Under The Influence

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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 Jobless Question ...

After having spent my day putting ads in papers and formulating ingenious plans to procure work in as short a time as possible, I finally found the answer ...

Barbarism Begins At Hove

The Smiths have influenced me more than possibly any other band I've listened to in my life, and Morrissey has been a muse of mine since before I was even in my teens. I never got to see them live, which is a significant regret, considering the force and elegance of Morrissey's performances and the almost maniacal fervour of their audiences.

There's a violence, a bravery about Morrissey, and something so primal, so achingly tender in his writhing and his crooning; something so perverse and contradictory in his gyrating nakedness and his saintly detactment. Everything laid bare, yet totally ambiguous. All this raw, sweating, complex humanity, this bizarre sexuality; it's like watching some kind of brutal boxing match, or an ancient pagan rite. Morrissey would detest this analogy, but to me he's a bit like a Spanish torreador, whipping the bull and the crowd into a frenzy before the blades go in. Numerous people have said The Smiths were miserable, wet and poncey; but they never realised they'd missed the point entirely.

It's very hard to describe Friday night for me without putting it in context. When I was eleven, although pretty grown up for my age, I was only just starting to discover music. I wore frilly white blouses and navy-grey kilts, an outfit I had swapped to from the battered jeans and geeky blue jumper I'd lived in up to that age - the age when I decided, enough was enough, I now wanted to look like a girl, be a girl, instead of being the odd, boyish thing I'd felt like up until then. I was tired of not feeling like I fitted into one gender or the other. So I grew my hair, became pretty, longing to be normal.

So the first time I saw Morrissey on Top Of The Pops, I was repulsed, as he flailed around the stage with flowers in his back pocket, a pale cardigan and bare chest. It took another year before any kind of interest in what Morrissey had to offer my psyche manifested. And it was purely, it seemed, by chance. Bigmouth Strikes Again had just come out as a single, and I hated it, hated The Smiths and all they stood for. Then, one evening, in my bedroom, I could hear my sister had the radio on; it was the John Peel Show. Then I suddenly heard these lines floating across from her room to mine: " I dreamt about you last night/ And I fell out of bed twice./ You can pin and mount me/ Like a butterfly"

I strained to hear the rest of that song, and was instantly converted. From that point on, I was obsessed. I bought all their LP back catalogue, got a load of Oscar Wilde out of the library and developed a rather frightening obsession with the Moors Murders. I gave up eating meat. This meant flushing the chicken off my Sunday dinner down the loo when my mum wasn't looking, or feeding it to the dog, or even throwing it out of my bedroom window onto the flowerbed below, as my Mum refused to let me become vegetarian.

When The Queen Is Dead came out that year, I played it to death and memorized every line, every word. Moving into my thirteenth year, I became fully immersed in teenage gloom. I dropped out in school, lost all my friends, became the class 'weirdo' (writing "Free Myra Hindley" on your Rough Book isn't the kind of thing to endear you to your classmates). I watched Andy Warhol films late into the night, took my first trip to Whalley range in Manchester, and got stoned on my sister's boyfriend's homegrown cannabis. I read more poetry that year than I probably have done in my whole life since. I wrote songs and poems. Lots of them. I drew. I played along to 'Well I Wonder' on my guitar. I discovered Buddhism. I self-harmed. I became intrigued by The Occult and Aleister Crowley. I tried desperately to Astral Project. Just all your regular teenage things.

I don't hold Morrissey or The Smiths responsible for this remarkable shift in my psychology. Or for the intense depression I kept falling into. Or for my plummeting exam results at school. In fact, looking back, it seems that, along with the books I read and the films I watched; my late night thinking sessions, Morrissey's voice coming out from my stereo was one of the things that actually got me through at least those two years of painful teenagedom without seriously fucking myself up.

I wonder how many other people who have a love for The Smiths have a similar kind of teenage tale to tell? The Smiths have always taken flack from the more superficial critics; it has been said that they promoted self-obsession, pretension and introspection. But The Smiths were never a refuge for the weak and navel-gazing. They showed strength and dignity. Yes, they attracted the shy, the geeky, the ones confused about their gender or sexuality. The clever ones who saw too much. But more than anything, they just stood up for what was human.

Morrissey was like the tall boy with the big feet who stood between you and the class bully, the one who wanted to smash your face in because he thought you were a wimpy weirdo just because you couldn't play football or you never got off with anyone at the school disco. The Smiths were for those who were sick and tired of hearing corporate shite on Radio 1, who didn't want anymore shoulder pads and perms, who needed a light to shine out in those dark, dour days of Thatcher's Britain.

November Spawned A Mozzer, was an entire evening dedicated to Morrissey and The Smiths, a night where die-hard fans could indulge their somewhat strange devotion to him and his music. This night was strictly for fans only. The ceiling was laced with Morrissey bunting, the walls covered in images of his naked torso; a TV played interviews with him, and a massive screen above the dance floor showed him in concert. Gladioli were handed out. There was even a 'best Quiff' Competition, with a John Betjamen book as prize.

To outsiders, it would have simply looked like madness. But far from being some kind of embarrassingly cringey tribute night, it was very touching. Almost everyone sang along, whether unabashed with their friends on the dance floor, or quietly to themselves, pints in hands, or in some corner. These people, undoubtedly having spent night after night in solitary communion with this music, were suddenly together. There aren't many opportunities in life to sing along with a crowd of people, the words "I am human and I need to be loved, just like everybody else does .."

When they played "I Know It's Over", I remembered what that song meant to me when I was 13. I'm not 13 anymore, but standing there, it reminded me how I'm not an altogether different creature from the one I was back then. And I'm glad for that.

Saturday

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

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

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

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

Dans Le Noir

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am thinking of the things that make me happy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And

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

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

Red Apple Falls

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nowhere To Run To Baby, Nowhere To Hide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

fire burned and blew out flowers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Catch-Up

I spent yesterday afternoon in bed with a hot water bottle and my toy dog, nursing a sore and menstrual belly. I took this time to slip in and out of the waking world to the sound of Joanna Newsom's new album Ys, her follow up to The Milk Eyed Mender .

To me, Joanna Newsom's songs transcend time and space, slipping between this world and all those others which spin together in this incredible and mysterious universe we call ours. And her voice is amazing, somehow sounding both direct and a thousand places at the same time, ageing and ageless. At some points she sounds no more than five years old, at others, she is a mature woman with lines creeping upon her face. Sometimes I can hear her at eighty five, others, she is a voice beyond all time, rattling down the centuries. She weaves her melodies through the cracks of existence and takes us with her down deep into the grass with the insects and the dew, humming across the sea bed to the tops of shipwrecks, spinning dark energy from her fingers, hanging from the corners of stars as she shouts entire verses about meteors and wheelbarrows and I am flabbergasted, left with huge tears in my eyes.

I love it when song can do this to me, when I am a balloon filling with vowels and consonants, crescendos and cadences. When it takes me to those worlds I always longed to go to, or that have become some distant memory, buried deep in the back wall of my being, or even that I never knew existed. When I listen to albums such as Ys, I know it can hold me, in anything, in the same way that a mountain or a wide green open field can, and that reminds me of the immense power that potentially lies in music and in words.

I felt similarly when I watched David Attenborough's Planet Earth last Sunday night on television. This is an extraordinary series, I never fail to be dazzled by the cinematography of this programme, as it tracks the natural world in all it's beauty and complexities. On Sunday, it was about jungles, from the tops of the tallest trees to a man who sat 300 hours alone in a hide in order to catch just a few shots of three birds of paradise performing their mating dances. From colugos, strange squirrel-like creatures that glide through the air from tree to tree by flaps of skin which attach, bat-like, from their bodies to their furry arms, to raiding chimpanzees, capturing and killing a rival member of a tribe, passing its bodily parts and head around to be eaten. It travels from the most impressive, beatific sights in nature to the most horrific, from the vastest to the tiniest all over the world. At one point it filmed a clearing in a jungle over the period of one year, but speeding the film up to show it all in a few minutes. It was clear from watching how these plant forms were growing and moving, how intelligent all forms of life are, as they travel and expand to the tune of their own logic and sense of instinctual survival. Seeds and pods burst to bud, to stalk and to vine, find their way across fallen trunks, scaling trees, climbing towards life and light. The plant kingdom is an entire universe in itself, governed by its own laws and logic.

For much of existence in the world, we humans are utterly insignificant save for the harm or good we inflict on them or their habitat. The animals go about life their way, the insects are indifferent to our desires or our dreams, plants and fish travel through their universes as we travel through ours. The toad belches and sings his way through the night, and it is his night, just as the child clutches his blanket and stares wide eyed and white faced at the shadows thrown by the cupboard door, and his world and the frog's world are as real as any I can muster. A flower knows how to court the bees and feed from the forest. The spider always knows the best way for a spider to be.

I wish I had a great mind for science and logic, I would love to study biology and geology, physics and maths. But my brain is as slow as a tortoise up Mount Everest at such things, stubbornly refusing facts and figures into its depths, preferring always the poetry and images that they conjure, the skew-wiff angle, the endless unravelling, the bits that escape definition, the non-rational, intuitive. Give me Derrida, I'll lap him up with a big spoon. Give me quantum physics and I'm there for five hundred years scratching my head to understand just three words, (despite the fact that I don't see a world of difference between quantum physics and deconstruction in the first place). So I'll refrain from saying something deep and meaningful in a factual way about the universe here now, despite feeling like this post needs it right now. Maybe I can leave that to the beloved Bob, who is currently residing in a tiny caravan alone in a wood somewhere in Sussex, probably eating RicePots and working out another law of the universe as I speak, and who blows my mind about such matters on a regular basis.

Well, it's been such a while since I last posted, so I might have known this would end up a long ramble. And I haven't even recounted all that has happened since I've been away. Suffice to say, I've been favouring music over writing for the last few weeks, hence my absence here, and it's been a productive time in that respect. I've recorded five of my songs for a demo with the help of the lovely Tom, who, aswell as being a dear friend, is also a wonderful songwriter and a talented musician. I've also been teaming up with others to collaborate and jam and things feel exciting for me musically at the moment.

Other things I've been up to recently: poetry submissions, being skint, sobbing daily at The Jeremy Kyle Show (move over Pete Doherty, he's my new hero), my acting debut as a grieving pale faced, black dressed sister who turns into a chiwauwa in Tony's new short and very weird (and good) film, previewed at the Duke of York's on Saturday. Eating lots of Turkish Delight and discovering the Choccywoccydoodah cafe (we're talking a piece of cake the size of your head, a cafe equivalent of an opium den), realising at 33 and a size 14, I'm never going to make it as a Supermodel, not cleaning my flat, loving, mourning, feeling romantic, occasionally reading and falling off my bicycle.

That should do for now.

Daniel Johnston on 'The Cutting Edge'

fuck, bless.

Hope To God I'm No Greeting Card

I've not done any substantial writing for a long time now, it feels. I've spent most of today and yesterday either at, or at least hovering around my piano keyboard in some tense, exploding state of consciousness. Creating makes me feel like the bird that has just broken out of an egg. Exhilarated, breathing, insane.

I pace the flat for something to distract me from the inevitable truth of those black and white keys. And still I haven't written anything of note for a long time now. The novel, or at least the drive towards a novel, on the 'back burner', that is, crept back into the recesses of my mind. A book of short stories, is reduced to two ideas only: birds' nests and windy places.

The post sinks into the ground. I am more preoccupied with things that make no sense than those that do. I walk to the shop. I walk back.

This thing I call creativity makes me happier than any sex, is as great as the greatest love. And sadder than all sorrows put together. I like myself a lot when I write, because I am not hindered by my own 'thereness', I am free to wander into whichever room of experience I please, untroubled by my own preferences and predelictions. And I sometimes hate all that I am too, saddled by my insecurities and cracking bravados, on nights like these.

Tonight, experience is painful and the rain dances.

But creating is giving birth, it is about something being birthed, born. And as I feel like the chick out of the egg, I also feel like the bloody mother, I can feel my body torn in labour. So this is a necessary pain, a necessary tension. Like new teeth pushing through gums. Skin ripping open.

And for what? For what reason do we give birth in this way? For sure, there is no fulfllment for me without it, to let the words or the song come into fruition without the tension of struggle, without working for it. Those slippy slidy works of supposed art, that trip so easily and so correctly off the smoothest tongue, they leave me unmoved by their composure, by their lack of a crime scene. No dying bull to trace in the sand, no ideal to stretch to the limit. Art can never be hidden behind, but exposes it all, all the workings. Ah, we are all so clever at this, still we try and tame the animal, lassoo it all so it belongs to us, not the other way round. Idiots, we are.

Can we make poetry with the head? Some people seem to think so. We can stare out to space with special instruments, we can calculate the mass of the world. We can float in space suits far above this bluest planet and watch the gases and the atmosphere, imbibe the greens and the corals and the turquoise patches, sail the infinite seas above, notating the wonders with a biro pen. And what does that make us? If we don't see it, it is all just another TV show, just an interesting experiment.

Poetry is not an interesting experiment. It is living, life itself. It is the often agonising process of opening up to what this universe is made of, and looking around, taking it in.

It is a space ship that travels to places otherwise unreachable, no other vehicle has the engine power, the correct design. It brings this human back, with the wonders and horrors of the world, of space, to write shakily some 'feeble approximation of starlight'.

It also travels underwater, to where the plants and the jellied fish grow. To where light cuts out under the ice, where sound is an ancient song from far above tides.

Descends, descends, past trees and caves and earth and matter and stone, into the stone it goes, the greyest, smoothest stone. Then the peat, and the ashes, the burnt out coal, the embers, the black chalk in the fire, soil and worms. Feel it in your hand, cool dark and sodden.

To the people, the stares, the unrelenting dreams. We say we are a million miles from the sky and the wood and the ground, from under the water.

No, we are the same life. In the human, there is always the valley and the rock, the repetitive seasons and the swimming fish. Discovered lakes, so much unchartered territory. The horrors of the flesh, the sinking stone, buried under ivy, human sleeps with fur and paw, eats its brother, dazzles with the sunlight and becomes dawn itself.

We are the night and the day, the afternoon, Northern Lights. We are neutron stars, gas and pollution. Moving in a haze of cloud. Whiskers. Dead creatures. Our own faeces. The blazing cottage. The never born girl child, left in a dream. A window, this book you hold, spent, spent, always spent.

This is all poetry to me. And to sit with that, is to sit with life itself. And the bravest poets are the Captains of the Boats at roughest sea. They bring the words home, they inspire, touch the fabric, rub the thread between their old warm fingers.

If I ever doubt poetry has a purpose, I think of this. I think of the bold. The death defyers. On a night like tonight, that I can be so bold, take these controls and launch again, is all I ask.

Sunday Best

Well, the afternoon Tea Party went down a storm on Sunday, with cakes, Assam and ginger cake galore. It was a magnificent afternoon, the weather holding out, and the sun daring to shine. We all wore our Sunday best and I even put on a bit of Edith Piaf and Django Reinhardt to add to the atmosphere. An eccentric affair, the kind that always bring the biggest smile to my lips. More afternoons should be spent like this - there is something poignantly beautiful about such a spread on the beach, with all your friends, watching as the sun sinks behind the horizon and Summer ebbs its way from the tides of the shore.

I finally have some more time off, so today I am working on a song at my keyboard. Oh, the joy of solitude.