Southbound

A shaft of iridescent brightness
Without edges,
A spear from the sky
Reaches down through cloud and dust
To dissipate across fields
Without end,
A rare shining on this evening's commute.
The clouds have become gobos -
Electrified rims graced with powdery light.
Trees and fields and hedges
Never before or since as alive,
Roll past my eyes through smeary pains,
Clean air, green foliage and white light,
A poultice.

Growing words

If I were a gardener, would you walk through my flowerbeds looking at the arrangement of colour and texture, the use of flower and shrub? Would you see how I'd used height and depth and buried bright blooms under marram grass, trained the sick hawthorne up the trunk of an oak tree and how I'd neglected to fill the pond with any life at all apart from a gurgling fountain? No, you'd smile and say "My mate Jules loves green stuff that grows," and leave it at that. Can't you just say, "My mate Jules loves words and phrases and clauses and paragraphs and the sight of dark green ink on creamy paper..." and let that be the end of it?

She had steel eyes

I'm having lunch with a friend, perched on a stool next to one of those huge plate windows, flanking a street busy with lunchtime human traffic. We're chatting, enjoying each other's company and the sunshine pouring through the glass, drinking overpriced squished fruit (in the name of health) and munching warm panini.

A woman comes into the café and takes her place at one of the tables behind us. I'm sitting at a angle, facing towards my friend to avoid the midday sun's glare, so I notice her, just sitting there, staring into nothingness. To begin with, she looks ordinary, mundane. Her clothes are plain - white shirt under a black, slightly old-fashioned, wool coat. A handback strap crosses her chest. Her expression is deadened, flat, but I think nothing of it and return to our conversation. We're talking summer plans, diaries and lists of things to do. There's less than twenty minutes left before we'll scuttle back to our desks, hands flying across keyboards, heads full of deadlines, so our conversation steps up a gear.

In a city, any concept of ordinary is far-reaching, so diverse is the climate. But something about this woman's behaviour disturbs me. I find myself looking over my friend's shoulder to check her out every few seconds. Her behaviour is incongrous. We're in a café, a busy, high-energy, eat-and-run kinda place, not a location for lingering, nor daydreaming. I wonder if anyone else has noticed her, so busy are they with their thai noodle soup, ham and swiss baguettes, shiny black containers of sushi with a miniature fish-shaped bottle of soy sauce, single slices of dry cake shrinkwrapped many miles from here, lattés with an extra shot, waxed paper cups of green tea, miso soup, polished green apples, cans of fizzy drink, plastic pots of fruit purée, Greek yogurt and crunchy granola, thick smoothies (all tasting too much like banana, regardless of their colour)... I'm sure no one else has seen her. She hasn't bought anything, and I can feel the annoyance of customers walking up and down searching for a table. Her hair is orange, frizzy, parted down the centre, and her eyes remind me of steelys - those steel ball-bearings we used to win at marbles when I was younger. After another five minutes or so we've finished our lunch, and I see that the steel eyes are staring in our direction. She stares mercilessly, without embarassment it seems, just glaring at us. When we get up to leave these metallic eyes will follow us out of the door.

Once in the relative freedom of the street, a gust of cool air flicks my hair back from my face, and I feel the freshness of the air. "Did you see that woman?" I ask my friend, "She was staring at us the entire time!" She hasn't noticed. I know I sometimes read too much into things, so I let the thoughts go, and rush back to my desk.

---

Ten days or so later, I'm with the same friend in an entirely different part of town. We've been shopping, trying on dresses, and are excitable and expectant of a fun afternoon. We've had coffee and biscotti and flown down back streets to escape the Saturday afternoon crowds. We're almost at our last destination for the day, a shop selling smart dresses, and our feet are beginning to ache. We walk through a confetti-like crowd, and are chatting as we go. I turn my head to the right, towards the shops we're neglecting for others, when I see her. The same black woolen coat, cotton-wool ginger hair, the metal eyes. She sees me, and for a moment our eyes meet. She stares, expression blank, eyes boring through the afternoon sun, and her head follows us as we walk arm in arm past her. I realise I'm cold, and when I look down at my hand, it's screwed up into a tight fist. I fight the desire to look back that is at the front of my consciousness, and increase my pace to lose myself in the Saturday crowd.

staring at grief

At lunch I eat salad and chorizo at my desk whilst surfing the net for a play to see on Saturday night. I flick thoughts and pages between ballet, drama, opera, Shakespeare, situation comedy, and decide on a Belgian political thriller. I’m merrily squashing yellow pepper and sunflower seeds between my teeth, entering Switch details into the black hole of online data, trusting personal details to a database that no doubt has been personified by a friendly name – Ted, Bob, Dave. Footsteps on stairs tickle my eardrums and I move fifteen degrees to the right on my black swivel office chair. In that moment I see grief mixed with life, truth, anger, pain, raw pain staring me in the face. I listen as I hear of a memorial service, petals falling from shiny domed ceiling to grace broken vessels below, hurt spilling out like milk from a bottle smashed on the pavement and abandoned. Young lives cut short, those left behind crushed by loss, by the black space remaining. My stomach refuses the superfluous leaves on the plate in front of me… I’m indignant, full of something – I’m not quite sure what. Empathy speaks of old ladies with sweet tea, and that word can’t describe it what I feel. Love, humanity, fear, love, anger, love, love. Mate, I don’t know what to say.

Indignant

I’m indignant about lots of things, some of the time. I’m indignant about some things, most of the time. I’m indignant about injustice, children sleeping on streets when they should be playing tag in a park full of green trees and kind old people with miniature poodles. Some of the things I’m indignant about today include:

Jealousy.
Rain between my toes when I’m wearing flip-flops.
Lack of sleep.
My stomach hating me and refusing even the plainest food. ‘Peppermint tea!’ it exclaims, refusing brown bread with apricot jam, weetabix and soya milk, home made chocolate chip cookies, cashew nuts, bananas, chicken stir fry, lemon cake, rice.

Silence

Today I sat in relative silence in the office for three hours. The 'phone didn't ring for me, and my email was quiet - no shots through cyberspace to disrupt my morning. The coffee in the paper cup went cold. The clitter-clatter of fingers on keys and the hum of the aircon unit provided white noise, which I've grown accustomed to since birth. I ponder what true silence is, and realise that it has been replaced in my life, and maybe yours, with quiet. Silence is surely a complete lack of noise of any kind, and what I've experienced today is its poor cousin - quiet.

Weird

I've just been reading one of those little books about London that's full of useless information to impress tourists who glide into the capital to consume culture, cappuccinos and history, before getting back on aeroplanes to where they've come from and promptly forgetting everything they found so interesting the day before.

Anyway, apparently:

* The longest ever game of monopoly lasted 70 days
* In the eighteenth century you could get £4 for a dead-body, more for a 'short' ie a child
* Every year an average of 7,000 umbrellas are left on the tube.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My heart went out to you...

I had dinner with a gorgeous long-lost friend on Thursday. He's one of those people who was joyously ever available for insults, comedy nights out, serious conversation, profound religious discussion, humorous political reflection, and burritos. I say was, because a couple a years ago he moved across the pond to Illinois, by the lake to be precise (see what I did there? The irony of it - there's a plethora of lakes, I've seen them). He's still there, in cyberspace, but you can't hug an email. Anyway, imagine the thrill, he's back in town For One Week Only! So we had dinner at my favourite place (location unimportant but they do fab big chips) and for an entire evening I was back in time by two years, being insulted, laughing at his jokes, giving advice on his success with the ladies. It was swell as those American friends of ours say.

Then the subject of this blog came up. He's been reading it at work, between selling grains and luminous carbonated drinks to fatten up the US military. He observed that my blog was pretty depressing, and his heart went out to me, blood and sinew floating across the lakes and the pond, through Heathrow airport, down the tube line underground to little old me, lying in my pink bed fast asleep, tetley tea in my kitchen cupboard. I've always known that suffering breeds art, that it's so much easier to write about melancholy than joy, that a fun picnic in the park provides so much less material than a break-up or a fight with a friend, but I was sad because he had been sad when he read it. So I kinda decided to try to be more positive - you can be the judge of my resolution!

Links

Check out the new links section. I did this myself using HTML. I am very smug about it!

- End -

Eventually, I was placed
on a bed like a boat
in an empty room with sky
filled windows,
with azure blue pillows,
and leopard-like quilt.

It was English tea time
with the kind of light
that electrifies the
ordinary. It had just
stopped raining.
Beads of water on glass
glittered like secrets.

(c) Julia Darling, 1956 - 2005.
Written about her own impending death from cancer. Gorgeously full of sad hope.

Writing about oneself...

"Writing about oneself is always a conceit, but usually a harmless one, unless a writer tries to pay off grudges, as do some foolish celebrity memorialists."
Max Hastings, The Guardian, 16 April 2005.

Hmmm. On first reading I agreed wholeheartedly with Mr. Hastings, I would have been grateful to shake his hand should I have bumped into him on Regents Street, newspaper under his arm. I liked this particular quotation so much, in fact, that I went to the bother of recording it in my notebook - a process, you understand, that involves:

a) locating said notebook in cavernous bag
b) finding (in horror) sandwich crumbs, bits of ham, pieces of chewing gum, stray tissues, the odd tampon stuck inside
c) shaking notebook open to remove above items
d) searching for pen that works (at least four minutes)
e) trying to remove pen lid, one-handed, whilst not dropping notebook, decaf cappuccino and jumper
f) finding blank page (becoming increasingly difficult)
g) transcribing aforementioned quotation onto page
h) reversal of above to restore notebook to bag.

As you can see, sometimes it's the small things that cause me the most consternation. Anyway, I digress, I'm talking about MH's little opinion about writing about oneself always being "a conceit". If that's true, then surely thinking about oneself is also a conceit, as in my mind, writing is just thinking with a pen... We're all inherently selfish, me above most of you I suspect, but writers seem to be charged with the introspective crticism more than most artists. Think about it, and be conceited!