Brunswick Festival

It's warm but blustery today, the kind of day I sit on the beach, but end up shivering. I woke at an ungodly hour this morning, to a small child patting my face and demanding Big Barn Farm videos. In the main, I’ve enjoyed waking up too early these last few weeks – it’s at these times I sometimes catch a whiff of inspiration that makes me crawl to my desk and write.

     
It's unbelievable to me that it's over four months now since Mum died. I always feel strange writing or saying 'Mum died' because that sounds so definite, so clear, so exacting. Of course it wasn't like that - pieces of her went missing every day. I'd set off searching for them with my torch and magnifying glass, but always came home empty handed. In the end, there was only a thin breath left, the warmth of her arm and a frightened look in her eye. She was a scared rabbit in the headlights of a car that never came.

     
Until four months ago. Most of the time I make myself forget. After all, amnesia is anaesthetic. But there are always moments when memory seeps through like an ugly stain beneath my newly painted wall. I searched for beauty and love in the situation, even after the end, to keep myself sane. And there it was, like one of Rilke's angels rising out of the blackness. But the ugliness, well, it's chiselled into my bones now like some kind of code, and no matter how I try to deny it, it's a part of who I am.

It shows itself in the most ordinary moments. I passed a woman in a wheelchair at the Brunswick Square Festival the other day - middle-aged, but looking much older. I noticed her limp, paralysed hand, the other making a fist around a Mr Whippy cornet. Sun scorched the grass. The woman had accidentally smeared ice cream all around her mouth and on the end of her nose. She looked like a ghoulish clown, a three year old going on a hundred. She was probably only fifty. Her weary husband pushing the wheelchair couldn't see her face.

     
All around people laughed with each other, dragging toddlers by the hand, sipping warm beer in the sunshine. The sight made me want to throw up. It made me want to cradle her husband in my arms. To lie down in front of them and ask them to run me over. Ridiculous, I know, but in flash, it was all there. Standing in that square, I was ridiculous and out of place, and so were they. For a few seconds, I loved them.

     
I think I seek out situations and people that make it okay to feel such irrational things; that will lift the skin from my body so I might run a finger along the white bones underneath. Perhaps this, for me, is consolation.

     
I'm never quite sure what I want out of life, if it's what I think I want. To be honest, right now I'd be happy just to put on this old Lou Reed record and let the words drain out of me until there are no more.

Hot latte in Freemont

Seattle. Full of wide fridges and parking lots; lacking decent tea and rain. I wander down 34th avenue, not daring to cross. I still don't get this rule about jaywalking, or how come everybody in this city seems so well-adjusted. The waitress tells me her life story. I cross my arms and feel my upper lip stiffen. I guess I'm a true Brit, after all. I love the tall wooden houses, painted grey and white. I imagine Norman Bates lurking in attic windows.

    
 I'm waiting for Jo to finish in the beauty salon. Today she's dressed in a grey vest that makes her hair stand out like silver. She is beautiful. She's nervous as hell about Thursday, lists flapping about her brain, wedding spreadsheets coming out of her ears. It's pointless me telling her all will be well. We've left William to get his hair cut and then we're off Downtown to watch men chuck huge fish across wet tables at Pike market and mooch about the waterfront. I feel clueless about Seattle, and my bearings are vague at best.

     
Correction. I am vague at best. I'm doing okay with the jetlag, despite having been up since 4.45am this morning. However, I do keep doing things like knocking my water over and spilling my cereal, and earlier I screamed at the top of my lungs when Jo disturbed me listening to music on my headphones. For several seconds I hadn't a clue who she was, or indeed, where the hell I was. I'm in an unfamiliar land, and yet, Brighton now feels unfamiliar. Crossing over, I still haven't arrived.

     
Oh Brighton, you can't help being what you are, can you? I blame you for a multitude of sins, mainly my own. You crystallise all that I do right in my life and all that I fuck up. I want to kick your pebbles into the sea and squash ice cream into your beaches.

     
I crave the green of the trees that line every avenue in Freemont. I want that green trickling down the back of my throat, flooding my veins, refreshing every tired, cracked bone inside me until I am new again.

All the World Loves Lovers...

Sun's out; the wind is fresh. A near perfect day for this time of year. A near perfect time for a cold-blooded examination of love. It's been a while since I teased out its feathers as I dip my toes in the icy river.

     
From time to time I do wonder about falling in love again - the Big-ee, a romantic dream fulfilled, end of story, credits gliding down the screen. But I've been wondering for some time, 'is that really my story?' I've had the violins, the orchestras teetering at the edge of the mountain, that sunset to end all sunsets. Sometimes nowadays I just feel like I've got better things to be getting on with.

    
Plus, there's always after the violins. That morning when we wake to a turned back on a greying sheet, rain streaming the windows. When we realise the bird has flown. When the postman leaves the side door open and wind rattles through the house. It is colder than we've ever known before. And that cold seeps into our bones and leaves us shaking.

     
It's happened to us all. It's the point when you leave or you learn what it really means to love. I guess.

I've had the best and the worst. Maybe lived it all too soon. Now the tape reel winds round again and I'm left wondering: Can I really fool myself into believing in true love? Isn't it like pretending the chopper of death isn't really coming? Can I really do monogamy again? Can I even be bothered with the story when I already know the ending? It'll end in tears as my Mum would say.

     
But none of this makes me unhappy. It may all sound dark and gloomy but in truth, right now, my heart is shooting up with the green buds and leaping about with the floppy-eared bunnies. The sounds of spring are all around me, and they're like music. But I still wonder about these things. Hey, I'd have to be blind as a mole to not.

     
All the lovers of the world cry 'We are different!' No you're not. You're just not there yet. At that point of truth where you test whether that love is enough or not. Nine times out of ten, it isn't, it can't be. It takes a lot to love. And not just willpower and an earnest heart. It takes a special something extra that can't be manufactured, cultivated. It's there or it ain't. I've had it. And I'm not sure I want it again.

Devil's Dyke

It’s the first heat of the year, all orange on my shoulders, glowing in my cheeks. Grass is soft under my hands; the hill is cows and lambs chewing on their mother's soft underbelly. We pass ponies, bumble bees, a shrew in the undergrowth. Skylarks. Kites bent high in turquoise. My back is hot, my face whipped cool by spring wind. I can see my breath.

     
It's majestic up on the hill, the yellow flowers of gorse bushes drawing blood on my finger. Then a pub with babies on strings, dogs with big fur, yapping; men guzzling plastic pints of ale. I nibble on oatcakes, basil leaves and sometimes fingers. The land arches like a back, folds like a handful of secrets.

     
Then I am walking back, lost, wondering whether to worry that I am lost. The moon is up on my left side. As long as it's on our left, we'll find our way home. But we're turning this way, that way... left, right, all about. I look up to my left and there it is... a snowy apparition in all that sunshine.

We pass horses galloping, erratic, tossing their riders. We pass the pylon and the path that disappears into nowhere. We pass the side of the hill that looks like skin. I want to stick out my finger and touch it, taste it under my tongue, bite it.

     
A six o' clock chill creeps under my jacket. Then we're back to bricks and tarmac and some man jogging. Gardens with fountains spitting tiny jets of water. A door slashed with Happy Birthday in a gold plastic streamer, five children inside, sitting in the shadows. I stand, feet flat on the pavement, the sun once again blinding me.

     
It's the end of Sunday afternoon. I ride the packed bus the rest of the way home, sore muscles and something soft under all these bones. It radiates out from my clothes, this softness; it nuzzles up to other passengers. Of course, they never notice. I walk up a cold street. Push open the door. Slip into a warm pub full of people. Order coffee. Sit down; lift the mug to my teeth. Hot liquid hits my throat, sliding warmth down my chest. I feel it here in my belly.

The Flight

I had three ideas I was sure would work. First, I could barricade her into my flat. Second, I could barricade her out of my flat. Third, I could hide her Green Card. Once I realised that I'd not quite got the heart or the neurosis to put any of these plans into practice, I knew I'd have to resort to other tactics.

     
Jo was of course leaving for Seattle in the early hours of this morning, after five weeks in England, and the last eight nights staying in my flat. The bestest friend I could ever hope to have - after eleven years of love passing between us, five years of living together. I can't remember a single row we've had in that time, or a time I didn't trust her implicitly. My family, my sister, my confidante, my spiritual ally. And she was sodding off back to Seattle forever.

     
I decided "I shall be a rock, impervious to all emotion." I certainly wasn't going to be reduced to a blubbering mess. We had only one hour left before bedtime so my plan didn't seem too ambitious. I ensured that my Itunes played no music with an acoustic guitar in it or worse, a harp. Then I sat like a wooden post at the end of my sofa, pondering whether to just put on Eastenders and pretend she wasn't there. I even considered informing her that I couldn't get upset for health reasons. Since my recent discovery of two frown lines on my forehead, any kind of emotional stimulus that worsened them would be quite out of the question.

     
Then she cuddled me. The cow. We squawked like two chicks in a nest, tears flying out from our eyes and landing on each other. Tissues streamed between us like great, soggy clouds. I knew it was too late to lock her in my cupboard. Jo, my loveliest of all Jos, was flying the coop.

     
She left at 4.30 am, as I hunched in my bed feeling a strange ache in my chest. I pulled up the duvet as she scuttled round in the hallway outside my door, collecting up her things. Then I flung it open and we hugged, my eyes stuck together with tiredness, my hair no doubt standing on end.

     
Now there's a Jo-shaped hole in my living-room, but I'm imagining her winging her way across the ocean as I write this, towards her new life. It's a beautiful image. And I got a chance to say goodbye this time, to wave her off, to wish her well, and hear her close the door behind her.

     
Never underestimate the preciousness of true friendship. It's like family - it runs in the blood, it is a tract that crosses all land and sea, returning home, again and again, no matter the miles.

A couple of nights ago we watched Lars and the Real Girl. They played this Talking Heads song in it, and it's one of my favourites. So this is for Jo. It's nicely weird, especially towards the end.

Rear Window

Well, I can't even call this morning. It's lunchtime, and I've been at my computer for almost three hours. I've reached stalemate with the story I'm writing, which always happens around about now. If I'm not careful, I'll be propelled into a round of meaningless www.nonsense, and then it'll be five o clock before I've blinked an eye.

     
And I need to be at least halfway through my story by the time it's dark tonight, and the man with the black hair in the posh flat across the road has closed his laptop lid on the day and left the room.

I'm somewhat annoyed with him right now. From time to time I waft about my flat, eat lunch, sift through papers and not once does he look up and acknowledge me. He's been working at that window for a year now, and nothing stirs him from his work. I figured I'd strip naked in front of my window to see what happens, but I've worked out he's probably gay (he lives with a man who irons a lot... flimsy evidence, I know).

     
I feel comforted when my man across the road is at his laptop working. Sometimes he talks on the phone, but mainly, he perches over it, the screen lighting up his glasses. I'd like to think that perhaps he's writing a novel or a screenplay (hey, we could swap stories!), or is on his way to becoming the next Danny Boyle (he looks a bit like him).

     
But I strongly suspect it's work of a rather more mundane nature he's doing. After all, he doesn't strut and fret his living room, hand to forehead, looking like inspiration's just about to strike. He doesn't toss page after page to the floor, lips quivering with rage. No, he sits and he types and he stares at his screen. He doesn't even drink tea or coffee (I never see a mug beside him).

     
Actually, he probably IS a writer. Because that's what proper writers do nowadays. In olden times, it was okay to spend your life speeded up to the eyeballs, reeling about your flat (if you had a flat), trying to find your way to your cup of coffee through the heaps of papers mounting up on the threadbare carpet, waiting for mystical vision (or the drugs) to kick in. Nowadays, it's work, work, work; tap tap tapping into your Imac, sticking to routines, deadlines, structuring your sentences. No one roll of paper and a line of charlie for my man across the road. He's got it sussed. Hard work and a clear head gets you there.

     
I'm going to make another cuppa. Wait for the hot water to turn to brown syrup in my teapot. That's how I'll get through today. Mine isn't always a healthy life, I have to admit, and I don't think I can even excuse it by calling myself a writer yet without sounding hopelessly pompous.

    
 But are we so different: him with his Habitat lampshade, me in my stupid furry slippers? I bet he's too posh even for Waitrose, and that he never cries at Eastenders. But if my man over the road can do it, then so can I, even if he never lifts his head and look at me. What would I do if he did? Would I really wave? Hold up a piece of A4 with a crayoned thumb upturned on it? Show him my new hula-hooping trick? Maybe. Or perhaps I'd scuttle off to the kitchen, caught out, and throw peas at my bin for a while.

     
It's a funny thing, this writing business, and we all need allies, don't we? Even if they are too preoccupied or shortsighted to acknowledge our genius, or just our fantastic leopard skin dressing gown.

...

I post this brilliant video in recollection of what was one of the only notable thing to ever happen at The Brit Awards (perhaps apart from the KLF machine-gunning the audience)... Thankyou Jarvis Cocker. Click the side bar, top video if this one doesn't work

Play from your Fucking Heart

Why Won't You Release Me?

I'll say one word. Duffy. Now some of you will have heard of her, and some of you won't. If you listen to the charts, watch TV, I'm sure you will have. She's been a scourge in my brain now for some time, and I'd hoped I could make her go away like a bad dream, but I see she's up for nomination at the Brits and no doubt she'll sweep the board there.

     
Duffy. She's Amy Winehouse with the crack sucked out of her. She's Otis Redding with a razor blade taken to his vocal cords. I hate her with a vengeance and yet, whenever she releases another godawful single, feel compelled to listen. It's like picking a scab.

I've nothing against her personally. I reckon she's quite a decent person. And she's talented in her own way. But what I do have something against is the 'creation' of her into some kind of banal icon; and I have a lot against those bloated media suits who made her the latest 'big thing", dragging her caterwauling onto Later With Jools Holland to infect my ears.

     
It's soul music at its lowest - all soul drained from its core. People love her songs because they're catchy, like a bumblebee in the brain. If you've never listened to many of the soul greats, you might even think they're the real thing. But they aren't.

     
I perhaps should have some loyalty because she's Welsh. But I'm afraid it doesn't stretch as far as this tiny singing puppet with a voice like a cheese grater. Am I cruel? Listen to Mercy, her greatest hit, and you'll be begging for it by the end.

     
I've posted a video of hers at the end of this post (click twice). You could easily mistake it for that Halifax advert. She cavorts about without any sexiness whatsoever as suited men hurl themselves about an airless studio. God save us all. What was that bloke out of Suede thinking when he announced her his protege?

     
Maybe none of this makes sense to you. After all, her songs are catchy, they have a habit of making you tap your foot, even if you don't want to, and she is kinda cute, isn't she, in a harmless kind of way, even if her face looks about fifty when she's actually only twenty-two.

     
But it's all that makes me weep about the music business; all that makes me lose faith in people's ability to detect a naff line when they're being fed one. When they decided to make her a star, the whole of the music business shifted in line behind her and opened their wallets. She's perfect fodder - a little hint of depth in her lyrics, a little harking back to the Sixties, all put together in a nice sanitised package. This funny little Welsh girl became a star. And now she's inflicted on me every time I turn on the radio. Once again, banality reigns supreme.

Modern Life Is Rubbish

Two things recently have made me realise I am getting older. When watching the corny What Women Want with Mel Gibson in it (the fact that I was watching it in the first place is somewhat unusual), I saw him and actually thought mmm, you're quite fit.

     
I have also started listening to Annie Lennox. Now she is someone who's always bored me shitless with her 'meaningful' lyrics, her strutting 'strong woman' performances, her stupid bald head. Worse than Sinead O Connor, worse than Skunk Anansie, she led the troops of the skin-headed, mouthy, empowered yet surprisingly bland female, with no trace of irony in her lyrics or persona. She stood for everything I hated about pop music.

     
So it seems, despite my best intentions, I am descending into middle age. Mel Gibson always turned my stomach with his hairy chest, and in the Eighties, his horrible mullet hairdo. Only housewives ever fancied Mel.

     
However in the wake of Iggy Pop gyrating about our billboards and TV screens selling insurance (how could he do that, why would he do that?), I realise that even I must embrace the middle road from time to time. I hit rock bottom a couple of weeks ago when I found myself crying to No More I Love Yous and had to admit - Annie Lennox is a fine songwriter.

     
So if John Lydon sells butter, and Iggy Pop sells insurance, and most other pop stars who haven't had to perch upon the pedestal of 'anarchy' 'rebellion' 'integrity' or 'debauchery' are busy selling their small souls, and further, I am listening to Annie Lennox, what is left of the rock n roll dream? Of poetic excess? Can you imagine Bukowski selling tinned pheasant in Harrods, or Rimbaud down at The Groucho Club spouting off about his latest line in aftershave?

     
I have little hope left for our culture, for myself. But when finally I see Patti Smith endorsing Macdonalds, or Morrissey advertising the latest IPod, then I truly will give up the ghost, and write modern culture off as the mediocre rubbish it so dangerously comes close to being.

ps Someone just pointed out to me that the only reason I fancy Mel Gibson in What Women Want is because he is cross-dressing. Hurray! My old identity is intact. I feel better.

Woodvale Cemetery

There are still some secrets about Brighton I'm only just being let into. After ten years since my arrival into this strange and eccentric city by the sea, this greatly excites me.

     
Today, I learned about Count Eric Von Stenbock, "Scholar, connoisseur, drunkard, poet, pervert, most charming of men," as WB Yeats called him. He was also remembered with affection by Aubrey Beardsley, Symons and Lionel Johnson (although they thought his poetry was drivel). Many of his verses concerned his doomed love for a Berkshire youth, Charles Bertram Fowler, who died of consumption at the age of 16.

     
He was alcoholic, Catholic, Buddhist, homosexual and overall degenerate, and most interestingly of all, he lived in Withdean. Mental illness dogged him throughout his Thirties, but, since he was a Count, when escorted (as he was at all times) by a dog, a monkey and a life-size doll, everybody had to greet them with according courtesy.

In Eric's mind, the doll was his son, and he referred to it as 'le Petit comte'. Every day it was brought to him, and when it was not there he would ask for news of its health.

On April 26th 1895, on the same day that Oscar Wilde faced the first day of his trial, Eric died. Drunk and furious, he'd tried to strike someone with a poker and toppled into the grate. He was buried in Woodvale Cemetery in Brighton on May 1st (the day Wilde's jury disagreed and was discharged), his heart removed and sent to Estonia, where it resides in a church at Kusal.

     
At the time of his death, his uncle and heir, far away in Esbia, saw an apparition of his tear-stained face at his study window.

     
Oh Eric, I applaud you. There's nothing quite like being a rotten poet with a taste for life-size dolls and the Divine.

     
I love Brighton cemetery. It's been far too long since I was last amongst the tangled ivy, my trainers squishing in the mud. Angels rear up at every turn, the lettering on headstones turning to rust in the dew.

Today, I peered into the small, simple plot where the Sisters of Mercy (nuns, not goth band) lay crammed in, heads to tiny feet. I also saw (thanks again to my knowledgeable friend) the resting place of the first man ever to spot Antarctica.

      
Tonight, I am very happy in my polka dot dressing gown and leopard skin slippers, listening to Debussy and generally avoiding starting my new story about a man who is perpetually late for everything. Mmm.

     
There's nothing like the dead to raise the spirits!

Boogie Woogie

So I’ve just looked here and noticed that my last post was the end of September. Oops.

     
I'm hungover today and haven't managed to do anything constructive yet apart from a few hundred words of writing homework. Mainly, I've been tidying up my recently returned computer, hula-hooping and watching repeats of Project Runway on TV Shack. 

     
I'm surprised how rubbish I feel today, when I wasn’t even particularly drunk by the end of last night. It seems to be that the less often I drink, the worse I feel the next day when I do.

     
Last night was partly a lot of fun, and partly a bit underwhelming. One highlight was the talented stripper, Leanna. She looked fantastic and did remarkable things with a bottle of vodka and some red stack heels. The low point, however, was definitely the Rick Astley impersonator. Never Gonna Give You Up. Oh, I wish he had, drag king or no. I felt like I'd regressed twenty years, and was now standing in a real, live, gay cliche.

     
Another highlight was a good bit of disco dancing. I get tired of anti-disco snobs – you know the sort – if it’s not The Pixies or an ‘upbeat’ Smog number, they think it’s tacky. If anything progresses to Chic or, god forbid, Sister Sledge, they’re out the door. To me, disco, even some tacky disco, is such a pure expression of emotion in music – hands in the air, strut your stuff kind of joy.

     
They played one of my favorite disco numbers, Yes, Sir, I Can Boogie by Baccara. I still remember dancing to it in a hotel disco in Mombassa, aged five, thinking I looked like one of the glamorous, raven-haired women from the band (despite the cropped hair, Clarks sandals).

     
College is good – very good. It's all the things I thought it'd be - challenging, intimidating, stressful, tiring, annoying and overwhelming, and I have to say, I'm greatly relieved.

     
Before I go, I have to say last night's dancing was nothing in comparison to what these cool cats are doing. Kids today could learn a thing or two. Yes, sir.

Monday: train to Brighton

I'm on the train, having just left Birmingham Moor Street, heading for London Marlebone. After several days of balmy Indian summer, I pass through a rain soaked Birmingham, drizzle sketching out its streets, a familiar greyness suspended in the ether.

I can feel my mood shifting as I edge nearer to Brighton; a heavy feeling in my arms and legs, a sinking inside my stomach. I look in my rucksack for the armour I need to face my life back home. I find hoodies and a hard-backed book about a complicated love affair.

I left my sisters on the tiny village platform, and watched them shrinking as the train drew away, their plump arms raised, faces smiling and sad. My lungs surged with feeling as I sped past houses, yellow coloured fields, more houses. This is territory I have known so well. I have chartered this journey for the last twenty years.

I'm uneasy. As I made the journey back home to Wales last week, my speech was still blurry, my experience filtered through a tin can. The preceding weeks had taken their toll. But having seen Mum for myself, stable and much as she was before this latest emergency stay in hospital, and having been home with my family, a little bit of myself has returned. There is a little bit of Clare back in place.

Uneasiness lurches up through my throat, determined as I am to not go back to where I was when I left Brighton last week - sucked in, spat out.

So I sip my tea, plan my strategies; write here. I even have biscuits in my bag. Life isn't so bad. Mum is still alive, I have sisters who are loving and brave, who fight their demons and cut my hair, make me cheese sandwiches. Who always tell me the truth about myself.

They sit chatting in the fading evening light out on our back yard, staring at the apple tree and the flowerbeds, flicking ash from their cigarettes into the cooling autumn breeze. They never sit for very long. In a flash, one of them will be up, dragging something around the garden, pulling out a hose, raising some clippers, re-arranging the shed. They like to keep busy.
It’s then that I feel most like the baby of the family that I am, with my writing, my hula hoop, my desperate need for a new haircut. Watching and feeling and thinking and turning it over, all of it, again and again.

I got my haircut. I watched the dark pieces fall to the ground and with every snip felt a little bit of myself coming back to life. I am still arriving, in whatever this new place is. I watch dead wood fall, hear the doors closing.

So I want to get my head down, start my course, let those who really care, come to me, and the rest, I'll watch them take off like birds into a cloudy sunset. Throw a stick and see what comes back to me.
Despite the Twinings label, the tea is disgusting. No amount of sugar can mask it. Drizzle hits the windowpane and I'm returning to Brighton stronger, but more wary than ever, to a town cursed by too much sunlight, by too many options.

I might feel alone, but I'm not alone; I feel scared, but I'm not weak. I have lost, but then... life culls what it needs to; it does some of our dirty work for us.

I watch crows taking off over cow fields, and feel the love of my family, the ones still there. I feel the greenness of the passing fields, my hair against my neck, a brightness still behind my eyes, and for now, that's more than enough.

Friday morning: back home

I sit up in bed on a cold autumn morning, and I can see that the sun is shining, the clouds are moving. This is the first morning in a couple of weeks that I've woken up feeling even vaguely like a human being, with a still beating heart, and perhaps even a future and a purpose. It's a feeble flicker of it, but it's there.

Mum has stabilised, at least for now. The doctors still aren't sure that it was definitely another stroke or whether it was a fit that made her lose consciousness like that and her breathing so laboured. As usual, it's a deathly mystery. And I guess that means, after preparing for the end, once again, after going through all that trauma, we're back to where we've been for the last two years. Waiting.

So when next week comes, I'll be winging my way back to Brighton. Sunny, happy Brighton. Home of the creative and free-spirited. It sticks in my throat like too-sweet candy.

I'd like to run away from Brighton, up sticks and sod off to London, where my course begins next week. But I know that won't happen, and that instead, it's the swallowing of reality of life in Brighton for now, of waiting for things to change.

I stare into my crystal ball and don't like what stares back. I remember the forces around me that are good, the ones who care. I see the tree outside my window is still standing, waving its branches at me. It is solid and still growing.

Speechless

This morning, as I inhaled a cloud of pain and breathed it out again and said No, I will change my life, I will not let the cloaks of recent events take me down, and I rang the electricity board, and I unpacked my new mini laptop and prepared for the launderette, I got a phone call. It was the phone call. The one I’ve waited for two years. Perhaps.

     
Mum has been rushed into hospital again today, this time with breathing difficulties. But she went to sleep and didn’t come out of that, and now we’re all playing the waiting game again to see if it’s another stroke, the one that’ll finally take her, if she’s finally able to swim to freedom, away from tubes and machines and the same view of squirrels and daffodils from her bedroom window.

     
Today, for the first time in my life, I lost the power of speech. I'm a good communicator. But today, my brain shut itself down, and the world span backwards, and my mouth no longer said the words I wanted to say. I slurred my way through this afternoon, this evening, a personality I no longer recognised, in a world all too familiar. That blurry world. Where walking forward feels like going backwards, where I blink an eye and am filled with terror. Where I suddenly notice the moonlit sky or the glassy sea-water and I feel like heaven is exploding right inside of me.

     
I am used to being split open. I even get accustomed to it even, and find joy in what I discover inside - the hidden jewels, the rapture of knowing what really matters in this life, behind the masks and the craving, the need and the games. I can hold it in my hands for an instant and know it’s worth everything.

     
As I cycled slow as a snail towards the Meeting Place today, I saw a little girl with her dad on Hove lawns, just learning to walk. She turned as she marched with wobbling legs away from her father, her face lit with an incredible radiance - sheer exhilaration, unadulterated joy coming into being. It's hard to accept, but true nevertheless, that what lies behind that little girl’s smile is the same as what lies behind my Mum’s closed eyelids, and what will take her, if not now, sometime soon, away from me forever.

     
What a magnificent beauty of a terror for us all to live with. It makes me want to love all the harder, dance all the more fiercely, hold what’s precious in the palm of my hand and never malign it. Then it makes me want to crawl under a bush and stay there forever. We are idiots, and that makes us all the more human. We throw away the best things in life and usually we learn the hard way.

     
I hope I'm learning. One day I will finally no longer call myself a victim. One day, maybe tomorrow, I will reach out and see all this is my making, not my breaking. And that forgiveness is always, always, already there, at every turn.

An Autumn Morning

I woke up too early, after little sleep, to the smell of sea salt coming through my open window. I stirred, felt my skin against the sheet and a small stab of wonder in my belly. It surprised me to find some joy on this too early a morning, when life hasn’t been too kind and I really should still be fast asleep.

     Maybe it was something to do with the weather, or feeling the sea so close at hand. This relentless shitty weather doesn’t bother me much. In fact, it is a relief to see summer slip away without any final words to say to light up these September days.

     Summer is so obvious. It wears its plumes like a peacock. It is without subtlety, without irony. I end up feeling so much pressure to live in summer – to squeeze its juice out to the last drop, to run in its sunshine, to muck about under its blue skies. These last months have largely been such a washout, that’s rarely been possible. It’s been cloud and relentless wind, with the odd peep of sunshine in between. So I’ve been let off the hook, and I felt this morning, as I have on many mornings these last few months, happy that I no longer have to try and be happy.

     I’ve always loved the rain. I don’t like grey skies, or damp cold, or that wind off the sea that bites into my neck and makes my face scrunch up. But I often welcome the streaks of wet coming down the windows of my flat, the sound of car wheels rolling through puddles, and the calm dripping from the gutters after the rain has died down.

     One thing I do feel a little cheated of, however, is autumn. Summer being a washout is one thing, but autumn? Autumn is for shifting colour, for the last flood of warmth on skin, for picking berries and getting muddy trainers before curling up to watch the sky turn first amber, then red, then pink from my living-room window. It’s not meant to be just a continuation of drizzle - non-descript and apathetic, each day the same as the last, uniformly wading into winter. That’s simply underhand.

     I'm not looking forward to this winter. I really don't know how it'll be. Although there is at least one major new beginning for me, I feel people I love dissolving around me like water into mud. Consequently, I feel very alone, only myself to rely on. Someone told me recently that life is giving me a chance to dig out the weeds, the old dead stuff, so that new plants and flowers can bloom in the spring. To let go in order to bring in the new.

     But if I look out at my garden, it seems pretty empty and forlorn, and spring feels a long way away. Maybe that’s what all this rain is good for. To make it all grow again. I hope so. Bring it on. I don't want to make anymore mistakes.

White Flowers

I went out and bought white flowers. Brought them back. Sat them on my table. I resolved: I no longer want to live in somewhere with an air of mild depression, where the carpet crinkles under my foot, constantly shedding anxiety. I said: I have built a pretty fortress, a sanctuary of steel and concrete, where I can rest away from harm, but where I am always alone.

     
These flowers make me happy. They honour the whiteness lighting up parts of my mind. They cherish the rain pounding inside me, and open like my springtime would, if only I’d let it.

     
I’ve been away from home a long time. This soup is thick and I am hungry. I'm craving sustenance, a liquid to keep me alive. My body is thinning, as my mother's thins, and will thin, one day, to nothing. That’s the day I give her back – my earth, my body, my shrine, my home. But I cannot wait until that time to start the letting go, for my own body to separate from hers, to find itself among the brambles, slightly cut, with the rain beating on it again. 

I came from her body, it is no surprise that hers became entangled in mine, or that it becomes me who is lying there in that nursing home bed, flaccid and paling into the vacuumed air. It is no surprise I don’t want to let her body go, or that I compare my own flesh to hers every day – see my arms fattening as hers do, lines appearing in my skin as hers wrinkle, my thighs plumper as hers slacken under sheets.

     
When her body transformed the first time, from healthy and normal to deadened and useless, I loved it even more. As the metal of the hoist came nearer, we let out nervous laughter, held the bar steady, trying to make sure she didn’t fall any more times than she already had. We all did things that broke us and made us bigger by the breaking.

     
But it isn’t me in a hospital bed, in a calm and shallow nursing home, waiting to die. I'm not yet 72 years old. I've not yet been a mother. I touched her body like it was a precious sculpture when I was little, when she was so beautiful. And I see no difference now - still beautiful, still wandering in her mind, inaccessible, all-giving. But the earth is taking her, and I won’t let it take me with it. My time isn’t done.

     
My body is abundant with grief. It yelps up my spine and faces me in the morning. It's a beautiful and peaceful thing, my body, when I accept it. At night, I dream I’m covered in mud, and that starlight is eating me – creeping up my toes, into my creases, nestling through my hair like sand over moon-stained beaches. Backed onto a cliff edge, I throw back my arms and laugh. I give my mother back to all that made her. My own child will survive if I learn how to look after her.

     
My friend said to me Go back to that place, back to where you felt safe. So I walked up the drive to the Poor Clare's Convent and knocked on the door. The windows streamed light through them, the benches were hard and I could hear the nuns singing for Jesus.

     
This is the place where saints surround me and I can, for once, look my mother in the face and say It’s okay, Mum, and mean it. Cause I saw another face in hers. Taking my coat back out into the world, I am not the same person as when I entered.

     
The white flowers live for all of us. They bloom, shrivel; they give off scent while they’re still living. We can make this life more beautiful. Let’s do that. Let’s make it better than it could be. Make it bloom.

Hi, How are you?": Daniel Johnston

I'm good, if not somewhat vulnerable this morning. I was in London last night to see one of my biggest musical heroes of recent times, Daniel Johnston. It was a bit of a dream line-up, with support from Jad Fair, Mark Linkhous (of Sparklehorse), Scout Niblett and James Mcnew (of Yo La Tengo).
   
After short sets of their own, and Daniel coming on briefly for two songs alone, they all all took to the stage together, like a bunch of escapees from the nearest psychiatric ward. Then we were blasted with pure fucked-up rock n roll bliss for the next hour.
   
To see Daniel Johnston still alive and standing in itself is quite an experience after all he's been through with his health/mental health. But the force of his songs was punched through a hundred times over by his live performance.
   
This man's beauty is palpable - it shook with his hands as they struggled to hold the microphone, rolling with his huge belly over his jogging bottoms. His set was sublime, twisted, anarchic, sensitive, tender and vitriolic, and his 'backing' band smiled at his lyrics as they played along.
   
I hope there are many years ahead of Daniel Johnston in which to write and play. I'd post this directly on here, but it's not working for some reason, so instead, here's a link to one of my favourite D.J. songs.

Buddhafield Festival

It's been sweltering all day today. Now, the sun's finally gone down, but a heat remains, sinking into the walls of my building, blowing warm through my open windows, caressing my back.
   
I'm home after almost a week away at Buddhafield Festival. I've returned to the computer several times today trying to begin to describe my time there, and each time I've gone away silent, empty-handed, a Zen stick pounding on my brain.
   
Perhaps there's just too much to say, or maybe it won't let itself be verbalised, this shift in myself that's turned me inside out. All I know is that my soul, my heart, has returned, and I see quite clearly things that before stood submerged in damp fog.
   
The heat from my body is rising like an aura. Outside, I hear male voices. There's a gentle breeze on my skin. I wonder where I'm heading with all this life inside me - rustling this way, snuffling that. I can only follow my nose.
   
 And right now, I find that I am glimmering with the waves, I'm out with the fishing-nets and seaweed. I'm lost, but this time, I don't mind. I welcome the tangles of my life that wrap like balls of wool inside Grandma's knitting bag. Summer finally has arrived.

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