The Repository

Scenery may have changed...

2011-03-10T19:27:00.000Z

...but the posting is still as erratic:

It's Time for saying Goodbye

2010-12-24T11:23:00.009Z

...Cause if I stay here to long, you'd get to know me too well and find that something was wrong(Neil Diamond, If I Don't See You Again)

So I'm sat here, making a mixtape (cd sounds soooo wrong to an 80's child). For my other half, of songs that mean something to use both (including Mr Diamond). This is version 3 - I keep trying to de-depress it, after all it is supposed to be a declaration of my love...

There's one song on it that has me hovering over the delete button. It crucifies me. Every time I hear it I weep, which is unfortunate when testing the flow of the CD on public transport.

I left it on though. Even though I know he'll struggle with it as much as me. Because this was a year of loss, deep loss, and this song encapsulates exactly how I felt. How we both feel.

So I'll listen to it once again, this Christmas Eve when the world is picture perfect in crystalline brilliance through my window. To Pim Pom Pam, to Jack, to Mike and to Harry - I love and miss you all. Jack and Mike, you were both taken way too soon. You left young families who adored you both, and you left friends that will always cherish your memory.

Harry, gloriously grumpy, truculent, clever, clever Harry who would never let anyone tell him he couldn't do things his way. Harry, who gave me something priceless - my best friend, your daughter, and who has been a part of my life for twenty five years. The King of Mint Imperials and a surprising Shirley Bassey lover, you live on in the many hand made tools you gave us that we use throughout the year and which were meticulously crafted by your skillful hands. I'll look after her, love.

Pim Pom Pam. My little mother in law. My sweet, sweet little mother in law, who left us in February after the cruelest of illnesses robbed her of her self. I'm glad I held both your hand and his as you left us. I hold his hand still, and will for as long as he lets me. Your beautiful boy misses you everyday and I try the best I can to paper up the cracks, but sometimes it's so hard Pam, so hard. Did you ever realise he has your mouth? A way of pursing his lips that is so reminiscent of you, just like he inherited your sunny humour?

One day we'll all dance on the stars, together again. Until that day, I'll think of you fondly. I'll think about you every time I hear this song.

Splinters

2010-11-12T21:31:00.005Z

Firstly, thank you to those that have raised concerns about me, it is most appreciated.

Please be reassured that in many ways I am fine. It is just that as animals shed their skins occasionally I must shed mine.

It is more than that, it is in fact a dislocation of whom I currently am. I have no doubt I will surface again in another skin once I conclude what consciousness means to me, but in the meantime I will drop by and support those in the blog community that I have become close to.

Thanks again, GingerD aka Jane

BTW if you wish to be close to how I feel right now, then a mix of Muse's Absolution and Depeche Mode's Playing The Angel will take you there. Literally.

Addendum: there was a man who called me Honey Child who traded secrets and loss. He met his dark lady two years ago, and left me bereft. Gary, my pirate, I am lost still. No one but you ever saw the Honey Chil', and no one else ever will. Rest in peace, twin of my soul, my pirate, my lost boy. I will never forget you.

Ghost Dance

2010-11-06T12:38:00.001Z

~ Fin ~

Shivers

2010-10-26T13:28:00.004Z

There's a shiver in the air today, and it's not caused by imminent Halloween. There is frost, it's true, closely followed by incessant rain and an unpleasant wind. However, it's a bit deeper than that.

Perhaps it's inaction. I'm too somnolent to care.

GD: has been spending indiscriminately; listening to Rumer, Depeche Mode and Antony and the Johnsons; wishing that the incessant whine of constant despair would abate and her broken little lover could find his smile again.

Solitude

2010-10-11T18:37:00.002Z

..is sausage, mash and beans, washed down with red wine and lashings of self recrimination.

So all is normal then!

GD: drunk, stupid, maudlin and occasionally friend-blind. It ain't your fault, I'm just an insensitive bitch.

It's a wonderful, wonderful life

2010-09-27T17:04:00.001Z

For Livewire, for B, Sat, Dan et al. Indeed for myself, this probably won't help much but I'm thinking of you guys.

The Roads We Take

2010-09-23T17:37:00.010Z

Maybe, the roads we don't take. Do you ever wonder what would have happened if you'd stuck to a certain path, even if deep in your heart you know that the original choice was well made? Idly contemplate the people and the places that you walked away from, the alternative life that could have been yours? I don't indulge in this often because I'm generally secure that once I make a decision then it's the right one for me, even if others disagree or if it is the wrong way for them. I have many insecurities, but dwelling over past choices made isn't one of them!

Inadvertently I got an answer this week, to one significant choice I made about fifteen years ago. I left the first person I ever fell truly in love with because I couldn't reconcile my life with his lifestyle choices. He didn't want my staid existence to interfere with his hedonism. I have never smoked, never took drugs and whilst I enjoy drinking, it affects me so much physically I choose my hangovers wisely. He did everything to excess and had begun to surround himself with parasites and dealers. Had I thought there was any chance of him waking up and smelling the hemp I would never have walked.

I did walk and within six months had met the man I would marry whilst looking for nothing more than a bit of fun. Funny how life can do that. I'd set boundaries around our breakup, no contact, no friendship - I needed to be away from the stale air, the addicts rummaging through bin bags looking for used needles, the utter contempt that people held me in for my polite refusal to take ecstasy. He once told me he'd leave me if I didn't learn to make roll ups by a certain date. Well, there comes a point when even I say enough is enough (still can't make them, though I do know the theory).

There is a point to this post. I did occasionally wonder how he was, what our life could have been like had we stayed together. Marriage has taught me that some paths are very hard to walk but they are worth pursuing. There was a point when the man I loved wasn't a strung out, stinking addict but a smart, funny, talented physicist with an abiding love of books. Now?

Hedonism has a price. In our twenties we believe we'll motor on forever regardless of what we do to ourselves, in our thirties we sometimes push it to show we still can. Well, he blew. He pushed it too far. His body stopped in his forty first year.

He didn't die, though in some ways you wonder if that would be kinder to someone like him. His body rebooted itself from the stroke that stalled his brain. It left him crippled in body, but with an active mind held inside. His drug addled girlfriend of seven years dumped him when he could no longer provide or function as a convenient mule, and his friends melted away. He now lives with his parents who care for him, and who sold their home to buy a bungalow so he has mobility. It's not all bad news I guess, he can walk again with a stick and is deemed fit for work. He is only forty three years old.

So I see that other path quite clearly and I see me in his mother's place as carer. And I feel great sorrow for this man who could have had so much but gave it away for so little. I don't mean me, I think I was always too soft for him. And I can't deny the relief at not being trapped in a relationship with someone who has destroyed them self, like my father destroyed himself when he was with my mother (who had to walk away eventually and ruined her mental health in the process).

Paths and choices. It's all life really is. I need to stop being afraid of the next choice and trust my instincts, however overgrown that road might be.

GD: reading Theodora by Stella Duffy; listening to the Stranglers ~ Strange Little Girl obsessively; thinking she should eat more fruit and veg, and give up the fish fingers!

Arrested Development Part 2

2010-09-21T15:22:00.010Z

I never really explained why I called my last post that. Maybe it was self explanatory - I get hooked up in the past. I'm not sure if it's nostalgia or masochism that keeps washing over me, I only know that I'm spending too much time revisiting things best left cold.

Take music. I'm hooked on last.fm and laying claim to a past that's not really mine. Like punk - The Damned, The Skids, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Sham 69 and the wonder that is the Stranglers - yet I am really to young to have been there first time round. I'm also fascinated by the early 80's - the coolness of it all, the Blitz kids in their fantastical outfits, the fact that Boy George did Kirk Brandon (jaw on floor time), even early Human League. I'm singing OMD in my head (Forever Live and Die, for the record).

Books - I found myself getting Adrian Mole - the Wilderness Years from the library today. Now this really is regression. I found his diaries funny at the age of 14, will they hold up in my more advanced state? Though I am also wallowing in H.P. Lovecraft's Necronomicon - I indulged in the luscious hard back edition in Waterstone's and earned the undying gratitude of the nice young man in there who told me I need a large leather armchair, open fire and glass of brandy when reading it. Can I add a smoking jacket?

I think I'm at a crossroads right now and I'm dithering - I know which way to go but as ever commitment is hard to do. That's partly why I'm posting, I need to get the vicarious thoughts spinning about out out out. I'm also having lots of nightmares, which isn't helping. Perhaps that's the Lovecraft?!

Telly - I've jumped on the Mad Men bandwagon. I wallow in the smart scripts, superb acting but most of all I wallow in the melancholia caused by the futility of need and expectation. This is such a smart show. I'm also aware that it was this era when my mother was the same age as Peggy Olsen and working as a wages clerk and you just wonder what she had to put up with. Though the less said about my obsession with America's Next Top Model the better!

Head cleared, time to go.

GD: Odd. Thorn in finger. Caked up. But generally doing ok!

Arrested Development

2010-09-11T19:45:00.008Z

Hmmm.

Ok.

Mid September. So what's up?

Well, the uni kids go back. I find myself in a snit. I'll be honest, more than a snit. A great big steaming hump.

Why? Well, in GD's world ideally we would have been starting our PhD this month. On a studentship, complete with bursary. But we screwed up we did, and so we aren't. So I'm currently watching the most recent uni intake of my town's two universities through particularly jaded eyes and an ever growing sense of panic about impending redundancy.

Pause. Think about the month past. It sucked. Not just for me, but for those about me. On Monday my best friend's dad's funeral was held. A humanist funeral, all about the man and his abiding love for his family, no frills, no ceremony. Just a lot of sorrow and love and memories of a man who has been a part of my life for over twenty five years. God, did we consume gin?

I had a week's holiday. Mixed emotions. Partially due to Harry's death and dealing with his emotional children. Owning up to losing a huge chunk of my childhood. This lovely man would set up the z-bed for me of a night, and tuck hot water bottles into the sleeping bags for when we'd roll in at 3am from rock clubbing. He'd wait up to see what we'd bring back from the Chinese so he could help us eat it. He'd eat mint imperials by the sack load and feed them to my dog from his mouth. I'm gonna miss you Harry, I don't think you realised how widely you were loved.

Partially spent in a rather lovely hotel, festival going and female urinal experiencing of a festival. Couldn't' be arsed to stay for Pretend Guns and Fatboy Roses, but Queens of the Stone Age were pretty cool. Though it was The Big Pink that broke me into bits with the lushness and beauty of their live set. I even danced to Delphic (but I blame beer for this).

Today I played with fire. Literally - we funded an open air forge day - visit - thing at work, so I went to see it in action. FLAMES! So fab, another reason i love my job (sad, moi?).

So now. I'm avoiding the issue. Where do we go from here (aka Buffy soundtrack, is it sad I know all the words?). I want to wrap my parents in cotton wool and never let age, or disease, or any heartache or horror touch them again. I don't want to face their inevitable decline. I don't want them to leave me. I love them and I want to share chips with them on other Saturday afternoons out. I want to buy them ice cream on the seafront. Most of all, I want to have the patience to listen to them when they're being trying or difficult.

GD: Listen to an odd mix of Echo and the Bunnymen's Seven Seas combined with the husband's crow from below snoring mixed with Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here belting through the floor...

Burning the Witches With Mother Religious, that's me.

Lights and Tunnels

2010-08-20T21:36:00.005Z

Sometimes you don't realise it until it's halfway out of your mouth. What you're saying. What it actually means. That, fuck ~ it's the truth.

I've been proper poorly this week. Again. On my return to work interview I was reassured that I have not let things slip and that I am working above and beyond the call of duty (or at least my job boundaries). I don't do this to score brownie points. I do it because I probably don't have anything else to validate my self worth on.

Redundancy has become really scary, even though it is still some months away. My manager was trying to reassure me, but then I heard it actually come out of my mouth. What I've been trying not to say.

'I've kept it together in the past because I always had work as the light. Now there is no light at the end of the tunnel.'

It hit me then, that it his is true. My life is measured against my performance albeit in a job I adore. Stupidly adore. I don't get paid any great wage. I have zero career prospects. But I have a certain autonomy of judgement. I am in control to a certain degree, within certain boundaries. I see good things happening because of my judgement. I work with a lovely team of people in a beautiful city. I have flexible working conditions that allow me to be a good employee even when I'm ill. And it's all being taken away from me.

So no more light. Nothing on the horizon to fill it. I am loved at home yes, but I am caught in my own illnesses, forced to realise that my capacity to earn, to be independent is over. I can no longer work full time - my body just can't handle it. I have to ask for so much from other people who are stressed to capacity in just dealing with their own issues, never mind mine.

This is a horribly cliched post, with stock imagery and phrases. I'm tired, though it's no excuse. Many people are tired, as they keep pointing out to me. Do I have to spend the rest of my life biting my tongue because I am beholden to them?

GD: possibly a bit over wrought. Reading Preacher: Gone to Texas because I need the humour and the jaundiced outlook on life. Listening to Pink Floyd's Division Bell which made me cry and get out of bed when it reached the twin hammers of Coming back to Life / Keep Talking

Today

2010-08-11T18:20:00.006Z

Today the following happened:

It rained so hard on my walk home that the dye from my new blue vest ran and turned my thrupenny bits blue
I succumbed to temptation and bought a green velvet coat that I don't need but didn't seem able to live without
I reacted strongly to perceived criticism and induced a hissy fit in a transvestite
I started yet another fraud investigation at work
I ate most of the millionaire's shortbread in the office (but don't tell anyone else!)
I scoured all the places I want to work for either a job or a PhD Fellowship and didn't find a single suitable vacancy anywhere
I watched tiny silver fish darting about in rock pools on the beach ~ well at least until the dog jumped in it to see what I was doing!
I listened to a very odd mixture of Abney Park, Billy Joel and Lady GaGa whilst commuting
I became hugely engrossed in Anita Diamant's The Red Tent, which I would never even have considered were it not a book club future read
I didn't finish the short story I am entering in the Story Tyne Competition (deadline - Saturday). Story title ~ As The River Runs, So I follow.

So that was my day. A perfectly normal, ordinary day. And now I'm just a bit shattered, with a toe nibbling dog being the perfect companion.

GD: wrapped up in a red and white checked blanket; watching CSI in peace cos the boy is still at work ('Not CSI AGAIN?!); wondering how to get dye out of skin as old fashioned soap and hot water have failed and me bits are still blue!

Snobbery

2010-08-07T11:40:00.014Z

Work takes me to interesting places. Well, interesting if you like to watch people the way I like to watch people. Like an anthropologist, with curiosity but not necessarily wishing to be emotionally engaged. So it was I found myself off to give a talk in what is considered a deprived area of the North East.

It is a little rough, admittedly. The metro station was swarming with ticket inspectors and police corralling the fare dodgers into a corner pen of shame, little black books waggling. On leaving the station I was faced with two choices: turn right and head to the venue where I was giving the talk and be forty five minutes early (I am mentally incapable of turning up anywhere late), or turn left and visit the local high street.

I turned left, reasoning that a bottle of water may be in order for the talk (two and a half hours of my own voice, even I get bored). The first thing that struck me was the stink - vomit. Seems the locals make like the Romans and drink to excess, pausing only to purge their stomachs to allow their session to continue. Except in their case the vomitorium is the high street.

Skipping past the noxious puddles of vomit I began the quest for a bottle of water and quickly concluded that healthy options were, well, not really an option here in the hinterland under the shadow of the looming architectural feature known as the Wall. The first two hundred yards took me past three Greggs* shops. All on the same side of the street. All full of punters, resembling ghostly beach balls.

I sought out the local post office. This was conveniently located between two of the aforementioned Greggs, in a Subway. The stench of sugar filled bread and reconstituted meatballs was almost worse than the vomit. Almost. And no bottled water. On requesting such a pure form of liquid I was greeted with an expression of such sublime confusion that one would have thought I'd asked why E=MC2.

There is a shiny new public complex, with an Olympic sized swimming pool and library behind the high street, with a small piazza where you can sit and watch the pigeons shag. Or the more entertaining spectacle of the drunks falling off benches, being chased by the local riot police (unbelievably HUGE) and (yes, you've guessed it!) vomiting on their shoes. I was wearing a back pack as I was carrying handouts and was acutely aware that I was being singled out by chavs as a possible easy theft target. I saw not one person entering the public building to improve either their mind or their body.

So I was sat smug in my middle class security in my pretty little frock with appliqued flowers at the neck, my swishy clean hair and pertness at odds with the surroundings when it struck me I was basically voyeuring at other people's lives the way that they slurp in Big Brother or the car crashes that are Lindsay Lohan, Katie Price or Kerry Katona***. I forget that structurally our lives have probably been pretty similar: substance dependent parent, one parent family upbringing, parental mental illness, social housing, midnight flits. I do think phew, I got to live away from vomitville. I drink it in like an episode of Shameless.

Eventually I need to get to my talk or I'll be less than fifteen minutes early. It's in a local fire station, shiny new and full of cute firemen who are unfortunately shy and ask for the blinds to be shut in the community room so I can't ogle them lustfully during boring moments of my chat.
I turn to the task at hand. After being shouted at for five minutes by someone I can't give a grant to because they are ineligible ("Blame the government, mate. They make the rules"), I take a deep breath and introduce myself to the local crowd.

And pause. Reassess. These people have travelled to see me. Just me, in the hope I can help them and the projects close to their hearts to get a little bit of cash to do something that's a bit of a treat. Even if it is just preserving the local cemetery. Taking a group of arthritis sufferers in their seventies out for lunch. Provide free care relief for those caring for people with dementia, Parkinson's - the list goes on. Local people, growing up in the abysmal shadow of the Wall. They ask intelligent, insightful questions. They talk passionately about their groups and what they do, their small communities that have no other support than that of friends. I talk to each group individually, give them advice, applications forms, business cards, reassurance that someone thinks what they're doing is worthwhile. Nearly three hours later my bottle of water could have been drunk five times over and I'm hoarse of voice.

People hugged me. They thanked me for going and spending time with them. They discussed my age and wanted to know about my life, my husband, my dog - where I came from and what made me relate to them. I found myself giving them anecdotes about my family that they laughed at knowingly. I discovered that I probably have far more in common with them than I do my Evangelical Christian neighbours (lovely though they are), or the people at no. 5 who breed diseased and malformed pedigree dogs.

I realised how profoundly wrong my first impressions of the place had been. Yes, it is still dripping in vomit, saturated fats and an average BMI of 35. However, it is far more than that. So much more beneath the surface that I wouldn't have seen if confined to my arms length people watching that bred only superiority and contempt. Or my ivory tower office perch.

I left the fire station emotionally exhausted but with a profound sense of well-being. As I sign off the first of the cheques to these groups I feel privileged that I can actually do something to give them a boost, even if I know my contribution is ephemeral in nature - what counts is their ability to work as a community and to understand that sometimes means putting aside the self and becoming the many.

I am so lucky, to do a job I passionately believe in and that once in a while proves to me that there is still good in humanity (though when I'm assessing the obviously fraudulent groups my language may suggest otherwise...). Shame the new government is taking it off me next year thanks to budget cuts. My small grants go a long way to make peoples' lives better. Hell, they go along way to making my life actually worthwhile.

What on earth am I going to do next?

GD: listening to Amanda Palmer Radio on Last.fm which is fabulous. Even if it is all rather heartbreaking. Reading the Belgariad by David Eddings for probably the twenty fifth time. Going out to play tonight for the first time in months with her best mate (and our spousal units). Breaking the writers block that's been plaguing her for months.

* Greggs being a bakers of lardy, high fat stodge selling only high sugar drinks, cakes and other artery busting treats.
** Chav - hmmmm, how do I even start to describe this sub-species of humanity to my non-English friends? Visit ChavTown here which is rather amusing.
*** English versions of Lohan, equal amounts of surgery but less talent. Honestly.

Retreat

2010-07-06T10:42:00.005Z

There is a reason I haven't been about. Namely this:

And this (obviously, that's not me!):

The associated solitude of just being in a wood in your own space is fantastic, with frogs and fish and the ongoing battle against the Himalayan Balsam to be waged (invasive non British weed that stinks to almighty Hades and murders British wild plants. We really are weedy in this country).

However, whilst the outside is pretty fabulous, indoors is a little more catastrophic and there will be no staying over for a little while yet until a new back wall has been installed. There are also a multitude of spiders. I am also reliably informed that being nettled on a constant basis is good for my immune system, having sat on one of the blighters recently I am yet to be convinced!

Check out our ming pit of a bathroom! It smells like the tunnel to Tarterus in there, believe me. So that's where I've been hiding. Outdoors and getting physical. Probably good for me!

GD: listen to bad 80's vinyl; waiting for the buggers at Fed Ex to actually get their scabby arses here with a late parcel; wondering why there are so many sirens going off in the distance

Why books are the most wonderful creation

2010-06-19T17:52:00.001Z

'What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.'

Carl Sagan. What an astonishing man.

The Sound of Inevitability...

2010-05-24T15:12:00.006Z

...is gravity taking my chest to the floor and boing-ing it back again.

Now I don't know where you are at this point in your life, but me? I'm in the skids. At the stage where it all begins to creak a little. Now I'd never really considered how I'd feel about this. A little sad, maybe, at the passing of the years and that youthful bloom in my pretty lil cheeks. Truth is, I was cushioned by the fact that as a five foot tall smiley little woman with dimples and freckles, people always mistook me for ten years younger than what I actually am.

But machines can see through the freckles. They diss the dimples. You get on that Wii Fit board and there is no mercy. There is no hiding your actual weight. Your BMI flashes before your eyes, orange and bold in that dreaded 'overweight' category. The cellulite on your once flat stomach ain't telling the lie - it's you that is a little delusional!

I suspect I was aware that gravity was taking it's toll, as the scaffolding to hold me up and in becomes ever more weighty. I always had an hourglass figure, fierce bosom, nipped in waist, generous (very generous) hips. But even I have to admit I am beginning to morph more towards the shape of the average British woman who appears to have abandoned the concept of a flat stomach and cinched in middle to resemble that dreaded muffin top, rather than a normal pert female. And I don't think I'm quite ready to give it up just yet, despite the gentle convexing of my once dinky mid section.

So my Wii Fit age. I blame the balance and lack of core strength for the travesty of being seventeen years older on the plastic board than off it (not the cup cakes and lack of exercise, then huh?). But hey! With a little bit of Hula Hooping fun, I can regain some of my youthful zing! I can sit and watch that candle flicker and burn and exterminate moths (don't ask....) and build my core strength with impunity. But can I head a ball? Can I hell (though I did belatedly realise that I had the Wii Fit board pointing in the wrong direction...)!

So I sit here humbled. My doctor pronounced me almost fit on Friday, despite the ME / muscle aches / viral illness / vasovagal syncope. I have no excuses! Not even my misaligned back (tip: don't attempt curved marble steps when you're even half as drunk as I was when i fell down them and spannered my right hand spine alignment....) should really stop me, which is why I'm off to the osteopath's next.

Who knows when the Wii Fit age will come even close to my real age? How long will it take me to lose that four pound that stands between me and 'normal'?!

Hell, I still have the dimples and the freckles so life ain't all bad!

GD: obsessed with the Clockwork Dolls; watching the fishies at her shack (and the frog! I have a frog!); reading yet more Joe Abercrombie!

Codiene~Cloud

2010-05-10T15:48:00.005Z

I believe that in other countries codeine is a prescription only drug, due to it's heroin type characteristics. Synthetic opiate. These laws must have been created by a man who didn't have to spend three days crumpled over their innards, moaning and leaking and positing about how dreadful it is to be a woman. These three days per month would be a write off for me should my drug of choice be removed. For three days I ride it's cloud, surfing through the highs and lows of giving one's self over to something that whacks my brain pretty much into the stratosphere. Having seen my father's reaction to pethidine in hospital last year I suspect it's a family trait, but at least I don't go running about naked, screaming that Nazis are holding me prisoner.

So today I'm on the gentle rise into the blue and it's just beginning to colour my judgement. Everything is peachy in my head. That curl in my womb isn't really happening. Peeling potatoes may be dangerous, but I'll smile benignly at the knife when I slice my finger top off.

Tomorrow we'll reach a peak and the grey matter will become, well grey and matted. I'll meet my mum for lunch and avoid wine, because baby - that combination is just lethal. So parsnip soup and apple juice for me, and I may be allowed caffeine for pudding! She'll tell me how tired and saggy I look, I'll smile vaguely and pop some more pills. Then I'll sleep like a dream (one where clowns become edible and have sausages for fingers) and wake to day three of oblivion - the day I go to work.

I shall attend my annual appraisal in a fug of happiness and contentment whilst the demons gnaw my disintegrating belly. My manager could tell me I was Myra Hindley and I won't notice. Nor will I notice her castigate my customer service skills, my inability to stop saying sorry and the surreptitious increase in my targets for the year ahead. Great.

Day four and reality bites. Sudden withdrawal from nirvana prompts cold shakes and paranoia. It really does happen that swiftly. I dread to think how bad it could be if I took my little panacea for a full week! On the bright side I no longer walk like a constipated baboon.

So the drugs do work. But they pack one fierce punch that I should respect heartily.

Five pm. Time for medication round 2....

GD: slightly stoned; listening to Billy Joel's Innocent Man. Again; reading Joe Abercrombie's The Blade Itself which is jolly good; frightened of the potatoes....

Breathe Again

2010-03-29T09:48:00.011Z

I've pivoted. Swung about. Considered the options and made some moves. Life is one big game of chess after all, which would be OK if I was strategically able. However, I'm not dumb so we'll use that as our starting point.

I'd been a little jaded and tired. I'd also been sucked into a virtual world where the online players purport to be your friends when in actual fact we're all just facades desperate to portray ourselves as something more than what we really are. I woke up and smelt the coffee elsewhere one day, and went cold turkey. Two weeks of sobriety later I can now turn on the Internet and only twitch slightly when the address shows in the toolbar.

The catalyst? It was a surprise actually. Though I read a great deal I wouldn't have imagined that a book could affect me so profoundly that it would invade my dreams, my psyche, and just nag away quietly, calling into question the very foundations that I've built my life upon.

Oh, I don't expect people to have the same epiphany from the same book. We're all different, after all, despite the homogeny of so called diverse interest groups. The book in question was by a much loved author, William Horwood, his first in fifteen years. I used to devour his books, there is a rare, beautiful and excoriating vein of sorrow that threads through them. And he got the idea of love as redemption way before JK. Rowling used it as a shield for Mr Potter.

So Hyddenworld. The book. It's a stately read. Leisurely, across it's 500 pages and there are parts which if I'm honest are more telling than showing with a little bit of slippage. Simple, evocative language. Themes that are familiar in many ways (I kept thinking of Borrowers more than Hobbits) and the magical boundaries of this country that I live in, England which I now wish to refer to forever as Englalond. Faithful attention to the legend of Imbolc.

The humans (and giant Hydden). Cast up on a shore of pain, yet moving forward in a voyage of self discovery. What really set this book apart for me was their depiction. We all know that some people are evil. However, in this book there were people who let life unfold for the beauty of it, and discovered joy and love without gratuitous description. I hadn't realise how much I wanted to read a book like this until I read it. It's...wholesome. But not in a preachy manner.

So I read this, and whilst my heart gave it five stars my head gave it four. Skallagrieg (by the same author) gets the perfect five.

Then the dreams started. Really powerful, peaceful dreams that begun the night I finished reading it. I won't go into the details, but it's like the first time you make love with someone, and I mean love - not sex. You can have the passion, the urgency of sex but there's something more, a connection that grabs you in the pit of the stomach and jumbles everything you thought you knew about everything but it really doesn't matter because you've found something real in a world of fakery.

The world spun a little, tumbled from its empty course and I began to think. Really think, about who I am and who I want to be. I sent off that PhD application (decision pending), I challenged the status quo at work. I made a second offer on a shack in the woods with falling down walls and a puddle underneath it, because I love the silver fish that play in the pool below (another decision pending!). I looked at my husband in a different way, the way I did when we first met and thought about what it was that I love. Why I love.

He says I've been different. Smiley, warm. More affectionate. Happy. I think he's right. I want to laugh again. We've been so bowed down with grief and responsibility that to move towards any sort of optimism is a bonus. I'm downscaling in some respects and focusing on what's actually become important. Discarding the superficiality of a sub-group that demonise their own for daring to be normal (I have always said, define normal....). I will stay on the fringes, happy in my own skin.

So new skin (literally, the blue on this blog skin matches the new paint on my study walls). New focus. If the things I'm seeking don't happen, then at least I've tried. I know I can make the decisions that matter.

I feel somewhat like self help manual with this post, gods help me that's not what it's meant to be. Merely an explanation of why I've been gone so long. There will be lows ahead; there always is but I hope I can look past them.

Thank you, Mr Horwood. Again. Now where are the next three volumes?

GD: star gazing, waiting for the phone to ring; listening to From Dreams and Angels by Abney Park; reading The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

Spring is coming

2010-02-15T11:48:00.002Z

And with hopefully a little bit of sunshine. I've been AWOl, for a myriad of reasons - the least of these will be resolved tomorrow with the arrival of my new desk and my ability to actually work in a structired environment after four month's study exile.

Back soon

GD: avoiding the unavoidable; admiring her croci; reading, reading, reading, reading....

Paul's Little Mum

2010-01-26T22:34:00.001Z

Little Pim-Pom Pam,

Dancing now on the stars with Moon Man Johnny, be at peace and be forever happy.

All our love, Paul and Jane xxxxxx

Tower of Song ~ Leonard Cohen

2010-01-23T19:55:00.002Z

Things have been a bit rough about here recently. So, short post just to say that physically I appear to be fine (which given what a horrible month it's been is frankly a relief). At some stage I'll be back, but for now my keyboard is mute.

I'll just leave you with Mr Cohen and a bit of mellow crooning.

Pressure pressing down on me...

2010-01-14T13:45:00.002Z

Hospital appointment this morning. An hour late (that's fine, a doctor was off sick). One hour later, sent to see Doctor Death (female). In serious need of HRT and / or hair dye and colour (grey, grey and more grey). Unable to speak as she had a pre prepared speech that bore no relevance to me because I already do what she was suggesting.

Realise pretty quickly that thought is futile. Try to point out that her recommendation I drink 5 plus cups of caffeinated coffee a day is ridiculous as I have IBS and would have to wear kangas to leave the house - not good on public transport. Mort continues on her dreary monotone, then announces that I'll be fainting for the next two to five years sporadically and that she's discharging me. Advise her that I have more tests next week for my kangaroo blood pressure. Bintoid obviously hasn't read notes...bintoid blames blue asthma inhaler for elevated heart rate - tell her I never use the blue, but that my daily steroids can cause disruption to blood pressure rhythms. Am told I'm imagining it....

Leave room looking for axe, cleaver, knife....settle for bacon sandwich, cake and decaff tea. Beyond furious. Blood pressure elevated...

GD: working from home this pm which is a very good thing! Listening to Radio 2, reading Submarine by Joe Dunthorpe which is a bit useless truth be told, contemplating a mammoth and unecessary amazon order of joy!

The Times They Are A Changing

2010-01-01T16:53:00.014Z

What would New Year's Day be without sharing just a little bit of it with Dorothy and friends in the magical land of Oz? She's currently skipping through trippy poppy fields towards Emerald City and that mad old despot, the Wizard. So as my attention wanders about gently, what better time to catch my scrambled wits and consider the year that was...

In my world this year, all things came with a lively sprinkling of True Blood, and the theme tune by Jace Everett wormed its way into my skull (along with some pleasant mental reserves of Sam the Were Collie butt naked) and onto my I-Pod. All I can say then, I wanna do bad things with you!

I basically devoured the Charlaine Harris novels in three weeks. Lightweight, occasionally a bit silly but essentially good humoured and enjoyable fluff, the TV series has taken these vampire bites and turned them into uber sex crazed but utterly compelling viewing. hey ho - at least the majority of the nudity is rather buff gentlemen for a change (thank you Alan Ball. Oh, and thanks for filling the Six Feet Under void very nicely!).

Musically, I stalled. Nothing new to report. Even the new Muse CD was disappointing, though I do adore Uprising. (aka the Doctor Who theme tune). My favorite song - Undisclosed Desires - is basically Depeche Mode in Teignmouth clothing, so all in all not impressed. The only little ray of sunburst on the horizon was Paloma Faith, with her big hair and quirk. All else left me a bit cold.

I've read quite a few books this year, and loved the following three: Stella Duffy's Room of Lost Things, The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry, and How to Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall. The Sarah Hall book was one of the most beautifully lyrical pieces I have ever read, the four individual narratives weaving in together through time and geography and a sense of loss that pervaded throughout. Absolutely beautiful. Actually, none of these books were particularly happy, all had loneliness and loss as central themes and each one was beautifully realised. I couldn't pick one that stood out more because they all had a different resonance. All had small faults that never the less did not distract from what wonderful reads they are. The worst book I read was Alice De Smith's Welcome to Life (Amazon won't let me publish my review online because I panned it, the swines!) - the emotional vacuum at the heart of this book and the truly trite handling of the ending was not hidden by the vacant, pretty prose I'm afraid!

Films, I disliked Inglorious Basterds against all my expectations. Really, really underwhelmed. Liked Let The Right One In, Watchmen and Star Trek (just loved the humour of it all). Termintaor: Salvation was just pointless. Harry Potter ok, the Alan Rickman factor elevating it somewhat.

The rest of the year has been spent skating along on work and stress and parents in hospital, with all that entails. I've been exhausted, ill and snarky. Quite frankly, I have on occasion been a snot! There have been some positives - a truly lovely day out of life on Halloween at Whitby in the sun with P eating chips and nachos (simple pleasures are coming to mean a great deal). The wonderful staff in my local NHS, from my GP to the consultants, even if it did on occasion appear to be like some sort of medieval torture with all the straps and suspensions and sprays in the mouth (and I still have more tests to go). Blackbirds nesting in the clematis giving several weeks of entertainment and anxiety. My dog's utter loveliness and stroppiness in equal parts, with unlimited toe nibbling for good measure. Starbucks ginger loaf cake. Rediscovering Dr Hook and Billy Joel (lashings of cheese!). New friends made in new places. Old friends and family, and their warmth and generosity when needed. And not least, P, still the only person who knows how to make me laugh out loud, who makes my hot water bottle every night without being asked and will forever be my tea bitch.

GD: waiting for David Tennent's last ever Doctor Who episode, with chocolate cheesecake reserved for this momentous event; reading Wicked by Gregory Maguire which is very funny and ever so slightly twisted; thinking the world looks very pretty all white and glowy, but its still the same old cracked pavements underneath!

Good Golly Dolly It's All Imploding!

2009-12-22T17:21:00.009Z

So. Season of good will to all men, so it is. Hmmmm...my seasonal goodwill is somewhat lacking this week, given what a *FABULOUS* beginning it didn't have.

Firstly, the freezer broke. Not a big thing in the scheme of global warming and Romanian orphans (BBC, stop it. I cried into my tea last night). However, my Haagan Das melted! Catastrophe! I never fill the bloody freezer. Never! Except at Christmas....so my contribution to the food waste mountain hit skyscraper proportions today. Still narked about that ice cream. Strawberry cheesecake it was. Grrrrr...

Went out playing Santa. Came back to discover a missing parent. Missing parent, with alcoholic partner somewhere in the depths of the NHS barfing on the staff. Litre bottle of gin a day anyone? I can be smug up here on alcohol free pinnacle (though admittedly I am awaiting the delivery of twelve bottles of fine red wine...). Anyhow, as the old goat is in sheltered accommodation, they called me when his fire alarm went off. He'd set his kitchen on fire in his panic to go to the hospital with Ennui....then vanished into the ether for the next five hours. Naturally I gave them permission to kick his front door in. He's not best pleased with that to be honest, but hey! Saved the rest of his house.

Being English, I resorted to a good cup of tea when in a crisis. Then the kettle blew up. Perhaps one cup to many? Then spent two hours trying to buy one in Whitley Bay this morning. When did the Co-op stop selling kettles?! I could buy wool, cake decorations & sugar craft, Weight Gain 4000, picture frames, muffins, pretend fireplaces, an entire banquet in Iceland, gob stoppers and black bullets (sweets for the uninitiated), free range olive oil....but not a sign of a bloody kettle. In the end I had to brave the hell of Sainsburys. But at least I am now caffeinated.

So. Cheer is somewhat lacking and I've hit the toblerone in despair. But never fear! this isn't all gloom, and doom. Following some tests worthy of the Third Reich, my local hospital gave me permission to drink 'in moderation'. I have no structural issues with my heart, but I do have kangaroo blood pressure (more tests in January, sigh...).

But really: Whoooo Hooooo! Alcohol's back on the menu boys! And this the day before work's party (last Friday). Thank the gods I was allowed to self medicate that night....Newcastle was a sea of angry sequins. Several of the large, structurally unstable sequins wanted to fill me in. Seriously, what is that people don't like about small redheads in black and lace (I was rocking the Goddess Paloma look that night)?

But now for this moment? The wine has just arrived. The tree lights are on, and a dog is sleeping on my feet. My father has been located (well, his body has but there is some discussion regarding the whereabouts of his brain). P is out buying me pressies. All is well, my good readers. All is peaceful. May it all be peaceful with you.

GD xx: listening to random YouTube stuff (Eden House, Paloma in particular); considering the merits of blue nails versus purple; quite content really!

Vasovagal Aetiology

2009-11-30T10:36:00.003Z

I got an 'ology'! Well, possibly maybe an ology...and a P2 murmur just for extra special benefit! Nope, I have no idea what it all means either...Apparently the fainting episodes are linked with vasovagal syncope, origin as yet undetermined. Have just had the cardiac tests with the results pending - once through I can hopefully rule out cardiac issues as the cause.

It's a bit spooky, seeing inside your own heart. Well, for the first five minutes it was fascinating. The technician was excellent - she talked me through everything on the screen and showed me all the valves - as my heart was going at 130 beats per minutes, the sight of my flappy valve thingies going at speed was just a little bit too much...I decided to close my eyes for the rest of the test. Either that or barf...

I then had a 24hr ECG. Simples? Nooooo, oh no. Who knew I could be allergic to the sticky chest pads. I spent twenty of the twenty four hours desperately trying not to rip my skin off. Needless to say, sleep was in shot supply and my temper even shorter the following day. Even the ECG technician was shocked when the gaffer tape came off - red, bubbling welts all over my chest. I looked liked I'd been attacked by giant mutant suckers, probably attached to some hideous sea monster with crunchy inner teeth...

Ahem. Enough about my eel issues. Tilting tables and possible projectile vomit next - what fun!

GD: happy as a pig in muck (hmmm...actually a pig in muck?!); listening to Buffy! The Musical!; lamenting the loss of Borders UK - fecking global capitalism really doesn't work.

Broken Doll

2009-11-06T15:20:00.003Z

Paloma Faith - Broken Doll (takes a minute for her to start so bear with it)

First round of tests yesterday - not so bad apart from the vomiting pensioners all about us. Positively streaming green bile. Modesty sent flapping into the breeze as usual, with them sticky little ECG pad things. They then dumped a tea towel over my salient assets - really, I wouldn't have bothered. They'd withered with the cold already.

Heart rate: excited. Heart murmur status: still present but presumed innocent. Actually, the registrar was wonderful, very thorough considering I'd lost my voice completely and had to suck soothers throughout the examination in order to squeak on demand. I have to go back for an echo cardiogram, 24 hour ECG and the topsey turvey tables but they already suspect they know what it is. And it's nothing majorly serious which is a relief. No formal diagnosis until the tests are complete but naturally the advice still precludes me from having beer, chips or chocolate (though I was so thoroughly sick of myself today I had a skinny latte and ginger loaf cake from Starbucks when I got sent home from work yet again...ok, so I'm probably infectious but I'm also lonely. My germs are lonely!).

I'm positively fed up, if you can be such a thing. I think I need to write my manifesto and a new design for life. I'm going to end up sacked if my health doesn't improve, and whilst my manager is absolutely wonderful about everything, I am genuinely concerned.

Still, it's the weekend. I am getting marginally better, and I have had cake. I bought tickets to go see the lovely Paloma. I'm slightly obsessed and would quite happily swap my scraggy old bones for hers. Doubt she feels the same somehow...

GD: in bed but still managing to have cold feet; listening to Paloma, Eden House and Incubus Succubus (eclectic mix but hey! I'm bored). Lonely.

Apology for Absense

2009-10-21T16:37:00.006Z

Apology for Absense, by Julia Darling

Look, it's as if my heart is a damp cupboard
filled with old brass that needs polishing.

Or I must cover myself with moss, damp down,
try to establish new growth in the rotting.

Sometimes I am ripped for shreds by the North wind
and must curl up beneath a counterpane.

I need to practise dying, to imagine health,
to eat tinned pears, light unecessary fires.

And love can be tyrannical, so sweet, yet edgy.
I am overpowered by its fragrent red roses.

Sitting rooms are too vivid. Things get torn.
I have to disappear, to darn each rip.

Forgive me, brave daughters, for the questions
that I have failed to answer. And my love,

please don't say I malingered,don't be
angry later, when you add up the ticks.

This is from a wonderful collection of poems written by Julie Darling during a period when she was dying from cancer. I cannot recommend these poems enough, though some of my liking for these is due to my familiarity with the places and the streets depicted within.

I have a heart murmur and have to have more tests. The advice is all:

So I guess that's what I'll do, until they tell me other.

Limbo

2009-10-13T12:04:00.005Z

I am somewhat subdued at the moment. Specifically, I have to contend with my mortality in a serious way for probably the first time in my life. Oh, we all know it'll come, and we all hope for an honourable send off with flowers, wicker coffin and a stupendous wake.

I passed out twice last week. Passed out is probably the incorrect description - I retained consciousness but couldn't respond to my body's strange mind bending propensities. Fell on my knees, the first time, in a crowed shop and felt like a complete tit. Felt OK afterwards so didn't really think about it. Second time the world distorted and buckled, and when I regained control it had taken on nightmarish qualities - everything was rolling, curved - like a world you'd find at the top of the Magic Faraway Tree. Topsey Turvey World. I stayed there for 24 hours, which made for an interesting return home on public transport.

I'll be honest - I haven't been treating this rather fragile body of mine well recently. I've been drinking too much, under a great deal of stress and devouring cake. A day hasn't been complete without cake. And I've had a chest infection and antibiotics. And my acquaintance with vegetables remains remote. I guess I forget I'm 37 and technically middle aged (SHRIEKS HOLLOWLY IN OWN SKULL!).

Then you realise the doctor thinks you may have a heart problem and everything inside of you ends up in your mouth, soaking it with fear. I should never have googled 'blood test crp', honestly, I should have just sat in blissful ignorance until the results come back next week. But I'm curious...

So, four vials of blood later, I have to wait a week for the results (I should add in the interest of balance that I'm also being tested for diabetes, thyroid problems and calcium deficiencies), I'm thinking 'Hmmmmm...'. I haven't had cake for five days (a big deal in my world!), or alcohol (even bigger, sadly). Apples are my only fruit. I have strict orders to go direct to hospital if it happens again (Do not pass go, do not collect £200...).

Probably a storm in a teacup. But I'm scared, sad though it is, because I know exactly what heart disease does to people. Have done since I was thirteen and my step-dad had a massive coronary event that has blighted his life ever since. So I'm drinking lots of herbal tea and reading obsessively to switch my brain off.

Oh, and don't google 'blackout cause' either. That one really freaked me! The Internet is a two edged sword and sometimes it cuts deep.

GD: morose, a fan of True Blood, thinking she better get a step on finishing the magnum opus before she karks it! And listening to the Cure and Kasabian. And a little bit of Billy Joel - we all need cheery cheese!

Definate lack of cool

2009-09-12T14:39:00.005Z

I know I'm not cool because:

I am listening to Clannad
I am currently teaching myself, through various You Tube videos, to crochet a granny square. And I'm doing it badly.
I am wearing a Celtic t-shirt with a gold knot work ring and bright green dragons and I don't care who sees it
I have red hair
I don't like Twilight
Conversely, I do love Charlaine Harris's 'Dead' series and have just bought another three volumes; upon which purchase I was laughed at by the shop assistant
I like Starbucks skinny lattes, even if they are all froth and no coffee
I'm indoors hiding, when it is probably the most glorious day of the year so far
I have never stopped wearing thick black (occasionally ribbed) tights all year, and now it is the season, I am contemplating moving into my woolly versions
I like proper hot water bottles without novelty covers
I have a Peugeot 206 that is covered in dog.
I write bad poetry
I love Dr Hook and Billy Joel, and I'm playing 'Innocent Man' just a bit too much these days
Just as graphic novels gain some credibility I find I'm going off them. C'est la vie

So there we go. Not cool. Not bothered.

GD: emotionally screwed and thinking she's about to break (I'm not kidding - I ran away from home today for three hours and ended up in Starbucks. Some rebel, I). Physically crippled but unable to get a doctor's appointment because the crones beat me in the 8:30am stampede.

The Abundance of Snot

2009-09-08T11:30:00.004Z

I have cold, so therefore it follows logically that I must be fed up. Which is true, but not necessarily cold related. No, I have cold because I'm stressed and my immune system has hit it's peak of brokenness which inevitably kicks in when I am mentally below par.

I am dreaming of face eating zombies, which is also affecting the quality of sleep I am achieving. In recompense, I have also dreamt about Sean Bean in (and possibly out) his Sharpe uniform, a dream so filthy I was actually blushing when I awoke. That I most definitely am not complaining about!

Sean Bean, aka Sharpe, aka a very, very bad man...

There's so much going on outside of the virtual life that I can't post; it's not myself that is suffering most but there are times when you wish for the worst, because the increments become ever more difficult to endure.

So I sit here in twee land, listening to Buddy Holly sing True Love Ways, I drink cappuccino and eat toast and I read Charlaine Harris obsessively (which incidentally may be where some of the more extreme elements of my dreams may be stemming from...!). Not great literature perhaps, but certainly great escapism.

I will be back sometime soon, indelibly changed and most definitely older and sadder. Until then, be well virtual world.

You Can't Start a Fire without a Spark

2009-08-23T14:40:00.004Z

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a woman approaching forty with no offspring hanging of her shirt tails or bank balance occasionally falls in need with some inappropriate object of desire and thus commits themselves to many years of joy, financial ruin and advancing critters of the night by buying a shack.

Well, I haven't bought a shack - WE have (or at least are currently awaiting the bank giving us the cash...) to purchase a woodland shack. They call it a chalet on the details - they lie. It's a wooden hut with bedrooms and the occasional running water. There are holes in the cladding and the insulation is shot. One bedroom is a fetching mix of lime and dark greens. And for 6 weeks of the year (high summer), it's off-limits for me thanks to my screwed immune system.
But it's beautiful. It's in an ancient woodland near the banks of the Tyne. You have to drive through a corn field to get to the car park. You think you're in gnome-y, twee hell as this is surrounded by (admittedly very pretty) chalets that are populated with the old folk who don't retire to Spain. Cuprinol skin is popular. So you park, and then you see a small path twisting off into the trees. Following it you step into the heart of the wood, and then you step onto the veranda and....

It's positively beautiful. There is a terraced open space, coolly shaded by deciduous trees, through which a small rivulet of water has been trained to create a small pond area that teams with tiny silver fish. If there is a heaven, I'm actually able to buy it....(well, lease it seven months a year!).

So we gave in, offered, offered again and are now undergoing security checks to ensure we're not going to go Blair Witch through the trees in the near future.

It's a step. Step one of us changing the way our lives work (and in P's case, don't). Step two will be to downsize Albatross (our house. The name is self explanatory: if not go read the Coleridge poem).

I can't afford to bugger off to Rio or Tuscany to write my magnum opus. But I can bugger off to our shack in the woods, with it's open fireplace and seclusion. I can sit dangling my feet over the veranda and watch my silver fish play. I will be able to lie under the canopy of trees and stars and look to an uncertain future with a smile.

It's a step. A very significant step. And I for one am so very glad that for once in my life prudence and common sense didn't hold me back from having something of very little practical value but of immense beauty.

GD: listening to Depeche Mode's Playing the Angel; very snotty and hungover (only myself to blame!); eating cake. Too much cake!

Teaser Tuesday: Book Related

2009-08-18T18:24:00.002Z

"Grab Your current read. Let the pages fall open on a random page. Share two teaser sentances from that page. Don't forget to name the book!"

Well, why not? After all, I am on a steady diet of trash at the moment, why not share! So we'll begin with Laurell K Hamilton's Narcissus in Chains, one of my current bedside 'classics'. Purchased from my local library's slush pile, this cost me a whole 10p. It's number ten in the Anita Blake Vampire Hunter novels, when we've gone from Anita being a straightforward zombie raiser and vampire killer to full on vampire / werewolf slut. Some parts are making blush. Really blush.

Selection One, for mass consumption (page 131):

He had a perfect imprint of my teeth in the right side of his neck. The
wound was still seeping blood, so the circle of toothmarks was filled with
crimson.

So, our heroine was playing rough with little Micah, was she? Now that wasn't all she got up to with him, particularly in the shower...

Selection Two (page 303):

I was reminded of the scene from the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy puts oil on the
Tin Man's jaw after he'd been rusted

Hmmmm...I haven't got that far so have no idea what it refers to. But these books make Anne Rich's Vampire Chronicles look tame. Lestat is a puppy in comparison with these nymphos. Good rollicking fun, and no doubt not the last LKH book I ever read.

GD: is tweaking her website for inspiration (hence new blog colours), listening to Turin Brakes, coming back to life

One day...

2009-08-12T08:51:00.006Z

One day I'll accomplish everything that's in my head to achieve. One day. But hey - why do now what I can delay until tomorrow, next week, the end of next year? Procrastination, my poison prince, your knife cuts deep. Or is it inertia? I've muttered about this less than savory character trait before. At the risk of sounding boring I suspect it's because it's one of my biggest flaws (along with the vengeance / lack of forgiveness thing, obviously!).

My mother reckons I'm too laid back. I've been inclined to disagree with her. If I'm honest, mainly because it's HER opinion. From others I may have considered it a bit too close to the truth, but from Hyperactive Harridan I've never really given it much credence. Perhaps I should: even though I feel like I boil away under the skin, I'm not hugely proactive about dealing with the things that I should. I have no real drive - ambitions are fine, but they remain intangible when in fact, with a bit of a push and hard work they're probably more achievable than I think or assume.

I think shyness holds me back considerably, coupled with deep rooted fear that I'm just not good enough. I'm trying to overcome this by joining new groups and challenging myself to participate and some of it's working. Its just that there's so much going on outside of ambition at the moment I'm not sure what to choose. My personal relationships exhaust me to the point of illness - do I cauterize the wound and cut the dead flesh free?

I have mental goals but they don't drive me. I'm all ad-hoc girl. I expect my *brilliance* to shine through with the smallest snippet of effort. It won't (and I'm not brilliant). I watched my father holding court from his bed like a fuhrer yesterday, looking for mischief and expecting to be treat like the god he thinks he is - where did he get that confidence from? Why don't I have it? Then I watch him treating people with a lack of basic respect and think 'OK, that's why we differ so much....'. But you can be over deferential.

So what do I do? I'll set some goals, here now, in my next post perhaps. I expect failure at the very most. I'm stuck in stasis and I'm afraid I'll be moored here for ever.

I'm very sad today.

GD: Mopey sod; skint and about to be skinter thanks to Suicide Boy; no ambition; a spark that's fading; thinking that 'What kind of Fool' by all About Eve sums it all up perfectly.

When life gives you a lemon, jump ship

2009-08-04T09:25:00.001Z

Nuff said. I never meant to break, but if you will not take any responsibilty for yourself why should I?

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade

2009-07-25T10:53:00.006Z

Here's the thing. My Dad went in for a routine hip replacement op on Wednesday as a high risk patient due to having angina. He's since been very poorly, had a heart attack, and is now on the Coronary Care Unit, where he is receiving absolute superb care. I can't praise his nursing team enough, what lovely people.

His girlfriend is making my life a living hell by telling everyone when he lives what a shitty daughter I am because I haven't had that close a relationship with him (funny that, after all he's the one who chose alcohol over his family!). But its that point in life when things come swinging round and suddenly you are no longer the child but the responsible adult who has to take care of their every need.

I looked at him yesterday, in his hospital bed, blue top and green bottoms all askew. You can trace my genealogy in the lines of his face, particularly the curve of his forehead and the dark eyes. Translucent skin, peppered with freckles. It's all there, in the blood. It doesn't matter about those missing years so much anymore: what matters is what's best for him.

My Dad is a relatively nice person who will help out anyone with whom he isn't related to by blood. He hasn't drank for over twenty years, but he is extremely demanding and has a complete lack of common sense. He has provided a very nice cash flow service to his girlfriend and her children for the past four years, plus a free taxi. I've turned a blind eye to it because they've taken good care of him, looking out for him which has helped set my mind at rest knowing that he's not alone.

However, it is now time for me to step up. Be responsible. Make sure his best interests are taken care of. I don't know how to tell him he'll have to forfeit his driving licence for the foreseeable future as being able to drive is basically his whole existence (whether or not he's fit to drive is a debatable point - he's 72 and a little bit erratic). It came home to me at the hospital that I'd not even been registered as his next of kin (his girlfriend was mysteriously down as his 'wife'). I have changed this, but the nurses were very embarrassed (not their faults) and my irritation levels rose sharply.

The husband showed me a Yoshimoto Nara picture this morning which he says is today's Janey Mood Indicator. I think he's right!

GD: thinking 'Hmmmmmmm.....!'; needing loud music; avoiding alcohol; wasting time until the hospital let me back in; reading 'Running With Scissors' to reassure myself that it's not just my family dynamics that are screwed!

Thrift! All consuming thrift...

2009-07-18T14:43:00.011Z

I am on an economy drive. Saving is the game at the moment, for a rainy day that may just come very soon. So I've not been indulging so much in new clothes, books etc but have transferred my shopping habit to the charity shops of dear old Whitley Bay.

This is a good thing - in theory. Charity benefits from my hard earned cash, I buy cheap and with pleasure in a bargain well found.

But is it? A bargain that is. In theory - I have made certain purchases this week that certainly have a monetary value greater than that which I paid - therefore (provided the market bites) I am a winner!

For example:

Girl annuals Vol 2-7. Toy optional

These rather special girls annuals - I picked up number 2 through 7 for a whole £2 each, when their actual value is about £5-£8 each for those in a condition that is 'fair to good'. The first was published in 1952/1953 and holds practical advice on crocheting a special summer bag and preserving wildflowers,plus some wildly implausible literature about 'gals' and 'horses' and hockey sticks.

These are lovely books. However, they have a history and a name. A previous owner. They were not created to become items of sale for a crafty thrift shopper. Nor to make a small but quick profit. They belonged to Christine McLennan of 41 Queens Drive, Whitley Bay. She cared enough to put her full name and address in, and they've been kept for over fifty years. They were a gift from Grandpa (I can't make out his name unfortunately) around about 1953/54.

They've kind of caught my heart a bit. The earlier volumes are well thumbed; the later books less so. Was Christine growing out of childish things? Becoming a woman? Too polite to tell Grandpa not to buy her these books anymore? Or did she still love them? Enough to keep them together for over fifty years.

I keep coming back to the fifty year point. The person who owned these books has parted with them. One can only hope that they still walk the streets of Whitley Bay, healthy and happy and with their own grandchildren to pamper with gifts and kind words.

Which brings me to this:

Lace detail on peignoir / nightdress

This is part of a beautiful two piece nightdress / peignoir set I picked up at another shop. Pale peach, reaches the floor, that then emergent new fangled fabric nylon, this was made by Saxon Lingerie and is in immaculate condition. The nightdress is simple and pretty, but the peignoir is absolute blowsy overkill, with row upon row of lace and peach bows over the press studs. Wearing it makes one feel quite the laaaaaydee! Even if my height is a distinct disadvantage!

But then the mind gets going and you start to paint a past. Like a wedding night outfit, kept evermore in pristine condition and taken out on special occasions. To the best of my knowledge this is also 1950's / 60's and you do wonder why after fifty years (always fifty!) it ended up stuffed behind the door of a charity shop.

It's beautiful. It's also fairly useless, but I can't help but look at it and wonder who it was made for, who floated about with their hair loose and a come hither smile. It's demure and then you move in it and...! It comes alive with a beauty that modern day nightgowns frankly just don't have.

So the initial plan was to sell these (probably on etsy). But I don't think I can. Not with so much history breathing down my neck. Not with the shackles of this imagination that brings these objects to life. I bought them because I saw a thing of charm, of beauty. Now I have them, I think I'll keep them.

Fifty years will make me a very old woman. Then the cycle can start again.

GD is: pensive. Having her feet warmed by Fat Dog (whose reindeer is proudly displayed above). Listening to Within Temptation. Supposed to be editing a competition entry.

And watching the rain fall on a quiet town.

Lightweight!

2009-07-12T15:29:00.004Z

Apologies! Apologies! This is lightweight central recently and it probably isn't about to improve with this post.

I have decided to forgive Aunty Beeb for killing Guisbourne (YOU BASTARDS!) because they are giving the world another chance to appreciate the beauty of one of the screen's rising stars - Aidan Turner aka Mitchell in Being Human, the hottest vampire on the box since Spike in Buffy (sorry, Angel never really did it for me...)

The lovely Mr Turner will shortly be gracing our screens as Dante Gabriel Rossetti in Desperate Romantics. Set in and among the alleys, galleries and flesh-houses of 19th-century industrial London, this follows the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a vagabond group of English painters, poets and critics as they basically charm and screw their way into the history books. With a redhead as their muse! Makes this redhead very happy – we always need positive press. Also goes to prove that once again I was born out of time (though thankfully in an age of medication).

If I am ever unfortunate enough to have a boy child, that’s his name sorted. No more Guy or Aragorn: Dante Gabriel it is! Though given that these loins are no more likely to spawn man flesh than mermaids, he’ll probably have to remain confined to the more salacious corners of my imagination.

In other news, the reading campaign continues. I have just finished MFW Curran’s ‘The Secret War’ which I rather enjoyed. This is a first novel (I think) and occasionally shows it’s greenness with some very basic language, but it has a good tale to tell, with demons and warriors, set just after the Napoleonic Wars. The flow of the book really kicks in about halfway through and I’m looking out for the sequel as a good commuting pot-boiler.

I’m currently reading Jacqueline Carey’s ‘Santa Olivia’. I am a fan of Ms Carey’s Kushiel novels, which are off world fantasy written in the first person with a bit of a perverse kick to them. I’m not yet sure about this, which is on world future and written in the third person. I’m just coming up to the part where the protagonist gets going and it’s an interesting story, just not quite as fluently told as I expected. Still, I’ll keep going.

I’m listening to the Mummers, Bat for Lashes and La Roux respectively: it’s a bit of a girl thing going on here at Whitley central. I have also joined a writing club at Borders Books locally and have discovered that a new character called Cherry wishes to come out and mess with my head. She’s narrated by a bloke, but I can’t quite define who he is yet…she’s basically a force of nature leading him astray!

I’ve been having some perturbing dreams: last night I was twisting in pain when I realised my torso had been pierced with hundreds of suspension needles that were being pulled for other peoples’ pleasure. I’m pale: the blood was vivid, red against my ribs. I’m stealing this dream for Caitlin’s story, I’d been thinking about what she could have suffered at Cain’s hands for the next part of her story. The dream was beyond what my waking mind could conjure: why waste?

Enough!

GD: repenting excess on Friday night when rather worryingly a work colleague kept saying ‘I’m seeing a complete different side of you tonight’…this is not good; thinking ‘does my new frock make me look like Rosie Webster?; drinking Como Sur red wine and sad the bottle is empty; laughing at the fact my ‘hip’ sixteen year old niece will not add me as her Facebook mate because I’m no longer her ‘cool aunty’….!

The British Bugger Corporation

2009-07-01T18:18:00.007Z

ARGH!!!!!!!!!!

YOU KILLED GUISBURNE!

YOU BASTARDS!!!!!!

And don't tell me Spooks will compensate for all that gothic magnificence and gratuitous use of leather clothing. Even if he does look just a tad gay in this pic...

(...I promise I will post something serious sometime soon, but right now I'm painting my nails sparkly green)

Needful Things

2009-06-16T10:44:00.006Z

I think its becoming a little obvious that I have a bit of a book addiction. My only regret about shelling out £45 yesterday on reading material was that I didn't buy more...this is on top of the pile unread from the charity shop. Also, the ratio of books in versus the ratio of books out (to charity) if becoming heavily distorted and storage space limited. What's a girl to do? Visit the library?

Here's the rub - I do that too. I read the papers in the library (and Q / NME) on a regular basis. I borrow books and CDs that I have no wish to buy but I'm happy to visit. Try before you buy (because if I like the bloody things I then have to buy them and all their constituent sequels). The library itself is a microcosm of local life which I'm only too happy to observe from my lurking spot in an armchair by the window. If they only sold coffee I'd be there all day; as it is I have to make a detour to Costa to read the Telegraph (Costa for some reason has either super high brow or super low brow - The Sun - in terms of papers for customers. I'll be honest and admit that on low brow days I dip my toes in the murky waters of the tabloids with some guilty relish).

But nothing beats the actual act of choosing, smelling, examining a book for purchase. Nothing beats getting it home and weighing up the promise inside. It doesn't matter that the best book I've read all year came from a charity shop (David Mitchell's Black Swan Green, if you're interested) - it's the thrill of the chase. Maybe I need to get out more. Or be seduced by a dark handsome Spaniard (someone pleeeeeeeeeeeeeease take Rafa's spectacular arm muscles off the telly - they are waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay to distracting for this failed author). The books I purchased yesterday hold that same promise. Each was chosen to fulfil a different need - humour in comic form, high fantasy by a tested and trusted author, light hearted biography and naturally the war between heaven and hell, featuring daemons.

Thus we have:

Nemi Vol 1 by Lise Myhre. Fabulous, irreverent take on the 'modern life is rubbish' theme, narrated by a feisty goth girl basically making the same mistakes I made at the same age. have managed to read half of this already, need vol. 2 already. Pah!

For our biog, we have carefully selected a serious tome by the title of 'If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor'. Bruce Campbell. Elvis impersonator. All round chainsaw wielding hero of the Evil dead movies. Cast staple of Xena: Warrior Princess and close friend of director Sam Raimi. I love this man. I love this book, peppered with pictures and anecdotes, and I'm rather fond of this actor and his humour so this purchase makes GD a very happy doll indeed!

For the fantasy channel we went for good old Robin Hobb, author of the Assassin's Apprentice etc. Good old fashioned fantasy, swords, sandals, dragons, cretins etc. I've only read six of her books, so I'm now starting on the Soldier Son trilogy which I'm a bit wary of, due to poor reviews. But what the hell - I'll give it a spin anyway.

Finally we have the Secret War by MFW Curran (thought I had a lot of initials...). I'll nick the Amazon blurb as this is a new author for me: "For thousands of years a secret war has been fought between Heaven and Hell. Daemons and angels, vampyres and knights, clash for the future of mankind, and as the two sides wage war across the world, innocent people are caught up in the conflict". So there you go!

I'm still finishing The Black House (Stephen King and the other fellow), only 400 pages to go, before I can start properly on the above. This is actually the best King / Straub book I've read in eons, I kinda grew out of him but life's sucked a bit recently and I needed some good old fashioned child disembowling with supernatural elements.

Gods! Life is a peach, even with gummy eyes!

And now it's Costa Time! My cup overfloweth...

GD is: self indulgent, listening to radio 2, snotty and gooey, and a cake monster.

The Eyes Don't Work

2009-06-15T10:15:00.005Z

The eyes have gone on strike today making typing somewhat of a challenge. This is not really anything to worry about: rather it is a combination of pollen and overindulgence that has rendered them stickily gunged together with fetching yellow crusts. Given that I spent a large proportion of yesterday slathered in sun cream in the back yard with red wine and the weekend papers (gods, my life is just sooo hard, non?) I have no sympathy for myself. Particularly as I've managed to lose my anti-histamine eye drops.

It's a queer day in other respects. I'm used to having Monday as my chill down day without human intervention, but the boy is on holiday working on his dissertation. Whilst not unpleasant to have company, its company that's looking for distractions that can be blamed on me and not on their reluctance to commit words to paper: thus we are heading to Borders in the next thirty minutes for books and coffee indulgence. Plus a substantial amount of people watching through my gummy eyes. Which will frighten small children from ten yards. Bollocks to lying in a dark room with a damp cloth over my eyes - I want book porn!

The credit card is burning, mine eyes are yearning. God, I'm a bloody awful poet and don't I know it?

Enough! Desist, woman! It is enough to look upon the glory of the face of gothic Guisbourne (aka Richard Armitage) and know the pain is worth it (gratuitous hot man shot alert):

GD is: mooching, salivating at the prospect of book excess and coconut cake, repenting red wine and having really fun mental conversations that involve being rescued from wet graveyards by strapping men in black leather trouser. And listening to Bats for Lashes.

Itchy Mind

2009-05-28T12:25:00.005Z

This is one of those days when you’d far rather be elsewhere than where you currently have to be. Which is a convoluted way of stating that I’m at work, nominally working through the huge pile of detritus that has gathered upon my desk during my recent extended three-week leave (NB I am well aware that this is a wholly indulgent span to take off work, but in fairness it was last year’s leave I was using up!).

Un-inclined to blog or write, I’ve mostly been lurking in coffee shops, in dark alleys in Edinburgh or drinking copious amounts of red wine in the back yarden. Naturally on our trip to Edinburgh it rained torrentially, whilst the sun was apparently streaming down on Whitley Bay. Naturally…

Still, Edinburgh was not without highlights, namely visiting the Titians in the National Gallery. They’re quite spectacular in their own right but I did find the Gallery overwhelming in it’s sheer content. Everything is on display. Everything! The building itself is gorgeously over the top (poshest toilets I’ve been in in a long while) but it’s all a bit too much. I found the prominence of the European painters over the Scottish painters (stuffed in the basement) somewhat displeasing. Some of the Scottish stuff was great – I particularly liked the Quarrel of Oberon and Titiana by Paton (below), with the multitude of fairies and strange animals spilling out at all angles of the painting. The He got rather upset with viewing all of the family portraits (dead people).

They also take the prize for the worst service ever in their fancy restaurant overlooking Princes Street Gardens. It was particularly shaming how badly one man in a wheelchair was firstly ignored by the staff and then rudely sent the wrong way to a place where he couldn’t get a seat. Not recommended.

Rain persisting, we hid in the Writers’ Museum and marvelled at the low doorways (which incidentally did not pose any kind of threat to my head at all) and then trolled off to the Black Rose in search of gin. There are some very drunken pictures of me splatted out on the cushions in there: they won’t be on here anytime soon!

I have also managed to read the following: Masquerade by Terry Pratchett; The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry; The Room of Lost Things by Stella Duffy; and the cruddy next volume for the book club – Welcome to Life by Alice De Smith, which is a witless meandering through the blandest of teenage lives in the 1980’s. Chick lit at its most horrific. Burn after reading, I say. Read Barry or Duffy for some absolute pleasure. Next on the pile is Sarah Waters Affinity, Late Gothic Short Stories and Wilkie Collins The Woman in White.

GD is: currently stuffed full of pasta and aubergine, listening to the dreadful new Green Day album (off cuts from American Idiot and Warning…), itchy of nose and restless of mind.

Teeny Bit Bored...

2009-05-13T11:24:00.006Z

The dog didn't really get this when she kept trying to run off with the boys. Oh well...

...she did bring about the death of the Wicked Willow Doll....the Bitch!

Firsts

2009-04-20T14:42:00.002Z

Hooray! I just had a completely new experience, which doesn't often happen at my time of life. Yes folks, I just received my first EVER rejection letter for a writing submission! A landmark development. After all, I was tentatively published for the first time in 1986 in 'Horse and Pony' (young men, don't smirk. Every teenage girl has a dream horse inside of them). But an outright rejection rather than nil response? New thrill!

Actually to be fair, it was pretty decent of them to write back and give me some very constructive criticism about how to improve the submission, which I have duly noted and taken on board. I then trolled off to the library to pick up a short story submission form to allow the pain and humiliation to continue, within whose warm confines I had an encounter with the Swamp Donkey**. Perhaps my story should be entitled 'Weasel plays Swamp Donkey High Notes'. Or perhaps not.

I seem to recall I spent one day this weekend rather drunk and lairy in Whitley's premier biker bar on the rather dubious terrain of South Parade (had to restrain P. from verbally abusing the chavs that live in the B&Bs down there, no expense spared at the working populace's cost, and who spend their days hanging out of windows spitting on passersby. Mind he calmed down when I gave him some bike porn and Southern Comfort in the pub. The words 'Kawasaki Ninja' have an amazingly soothing effect on him).

Anyway, I'm idling away time here when I should be working on my magnum opus. Which isn't an ice lolly with chocolaty bits, like I'd hoped.

GD is: Listening to Blondie and Altered Images; crippled with neck trauma and about to become £32 poorer at the osteopath's; snotty; eating too much lemon cake from Costa.

** Swamp Donkey = failed actress = my ex next door neighbour from hell. I've seen her die on Holby City AND League of Gentlemen! Whoooo Hoooo! The Weasel is her 'lover' Eric 'The Groovemeister'. Avoid at all cost, particularly if you hate the sound of drums at 3am.

When letting go just isn't happening

2009-04-07T15:07:00.006Z

The title doesn't refer to anything specific. Well, it does if you apply it to one thing, without examining all the minutiae that make up that overarching concept of a decade. What is a decade? A ten year span, as humans define time. Barely a ripple across the fabric of the cosmos in terms of impact (unless we wish to talk CO2, which we don't. Not today, anyway).

The decade that I can't seem to let go of is the 1980's. Start to finish, I'm still caught there with people, places and my evolution carrying on it's own merry dance behind my eyeballs and it just doesn't appear to want to let me go.

This isn't helped by the constant reminder of the decade that are splurged out across shops - namely the '80's trends that are cluttering up our clothes shops (Topshop, I blame you!). It's like stepping into a weird machine that reconfigures time and takes you back to the decade that gave us Pretty in Pink, the Cookie Monster, Back to the Future and...erm...Def Leppard. You can buy all of these things (plus Slayer, for gawd's sake) emblazoned on Topshop / River Island t-shirts. I did note the time machine failed to return me to my much missed size 6 (US2) figure but we can't have everything!

But then I came across style nirvana. Admittedly it was adorning my much skinnier, trendier sixteen year old niece, but it came in the stylee of the student cardigan. Namely, that staple of university students world over at the end of the eighties, the Marks and Spencers Grandad cardigan (in dark grey, russet or dark green) available from their men's department and worn by student women with their doctor martins and rolled up jeans the world over (well, probably just the UK, but you get my gist).

I succumbed. And wore it naturally enough with my shiny new doctor martins (I am proud to say I will never, ever roll my jeans up a la Tiffany ever again). HE laughed and accused me of becoming retro queen. He's probably right. What with soaking up books based in either the 1980's, academia or both (The Secret History, Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now, Black Swan Green) I'm becoming a little obsessed with the past. Not helped by sodding Facebook, which is like a labyrinth of all those faces you'd hoped had been squished into oblivion (there's something strangely comforting in seeing that the evil bitch that hit you with her white stilettos on the back of the 631 has developed into an ugly grog monster with 6 kids and no teeth).

I've been so hung up on myself recently, just falling down this avenue of self loathing and disillusionment at the fact I am so CRAP at everything. I realise this is a perfectly normal human state of mind but I really want to stop the turntable and get off this trajectory. I've been unable to write for weeks, it would be too self regarding to call it writer's block, but I've come to a very slow and dim realisation that what I actually need to do is write what I know. And then let it go.

And that's the decade that style forgot. The nineteen eighties. And I have her here in my head and I'm using this post to tell myself its OK to let her out, so that I can ultimately let her go.

Phew!

GD is: listening to Kate Bush's Hounds of Love on vinyl, trawling charity shops for vinyl because it feels better even though its big, clumsy, easily broken and just not cool, reading Persepolis by Marjane Sartrapi which is superb (thank you Husband!). And being obsessive but weirdly non productive. (note: by the end of this I'd finished with Kate and how now moved on to Nik Kershaw's The Riddle. The video linked here is a complete homage to the '80s and the lips poking through the wall are just a bit freaky...Which I will not apologise for loving!)

Everything is Italicised!

2009-04-04T15:55:00.002Z

When did that happen?! The blog went wonky!

I'm too cold to blog, so I'm off to snuggle up under a duvet and watch Bond. Mmmmmmm!

Teaser Tuesday: Book Related

2009-03-31T17:15:00.008Z

I pinched this from Just One Page, and it may work better for her reading in a more literary manner!

Grab your current read. Let the book fall open to a
random page. Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12. You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book
recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given : ) ! Please avoid spoilers!!!
OK then....:

'Not as much as it freaked me out when a voodoo doll turned up'

'The fun transfers to one of our rooms, usually mine (I can be persuasive like that), and never Sam's (who might have a body in there for all we know).'

From Andrew Collin's 'Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now (My Difficult '80s)'

Now this is a good, lightweight fluffy book if you wish to read it on public transport. But it probably is only interesting if you were a teen in the '80s (like me!).

I thought I'd do the same with Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses, this month's book club choice. But each sentence is about a page long so I abandoned that swiftly. I have managed a total of 27 pages in three weeks. Panic reading starts in about twenty four hours.

GD: is stuffed (with food that is!), trying to balance on a computer chair on which the back has just fallen off, about to be technically a whole year older in 5 and a half hours time, listening to Radio 2 and wondering why....

Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here

2009-03-30T09:56:00.002Z

I have realised that not hearing is actually more painful than outright rejection.

Nuff said.

Guess I need to go find something productive to do with my shambolic life.

GD: miserable, ancient crone of doom. Awaiting the arrival of an even more miserable crone (and my father). I'm beginning to resent the fact that I can't actually have any 'alone' time with my dad anymore because she always comes and then inevitably complains about everything. Down to the smallest detail. No more chemical conversations about the poisonous properties of plants (the old man was a chemist), no more politics talks...no all we're allowed to talk about now is why I don't have 'babies', how much I earn, why don't I eat more (she's the same height as me and 13 stone heavier...), and how I'm not normal. Oh! and how much money she's managed to do my dad for this week....

Think I perplex her because I ask for nothing. No money, no emotional support. Because that's the way its always been and always will be. If he couldn't pay for me as a child, he doesn't need to pay for me as an adult when he needs me more than I need him. Life does things like that.

Er, this post digressed somewhat. Oh well. Time to go paint on a smile and fake nice.

Sound of the Underground

2009-03-16T17:53:00.003Z

Or, Going Underground if we don't wish to quote Girls Aloud. I've been a bit underground. I'm working too hard, drinking to much and feeling the rather grim effects of it all on my rather feeble constitution. In other words, I feel like crap and I'm sat here with a large glass of red wine merrily contravening the government's drinking limits for women of a certain age.

Part of the issue is that as I approach another birthday, I'm wondering quite what it's all about. I can't claim teen angst as a spur anymore, but perhaps middle age is as good an excuse as any.

I'm also suffering the shock of realising that how one views oneself doesn't necessarily reflect the views of others. namely, in my 1-2-1 with my manager (who can be the Queen of Sharp when she wishes) I was a little shocked to realise after my hour long rant that she actually feels sorry for me. Worse than that, I get the feeling she's concerned that I am an abused / controlled wife in thrall to some monster of a man (OK, maybe we should have just stuck to work issues!).

If it had just been the one time she'd implied this it may not have sat so heavily on my psyche. It's not though...and that's what worries me. Is this what my friends think? I'm too scared to ask them...

Perhaps it's my representation of P as a person to them that is the issue. I don't vocalise my whinging often, but when I do it's like a torrent of slurry that pours over my tongue with a particularly bitter aftertaste (much like the wine is leaving now). Its also a very unfair representation of him as a person.

But when your hard ass boss offers you a room to move into if things get too hard, well, I look back at the conversation and wonder when she got the impression that I need that level of care?

Oh well. Perhaps I should accept that I have special needs. I am very thankful that someone cares enough to look out for me. But I'll be honest and say that it's left my platform of self image somewhat rocking.

GD: drinking red wine + wrapped up in a cream blanket = bad combination. Listening to Elvis Costello. Waiting anxiously for news from a number of publications that will not doubt line up to say 'NI!'

Randomness

2009-02-24T16:22:00.002Z

No see for a little while. Had trips to Whitby followed by hordes of relatives coming to stay so have been somewhat overwhelmed. Work is also a little mental with the joy of the financial year end coming.

So no coherence, just some thoughts:

My dishwasher was on fire. I now need a new circuit board and it's hideously expensive. Yay for shitty workmanship!
Beer is bad. I spent three days drunk at the weekend. I sang in public. I did disco karaoke. Nuff said
I'm having a midlife crisis, it's official. I joined a book club, which apparently only women in search of men or an affair do. Hmmmm....
People are idiots. Especially the posh twats on Tynemouth beach who insist my dog must be in heat when she tries to tear the throat out of the idiotic male dog that keeps trying to shag her. She's been spayed. I think they need an anatomy lesson.
I learnt that teenage boys can actually be quite nice creatures at the weekend. Teenage girls however are extremely high maintenance. Two baths a day?! And they only eat cheese and chocolate and leave a trail of sweet wrappers in every room.
The sun is shining. Time to hibernate for the summer.
Whitby is still gorgeous, even though I was allergic to the cottage (cats had been staying prior to us). And if you do your best puss in boots impression, the pub landlords will let you in even with a big stinking lump of dog. However, the locals aren't happy when you disturb their Countdown viewing with the Rolling Stones and Iron Maiden. They retaliate with Britney and Lady GaGa. JukeBox FaceOff commences!
Note to self: do not buy DVDs from strange men in Whitby pubs that have heads and a strange 1980's fuzziness to them. Especially when said man is later spied wielding large knives in the local Chinese take away...

That's it. That's my life. Not very exciting is it?!

GD is: awaiting the full horror of the cost of fixing her electrics to come through; engulfed in a fury of spring cleaning but unfortunately breaking everything she touches, reading Twilight by Stephanie Myers, as it was given to her by the aforementioned teenage boy as a thank you, and a bit unsure as to how I feel about it. Oh, and listening to Guns and Roses' Appetite for Destruction because she loves Mr Brownstone.

There's an eel in ma garden, what am a gonna do..

2009-02-03T10:59:00.005Z

OK. Given the last post you'd think my close encounters with the rubbery species were a one off. Oh no. Another overnight storm, another eel in the garden, specifically this one:

But the worst thing? The poor little bugger was still alive, despite being dragged out of the waves, caught up in the winds and then dumped in my garden on the shale just in time to be inspected as a tempting doggy snack. Thankfully Miss Sally was under close supervision (she currently thinks the clematis stems are breakfast and is biting them all off a the bottom. The cow.) so I caught her before she could do anymore damage.

So I chucks it in a bucket of water and it comes back to life, it's hideous maw opening wide and giving me nightmares that will continue to haunt me for decades. Dog lead in one hand, jug on the other I sprinted for the sea, specifically the shale beach just across the road. Of course the tide was coming in, but in long shallow runs rather than deep pools. I didn't want to throw the critter in just to get damaged on the shale so I made a run for the deeper part of the sea when the flow went out.

The inevitable happened. I went arse over tit and ended up plonked ungraciously on my butt as the sea swirled around me in all it's Arctic glory. The dog was thinking it was a great game and throwing herself on top of me, I couldn't stand up or even think coherently for laughing. And then I saw I had an audience of rather gobsmacked dog walkers ringing the top of the walkway down to the beach...

Naturally I was wearing jeans. Squelching home I must have looked a complete loon because I couldn't stop laughing. Ain't hysteria great?

But at least I let it go, even if the poor thing dies ten minutes later. I did my best.

GD is: on the settee in her jimjams warming her butt up under several blankets; reading lots but finding very little satisfying after finishing David Mitchell's wonderful Black Swan Green; listening to Radio 2 which is currently playing the dreadful Madge yowl. I could flick the switch and change the station but I'm just too damn comfortable..

Bizarre things in life...

2009-01-19T16:05:00.006Z

Would someone like to tell me how I found my delightful mutt sat in the backyard inspecting a dead eel that she was obviously about to consume for breakfast? As my backyarden is surrounded by ten foot high brick walls I was a little surprised as I wrestled the hideous object from the jaws of steel. It looked like this but with flaking skin where it was rotting away...

How did an eel get in there? Enquiring minds wanna know...

GD: thinking about torture and mind control; channeling my inner Shirley Manson through excessive YouTubing of Garbage videos; highly frustrated because the sodding Java plug ins that Firefox needs won't load properly and I can't work out why and I have no patience so I'm losing my temper. So I've deflected to delightful buggy old Explorer. Oh, and the weather outside is grotty, and I think I have a friend crush on the boy in Costa coffee house along the road. I just want to pet him.

Family Ties

2009-01-13T15:36:00.006Z

My brother is great. He's funny, successful, generous and hugely likable. It took me at least 21 years to actually realise this (or at least admit the possibility that we may be related. There are six years between us, after all). He is also exceptionally driven, ruthless when he considers it necessary and never puts off today what he could tomorrow. No, he's a grafter who starts things and then finishes them. In short, he's nothing like me.

Sibling differences aside, we do have some similarities. We don't suffer fools, we enjoy good times (wine and live music we have in common, plus art but he has the cash to indulge in his artistic tastes, whereas I have downloads!). Plus we are both very careful of what we say to our mother!

I have no desire to be like him or emulate his lifestyle; the same goes for him, yet we both recognise that we enjoy our respective lives immensely and we can take pleasure in what the other has achieved. Despite this, parental forces claim that we're jealous of one another...which leaves me somewhat astounded. My brother has had great economic successful, a wonderful house in a wonderful estate (mortgage paid), and won Welsh Manager of the Year (I'm not kidding...!). He has a fabulous daughter. He also works like a Trojan and has a highly stressful, non secure job, which involves making people redundant on a regular basis, something that bothers him very much. In short, he's successful because he works like a dog and does the crappy jobs.

I, on the other hand, don't work like a dog. I'm lazy. I have a nice, part time lifestyle with time to indulge in my hobbies which suits me nicely. I like my house even if my mortgage isn't paid off and likely never will. I really haven't maximised my potential earnings by ramping up my hours because I get so stressed that I think I may pop. Literally. I have no desire to take up the thankless task of managing my fellow human beings with their little hidden agendas and petty arguments.

However, I'm doing my best to be more like him this month. Hence opportunity no. 2. Submission no 2 is ready to go, all bar a summary about me and the posting. People ain't going to come to me if I don't give it my best first. I can dream about a three book publishing deal, but if I don't actually write something of publishable quality AND take the time to submit it properly (which is harder than it may seem at first) when opportunities arise then I have no right to whine about being an undiscovered genius.

So I'm currently doing the truffle shuffle bum dance on the envelope for luck (ask my friends...) and sending off my wing and a prayer...

GD: dreaming the impossible dream; thinking her editing is getting better because she's getting more self critical; listening to Garbage and worshipping at the altar of Shirley (Manson); reading Moab is my Washpot by Stephen Fry, which is great. Who knew he was a tea leaf?!

One down, one to go...

2009-01-05T11:18:00.003Z

So its starts. I had to make a start somewhere I suppose. I can't just be content with P getting my dissertation bound into a book for me to give to peeps (a lovely gift, and one that forces me to finish the book because those same peeps are now all demanding to know what happens next...).

I didn't make any resolutions this year - it seemed rather pointless given I don't know where the hell I'm going right now, or where I'll be in a year. However, I can dither over things for the rest of my life of take a chance. So chance 1 of January 2009 has now been completed and is awaiting just me to leave the house and shove it in the post box. Short story comp + mslexia magazine + £8 = a probable confirmation of the fact I'm a crappy short story writer but what the hell! I sent it anyway.

Chance 2 of January 2009 is a bit more substantial, in that it's another submission with prizes, but it's the start of the aforementioned novel which I want to tweak in line with initial reader feedback. It's tricky because the first chapter is either loved by readers or hated, there's no in between and it does have a different tone to the rest so I'm unsure as to whether it stays or goes....

Hmmm...forgive my rambling. I'm just trying to orchestrate my thoughts and get my fingers going, which is quite difficult these days. Perhaps its the switch of laptop. Perhaps it's habitual laziness! Eeeeh well, whatever. New year, new challenges and all that. Have to think two years ahead for when job contract ends. Wouldn't it be nice to have actually published something?!

GD: listening to Bon Jovi (naff is great sometimes!), having a closet clearance and getting rid of anything that makes me feel dowdy or fat regardless of it's social history, anticipating Saturday when we're promising ourselves a Grand Day Out.

If I were a flower growing wild and free...

2009-01-04T12:20:00.011Z

...all I'd want is you to be my sweet honey bee..

From the best film and the best soundtrack of 2008, Juno has etched its way into my cultural desert along with the best of them (Little Miss Sunshine, American Beauty) as a duvet day film classic. I'm having a bit of a splurge on duvet days at the moment, which is somewhat indulgent. Although my reasoning is that if I venture outside the confines of my living room I will infect the nation with the bloody awful chest infection I picked up somewhere (lord knows where - public transport, hospital visits, nursing home bacteria...).

So it's probably time to write off 2008 and say Hola! to 2009, which in all fairness would have to go some to be as crap as last year (I shouldn't say that...tempting fate and all). So here's my hastily cobbled together Hi's and lows, joys and terrors etc for my delection:

Woman of the Year: Duffy
Peerless. Beautiful. Elegant. Talented. A dead ringer for Stifler's Mom (albeit twenty years younger). For writing Distant Dreamer (favourite song of 2008). She may seem an odd choice for someone who usually loves goth / rock, but I love Rockferry, and saw her live at the Academy last month where she was without doubt the best female singer I've ever seen. She owned that little podium. And my husband's heart in her hands for the whole 90 minutes, but hey! I'll overlook that fact...
Honorable mention: Britney, for clawing herself almost back together but still being endearingly partially splattered; Katy Perry, for the zebra, and Hot n' Cold, which I absolutely adore to kitchen dance to (along with, inevitably, Womanizer...) Yes, I really embraced my pop tart side this year.

Man of the year: Undecided
Men haven't impressed me much this year. I could be obvious and go for Barack, but 101 thousand other bloggers will. I could be banal and go for Eric Bana, but The Other Boleyn Girl was absolute trash. David Tennant's abandoned the Doctor for higher planes. Richard Armitage is a tad too thin in Spooks. In fact, I think I'll plump for my undisputed weird crush of the year, Michael C Hall, aka Dexter Morgan, aka David in Six Feet Under (aka DVD box sets of the year times 5). He's slimy, he's ginger (though I admit that's pot calling kettle black), he's either a raging gay love machine or murdering pyscho and boy do I find him hot....

Event of the year: drinking £35 bottles of wine in Mal Maison on Newcastle Quayside, December 2008
I have to thank my brother for this. We needed somewhere warm to hole up on a very cold afternoon which had started in the Hilton (where Bro & GF were staying) eating all the salmon sandwiches in the hospitality lounge, and the Mal is a homage to gothic decadence. I adore it. I could live there, with it's subdued lighting, thrones and purple velvet furnishing. It's pure heaven, albeit at a heavy price. Bro started it, he ordered the wine which was a beautiful South African red, that just flowed down like water. We continued it, ordering a second though I did see Bro wince slightly (we didn't know how much it was because he wouldn't tell us until we wrestled the bill out of his sticky little mitts to give him some money). Then we got loud and leery in a very posh space, singing AC/DC songs. Oh, and that line in SOAD that goes 'My cock is much bigger than yours...'. Probably the best afternoon I had all year. And the most expensive!

Honorable runner up: Whitby Goth Festival, October 2008. Would have won, if it hadn't been for the excessive bitching on the WGW Forum beforehand which tainted the air somewhat, and the even more excessive posing and constriction of gothic terms of reference. Next year we'll just do the pubs. And Edinburgh (Feb 08) was pretty damn good too.

Film of the Year: Juno, which I already mentioned...!
That's this afternoon's DVD. I also loved Batman: The Dark Knight, Hellboy 2, Wall-E. But I really didn't like Indiana Jones or Iron Man. Indy was just...limp, and Iron Man pushed even my love of comic book movies that bit too far. Haven't seen Quantum of Solace yet (shameful). However, I have spent a great deal of time wallowing in 80's brat pack movies - Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, St Elmo's Fire, and the peerless Lost Boys. I've also been trying to source Pump Up the Volume (Christian Slater film, when he was still fit) on region 2 DVD and it's very, very hard to get hold of...

Can I also say I am very pleased to be one of the 2% of women in the UK to have not seen either Sex in the City or Mama Mia?

Music: Soundtracks all the way..
Juno, Deathproof (Chick Habit by April March is just AWESOME!), Hedwig and the Angry Inch. I loves a good singalong, and these have provided great pleasures previously unknown. Also loving Trivium, which has filled that sad vacant hole in my soul that System left (though they'd benefit from the mad Ukrainian harmonies). Other than that I've been a bit lacklustre with music. Sorry!

Crappest event: OMG CREDIT CRUNCH!!!
Will ya all stop going on about it, already? We can't do right for doing wrong - pay of yer debts and the government howl because you ain't putting money into the economy. Well, bog off Gorden, thanks to the interest rate cuts I can now afford to pay back some capital off my mortgage and reduce my liabilities, so that's what I'm doing. Sod spending on my credit cards (paid off). Sod buying that new settee (the dog sleeps on it so it would smell). My purse is buttoned up and the high street a faint siren call. I'm not buying, I'm reducing, and loving every penny of it..

Additional trials: P's mum being so ill, obviously. Marriage woes, hopefully settled but here's watching 2009...

Can't be bothered to do books. I enjoyed The Color Purple, Watchmen, but nothing else really excited me. Pah.

Happy 2009 everyone!

GD is: on the settee with a stinking dog, trying not to let the fire go out, listening to BBC 6 Music, reading the Sunday Times and attempting to learn how to age proof my face...

Death Watch Beetle

2008-12-19T21:43:00.006Z

The death watch beetle can be heard by those lying sleepless at night wondering about the sound of death. It taps or ticks, and is named for the vigil kept beside the dying or dead, and by extension the superstitious who have seen the death watch as an omen of impending death.

I am a death watch beetle. I keep watch by the side of one who is about to pass on.

It is with some trepidation that I write this, because I know how much this subject hurts the person closest to me.

But it plays on my mind. I can't stop my thoughts, and my thoughts ask if you would seek peace or torment?

Would you choose to be imprisoned in a decaying unresponsive shell?

Would you choose to be a rag doll dependent on others for all your bodily needs?

I will sing to you until you stop. I will give you my voice until it breaks. But I cannot truly believe that the God that you believe in would wish you to end your days this way. A prisoner of your own soul. A frail vessel that disintegrates whilst those about you can only try to do what is right by them.

I do love you. But this is breaking my heart, and his soul.

Graduation

2008-12-12T16:07:00.004Z

I had a fab day. I also got a bit hammered and hugged the world and it's mother. My maiden Aunty Elsie (76 and never dallied...) was shocked at my apparently outrageous flirting! Saying as the hugs were indiscriminately being sown (my classmates, my lecturers, my husband, my aunty herself, the Big Issue seller on Grey Street, the nice boy in Fenwicks who sold me Laptop Ares at a vastly inflated price whilst I was inebriated...) I suspect it was more a case of hug diarrhea than any serious attempt at flirting. Anyway when I flirt, I flirt like a house brick.

Class of 2008: I'm the gormless redhead on the left, next to Louise, David and Andrew (who won a prize, the Git!)

GD is: listening to the plumber destroying the bathroom, Marilyn Manson's Mechanical Animals, and enjoying an illicit afternoon off work. Also about to drink red wine, eat chocolate and attempt to put the Christmas tree up. And make a start at rebuilding my I Tunes library, as I don't download, I import from CD. I'm old fashioned like that...

Death of Zeus

2008-12-09T12:49:00.003Z

You're probably thinking who the hell was Zeus (apart from the fact he was the head of the Greek gods, obviously...). Well, Zeus was my laptop for the past four years. Solid, dependable, honest and hardworking, he never flickered as the repository for all of the crappy story writing and dodgy web surfing that I carried out on his uncomplaining shoulders.

But Zeus is no more. I killed Zeus. And it damn near broke my heart. Now I treat my electronic objects with respect. I name them. I never treat them rough and I always read the manuals. And it all started with a late finish at work and a very bored dog...

Came home several hours late. Found laptop power cable had been eaten (thank the pantheon it hadn't been switched on). Very guilty looking puppy sat in a mess of plastic bits and toilet roll (she'd rampaged in the bathroom as well as the study). So order new a/c, you'd think it be easy as Zeus was Dell born so rather ubiquitous...

Oh no. Not so easy, so I borrowed the power cable from my friends almost identical Dell laptop. Plugged in my baby and POOF! Zeus no more...sad little warning lights twinkled and faded and he died a sad and dignified death by electrocution at my very own hands...

So farewell Zeus, my well configured boy. My tooled up and switched on baby, holder of four years of stories, photos and knocked off software.

So to how to replace Zeus...well I now have Ares, a young upstart with pretensions of grandeur. Like not giving me administrator rights to allow me to install free anti-viral, anti spybot etc software. No Microsoft office (they'll give you a 'free' trial if you sign your life and your laptop's integrity away to them so THEY can spy on your every action). We'll see how he settles into the family. But wish I'd bought the right a/c and just waited a little longer for delivery. Or bought an I-Mac instead of Ares.

GD is: foaming, irritated and burning a very short fuse; having to socialise tonight at a restaurant I don't like (everyone's fingers are in everyone else's dishes - EURGH! Germs). Listening to Siobhan Donaughy's Ghosts which is quite lovely but very Natalie Imbrulia; reading Alan Moore's Watchmen, The Colour Purple (which was on the shelf for about ten years before I finally picked it up) and Eleanor of Aquitaine by Alison Weir. Not much then...

Hodge Podge

2008-12-01T15:58:00.003Z

Life's a bit of a mixed basket at the moment. There's a few ripe cherries (notably the Saw Doctors last Friday, complete with a bit of dancing in the aisles and pints in the Bodega afterwards) and a few sour plums. The sour plum knows very well what and who it is and is currently attempting to make recompense for it's transgressions....we shall see how it fairs. I really don't like people taking the piss, so the plum had better learn it's lesson or find itself squelched beneath the boot heel of doom.

I graduate my Master in Creative Writing next Monday with commendation (I may have mentioned that before....big head? Moi?!), have bought fabulous if slightly frivolous frock for the occasion. Not that I need an excuse for frock buying. I'm looking into sponsored PhD's - I can't afford to pay for myself any more, what with spiralling costs. P's MSc is £1,800 this year, £200 more than last year which is shocking as he doesn't get formal teaching, only dissertation guidance three times a semester.

So life just...trundles on. Despite my inherent solipsism I haven't even got the bones of a decent post to stick here, only a recounting of the passing of my days in a haze of mediocrity and cold bones.

Oh, I did have a message on the answerphone the other day that made me shudder in abject horror. The Father (ten stone weakling, in 70's) has a girlfriend (twenty two stone, 60's). Not a pretty picture is it? Especially as GirlFriend has a new phone that OldGoat can't work, so left a message hollering 'Where are you? You're never bloody in!'...then failed to hang up, upon which a conversation ensued regarding GF's new phone. 'Fit's in yer hand nicely,' spouts Dad, 'Bit like me dick...'....NO NO NO NO NO!!!! NO and NO!!!!!

I'm having lunch with them tomorrow. HTF am I meant to keep a straight face...?

GD: freezing her hypothetical nads off, listening to QOTSA, ordering inappropriate presents for work colleagues (damn that Secret Santa! Damn him! This year's recipient is getting a Jew's Harp, otherwise known as a Khomus amongst other things)

Slightly Off Target

2008-11-10T16:36:00.003Z

I'm having a small, unexpected hiatus. Nothing wrong, just a lack of time through various activities. Needless to say Whitby was fabulous, cold, full of beautiful people, I ate too much and didn't get enough sleep. The crepes with vanilla ice cream were particularly well received. As was being almost run over Voltaire's luggage in the Spa on Saturday afternoon where he and me were lurking with a pint. Oh! And there were pirates and wood nymphs and men wearing nothing but boots and grey body paint...

I did discover that I'm not as goth as I thought I was. It appears to be developing into a very pure brand of Victoriana, with the odd deviation such as loli and the T-Girls. I'm not really any of them so I felt a bit odd. Which in itself is...odd!

Anyway, brief list because sorrow is on my mind: the five songs that make my gut physically clench in pain:

Unintended by Muse
Damaged People by Depeche Mode
If I don't see you again by Neil Diamond
Hurt, the Johnny Cash version
And we have a new entry....Wire to Wire by Razorlight, a band I usually dislike intensely. Which came as a bit of a shock when this song first played on the radio.

Honorable mentions to Cannonball by Damien Rice and St Patrick's Day by Oh Susanna.

GD: grieving her lost Bob, her Gringo and her little critter that came from the sea. I love you Bob. Wherever you are.

Whitby Goth Weekend

2008-10-29T11:30:00.004Z

Me, somewhat drunk and collapsed!

I'm shooting off to Whitby soon, for the Oct / Nov Goth Festival...I'm very excited, if a little overawed by the sheer sumptuousness of my fellow attendees outfits / preparations. I'm obviously 'modest goth', should I need to pick a category to plonk myself into. I have three frocks, two pairs of boots and two coats...I appear to be somewhat under prepared to my female counterparts currently waxing lyrical on the WGW forum!

Still, it is nice to be going somewhere where difference is celebrated and much beer is consumed. For a taster of the weekend ahead I've been watching YouTube. Don't like putting the full thing in my blog, but the Culture Show article is worth a watch (six mins long, but captures it perfectly):

Whitby Goths

There was another vid that appears to be 101 things to do with a rose when surrounded by goths...

WGW - Roses Bring Sunshine

And my personal fav, five goths in a tent - a song / photo homage to the event...somewhat tongue in cheek...

Anyhooo...have a good weekend all, I will no doubt be in some pretty states (particularly Friday when we celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary!).

GD: battling a red wine hangover, watching bizarre stuff on YouTube, ON HOLIDAY YAY!!!! and playing at loud decibels The Sisters of Mercy. Particularly Temple of Love.

Caught on a wing and a prayer

2008-10-21T11:53:00.004Z

Introspection isn't really a very useful life pastime. It tends to raise issues with one's self that one really doesn't wish to deal with, change, develops angry tendencies over or just cups their head in their tender (and very cold) hands with a fervent wish for it all to change.

This post isn't about that. It's about the fact that sometimes being a narcissistic blogger and pouring forth all of the festering rot that hides within your core has a value. It has a use. Whilst I appreciate the blogs of others and their views it has a far more basic construct for me than just reaching out to an audience - it allows me to gesticulate wildy in word in a way I am unable to in the *real* world for fear of alienating all those around me.

More, it has given these frozen digits a purpose. A voice. I think of this now because I was going over the archives of my previous blogs (now offline, Breaking the Angel & Spitting Blood). It is notable how they developed the more I wrote.

That's not to say that what I write now is of any purpose or delicacy of form. What I am saying is some of the early entries were excruciating to behold. I cringe when reading some of the past drivel from BTA. By the time I abandoned the vindictive outpourings that characterized the end of said blog, I'd marginally improved but I suspect that was because the writing was informed by rage and pain at the events taking place in my life at that time.

At least I could vent, and Lo! Spitting Blood came into being. It's colourful recounting of my visit to the STD clinic being one of my personal highlights, closely followed by my deconstruction of the *values* of the Chicken Factory I worked in at that time (a metaphorical chicken factory, I should add). It brought home how I felt to the person closest to me who had to stop reading it because of the level of pain expressed within it.

Then we come to The Repository. I don't know what the future holds, but I do know that I'm often diverted from blogging by giving the girls in my head an outlet to run free and confront the misery of their own personal circumstances (creative writing, folks, I haven't gone barking mad). I think it has informed the fact that these girls express themselves generally in the first person, and that there is so much of myself pouring into Caitlin at the moment that it's a little freaky (she being the she about who my novel is about).

Confused? Try being in my head. Blogging has it's detractors. But for me it gave me a voice when I obviously needed one, albeit a somewhat rusty and awkward squeak. And people. And friends. And it's made me edit myself more thoroughly (is this she, he or it, or could it actually be me? Did I really think that? Am I really such a vindictive bitch?!). So I got wings. And I got caught. But it ain't a bad place to be.

GD: really overly excited about Whitby Goth Festival next week, dreaming of chips, listening to the Mission (UK), amending the short story 'The Moon and Selene' for submission to the Big Girl's Magazine listed in the side bar (Myslexia - EEK! No chance, but if I don't try I won't know...!) and five inches taller in her new goth boots - WAAAYHEEEEY

After the euphoria strikes the crash

2008-10-14T14:51:00.004Z

Reality. Good, ain't it?

Trips you up real good and proper just when the light begins to emerge. Oh, that's not to say things are bad. They're not, just indifferent and bubbling under with future grief.

You can see situations forming but you can be left powerless to do anything. Then there are the problems that you could do something about but choose not to because the person involved caused you great harm in the past. Blood is thicker than water, and I wouldn't ignore an outright plea for help. But if I offer myself on a plate right now I'll get swallow and drained to the very marrow.

So I hold off emotional involvement. At least that's what I tell myself but truthfully it's all bollocks because you can't help not be emotionally involved when this person is so closely related. I can't decide if I just can't be bothered to help, or if their grasping and naked need actually freaks me out so much it causes inaction.

We'll see this weekend when I take steps to address it. It's awful to describe a person as a problem, but they made their bed an awfully long time ago with a seriously deleterious effect on my life and subsequent choices. They had a choice: I did not. They chose to blow it.

GD is: frustrated, slightly sophoric after the osteopath, smelling somehow of patchouli and not knowing how, wishing she was alpha-pretty, wasting time

Smug Mode

2008-10-03T16:27:00.005Z

Your little Ginger Doll has been neither use nor ornament this past day. She's been very happy however, basking some would say, in the glory of achieving her MA in Creative Writing and for a pretty nifty mark for her dissertation. And she got a merit overall!!! Go ME!!!

I've just released the first installment of 'Playing the Angel' to my unsuspecting work colleagues. In fact, to my Chief Executive. Now given that it is somewhat blasphemous and peppered with rather sarcastic observations about...well everything...it shall be interesting to see if I have a job next Wednesday!

Oh well! Eccentricity is a bonus as far as I'm concerned.

And NOW I'm off to allow myself a celebratory glass of gin and tonic.

Chin Chin my friends!

GD is: hyper, happy, pursued by wild dogs (they haven't been fed since breakfast...), probably unemployed and yodelling 'Broken Boy Soldiers' along with the divine Mr Jack White.

Wanting

2008-09-29T16:04:00.003Z

Kate,

I'm wanting you to know I know
I'm wanting you to know that I'm sorry
I'm wanting to contact you to say that sorry
I'm wanting it not to be so late in the game that my apology would be meaningless to you
But I'm also wanting to know why?
I want to understand, get me. I don't condemn you, it's your choice and you have the right to develop however you want
You have the right to want to be different
You have the right to change yourself to become the mirror image you want to see
I guess I want to know if it's my fault, which is basically a very selfish reason for thinking about you so much after this time
But, such a fundamental change...I can't let it go. I want to understand why.
I want to understand how, and the fascination for it revives my interest in you which again, I'm a little ashamed of.
I'm wondering where you've gone and I want to know if you've come back to your roots. Will it be easier for you here? Will your family accept you, now you are longer Jeff?
I have no right to want. I gave that up many years ago when I hurt you so pointlessly. I'd like to think that if I'd known what was truly going on in your head that I would have treated you better, not been such a bitch. In truth, I know that I would have acted the same way - seventeen makes for shallowness that only bitter experience can cure
I don't love you. But I do wish you well. And I want you to know that, sweetheart. I want you to know that you'll always be intrinsically good, no matter what skin you wear. I want you to know that you're a wonderful person who has had probably one of the most tragic lives I have ever known.
I just want you to know I'm forever sorry. And I wish you well.

Jane.

SCREAM****

2008-09-22T15:01:00.002Z

I'm bed ridden and furious.

That's all I wanted to say, really.

GD has: a spastic rib (literally, it's in spasm); in bed yet freezing cold; trying to type whilst lying flat, which ain't no picnic; banned from working, reading (what?!), watching any television, standing upright for any length of time; totally skint so can't even waste money on Amazon and very, very grumpy about it all. OH! But I am allowed to eat so I'm turning into a cheese and crumpet monster.

Gimme More?

2008-09-12T13:56:00.001Z

I’m a little subdued at the moment. There’s a kind or reversible envy going on in my household: he’s back at uni and I’m not. He hates uni and I’m crying out for educational stimulation. You’d think that less than a month after submitting my final dissertation I’d be enjoying the break: far from it. I’m pining. Pining for academia.

Being somewhat of a solipsist I have examined my feelings towards. This. It stems from early failure – I was the first person in my family to attend university, ergo I was also the first person to be thrown out on my ear at the end of year 2. The fact I did have a spectacularly wild and abandoned second year (lived at home year 1, moved out year 2) cut no mustard with the family: I was deemed an academic failure. Worse, I had wasted good opportunities to better our social standing.

The day I told the Mother I recall sitting on the local playing field with my good friend Helen who found the whole situation very amusing (she’s knows my mother very well: angry little squaw being an appropriate description of her). I sunk a quarter bottle of vodka (the cause of my downfall that year) on that field before breaking the news and letting the wrath of the disappointed smash me into thousands of tiny pieces.

My transgression was never forgotten. I have always been a failure, defined by teenage excess. No matter what my latter achievements have been I cannot be allowed to forget I bombed out (and had my head stapled to boot).

Thus I’ve become stuck in a cycle of defining my worth by education. I worked through an HNC (two years of an undergraduate degree), four years of a different degree, then took a full time masters. Didn’t seem enough, so when I started working again I took my second part time masters over two years, duly completed last month. Now I’m hankering after a PhD. Don’t know what in, can’t afford it but still…

Perhaps I need a new definiter (does that word exist…I don’t think so!). But then I look at what I have – a job that I adore three days a week that gives me the leisure to indulge in creativity and writing. I give money to people and get paid for the pleasure. I help people on a daily basis to make their lives and communities just that little bit better, that bit more supportive. I don’t get paid a huge amount, but what I get reflects the fact that I am a professional who works for a charity. I certainly don’t care about earning more, and I realise that’s quite a rare gift.

I’m not materialistic (unless it comes in book form). I don’t need objects to make me happy. I’ve been scraped along the bottom of the barrel in my personal life, usually by those I love the most, but I’ve come out smiling and with my backbone reinforced.

So why the emptiness? Why the longing to be on campus, mooching about the library and drinking tea on the lawns? Sigh…I’ve actually started to read philosophy text books when commuting…who, why, what? Hard questions for an atheist.

GD is: peevish. Spending too much time on the Whitby Goth Forum. Searching desperately for the one bit of paper with the name and number of the one person she desperately needs to call which has of course disappeared into the ether; balancing the textbooks with Dexter volume 2; listening to 30 Seconds to Mars cover of Kayne West’s Stronger which is surprisingly good; now onto the fifth and final series of Six Feet Under – hurray / boo…

Loving Russell Brand

2008-09-09T11:39:00.004Z

Normally I don't. Nor do I love MTV. However, I do love Russell just a little bit more following his MTV 'outburst'...

Russell Brand says it like it is

In other news GD is: headachy, whingy, waiting for the telecom engineer to switch the TV back on, listening to Clannad of all things, wondering quite how she's managed to overspend quite so much this month, and thinking she really ought to be doing something creative but all she wants to do is eat. Oh, and don't forget the new boot lovin'...

Identity Crisis

2008-08-28T13:23:00.001Z

How do we define ourselves? We could be in a certain state of mind that generates how we see our situation at that particular point. For example, which of the following is true?

Well employed with a skilled job that gives me the freedom and flexibility to be who I wish to be or a trapped, bored corporate whore?
Outgoing, friendly and helpful to those who approach, or hiding a ‘Burn Everything’ mentality?
Lucky to live in a land of plenty where I am rich enough to live comfortably, or a fat, grossly self-indulgent bucket of lard?
Highly educated and seeking further enlightenment through study, or hiding from responsibility behind academia?
The proud owner of a lovely seaside house that keeps me warm and nurtures me, or trapped into a cycle of mortgage repayments and negative equity?
Tinged with a first world country healthy glow and the benefits of the National Health Service, or a neurotic, self deluded harpy…

You see where I’m going with this? Incidentally the answer is yes to everything.

GD is: at work; perspiring; extremely anti-social; wondering what to do now this stage of my formal education has ended; suffering from a week without television; watching too many DVD box sets (Dexter, Heros 1 &2, Six Feet Under, which I’m loving) and having a Tarantino Fest

Circularity

2008-08-17T13:07:00.005Z

This is a peculiar phase in my life. Certain places, times and people are coming full circle in my life to a natural close. Some of it is desperately sad. Most of it doesn’t even affect me directly. The effect it has on my psyche is an entirely different matter.

Throughout our lives we build unconscious bonds with places that come to hold great significance at key parts of our lives. One such place is my friend Tish’s childhood home. It still is her home in many ways, despite her having not resided there for any significant period of time for the past eighteen years.

Tish in TX Maxx. Yes, the bright orange PVC was only being modelled for fun....shame you can't see the gigantic crotch hole that made it even more special...

It’s a nondescript 1960’s semi detached house on a pleasant, family orientated estate. It’s right next to our old infant / junior school, with the swathes of grass and gorse bushes that marked our childhood boundaries now replaced by ten foot metal prison fences and uniformly flat lawn. My old classroom has been demolished: Tish’s bedroom overlooks where it used to stand.

At this house I first got drunk and paraded about in silver tights, I first wielded a whip (don’t ask…!), I watched Tish high karate kick her bedroom wall when her heated rollers wouldn’t work, and in this room we would always return following a hectic night out rock clubbing, to fall into camp beds her dad had set up for us, complete with hot water bottles to keep us warm. I would change here from the parentally approved demure long skirts into far smaller creations, whilst I constructed elaboratly linked drinking straws to allow us to drink from the same two litre bottle of cider on the back of the bus to town. And one memorable night my dear friends managed to turn my face green and I learned all about crabs (the sexual disease kind)…

Tish’s dad is very frail and the house has to go. We stayed there again recently, just the two of us, drinking wine, eating chocolate and discussing the incontinence of age. Looking at pictures of us twenty years ago (my god I had bad hair: on one photo I look like Princess Anne) was a sharp reminder of how far we’ve come. We listened to Nightowls, a regional radio programme that was the required listening when we were kids, if only to see which of our friends was ringing up to confess to an illicit crush or illegitimate baby.

So I say goodbye to something that has been a vast reference point in my life. Farewell to old memories. I need to move on. Stop drifting.

...........Sigh..........

GD: listening to the Bunnymen live on Last.fm; finishing my university portfolio two weeks ahead of schedule (no, I can't believe it either - there's just the final edit and presentation to complete). Contemplating the pleasures of my new bathroom which is currently being installed (thank the lady gods I have two toilets as the bathroom's been out of bounds for four days). Being nibbled by a very bored and farting dog.

Ineffectual Flailing

2008-08-13T09:04:00.003Z

Will someone please give me a solid kick up the arse and tell me to stop time wasting?

Please?!

GD is: Procrastinating, expanding, eating waaaaaaaaaay to much sugar, not wanting to get off her ass and go to work / complete her dissertation / be productive and smiley. Listening to Kate Bush. Watching way to many Olympic fringe events. Since when did I like synchronised diving and clay pigeon shooting so much?

Night Before The Morning After

2008-08-07T17:47:00.003Z

That's a completely stupid post title. It has no relevance. The whole point, it was a line in a song that just played in the background as I was sat here in a crippling ennui of writers' block. Seems to have achieved it's objective, at least I'm typing now, even if my head is just going about in concentric rings. Fact is, it's been so long since the last night before the morning after I have no idea what it's like anymore to experience that fizzy sensation of starting a night all dolled up with many places to go and many pigs to snog.

It was supposed to happen last week. Was supposed to be the Mayfair Rock night reunion (yes, yes, reunions are sad and pathetic. But this one would have been special. Mr Claypole. Mr Rock. Pigs of the Mayfair. Torpedo Tits and Tiara (who had wheels. I really wanted to see if she still had wheels)). Should have known it wouldn't happen. Truth be told, I'm not quite sure why we didn't go. Think it goes back to the aforementioned ennui.

So no dolling up, no red lipstick and false nails revisited, just a sofa retreat with a Heroes box set (yes, I am the only person on the planet who hasn't watched the entire first series of Heroes, though I'm up to number 17 now, so will soon be a normal, functional member of the human race again). Gin and Tonic. A few desultory texts amongst friends also supposed to be Mayfair Revisited who'd also hidden in the sanctuary of their sofas. We did raise a glass to the Queen Mother (Chin! Chin! God rest her soul!). But it doesn't really make up for missing a hard night boogying on down to Nirvana, NIN, GnR, Irom Maiden and the obligatory Sabbath (usually Paranoid. Never changed).

So life is sucky right now. Work is stressful (but I wouldn't be anywhere else for all the Russian rubles in the world). I have absolutely no clue what to do with the parent who appears to be developing dementia and is a real physical danger to himself and others on the roads in his shiny new, hire purchase bought 4x4 (what were the garage thinking, giving a 71 year old man of no income credit?!). He's also a hysterical, often nasty man prone to shouting abuse at people in the street (that's not the onset of dementia, it's the product of a grossly inflated ego. He's always had that!). He's also entertaining, occasionally funny, scared and lonely, despite my occasional thoughts that revolve around removing his head and boiling it.

P's mum has recovered to a certain extent, but there are a myriad of problems still to be dealt with. He's doing amazingly well, given how much strain he's under.

So, fellow bloggers, I need to party. Need to paint myself white and black and purple (giant bruise - yay!). Want to wear fishnets and inappropriately large boots, preferably with pointy toes. Want to wear purple victoriana dresses and decolletage (sassy not slutty). Want to sip long G&Ts with ice and slice, and feel alive again. Feel young again. Feel worthy again.

Instead I sit and adjust my finances for the credit crunch. I charge my retro ladden ipod. I bite my nails and scrape my hair back after removing the grey I found lurking within. I buy industrial strength bosom scaffolding to cope with gravity. I wait for the boy to get back from the hospital, tired and sad, when we'll both put on a smile and make like it's all OK.

GD is: thinking about shoes, college deadlines (thinking, not acting...), visiting the town of her name tomorrow and very foolishly listening to Disintegration by the Cure which is currently on Pictures of You and doing nothing for her humour at all...

Bruises

2008-07-23T22:13:00.004Z

'I had a dream that we were skating, the ice was thin and we were waiting. To fall right in', All About Eve, Pieces of Our Soul

P's mum is in hospital. Not unexpected, but for many reasons frustrating. She's a prisoner in her own soul.

I'm so very weary, but it can't be anything compared to what he's feeling.

GD: lacking sleep, bruised with light drink, worrying about all and sundry...and so very, very frightened by it all.

To my extended family

2008-07-22T15:12:00.004Z

Sigh. Where is one to start? Life has it's highs and lows, and then it has it's strange impasses. This is currently impasse phase. There is nothing bad / unusual / cruel happening to me personally. Instead, life's shittiness has just spread itself against my nearest and dearest and is conspiring to make their lives generally miserable, difficult and often downright unpleasant. For reasons of privacy (theirs, not mine - my life is often a distressingly open book..!) I can't go into the details but if any of them pass by this way, then I'm thinking about you and I'm loving you all very much. Wish I could do more, but right now it feels like my place is to stand helplessly by and hand over the Kleenex when it's appropriate.

For P, because this is very much how you feel and I can give just a little help when you need it:

Dancing In The Dark: Bruce Springfield

I get up in the evening
and I ain't got nothing to say
I come home in the morning
I go to bed feeling the same way
I ain't nothing but tired
Man I'm just tired and bored with myself
Hey there baby, I could use just a little help

You can't start a fire
You can't start a fire without a spark
This gun's for hire
even if we're just dancing in the dark

Message keeps getting clearer
radio's on and I'm moving 'round the place
I check my look in the mirror
I wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face
Man I ain't getting nowhere
I'm just living in a dump like this
There's something happening somewhere
baby I just know that there is

You can't start a fire
you can't start a fire without a spark
This gun's for hire
even if we're just dancing in the dark

You sit around getting older
there's a joke here somewhere and it's on me
I'll shake this world off my shoulders
come on baby this laugh's on me

Stay on the streets of this town
and they'll be carving you up alright
They say you gotta stay hungry
hey baby I'm just about starving tonight
I'm dying for some action
I'm sick of sitting 'round here trying to write this book
I need a love reaction
come on now baby gimme just one look

You can't start a fire sitting 'round crying over a broken heart
This gun's for hire
Even if we're just dancing in the dark
You can't start a fire worrying about your little world falling apart
This gun's for hire
Even if we're just dancing in the dark
Even if we're just dancing in the dark

GD is currently: stubbing her stocking clad toes a great deal, weeping over certain passages in certain emails about the previously unknown affection of someone who killed them self some time ago, thinking that age has definitely got its cold grip into my soul as all the adult orientated rock that I so despised in my youth suddenly speaks with perfect clarity, hence the Brucey lyric above. Oh, and I'm wearing purple which clashes tremendously with my hair but I don't care because it's a pretty dress and I'm feeling the need for decoration.

Swiss Roll Breasts, B'God...

2008-07-06T10:32:00.003Z

I'm all bits and pieces right now. Will concentrate on gluing myself back together with lard, then no doubt normal (if erratic) service will resume. Take care, all.

Drinking the Snot of Summer

2008-06-25T15:24:00.003Z

The post title may sound gross but it's exactly what I'm doing today, and what I have been doing for the past three weeks, leading to a black hole of activity, cognisant thought and an excess of mucus and apathy.

I'm sporting a pair of beautiful black rimmed eyes right now: no, not gothic excess, just as summer paints some people with golden hues, it taints me with decay. I risk an asthma attack every time I walk outside. I am being a morbid drama queen of doom right here and now, but I don't care. I've put on seven pounds in weight in a month purely by not being mobile in my usual way. And now I'm sick of it!

Nine million people in the UK have hay fever to varying degrees. People who have never had it before are developing it now in their fifties and sixties, not childhood as previous, and they're not growing out of it in their forties (bad news for snot bunny here). It's a curious phenomenon yet it is an ailment derided by the working establishment for not being a serious ailment. Well, I can't see properly, look like I've been fighting, am so crabby that I would actually like to have been fighting and I have HFT (Hay fever tension). My lungs are gasping like holey bellows and my nose bleeds frequently. I'm a lovely sight either at work or play...

Given the widespread nature of the disease there is very little support or research happening aimed at finding comprehensive cures. I'm still hankering after the worms (you eat them, they live happily inside you, your immune system turns on them and ignores the pollen) but the husband isn't quite so keen. Gene therapy solutions are a little new and permanent for my liking (just watched I Am Legend, crap film but likely scenario).

Anyway, this little tirade has quite exhausted me. I am now off for my afternoon nap. I feel about 102. Pah...!

GD is: listening to the Juno soundtrack again, lusting after pencil drawings in the Baltic arts centre by Yoshitomo Nara, especially the one that states 'Burn Everything'...

If I don't see you again, it was a hell of ride

2008-06-10T14:33:00.004Z

Genetics by Sinead Morrissey

My father’s in my fingers, but my mother’s in my palms.
I lift them up and look at them with pleasure –
I know my parents made me by my hands.

They may have been repelled to separate lands,
to separate hemispheres, may sleep with other lovers,
but in me they touch where fingers link to palms.

With nothing left of their togetherness but friends
who quarry for their image by a river,
at least I know their marriage by my hands.

I shape a chapel where a steeple stands.
And when I turn it over,
my father’s by my fingers, my mother’s by my palms

demure before a priest reciting psalms.
My body is their marriage register.
I re-enact their wedding with my hands.

So take me with you, take up the skin’s demands
for mirroring in bodies of the future.
I’ll bequeath my fingers, if you bequeath your palms.
We know our parents make us by our hands.

GD is: in a wistful, abstract mood, listening to Neil Diamond's 'Home before Dark', thinking that anyone who likes the above poem should buy the Bloodaxe twin anthologies 'Staying Alive' and 'Being Alive' (from which it is taken), wishing I'd the skill to craft something as beautiful as either 'Genetics' or Mr Diamond's 'If I don't see you again', and being very very avaricious and ordering all five Johnny Cash American Recordings in one go...

Passive Voice

2008-05-29T16:32:00.004Z

"You can put it down to lack of patience
You can put it down to lack of sleep
But it's in my head to stay in bed
Tucked under the sheets"
We're Not Deep, The Housemartins

And there it is. The real problem with this girl is she says she can't when she can (and I'm being very flippant here in line with the Housemartin's LP storming along in the background). Having said that it is true.

I'm being seduced by late spring. By soft grey rainstorms and intermittent sunshine that illuminates my little world when I least expect it. I'm drowning in girliness and realise its a substitute for youth.

I'm planning outings and then actually undertaking them. I'm buying cute dresses (again) like the recession is just a creepy little dream. I'm drinking less but making it count more.

I'm reading, wallowing in high fantasy that stretches across six thick, satisfyingly good tomes (Robin Hobb, for the record). I'm dreaming (nocturnally) of princes who need kissing and the joy of that first touch (not sure if that's such a good thing...).

I'm pulling the brittle cords of the first grey hairs from my head and trying not to admit it scares me. I'm watching other peoples' children and thinking how beautiful they are, whilst trying not to admit how glad I am not to have one as their incessant demands for attention override even the sweetest of curly blond heads.

I'm a little thief. I steal peoples' thoughts and emotions and weave them into the fantasies that fill my days but fail to materialise on paper. The words of others more literate than me sustain me as I wheel flippant fingers on the perfectly formed black wheel of my pretty little needful thing music device.

I wait impatiently for the bulbs that I planted in fallow ground to take root and blossom, and I scrutinise their progress each day with little regard to the slow passing of time. I look at my grey headed father whose mobility is dwindling week on week, and my grey headed angry little mother and I feel the quickening pace of their lives' as they speed towards extreme old age.

I'm scared. Scared most of all by this passive voice that colours my activities. Passivity caused in part by contentment, by relief that I have a period of time where I no longer have to fight. Sometimes adversity forces us to act, without it I become a dumb animal. Or so it seems. What will I regret most in thirty years time I wonder?

Why?

2008-05-06T15:36:00.005Z

I've been asking myself this a lot recently, both in the personal and wider sense of the word.

Personal
Ask me what my dream is and I'll sing you a song that encompasses freedom and self fulfilment that is all tied up in escaping the now. I'll sing of Whitby and wonky houses (if you follow that link you'll see my dream house...), a life spent reveling in the written word, a place and a time where I can step away from the shackles of responsibility and be truly free. I could spend my days elevated above the world in my own little piece of sky and write about love and death and all that passes in between . He could spend his days being a code monkey to his heart's content.

It's his dream too, relocate to the place that speaks to us both of who we really want to be. It's only two hours away by car. It is not the end of the earth. Sure risks would have to be taken, jobs given up, friends to be made. Parents would be further away which would cause concern as all of our siblings has happily shuffled responsibility for their well being to ourselves. But still only two hours away...

What pisses me off so much right now is myself. Y'see, my dream could so easily be reality. There is absolutely nothing standing in the way of it's realisation except fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of risking the comfortable, middle class lifestyle we've built for ourselves. Fear of stepping outside the trap that we have created.

And it is a trap. It's a gilded trap, these four walls. They give the illusion of security all wrapped up in a candy coated shell. There is the ties of a mortgage that we can never hope to pay off. There is the tie of everyone else's disbelief that this isn't enough for us, there is the weight of expectation from the older folk that we stay here evermore (croaked the raven and we all know what happens in that poem...).

So why can't I do it? Why am I not brave enough to say fuck it all, sell the house and move elsewhere? Why can't I fill my days with writing and determination, commitment and self discipline? Why am I such a lazy arse, sat here spreading with middle age acceptance and flatulence, conforming to society's view? When did I become so scared?

Wider World
I've mentioned Whitby. Last weekend was Whitby Goth Festival, at which a bench was dedicated to the memory of Sophie Lancaster. Sophie was a twenty year old goth who was beaten and kicked to death in a park one night as she tried to protect her seriously injured boyfriend when a gang of youths attacked them. The little bastards responsible showed no remorse. The police investigating the case said that their parents found the whole thing funny and laughed during the investigation. This story has really hit a nerve with me. I've been meaning to post about it sooner but found every time I tried I got upset.

I have no right to grieve for a girl who didn't know me. That right goes to her family, in particular her mother who has acted with dignity and humanity, starting a fund in Sophie's name (Stamp Out Prejudice, Hatred and Intolerance Everywhere). But my heart is gladdened by the generosity and efforts of the goth community of which she was a part, who raised the money for the bench and saw it dedicated to her on the 26th April. Who made pilgrimage from Whitby to see her murderers sentenced to life in prison. Perhaps something wonderful will come out of this senseless loss of life.

GD is: moping about like a big fat fly stuck in a web, listening to The Damned's Phantasmagoria on very scratched vinyl and thinking it hasn't survived the eighties very well.

I hear the word for love, I hear the word for death, but I don't hear any answers

2008-04-27T20:02:00.007Z

I'm feeling somewhat recovered but suspect that's due to the studious application of red wine. Yes, good reader, I am somewhat inebriated. I'm also writing which is a good thing. In a recent critiquing session my fellow students very kindly said they liked this passage from my novel, so I'll share it with you:

"In truth my father was a tall man with hollow shoulders that stooped slightly as he walked. Like all of our family he looked younger than his proscribed years but his hair had greyed preternaturally and I can’t recall him ever looking fully rested, even when on holiday. There was an overt gentleness to him that masked a hidden core of strength and practicality. I watched him once wringing the neck of small bird found cat injured on the path leading to our house. He told me to go in whilst he saw to it but I turned and watched instead, saw those pale long fingers caressing the bird gently before the sudden twist and crack and his unflinching eyes that met mine over the small carcass. Sometimes, he said, sometimes you have to make hard decisions. He could never fly again. What life could a bird have when it can no longer ride the thermals, when their wings no longer send them spinning into the sky? And through the tears I understood what he meant."

Through my tears I wonder when the thermals stopped catching me up like they used to. Do birds know, when they get old, what they're about to lose? Or does nature and no forewarning of death protect them?

NB. Don't fret about me. I'll be fine come the morrow. I'm just mourning the passing of time and opportunity. And my fingernails.

GD is currently: drinking more Shiraz than recommended, scared witless but rather thrilled by the spectacular thunder / lightening storm outside her window...facking hell, the sky's gone out....all whilst listening to Nightwish's Nemo...

Defeated in Body

2008-04-27T12:56:00.002Z

The Snot Monster cameth. He saw, he conquered, he torn my little chest apart, shook me up and filled me with mucus and sputum, then left me drown in a pool of codiene, asthma meds and inertia.

Yours from the Land of Nod, The Sickly Redhead.

Who is currently: eating her own fingers, nails and all, listening to excessive amounts of Guns and Roses and feeling very very sick.

Read My Mind

2008-04-18T10:12:00.001Z

I’m feeling a little washed out (or maybe up?) at present. Hence I’ve been listening to this a little overmuch. I’m also mangling the English language marvellously well in a whole three sentences. Go me!

"Read My Mind" The Killers

On the corner of main street
Just tryin' to keep it in line
You say you wanna move on and
You say I'm falling behind

Can you read my mind?
Can you read my mind?

I never really gave up on
Breakin' out of this two-star town
I got the green light
I got a little fight
I'm gonna turn this thing around

Can you read my mind?
Can you read my mind?

The good old days, the honest man;
The restless heart, the Promised Land
A subtle kiss that no one sees;
A broken wrist and a big trapeze

Oh well I don't mind, if you don't mind
'Cause I don't shine if you don't shine
Before you go, can you read my mind?

It’s funny how you just break down
Waitin' on some sign
I pull up to the front of your driveway
With magic soakin' my spine

Can you read my mind?
Can you read my mind?

The teenage queen, the loaded gun;
The drop dead dream, the Chosen One
A southern drawl, a world unseen;
A city wall and a trampoline

Oh well I don't mind, if you don't mind
'Cause I don't shine if you don't shine
Before you jump
Tell me what you find when you read my mind

Slippin’ in my faith until I fall
You never returned that call
Woman, open the door, don't let it sting
I wanna breathe that fire again

She said I don't mind, if you don't mind
'Cause I don't shine if you don't shine

Put your back on me
Put your back on me
Put your back on me

The stars are blazing like rebel diamonds cut out of the sun
When you read my mind

Today I is: tired, vulnerable and emotional, a big fat shoulder to cry on, shuddering at the thought of alcohol tonight and yet knowing I do not have the willpower to say no.

Compulsions

2008-04-12T10:03:00.004Z

I'm turning into a batty old lady. What else explains my current compulsion to dress like Alice in Wonderland on a regular basis?

Normal posting will probably resume tomorrow, right now I'm off to find a white pinny and I'll leave you with a quote that stopped me in my tracks when I saw it inscribed in white marble at the Baltic on Thursday:

"He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star"
William Blake

Jane is: listening to The Mission's God's Own Medicine (retro still strong in my world), reading Wide Sargasso Sea (the story of the mad woman in the attic, marvellous!), freezing her tits off in her study (common occurrence, I need mittens), lusting after all the pretty spring frocks she can't afford, feeling emotionally asleep whilst trying to write a scene of developing love which really doesn't help.

Declaration of Intent

2008-04-02T09:05:00.003Z

Before, I was just playing.

Now, I'm serious.

Let's see what the year brings.

Today GD is mostly: washing her hair with a jug, playing Consolers of the Lonely by the Raconteurs (though bizarrely I'm convinced it's called Connoisseurs of the Lonely), repenting excessive birthday consumption, eschewing meat again, wondering when personal grooming became so reliant on umpteen product applications (including 3 types - yes 3!!! - of moisturizer)....

I make no apologies!

2008-03-30T19:00:00.010Z

I sincerely don't. For you see, the EVENT of my birthday is upon me and I turn the grand old age of 36 on Tuesday. All Fools Day, which is about right. I have been spending the last few hours happily cocooned in '80s nostalgia and avoiding all thought of the sartorially painful '90s at all cost.

It's funny how a time defines us. For me it was the late 1980's because I think that was when I began to realise what type of person I was going to become (which is different from having a clue as to what is going on!). I was fortunate to have my very own 'summer of love' in the shape of 1989, and a sixth form common room that I dressed with daffodils, lenient teachers (dress code wise, anyway), finding an identity of sorts and playing with the boys a little. But not too much! I've always been a dreadful prude...

I spent that summer and probably most of that year in a goth-romantic haze. I have no diary entries for this period, they petered out after the horror of being sixteen. I read Marion Zimmer Bradley's 'Mists of Avalon', T.S. Eliot, excessive amounts of Thomas Hardy and John Fowles 'The French Lieutenant's Woman' - an A level text that held a satisfyingly puzzling narrative (including several endings, a description of prostitution in Victorian London and the nature of condoms, plus probably the most unsatisfying sex scene in history). I ADORED David Eddings Belgariad books and read my copies into extinction.

I started going to concerts proper, either with friends or the current love interest (Jeff). I was content with my peer group and knew my place within it. I saw Evil Dead and The Lost Boys for the first time, and I knew film heaven. I lost my heart to Keifer Sutherland's vampire David and posted him next to the consumptive Ian McCulloch in pride of place at the side of the bed. At the head of the bed was The Master - Robert Smith looking unbelievably delightful in a Betty Boo t-shirt. I ran round Tish's back garden in a t-shirt and silver tights with an unbelievably high backcombed fringe and leather whip (don't ask...).

It was a time and a place where I felt beautiful. Radiant even, though you'd have never guessed it from the demeanour, dress and music! I played the Mission's Carved in Sand, The Mary Chain's Darklands and anything by All About Eve I could get my obsessive little mitts on. I learned which Cure albums to love and which to avoid. 'Just Like Heaven' on white 7 inch vinyl was my prize acquisition.

I wrote down my life goals on a piece of paper that I kept with the Sisters of Mercy's autographs (now sadly lost):

Go to university (big thing - first in family)
Go to see The Cure (Rob was god, after all)
Pass A 'levels (which I did, all three though I can hardly say I stretched myself in the sitting)

And that was it...! The sum total of my seventeen year old self's ambition. It all seems so innocent. And it was. Jeff taught me to shoot a pistol in his back garden whilst we were supposed to be studying for our politics exam together (we both got 'B's which is quite an achievement considering most of time was spent canoodling in various fields) and I wore an exquisite little black top with beads that fit me like a glove and which now I can barely get over my forearm (I can't bear to part with it). I was tiny, so tiny and I used to look at my chest in desperation, willing for some growth action (cured that by going on the pill and going up 4 chest sizes in two years!).

I Tunes is currently playing 'Where were you when I needed you?' by the Bangles, a satisfyingly '80's band that Angela idolised. There's a picture below that shows us all on New Year's Eve that year, and she's at the front with the bare legs. What that picture doesn't show is me two hours earlier frantically rubbing sunshine tan into her milkbottle legs to give her a glow that our winter sun couldn't. Note I'm palm down on the right: I had stunningly brown hands that contrasted rather sharply with my magnificent translucence!

All things end. At the start of 1990 I dumped my big haired Jeff for a number of reasons (young, callow stupidity being one of them, prudery another). You see everything changed for us that night, as a group. Just after midnight we received a call to say that my friend Tish's mother had collapsed with a stroke and died. She was so young, only in her fifties. Our secure little world was irrevocably breached. Ties shattered and reality hit home. I don't think that is any coincidence that my sound track to 1990 was Depeche Mode's Violator, a far cry from 'Flowers in our Hair' and 'Shelter from the Rain' All About Eve staples. The world was becoming less pretty. Grunge began emerging and I threw myself into Doctor Martins and Nirvana with equal fervour. A dark decade for many reasons.

It scares me to realise that the first decade of the twenty first century is nearly at a close. I have better hair, better frocks than the nineties, a far more developed sense of self and liberalism. I read far wider than ever before and I write my sad little stories wondering where they stem from. I dared to dream and now I intend to take wing. Age takes no prisoners and life is fragile.

Bon nuit, sweet readers. Enjoy the pics - I enjoyed the taking of them!

Big Haired Jeff & Me

New Year (Jude at back, l-r front Helen, Angela, Me. Jude's bedroom and her New Kids on the Block pics...)

Jane: The Emaciated Years

For Erinye and for friends in need

2008-03-17T12:40:00.002Z

A friend Called Jack

Like rats we chased one another through the rubbish strewn corridors of Knotts Flats. Like vermin we grew into teen awkwardness with little more than a sense of home, a time, a place. Our territory expanded into the surrounding urban wilderness – the sharp metallic ruins of Victorian railway architecture that was filled with endless possibilities from its shattered iron and steel construction, coupled with the relief of thick vegetation that crawled with life and small boys when private refuge from public mischief was required.

We cut feet and teeth on the shore below the flats, angling our kicks on the sharp rocks to ensure that the limpets that lived in harmless state would fly loose from their rock sanctuary to face the internal inspection of small fingers before being cast aside indifferently to a certain death. There were worlds within worlds on our shoreline, and you created and embellished their stories with each breath that you took, a story teller dressed in thin skin and scrawny sinew. Your bright eyes could see beyond the mundane greyness of adult explanations that sought to strip the glamour you painted from our childhood views.

There were casualties amongst us. All childhoods hold some form of tragedy and ours was no exception. The industrial heartland of our playground was cruel. Tommy was lost, crushed by the fall of gigantic machinery at the shipyard, illegally accessed one balmy Sunday evening, prompting the bile to pattern my boots as you stood wide eyed with distress as we watched the light fading for eternity before adult support arrived. Soon after, following the path of the freight giants along the tracks we found so little of Petey Harrison’s father left by the sleepers that all I recall now is the sharp stench of diesel and the faint cast of rotten meat spilling from his sad remains.

We were chased by the dead as we scaled the cliffs at the Priory, and then hunted by the living, a chorus of disapproval from the good folk of Tynemouth who despised the sewer children of social housing. No respect, they would mutter, as we ran gloriously free, too wily to be caught by their lumbering, well upholstered bodies.

You wove these times into your tales, embellishing our small victories and painting a vivid world of colour through which your joy for life shone. You incorporated the sharp phizzz and SLAM! of the call to sea for the rescue crews, a sign of ships in distress in the harbour. We’d rush onto our respective balconies and hang precariously over the edges as we shouted and waved at the small craft flying past into the harbour, then we’d watch anxiously for their return, carrying the hopes of all sea dwelling folk in our small prayers.

Then the call to war caught us tight in its implacable march. Separately we were deployed, you to the Navy, myself with the foot soldiers. Without your bright chatter I entered the iron giant that I’d watched constructed, with childhood awe stripped away and replaced by fear, a fear left to gnaw at me silently without your light tales to turn it into something new. I imagined you on your separate metal warrior, cresting the waves with aplomb as your charmed your new companions with your memories of the girls you’d flattered at the fish quay, your patter woven with charm and flattery as you spun their beauty into your starry world.

Before leaving we had strutted in our uniforms, brisk with purpose and bonhomie. I will never forget how you turned to me when the bright eyes of the girls were distracted, and clasped my hand tightly. You spoke quietly, with hesitation so unlike you I was concerned. You spoke of your fear, and it burned into my very bones as you spoke. There were no fancy words, no false bravado, and as my gut clenched in agreement I hated myself for the cheery platitudes I made myself spout to calm your fears. You smiled briefly, I remember, and briefly clasped my rigid body before turning back to our bright haired companions who’d come to wave us off with furtive kisses on our separate journeys.

No need to write of the horror of war. We were both medalled for honour, although in truth I felt nothing but numbness at the reward for peddling death. There was no return for you however, no long evenings for us to spend at the Comrades Club sipping our stout, me your silent companion whilst your tales drew in the young people. The raconteur of Knott’s Flats was forever silenced beneath a grey sea, the same sea in which we sent countless small molluscs to certain death. The sea that coloured our dreams with the sound of the wash upon the banks below our childhood home, that same endless body of water we blithely ignored daily. She claimed your tales in tribute, I believe when I think of you - this the first thought I had when all eyes in the Flats watched the slow progress of the sailor bearing the telegraph to your mother. My dreams are still peppered by the piercing sound of her keening as she fell to her knees before the young man whose eyes were swimming with unshed tears as he stared straight ahead.

There were to be no more childhood tales from your lively tongue echoing those concrete corridors. Childhood ended with the silencing of your vibrant voice and the marshalling of mine. I took up your mantle. I became a tale spinner, widening my eyes to the unreality of life and the bright beauty that dances all around me, even in the bleakest of northern industrial life. I sought to enchant the generation of the jaded and exhausted. To carry on with your voice that implored that adults ought not to fall into greyness, your greatest fear but to show that even from apparent ugliness the most beautiful seeds can be sprung.

Amber Girl

2008-03-16T16:17:00.005Z

...post title in ref to Tori Amos' Scarlet's Walk which is playing right now. Think I'm an amber wave girl, but just don't tell anyone!

I'm stealing other people to be me today. Tori, Post Secret, I'm living vicariously through the eyes of others.

Today I am: identity confused, musically retrospective, university challenged and personally pessimistic.

Economy Sized Dreams of Hope

2008-03-11T15:51:00.005Z

I confess to sleeping little last night following the parent's bad behaviour. As my brother said somewhat wryly to me this morning when we talked, she has a dreadful mouth and doesn't stop to think when she opens it. Ho hum, enough of this misery. Hope has landed in the form of the creative banshee.

I visited CB this morning to talk about my final MA project, Playing the Angel. This is a pure fantasy novel, written for that genre only and therefore not particularly literary fiction. Dense, as she put it, as opposed to rushed and thin as my first attempts to get the voice right were. I'd gone completely back to the start with the submission for this tutorial because so many things didn't work for the last piece of work and it was absolutely no fun at all to write.

So I switched to first person, which feels as natural as breathing (I have asthma so make of that what you will...). She was extremely complimentary. She literally had no amendments, no criticisms other than to tweak one sentence that didn't read quite right. I was shocked, stunned and a little teary at her praise. It was completely unexpected because I was beginning to give up hope of producing anything other than bog standard third person prose with no life.

The irritating thing is, I only switched to third person in the first place because I was so heavily criticised in year 1 for writing in the first all the time and not experimenting enough. Apparently I've moved up into another level. I'm so relieved that she actually likes something I've written I am now physically unable to do anything other than slump with disbelief over me keyboard.

Oh well, the praise is nice. Now just another 65,000 words to go...

Today I am mostly: listening to shuffle on the Ipod, which means that Green Day (hence the post title), Pink Floyd and pop tarts are popping up quite a lot; being very silly and drinking two full fat lattes (I must be strung out and emotional); wondering why my husband is occasionally a numpty (to long to explain); realise just quite how much typing 65K words actually is and thinking that maybe I should back Zeus up more often...

Unlocking the Inner Demons

2008-03-10T14:44:00.009Z

This title does not refer to me. It refers to my mother, who has decided to embark on yet another voyage of lunacy. There has been a great deal of press recently about depression and how - drug dependency aside - it is can often be very good for the soul, building a person's empathy and resilience for later life.

I've found this quite hard to stomach, and some of the newspaper coverage has been so flippant it's irritated me beyond belief (its probably a good job the comments box on the Caitlin Moran pages in The Times regarding a good backhander weren't working when I vented my spleen, kidneys and pancreas). The reason I'm so irate? Not a mention of the families of the depression sufferers. Not a mention of the devastation and harm that parental abdication of responsibility through mental illness causes. No discussion about the repercussion of growing up in a household dominated by blackness for the duration of your teenage years.

If there is one thing that these teenage years taught me, its not to be afraid of my emotions or who I am. My mother hid her illness from all those outside of the family and refused to acknowledge this huge, gurning monkey sat squarely on her shoulder twisting her brain into tortured and fanciful notions. She refused treatment. Outwardly she seemed like a perfectly nice if somewhat sharp tongued middle aged lady. Within doors she cast us down and eviscerated us to keep us in line.

Only in later life, once my brother and I were unceremoniously dumped from her life and refused to crawl back begging for scraps like she intended, did she seek help. Give or take the odd blip she has been relatively well behaved for the past fifteen years. This is largely due to our refusal to entertain some of her wilder denouncements or to venture into a full-on argument with her. These arguments always invariably lead to her screaming repeatedly 'You're just like your father' as she spits at you incoherent with fury.

Well, yes, I admit I am like my father. I'm very like him, without the alcoholism factor. I have a smart brain (and I'm occasionally narcissistic!!), I love books, don't mind a bit of dirt and love a good debate on politics. I'm not an all out money grabber. If there is one key difference between us its that I don't shag around (admittedly, that's a major flaw of his). I look like him, with dark eyes and red hair. This is a fact that hurts my mother every time she looks at me and she cannot forgive me for it.

Well, there is little I can do about this. However, what I can not - and will not - allow is for her to turn her twisted mind on my fifteen year old niece and by extension my brother. My niece is smart, funny and beautiful. She is sweet and cute but she sees and retains information effortlessly and my mother has a careless tongue. My niece has also strayed perilously close to an eating disorder and is monitored closely for signs of slippage. My mother uses this against and tells her she's getting fat (the girl is a spelk). Whilst she's done this to me for years (including when I was seventeen and six stone nine), I cannot allowed her to destroy my gorgeous niece's self esteem the way she did mine.

But my mother's sights are set on more than controlling my niece. She is now hellbent on destroying my brother's two year relationship with his lovely girlfriend. She doesn't care if she loses both of us in the process because her fevered delusions are more important than our happiness. It is reasonable to expect that my brother and his girlfriend wish to create a home elsewhere from the marital abode he lived in for ten years with his ex wife, or so you'd think. Oh no. All the excuse needed to release my mother's inner physco (how in Tartarus do you spell that?). Worse, she's doing it through my niece without bothering to ask her how she feels, but assuming she knows her thoughts better than anyone else, because 'she knows...', the stock phrase she always turns too when she can't win an argument.

I refuse to be drawn into a bitching session at my brother / his girlfriend / ex-wife etc at her behest. Now she is no longer speaking to either he or I, but she is still happy to brag about his achievements (he's a very successful businessman, just won a rather nice award etc). She feels keenly her loss at not being the centre amongst my brother's 'professional' friends, amongst who she could pretend she was important. The job title is more important to her than the person beneath...

God I'm exhausted. I'm caught up in the middle of gross unpleasantness with little hope of reconciliation and my dear parent has ceded responsibility for explaining her hatred towards my brother and his girlfriend to my niece to me, because she will not take responsibility for her own actions. It is all so pointless and futile. We are all supposed to be adults. Is it so wrong that I believe my brother's happiness means more than the location of his house?

Today I am mostly: shattered, reading Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Dart (again), needing to get it all off my chest, hit by darts of ice whenever I venture outside, eating bad things like kettle chips and white chocolate, wishing I didn't have to be a grown up anymore :-{

Let Me Steal Away

2008-03-03T12:01:00.003Z

Firstly, I am beyond cold. Why this room is so cold I can't even begin to fathom. Even with the added benefit of dog water bottle on my feet I am cold to the bone (and probably bad too).

Secondly, I am supposed to be tidying up some work to send to uni to be distributed amongst my fellow students for critical discussion. This is scaring the bejesus out of me so I am procrastinating. It's futile of course, it just means that by the five pm deadline I will have achieved little and embarrass myself even more fully by the submission of substandard, poorly planned prose. Oh well. Be that as it may be, some of the inertia comes from being uncertain which way the wind blows in terms of authorisation to take the project forward. I'm pissing in the wind if I expect direction from my tutor, who cancelled my latest tutorial. Besides which, this project is boring me. I want to do something else but the Creative Banshee won't let me at this stage of the course. Oh man.

Thirdly, I am contemplating the godlike loveliness of Eric Bana (a state which occasionally rears up in a most welcome, distracting way). I'm so very much hoping that he shows some bare naked flesh in his new movie, The Other Boleyn Girl. OK, so I'm being slightly crass here, but sod the acting, just bring on those big ears and long limbs. AS Mr Bana has very little to do with the book I'm allegedly writing (Playing the Angel) I suspect that this is another form of creative procrastination. And the 'heroes' are modelled on Billy Joe Armstrong and Viggo Mortenson, so that clears that up!

OK, so I've burnt my heroine's parents and baby brother to death, I had her outcast as scum from her family, lose her first boyfriend to an alpha female, exchange sparky dialogue with the family patriarch which ends in her throwing her shoes at him, almost run away with a hot as hell vampire angel, and then abducted by the son of said angel, then called a liar when she is returned to the family, all within the first 8th of the book. What more does the banshee want? Blood apparently...

Today I am: stroking new cds by Juliette and the Licks and the Killers, loving 'Deus' by the Sugarcubes (see Last.fm), reading Terry Pratchett's Making Money (I wish...), bunking off uni to finish uni work, thinking about the box of organic chocolate truffles in the cupboard that technically belong to Paul...

Leaning towards Infinity

2008-02-25T17:11:00.004Z

...by Sue Woolfe. Just finished reading (obligatory uni tome). Bored rigid by the first 307 pages, then transfixed by the last 60 odd. Go figure.

"Does this wild errant need fade, like the colour of eyes do?"

I don't think it does.

Today I am mostly: meeting the gruesome twosome, unable to listen to music as this is a uni PC and the ipod has died, watching my smaller dog fade but refusing (with grim determination) to give up, collecting pebbles from the beach and anticipating a new story that pinged into my brain on wings after I finished 'The Repository of Lost Souls' and decided I didn't want to write again - all generated by an innocuous photo sent in to work with an older woman's ankles and a pair of pop socks. I guess that negates my last post then!

End-Stopped

2008-02-19T15:54:00.007Z

A term denoting that the sense of a line of verse is complete in that line and does not run over to the next (Brewers Dictionary of Phrase and Fable). I end-stopped Spitting Blood when it became apparent that the use for which it was created (to express anger and frustration at those events which I couldn't control) was no longer present in my life.

The Repository is the next line. As I age I find myself losing strands of who I am. Yet I've never been so certain of where I am going. Is this wisdom? Or am I just deluding myself that everything has finally slotted into place? I know enough to be wary, after all I have watched the histrionic slides towards clinical depression that have punctured my mother's life for the past twenty odd years to know that a good spell rarely lasts.

You can buy here in the UK notebooks that are called 'My Story' which are structured with handy hints for you to record every step of your life. This includes handy hints for keeping lists of all the cars your bought and what their re-sell value is...I admit to some list making within this blog, whoever it is usually under the auspices of the creative writing exercises dictated by my course and I tend to prune before display. But would you really wish to recreate all the minutae that makes up your day / week / month etc? Who would you be writing it for? Do you have children?

I understand the need to have a physical thing that you can pour thought and feeling into , there is something cathartic about sitting at this keyboard and letting loose. In the physical order of things a good friend of mine covets moleskine notebooks - with sound reason. If you seek to write long handed they are easily the most beautifully crafted, tactile recipients for your words that you could ever posess.

What I'm asking myself at this moment, at this point where I have a certain level of serenity, is whether I still want to write and if so, why. Do I need to keep an ill cared for blog? I generally use it as a stepping stone to other people whose relationships are important to me. I have no wish to create yet another virtual persona to reflect who I am at this point in time, when next year I may be baying for blood again and resurrecting ...Blood.

Sigh. I don't have all the answer. I never did. I do know that a creative project I just finished offline as a gift exhausted me both physically and mentally. I'm realising that to write I need to turn the inside out and it's scaring me. I could be a mediocre writer who skips through life quite happily, or a possibly better but still slight writer who digs in places they really shouldn't dig to pull something else out.

I don't know. I really don't know. I do know I feel a fraud for even considering myself a writer despite the fact the MA is nearly done. I've sat with truely talented people and I can't compare myself to them.

Enough, already.

Today I am mostly: moping, listening to Last.fm (again so no suprise), contemplating the fact that my face may still be young but my hands give the game away and starved for sleep.

A good year

2008-02-04T13:10:00.000Z

I have indeed. But will the year agree?

Image from Postsecret

Today I am mostly: anticipating, eating comfort food (rice pudding and chicken sandwiches), singing along to Amy MacDonald's This is the Life, twinging slightly with back pain and wondering why I don't write more when it's all I really want to do.

There comes a time

2008-02-03T15:32:00.000Z

..when you have a perfect day. It was just an ordinary day. Mundane in many ways, it was a stormy Friday with snow flurries and an early start. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Then something extraordinary happened. Everything suddenly started to go right. This is an unusual phenomena in my life, hence the delay in posting because I'm so wary of jeopardizing this enormous sense of deep, uncomplicated joy.

Such a little thing. The only thing that I have passionately, whole heartedly longed for the past several months. Something I have genuinely lost sleep over at night. A simple call into the chief exec's office, and those few words to say that they appreciate the work I've done so much on my temp contract that they're going to find the money from somewhere to keep me for at least another three months, then for three years if the gov funding contract we're after becomes a reality.

I adore my job. I get a rush of happiness every time I see a project I have assessed receiving funding. Especially the great but financially poor projects where what I write in my assessment report can make the difference between success and failure. I work for an organisation that receives money from rich people to give to poor. That over simplifies it somewhat, but it is such a simple yet cracking idea. I get to visit people who are absolute passionate about what they do, be it theatre that supports young girls with eating disorders, physic gardens run by neuro-scientists, community venues driven by amazing individuals. I stand back in amazement at their energy, their creativity and their drive to make my region a better place. What I do is very small in comparison but it can make a huge amount of difference and I believe in it. I truly do.

Furthermore I am so lucky to work with like minded individuals. We all believe. We all want to help in the most professional way that we can and it makes going to work a pleasure, to know that you can indulge in intricate conversations with people who don't think you're a loon for getting excited over a dreadful set of accounts! And I work three days a week for a decent salary - what the hell more could I ask?!

So this means a lot to me. Especially after the chicken factory. It also means I don't have to sell my house just yet! It means that after two totally shitty years I can actually look forward with some confidence instead of wondering just what's going to hit me next. This is why I'm apprehensive!

Then I got home from work and discovered someone had sent us a cheque for £50 ($100) completely out of the blue...! Happy day indeed!

Who knows, next time I post I may be miserable as hell. But for now I'm gonna bask in this sense of well-being. Because it ain't come cheap.

Today I am: eating fudge, listening to Last.fm (thanks Sat, for some very good tunes!), smiling all over my silly face, wondering what to do next and reading the Penguin Guide to Punctuation and realising how badly constructed this post is grammar wise!

Vomit, and all that it leaves behind

2008-01-28T09:07:00.000Z

I have been meaning to post, honest. Its just I picked up this tiny little germ. Tiny, insignificant, winter generating stomach germ called norovirus that causes the aptly named 'winter vomiting virus'. I will never be able to eat another piece of gnocchi ever again. That's enough of the detail. Due to my ever turbulent innards being ever turbulent innards it's lingering, and whilst I haven't physically hurled for a few days, the nausea is a little grim. But not as grim as the sweat. Bloody hell! How can one small usually cold person produce so much sweat? I'm ashamed to go out in company which has led me to cancel two dates today and I'm dreading uni tonight (mind, I'm also dreading uni because marks are due back and it's 'call of the wild' teaching us - Pauline. Always makes me think of the League of Gentlemen that name).

So I'm caught in inertia. Again. That suspended feeling between pure illness hell and total recovery. Alright, so I'm feeling sorry for myself! There are so many things I want (need) to do that require just that little bit of effort that I just can't be bothered to pull out. All goes back to laziness again.

So in response I am becoming turtle-like. I am retreating to the settee with water and digestive biscuits and all five volumes of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy for solace. I am daydreaming pretty dreams about beautiful distraught maidens who want to throw themselves off high walls (pretty because in my head it looks like an Alan Lee painting), I'm thinking about loss and how it's two years since Johnny died tomorrow, the point at which the world caved in around us both and swept us into a maelstrom of misunderstanding and regret. I thinking about the words of Freud (pilfered from Saturday's Guardian):

"We will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else. And actually this is how it should be, it is the only way of perpetuating that love which we do not want to relinquish."

The Surreal World

2008-01-06T19:43:00.000Z

Tish descended upon us this weekend in her full witching glory, and I duly accepted her invite to return to the home of our youth, Winlaton Village for a bevvy. Mindful of where we were going I dressed somewhat conservatively in blue jeans, cute white blouse and v-neck jumper, so no exposed flesh, no exposed chest etc, given that the locals can become quite savage.

After a celebratory glass of champagne for the new year we ventured cautiously to the hub of local refined culture - The Rose and Crown public house. Waltzing through the door first I was nearly decapitated by a whirling dervish wielding a sword with gay abandon. Yep, the Morris Dancers had returned to Winlaton in their full glory, little bells tinkling with gusto.

Slightly unnerved by this, we waited until the aged gentlemen paused for breath, clapped politely and gave them some money to ward off evil (we really did...). We sunk a few companionable gin and tonics whilst the locals tried to remember who we were (I should mention that Tish has died her hair a very fetching shade of bright pink, accentuated with turquoise eyeliner. Winlaton isn't quite ready for this level of glamour).

Feeling brave we then ventured 'up the street' as it's known, to the banging disco at the Vulcan. There were precisely six people in there. The gin had that dangerous fluorescent sheen that tells you it isn't kosher. Cue tall, baldy chap starts to talk to me. Transpire we'd been in the same form class at school, although I didn't recognise him from Adam (ok, ok I'm a bitch! Let's just say the years have not been kind!). Last orders shouted, he persuaded us to the Murderer's Arms (The Queens) for another drink and to meet his friend.

Now, I don't know why my brain disengaged from the obvious danger here, but it was particularly gin addled by this stage. The dear Morris Dancers were back in operation in this pub, and we smiled, said hello and gave out some dutiful kisses (I really was drunk...). Then this bloke with a face like a raw meat patty joined us - the 'friend'. First he grabbed Tish's ass then made a move on my chest (twatful). He was rebuffed. Then he told us all about his wife and the eight porn films he'd 'starred' in. What, with animals? No sane woman would go near that face...

We decided after an emergency conference in the ladies to escape. However, they'd sat on our coats (bastards!), so we had to ask for them, at which point they got nasty, cos apparently we were going home with them....! Tish nicked off and had a brilliant flash of inspiration...she sweet talked two Morris Men to pretend they were her father (both at once! That's a neat trick) and they came and escorted us out of pub to the Chinese takeaway. Hurray for Morris Dancers! The kisses on cheeks worked! Chivalry ain't dead.

Seriously, it was a bit scary. I haven't been out pulling for ever (n.b. I wasn't out pulling then either, just looking for a chat about village life) and I'm really dense at realising when people are chatting me up. I now recall why I no longer live in a small village.

We ended the night having a midnight feast on the foldout settee with wine, crisps, cookies, jellybeans and chocolate. I felt liked I'd been clubbed the next day but it was totally worth it!

Today I am mostly: eating lovely food (not just any food, Marks and Spencers food!), listening to K.T. Tunstall at this precise moment (i-tunes on shuffle), reading The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams, meant to be editing my uni work (hah!), wondering why I'm not wearing socks as my study is freezing, vowing never to drink again. Again. I think I say that weekly...)

I have a dream...

2007-12-30T14:26:00.001Z

...of Jack White and Shirley Manson, hopefully both on tour next year: Jack White and those Cherry Lips

Chatterboxes and Control Freaks

2007-12-27T15:17:00.000Z

Right brain versus left brain? Personality inhibiting output? Oh, just somewhat today, tonight and forever. My head hurts, my back hurts and the inexorable deadlines creep ever closer. So why the title? Well, the inimitable Ms Roselle Angwin is supposed to be providing the muse today via her tome ‘Creative Novel Writing’. In particular I have been reading chapter five, Right Brain Writing. Good god, learning the craft is tedious. No wonder I get sidetracked with thoughts of Richard Armitage half naked, or the tenth Doctor fully clothed (funny how that works, but my cerebral side pines for a fully dressed doctor when my more lecherous visual side has already seen what Mr Armitage hides under all that leather. MEOW!).

Anyway she witters on a little about Jung and journeys into the spiritual, arriving at a physical destination without quite knowing how you got there. Could this be the reason I can’t drive, I ask myself? See, when I drive my imagination takes flight. I imagine the accident before it begins, the twisted sheets of metal that pierce through my skin – and that’s if I’m lucky. If I’m unlucky it’s a scene from the Towering Inferno (substitute car for tower block – its hard but it is possible). Likewise my fear of flying which manifests itself by my being able to visualise the drop between myself 30,000 foot up and the earth below. Tuck your head between your knees they say. Yeah, right – just so my body doesn’t shatter on impact and become impossible to identify. You just want me to keep it whole for your convenience.

Who am I talking to? Does it matter? All I know is I’m tired, I’m bored and I’m easily distracted by unimportant things like idiots who write gushing reviews about crap books on Amazon.

Gratuitous Richard Armitage Picture Alert! My, don't I just like the brooding dark ones with big noses?

What have I learned today then? Well, the right brain is the creative heartland of my soul. It is the unconscious side of me, the ‘nourishment for all that we are, including the world of the ego, the conscious mind.’

…words fail me…well, maybe they don’t but I don’t find the words I wish to find. So! Of chatterboxes and control freakery. There is apparently ‘monkeymind’ and ‘tidy mind’. Monkeymind is incessantly busy, and apparently ‘slavers over absolutely everything soaking up info like a sponge…much of it is trivial’ (that’s me then). Tidy mind is the critic (and hence left brain real world dweller). Apparently this is the voice of my mother telling me I’m pants and will never write anything of substance. I should bin this mind, and unlock my monkey mind. Oh woe is me.

PS. in case you’re wondering why we bother with left brain at all, its because it is apparently THE creator. Skating very close to theological issues here, Miss Angelle is. Or maybe she is really Yoda.

Today I am: drinking red wine to dull the pain despite a post Christmas IBS flare up, listening to The Arrow on me swanky new DAB radio, reading Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and wondering why I never noticed before it was a pre-cursor to Wikipedia, nursing a sick, elderly dog who had a funny turn last night but is milking the tea and sympathy as much as possible, bless her stinky little socks.

On Reflection...

2007-12-15T11:31:00.000Z

It's the time of year for award shows and talent show finals. Normally I would produce a shiny top ten love / hate list or some such for the year, but whilst musing on this I realised that whilst on a personal level things have moved and changed significantly I haven't broadened my cultural horizons very much at all this year. In fact I have stagnated a little in the music and books I've been reading which I think is very much a comfort thing. Therefore a general statement on 2007 is probably more appropriate.

Thank god it wasn't: 2006. In no way shape or form was this year as dreadful as last year. Yes I had issues with the Chicken Factory earlier in the year and I was totally exhausted by April but thankfully due to a sympathetic doctor, some extremely good and wonderful friends and a chance opportunity for the part time job of my dreams that particular issue has been ironed out flat. Yes, I am imminently unemployed (April 08) but that's a minor issue for next year! I've been able to spend the latter half of 2007 resting, recovering and meeting some fabulous people through university and work, reflecting on how I got here, which leads me to...

New music revolution? Passed me by entirely. I've spent the majority of this year wallowing in the music of my youth. The majority of cds I've purchased have reflected this - Fat Lady Sings, Cocteau Twins, Tori Amos, Garbage. I haven't bough anything remotely recent other than the Greatest Hits of Girls Aloud, which some would say is a shooting offence! I don't care. I'm finally beginning to be happy in the fact I'm getting old and its ok to think that the tortured vocals of Kate Nash are crap and I don't have to like her just to be hip. The old guard such as the Foo Fighters, Marilyn Manson and Red Hot Chilli Peppers have produced music of total mediocrity. There are two exceptions to this: Queens of the Stone Age's Sick, Sick, Sick (someone bring me Josh Homme on a platter, now PLEASE) and the wonderfully barmy singalong chants of Reverend and the Makers who I surprised myself by liking very much indeed.

I've been listening to: Well, the top 25 on the Ipod would testify to the strange nature of my listening habits this year, with Muse's Super Massive Black Hole still reigning at the top of the pile, closely followed by Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Part 1 by the Flaming Lips and All These Things That I have Done by the Killers. Plus a smattering of perfection from the Raconteurs (easily this year's best live performance). Then storming up on the outside is the pop tarts - Oops I did it again (Britney), Biology and Love Machine (Girls Aloud), Hole in the Head and In The Middle (Sugarbabes). Hmmm....2007: The Year of Dumming Down. And did I mention I have tickets to see Kylie and Girls Aloud (five rows from the front!) next year?

Reading hell / heaven: hell is Trainspotting. Easily the grubbiest book I have ever been forced to read (university sucks occasionally). I hated it all. Heaven is in the re-reads. I'm rediscovering Thomas Hardy (Jude the Obscure is peerless). Still loving Jacqueline Carey (disposable, well written and slightly debauched fantasy) and the beautifully constructed worlds of Tad Williams on the fantasy sci-fi side. Another old love refound is Terry Pratchett, whose Wintersmith was effortlessly charming. It is absolutely heartbreaking that he's just been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, but true to form he's facing it with a smile and good heart. However, this is also a year of growing dissatisfaction where new fantasy is concerned. There is so much dreadfully written trash out there being marketed as 'exciting, vivid new voice on the scene'. Absolute toss. In particular Trudi Canavan and her appalling, one dimensional tat. Closely followed by Fiona McIntosh. By all means write for teenagers but at least attempt to make it well constructed, lucid prose. And don't get me started on the schizo viewpoint...

Film / TV: again, I go backwards. Buffy is still without rival for my affections. I do adore Bones mind you, and its developing in the third series into a much more well rounded character study of the crew but with enough gore, nerds and sinew to keep me entertained. Also loving Gray's Anatomy, even P finds it funny though he tries desperately hard to hide it. UK TV? Redeemed from mediocrity by one thing only: The Doctor and a peerless episode called 'Blink'. Freaked me out in the best possible way. Film wise I loved Running with Scissors and not much else (except Pan's Labyrinth which I think was 2006).

My Newcastle Love Affair: I still love cupcakes, in particular the cakes from Sencha are to die for, although their website doesn't do them any justice at all. The local paper does it more favours and it is a fabulous people watching spot just across from the old Grainger Market which sports some interesting pond life indeed. It also house Scorpio (seen here in the background with a giant red boot on the roof) which has both the cutest shoes and goth boots in town, and by far the most effortlessly charming and gorgeous boy staff. Yummy.

Good grief that was exhausting...

Today I am mostly: nursing a cold, awaiting the arrival of the Saturday papers, listening to 'Oh Brother Where Art Thou?', doing the Christmas pre-clean, inappropriate dancing and slightly high on an assorted mix of cleaning fluids.

When did Christmas become a chore?

2007-12-09T14:19:00.000Z

When it comes to present wrapping, card writing and special post issues. I hate wrapping gifts. I am so cack handed that I often think people would prefer it if I just left them naked instead of struggling with shiny paper and long streamers of silver ribbon. Still, t'is all done now and I can give a gusty sigh of relief and slob down again with a pot of herbal tea.

I found some of it entertaining. My Secret Santa pressie for work was for the lovely Big Jim, outwardly austere and forbidding, inwardly of an impish viewpoint and wicked sense of humour. I purchased a PostSceret book for him (he's also a bibliophile) and then set about making my own secret to leave inside:

Following this I then compiled the annual 'Little Box of Crap' for my best friend, Heather. This year it is an alternative relaxation kit, complete with salacious heroin memoir from an ex Motley Crue member (her heroes), a Hello Kitty craft book and fridge magnet, lots of jelly beans, a mini VW Camper van complete with 'pull back and go action', a mini fondue kit and - my favorite - a large pink hammock. Its so bad it's beautiful. And a personalised mix CD of tunes from yesteryear, complete with this delightful picture taken in the now cruelly demolished and desecrated Mayfair Rock Club:

Of course, now I made it I can't stop listening to it. All the tunes are personal, starting with Aerosmith's Love in an Elevator and topped of with two crowning glories - Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart and Meatloaf's Paradise by the Dashboard Lights - possibly the greatest necking song ever written. OK, so its pure hair metal. Apart from Temple of Love (Sister of Mercy) where we get to do gothic hands!

Today's rereading of Jane's Diary circa 1988, we discovered the day we popped our cherry (it is so cringe worthily embarrassing I can barely read it...I seemed a bit ambiguous at the time, mind you and didn't go near another bloke for three years - obviously a highlight!). The top night in April appeared to be a Wednesday night student stalking in Newcastle. Yes, we would pay our ten pee bus fare (twenty cents) and wander the streets in our rolled up jeans following students covertly. We were so desperate to go to university, so desperate to be cool, hence Judith always toted Chairman Mao's Little Red Book (before she became capitalist queen of Gateshead (and her gothic hands are special. Really special) she was an avowed commie) and I would be trailing whichever tome of Thomas Hardy I was swooning over at that particular point in my life. Probably Jude the Obscure, which looked good even if I only understood one paragraph in ten. Jude, aged 16:

Today I am mostly listening to Anthems for Dim Youth (the aforementioned mix tape), reading Grimm's Fairy Tales, thinking I should be reading the Bible (not that I need saving, just I need to refresh myself with the bloodiness and calamity of the old testament) and eating bloody marvellous home made omelettes. My cooking skills are just exceptional...NOT!

Dishwasher Blues

2007-11-30T17:48:00.000Z

I'm supposed to be emptying the dishwasher. This is fact. Instead I'm sat here pontificating on the vagrancies of life and why the hell I never take a brolly with me when rain is forecast. I'm sporting the 'drowned rat' look right now, which is always appealling.

In today's mini-research session I've been thinking about Aesop's Fables. A charming young lad called Scott once cycled eighteen miles from South Shields to Blaydon to give me a copy of this when I was twenty year old hairspray harpy. I chose Chris over him (I'm shallow - Chris drove a tank, that was far more impressive than a poxy racing bike...) but I still have the book. There is a complete website dedicated to the Fables, which differentiates between tales, parables and fables:

'The tale, the Parable, and the Fable are all common and popular modes of conveying instruction. Each is distinguished by its own special characteristics. The Tale consists simply in the narration of a story either founded on facts, or created solely by the imagination, and not necessarily associated with the teaching of any moral lesson. The Parable is the designed use of language intended to convey a hidden and secret meaning other than that contained in the words themselves. The Fable partly agrees with, and partly differs from both of these. It will contain, like the Tale, a short but real narrative; it will seek, like the Parable, to convey a hidden meaning, and that not so much by the use of language, as by the skillful introduction of fictitious characters; and yet unlike to either Tale or Parable, it will ever keep in view, as its high prerogative, and inseparable attribute, the great purpose of instruction, and will necessarily seek to inculcate some moral maxim, social duty, or political truth.'

Crivens! I never realised that fables were such moral beasts. Perhaps the lovely mop headed Scott saw through my superficial choco-munching goth facade and decided I was much in need of moral instruction. I decided that my moral compass needed resetting and therefore I currently have the rather lovely book he gave me on my knee, deciding to trust to whatever page it fell open at. Well, it would be the wine fable now wouldn't it? Deep and meaningful my giddy aunt:

The Old Woman and the Wine Jar

An old woman once found
A wine jar lying on the ground
But though it had been drained
The fragrance of the lees that still remained,
When she sniffed was so fine
That she exclaimed, 'What a wonderful wine
You must have contained
If its ghost smells so divine'

Apparently the hidden meaning of this story is 'the memory of a good deed lives'. And so this tale comes full circle, because I still remember Scott. And I still wonder which direction that parallel path would have taken me down if I'd chosen him and not the tank driving Kiefer alike Chris (although to be fair, I did get handcuffed to Chris for two hours at a party and there was really nothing better to do...)

Today we are mostly...reading 'The Historian' by Elizabeth Kostova (100 pages in and liking so far though Amazon reviewers have been unkind), listening to Girls Aloud (I really got over my pop shame in my old age, now didn't I!?), looking forward to the cultural desert that is the final of 'I'm a Celebrity', mourning the fact I am not allowed any alcohol until I've seen the doc on Monday. Pah!

The Repository

Scenery may have changed...

It's Time for saying Goodbye

Splinters

Ghost Dance

Shivers

Solitude

It's a wonderful, wonderful life

The Roads We Take

Arrested Development Part 2

Arrested Development

Lights and Tunnels

Today

Snobbery

Retreat

Why books are the most wonderful creation

The Sound of Inevitability...

Codiene~Cloud

Breathe Again

Spring is coming

Paul's Little Mum

Tower of Song ~ Leonard Cohen

Pressure pressing down on me...

The Times They Are A Changing

Good Golly Dolly It's All Imploding!

Vasovagal Aetiology

Broken Doll

Apology for Absense

Limbo

Definate lack of cool

The Abundance of Snot

You Can't Start a Fire without a Spark

Teaser Tuesday: Book Related

One day...

When life gives you a lemon, jump ship

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade

Thrift! All consuming thrift...

Lightweight!

The British Bugger Corporation

Needful Things

The Eyes Don't Work

Itchy Mind

Teeny Bit Bored...

Firsts

When letting go just isn't happening

Everything is Italicised!

Teaser Tuesday: Book Related

Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here

Sound of the Underground

Randomness

There's an eel in ma garden, what am a gonna do..

Bizarre things in life...

Family Ties

One down, one to go...

If I were a flower growing wild and free...

Death Watch Beetle

Graduation

Death of Zeus

Hodge Podge

Slightly Off Target

Whitby Goth Weekend

Caught on a wing and a prayer

After the euphoria strikes the crash

Smug Mode

Wanting

**********SCREAM**************

Gimme More?

Loving Russell Brand

Identity Crisis

Circularity

Ineffectual Flailing

Night Before The Morning After

Bruises

To my extended family

Swiss Roll Breasts, B'God...

Drinking the Snot of Summer

If I don't see you again, it was a hell of ride

Passive Voice

Why?

I hear the word for love, I hear the word for death, but I don't hear any answers

SCREAM****