Where have all the libertines Gone..?

There are times, like tonight, when I do not smile upon my physical form, I do not take comfort from my shape and my softness. It took me a good ten years of being on this planet before I could even get my head around being a girl at all, and even then it felt like a strange act to put on in so many ways.

And yet, I remember staring at myself in a mirror whilst on summer holiday one year, at my cropped hair, my thick boy's shirt, my gangly shoes. And I took a straw hat from a stand and put it on my head, cocked it to one side and narrowed my eyes the way I had seen those stars of American Seventies films do when they were being meaningful and sexy. I wanted to look like a film star, I wanted to pout and to seduce the way they did, and from that time on, I would sit in the back of our family car whilst my Mum stared ahead driving, looking out of the car window in a dreamy, deep, dramatic way, my eyes again narrowing in film star pose, as I imagined a secret camera filming me rolling through the streets of Hawarden, up Bennett's Lane, under the bridge where I would hold my breath for good luck, past the nuns playing their recorders in the Convent garden and up our long drive that led to home. In those moments I was all of Charlie's Angels. I was Daisy Duke. I was Wonder Woman.

But I never could imagine becoming Wonder Woman in reality, with her dynamic basque and erotic hotpants, her large, powerful breasts, her lassoo. Instead, I felt more inherently like I was Dangermouse. Or perhaps a kind of hybrid of Carry On characters (my favourite films growing up)- a bit of Charles Hawtrey crossed with Hattie Jacques, a liberal dose of Kenneth Williams morphing into the cackle of Sid james. So on the inside I felt more like these, but at the same time desperately wanted to be Wonder Woman, or better, one of those dancers in the Kenny Everett Show, Hot Gossip, who wore very little, and whom my mother would try and ban us from watching whenever the programme came on.

Maybe I still felt more like Dangermouse when I finally lost my virginity at sixteen. I would wear basques and frilly black knickers and stockings, because that was what I thought was meant to be sexy, what my boyfriend thought was meant to be sexy. But I always felt too flat chested, too girlish to pull off seduction, not yet in either my body or my sexual power to get anywhere close to understanding what all this meant. And it took me years to realise that what was meant to be sexy would never be sexy as long as it stayed in the realm of what was 'the done thing'. 'The done thing', largely, in my experience of the world of sex throughout my teens and early twenties (despite trying to pass itself off as wildness and experimentaton), seemed largely to consist of disembodied people (myself included), committing disembodied acts with each other, being shown disembodied sexuality in film and magazines (meant to be a turn on), whilst living in a largely disembodied bigger sexual culture.

And of course, in a culture like this, in a mind set like this, nothing is really sexy. And I thought it was me, that there was somehing wrong with me. Or with my partner perhaps. But I realise now that it was nothing more than a symptom of being young and inexperienced in a culture where we read Page Three with our cuppa, where pornography = the death of the Imagination on all levels, and women are brought up to believe that lacy thongs from Knickerbox are what makes her a desirable woman.

I no longer feel like Dangermouse. Though in fact, I wouldn't be too disturbed if I found myself feeling like that in a moment of arousal, who knows, it could be quite sexy. But I do find sex as it is presented in our culture, possibly one of it's most tedious and banal shortcomings. Sexual consumption and artifice seem to be what is peddled daily by our media and sex industry. Perversion and kinkiness yawn at us from every street corner (and that's just the billboards). Jesus, hasn't anyone cottoned on yet that the breaking of sexual taboos has become just the latest form of conformity? That every man, woman, transgendered person and their dog has probably done fetishism in some form, no matter how slight, and it doesn't need to be rammed down our throats (excuse the turn of phrase) at every opportunity in order to sell a new perfume, promote the latest facile pop act, sell a few more million newsapers that aren't, in reality, fit for us to wipe our bums on.

I digress. I want a new sexual thrill. An extremity no one has ever dared to peek inside before. And I'm not talking nailing my nipples to a wooden post, or hanging by my toenails from the chest of Pamela Anderson. Jesus, my life is filled enough of that stuff anyway in the real world, never mind in a fantasy one (metaphorically speaking, of course). No, this thrill would come from the society around me. Just give me something pulsing with aliveness, something articulate and meaningful and born of the stuff that life, growth, decay and death are made of. Just spare me the alienation and manipulation and exploitation, the dead dog that tries to pass itself off as sexual consciousness in our society. Then I might just get a thrill, I might just feel even a flicker of interest in what our culture wants me to get turned on about. And this is not some feminist plea, god save me from that. It is simply a desperate, fed up call, away from the superficiality and crippling blandness of mass sexual consumerism, towards life force, imagination and, dare I say it, soul. Whether that soul is as clear as the sun up in the bluest of skies, or whether it is a blackened, twisted thing of many contours and many lonely lanes. Whether it is made of perspex or rubber or tin. Whether it is a violence of sound, or makes the tiniest whisper in the morning. Perversion and fetishism was always a means of contacting the deeper, darker, powerful forces of life and death, of subverting tired norms. It saddens me that now it just seems like any other episode of Hollyoaks.

I can fill a bra and pair of stockings these days. I might even look pretty good in those gold hotpants. But that doesn't really do it much for me tonight. Tonight I feel more like an 18th century boy, hat in hand, my shirt open to my belly button, the material of my trousers caressing my slim hips, my toes pale and dirty. And I'm looking for a house where I can take myself and my longings, and it's not in this country, it's not in this century and it's not here.


N.B. any cheap, stupid or obscene comments made on this post will be immediately deleted unless of course they are made by my boyfriend.

Pogli

When I was in Darjeeling eight years ago, I stayed with a woman of 60 years or so who went by the name of Mrs Ongel. She had a penchant for poker and Padmasambhava, with dark eyes that curled up at the edges when she was concentrating on winning a game, and that danced with laughter when she played with her young granddaughter, Tara.

One evening, as my boyfriend and I wound our way through the narrow streets of Darjeeling back to Mrs Ongel's, we came across a strange woman with jet black dishevelled hair and a rather crazed look in her eye who was sweeping the cobbled street with a fervour I had never before seen devoted to such a job.

The next morning at Mrs Ongel's, as she shuffled her cards and offered us tea, we mentioned the woman, commenting on how unusual it was to see a woman doing such a traditionally male job, (it seemed rare for that to happen in Nepal at that time), and so late into the evening. Mrs Ongel just smiled and said "Ah, that is Pogli. That is not how she makes her living, that is just what she does, you know, for the sake of it. Because she is, well, pogli."

I mulled this over.

"Pogli?" I re-iterated.

"Yes," smiled Mrs Ongel, "We call her Pogli because that is what she is, you know, p..o..g..l..i..". As she mouthed the word slowly, she started making hand gestures, pointing her forefinger at the side of her head and circling it rapidly. In the end, we got it: Pogli was someone who, in Mrs Ongel's mind was off the rails, a bit crazy, 'got a screw loose'. Her hands flapped in the air.

I never forgot this, nor did I forget my time at Mrs Ongel's, with her gambling ways and her serious devotion to Tantric practice. For the rest of the trip, and upon my return to England, indeed for all the subsequent time since then, the word pogli, or poglie, as I sometimes spell it (for I have no real idea of how it is spelt or even if Mrs Ongel's explanation of the term or indeed my interpretation of her description was correct), has become a significant word in my own personal dictionary, a mainstay of my communication, somehow filtering into my language and descriptions.

And so I have, for my own purposes, adapted this word to describe a state of being that I have never before had words for, and desperately wanted a term to describe: that is, something or somebody: it could be a moment, a behaviour or an action, it could be a way of thinking, it could be a place, or even an object, that is inherently, indefatigably, eccentric, odd, unusual, silly, strange or not able to fit into conventional society or experience. And, to put my slant on it further, that, in its eccentricity, is undeniably charming, endearing and life-affirming. To me, that is pogli. And so I have incorporated and re-framed this word, frankly, because I see and experience so much in this world and life that is frankly, pogli beyond belief, and that otherwise,I have no language for.

In fact, in my own purloining of this word, I would not only put the black haired obsessive compulsive street sweeper of Darjeeling into this bracket, but also Mrs Ongel (her name can be translated as Mrs Angel for heaven's sake), and no doubt myself at the time, working my way, as I was, through some of the holiest places on the planet, attempting to track down the elusive Dzogchen master Chatral Sangye Dorje, sitting in caves waiting for an emanation of Guru Rinpoche to appear, attempting to practise shooting my consciousness out through the top of my head with about 500 other Tibetan monks and lay people on retreat, throwing up on a regular basis and reading too much William Blake. In fact, I would go as far as to say, that, though all countries undoubtedly have their aspects of pogliness, if pogli is a throne at which the powers of the strange and wonderful and occasionally bananas sit, India must surely be its queen.

So there we have it, the power of the pogli.

So I explain this so as to be able to say to you: yesterday was a pogli day. I first realised it was going to be pogli when I woke up in the morning and remembered my dream. In it, I was living alone in a tumble down version of my old family home, the only other memorable item in my house being an old and bent metal framed pair of spectacles which belonged to Karl Marx. They hung inconspicously and somewhat sadly on my lounge wall. And somewhere, in a distant room, the ghostly image of Marx's grandson floated above the carpet, himself now sixty, with a large belly and paunchy face, having convulsions, as he sweated and and struggled to breathe on a white table. Outside the house, reporters gathered, and I discovered through reading a newspaper that years ago my father had bought a Faberge egg which was now worth 30 million pounds, and it was still somewhere in the house. But I couldn't be bothered to look for it.

So when I drove up the Upper Lewes Road, that morning, and spotted not just one, but four identical pairs of black converse boots suspended mid air from their laces from the middle of the telephone wire, 50 foot above the road, I was starting to feel that the power of the pogli might be with me that day.

We then stopped off at Sainsbury's, for my companion to buy a box of Celyon tea and several packets of hobnob biscuits (the ones with vanilla and chocolate cream in the centre), to which he seems to be firmly addicted (he keeps them in a rather impressive biscuit barrel, and when I noticed he had attached with sellotape a paper sign on the lid asking: what is it you really want?, I asked him if this worked as a deterrent, he replied, " No, I just realised that what I really wanted was biscuits"). Approaching the supermarket, I then noticed that the Welcome sign on the side of the building had been altered by somebody, and now read: hell: we bury ewe.

This significantly cheered me up, as it was, early on a Saturday morning, and I still felt like I should be tucked up in bed dreaming, whether it was of Marx's spectacles or not. I then sat in the car and listened, whilst my companion searched for hobnobs, to a radio programme about the National Lying Festival, held in Cumbria, in which men and women compete for the title of the best fibber in the land. Apparently it all began out of the tales that locals would regale visitors to their region with, and, who, usually upper class, with a naive and patronising view of the 'backward' yokels, would believe every ridiculous story spun them. And so, to poke more fun at their guests, the locals' tales got more and more silly and improbable, as the visitors would shift uncomfortably in their pub seats over an ale, trying to work out, puzzled looks on their faces, who the real stupid one sitting at the table was.

We then drove through the rain to my companion's house to take it in turns to stand for the rest of the day on a wobbly plank that we slid into one large ladder and one small ladder at each end, twenty foot in the air, in an attempt to paint his stairwell three different shades of cream, whilst he took regular flights towards the kitchen to make another cup of tea, and towards the living room to grab his banjo and, break, spontaneously and wonderfully into exhuberant twangs and twiddles of fine banjo music.

Upon returning to my flat on the evening, I was visited by the Bob, and, well, frankly, that requires no explanation as to how or why that might have been somewhat pogli, given that Bob just is pogliness personified, at least in moments that come with delightful frequency (he recently invented a blog called the that bloke's bike's back brake block's broke blog).

I mean, really, the whole world is pogli, we all know that: it just pretends it isn't. And this is a world I want to live in, a world where people hang shoes from telephone wires, and hold Lying Competitions and play the banjo when they are supposed to be doing up their house. Where there is room for women who sweep the streets for its own sake, and, though they might get a little teased for it, are accepted as part of society, and regarded with affection. Where people devote serious time and energy to cataloguing the minutiae of birdsong, and a girl with wonky specs writes for far longer than her arms are happy with, about stuff and nonsense, lost in memories of India and Nepal, and fleeting angels, lost gurus, and tumbledown buildings where men in smocks blow horns making ridiculous sounds, and mantras of devotion are chanted over and over and over again to the spirit of some ragged and beautiful, absurd truth.

Catch-Up

I spent yesterday afternoon in bed with a hot water bottle and my toy dog, nursing a sore and menstrual belly. I took this time to slip in and out of the waking world to the sound of Joanna Newsom's new album Ys, her follow up to The Milk Eyed Mender .

To me, Joanna Newsom's songs transcend time and space, slipping between this world and all those others which spin together in this incredible and mysterious universe we call ours. And her voice is amazing, somehow sounding both direct and a thousand places at the same time, ageing and ageless. At some points she sounds no more than five years old, at others, she is a mature woman with lines creeping upon her face. Sometimes I can hear her at eighty five, others, she is a voice beyond all time, rattling down the centuries. She weaves her melodies through the cracks of existence and takes us with her down deep into the grass with the insects and the dew, humming across the sea bed to the tops of shipwrecks, spinning dark energy from her fingers, hanging from the corners of stars as she shouts entire verses about meteors and wheelbarrows and I am flabbergasted, left with huge tears in my eyes.

I love it when song can do this to me, when I am a balloon filling with vowels and consonants, crescendos and cadences. When it takes me to those worlds I always longed to go to, or that have become some distant memory, buried deep in the back wall of my being, or even that I never knew existed. When I listen to albums such as Ys, I know it can hold me, in anything, in the same way that a mountain or a wide green open field can, and that reminds me of the immense power that potentially lies in music and in words.

I felt similarly when I watched David Attenborough's Planet Earth last Sunday night on television. This is an extraordinary series, I never fail to be dazzled by the cinematography of this programme, as it tracks the natural world in all it's beauty and complexities. On Sunday, it was about jungles, from the tops of the tallest trees to a man who sat 300 hours alone in a hide in order to catch just a few shots of three birds of paradise performing their mating dances. From colugos, strange squirrel-like creatures that glide through the air from tree to tree by flaps of skin which attach, bat-like, from their bodies to their furry arms, to raiding chimpanzees, capturing and killing a rival member of a tribe, passing its bodily parts and head around to be eaten. It travels from the most impressive, beatific sights in nature to the most horrific, from the vastest to the tiniest all over the world. At one point it filmed a clearing in a jungle over the period of one year, but speeding the film up to show it all in a few minutes. It was clear from watching how these plant forms were growing and moving, how intelligent all forms of life are, as they travel and expand to the tune of their own logic and sense of instinctual survival. Seeds and pods burst to bud, to stalk and to vine, find their way across fallen trunks, scaling trees, climbing towards life and light. The plant kingdom is an entire universe in itself, governed by its own laws and logic.

For much of existence in the world, we humans are utterly insignificant save for the harm or good we inflict on them or their habitat. The animals go about life their way, the insects are indifferent to our desires or our dreams, plants and fish travel through their universes as we travel through ours. The toad belches and sings his way through the night, and it is his night, just as the child clutches his blanket and stares wide eyed and white faced at the shadows thrown by the cupboard door, and his world and the frog's world are as real as any I can muster. A flower knows how to court the bees and feed from the forest. The spider always knows the best way for a spider to be.

I wish I had a great mind for science and logic, I would love to study biology and geology, physics and maths. But my brain is as slow as a tortoise up Mount Everest at such things, stubbornly refusing facts and figures into its depths, preferring always the poetry and images that they conjure, the skew-wiff angle, the endless unravelling, the bits that escape definition, the non-rational, intuitive. Give me Derrida, I'll lap him up with a big spoon. Give me quantum physics and I'm there for five hundred years scratching my head to understand just three words, (despite the fact that I don't see a world of difference between quantum physics and deconstruction in the first place). So I'll refrain from saying something deep and meaningful in a factual way about the universe here now, despite feeling like this post needs it right now. Maybe I can leave that to the beloved Bob, who is currently residing in a tiny caravan alone in a wood somewhere in Sussex, probably eating RicePots and working out another law of the universe as I speak, and who blows my mind about such matters on a regular basis.

Well, it's been such a while since I last posted, so I might have known this would end up a long ramble. And I haven't even recounted all that has happened since I've been away. Suffice to say, I've been favouring music over writing for the last few weeks, hence my absence here, and it's been a productive time in that respect. I've recorded five of my songs for a demo with the help of the lovely Tom, who, aswell as being a dear friend, is also a wonderful songwriter and a talented musician. I've also been teaming up with others to collaborate and jam and things feel exciting for me musically at the moment.

Other things I've been up to recently: poetry submissions, being skint, sobbing daily at The Jeremy Kyle Show (move over Pete Doherty, he's my new hero), my acting debut as a grieving pale faced, black dressed sister who turns into a chiwauwa in Tony's new short and very weird (and good) film, previewed at the Duke of York's on Saturday. Eating lots of Turkish Delight and discovering the Choccywoccydoodah cafe (we're talking a piece of cake the size of your head, a cafe equivalent of an opium den), realising at 33 and a size 14, I'm never going to make it as a Supermodel, not cleaning my flat, loving, mourning, feeling romantic, occasionally reading and falling off my bicycle.

That should do for now.

Constanza and The Nun

Ever since watching a programme about it last Friday, I can't stop thinking about Gianlorenzo Bernini and his sculpture The Ecstasy Of St Theresa. I feel haunted. In the most transient moments - sipping a cup of tea, throwing a bag over my shoulder to go out the door, turning over in my bed in the early morning, slicing potatoes on my plate, I see the image of St Theresa's enraptured face, turned upwards, her mouth open, the fine point of an arrow entering her, a spray of golden light behind, her robe in swathes around her like liquid sunshine.

It is almost a cliche now to talk of the greatest art as being created by the most messed up people. And true, there is much powerful art that is, and has, been created by men and women where neither mental illness nor egomania is the driving force. But equally as true, genius springs from what is incomplete, flawed, sordid, neurotic, stupid, disparate and ugly. From the gutters of despair, in the midst of crashing disillusion, loss, sorrow, hatred and violence (I wonder if life itself is only as beautiful as its own despair, only as pure as its worst filth, only as strong as the weakest, most despised runt of the litter).

I think of this when I look at the Ecstasy Of St Theresa, and when I remember Bernini's torrid life story, and his dramatic depiction of this woman, a holy woman, and, in particular, of her physicality, her face and body as the meeting place or conduit for divine revelation and bliss.

I think a woman's body, in all its variations, is to me one of the most beautiful forms there is on this planet. It is one which has been, and still is the site of devotion, adoration, violation, reverence, contempt and horror in our world. Exalted, degraded, ridiculed, feared, controlled, desired in a million different ways, a woman's body is as complex as life itself, as death, as dying, as growth and decay, as desire, wanting and repugnance.

Sitting here now, under my clothes, I can feel the skin of this body that I breathe through, I can sense the blood circulating my veins, hear my heart beating in my ear if I press it to my shoulder. My breasts, my hips and vagina, my neck, legs, skin, hair, eyes, buttocks, feet, my back are all realities in and of themselves, but they're also the vehicle for a thousand different projections, some dazzling, some shimmering, some comforting, some lit up in the crudest red light or beset by howling laughter.

Some of these have been handed down to me through time, some are of my era, some through art, through philosophy, religion, culture, literature. Some are inside my own head, most surround me from the outside, from the voices of men, from the voices of women talking to men, from the voices of women who do not care what men have to say. From my mother, from my father.

Am I ever my own woman, I ask myself, can I ever escape this hall of mirrors, know my body beyond its own symbols?

I think of it split and ripped by giving birth, a cell multiplying inside it, growing into foetus, forming, enlarging, holding the blueprint for its own destiny, forming hands and feet, a nose, a throat. A life being born - my body as toil, violent music playing through a crackling stereo. A child moving through me, pushed out by labour and agony through the birth canal, ripped from my flesh, out into cold open air. The uncut umbilical cord, the bloody placenta.

Inside and through this female body, life is formed and grown and expelled with massive effort and incredible physical, mental and emotional intensity. And this intensity, this force and power is there, whether realised or not, in every single woman as part of her physical being.

To me, this force inside a woman is beautiful, and messy. It is complex and it is also the simplest force in the world. A force not different from that of the uncovered grave, a corpse peeping out at us from under the soil. Or from a puja on the Ganges, in a blazing light of candles. Or the baby floating past, its head, a bloated shrine. Its skin, grey.

And yes, it is The Ecstasy Of St Theresa, hovering in the air. But it is also Bernini, the artist who carved it, a year before its conception, sunk to the floor, a nobody, a nothing, the memory of the failure of his greatest architectural ambition ringing in his ears.

As it is the epilieptic nun, scissoring in divine rapture across the wooden floor, eyes rolling in the back of her head. She is not pretty. She is not even beautiful. Only a coarse woollen robe, two pairs of old hands holding her spindled tattered frame in the sunlight that pours through the stained convent windows, too bright to bear without her palm across her face.

And this same force is also Bernini's illicit lover, Constanza, in marble, the loop of her cotton blouse pulled slightly undone, her eyes like wildfire in a forest at night, or a tiger esaped from the zoo, once leashed and captive, now, more than untamed: out of control, hunting, hunting down.

And it is Bernini's servant with a sword, slashing at Constanza's face in retribution until it is ribbons, the pillow soaked in her blood, the colour of her most beautiful dress, of her lust. She will never again have a face that can be immortalised in sculpture. The Muse becomes damaged goods, fallen from ecstatic grace, imprisoned for fornication, disfigured.

So it is Constanza who pays the greatest price for passion, and after nearly killing his own brother and scarring her face for life, the real perpetrator goes free: Bernini, the great hero of Rome becomes an even greater hero, the great hypocrite, scoundrel, egomaniacal amour, liar, destroys and violates in the name of love all that he once created and revered as beautiful, as divine. This woman who was his Muse, who became marble, who fired one of the greatest sculptors in history's world with a blaze of signifiers. Who torched it all with her own betrayal. Whom he will never want again. Whom he will never again watch sleeping through the night, holding his breath lightly so as not to wake her. Whom he will never long to press her small head into his chest as though she were his own restless child.

And now her face is a map of stars, all traced in blood, her honour a withered flower, her wildfire burnt out beyond all reason. Where is left for the woman to go? At Bernini's command she is again caged, this time in a damp prison cell without light, in rags and humiliation, taught the lesson that all women who play with fire must learn in 17th century civilisation, the image of her passion, her beauty, her womanhood, consigned to a sunless locked vault.

This same man conceived and gave birth to the remarkable, transcendent Ecstasy Of St Theresa, long after the light had left his eye, long after such tragedy and violence, after his own sudden descent into failure and his turning to God. And this same woman, Constanza, also gave birth to it, and is enfolded within the creases of St Theresa's robes, in the openness of her mouth, her half closed eyes, though almost certainly neither she or Bernini will have ever known, will ever know this.

Woman, Muse, sister, daughter, mother, virgin, slut, truth, beauty, warfare, corruption, fertility, deceit, the earth, the stars, the moon, the fields, the tether, the breaking of all mundane bonds, the higher, the lower, animal, angel, divinity, a flower, a rose, the scent of death...these words and images haunt me, as the Ecstasy Of St Theresa haunts me, as Constanza and the nun haunt me, as a woman who, like every other woman, is all of these things, who is Constanza and St Theresa, Bernini and the ecstasy itself, and, who, in the middle of the night, or when sipping tea, or throwing a bag over her shoulder to go out of the door, slicing potatoes, is none of them, never has been, and never will.




(top image: 'Eve', Rodin's studio, 'Cain' in background.)

Nunhead Cemetery

Four o' clock. The iron gates close at five and this is not the kind of place you want to spend the night in. My sister and I hurry up the gravel path, then stop suddenly to speak about our mother, taking it in turns to empty our hearts, spill our grief, hear the brown leaves crackle underfoot.

We walk up to the ruined church, without a priest or congregation, without stained glass or sermon. No hymn book. No bride. Only our two sad faces peering up into the light, past the crumbling pale stone, no longer seeking the holiness of perfection, instead loving the ruins of beauty, perfect in themselves.

And so we wander this way, wander that way, speaking in staccato through leafy alley ways, past grey tombs and mighty obelisks, under huge trees heavy with ivy, graves hidden in the bracken, overturned headstones, fallen angels with broken wings sliding, sliding into mud.

We stumble down a narrow dark tunnel of green, and there, in the squelch of mud, we speak our truth of grief and fear and losing, say things rarely spoken of life, except at times like these. Names and dates, old and young, men and women, loved and unloved, all pass through our unlit eyes.

To my right, an ancient tree is being lifted into the air by a cracked headstone which has subsided and moulded itself into its thick roots. My sister turns, spots a marble casket, its lid open some inches, sliding off. The blackness inside stares back at us like an unflinching eye.

We stagger out into daylight and a damp grassy glade filled with the graves of wives and mothers, plastic flowers in psychedelic colours in plastic pots dotting the horizon. And there, around the fresh churned soil of a newly dug grave, jump seven magpies, and a red fox, darting, moving.

I feel like we are intruders in this scene. The grass is all lit up, the trees are bowing. A strange current of silence is in the air. The grass is blowing. For this is their world, their language, of brightness and burial, tender woodland and no return.

The fox looks up and stares at us carefully, turns tail and leaves. The magpies scatter and disappear, and we are left alone once again in the singing daylight with only the trees, the dead and the ravens, and some distant echo.

We leave the gates of the cemetery. Back on the high street, I feel as though I am emerging from a murmured spell, a remarkable tune running through my head.

Next to the Angel Peace Statue at the point where Brighton turns into Hove, there was a huge crane towering over the seafront, looming tall next to Embassy Court. I wondered what it was for, with a metal grill box hanging from it, and I could just about make out the outline of two men. Suddenly a figure of a man jumped from the box and was dangling before my eyes attached by a white rope around his ankle.

I stood and watched as he was lowered back down and another man took his place in the metal grill box, and was lifted back high in the air.

Today the sea front is so alive with such sights, I feel almost airborne. Huge swathes of starlings line every inch of the West Pier, and seagulls float above me, immobile in the wind. Black silhouettes of men in wetsuits bob up and down in the waves around the West Pier, and occasionally, one struggles to his feet on a board momentarily before being swept under the foam and waves once again. In the distance, seven kites curve in the air, dragging more men and perhaps women above and across the surface of the choppy sea.

Even the clouds seem buoyant and adrift, turned orange by the fading sunlight, which casts a sheen over the sea like copper, which mixes with the turquoise of the five o clock sky and makes the rain on the pavement shine.

It feels good to take steps in such a swirl of brightness, like a lifting bird who does not mind if her feathers are ruffled or if it looks like there might be a storm over Shoreham harbour tonight.

Light, light, light. I pass the lawns I have passed so many times, the toes of my shoes turning darker with the wet from underfoot. I have a wind in my soul, clearing through cobwebs and the blackest dust, loosening the stiffened grey cogs of my machinery so that I can move again. I am surfing this moment, my hair, aflap with gulls and a single aeroplane trail. Air is billowing my dress and senses, the wind is sailing me home.

Hi, Here's Me Today

Tell Me I'm Not getting Old

I've just had the bus ride from hell. Teenagers with ghetto blasters under their blazers spewing out what sounded like a mutant hybrid of drum n' bass and the theme tune from TellyTubbies.

If I had my way, with people like this, as well as those with extraordinarily loud ringtones that play the latest Gabba track, or worse, some Rn'B catawalling from some talentless trollop, I would round them all up, stick them on an island, strap all their arms to their sides, and ring them all up at the same time so they'd all be deafened by the simultaneous shrieking of their combined ringtones, which they of course would never ever be able to answer. I would then employ someone to walk amidst them hurling screwed up bits of paper past their ears at various intervals.

I might write to my M.P. with my radical new idea. A fine use of taxpayers money I think.

Eileen Scott

The other week, I got into a fairly intense discussion with my hairdresser about euthanasia and the NHS ( he's quite an intense hairdresser). He's French, and he told me how, when his grandfather was seriously ill recently, he went to visit him in a French hospital, where the standards made British hospitals look frighteningly archaic. The standard of hygiene over there is exceptionally high, as is the nursing care. Apparently there is no such thing as M.R.S.A over there, the hospital superbug that is ravaging our British hospitals.

This story that I read in The Mail, though of course designed to throw a hefty punch at the Labour government, is not unusual. It seems like it could be a somewhat sensational horror story, perhaps a terrible one-off, a tragic mistake.

However, when my mother was in Chester Countess Hospital, at least five women in her ward of eight had contracted M.R.S.A, at least one of whom I know to have died. And they left my Mum in that same infected ward for two days, saying there was nowhere else to put her, and then, in the end, telling us that in fact it was, perversely, the safest place for her to be, because everywhere else they could have moved her to was in fact even more risky, with an even higher count of the superbug.

This story of Eileen Scott does not shock me, the elderly woman in question contracting and finally killed by two strains of a superbug from a non-life threatening complaint for which she was admitted into hospital. Further, she was left in her own excrement for days, regularly not fed because the nurses were too busy, and was only admitted to hospital the second time because of a shoulder fracture which she suffered when two nurses tried to move her.

I remember the shocking treatment my Mum got in the Chester Countess Hospital, how run off their feet the nurses were, how little thought and care was put into my mother's healthcare and comfort. It was diabolical. If we hadn't been going in every day, and then my sister continuing to go in every day after my other sister and I had left, to attend to Mum' basic needs, I shudder to think of the state she would have been left in. It was one of the worst aspects of Mum being so poorly, knowing how badly she was being looked after, how dangerous thew hospital was in terms of M.R.S.A., other superbugs and general misconduct (Mum's pneumonia was probably caused through a nurse accidently knocking out her drip).

And yet, both patients and their families at such a time are rarely in the position or state to be strongly challenging the hospital management, and even if they did, wouldn't be likely to get far through the red tape.

So the Government are launching a campaign of 'Dignity In care' for elderly patients in hospitals and in care homes. If the Government want to implement 'dignity in care', I think perhaps not forcing sick elderly patients to sell their own homes in order to fund time in care homes might be a start.

My mother was lucky, she was deemed part of a process of 'continuing care' from the hospital, and her Nursing Home was funded. But it was only by the skin of our teeth that we got that, and I know how horrendous it would have been to see my mother's home, our home, forced to be sold, and my sister made homeless because of it, all to keep my Mum in a state which the Government and law deems 'living'. Thousands of other elderly patients are forced every day into such a situation.

There is very little respect or understanding of the elderly in our culture today, as I think there is little understanding of the deeper issues around what it means and what it takes to give dignity and choice to the 'living'. Perhaps as well as throwing a bit of money at the NHS and care home funding, the Government would do well to invest in more deep medical, and yes, I'd say spiritual or psychological investigation into what it means to be alive as opposed to just medically 'living', how it feels to be suffering from disease or illness, or to be facing death, how it feels actually being elderly. From what I have seen, the elderly, especially the sick or disabled, are largely patronised or forgotten, pushed away out of sight, often their choices and dignity taken away from them.

Ours is a superficial understanding of what it means to age, and what it means to get sick, what it means to live and what it means to die. As usual it is not just money that continuing health care for old people needs, but education, awareness, and yes, humanity. We will all be there one day, if we make it. Let's hope this new campaign shows some of that, but I won't hold my breath.

Snowdon

I'm just back from a week in North Wales to see my Mum and sister, and to explore my native country.

I began the journey at my Mum's house, staying with my sister. We visited Mum in the special nursing home the next day, the first time I had seen her there since she got transferred there from hospital last week. I thought I'd be ok with it, thought somehow that her being settled somewhere would make it easier to comprehend her situation, but it didn't. I spent the first afternoon with a dazed head that wouldn't quite attach back to my body, as I walked in and out of her bedroom, nauseous and lost.

The second visit the following day was worse somehow, my Mum has a chest infection again, which is never easy to see her in such physical distress. In the end I had to walk outside in the cold Autumn air with my sister, and rail at the whole situation. It all just felt sick, cruel that Mum is being put through all this struggle in the name of living, when it seems to me that her time has come. I have had it said to me that maybe her time hasn't quite come, maybe she is hanging on for something that we cannot comprehend. Maybe. But without two drips feeding and medicating her, she would not be here right now - it is only thanks to the wonders of modern medicine, and a philosophy that says we must have life, no matter the cost, that she hangs on.

It brings a lot up for me, seeing my Mum like this, in terms of issues such as euthanasia and a human being's free will. It seems we cannot even determine our own death anymore, we can't die with dignity or self-determination, instead we must ebb our days out in state funded nursing homes. I know it is a complex subject, but somewhere it just seems wrong, wrong to subject a person to this. I guess it is perhaps only when it happens to someone you love that you realise what an important and painful subject euthanasia is.

I guess death itself is such a complex thing. Determining at what point someone is still deemed alive or capable of life or having any quality of life is a difficult thing to assess. People don't want to be responsible for making that choice of potentially ending lives that could have maybe been lived longer or even saved. But the price is that people are forced to live on, and it seems in this culture, no one realises that that is often worse thing than dying, for the person, for their family.

As I was sitting outside the nursing home with my sister, I became aware just how kind and strong my sister was. She understood all my anger, my fear, my fear, my panic, my loss. But every day that I was unable to come and see Mum because I live so far away in Brighton, she was there, day after day, going to see her, wiping her mouth and brushing her hair, holding her hand and playing her the radio. In the face of all this seemingly impossible and boundless suffering, she told me in her own way, that there were still little acts of love she could give to our Mum, there was still dignity and humanity she could bring to the situation, and that is what she would do, to the end.

After talking with my sister outside on the front bench, I felt renewed courage, and wasn't afraid or angry anymore. No time for that, these moments are too precious. I returned to my mother's room, somewhere more at peace. It is no surprise that we resist the truth, the awful truth of sickness and dying, because it just hurts so much. The pain of having to let go, in a situation over which, ultimately, I have no control, is hard. But when I can stop resisting, stop struggling, somewhere there are moments of peace, things are just as they are, and I am back again, loving, no longer afraid.

Wednesday night, Bob arrives, on a late train, that was late. We all go to meet him at the station. Thursday is the day he and I take the train to Snowdonia to climb the biggest mountain in Wales.

Thursday

12.30pm, at Shotton Station waiting for the train to Llandudno. We have just arrived from the tiny train station at my village, Hawarden.

My mother was raised in Shotton, my grandparents lived here all their lives, as well as my Great uncles and aunties and other relatives. This tiny steelworks town, grey and rainy, is infused with memories.

I used to love coming here as a child. Only a few miles from my Hawarden home, I would come to stay with Grandma at weekends. We would walk up the high street, she and I, and I would stare at my reflection in the shiny Tesco's wall, when I was younger, holding her hand, and when I was older, trailing behind her playing with my hair, pretending I was cool. We would go to the pick n' mix section at Woolworths and I would always get strawberry creams and a small packet of After Eights for 20p. Sometimes she would pop a toffee from the pick n mix into her mouth, giving me a naughty knowing smile as we walked up and down the aisle.

If she didn't have a pan of scouse waiting for us in the pressure cooker when we got in, or braising steak with thick gravy, we would get fish and chips from the chippy at the end of Shotton high street, with Angel Delight for pudding if I was lucky. Apart from my Grandma's jam turnovers, Angel Delight had to be my favourite ever pudding, especially when it was served in her cut glass bowls and kept in the fridge overnight. I could clean my bowl in seconds, and would lick the last streaks of pink mousse off the spoon like it was precious gold dust.

When Fridays at school were still half days, my Mum would drive me and a friend to Shotton, to the 'icey'. There I would watch packets of crisps drop from metal pincers in the crisp machine, slurp my Slush Puppie that turned my lips blue, eat Monster Munch and whirl around the ice rink to the sound of echoing music. I cherished those Friday afternoons, the smell of ice and children and the way it felt when I had finally laced my ice skates up, and was padding across the black rubber flooring to the entrance of the freezing rink.

It's raining. It's been raining on and off for days now. It has gone straight from Summer to the heart of a British Winter in four days, it feels. We are on the train to Blaenau Ffestiniog now, from there, we will catch the steam train and chug our way deeper into the heart of North Wales. A young girl on the train is teasing her mother in Welsh. I don't know what she is saying.

Everything is so cheap here in Wales, so unpretentious. It makes me realise what a blag so much of Brighton is. Yesterday, in Mold, I bought a pair of boots for £3.50, and shoes for a pound! Bone china cups for two pounds each.

My sister and I ate lunch in the kind of café I used to come to a lot when I was a teenager, with my first boyfriend. The entire place was heaving with fat old ladies with chronic health problems sitting on orange plastic chairs, smoking fags at the tables. We got a proper cup of tea, and a 'milky coffee', (instant coffee and hot milk kept warm in a huge pot on top of a stove.) It tasted fantastic. The owners were collecting money for one of their washer uppers, who has recently found out they have cancer. A fat lady in a wheelchair commiserated:

"I was in hospital recently, and they cut the wrong vein. Terrible it was. They don't care, you know, you're just a number to them. But then, as I was lying there, I had to think, when I was younger I was a matron in hospital, and I'd go and see all those men who had lost their arms and legs who were in the Paraplegic Ward, all there, back from the army, and I'd think 'there's always someone worse off than you.' Yes, there's always someone worse off than you. Anyway, I'd better be going, I'm on a hunt for Shredded Wheat, reduced sugar.."

With that, her son span her out of the café in her wheelchair, a somnambulistic look across his face. Somehow I feel like there is a woman like this in every cafe or bar across the Western world, telling such a tale, with a cigarette in her hand, and glasses, dyed hair and a son with an impenetrable sadness in his soul.

Wales, I always feel so much more at home here, and always such an alien.

The land is rising up. From the coast train past Rhyl and Prestatyn and Colwyn Bay, now we are deep into country where the hills are starting to rise, fir trees pointing upwards from their peaks. The grass is verdant, almost luminous in the rain. Slate walls, slate paving, slate rooves under the cloudy slate coloured sky. The Welsh landscape. Moving, primal. It's time to get my raincoat out.

So we did a trial run of the mountain in the rain on Friday, with the intention of just ambling up the Watkin Path to take in waterfalls and woodland and general picturesque beauty. In fact we ended up climbing two thirds of the way up Snowdon, so hard it was to turn back from the ominous magic of those blackening peaks that we gradually edged up towards.

Saturday, we were out of the house by half past eight, on the bus for nine, and at the foot of Snowdon before ten. A quick coffee and a fried egg butty for me and we were on our way.

My legs aren't used to this. This becomes clear after about five minutes. This is going to be no easy climb. But the mountainside increasingly drops away beneath us, and we climb, slowly, steadily, towards the distant cloudy peak. Fellow climbers surround us at every pass, for it is Saturday, and a clear fresh morning.

We climb for a couple of hours, aiming for the point where the path splits into the one to Snowdon and the one up to Crib Gogh, with its dangerously narrow snaking ridge. As we turn the corner of the path, the mountainside gives way to reveal huge green lakes, sunlight streaming over the waters. And we are standing on a giant halo, a crystal strewn mammoth of a rock. In front and behind us our fellow climbers, in all shape and forms, the same as me, pant their way forward, increasingly red faced, exhausted.

As we get higher and higher, I realise why I am doing this. From gentle, inspiring rolling green beauty, the mountain changes to a denser, darker presence which strikes me speechless and unnerved. Immense and watchful, Snowdon is power, and we are merely crawling across its vast body like tiny insect babies. At the same time, its power fills me up, imbibes me with a determination and desire to reach its top.

The further and further up that we go I realise, tears down my face, that this place can hold all the strongest stuff of life, love, loss and suffering, it feels like it can hold the whole of existence itself. And as I walk and I watch the grey and black and brown of Snowdon approaching, I can feel my mother, she is here too, she is in the mountain, she is the mountain, and this climb I am doing is life itself, is death, is ending and beginning, endurance, hope, struggle, surrender. With every step my body comes alive, despite the strain and soreness, despite the strong desire to rest. My legs haven't felt this way since I was a child, probably since I used to go walking in Wepre Woods with Mum. For miles on end we would go, through trees and over brooks, up steep banks and over styals, through mud and ponds and endless fields. And here I am, halfway up a mountain, and I am eleven years old again.

After three and a half, maybe four hours, we finally reach the top ridge and make the final walk to the summit. We are above the clouds now, and it quickly becomes freezing. We pile on extra layers hurriedly, wish we had a flask of tea or something stronger. Below us, an endless stream of climbers makes their own journey up to this place, but I can no longer see them. I can see nothing from the top, only cloud, but it doesn't matter, I'm here, I made it, and somehow, everything makes sense.

Darkness When The First Light Was Born

Homage to the world. Homage to the raging fires that eat it alive. Homage to tomorrow. Homage to the day when none of us will wake up. Homage to ships and planes. Homage to speeding clouds. Homage to the stripe on the zebra's back. Homage to all fallen prey. Homage to the predatory. Homage to light. Homage to the baby's skull. Homage to machinery. Homage to apparatus. Homage to buildings and to streetlights. Homage to my sisters. Homage to bad friends. Homage to mistakes. Homage to silent birds. Homage to snow.

Homage to stereos. Homage to the yellow stain on my mother's nightdress. Homage to kissing. Homage to fingers. Homage to harrowed eyes. Homage to brilliance. Homage to stupidity. Homage to sex. Homage to abstinence. Homage to a blue sky. Homage to apples, unripened fruit. Homage to leprosy of the soul. Homage to worshippers. Homage to the uncontrollably vain. Homage to TV. Homage to the hermitage on a hill. Homage to the ringtones of teenage children. Homage to their fathers.

Homage to the dying. Homage to every tear wept at their bedside. Homage to my mother. Homage to my father and his ebbing mind. Homage to animals and to beasties. Homage to the night. Homage to the frail, the ugly. Homage to superstars. Homage to the brave. Homage to power stations. Homage to sadists. Homage to euthanasia. Homage to the suicidal. Homage to insects. Homage to bats, eaten alive by beetles. Homage to caverns. Homage to church steeples.

Homage to the beatific. Homage to the horrific. Homage to the damaged and needy. Homage to air. Homage to sunlight. Homage to wrinkles. Homage to breath. Homage to limbs. Homage to eyesight. Homage to decay. Homage to the Atlantic Ocean. Homage to gravestones. Homage to small Northern towns. Homage to nonsense. Homage to the written word. Homage to mystics. Homage to tenderness. Homage to the cry of the wind. Homage to bad smells. Homage to the face in the mirror. Homage to you. Homage to me. Homage to waving goodbye. Homage to the end.

Daniel Johnston on 'The Cutting Edge'

fuck, bless.

Hope To God I'm No Greeting Card

I've not done any substantial writing for a long time now, it feels. I've spent most of today and yesterday either at, or at least hovering around my piano keyboard in some tense, exploding state of consciousness. Creating makes me feel like the bird that has just broken out of an egg. Exhilarated, breathing, insane.

I pace the flat for something to distract me from the inevitable truth of those black and white keys. And still I haven't written anything of note for a long time now. The novel, or at least the drive towards a novel, on the 'back burner', that is, crept back into the recesses of my mind. A book of short stories, is reduced to two ideas only: birds' nests and windy places.

The post sinks into the ground. I am more preoccupied with things that make no sense than those that do. I walk to the shop. I walk back.

This thing I call creativity makes me happier than any sex, is as great as the greatest love. And sadder than all sorrows put together. I like myself a lot when I write, because I am not hindered by my own 'thereness', I am free to wander into whichever room of experience I please, untroubled by my own preferences and predelictions. And I sometimes hate all that I am too, saddled by my insecurities and cracking bravados, on nights like these.

Tonight, experience is painful and the rain dances.

But creating is giving birth, it is about something being birthed, born. And as I feel like the chick out of the egg, I also feel like the bloody mother, I can feel my body torn in labour. So this is a necessary pain, a necessary tension. Like new teeth pushing through gums. Skin ripping open.

And for what? For what reason do we give birth in this way? For sure, there is no fulfllment for me without it, to let the words or the song come into fruition without the tension of struggle, without working for it. Those slippy slidy works of supposed art, that trip so easily and so correctly off the smoothest tongue, they leave me unmoved by their composure, by their lack of a crime scene. No dying bull to trace in the sand, no ideal to stretch to the limit. Art can never be hidden behind, but exposes it all, all the workings. Ah, we are all so clever at this, still we try and tame the animal, lassoo it all so it belongs to us, not the other way round. Idiots, we are.

Can we make poetry with the head? Some people seem to think so. We can stare out to space with special instruments, we can calculate the mass of the world. We can float in space suits far above this bluest planet and watch the gases and the atmosphere, imbibe the greens and the corals and the turquoise patches, sail the infinite seas above, notating the wonders with a biro pen. And what does that make us? If we don't see it, it is all just another TV show, just an interesting experiment.

Poetry is not an interesting experiment. It is living, life itself. It is the often agonising process of opening up to what this universe is made of, and looking around, taking it in.

It is a space ship that travels to places otherwise unreachable, no other vehicle has the engine power, the correct design. It brings this human back, with the wonders and horrors of the world, of space, to write shakily some 'feeble approximation of starlight'.

It also travels underwater, to where the plants and the jellied fish grow. To where light cuts out under the ice, where sound is an ancient song from far above tides.

Descends, descends, past trees and caves and earth and matter and stone, into the stone it goes, the greyest, smoothest stone. Then the peat, and the ashes, the burnt out coal, the embers, the black chalk in the fire, soil and worms. Feel it in your hand, cool dark and sodden.

To the people, the stares, the unrelenting dreams. We say we are a million miles from the sky and the wood and the ground, from under the water.

No, we are the same life. In the human, there is always the valley and the rock, the repetitive seasons and the swimming fish. Discovered lakes, so much unchartered territory. The horrors of the flesh, the sinking stone, buried under ivy, human sleeps with fur and paw, eats its brother, dazzles with the sunlight and becomes dawn itself.

We are the night and the day, the afternoon, Northern Lights. We are neutron stars, gas and pollution. Moving in a haze of cloud. Whiskers. Dead creatures. Our own faeces. The blazing cottage. The never born girl child, left in a dream. A window, this book you hold, spent, spent, always spent.

This is all poetry to me. And to sit with that, is to sit with life itself. And the bravest poets are the Captains of the Boats at roughest sea. They bring the words home, they inspire, touch the fabric, rub the thread between their old warm fingers.

If I ever doubt poetry has a purpose, I think of this. I think of the bold. The death defyers. On a night like tonight, that I can be so bold, take these controls and launch again, is all I ask.

Sunday Best

Well, the afternoon Tea Party went down a storm on Sunday, with cakes, Assam and ginger cake galore. It was a magnificent afternoon, the weather holding out, and the sun daring to shine. We all wore our Sunday best and I even put on a bit of Edith Piaf and Django Reinhardt to add to the atmosphere. An eccentric affair, the kind that always bring the biggest smile to my lips. More afternoons should be spent like this - there is something poignantly beautiful about such a spread on the beach, with all your friends, watching as the sun sinks behind the horizon and Summer ebbs its way from the tides of the shore.

I finally have some more time off, so today I am working on a song at my keyboard. Oh, the joy of solitude.

Les Blank:Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe

Klaus Kinski - Jesus

The Leaves Are Starting To Fall..

Autumn is coming. Walking up Ditching Road this morning, I felt it in the breeze, saw it in the cracked orange leaves that circled round my knees and bag.

This morning I am a girl of the sea. Sweet and strong with a head full of wonder, an eye for light: I sparkle on water. Tomorrow I may be Andalucia, with a body of blood like aged red wine from the cellar, a heart of ardent rapture, sitting by a ring of sand, watching the bull toss his head with bleeding pride.

Yesterday was a bad day. Today, so far, my heart is alive and breathing once again, remembering it can take care of itself, and that, in the midst of pain, there is still love, if you can persist to find it. This can take some looking.

But as there is a season about to end, there is another beginning. I will make it a new beginning. And to mark it, this Sunday I hold A Tea Party on the beach, with fancy frocks and friends to say goodbye to what has, in many ways, been a memorable and beautiful season.

And I am not quite ready for snow, but the thought of chocolate coloured days and walks by the green cooling river fill me with a new joys. Trips to London to see the new Rodin collection, Tate Modern, my sister and the Thames. Kittywakes calling from Seaford cliffs, quiet afternoons writing, berries and hot tea late at night.

And the beach will change its flavour, but will still be there, chugging and churning, my solace in this greedy busy town, peace in the burning car headlights.

Who knows what will actually become of this Autumn, but perhaps I don't have to opt for complete hibernation just yet, or can do so in another way. I think they call it Recuperation. I call on all my animals of the forest, of the ice, of the road. Let them take care of this little soul when it grows littler, when the rocks start falling and I need a place to hide, some fur and strong paws to bury my face in.

And all being well, it won't break my heart to see Mum in the new nursing home where she'll soon be residing, with her child-like vision, the flower pots on the patio. I am so glad there will be flowers for her there. And though it feels a devastation to think we all might be in for another long haul, because we know she will not get better, but could stay in some twilight world for years to come, I am glad she will be settled somewhere where there are no nurses, too busy to give my mother a second glance, to really look after her, where I can leave behind wards, the clinical smell, the dreadful taste of death and withering in my mouth. At least there are hills there.

And I have joined a Writing Circle. And I soon begin a little writing course. And life moves onward. I never stay the same. And even in one day, who I am shifts and changes. I am Clare, and I am reborn with every tear, every pain.

Hibernation

What a heavy hard week it's been. After the big thunderstorm last Wednesday, which would have been an exhilerating tour de force of nature right outside my bedroom window had huge cracks in my ceiling not appeared, and water, in various sized rivulets and streams, flowed down my walls, doors and light fitting, nothing in my heart has felt quite right.

In fact, as I cowered in my bed waiting for the roof to cave in, I realised, I simply cannot cope with such practical calamities at the moment. Ordinarily I may be a bit wobbled by the sight of water dripping through my electrics, but not phased, always up for a touch of dramatic catastrophe. But somehow, it all felt too close to the bone, too close to home, cracks and holes appearing in my world, no way to keep the violent storms out.

This is not the first extreme happening to occur in this flat. A couple of months ago, in fact when I was right in the midst of the immediate trauma of my Mum's near fatal stroke, I arrived home to find that my living room window, in its entirety, had been blown off. The whole thing lay sad and glass-less in the garden below my attic flat, luckily, I reflected later, with nobody lying underneath it. But it was weird, because, at my most vulnerable and insecure, feeling in need of self-protection and a sense of home, my window goes and blows out, and I am left with a gaping void where the frame and pane was, a room full of swirling papers and a sense of large holes appearing in my world whether I like it or not.

And so, with the ending of the Summer drawing ever nearer, the events in my family still fresh and harrowing, I find my flat is once again manifesting the state of my heart and my mind, cracks appearing, not enough bowls to hold the water that is filling them up.

So after last week I have been very aware of my need for some sense of safety, from somewhere, anywhere, to counter balance the huge fears and stresses of the last months, which are, to some extent, continuing. If I refuse to see the writing on the wall, my flat is spelling it out for me ( it likes to do that occasionally, see "Blood" ).

And I feel terribly upset, I have sailed far too close to those edges which we hope to only come up against a few times in our lives. So not just one abyss of facing death and disaster to stare into, but several, all coming at once, shocking, cruel, frightening.

I've coped well this Summer, I never felt stronger. But somehow, with the knowledge of this season coming to a close, I am tired, too tired. I want to sleep for about six months. Hibernate and come out again when it is Spring and the buds are bursting upon the branches of the cherry blossom trees and daffodils lace the parks that my bus sails past on my route home.

Maybe I just want another season that is not this one so I don't have to face the present moment, or maybe even the changing of the seasons remind me too strongly of how nothing ever stays the same, and how,in the end we hold onto nothing that we long to keep, no one who we love most dearly.

If I could, I'd pick up my tail, climb my way between the ferns and the fir cones, the sheep wool and the bracken, down into a tunnel of dark, where no sound can travel. And there I'd sleep, and maybe dream, but the days would no longer own me, memory would fade, my bones replenish and my fur would grow strong once again. Here, I'd close my eyelids, there'd be no more weeping for a season.

I'd wrap my tail around myself, a dark brown brush of life, softly, silently, sleeping.

china

There is a white china cup that sits on the wooden table. A pile of papers lie to the right, their edges softly blowing up in the breeze. Apart from these, a china cup is the only object sitting on this scraped old wooden table, with its legs that wobble, its planks that heave with cold. The china cup is shaped like a small well and it gleams in the morning sun filtering through the open bay window. It leaves a ring in the unpolished surface.

I mark my seasons by the white china cup. April is for green tea, flowers in the top, floating. Summer is for sweet hot apple cider, straight from the piping urn. September is berries and darjeeling, taken black. Autumn seeps into flavours of licorice and anise star, hot water doused cardammon, cinammon sticks, cloves, milk. December is cracked ice, Baileys poured over.

I live the seasons like this, until the winds drift over and March appears, a blighted snow drift on the horizon. And the drinking stops, the china cup is filled with lighter hue, which hails, in its thin lipped taste of biting white, the onset of a distant Spring.

This is the month where the china cup sits empty on the wooden table. Where I lie on the moth bitten sofa, with its Japanese throw and its smell of jasmine and pink wafer, and I watch, as the cup tows its empty china through another cycle, its life, a bequeathed rim of silver, to another year.

Every Time You Go Away

Tonight I watched Celebrity Masterchef. Marie Helvin, the model, some guy that I think may have been in the pop band Imagination and, love of my life at age 10, the one and only, Paul Young, all competing to come up with the perfect culinary dish to win the title of this BBC2 cooking competition.

Jesus, it was strange seeing him. I used to actually keep a notebook to record my obsession with Paul Young, making a note of each new poster that I bought, which eventually covered the entire walls of my bedroom, (except for an increasing number of Aha ones, but I don't talk about that little betrayal). I even had a life size one which I got in installments through Smash Hits - one week his feet, the next his legs and groin etc. I firmly believed I was going to marry him and was devastated when he got together later with Supergirl actress Helen Slater. The cow. I even had a Paul Young scarf, with a very distorted picture of his face on it, as well as his pretend signature which I ordered through his fan club, of which I was, of course, a member.

The only other club I remember joining through the postal service when I was young was the Desperate Dan Club. I'm not quite sure where my fascination for Desperate Dan arose from, as it wasn't exactly a popular girl's thing to be into. I remember getting all the stuff through the post, and how excited I was to open it. There was this picture of him on the front of the Membership Card with a big bristly chin, about to tuck into a Cow Pie. As I opened the pack, I was confronted by a test that said unless you can answer these three questions, you cannot join. You are not a true Desperate Dan fan as you are not tough enough. It was three jokes, of which you had to guess the punchlines. Easy probably. But I didn't get one of them, and I remember the shame, the utter humiliation of the fact that I had this stupid membership pack, which I'd been so excited to receive, and yet I had just exposed myself to the fact that I wasn't worthy to join it because I wasn't tough enough. Ok, no body else knew, but I knew, I knew I wasn't up to the job. I remember thinking it's because I'm not a real boy - now they've found me out. I slung the membership pack into the back of my sock drawer, hoping it wouldn't be discovered by my Mum or any other potential Askers of Difficult Questions, who might realise the truth that I was trying to infiltrate some secret boyhood that I could never truly belong to.

I never wore dresses growing up, except on the odd occasion, and they were still somehow ungirlish and unflattering, with frills or flaps on them too large that they engulfed my entire chest. Me and both my other sisters all had our hair cropped short, a trio of little pseudo boys, until I finally protested against being constantly mistaken for a 'sonny' and decided to grow my hair long. That was when I was ten, and I have never worn it short since, some kind of life long compensation for feeling for so long like I'd been born into the wrong body.

I didn't look like other girls, and I was sure as hell at the time that I didn't feel like other girls. I did like playing with my Sindy dolls, but my favourite game used to be 'let's tie Sindy up and pretend a train is coming to drive over her'. That was one of my favourite film themes as I was growing up - the silent movie 1920's starlet tied to the train tracks whilst the black caped baddie chuckles on the sidelines rubbing his hands in glee, and the train hurtles towards her whilst the hero grapples dotingly with her ropes. I think I wanted to be that curly haired girl, dressed in some flimsy negligee, squealing silently and struggling in black and white as the piano tinkled on and on in the background. I think I also wanted to be the baddie in the cape, and the dashing hero as well. How kinky.

So yes, I did like playing with dolls, but that was about it as far as my girlishness went. I was strikingly tall for my age, and very strong, not delicate at all. I remember playing kiss chase in the little school when I was six or seven and finding it a highly erotic experience, but whenever a boy caught me, I would punch him in the chest and run off shouting "NO!". I hated those namby pamby girls that would just relent and giggle and toss their pigtails in the air. The boys loved them. I never wore pretty shoes, and the boys never fell in love with me.

My two best friends at that age were Jamie Pope and John Stewart. John Stewart was the Pete Doherty of Sandford House School, the bad boy amongst a classroom of seven year olds. God he was sexy. He used to swear and use words like 'shit' and I was terribly impressed, amongst this bunch of mainly drab and dreary girlies and boys. My favourite lunchtimes were when him and Jamie said I could join in with their games (no other girls were allowed the same privilege), which mainly involved dragging Action Man in and out through the holes in the wire fence behind the playground bushes. God I felt cool and I loved playing with Action Man. John Stewart NEVER tucked his shirt in.

I used to have fantasies at night of staying behind at school to play alone in the shed that was in our playground. In my fantasy, John Stewart would appear, and he would tie me up in the shed. This tying up thing seems to have been a bit of a theme for me. I didn't know why the idea of being tied up by this boy was so exciting, and nothing else would happen but that, but it gave me a feeling in my body I liked a lot. At night I would pull my arms out of the sleeves of my nightie and slide them underneath it so that my hands could roam freely over my body. I didn't know why I liked this either, but I did.

John Stewart never did find me in the playground as I wanted him to, and I moved up when I was eight to the big school next door, where boys were no longer allowed. But it started to really perturb me that I didn't really feel like other girls seemed to feel, and still looked the gawky young boy in the brown round toed shoes. Little Lord Fauntleroy, my sister used to call me. In fact, she still does, when she's feeling fond.

When I was eight I also got a silver bike for my birthday. I remember being so chuffed that I had a fancy cool bike, and so disturbed when I realised it was a boy's bike. For a while boys from around the council estate across the road would come and play with me, and admire my bike and take a ride in my Police Car, which you could sit in and peddle and it was cool and it had a flashing light on the back. But they never fancied me.

In fact, the only people I remember there being any kind of fancying scenarios with, were girls. There once was this girl, who for some reason came to play round at mine one time, whom I hadn't the foggiest who she was, and for at least half of the day I thought, was in fact a boy. She was so androgynous with her short hair and jeans. I remember feeling curiously drawn to her, finally asking her outright whether she was a boy or a girl. When we sat together on my Dad's reclining chair, I still remember a strange feeling in my belly as we sat squashed together, our arms pushed up against each other.

The only other frisson was with one of my best friends at the time, whom I played with a lot. She was Indian and I would go round to her house and her Mum would dress me up in saris and I'd like it because I felt pretty and feminine for once, and her parents had a Hindu shrine in their bedroom with a picture of Ganesh in front of their mirror. I was fascinated by him with his big long elephant nose and the smell of incense that wafted around him. Sometimes we would eat curry for tea but mainly we had Findus Crispy pancakes which I adored, particularly the ones with cheese inside. Sometimes she and I would play 'peeping tom', where one of us would take our clothes off and have a shower and the other would pretend to come in by mistake and look. It seemed to always end up being me in the shower. One sunny day in my back garden, my friend confessed she was in love with me. By this point I was ten, and absolutely horrified by her confession. Sadly, in a blind panic and confusion, I stopped being friends with her that summer, denouncing her a 'lezzy'. Oh dear.

Looking back, I see that in certain ways, my life plays out now pretty much in the same ways it did then. The parallels are unnervingly striking. Perhaps the only difference is that now my hair is longer and I most definitely look like a girl, I made sure of that. And I'm not so into tying my dolls to imaginary train tracks, at least not all the time. And that sometimes, when I'm caught by a boy, I won't always punch him in the chest, but let him kiss me on the lips. But only if he kisses like John Stewart.

And ah I remember, the actual point of this meandering post, was to tell you about Paul Young. Well, my beautiful animus, my soul singing icon of sexiness who set my heart and loins a flutter with "Wherever I Lay My Hat" in 1983, he won through to the quarter finals of Celebrity Masterchef with his dish of Cajun Prawns with a basil coulis and wild rice. Despite looking somewhat haggard, he had tears twinkling in his eyes. Bless his cotton socks.

I Guess I Just Wasn't Made For These Times

In a post a couple of days ago I wrote about forgetting. How I want to keep remembering the bigness that I chose to forget the day my shoes became to small for my changing feet and the taxman came a calling.

Maybe this is just a process that happens over time, a gradual erosion of innocence in the mind, as experience rakes us over the coals and we become 'adult'. But I can also see how it can just take one or a few single experiences to do this to us, where life can never then be the same again and it feels like there is no going back. You can never go home again.

The dream is lost, the love is betrayed, the dog gets run over, the parent leaves, the child is never born, the talent goes unrecognised. Even the seemingly tiniest of things can change us irrevocably - that harsh joke at your expense from an otherwise all loving grandparent, that schoolyard taunt that never went away, the way he held you that one time and it made you feel all dirty and bad.

And yet on and on we go, forgetting because we don't want to remember it, the bad things, those embarrassing moments, the shame of the past, and how our innocence and naivety led us, again and again, into trouble and pain.

But if we ever stop to think of such moments, where everything got changed, where we made a decision somewhere to close down, or run away or be tough or never let anyone near again, we'd realise how often they'd been made in an instant, and a moment of intense or sometimes not so intense disillusion and betrayal has marked our future forever.

But we can open up the vaults and let the past through. We can sit in the complexity of our selves and let them be. If we can just give them space. Let the hordes through, let them rampage our streets and tear up our neat new lawns. And then let them leave, wave them off, show them the door - after all, you don't want to be stuck with that death metal listening teenager forever.

But I wonder, I wonder about what happened before even all the trials and terrors of childhood and adolescence, of birth even.

What about before life even came?

When I see pictures or footage of Antartica, I feel a sense of that, of the wilderness that was before life came. Before there was language and a civilisation of the senses. When I look at the blueness of glaciers, the whiteness of ice, the stillness of freezing water, I have some sense of what it means to be unborn. What it means to be deathless. Such landscapes are the gateway into a state that lives in the human psyche and beyond it. I recognise it when I see it and I say: there I am, there it is, this is it.

Nature mimics the mind, or is the mind. But my mind has forgotten itself, it has forgotten what it is, it has (necessarily) left behind its true identity, in search of Life and Order and the World. Because that is the way of things, that is the nature of living. And once you are born, it may fill you with awe to stare upon a glacial wilderness, but it is also terrifying, because it is all whiteness, it is ferociously uninhabitable.

And the only animals alive in these places seem like creatures from a childrens' story book, fantastical, hilarious, unearthly, zoomed straight from the unconscious into a billowing white pillow of nothingness.

The vast and uncivilised places will always have answers to the questions we seek or run from, will know more than we can ever hope to, with our silly clever minds, with our hard hats and our compasses. They are always beyond our reach.

I remember feeling this way as I looked across the Almerian desert last year, as I felt it all around me, amidst its stark branches and crystal rocks, a bigness I could not comprehend, but felt, that knew me better than I knew myself. It was eerie.

There is a place in the desert, perhaps the Sahara, where, for the time you stand there, all your memory of who you are and what your past was is erased. And there is only that moment. Apparently it is deeply unsettling, disturbing, and one who has stood there can never be the same again.

I don't know how true this is, but of course my first reaction to hearing it was "I want to go there". To a place beyond the reaches of the mind. And partly I do, partly I want it so bad that when I do see footage of wild places, such as Antartica and the desert, I am immediately in tears. Because it reminds me, of something I know but I have forgotten, somehow chosen to forget. And it grieves me - remembering a little more of who I am reminds me of how much I forget it most of the time.

And so also, I do not want to go to some place that wipes your memory, and maybe replaces it with a truer one. Where there is perfect recall. Because it is frightening. So I look at pictures instead, and dream of a day when I will set foot on the ice, of when I will let the sands take me.

But, as it is in the tiniest moments that we can forget who we really are, it is also in them that we can remember. I have been to dramatic places, literally and symbolically, that have changed me irrevocably. And yet also I have seen a picture or heard a sound or song which, in one moment has changed my life forever. We do not have to cross ten thousand miles to find what we are looking for.

But somewhere I want to. More and more I identify with the myth of the explorer, of the expedition, the journey to the centre of the earth. I want to pilgrimage. I want to cross the seas for no other reason than because my heart is moved to. I want to do it alone. I want to do it with others. I want to discover uncharted territory and bring back treasures. I want to live out with my arms and legs the poetry that brims in the corner of my eye.

My Grandpa and Great Uncles were Captains of ships throughout this century, and some of them died at sea. I like to feel I have adventure in my blood. Or maybe I've done enough travelling inside myself, I want the world too. I want it all in my arms like a greedy girl, with its red stained seas, its whitewash walls and frozen waterfalls. With its flippers and its mites, its dungheaps and its leopard's kill. The end of the road. The mouth of the river. The trail of dust.

And dreams are beautiful, messed up things. After all, they're what brought us out of the womb in the first place: and it is this beautiful hunger that makes us seek, and search, and want to live, and fall in love, and that desires it all and desires none of it, that is foolishly, heroically, doomed. It is what makes us both forget and remember, seek out the best and the worst and tie them both together in the strangest kind of knot. It is what makes us run away like cowards and stay and fight, right to the end.

And I can't help that naive, sometimes grandiose, romantic streak, that engulfing passion that sometimes swallows me up whole.

Beautiful, doomed creatures we are. Like penguins on the ice, we risk our lives every year to take the journey to the breeding ground, to find the mate, hatch the egg, and, if we are lucky, and still alive, see the baby born.

What're You Doing Saturday Night?

Tiny minds and Umbrellas

When I was little, I thought big. As I grew bigger, I learnt to think smaller. I realised that the visions I had as large as the Himalayas, I could never ultimately keep climbing. My knees would always break down somewhere half way up, or the snows would bury me. That no matter how many times I jumped off my front steps clutching an umbrella, I would never take flight across the roofs of Hawarden. Because there are certain laws to this universe that cannot be overruled even by imagination, such as gravity, and these laws are tougher than even our stongest idealism. There is always a pragmatic wind blowing through the landscape of our dreams, pulling it apart. Physics makes us all its bitches.
And so, from this perspective, this fatherly advice, creeps in that terrible phenomena which seems to haunt our world - the tinying of the mind.

I remember standing at my bedroom window when I was young and pointing to the night sky outside and saying to my Mum " but what about all this?"

I distinctly remember her reply " We all think about such things when we are young. You will forget. Life takes over".

I remember being devastated by this, more so because my mother had actually contemplated such things as the universe and what this life means, but then promptly seemed to set it aside when the correct time came. But I also felt defiant that I would never become what she said I would become - a forgetter.

Are we all forgetters, wandering the streets with convenient amnesia? It is a necessary condition of existence, huh, if we are not to go mad, run through the streets, our clothes torn to shreds, the predator of truth chasing us, chasing us to the edge of the endless drop? Every angel is terrifying, after all.

We are hardly going to look up from our bedsheets and our spreadsheets and our tiny calculations of life to stare at this winged being flapping its giant wings at us. But then, what about the loss? What is left when the dreaming departs, when imagination is crushed to the ground, and we stop believing in things we cannot see?

In and out of vision we can go. Grasp the mantle of a spiritual quest and follow until we are forced to let go, until we see even through the limitations of yearning for a quest at all. It is crushing. It is liberating, if you can stand the loss.

And so everything that ever meant anything, at some point, gets stripped away. And will continue to, as long as it is held and cherished as the answer clear. So that we can move on.

Dreams are born to live and to age and to finally, like everything else, to wither and die. We keep none of it.

And yet that is still not the end. How can it be? The walking is the best bit, we often just don't see it until the journey's over.

And so, when I was little, I thought big. As I grew bigger, I learnt to think smaller. Then I learnt to think big again, with the shadow of death and ending by my side, taking in all the little beauties on the way, whilst still walking the line, at least most of the time.

We bring into daylight the dreams that haunt our sleep, knowing even they will come to an end. To remember, and keep remembering, to keep jumping off that step, umbrella in hand, no matter what.

This is deep beauty, with these tiny, fragile eyes of ours, to embrace all that we love, all we know to be true, falling forever into the abyss.

Let us never forget.

Dungeness

Dungeness is haunted. It is the most haunted place I have ever been to. And the most haunting. Everything is a ghost here, everythng hangs in the shadow of death. Life is built upon discard and decay, memory and emptiness. Only artists and murderers can live here. Only the crazy or the really crazy. Only the dying and the wayward.



Of course I'm talking metaphorically here. For me, the whole place is an artwork, and being here, is like moving through a Dali painting or waking up and finding yourself in a David Lynch movie. It is a place of dark soundtracks, where fish eyes look up at you, dead and resigned. Where everything is disheveled and dissolving. Where a smoking oven stands abrupt in a desert wilderness. Black pylons so beautiful you could weep. Where British flags fly from every wooden house, ragged and torn apart by harsh winds. Where people build houses without windows and make gardens out of jelly shoes and rust and empty green bottles.



Where mouldering sheds spew green fishing nets and grey plastic casing that haven't been touched for years, where boats are left on the shingle to slowly rot, and a train track abruptly begins from the side of the road, all the way down to the sea - a railway that is going nowhere, a train track that is taking nothing.

Where a film maker and artist built his living room so he could look out over the huge infernal power station that casts its dread over the whole place, that shines at night like an ancient palace, that makes a constant hum, and never sleeps, plutonium death at its core.

Where it feels like the end of the world, no coming back, and the gulls rise and fall on the mud flats, wild flowers grow from every corner. This is one of my most favourite places in the world.

Dungeness 2

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I couldn't quite believe it when I stumbled across the picture on the internet last night. 'Lighthouse For sale'. And there it was, the Old Lighthouse of Dungeness, for sale for the meagre price of £150,000. Dammit, if it hadn't been snapped up, and 'this property is no longer available' printed across its peak.

This is the same lighthouse I climbed on Sunday with B. We stood in the gale force winds at the very top, looking out over the bleak landscape and mused with him about how it would be to own such a magnificent beast of a place.

"You could throw some great parties here" he considered.

The only kind of parties I could imagine B throwing were ones he could immediately depart from, even if he were the owner of such a cool pad. No, he would be slinking off as the champagne corks popped, up to the very top, alone, watching out to sea or maybe spotting passing gulls in the darkness with his binoculars, pointing out star constellations.



I've wanted to be a lighthouse keeper ever since I can remember. Preferably somewhere off the coast of Scotland or Wales, wild and rugged, only reachable by a wobbly, dangerous rope bridge. I imagined the copious amounts of tea I would drink, alone and startled awake through to dawn. I imagined sailors I would save and the shipwrecks I would salvage from days gone by, pieces washed up on the shore. I imagined the joy of absolute solitude, and the beam of light that I would direct all around the stretch of coast, keeping all sea farers safe for another night.

Another fantasy went like this. One night whilst rambling out on my own, I would stumble across a lighthouse via the dangerous wobbly rope bridge. I'd pull at the clunky door and find to my surprise and delight that it opened. I'd then climb the tower of steps up to the top and find the Old Lighthouse Keeper sitting there. We'd sit together through the night, and he'd regale me with exciting tales of sea and shore. Occasionally he'd get too drunk (for he like a tipple), and I'd be forced to take over, hence saving numerous sailors from certain death had I not been there.

There is something mad about lighthouses, something deranged. And something so beautiful, I can only compare it to the cracked glacier or the uncrossed desert. Yet it's man made, the last outpost of humanity in an inhuman natural world. The Lighthouse Keeper is the last person to stand between this world and that.

I heard recently that before lighthouses became automatic, they employed three men at a time to work in them. Apparently, at first they were manned only by two men, but in one occasion a Keeper died up there (or was murdered by the other Keeper) and so the other was left to man it alone. Since there was no communication with the outside world for months at a time, he sat, alone, and slowly went insane. So apparently they changed it so that lighthouses had three men at a time, just in case one man dies or loses his mind.

So when B and I found the 'new' working lighthouse at Dungeness at nearly midnight on Saturday evening, that stands only a few hundred metres from the old disused one, we were excited. A beautiful thing. Its beauty is a perfect balance of masculine and feminine, towering upwards in spirals, a curved thing of wonder yet tall and erect, reaching high and proud upwards in the sky. I wanted to break in.

We were both convinced that if we did indeed hop over the fence, pull the door, find that it had been mistakenly left open, that what we would find when we reached the top would be my very own flat, supernaturally transported from Hove through time and space to Dungeness. For there appeared to be a curtain in each of the lighthouse windows that was coloured Brighton Rock pink, and behind that, a wall of duck egg blue, both colours just like I have in my living room. I imagined tiny white polka dots on the curtains and an ageing Keeper in a smoking jacket and pipe up there, listening to Parisien cafe music and doing the Times crossword. He would smile as we stumbled in and offer us Port.

But we didn't break in, instead crossing the heavy shingle to the shoreline, where in the wind and darkness, the waves looked huge and ghostly. They looked as though they were moving backwards rather than towards the shore. Strange and chilling.