Hello

Tweet

Today in my bathroom, after I'd arranged shampoos and beauty products according to their  exact colour shade, after I'd scoured and sluiced my bathtub, sink, and toilet, after I'd painted the walls in Morning Mist and ummed and ahhed about what pictures to  hang, after I'd scrubbed the grouting with a toothbrush, I realised I might be avoiding a few things. What I felt most sad about avoiding was writing this blog. 

      
This blog used to be a place I turned to when the writing bug bit. It fulfilled a need to express powerful and not so powerful events in my life. It provided sanctuary for my soul. Then I started writing a book, completed an MA in Creative Writing and what-dya-know, I'm lucky if I write here a few times a year. Though I do blame lack of time (most of my energies are poured into agonising over where to place my next semi-colon), that's not the sole excuse. It's fear. I want to be taken seriously as a writer and so whatever I write and whatever medium I write it in I feel must be worthy of that. Yet when I wrote most on this blog, and best, I think, was when I wasn't worried about being taken seriously. I wrote because I wanted to. 

     
Writing a blog is exposing. Especially when writing about the kinds of things I tend to write about. I always tried to fight the desire to hide behind words - clever words, beautiful words, original language. My blog was rough and tender. It had strange poetry splattered across it. Posts about innocence and galaxies and stalking Bearded Collies along Hove seafront. About sea swimming and dinghies and falling off my bicycle and being rescued by old ladies with purple rinses. About my mother's stroke. My Dad's absence. About toppling into love and crawling back out again. Oh, and I wrote one post whilst on E.

     
My day-to-day life has never been that usual. Which is why I'm bothered to write in the first place.  I don't want to fall into that trap of seeking to please or of trying to be like other writers. Because we are all different breeds of creature. The animal I am can only walk, climb, kill and give birth my way. 
     
I've got a little hidden lately, down in my burrow. Dark eyes to the ground, incubating my babies.

     
So it's time to show myself again.

     
Hello.

Northern Lights

I read an interview with Bill Drummond the other day, in which he talks about nostalgia. He describes it as a sickness to be cut out because it tells us lies about things being once better than they are now. Forget the past; think about today. As someone who spends a lot of time writing about the past and trying to make sense of it, I’m not sure how much I agree. I certainly can romanticise it, but not because I see it as better than the present, but largely because I view it as infinitely worse. Oh, the terrible times I lived through!

There are many things I don’t want to remember. The past tugs on my arm, demanding to be recognised. I turn the other way. “Oh no, we’ve never met before”. I shrug it off. How many of us do this – hiding in the present, scared of who we once were? The past would haunt us if we let it. But we won’t. We cut out nostalgia, and with it, remembering.

I think that’s why places from my past fascinate me, and why I can’t ever quite leave them alone. Because no matter how much I may think my life has changed, there’s always a little bit of myself I leave behind, like a photo, tucked inside some old jeans pocket. I never quite know when I’m going to accidentally pull it out, and feel surprised.

The other day I posted pictures on Facebook of my recent trip up North to Yorkshire and Snowdonia. They reflected back the dark, brooding mists of my homeland, those places I love so much. I can so easily romanticise the North from my flat in young, happening Brighton, with its candy-rock Palace Pier, it's everlasting stream of clear sky. I forget the days when I couldn’t wait to get the hell away from there.





Though I studied in Manchester for five years, it’s not fun college times I largely remember. It's days spent wandering the collapsed city centre immediately following the IRA bomb explosion in 1996. Ooh, what a laugh I am. As someone standing right near where it went off, it would have killed me and probably a thousand others had the IRA not issued a warning and the police been so quick to react. I’d stare at the blackened hole, leaning into the mesh that separated me from it, wishing I could wriggle underneath and walk unfettered through the dark heart of Manchester, through the ripped out concrete shells I’d once shopped in. Royal Exchange, Corn Exchange, Arndale Centre – all Manchester landmarks and great seats of consumerism, reduced to rubble. Just as vulnerable and fragile as me. In a strange way, it made me want to laugh.

I was upset when they began to rebuild it. I wanted something of that charred, empty space to remain, to remind everyone of the terrible thing that had happened. Now, I hardly recognise Manchester anymore. The shops are bigger and better and the Corn Exchange where I used to work - a crappy flea market filled with dodgy watch-dealers and astrologers - is now a Harvey Nichols. People don’t want to walk past a reminder of a city’s grief. They want the future. They want tomorrow.

Who can blame them? The last time I was in Manchester, I looked up at the sign on the wall of The Hacienda Apartments and thought ‘I could be sad about this, but the irony is too great.’ Perhaps those who, twenty years ago waved their arms up and down on The Hacienda stage off their nuts, were the same people who now drove their BMWs into the electronically controlled Private Parking spaces under the building and, kicking off their shoes, looked out over Whitworth Street and smiled.

Is this nostalgia? Wondering what I’d have done without that nightclub, the drugs and the dungarees, the Frankie Knuckles mixtapes and the dream Ecstasy gives you at that age? Standing on the corner of my road, aged fifteen, with my sister and some lads from Blacon who made acid house music on computers, shouting “In the beginning, there was House!” at old ladies in Mini Metros. Done my homework? Actually listened in Geography class?

Dashing in from school every Friday, I’d throw off my uniform, pull on my Kickers and wait for the car that would drive my sister and I up the M56, past Helsby Hill, past Runcorn chemical plant into Manchester. As we drove into the city centre, I’d catch sight of the queue that snaked half a mile down the street, my fake ID trembling in my hand. The doors would open and that familiar thud of bass-line and dry ice would hit me. I'd sip my coke, a pill sliding down my throat. Then half an hour later I’d push my way into the thick of it; sweat, bodies, faces, smiling, a crazy rush of communion, screaming up at the DJ box, “come on!” chanting like a tribe to its leader. I was home.

Bittersweet times. Isn't that youth at it's best? At its height, I fell in love with a boy in a pink NafNaf sweatshirt, who had black hair that curled over his ears and a dog called Blackie who bit my ankle. Pretty soon, I’d left the Blacon boys to their drum machines and started instead driving to Manchester with my new dark-haired boyfriend and his mate. We’d tear up the highway in his friend’s Rhosddhu Carpets van.

One morning, after a night at the Hacienda, my new boyfriend and I wound our way through grey tenement blocks and chip papers, to where the thudding bass continued all through the night. Hulme was beautiful to me then. We pushed open the door of a squatted flat, filthy with three-week old leftovers, swarming with flies in the July heat, trying not to touch anything. Then he and I lay down on a dirty mattress and held each other and looked into each other’s eyes, sunshine already breaking through the torn sheet across the window. It was the first time I’d been touched where my desire felt like something real, not something expected. I almost lost my virginity that morning, but we stopped last minute because we didn’t have any protection. I didn’t want to end up some girl pushing a pram at fifteen. I wanted to write, be in a band; get a degree. So I cried out, his hand between my thighs “Not now! I don't want to end up like bloody Michelle Fowler off Eastenders!”

On the way back from Snowdonia last week, we drove by the village where I grew up, so I decided to pop in on my sister. A familiar feeling of love and panic hit me. Beforehand, we drove to the cemetery where Mum is buried. However, when I arrived, there was no marking post, nothing to tell me where she was. Poor Mum. I rang Flintshire County Council and wandered through the graveyard clutching my mobile until they eventually found me her plot number. I sat down, feeling angry and sad. “Sorry Mum”, I said.

The last time I went to her grave, I lay down on the grass beside her, just as I’d lain the last time I saw her alive, struggling for air through a face mask in Wrexham hospital. I’d talked and cried, rubbing my fingers in the newly turned soil. But this time, my words evaporated in the silence, until, cold and hungry, I eventually got up and left.

The Scarf

Tweet

I thought all I had left of him was a beige cashmere M&S scarf. This scarf is soft as cat fur. It goes everywhere with me.  A gift, one Christmas, he’d left it in a flat box, slipped between two others, on my Mum’s front step. He’d left gifts for several years after I stopped seeing him. We threw all the others away – on principle, you know? But I couldn’t bring myself to part with the scarf. Then one Christmas, all through Christmas Eve and the next day, I opened and shut Mum’s front door, snagging the holly wreath, letting in a chill. But the step remained empty.

     
That was the end of 2000. Tonight, as I returned home across town through a windy drizzle, I knotted that scarf around my throat; pulled it up over my mouth. I remembered our phone conversation, a week ago.

     
It was as though no time had passed at all. The first thing he said to me, after ‘Hiya love,’ was ‘There’s a fella here I’d like you to meet. History Professor. I’ve told him all about you. He's two beds down from me.’ That’s so Dad. Twelve years of painful nothingness between us and now he wants to show off his ‘clever daughter’ to the man in the other hospital bed. It was sad hearing him in the ward. The nurse talked about him being up and about on his Zimmer frame as though that was a good thing.

     
Zimmer frame?

     
The second time we talk, he tells me ‘You always were your mother’s daughter.’ Asks me what we are doing about Mum's house. ‘We’ve got to go for probate,’ I say, not mentioning the protracted grief, trauma and health problems my sisters and I have endured since our mother's death. 'But then I think it’s best that we sell it as soon as’. ‘Very sensible,’ says Dad. ‘You want shot of that millstone.'

     
 I’m stunned by the mysteriousness of my Dad’s life: it lies behind a door I’ve never opened - I never even so much as curled my fingers around the handle. Dad gave himself another family, another wife and stepchildren, even grandchildren. How did he do all that... without me? I know virtually nothing about the last twenty years of his life or the people in it – just a few names. In my mind, my father has stayed the same man as the one he walked out as in 1991, wearing the same clothes, holding the same attitudes, and with the same mistress. He's occupied some ethereal space in the back of my mind. I've had vague images of a hump-back bridge, a quiet leafy lane and a bungalow, paintings of landscapes from our old house hanging on its salmon-coloured walls. 
     
But for my Dad, of course, life moved on. For over half my own life-span, he’s lived another life – full, not empty and containing something approximating love. The mistress became his wife, the blonde bit of stuff became his step-daughter. Then what? Holidays to the South of France? Afternoons out to stately homes, with a cream tea for afters? Cosy nights on the settee front of the box? The question mark he left for us, his three children.

     
I’m not angry with Dad. Not now. Not today. Too much time has passed, and there is so little time left. It’s funny, he sounded like my Mum on the phone – that same softening of the palette, that child-like laugh. Is that how all people sound when they’ve reached a certain age or degree of illness? And a Zimmer frame. Bloody hell! That’s a far cry from his purple Porsche blasting 120 down the motorway. Dad shouts at the doctors, and argues with the nurses about his medication. That man could argue his way out of any situation. Any parking ticket. Any hotel bill. Any extra-marital affair. My Dad, the self-made man, unmade. He falls over on the living room carpet. Is at the mercy of medication and heart monitors, bad hospital food. He loves his food, my Dad. Butter spread thick as cheese.

     
I want my Dad to be happy. Not lonely under thin white sheets. Scared. Still I wonder how he lived all that life without me. How it became normal, to make me into a memory. It’s not nice feeling erased. So of course, I erased him, or tried to. I know when I’m not wanted.

     
When something has gone, it’s gone. And if it was never there, nothing will ever, ever, make up for it. Some people understand this more than others; they’ve learned it by experience. Yet so far, a couple of phone calls to my Dad have made a difference. Everyone has such a different relationship with their parents - and some people are better at being parents than others. Some are just plain rotten. But good or bad, the relationship simple or complicated, your mother, your father – they made you what you are today. Call it biology. Call it blood. They bloody know you.

A Handsome Man

Tweet

Sunday, I came back from London. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. Things didn’t make sense. On the train home I read the spiral bound diary of a relative I couldn’t place – no name on the cover, only a date: Aug 6th 1938. I wasn’t even sure if the author was a man or a woman. They’d taken a train from London to Basle in Switzerland, (‘Train reservations wrong… terrific electric storm and rain all night through France’), and then on to Lucerne, and finally, Lugano. I traced the journey as my own carriage shuttled through East Croydon and Gatwick, aeroplanes humming overhead. I ate chocolate with hazelnuts. Then I flicked through some photos I’d taken away with me from my sister’s flat – of my mother and aunts as children, of my grandparents and great uncles, and my grandma’s semi-detached house in Shotton. I read a newspaper cutting about my aunt’s journey to Nigeria to teach at a local school, and two Easter cards I’d made in infant school for my mother. I’d also brought with me two photocopies: one, a newspaper cutting noting the funeral of my great uncle Preston, who died at sea, and the other, describing my great uncle Tony’s bravery as a ship’s officer in helping rescue the crew of twenty-four men of a Portuguese steamer, abandoned in a fire in the Bay of Biscay. 

     
It is strange thinking of all the men on my Mum’s side having had distinguished Naval careers. Generally speaking, I remember nothing of their lives - only dirty red brick terraces, a Woolworth’s and a butcher’s, fish and chips wrapped in newspaper. I remember Shotton steelworks pumping out grime; the whirr and clump of skates on Deeside ice rink. Yet even my Grandpa, of whom I have no memory, and who my mother described as a dour, emotionally blank man, sailed a clipper ship up and down the River Dee.

     
My Grandma and Great Aunts were the kind of women you’d expect from that period – born just after the turn of the century – strong, solid women with large shoulders, striding purposefully in flat, ugly shoes and black furs, handbags tight under their arms, hats propped neatly atop iron-waved hairdos. They kept house, and they kept each other going - proudly, and without fuss. Whenever I stayed at Grandma’s, despite her being up, without fail, at five-thirty each morning, she’d still open her curtains before we climbed the stairs to bed. I’ll not have her-next-door saying I can’t get out of bed of a Sunday morning.

     
I’ve always run from the family line. I think myself autonomous, born anew, escaping the ghosts of my past. But we can never finally stand apart. Can a box full of images really give me back my history, restoring my sense of belonging somewhere? These men and women who went before me, who lived and died, the images of their births, marriages, deaths, are as transient as moments of my own life, which seemed so important at the time yet now are lost in a blizzard. As I get older, what marks me diminishes; the significance of things punctures the skin less and less. When I was young, I opened my arms to it all, and life crowded in, promising so much. I seized it, and the bruises seemed worth it. Now, most are not. 

    
On Saturday, in a London restaurant, over pizza and pasta, my sister passed me my mother’s gold wedding ring. I slipped it on, not expecting to feel much; I’ve done my best not to feel much this last year. But as soon as it was on my finger, I felt a circle completing: Mum was all around me again, as though she’d never left.

     
I always cringed when she told me that had I been born a boy, she’d have named me Preston. Now my Uncle's picture is on my wall: in his white peaked cap, stripes across his jacket arm, gold buttons down his front. A handsome man, they said, and a brave one. A right charmer.

Under The Influence

• Tweet

I was in the upstairs spare bedroom singing along to Mary Coughlan's Under The Influence - Fifteen or Ice Cream Man, I don't remember which. It was my sister's LP, dragged from a dusty blue case beneath the dresser; slipped from its case and onto my old Rotel turntable. After twenty years, it still had hardly a scratch on it. I've been sneaking Under The Influence in and out of my sister's room since I was thirteen, back when it was a guilty pleasure - sleazy Irish ballads ill-fitting with the rest of my record collection. Coughlan's voice, to me, sounded like burnt treacle. The album must have reached a rousing chorus because when the phone rang I didn't hear it. Emma was shouting up the stairs. When I finally turned it down, walked out onto the landing, and saw her face, I knew that Mum was dead. 

     
A week after the funeral, I was back in Brighton and at work, decorating the house of an eight-and-a-half month pregnant financial adviser who, after we’d finished, stood on a chair checking each doorframe to ensure it was painted correctly. Perhaps I shouldn’t have gone back so soon. But the alternative felt worse: sitting around my flat, staring at my computer screen, listening to gulls rip up bin bags outside my living room window.

     
So I drove myself crazy at work instead. I sweated at the top of a stepladder until ten-thirty at night, listening to bad Experimental Jazz on Radio 3 or crouched in low-ceilinged bedrooms, cutting in skirting boards. I didn’t particularly want to think about Mum. I certainly didn’t want to talk to anyone else about her. I wasn’t particularly sad; in many ways I felt relieved – joyful, even. But friends told me I was vulnerable. That I needed to take care of myself. Stay grounded.
     
Staying grounded was the last thing on my mind.
     
That week, someone new came to work with us. Within a day I’d fallen in love with him. A man already in a relationship, a man with a disastrous psyche. Click-clop-thump— I ran into mess as fast as my Converse pumps could carry me.

But that’s another story. Eighteen months later that same man and I are decorating together again. Things have moved on; the affair long ended, the emotional entanglements of the previous year smoothed out into clear separate strands. It’s autumn and we’re painting a mansion in West Sussex. It’s a country idyll. During tea breaks I stroll down the path towards lush gardens and an orchard with trees hanging with apples and pears. Every so often white horses in the neighbouring field break into a gallop, tearing across damp grass under Wolstonbury Hill. We are painting the windows of a once internationally famous actress – the kind who always seemed to be semi-nude in films, and who was once declared to be ‘one of the most beautiful women in the world’. She smiles at me from her doorway, her un-manicured fingers on her hips, her heavy-lidded eyes free from make-up. Cats curl their tails about her ankles. I take heart in her crumbling beauty and in the wild lawns that surround us. There is now friendship with this man, and the pain of what happened to Mum – those salmon-coloured hospital walls, canteen tea in its polystyrene cup, the hum and beep of life support machines – has faded. I can almost forget how, before Mum died, each time I’d looked from the nursing home window a bird would be hopping about on the frozen earth, or in sunshine, as if to show me my mother’s own soul – how it could be if only it was free to go, leave; exit the building.

Two weeks later, the weather turns, the job ends and the orchard, the summerhouse, the galloping horses all get washed away by a black, pounding rain. My friendship with the man dissolves into mud, accusations hurtling through mean damp air. Again I sit alone in my flat, a little more worn and once more with time to write. I’ve heard it said that grief and sex are inextricably linked: two sides of the same sharp knife. It’s true, the summer after Mum died, I was a bird flying into a shut glass window. But after such a cruel three year period of glacial stasis, I felt finally free. And that meant I was free to fuck up my life however I chose. Because of that, I couldn’t regret a thing.
    
Soon I’ll put on my parka, step out into the shuddering rain and head up to the Post Office to collect my recent purchase: Mary Coughlan’s Under The Influence. We can’t recapture what was beautiful about the past, but we can let it call out to us again.
      
I am glad that when the phone call came, I was singing.

The Coming of December

Tweet

It’s almost November. Soon the season will turn to grief, as it does every year. This year it will be more so. December used to be the one winter month I actually liked, now it's diseased with bad memories – fluttering snow, a chilled top deck of a Greenwich bus, that phone call. And for all I’ve achieved this year despite ill health, despite the hard times, I regret my failure to deal with what happened last December, with the loss that was not my loss; that belonged to someone else I love deeply. Because of this, I never worked out quite how to get over it myself.
     
A hot bath can work wonders: it is immersion, solace; a bone-soother. Tonight I emerged from the water revived, but sad, and desperate for a cuddle. I dried myself and came to this portable computer, to these awkward, tiny keys, not knowing what to say, as has become usual these last weeks. I feel apart from the world. I have no peace, love and understanding with which to package up its evils into pretty, bowed, gift sized pieces. Years ago, I had ideals. Now, the bodies pile up. 
     
I loved the snowfall last December, even during the funeral - it cast a white dream over everything. Yes, I tell myself it could all have been a dream. But I remember the blossom tree from the morgue toilet window - flakes falling in front of it like television static. Footprints covered over as soon as they were made.

Bring Out Your Dead!

Tweet

For weeks now I’ve had hulking great ‘writer’s block’. Each morning has been the same: my fingers hover over my keyboard, sentences in my head unraveling themselves, the passion in my belly shrinking to nothing. No metaphors spring from the black pit of my brain. No imagery dances across my tired eyes. I am null and void. Kaput. Bring out your dead! I want to shout from my living room window. I find it hard to believe I’ll ever write another good sentence again, or that I ever did. Words clunk into each other, and so I press DELETE over and again, unpicking all I thought I wanted to say. I'm presented with a blank page, an unscratchable itch. A life without writing.

     
Where once was bustle, voices, movement, now is shadow and an eerie quiet. It’s been great for getting on with the rest of life – I’ve mended two record players, been prompt with my recycling and even caught up on hula hooping. I’ve earned money. But the silence is disturbing. I think of those Chilean miners after the tunnel had collapsed, seven hundred metres under solid ground; I imagine them staring through torchlight at impenetrable walls. They survived on so little sustenance, but more, they survived that deathly quiet. They kept themselves going by making enough noise to drown it out - the silence that encircled them like a noose. They sang, prayed, talked; they planned, and laughed.

     
Oh, to have such guts. Today the sky outside my window is heavy, as though it’s propped up by the two TV aerials on the roof of the house opposite. Someone told me the other day that in dreams we cast no shadow, that the unconscious is self-illuminating. So I slap my hand to see if I’m really awake. Or if I’m merely sleepwalking through my days: mornings spent in a cheap dressing gown, pressing fingers against a hot, stained teacup hoping it will stir my unconscious voice into life. A world without words is an easier place, but also a colder one. I take a sip of tea, stare down into the white hole of my computer screen - and freeze.

Navel Gazing

The younger I was, the more I investigated my body’s secrets. I explored each tiny place with curiosity: palms against soft, white skin, fingers poked in ears, bitten nails skating the dip of my throat. My body was not just familiar territory – it was my very own erratic, unkempt kingdom. Until puberty, I didn’t judge the merits or defects of the blood and bones that kept me alive, I only marvelled at its wonders. I’d sit on the stool in front of morning re-runs of Batman, peering down into the dark cavern of my nightie, breathing in its musty smells, touching the mole on my upper thigh, pulling at a new scab on my knee.

     
However, when I reached eleven or twelve, things changed. I swung from fascination to repulsion with my body, depending on my mood or what magazines I’d been reading. We were close like lovers - sometimes at peace, but often warring, confused, simmering, full of desires and woes. Still we remained allies against the outside world.

     
But as I grew older, we gradually parted company. And as others began to explore my body, I knew it less. Each nook, each tangle seemed less remarkable to me as others uncovered it. As lovers commented on its curiosities and miracles, I grew bored, forgetful. When I was nineteen, I got my belly button pierced. Perhaps that was the start of it. As seems the curse of pubescent girls, my teens had been wracked with bodily despair and an obsession with perfection – perfection that, naturally, I’d never achieve. I had longed to get a piercing since I was thirteen - as though somehow that would empower me, taking me out of teenage insecurity into something deeper, darker, more primal. Though it was years later, getting it done somehow felt like a rite of passage. In that Withington bedroom, lying there as my tattooed friend leaned over me in his black, sleeveless T-shirt, I had fainted, my belly button disappearing beneath a sheer bolt of silver. He screwed a tiny silver ball in at one end and I didn’t see my belly button again for another eighteen years.

     
When I was little I used to spend hours playing with my belly button  – an ‘innie’ - small, round and perfect, serving as a secret hiding place for toast crumbs. When the piercing fell out in the bath a couple of months ago, I decided not to feed the silver bolt back through again. Despite the unsightly scar I liked seeing my belly button. It felt ‘natural’, whatever that means, and as though I was recovering some aspect of innocence – all fresh, pink and soft.

     
It’s unnerving to think that the umbilical cord attaching me to my mother was imbedded in this unassuming tissue. And that the cord no longer exists, as she no longer exists. Yet the hole remains, and surprisingly, for the first time in a long time, I can see it. It's a full moon lighting the way back to that place from which I emerged, where I once belonged, wrapped up in wet unconsciousness, blind, unaware of my skin as separate from hers. One red flesh, pulsing together.

     
I stick in my finger, pull the sides apart, and look inside. It’s still small, round and perfect. I wiggle the finger in that black eye, a warm aperture, a relic of an eternally lost hiding place. Can that cord continue, I wonder, or has it irrevocably snapped? Could I become a mother? Inside me, an unknown beating heart, some tiny pupil into which my body pumps all that I gorged on as a child, all that was given me by my own, unseen mother?

Anyone for Pingpong?

To those who know me well, it won’t exactly be news to read this. They’ve heard it all before. They even love me for it. However, for those who don’t, here it is.

      
I, Clare, don’t fit in. Anywhere. Never have done; never will. The only place where I feel remotely at home is with other people equally as estranged as myself. Even then as some kind of group gradually forms, I never fully feel part of it.

     
Welcome to the human race, I hear you cry.

I’ve tried on various identities throughout my life (as though they were ill-fitting raincoats or top hats). And I spent the first twenty years of my life feeling lost as to what my identity might even be. It was only when I became Buddhist that I began ‘exploring’ different sides of myself. I ditched my long black skirts for sky-blue dresses stitched with swirls (gazing at them helped me slip into blissful, meditative states). I went on the road with like-minded people. I experimented with ‘open relationships’ (placing values of ‘freedom’ and ‘letting go’ above the humiliation of having to smile at parties like someone had just stuck a fork up my arse as my beloved seduced some hippy dippy chick with perfect tits.) I saw Buddha nature in everyone. Made 'spiritual' friends. 'Found’ myself. Lost myself. Found myself again. Then I realised - I still don’t sodding fit in.

Within the Buddhist movement in which I was involved, I was encouraged to give up my name and my personal vision, supplanting it with another, greater one. I could be an individual as long as I took on board someone else's interpretation of Buddha's teachings and swore my faith on it. A big part of me wanted this. But I was still, on some level, doing as I was told. And I was doing it alongside people who at best possessed grace and compassion as well as insight into their own and others' lives, but who at worst were nutters you wouldn’t have given the time of day to had they not been wearing a skull mala or able to harmonise brilliantly on a Vajrasattva mantra.

     
So I left and became ‘an artist’ - a writer. Maker of music. Poetry scribe. I kept going with the fucked up relationships but moved into a flat on my own where I no longer had to put up with people’s rows about veggie sausages or Tantra or why one person had 'inadvertently’ shagged the other's boyfriend. I shut my door - the world and Enlightenment could fuck right off.

     
It’s a shame about loneliness. And it’s a shame that being ‘an artist’ brings with it all the same bullshit everything else does. I replaced a genuinely deluded idea that I could escape the pain of being alive by getting Enlightened with a genuinely deluded idea that I could transform that pain into great stories and poems that would bring me a purpose in life (and an income). That I’d fit in somewhere – into the world of books and writers. Hey, I’d make songs and maybe I’d become some kind of pop diva (even if my songs were about sticking ex-friends in freezers, burning down cities ,and ‘deep-throating’ large mulberries). I’d find my place – not in renouncing the world, but in reclaiming it for my very, freaky own.

     
Oh dear. I spent five years filing my poems away, writing a blog read by approximately 3.5 people and performing, ooh, at least twice. So then I decided on something else. This time I wasn’t going to shy away from the very thing I’d kept at least half-shoved in the closet most of my life.

...

I’m a North Welsh woman who grew up on the border with England. I’m from a rich family but my parents came from poor working-class backgrounds. My Dad never gave me a penny of his money and my mother’s last job was as a cleaner but I went to a private girls' school. I’m intelligent but rubbish at pretending to be clever. I’m pretty but getting old. I am disappointed by men, and fear women. I am a Buddhist who believes in God, a closet Catholic who can’t stand the Church. I fancy girls with guns and boys who play banjo. And yes, I realise they are cliches. I fancy cliches too. Oh, and I fall most passionately in love with people who are dysfunctional and creative and generally confused.
     
And my next identity move? Living as someone who is motherless and, essentially, fatherless as well. Living as someone who is thirty-seven and childless, broke, living in rented accommodation and trying to make it as a writer of some integrity. Living as an epileptic - assimilating that into my life and taking what I can from it that makes me a more interesting individual - living with the vision it gives and the dark places it takes me to. There’s nothing like 24 volts of electricity surging through your brain to make you even more convinced of life’s instability, and at times, of its wonder.
     
Life is a series of ‘Over the Rainbow’ moments (and I'm not talking about the TV programmme). So here's my advice - watch out for the witch with the green face, but watch out even more for the one who looks like Dorothy. Follow that yellow brick road, even if it is leading to a place that doesn’t exist. And don’t worry too much if you end up rolling around awhile in a field of poppies. They smell great and we all need to get high sometimes, somehow.
     
You can trust Toto.

If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next

New York

I remember my trip to New York in 2005. Over the winter months, I’d been emailing with a young writer from North Carolina (whom I shall call C), who’d recently lost his father. One evening, in a long email quoting Richard Siken, he invited me to meet him in New York and explore the city together. I didn’t need asking twice. I'd dreamed of New York since I was twelve, and in particular, The Chelsea Hotel, gorging myself on a teenage diet of The Velvets, Chelsea Girls, Dylan’s Sara and Cohen’s ode to Janis Joplin’s blowjob. Also, I was more than happy to flee my current love affair that I knew (my small heart temporarily crippled) was never going to work out.

     
Before I flew out, I emailed C to say I'd see him at five o' clock the next afternoon in the Museum of Modern Art, in front of a painting of St Anthony in the Wilderness. After arriving in the city I'd trudged, exhausted, up Fifth Avenue, my green fraying rucksack heavy on my shoulders. However when I reached the grand glass doors, security stopped me. No bags. So C and I met instead outside by the trashcans, a bird pendant swinging around his neck.

     
Other snap-shots remain fixed in my memory. I remember the morning I left Brighton - a taxi ride to Poole Valley bus station, my vision of early morning travellers and dark-glass windowed coaches blurred by sleep. I remember the feel of a warm hand on mine, a copy of James Joyce's Ulysses bluetoothed to my mobile. The goodbye was dream-like and beautiful, empty of substance. 

     
Then I remember swooping down towards Newark airport, the Statue of Liberty dirty and unimpressive below me. The city seemed like a grey polluted stain, and the Hudson, a stream of drizzle spinning down a gutter. I remember falling asleep on a single bed (in a house with four giant poodles, where I was fed cream cheese bagels at midnight and we watched The Sopranos). C, no longer a boy, but not yet entirely a man, read O' Brien's The Third Policeman to me, images of Macruiskeen and old Mathers cycling into my dreams.

     
I also remember swinging, orangutan style, from scaffolding with C whilst we waited for a poet to emerge from a subway.  C had talked much about him and held him in high esteem. We played footsie as a black curly shock of hair rose up into view from behind a metal railing. And then I remember driving through Boston at three in the morning, Lambchop on the car stereo, a house huge and ghostly, rearing up like a hallucination behind a white picket fence and neatly cut lawns.

     
I remember a kiss, like tango, or rather a desire for tango in an apartment near Central Park with huge white radiators. I recall the sound of the key in the lock and the clatter of a flatmate returning --  C and I, muted, still, frozen together, pressed together in the spare bedroom.

     
I remember turning a corner in the MOMO and facing Yves Klein's Blue canvas –  a sudden dizziness – sky coursing my veins, invisible currents knocking me backwards towards the wall. No other art in the building did that to me and none has done that to me since.

     
And I remember standing in a rainstorm on my last night with that same poet who'd met us from the subway - his hair frizzy and glistening with pearls, yellow taxi cabs speeding past us. In a single moment I fell in love with the blackness of the storm, the glare of headlights and this thirty-year-old woman-chasing poet standing by my side - disarmed, hopeless, desperately trying to hail me a cab, squinting at me through rain-spattered spectacles. 

The Daily Growl

Cars

Anyone who has been to Beachy Head knows the vertigo that peering over that chalky-white cliff to the rocks below can induce. It’s the kind of thing that either thrills you or makes you nauseous, depending on your temperament. And neither the lighthouse - that striped pepperpot sticking out into the ocean - nor the horizon where blue meets blue, can soften the fact that this is a place where people go to kill themselves. 
     
Sad remnants of deaths are strewn all along the cliff-edge – cotton flowers faded with sunlight, tiny wooden crosses and small cards with messages of love etched in biro.

     
Yet even as you walk along the edge, looking over into white frothy waves, seagulls swooping and rising, you can easily miss something that’s nestling in a clump of trees, halfway down the jagged slope. Squint, and you’ll make out rusty car windows, a bashed in bonnet. I noticed this car the first time I took a bus along the coast road through Newhaven and Cuckmere, towards those cliffs looming over Eastbourne. The car seemed like a drunk who'd fallen over and now lay face down, pissed, in some hedgerow. Grass has gradually grown over most of it so that now it’s almost invisible and easily missable. I find it terrifying - the empty driver’s seat, passenger door flung open, its glass long-gone. I wonder who, why, and how it came to be there, and how long the person who accelerated it off that cliff lay inside its crushed metal or thrown across bracken before the helicopter rescue team flew down over the Sussex coastline. Perhaps they jumped before the wheels skidded off the crumbling edge. I hope so, though somewhere I doubt it.

     
A few years ago, I sat on a bus that steadily rose through the Alpujarras mountains in Andalucia, Spanish voices chattering loudly around me. I shielded my eyes from view out of the window - a steep, rock-strewn incline, diving hundreds of feet down. From time to time I’d peer out from between my fingers, and almost every time would spot another car contorted like a body in the grass, beside olive trees. I followed the trail of devastation, like markers on the road to annihilation - my palms sweaty, teeth crunching down desperately on boiled sweets.

     
Seeing an abandoned car or one crushed by gravity is obviously less horrifying than, say, passing a car wreck – time has passed, the suffering has long since gone. Yet to me, it is compelling, scarring; evocative of all that we pretend to be far away from our daily realities - death and destruction, losing control at the wheel; that exhilarating fall. I remember as a kid trying to recall the best way to escape a car that was sinking into the river (I watched TV programmes on it, read stories about it) and the terrifying prospect of sitting in some airless container until enough pressure had been released so that the windows could be rolled down. When they invented automatic windows, my first thought was – so what am I meant to do now…? I’d be sunk, mouth like a goldfish, gulping nothing.

     
Recently I walked with friends through countryside that was flat and waking up with the first signs of spring. At the side of the small road that led towards nearby fields, we spotted an old barn. With its peeling white painted planks, its still spinning weathercock and dark, smashed windows, it looked mysterious, inviting. I peered in through dead grass that blocked the doorway, but inside was filled only with rolls of barbed wire and empty crisp packets. However, out front, two cars sat side-by-side. It was as though two people had parked up, turned off the ignitions and just wandered into fields and towards the river, knowing they'd never return. Decaying and mildewed, these cars were oddly mesmerising like some old, dead couple, still holding hands.

     
I don’t drive. Probably never will. Is that part of the reason why I’m so fascinated with cars that no longer function? Why I want to wrench open the doors, climb in, and sit inside the wreckage?

 

,

Writing Manifesto

•  Keep going through self-doubt, criticism, a sore back, rejection, ridicule and terror.

• Honour that tiny light that sparks sometimes when I touch keyboard or grip a pen.
• Let go of pride, decency, even ambition.
• Make that stab in the dark.
• Dwell in uncertainty and make friends with insecurity. Be hungry.
• Leap for that goal. Turn into a rainbow shoal of fish as I do it. Or a dead man in a stinking overcoat.
• Kiss the scabs on my fingers.
• Wander down some cold back alley in an unknown country, at three in the morning (without my cardigan, and in heels).
• Stare without blinking.
• Love loneliness, or at least offer it a whisky when it comes knocking on my door in the rain.
• Stay with struggle.
• Have the grace to fall.
• Have bruised knees and no one to phone at two in the morning.
• Watch. Listen.
• Stop loving the sound of my own voice.
• Let go of being clever or the desire to be clever, or to be seen as clever.
• Sever myself from ideas of success.
• Feed beauty. Track wonder. Breath out fire. Dream.
• Die not with a thorny blue rose in my palm but with a ridiculous happy look on my face, and odd socks.
• Love.
• Take delight.
• Run rings around inadequacy. Remember the blood in my veins even as I wake up with a hangover.
• Embrace boredom.
• Run out of teabags three lines before the end of the paragraph and laugh whilst cursing.
• Freefall.
• Chill the fuck out
• (it will never be what I want it to be.)
• Accept/ever accept.
• It is solace, so give solace.
• It is generous - so give the shirt off my back.
• Take those risks, the ones that matter.
• Eschew judgment, especially my own viperous tongue.
• Kiss fear on the mouth or at least one cheek.
• Never give up.
• Carry on swimming out until the yellow buoy is under my hand.

That Day

I opened my curtain this morning and peeped out, expecting to see a white river spreading across the streets and rooftops of Hove. But the road below me was grey, dry and hard, as though no snow had fallen at all over Sussex these last weeks.

     
Yet yesterday as we spilled out onto a London pavement, clutching flowers, coconuts; two packets of butter, handbags and a brightly painted Ganesh statue, the heels of my brown 1940s shoes sank straight into slush and ice. Snow smothered pavements and cars; I stumbled towards a taxi.

     
We were running slightly late. In fact all the guests were running slightly late, except for the Hindu priest, who was running rather late. My friend S, coming from Brighton, stood on a platform at East Croydon staring at Cancellation signs on the departure board, and the snow was still drifting down. South East London was muffled by white. I suspected that the five of us squeezed into the cab might be the only ones making it to the crematorium that morning. My sister, her calm expression suddenly cracking, said, "I'll do the bloody service myself."

     
There aren't many days in your life where you say have to goodbye to someone you love, and won’t ever see again. Tears mess up your eyeliner; hands shake, voices wobble. Ordinary life seems like a silly childish sketch: bus journeys to work, petty arguments; that TV programme you can’t bear to miss. However, such days seem to have increasingly crept up on my family and I over the last few years, to the point where they feel more normal and real than anything else a lot of the time. Jobs, money, relationships, aspirations: these are the things you do between heartbreaks, and not vice versa.

     
In Hinduism, yesterday was an auspicious day, one where sins are cleansed, and night and day are of equal duration. Anyone sent to the other world on this day is especially blessed. After we’d arrived at the Crematorium, I couldn't help feeling, as I watched snow hanging off oak branches in clumps, weighing heavy on rose petals in the garden, that we might be the only people left in the world, the rest of it muted to silence, whited-out by puffy snow-clouds.

     
Soon taxis pulled in; legs stretched out onto pavements. The driveway filled up. Everyone had made it.

     
I can write about before the funeral and I can write about after, but not about what happened in between. These things are too personal. All I can say is that I think it was what he'd have wanted, absolutely. And I was proud to be there.

     
I ate twelve ciabatta sandwiches yesterday, including three I grilled for my dinner at my flat later that night, after it was all over. I'd left my sisters, friends - people I've loved long before I really knew what love meant - hanging over the balcony of a London block of flats, waving the paw of a dog at me. Then I trudged again through thick snow into darkness, the wet gloom of a tunnel finally gobbling me up. I sat on the train eating Reese's Cups and crying quietly, the day, the last month, finally catching up with me. Beauty, suffering: two sides of the same inexplicable force we call life. Of course there's not one without the other. But knowing this doesn't make it any easier, does it?

     
The sadness didn't leave; it followed me into my dreams, and was there when I woke up this morning. But now I'm here. Tomorrow, things will be different again. Life moves. The snow melts. The rose opens its petals.

No Music Day

I’m a North Welsh woman who grew up on the border with England. I’m from a rich family but my parents came from poor working-class backgrounds. My Dad never gave me a penny of his money and my mother’s last job was as a cleaner but I went to a private girls' school. I’m intelligent but rubbish at pretending to be clever. I’m pretty but getting old. I am disappointed by men, and fear women. I am a Buddhist who believes in God, a closet Catholic who can’t stand the Church. I fancy girls with guns and boys who play banjo. And yes, I realise they are cliches. I fancy cliches too. Oh, and I fall most passionately in love with people who are dysfunctional and creative and generally confused.
     
And my next identity move? Living as someone who is motherless and, essentially, fatherless as well. Living as someone who is thirty-seven and childless, broke, living in rented accommodation and trying to make it as a writer of some integrity. Living as an epileptic - assimilating that into my life and taking what I can from it that makes me a more interesting individual - living with the vision it gives and the dark places it takes me to. There’s nothing like 24 volts of electricity surging through your brain to make you even more convinced of life’s instability, and at times, of its wonder.
     
Life is a series of ‘Over the Rainbow’ moments (and I'm not talking about the TV programmme). So here's my advice - watch out for the witch with the green face, but watch out even more for the one who looks like Dorothy. Follow that yellow brick road, even if it is leading to a place that doesn’t exist. And don’t worry too much if you end up rolling around awhile in a field of poppies. They smell great and we all need to get high sometimes, somehow.
     
You can trust Toto.

No Smoke Without Fire

 

I lift my finger and sniff. There’s no smell, no evidence of it at all. It doesn’t linger on my fingertip as it does in hair or cardigans.
     
I look at the cigarette fallen carelessly from the ashtray, grey speckles spreading across the table like a distant constellation of stars. I rub my finger in it again; make a smiley face.
     
Cigarettes reminds me of my family: of my mother sipping black coffee on the back step on dull afternoons, of slanging matches with my father across Sunday dinner, of Alien Sex Fiend's RIP rising like a ghoul from my sister’s speakers every Saturday morning. The smell of nicotine carries me back to Garthfechan - our old white ghost of a house swallowed up by holly bushes and cherry blossoms with its red front door, Seventies wallpaper and our King Charles Cavalier spaniel, Daisy - her brown and white paws skittering across the kitchen lino. It’s tea stains on the green carpet; it’s squash rackets in the hall. It’s raised voices on the upstairs landing. It’s gravel spitting from under tyres as Dad’s Porsche speeds off again down our driveway.
     
Both of my sisters smoke, as did my mother and also my father until he got diabetes in his Forties and gave up. Most non-smokers I know, given the choice, would extract their own lungs before taking a smoker as a partner.
     
But me, I love a smoker. The smell. The ritual. I feel as though I was born in a tobacco cloud. My memory of childhood is fume-filled, hazy, polluted with tar and matches. I can almost imagine my mother lighting up another Silk Cut as she pushed me out of her, sucking on it between the midwife's swearing and her own screams. Every night of my childhood she sat in her red leather armchair by the living room window, the TV screen lighting up her specs, a marble ashtray teetering on the arm. I'd peer up as rings floated from her mouth like bubbles. Fags were as much a part of her as the tight perm, large square bifocals and her all-year tan (from hoeing the rich, rye earth of our flowerbeds in all weathers.) Mum pinned little swirls of hair to her scalp as the opening credits of Minder or Coronation Street rolled. I took another Kirby grip from the old green tin on the carpet; open up its dark ribbed metal pincers. They were addictive to play with; I pulled their shiny heads of like lice eggs and squeezed them between my fingers.
     
I like the faint aroma of smoke through chewing gum; the casual whiff of it on clothes. I love to hear the click of a lighter and watch a person’s face change as the cigarette end starts to glow. I’m intrigued by the necessity of it, the burden. Mum demanded fags throughout all three strokes. We tried to deny her, but in the end, well, it was one of her only pleasures left. I’d sit by her in the living room as it burned down in her fingers until the end was a curly, grey beard. Then I’d nudge her and she’d flick it, absent-minded, into the ashtray and take a puff. For her, it was now less about smoking and more about feeling that thin paper between her fingers as she sang along to the Sheila's Wheels adverts. It was about being normal.
     
I am a terrible smoker. I take the tiniest puffs and choke if I inhale anywhere near the filter. In my parents’ day, smoking was what film stars and heroines in novels did. It was sexy; it was romantic - like driving fast cars and giving up the person you loved for the sake of international politics. Watching Godard’s Breathless recently, I noticed the film was shot almost entirely through a cloud of French cigarette smoke. I can't imagine Jean-Paul Belmondo’s climactic death scene without that final drag on his Gauloises.
     
Let me make it clear - I am glad for the smoking ban. It’s a bit like sex – I only want people I am intimate with blowing smoke in my face, giving me an increased likelihood of lung cancer. Strangers – you can forget it. However, in an increasingly vice-less society, where our experience is franchised rather than disenfranchised, where troubles are smoothed out by regular decaf lattes drunk in regulated chain-cafes, served at regular temperatures by waitresses with regular faces, regular breasts and regular uniforms, smoking seems one of the last bastions of irregular, disenfranchised, real life.
     
Admittedly, Brighton still has its pockets of iniquity, where rooms are filled with that unmistakable clog of youth and a few too-old-and-should-know-betters. And though I’m by no means saying that pleasure can’t be found in past-times that are healthy and wholesome, I can’t help wondering if one day soon we’ll be reminiscing about a long-gone era of revolution, rock n roll, fags, booze, pub brawls and teenage rebellion. Counter-culture will be dead; pop music will be dead. All the old hippies, punks and ravers will be lying in unmarked graves.
     
Would we care? As with climate change, you may mock, say it’s all fantasy, a gross exaggeration. But the signs are already here, and it might not be that long coming. So, any last requests
     
I thought so.

Sea-Swimming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Drugs Don't Work

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

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

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

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

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