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.

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.

Stagger into the Light

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

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

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

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

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

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

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..

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.

china

There is a white china cup that sits on the wooden table. A pile of papers lie to the right, their edges softly blowing up in the breeze. Apart from these, a china cup is the only object sitting on this scraped old wooden table, with its legs that wobble, its planks that heave with cold. The china cup is shaped like a small well and it gleams in the morning sun filtering through the open bay window. It leaves a ring in the unpolished surface.

I mark my seasons by the white china cup. April is for green tea, flowers in the top, floating. Summer is for sweet hot apple cider, straight from the piping urn. September is berries and darjeeling, taken black. Autumn seeps into flavours of licorice and anise star, hot water doused cardammon, cinammon sticks, cloves, milk. December is cracked ice, Baileys poured over.

I live the seasons like this, until the winds drift over and March appears, a blighted snow drift on the horizon. And the drinking stops, the china cup is filled with lighter hue, which hails, in its thin lipped taste of biting white, the onset of a distant Spring.

This is the month where the china cup sits empty on the wooden table. Where I lie on the moth bitten sofa, with its Japanese throw and its smell of jasmine and pink wafer, and I watch, as the cup tows its empty china through another cycle, its life, a bequeathed rim of silver, to another year.