Wishbone Soup Cures Everything

Boy gets in the car, chuckling. He has been passing the time waiting for us to fly past between jobs and snatch him from the designated meeting spot. Mr puts his foot down exactly like a kidnapper so we have time to eat lukewarm fish pie. Boy recounts the failed attempt of fellow students to embarrass him in the underwear aisles of New Look. 'Hey, Boy: pink bra or red bra, what do you think?' Shrug. 'What will you be wearing it with?' Boy has me for a mother. Skinny-dipping, clown-suit-wearing, former smoker of enormous cigars, you get the picture. There was the time that Mr won the Walking In Heels competition: it isn't just me. Slowly, Boy has been inoculated against embarrassment. I should footnote that while bonkers is a suiting word, we also do practical stuff like work for a living and nag about homework and steam healthy greens. One strives for a balance, even with such idiosyncratic scales.  I know you all, and will awhile uphold Th...

Stitched up and head strapped into a plastic cone, Dog walks uncomfortably but with much determination. Even if the cone wouldn't get wedged in brambles, she is kept on a lead. I do permit drinking from a clear puddle. She likes rainwater. The sun shines. We find four almost ripe hedge strawberries. The hedge is a normal place to find them: fruiting in November, peculiar. The flavour is a foreground of water and earth, a background of summer berry. Something almost always turns up, when you need it. On the squashed up busy road to work there are too many cars but mostly lights are green on approach. Idle thoughts stir as we swing the roundabout: the ability to control the lights to make them green always has no real skill to it. The ability to admire is the one that flows your journey so that red lights coincide with wanting a rest, and green lights with the desire to move. 

I thought it might be another normal November day: trees on fire and sky as grey as smoke. I took Dog to the beach to run in the sea and let the salt water heal up the barbwire slice she came out of the Forbidden Woods with. There's an old fly-tip down there, fascinating and dangerous for all animals including me. As a child growing up on a beach I was programmed to regard seawater as a cure for anything but drowning, but also sensibly banned from climbing through tips. Dog chased cormorants at the edge of low tide and the worn down rocks lay like ossified blocks of things long gone, and I walked, thinking of claws and scaly tails, pressing bare toes into cool damp sand. Back at home I bribed Dog to roll over and let me check the wound, only to find another, deeper gape carved in her flesh: the kind that even I can't believe the sea will mend sufficiently. Knowing how limited our resources are I tried to believe the sea could do it. Dog slunk to her basket, apologet...

I don't know why I felt the need to paraphrase Baudelaire's 'Get Drunk' poem: to understand it better perhaps. I read it yesterday and it won't leave my head, although there are worse things to be echoing than this call to be vibrantly alive. On this table, under the ticking of the clock, there is a glass which should not be empty. The more you fill it the bigger it gets, and the clock shrinks in size and noise; the clock that holds a scythe and is circling for you. Into the glass pour the essence of intoxication, of delirious loves and hearts that beat with wings, pour and drink and be always drunk from it. There may be a time that you wake, cold and sober in a place unknown, but only ask; what time is this; only listen; the answer flows in every thing to every sense; even in the tick of the clock, the answer holds. It is the hour to fill your glass. I love the appreciation of life, simultaneously am repelled by the suggestion of selfishness, maybe ...

I stood still. I was getting a casserole ready, had a chopping board full of root vegetables and the Rayburn lit ready. I was checking the clock for the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. I had the iron pot warming on the coal lit stove. The hands on the clock said it is time to be still.  The First Two Minute Silence in London (11th November 1919) as reported in the Manchester Guardian, 12th November 1919. 'The first stroke of eleven produced a magical effect. The tram cars glided into stillness, motors ceased to cough and fume, and stopped dead, and the mighty-limbed dray horses hunched back upon their loads and stopped also, seeming to do it of their own volition. Someone took off his hat, and with a nervous hesitancy the rest of the men bowed their heads also. Here and there an old soldier could be detected slipping unconsciously into the posture of 'attention'. An elderly woman, not far away, wiped her eyes, and the man beside he...

Had a sincerely convincing dream that I won £250,000 on the Euromillions lottery; I bought a ticket, on the strength of that. I won £2.50. How dreams can shrink in the light of day! Spent the winnings on Lotto tickets. Sometimes a gamble is a leap of faith, just a way of saying hey, universe, I embrace a change. All the road to Exmouth was hedged with gold leafed trees. We spent a day with Little Grandson, assorted grown up children, a bag of toys, ample platters of savoury and sweet. Bouncy Beagle taught himself to eat an orange, which took several wincing at the citric attempts. Outside the cold wind flowed over the windows and the sun's light poured through. Bolts of gold drape our shoulders. If the ticket pays up, we could all take a holiday, and sit out in foreign heat. Meanwhile, I'm sitting here, crunching up the last jalapeño, content. 

Circa 1993?  In my usual daily regime, something fresh gets scrawled, and often it seems like I'll chuck a post together. The construction is not as random as I make it look. When words come slow I just type anything that pops in my head and sometimes this is a white water river ride and sometimes a shopping list. Then I play and snip and tap and between the flow of this present moment and the years of blistering practice, a presentable piece of work emerges. But it had to start somewhere, didn't it? Should I owe something to these words? I had nearly forgotten this story altogether. I think it references the emptiness of needing objects to verify personal identity. It's the work of a student, the sort that walks out of the canteen, accidentally stealing a mug, getting wet muddy feet collecting autumn leaves and most likely has paint in her hair. I think I might follow it all the way through to as far as it got, but I can't face it all in one go! The Red D...

Clouds get bigger all day: huff up, big as basilicas, easily as grand: I see a sky full of cathedrals. Except that the building is the imitator, is designed to reflect the creative glories of mountains and caverns and celestial shine. It occurs to me that outside, in the actual presence of mountains and caverns and celestial shine, I am more humbled: connected, but such a mere part of the universe I hardly need pay myself any attention at all. I love this feeling, there is a unique freedom in it. Within the walls of old churches is a concentrated sense of human belonging; of being huddled with endless ghosts, with their warm hopes and aching desires: the whisper of prayers over hundreds of years of footsteps, part of the fabric of the place. That is what a church can hold that I would recognise as consecrated. A space for humanity to express itself, not something segregated, but all voices joined together, worshipping everything that is wonderful, bringing love to heal wh...

The coffee pot was washed, but it is so much a pot for coffee, the caffeine tang resisted. There are four teapots that could have been utilised. Only the whim was, to watch the rosebuds float and brew, and the coffee pot is made of glass. When you have grown, picked and dried the buds yourself, sealed them in a glass jar and smiled at them on the larder shelf everyday for nearly half a year, it makes for an amiable balance of work and indulgence. The pot goes on the oak secretaire, light pours through it, filtered pink. It brings rest to my busy eyes. In the cup, it brings warmth to my hands. Warm fragrance assimilated by steam, by quick liquid sips. A core of heat flickers like a candle flame. Slight sour aftertaste of years of layers of coffee. I do not regret the coffee, not even the day of the espresso overdose when I ended up trembling in a corner with an a-rhythmical heart. But I feel the calm flame, and I think: coffee to sustain me, tea to restore me.

Dog wanted to roll in it. She was not permitted. I didn't know what it was and I didn't have a camera on me and it isn't easy to explain. Whatever it was (this is not fiction, incidentally, this is me on Widemouth Beach finding a sea monster) had a fleece skin and the S-bend body shape of a seven-foot slinky fish. Flesh seemed mammalian. Obvious explanation is that a sheep has tumbled from a cliff edged field and been remodelled by the sea. Can't work out how that sharky shape can be made of sheep. Mysterious: strange. Shook my head and went for a stride in the waves, which were messy and cold. Drove home my favourite way: with bare sandy feet. Later when my feet were dry and zipped in boots I decided to get some mussels for tea, and on the way to the fish counter met one of my junior students. She has a twin brother, who looks much like her but is autistic and does not speak. I smiled at him and he reached out for a hug. This is a rare event, decidedly no...

Here I am, at the beginning of a new project. It has been in discussion for a few weeks and now the practical stuff must be applied. It's a challenge I'm confident with, but this means nothing. The gap between talking of doing something and actually doing something is a place in which other things grow in interest, and you aren't sure if it's disproportionate or not, so one had better have a good distracting think about it. I like a project to simmer in my mind for a while (a very apt soup metaphor. Exactly as I make soup, in fact, I have to get a sense of a flavour and then the herbs and spices work.) But how easy it would be to wander away in this pitch of fascination, wander completely off subject… In the clear day sky, a broken eggshell moon is left. An oversight, or act of defiance? A chair is rediscovered under the washing pile. Old sketchbooks consulted: remember the series of prints done with plasticine and ink? Mixed media abstracts with glitt...

Sky the colour of wet slate, clouds like smudged chalk, up to the demarcation of a double rainbow. Beyond this: perfect edged white, cyanine stillness. Other words, immaterial: other frescos, outshone. Nature flummoxes with a magnitude we can only faintly sketch. I attempt to describe a feeling of symbiotic absorption. Cross out notes, words are too clumsy. Allude to a space behind words, a silent resonance. Rain gathers, confers; at the right density, it drops.  

Hail fell, just the size of rough-cut rock salt, bouncing over the lane all pretty and fleeting. It melts on the ground, joins a rain stream undercutting the edge of the new tarmac. Dog looks up and then ignores it. She has pheasants to put to flight. Mr is outside pressing juice from blackberries. He says he thought of fetching the car to us when the hail struck, then he had remembered how I love a change of weather. He's right, it was delightful: just that slight difference, it puts crystals at my feet. I needed that, today: a boost, a sign, a few crystals at my feet. Dared to spend money on three cinema tickets. It is Bond's fiftieth birthday, and we don't go out much. Sneak a look at the faces of Mr and Boy by the light of the title credits. Rapt and joyful; I liked the film immensely, but this was my favourite scene. On the way home, Mr buys a Millionaire's Cheesecake. 

I have been blog-tagged. A writerly sort of tag, in which one drags out an old story snippet. Most of mine aren't on any useful USB, but are actual paper copies, unbound sheets of tatty A4 paper. I considered saying 'No thank you, this looks too difficult,' but then curiosity kicked me firmly in the pants. Paper all over the office now. Reading stuff, avidly, blanching. It is like seeing photographs of yourself with painful teenage hair. Embarrassing, but something to be secretly proud of: proof that you dared to have a go at life. In this story, I have attempted to describe the artist's outsider status using a mythological fish. It went through many titles, including Luna's Beast; this snippet is from the version named 'St. Pariah.' Formative stuff! ' The water was very dark. It looked so deep. I thought that was why I felt so isolated, because the sea was enormous. I swam out to the boat. The waves were behaving strangely; I noticed this,...

Last night I tripped over one of our house spiders and as a result of this it became deceased. I thought to have stumbled on a small stone and shook its curled body from my sock with a remorseful 'Oh.' It was the one with six and a half legs. I laid the husk out overnight in case it was merely bluffing. This morning I consigned it to the Rayburn flames, with a little All Souls prayer that it be delivered back to the bosom of the universe. I couldn't help thinking it had been trying to tug at my trouser leg, to whisper me a secret. I shan't know it now. Mr and me took Dog walking in the secretive woods, along the literal road less travelled, through bramble cover and over fallen branches, under the strange filtered light. The woods don't quite seem real, which is why it doesn't seem odd to walk past the holes of the Border Trolls (creatures that drag their fat knuckles through the pine needles at night, patrolling old boundaries, from here to t...

HAPPY HALLOWEEN:-) The smooth sides are preternaturally white. It reminds me of a headstone, the first time I see it. 'Why is the fridge in the spare bedroom?' It doesn't seem to me that the question is odd. There is a 6 foot fridge-freezer in the bedroom, but no bed. 'We had to move a few things around, that's all.' The landlady scowls. 'I'm in a hurry?' 'Oh, okay.' We follow her back down to the kitchen, where the stairs open out. 'Would it,' I ask, but I pause, and the landlady huffs. I take an audible breath and start again. 'Would it be okay to move the fridge back to the kitchen?' 'I don't know, why don't you ask it?' She shows her teeth. I think it's a smile. 'So, if you want it, be quick, I have another viewing this afternoon.' Sharp looking teeth, behind that slash of red lipstick. 'We'll take it.' Luce nods, resigned. 'There's nothing left on...

Best Cinematic Pose  Girl is at the cinema, most likely swooning, first over Bond James Bond, second over costumes, though the order may change. 'OhMyGod!' she will say, and the lack of spacing between words here is representative not typographically erroneous: 'Mum! YouShouldHaveSeenIt!' I will be on the sofa, mostly half asleep, mostly lost in editing, with one small sliver of me on an inner space search mission, finding the energy to respond. Her enthusiasm will help power it. Except, she says, 'Yeah, it was all right.' I have forgotten to factor in that she is a mother too and has just moved house. She is more tired than me. When I get home I peek at the two pumpkins waiting in the pantry, I approve of my earlier cleaning efforts, I think of the lovely disgusting Halloween story I am going to post up. And take a glass of blackberry wine.