Tuesday 20 December 2011

Sleepy Head

High up in a tower, that shadowed all the neighbouring towers, Sleepy-Head lived alone with her mother. Sleepy-Head had a body that was spindly and sallow like the stem of a plant deprived of light. Looked at one way, her features were incongruous with the delicate, oval pallor of her face. Look again and you might find yourself thinking differently. Whilst she had a bump on the bridge of her roman nose and a small gap in between her two shiny front teeth, she had lips so ripe they may have tasted of cherries and eyes like hot cocoa. Her appearance mattered not to anyone beside herself, however, as for as many of her thirteen years as she could remember she had had only her mother, Wide-Awake, for company and apart from a few windows looking out of their home on the thirty-seventh floor, no other experience of the world beyond.


Sleepy-Head ached to go outside so she could encounter for herself the taste of the wind; the sound of wet grass; the smell of laughter. Her mother proclaimed it to be too treacherous a place for her to enter as yet. With Mother Wide-Awake it did not matter from which angle you gazed upon her crags and creases; her looks were as cold and gravelly as her character. Despite her mother's view, Sleepy-Head continued to ponder the question of how people left the tower in the hope that one day soon she would too. 

Sleepy-Head had once believed that people must be able to fly, for she had watched the way birds travel on their wings and although she could not fly herself, she knew flight was possible. Lately, she watched people from her window as they appeared from the bottom of the building and observed that although she still did not understand how they made it there, she could no longer be certain that people flew.


She began to lie awake in her rickety old bed, concentrating on the sounds beyond the confines of her room. Sometimes she heard other people's babble below her and from them she learnt a great deal. But more often she heard the grumbling, growling and moaning of a curious being on the other side of her wall. She had become accustomed to its snaps and groans. There was a rhythm to them; the growls raised and lowered, culminating in the clunk of jaws closing. The creature could not be malevolent, she reflected, as she often heard people conversing with it. This, she realised, was how people travelled up and down the tower.


Every day Sleepy-Head cleaned the house from top to bottom, not having the courage to stand-up to Wide-Awake who would appear suddenly at the same time in the evening and inspect her efforts. No matter how hard Sleepy-Head grinded, by the next morning her labour would always be undone and the house as dirty as ever. One day, she waited until just fifteen minutes before her mother was due to arrive home before beginning her chores: She frantically embarked on her cleaning. Wide-Awake arrived to find Sleepy-Head beetroot-red in the face and soiled with dust. Removing her coat, Wide-Awake scuttled a finger along the mantle-piece.

Sleepy Head faked a long, wide-mouthed-eye-rolling yawn and exclaimed, Oh, Mother! I certainly have been working hard in your absence, Im just about ready to fall asleep upright!


Wide-Awake exhaled sharply and began to scrutinise the inside of the oven. She stood up straight and looking around the rest of the room announced, Why, I have never seen the place so clean! You must have worked yourself nearly to the death doing all this.


She kissed her daughters cheek, which sent a chill down Sleepy-Heads back, and stroked her hair with a skeletal finger, smiling all the while. Would you like to stay up and eat with me or are you going straight to bed?


Oh, to bed, to bed, said Sleepy-Head, and sleep well, Mother!


Without changing out of her sooty clothes, Sleepy-Head wriggled under the bed-clothes and lay with her mouth covered, suppressing her delighted giggles. She tried to adjust her eyes to the darkness.

From the lights that danced before her a figure seemed to emerge dressed in white and then fell away like an ember. Beyond the wall she heard the comforting sound of the creature purring and burping.

Later that night, when she was sure her mother would be asleep, Sleepy-Head crept from the house for the first time ever. She tiptoed down the tunnel and found herself face to face with the creature she had spent so many years listening to through the wall. As if by magic, its jaws began to open with a recognisable clunk. Knowing that she had no choice she stepped quickly inside the creatures mouth, hugging her arms around herself. Her stomach churned and her skin prickled hot-cold with sweat at the anticipation of what laid below.

Overwhelmed, she sank down and squatted on the sticky floor. She stretched her thin cotton dress tightly over her knees and began to chew furiously on her fingernails.

The descent was painfully slow: she willed to be plummeted to the ground. Then suddenly lights were flickering and the grumbling began to lessen: the creature was resting. Sleepy-Head jolted up from her squatting position, the jaws opened obediently to display a tunnel much like the one that had led from her home. Noticing greasy paper-bags and drinks cartons littering the floor she asserted this was not the same tunnel she had just come from. Uncertain as to the creatures mood she crept away from its mouth and down the tunnel towards a large window. To her amazement she saw things she had never seen so distinctly before.

She saw vivid green and the carefree blur of children. She could not tell quite how far away they must be but they seemed so much closer than before and she could not wait to embrace it all. 

Sleepy-Head thrust open the window with only a small amount of difficulty and with a soaring sense of expectation and elation greater than any she had ever felt or would ever feel again, manoeuvred herself onto the ledge. Fear was far, far away and so she jumped: her arms held out wide as she descended; she felt her dress billow up and flutter at her sides like wings. A man below her looked up at what he thought must be a bird.

Sunday 18 December 2011

another fairy story


    In ancient times that were ancient then and even more ancient now, the city of Be’ersheva- Mother of Sheba, the city of Abraham, Father of the People, the City of Seven Wells, was a place of importance and a centre for trade, as is the case wherever an oasis springs up in this dry, unworkable place. The city seemed old but it also seemed new, for it was both of these things to at least some people, at least some of the time and it moved and swayed and throbbed, shimmering amongst the already shimmering desert beside an ever-more shimmering oasis. 
   This was a place that clamoured with a mixture of joy and severity. A place where all kinds of people from miles around met to trade and catch-up. ‘Oh, yes! This is the first time in a long time, friend!’ ‘So good to see you, so good, and your daughter?’ A meeting point for people who had been travelling to discuss their plans and decide where-to-next. 
It was in this city that a man and a woman met and fell in love, as men and women are bound to do. 
   The woman of this story was an Amira, a princess, of the important Ai-Hawa, tribe of the wind, who met cyclically in Be’ersheva to buy and exchange goods of all kinds. The Amira Ai-Hawa, was an unhappy princess. She longed to be as free as her name and on one particular trip to the city she decided she would go for a walkabout apart from her family. So Ai-Hawa followed her father to the market place and waited until he was safely engrossed in business talks and then slipped away into the crowds. Ai-Hawa passed through Be’ersheva’s expansive and bustling market. There were fruit, vegetable and textile stalls in abundance. She ran her fingers through baskets of grains and pulses, all the while remembering to watch her head for hanging baskets hanging high, and fruit and vegetables that tumbled like acrobats from containers on poles. Old men smiled, laughed, squawked and cooed like birds and monkeys and as they laughed pomegranate pips fell from their mouths, landing at her open toed feet.
The man was Abiel, the son of an equally important family, known colloquially as the House of Many Doors and he was affectionately known by the people as the Prince of Closed Windows because of his mother’s over-protective nature. Now Abiel was a grown man he wanted to be as free as the wind that called at his bedroom window and so he began to seek this freedom in the town’s baths and opium dens. It was in one of these particularly reputable establishments that shortly after leaving her father Ai- Hawa- overcome with intense curiosity- found Abiel totally benumbed upon a sofa. And wellaway! The pair beheld each other in the way that two beautiful people behold one another. And wellaway! They began to speak like young lovers do, saying thus and thus.
Abiel said, ‘Young Amira, let us not beat about the bush, will you marry me? For if we make haste it can be done in a matter of days!’
Ai-Hawa laughed and said ‘a matter of days? Your people surely don’t marry in the same way as ours!’
‘Then how?’ he asked.
‘Like this!’ she replied and lay down on the mattress beside him laughing still. She looked at him deeply whilst they caressed for a very long time.

If He Were There

Our father liked to walk about the house barefoot. It should not have been something unusual for a man to do in the sultry heat of Guadeloupe, but with him it had become an obsessive caprice. The floor had to be clean. He instructed our mother firmly on this matter. She was to make sure the floor was well-swept during the day, ready for his arrival home in the evening. He had a particularly intimidating way of ensuring she did this.
As soon as he got back from the office he would balletically remove his shoes, whilst almost mid-air between the entrance and the inside of the doorway. Then he walked with his bare feet touching the tiles from the porch to the kitchen. Our father would do this, as he did most everything, completely silently. He had a particular way of walking; like a nomadic wanderer, lifting his feet in the sand. Perhaps it was the influence of our geographical antecedents; the pugnacious Carib, who defended our island against the Spanish colonialists so successfully for nearly a century. Or maybe that was just what my father’s tall, graceful build led my imagination to believe.
He stalked into the kitchen to deposit the shopping bags; as he did this, he felt under his feet for traces of dust. You could have sworn the air stopped moving around him as this ritual took place. It was a pivotal moment in the day, upon which the atmosphere of the ménage depended for the rest of the evening. If our father was satisfied, the family could relax and enjoy a jovial time with him; playing games and telling jokes. If he was not satisfied, he would return to the kitchen and with ceremonial dignity present the dustpan and its guilty contents before our mother. All this before he had even said ‘good-evening’ to any of us. 

As a result, for several days after, our mother would pay special attention to this duty and all of the children of the house would be inveigled into helping her in a last minute clean each night before our father arrived.

I returned home one evening, after a long, hot, lazy day at Pointe-a-Pitre fishing with my friends. We often spent our time in this way, not having to worry about food or money, as the fish we caught on the nearby beaches provided us with both. Otherwise we would cook the vegetables we had found in the forest on a wood-fire, eating them surrounded by fellow intruders: Iguana Delicitissima. By seven in the evening the temperature had dropped to only 77 degrees. Our father entered the house and began to make his journey from the porch to the kitchen. Once again, the air stood still around him; stiller than before and we knew something was amiss.
He moved as if traversing the breadth of the island. In a few swift steps he felt the mountains crumbling underneath him, he felt the moist earth below the tropical vegetation, he felt the desert and he felt the beach I had played on that day with its black, volcanic sand.
He swiftly began to sweep the house. From the kitchen our mother must have already been aware; did she hear the sweep-sweep of his furious brush? Sweep-sweep on the tiles. Maybe she just sensed it. There was something about the way she attended the calalou on the stove; her back remained turned. She seemed quieter; more pensive than usual. What crossed her mind? There was a still and silent communication taking place between our parents and all any of us could do was wait.
Then he appeared. Like ear-wigs jumping from a piece of rotten fruit, we scattered. The presentation of the dust was something we would settle to watch from a distance on this occasion.
One and a half metres in front of her he stooped as if to place the dust-pan on the tiles. He did this silently; without a word, as always. But something was different.
Did our father realise what he had done? Our mother realised it. Long before he even appeared before her, with every sweep-sweep of his brush her mind had been ticking over. Stroke, stroke. Another revolution took place; gained momentum from its foreboding. Invisible to us she had begun to tingle, not just with fear, but with angry trepidation.
We were still lingering on the edge of the scene. I pulled my sister behind me, taking a further few steps back. I was clinging to the doorframe now; and my sister to me. I was determined to be a witness, no matter how small; no matter how great my fear.
We were frozen. Our parents stood facing one another. Our father tall and slender; smooth and dark, like the Carib warrior that was latent within him. Remaining as still and stony as one of their zemi idols, while our mother seethed and smouldered like La Soufrière.
Our father’s hand continued to stretch out, unfalteringly offering the dust to her. And we were there: frozen.
A fly moved its way around the rim of the pot of calalou on the stove. Large, bulbous eyes occupied most of its alien head. The membranous wings twitched and its swollen antennae bristled. The raised layers of the circus formed a shield above the abdomen. And again, with wings twitching, filmy and thin; the fly suddenly parachuted into the air.
I felt the wood splintering under my fingertips and for a moment longer my attention was caught by the fly, spiralling into the garden where the rough scales of a gecko drew along the ground beneath a flurry of poinciana and hibiscus. Gecko doesn’t mind a bit of dust but he does carry evil spirits. The fly spiralled away from our sheltered grove within Pointe-de-Pitre towards each corner of our butterfly shaped island and then higher, above the two wings of Guadeloupe. Our parents had always been separated by the fact that they were from two different sides of the island but at that moment, as they stood facing each other- she from the mountains of Grande-Terre and he from the rainforests of Basse-Terre- the gulf that separated them was greater than the river that separates the two. I felt for a second that we kids were the channel that joined them together. Another fly moved around the rim of the pot.
“Reiver!” She made to knock the dustpan from his hand, but stopped and shouted instead: “You want your damned floor cleaned just how you like it, then get a servant!” Feeling the burn of her words which seethed at him like the sap of the poison Manchineel our father dropped the dustpan.
There was nothing else to be said. Our mother left the kitchen and wandered to the end of the garden, her muttering a furious fly-like buzz. Two pairs of eyes wandered after her through the open kitchen doorway, which left off the latch, slowly slid wide open. We surveyed our barefoot father standing in the dust for a moment, who, although unaware of our presence, was too sad to watch any longer. Curious of our mother’s whereabouts we slunk away; conceding, we knew who had won that battle.

What you sayin', Bertrand?


PRE-DISCLAIMER DISCLAIMER

This is an exceptionally long post. It is actually essay-length. If you’ve read any of my other longer posts then 1) well done for getting to the end and 2) be a bit worried because this one’s even longer than the others. You might want to pop to the shop and get a few supplies in before starting. I wouldn’t bother “sitting comfortably”, just phone work and tell them you’re taking the day off.

DISCLAIMER
I’m no philosopher. I ain’t pretending to be clever or muffin, so if you were here for the advanced class, then I’m sorry but you’ve actually stumbled into Philosophical Ponderings: the Advanced Remedial Level by accident. You may know from some of my previous posts that I’d been banging on about thinking about the old M.O.L. This is, obviously, not something that I have begun wondering about recently. As a child, I spent so much time on my own thinking about why we were here; where we came from and generally being a bit serious that I occasionally used to experience momentary black-outs when considering the enormity of things such as, quite how long ago the dinosaurs were and how amazing it was that we’re here at all. Now I am aware that this M.O.L is a question that isn’t exactly new, a bit like Michaela Strachan, it’s actually pretty old, never goes away for long and pops up when you’re not expecting it with a seeming pretence of youthful novelty. “The meaning of life, you ask? Well gosh, I wasn’t expecting that, I’ll have to get back to you!” I was fully aware of the unoriginality (vanity, even) of what I was asking and I’m not pretending in the least to have anything of any consequence to say on this. It had just been that a series of events had conspired to get me a-thinking about “IT ALL”. Y’know, you’re bumbling along, thinking things aren’t the best they could be but you’re doin’ okay, you’ve been working hard, the worst is over, you have survived adolescence and university mostly unscathed, notched up a few more notches on the old bed-post than you would have liked to in the process but generally you know how to make your hair “work” and you’re even beginning to get better at doing things like making conversation with other people’s grandparents and you have a pretty high success rate with poached eggs, la-dee-dah, you think to yourself, I am some sort of actual grown-up. And then no sooner do you reach this sort of moment of self-realisation, just like the heroine of a Jean-Luc Godard film, BANGCRASHFUCK! It all goes wrong and you hit the usual mid to late twenties we’ve grown apart-heart-break followed by “all I had been working towards, all my hopes and dreams are shattered” ennui-slash career crisis. That was a bit heavy. I think it might be time now for something like this:
[Insert lol related joke here]
So when I give this really long self-deprecating and overly self-conscious disclaimer about how embarrassed I am to be asking this question, I guess what I’m really saying I’m bothered about is not the question itself but that despite the fact that we ask this question to ourselves so often, there is so little security-cleared advice on the matter. In everything most of us do we are wondering, “Why am I doing this?” This applies to our careers, our children/our un-children, arguments with boyfriends, the decision to exercise or not exercise, the question of whether to practise our ukuleles or trawl the internet for pictures of kittens with humorous captions? What does it all mean? Should I worry about any of this? Even if you pay by the hour to find the answer to that question, you’ll never get one. (That would be unethical, obviously.) So now, back (briefly at least, don’t worry, there’s another tangent right around the corner, in fact, less of a tangential corner and more of a Thelma and Louise tangential canyon), yes, so back for a moment to the list of three pieces of evidence I mentioned some weeks (now, months) ago that I would like to present to the M.O.L jury (sorry/not really sorry for repeating myself- oh and by the way if anyone has any suggestions as to who might be on the M.O.L jury panel, please let me know, I’ve had a think and I’m creatively stumped… I’d imagine that choosing the jury would be something like deciding the panel for X-Factor, not all the members of the panel should be experts in the field… this shouldn’t necessarily be Project Runway: The Philosophy Season- I’d like to think outside of the Tupperware on this one. It also makes me think of that ubiquitous magazine Q&A question: “If you could invite anyone alive or dead to a dinner party… who would it be?” Where some numpty always says something like, “Ooooh, I’d ’av: Nelson Mandela, John Lennon and Martine McCutcheon.”) Anyway, the official line-up can wait, so for now consider the following to be recommendations to you my dear jury of six loyal followers and an unspecified number of lurkers that read this blog (I know you’re there even if I don’t totally know who you are [although, I sort of do]):

1. Lars Von Trier’s 'Melancholia'. I said you should watch this as I had fully intended to use one of my free Cinema City members’ tickets to go and see it before I had to admit that I had recommended a film I hadn’t actually watched because in the end I never managed to get out of bed in time. That was me admitting it, just now. So in place of an actual review of the film I’ll say that it’s something to do with the actress out of Spiderman who used to say she wasn’t going to give into Hollywood pressure to have her pronounced incisors corrected until she gave into Hollywood pressure and had them corrected, yeah, her, that Vampire-movie child-star, something to do with her and that bloke who wasn’t the short English one with a hammy Southern accent out of True Blood, but the other one- something to do with them and the end of the world. The fact that it’s to do with the end of the world is why I thought it might be appropriate evidence but, sorry to say, I still haven’t done my homework and it’s proving difficult to download illegally (not that I do that- except I do- note the sarcasm- course, I don’t- I do). Anyway, as I am rubbish and lazy, I cannot speculate too much about what answers this film might give us had I actually gone to see it but anecdotal reports so far say it’s incredibly dreary. On the other hand, I’m still keen to watch anything directed by a man famous for bullying Nicole Kidman as no one likes her really, do they?

2. So yes, we keep on asking but there seem to be no real answers, unless you want to, like, dose up on the, like, Prozac of, like, organised religion, man. Enter Mr Will Self with his Book of Dave. My instructions on this one were to “believe”. (Before I continue to rant on talk about the novel I just want to mention briefly that I was really sad to read in this weekend’s Guardian Review of Mr Self’s terrible illness. That’s all I’ve got to say on that, so back to Dave.) EXPLAIN THE BOOK. What answers does this satire give us? Perhaps none, other than the very important one which is not to trust answers that are spoon-fed to us with sugar by Mary Poppinses in dog-collars, obviously, and whilst you may not know the answers you can still comfort yourself by laughing at those who think they do. Which leads nicely onto my third piece of evidence and, hark, for quite a revelation it is!

3. Graniad article: I said to read it, and here this is where my original disclaimer kicks in again. Much like my previous sausage roll feminism this is juice drink philosophy, not freshly squeezed. But somehow, like choosing a bottle of Lucozade instead of a fruit-smoothie after a night out binge-drinking, it managed to help me to kick-start my day and cure me, at least temporarily, of my M.O.L hangover. This article from 2004, is a summarised version of ‘What’s It All About: Philosophy and the Meaning of Life’ by Julian “my real name is probably Baggins” Baggini. You may know him from other toilet-reading classics such as “The Duck That Won the Lottery: And 99 Other Bad Arguments” and “The Influence of Egg and Bacon Flavoured Crisps on 9/11* and Other Underwater Basket-Weaving Experiments”. I would imagine, although I cannot be sure, that he is probably friends with other intellectual-writing-for-Generation-X authors John Sutherland (“Is Heathcliff a Murderer?: Great Puzzles in Nineteenth-Century Fiction”), Tom Hodgkinson (author of “How to be Idle”, “How to be Free” and “How I became idle and free by telling you how be idle and free but I hope to god, you never do or no one will buy my books anymore”) and that other Guardian darling, sneary-self-help guru, Oliver Burkeman with his new book, “Help!: How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done” which tells you so much about [what the book is about and…] what life is really all about in just the title that you really need not read the book at all but just go… well, gosh, I think that perhaps what this is going to tell me is that ultimately whatever I do in order to be happier, the most I can expect to achieve is to be slightly happier and get a bit more done, therefore…. maybe I should just stop worrying about being happier, worrying about getting more done, reading books that tell me to stop worrying, reading books that tell me to get (a bit) more done and just fucking well be a bit happier and get a bit more done. It’s that classic modern folk expression again, isn’t it?: JUST DO IT (I think it might have been something Beowulf said). Anyway, I merely josh about these writers as I like them all and besides I'm part of the tabbing generation who can’t concentrate on anything too heavy for long and would probably never read non-fiction if it wasn’t for Sutherland & co.

Anyway, you go back to her and I’ll go back to, back to, back to Baggini, (a careful consonant/vowel swap still isn’t fooling us into thinking your real name is more exotic than it is BAGGINS). But good gravy, and juice-drink philosophy aside, I think the man might be onto something. He begins with an oft-related anecdote about a taxi driver who once had “that Bertrand Russell in the back of his cab.”


I feel, though, that I can maybe sympathise with Mr Russell. Let me use another two hundred-word tangent to explain! [I’ll use a different font and indent the text in desperate  hope of maintaining your concentration.]

Back in 2005 when I had begun ‘seeing’ (amongst other verbs in the present continuous… funny that ‘seeing’ is the one we tend to focus on, perhaps ‘touching’ is too crude, ‘smelling’ too subtle, ‘hearing’ too friendly?) a man we’ll call Mr. Rochester (or something funnier, but no comparisons to Bridget Jones and Mr Darcy, please) he used to call me sometimes when he’d remembered that he had a girlfriend who he could use his mobile to contact, when said mobile wasn’t lost under a pile of damp washing and pizza boxes, that is and ask: ‘What you sayin’?’ Now, at the risk of endangering my impossibly cool reputation (and I must stress that this was SIX years ago- we didn’t even have The Internet, Ukuleles or BlueTac then, for god’s sake, NO-ONE was that cool) but for quite some time this question left me rather puzzled. In fact, the question and my ensuing bewilderment were possibly indicative of some deeper miscommunication at play in our relationship but leaving that aside I was quite confused and for several weeks and months whenever Mr. Rochester asked me: “C* (*Insert real name here), what you sayin?” or “What you sayin, darlin’?” and I’d just reply in a way, which may have accidentally implied a lack of interest, “well, err, nothing really, Mr. Rochester,” when really, despite my Peckham ““roots”” I just wasn’t street enough at that time to comprehend what I now appreciate to be a wonderfully inclusive greeting (rather Batmanghelidjhesque, you might say).  So, using my own experience, I think perhaps when the taxi driver asked Bertrand, “What’s it all about?” he was probably just caught a little off-guard, a little out-of-touch linguistically, much as he might have been if he’d been asked, “Bertrand: What you sayin’?”

 
Now this is the point I got to on the 27th October and since then I've tried several times to finish this piece. All I really needed to do was summarise Baggini's article but I kept being stumped. Probably because, as he says himself, explaining the meaning of life in a cab journey is quite a tall order, and now here I am trying to juice-drink-philosophise his answer even further when you could just go off and read it yourself (-do). Second I was disuaded by trolls' comments on my blog. But third, I was just too busy all of a sudden, very happily living my life, happily not caring about the M.O.L. 

What Baggini basically says is that satisfying the M.O.L comes in two ways... looking for answers in a forwards direction and answers in a backwards one. Looking backwards is actually unlikely to help much, as 'life's purpose, if it has one, is not given to it by its creator', but this does not mean that life has no meaning. 'Meaning', however, does not necessarily belie long-term goals which unfortunately it often turns out we choose for the wrong reasons... we do things for the sake of other things, we study to pass exams....we work to pay the mortgage. Life can have all sorts of meaning, but it is meaning in terms of values, day-to-day values, of which we can make our own personal list (Baggini offers us Woody Allen's "Groucho Marx; Willie Mays; the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony; Louis Armstrong's recording of Potato-head Blues; Swedish movies; Sentimental Education by Flaubert; Marlon Brando; Frank Sinatra; those incredible apples and pears by Cézanne; the crabs at Sam Wo's; Tracy's face") and of course, we all have our own lists... so on that note, go make your own list, have a cup of tea, sit back and enjoy some of the beauty that life has to offer for nothing's sake but its own... Here's something to start off your list {skip to 4:45}:-

Sunday 30 October 2011

a bit of short fiction this time: ‘Dried, Chewy Squid Snacks’ (Inspired by traditional Korean bar food; written May 2008)


Dried, chewy, squid snacks; fermented and rotting vegetative matter; trapped strands of meat; ground peanuts. The inside of someone’s mouth is a place most people never want to see in too much close detail.

Why dentistry? His father was a surgeon; his mother a psychiatrist; his older sister had bagged gynaecology. One could say, his options in life had all chomped shut a long time ago.

No matter how far we are from what we would really like to be doing; no matter the mundanity of our work we must all look to find some meaning in what we do.

So, looking into his patients' mouths he no longer thought of the people they were part of. Instead the mouth was a degenerate, alien world; the saliva an ocean tide rising up the cliff edges of teeth; the tongue a writhing mollusc that had been disturbed inside its shell.

Lying in the bathtub at the end of the day, he found it difficult to shut out his work. The cold enamel sides reminded him of huge teeth which trapped him inside a cave's salivatory depths.

For instance, one night, a couple of hours after his usual bath, with a couple of
glasses of single-malt whiskey warming his breath, whilst kissing Sandra, (34, Human Resources Manager of 'Wimpy' South Western Division), he imagined his tongue not as his tongue, but as a solo muscular embodiment of himself slipping inside of Sandra’s mouth.

He was unequivocal about it, not prepared to miss anything as he clinically and systematically explored her every crack and possible cavity. The plaque along the ridges of her teeth aided his grip as he climbed, slipped and slid in a fantasy of dental rock-climbing.

Until, he remembered what he was really doing and pulled out of Sandra’s mouth so suddenly he almost bit her, prematurely ejaculating the only explanation he could, (and not for the first time)-

‘I’m sorry, it’s not you; it’s your teeth.’

Thursday 27 October 2011

plenty more _________ in the sea


Now I was up until the wee hours trying to finish this other piece, 'What you sayin' Bertrand?' I was doing so well but at 4am I had to give in and go to sleep and now I've got more pressing matters to discuss before I get back to Bertrand.

As some of you may know, over the last eighteen months, being unfortunately afflicted with singledom, I had been trying my hand at spinning the horrific wheel that is ONLINE DATING. I had intended to devote more time at some point to describing my experience on the three different sites I tried, on and off and on and off again (mostly off) for about ten months. Whilst the "highlight" of my year of Internet dating (slash, year of five dates) was probably being stood up by a man I thought was going to be a sexy Irish musician (INSTANTLY THE WARNING BELLS SHOULD HAVE BEEN RINGING), but actually was just a bit of a douche, ON THE WAY to the date, which was supposed to be AT THE ZOO. (Oh, and "Isn't the zoo a bit expensive?" I had said before we agreed to go. Oh no! Don't worry, he had an UNLIMITED MEMBERSHIP CARD! To the Zoo! Go figure.) ON A SNOW DAY IN LONDON (when the transport is all buggered up and even the animals are sensible enough to know they should just stay inside their enclosures) so I had already  battled adverse weather and transport conditions whilst trying to look all sexy-first-date-cute in my winter woollens for several hours before I finally managed to get on a tube in South London and received a text from him saying, "... have you left yet?" ("Yes I've left, I told you hours ago I was leaving!") But unfortunately, "something had come up", even though the date had only been arranged two hours earlier and it had all been his strange idea in the first place. The words 'lucky' and 'escape' spring to mind.

Anyway, I thought I had given up on the dating for good.. it wasn't just the messages like:

Hi im writing this cos ya know how it is looking over folks . But ya know they do that hole lol thing . Well i really did . Looked at ya pics very cute. Ya know the hole thing ya style an that . Look as you can see i do have kids but im not looking for no baby mummy. I totally know the washing matchine.

The worst thing was just being totally on edge for weeks if you did think you had found someone you liked and you would begin exchanging tentative messages, all the time just wanting to meet, until eventually you would... the problem with that then is that you invest so much of your time in something that could have been decided very quickly had you just met at a party. The problem with the British (and maybe lots of other Europeans- I cannot confirm nor deny) is that we just don't really do dating. Compared to the Americans, for example, we just don't small talk in that way either. It's like you need a personal reference from a mutual friend before you can so much as begin to talk at ease with someone you've never met before. Single? Want a new boyfriend or girlfriend? The best you can hope for is to scour your existing friends, colleagues or mutual friends of theirs and wait for a drunken opportunity to present itself. That's how it works here and although not a very dignified method for the earlier part of my twenties it had been working just fine.

So anyway, I thought I was over online dating for good. It was just another social networking procrastination disorder taking over my life and encouraging me to buy expensive jumpers that I thought would make me look 'cute but indieish' to impress the Creative Media Professionals I was meeting on GraniardSalemates. Then in the kitchen- in on my own- on Tuesday night I cracked. I LOGGED BACK IN. Before I knew it I was scrolling through pictures of men in the area... within minutes I had re-filled my previously deleted profile, zhoom zhoom, uploaded 9 different pictures of me designed to appeal to any tastes! Cute and indie, I can do! Sultry, I can do! Nature-loving, I can do! I could go on but, oh no, basically, I've done it again... and in record time: I have a date on Friday night. It all seemed so easy, "blah blah blah, you're new to town, let's meet up for a drink", "blah blah blah, YES". YES?! What do you mean 'YES'? I actually have to go through with it? Now for the hard part.... What do I ask him? How do I act? What do we talk about when we've run out of small talk? What if he's weird? What if I seem too keen? What if I use too many big words?

Life. So hard. All advice appreciated....

Wednesday 26 October 2011

news in brief



*Just because my posts tend to be very infrequent, more than 1,000 words long, largely negative and highly repetitive doesn’t make this a “rant blog”. I would say that generally my arguments are too tangential and badly made to be referred to as "rants" but I’ll take this as a compliment, so thanks. Like I've been saying all along, just keep this a 'lol' free zone and no one needs to get ranted at.

Wednesday 19 October 2011

He’ll Get His Curmuffins*

Dear Readers,
Hark! For there is trouble going down in the blogosphere, and no mistake. I am afraid that, yet again, my extensive research project, "Comparisons of the representations of the mythical figures 'Shawty' and 'Lorelei' in Hip-Hop, R&B and Folk" has been tossed aside to write about a dangerous incidence of 'umbrage'. I tried to tackle this as politely as I could, thinking initially this post could be just about malapropisms but unfortunately I think I may need to meet head-on the aforementioned 'umbrage' that was 'taken' by one of my highly vigilant (some might say, TOO vigilant) followers. Apparently, (ha! as if!) in my last post I wrote about my decision to monetise my blog using AdSense, saying:
"here’s hoping none of my three followers take umbrance with this"
which really IS quite ironic, as I never wrote that. And besides I have four followers now. In fact, I think you’ll find that if you look back I never wrote any such thing. I urge you all to go and check. Obviously, I wouldn’t have written such a thing, as “umbrance” is not a real word and I only know words that are real. Like 'spoon' and 'zygote', two examples I use often in common-parlance. Obviously, now you might say, “ooh, but couldn’t you have just gone and changed it to make it look as if you never had made such a mistake, thus making yourself good?” Well, again, obviously the answer is NO, as I have never knowingly done, nor would I do, anything to make myself look good. Going back and changing the nonsenical malaprop “umbrance” to the correct word, or even, just changing it to some other wholly wrong or inappropriate hodge-podge in order to create a sense of bathos would just be totally out of character, (*cross my heart, hope to die, throw my collection of Stewart Lee DVDS on a bonfire*).
At the risk of further isolating my loyal and first-cyber-born follower who is probably already rather at the end of his tether with my time-consuming (albeit impeccably well-written) monologues about how I haven’t got much to say but I’d like to analyse why I think that is, so as to invent something to say, interspersed with topless pictures of Michael Fassbanger (sic); I would just like to invite the rest of my extensive following to consider for a moment the reliability of a man who writes under the pseudonym “Finnginn”. Yes! Finnginn! Very cutesy and asinine you might at first think. Perhaps he just really likes the name Finn, perhaps he likes gin, perhaps he likes the Finnish story of the Moomins and picked the next consonant in the alphabet to create a rhyme with ‘Finn’. Tosh! There is something much more insidious at play here. FINNGINN- if that is your real name, which it’s evidently not- I would like to know what you are trying to achieve by choosing a username which rhymes so blatantly with the old-fashioned oft-mispronounced forename ‘St John’? You haven't got away with it that easily, you see, as I have realised that this is a flimsily disguised reference to the literary character St John Eyre Rivers, the clergyman and cousin of Jane Eyre, the heroine of the eponymously titled novel, a film remake of which was released only last month, a fact which could barely have passed your scrupulous eye. And, who, pray-tell, starred in the lead role as Rochester?? None other than MICHAEL FASSBANGER (sic) himself! A clever Moriarty-like dig, indeed, Mr Finnginn, but I'm steadily gaining on you, whatever that might mean. And don’t bother trying to explain away the coincidence by saying you’ve "had that username for years and that it's got nothing to do with you or your strange obsession with a mediocre actor you actually knew nothing about until only a few months ago". I suppose you’ll be saying next that you had that moniker in mind when I was still nothing but a drunken twinkle in my daddy’s wandering weegie eye! You'll be saying that this nom de plume was invented by your own father who named the twinkles in his own eyes 'Finn' and 'Ginn' and that I wrote this whole piece as an excuse to post another gratuitous picture of Fassbanger (sic).
This, dear readers, is the sort of bare-faced cheek that I really take umbrance with.
* A.Pirie.

Tuesday 18 October 2011

What I _____ about when I ______ about _____ing

  Prologue

Now I just want to make sure everyone here is still vaguely aware of what’s going on.
I’m just checking, because I know some of you need a little help with these kinds of things and I don’t want anyone telling me later that they hadn’t been fully apprised of the situation, y'know just as we're about to catch the ONE train that leaves from the station every hour to get to that place that only opens for thirty minutes every Tuesday, except it's two minutes until the train comes and you haven't had a wee or bought your ticket or remembered your sandwiches or your anorak or asked permission and now you want me to hold you over the platform so you can take a piss with my one arm wrapped around your waist  so you don't fall over and the other arm holding an umbrella over you 'cos it's whazzing with rain, whilst cradling a mobile to my ear so I can call your mum and check it's all okay. That would be a bit annoying, as I don’t have much time to keep re-capping and explaining everything, even though the Primary School metaphor is just yet another self-indulgently Primary School metaphor that's wearing a bit thin and you're all wondering when I might use some of my "better" school-based jokes, at least the ones that involve Show & Tell or are totally made up like the one about the Vietnamese boy with special needs and lactose intolerance but in actual fact although I'm  unemployed, my schedule is so ram-packed with eating jam on toast and staring into space, I'm still too busy for you.
So in case you weren’t following here’s a recap:
·      This is a blog that is essentially an infrequent record of the tangential ramblings of my mind. I like to keep you on your toes by using things you might not be familiar with, like “footnotes”, y’know just to sorta show off and be all literary and Jorge Louis Borges on your asses (yeah, how d'you like those Forking Babels?) but then I’ll analyse the footnotes themselves so excessively and self-consciously that I’ll make you feel a little uncomfortable for even daring to think I was a pretentious knob. Which you are still in your rights to feel. If there was a face that was all like "sad-face" but like, self-pitying sad-face I could maybe use it now but essentially I don't really care what you think so just like stop tabbing between Facebook and some random google-searches you've got open and concentrate.
·      Sometimes I might throw all of the above right back atcha all in your faces, like, and just put up something literary but again, it’ll probably be so horrifically pretentiously literary and long you won’t want to read it, so feel free to ignore those too.
·      Ultimately, if I had to hard-boil my remit (no one’s making me do this but it’s been a few days since the prolific bi-posting which occurred on the 11th October and I feel the dizzying popularity of those posts- I do check the stats y’know- just left me reeling like some sort of crazed child star Drew Barrymore post E.T. Or something. Emphasis on the ‘or something’), anyway, footnotes, brackets, wedgies, cold-weather, neuroses, spell-checks, unsettling neutrino-news aside, I guess I’m trying, tentatively to be a little funny or at least a little interesting. So just be patient with me.
·      If you don’t ever, ever, ever find my posts remotely amusing that’s fine. Whatever you do, though (this is where the re-cap is most important), WHATEVER YOU DO, don’t you ever, EVER, ever, DARE, to ‘LOL’ on my blog. Because if you do, I’ll ensure you never use the Internet again. Probably by maiming you with a copy of Borges' 'Labyrinths' or something. *Ways and means- I’ve got ‘em.*
If you’re still not following very well I would advise you to attend one of my surgeries, which are open by public demand. Entry is free provided you bring Supermalt and don't question my choice of Motown or Electroey-Indie. To conclude, I was going to mention here a quote from Stewart Lee but instead I thought I might finish off with two companion quotes/pieces of advice:
The first I overheard from an elderly man at The Alexandra public house on Friday: “I won’t hear a word said against Ray Mears because that would be blasphemy”.
The second is from a Lee “Scratch” Perry song and I think it goes some way to put two fingers up at anyone who tries to say he’s losing the plot: “Curly Locks/your father is a pork chop.”
 Ray Mears + Lee "Scratch" Perry= [Insert your answers here]
Right so, we’re all up to speed.

Chapter 1
So I actually began keeping a blog four years ago as I thought it might help me as a way back into Creative Writing after the horrific demoralising experience of having to share my work with Chemistry Undergrads with no writing experience whatsoever who for some… reason.... ($$$?$$$/////bhjghjg) had been allowed onto a so-called pr&st!gious writing course at a well-known Un!versity in the East of England, but I could never actually bring myself to make any of my blog posts public. After moving to Norfolk in July this year I realised I had a choice. Either keep busy by any means possible, even if it meant forcing the chaotic ramblings of my mind onto anyone who was reading (there in lies the beauty of the Internet… the most consensual of all the media… no one’s really forcing you to read my drivel, there are no ad-breaks, no pop-corn investment, no voice of Liz Kershaw unless you actually want it, and so as long as you allow me to keep taking advantage of your minds, I think I will), OR just give in and join the gang of ex Blue Peter presenters that like to hang around outside the Wild Man. It was *literally* (never use that word lightly), as simple as that. Now, for the discipline element. That’s the real problem. However, there are three things I have discovered which have been helping to motivate me:
1. Running (See Murakami - if you’re interested that is. I’m not implying that you don’t understand what running actually is, I'm just saying that there's a correlation between being focused for a creative activity and taking exercise. Geddit? There's nothing to get.)
2. Knowing that people are reading. It doesn’t matter if they aren’t commenting or enjoying but as long as they are reading I will continue to be motivated. (There aren’t any direct references for this, other than that I am vain and enjoy attention). The profligacy of the 11th October and resulting reaction had me so excited I was awake until five in the morning listening to the three songs by Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros that I like on repeat. I was feeling so confident I perhaps sold-out too soon and have now allowed Ad-Sense (here’s hoping none of my three followers take umbongo with this) to post ads on my blog. Who knows but in a year's time I may have made 20p from these drunken (more often not, drunken, to my chagrin) ramblings.
3. As above, but specifically: PEER PRESSURE, (thanks Finnginn). As I said above, being as I am now a highly successful blogger with a high number of (three) followers and an approximate number of 350 hits to my blog, so it has been difficult at times to keep up with demand but basically that's why I'm writing this nonsense.
Right, all of that being said, I’ll move on to writing my next post as I’ve got a lot to catch up on and that post about the representation of ‘Shawty’, in Hip-Hop and R&B and my philosophical piece entitled “What you sayin, Bertrand?” aren’t going to write themselves.
*Oh, and in case I misfired the proverbial love custard with my picture of Fassbanger (sic) in my previous post, here are two pictures which I believe we can ALL enjoy (yes, they are the thinking-human's-totty Lord Byron and Stewart Lee! ... Unfortunately I've scoured Plenty of Fish and OkCupid and no such 21st century amalgamation seems to exist in East Anglia, or if they do, they don't want to reply to my propositions).