Pea soup for the soul

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday

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

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

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

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

tuesday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wednesday

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

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

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

News

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

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

Sunday Morning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dans Le Noir

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GIg!

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

Apparently neurologists and psychologists are now making a link between temporal lobe epilepsy and mystical experience. The two often seem to go hand in hand. When having fits, such epileptics often experience what they might call God or Oneness, or indeed, experience themselves as God, or perhaps, as the man on the videos below does, as having "heaven and hell in my eyes".

Somehow, this doesn't surprise me at all. I have long suspected that all kinds of so-called afflictions, physical and psychological (such as migraine, epilepsy, low blood-pressure, brain tumour, mental health issues, personal trauma, neurosis, mental breakdown), can open gateways into bigger, spiritual, experience.

Last week I found out that somebody very close to me has temporal lobe epilepsy. It has been a diagnosis that's been long due, and though in many ways I wish she didn't have to live with this, in others, I'm glad at least we know now what the cause is of her fits.

Without wanting to go into her personal experience, on another level, I've been intrigued by some things she has told me about her unusual experiences during and after a fit, and by the potential implications of that for her, and indeed for myself.

Though I am not epileptic, I do have a strong disposition towards both fit-type experiences and what one might call unusual or mystical experiences. Just after I was born, I started having convulsions which went on for some time, resulting in periodic stays in hospital. Throughout my childhood and teens I had a strong tendency to faint at the slightest thing, where it would almost be like a fit (instead of falling to the ground, I would often still be animated and moving around as though awake, much to the amusement and bafflement of my family). I also had a strong tendency towards both intense psychic, imaginal or 'cosmic' experience, and also, in my teens, a tendency towards extreme mental dissociation, which caused me severe distress at times, as I feared I was 'going mad'. This has continued into my adult life, but has decreased as I've got older and, I think found bigger contexts for it.

Without medical diagnosis, I can't effectively say the cause of this, but my own guess is that it could have been caused by a combination of intense physical and psychic sensitivity and perhaps low blood pressure, which I suffer from. I still seem to often experience extreme physical responses to emotional (and particularly spiritual) input, such as shaking, convulsing, severe coughing, gagging, involuntary laughter etc. I wonder what it is about my physiology, if anything, that perhaps encourages me to experience things this way?

Though I am not denying the physical nature of temporal lobe epilepsy, I do find the link between it and spiritual experience fascinating. It raises many questions. I also find the reverse connection interesting also (and somewhat unnerving), that is, perhaps mystical experiences are just our way of interpreting certain patterns of neurological impulse/connections which are taking place in the brain. It also makes me want to mull over again the connection that I see over and again between that which is often named as 'messed up', 'dysfunctional' or 'destructive' in life, and the arising of genius, deep spiritual insight or experience.

Here is the link, the site itself is worth checking out...

Long Afloat on Shipless Oceans...

Bob has come up with a new nickname for me. It's not the prettiest, but it has a certain ring to it if you say my name in full. Cotad. In fact, that should really read C.O.T.A.D. It stands for Completely Oblivious To All Danger. Yes, that's me.

It was a glorious, sunny, blue-skied day on Monday when my friend L and I tramped our way to the inflatables shop on Hove sea-front to get my forlorn and pumpless dinghy blown up. There was a light breeze, but the sun was hot and the sea looked like it was begging us to dip our toes in.

This was the first outing of Her Ladyship since my failed attempt last week with G due to torn pump rubber and inadequate gaffer tape. As the owner dragged the now fully inflated dinghy from his shop, he creased his ruddy face and asked "Are you sure you'll be alright going out in these conditions? There's a strong wind out there today."

"Nah, no problem" we both replied.

As we excitedly dragged my great blue and yellow wonder away from the beach balls and plastic windmills, his wife reiterated "You sure you'll be ok?"

Blimey, I thought, these sea-front people can be so over cautious.

Rather than leave our stuff on the beach, we decided to bring it with us. We piled it all into one huge plastic bag, and, somewhat stylishly and effortlessly, manoeuvred both ourselves and the bag into the dinghy and set off from the shore.

I love leaving Brighton behind. My favourite thing about going out in the dinghy is that I can watch the shoreline shrinking, the noise and the hassle of the city slowly drifting away. Brighton and Hove look so beautiful from out there. They stand wrapped in silence, with only the sound of lapping waves, or a gull overhead to interrupt the feeling of endless emptiness and space. In the sunshine, the city looks like it's made of gold.

I relaxed while L rowed. I had only recently found out that he is as much of a dinghy fanatic as myself, and, the experience of finding this out had been not unlike discovering that your friend is a member of the same secret, subversive society as you. We discussed our passion for the inflatable vessel over pear cider last week, agreeing how it is so much more than a crap blown-up toy which people muck about in when they go on holiday. No, it is much more spiritual than that, much more mysterious, esoteric and radical. I have long known that there are those who understand the full implications of The Way Of The Dinghy, and those who dismiss it as merely childish, silly or uncool. Such lost souls, one can only feel sorry for.

Anyway, it got a bit nippy, but thanks to the vast array of clothes we had packed into the boat, I wrapped up in a jumper. L started to look somewhat puzzled. Even though we hadn't actually tried to row further out to sea, we seemed to suddenly be rather far out, and since there were no yellow buoys out to give us any perspective, it was hard to determine exactly whether it was too far. L was concerned and so began rowing back towards the shore. After ten minutes, his puzzlement had turned to a grimace.

"No matter how much I row, I'm not actually moving anywhere" he uttered, frowning. I thought it was best for me to look concerned as well, so he didn't feel alone in his panic, and didn't notice how much I thought he was overreacting.

"Let me try," I said.

"No" came the prompt, stressed answer. He carried on rowing. At that point I turned to survey the shoreline. We hadn't moved one metre in ten minutes.

I took an oar. We both started rowing, I put my whole body into it. After a few minutes I looked again and slowly the shoreline was looking a little closer, not much, but a little. We carried on, my arms began to ache, and finally we reached a place where it felt comfortable enough to take a breather. Phew.

Our spirits returned in the knowledge that we were out of immediate danger. L suggested that I turn around so that we were both facing the same way, so that we could put more power into it. Now, turning round in a dinghy isn't the easiest of tasks, and I had just clumsily managed the maneouver and grabbed the oar when I spotted a boat heading towards us. I panicked for a moment that it might crash right into us, then, to my relief, and then my horror, I realised that it wasn't a speedboat, but a lifeboat, and it wasn't simply heading in the same direction as us, it was heading for us.

Suddenly, L cried "Run for it!" Looking back on it, this wasn't the cleverest of things to shout in the circumstances, firstly because one can't really 'run for it' in a dinghy, and secondly, if one isn't to take the wording too literally, even then, trying to out-row a large engine powered lifeboat with a small inflatable dinghy, is quite unlikely. Nevertheless, I promptly grabbed the oar and we flailed around attempting to flee the oncoming boat.

"We've had a distress call about a blue and yellow dinghy!" came the loudspeakered voice.

Now, following this announcement, came the second utterance that makes no sense in hindsight, but when faced by potential utter humiliation and embarrassment, one is driven to say somewhat stupid things.

I shouted back "Oh, that's not us, I think it's that dinghy over there", as I pointed to a speck on the horizon which I didn't even know what kind of sailing vessel it was. "We're fine!" I proclaimed as a helicopter flew overhead, and stopped precisely above us, hovering like an annoying fly.

"No, it is you" came the quick reply as the helicopter continued to buzz above us. L muttered expletives under his breath.

"No, we're really fine" he echoed, "we're just making our way back to shore now".

"We'll tow you back" came the loudspeaker.

We looked at each other. No fucking way. We'd both rather drown trying than have the humiliation of dangling off the back of the RNLI all the way back to shore. We waved our oars around and tried to look effective and competent. Unfortunately, I had only just swivelled into my new position in the dinghy and hadn't yet got a grasp of how to use the oar from this position. We sped round in circles.

"Are you sure you don't want our help?" came the now sniggering voice.

"No," shouted back L in an attempted air of confidence. "We're very British you know, very proud".

They stood there watching us, tailing every slow and self-conscious stroke of our pained journey back to shore, the sound of our rowing echoed by their laughter. At least the sodding rescue helicopter cleared off.

Finally, we arrived, wobbly handed at the beach, managed to get ourselves and our belongings out of the dinghy and up on shore.

"Bet they're still laughing at us" L said with a scowl as we waved at them and they finally sped off.

We laid out the blanket. The sheer humiliation of the experience was potent fuel for laughter. We cracked up. Suddenly, I spotted two coastguards approaching us. "Are you the owners of this blue and yellow dinghy?" one of them asked. Here we go again, I thought.

They were very nice about it all, considering. Again, don't ask me why, but I tried to convince them that there must have been a mistake.

"There was another dinghy out there" I told one of them. "I think maybe it was that that was in trouble."

"No," he responded " that was a man in a kayak who was actually on his way out to you both to see if you needed assistance. We received three alerts about you from members of the public."

Shit. We apologised profusely for the fuss we had caused.

"I'll have to take down your names and addresses."

I imagined myself on some Dinghy black-list.

"It's for our records only. Any further out, and you two'd not have made it back".

So there we have it. COTAD. Completely Oblivious To All Danger. I still couldn't really accept that maybe we had lost a bit of control of the dinghy out there until I told a friend the story the other night. Whilst giggling at the hilariousness of it all, I looked back at her, and noticed that she wasn't smiling.

"I might never have seen you and L again," she cried, "I'd have turned up for Writers' Group and someone would say 'Oh, they're not coming. They drowned in Clare's inflatable dinghy yesterday."

I guess that's the thing with the sea. Like life, you never can quite tell which way the currents are pulling. They look like they're going one way, and then suddenly you realise they're going in quite another. It's all a question of navigation, strong arms and not letting yourself get carried out too far.

When the coastguards had finally left, the sun was getting so hot I could feel my face burning. I lay in a semi-sleepy state, basking in the rays. "We'll probably find ourselves on the Government's terrorist suspect list now" L surmised as he got out his crayons and pad.

"Yeah," I agreed. "CID will be tapping our phones". I wondered what the time was, as I had lost complete track of it in all the drama. I sat up.

"Are you drawing the sea?" I asked him.

I leaned over his pad. And there she was, in blue and yellow. My Rapid 4000 who had got us home. The best dinghy in the world.

Mother's Day

They are selling cut-price flowers in Tesco's, for this special day, for all those last minute sons and daughters.

I came back from Wales yesterday, on a long Pendolino train which arrived at 11 o'clock in the evening, then I caught the last bus home. Today, I am shattered, and have been attempting to cultivate a pottering state of mind - one which concentrates only on the unpacking of tea cups, the re-aligning and colour-coding of books on shelves, and the playing of crap bubble-bursting logic games on my mobile phone.

I knew at some point today I would need to sit myself at my computer and attempt to recapture the last few days, and I knew it wouldn't be easy. My heart feels like it has been pumped with helium, so swollen with life, it is, so engorged with feeling, I fear it might just sail right out from under my tee-shirt, out of my living-room window and into the dark rainy night.

I arrived in Shotton at lunch time on Tuesday, tired from the train journey, the early start and the lack of sleep I've become used to in these recent weeks of late night music and writing sessions. I have been wanting to see my sister for some time, we met jubilantly on the station platform, caught the train together to our village and walked home.

As I sat in my Mum's old bedroom, which looks out over the playing fields, I could see, through the trees in the distance, the partly hidden walls of our old sprawling family home, the house I grew up in from the age of four until I moved out at eighteen. With its vast tangle of bushes, trees and flowerbeds, its large echoing rooms, the endless driveway, it is still very much a mythical place for me, a place I still dream about, I still think about. It is a house of so many memories, and I'm still trying to understand and come to terms with what went on within its four walls.

I've known for a while that I needed to go and have another look at the old house. I hadn't seen it close up in some years, I've avoided going up our old road. Right next to it stands the Poor Clares Convent, just on the other side of the wall. I hadn't been back to the Convent since I was a little girl. I have known for a while that I've needed to return here aswell. I've wanted to see what it was like on the inside, as I can't remember from all those years ago, and I've needed some answers in order to piece together the missing pieces of a puzzle that is my childhood. So I have needed for a long time to go and visit the Poor Clares. This week felt like the right time.

I can't locate much in my memories of childhood that, looking back, seem normal or ordinary, if there is such a thing. At the time, I thought that was just how things were in family life, it was all that I knew. But I so longed to be normal and ordinary, in an ordinary house, with an ordinary family, ordinary friends, ordinary wishes and an ordinary experience. The more I look at it, though I know that the idea of a normal family-life can only largely be myth, the more I think what an extraordinary existence in some ways my childhood and teenage years were.

However, when I remember, it is usually the bad that I remember, the darker parts, the shadowy overhangs of branches in our gardens, the crawling in the undergrowth. It is the creaking in the loft above my head, it is the white statue on the lawn that, in the night, always seemed to be moving. It is the death of the bumble bee in the spider's web next to our back steps, it is the crying in the night. We kept the back door locked tight and the front door gleaming with red gloss paint and a brass knocker.

This is what stays with me most, the feeling that someone was always hiding in those tall poplars that lined our long driveway, that there were forces out there, surrounding us that me and my family didn't want to know about. We were all haunted.

But then there was the Convent, with its clock that chimed on the half hour, with its Cross that stood tall above all our heads. I would hear the nuns singing in the morning at dawn, as my mother took me by the hand and gently led me down the front lawn when I was little and I couldn't sleep, and the sun was just beginning to shine and birds were just waking.

There was something about the Convent that I didn't understand, but which has affected me all my life. I am only just realising why. The nuns would come and visit my Mum and they would bring us hand-carved Crucifixes and tiny painted nuns made out of wooden clothes pegs. I would keep the prayers of St Francis on my head board, stuck with blutack, and I would pray every night and feel the kindness of those words trickling down my forehead.

..Lord .. grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life..

A thread has run through my veins and through my life from as far back as I can remember. I still don't quite understand it, and it is still unravelling. It runs all the way back to my childhood, to the old house and to those closed Convent walls.

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.