Wishbone Soup Cures Everything

Been etching at the novel today.  Protagonist Anya, throughout the book, tells her story mostly in retrospect but also in the present tense, because of how the past clings. She takes us to relive directly, using italics to denote her own direct thoughts, and indirectly by allowing a third party narrator. Today's big scene happens around 1973, although the events could have happened any other year. The next novel I might have a go at has more period detail. (I love how this makes it seem; that I just slap and dash my keyboard, throw a couple of hundred pages together.) This is what I edited and wrote and edited today, with the odd pause to discuss sheds and eat.   Anya stares harder at the horizon. In her chest, a cold heaviness presses, as though she is turning to stone, like one of the granite maidens in the old stories, cursed for dancing on the Sabbath, and the little flecks of silver mica will be her frozen tears.  Frank drives on. The road shrinks, twists, the sk

I recall a quote from Girl: ‘having my child is like having a liquidiser, only I don’t have a lid for it:’ I am following a trail of cat litter, shampoo and odd shoes to where Baby is feeding Dog an envelope. Baby gets all her work done, but mine gets neglected today. When Baby is gone, I’m tired, I register fully how tired I am, but it’s not the liquidiser effect, it’s really the coffee I drink too late at night and my brain bounces in my skull and wakes me up well before the alarm. I have three optimum writing times and late is one of them, the only one today I will be taking advantage of. I love the cloistered dark; a throw back to the intrigue of impressionable youth, to the image of The Poet: the cold, hungry soul alone in a garret, nourished only by words, inking intensity by the flicker of a goose-fat candle. Poor Poet, too romantic to sustain a life; the blood flecks of tuberculosis have ruined your cravat. I can poke fun at the appeal, you see, just not quit

Sumo Baby, looks like a shoplifter.  7.30am . A wood pigeon clatters in the oak. I look up at the tree, it’s all knees and elbows. The lane hedges are tall here, they channel vision. I see a cloud, anvil shaped; a western anvil with a curled out lip; and the parallel colours of a rainbow section. It curves from a cloud, like the leg of a cosmic lizard. 10.30am . Girl and Baby and me, we drive to Tavistock, park by the river, swim in a pool. Baby has a sumo swimsuit. She splashes my face and rubs it; there you go Granma, your face is washed, in the big sink. I put 20p in the machine to dry her hair, she leans her head into the warm airflow, looks quizzical; this is a peculiar telephone. ‘Hiya!’ She listens but no-one answers, they are just blowing air on her. She chuckles like a pan boils over. 1pm. The afternoon comes with darkening cloud and the washing on the line is a risk. I dare myself to do it. I keep a weather eye out. I forget all about it because I disappear in

(A picture of Girl in a wig- doing her 50s starlet face but not wearing mink.) Soft cloud this evening, the sort that I want to pull down and wear as a cloud fur coat. This image bumps into another, swings it from shadow to conscious surprise. 1981: the full length beaver skin coat arrives in our house; the way I remember it, almost like it had come to stay, like it had brought its own monogrammed suitcase, arrived straight from the funeral of a relative. We couldn’t turn it away, because we were related, because it was bereaved. Fur was a huge taboo. To kill something you don’t eat, to plunder nature for callous profit? It definitely arrived with baggage. Inevitably, it was an object of wonder. When the house was empty, I took it from the wardrobe; it had a fine hanger, carved wood, maybe cedar wood. The lining was satin, smooth as a liquid. I put my hands on the rich opulent decadent fur. I understood why my Gran always said ‘fur coat no knickers.’ You would want to feel th

No sight of the sun in the mist on this morning. Day is a spillage of grey light. Mist separates into cloud and rain. I would be almost in Bristol, by now, I calculate, if I could have afforded to take my Second Dan grading. Offset disappointment with a cozy bedside coffee. I’ll just keep training, I think, the money will turn up. Sigh, because my cup is empty. With reluctance, add a waterproof layer. From the moment I have put on socks, Dog has bustled between me and the door- socks means boots means a walk means happy Dog. ‘Well, if I was in Bristol, I wouldn’t be here with you in the rain, would I?’  Dog takes this entirely positively, and we tread out to the wet world. The coffee was lovely, but not much of a breakfast. Realise I am hungry just as my boots leak. Okay, I say, the hedgerow will give me breakfast. And can I find a single blackberry? Hmm… Okay, I say, I think it goes like this: the universe is made of energy. Energy that flows is energy that works. A gr

Fine mist opaques, obscures. On the fat trunked ash there are several stark dead branches. Silhouettes like this are where ogres come from. On the lane, a soft carpet of plop. The risen sun, a concentration of brightness in the white sky, has heat, but the ground is a drop colder than yesterday. On the thick slate chunk of the pantry windowsill there is the skull of a light brown fox, maybe the oddest thing we have cropped from these hedges. At our old house, we famously found a whole Land Rover in the undergrowth; that has been the most surprising thing. A 1964 model. The mist sneaks back to the river line while I’m making coffee, while I set the washing machine singing. Its song is rumbly and full of pauses, very modern stuff. I have a well documented adoration of the machine that washes my clothes. When its song spins to a finale, I slither out the wet cloth, lump it in a trug, lug it to the line. A transformation need only be simple. Wet cloth, pegged to line, under the s

Across the light blue dressing of new road surface lies a layer of slopped dung, bumped from a series of high-sided trailers, jigging along behind tractors, from the muck store to the cut fields. The thing I recall most about my day is how it smelt. Not pleasant, exactly, but reassuring: the cyclic nature of it. Which part of the cycle you focus on, that’s up to you. By day; and that I am happily relating stench demonstrates the truth of this; the writing, the editing and the bout of illustration all goes well. Today I do not need rescuing by a Buster Keaton spider or culinary hypnosis. This evening I stand outside, under a sky that would be clear if it weren’t for all the stars. High beats and low bass sound out: a party in the direction of Treniffle. The air is fresh, and stinks. Spread my hands palms upward, fill my lungs.