Wednesday

I went to see Mum at the nursing home the following day. She looked crumpled, lying in exactly the same position she was in some months ago when I last saw her, as though time had stood still. The only difference was the paleness of her skin, and her eyes. It broke something in me, to see her like that. When she looked at me, she seemed to be saying 'get me out'.

My sister had made a compilation cd of all my Mum's favourite songs and show tunes. I put on It's Not Unusual. Mum used to love dancing around to this, shaking her arms from side to side, swaying her hips. She fancied Tom Jones like mad. Then I put on Copacabana and sat by Mum's side singing along, my sister in the background doing a little dance. There was no response. In the end we turned it off. I remember watching Barry Manilow concerts on the telly with Mum in the living room when I was growing up. We'd sing along, especially to the slow ones, where the middle-aged women in the audience would sway in unison to the music, holding their lighters in the air high above their heads.

Emma went off to give me some time with Mum alone. I put on Relaxing Piano Classics. I really don't know what Mum makes of all this. I sat next to her by the window whilst Clair De Lune played. Mum stared out at the same spot she always stares at. A robin hopped onto the bird table outside, and started pecking at seed. I pointed at it, encouraging Mum to look. There was a flicker of interest in her eyes.

I watched her, watching the robin. Then I turned back to look at the robin, so tender and slight, flitting about the table. The piano ebbed and flowed like white foam on water. I felt myself breaking into tiny pieces, dissolving into the sound of the piano keys, the sight of the pecking robin and the blue of my mother's eyes.

~~~~

We went to see the doctor early next morning. I trembled as I went inside her room, as she asked my sister and I to have a seat.

Here was a kind doctor, whose words were a balm on all the cuts that have been building up on me since my mother's first stroke, over six years ago; on all the cuts that the tens of doctors who haven't understood, who haven't bothered, who have deprived us of answers, who haven't had the time to care, have left. For the first time I felt I was being listened to.

I tell, for the first time, how I feel about my Mum being kept in this awful state, where she is neither here, nor gone, powerless and voiceless, forced to reside in some half-way world, unable to let go, unable to return. I have become sure that she doesn't want this, that she isn't a willing participant in what the doctors have decided is the easiest course of action. It is one that we never had any say in, and Mum certainly didn't.

I expect the doctor to fob me off with platitudes and protocol. Instead, she turns and says to us "It's no way to live".

When I see my Mum later, I feel differently from the day before. I feel like I can finally look her in the eye and say "Mum, it's going to be alright".

A history of my Religion

A couple of Saturdays ago, I went with a friend to Catholic Mass at a local Brighton church. The yearning to go there had started before Christmas, when feelings of grief over my Mum's condition peaked, and I couldn't see any real point in existence, if where it was to lead ultimately was simply dissolution, pain and death. The need for something big enough to hold this experience came to a crisis point.

What actually moved things on for me was listening to a talk by a Buddhist Order Member, Danavira, on death and dying. I sat, lights out, in my front room for two hours listening to the recording. The impact of it went directly into my veins and bones. It took on the horror, the devastation, the messiness and complexity of death, and ultimately, its utter profundity. Danavira's words were big enough to meet the immensity of my insights and emotions over what it means to live and to die, to be born and to decay.

Months earlier, in October, I walked up Snowdon with Bob, the first time I have ever hiked up a significantly large mountain. I found, in the climbing, that, having seen my Mum in hospital just days before, this was a mountain huge enough and powerful enough to take my grief, big enough even to hold Mum herself in her dying state. So tiny, I was, climbing the vast expanse of its stomach, I knew that the mountain understood and held me fast. Now, I am not speaking symbolically or poetically here when I speak of the mountain holding me, I mean it absolutely literally. I tangibly felt that presence and character of the mountain surrounding me. Because of that, all my grief and sorrow turned to amazement. That one primal, unanswerable question that I ask myself in every moment of grieving, "How come?" returned to me in the single voice of the mountain, not through words, but through a sound. It was a resonating hum, that the peaks and the valleys and the woodlands and birds and the small climbing bodies of hikers were all making. This is it. This is my answer. Everything I need is here.

I was surprised, then, when it was talking about Saints and Catholic Mass with some Catholic friends of mine that aroused such a strong feeling of yearning in me, rather than Buddhism. After over eight years of Buddhism being almost my whole world, in terms of way of life, friends, commitment and philosophy, I have drifted from it over the last few years, in order, I think, to go more deeply into my own experience of how things are and who I am, through writing, poetry and making music. Language, specifically poetry, and music, unlock realms of reality and experience I've never known before, and I can only seem to experience them through creating in this way.

And when I had what might be called mystical experiences some years ago, which totally tore down and rearranged my life, it wasn't Buddhist teaching that I felt was being revealed to me directly, but a direct and non-rational experience of healing, grace, and the presence of angels. This disturbed me greatly at the time, as it didn't fit with what I believed of reality, and not many people around me seemed to know what I was on about; only the the reiki healers, the lost shamans, the acid casualties, the people who had found God on the roadside.

I have always been attracted to the imagery of Christianity, to the blood and redemption, the wounds of Christ, the choirs of angels and the Saintly lineage. But there is more to it than that. I am drawn to the lineage of Christian mystics in the same way that I am drawn to the lineage of Nyingma cave-dwellers, or the seekers of Divine union in Sufism. The practice of direct communion with God, if you call it that, or with Reality or The Divine, if you call it that instead, feels like the truest form of practising any religion for me personally. It is helpful at times for someone to tell me about God or The Buddha or the holiness of existence, but ultimately, I have to plug into that directly myself. And that is never easy. But I relate to the convulsions and stripped back wonder of certain Saints, the fighting of demons in the mountains, the visions, revelations, hallucinations, the manifestation of stigmata, the terrible angels of beauty descending. And I relate because it feels like a world that I already live in.

Going to Mass that day blew my mind. The ritual blew my mind. No wonder the Spanish go to the bullfight on the Saturday and then take Communion on Sunday. The two seem inextricably entwined, to me, bullfighting and Catholicism. And the Mass spoke to parts of me that even Buddhism has not reached. It is poetry to me, amazing, cataclysmic poetry. And, if I look at it it as anything but poetry, in the biggest sense of the word, my fear is that it is also quite possibly a form of madness. In this way, I am still scared of Catholicism, rightly or wrongly, in, as one overseas friend described it, its strange rites of supernatural cannibalism. But then I have always been attracted to things that dwell in equal shares of darkness and light, and poetry did always tread those pathways between the sane and the crazily lost.

I was scared at the thought of returning to the Convent. I was scared that I would be disappointed by what I found there. I was scared that I would not be disappointed and that it would show me all I hoped for and suspected was there.

When I rang the Convent bell, an old nun came to the door and invited me in. I said to her "I used to live in the house next door, for over twenty years. But we moved out years ago." I had no idea if she was even at the Convent during that period, as I know that most of the nuns from then have either moved on or died. She smiled at me and said " Are you Clare?"

We sit on the bank. It feels like spring has come and is spiralling into summer. My feet are twitching in the heat, his eyes are melting. The sky is the bluest it has been since winter came.

Downhill, the graves perch up against each other. Chimney stacks form a fortress above a blue haze of rooves and painted walls. If you scrape back the turf, you can find the names of the dead.

I am unnameably happy. But I sit here crying in the grass with my soft-haired lover, because I don't understand what I feel. And I know that somewhere behind me in this graveyard is the cherry blossom tree that I once stood under, where, a long time ago, I named my love for another man and I meant it forever. He disappeared with the petals that blew on our faces from the branches, and he had a son.

And his son was named after a saint, and now this saint stares back at me from these church walls, a seer and a poet. And this name lives in my own, buried between my forename and my surname, as it is buried in the walls where I grew up, between the winding hedge of our garden and a Convent's vegetable patch.



Poor Clare's, nuns with their recorders, giggling in the garden, their Crosses tied at the waist of their dark brown habits, glinting in the sunlight. They sent poems to me over the wall and I stuck them above my bed. At night I would pray to them.

But I also remember the dark evenings when God was an evil eye watching all the time. I remember turning to the left-side so I could seek out the Devil. I felt him on my back all the time, as soon as the sun went down.

That was when I was younger. An atheist by eleven, I started to scorn the nuns and their silly smocks, their locked up world. I would never give myself up to a man like that. I loved Sylvia Plath and The Women's Room. Then, at thirteen, mixed up teenager, I came across Buddhism, experienced a flash of insight, some kind of breakdown and a resurrection and the feeling never went away.

I remember searching even then, through the curtainless window, past the dark, long, empty garden, into nothing. I remember how it felt to want wings and to fly at night when no one was looking. And to fall, back on the hard carpetted floor, when the sun came up in a voidless sky.

I look now to four solid walls of stone, and a cup of wine. I am too much of a Catholic by temperament to become one now. Too much of a Buddhist to ever be ordained. And I love the stories of the saints, they all seem crazy; they scissored like epileptics across their beds in fits of holy abandon, and wrote, frenzied into the long dawn. They couldn't live a normal life.

I like to read about them as I like to read about Rimbaud or Baudelaire. There isn't much difference to me, there isn't a difference in any of it to me. The cup, the wine, the blood, the calling, the sex, the hunger, the deathly embrace. The space between words, the words themselves. The crucifixion. The flame of light. The empty corridor. The black bull. I can see the pattern in everything. After all, it was all born in my blood.

I look up. The angel's face is covered by branches, and they look like flames.

Diary of an Exquisite Morning

I went looking for God up the Breakfast Cereal & Tea and Coffee aisle of my local Tesco's.

Of course, I caught a glimpse of what I was seeking, I caught a whisper of it in my hair; a touch of gold, flaked on my forehead. I expected the Shreddies and Nut Clusters to hurl themselves from the shelves, in awe of what I was experiencing, and that in the space they left, from where they had fallen, a light would shine, right back at me.

I moved towards the Egg & Jam aisle, where black and red haired women with toddlers charged towards me, and I felt angry because I didn't want these women or these babies interrupting my search for God. I curled my lips into a harsh, wavy line. I ruminated over Free range or Organic Free Range, knowing really, this week, I just couldn't afford the latter.

And then I felt the touch of it again. I couldn't name it until I had left the store. It was only as I scoured the long aisles of the supermarket from the other side of the glass, edging myself toward the street, still hankering for a final glimpse, I could finally mouth to myself the word angel.

Sitting at home now, I understand that this compulsion towards God can take on many forms. And I'd like to think of it as holy. I would like to think of it as truthful. I would like to squeeze my palms together, making like a prayer and for it to be that simple.

The world is made up of religious fools, scraping the floors of cemeteries for the latest dust of truth. I will be there with them, falling on my backside as the gatekeeper comes, jangling his keys impatiently, already imagining his wife's stockinged legs in the bedroom waiting for him when he gets home.

This, of course, will not stop me looking. Nor should I stop. The presence of angels is a good enough reason in itself for me to blink, huge-eyed, when they appear. Silly as I am, daunting though the consequences may be, I am in it for life - a hunter after divinity, a shark for brilliant light, a presuming idiot who spills her breakfast when her head is turned towards this burning and burnt crater manifesting at the edge of her living room floor.

This may not make any sense to you, so I will not bother trying to explain. I bought what I needed to, then I walked away. My bags were mediumly heavy, I had numerous voices in my head, which I didn't bother listening to, for they were all bores. Instead, I walked home, and up the stairwell to the unpainted door of my flat, entered, breathed and put my shopping away.

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.

Dog Fever

So now that my quest for finding out exactly what the breed of the dog of my dreams is has come to an end, and I now know that the dog I'm after is in fact known as a Bearded Collie, my dog obsession has reached fever pitch, resulting last night in partial insanity.

I want a Bearded Collie so bad. Now I know it, even the name is unbearably endearing. This is no transient longing. I have been ruminating over it for the last eighteen months, fantasising and wrangling with my conscience as I have known I could neither a) afford it, nor b) justify housing any dog of reasonable size in my little flat.

The man I talked to outside the cafe yesterday, who was accompanying the said dog of my dreams, told me that they are apparently the most intelligent of dogs, but also need the most extraordinary amounts of walking; miles and miles as a puppy, slightly less as an adult.

Does this mean now that I have to move to the country to fulfill my dream, or at the very least install a small treadmill in my flat? I want to get a rescue dog really, and if by luck he happened to be a Bearded Collie too, in order then for us both to live happily side by side he would have to be either very old, thus not in need of so much walking, or blind. Thus he wouldn't see how inadequate his home was, or perhaps with only two legs or something, you know, the front two working, the back of him mounted on wheels, then I could just roll him along the seafront and he'd be happy as larry.

I'll stop there, I think.

What am I to do? I know if I even venture to Shoreham Dogs' Home to take a peek at the dogs there, I will return home with at least one of them in my arms.

Another alternative is to fall in love with another breed, a breed of tiny, tired dogs, who are puffed out after five minutes of walking and fit in my handbag. I'm not sure if that breed actually exists, nor if I'd like them. They sound quite weird.

The third option, the sensible, bigger person-ed, less egomaniacal, over-the-top romanticised option is to take a dog which most needs a home and is neither tiny nor huge, not a puppy but not at death's door and who has all his own legs, and leave the rest up to the universe.

Nope. I want a Bearded Collie.

Red Apple Falls

I do like Smog, I do. It's unusual, powerful music. However, sometimes, on a day like today, when there's a chill in the air and I have clearly had my fill of January, I just couldn't bear to listen to much of Bill Callahan's wintery cold words and endlessly drawn out melodies, his lyrics about wells and hard-wood floors and men and women not liking each other very much ("So she washed her cut in the sink./Without her clothes she looked like/A leper in the snow/I left her in the snow/Without her clothes"). Great.

Yes, I can find him a tad on the depressing side. So I was happy today to remember Red Apple Falls, an album from 1997 that has been lurking round my music collection for a while now, and I stuck it on my CD player, and it has now cured me of my Smog apathy completely. It is complex and uplifting songwriting, full of hope and heart and strong imagery littered with apples, rivers, husbands and horses. I can't recommend it enough as music for soothing those sore arms of winter which wrap around us all from time to time during these darker months.

I am presently in the midst of an icy haze of a cold bug which has been sweeping through my body and, most noticeably, my nose, for the last couple of days now, bringing with it a sense of what it is like to be a human marshmallow. Between long hours of sofa lurking, rolling inside my duvet and blowing into vast quantities of Co-op's finest re-cycled loo roll, I keep having spontaneous bursts of energy during which I want to leap into some creative project or other.

Hence, this afternoon, as the sun went down I took out my scissors and began chopping away at my hair, both at the length and my fringe, in a frenzy of rejeuvenating my 'look'. This 'look' of mine has been slowly deteriorating over the last months (and I wasn't even that sure what it was in the first place), but today, the slow and cruel slide from some kind of a Chrissy Hynde/Charlie's Angels look, to that of an Old English Sheep dog was more than I could bear.

I don't think I should have done it, however, whilst listening to The Only Ones, where one should most definitely be pogoing in a violent crowd, not trying to trim a perfect line of fringe, both exact and at the same time gradually descending down the side of my face into a neat blending into the rest of my hairdo. As a result, my careful cutting became increasingly frenzied, and it didn't matter how much I told myself that this was the genius inner hairdresser in me coming out, my fringe was getting shorter and shorter, and the line, wobblier and wobblier. I thought I'd try and temper it by chopping the ends off the rest of my hair aswell, making the whole hairdo shorter, and therefore the fringe look less out of balance. Well, it didn't work.

Oh, why didn't I just make myself some hot ginger tea and read my book? I now look like Joan Of Arc or that bloke off On The Buses or no, oh god, I've a horrid memory image coming to me - I am somewhat resembling Valerie Singleton on Blue Peter circa 1971, or even worse, a kind of amalgam of her with a bit of John Noakes and Peter Purves thrown in.

There's a thin line between quirky and crap, a very thin line. My dilemma now is: do I try and resurrect my fringe, somehow attempting to bring it back from the ashes of destruction into a new cutesy, sexy, boy-girl sprig of loveliness?

The quite clear risk here is the fact that it is ever shortening, and that instead of it ending up looking like Beatrice Dalle in the opening scenes of Betty Blue, where she smoulders, scantily clad at the entrance of her lover Zorg's perfect wooden beach house, gorgeous messy fringe sexily falling in her eyes, it instead would be Beatrice Dalle as Betty sometime later in the film, in the lipstick splodging/hair hacking/stew smearing/nervous-breakdown-sliding run up to eyeball poking-out dinner table scene.

Incidentally, recalling these two scenes from Betty Blue makes me realise how they seem to perfectly depict the typical difference between how women often start off in a relationship and how they unfortunately often end up. One minute we're setting our man's heart and loins alight (and his beach house) with our fiery passion, our innate charm and our incredible breasts. The next, we are weeping into our boeuf bourgignion, running off up alleyways in our knickers, and stabbing women in the arm with a fork. I am, however, trying not to encourage this line of thinking, still, as I am, hopefully on the sexy, sane side with my lover, with only a few fork brandishing type incidences, and I don't want to tempt fate. Nor do I want to tempt fate by carving a psychotic fringe for myself.

So, it seems clear now, I need to cut my losses (ha ha) and lay off the hairdressing for tonight. Instead, I am going to play it safe and keep my hands occupied by making dinner - a savoury and stodgy winter busting puff pastry roll. That could cheer up even Bill Callahan.

Nowhere To Run To Baby, Nowhere To Hide

I am spending way too much time alone. I realised this again today as I made some soup and realised that I had been having an animated and somewhat tetchy conversation with it for the past five minutes. Something is wrong when your lunch starts to take on a personality of its own, and an irritating one at that.

One good thing, however, about descending into the vaults of loner-y weirdoness is that you can discover places you wouldn't usually be on the look out for if you were with someone else, actually enjoying yourself, or having a life. So I'm cycling up the main road towards Shoreham today on 'Jeopardy', my aptly named death trap of a bike, hoping not to be squashed by a lorry or hurled headlong into the road by the surprise opening of a car door (I've not quite regained confidence in my bike or in my cycling skills since I quite unstylishly fell off her on Hove Lawns last December and had to be prised out from underneath her by a gaggle of purple haired old ladies and one jogger).

Then, out of nowhere I spot an American style diner by the side of the road. Apart from the fact that it's pretty rare to see a diner in England at all, it is even more unusual that I would find myself actually choosing to cycle in the direction of Shoreham per se, nevermind doing so in a gale force wind storm, since, for a slightly morose feeling person, it isn't the most conventionally uplifting of locations. I mean, the power station does have an incredible dark kind of beauty to it, but it's hardly the most life affirming of sights for someone who is a bit down.

I've vague recollections of my friend telling me about a diner around this area, but I've never been able to find it. But by chance, there it is, all neon strip lighting and big windows. I decide to cycle past it on my way home and stop for a coffee and write. After all, that's surely what diners are for: coffee and writing in your notebook as the waitress refills your cup.

I love diners. In fact, if I were to cite my reasons for wanting to live in America (an urge that comes over me from time to time), the presence of diners is one of them. As I entered 'Woodies', I forgave myself for my lack of ability to be scathingly critical of the fake American post-moderniness of it all. 'Must everything become a replica of the American dream, a dream which is, and has never been real?' Ah well, more to the point, how fat will the pancakes be? I'm quite up for sitting here and looking out over the corrugated steel rooves and pretending I'm not in stinky England.

It's a clean, smart looking place. But, sadly, the most important thing about a diner is missing - booths. Booths, to me, are like restaurant versions of the hidden room behind the painting in a stately home. They are inherently romanticised in my brain. They bring to my mind that one off reunion between two, now elderly gay lovers who haven't seen each other in over forty years, who, silently, as they wait for the bill, touch each other's hands, and smile a sad smile before both looking away. Or the overweight divorcee who's just had to move into rented accomodation, who rattles his change nervously in his hand and sweats loneliness. Or the female serial killer who's just notched up another policeman on the roadside, and who checks her lipstick in the silver napkin holder, and is not even bothered if she makes it to the border. Or there's the three gangsters in crumpled suits who are discussing their fat wives and praising the shape of the waitress's legs through her uniform, belching into their Root Beer, whilst outside a dying gagged man is locked in the trunk of their car. Or the nineteen year old boy with a notebook and a grey duffel coat who turns up every day and orders tea, who, in two years will have finished writing one of the greatest novels of the last fifty years, and which will never get published. These and other numerous somewhat cliched images in my head are why I love diners.

But I am appeased by the fact that, as I am shown to a table by the window by a pretty waitress with electric blue eyeshadow and white pumps, they are playing 'Stoned Love' by Diana Ross on the jukebox. In fact, they continue to play great music for my entire time there. I order a coffee and realise I've forgotten my little notebook, so instead I begin to write on the napkins. They bring my coffee and it's good, and they don't mind me writing on their napkins, and, as the sky darkens outside, I'm feeling a peculiar kind of contentment, the joy of being warm, hearing good music and feeling anonymous.

'Time For Action' by Secret Affair comes on the jukebox. Wow! This has to be the most evocative song of my childhood, and the happiest (perhaps matched only by 'Reward' by Julian Cope and 'Mirror In The Bathroom' by The Beat). How does a song do that? One minute I'm in a strange diner on a miserable January afternoon, scribbling on a napkin. The next, I'm seven years old again, and happy, balancing on the rotten strip of wood that went all the way around the flower bed that the tree in our back yard grew in, up past the convent wall, next to the plastic shed roof with the rusty motor boat under it. I make sure I don't swallow my gum as I tip and sway, as I sing and pull at the ivy that is climbing the tree, crossing my fingers it isn't poisonous and about to bring me out in a scary rash. I thought I was it then, the baby sister who would sit on the knees of my older sister's male friends whilst they painted their faces like Alice Cooper and drank beer. 'Time For Action' reminds me of running down our stairs and standing in the hallway in sunlight whilst my sister talks on the phone. It reminds me of going into our lounge, with its green velvety walls, its leather sofas and its French doors, and slowly opening the dark wooden doors of the dresser under the window where inside sits the record player like some holy relic. And I put that record on, listen to it crackle and jump as I dance, pretending I'm a Mod boy, in cool clothes, in a cool gang, walking through the streets of some unknown Northern town.

They are playing 'Nowhere To Run'. I'm really happy. I wonder to myself if the pancakes are really like the ones in America, not just, as it usually is, some lame British version. Why is British food and service so rubbish? I remember when I was driving from New York to Boston last year with Chall Gray and stopping off late at night at a diner for pancakes and coffee. That diner was fucking fantastic, the counter gleamed, the booths were pink and everything was mirrored, and there was even an entire open refrigerator full of fresh food on ice which you could pick out for yourself. It was something else.

But here, I like it here. I like the fact that it is a chrome paean to Americanness and that it lies on one of the busiest and most grim and unAmerican main roads out of Brighton. I like the waitress, I like her pumps, I like the view, I like not knowing anyone. It's that right balance of cheerful, clean and a bit weird, and I know the power station is looming up behind me as I sip my drink to give me that David Lynch feel. I shall return to haunt this place again soon, rattling up Kingsway on my trusty 'Jeopardy', and next time, with a notebook stuffed in my pocket.

It certainly wasn't the road signs or the thought of love or money littering the streets or what the paper said.

Only the half caught things that make my day. Like the end of a T.V. show. Like reflections in car windows. I don't understand why I was meant for a treacherous life. Never known any different. The clouds speed at two o' clock along with the rain and my head falls forward on your chest. Your room is white as air, Death Cab For Cutie on the stereo. I feel your tears rolling into my hair as mine spread down my chin. I say "I'm tired, I'm tired". And the way you looked at me then, well, it made my day.

And I am out into the wet again, boots soaked through to skin, waves up high against the balustrade. Paper blowing to the West, a magic lantern swings on the peeling wooden railing. I am no ornate fixture, despite the tunes trickling through my head. I am blown to pieces. But how he took my hand, he didn't have to. Led me up the wobbling road. He bought me yellow roses and carnations just to cheer me up. And a washing up bowl, one without a hole in.

I had an orgasm tonight. When I came it was no man, no woman, no fumbling graphic scene, it was only the kindness in a stranger's eyes which made the world explode. Kindness, almost blue in colour. I remember then the page after page I read yesterday from a guy in Pennsylvania writing about his girlfriend, a local stripper, who danced for him the first time as she danced for all the others and how he fell for her and how she had left him, and I cry too.

In a small room, a woman whose hair is long, the rest I don't remember, brusquely gets up from her chair, rustles through folders, tells me as I'm leaving "I can help you, do not worry". Then I am on the bus home, front seat, rain all over the windscreen, smudging the outside world into blurry charcoal. I sense the lazy orange lights of the Palace Pier, seeping through wet and black. I see beauty in oblivion.

I'm flailing like a good one. A nine to five seems like bliss right now. A strip lit room with pens, wrinkled shirts and routines, a pay packet on a Friday. That would keep me warm. All this writing reduced to zero. What does it count for? All that I love most is like the fucking wind. Can never get my hands on it. Get into media. Get onto the Ladders of the World and Climb. I never bothered much with what I'm meant to, it never aroused a thing in me. But I pretend. I don't let on that I know you, every last one of you, and every piece. It gets me out of tight spots to be this way. Like having a pretty face. It can pacify bus drivers when you've forgotten your change.

Stagger into the Light

I am so fed up at the moment. As my Mum would say, fed up "to the back teeth". I feel at the moment like my life is being lived on a high wire, and I am some untrained circus performer who was just minding her own business taking money for the show before being dragged up there by a couple of brutish clowns without a safety net. This isn't what I signed up for. Though one gets to experience a certain existential wisdom and inner knowledge at such times as these, I have to say, as a compensation for how bollocks everything can feel, that is not the greatest source of comfort to me.

And yet, it has its moments. After working out my finances and discovering that I have a total of 27p to live off for the whole month of February, hearing that my Mum's health had taken another turn for the worse and realising that I do not know what the fuck I am doing with my life at the moment, on any single level, today I prised myself out of my hidey hole and took to the sea-front in what felt like my very last attempt at bothering with life and its doings at all.

And I was startled by beauty. All along the prom, out far from the shore, in each direction, East and West, from Shoreham harbour up past Palmeira Square, Sussex Heights to the Palace Pier and beyond, the afternoon light fell like strands of golden hair over the coastline, over and around the enormous mass of human beings enjoying the first clear blue sky day in Brighton for weeks. The tall cream buildings lining the road past Hove Lawns stood quietly luminous and everything I saw was softening in the glow of the afternoon. I tilted my head back and felt the skin on my face lit up by the gleam of the sky.

It is a wonder to walk the prom on a day like today. To witness life, to smell the sunlight, to feel the blueness of the air all around. It all becomes part of one single movement - the puppy in a green coat chasing its tail, the flat bodies of surfers, faces pressed to their boards, bodies black and shiny, waiting for a wave to break. The bare curved torso of a teenage boy as he skateboards down the pavement disappearing into a crowd of parents and prams, women selling trilby hats, a man selling hippy clothes, and thirty something media professionals recovering from the night before. The white lips of the waves coming in, the dark of the West Pier, the pinks, yellows and blues of the beach huts, the arc of a seagull wing, the smell of chips from the sea front cafe, the glittering row of hotels shrinking into the distance.

I pass huge dogs, tiny dogs, silly dogs, magnificent dogs, swimming dogs, sniffing dogs, dogs whose eyes look like they hold the key to every soul within them and I want to take every single one home with me. I decide: I will open a dog sanctuary, no, I will live in the country with twenty working dogs for company, no, I will ask one of the owners politely if it is hard work looking after their dog, and then gently offer to take it of their hands as an act of compassion.

I wasn't expecting this. I wasn't expecting to be lifted, or to feel joy for no other reason at all than being here, now, in this perfect sunlit scene. On the way home I took the last money from my purse and detoured up to Tesco's, threw caution to the wind and bought a chocolate cake, from their 'finest' range. I took my £1.65's worth of joy home with me, made a cup of tea, and ate a slice in silence. It has been many weeks since I have enjoyed the glory of a piece of chocolate cake, and it tasted good. Sitting in the fading sun of my front room, it tasted perfect.

Cleveland Potash

This is where you end up staying when you spend half your Christmas holidays with Up.

fire burned and blew out flowers

This morning I've been re-listening to that little ray of sunshine himself, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy. He's such a cheery lyricist. Songs such as Another Day Full Of Dread, Today I Was An Evil One and of course I See A Darkness make up this sunny and light album. One of my absolute favourites on it, however, is Death To Everyone:

I am here/right here/where god puts none asunder/and you/in black dress and black shoe/you do/invite me under

One of the hardest things about grief, I think, is the insidiousness of it, the way it filters into every atom, every fissure of your life. How it creeps up on you when you least expect it. Making a cup of tea, the radio on, one minute you're singing along, the next you're on the floor doubled over. What happened? Perhap it was a line of a song, perhaps, just a word. Maybe it was the way your spoon clinked in your cup as you stirred in the sugar. Maybe it was noticing that picture that wasn't hanging straight on your wall and adjusting it, suddenly you find yourself staring at it, lost in its image.

It is a hard process to understand in oneself, because it is sometimes so unpredictable and apparently illogical. For me, there can be several weeks where it follows me everywhere I go, it's that black dog I simply can't shake off. Then eventually I emerge, new again, still alive, still whole, still able to smile, perhaps smiling even more. Other times I can go in and out of it on a daily, even hourly basis, one minute writing out some plan for my life, preparing an application form, the next, I am inconsolable, unable to lift a pen.

It is perhaps even harder to understand in another person sometimes. And the thing about grieving is that the only thing you can do really is carry on, is to get on with life, because you need the straight and narrow to keep to whilst your world falls apart, it's the concrete and the road signs that keep your nerve steady and your feet moving when there's a tornado tearing through all the land around you which you once called your home.

You keep looking ahead, eyes on the next step forward. And when you come across a patch of meadow that hasn't been hit you say "hey, look at those daisies, look at those buttercups, aren't they beautiful!". And they are, and you do really see it, you really can smell the grass and the earth beneath it. Sometimes it can feel like the first time you've seen a flower at all, it is that beautiful. In that moment there is joy, so much joy to realise the grass is still growing and the flowers are still blooming somewhere, and that they all look so perfect and smell so good, even if you know that's your house over there in the distance, and it's burning to the ground.

However, the thing about getting on with life when you are grieving is that people can then believe you're ok. Of course, they want to believe that, we all do, because grief is unpleasant for everybody, even if it's not your own loss, it still brings a chill to the heart of an otherwise sunny day, it still reminds you of your own mortality, it is the cold clammy truth none of us particularly want to know about on a consistent basis. Unless it's thrust on us, of course. But when you are grieving, it is all you know. It is all you think about. It paints every aspect of your world with it's own particular colour. Life, death, ageing, sickness, beginning, ending, birth, loss, love, suffering.. questions, questions, always questions that you can never stop asking and yet must learn to live with the unsatisfactoriness of the fact that no answer can really provide you with the solace you long for.

So when you cannot yourself run away from the truth of loss, when it is right in your face, you also realise that others can run away, that they have an option which you do not. And so, on some level they cannot access with such intensity what you youself can at this time, and that, right now, every day, they are creating and building worlds just as yours are constantly being torn down. You realise that on some level, at the end of the day, at a time when you most acutely want and need kinship and understanding as if it were air, you will be, at times, most profoundly alone.

This has been a strong realisation for me, and it's helped me grow up a lot. It's also been hard. And people are there when they can be, and some people close that gap as much as any caring person can, and it's a beautiful thing when they do. And somehow, in the times when people can't, you learn to find a way to live with that gap of experience, and not blame, and not blame yourself.

However, last year I had to let go of several people I thought were and would always be the closest people in my life because for whatever their reasons, they didn't have it in them to meet me even a tiny bit of the way in trying to understand what it must be like to be losing a parent. And that hurt. There hopefully aren't that many times in one's life when one has to hold up one's hands and call on friends and loved ones to rally round a bit -and it's hard not to feel let down when that does not happen, and people even turn away from you. I'm still working on that one.

Grief does its work on so many levels, it leaves nothing unturned, on the one hand it draws out and burns up what is not true, what is bullshit, what is fantasy, what is not good for us, what needs to go. It shows up what is weak, superficial or selfish and it highlights what is strong, what is deep, what is loving. On the other, it brings forth a demon of rage and bitterness and an unforgiving pain that will not be pacified, that does not want to understand the complexity of human foibles, only it's own need for solace. For me, I struggle to work out which is which, and what I can realistically expect from people, and that struggle is part of the complexity of my grief.

We all go to places no one else can go at times in our lives, over and over again. There are things about every single person on this planet that no one else will ever know or understand. We stand alone. And yet we cannot survive without human love. These two will hold hands in a clasp of contradiction forever.

And I wouldn't give up those moments when I realise I'm really ok being alone in darker places, I'm really ok that no one else knows all that I am keeping inside. What would the world be without its secrets? And somewhere, out there, there is always someone who has shared your experience. Because whether we realise it or not, ultimately we're all in the same shoes, heading in the same direction, coming from the same homeland. And it's a place of fire and flowers, meadows, whirlwinds, the scorched thatch and the long, long road.

I'm slowly learning to draw a circle around me, I guess you could call it a sacred circle, one that honours and cherishes that space where no one else but I can go, that lights a candle and sings softly in devotion to those darkest, loneliest hours. And to remember that there is still love over the other side of the line, sometimes imperfect, messy love, but love nonetheless. And I am not perfect, and I cannot always do the best thing, and I get upset, and I get bitter, and sometimes I flail and I rail, stumble about, and I can't always forgive others' shortcomings, and I can't always understand or even be reasonable, because I've been losing the most precious person in my life for some time now, and death isn't doing it's work kindly, and loss is a peculiar, devastating thing, and when any person deeply touches it, it is a fire in the hearth from which they cannot remove their hand, until gradually, eventually, with the passing of time, its flames die out.

So strap me on/and raise me high/cause buddy I'm not/afraid to die/cause life/is long/and it's tremendous/and we're glad/that you're here with us/
death to me/and death to you/tell me what else can we/do die do/death to all/and death to each/our own god-bottle/s'within reach..

Happy New Year

Well, it's a new year and there is much to recount of the last few weeks or more of my life, much to divulge of the inner workings of my mind and soul, and many outpourings of my imagination to offer up to you all.

And of course there was Christmas, with it's strange Midnight Mass and an abundance of gingerbread and chocolate bishops, with its beautiful and sometimes difficult workings out of family love and loss, a silent New Year's Eve and my three day excursion to a fishing village by the sea in deepest darkest Yorkshire to meet with the rugged elements and a certain boyo's family.

But all this must wait, for there are more important things afoot.

Yes, Celebrity Big Brother is back! I've just finished watching it and it is as disturbing and as ludicrous as ever. Eleven 'famous' housemates have all entered the Big Bro house tonight and are now awkwardly sipping tea and failing to recognise who each other are at this very moment as I write. Yes, there are the usual boring characters - a beautiful Bollywood actress whom nobody's heard of over here, then there's Denise Somebody Or Other, whose main claim to fame is that she got kicked off the Miss United Kingdom throne of honour upon winning first prize ater it was discovered she was shagging one of the judges (who happened to be Teddy Sherringham).

However, the person I was most shocked to see in there was Ken Russell, God forbid, who took to the celebrity runway from his blacked out car with a bright red face and multi-coloured waistcoat, acting like someone on day release from the local Alzheimers' ward. He staggered along shouting gibberish at the crowd in what looked like some kind of attempt at being wacky or way out, which unfortunately just left him looking like a grey haired puffy faced old man version of most of his films - unpleasant, tedious and somewhat distasteful.

The same kind of went for Leo Sayer, who bounced his way through the crowds like a demented troll, huge white teeth flashing up at every camera. And my God, he doesn't look any different from how he did in the Seventies, and he is just as irritating in the flesh as one might suspect from hearing his songs.

The entrance of Danny Tourette, mulleted blonde haired singer from rock/'punk' band the Towers Of London looked promising as he staggered pissed out of his head up the red carpet shouting "Fuck you all!" to the entire crowd and showing them his skinny torn denimed behind. Though it was even better when he entered the house and the only person he happened to know there was Leo Sayer. "Leo!" he cried as the midget frizzy haired 70's popster swung Donny into an embrace and squealled "How're you doing boy? Berkshire, isn't it, where you're from, how's it all going there?".

But the total highlight of the evening was the final entrance, from Dirk Benedict. At this point in the proceedings he is very much my tipped favourite. He emerged from the back of a van with a huge cigar, beaming at the crowd before turning back to the van and shouting into the backseat "B.A., I'll be back soon!". Yes, it was none other than Face off the A - Team, now a middle aged screwball with an overnight bag filled only with cigars and whisky, who hates groups and team work, and who is single and wants to find a nice woman in there who isn't the age "of my daughter". Fantastic! He got a hero's reception, and quite rightly too.

It apppears that Big Brother hasn't sold itself short on the mix of B-List Celebrities and old has-been former stars, whilst throwing in a good measure of bimbos and ex boy/girl band members for good luck. And they all appear to be as mad as a bag of spanners. But adding Ken Russell is a touch of brilliance, and Dirk Benedict just perfect. Let's hope by the end of the evening everyone has worked out who Jermaine Jackson is, with his sequined jacket and shiny plasticised face, before he has to tell them.

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.)