If chronological order is what you are after (recommended, if you don't want your hair to go all frizzy like Einstein), please read the earlier 'Lock out' post first.
Still here? Ah well, this is the first piece of writing I did for my 'Creative Writing class'...
These are the questions to get us going which our teacher asked, once she had handed out the postcards:
What is the first detail you notice? What time of day is it? What is the main colour of the picture? What do you hear? What does it sound like? What is happening and why? A detail you haven’t noticed before Write a line that follows from the last one, but including the word ‘always’ If the painter moved a fraction to the right, what would be seen? Bring someone else into the piece (yourself or another person) A maximum of five lines/sentences to finish the piece off (try to pick out and repeat a phrase form near the beginning)
Homework: turn it into something coherent
And here's what I came up with:
The overskirt of seaweed first draws me to the picture.
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Dorothea stands motionless for fear of breaking the spell. She has captured on the canvas a Surreal gift to herself, a birthday self-portrait. Without revulsion, she watches the metamorphosis of the seaweed skirt into frogs’ legs. They skitter up to her waist, never arriving, croaking without voices.
It is early morning in Blitzed-out Dover, as close as she can be to pre-War Paris inspiration across the water; from her bedroom window, if it is clear, she can see the French coast gleaming. She works with the sun that keeps the colours true, but today in the paint-fumed, attic studio with its cold, North light, she is glad her birthday falls on the Winter Solstice, the shortest painting day, when she will be able to leave early for the cosy domesticity of the kitchen downstairs, hiding behind blacked-out windows.
The colourless colour of the sea on a stormy midwinter day envelopes her. Purple satin sleeves and pink lips attempt defiance, but pale skin loses the battle, bare feet, bare breasts fade back into the drab.
She ignores the death-bearing, routine thrum of the Luftwaffe returning home, so close that she can almost to
Excuses, excuses. It's nice to be back though. Promise.
Been too busy to pay more than the odd fleeting visit to the motley crew linked to here. How do you keep going so well, so funny, so yourselves? Deeply impressed.
What happened? Having posted in November (NOVEMBER arghh!), I got locked out of here. I did keep trying to get back in with the unsuccessful help of those lovely blokes at Blogger. (They come over as the stereotype. So cool. So West Coast.
In fact, I'm suspicious. It's probably some techie girl in Dublin who's never been near a surf board. Or, more likely, in Bombay. I'm perfectly happy to have my electricity bill dealt with there, as so many UK businesses do, but not so happy when they give the impression they're down the road just to reassure me by telling me what the weather's like outside my window etc.)
Anyway, back to the Blogger crisis. Emails flitted back and forth till Christmas caught up with me and I started irrationally buzzing round trying to buy totally unsuitable presents for elderly aunts.
That's enough excuses. Let's post a story for you. I'll go on posting every couple of days (I think this would be a bit overwhelming otherwise. My first effort for the creative writing course follows. It's based on a picture, Birthday, by Dorothea Tanning. I tried and failed to put the picture here. Sorry. Never mind. Later perhaps. And who know's why this is in funny size typeface. Never mind again. I'll try setting the span size at 100% and see what happens. No time to debug. If a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing badly.
Anyways, our teacher gave us a postcard each and asked us some questions about it. From there we constructed a story.
I'm afraid I'd never heard of Dorothea Tanning before, and a weakness of the story is that no one else will have either, so here's a little something about her first to make it a bit more meaningful. This is from the blurb for an exhibition held in her honour when she was 90:
Dorothea Tanning
"Birthday announces an artist who emerged into the public eye with a fully formulated vision and exquisitely flawless technique," says Ann Temkin, The Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, of Dorothea Tanning's celebrated self-portrait. Painted in 1942, when Tanning was 32-years old, Birthday was acquired from the artist in 1999, with funds contributed by Charles K. Williams II. The painting is a central icon of the surrealist era, as well as one of the great self-portraits of the 20th century. To celebrate this major acquisition, the Museum will present a salute to the artist, Dorothea Tanning: Birthday and Beyond, Tanning's first one-person exhibition in an American museum.
An Illinois native, Tanning studied at The Art Institute of Chicago. At the time she painted Birthday, Tanning was living in New York City and working as a freelance illustrator for Manhattan department stores. Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism, the groundbreaking 1936 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, catalyzed her artistic approach, and it was the Surrealist émigré artist Max Ernst (1891-1976) who suggested the painting's title, Birthday. While scouting works for gallery-owner Peggy Guggenheim, Ernst encountered the painting at Tanning's Greenwich Village studio. Captivated by the model as much as her painting, Ernst later married Tanning in a double wedding with Man Ray and Juliet Browner in Beverly Hills, followed by a reception at the home of art collectors (and later Philadelphia Museum of Art benefactors) Louise and Walter Arensberg.
Birthday and Beyond will showcase a quintessential selection of Tanning's work drawn from five fertile decades in France and the United States. While celebrating the acquisition of Birthday, it will also reveal Tanning as an artist who, at the age of 90, has invented a realm still to be discovered by American audiences.
Phew. Blogger seems to be behaving itself. All posts magically appear on the blog as opposed to stacked up in the file.
Hi Paul! Big wave. Thanks for dropping by. We all know you can write so I don't think you needed to learn!
I do enjoy this creative writing course. It's a challenge, although I think I cut my teeth here with the blog. I love my fellow coursees too. That helps. They're frighteningly talented, so it's a bit like playing tennis with someone better than you. You raise your game.
Bother. Blogger seems to object to the last post. It's still not here.
OK. Anyone can be a writer. Just keep your ears open. I overheard this in the Dim Café Hampstead 8 November 2004. It’s as close to verbatim as I could manage. Woman in her mid-thirties having supper with her gay man friend. He’d just opened his heart about his longest relationship being 2 ½ years with the man who brought Prozac to England and more besides but this was the bit that really stopped the conversation between me and The Husband:
I heard about your leg, but I never knew exactly what was wrong with it. Well, I could hardly walk and they gave me all sorts of tests and MRI scans at the Royal Free and they found I had a cyst, so there was only one way for the blood to get out. They were going to operate right away but I got sick. I had an infection – vomiting, diarrhoea, the works. And my mum came to take me home. Well, she would have taken me home anyway, if I hadn’t got sick. She wouldn’t have let me have the operation. My uncle in Israel rang up and told her to stop me.
That’s your mother’s older brother, right? That’s it. He’d been in a synagogue, tears streaming down his face. It’s not every day you see a seventy-year old man with tears streaming down his face. And an old man, a rabbi with white hair and a long beard, had come up and asked him why he was crying.
‘It’s my niece.’
‘Is she ill?’
‘She’s in hospital.’
‘She’s with a non-Jewish man, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘If she stays with that man, she’ll lose the leg. In fact, she’ll lose the leg and the man. And she mustn’t have that operation. It’s the wrong thing to do’. My uncle took his eyes off the man for a second, and when he turned round, he was gone. My uncle looked everywhere for him, asked everyone in the synagogue but noone had seen him, noone knew who he was. So my uncle went home and told my aunt and she rang my mum. She was hysterical. Mum couldn’t understand a word. Mum started getting hysterical too.
I love your mother. I’d like to know her better. She’s such a passionate person. Your whole family’s passionate. That’s why people love them. So what happened.
My uncle came on the phone and told her ‘you must stop Rachel having that operation. It’s the wrong one. Mum asked him how he knew and he told her about the rabbi. She came straight to the hospital and took me home. I got over the infection there and then I went to see someone at the Garden Hospital in Hendon. It turned out my uncle was right. It would have been the wrong operation. I could have lost my leg.
Stewart left me in fact. I was really unhappy. We’d booked a holiday to Ibiza and when my leg swelled up and I went to hospital, he said he’d stay, but I told him to go. So he went. I didn’t really want him to go, of course. And when he came back he was all distant and then he just left.
He’s such a little boy. He ran away. Something different and he just ran. Couldn’t cope.
I know, but back then I hated him for that. But because my uncle was right about the operation, they made me promise on the Tora and my life that I would break up with Stewart, so I did, and my leg got better.
I got back with Stewart but I couldn’t trust him. Always waiting for him to walk out again.
My leg got better too because I went to see this famous healer, he charges 100s of pounds. Queues of people waiting to see him. I went to see him and he said ‘let go’, and I cried and said I couldn’t, and I told him about my mum and about Stewart, and he said ‘just let go’. He came round to my house. He wanted to meet my mum.
Everyone wants to meet your mum. I really want to know her better. You must come round to dinner.
It was so embarrassing though, there was the healer on the doorstep and I was in a track suit. I’d been rollerskating.
You don’t usually rollerskate. And I’ve never seen you not tarted up. Well, this was a lesson. Always look your best. You never know who might call. He gave me a mezuzah and told me to sleep with it under my pillow and I slept with it under my pillow and within a week I was better. And I am letting go. My mum said ‘you must stop hating Stewart and pity him’ and I’ve started pitying Stewart, not hating him.
Busy as usual. Dennis Healey once said 'if you're in a hole, stop digging'. There's another solution though: If you're in a hole, keep digging and eventually you'll make it to Australia.
I make myself so busy and then I take on another thing. I've started a Creative Writing course at Birkbeck. I love it. Worth more work.
I've declined wonderful new job and stuck with OK old job just round the corner. This was after a Little Chat with the boss. We sorted out a few things and I'm a much happier bunny.
He also broke his leg and I took pity on him. He knows that I'm on the look out for The Perfect Job but I'll stay for a bit.
So what I'm going to do is post my creative writing stuff here. At least it means I'll start posting once a week or so.
Just to start you off, here's a little tale about Juggling.
The homework from last week was to turn some part of your life into a story. Well, I’m an old-fashioned sort of a bloke, so to me stories have a Beginning, a Middle and an End. There’s almost nothing in my life like that. Mostly it’s just get up, go to work, have supper, go to bed – and you don’t want to read about that. I did start a few things, but they just fizzled out and I was left with a Beginning with sometimes the beginning of a Middle, if I was very lucky.
But then, I was coming here on the tube today and thinking ‘ohgodohgodohgod, I’m going to the Creative Writing class tonight, and I haven’t written anything, creative or not.’ Actually, I almost didn’t come here at all. Then I realized that there was one story I could tell you, and I’d been skating round it all week. I didn’t have time to write anything much down, just a few notes. Actually, I’m not sure I could write this down. So, is it alright if I just tell you this story out loud?
[Deep breath] Sorry, but this is much more difficult than I thought it would be. You’re a bunch of complete strangers. Well, you were until a month ago (no offence), and I’m about to tell you the most important thing in my life. It’s a love story. And it’s about communication. That’s ironic on so many levels, but we’ll come to that.
Where was I? Not getting on with it, as usual. OK, so let’s plunge straight in with a Beginning. I first met her long after I’d first seen her. You probably wouldn’t guess it from the respectable way I look now, but my friend Dave and I used to busk in Covent Garden. We had a good pitch - Dave’s a big bloke; I once saw him eat eight sausages at a sitting. We started early to catch people on their way to the office, a juggling act – we’d juggle anything – kitchen pans, shoes, peacock feathers (but only if it wasn’t windy), knives (but only if we were sober). We made a living for a while, at least £200 on a good day, and most of the days were good.
This girl would come past every morning at about 9.30. She was really lovely – only 19, intent, graceful. She walked like a cat. She was usually carrying one of those big, black portfolios – I found out later she was a student at St Martin’s and we were sort of on her route. She’d linger to watch us, even in the rain. Well, she didn’t watch me. Actually she’d watch Dave, but he didn’t notice.
We used to finish about 7.00, and we’d often go up to The King’s Arms in Long Acre. One night there she was, behind the bar. It was a bit of a shock. I knew her right away. Once my tongue was oiled with a couple of pints of Old Peculiar, we got chatting, liked each other, had a laugh. We went out a couple of times but I was always a bit awkward around Sarah, she was just too beautiful to touch somehow. It’s funny actually. I think of myself as good with women; I usually have a girlfriend, though I must admit that relationships have tended to fizzle out on me.
The act with Dave ended. He always had itchy feet and it was November and he got an offer to go back to South Africa and join a circus in Cape Town. I worked on my own for a bit, but it wasn’t the same and no one I tried out with really jelled. Eventually, on a particularly rainy February morning, I just went into a temping agency and got myself what my mother called ‘a proper job’ (I’m educated, you see, though that’s probably as unlikely as me being an ex-juggler).
Somehow my path crossed Sarah’s every six months or so. We’d chat about old times, but nothing happened. One day, I promised myself, I’d get really drunk with her and tell her how I thought she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever met and would she spend the rest of her life with me.
I went to a few parties with her too and once Dave was there. It was hilarious actually. He was like a magnet. Wherever you saw the highest concentration of beautiful women, Dave was at the centre. Well, all the beautiful women except Sarah. She watched him, just like she had in Covent Garden, and he was just as oblivious. Actually, he wasn’t oblivious. He thought she was stand-offish and that she didn’t like him. How thick can a bloke be. But you couldn’t get a syllable out of her if he was anywhere within earshot, so I suppose it was understandable.
A couple of years later Dave got married in Islington Registry Office to a nice girl from back home, bronzed, healthy and with absolutely no sense of humour. He had grown a beard. Her parents and brothers sat in the front row, stony faced. They were good Dutch Reform Church-goers. Dave wasn’t exactly their idea of a good catch, and this wasn’t their idea of a wedding either, without a minister or an altar.
Flocks of women sighed out of the Registry Office and tottered on elegant stilettos to the reception. He’d invited everyone he knew. He must have invited everyone, because somehow Sarah was there, looking really elegant in a vintage suit – Chanel or Dior or something - that fitted her just perfectly. I’d always been smitten, but now I was completely gone. I did pluck up the courage to dance with her, until some suave City type cut in and I went and got completely paralytic with the other sad, lonely gits at the bar.
Dave always said he preferred London to all the good weather and good food in South Africa, but eventually Laray wore him down and he went back with her and worked in her father’s business. I did catch the odd glimpse of Sarah every now and then. I was still smitten and tongue-tied and she still didn’t seem to notice.
About five years later, Dave came back. He’d split from his wife. He shaved the beard off and came to live with me, but it wasn’t the same as the old days in Covent Garden. I think I resented him actually. I was getting up early to go to work and he just seemed to be dossing in the flat that I was paying for, eating my food all day.
He wasn’t really dossing as it turned out, but getting his juggling back. He’d always been better than me and now he got really good. Actually, working inside is much easier than freezing outside. You can imagine. Anyway, soon he was juggling seven in long runs, and making it look as easy as three. He even got up to the magic nine and past that, to ten and eleven. Even Bill Barry and Sergei Ignatov struggle beyond nine, and they are the masters. Dave was right up there with them. I suppose I should explain there’s a machismo thing about numbers juggling – being able to juggle large numbers of objects – it’s one of those things jugglers admire in other jugglers. I expect it’s not very interesting for outsiders to watch, but the margin of error is almost nil when you get above six, so to do a long run of over 20 successful catches is really hard.
No wonder the Cirque du Soleil wanted him.
He was just as good at juggling women. He had sniffed the air and, sure enough, some of the flock I’d seen at the wedding came tottering back on those high heels. And others besides.
Sarah phoned me up out of the blue while Dave was still living at the flat. He answered – the calls were usually for him – but he handed over pretty fast when he found out it was Sarah. Her mother had just died and she knew my mother had died the year before, in fact she’d come to the funeral. I’d been numb with grief and she hadn’t said anything, just held my hand at the crematorium. I’d had to explain afterwards, of course, to several of the family that ‘no, we were not an item’.
Anyway, she wanted to see me for a chat. I hardly recognized her when she came round. Her hair was scraped back into a rough ponytail. Her eyes were red and puffy with crying. Her skin was all blotchy and I was even more smitten than before. She was absolutely overturned with grief. The doorbell rang again and it was one of Dave’s women so Sarah and I escaped to the Kings Arms in Covent Garden for old times’ sake. We got so drunk that I nearly told her about the being smitten, but I held back. It just didn’t seem fair to take advantage of her right then.
Then she rang again, to confess I suppose: ‘You know how I got drunk with you last week, well, I bumped into Dave and we got drunk together too. I don’t know how it happened, but I told him about how I felt about him, and he came back home with me. Sorry. I’m so vulnerable at the moment. I just couldn’t help it.’ What she didn’t know, and for some reason I didn’t tell her, was that actually, Dave had cracked long before she did – I’d heard the same story from him almost as soon as he’d left her.
It must have been less than a month later that she’d gone off to India. Dave went on staying with me when he wasn’t touring. By this time he was earning quite a lot and he paid me a good rent to keep a room for him. I wasn’t happy about this but he insisted.
He happened to be around when there was another phone call from Sarah. He rang me immediately: She’d been living with a man in India, but yesterday, on impulse, she’d got on a plane back to England with just the clothes she stood up in. Could she stay for a few days while she sorted herself out?’ Of course I said ‘yes’, which was lucky because Dave had said yes right away..
When I saw her, she’d gained a sort of distance and calm that is quite hard to describe. She looked straight into you somehow. She wasn’t too bothered about most of her possessions but she’d found her painting style in India and she’d had to leave nearly all her work behind. She showed us what she had with her, though, and it was like opening a window onto all that heat and colour. She gave me one as a memento.
I suppose travel wasn’t a big thing to Dave anymore. Anyway, he was ringing round airlines and within half an hour had got himself an open return ticket to Delhi. She was both shocked and pleased. She didn’t even know if her ex-boyfriend realized she’d left. She never told him. We took Dave to the airport for the 9.45 flight and three days later he was back, several large crates in tow. Her work. (I told you he was big, didn’t I? Apparently, the boyfriend had helped him pack them).
So this story seems to have a Beginning and a Middle, but I’m hoping this isn’t the End. Sarah’s now travelling with Dave. She paints the circus on and off stage. They’ve still got the room in my flat for when they pass through London. Maybe one day they’ll split up. Maybe Sarah and I will get drunk again and this time I’ll tell her about being smitten. Maybe she knows already.
The muse of bloggery strikes, and on a Thursday too. Goodee.
God preserve us from interesting times. Boring is good. Dull. That's what we want.
On Friday, just as we were going to bed, I smelt burning. It wasn't a nice, early autumnal, neighbour-burning-leaves-sneakily-in-the-dark-because-we're-in-a-smokeless-zone kind of smell. Or even a gullible-mother-burning-a-wasp's-nest kind of a smell. It was a nasty, smouldering, burning-wool kind of a smell.
We traipsed around the house trying to track it to source, without any luck. By this time we were feeling distinctly queasy, I think with the smell, but also with getting tireder and tireder and more and more alarmed. Eventually, we decided to open all the windows and call the fire brigade. Within five minutes, not one, but two, fire engines were parked outside, blue lights wheeling. Clearly not a busy night. At least I hope not.
We now had six firemen in the hall. It began to seem very small. One in particular wouldn't be squeezing through any windows. He was more your hefting about women-the- size-of-small-whales type.
They were extremely kind, despite the fact that, having opened all the windows, the burning smell had dispersed. They did believe us. I think. Anyway, they spent some time with a device that looked like a big torch and was called a Wasp (no wonder I was thinking about Mum and the wasps' nest). It registered heat and they combed the house with it and didn't find any hotspots.
Joining the general melee was one of our lovely neighbours, offering cups of tea. Very Suburb that. Terribly helpful. Terribly curious about what was going on...
We went to bed, glad that our smoke alarms had been given a professional seal of approval, wondering if we'd wake up to a smouldering ruin, wondering if we'd wake up at all.
We did.
No burning smells since. Can't think what it was. But we're getting the wiring done asap (we keep testing it, and it's fine, but it is forty years old, and I tend to think it will test fine until it doesn't).
Seeing them all made me realize what a female society I've tended to live in. Old job was all women. Daughter, Mother-in-law, budgie, dog, all female.
That's been a bit different lately. I work with a man, for instance. And the house has been full of men. The Husband, of course, but also we've had some delightful lads fixing the house up. They've painted the outside and are now doing the windows. They're doing a lovely job for not very much, but part of the deal is that we give them lunch and they are capable of doing serious damage to any meal you put in front of them (Oliver managed 8 sausages the other day). It brings out the Jewish Mother in The Husband and steaming platters are produced with love and a flourish. He's really enjoying himself.
The Daughter's back at school (sniff), so that's minus one female. She's in her element this year, her last at school, a Prefect, no less, top of the heap. Not sure where she comes from really - neither husband nor I were Prefect material. Maybe two negatives make a positive or something. Her plans for world domination took a blow this week. She got offered a part in a pop video for a boy band called 'The' (no, I've never heard of them either). The school would have agreed to let her do it too, but it was the days when she was repeating her Edinburgh performance for the school. Bother.
And a wonderful new job seems about to fall into my lap.
Sunday, August 29, 2004 Behind the Fridge We've been gadding about this week. Such a relief really. I hadn't realized how fast I'd been living till I slowed down a bit. (Yes, yes, I know - today's feeble excuse for not blogging).
The Daughter has been in Edinburgh, pursuing The Dream, and we followed her up there (Dream in question is to become Dame Judy Dench, and The Path is doing any acting she can find in order to get there). She's in a thoroughly odd play called More Light. About Chinese concubines locked up in a tomb with their dead emperor (they eat him...).
As the average Edinburgh Fringe audience is apparently about 4, we thought we might be necessary moral support (as well as half the audience). Actually they got 31 on their first day and have settled down to a respectable 20 per day after that, so they're doing OK.
Their venue is about a hundred yards from the grave of Greyfriars Bobby's master. I'm such a sop. I have to confess that it brings a lump to the throat this story of a loyal dog sleeping on his master's last resting place for 14 years in all weathers (and Edinburgh does have all weathers, apart from tropical heat). I'm not the only soppy person around though. There are still flowers on the grave and the richest woman in England, Baronness Burdett Coutts, had a memorial put up to Bobby when he died.
We had enormous fun in Edinburgh. The Husband's walking seems to be getting much worse so we took taxis everywhere. People were immensely polite and kind to him. I can quite see why Matt chose to go to university there. Not only the helpfulness, but also the art galleries; the book shops; just enjoying the Old Town underneath its tartan overlay of tourist shops; and the New Town (well, newish, it was built between 1776 and 1840).
I began to understand Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in a different way, in terms of the city itself, the grace of the New Town vs. the medieval muddle of the Old; the genteel civilization of the city perched on the guts of Carboniferous volcanics (it's no wonder that Edinburgh was the cradle of British geology - you trip over interesting rocks without even trying).
You'll know about blue moons, I expect. It's very rare that there's a second full moon in a calendar month but tonight's one of those special nights (Oops. Actually, having looked this up, perhaps I don't know about blue moons at all and I'm responsible for one of those bits of misinformation that get the internet a bad name)
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Where've I been this time? Well, mysteriously, I woke up on a space ship called Nostromo - the ship's systems had roused us when some sort of distress signal was received from an alien ship. It got very messy, especially the night we ate spaghetti. Just no time to blog what with blowing up the ship and all.
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The Daughter has been getting a taste of celebrity this summer. In true celebrity style, this is not for doing anything special, but for having a likeness to flavourofthemonth Keira Knightley. I failed to see it until this picture appeared on the front of the Evening Standard magazine on Thursday:
And now The Daughter:
OK. Now I get it...
This could all bode well I suppose. If there was any call for Keira Knightley to have a younger sister, The Daughter would be your woman. Damn. There was a call. Pride and Prejudice. Ah well, probably all for the best. Do I really want her to be a film star? Not really. I find myself going all traditional - 'finish-school-and-be-normal-at-least-till-you're-grown-up-and-know-what-ordinary-life-is'. I see those children who sipped the poisoned chalice of being in the Harry Potter films and think 'no thanks'.
OTOH the thing The Daughter would most like to do in the world is go to RADA and become an actress. She's been furthering the ambitions with a dream course at the Old Vic run by RADA themselves for a couple of weeks (next Friday is the performance). Teenagers sometimes have a bit of difficulty getting up in the mornings. Not if they have something to get up for. Daughter's been on the train every morning 9.00 am without even trying. It's like peeking through the gates of heaven for her. Only trouble is you have to be very good and very lucky to get in - RADA get something like 2000 applications each year for 70 places....
TWO MONTHS. No. It CAN'T be. Ouch. I can't possibly apologize to you all. What I need a Monkey Dust excuse a la Clive Pringle...
Well, this mad professor who lives down the road lent me a De Lorean which took me back to a time before my parents had met and my dad fell in love with me and my future started disappearing and then I brought the parents together by playing guitar like Chuck Berry before he played it himself. Then the mad professor sent me back to the future by using a lightning strike on the old clocktower. But I missed a couple of months.
Well, something like that.
Everything's fine.
Sort of.
Except:
Working too hard. New boss is taking over the world and requires far too much help from me. I like this job but working till 7.00 nearly every night is too much. I'll stick with it for the time being but I can see my eye wandering if we can't work out a way for me to go home on time more often than not.
Husband's not well. A bubbling MS attack has struck this summer. He's not too bad but his walking has got rather shambolic and he's got no energy so I get back from work and go shopping, cook supper etc and feel a bit like Cinderella. Moan, Moan, but it's not his fault I know, so I'll just moan to you instead of him.
Computer's not been well. Usually at weekends, which is practically the only time I could have blogged. Because the Husband has no energy and I have no time, we haven't been as fierce with the people who supplied it as we should have been. I'm sure it would have been cheaper if they hadn't just pretended nothing was wrong, sending someone out to fix it every week. Unfortunately, because pc's are just black boxes to me, I have no idea when I'm being a hypochondriac/ technically incompetent or when something is really wrong. Turns out something was really wrong. The motherboard had some major fault. One new motherboard later and all problems magically disappear (whatever a motherboard is. As far as I'm concerned a motherboard should be something I go off to Cornwall to surf on).
Mother-in-law's not been well. Poor pet has been in hospital. Having been in hospital last time while the cardiologist got her drug regime right, the outpatient geriatric clinic took her off something crucial, and, guess what, she got sick. This makes you wonder if the point of geriatric medicine isn't to finish the elderly off rather than to keep them going (much cheaper for the National Health for them to be dead). MIL in hospital means lots of visiting in the evenings to keep her spirits up, shipping in fresh fruit for her, taking in fresh underwear, taking it away again when she thinks she's got too much stuff, taking it back the next day when she decides she's going to run out...
Daughter's been needing some support. I will not mention Dr Freud or wolves in traps chewing off their paws, but the wind slammed a heavy door on her right hand and her middle finger looked like a Francis Bacon. This about two weeks before she took her AS levels (evil public exams which were originally intended for those leaving school at 17. Which turned into exams people leaving school at 18 take as well as their A2 exams. This means British children get examined within an inch of their lives - three sets of public exams in three years and no time left to actually learn anything. No wonder they go slamming their fingers in doors.). She seems to have come through the fire, but we find out for sure on 19 August when the results come out.
What with all this, I got out of the blogging habit. But I'll try to mend my ways.
Especially because when I got back on line I found all these lovely messages from you. Thank you very much. You warm the cockles you do, my dears. I'll reply separately right now. And have a little look around to see what you've all been up to...
This was the best of the unblogged blogs, written 18 April.
The budgie is fine, a brush with death has made her raucous, a happy bird. The first budgie we had used to love La Marseillaise (it was 1993 and There Was A Lot of It About, what with the bicentennial of the execution of the King of France). Twilight is less discriminating and will squawk at anything from Eminem to Mozart. But this is another story.
Your intrepid blogger was up betimes this morning. The Daughter had a job in Blackheath (a suburb in south-east London. As our postcode begins with NW, you can guess it's quite far away). They were photographing her at a hair salon for the Hairdresser of the Year awards.
Normally if we'd been mad enough to be on a tube train at 6.45 on a Sunday morning, it would have been a scene out of 28 Days Later or Shaun of the Dead - the odd derelict who'd forgotten to go to bed. Or who had no bed to go to.
This morning was different. More like a mass Rocky tribute. Station by station we gathered more and more keen young men (and even more keen middle-aged men. A couple of them were women. They had green hair.). By the time we got to Charing Cross, the train was packed. They were all in running shoes, clutching identical white carrier bags and reading instructions, clutched with white knuckles. London is full of little sects, and we'd just stumbled among another one - the London Marathon runners.
Fortunately the Husband reads the newspaper so I did know that the whole of central London would be closed off and Blackheath was one of the start points for the race (that's why we didn't go by car), but the scale of it all was still astonishing. I'd expected to be deeply out of sympathy with these people. A bit like when Princess Diana died. I felt very sorry for the sad, attention-seeking woman who could never have enough love because she didn't love herself and I hope she saw what happened in the few days following her death - the grass in front of Kensington Palace where she lived became a vast ocean of flowers. The local council, The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea eventually used teams of volunteers to strip the cellophane from the rotted offerings and build a huge compost heap.
But going on the tube every day with the mourners on their pilgrimage (I worked for Penguin Books, just round the corner) was a disturbing experience. There was a seething resentment and intolerance, not just for her weak sap of a husband and his family, but for everyone who didn't wallow in the depths of hysteria with them. I just kept my head down and eyes averted, much as I probably would have done in Nazi Germany I'm not proud to say.
But back to the marathon. By the time we got out of the train at Charing Cross station I felt like standing at the top of the stairs and shouting 'You are all going to die, just like the rest of us you know'. But I didn't.
More than 33,000 of these sad obsessives with unhappy/no marriages keen and charitably-minded (it raised £34 million) people converged on Blackheath/Greenwich to start the marathon. And another half a million came to watch, and most of them were on that train with us from Charing Cross to Blackheath. Luckily they were all thin (the Daughter fitted in nicely). Most of them seemed to be from up North where Mr Ariel comes from. Resist the urge Mr A.
As I said, I expected not to like them very much but actually they were sweet. Wide-eyed, like little boys on their first day at school. Fear and excitement in equal measure. Making friends. Not quite knowing what to do.
As we were all sardines in a tin, we got to know each other quite well. There were a few loyal families/partners who'd come out this early on a Sunday morning to support the runners, but mostly they were playing out the drama by themselves.
One young man, not from the North, reached new heights of sadness. Amongst the somewhat insane he shone like a beacon. It was his first time. But he'd done a dry run - the whole train journey timed, and had walked the course. Instead of keeping quiet about this like a normally abnormal runner, he told us. He was right though, you began to realise just how far 26 miles is when you've been on the train for a while. They all shuddered slightly at that.
Having dropped the Daughter for her shoot, I just had to go and see the start. There was someone dressed in a giant running shoe, a beefeater, some bedraggled pirates, though none as beautiful as Johnny Depp, Paddington Bear. A few women, all under 5 foot tall, so that lets me out. Perhaps most startling was a beefy man dressed as a cheerleader, pom poms and all, with the pointiest breasts since Madonna.
Despite all this jollity, it was drizzling slightly with a chill wind. The runners were being motivated by a commentary over loud speakers, 'smile for the cameras', and 'oggy, oggy, oggy' to which they were meant to respond enthusiastically with an 'oi, oi, oi'. It was a bit like officers encouraging men over the top in the Trenches.
Then they were all gone and we started drifting away. The plastic bin liners that the runners had used as raincoats to keep dry blew across the heath like tumbleweed. The drizzle got colder and harder and I felt very sorry for the runners as I headed for the nice warm empty train back to Charing Cross.
The centre of London was an extraordinary sight. Thick crowds lined the Embankment, but of course the runners wouldn't be coming for hours yet, so there they were staring at a completely empty street. Surreal.
I had to hang about Central London waiting for the Daughter for most of the day. What a pity, browsing the shops, having cups of tea. It's a hard life being Mrs Worthington.
When the Daughter eventually finished she came for a little browselet with me herself, clutching the £50 she'd been paid (slave labour but still).
With some astonishment we noticed that the truly hardy runners were amongst us, taking the opportunity for an afternoon in London, proudly wearing their medals round their necks. Now that I admire…
I'm not the only soppy person around though. There are still flowers on the grave and the richest woman in England, Baronness Burdett Coutts, had a memorial put up to Bobby when he died.
