These days, I am finding it increasingly hard to look at photographs of my Mum. I glance over them quickly, unable to allow myself to make the connection between who I see in the picture and the image I hold of her in my head. In so many more recent photos, she is sitting in the front room, tv on, her hair scraped back into a pony tail. She is smiling self-consciously. But the image in my head is of a moment caught forever in silence and stillness. It is a running video, but nothing is moving; it is a song without sound, a touch I can feel, but I don't know where the hand has gone.

The woman in the picture has gone and I don't understand what is left of her. I think of Sleeping Beauty with her rosy cheeks, ivory skin, eyes closed, spellbound to perpetual coma. I see only a haze of white - white sheets, white pillows, the white of her eye, white nightdress with a satin ribbon at the neck. I want to immerse myself in snowdrops. I want to course the ice floes, stretch myself out on a glacier, breathe it in deep. I want only cloud and a sun behind it that never sets. I want to be pale as a baby wrapped in its first blanket.

From the whiteness, red creeps in. Blood circles in my hands and arms, and begs these legs of mine to run. Run to the equator, to where time zones collide, imprint a map of the world upon my skull, forage amongst the insects and the beetles for a taste of life itself, curse the sky and ride a westward thunder, laughing. Blood follows me wherever I go. I cannot evaporate into ether, nor disappear into silence. Blood keeps me feeling, remembering I am flesh and bone, skin and longing. Angels inhabit my tender places, they haunt my dreams with their whiteness and their singing, but it's the bloody hand that keeps me here, that keeps me in the running.

I won't lie frozen for an eternity until I am kissed by a prince with black hair and a sword. But I will watch my mother, in her own world now, in a world of whiteness far beyond my reaches. And there will never come a day when I won't crave her touch again, to see the redness in her cheeks, for her lips to come back to life and speak. Blood still runs through her, though it is silent. She stares out of the window, at what, I can't know. It is then that the snows fall on me again, as I remember the belly I came from, the mess and spill that fell out with me, the cord that kept me attached until it was cut, my first cry into her breast and the red fist I raised at the world as I realised, in utter joy and horror, that I was alive.

Three things making me happy this morning (and a secret one).

High on Tetley tea and a gradual recovery from some strange and unnameable lurgy, I am feeling very pleasant this morning, the kind of pleasant that, in fact, surpasses the meaning of pleasant, since pleasant usually denotes a somewhat tepid experience without that deeper bite of life.

I am thinking of the things that make me happy.

I am having amusing fantasies. I am thinking about some of the bands and songwriters I never get tired of listening to. Then I am imagining a large bustling kitchen, with blue and white chequered tiles above the cooker and bowls of Frosties on the table. Tea is swilling in the pot, toast is popping up golden from the toaster. It's ten o' clock and I am a child sitting amidst my strange new family.

They are a vocal bunch, bubbling with eccentricity and odd hairdoes and voices which make me skip and dance across the linoed floor. If I were to imagine what their names were, I'd say Joanna is my sister, with her dangerously uneven fringe and her pleated dress. Then there is my dad, Micah P, with his craggy cheeks and unkempt mop of thick black hair, streaked with white. Then there is my mum, Kate with her flowing wavy black locks, her wild eyes and her rather hideous beige jogging bottoms. Then there would be old Kurt W, my Uncle, in his red and white shirt, his sloppy paint spattered dungarees and his slow big hands. And of course, there is my wayward brother, Peter, who only turns up at the house occasionally, when he has run out of underwear and fags. He adjusts his trilby on the front doorstep, running his hands through the tufts of his hair, tucking his dirty shirt in.

I wake up blearily in the morning to Joanna and her long red hair, her elegant fingers, who is throwing tiny wooden dolls out of my bedroom window, shouting 'Danger !Danger! Danger!' at the postman below. The postman shrugs and struggles to drop off the heavy parcels of cigarettes through the letterbox for my father to smoke, so he can age his lungs into further disrepair, scouring his vocal chords until they sound like the low grind of old farm machinery.

It makes me happy to imagine what breakfast time would be like in this family, and the words and sounds that might be spoken. I think the women of the house at times might try my nerves, Joanna with her dreamy babbling and endless improvisational harp-playing when I'm only asking if I can borrow her hairbrush or for her to pass me the tomato sauce; my mother staring upwards as raindrops gather on the edge of gutters, singing high-pitched verses about bursting clouds and a place called wuthering heights and washing machines, oblivious to the fact that she has left the all our clothes out on the line.

It would be at times like these that I'd slip onto my Uncle's lap and curl up like a dog, listening to him humming darkly as he chews on tobacco and strokes my head with his large forefinger and thumb. Or else I would join my father outside in the shed, where he would be whittling away at pieces of wood, shaping them into cats and elephants and one that looks like the Eiffel Tower. He would give them me when they were done, and I would line them up on my window ledge.

Late into the night, I would sit there, playing with them, staring up into the night sky. The faint strains of Joanna's jumpy high pitched squeaks from the next room would echo around my head, words about meadow larks and sparrows jumping about my ears and brain. As I peered up at the stars outside, I'd whisper softly along with her to my own melody. My own voice would be soft as honey, oozing quietly through my teeth, as her notes and words skittered upwards, a cacopany of syllables and cadences and brilliance filling the night air.

I like this fantasy. I like to imagine different families of different figures. Some would be happier than others. Some would be a recipe for disaster. How would it be to grow up with Einstein, St Francis Of Assisi and Charles Bukowski all under one roof? Roald Dahl could be my gardener. I could grow up in a dark and brooding family with Sylvia Plath as my older sister, wandering out to the garden at night, disappearing into the bathroom for worrying lengths of time. She would steal my favourite clothes and never return my eye shadow. Morrissey would be my older brother, slouching in the corner of the sitting room in one of his moods, specs on, fringe stuck high into the air. He would sit there with a condescending look in his eye, a huge pile of books at his side, reprimanding me for making too much noise. Then he would make my eyes grow big with wonder as he quoted me lines from Oscar Wilde or A Taste Of Honey. Or what would a line of uncles who were composers be like? Debussy, Shostakovich and Bach all under one roof for Christmas?

This morning I am also thinking about all the words that make me happy. There are so many of them. However, for some time now, I have seen a pattern emerging, wherein most of my favourite words seem to begin with un. This includes: undone, unborn, unlit, unsmiling, untie, undress, unnerve, unloved, unseen.

Oh to live in a world where everything moves like these words. Where all is undone, unseen and unsmiling. I go all silent and hushed inside when I read these words, quiet like a church when the service is over and all the people have left for home.

I also think that the word unkind has one of the most wonderful sounds in the English language; it is impossible for me to say it without it having the ring of ineffable kindness about it. Isn't that wonderful, for unkind to be such a kind word? The sensitivity and gentleness of it is beautiful.

The third thing that is making me happy this morning is The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien. I was introduced to this book when I was in New York last year, and I first became acquainted with it in a mood of sleepiness, as it was read aloud to me on several occasions as I drifted in and out of somnambulistic states of dreaming. My apprehension of this novel was therefore done through the haze of half closed eyes and ears, and upon reading it properly for the first time recently, I realised that perhaps it was more than just tiredness that kept my perception of this book hazy and dream-like. This book is like a haze of a dream, or perhaps an acid trip taken at a young age. It is a act of bizarre genius, which makes me indefatigably, irreverently, happy. It also makes me see my bicycle, Jeopardy, in an entirely new way.

These seem to me to be two perfect passages of writing:

Maccruiskeen put his baton away into the hole in the wall where the Sergeant's had been and turned to me, giving me generously the wrinkled cigarette which I had come to regard as the herald of unthinkable conversation...

And

I sat there for half an hour, bereft of light and feebly wondering for the first time about making my escape. I must have come back sufficiently from death to enter a healthy tiredness again for I did not hear the policeman coming out of his bedroom again and crossing the kitchen with his unbeholdable and brain-destroying bicycle. I must have slept there fitfully in my chair, my own private darkness reigning restfully behind the darkness of the handkerchief.

Wonderful. Apparently, O'Brien (not even his real name), who was a shy man and a raving alcoholic, was so embarrassed when they refused to publish his novel in 1940, that to save face, he told friends that the entire novel's manuscript had blown, page by page, out of the boot of his car whilst he was driving around Ireland.

Creature Comforts

Monday afternoon and I'm at my computer with a cup of tea and a mini Battenberg cake. All should be well in the world. However, my space button has gone weird since I banged it angrily this morning when I was attempting to write a post here and Blogger wouldn't allow me to until I had upgraded my blogs to the fancy new all improved version. Naturally I banged down hard on my keyboard in justifiable rage and repeatedly poked at the screen of my monitor, thinking this would somehow show Blogger I meant business and that I wasn't someone to mess with. Then I remembered I was alone in my living-room with only my high pitched squeally voice, my now smudgy monitor screen and a broken space button on my keyboard (that keepsdoing things likethis and I have tokeep constantlyediting it).

It crossed my mind that this incidence proves that there is absolutely no justice in this world. The meek and kindly (such as myself), end up with dodgy keyboards and consequently with sore fingers, whilst the truly bad blindly stumble forward happily without conscience, forcing unsuspecting innocents into getting Google accounts for their blog, their own keyboards and fingers in perfect working order. But I realised I was being a bit mad, and that this was not the best of theories.

So, how am I? Well, the Bearded Collie obsession has subsided only enough to prevent me from driving everyone I know completely crazy. I am still thinking of ways by which my suitability as a B.C. owner can be increased. Yesterday, I was even considering moving into my friend's shed. I convinced myself how nice it could be, me, the beardie and a little wood-burning stove, and she has a garden with ample room for dog romping activities.

Over the last day or two, I have been having a slow and disconcerting realisation about how I become attracted to people. I've realised that one of the primary factors that makes me fall for someone, or become intrigued or interested in them (even as friends), that far outweighs any other factor such as looks, financial standing, career status, fathering potential etc, is what kind of creature, in both appearence and manner, they most resemble.

Whilst I can, to some extent, pass this off as a poetic and therefore wonderful way to become involved with someone, it's probably not the most solid and tangible thing to base a relationship on. No matter how much they curl their neck like a penguin or lift their eyebrows like an owl, appear to have paws instead of hands, or look at you with their gentle panda eyes, it isn't necessarily the quality that's most going to make a relationship stick together.

From this train of thought, I have been somewhat unnerved to realise that a number of men I've been romantically involved with, have, in some way, reminded me of dogs, or have held doggy associations for me. I confess that a high pitched woof from a man can really turn me on. Somewhere I feel this to be very wrong. When Bob recently began impersonating the tiny coughing dog off the Japanese Ghibli film Howl's Moving Castle (see above), frankly, I could hardly contain myself.

Further, aswell as this potentially meaning that I have projected particular dogs onto my lovers (mangy dog, wolf, terrier, barkless dog), which in itself has some disturbing implications for my love life, it also could follow that I've been projecting some masculine archetype onto both my desire for a dog and my choice of dog. Shit! I began to panic today that maybe my longing for a Bearded Collie is just another version of the animus projection, that a Bearded Collie is in fact just some long-haired, furry-pawed bone-chasing version of Pete Doherty, an external projection of my furry wayward artist within. After all, Bearded Collies are supremely intelligent, lateral thinking, creative, individual, tender-hearted with a penchant for bouncing over very high fences that they're not meant to. Isn't that just what I go for in a man?

Oh, I hope not. I do not want to spend the next 6 months in therapy working through canine projections. And as I am happily ensconced in a relationship with an actual, real live man, and a lovely one to boot, it doesn't make sense that I would need a dog for this purpose.

Perhaps it's not such a bad thing to fall in love with people's creature-y natures. It is terribly restricting to have to be a human being all the time. I'd go crazy. Somewhere, I think we're all moved by the urges to nest and to burrow, to catch and to stalk, to bury our bone and bark into the wind. I certainly think it's a more valid reason to like someone than because of the size of their car, their bank balance or their pretty boy looks.

Sometimes, even being a worldly creature is too narrow, too restrictive. I know I need to be free to be otherworldly, at times, to dwell in universes very different from this one of earth, moon and stars. I sometimes need to be a strange creature from an unknown land, far, far away. And it is at times like these I want the company of all those other odd creatures who dwell in worlds unfathomable and strange, who can't altogether fit into a world of concrete and clay, and these creatures I call my friends, and sometimes, when the magic is right and our tails fit together, we fall in love.