Tandems

I cycle through the morning sunshine, my presence displacing currents of warmth that glide past and kiss my cheeks. Twice daily I peddle this route over tarmac, gravel, cobbled mews streets, floating plastic bags. The traffic is backed up, stop, start, stop, start, engines purring and spluttering, but I don't care. My two wheels squeeze through and past and carry on up and round and down and round and past and in and out of the cars blocking the road. I'm confident and full of my own thoughts - alone underneath the snail's shell guarding my consciousness. The morning commute is my favourite part of the day. I wake slowly and generously, carefully - no sudden movements, don't panic, no sudden movements, "women - remove high-heeled shoes!" I'm less of a liability now that the days of caffeine addiction have decided to remain in the recent past, they're happy there, and I'm less edgy.
One part of the route sees tyres gliding, arse firmly on the seat - for one road only - the recently tarmaced, not-yet-speed-bumped cyclists' dream! Rubber meets seedless raspberry jam smoothness and for a moment my feet stop doing the hard work and I fly...
I do my best thinking on this road, I respect it so much. It's smooth and calm and curious and never blinks... hang on, that's a Suzanne Vegas lyric... I mean, it's smooth and solid and dependable and clean and always there and great in the rain and makes my life, well my cycle, more fun. Who knows? it maybe even contributes to my mental health! Perhaps doctors should prescribe smooth-road-cycling to the depressed folk who clutter up their waiting rooms. But hang on, I was a waiting-room-clutterer once, and I know how little motivation I had... tandems! That's it! Tandems are the way forward, all of the benefits and none of the responsibility.

Solidify

He is solid. Brooding. Deep. One of those guys who believes in other people more than he believes in himself, which, rather than making him an eternal under-achiever, merely serves to grace his outlook with a humility that’s becoming increasingly rare in the inner-city. Occasionally, he wavers between courses of actions… which compliment to give, which girl to invite to the sell-out play he was organised enough to snatch tickets for before the ink was dry on the flyers… but mostly he knows what he wants. Getting there used to be a race, he was up all night, fingers stroking keyboard like an omnichord. Things have changed now. There’s a polite dance through and in and around and behind and over those who have the fortune of being in his way. There’s a polite “excuse me, sorry”, and he’s at his destination, the burrs on worn grey trousers compliments, lessons learned, observations made. Nothing is wasted. Everything is here.

In your words, you’re awesome man.

5.47pm

It's 5.47pm and I'm a dead weight at my desk. My body has morphed into the chair, we are one and aren't gonna give each other up easily. I sigh and flick off my monitor and desk lamp for the night. The week is passing through me, wave after wave smashing over my head, the tail end of one of which I'm lingering on. It's chock-full of adrenilin and is powering me forward. All thoughts of my personal life are surpressed beneath organisation's poor cousins - Urgency and Productivity. The dryness in my eyes reminds me that I haven't slept well, and I blink and rub my eyelids with a floppy hand. Eventually the chair and I part. It's acrimonious but we've been so close these past few days that I can see the ties between us. Some distance will do us good though. Ten minutes in front of the mirror and I'm transformed. I wipe the day's grime off my forehead with a tissue and reapply much-needed colour onto a pasty face. A stranger smiles back at me. It's gonna be a good night.

Affluenza

I read today in the Observer Magazine, that despite being richer than our fellow Brits in the 1950s, we´re much more likely to be miserable, experience a major depression, have a mental illness or develop cancer. How depressing! I belong to the school of thought that believes there are a lot of unhappy folk out there, which is why I inwardly glowed on seeing the beaming smiles on a pack of Hare Krishnas in SoHo last night (to be totally correct, I heard them long before I saw them). The article quoted stats galore - Americans are more likely to be ill than those in all other developed nations in a period of 12 months (26%) - for example. "Why is this, I cried!" Why was my grandma more likely to be content with her tin bath, no inside loo and the experience of eating out limited to fish & chips every other Friday? The thing is, my grandma is an optimist, born and bred. She sees the best in every situation. She´s pleased when it rains because the geraniums were getting parched, she can make a Spam sandwich taste better than anything from Pret, she had a mastectomy and never once complained, "What do I want with breasts at my age!" she said, incredulous at the familial concern cluttering up her normally tidy living room.

You see, I think I know why this generation is miserable, we're fundamentally insecure pessimists who continually fail to see good in others or in most situations that come along in everyday life. We expect too much. My grandma was happy with a pork chop and apple sauce, a week camping in Cornwall every summer and two kids in clothes previously worn by five others on the street. We strive to buy houses we can't afford that we're too busy to enjoy because we're working overtime to pay for the mortgage. We eat at restaurants with menus we can't quite afford because we're too proud to go to the cheap Italian on the corner. We pay for things previous generations would have laughed at - cleaners*, dog-walkers*, shirt-ironing and kitsh furniture from Heals.

This week, I for one am gonna try not to live like a statistic. I'm going to sit by the river and drink cheap wine from a plastic cup, eat a jam sandwich and watch the hazy river floating by. I'm going to take my shoes off and feel the damp earthy coolness between my toes. I'll think of my grandma and I'll be smiling.

* These are examples meant solely to illustrate my story. I have neither, nor a dog for that matter. I'm more of a cat person anyway, and they can look after themselves.

Giantess

Some days I see a lot of small blokes.

Creeping up

I´m always surprised that despite being home to more than seven million people, I regularly bump into people from my past in London. I´ll be minding my own business, power-walking the Piccadilly/Jubilee line interchange at Green Park, when a familiar walk will flash past, grazing my vision, forcing me to blink with surprise. This happens maybe twice a month, and I´ll probably speak to one of those people. The conversation generally goes one of two ways. The first sees us screaming, we´ll wrap our arms around once-familiar shoulders, look closely into eyes, now wiser, and subconsciously put 110% effort in re-engaging in a relationship. Vital stats are exchanged - the whats, wheres, whos and hows of this city. Numbers are punched decisively into mobiles, and we´ll part, strides now bouncing, hair flicking, eyes shining with memories now floating up through the murky dirt of the tube platform. The second is awkward, fleeting. We feign interest in boyfriends long past, convenient flats with off-street parking, the dream job with the dragon boss, the love for the city. One of us will crack first, the phone comes out of the bag, eleven digits are begrudingly entered onto an already too-full SIM. We´ll never call each other, we both know that, but we´re British and polite, and gosh, "I´ve got a train to catch!" and she´s gone.

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!

wasted

The clarity of his affection for her was wasted in the haziness of her response. He's mad on her. If he had any heels his head would have been over them weeks ago. She sits in the centre of his conscious and unconscious thought, and there she remains, waiting. There are no meaningful gestures, words spoken through dedicated promise-filled eyes. He scrambles around in the greyness of their time together, grasping for such moments, longing to record and replay them in the quasi-private space inside his head. Disappointment rolls in overhead. The greyness turns to charcoal and he stops, stock-still. Moments glide by like graceful swans. Acceptance shakes him by the hand and he sees Resignation ahead. "I love her," is the whisper from pale lips.
"I once loved her."
"Let her go."

Remember New York

Remember New York,
Last year.
Vibrant sunsets greeted us,
Rain fell mercilessly in Union Square.
Blueberry pancakes sustained us,
I forcing them down past an
Incessant lump in my throat.

You were so alive, blood-red.
That scared me.
I whose pallor spoke a thousand words

On-board thesaurus transmitting through dull eyes.
I feigned cheerfulness, enthusiasm for
Endless walking, climbing of tall buildings,
Views shielded by life in your ravenous gaze.
Your eyes held appetite enough for us both.

I tried to retain composure, to be cheery
And bright, to force unfamiliar food
Past retching intestines, cramping up with every bite.

I love you now. Months later the pain has receded and
I love you now.

birth

All words are dust. You are dust. I am dust. You see – it’s simple really, a pile of particles, nothingness. So I thought about you and these words came alive. They were birthed, some easily, naturally, some with intense pain. Some were welcomed, gladly, parties were held in their honour. Others were begrudged, I tried, guilty, to erase them, but their life was too strong and they fought their way onto the page of my book. Powerful little beggars. Once there they wouldn’t give me a damned break. They screamed at me through the green and yellow cover with the Orla Kiely print. Some were polite about it (especially the ones conceived in Café Nero on Ken High St). Others swore – filthy, abhorrent combinations of innocent letters grating through my skull. I had no choice, no option remained but to listen and ask them what to do. You see, I brought them into this book, their world, and now they were banging on about literary rights and treaties and freedom of expression and air space… I couldn’t ignore them, the cacophony was deafening, so eventually I resisted, and one by one, clause by clause, sentence by sentence, I let them out. The precious ones I allowed to be typed, finger by finger onto the screen, where white characters reverse out of black, titles in bold lime green. They are happy now, you see. Their destinies fulfilled. I’m sorry though. Had I know when I began writing about you that the words would fight their way out of the book onto the screen of public glare, I would have warned you… been more careful. But as I always say, such is life and life’s too short to invest in obscure notebooks with shiny covers.