to a neurologist and cardiologist. I wouldn't surprise me if it was epilepsy either, but it also wouldn't be a shock if it was just another form of panic attacks, frequent and savage.

The bottom line is, I have to take it easy, easy within a sudden life change of being incredibly busy. How ironic. At a time when I need to avoid computer screens and caffeine, I find myself having to spend days writing book reviews. When I need to rest and avoid stress, I'm wobbling up a ladder working to deadline, with strong paint fumes swilling in my brain. But I'm determined to go softly. Whatever it is that's going on with me, that much I know.

So I'm off to curl up in bed with a book, feel the night dragging in the sky outside my bedroom window. I'm not bothered if there aren't any stars out tonight. I just want a clear, fresh morning tomorrow, light and breezy, filling up my step and my lungs with graceful ease.

Monday

There are days that begin with a strange hue, that open their curtains to a light never seen before. Today began in smoky greys that crept under my eyelids like ghosts from the sea. I'd been dreaming about a ship off the coast of Morocco. I was staying on it, taking breaks from it to visit this little village on the Moroccan coast. It was always tricky getting back out to the ship, so sometimes I would stay overnight in the village.

However, one time I had to get back to the ship. The only way to do so was to sail out to it by dinghy. This was a risky thing to do. Lots of people did it, but many got lost on the way. I had a friend who had been blown all the way to Nigeria by harsh wind currents. The golden rule was this – no matter what, you had to reach the ship before nightfall, else you would be adrift without any sense of direction, heading out into the empty ocean.

It was a strange dream, full of unhelpful people and cool characters. I undertook the journey back to the ship with a friend of mine. She turned out to be rather immature and annoying, and insisted in stopping off for food in this town we had come across, even though time was precious and night wasn’t far away. I began panicking. As we left the café, I saw that our dinghy had been stolen. My friend and I walked up this road in search of a boat to borrow. As we did so, a Christian woman preaching the word of God came up to me. I waved her away, pre-occupied as I was by my dilemma. I didn't need her preaching; I didn’t need her agenda. My friend however, stopped and gave her a broken string of beads. She smiled.

Halfway up the road, I collapsed in despair, knowing we'd never get to the ship before nightfall. As I slumped against a wall, the woman caught up with us, a man joining her. They were talking about God. His legs were crippled. He said, to no one in particular "People ask how God could do such a thing as to make me lame. But look at these legs of mine - they are simply just different from yours. They have their own shape. They have their own beauty. I am grateful for legs like these."

As I felt myself waking up, I decided to stay in that village for the night, and set off for the ship again in the morning.

So this smoky morning is filled with that dream, and my own sadness. On a daily basis I convince myself that I am over things, I am on top of these losses that drift in and out of my life. But they weave their own spell; they inhabit my dreams, and are there when I wake up.

I think about Mum, weaving in and out of her own dreams. It is a peculiar kind of loss, I think, to mourn those still alive. But every loss has its own sad flavour and each bleeds into the other. I am missing my friend, David, and his death has its own mystery and shock. I am also missing what I could have had, had my life been different and I'd made different choices. I don't regret, but I do mourn.

Today isn't a heavy, foreboding kind of grey. It is light and wispy as a mouse’s fur. It fills the streets outside and the air in the sky over Brighton. It curls around the pier like a tail and disperses with the seagulls taking flight. I breathe it in and swallow, feel it welling up in my eyes. I realise that my heart is a slate, and I write my longings on it with a soft piece of chalk. I don't know how to say goodbye. If I could write that; that is what I would say.

I've got a new teapot, a lovely green and glassy Christmas present. It is sitting on my table under the window and, magically, looks like it has always been there. I have a not-so-secret belief that tea cures everything. So I dry my eyes and put the kettle on, warm the pot. This magic ritual is a supreme comfort; it is an act of love. I don't want to open my doors to anyone today. I want to hide with my teapot and my chalky heart until day passes into night. But life isn't made like that. Things press on. I must open my curtains and move.

For Better, For Worse

I'm back in Brighton after four days at home in Wales. I saw my sister, I saw my Mum. I even visited the nuns at Poor Clares. And I went to a wedding.

I usually tend to subscribe to this commonly held misconception: the present is what's here now, the future is yet to come and does not yet exist, and the past, well, is in the past. All that sails into it is gobbled forever.

This weekend I remembered a different reality: that the present is disappearing even as I live it, that the future can never be separated from what is happening now. And the past? Well, it never really goes away.

So, at the start of this new year, after eighteen months of watching my mother ebbing away before my eyes, after losing a dear friend, I turn around and suddenly notice that nothing has ever really left me, and that no matter what it feels like in those emptiest of moments, nothing is ever lost.

I don't understand this, but I know it's true. And as I sat at a long table in Wrexham Lager Club, melodies from old Motown songs swirling around my ears, a cocktail stick with cheese and pineapple on my plate, I became absolutely certain of it.

The most painful thing about the passage of time is that you can't bring back what has gone; you can't turn the clock back, you can't undo the mistakes or right the wrongs. You can't recapture what is lost. You can't ever, as it were, go home again. But what do you know; sitting at that table, I realised, it all goes on living inside us anyway, the good and the bad. Something endures.

I finally found an hour on Monday to visit the Convent that sits next to our old house. I wanted to say hello, keep up the contact I've begun. I sat in their chapel listening to the sounds of nuns laughing and running for lunch, then I got down on my knees and prayed. Strange as it sounds, I find it hard to pray very much in Brighton. But there, in that quiet, holy place, it felt the most natural thing in the world. And I remembered that thing about the past again; I felt the holiness pouring through the windows, through the wood of the bench I was sitting on, through my own bones. Something that's there all the time, I just can't see it, flooded the chapel with light; it bounced off walls and reflected off bronzed figures, hitting the sides of benches and lighting up the corneas of my eyes.

I remember this light from when I was 8 years old and kept a picture of St Francis above my bed. I would peer from my bedroom window into the Convent garden next door, watching the nuns as work or giggling together. I never thought one day I'd be on my knees in their chapel, feeling that holiness from inside those walls.

The wedding on Friday was of the father of my ex-boyfriend to his long-term partner. I've known my ex for nearly 19 years, and when we were still together, his family were like my own. He is my kin. And I know what it took for my ex-boyfriend, his brothers and their father to get to the point of making that wedding happen. I also know what it took for me to be there. The amount of love I experienced that night was so strong that for at least part of the evening I was pinned to my chair by the sheer force of it. I caught the train home, humbled and exhausted. The feeling I had was the same as on that chapel bench.

Time passes, but the bonds of real love remain untouched, perfectly in tact. I want to try and remember this. And I know I'll forget it again. I know I'll see the failing flesh of my mother, the darkening of her eyes and I'll not be able to see past the withering skin and mind; it will engulf me. That is the other mystery. We remember, we forget. Only to remember again.

Hoppy mew year

Yesterday, I did two decorating estimates. The first was for an older couple. As I entered their rather posh house, both immediately apologised for the amount of sneezing and coughing they were doing, stricken as they were by wretched colds. "Don't come near me!" the man cried, waving his tissue in the air.

During the second estimate, the guy happily announced how he was just over 'it', and how he didn't intend to walk out through his front door again until late spring. Later, I went and paid my rent on Church Road, and the woman in the office (usually somewhat disinterested and abrupt) sniffed feebly as I entered before telling me, her nose almost sunk to the desk, how she hadn't even been able to even smell her Christmas dinner.

So after having spent the whole of my Christmas (except for Boxing Day afternoon: Soho, cream cakes, mad art directors, the hovering spirit of Noel Fielding) and the whole of New Year (both days entirely alone with my Kleenex), ill and partially bed-ridden with a cold virus, I've found that the whole world is steeped in tissues and a vague kind of misery.

This has cheered me up no end. I have a small sense of what it might have been like during the Blitz. A kind of snotty camaraderie is forming between people and I can feel an invisible, mucus-y thread binding me to the rest of humanity. It is the groggy, snotty, raucous cough of interconnection.

Bless. Suddenly I realise that probably most people have had a miserable Christmas, most people have got through it as one gets through a very hard day of explosive- detonation-training at Special Forces Unit Camp, and are now crawling their way forward into the new year with dripping noses and a dangerously low bank balance.

Luckily I don't have to worry about the dangerously low bank balance, seeing as mine is perpetually dangerously low anyway, and my spending on New Year's Eve came to, erm now let me see; NOWT. After bathing in a luxurious concoction of self-pity, bitterness and frustration upon my return to Brighton from Yorkshire (propped up in Bob's car, wondering if it is possible for a nose to actually explode on impact from a particularly violent sneezing fit), I moved into New year with the help of crap music from Kylie Minogue (I know she's meant to be majorly talented, but it's such an effort to stay awake during her 'amazing' performances) and Madness on Jools Holland. You could see how that might be a little soul destroying.

However, I also discovered my watercolour pencils, and, following on from some rubbishy sketches I did at Bob's, I immersed myself in painting some characters I'm thinking of featuring in a little story book that's going round my mind at the moment. So I can say, with some satisfaction, that I passed from 2007 to 2008 in the company of small girl-boys, creepy men in top hats, dogs and some singing nuns.

Art has always been a kind of secondary love for me. I've always been quite good at drawing, and particularly sculpture, but have always felt that even if I applied myself to it, though I might get pretty good, I'd never be as good at it as I would be at writing. I am generally more sound and word orientated. But then, maybe this lack of confidence comes from my art teacher in 5th Form hanging my final Art Project over the Home Economics sink and cackling " Ha! Let's see what she thinks of this!" (She was literally a witch, I think, and we did not get on).

I love art and it feels like a little piece of a puzzle has come back for me through getting back in touch with it. I love creating worlds; usually I do that through words and in musical notes, but when that world grows a face - literally, when you can see the face of that world forming, it is so exciting, it's like growing another sense.

Do you remember that Smiths' line from 'Shoplifters of the World Unite'? I tried living in the real world, instead of a shell, but I was bored before I even began. That's how I generally feel about life. I'd rather stick my head up the backside of genius any day; I'd rather fly around my own head or land on the ear of another listening, twinkling soul who is blinking into the darkness than give this world that rules me the credit and attention it so wrongfully steals.

Yes, in some ways to say this is silly and it's vain. But the world takes from me what it will anyway, and the alternative; this crazy un-sensical magic inside my head, ah, it's a ragingly beautiful fiery mess, and I love it.

Up North

It is quite possible to find something awful and beautiful at the same time, to feel love and joy and some terrible, irredeemable loss all rolled up into one tiny ball. Thursday was like that, an exhausting, endurance test of a day that shone with life and connection and even some smiles.

The funeral was a good funeral, a fitting farewell to my friend, not glossing over the loss, not remaining stuck in its black tar. Flowers were wound into the pale wicker of his coffin and candles were lit, a round was sung, and the words here I walk in beauty/beauty is around me/above and below me would have been enough to break through even the most closed of hearts.

But the disbelief at the situation was palpable. Not only myself, but, it felt everyone in the room could not believe that the young man in the photo on our programmes, with his sweet smile and his floppy fringe, was the same man lying before us in a wicker box.

I don't think we ever come to terms with the mystery and pain of someone disappearing forever. But this, so sudden, so senseless somehow, is hard to take. There is something so appalling about seeing a father struggling to speak about his son, who now lies before him, cold as stone. No father should ever have to do this. It feels like an anomaly in the nature of things. But one thing I am learning as I grow older is that senseless things happen to people who don't deserve them all the time, and that it isn't personal, it might be unfair, but our universe wasn't, isn't and never will be a fair universe. It is as it is.

But I can still feel angry about this. I still open my eyes wide and perplexed as I try to make sense of how my friend's life ended so suddenly, when he was so happy, and had so much to live for, so much left to experience and to give. And how my own story of him, and with him, has suddenly ended. I won't be taking up the strands of our friendship and marvelling at the next port where it will be stopping. This is it. This is that final port. The final stop happened when I hugged him on a chilly beach, a blue sky above us some weeks ago. If I thought we might be coming together again to be there at yet another significant time in our lives, I never thought it was to be at his own death, and that I was to be there, waving him off to somewhere I shall not be able to follow. Not now. Not yet.

Funerals are profound things, everyone so raw, so honest, so real. Death makes the best (and the worst) come out in people. It makes people speak truths they would never otherwise say, it makes them open to things they might usually brush over and dismiss. In that way, they can feel like the most real, and therefore, nourishing places to be in, devoid of the usual bullshit. And they can be poetic and beautiful and awe-inspiring.

But one thing I often experience at funerals is the ridiculous way that profundity and mundanity sit side by side. People utter the most profound words, and the sight of a coffin bearing someone you love inside it is enough food for contemplation to last a lifetime.

Yet, for me, there is also this edge of knowing that life in all its mundanity is carrying on. And a certain black humour can arise in me. People fluff up lines, taxis don't arrive and there is always that moment when the pallbearers lift the coffin high into the air when I feel a certain hysterical laughter rising in my throat. It is the uneasiness on their faces that makes this feeling well up in me, and the terrible possibility of what could happen should their hands slip. Funerals contain drama; they act out some mighty cosmic drama that is going on, unacknowledged, around us every moment in our lives. And they also include all the fragility and ridiculousness of it as well.

We spent a couple of nights in Manchester, the five-hour drive seeming too much to contemplate straight after such a day. So, following chilli and cake at the Manchester Buddhist Centre, I wobbled out into the town centre with Bob, like a homing pigeon, heading straight for Afflecks' Palace. Realising the toll that the day had taken on my system, I stood at the top of the building, trying to catch my breath, realising I needed to sit down somewhere calm and not try and follow the footsteps of my past, my days of living in Manchester, right there and then.

We went and had brandy hot chocolate in the Night and Day cafe, a huge, eight foot painting of Ian Curtis on the back wall. Oh Manchester. I was there for seven years, and so many significant things happened to me during that time, one of them being that I met David, and we began both our friendship and our life as Buddhists there. After our drinks, and feeling much more grounded, Bob and I ventured out onto Oldham Street, and spent the next couple of hours trawling the streets we both knew so well (he also lived in Manchester for years), past Dry Bar and Eastern Bloc Records, to Piccadilly, where they'd installed an outdoor ice skating rink.

Manchester's so upmarket these days. It smacks of money in a way that it never used to. Who'd have thought that the IRA obliterating the entire city centre would precipitate such a major transformation of the city. I remember walking as near to the exclusion zones as was allowed, months after the bomb, and staring in awe at the bare skeleton of the city's shops, a ghostly feeling following me through the streets. Now it's all Harvey Nics and art galleries.

Though I'm glad it has been rejuvenated, I can't help feeling that it has lost some of its soul. We wandered all the way down Cross Street, past Albert Square and its huge inflatable Santa, its German Christmas Market, and down past the Peveril of The Peak pub. And what do you know; The Hacienda is now a swanky block of exclusive, trendy, metal fronted apartments, with its own underground car park full of flashy sports cars. Businessmen rest their rich and conservative heads in what was one of the most decadent, ground breaking and influential nightclubs that's ever opened its doors. Oh, the fucking irony.

After staying with some very welcoming and lovely Buddhists in Salford, with the frost wiped from the car windows and some porridge in my belly, we drove home. Back in my flat in Brighton, I am still left wondering what my relationship to the North is, and where my dear friend has gone.

This week has sometimes been...

and even like...

but mainly, it's been...

Sunday

It has been a queer and blustery week. The wind and rain have been relentless, ferociously banging on my window, demanding to be let in. I've stolen precious moments of my days snatching at my copy of Wuthering Heights, wrapped up in the book's bleak pages while the storms raged outside, happy and content amid the ravages of Emily Bronte's violent narrative.

Then on Thursday I received some shocking news about a friend of mine. He had been taken into hospital with an infection and was in a critical condition. As the evening passed into the next day, I finally discovered the harsh truth of what had happened - from a sore shoulder all week they had discovered an abcess and the abcess had burst, then blood poisoning. He was in a bad way until Friday morning, and then I got the news on Saturday that he had died. I've been wrapped up in sadness and shock ever since, unable to make any sense of what's just happened.

I've just been standing in my hallway, in fact, looking up towards what you might call heaven, talking to my friend. But as I was standing there, I suddenly came to and realised that actually, heaven isn't up there, just above the sky, and that I was in fact simply staring right up at the leaky hole in my ceiling where a load of dirty water poured through onto my carpet during this morning's storm. I felt silly then, for trying to talk to my friend through a leaky hole in my ceiling, as though he might hear me.

This feeling of silliness has stayed with me. I really don't know where my friend has gone. All I know is that he has gone. Suddenly, shockingly, tragically. And I can't seem to help this crazy reflexive movement in my mind that keeps telling me he is just up there, either in in some white and clean realm looking down on me, or else, kind of whirling through space, making his way towards another life; revisiting the places of his last.

These feelings seem so naive; so child-like and simplisitic, as though I'm desperately trying to map out some unmappable territory, give some kind of clear and sign-posted geography to that which is utterly mind-blowing, devastating and bewildering. I want to know the way to Heaven, or that there is a course through the Bardo, because otherwise, I'm just baffled. Baffled and lost.

But the truth is, it's unlikely that he's just hovering around in the ether watching me go to the toilet and clipping my toenails, waiting for me to strike up a conversation with him. Or that he's in psychic connection with me, floating about the stars. I know I don't want to let him go; I don't want to conceive of him disappearing entirely into thin air. I want at least a trace of him. Somewhere. Keep him alive for my own heart's sake. There are moments when I can feel he is so alive, in the tissue and blood of my own heart, in this heart that beats as his does not. But then, that passes, and I am left in an empty cosmos again.

I can't reduce this life to ash and cinder though, to an equation of atoms and molecules, brain and blood cells. The rubble of life is blessed by something incomprehensible to us all. But, oh, it is all too much to try and put into words, and if I were to even try to begin to talk about God, it would be no easy answer either; it would throw up as many questions as I seek to answer.

My lovely friend had everything to live for; he was healthy, he was happy. He had a family. There was no tragedy brooding in his veins, waiting to leap. He was clever, and he was my age. I was going to go up North and stay with him soon, rekindle the warm embers of our relationship, now that we are older, now that our lives have changed in so many ways, and yet still with all those same characteristics and the same relationship as when we first met, almost ten years ago. He was there in my life in some of the most significant times in my life, and some of my most difficult, as I think, I was in his.

Following the last time I saw him, several weeks ago, I believed he was coming back into my life again, after a break of three years. The storyline in my head said we'd soon be back, continuing the next phase of our friendship, and I was fascinated to see what might unfurl. If I did move up North, he'd be there again, in the middle of another massively significant life-change for me. But he's gone now, absolutely gone, without a trace, utterly removed from this world and from my life forever; the story-line has been ripped from me and try and try as I might, I don't understand how.

So I'm going to carry on talking to David through the hole in my ceiling. Maybe he hears me, maybe he doesn't. Maybe he's there, maybe he isn't. But I'll keep talking and I'll keep him in my dreams and in my prayers, in my meditation and in my writing. In my footstep on the pavement. In the letters that he sent me. In the memory of him on the beach with his daughter, flushed and happier than I've ever seen him. He is ever present, in this way. But once my door is closed and the lights are down, my own sadness reveals the truth of his absence, and from that, there is no escaping.

Friday

I went up to London last weekend. The trip left me simultaneously drained and exhilerated at the same time, as it usually does. There's something inherently exhausting about London; even whilst I am still on the train I can feel a certain kind of tiredness descend as soon as I see the rooftops peeping back at me, the Thames blinking into view.

I feel a wonderful adrenalin comedown just at the thought of all those bodies rushing about in their own personal bubbles, trying so hard not to knock against each other in case they might pop. This small act of vulnerability, this knee-jerk response to the giant mass of human life thudding in all directions, a million beings swarming in their own dreams and poverty, riches and frustrations, I find myself falling inline with almost as soon as I've stepped out of the station.

A slippery ambition coats London streets, and Brighton can feel like a lurching lost soul in comparison, steeped in an opium haze, watching the sea roll in, roll out, roll by. It holds a drink to its lips, lazy ardor running through its veins. Brighton sleeps for days.

On the other hand, London has speed and cocaine running like shuttles through it's blood, and it never sleeps. It naps between the noisy car horns and the fumes, the terrorist threats and the boats going up and down the river taking Japanese tourists to Greenwich. Between the housing estates and the delis with their £4 loaves of bread, indifferent shop assistants with concrete faces and eyes like treacle, Tower Bridge sits, luminous and ever watchful over the skyline.

In fact, I did very little whilst I was there, my reason for going, as usual, to see the people I most love, and to remember who I am again, remember the parts of me that come alive when I am with them on some busy dirty London street. A slightly different Clare. And I never leave without some pang of longing for the busy streets and the caffeinated conversations, the deep bonds with people, and the buildings that rear up, jagged, around the Thames, like a shock, like a broken jigsaw, pieces oddly fitting together, but somehow forming perfect symmetry. London is so beautiful I could weep. And it's a beauty that can't be owned. It is its own mistress; rude, loud, manipulative and slutty, but utterly honest in it's unquenchable, ravaged thirst.

If Brighton didn't have the seafront, I'm not sure I'd still be here. Maybe that's a hasty thing to say, but really, without wanting to sound arty and pretentious, (and no doubt sounding so anyway), of all Brighton & Hove's creative life, the seafront is my real Muse. Whereas London surrounds you like a loud, heaving crowd, this part of Brighton stretches out flat like elastic. It feels like it will go on forever, and you can fade into the blues and greys of the horizon, be swallowed up behind the piers and cast into a cloud of black wings, as the starlings swirl like a lava lamp, taking you with them up into the marbled sky above. It is whirling life, breathless poetry speaking in tongues, it is a windy squawking silence that makes me sigh over and over again until my lungs are entirely emptied.

I wonder where my place is. I think about Syliva Plath, buried up North in Heptonstall. I think about the Moors that surround Yorkshire and Lancashire, and allow myself to be swept up in Emily Bronte and the harsh murderous truths that shout across Saddleworth Moor. I think about Manchester (oh yes, still so much to answer for) and North Wales, my home, that took so much to get away from, that has such a pull, like a magnet that both draws and repels.

How long I'll be in Brighton I don't know, if I will stay South of the border or if I'll return to the place of roots and shadows, love and that pain of growing up somewhere I longed to escape from. The truth is, wherever we are, we always want, at some point, to escape the very things that drew us there in the first place. Like a long-term lover who shows you, because they know you so well, too much of who you are underneath the facade, and so you long to be someone else again, reinvent who you are and what you might become. To cast off the cloaks of habit, come hurtling through the tunnel into a new world, a new self, a baby in a fresh universe full of possibility.

I know enough now to know that whatever you run away from, comes back to you at some point, that we take all our selves with us, wherever we go. But change must happen if we are to be still alive, for the blood to not coagulate in our veins until we become stiff and unyielding, rigor mortis in our brains, hearts like vapour, ever drifting off over tree-tops to somewhere where the grass is greener, then returning with a bump of resentment when we find ourselves still here, in our stilted, safe reality. So I'm thinking of moving; whether or not that involves me packing a suitcase, I still can't say.

...

I wake up, stretch. I make tea, cross the room, I move back again. Turn on the computer, turn it off again, shut the door behind me, check it's closed tight. Down the stairs, out on the street, through the rain, passing windows with the lamps just coming on in them, past windows with sticky signs in them selling flights to New York, Paris and the Costa Brava. I am happy. I'm on the move. There is a safety in my step. I buy a scarf. I scour the wet streets for the reflection of shop lights. There's a warm fuzzy feeling inside me. I walk home.

But back inside, a familiar feeling, one which usually comes only during the night, when I and the world are fast asleep. It came last night; I awoke abruptly and stumbled, half-asleep to the bathroom. Night-time is when another me emerges from deep inside, a me I don't recognise. A time for blackness to come running, for a cold clammy fog to swallow up what is not yet left of the daylight. Blocking up my throat, swelling my chest, nothing to be seen. My eyelids droop to the pillow exhausted. I become an invisible ghost, meandering through this room, that room, finding every single one of them empty.

These night tremors, night terrors, which boil me in my own fear, disappear with the morning. I'm left with no memory but the feeling of death on my lips. But was it the man I spotted lurking outside my changing room today, unconvincing as he examined the ties, or the charity shop assistant who looked at me and said "A five pound note? For a 50p scarf?" that chased my heart back down that black road that goes from golden to ash; morning turning into an endless vacancy of stars? I am left quite alone then in the mechanics of my life, oiling the cogs, keeping it moving, mending and re-structuring, whilst the pit opening up in my stomach tells me that this destination is to nowhere, no place to finally rest except the grave, where loss is the only thing I can be certain will never leave. I see Mum's hand, inert on the white sheet. I see my father, turned away. I see three little girls, running.

I realised yesterday, as I discovered a tear welling up in my eye whilst I watched a James Blunt video, that I must be pre-mentstrual. There is no other reasonable explanation for such shocking behaviour. Even so, today I put down my pen, curled up on my bed and let myself fall into the absence, into all the things I wish I had in my life, that I will never have, that are gone, non-returnable, no deposit, finished, done with, ended, vanished. And always at the bottom of it, is my Mum's hand, the softest hand in the world. Once it stroked my hair. Now I stroke it in my mind, kiss it lightly and pray for its warmth to stay with me for just a little while longer.

My life is ok. I can't complain. But when a mood such as this takes hold, there's only a bullet or a hatchet that could feel more sharp and more deadly. Outside, it is raining again, as it has been for days, people strapped into their houses as the water pelts down the streets. I am glad for security. I do not feel guilty for wanting what's safe. No, actually, that's far from true. I am perhaps the greatest devotee of the God of Loss. A true believer. But blackness inevitably passes, leaving only a trace of its scent; a cool, musky, damp scent of freshly turned earth.

No sleep till Moulescoomb..

It's late, and I really, really, should be in bed. I'm sat up in the dark in my pink hooded top, my comfy jeans, and the room is chilly. I'm wondering again, wondering, wondering where it all will end - this mind of mine and this beating chest, these legs of mine that just want to run. Running away from; running towards. My legs go, fast as summer, like a young girl racing to catch the ball that spins through the air in a perfect arch between her parents' fingers.

I run from, I run towards. Across the beach. Through backstreets. Beside car parks. Past bushes and streams. Up mountains. In the rain. Down the front steps. And it's the shadow of the sun on my face that tells me how alive I really am.

I don't feel eloquent. Or articulate. I am back in the world trying to carve out some bread and butter and a way to hold my head up, but... I'd always rather be at home, under the cover of night, communing with the angels and demons that fly around my head. Inside my flat can be a bit of a raucous party, with all the interesting beings that gather there to cause pandemonium and guffawing, who light candles and sing and bring stars out from under their pleated skirts as gifts for me, and occasionally, throw up on my carpet. Evenings here are never dull, that's for sure. We sit together and eat and tell each other our stories. We dance and make love. We fight. We pore over ancient manuscripts. We invent new languages. Especially when I am disciplined enough to turn off Eastenders.

And of course, they all go back to from where they came, whenever guests pop by, or when I am forced out from behind my safe walls into the real world where people stare if you bring out strange creatures, and buses crash if the haloes around you suddenly start singing. No, I go with notepad and pen, a look of efficiency on my face. But tonight I got lost around Moulescoomb in the dark, and, as I wandered around searching for a house number 113 that didn't seem to exist, and waiting to get my head kicked in, I did wonder what the fuck I was doing there. Trying to earn my crust. And that's what it is. 89p, Co-op own-brand white crust. Without butter on. The dryest thing in the Western Hemisphere.

So I come to you, my keyboard and my letters, to cheer me up, and to keep me from falling on the concrete, and the narrow, narrow roads. I pray to you, poetry, like a guardian angel, to keep me always, always, safe at the hearth, in the homes where I belong. Let the creatures guide me across the sea and ice, let the holy ones light up my face when all has gone dark, and let the ones who will never see me, keep warm in their jumpers at night, when the moon has turned her whitest cycle in the reddest sky, for the very last time.

A Note..

I am announcing my attempt to keep a pledge I've made to myself to write on This Beautiful Hunger more frequently. Announcements are a good thing because then if I start slipping into the old 'once a month' styley postings, someone will hopefully notice and give me a kick up my pretty backside.

I've also recently been pondering the nature of this blog following a comment from the lovely and not-exactly-normal-himself, MadPriest about me, namely, that I was, quote, 'as weird as a weird thing on the top shelf in the weird supplies shop.'

I took this as a great compliment at the time, but, as I've been pondering it since, I realise I have been feeling perplexed, as I rarely think of myself as 'weird', or my writing as particularly weird or eccentric or intense or whatever. This might be because I'm me, and me is always going to feel like the most normal thing in the world, and describing my own inner world is always going to feel as natural and ordinary as going to Tesco's, even if I am talking about death, religion, love, loss, obsession, addiction, romance, sexuality, bicycles etc. Perhaps.

I mentioned the comment to Bob, and cited my recent post about a greyhound as evidence for my utter normalness (are dogs not an exceptionally ordinary thing to write about?) but he pointed out that the post wasn't about dogs, it was about crocheting my own greyhound. So it left me confused.

This is something I do find rather fascinating - what we think of as weird and what we think of as normal. I think I find most conventional and supposedly 'normal' ways of life quite freaky, as I don't really relate to a lot of them, and can feel quite out of place. But I wonder how many other people really do either, if they're being honest, or take the time to think about it. After all, the world is, at best, a pretty eccentric place, and at worst, well, it's off its little rocker.

Obviously I don't want to stop writing about what interests and moves me, else, what's the point of writing in the first place? However, my hope is that if I do blog more regularly, perhaps the length of my posts (usually at least a quarter of a mile long) might decrease, and my subject matter might find more new and interesting avenues to travel down.

And here's how normal I am, I'm about to make my tea (rice, veg and egg) and settle down to watch my new favourite tv programme, Top Gear (yes, that programme about cars and things, made by blokes who smoke pipes and have bad Eighties hair) and then, like, have a bath or summat. See. Normal. Me. Ever so.

My friend sent me this the other day, and I have to say I'm well on my way to believing that it could be the remedy for all my dog-longings. Like many of my friends, my desire to have a canine companion has been foreshadowed by the fact that I live in a distinctly bijou attic flat, three floors up. So that means a major trek whenever they wanted the loo, and anything but a drugged, ancient or legless dog would be driven mad by its confining size.

The double blessing of crocheting my own dog would be that it might help solve my financial crisis (I won't be spending any money if I'm perpetually crocheting plus I won't have to pay out any vet fees) and also I get to while away my Winter immersed in crocheting bliss instead of perpetually mulling over tedious existential questions such as where the fuck is my life is going? Handy.

Also, it would mean that I can finally fill the dog basket that lies mournfully empty in my hallway, waiting for some furry fellow to come and grace its sheepskin interior.

A Fierce Beauty

Last night I went and spent money that I didn't have on an evening dedicated to the great Spanish poet and dramatist, Garcia Lorca. I commited this rash act (being, as I am, savagely broke), because Lorca happens to be among a handful of artists who have changed my life, and for whom I would, as they say, lay down on the tracks. So parting with my money to go and see it seemed like a relatively small act of devotion.

Unfortunately, the evening was utter rubbish. It took the most razor sharp of passions, some of the most mortally wounding poetry of the 20th century, and put an old, comfy, pair of slippers on it. Though it makes me sad to say it, it was tragically British.

Lorca lived a relatively short life. He was beautiful and he was homosexual, and in the Thirties, Lorca was Spain's greatest living poet, describing and epitomising a spirit of Spain, a spirit that also manifested in flamenco and in the bullfight. In 1936 he was shot dead by the Fascists both for being a poet and for being a homosexual. He died face down in the mud. He wrote these words:

..there are neither maps nor exercises to help us find the duende. We only know that he burns the blood like a poultice of broken glass, that he exhausts, that he rejects all the sweet geometry we have learned, that he smashes styles, that he leans on human pain with no consolation and makes Goya (master of the grays, silvers, and pinks of the best English painting) work with his fists and knees in horrible bitumens..

I think anyone who creates - who writes, plays music, performs, longs for this state that Lorca describes and that runs through all his poetry, because it contains magic and genius. Or perhaps we don't even need to be an 'artist' to have this longing, in life itself we can yearn for it. But most of the time we are so terrified of it that we want to stick to all the safe roads instead; we seek out the poultice of burning glass, but we don't want it to burn our hands.

As I struggle with my own existence, trying to write, trying to make music that might just have some integrity to it; through the loneliness and insecurity of trying to stay with the process and the wildernesses I often finds myself in, it feels a precious thing to try and keep remembering Lorca.

It's horrid seeing the fear of mistakes and failure embodied in another person's performance, as I did last night; to see all the imperfections rubbed out, and with it, all the lifeforce. It reflects what I myself might become if I begin to let those things rule my own poetry and songs, my performance. And it's sad that those musicians' efforts killed even the possibility of anyone in that audience getting the chance to experience the beauty that Lorca lived, and died for. Better perhaps to stay silent, than to kill the thing you love.

Here is some footage of one of the greatest ever Flamenco dancers, Carmen Amaya, who had left Spain by the time of the Civil War and Lorca's death, becoming a world-wide star. Often dancing in men's breeches and a jacket, she danced steps traditionally reserved for male dancers, and she embodies what Lorca describes as that "mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher explains.. a power, not a work.. a struggle, not a thought."

He continues "I have heard an old maestro of the guitar say, The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet. Meaning this: it is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation."

By the way, the woman in the first video is Eva La Yerbabuena, who is also incredible.

tuesday

Though I'm pretty sure she doesn't know it, it is Mum's birthday today. She is 72. This is a picture of her with my sister and Aunty before her last stroke, looking happy in the sunshine.


by e.e. cummings

if there are any heavens my mother will (all by herself) have
one. It will not be a pansy heaven nor
a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but
it will be a heaven of blackred roses

my father will be (deep like a rose
tall like a rose)

standing near my

(swaying over her
silent)
with eyes which are really petals and see

nothing with the face of a poet really which
is a flower and not a face with
hands
which whisper
This is my beloved my

(suddenly in sunlight
he will bow,

& the whole garden will bow)


x x x

I've cut my hair again. Happily (and somewhat unusually) for me, I am experiencing absolutely no post-haircut regret. In fact tonight I'm loving it and am, as a result, rather smug.

I'm also thinking again about what is going on underneath all this compulsive haircutting. I seem to be trimming and pruning almost weekly, my hairdo creeping shorter and shorter, its style wavering about, curling and creeping behind my ears, seeking its shape. With each snip of my scissors, I feel like I'm desperately trying to match how I look on the outside with how I feel on the inside.

My appearance has always been massively significant in my world. I have hidden behind femininity and then I have slung it out in fury. I have utilised its powers and I have been crippled by its limitations. I have blundered around confused as to what this thing called womanhood even is. My clothes and hair have always played a vital part in that, from a childhood of boys' clothes and loathsome haircuts to long hair and a precocious, feminine sexuality at thirteen, when I was a loner indie-kid in my uniform of biker boots, black eyeliner and short skirts. By 15, I was a raver, popping pills and returning happily to baggy trainers and jeans and sexless Mambo T-shirts.

I don't think I really felt remotely female until my early twenties. I think I could pretend like I was one, and there was some sort of inkling in that direction, but on the inside, it just didn't match up. I would scour the magazines for pretty girls who felt like a different species from me.

Also, I realise I can also actually recount the entire last ten years purely in terms of what shade of colour I was obsessed with at the time. At 23, I discovered Buddhism, festivals, hippies, meditation, chakras and Reiki. I moved to Brighton where the sun always seemed to be shining and felt like I had escaped from a lifeless, colourless, dowdy, grey cell. During this period I became obsessed with turquoise, silver and baby pink. I painted my entire bedroom bright turquoise and hung glitter balls from every part of the ceiling that reflected the sunlight a thousand times over. I made a large silvery glitterball shrine devoted to Vajrasattva, the Buddha of purification. He was my discoball Buddha. I wore little baby pink jumpers and sparkly blue dresses and I painted my nails silver. Sounds foul, I know, but I still think it was kind of kookily cool. I revelled in cosmic-girly chic, young and vibrant and a world away from how I'd felt for the previous 7 years, which was old; old and grey as the fucking mountains.



Then I started to get a bit of a feeling for some inner sexual power and my real passions and desires. I got into Mary Magdalene and Rilke and Patti Smith and became obsessed with dark purple. My bedroom became a dimly lit shrine with an abundance of Evolution shop netting, Edward Munch pictures and dyed blue roses. My next room was similar, but this time with little sculpture shrines of broken glass around it, a Garcia Lorca poem handwritten around the top of its walls and a huge purple swirling vortex I'd painted on one wall, six feet high. Then I broke up with my boyfriend and painted over the whole goddamn room in coconut and duck egg blue; light, grounded and non-intense colours. I got rid of the broken glass and the Lorca poem with the painful relationship. I was done with intensity.

When I moved into my present flat, the decor and all my clothes went green, right down to my purse. I became a lady, with a wide brimmed hat and a flat full of birdcages and spotty scarves and flowery teacups. I wore polka-dot flamenco skirts and neckties and my boobs even grew, so for the first time in my life I had a cleavage to show off. I liked my new life as a lady. It was kitsch and camp and over-the-top feminine. It suited my newfound curves and womanly figure. I dressed up in frills for festivals with my friend and we sold chocolate energy balls and gave out free spankings to the highest bidder.

I have a certain fondness for retro chic. The Twenties, Thirties, Forties, Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, I love them all (though I'm still not sure about the Eighties). I find it hard being a modern girl. And at present, I am finding it hard being a girl at all. I have largely eschewed the frocks and skirts, the busty tops. My flat is still a haven for birdcages, Venetian masks and flowery teacups, but the flamenco dresses are firmly at the back of the clothes rail. I've taken to wearing more boyish clothes, comfy jeans, shirts, caps, jackets and sometimes, even ties. I feel stronger somehow in these clothes, and less in need of something, even if I'm not sure what that something is. And I have cut my hair off for the first time in my life.

During a lot of this year, I felt like I just wanted to look and feel boyish. I felt constrained by my hips and my curves as much as I felt constrained by my still insistently alive desire for affirmation from men. I wanted to be free from all of it, perhaps a skinny, boob-less boy-girl. Perhaps I wanted to be free from gender altogether, from sexuality, so I didn't have to work out what it all meant and why it was felt complex. On the one hand I began to renew my interest in gender politics and on the other, I was falling for poetic images in Christianity and saints such as St Francis of Assisi.

Although to some people it may seem like a deep contradiction, to me it feels like maybe it was no coincidence that, as I started going to local Queer events where cross-dressing, sexual ambiguity and androgyny are the norm, I also began going to church and following the trail of saints such as St Clare, who defied religious convention by sneaking out of church down a secret passageway to join St Francis and others in a new, radical way of life, as she experienced a holy conversion. In the dark of that night they helped her cut off all her beautiful hair.

There are now days when I wake up and I want to look feminine and definably a woman. It feels good. So when I stood in front of my bathroom mirror tonight inspecting my new self-administered haircut, I suddenly realised why I liked it so much. There was, at last, the start of a synthesis. It was that same synthesis I've been seeking inside myself these last months.

It is a synthesis of different sides of myself, where one does not have to reject the other for its own survival. Where I can feel masculine and feminine, boy and girl, woman and man and all the shades in between; where those words mean everything and mean nothing at the same time. Where my desire is my own, and not something reflected back to me through the half-light of another's desire for me. Where my sexuality is not what my identity hinges on, and men (and women) do not hold the keys to my self-worth. Where I am hard and soft, potent and yielding, receptive and active. It's a place of the hunter and the hunted, the chaser and the chased (chaste), the doer and the doing, the done; the giver, the taker and the giving itself.

When I strip back the layers of conditioning, take off the years of habitual behaviour, the naked sight underneath is a disconcerting one.

The lady and her polka-dot skirts have left the building. There's a strange boy in her place, with very feminine charms and a gentle touch. She is soft as ever, but with a wilful eye. She is the figure in a photo, me at ten years old, pale blue jumper, jeans and Clarks brown shoes.

Last year my mother suffered a massive stroke that left her brain-damaged and unable to speak, eat or move. The strange thing is that I now find that I have almost the same haircut as when I was ten; just as my mother weaves her slow and painful way out of this world. I cut my first fringe earlier this year as she lay looking the other way, out of the window, in a half-trance. Her words, spoken to me regularly from the age of thirteen, have lain dormant in my mind until tonight, yet they were words that always kept me away from the scissors ...Don't ever cut your hair, never cut a fringe, always keep your hair long; such beautiful hair...

Whatever it is I've lost in that beautiful hair as I chop and I snip, is worth it for what I gain, simply from its absence. It's been a lifetime of seeking myself, losing myself, creating identities and shedding skins. The clock ticks, the sea of life surges on, personality unravels to reveal itself in more brilliant colours than ever. The final bed is made; the sheet turned over. The mirror reflects the light shining on it. A bird takes its final breath. I am alone. The bathroom is empty except for one reflection; a face looking back at me. It is nothing I have ever seen before.

500 Acre Wood

This weekend I went to 500 Acre Wood, near Tunbridge Wells. Bob and I set off there in the car, attracted by its name which reminded us of those endearing creatures from a Hundred Acre Wood in the AA Milne stories.

Place names are so interesting; they can be so evocative, and so unlike the place they are actually describing. As we passed through Crowborough, staring at a map I discovered there was an area in the town called Blackness. So we set off up little streets and round bends to find the elusive Blackness in the heart of Crowborough.

However, after much twisting and turning we found ourselves on a road we could not get off, that wound down the hill and straight into Morrisons' basement carpark. We sat there, amused and befuddled. I guess you never quite know where the Blackness will take you.

500 Acre Wood was just that - not too big with trees still relatively young, only just grazing the sky, leaving ample room for the sun to streak through their leaves. Woods are perfect in Autumn, they feel like the right place to be, like going into some kind of protective womb; a shuffling, muffled silence, broken only by the occasional birdsong; full of life that slowly grows and will soon hibernate or drop its leaves.

I love the dappled darkness in there, the soft damp woodyness beneath my shoes, enclosed yet winding onwards, empty, yet full of presence. In woods I always feel like I am in a room full of silent people. I know that they are thinking and communicating to each other and to me in their own way, but no words leave them. I am well aware of the trees here. They say nothing, but speak volumes. I can't help but be in awe.

As we left the wood, we walked out onto a vista of red and green hills, their vision hazy in my eyes, adjusting as I was from darkness to daylight. We stood by a tree and looked up. There were mosquitoes dancing by a branch. I watched as they circled each other in the bright light and I felt my eyes changing, felt myself change, as the world opened its door and let me in.

I remembered then what I always seem to forget: that whatever it is that's making those mosquitos dance, is the same thing that is circulating in everything. That is still there even when the breath has left and the bones are laid to rest. That brought me here in the first place. Oh yes.

I wonder why I can't see this all the time. Why the vision leaves me often when I most would have it near. It seems an inescapable pattern embedded in my fragile human nature, this forgetting.

I've been reading a lot about St Francis lately. It's been stirring up soul in bowlfuls. This is what GK Chesterton wrote about what happened immediately after St Francis' conversion. It resonated, re-reading it after being at 500 Acre Wood.

He went out half-naked in his hair-shirt into the winter woods, walking the frozen ground between the frosty trees; a man without a father. He was penniless, he was parentless, he was to all appearance without a trade or a plan or a hope in the world; and as he went under the frosty trees, he suddenly burst into song.

I know that I horde life. I keep it under lock and key, lest it leave me alone and lacking. And of course, what we horde, what we think keeps us safe, keeps our very souls imprisoned. I think I know what success means, what life means, what it means to gain and what it means to lose. And I am in a sense right. But so wrong. If I could remember it was never mine in the first place, but a gift, for as long as I exist and longer. If I could know that I am never really alone, even in my loneliest days, or that success can't be measured by worldly standards, only the standard of our souls, I think I'd be a happier person.

But then, somehow it seems that we must forget in order to remember again, and keep trying to follow whatever helps that remembering. Bowing the head, clutching the beads, bending the knee, humming repetitions under our breath. Whether it is in a church or in the middle of shopping centres. Whether it's Benedict or Bukowski. Gautama or Rimbaud. Our betraying friend or our most loyal. Venerating the light. Loving the dark.

Words so easy for me to write, so hard to remember. And I am no St Francis under the frosty trees. Chesterton writes a beautiful description of St Francis' asceticism and finally, his death.

It was not a self-denial merely in the sense of self-control. It was as positive as a passion; it had all the air of being as positive as pleasure. He devoured fasting as a man devours food. He plunged after poverty as men have dug madly for gold. ..It is certain that he held onto this heroic or unnatural couse from the moment when he went forth in his hair-shirt into the wintery woods to the moment when he desired even in his death agony to lie bare upon the bare ground, to prove that he had and that he was nothing. And we can say, with almost as deep a certainty; that the stars which passed above that gaunt and wasted corpse stark upon the rocky floor had for once, in all their shining cycles round the world of labouring humanity, looked down upon a happy man.

Two Left Feet

Tonight I think I need to confess how I'm feeling. Well, I probably don't need to, but I want to; so forgive me for using you as a kind of therapist's couch this evening. For I am confessing to being a mess.

In fact, it was last night when I realised what a mess I was, as I struggled out into town to band rehearsal, full of some strange flu-like illness, and sat wobbling on a high black stool listening to piano keys clunking and red wine being supped. I felt tears pricking my eyes and a familiar welling up inside. Shit. The penny dropped. I am all over the place.

Then something else happened. Something that rarely happens to me. Instead of feeling upset, anxious, fearful, confused and stupid about feeling a mess, I suddenly was overcome by a feeling of alrightness. Absolute alrightness. And I liked it.

I'm one confused human being at the moment. I wonder if this is why, when I am falling asleep last thing at night, my heart keeps doing little pirouettes in my chest and why my dreams are filled with psychopaths. Why I keep having to trim my hair just that tiny bit shorter. Why one day I wear low-cut tops and the next I find myself in high collared shirts. Why I reel from reading the biography of a saint to writing songs about strange animals to compulsively watching a tv show where women are dressed as men and strap-ons are as commonplace as the next soya-decaf-frappucino. All this might not sound too significant, perhaps a bit drama queeny, if you don't know me that well. Or maybe even if you do. But who I am doesn't add up anymore. It doesn't add up.

Tonight I feel less welcoming of this fact. I feel disarmed by myself. I'm also aware of the fact that I'm going to be back in Wales in a couple of weeks, and I know, deep down, I'm really frightened because it brings the mess of me right back into sharp relief. It brings back how confusing life is, and how hard it is living under the shadow of Mum's state; knowing how I've been blocking it out these last months, because if I didn't block it out, I would have become a mess, and I don't want to be a mess, I want to be ok.

So the mess has to cope with only getting little outings, little forays into the world of Clare. And the rest of the time, it is strictly relegated to the world of dreams.

As usual, there is a good side to this. Whether I let it in or not, the devastation of Mum's condition is working on me night and day. And the price I may pay in sorrow for this, is reaped back through all the cracks that grief shows up in my life. It prises the cracks apart so I can look inside and see what truly makes me tick.

I thought I liked it better when I supposed I knew what made me tick, even if it felt constricting and suffocating, like a silk stocking tight around my throat. Now, I don't quite know what to do with all this air. Or what this feeling is in my lungs. I know too well the sting of life. And how things can fester. But this breath inside me, well, it's equally as terrifying. Such a grave responsibility it is: stepping into one own shoes.

The Jobless Question ...

After having spent my day putting ads in papers and formulating ingenious plans to procure work in as short a time as possible, I finally found the answer ...

Wednesday

Looking in from the outside, you might say tonight that I am lucklustre in presence and partially absent of heart, a sleek shadow skulking about the flat whilst the wind gently rattles the windows. But from the inside, I can definitely tell you that the lights are still on and I am definitely home. I just don't want to do any kind of entertaining this evening. I am pyjama-ed and bed-socked. Passers by are most definitely not welcome.

Tonight, all those things that people need to keep them going, all their endearing little idiosycrasies that make them who they are, their quirks of nature, their habits, well, I'd like them to all kindly scuttle away and leave me in my hideyhole, at peace.

Hideyholes are the best, a vital necessity in this day and age where nothing is private, no lines of communication are ever blocked, and people can get a hold of you with the click of a switch just about wherever you are, whenever they wish. Don't we just love all that technology? I know I do. And this post harbours no resentment towards it or towards folk going about their way, in their way. But just for tonight, I want them all to do it somewhere else.

I've spent four solid hours today watching dvds, something I don't actually think I've done since I was a kid, and I'm feeling like a bit of a shameless tv set junkie. You know, it's one of the first signs of a junkie - when suddenly other people become less important, mere side players in the addict's great quest for their own fix and the bliss that ensues.

I tell you, it felt like some kind of divine intervention today when the lady in the Jubilee Library told me that the dvd set I've been chasing had finally arrived back - five minutes before I entered the Library. And when you start bringing God into the equation in such a matter, I think it definitely marks the onset of addiction.

So what else? Well, as we all may have noticed, in one swift and cruel move, winter seems to have arrived, bypassing autumn altogether. Perhaps yesterday counted for both the first day of autumn and also its last. The day had that feeling of summer ending as the first chill of the new season breathed into the sunlight that was still dancing upon the metallic sea. I absolutely love that time of year - frail and filled with poignancy and nostalgia, echoes and fading warmth. Unfortunately, it seems like that might have been it. Today was a bedraggled dog of a day, damp and chilled to the bone, the misery of winter too close on the horizon, etched on people's faces, a lost summer without climax following everybody's steps home.

If I can make some money this winter, I shan't be bothered about its dourness. In fact, I shall welcome it. I have loved my winters in Brighton for the last few years. There's been something so bitterly romantic about them, holed up writing, loving, losing; you know, all the usual stuff. However, significant portions of joy have come from the adventures abroad I plan during winter, because it's then that I can actually afford to travel abroad. Without that, I can see it's going to be a long season, as I haven't got away to any of the places I most yearn to get back to at all this year. And I am seriously pining.

So I can see that without money, life may become an endless trail of trips to the Jubilee Library to get my fill of imagination and excitement, my backside numb from lolling around on couches staring at LA lesbians and New York mafiosi, my eyebrows crinkled and mouth permanently mishapen by all the grimacing I've been doing at the high-octane emotional drama unfolding before my eyes.

Rock n roll. Bring on Episode Five quick.

Sunday

Since I cut my hair, it no longer gets in my eyes the way it used to; it no longer falls down my back in straight lines or spreads across my pillow in the morning. These days, I'm not sure who it is I look like, or who I thought I was before. A new dress, a different pair of shoes, a pair of trousers; a grey felt hat cocked at the perfect angle, and a person can be changed forever. These clothes, this face, my body, are all a mystery to me. My own mirage; the hieroglyphics written here.

Tonight, the world is spinning too fast for me to grab hold of what it's made of or what surrounds it. I'm sitting on the island where I always live, peeking at stars and toying with black holes, wondering which dark galaxy I am heading for next, still not comprehending from where it was I came, still hoping for angels.

Just now, I washed up my things in the sink, switched off the dvd player and came here to this uncomfortable seat to feel my fingers against keys, to feel myself uncoil. The screen becomes for some minutes my lover, my God, the mirror reflecting what I couldn't see otherwise: the lines and cracks, the substance, the light which temporarily blinds me when I am shown it. Damage. Sorrow. Fight. Heaven. And something else I'm not sure I have words for.

Isn't that the struggle and the point of writing? To somehow birth into being what we cannot give a name? And into which letters will it sink itself today? Where is the cadence that will have us all weeping?

Tonight I ache under my ribs with a tenderness that makes me swallow quickly, that makes me fear I'll get cut in two if anyone were to walk through my living-room door right now and show me any more beauty than is already here. Luckily, my front door is bolted.

I'm a slow-moving fish. A rattling train. I whisper too many secrets to myself and wish the world would tell me his. It's getting late, but not late enough. I am genuinely happy for the first time in a long time, and for that I am, as ever, troubled.

Thursday

I've been flailing about lately, as perhap you may have discerned from my recent posts. I could also say I've been a bit in the wilderness, a place without borders or signposts, without a nice cup of tea waiting at home for me, with a few wild animals tracking my footsteps and a distinct lack of fresh water.

I am tempted, as is easy to do, to assume that this is a problem, that something is wrong in me or in my life. To temper this, I find the good old 'New Age' sound bites rising up in my mind. "Follow your heart". "Trust the process". "Everything is a lesson". Oh, to be a New Age writer churning out masterpieces such as "The Little Book Of Wisdom" whilst earning a nice few hundred thousand spondulies.

I digress. I can mock such phrases, but that doesn't stop them from potentially being true. The problem for me, as I suspect it may be for a lot of people who don't feel guided by angels or the will of God, is precisely how to discern exactly what these statements mean. One can follow ones heart, but that doesn't mean it won't lead you straight into a ditch. One can try and trust the process, even if it's difficult, but there's often the niggling doubt that there might not actually be a process going on at all, one may just be in a bit of a mess. On a good day, all is a vast and mysterious lesson from which one grows. On a bad one, well, the word dukkha springs to mind, that is, things are painful and crap, and basically sometimes there can be no reasoning that out. In fact, to try and reason it out is just to try and escape the suffering.

Having said all this, it cheers me up more to think of profound cosmic things afoot in my experience, of processes rising and falling and leading me to a greater understanding of something or other.

So how to find something in this life that endures. That's the question. I know it's all going away, every last drop of this life is disappearing with the clouds, never to return. And living with such fragility and uncertainty, and finding the peace and beauty is certainly what I have been taught to do through Buddhist practice, and what I've tried to do, in whatever ways I can, for years.

But right now it doesn't feel enough. I can't struggle with that existential question on my own. My body isn't large enough to hold the magnitude; this 'self' of mine cannot meet nature, time, old age, sickness and death on its own terms, never mind violence, injustice, poverty, cruelty, betrayal, corruption, abuse of power. I am no one woman army. And the fact that we all stand in exactly the same shoes when it comes to facing life and death means we can be guiding lights to each other, unfortunately our relationships made out of the same fragile and delicate material as this life. We can claim solidarity, but we still face the questions alone.

Perhaps it is obvious, where I'm going in this post. This thing that endures, that can hold all life within it; that isn't separate from life or from the people in it; that's in the buildings and the structures of our existence, the hearts and minds and bodies, as it is in the end of them. But is it an unnameable force which is at once there and not there, an emptiness which is full, a fullness which is ultimately empty; the beauty of transience itself? Or is it a tangible, real presence we can call on, we can count on, that has a name and a face; a body and blood?

I don't know. But these are the questions I don't quite know how to put to rest.

Friday

Tonight I cycled along the seafront. It was late and the air felt still, the sea was dense. There was a pressure in my head which made me speed up on the concrete and my mind feel like it was richocetting off the balustrade.

That's alcohol for you. Inhibitions left to the wind. Thought processes unsteady and darting, like a hundred shoals of tiny fish; full with fleeting feeling, reason empty.

I sped along, unaware of how fast or slow I was going, but at the same time, sure of myself. It was then that I saw them, emerging, ghostly from the recessed darkness of the beach; a man and a woman dressed entirely in white, their robes billowing out like they were two brides. As I sped along, a police car cruised further up the seafront to where more men and more women were dressed in white, emerging from the dark sea. It was a strange sight, stranger still for I remembered then that I'd seen them here before.

In the pub tonight, we spoke, as we always seem to do, of religion and spirituality, each of us, it felt, desperately trying to gather some truth in for ourselves, each of us missing some part of ourselves that we were trying to find, yet telling others that we had already found it.

I shirked at my own feelings on meditation and Buddha and God and finding inner peace. Almost ten years on, I have to ask the question, have I found it? Have I got those answers which seem so integral to positing oneself to others as a 'spiritual' person? No, the questions just get harder. The more I learn, the more and more I get out of my depth and then am forced to swim.

The inner peace I sought in the past, well, now it seems fanciful. Because peace to me used to mean the end of all this tiring, endless shit. But it doesn't. The endless tiring shit goes on and on, for as long as I go on and on, for as long as the world turns in its sleep.

So the question has become one of, do I want reality, or do I want comfort? I ask myself over and over this question, and I still can only answer: both. I want reality and I want truth, but I want that truth to be palatable, not painful. In the words of that great band, Of Montreal, I want my film to be beautiful, not realistic.

But nine times out of ten, reality whoops my ass, so to speak. I was told for years that the only way to happiness is to 'be here, now'. And I can talk like a jaded old thing, but the truth is, they are right; but the question remains, well, how much do I really want to?

I felt blessed by seeing those strangers in their white robes; glad they weren't in their houses tonight watching TV. Glad for the fact that they seemed so strange and unearthly in this all too often one-dimensional world, where spirit is absent too much of the time. And I'm glad I am cycling, using my legs, using my lungs. I want to cycle more, so that my legs ache and I am caught for breath, so that I am finally worn out with effort. Perhaps that is what they talk of when folk talk of peace; it is when you are finally done with trying, and the wind catches in your throat as you breathe it in.

The Grass is Always Greener on the Other Side of The Moon ..

We made a routine out of sitting by that cliff edge. We nipped back and forth from our tent as though the cliff, the seamless sky and the sea below it were simply the corner shop or the loo.

I lay back and looked. He was constantly naming stars and constellations, happiest to sit and gaze up. I was constantly discovering all the things I still feel I need to do in my life, things that I probably never will, but somewhere still hold a light to, hoping that one day ... when I'm rich, when my life is different, when I've completed the training, when I'm older and more settled, when I win 35 million on the Lottery.

And we would scuttle back to the tent and sleep or wake or giggle, and then we would be back there again, lying back, gazing upwards, him naming constellations, me discovering yet more things that I still want to do in my life and possibly never will. The list became endless ...

I must go up in a space shuttle and orbit the Earth. I have to fly to the Moon. I want to go to Mars as well. I want to be a rockclimber. A mountaineer. Go paragliding. Own and fly my own bi plane. Do formation dancing whilst strapped to its wing. I've got to climb Everest before I die. I will one day go to Antarctica. Can I live without having stood at least once amongst penguins and ice? I must understand all religions. I want to be wealthy. I must become Enlightened. I want to know Christ; journey to France to live alone with nothing but the clothes on my back. I want to be a mother. I will be a writer. How far off is that journey in a tour bus? What about the record deal? Can I build that home in the desert with my own hands? Will I ever really know what it is like to live as a drunken poet, willing to sacrifice all decency? Where is that great movie script inside me? How can I live to the end of my days without knowing what it's like to be a man? Is there any bird that could bear my weight on its back as it flies across whole continents? Why can't I write a PHD on Quantum Physics? Why do I still think stars are little candles in the sky? Why does my head explode when he tells me that the star I'm looking at isn't a star, but is actually a whole galaxy which itself contains millions upon millions of suns just like our own sun in it, and it is 2.5 million million light years away, with each light year itself being the equivalent of 6 million million miles away?

This cliff edge is strong. It's pulling me out towards the fulmars and the black-backs. Then it's taking me further, out into the inky mass of blackened planets, to where my craving meets my soul and both explode in starlight. These dreams are not the work of idle moments. They live in me like a constant heart beat; most of them since I was a child. Back in those days, so much was fantasy, an unattainable goal. These days it is not always easy to know what is far fetched and what's real. The moon landing or the record deal. The bi plane or the novel. The Big Bang or the Holy Spirit. However, craving, and the vision it brings does not usually possess me as much as it has on this cliff top; on this strange and beautiful cliff of longing.

I look at him. He has some secret I cannot yet discover. He simply watches and looks, his nose edging upwards towards the wings that pass above him. If I could be so content. If I could sit and remember it is all here now - the moon, the stars, the space shuttles and the backs of birds. My dreams are always of travelling, of flying, of taking off, or else they are of being struck down, struck by a lightning bolt that illluminates everything. Do I dream of angels? Yes, sometimes; as much as I dream of dirty bars. Is it here, now? Of course it is.

I like it here. There are no signs of a normal life lived here in these parts. We are happy. Him and me. At the edge. Both of us dreaming, in our own ways.

thursday

Enough is enough. That's something, ironically, I often have to say to myself a number of times before I finally believe it myself. Today, as I pulled the lid from the old pan of pea soup that's been lying in wait in the corner of my kitchen and I swear I saw something move in there, I realised, enough is enough.

The stench of it was an amalgam of shit and vomit. It fizzed and spluttered as I poured its remnants down the sink, trying desperately not to breathe through my nostrils, gagging at the merest hint of the smell. And I couldn't help thinking somewhere, my life has got out of kilter here, I shouldn't be pouring half alive green sludge down my plughole, I shouldn't be ignoring the hair on the carpet until it looks like it is growing a second rug on top of it. I shouldn't find myself wearing the same socks for the however-many-days running because I haven't been able to face the launderette. But I have, and now I realise, enough is enough. Somewhere, in the midst of my life, I've been losing myself.

And as for the technology which has been bringing my life to a halt and corrupting all simplicity and grace in it, well, it has to stop somewhere. I find myself these days unable to exist without checking emails at least several times a day, but worse, without checking the various 'friending' and networking sites which I find myself having joined.

Although I know it's a valid way of keeping in touch with friends near and far, a way of getting my music out there and making connections for gigs and poetry submissions, I find that recently, instead of using that way, I'm posting people UFOs and aliens, and getting into needless arguments because of stupid privacy settings on my goddamn Facebook profile. Technology has become another thing to get addicted to, to become enslaved by; a way of keeping out the cold, of plugging the silence with noise and chatter; of not, finally, having to be alone.

I've got to cut this clutter out. And, yes, here I am, on my blog, writing when I could be outside in the cold damp air, feeling alive, taking in the waves across the sea, feeling the seagulls swooping over me, treading the pavement towards some form of rest and recuperation for my soul. However, this blog is one place I have no trouble justifying using, in fact, I cast it aside far too easily for more inane forms of communication.

Out, I need to go. Further than the seafront, further than the shore, further than where the horizon meets the deep, wet blue. I can't live for long unless I can penetrate the blue itself, go further, to where clouds swallow me and the air is frozen. It's not enough, this place; this city; this land; with its concrete walls and its TV sets, its motorways that always lead somewhere; its cups of tea to warm my hands against the winds that blow in from a cold, uncertain future.

Sometimes it's hard to bear the crushing weight of this sky we all live under. Sometimes, we must break up into pieces in order to let it touch us; to feel the grace of emptiness; the perfection raging in our souls. I feel like a woodland animal hunting out a warm burrow and some food. Like all of us, I need a shelter. And I am dreaming everyday of God, hoping for a glimpse of what brought me here.

I've been having email contact with the Poor Clare Colletine Community lately, whom I spent almost twenty years growing up next to in North Wales. I initially emailed them because I visited their Convent earlier this year when I was home to see Mum in the nursing home, and the experience affected me deeply; it was very healing. It's been lovely to have the contact with them, and keep up my connection with St Clare and St Francis, and feel there are presences and people out there who are praying for Mum, for all my family really. It makes holding the hugeness of our situation easier to bear.

Today, they sent me some pictures, which was touching, and I've included them in this post as it was St Clare's Day on Saturday.



Here is the dormitory where she lived and died.



And here's a picture of Mum before her last stroke, opening presents on her 69th birthday. I haven't been able to look at photos of her for a while now, it's been a bit too much to take. So it's good to look again, and see her in all her loveliness and with her hair in plaits.

Barbarism Begins At Hove

The Smiths have influenced me more than possibly any other band I've listened to in my life, and Morrissey has been a muse of mine since before I was even in my teens. I never got to see them live, which is a significant regret, considering the force and elegance of Morrissey's performances and the almost maniacal fervour of their audiences.

There's a violence, a bravery about Morrissey, and something so primal, so achingly tender in his writhing and his crooning; something so perverse and contradictory in his gyrating nakedness and his saintly detactment. Everything laid bare, yet totally ambiguous. All this raw, sweating, complex humanity, this bizarre sexuality; it's like watching some kind of brutal boxing match, or an ancient pagan rite. Morrissey would detest this analogy, but to me he's a bit like a Spanish torreador, whipping the bull and the crowd into a frenzy before the blades go in. Numerous people have said The Smiths were miserable, wet and poncey; but they never realised they'd missed the point entirely.

It's very hard to describe Friday night for me without putting it in context. When I was eleven, although pretty grown up for my age, I was only just starting to discover music. I wore frilly white blouses and navy-grey kilts, an outfit I had swapped to from the battered jeans and geeky blue jumper I'd lived in up to that age - the age when I decided, enough was enough, I now wanted to look like a girl, be a girl, instead of being the odd, boyish thing I'd felt like up until then. I was tired of not feeling like I fitted into one gender or the other. So I grew my hair, became pretty, longing to be normal.

So the first time I saw Morrissey on Top Of The Pops, I was repulsed, as he flailed around the stage with flowers in his back pocket, a pale cardigan and bare chest. It took another year before any kind of interest in what Morrissey had to offer my psyche manifested. And it was purely, it seemed, by chance. Bigmouth Strikes Again had just come out as a single, and I hated it, hated The Smiths and all they stood for. Then, one evening, in my bedroom, I could hear my sister had the radio on; it was the John Peel Show. Then I suddenly heard these lines floating across from her room to mine: " I dreamt about you last night/ And I fell out of bed twice./ You can pin and mount me/ Like a butterfly"

I strained to hear the rest of that song, and was instantly converted. From that point on, I was obsessed. I bought all their LP back catalogue, got a load of Oscar Wilde out of the library and developed a rather frightening obsession with the Moors Murders. I gave up eating meat. This meant flushing the chicken off my Sunday dinner down the loo when my mum wasn't looking, or feeding it to the dog, or even throwing it out of my bedroom window onto the flowerbed below, as my Mum refused to let me become vegetarian.

When The Queen Is Dead came out that year, I played it to death and memorized every line, every word. Moving into my thirteenth year, I became fully immersed in teenage gloom. I dropped out in school, lost all my friends, became the class 'weirdo' (writing "Free Myra Hindley" on your Rough Book isn't the kind of thing to endear you to your classmates). I watched Andy Warhol films late into the night, took my first trip to Whalley range in Manchester, and got stoned on my sister's boyfriend's homegrown cannabis. I read more poetry that year than I probably have done in my whole life since. I wrote songs and poems. Lots of them. I drew. I played along to 'Well I Wonder' on my guitar. I discovered Buddhism. I self-harmed. I became intrigued by The Occult and Aleister Crowley. I tried desperately to Astral Project. Just all your regular teenage things.

I don't hold Morrissey or The Smiths responsible for this remarkable shift in my psychology. Or for the intense depression I kept falling into. Or for my plummeting exam results at school. In fact, looking back, it seems that, along with the books I read and the films I watched; my late night thinking sessions, Morrissey's voice coming out from my stereo was one of the things that actually got me through at least those two years of painful teenagedom without seriously fucking myself up.

I wonder how many other people who have a love for The Smiths have a similar kind of teenage tale to tell? The Smiths have always taken flack from the more superficial critics; it has been said that they promoted self-obsession, pretension and introspection. But The Smiths were never a refuge for the weak and navel-gazing. They showed strength and dignity. Yes, they attracted the shy, the geeky, the ones confused about their gender or sexuality. The clever ones who saw too much. But more than anything, they just stood up for what was human.

Morrissey was like the tall boy with the big feet who stood between you and the class bully, the one who wanted to smash your face in because he thought you were a wimpy weirdo just because you couldn't play football or you never got off with anyone at the school disco. The Smiths were for those who were sick and tired of hearing corporate shite on Radio 1, who didn't want anymore shoulder pads and perms, who needed a light to shine out in those dark, dour days of Thatcher's Britain.

November Spawned A Mozzer, was an entire evening dedicated to Morrissey and The Smiths, a night where die-hard fans could indulge their somewhat strange devotion to him and his music. This night was strictly for fans only. The ceiling was laced with Morrissey bunting, the walls covered in images of his naked torso; a TV played interviews with him, and a massive screen above the dance floor showed him in concert. Gladioli were handed out. There was even a 'best Quiff' Competition, with a John Betjamen book as prize.

To outsiders, it would have simply looked like madness. But far from being some kind of embarrassingly cringey tribute night, it was very touching. Almost everyone sang along, whether unabashed with their friends on the dance floor, or quietly to themselves, pints in hands, or in some corner. These people, undoubtedly having spent night after night in solitary communion with this music, were suddenly together. There aren't many opportunities in life to sing along with a crowd of people, the words "I am human and I need to be loved, just like everybody else does .."

When they played "I Know It's Over", I remembered what that song meant to me when I was 13. I'm not 13 anymore, but standing there, it reminded me how I'm not an altogether different creature from the one I was back then. And I'm glad for that.

tuesday

She's gone! Five weeks to America and who's knows all that shall come of it. The dearest, sweetest Jo in all of England has embarked on the biggest journey of her life in years, and is now, I imagine, gracing the folk of Seattle with her loveliness as I write.

Let it be known, she shall be sorely missed! And I expect photos of pancake stacks and gas stations and those long, long roads ..

I accompanied the girl to the airport, as she accompanied me, a year or so ago, when I flew to New York, and I saw her off at the Departure Gate before scuttling off for a cry outside the pyjama rail of the La Senza underwear shop. How funny to be the one saying goodbye, waving off, before getting the little train back to Brighton, back to my own life, to my own life which is itself changing, though I can't always see it..

A wonderful thing about someone close to you following their dreams and taking that chance is how it rubs off on you. For me at the moment, my way is not of long flights and travelling overseas alone towards some destiny, but it is of admitting my dreams and following them, even in the knowledge, the painful knowledge, that they might well lead only into dust and vapour. And it is admitting that I can't do it alone, that I need people and I need love. Solitude has been necessary these last four years, but now it is time to dive back in; ok, perhaps still with armbands on, but diving in nevertheless. The waters are cold and deep, but so alive; kicking my legs through the milky blackness.

wednesday

Chocolate pie with whipped cream. Oh my sweet Lord, it is all I can think about today. As soon as a free moment enters my day, there it is, its gooey, chocolatey, whiteness gleaming back at me in full, sensual, naked glory.

You may think I'm dramatising my craving a little for effect. I wish. I've been stuck at my computer all day, writing advertorials and restaurant reviews, the kind that involves lots of ringing people up and no actual eating of any restaurant food. What kind of job is that? It sucks. And though I am a) Taurean, and thus astrologically pre-disposed towards all puddings that are-naughty and involve chocolate, and b) prone to transfering my deep needs for love/sex/mothering onto any foodstuff with the word 'indulgent', 'creamy', or '70% cocoa' on the label, I can safely say that today's longing is strictly medical .

Having just started my period today, my hormones are kicking in to provide me with not only a feeling like I am mainlining valium into my brain,(not that helpful when in the midst of working to a deadline) but also that if I do not eat chocolate pie, and if it is not laden with the largest dollop of thick whipped cream that is possible to spoon on in one go, I will not be responsible for my actions. Everytime I shut my eyes, the sweet squishy image there reminds me that this is no idle threat.

It is now 4.19. I note that my first cravings began at 1.40pm. I feel the way one does when one first falls in love with someone who you know is just plain bad for you, but your rational mind is powerless to intervene. That damn Kylie Minogue song keeps returning to me, "I just can't get you out of my head.. you're all that I ever think about ..". Sure. Every night, every day, just to be there in your arms .. oh dear.

Surely it is not right for a pudding to hold such power over me? To tantalise me, its pale-brown filling wobbling ever-so-slightly? Its crust, crumbling under the firm touch of my finger. The swell of cream, burgeoning over the side of the plate like wild sea foam crashing against hard rock. It is not right, I tell you.

The truth is, today, I am a victim of my female biology.

Now bring me pie. Please!!

Pea soup for the soul

In my new and recent bid for healthy living, I have not only purchased a video, The Crunch - The Latest, Most Effective Way To Flatten Your Stomach for 59p from Barnardos, and almost severed both my knee joints and done temporary damage to my nether regions by cycling at top speed just about everywhere on my new friend, Jeopardy, but I have also been making healthy, vitamin packed soup. In fact, the same soup, for the whole of the last week. Pea soup has, as all things are wont to do with me, become a bit of an obsession.

Up until last week I didn't actually own a fridge with a working freezer compartment, instead having one with the equivalent of Antarctica at the top. Having waited one year (yes, that's ONE YEAR) to get my lovely companions at my letting agency to supply me with a new one, finally I arrived home one day to find another fridge plonked unceremoniously in my hallway. Unfortunately upon perusal I discovered that (oh, why was I not surprised by this) the new fridge was broken in exactly the same place as the old one, ie, the freezer door had bust. Twats. However, thanks to Bob's handywork, some superglue and a hacksaw, a new freezer door was finally installed, allowing me untold new pleasures, such as the buying and storing of frozen peas.

One happy byproduct of making pea soup is that I get to indulge my little pecadillo of munching on handfuls of peas straight from the freezer as I go about my business. I remember, growing up, that my sisters and I were all big fans of frozen peas, helping ourselves to huge bowlfuls of them from the freezer, eating them like sweets. In fact, my sisters and I developed several unusual eating habits in our youth, such as munching raw Supernoodles straight from the packet and eating a variety of baby foods from glass jars. However, the chief favourite in our house was Farley's Rusks, sometimes whole, sometimes mashed. Ahh, heaven. I only grew out of eating baby food in my twenties, at about the same time I stopped blagging half-fare tickets on train journeys.

My diet was relatively restrained in my youth compared with my sister, who, apart from the raw noodles and baby food, seemed to exist almost entirely on a diet of nail varnish, Wagon Wheels and plastic forks, which she devoured with relish. No plastic cutlery was safe in her clutches, and my mother regularly complained of my sister eating up the last of her best shade of Rimmel.

Anyhow, his latest batch of soup is mighty fine. Nutritious, thick and hearty, and an amazing colour, I'm in pea heaven.

Other news - well, apart from the fact that Charlie is STILL in the Big Brother house, despite the fact that she has shown herself to be The Spawn of The Devil, so foul-mouthed and manipulative she is, and that Liam has been wearing a gimp outfit in the BB house all day as part of one of their tasks, I've been having another unsuccessful trawl of poetry sites on the Web in the hope of finding poetry I can relate to and respect. There seems, however, to be an overload of male 'poets' who seem to think that writing about shagging in lifts and going down on hairy women makes them somehow the enfant terribles of the poetry circuit. No one seems to have told these boys that simply obsessing about what one does, or would like to do, with ones penis does not make one Charles Bukowski.

Ok, I'd better go, my book is calling and my arms are sore.

Saturday

The fucking rain does not stop raining and the fucking streets do not stop streaming with all this dirty water. It's British Summertime and the umbrellas are out, I'm sitting inside my flat with a hangover, with a comedown. Saw a couple of unmemorable folky/indiey musical acts last night in the most uncomely surroundings, improved only by black and white wall paintings that depicted a blind man chasing another faceless man in a top hat. I drank pear cider, brandy and tequila, talked Big Brother and wobbled home on my bike in the early hours. It's forecast storms for 40 days and nights or something like that, and we may well be in Noah's Ark by the end of the month if we go on this rate, or in some other equally technicoloured Biblical disaster epic.

So what's new pussycat? I'm grumpy. Have written at least five beginnings of songs, none of which have proceeded past that point before I've given up. I've considered doing many things, done none, lay down, got up again, lay down, got up and trawled YouTube, felt depressed because I'm a girl, not a boy, because I'm unknown, not famous and because people say I'm powerful and I feel weak. I thought about how come female singer/songwriters with beautiful voices and pretty lyrics about the confusions of being a sensitive woman full of longings make me want to gag, and I tried to write a song about it but didn't get past the fourth line. Hoped to God that at least if all else fails and ruins in my life, I shall at least not end up singing songs like that.

I lay on my bed this afternoon, looked back at my life and saw nothing of value, nothing at all. For a few minutes I regretted all of it, saw nothing in the future because it felt like all that I am is nothing compared to all that I'm not. Oh that terrible place, the one we all strive so hard to stay out of falling, where there is only blackness coming in.

I feel better for it though - for the descent, for that sacred act of despair. I actually feel quite cheerful now. I can see the lovely joke of it all again and feel plugged into a bright source of electricity. When I love how messed up it is, life becomes a shining, brilliant thing. Still keeping up a grumpy front but am not really, I've got a cup of tea in my hand and am happy to remember such things in life as cake, penguins and disability carts, and that songs such as this exist, and that they always, always, make me smile.

tuesday

These days are dark days, or perhaps light days with the curtains half-open, semi-shut. These days I am leaping from a tower into blackness, or I am rolled up in bed, clutching sheets and blankets.

I'm not sure where I begin or where this story is going, my life's ebbing away and only just beginning. I'm on the right road, but quite lost. I have achieved, and the future spreads out in front of me like an empty plain. I fear I'm a failure.

These words bluster what I want to say. Focusless at the moment and yet driven, I'm almost crazily heading towards some destination. I want to pack up my flat, get the hell out of here. I want to go mad at some festival. I want to walk a dog in the moonlight, by the River Adur. In short, I'm confused.

I get these spells from time to time, in fact, they can stretch on for months. The only real remedy perhaps is to get out of the flat, go walking, do something, anything, to stop the ceaseless mind-chatter, the compulsions, the laziness, the swirling head that takes over.

I feel like I have been dropped from a great height and have landed, splat, on a vacated hillside. All is possibility, and therefore, all is frightening. Too much possibility scares me, but stasis and stagnant boggy fields, empty of flowers, scare me more. I'm running scared, scared of my life, of what I might become if I put my mind to it, of what I might fail to become, if I don't.

I'm reading a book on Harry Crosby, who founded the Black Sun Press and who was found shot dead with his lover in a hotel room in New York in 1929. When they found his body, he wore a black flower in his lapel and his toenails were painted bright red.

I am very afraid of a character like Harry Crosby, and of course, fascinated. I find it hard to conceive of a life without drama and gunshots, excess and vision. But in truth, either my skin and my bones are thinning or I am simply becoming more aware of how sensitive I am to life's madnesses. I can't abide betrayal anymore, I can't abide mind-expanding drugs, or even hangovers, I can't do illicit sex, or even perversion and it feels as though I am turning into a moralist, a radical feminist and an evangelist. Am I simply too long lived to not see through all this junk, or am I getting frailer? Who knows, but though I feel stronger in ways I never thought I was, I also feel more delicate than ever, a china cup who wants warm liquid inside her, without the cracks, without being dropped to the floor. I want no more smashing.

Oh, this is a strange post. There is so much to tell about the facts and figures of my life, but for some reason, here, I want to keep it secret. Change is afoot, but in which direction, God only knows.

Wednesday

I cycled into town today, mist billowing towards me. I have had a complicated relationship with my bicycle, Jeopardy. It has been fraught, to say the least. I am feeling now, however, that we are finally beginning to understand each other, rather than simply tolerating each other, or at worst, forming what can only be described as a dysfunctional bond, based on mutual dislike and mistrust. I have to admit, I haven't been very caring towards her.

These foggy days, I love them even more than those ones which are pumped with sunshine and crisp blue skies. Today, the sea looked like snow. The West Pier was even more spectral than usual, rising up out of the frosty waves like a black demon. On days like this, it is possible for me to believe that I could be living in any age, the world stilled into a black and white photograph, all modernity vanished.

On days like this, it makes me cry to think about leaving Brighton.

News

I finally have a Myspace! In fact, I now have two, one for my songs and my band, which I have in fact named after this very weblog, and one for my poetry. So do check them out!

www.myspace.com/thisbeautifulhunger
www.myspace.com/clarefdavies

Sunday Morning

First of all, apologies to all who are still reading my blog for the ridiculously long time since I last posted. I've been caught up in other things, mainly making music. I seem to find it hard to keep up both music and writing equally, so either one or the other tends to suffer.

I'm just back from Mary Magdelen's church. It's an eccentric church, so it doesn't surprise me that I was drawn, via various links, to that one. The priest isn't exactly run of the mill, and the congregation - well, they're a motley crue of oddballs, eccentrics, underprivileged young people and addicts.

I rarely leave church without having shed at least a few tears. It's powerful on many levels, and some of those levels are in fact a strong sense of alienation from some of what Catholicism teaches and preaches. This, combined with quite an overwhelming sense of devotion and my heart feeling moved in ways it hasn't before, makes it potent and unsettling.

I was talking to a Buddhist friend last night about Catholicism, and he was talking about his views on the Christian God. In his mind, God is a powerful force, but one which is essentially still an other power, and therefore ultimately limited. On the other hand, in Buddhism, sunyata or emptiness, the Buddhist vision of reality, transcends all dualistic notions of self and other. Therefore, the notion of a God being somehow outside of ourselves, or something/someone to worship no longer makes sense within this Buddhist framework, because there is nothing to worship and no one to 'do' the worshipping. I guess that follows then that there is no sin, no sinner, no saviour, no heaven or hell.

However, I'm not so sure about this. To be honest, I don't think I've yet met a single person who seems to have transcended this 'dualistic' state of mind. And I think inevitably, even within Buddhist thinking, non-duality, like everything else becomes a concept, one we can talk about, even debate or argue over. It can become as clear in our minds as God can be to a Christian. Buddhists have their beliefs just as Christians have their beliefs, noble beliefs, I think, by which they can structure their lives, but I personally feel it is very hard to talk about such subtleties and mysteries of reality at all, and once I get into the realms of what my friend was talking about, I'm not entirely sure how relevant it is to me at this point in my life, or how easy it is to work out.

The sense I have during Holy communion, despite not even being able to take it myself, is of a power or spirit or divinity coming through. And yes, these terms, spirit or divinity and so on are limited in a way by their language of 'otherness'. But my personal experience of what one might call God has felt profound and mysterious, in some respects even more so than any experiences I've had through meditation. I've felt such a powerful element of surrender in Catholic Mass, and of something else stepping in which does not enter through one's own will or effort, but simply by being open to it. A force of love entering oneself, and purifying all that it comes into contact with.

I have said to some of my Catholic friends that my interest and intrigue in Catholicism has nothing to do with wanting to feel like I belong or needing a sense of community with others. I've already got that in my life in so many ways. I'm not looking to have a conversion, I've already had that when I first discovered Buddhism over twenty years ago. Some Catholics have said to me that when they came to Catholicism it was a coming home, and that they find supreme comfort in it. For me, I've felt like the last thing I want from Catholicism or any other spiritual path is to 'come home'. I'm more and more wandering away from 'home', away from the places I thought were the answer, because as soon as I feel like I've arrived, like I'm home, I get comfortable and want to put my feet up and stop searching. Once I think I know the answer, generally, I'm in danger of becoming a bit blinded. However, as I kneeled in church today on that hard wooden block, and Fr Ray lifted the bread high into the air and muttered, I realised that I'm not sure that this is totally true.

When Mum had this last stroke which brought her near death and has kept her in a perpetual near death state for the last year, nothing really could touch the vastness of that situation. And I wanted Buddhism to be the thing that came along and took hold of my grief and gave me a sense of something that could meet this huge event. And I guess, in some ways it did. But really, it was, by various turns of events, Catholicism that offered itself up and somehow met that need in me for something that could hold what was happening to my Mum, to my family and to me. It wasn't dwelling on sunyata that did it, it was experiencing God in some funny convent chapel with a load of eccentric nuns, next door to the house I grew up in. It was in the feeling that came upon me when I left church one evening and was walking down my street, that I was truly loved, and that this love was greater than anything I've been able to imagine before, which made me almost fall to the ground. And when I go up to the priest and receive a blessing, when I pray, when I witness communion, I have to say, yes, I do feel comfort, a deep comfort, a comfort I never thought I needed. And it does help me to be able to get on my knees and just pray for my Mum and for my family, for myself in a sense, because I realised in Mass today - my family and I need all the help we can get at the moment. It does bring me some consolation, and I don't think that is a bad thing. In fact, I think consolation is a beautiful thing.

The situation with Mum is so heart-breaking on some level, it doesn't really help me ultimately to think in terms of karma, or the four noble truths, or even impermanence. To an extent it does, but the truth is, on some level I'm starting to more deeply understand what life is, what death is, and it's a fucking hard one to face, but I'm facing it. Impermanence is there at every turn. What I really need is love, a love that knows no limits, that seeps into every crack in every broken heart and eases the pain. I want my Mum to be prayed for, given consolation, a balm upon her weary forehead, and I want holiness to surround her. At the moment, going to Mass puts me in contact with a much needed sense of benevolence.

I don't see God as outside or within. I don't know if it's both or neither. It is a mystery I cannot explain. I'm happy for now to leave it like that. This mystery they call the Holy trinity, the body and the blood, crucifixion and resurrection, the wounding and the healing, this brings me comfort at a time when I thought comfort was gone forever, and that it was a luxury or privilege for those who haven't yet had to contend with the reality of death.

Dans Le Noir

A couple of nights ago I dreamt that I was watching a white bunny rabbit in the garden from my old back window, and it turned into the Virgin Mary before my eyes, filling with rainbow light. She then started glowing a deep red, which emanated out towards the trees as she hovered above the flower beds.

Last night I dreamt that someone gave me a load of old Mr Men books, and I was looking through them and the only one I recognised was Mr Forgetful, and I was thinking "but I've already got Mr Forgetful, should I tell them this or keep it to myself?" Then I was at sea, with several faceless companions, all in dinghies, waiting for the best wave to take us off over the horizon into oblivion.

Somehow, all these dreams seem to aptly sum up my weekend, from which my senses haven't quite recovered. My psyche is still re-arranging itself back into something vaguely recognisable to me.

Friday was my birthday, a day I have loathed all my life. When I was thirteen, I decided that birthdays, at least for me, were unlucky - something always went terribly wrong on them. One year my Grandma died, the next, my dog got run over. Indeed, it was on that same thirteenth bithday that my sister went missing, my mother assumed a child-like position and I spent my passage into teenagehood as the only member of my family coherent enough to explain my sister's disappearence and details to the local policeman. When he finally asked me how old I was and I explained "I'm thirteen today!", I promptly burst into tears at the horrid injustice of my birthday always seeming to be the most fucked up day of the year. Years later, I discovered that same policeman, whose presence I felt a reassuring comfort from since he seemed the only person with any degree of sanity in our house that evening, had gone to prison for murdering his wife by driving her off the edge of Tinkersadle, a steep, winding dangerous road that goes up to our village, and trying to make it look like an accident. So much for my feeble sense of security.

So yes, I decided at that point that not only were birthdays crap, they were in fact unlucky. They were portents of doom. The only thing good about them at that age was that they meant I was getting older, and nearer to leaving school and home. Unfortunately, this plus point only lasted until somewhere in my twenties, where suddenly the reverse began to happen, each year becoming further evidence of some inevitable and cruel decline into frustration and regret.

ANYWAY. Ahem. This year I decided I wouldn't add to my stress by planning a big birthday event on the actual day of my birthday, instead, dragging it out for an entire weekend, and playing my first gig in the midst of it all. Mmm. The morning was spent with my usual neurotic "Oh God, I'm 30/1/2/3/4 .." wailings, but they quickly subsided once I arrived in London with Bob, had a strong coffee with my sisters, then disappeared of to Farringdon for a meal with a difference.

Now, only Bob would think to take me out for a meal in a restaurant like Dans Le Noir, and only I would find it the perfect, romantic birthday gift. Somehow it suited our slightly strange natures perfectly. Basically, as it's name suggests, Dans Le Noir is a restaurant which is completely, and I mean completely, in the dark. No candles, no little lights in the distance, it is pitch black. We were introduced in the lobby to our partially sighted French waiter, Cyril (pronounced See-reel), who instructed "the lay-dee of Ro-bear" to place her hand upon his right shoulder, which I dutifully did, and then called the following four women and five men to do the same, until we formed a nervous line, as though we were about to do some surreal conga through the lobby. He then began to move off, taking me and the rest of the befuddled chain with him through dark doors into decreasing light, until we finally reached the door of the room where we would be eating. At this point a woman screamed and shouted "I can't do it! Let me out!" and left. Then, like intrepid explorers we continued our adventure, and I was led to a table, and Cyril placed my hands on the back of a chair and said "E-yere ees youwr siet".

Ten of us to a table, we were handed water, wine, bottles of coke and lemonade, and course after course of perfectly cooked food by our flawless, partially-sighted host. The exact nature of the menu we were not told, but had to guess. Fumbling to pour the water into glasses was interesting. Trying to chase smoked salmon around my plate even more so. A little bit of footsie under the table was the most interesting. I was praying it was Bob's foot I was messing with. And then, like the voice of an angel, Cyril would appear, and softly say in my ear "'E-yer ees your men couwse" whilst I held out my hands hopefully into the blackness. Table manners weren't a problem at this meal. I gave up with the knife and fork halfway through my main after scooping up ten forkfuls of nothing and began using my fingers.

Finally, when we were finished, Cyril Bob and I, hand to shoulder, back out into the lobby. The light was dazzling. I just kept saying "Wow!". After finding out what our menu had in fact consisted of and realising that our guesses were pretty accurate (after all, panna cotta is just glorified blancmange isn't it?), we went upstairs to the swanky bar to recover, and to sip at a Black Martini in a funny glass.

After this brilliant evening, Saturday had a lot to live up to. After final rehearsals and our first ever sound-check ("erm, where do I plug the keyboard in?") guests piled into the Angel House, and by 8.30, the room was filled. It's funny, the process of nerves. I'd say that in some form or other I think Ive been nervous about this gig since I heard I was playing it three weeks ago. That slight sense of sickness in my gut never quite left me. However, with 15 minutes to go, all nerves simply left, and stayed away for the entire performance.

There is something about getting what you want in life which is so extraordinary, it makes me realise why so much of the time we are doomed to the opposite, to that feeling of things not quite hitting the mark, leaving a part of us empty, and still longing for fulfillment. In fact, I think the preciousness and beauty of getting what we want partly arises from all those times when we didn't. On Saturday evening I felt glad for all the days and nights I've spent poring over my keyboard, frustrated and lonely, banging out harmonies, trying, trying to get that perfect line realised, to manifest that ending, make the picture complete. For how wretched I felt at times. I felt glad for those childhood dreams which told me this is what I was meant for, and equally for all those years I refused to let myself believe them. I even felt glad for all the rotten things that have happened in my life, for the broken dreams, the lost belief, the inescapable heart-ache. On Saturday night they all went into the songs, they made themselves heard in the melodies, and I sang out all that I had lost, and refound it in a room full of people, with a bright light on me, feeling more myself than ever.

We can't escape that secret feeling if we haven't given it our best shot, if we haven't pushed ourselves beyond the limits of our fears, if we have stayed safe and warm and dulled in life's soporific dream-time. If we didn't step out into the wilderness and search for water. If we didn't take those reins and ride.

Sunday, followed a messy and curious post-gig party, where everyone I know who attended it, including myself, decided to drink whatever came their way, whether it came in glass or bottle, cafetiere or saucepan, or from the fingers of passing party goers. And so, when Sunday morning arrived, following only two and a half hours sleep, I lay like a broken doll in my bed, at once happy for the success of the gig, at the same time, a physical wreck. How I managed to go from feeling like a crawling insect on the toe of life to shopping for potatoes in Tesco for the upcoming birthday tea party I was hostessing on the beach that afternoon I do not know. God or the Devil must have been with me. Bob and I struggled to the beach at four o clock with birdcages, French Fancies, Battenburg and an inflatable parrot, to weather which would not have looked out of place on the set for Titanic. Wind howled and the waves rose like trees from the blustery sea as I lay out the pretty pink spread, feeling like the biggest freak that walked the earth. No one would come. I would be sat here on my own with my swiss roll like some weird old freaky bag lady. I was becoming accustomed to this idea when Jo arrived, and then Olivia, and then the people rolled up one after the other, virtually all with horrific hangovers, bearing cards and gifts and sausages for the fire, until there must have been twenty of us, freezing our little bums off, chatting into the wind, enjoying every minute of it.

Yesterday, Bank Holiday Monday, I ate chocolate fairy cakes for breakfast with scary purple icing and spidery red hearts. Then Bob and I drove to Seaford cliffs and I slept in the back of the car on the seafront while the rain hammered down. The sound of rain on a metal roof is so comforting. Then the rain stopped and we climbed to the cliff top, held each other tightly so that neither of us blew off, and watched the kittywakes rise and fall in the wind like paper planes, their wings so fragile, their black legs jutting out beneath them. They sailed through the air, frail beings in a vacuum of light, feathers against the sky, all lost, all swirling, heading outwards, flying home, seeking out the place where the current takes them up high, their singing lost into chalk and rock.

GIg!

At last, my first gig! If you're around Brighton this Saturday night, do come along. As well as the wondrous This Beautiful Hunger performing (myself, Laurence and Jo), Charleyville are headlining and it's also the Brighton premiere of Tony Gammidge's film The Baba Yaga Chronicles. It's going to be good...