kaiki caitsith

readers digest

2008-08-26T21:34:00.000-12:00

flash fiction in 500 words. harder than it looks, even harder to make it any good. still not happy with it but i'm learning, i'm learning. enjoy.

'I'm sick. I sleep all the time these days and when I'm not working I lie down, I read comics, writing letters I won't send, eating food dry and raw because I forget to cook and thinking, thinking, thinking.

I've stopped reading the newspapers - there was a story the other week about a fortune telling fish. Apparently this miracle fish was predicting flash floods and minor earthquakes in the lowland provinces of Japan and the local people had become torn between worshipping it as a piscine deity and grilling it over hot coals. At first it depressed me that this fish had warranted more column inches then say, the rising crime rate or the economic downturn but then I figured, what the hell, let the fish have it's glory. It's just my mood these days. I think it'll pass.

I don't watch the tee-vee anymore either. The batteries for the remote control gave up four months ago and I haven't got round to replacing them. This suits me fine. I've heard its beginning to eat itself, television, digesting and regurgitating ideas into slickly produced pools. Soon there won't be any programming, just a long shot of the same image being replayed over and over again.

So I'll just keep on writing my letters. I have a pile of them now, all to my brother.

He's dead, my brother, he died saving another kid who was drowning in six feet of water. Six feet man, can you believe that? Some people are that tall and then some, it isn't much. The kid survived, it was my brother who went under. The papers called him a hero and the mayor gave my grieving parents a medal - a posthumous award, which made about as much sense to me as banana skin shoes. He didn't need it, we didn't need it, so it sat growing dust on the mantelpiece for years until my father put it in a drawer and we forgot about it.
My parents still get letters from the kid he saved - isn't there an old Chinese proverb which says 'if you save a life you are responsible for it forever'? The letters are growing more infrequent as the time passes and pretty soon they'll stop altogether, but right now he wants them to know that he's graduated in law from UCL, has started training as a barrister with a firm in London, how it's all down to Tom, all down to Tom, your brave son brave Tom.

They're the letters I do send. The letters to my brother are the ones I can't. The ones in which I tell him I'm sorry for wading out into that murky water, with it's lethal shelf which falls away beneath your slow moving feet. I want to tell him that some days my mouth still fills with the blind, mineral taste of the river and I feel like I might choke on it. I want to tell him but I can't. '

showing your age in put downs

2008-08-12T21:57:00.004-12:00

A short while ago I was heading home from work when a van pulled up alongside me and the passenger leaned out the window.

“Excuse me love,” he asked, “can you tell us how to get to the Level ?”

I began to tell him, secretly impressing myself with the succinctness of my directions. It was only when I looked up that I realised he wasn’t listening. He leered forward, until he was halfway through the open window.

“What are the chances of me and you…..” here he made some gesture with his arm. I’m still not sure what he wanted. It was either to give me an uppercut or fist me. I really couldn’t be sure.

I peeled off my sunglasses and squinted at him. I’d been to see Mudhoney in London the previous night and consequently ached all over. I hadn’t slept and had the beginnings of a fearful hangover. I shook my head sadly and replied,

“Don’t be ridiculous mate, you look like Corey Haim.”

As they pulled away I caught the driver laughing. Corey just looked at me blankly.

Unfortunately they hit a snarl of traffic up ahead which rather ruined their exit, but also meant I had to walk past them. Again.
Corey was already leaning out of the window – I’d already called my friend Sweetman for support but despite the fact that I was on the phone, he blared out,

“Oi! Love! Oi, you in the tight dress ! Oi!”

"What ?” I asked sweetly, but I with a heavy heart I realised I already knew what he was going to ask me.

“Who’s this Carrie Haim ?”

“Corey.” I corrected him, “From the Lost Boys ?”

“The who ?”

I gasped. Surely everyone has heard of the Lost Boys, right ? It’s one of my favouritest films. Then I looked closer. This kid was no older than twenty-two, twenty three at the most.

Jesus Christ. He had NO IDEA what I was talking about.
I’m not sure what had disturbed me more – the fact that I was being propositioned by a chubby man-child or the fact that I’d slapped an 80’s diss on him. I shook my head sadly. Imagine never knowing the Lost Boys.

a fully paid up member of the Hsktskt Faction

2008-08-11T01:18:00.003-12:00

I received an email the other day from someone asking me why I’d be so sorely neglecting the blog recently.

In truth I’ve had an awesomely busy* couple of months, have had some fairly seismic changes to make** and on top of which have had to write *** the synopsis to THE NOVEL which is proving to be a task on a scale with poking yourself repeatedly in the eye with a sharpened pencil in terms of sheer enjoyment.

In order to glean some insight in how to make this seemingly impossible task slightly less hellish I had a brief scout on the internet for synopsis writing aids.

Eventually I found one. Initially it started off well – she had a clear-cut and concise list of detailed instructions in how to begin, including a list of do and do not which I thought was pretty invaluable.

Then she gave an example of how to begin using this novel;

“Begin your synopsis with an opening paragraph that presents a clear, brief view of your protagonist, his/her world, and the situation he/she is in when the novel opens. For instance;

"When the Allied League of Worlds withdraws from the Pmoc Quadrant to pursue the enemy Hsktskt Faction, Lieutenant Jadaira (Dair) mu T'resa and her squadron of SEAL (surgically enhanced/altered lifeform) pilots remain behind to provide planetary patrol. They have to; the aquatic pilots can't survive away from their native underwater environment on Kevarzangia Two for more than brief periods. Mainly they deal with remnant ordinance and space traps left behind by both sides, and which are hazards to the influx of refugees fleeing the war."
–BioRescue by S.L. Viehl ”

What ? WHAT ? Does anyone understand the premise to BioRescue ? My eyes have literally stopped recognising that paragraph as the English Language.

*hungover
**been a bit bummed out
*** rewrite, rewrite and then fucking write again

the meaning of true happiness....

2008-07-16T23:45:00.000-12:00

....i has it.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=9fciD_II7NI

Lyrics for Simple Kids

2008-07-14T03:02:00.003-12:00

Learning lessons from song lyrics part I.

“She's a beautiful smile, she's a gleam in your eye
Dresses like a princess, playing games in your mind
Falling out of her top, runs a hand through her hair
Playing so hard to get, cause she knows that you care”

Right. Well from the start this girl sounds like a nightmare – ‘dresses like a princess’ ?
Which one ? Diana, the People’s Public Princess of Hearts™ ? Sleeping Beauty ? Princess Anne ?

And what’s this about ‘falling out of her top’ ? Call me a puritan but the last time I lost my dignity enough to fall out of my top was after two bottles of thunderbird and a litre of martini when I was fifteen. Wasn’t a good look then, can’t be a good look now.
However, this ties in nicely with the line,
‘Playing so hard to get’
If sitting there with your tits out can be considered playing hard to get - rather than say, not phoning for a day or two - then yes, she certainly knows how to be elusive.

I don’t need an excuse to hate Mika, even the sight of his trousers hinder my breathing, but he deserves to be sealed in a box and kicked off the end of the pier for this one surely;

‘Walks in to the room
Feels like a big balloon
I said,
'Hey girl you are beautiful'
Diet coke and a pizza please
Diet coke I'm on my knees
Screaming 'Big girl you are beautiful'.

Feels like a ‘BIG BALLOON’ ? What does that even mean ? This is meant to be a call to arms for larger women and in the first two lines he reduces it to a song which is the aural equivalent of slapstick. Bad slapstick. Like the Chuckle Brothers pitching their sinister brand of two man comedy in your living room. Expect to hear this being belted out by hen parties and numbskulls until the end of time.

This is my favourite;

‘I like the way you, act all surprised,
I like the way you, sing along,
I like the way you, always get it wrong,
I like the way you, clap your hands,
I like the way you, love to dance,
I like the way you, put your hands up in the air,
I like the way you, shake your hair,
I like the way you, like to touch,
I like the way you, stare so much,’

Now read it again. Try to imagine this woman he likes so much doing all those things, simultaneously. That’s not attractive, that’s a simpleton. That’s someone with no apparent control over their primary body functions.

just a quickie, then

2008-07-08T21:55:00.002-12:00

A few years ago I was spending a family Christmas at my sister’s. I’d had a shower, and as I was getting dressed I noticed a hand cream on the shelf – Aveda’s Hand Relief.
Ha, ha, ha. I thought to myself. That’ll make my mum giggle.
Still laughing I walked into the kitchen and exclaimed,
“That hand cream’s name is hilarious!”

Looking round I saw my sister’s other family was there – her future mother in law - an incredibly nice looking woman – a bit like a cross between Hattie Wainthrop and Jessica Fletcher. Not the type who might fall about laughing were I to point out that my mum’s hand cream sounds like the sort of thing you’d get from a hooker round the back of a skip.

My sister; “What’s hilarious ?”
Me; “Oh…nothing.”
My sister; “Yes there is. you said something about hand cream ?”
Me; “No, no I don’t think I did.”
My Mum; “Yes you did. You said the name of it was funny”

I swear she was trying not to laugh.

Me; “Yes, I did say that, but thinking about it, it’s not funny at all.”

I looked, not for the first time in my life, a bit of a idiot.

asses all areas.

2008-07-02T01:13:00.007-12:00

A friend of mine recently asked me how I decided what I wrote about in my blog. Actually, those weren’t her actual words, her actual words were;
‘What the fuck makes you think your life is so interesting that other people will want to read about it ?’

Which I prefer.

It’s a good point though – I don’t imagine my life to be any more compelling then say, yours or theirs, and I’d have to be a completely complacent numbskull to think otherwise. Similarly, ‘writing about things’ is no more specialised than keeping a diary or telling an anecdote – it’s just in the telling of – which is a more complicated and pertinently pretentious way of saying;
‘It’s the words you use’.

With this in mind, and in order to keep things simple so that my weekend addled brain doesn’t collapse under the weight of it’s own sleep deprived synapses and because even just typing these few lines has given me the kind of bewildered expression more commonly seen on my face when trying to solve a mathematical problem (and here I mean any mathematical problem - from equations and fractions and algebra to deterministic finite automata string searches.) I’m going to save writing a ‘proper’ blog till tomorrow or at the latest, next week.

Sooooooooo, coming up soon - Tina as a transformer made of cardboard, what Finch had to say when we watched Battles together and why you should never, never assume that your friends think the way you dress is cool.

p.s – Something for you to watch instead - this band have made my year – I’m in love with their singer. I’m in love with the way their sound is that of sunshine seen through slowly melting honey. I was so in love with their Glastonbury performance that I saw them twice.

jeff bridges is aces

2008-06-23T02:48:00.004-12:00

This post, incidentally has nothing to do with Jeff Bridges. I just really, really like him.

I’ve done a few things in my time that I’ve regretted but this weekend was the first time I’ve regretted not doing something I might later regret.
Ever woken up the morning after the night before with that small beast of dread curled tight in your stomach and an anxious clawing in your throat ?
‘What the hell was I doing last night ?’ you think dramatically as you search the room and your phone and your body for clues.

This is how I woke up ten o’clock on Saturday morning, having crawled into bed only three hours previously. Realising I (a) wasn’t in my own bed and (b) wasn’t alone I felt those first familiar shreds of sober self-doubt.
‘What the hell have I been up to ?’ I thought, before realising I was not only fully dressed but, as far as I could make out, non-violated. As I rolled over I discovered – in the punishing daylight – that I was in bed with an impossibly handsome man and clearly, nothing had occurred.
“Damnit.” I thought, hunting for my coat.
(Incidentally, if anyone wants to know what wakes Mikey up in the mornings the answer is nothing and no-one – not my phone ringing, not me searching for my coat, not my crashing into a bookcase. Nothing.)

It was only as I was walking home that the events of the previous night slowly filtered back to me. I had a flash of someone’s lounge, and music and lots of people I’d never met.
‘A party !’ I groaned, ‘Oh God, a party, what the hell did I do at the party ?’

Uh, nothing, as it turns out. I think I secured myself a seat, drank some cans and talked to some people. Nothing too outrageous, unless you count ranting at Doogle, and no-one counts that, not even Doogle. Briefly, I tried to remember if I’d danced, but not unless you count a brief running man which was out in the garden for no-one to see.
‘Oh.’ I thought, slightly disappointed.
Then I reached the probing fingers of my memory a little further back.
‘The pub!’ I recalled, ‘Jesus, what was I saying to that fella in the pub ?’
I remembered his face, slack jawed, eyes a little glazed with boredom. Could picture his downing his drink in lethargic despair as I’d talked and talked.

Then I realised I’d been talking about my trip to America, which I’ve been doing enough to bore my closest friends, let alone someone I’d only just met. Nothing too terrible there.

By the time I’d got home I was slightly annoyed that I hadn’t taken more advantage of my drunkenness and sleep deprivation to do something I might have, even only slightly, regretted. There’s no point spending all that money and going to all that effort only to domesticate what, I’m sure, are my wilder urges.
Next time I’m dancing like an idiot, caining shots and stumbling over in public. Only then will I awake the next day feeling rightly regretful.

i just wanted to make your ears smile

2008-06-10T02:44:00.003-12:00

Anybody remember mixtapes ?
Well done. You’re either as old as I am or older, which makes me feel better.

They were complicated, mixtapes. A friend of mine is making one for me at the moment and he has this to say on the subject;

‘doing this for girls is hard work... "will she like this one? hang on...she might take that the wrong way....don't put that on there she'll think you are stalking her"”

Here’s hoping he’s going for some obscure tracklistings;

track 1 - Without You by Air Supply
track 2 - So Fucking What ? by the Anti Nowhere League

or

track 1 - Song to the Siren - This Mortal Coil
track 2 - Too Drunk to Fuck - Dead Kennedys
track 3 – Hallelujah - Geoff Buckley

Chuck ‘Suspicious Minds’ by Elvis anywhere into that mix and you’ve got yourself a situation, buddy.

I was recently looking through a bag of ‘stuff’ from my past – a vipers nest of old tapes, photos, and assorted clutter and came across a mixtape from my ex-boyfriend who was both my first love and one of the hardest lessons I’ve learnt. He’d designed the cover himself and being a bit of an arty sort had drawn a picture of the two of us together. It was a strange mix of songs, culled I think, mainly from his dad’s record collection, and now if I ever hear Procol Haram’s Whiter Shade of Pale even now, fifteen years later, I’m transported to the wooded lane by his house with the taste of strawberry bubblegum on my lips and tongue and long licks of tall grass brushing the palms of my hands.

The mixtape is the past and the future people, and sticks in your mind even when you’ve long forgotten why ‘Love is a Battlefield’ meant anything to either of you. I suggest you make one for those you love today….they’ll thank you for it, I promise.

woefully mis-cast miscreants

2008-06-02T02:27:00.004-12:00

I love vampires. I love comics. I love films. So imagine, if you possibly can, the sheer scale of my excitement when I found the film ’30 days of night’.

It had it all – asinine, aesthetically pleasing leads which lent the whole gory thing an air of flawlessness, as though the actors had been picked from the rejects of a Gillette commercial. This is no bad thing, as none of us want to see some boss-eyed harridan looming into the lens like a seahag at a porthole.

Blood guts and gore splattered hither and thither to such a degree that at one point it felt as though both of my eyes had ruptured and I was staring at the world through an oozing, scarlet screen.

Night vision – as the title suggests, most of the film is rendered in near darkness and shot on what appeared to be cutting-edge-o-matic cameras, the sort of MTV friendly cinema scope which, to my aged eyes was so bloody modern I nearly recoiled in fear. It’s all very well when music promos make me feel as though the future is accelerating into the distance without me but when films do it it makes me want to doctor my birth certificate by about ten years.

That aside, the film was going well, I’d settled into my friend’s ridiculously comfortable leather sofa, opened a can and kicked off my shoes. It was a shame then that they choose to cast a clone of Neil Tennant from the Pet Shop Boys as the head vampire, Marlow. Much to my chagrin I found I kept hearing bursts of ‘West End Girls’ every time he swaggered, swathed or slithered onto the screen. It got to the point where I couldn’t look for laughing.

This got me thinking about other roles in films which could, and should, be remade with woefully mis-cast leads. The best we came up with was This is England with little Jimmy Krankie as Shaun, or Schindlers List with Kris Marshall as Oskar Schindler. If anyone can come up with any better ones let me know, I’m intrigued.

Oh King, My King

2008-05-20T21:01:00.003-12:00

I walked into the book shop yesterday afternoon with a long list of books I’d been meaning to read for a while.
“Hi, “ I said, distinctly aware of how loud my voice sounded, “Do you have ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ by Thomas Pynchon ?”
He nodded.
“How about ‘Philosophies of the Boudoir’ by the Marquis de Sade ?”
”Good choice.” He replied.
“Thanks. And uh….“The Stars, My Destination.” By Alfred Bester’
“Yep. Anything else ?”
I lowered my voice, “‘Tommyknockers’ by Stephen King ?”
He looked at me as though I’d just asked for child porn.

Admittedly it’s not his best book, but come on.

venus flytrapped

2008-05-15T21:46:00.000-12:00

If you're the kind of person who - like me - finds a small pearl of fascination in the strangest places then you may enjoy this. If you're not, move on, this won't be fun for you.
I once tested my threshold of bad taste in a sex shop in Prague. My boyfriend at the time and I had wandered inadvertently into the 'back room' and found ourselves in a sea of flesh, scat, pregnancy porn and something too awful to describe with used sanitary products. It took me ten minutes to get out of there and that was nothing to do with being unable to find the exit. That slippery dark part of me, the one which tells me to look away if I stumble across a live autopsy on Channel 4, was fascinated.
One DVD in particular - 'Elastic Arseholes' - had to be turned one way and then the other to figure out exactly what was going on. If it hadn't been for the title I'm not sure I would have known which way up to hold it.
Incidentally, we left that one on the shelf. We took home 'Apocalypse Climax' instead. Don't ask.

What's that ? Ah, okay, moving on....

While I'd never describe myself as green-fingered I have managed to keep most of my plants alive, at least for a few months. On our kitchen windowsill we have a Venus Flytrap. Aside from being incredible to look at they are also immensely fun, and, in my mind at least, are the most evil and barbaric of carnivorous plants. The tiny fronds close together at alarming speed to form a fleshy purse which traps the stranded insect inside. Days later they open to reveal a husk of fly or mosquito, drained dry and useless.
Usually they do. Except one day the insects (or in this case opiliones) fought back.
Walking around the kitchen in my usual early morning stupor I rinsed out a cup and then set it aside, forgetting entirely why I had done so. It was only the kettle boiling which reminded me.
Ah, tea. Of course.
I noticed the Venus Flytrap out of the corner of my eye and moved toward it, noticing as I did so that one of it's pods had closed. On closer inspection I found it had caught a spider, a wingless daddy long legs, the body contained inside, the legs poking out through the hinged blades.

And, dear reader, those legs were still moving.

Horrible as it was, I watched until my tea went cold. And I continued to watch periodically for three more days.
Three long days that spider was being slowly digested by plant juices, and each time that I thought,
"Ah, it's out of it's misery"
one of those legs would twitch again. The worst thing is.....part of me couldn't not watch.
After five or so days the Flytrap slowly opened again to reveal nothing left but a small sphere of spun silk, no bigger than a pea. All that was left of the spider's struggle to grip onto life. No husk, no arachnid corpse. Just that delicate ball of white fibre.
Days later the plant itself began to wither and die, growing black from the neck up. I heard somewhere that Daddy Long Legs are one of the most venomous creatures on the British Isles, and we are saved only from their fatal bite from the size of their fangs, which are too small to convey the poison. Whether this is true or not is debatable. All I know is that not long after, the Venus Flytrap was nothing more then a few stubs of plant and broken leaves.
If I was more high brow, or worse, reckoned myself more high brow, I would tie this in with a moving and thought provoking metaphor, tying this story to life, or love, or sex, or all of the above. I'm not going to do that. Mainly because it would be clichéd, but also because you're all intelligent people, and you'll draw your own conclusions.

Besides, try and tell me you wouldn't have watched as well.

i've never seen scarface either.

2008-04-21T20:20:00.002-12:00

Hands up all of you who are 'into' dance music. Buffoons, all of you. It's witless, soulless trash.

That was me just under ten years ago. I think we've established how fickle I can be but for those of you reading this for the first time I am the crown Princess of the backtrack. I used to hate reggae too, and would whine and writhe in my seat every time my boyfriend lent over to play Lee Scratch Perry, finally sliding noisily to the floor in protest as he stared at me passively.
Now I'm sat here listening to the Orbital practically dancing my way out of the seat and across the room, occasionally breaking off typing to do some kind of nu-rave hand gesture. But that's just me, I am closer to forty than twenty these days.

I'm the same with any popular (for 'popular', read 'good') television series - Father Ted, The Mighty Boosh, Shameless, The Wire, Futurama, Spaced, Flight of the Conchords - I 've let them all sail past me and into the horizon of my interest before I'll realise that hey, this is quite good actually. I'm the twat always slavishly parroting the catchphrases long after any self-respecting individual stopped, if that is, they ever started at all, which is unlikely. That won't stop me though, this is all new stuff to me.
Actually I've just seen that I've listed The Wire there, and I've still yet to see that. That's how behind the times I am - I've come around full circle and am existing in a self-created paradox where I've actually seen the things I claim to have missed.
Such is my studied dis-interest I'm impressed I managed to be present at my own birth.

Feck! Drink! Arse ! Girls!

i fell over myself

2008-04-15T21:27:00.000-12:00

I fell over myself trying to please you and you just stepped right over me and carried on walking.
"I'll be back for you," you'd told me, over your shoulder, "you just wait there."
I did, I waited, and time seemed to pass, and always you were on the edge of my peripheral vision, too far away to touch. After some time I started to get up, and brush myself down. I was surprised how much it hurt.

This is what I was doing when you came back,
"What are you doing ?" you said, sounding shocked, "I told you to wait for me."I barely looked at you.
"Hey!" you demanded, sounding petulant and antagonistic, "I told you I'd come back. Here I am."

But by then I was on my feet, and already you seemed smaller, and less important. If I move away you become less of me. Once it felt like it was us against the world, and now the idea of us was crystallised in a tiny fraction of a fossilised past.

I fell over myself trying to please you and you walked all over me.

not millions of fun.

2008-04-07T20:30:00.004-12:00

The past is a foreign country. Someone brought this clumsy phrase up at me at the weekend - much like my friend Odge regurgitated a packet of sweets called 'Millions of Fun' during a trip to Cornwall and thus;
"And were they Millions of Fun, Odge ?"
"Fuck, no."
(Check for yourselves, they've actually changed the name of the sweets to just 'Millions'. I suspect the 'Fun' was reported to trading standards, because a mouthful of acidic syrupy goo could never be called 'Fun', unless excessive enjoyment tastes of sugary bile.)
Where the hell was I ?

Oh yes. The past is a foreign country. Not one you'd like to visit either, no matter how good the memories. If the past was a foreign country it would be called Memoralia and would be a hazy, indistinct blob on the end of a more self-important country (namely the Present) and would make you cringe if you were to ever have to look back through photographs of that particular holiday.
"What the HELL was I wearing ?"
"No idea Daise, do you want me to burn this one too ?"
"Yes please."

I, however, tend to revisit Memoralia a lot. For a start, it's right next door. Secondly, the cost is very low - maybe the painful tug of a memory or two - thirdly, it's safe there. Because nothing which happens there can surprise you. Do you think this sounds a bit mad ? Really, don't. We all do it, each and every one of us, more then - on average - three times a day. Show me a person who exists solely in the present and I'll show you an imbecile. A song, a smell, even a colour can remind us of something, someone, sometime and then you're already right back there, fiddling around for your passport and maybe your currency. How long you stay is up to you, but be aware, it is not a country built for living in, only for visiting.
As I said, it's not a bad place, but it is captivating, and it's easy to stay there longer than you'd planned.
However.
I once looked after a lady with no short-term memory. This meant that every fifteen minutes or less she would ask me what my name was or why I was in her house and what I was doing there, but yet she could tell me stories of her childhood, or how she met her husband, and the name of the ship he sailed on in World War II, but not whether she'd had breakfast that morning….and what was my name again ? Her knack for recounting incidents - however minor - which had occurred forty or fifty years previously bordered on uncanny - but there was no obvious cure or method with which to help her train her brain to living in the present. It is significant to note as well that I, as a crass, idiotic twenty-five year old grew frustrated with it, very quickly. Thinking back now I wish I could have supported her more, but I was young and stupid and not altogether patient enough to deal with it.
So, back to the past. There it is, spread gleaming and generous before you, as it sometimes can be, or wrapped in barbed wire with crows circling above, depending on which past it is that you're re-visiting. Just don't stay there too long. As my friend Odge would tell you it is not, in any way, Millions of Fun.

the mighty brain

2008-03-13T00:07:00.003-12:00

I don’t often dedicate this blog to people, preferring instead to wang on pointlessly about myself, but this one is, I feel necessary.
If I were to be the patron saint of something – and now that the position of Patron Saint of Quality Footwear has been taken – I would be the Patron Saint of Getting People Wrong. I mis-judge everyone I meet, and couldn’t weigh up character if I had a gun to my head. The only way I can really work with this is to find myself defending people to my friends. That is usually a very good indicator that, once again, I have Got It Wrong.

There is one exception to this rule and that is Alex. No-one likes Alex – he is a rude, obnoxious bastard – not in a loveable rogue way – he actually is just rude and obnoxious. For years I defended him, stood up for him and stepped up to tell everyone that no, he is okay really, I know he just called you a terrible cunt yes, I heard him too, but really, he’s only joking.

A few years ago I went to a Reclaim the Streets march to protest against global multinationals and denounce capitalism as Babylon or something, it’s all a bit vague now.
Alex called me from his office in the City.
“Where are you ?”
“Penned into Oxford Circus by the police. Where are you ?”
“At my desk. In the warm. Earning a fortune.”
“Capitalist.”
“Hippy.”

A week later I found he had set up a standing order to my bank in the name of ‘Satan’ paying the sum of £6.66 every month into my account. When I quizzed him about this he simply said,
“It was you who said money was the root of all evil.”

When I got my first place in Brighton Alex put the deposit down for me, and helped out with the rent because money and I had long since fallen out beyond repair. Typically he gave me the money with the line,
“I’m loaded. Even if you tripled your salary you wouldn’t earn as much as me. Don’t worry about paying it back.”

When I went to London recently he put me up at his, didn’t complain when I stayed in playing Resident Evil 4 on his playstation while he chipped off with his friends, and when I woke up in the morning there was a note on my pillow saying,
‘You need to shoot the chainsaw guys with the shotgun. It’s the only thing which works.”

There is more to our friendship than money and playstations obviously, although not much more. To me the boy is proof that sometimes, or maybe only really this once, I got someone just right.

Cheers, Alex.

Working for the Department of Wishful Thinking

2008-02-25T22:52:00.003-12:00

I’m handing out some awards. You don’t need to bother putting on a frock or a suit, it’s not that kind of occasion. But you could at least have made some effort with your hair you scruffy git.

Award for Film I’ll Never Understand
Terry Gilliam for Tideland. I watched this last night. Like the fevered dream you’d have after knocking yourself unconscious with a copy of Alice in Wonderland in one hand and Deliverance in the other, I understood precisely four minutes of it, and that includes the credits.

Award for Cowardice Beyond Measure
The shopkeeper who, upon having a knife drawn on him and the contents of his till demanded by some Brighton thug, pointed at my friend who was also in the shop and said;
“She’s probably got more in her bag than I have in here. You should be robbing her, not me.”

Song Most Likely to Bowl Me Over Every Time
Summer Babe by Pavement. Every time.

Person I’m Most Likely to End up Hurting Physically
My boss. I don’t have a violent bone in my tiny body but he is the singular most frustrating and aggravating individual I’ve ever met, and I’ve known a few.
This is the order I would do it; Chinese burn, knuckle rap with a ruler, slap across the face, that thing where you bend their fingers back, Chinese burn again and a roundhouse to the head that would make Chuck Norris proud.

drunk and in charge

2008-02-19T21:16:00.003-12:00

I'm not very good at many things. Pole vaulting. Computer programming. Concentrating.....Ooooooh look! A penny.
One thing I managed to excel at this weekend though was drinking. Or rather I didn't. I had enough to floor a horse I'm sure, but found myself having the swift kick of recollection the next day that leaves you simultaneously startled and confused.

Example 1

Speaking to my friend Gordon on the morning after the night before when I felt as though the inside of my head had been licked out by a hound.
"Emma said you'd been having a bit of a rough time at the moment. Why didn't you tell me ? You know we can talk about these things."
This much is true, so I thought back, with the slow careful progress of a tightrope walker.
"I know, I know" I intoned thinking, 'Who told Emma that ?'
"She said you'd poured your heart out to her in the pub after I left."
"Emma was there ?"
"Yes. I left before her."
"You were there ?"
"Daisy." Gordon said, in tones reserved for the elderly. "We had dinner together."

Example 2.

Somehow we ended up staying in a friend's pub until late. I made a small and rather heartfelt speech about how much I respected and loved all my friends, and then had a protracted and badly concealed argument with one of them for deleting a text from my phone before I'd had a chance to read it.

Example 3.

Upon leaving the pub at about stupid-o-clock in the morning light, and having gained back possession of my phone, I received a mysterious message made all the more cryptic by it's content."What does it say ?" said Justin, lurching up the hill, with Tina under one arm.
"Something about posting me a cd, and glad I liked the music," I said, " Must be a mistake."
"That's Steve. My mate. You were just talking to him."
"When ?"
"In there. He was playing you some music on his i-pod."
"You mean Stuart, right ?"
"No, I mean Steve. You kept calling him Stuart. Then you gave him your address, so he could send you a c.d"
"My HOME address ? TO A STRANGER ?"
"You gave him AN address Daise. I've no idea which one it was."

It's still coming back to me, in waves. Seeing my old housemates, the skaters from Bath, in a pub in Bath, and marvelling at how they were there.
"I can't believe you're here !".
"We live here, Daisy, it's a small town."
Telling a very lovely girl that she should enter the Lovely Girl competition on Craggy Island. Fighting with a cat, and losing. I still have scratches up one arm. Begging Tina and Justin not to move to Bristol and then five minutes later listing all the reasons why they should.
What's worse is the things which aren't coming back to me. Sam looking bemused at something I'd said, which is still stubbornly refusing to surface in my mind. A raspberry beret. Standing out the back of the pub at four in the morning with some people I've never met before and talking....talking....talking....I've no idea what about. Odge always tells me this is the POINT of drink. It's true to some extent, but I feel for those in my company who aren't as drunk as me, which luckily rules out most of the people that weekend, including Stuart, or Steve, or whatever his name was.

coco-not.

2008-02-12T22:50:00.001-12:00

Oh dear. At work, with quite an important client, listening to a news report about Kurt Westergaard – the Danish cartoonist who sparked a near jihad with a caricature of Mohammad.
The tone of the report was pretty grim, and at one point the newsreader said
“….there was a bounty on his head….”
At which point I quipped,
“….and coconut in his hair.”

The client stared me down, and I wished for a delorean.

the aquatic grim reaper of death

2008-01-28T04:56:00.000-12:00

What do you know about goldfish ? Probably about as much as me which is why mine have met several nasty or protracted ends over the last few years.
I initially bought them because I like to watch them. Two shimmering flashes darting round a glass bowl, gills heaving, mouths puckered in that absurd way which goldfish have. I love being underwater, suspended in a weightless galaxy of silent, slow moving transition, no sound but the limber pace of your heartbeat and above, the distant crash of waves. Watching them gives me something of an echo of that. It's peaceful. The Chinese consider goldfish fortuitous, especially for money, and although I ate one a while back in Indonesia (it was pretty good, incidentally) both Indonesian and Malaysian peoples hold them in high regard in folklore and superstition.

But for a time I couldn't stop killing the bloody things. The fact was even immortalised in a song my friends recorded for me, the chorus being;
"Missus Daisy Pearce,
You kill your fish,
And that is wrong."

It seemed that no matter what I did, they all went belly up in the end. I'd wake up in the morning and the first thing to greet me was the sight of a bloated piscean body floating on the surface of it's tank or bowl. It really dented my mood first thing, which is never very good anyway. After a chat with the incredibly helpful man in our local pet shop I kept an eye out for illness - fish have a fantastic range of diseases - white spot, swim bladder, fin rot, pop eye - but the problem is that you can't have a goldfish put down, and to leave an ill fish swimming with all the others risks contaminating them. Treating the water was a preventative as opposed to a cure, and when I noticed the siamese fighter fish looking - literally - pretty green at the gills - I had only one thing I could do.

The best way to kill a tropical fish is apparently, to freeze it. It slips into a painless coma and dies. So after several moments of indecision that is exactly what I did, sealing it in a scoop of water in an airtight bag and shoving it in the deep freeze. Thinking I was 'doing the right thing' I told my housemates about it over a pint later that day.
Their jaws sagged.
"Daisy. For fucks sake."
"What ? WHAT ? IT'S THE ONLY HUMANE WAY! "

They got used to it after a while, little baggies of deceased fishes turning up in the freezer, or in the bin. Meanwhile I despaired, I have a hell of a guilty conscience under normal circumstances and at this rate I was turning into the Aquatic Grim Reaper. I don't know how these last ones have survived - they've had a few near misses - I've dropped them, moved them from house to house and at one stage nearly boiled them alive, not to mention the Sweetman incident which we won't discuss - but somehow these hardy little bastards keep on going. My friends had their revenge on me as well, by telling me exactly how long goldfish can live for. Turns out it's not the two year maximum I initially thought it was. It's anything up to fifteen years. Fifteen years ? I don't know where I'll be in the next fifteen minutes.

stitch and bitch, baby.

2008-01-07T23:10:00.000-12:00

In the pub toward the tail end of the summer Finch was bemoaning the fact that she had nothing to keep her occupied in the evenings. While her boyfriend went to bushcraft sessions and judo or whatever it is he does Finch found herself square-eyed at the goggle box, until the early hours. Finch has always been one for hobbies and craftwork (not Kraftwerk - her music taste to the best of my knowledge has never extended to pioneering German electronica, although it should) and so she was talking about taking up an evening class in order to make proper use of her free time. To me being in the pub was a proper use of my free time and I told her this to which Finch replied;
"Daisy, don't you want to do a bit more sometimes ?"
"Well then," I said, with barely concealed annoyance at her admittedly true comment, "why don't you get Tina to show you how to knit ? She's been doing it since she was a foetus."
Tina nodded eagerly,
"Sure. I'd be happy to."
"See ? You get to make things to wear and it's cheap." I said.
"Great !" Finch was talking over me, "We can meet every week and bring food and have a stitch and bitch. It'll be genius! Wednesday good for you Daise ?"
"What ? No, no, this is your thing, not mine."
"Ah go on go on go on go on go on." said Tina, who is Irish, although I may have made this bit up.
"Can we drink ?" me again. Finch and Tina shook their heads.
"You can't drink and knit. You balls it up, you'll be dropping stitches everywhere."With incredible restraint I smiled and said through gritted teeth,
"Sure! Sounds great ! Count me in !" Tina and Finch exchanged looks and I knew my voice had gone all squeaky.

A few weeks later we were due to meet at six-thirty which gave me time for a quick couple of pints with Odge and Sweetman. At quarter past I grudgingly got to my feet and picked up my wool and needles, muttering something about 'bastard knitting bastard club'. Odge made a noise which may have been a laugh but sounded more like a strangled curse. Sweetman requested that I knit them a roll of toilet paper which they could then wash and re-use. It was with a heavy heart that I walked out of the cosy bar into the brisk wind carrying needle sharp freezing rain.
But by the time I arrived at Tina's place she had cleared a space for us all in her lounge, put on a pot of coffee and (here is the killer part) had baked a fricking cake. She sat us down and got us started and then the conversation descended into the ribald hilarity I always find myself knee deep in when I'm with certain people and not only did I find myself enjoying it but carried on with the knitting when I got home. Then I started taking it to work, prompting people to peer at me incredulously and mutter 'loser' as they walked into my office.
Fuck them, I thought, I'm a knitter, and I'm proud.

There is no moral to this tale. Once I'd knitted myself a decent pair of arm warmers I gave up for a bit, and generally forgot all about it, except for one drunken mistake in Bristol over Christmas. But when Tina suggested earlier that we start hooking up again on Wednesdays I leapt at the chance - because it's all about the company you keep and the bind of the group that means whatever happens in knit club (still a bit too close to 'shit club' for my liking) stays in knit club. It's nothing to do with the fact that we're meeting in a pub. Oh no.

three men and an idiot watching this rubbish

2008-01-02T23:11:00.000-12:00

Over the festive period - a time when some of the worst films ever made get dragged out to clog up the schedules, usually late at night - I've found I have at least one more guilty pleasure than I first thought. I adore shit movies. Any old guff starring Jennifer Love Hewitt or - God forgive me - Steve Guttenburg and I'll be there poised for the opening credits on the couch like an especially predatory widow.
Especially if I'm hungover. Then I really will watch any old toss. I've sat through more Channel Five Family Movies than I am prepared to admit, lest I spontaneously combust with shame. On New Years Day I caught myself watching Three Men and a Little Lady with a twinge of pleasure, because there is nothing better than a bad sequel. My Girl 2, Piranhas 2 (they can fly), Dr Doolittle goes Apeshit or whatever it was called, The Exorcist: The Beginning - described in the Guardian Guide as 'an unnecessary prequel' - sounds aces, as does Jackie Chan's The Tuxedo ('a misfiring comedy'). However, in watching Chan flip about the screen as though he is made of rubber I miss 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid', the multiple award winning, critically acclaimed western most often described as 'unmissable'. Unmissable perhaps, unless Chan happens to be on the other side.

The slowly dawning realisation that I would walk half a mile for a bad horror with lousy effects and a laughable plot but wouldn't lift the remote to watch 'a powerful and compelling drama' on the other side is something I'm only really half aware of.
There is more to it obviously - I have the attention span of a foetus and would only ever be described as 'highbrow' in an antonyms competition - but if I start telling you about that I miss watching 'I Still Know What You Did Last Summer.'
Seriously, it's set on an island and everything.

for me ? how kind.....

2007-12-11T22:04:00.000-12:00

Winter. The Arctic tundra of the outside world, the creeping darkness which awaits you in the morning and tails you home like a lost dog in the evenings, haemorrhaging money on Christmas presents, the limbo of the winter rains, 'variety' festive specials on the television.
Winter is the most dour of the seasons, the unwelcome drunk at a party who is sick with self pity.
I thought all was lost to the frost until I got home from the pub last night and entered the living room, which was cosy and warm, and all my flatmates and comrades were there under duvets, eating a takeaway and watching Watership Down with the fairylights on.
Mitton turned to me and said,
"Lenny popped round earlier and dropped some presents off for you, they're in my room."
"Presents ?" Suddenly, the chill of December melted away, even as I put the kettle on and prepared a brew.
Cartoons and curry and warmth and presents and tea and lowlights and friends*. It suddenly feels like Christmas to me.

*who eat all the chocolates out of your calendar because they don't know the difference between five and nineteen.

hit me baby, one more time

2007-12-09T21:25:00.000-12:00

To say I have an addictive personality would be a trite and reckless statement, borne of one or two examples which amount to little more than a current obsession. However, I am easily sucked in - usually to the most benign and habitual of pastimes - and once I'm there, I'm a bit of a goner.
It started with those ten-pence-pushing-machines - you know the ones, haunted by desperate, sad eyed cadavers with pocketfuls of change and a loose ambition - and perhaps it was the gaudy, flashing lights or slow, sultry way the drawers moved backward and forward over the scattered ocean of silver treasure, but I was hooked. It started when I was seven, and I've never forgotten the chink of coins hitting that small steel tray -which looks almost surgical - when the overspill is knocked forward. I won fifteen pounds in a 'jackpot' in St Ives once and had to carry the lot in the pockets of my coat for the rest of the night because the cashier, sullen in his plexi-glass casing, refused to change it for me. Fifteen ponds in ten pees is heavy, I warn you.
It lost its glitz for me in the arcade at Brighton, after I'd 'found my machine' - one which looked likely to pay something out - and had stood there with Ben for the best of five minutes.
Chinkchinkchink.
"Oooooh ! Look ! I won !"
"Yeah, seventy pee. Nice one, and you only fed three pounds in. This is a right laugh."

I needed to move onto higher stakes. I'm addicted to smoking, which is something I'm hoping to crush in the new year, and booze, and caffeine, but ultimately, I like to profit, and unless you count heart disease, hangovers and the jitters as a profit, I needed to find something more. Don't get me wrong - I'm not trying to trivialise addiction, which, in it's worst forms, swallows lives and stability and rationalisation - but I can see it is in me, at least in the smallest dose. The thing is I never see it unless it's pointed out to me.

Two years ago I played poker with my family on Christmas evening. I'm a reckless gambler - anyone who has betted against me in Pontoon knows this; "Hit Me!" - but for me that just adds to the thrill. So it was I found myself low on chips and high of hand at about half past twelve that evening, desperate to win something.
I lent over.
"Mum. Mum, lend me some of your chips."
My mum, who had been WINNING ALL NIGHT refused politely, citing the rules of the game.
"Fuck the rules mum, come on, seriously. I have a definite winning hand here."
"No."
"You won't do this for your only daughter ?"
My sister looked flatly across the table at me, saying nothing.
"Alright, look. You lend me the chips, I'll win, I'll pay you back double. Double."
"No, Daise."
"Alright, cash then, I've got the cash right here, it's in my purse. No ? No ? Alright look, these car keys, I have these car keys against this hand, if I lose, you get the car."
"Those are my keys, and that's my car." Steve said, at which point I gave up, protesting, and went outside to worship the god of nicotine.

It's the same with the Playstation - oh Playstation, you beautiful device you - which I played so obsessively and relentlessly that I actually had to ban myself from owning one lest I lose another job because of it, not to mention the boyfriend who left me because I was playing with Leon more than I was him.

A while ago, Lenny and I were in the pub when he mentioned a game they had called Shut the Box. The premise is so simple it's almost insulting - it's a dice game, so no skill is involved, just the subtraction of numbers between one and nine. I'd never heard of it, so was clapping my hands with glee when Lenny brought it over.
"Shall we make this interesting by putting some money on it, say a pound a game ?" he'd asked, and I'd said yes.
Five pounds down and Lenny said he had to stop,
"I don't want to lose any more money," he'd said.
This struck me as odd - not that I was winning, I occasionally get lucky streaks, you should see me play pool - but because he'd stopped, entirely of his own accord, whereas I would have started scribbling IOU's and making empty promise for JUST ONE MORE GAME.

This came to a head last night in the Fortune of War in Brighton, where I was with some friends. There is a quiz machine in the corner, but I never really play those things, and hadn't really noticed it until Billy pointed it out.
"Ah, I really wish you'd been here the other night, Daise. I was playing that and one of the categories was 'Stephen King Books'. I got them all wrong."
I smiled.
"I'd have aced that."
"Yeah." Odge agreed, "You would."
"Might have a go myself." I murmured, and ten minutes later, was being manhandled away by Odge and Billy.
"Billy, give me some change, I need some change." I'd demanded.
"I can't Daisy -"
"Why ? You work here don't you ?"
"Yeah. It's just that you've put quite a lot of money into it already and I think anymore would be a waste."
"Oh come on! No-one knows the capital of Kenya." I implored.
"Nairobi." everyone answered.
Bastards.

hanks in pants

2007-11-28T22:55:00.000-12:00

Three, maybe four years ago my friends and I - our name was legion and we are many, if you like - decided to spend Christmas in our flat, and aim out going to see our families. There were fifteen of us on Christmas day, all chipping in money for drinks and food, which were both bountiful, and with one of us - thank you Meade - doing the cooking.
Over the seasonal period our over indulgence led to most of us sat on our collective arses eating and drinking our way towards cardiac arrests and watching ALL the Christmas fayre tee-vee had to offer, which mainly consisted of old Tom Hanks movies designed for the young, or the female or the stupid, or in some cases all three.
It would appear that Tom Hanks has it written into some draconian contract somewhere that every single one of his movies has to feature at least one scene of him in pants. So it was that in Turner and Hooch Hanks wrestles with a dog in pants. (Hanks, not the dog, that would be weird). In Big, he is seen strolling around in nothing but pants. Ever watched Castaway ? End to end loincloth. I've never watched it all the way through but I'll bet money Sleepless in Seattle features a 'heartwarming' scene whereby Hanks vacuously reprimands his young son while one or the other are in pants. Saving Private Ryan only ever led to the phrase 'Hanks in Pants with Tanks' and as for Apollo 13, I really can't comment, mainly because we got bored and put on some music.
It's a hell of a game, look out for it, and every time Hanks strolls onto the screen in his pants for seemingly no apparent reason - The Burbs - please do award yourself a point. Go on, you deserve it.

"you, madam, need some discipline"

2007-11-18T21:28:00.000-12:00

I have things to do, but being a procrastinator of almost epic magnificence I'm finding excuses to put off doing them all.
Like writing this piffle for example.
My apathy always reaches new dizzy lows in the winter, as the darkness begins to surround us a little more tightly in the mornings and the evenings and the weather mutates into one long wet, bone numbing day. At least that's the excuse I'm giving, that's what I'm telling myself as I flick through endless channels of even more endless vapidity without lifting my head from the arm of the sofa. Free Willy ? Yeah, I'll watch ten minutes of that until the One Hundred Greatest Pop Songs starts on TMF. Reckon I can get a good hour of that in before it's time for the Antiques Roadshow. And I'll eat at some point. I guess.
Meanwhile, here are the things I ought to be doing;
(a) Cleaning out the goldfish. They have taken to swimming against the glass of their bowl and occasionally flicking the surface with their tails trying to alert me to the squalor of their faintly orange tinted water. I know it's cruel. I know that the edges of that tank should not be furred up with algae. I know I should be able to see them through the glass and the murk. I know all this and I will do it.
Later.
Once I've done this.
(b) Get dressed. It's four thirty in the afternoon. I'm still in my night attire and while on someone else that phrase may sound sexy and alluring - "I'm only wearing a very thin, very short nightdress," - that, I can assure you, is not the case with me. Until someone makes a fetish film called 'Chicks in Oversized Tee-shirts and Knee High Socks with Bad Hair' that is. Then I'm your girl.
(c) Eat. Unless I can reach it from a prone position on the sofa, it's not going in my mouth. I've discovered I can slide a bowl of Maltesers towards my groping hand using my foot - thank you, dance classes, I knew you weren't in vain - and I can look pitifully at whoever comes into the room.
"Are you going to the kitchen ?" I ask in a lost little girl voice, "if you are can you please bring me in an apple/sandwich/full roast dinner with all the trimmings ?"
(d) Finish the short story I started a week ago. Deadlines are my nemesis. They come steaming towards you, blundering past everything else you've put off doing for weeks, announcing themselves in a thunderous voice that you were meant to have taken notice of five weeks previously. If a deadline had a voice it would sound like Brian Blessed. This is true.

A high achieving friend told me once that procrastination was just another word for laziness. I don't agree, and the moment I'm out of my vegetative state of inertia I'll argue the point with her, but not just yet. Five more minutes.

Committing Piscine Genocide

2007-11-11T21:44:00.001-12:00

I know, I know, I'm unstoppable. But you know how it is when you have an uneventful Sunday night of doing very little in a warm place, wrapped up snug and womblike in front of a movie until you think, I'll just chip off to bed with Catch bastard 22, the book which never ends, and in doing so you take off your clothes and hang them on a clothes rail which lurches unexpectedly and fatally to the left, tilting over in horrific slow motion and smashing into your goldfish bowl which splinters open like a cracked nut with a terrific smash, spilling out a cascade of water and the audible fleshy thump of two piscine bodies hitting the floor where they flop about for a bit and then lie still while all around them is water, water everywhere and you, frozen barefoot in just your underwear can't move for the broken glass and can only watch them flail while water spreads out towards you like slow moving lava in a dark shadow and by the time, five minutes later you get round to picking them up by their tails and the bloody things are still alive and squirm in your hand so you squeal like a girl and shove them in a bucket of water while for the next three quarters of a cocking hour you are on your hands and knees for all the wrong reasons mopping up stale water and then you think to yourself 'Bollocks to this it's half past twelve, I'm going to get a beer.'

You know those kinds of nights ?

I fucking do.

small town blues

2007-11-11T21:30:00.000-12:00

A little while back Philip J and I were discussing Small Town Mentality Syndrome. Having grown up in a city the size of a monopoly board I am well versed in the mechanics of gossip and rumour and the constant vigilance of the small townee. On more than one occasion as a teenager I'd arrive home to find that my parents knew more about what I'd been up to that night than was entirely comfortable, particularly as my good times revolved around spar cider, poppers and french kissing the local youth round the back of the cathedral.
Don't get me wrong, I like to gossip as much as the next lass, but there is something sinister and almost bleak about being the subject of the bitchery and snipery that sustains the Small Town Mentality.I'm known for my terrible judgement of both people and situations and therefore found myself against the better judgement of every single person I knew, on a flight to Asia to marry a total idiot. My friends tried to stop me. The regulars in the pub I was running tried to stop me. My own mother offered me money to not go. But I knew what I was doing, I was in love.

So when, four weeks and many tears later I arrived unwed back in Brighton, tanned and skinnier than when I'd left but feeling like a catastrophic failure and abysmally alone, it came as no surprise at all to find that everyone knew. Everyone. Even complete strangers came up to me in the pub;
"Ah, we knew it wouldn't work out. He was no good for you. We all thought so. Boys a fool if he doesn't want you etc"
"Who are you ?"
"Ah. We saw your picture in the shop there."

"What ?"
Turns out my flatmate Simon had put a poster up of me in the town centre with the words;
'LOST. A friend and a flatmate, last seen running away to Thailand with her head in the clouds'
because he knew, like everyone else it seemed, that it was never going to work out. Just like everyone had said. A few people had joked about taking bets on how long it would be before I came home - at least I think they were joking. The point being that the fact that it hadn't worked out made for very good story indeed, especially when you consider that the boy involved flew back to England before me threatening to kill a man I'd once had a fling with. Oh, how that paid off in gossip gold. It's all there, broken hearts, shotgun weddings, bikinis, threats to kill, if it didn't sound so fictional I'd write a book about it.

Back to the conversation. Philip had made a good point in that when you live in a small town with not much happening except the events of other people's lives you tend to get 'a running commentary' on your activities from others.
In this case I was meeting a friend who had moved away from Brighton recently and was only in town for the afternoon. We had about an hour and a half together before she had to go, which was time enough for a pint. Sitting in the beer garden I hadn't even taken my jacket off when I was hit with the question bullets flying out of her face.
" You're not going to tell about this man you've met than?"

"Which one ?"

"I hear you haven't written anything for a while because you've been drinking too much."

"Pardon ?"

"Is it true that you're getting dressed up as Led Zeppelin on the night of the tribute concert and performing the entirety of 'Physical Graffiti' in your kitchen and that you and Lisa have fallen out because you both wanted to be Jimmy Page?"
"That's not strictly true, no -"

"You still not sleeping I hear ?"
"Jesus - "

"Someone told me you were some kind of ultra vixen with a torture dungeon in your basement and a cache of weapons in the loft."
"Yeah, I suppose."

Turns out she was being fed this information through the many and various mouths of my acquaintances, and as she no longer lived in town she had specifically asked that any news was reported back to her with the speed and inaccuracy of a tabloid reporter. Which I could have been annoyed about. I could have pulled her up and told her that if she wanted to know about what I was doing all she had to do was ask and I'd tell her. But after years of living in a tiny, snub-nosed town I have developed the ability to shrug off all my gossip and laugh in the face of all the scandalous rumours. Particularly the one currently doing the rounds about me at the moment. I'm sure you'll hear about it soon. Just not from me.

that van stank to high heaven though.

2007-10-28T23:13:00.001-12:00

I have a wonderful image in my head, a static slice of frozen time.
Cornwall, a few years ago. Nine of us had miraculously managed to get a weekend off our various bar jobs and hired a mini-bus to drive down there for an experimental exodus out of Brighton. It was, and remains still, one of the happiest journeys I've taken so far - 'the devil fools with the best laid plans' Neil Young once sang but we were safe because we hadn't made any. Not one. Hence the first night was spent with nine of us sleeping upright and drunk in the van parked on Perranporth beach. The image in my head is that of us, windswept and tired, on the seafront down at St Ives on a brisk May morning the day we were due to leave. Alex John is looking pale and unhappy because a seagull had stolen her ice-cream and she had a bilious hangover from the local scrumpy. Tina is still drunk, and wrapped up in a bright pink blanket. Jon and Odge are to my left, discussing Fifty Cent with Gordon, who looks stilted and worn because he cricked his neck sleeping in the van on the first night. From here, stood on the beach I can see Amy and Burg writing their names in the sand. Finch is to my right, with a pasty, ignoring the fact that the temperature within it is close to that of molten lava.
It was here that I can remember feeling happy - happy in that content, this is bliss way - and hoping it was a moment I would never forget. We've banned ourselves from discussing that holiday now - particularly in the presence of anyone who wasn't there - because the stories and anecdotes are numerous and the in-jokes so inverted that they may as well be mythical, and anyone listening to us ramble on about it generally starts shifting in their seat, then their eyes develop a glassy sheen, then their jaws slacken and a runner of drool swings from their lower lip as they enter an advanced catatonic state.
Alright, it's not that boring. But like all the best things, you had to be there.

aka 'big stupid nobchops'

2007-10-09T21:18:00.000-12:00

If you're going to give yourself an alias - the sort of cool, razor-edged, law-breaking moniker used mainly by rappers and hustlers, always, always choose something which makes you sound, well, cool, razor-edged and law-breaking.
For instance, no-one is going to question the credentials of the Grym Reaper, Dr Doom or Ol' Dirty Bastard.
And you'd have to be an maniac to pick a fight with someone calling themselves Ghost Face Killah.
So in my childish way, it really made me laugh when, on Saturday afternoon as I headed off to the pub I saw that someone calling themselves Big Daddy G had tagged themselves all over the walls of one of Brighton's junctions. What made it funny, at least to me in some puerile way, was that someone had added '-ay' at the end of ‘ Big Daddy G’.
Ah, the comedy.

such a load of old bono, all of it.

2007-10-02T22:19:00.000-12:00

The other night Alan and I were having late drinks in the pub and we overhead a table having a ‘Ten Bands we Must see before we Die’ conversation, which led us, in our meandering, drunken way, on to a conversation of ‘Ten Bands we’d rather Die then See’.
I’d forgotten all about it until last week when I received this message from Al;

Alan - Oasis, Hard-Fi, Fatboy Slim, The Kooks, Arctic Monkeys, U2, Calvin Harris, Maroon 5, Hootie and the Blowfish, and Hard-Fi again (Cos I hate them so much)...

Which led me to respond;

Daisy - u2, sting, sting and u2 in concert , sting, bono and simply red live with jamie cullum, genesis, phil collins, mike and mechanics, razorlight, steely dan, ub40, fallout boy, my chemical romance, ub40 guest appearing at a lenny kravitz concert.
*deep breath*
akkon the ringtone menace, jack penate, sean kingston, katie melua, dave stewart solo with jamie cullum on the pia-pia-pia-no, collins on drums, and bono on vocals. it’s a super group.super shit that is.

and m-people, which I have just thought of. Bunch of insipid, lukewarm arse.

(thanks to Alan for making me laugh so much about it though.)

insomnia's revenge - the awakening

2007-09-25T21:16:00.000-12:00

It's four-thirty in the morning the night before the day I'm going to post this, or the morning of, if you're a bit of a pedant.
I've just been downstairs to make a cup of tea and stare glazed around the kitchen cursing my restlessness when I found myself drawn against my will to the flat black pools of the windows which overlook the garden.
I've said it before and will happily keep saying it until someone physically restrains me, there is something sinister about the middle of the night. On Sunday I woke up at three o'clock in the morning, paddling against the restraint of my covers and wondering why I could only see things in black and white.
" I'm colour-blind!" I screamed inwardly "I can only see in monochrome!"
A know plenty of people who get 'face at the window' syndrome - anyone who has watched a horror film from the eighties or early nineties will have some measure of this - when all you see is the spectre of your reflection peering back at you and somewhere out there, in the dark and the depths of the night the killer is prowling, stalking, knife glinting in hand, your eyes wander restlessly over the - ah Jesus! there he is, pressed flat against the glass.
The looming face at the porthole of your fears.
I spent at least five of my teenage years in a state of painful anxiety after being told by a 'psychic' that I was going to start seeing ghosts and that the first one would appear to me over my shoulder in my reflection. Thanks for that. I was a staggeringly insecure adolescent - as if there is any other kind - and would have happily spent hours staring into hostile mirrors and mentally pulling my image apart. Catching my own reflection became a terrifying ordeal, not only having to contend with the unhappy symmetry of my features but potentially the wispy face of a phantom hovering about the place, suggesting ways I could improve my hair. Whether I believe in ghosts or not, her words always, always come back to haunt me in these dark times, these alone-in-the-bowels-of-the-night times, when all I see out of the exposed kitchen windows is my own pale face, nervous and wide eyed, not just because of the roaming killer about to slam himself up against the glass but because the faces of the dead are about to loom up in the behind me as well.
It’s not as if I encourage meddling with the afterlife, I’m going to be seeing enough of it when I’m dead.

i'll (not) get these in.

2007-09-11T22:09:00.000-12:00

"Life moves pretty fast, " said Ferris Bueller, later to be sampled on the Gravediggaz Niggamortis album, "you don't stop to look around every once in a while, you miss it."

Ferris has obviously never spent a week in my company when I'm off the sauce, when time slows to a lame crawl and the only thing you're likely to miss if you don't stop to look around is my cells dying. A craving, like gossip, is hard to ignore, particularly if you regard the twin evils of smoking and drinking as I do, which is like fond old pals instead of for what they are. One, a hysterical displacement activity and insidious poison, the other an emotion sating, speech slurring social activity.
When I tried to give up smoking back in June it was as though someone had told me I could no longer breathe. I'd sit huddled in pubs with my friends, insanely jealous as they wafted smoke about the place and made roll-ups with nimble dextrous fingers, occasionally glancing at me and saying with sincerity,
"I'm really proud of you, Daisy, you're doing really well."
Well fuck well and fuck you. Fuck all of you, you giddy, laughing, smoking bitches. Those were my actual thoughts, and the beer didn't help because aside from narrowing my already shrinking willpower to that of a gnat, one without the other just didn't seem right.
I fell off that wagon so spectacularly you could have called it a stunt dive. One of those with men carrying panes of glass across a suspiciously empty street, stacks of boxes piled up in alleyways, cranes carrying dynamite toppling over onto firework factories, that kind of thing. So I'm determined not to do that this time. It's only day three, and I'm already discovering that eerie clarity of thought in which objects, perspective and people take on vivid new dimensions which - in my blurred and booze fugged mind - I'd previously never noticed. I don't look as though I've had my hair styled by Ken Dodd as I walk into work. I've found out that I do understand Catch-22, it's just a huge tome, and will be quite laborious. I've fed my goldfish every day instead of just when I remembered, and now they are no longer trying to propel themselves over the rim of their bowl. I discovered I still have a child-like enthusiasm for many things, instead of the dried-up cynical approach I'm familiar with.

I don't advocate abstinence - I don't advocate anything, I'd be a fool to try, especially since the last time -
"What's that noise ?"
"It's bloody Daisy advocating the merits of Paul McCartney. Let's get out of here."
- but I have to say, from my sanctimonious, smug little cocoon of sobriety I'm feeling pretty good. Especially when all those around me are suffering with hangovers. Drink up, losers.

Next week : I'll be back at Threshers, doing the weekly shop.

bushes on mushes

2007-09-03T20:49:00.000-12:00

This is my third rewrite in recounting the events of my weekend, so surreal and magnificent as it was. If, upon reaching the end of this post you still feel adrift in a sea of implausibility I can only hold my hands up and say;
"Hey. It's how it happened."
Friday saw the return to Brighton of my friends Sam and Sam, the bi-titled couple who for reasons known best to themselves moved to Bristol over a year ago. The reason for their return was twofold - the World Beard and Moustache Championships were being held at the Brighton Centre on Saturday and Sam and Mitton's Marriage of Friendship at which I, as best (wo)man was to oversee the joining together in some kind of matrimony of these two best friends.

With me so far ? Good.

Friday saw much fun and drinking and the playing of the Minder theme tune in odge's pub, with me trying to usher everyone into dancing to Come on Eileen with me - it didn't happen. The next day dawned bright and sunny which was a shame as the light lanced my parched eyeballs and throbbing head at precisely eight thirty that morning and then stubbornly refused to leave, like an uninvited drunk guest, forcing me up and into a shower which needled my delicate self and left me wet and tingling. Truly, I was suffering, and I only had a few short hours to compose my self before donning my wedding outfit (pinstriped funsuit and tie, trilby, moustache, sunglasses. I looked like a cross-dressing blues brother. I looked like John Belushi in drag. John Belushi in drag after death. You get the point.)
Hoisting my sorry self in a taxi and across town, we finally entered the Brighton Centre a good hour and a pint later and by the powers of all that is hirsute and holy it was quite literally indescribable.
No, it really was, trust me, I've tried. Even photographs don't do it justice, I can only urge you to go and see the spectacle for yourselves and consider the dedication and devotion of each and every man to his facial accessory, and instead of wondering 'Why ?' just think 'Aces'. After all as the song says;
'Every girl loves a fella with a bush upon his mush'.
At least I think that's what it said. Certainly works in my mind.
At this point I'd like to steal wholesale an image which Sam conjured up for us in the pub later, that of Tony Hewittson and his portrait on the stairs. As you enter the Centre there are two staircases - one to the left and one to the right - I, like most right handed people consistently turned right upon entering the building and in doing so we found ourselves confronted each time by a portrait of Tony Hewittson on the stairs. Who he was or what he did I don't know but the artist has captured Tony in a suit, at a desk, on a phone. As Sam said later,
"When I die, I went a portrait of me riding a stallion into the vast depths of hell holding a flaming sword in one hand and a human head in the other. I don't want it to look as though I'm trying to get through to the marketing department."
It's a fair point. Perhaps the Brighton Centre would like to take this into account.
After being touched up by some very frisky gents in uniform - I said put your arm around me for a photo, not go for my tits - and marvelling at one very dapper gent (Number 17 in the Full Beard category) who pulled the chair out for his good lady wife and stood when she stood, was seated when she sat etc, I remarked on how it was a shame manners didn't exist like that any more. Mitton wrinkled her nose,
"It'd piss you off after a while, Daize. You'd end up bobbing up and down all night just to see how long it would take for his patience to snap."
Touché. And indeed, 'Tasche.
The wedding took place on the floor of or local pub's beer garden owing to lack of vacant beaches and was witnessed by myself and Gracie, a stout dog-pig with one of those wrinkled, flabby faces you can't fail to find distinctly unappealing. Then it was shots all round and a magnificent tumble from Lisa 'It's been a while' Mitton on the way home.
Their wedding night was spent with me in the kitchen arguing over whether or no Rod Stewart has ever been hot. (Answer: NO).

Me ? Drinking problem ? Nah, I don't have a problem with it.

Update: I’ve been asked to mention the tequila fuelled band which was formed following the wedding ceremony called Dog for a Witness in which I’m the lead singer. Looks like I’ll have to put my electro project Laser Love Guns to one side for a while.

apples and spice and all things nice.

2007-08-28T20:11:00.000-12:00

It's nearly that time of year again - October 21st is National Apple Day (or at least it was last year, I haven't checked the dates this year, I don't have an apple fetish or anything.)
Last year we took ourselves to Middle Farm, a working farm straight outta the Shire and hidden in the Sussex countryside, known for it's homemade cheeses, a monstrous shire horse called - and over two hundred different types of ciders, meads and scrumpies all for the tasting.
These are proper ciders and scrumpies - bitter and cloudy and in the case of the pear cider, a mild laxative. As Odge can tell you. Ten minutes with a 5ml tasting cup and you're already a bit heady, feeling the crab apple flush building on your cheeks and a slow, stupid smile rise on your face. It's homemade and cheap and sold in cleaned out milk cartons with handwritten labels plastered on the front. If it sounds overly twee that's because it is, and if, after quarter of an hour of standing in the low-ceilinged converted barn, surrounded by the musk of old wooden barrels and the tang of spilt cider you don't emerge swathed in gingham chewing a piece of straw then you haven't really done it right, and should keep drinking until you fall through the Cider Portal. Even the names themselves seem to thrust huge innuendos and charmless metaphors into your slowly blinking bovine face. 'Crippled Cock', 'Double Vision' and 'Mangled Perspective' might sound like pro-wrestlers, but the only parallel they have with them is that all may leave you with something either sprained or broken, depending on how long you spend with each one.
They also have an Olde Time Fayre (don't laugh) which consists of the kind of circus music and swirling giddy rides you only ever see in cheese based nightmares and 'drug trip' sequences in bad films. One of the stalls is a Olde Time variation on a shooting gallery with crossbows and arrows instead of air rifles which isn't only perversely dangerous when you think of all the Double Vision seeping into your bloodstream but hilarious, especially when Richard fired vertically instead of horizontally and speared the fairy lights in the ceiling.
No prizes for Richard.
They also have a huge selection of bantam hens, each and every one of which looks as though they are wearing a pair of feathered flares, which, once I'd had enough mulled cider (hot, spicy, sweet and embarrassingly potent) I could and would have laughed at for hours, if Sweetman hadn't taken me by the arm and dragged me away muttering,
"They're just hens, Daisy, they're just hens."
Everyone should go, and if you're not singing the duelling banjos from Deliverance and making ill-judged predictions abut the weather all the way back to the train I'll eat my straw hat.

planes, trains and shitmobiles

2007-08-12T22:28:00.000-12:00

We all have mental filters which means we only register certain things. The things we do register sink, sponge-like, into a consciousness bank, to be accessed at will. As a for instance, for me it's theme tunes, advert jingles, ghost stories. I can easily tell you that the ewoks theme tune from it's short lived cartoon spin off went 'we're the e-e-e-e-eeeewoks, one big happy happy family' or that no matter what you say-ay, the muskahounds are never far away. ay. (if I'm drawing on lots of childhood things here, which I am, it's because that was the last time I watched t.v with any degree of enthusiasm).
Other things simply skate off the surface of my brain like greased wheels on ice, leaving barely a trace.
I once asked an ex-boyfriend to explain to me how planes stayed in the air. Jason began describing, in great detail, the necessary schematics needed for flight - I heard turbines, velocity, something about jet propulsion, maybe ? Then I began to wonder whether or not bees could hear themselves buzz. After a minute or two, he paused and peered directly at me.
"You're not even listening, Daisy." He said, justifiably angry, "Why ask me if you're not going to listen when I tell you ?"
"Sorry." I'd said, turning my eyes into big round baby blues in an effort to avoid an argument, "It's just not sinking in."
Jason looked at me for a moment and sighed. "It's all pixies and fairy dust and magic." he said.
"That's what makes planes fly ?"
"No, Daisy. That's what's in your head."
It's not that I don't care. I can tell you that my friend Finch works with people with learning difficulties and that Odge is running a pub. But Lenny and Alex, who I regard with equal affection and a certain fondness, I haven't a clue about. I know Lenny is in his second year at university studying...uh...something to do with music, he has told me...um...sound production ? No, it's not quite right. I know that Alex works in the City, doing something very high-pressured and important with large amounts of money for an enormous salary. But even though he's told me, I still couldn't tell you his job title.
I have a filter for finances, something I've had all my life. Again, it's not that I don't care - left to my own devices I'd be bankrupt by now - I just don't hear it. Bank statements continue to go into the drawer unopened, balances unchecked, withdrawals unmonitored. Someone tried to go through it with me once and gave up in disgust when I asked he minded if I played the playstation while he carried on.
Like I said, it's not lack of caring, or ignorance, it's just the mental filters only process really useless knowledge and functionless trivia into the portals of my mind. It's why I've got no idea how music is transferred to a c.d but I could wang on to you endlessly about werewolf legends or futurama or goldfish.

more than meets the eye

2007-08-05T20:33:00.000-12:00

So, Transformers.
I've tried to see this film three times now at have been thwarted at each attempt like a lazy bluebottle. The first time I couldn't go because I was ill, the second time was because Lenny, who had so kindly offered to come with me when no-one else would, got drunk and forget to book the tickets. Then he dropped an even bigger bombshell.
"Actually Daisy, I've been meaning to tell you this." Lenny looked uncomfortable, his eyes dancing away from mine. "It's just that, well , I -uh - I watched Transformers at the weekend."
"WHAT ? Without me ? You bastard!"
"I'm sorry Daisy. It just happened, and I thought of you the whole time. I'll come with you to see it though, it was so fucking great I'd happily sit through it again."
He began explaining a scene to me in vivid detail until I said,
"Alright, alright, we'll go on Thursday."
So last Thursday Sweetman and I (and briefly my parents, who were visiting for a couple of days) were sat in the pub, itchy with excitement. We got a couple of pints, I was doing my Transformers impressions, my parents were asking what the film was - "So it's a bit like that car advert then, when the car transforms into a robot ?" - when my phone rang. It was Lenny, who'd gone ahead to get the tickets.
"Cinema's shut."
"Fuck's sake. How long for ?"
"Just tonight. I'm outside the pub anyways, so I'll come in."
In he came, and sat down beside me.
"Fucking cinema cunts," he was ranting, "titwanks -"
"Have you met my mum ?" I said stridently, pointing across the table. Lenny had the decency to look embarrassed and mutter something about being Irish and therefore entitled to have language which would make a docker blush. In the end we had a few pints and I did my Transformers impression to no acclaim.
The next day I got to work to an email from my friend Alex, telling me all about the film and skirting into the plot and certain memorable lines.
It's okay, I think, he hasn't really given anything away, and the plot isn't the reason I'm going anyway.
Then Sweetman calls me at work. He is hungover which makes two of us.
"Where are you ?" I ask, grateful that he's called. His voice is a soothing balm on the ache of my head.
"Seafront. Well, nearly."
I'm suddenly suspicious. "Why ?" I hate the seafront. "What possible reason does anyone go to that beach ?"
Sweetman, very quietly, "I'm going to see Transformers."
I nearly thrown the phone out of the window. I wanted to howl "It's not faiiiirrrrrr" into the receiver. I managed a "okay then." Sweetman reassured me he'd meet me after work for a Friday drink, and even persuaded me to do a quick decepticon down the phone. Later in the bar garden he was telling me about the film, all the best bits rambling out of his mouth in a neon blur until a slammed my pint down and said,
"Alright stop. I haven't even bloody seen it yet and I already feel like I know most of it."
"I'd defiantly go again," Sweetman says, eyes aglow like an eighties child, "It's fantastic."
On Saturday I'm gaying it up at pride when my phone rings. It's Philip, so I call him back.
"Hey, it's me." he says, unneccesarily, "Look, I've just called to tell you that a mate's just come down and ummmm, well we're going to watch Transformers in a bit." I have to steady myself against a wall. Philip has broken three ribs recently so to call him the name I was thinking of calling him seems a bit harsh. I swallow it back, but it's an effort.
"Great."
"I'm really sorry, Daisy. I know how much you wanted to see it." it sounds like he's grinning. I tell him I hope he enjoys it and think I manage some conviction.
Later, I'm back at the house with a beer when he sends a text.
"They've just captured bumblebee!"
Then another;
"Oh my god! He put the cube in megatron's chest instead!"
Jesus Christ. Charlie Brooker once said that the biggest movie spoiler of all time was the DVD cover to Planet of the Apes with the statue of liberty's head sticking out the sand.
He should meet some of my mates.
Update: Cinema at eight thirty Wednesday. Nothing but the second coming will stop me.

fall apart in my backyard.....

2007-07-30T23:05:00.000-12:00

For reasons I can’t fathom a friend of mine is planning a trip to Canada in order to complete a 600km cycle trek.
This morning he received an email from the organisers from which I have pulled the following text because it made me laugh:
Bear Safety
"Local bear expert Jay Honeyman will be giving a bear safety presentation as part of the pre-race briefing on August 12th. Jay will also have bear spray ($30), with holster ($40), and bear bangers ($40) available for purchase following his presentation. Sale of these safety items will go to support the Karelian Bear Shepherding Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting education and research to reduce incidents of bear human conflict."

First off, he’s called Jay Honeyman. Bear experts should be called Mike Grizzly or Frank Claws or Hardcore Muscles – Jay Honeyman sounds a bit, well, fictional, no matter how apt a name it is.

Bear Spray ? Brilliant ! That’ll keep a charging half ton grizzly at bay. At least you get to wear a holster as your throat is ripped from your neck and your head flung twelve feet into the undergrowth. Holsters make you look cool. Fact.

Bear Bangers ? Aces. I can only imagine these are thrown at the bear’s paws in order to scare it off, but surely the only effect this will have will be to make it dance on it’s hind legs. Which is surely illegal ?

I write this with apologies to Amy Mead

2007-07-25T20:30:00.000-12:00

I have many many many lovely friends. One of the loveliest and shortest is Amy Mead, aka shortarse, pixie mead or in my case Moo.
I am known for my fickleness, it seeps from me in unusual ways - I say I'll be somewhere and I won't, I promise something only to get the fear of commitment and dash it against the rocks of loyalty at the last minute - I can barely trust my own promises to myself.
I made a very quick decision in March to go back to university this year and in an unsurprising turn of mood yesterday have decided to defer, at least for a year. After all, I don't want to commit to not going either. Today I broke the news to Amy, while standing on the grimy pavements of London Road, buffeted by swarms of wretched hags and harridans, each screeching insults at the other as they passed me. Therefore the conversation went something like this;
Amy: "What do you mean you're not going to university, Dooks ?"
Me: "Stupid fucking bitch."
Amy; "Ey?"
Me: "Sorry not you. Some twat - yes you, you twat - is trying to push past me. Yeah, like I said, I think I've changed my mind about university."
Long, long pause. I could almost hear the depths of Amy's knowing, stupefied mood.
Amy : "Are you joking ? You're joking, are you ? Are you ?"
Me: (quietly) "No."
At this point Amy's language turned the air so blue I could practically swim back to work.
Me: "Look. I've really thought about this."
Amy: "I am never going to believe anything you say again."
Me: "Yeah you too, arsehole. Sorry, someone was trying to get past again."
Amy: "You always do this."
Me: genuinely affronted "Not all the time"
Pause.
Amy: "I'll talk to you about this later."
Me: " Seriously I know what I'm doing this time."
Amy: "Whatever you want Daise."
Me: "I'll stick it up your arse in a minute mate. Sorry, someone was - Amy ?"
Nope, she'd gone. She's right of course, I do do this all the time, and the fact that she cares means a great deal to me. So I just want to say to Amy (and Lenny, who said he'd kick my face off if I didn't go, and possibly Big Al B who may read this at work and come downstairs and kill me) I'm really sorry.
Not that sorry obviously, just enough to get back into your good books.
Update : As an afterthought, a huge cheers with off licence beers to Mitton and Jason who put 'poo-shaped cake' on my list of reasons to stay. I just need to know...why ?
And next time, it'll be all about ME obviously.

kick 'em in the vice magazines

2007-07-16T19:55:00.000-12:00

Being a westcountry girl a fairly large part of me is superstitious. Cows lying down ? Rain. Red sky in the morning ? Rain. Starlings flocking to the left ? Uhhhh....rain.
I’m terrified of lone magpies the way some people are of diseases and letters from the council. Lone magpies are an omen of sorrow, or in the case of Saturday night, indecent exposure and surrealism on a massive scale.
My favourite pub in the world is in north London - I found myself outside there with Alex on Saturday afternoon. I was going out later that evening so I was wearing the funsuit (shorts on the bottom, halter-neck on the top, bit like a waistcoat. business at the top, party at the bottom, I’m sorry.)
Alex was at the bar. A magpie swooped into view and strutted about briefly in that peculiar way they have, occasionally glaring at me with it's onyx eyes. "Good afternoon mister magpie," I intoned. It stared back so hard it was like being crushed by black ball bearings.
Oh dear, I thought, that's a bad omen.
The problem with funsuits is getting them off, and if the funsuit magic is working properly you will have someone willing to do that for you in no time. However, this was not one of those times. so as I struggled back into mine in the toilet I heard a tiny sound.
Ping.
There was a button on the floor.
Shit, I thought, picking it up. shit. Oh, it's alright, it's a concealed button at the waist. No-one will notice. I’ll just do these top two up, and...
Ping.
Ping.
I look down with mounting horror. On the floor are the top two buttons, gazing balefully up at me looking for the all the world like the eyes of a magpie. I groan. Looking down at myself I notice two things, and they should really not be so noticeable.
Clutching the top together I scurry through the pub and outside. (smoking.) Alex is looking at me.
"What ?" he says. I show him the clutch of buttons in my palm.
"So ?"
"Alex," I whisper, "you can see my bra." (it is a good bra though, but still.)
"No I can't."
I show him the affected area.
"Jesus." he says, averting his eyes. "Jesus Daisy, I did not ask to see that."
"What am I going to do ?" I have a scarf with me, so I put it on. It is very narrow and hangs limply down. Alex shakes his head.
"If anything that's worse. It looks like a fucking arrow. You'll just have to keep your coat on."
Good idea I think, as I make my way to Camden. I’ll just keep it done up all night.
At the venue I am greeted by Dan and The Drummer Whose Name I Do Not Remember in the garden. Dan gives me a hug.
"You look hot."
"Thank you," I say, giving him a little twirl.
"No, you look hot. You're sweating. Take off your coat."
"I can't. I’ve had a wardrobe malfunction."
"It's alright, how bad can it be ?"
I show them. The Drummer Whose Name I Do Not Remember takes a step back.
"Yeah, keep the jacket on."
At this point I want to say that Anne performed as ever, superlatively, despite being pregnant and claiming to feel tired. She looked and sounded glorious and rocked the place out. Anne, you were awesomer (you see Philip ? I do listen to you) And aces. I threw some shapes to Apple Pie despite being perilously close to overheating and smiled smugly at everyone because Anne and I have known each other a long, long time.
At the end of the night I thought I’d catch the last train back to Brighton for a drink with Odge, so I made my excuses and left.
It was eleven o'clock as I reached the bus stop to take me to King's Cross. One hour and fifteen minutes later I am still sat there, surrounded by drunk students and the entire cast of Blazing Squad, also drunk.
Just as I’m gritting my teeth to nothing more then a fine white powder the bus pulls up. I get on. Blazing Squad do the same. The bus driver starts shouting about travelcards. They start shouting back. There is much to-ing and fro-ing of disses and accusations and the bus driver hits the switch. At this point the engine dies and the entire vehicle turns into a strobe factory, complete with klaxon. By now my head is in my hands.
Grudgingly, after a full ten minutes more of protests, Blazing Squad dis-embark, muttering darkly about popping caps in asses and generally sounding like the stroppy teenagers they are. And that's fine, but not on my time.
By the time I reach King's Cross I have missed the last train and have to travel to East Croydon, a journey which is slightly marred by the man opposite, gurning and licking his own eyeballs. I try to tell him when we are at East Croydon as it is the last stop. He reaches out to hug me into his sweaty chest. I scarper, and I’ve never even known what scarpering was before now.
Finally, the train to Brighton shrugs into East Croydon at twenty five past one in the morning. Odge is guiding me home through the magic of text messages, despite the fact I’m a full two hours late, and if it hadn't been for him and his amazing words ('anyone in Camden gives you grief, kick 'em in the Vice magazines') there would have been actual tears.
On the train I sit opposite a man so old and tissue skinned I kept checking the rise and fall of his shoulders to make sure he was still alive. He gave me a bit of a scare at Purley when he caught his breath but luckily he made the full journey without the intervention of the grim reaper. Opposite me to the left was Reggie Kray, at least as he looked in his fifties, all slicked back hair and clunky jewellery. Kray meets Saville meets, as it turned out, Rain Man. He kept muttering and cracking his knuckles and clutching his head. perhaps he was thinking about Barbara Windsor, I know I was.
An hour until Brighton some Welsh dimwad gets out his phone and proceeds to play tinny versions of the Star Wars theme, whooping joyously along with the Darth Vadar march and occasionally increasing the volume in case they couldn't hear it in the next fucking carriage. The resulting buzzing, unlistenable, unrecognisable mess was so far from the original film score I found myself looking hopefully at Reggie Kray, wordlessly pleading with him to go and do the gentleman's thing of smacking the Welsh bloke in the head.
Alas, Reggie was preoccupied with clutching his head and muttering. Too bad, Reggie.
I fall off the train and practically commando roll into a cab which takes me to Odge's. Poor the Odge. He has been waiting up for me for four hours with Man Flu and cheap beer. When he opens the door I am so slump shouldered, utterly dejected and quiet that he gives me a hug, plonks a can in my lap, puts on the first series of the Mighty Boosh and gets me a t-shirt to hide my modesty.
I sleep on his sofa, warm and safe and happy at last. On the way home in the morning I see two magpies, pecking around in some scrubland. two.
...and do you know what ? Sunday turned out to be an aces day. Bloody birds.

aces outer spaces

2007-07-12T20:25:00.000-12:00

I had to write this. I went for dinner last night with teena (who makes badass fajita, and that nearly rhymed).
talk turned to our respective ages;

teena: "…I just really feel that I’ve matured since then"
me: (snorting derisively) “Really ? where do you hide this new found maturity then ?”
teena: “Up my hole.”

One day I hope to be as mature as teena.

all the things going bump in the night....

2007-07-08T23:27:00.000-12:00

my sleeplessness is out of control, and when i do eventually drop off i’m treated to the kind of dreams usually only seen in cartoons starring talking mice.
(you thinking what i’m thinking brain ?)
currently my bedtime is like a form of extreme sport - the kind only whooping idiots do - and i’m genuinely surprised at how resistant my brain is to actually fucking switching off when i ask it to.
the way this has manifested itself is mainly in the words, in the writing (see the duck-legs story, and a particularly shite early effort of mine which spoke of tigers and white russians. think i destroyed it, it was a solemn cremation – poof! up in flames) and also revealed in my vacant expression as i float through the day like an embryo. i’ve no idea how far my threshold will stretch before i end up the walking comatose, snatching sleep from pockets.
the french for sleep translates as ‘the little death’.* that sinisterism alone keeps me awake at night.
if anyone has any remedies for this sporadic insomnia let me know. but knowing you lot it’ll be booze and valium.

*update - thanks to AaA for telling me i am wrong. he can expect a prize of sorts. sorry, did i say prize ? i meant chinese burn.

roosting in the eaves of the mind

2007-07-02T20:42:00.000-12:00

Many, many things scare me. Many, many many things. My age. Flying without valium. The fact that our sofa doesn't lie flush with the wall so that if I'm watching anything scarier than Doctor Who I can imagine how easy it would be for someone (or something, thanks Stephen King) to crawl into the triangular gap and wait amongst the dust and the dark, waiting for me to relax a little, or for a lax curl of my hair to spill within it's clammy, callused grip. The eventual death of my cowboy boots. Zombies. Voodoo. The diabolic creaking outside my room between three and five every morning. This is true, it's like a bothersome spectre running up and down the corridor. In fact that last one wouldn't be frightening at all, it would just be annoying were it not for the fact that it happens in the dead of night, where your tired, overstretched mind will believe anything. It's why it's called the dead of night, not the 'lovely comfort zone' or 'the hour of rapture and good cheer.' No, it's the dead of night sunshine, just past the witching hour, and that noise isn't a tap dripping it's the slow steady hammering of the evil leprechauns breaking in through the cellar to steal all your toes and teabags and because it's the dead of night suddenly that idea has more plausibility then it would at any other time.
I am writing this late, not quite the dead of night but certainly day is in it's terminal stages.
My room is on the ground floor, facing the street. Our road is very posh, and very quiet and there is rarely a squeak after say, ten o'clock at night. The other night a cat miaowing on a window sill just past midnight received a record number of residential complaints and a petition to have it's voicebox removed. I signed it.
There is a man whistling outside my window. Perhaps it is a solitary drunk tunelessly picking out the notes to 'Two Little Boys', heading home after another late night. But the crashing dark doesn't want me to think that. Oh no. I have him in my head now, tall and stooped and irregularly shaped, like an amorphous shape squeezed into a man costume. His puckered lips are wet and his nose is bleeding. His shifty eyes don't leave my lit window, and his hands are deep in the pockets of his long coat which falls into pools of shadows by his feet. In the gloom you can almost see him smiling a little, a grin like a slit throat. Each note withers and dies as he croons it out.
And he's probably controlling the fucking leprechauns in the cellar as well.

go on mick, give it some stick

2007-06-29T01:05:00.000-12:00

i love chas and dave. i really do – i dragged a group of protesting, clamouring friends to see them at glastonbury (“i don’t want to go – it’s not even the real dave!”) and from the moment they showered the crowd with the opening chords to gertcha, we were all doing the lambeth walk in the mud and the rain and the rain and the mud. actually i lie about the rain – the sun came out and continued to shine throughout their set, like a benevolent blessing over the pearly kings and queens and cockney rock.
rockney.
sadly, while dancing in the rain may seem vivacious and buoyant, like the animated replicants seen in trainer/soda/feminine hygiene product commercials it invariably leads to fever, the chills and the shivers, not to mention the type of lurid dreams i‘ve only ever witnessed during the ‘drug trip’ sequences in cheap films. the kind which don’t involve emilo estevez dancing, however.
shockney.
so if this post appears a little disjointed and blowzy it’s because it’s how i’m feeling. i blame the chills (they’re multiplying) and the tiredness. also my mate the brain, who sent me an email earlier which led to us (well, me mainly) discussing how we’d look if we were zombies. i reckoned i’d look like a cross between an ac/dc groupie after a heavy night crossed with a wilting goth girl. in terms of wounds, i imagine both my arms would be intact but i may have a slight limp, owing to a twisted ankle. oh, and both my eyes would be pure white, with two tiny dancing black dots, no bigger then the points of a pencil floating on the surface.
basically, in death as in life i would be a bit scruffy and maudlin, and a bit of a pussy.
schlockney.

story 7: what the ducking hell ?

2007-06-20T01:37:00.000-12:00

*a note on this. i do not know what i was doing or what i was aiming for when i wrote this. i should be clear-headed - i haven't smoked or drank for a couple of days (maybe that's why) and i've been sleeping better than usual...so i don't know what went on here. it's messier than a crime scene. i do like it, in a way. but i also apologise...*

Her looks were average, but she had the legs of a duck. Slightly bowed, flat footed and webbed toed. The skin on them was scaly and tinged a vagrant orange like a boiled sweet sucked to a sliver on the tongue. When she moved the anatidae limbs caused her to stoop slightly, feet splayed slightly outwards, her rounded buttocks twitching and swaying in a neat waddle. There were soft downy feathers on her upper thigh in tawny browns, and no matter how often she plucked them they always grew back, bristling through the livid skin.
I can help you, he’d told her as she’d waddled through the park one morning. Trust me I’m a surgeon.
He was too, Dr Evern Dem Swiss no less, the swizz, the cheat, the fraud. Lara had looked down at her squat limbs, no thicker than a child’s arms and nodded tearfully. She had never dreamt of being any different but now that Dr Evern Dem Swiss had planted the seed of the idea it sprouted inside her gut with probing blind tubers. Seven days later she had arrived at the home of Dr Evern Dem Swiss, her feathered appendages tucked neatly beneath the folds of a long skirt.
The good Doctor had opened the door carrying two long, painfully sharp looking knives. He struck them purposefully together, drawing each wicked blade along the other with a metallic whicking sound. They had greeted each other, and as Lara had stepped through the door she noticed the smell of damson plums, rich and cloying.
Jam ? She’d asked.
The doctor had shaken his head. Plum sauce he’d answered, and furrowed his brow. To go with the pancakes.

good news everyone

2007-06-17T23:23:00.001-12:00

when hungover, there are really only three cures.
more alcohol or strong coffee.
if the first two are unavailable, i strongly recommend futurama.
it works.

a big thanks to all my fiends

2007-06-17T23:04:00.001-12:00

it was my birthday on saturday – thirty crept into bed with me at midnight on the fifteenth like a sinister uncle and woke me up on the sixteenth with a nudge and a poke. (i’ve just read that sentence back and i apologise.)
i had much fun and a slice of cherry pie, from which the filling was spilling in scarlet juices. i wore a moustache and kissed all my friends, and applauded finch’s carrot cake, which slayed us all at dinner. i managed to walk the distance home in heels until mitton pointed out how well i was doing at which point i stopped thinking happy thoughts and the heels became a handicap.
i wanted to thank everyone for birthday joy – however the reason there is a photo of lenny attached to this post is partly because he had a hand in making it super (like a hero) but principally because he emailed and asked why i never mentioned him here. so here he is, ladies and gentleman – it’s lenny.

failing not to kill people

2007-06-13T22:59:00.000-12:00

two things. alright three, if you count my birthday on saturday when i will be thirty (count ‘em) years old.
the other two things; i’ve just been reminded of the tee-shirt sean wears in the 1980’s film ‘monster squad' which, essentially, is the goonies with added comic book monsters.
it is red with yellow lettering on it and it reads;
‘stephen king rules.’
oh yes. if anyone knows where i can locate one of these puppies please let me know.
thirdly, the last story my friend the marvellous sweetman read of mine (‘lady de mort did not believe in ghosts’) he had finished and had said, very sweetly, as is his nature,
“i’m looking forward to reading a story you write which doesn’t involve death, ghosts, pirates, highwaymen, monsters, vampires or werewolves.”
then he had gone to the bar. i’d thought about this, and had asked him what he meant on his return.
“just be interested to see what you were capable of if you wrote something…grown up.”
“grown up?”
“yeah.”
“you don’t think i’m grown up ?”
“not you. just your subject matter. i like it daisy, i’m just interested to see you with something a bit heavier.”
i think sweetman may have seen the twitch beneath my right eye at the point because he’d rapidly changed the subject and bought me a pint.
so last night, with this in mind i sat down to write a short story without the subject matter of a scooby doo cartoon. it is, i feel i have proven to myself seven pages later, not possible. it started off well, i liked the characters, they seemed to slip into their roles easily, nice and loose like clown’s trousers.
suddenly, with no prior warning i felt an inexplicable urge to imbibe them with terror and kill them off in terrible ways.
this is scary…it was meant to be a nice story about two brothers.
i don’t know where i get it from but monster squad and the goonies must surely take some blame.

supercreeps

2007-06-10T23:51:00.001-12:00

i went to see nosferatu last night, courtesy of my kind friends finch and rich as a pre-birthday treat
i love, love, the scrolling, jittering quality of this film, almost like a stop-motion animation.
the only reason i’ve posted this is in order to use the accompanying picture, which i used to carry round with me, when i was
(a) much younger
and
(b) a goth (for about five minutes)
beautiful, isn't it ?

all the drinks were free! (up to half nine)

2007-06-10T19:57:00.000-12:00

hello thursday, i love you. you're like friday but with more anticipation and less pressure. you hover at the end of the week like a fleeting fancy and your nights just tickle me.
on thursday night i attended an awards presentation in london, (the observer eco awards, and no of course i wasn't up for an award, which is what my mother assumed when i spoke to her). i was there as a third choice 'date' to my former flatmate and friend with the superlative hair, simon. by all accounts he needed someone he could go with who would scrub up well, behave herself and not neck all the free drinks like they were going out of style. when she fell through he asked me. (ba dom ba dom tish!)
things went pretty wrong on arrival when i grabbed a glass of champagne and a beer from the tray at the door, and was about to take a bloody mary too until si gave me look which said "please. it's not going to run away, you can't drink three drinks at once."(i can, especially if they're in the same glass).
after failing to mingle and failing to not smoke in that order i managed to bore the very arse of some girl by talking to her about the worm bin at the bottom of our garden*.
me: yeah, we've got a worm bin bla bla bla rubbish bla bla bla worm bin bla bla compost dooby dooby doo worms bla bins bla bla
her: yeah that's fascinating. do you mind if i stick this glass in my eye to liven this conversation up a bit ? would it even matter to you if i did ? tell you what, i'm going to chip off now and you still won't notice. yep, i'm over here and she's still banging on to herself. bye!
me: worm bins bla bla bla
i scared danny dyer by popping up whenever he least expected it like old episodes of columbo - i know i'm a bit of a stalker, but this was purely co-incidence, and the look of mounting distress on his face was quite funny so i kept at it.
by the end of it i was quite drunk, telling the girl who was filling up the champagne glasses;
"thatsh great, can you leave me the bottle ashwell ?"
and she did, by the mercy of the lord, she did.
however i was nowhere near as pissed as si, who, as well as seemingly losing his navigational skills, had taken to doing his double handed 'invisible pistols' at passers by.
"to the bus." said i.
"no, too drunk, too drunk. to a hotel!" said he, and so say all of us for we did. here. to be fair, despite our smart dress we looked as though we'd both been mugged by world weary punks - my hair had transformed into a tina turner fright wig and si had only one eye open - so i can't blame the staff looking at us suspiciously, and it wasn't until i woke up this morning, feeling just that tiny bit closer to death that i remembered thinking it would be funny to try the pauline quirke lie (see post 'pauline quirke has stigmata') on some poor bloke the previous night. he looked like he wanted to call the police. he should have been grateful that i wasn't telling him about the worm bin, frankly.
ow, my head. it feels like it's been scraped clean and replaced with mucas and dirty water. i don't know how i got to bed - i do know that there was none of that funny business, thank you very much, i retain my ladyshipness even under the slew of alcohol - and wasn't sure why i had a stomach that was threatening to violently revolt but i do know that when i bordered the bus at six thirty in the morning to get to victoria, wearing last night's snazzy little number, stone fox heels (see photo) and sunglasses the bus driver didn't want to let me on.
"you have ticket ? let me see ticket."
i showed him the ticket, praying i wouldn't be sick.
"you can't work here.""what ?"
"you not working here."oh jesus, let me die in peace can't you ? my stomach is really jittery and my head feels like it's got ram-man running around inside it.
"no, i'm not working here.""okay."
i think he thought i was a hooker. the only other people on the bendy bus were two old woman sat side by side like plump batton hens and an emo boy of about thirteen with a slipknot hoodie on, so if i had been 'working', trade would have been pretty slow.

*thanks for the advice, mitton. ("what shall i talk about if someone tries to talk to me ?" "just tell them about the worm bin.")

really leaving las vegas

2007-06-03T21:53:00.001-12:00

with reference to the post below (brighton pier), i took this picture yesterday.
the game they are playing is called elvis in vegas.
it is a ten pence pushing machine.
they are using cups of change just like they do in casinos.
this scene is about as far removed from las vegas as it is possible to be without building a parallel universe and climbing inside.

you ask too many questions....

2007-06-03T20:38:00.000-12:00

i'm endlessly fascinated by things, those little shivers of curiosity - if you mix these together, will it taste like watermelon ? who let the dogs out ? why is ben fogle ?
once, when i was seven years old a friend and i stayed up all night playing wonderboy on the sega master system (and that other game with the dwarf and the axe - 'dwarf blade', maybe ? 'golden axe' ? alan, you'll know.) we were waiting to see what the world was like at four o'clock in the morning. it was, we subsequently discovered through bleary eyes, dark and quiet.
another time in my early twenties i met up with my old friend ben dobson, and the conversation meandered lazily towards my ex-boyfriend with whom i had been devastatingly smitten for two years, and his new girlfriend. like a fool, i asked "what's she like ?"
ben lets out a long, low whistle;
"imagine helena christensen, but with long blonde hair and a bit shorter, my god, she is a hot piece of ass, and really funny too."
then, on seeing my horrified face, you could almost hear him back-pedalling;
"oh no, no daisy, i mean - she's not you right ? you have a wonderful personality."
jesus.
(incidentally, if you're reading this ben, the best time to try and reach me by phone is not three thirty, four, four fifteen, five and six thirty in the morning respectively. what are you, nocturnal ? seriously though, we'll talk soon.)
subsequently this weekend i have discovered many things which i previously did not know, had in fact spent most of my adult life wallowing in the not knowing, perfectly happy.
(1) the pier in brighton is, even if the sun does have his hat on hip hip hip hooray, the World's End. i went in there yesterday wrapped in a thick layer of happiness and walked out under a obsidian cloud of despair. if house of the dead cannot save it, nothing can. in summary, to out and out steal a phrase from a very funny man - Luckless Proles.
(2) i discovered, courtesy of one of my more sexually enlightened friends, what it is like to have a seven man orgy, what to expect on visiting a dingy fetish club and (apologies) what it feels like to fist someone (like the lining on the inside of your mouth, apparently. stick a fist in there, you're close). i staggered away from that conversation.
(3) that if you give up smoking, as i recently have, nothing, nothing, nothing and nothing can replace it, or stop you thinking about it. or needing it.
(4) that simon, another friend with superlative hair, once continuously and silently farted in front of juliette lewis in an airtight booth, until she made her excuses and left.
(5) that working on a film is no fun, combining long hours and severe discomfort, leaving you pale and short tempered and almost tearful, as my flatmate the mitton has proved. i was jealous at first mitton, now all i can do is offer you tea.
screw it, it's the weekend, let's all have a cup of tea.

too nice, too stupid or both ?

2007-05-30T02:31:00.000-12:00

when i first left the warm embrace of cornwall and moved to london at age nineteen i was nice to everyone – utter strangers, unconscious drunks in gutters (he hated me for it, admittedly), numerous belligerent strays - until one day, on the quiet top deck of the seventy-three a man wanked into my hair from the seat behind me.
i only discovered this when i ran my hands through the wet ends.
on friday, when i went to the v&a for the surrealist’s ball (question, how was it ? answer, really really weird.) a man approached me with what i at first thought was his cock in his hand but which in fact turned out to be a carrot held at groin height.
still, even when i thought he was holding his erect penis i smiled genially.
am i too nice, or too stupid, or both ?
you were right odge, i never learn.

world's worst liar

2007-05-24T20:23:00.000-12:00

ahhhhh, my idiocy knows no bounds. i am a bunglehead.
just meant to send the following text to my friend the mitton;
“what time do you want to meet at the v&a ? about seven, maybe ? i have told my boss i need to leave at three for an ‘important appointment’…har har har i am a terrific liar*.”
yes. i have sent it to my bloody boss by accident. he hasn’t noticed yet – with any luck he won’t look at his phone till three. i can see him from where i’m sitting.
this is not very good. i am looking at going on eternity leave.

* this is a joke. i am the world’s worst liar. i blush, stammer, look wildly around and generally cock it up.

**update attack: my boss has just walked past me three times. on the third he looked at me. suspiciously. more bulletins as events warrant.

rn’b rubs me up the wrong way

2007-05-23T03:36:00.000-12:00

i’m suffering through the worst radio station in the world – i say suffering, not silently you understand – and have now earnt myself the nicknames ‘grumpybones’, ‘miserablist’ and ‘old granny shitflaps’ by my colleagues.
“cheer up,” they’re saying, “it’s only a bit of music.”
wrong.
i don’t often get angry and almost never in situations when it’s justified – cheat on me and break my heart and you’ll be forgiven after a couple of hours and an earnest apology. borrow a tenner and with enough protracted assurances, i’ll never ask for it back.
but in this instance i’m making an exception. rn’b is the lowest denominator, the worst type of soulless dirge generated by idiots for drones. each song a repetitive mirror of it’s predecessor.
if i have to listen to much more of dj totally dangerous and mc utterly streetwise’s* toothless, threatless, unhazardous bile, their very blandness covering up the fact that they are musical charlatans, then my friends, i may contract distemper. i’m on the verge.

*i made these names up.
** now playing ? it’s the fucking black eyed peas.

all back to myspace

2007-05-21T21:29:00.000-12:00

officially i am now a myspace geek. i said it would never happen, and looking at my dismal friends list (five, including the statutory 'friend' who is sent to everyone on joining. five, and two of them are the same person.) it's hardly likely to develop into the dizzy orgy of friendship i've been led to believe it is.

Check me out!

do what you want with it....

pauline quirke has stigmata

2007-05-17T01:20:00.000-12:00

i am a child. certainly in terms of juvenile humour. i’ve recently started telling people that the diabolic gwen stefani single 'the great escape' is a new single by carol vorderman called ‘3 from the top and 4 from the bottom’. you’ll be surprised - if you can maintain an air of contrived insouciance long enough – how many people believe this. especially if you crudely cut and paste a cover together and send it to people attached to an email as proof.
i mention this because a friend has just rung to tell me that not only did hmv not stock the carol vorderman album ‘another consonant please carol,’ but they’d never heard about it. i told him it was out on geffen and that he should contact the record label in case they have delayed it’s release – i can’t tell which concerns me more, the fact that a friend of mine believes this or that he’d be prepared to part with money for the wretched thing.
now i’ve begun telling people that pauline quirke has stigmata. no reason except it amuses me. unfortunately i can’t seem to muster the requisite expression to deliver this with the required impact and as a result have succeeded only in looking faintly puzzled as i tell people – more conviction is required but it’s very difficult... try it, and if only one person believes you, you win.

taking a leaf from the book of mitton

2007-05-16T01:35:00.000-12:00

i confess. i’ve let myself get sucked into all manner of things in my time – lame relationships, worlds of survival horror, meerkat manor (i blame bill nighy) – but it’s been a long time since anything grabbed my attention quite like My New Favourite Thing™…
…visiting museums.
yes. not for me the blurred, giddy world of high profile parties and waking up in a sticky pool of something on sunday afternoon with one shoe off and my ears ringing.
no sir.
saturday afternoon i was at the brighton museum, primarily because they had a gypsy fortune telling machine* almost identical to the one in ‘big’ and i’m a sucker for all the hoodoo nonsense. week or so before i was hawking round the v&a like it was going out of style and now i’m genuinely excited because i’m
off to the natural history museum next weekend. perhaps it’s my age, but i prefer to think it’s the exquisite thrill (thrill possibly too strong a word, there) of looking at something of great beauty, or sheer hideosity and coming away feeling like i’ve actually been informed about something.
it’s a way i wish i’d felt more as a kid instead of discovering smoking, cider and french kissing round the back of the cathedral.

*it was out of order

story 6# the vaininator

2007-05-15T23:44:00.000-12:00

take the case of micheal laftley. i put a ‘drink me’ label on a bottle of hair tonic and he did – now he has a lustrous mane of thick brown hair lining the silken column of his throat and can’t breathe without sounding like a blocked hoover. food gets caught in the bristles on his pink trachea and remains there trapped, fragments of omelette and sandwich.
amanda was nineteen and convinced her thin lips crippled her otherwise extraordinary features. when she found out she was allergic to cats she wiped her wizened chops across a tabby, feline back. Her lips mushroomed into bloated pink.
amanda suffocated on a furball when she was twenty-five. sad day.
garth was a being of almost unbearable physical beauty – a tight cheeked Adonis almost biblical in his sculpture, he would regularly leave his bedroom door open so that the russian housemaid could let her gaze linger on his chiselled, taut buttocks as he dressed. vanya would peer with her furtive, thrusting glance through the doorway, and garth would see her slavic gluttony and it would please him.
over the years she siphoned over forty thousand pounds from his various accounts and, when his buttocks were slapping fatly at the upper reaches of his thighs, deflated cheeks gouged with deep creases, vanya raised a glass many miles away and toasted his wealth.
vanity makes fools of us all.

just do it

2007-05-10T21:15:00.000-12:00

anyone else think that in the new nike adverts where the exercise junkie repeats the words "i'm addicted' they should have just left the '-ted' off the end ?
honesty in advertising people.

stay awake

2007-05-10T21:00:00.000-12:00

holy toast. i'm not well, and like all unwell people i'm lying around on the sofa under a blanket, griping and moaning and watching dvds. until this afternoon when i watched a horror film so bland and shockless i found myself doing all of the following things during it;
~watered the plants.
~watched a carrier bag flutter on the railings outside my house for ten solid minutes.
~read the payment instructions on the back of the gas bill.
a few years ago, when i lived in a flat known as greyskull, tina and i made the fundamental mistake of renting a dvd based purely on it's cover. i thought nothing could match the insult on my intelligence that was th13teen ghosts but somehow stay alive managed to simultaneously insult my intelligence and waggle it's tongue in my face.
a third of the way through the film i was practically screaming at the telly - 'how did this get green lighted ? how ?' what was the pitch for god's sake ?
"yeah, it's like, a cross between resident evil, hollyoaks and like, final destination, the trilogy, yeah ?"
actually, that at least makes it sound interesting. what it was, as far as i could tell though i did have a fever, was a gcse drama with high production values.
the gang's all here - gawky teen, goth girl called october, kooky chick, snoopy, charlie brown and linus, all struggling under the weight of the towering cliches hurtling form their purty lil mouths. adam buxton once wrote a very funny guide to dialogue (as director ken korda) and i swear, it was as though the hormonal scriptwriters had lifted it straight from him;
"something bad's happening. something really, really bad"
"what the HELL is going on here ?"
"we're in the bitch's back yard, man"
"he was run over by a horse drawn carriage!" (honestly, i am not making this up)

now i love computer games. and i love horror films, even shit ones. but the two should never merge because the terrifying, mewling afterbirth it creates is so god-awful i found myself pleading aloud for even the most likeable character to hurry up and die. the point of the film is that they start playing a game, which releases an evil spirit, which then starts killing them off in the game, and then in real life exactly as they did in the game, except they stop playing, but then the killing continues and...you get the picture. at this rate i can look forward to being eaten by zombies, killed by a pig-masked maniac with a chain saw or tumbling off a cloud if stay alive knows something we don't.
...what really made my tongue unroll in awe was that at the end of the film (i'm not ruining the ending for you, the film ruins the ending for you by existing in the first place) the killer computer game hits the shelves of department stores all over america, so next time...it could be you (provided you part with the forty quid to buy the game in the first place). the marketing executives must have been fisting each other with cheques at the thought of this franchise tsunami - watch the film, buy the game - what's that noise ? why, it's bill hicks spinning in his grave.
words alone cannot describe the body-popping, traffic-stopping awfulness of this film. watching it can. i now have a copy of this film, given to me by a - now i think about it - relieved looking and smirking friend. you can have it. anyone. anyone at all. give me your address, i'll pay the postage.

story five# privet, no peking

2007-05-02T02:54:00.000-12:00

we ate roast chicken and drank red wine in bed. the meat pale and slippery, steaming hot, grease staining the duvet in irregular little islands. he wrote his name, drunk, on my arm and fashioned a nervous plait in my hair as i lay back on all the pillows, stacked beneath me imperiously. earlier, he’d claimed he didn’t need one and lay curled on the swell of my breasts instead. i taught him how to curse in spanish and he’d told me not to show off, then smiled, teeth stained claret.
as the night faded and the empty bottles rolled off the end of the bed whenever we’d moved our feet i’d asked him why he’d done it.
silent, for a moment, but he didn’t sigh as i’d expected.
he told me because he’d needed the money, that he’d been desperate.
my fingers smelt of roast chicken and his chest hair. i told him i’d have lent him the money if he’d been that desperate, that he’d just had to ask.
then he did sigh, and rolled over, snagging the covers.
in the morning his name had blurred and bled on my skin.

facial slot machine

2007-04-29T23:55:00.000-12:00

….not, as you might expect, the kind of thing you find only in hardcore porn films or the fevered imaginations of teenage boys but a game on the irresistible ‘bishi-bashi special’ which i found myself playing on saturday morning, just as the beginnings of a hangover were gnawing at the edges of my fragile mind.
(a quick moment of thanks to my friend alex for meeting up with me at the weekend, laughing at my salary, letting me drink all his beer and allowing himself to be dragged by his girlfriend and i to an exhibition the next day even though he clearly suffered from the fear throughout.)
jack white once said that he didn’t trust anyone who didn’t like led zeppelin – i can appreciate this, and moreover said something very similar on friday – i don’t trust anyone who doesn’t find the adam & joe show funny.
moreover, i also don’t trust anyone who…
(1) …uses the word ‘eclectic’ to describe their bastard musical taste – ‘eclectic’ means diverse, so say diverse, or tell me it’s broad. don’t tell me it’s eclectic or i will wash your mouth and ears out for you with carbolic soap.
(2) …tells me that they think pornography is degrading to women – i say this mainly because i once had a boyfriend who said that with such weighted sincerity it was quite sinister – i later found his stash of jazz mags under the bed.
(3) …lists which countries they’ve done – “oh yeah, i’ve done burma, done vietnam, did norway in ninety-six.” did what to it exactly, you preening nomad ?
(4) ….des’ree. des’ree and all who sail on her. “oh life! oh life! oh life! doo,doot doot dooo...” goodbye, des’ree, turn the lights out on your way down.
(5) …tells me to grow up. i once had a friend who didn’t let the fact that he was seven years my junior stop him giving me measured advice on exactly which aspects of my life i needed to focus on, otherwise i’d never get a mortgage/learn to drive/see forty. reality is usually so far down my list of priorities it’s been squashed in at the bottom, in really cramped writing.
(6) …every single person on the sunday times rich list.
(7) … plays, or enjoys the sound of the jazz saxophone. ‘curtis stigers’. mention the name to me and i will visibly shudder right before your very eyes. do it twice and there may be a bit of sick.
there is more, but reading this back i’ve realised it looks like a self-indulgent exercise in ostracizing myself from all my family and most of my friends so i’d better end it there.
(8) …except for people with clammy hands. pasty, damp hands and chubby fingers, handshake like clutching the thoughts of a dying pituitary gland. don’t trust ‘em.

being under bella emberg

2007-04-26T02:01:00.000-12:00

i went to the cinema on tuesday to watch ‘häxan – witchcraft through the ages’ - a danish black & white silent film made in 1922 which was, on it’s release, immediately banned. Accompanying the eerie images was geoff smith, who had composed an original soundtrack on the hammered dulcimer which he proceeded to perform flawlessly alongside the film.

bear with me.

i’d never heard of a dulcimer, hammered or otherwise, and was mildly surprised to discover it’s appearance is that of a horizontal harp, the strings of which are hit with small hammers, instead of being plucked. the resulting sound is a malefic resonance which, combined with the images of satan floating around on screen genuinely put the frighteners on me.
however, there is something intrinsically funny about silent movies, and a proportion of the audience were laughing when, for instance, the camera panned to a shuddering shot of the devil seemingly masturbating furiously. i practically scalded myself with hot coffee when a monk hoved into view who looked identical to david st hubbins from spinal tap…and i defy anyone to sit beyond the subtitle ‘satan penetrated every nun in the convent’ without a ribald laugh.
however the girl next to me (trendy haircut, oversized glasses) was huffing and puffing with indignation each time the audience was provoked into muffled sniggering, at one point turning to her boyfriend and saying ‘for god’s sake, this is an ARTHOUSE film.’ (it wasn’t). her boyfriend incidentally looked as though he’d rather by anywhere –anywhere else – on the playstation, in the pub, under bella emberg - anywhere. the worse she got, (“i really don’t see what’s so funny about this”) the more juvenile i became…
…with this in mind, imagine my unfathomable glee when i spotted the above sign in the hippy shop in kemptown – this is, i swear, is a very real request, so should anyone know an unemployed warlock, send them here. genius.

crushed underfoot

2007-04-15T21:56:00.000-12:00

oh dear. on friday i went for a few pints with finch, rich and jason. casually over conversation the subject of my extended foray into singledom came up which prompted me to say;
"oh it's alright, in my head i'm having a fantastic relationship."
as a conversation killer you can't beat it. try it at dinner parties. i looked round at their aghast, frankly baffled faces.
"what ? does no-one else do that ?"
apparently not.
jason, very kindly, as if he was dealing with an incendiary device said,
"who with, hon ?"
i'm fairly well known for my delusional crushes on people, and even now at my age i still indulge these whimsical fantasies occasionally safe in the knowledge that it's harmless, and will frankly never happen - well, at least not yet, i'm still hanging on for brooker. here, in no particular order, and mainly for my own amusement, is the comprehensive list of my imaginary relationships:
(1) beck, i believe was the first. that lasted three years and was actually during a relationship with a very kind ex who tolerated it patiently, safe in the knowledge that i was mad for a five foot manchild whose head was too big for his body. my mum made birthday cards for me with cut and pasted pictures of his face and wrote sarcastic comments on the back. thanks mum. i nearly sat in on an interview with him once but spangled it, mainly because i knew i'd be a mess but partly because i heard he was a bit of a bellend. sadly the 'relationship' ended when i left him, homesick for england. this is true.
(2) julian barratt. brief fling. encouraged wildly by odge and sam barnett sending me photos of him in standard awkward poses with speech bubbles coming out of his mouth saying various dirty things. went to a gig once because i heard he may be there. he wasn't. ended abruptly when real life intervened and i found out his girlfriend (a real one, incredibly hot, talented and funny, unfortunately) was pregnant.
(3a) blink-and-you'll-miss-it non-action with cloud, the pixellated nancy boy from final fantasy vii. i am joking here....or am i ? or am i ? etc. (that is an in-joke from the game which will appeal to only one person i know, and he won't be reading this because he's playing final fantasy xii.)*
(4) frodo – not elijah wood who looks like the result of an unholy union between a frog and a startled husky but frodo, the hobbit. yes, i know. something in the homoerotic nature of his lingering glances at sam i think. i walked on this one when i realised in ‘real life’ he has hair like a studio line advert.*
(5) charlie brooker. slow burner this one, but i've just watched his television programme and was immediately so hot for him i disappeared into a weird fantasy of nonchalant canoodlings, idle stroking and witty asides. the man has the ability to make me laugh like no-one else - he described anne widecombe as 'having a face like a haunted cave in poland' and developed television gold such as 'indiana jones and the doomed office romance' and 'honey, i browndicked an acrobat' which i'm sniggering about even as i write this. plus he's childish, sulky and rude and has a strange fixation with the word guff. magic.
as i said, i'm still holding out for brooker.
having said that i'm aware that if i ever met the object of my affections i'd stumble over my words, crack lame jokes and stare bewildered at the floor, safe in the knowledge that yet another crush flickers out because i'm incapable of having an actual relationship....and frankly who wants one ? with the bickering, betraying and bodily fluids i'd rather strap my heart to the undercarriage of a jeep because sometimes that's how it feels. i'm delusional, almost certainly, but i can do without it now, thanks.
anyway in real life i'm off to the beach for a pint. because imagined relationships are all very well but the tight bastards never get a round in.
*i've just read this back....hobbits and computer characters ? what can i say, i'm a dick of the highest order.

story four# word war

2007-04-15T21:54:00.000-12:00

He was a collector, he was a collector of words. The sound a penduluming drop of liquid makes as it hits the surface ? SplInk. The sound of wet glass being wiped by a dry hand ? Fweeeep. The brittle sound of ice cracking in a warm glass ? Frickle. Scrrrrrrip. Tethered not by dictionary, nor thesaurus ('those linear, insular, bound dungeons of language') he spurned the common language for sound and shape.
"You can't say that" they'd say, "they're not real words"
"According to who?" Mouldering Dave would ask.
They'd referred to a Rogets, an Oxford Concise, a Cambridge, the thick heavy tomes, and said "These are real words.""Ah yes," Mouldering Dave had nodded sincerely "The language police."
He'd seen the expression on their faces, the smooth sheen of pity, could read their thoughts as though their eyes were transparent, he's old, humour the demented old man, he's not long for this world anyhow.
Splam-dips he called them, or occasionally, a Nockle.
It was a shame then, that when crossing the road on shoes which made a dim fleep, fleep at the back of his head he did not hear the froooooooaaaaa of the oncoming car.
On his gravestone they had put; ' Mouldering Dave. Never at a loss for words.'

blissful astonishment

2007-04-09T21:16:00.000-12:00

there are a few things, i noticed last week, which without fail are prefixed by 'the fucking'*.
'the fucking council tax bill.'
'turn off the radio...it's the fucking black eyed peas.'
''the fucking queue's massive.'
can't unfortunately do it with bono, doesn't work. you can however, do it with the fucking edge. who prefixes their name with a 'the' anyway ? idiot.
and so it occurred to me, on thursday at approximately half past four, when a face poked itself around the door of my office and said;
"coming to the pub ?"
"now ?"
"daisy. it's the easter weekend. week's over till tuesday"
the fucking bank holiday. i practically cartwheeled out of the office and into the pub, arriving at the bar with a terrifying vaudeville routine, a somersault and a 'taaaa-dah!!!'
look at the blissful astonishment on my face, lying in my garden. you can't see it, but just out of shot is a punnet of strawberries. there's practically a halo of joy over my head. ahhhhhhh.

*'the feckin' if you're lenny or teena, the irish types.

looks like we're in for nasty weather....

2007-04-03T02:30:00.000-12:00

metallic clouds over brighton beach today. even the crazy golf looks washed out, garish colours slightly anaemic looking in the dimming light, as though the victim of electric shock therapy. not-quite-crazy golf. sane golf, lobotomised golf, maybe.
sorry, i’m tired.
stretching slightly to readjust my faculties – scattered to the four corners by the dark clouds blowing over the seas today - i’m planning a bracing walk along the seafront after work. although looking out the window now at the rapidly darkening sky, waves tossed about by a bitter atlantic breeze, and the threat of rain close enough to taste, i’m thinking that actually, and in all possibility almost definitely, i will probably end up huddled over a pint, a rollie and a crossword in the pub after work.

3 down; unit of liquid equivilant to 560 ml (4 letters)

1 across; polite request, anagram of 'asleep' (6 letters)

story three# meretricious mister marvellous

2007-03-26T02:01:00.000-12:00

*i have edited this quite heavily, the original is a bit longer and will be included in some compilation or other at some point.*

It wasn't what any of them had expected, although they had talked of nothing else for weeks. In it's conception it had begun as the smallest thing, the embryo of an idea, taking shape and manifesting into cream teas and jumble, tombolas and raffles. No-one could have anticipated it. Least of all the Women of Perranarmykle, the closest thing the tiny town had to a village committee. Now they sat, the nine of them, heads lowered, wondering how to fix things. Sue spoke first, Sue, founder of the sponsored knit-a-thon and the primary school bring and buy.
"There must have been something we could have done."Margaret’s eyes had taken on a dull sheen of disbelief. A coil of hair hung, unchecked, across her lined brow.
"It's not as though we could have prepared for it."
"Perhaps," said Helen, her glasses reflecting the light, turning her eyes into blank, silver pennies, "Perhaps it'll blow over.""Blow over?" Clare's voice was guttural, she who orchestrated the Best Dressed Dog Contest.
"There's no need to shout." Sue said rudely, and took a pinch of the Finest Cake Winner.
In the village hall the light was dim and growing dimmer, the sun a dizzy red ball hanging low in the sky. Shadows slid easily down the walls as though greased, oily, slippery dark matter which congealed in corners. No-one noticed.
A small town, a nothing town, a small clench of houses surrounded by the looming spectre of a church, hedgerows trimmed within a pubic inch, manicured privet and fern. The sign which told you as you came in, ‘Welcome To Perranarmykle’, and was so scrapingly grateful as you left, ‘Thank You For Visiting Perranarmykle’, now hung, corners drooping in easy rust. The scandal of '84, when Sarah Thornbow had eloped with the Pastor Crane had sent a shudder through the village, but that, eerily like everything else, had been powdered and sugared, pinked and dusted down by the nine to nothing more then a fragrant memory. The sign in the muted church hall read "For We Alone Must Fight", but now in the dying light - the ochre and amber of a weary day - it looked like ancient parchment, something used up and dried out.
The darkness shadowed their faces further, made them look rangy, like kicked curs.
"He asked me," Helen said into the gulf of silence and heads turned, almost creaking on tired tendons.
The afternoon had begun with an un-forecast spring chill, a brisk April breeze, causing metallic clouds scutter across a drab sky. On that wind the scent of spring rain, and something darker, less fluid, the air had seemed to thicken and grew musty, like pulling canvas away from senescent, brittle furniture. Helen had been bent over the tub of money, a bright sign reading "50p All Ages" which shivered briskly in the breeze when the stranger had approached, his oilskin raincoat buttoned up to his nostrils and hanging down to his knees. He bent over, leaning in towards her and Helen instinctively drew back, recoiling so fast she stumbled back a step or two. His breath was warmed veal and low, greased spices.
"How much for a stall?" he'd asked.
"I - I -" Helen felt her hands flutter to the scrag of her throat and she forced an insipid smile "It's full. I'm afraid.""Don't be afraid." he'd said and tossed a coin into the pot. She couldn't be sure, but later, as she was counting them out, she found a coin of soft ruin, bruised and knuckled at the edges, and blamed him. It was Sandra who'd noticed the dark stall hung in fluttering canopies of greys, the colour of diseased oysters. As she watched Edward Pascoe, clutching his young daughter Posey by the hand, lifted the flap and ducked under the awning. Later, Clare said she'd touched one of the billowing dark curtains and said it felt wet, dense and moist,
"Like sealskin," she offered.
It had been a small tent, propped up on warped sticks of willow, with a clumsy entrance slit from top to bottom in jagged strokes, and a listless flag the colour of maudlin funerals. Despite it's height of merely six feet the top and edges of the flimsy roof were gilt with frost, as though at a mountain's peak. The shape was square but seemed to waver before the eye, growing and shrinking in equal measure until your perspective throbbed like a diseased tooth. Outside, no signage, just a steaming copper kettle hung over a slump of glowing coals.
It was Johannah who had noticed when the candy floss machine, unchecked, had begun to spew its cobwebby innards all across the counter and onto the grass where the wind blew it in gossamer strands across the near deserted field. In the distance the carousel ground it’s pirouetting horses to a slow, laboured halt, and the music ebbed into an uncomfortable stillness.
“There’s no-one manning the raff-” Johannah began and stopped at the flat, loose expression on Sue’s face.
She was stood three feet downwind of the black tent and as the flaps lifted daintily they caught a scent of exotic secrets, dusty spices and dark, obsidian runes. Johannah started forwards but Sue put a hand on her arm.
“Don’t.” she said firmly.
"Are they all gone ?" Marie asked listlessly, leaning forwards and scattering notes on Best Fern before her. A twitch had begun in the fleshy pouch beneath her eye, but she seemed not to notice.
The nine, adumbral in the gathering folds of the evening. Outside the hall a long stretch of silence. Even the twilight birds were still.
"All gone." chimed Alice, and turned her head to the dank orb of sun.
"They all went in. They didn't come out."

harbour of evil wind

2007-03-20T00:42:00.000-12:00

falmouth, yesterday morning, six of the clock. me, stumbling about bleary-eyed and horrified by the hour of day. my hair, seemingly embracing the moist atmosphere, turned into an afro, my smart ‘ ideal for interview’ dress is revealing a lot more of my breasts then is mannerly and in reaction to the lack of sleep my tongue has turned into a bloated, slumbering beast and refuses to allow me to speak properly.
this was not the best start to an interview and it only went downhill from there – spangled the i.t test, told them my biggest weakness was ‘inability to make a decision’ and then laughed a little too brazenly at a weak joke one of the interviewers made.
i blame my naivety in these situations – it’s been several years since i’ve had a ‘proper’ job interview and the inexperience makes me nervous. that and the tiredness. oh, and the caffeine jitters.
it’s all very well moving back to cornwall to edit the novel, and make progress with the second (slow, laborious inching progress it may be, but it’s still progress) but without food, clothes, a house and booze money – not to mention the Mighty Fund for Fun Nice Things – it’ll never happen. ergo, (magnificent, poncey word which is underused, i feel) i need to find a job – because the booze money is really, really vital.

fry-day

2007-03-19T23:08:00.000-12:00

the bloggers book is out - here is the link to the site, buy! buy! buy! pay top dollar, it’s all in a good cause....
http://troubled-diva.com/labels/rednoseday.html clearly it was a real struggle to get this book published in one night, so huge well done to all involved....
....great, now back to me.

looks like I picked the wrong time to start worrying…

2007-03-14T00:36:00.000-12:00

…five in the am to be precise. perhaps it’s just the restlessness, the lying awake, the night on the cusp of dawn, or perhaps it was the dream i was having about david bowie (married to each other, kept dogs, lived in small terraced house, hid from photographers, cleaned his sparkly platform shoes etc,) but as soon as i woke up i knew, knew, that i was going to start worrying; upcoming job interview-what if i say the wrong thing or swear (likely) or spit while i’m talking or get distracted? moving house, moving counties, leaving friends, money – there is never a good time to worry about money granted, and i never have enough anyway, but money worries are always floating in the flotsam of my thoughts, waiting for a passing anxiety tide to drag it in – work, the Book, do I drink too much ? must cut down smoking, what if my dead leg means i’m paralysed ? did I switch off the gas ? by the time my alarm kicks off two hours later i’m such a neurotic wreck that i turn up for work looking like marty feldman with hair by tina turner.

at this juncture i found the recent photograph i'd taken of perranporth beach (left) and slipped reality aside for a moment. ahhhhhhhhh.

that aside, i made a small detour through town today - it was sunny and i’d two hours to get to work on account of my feverish morning – and found myself on an entirely new street which appeared to have sprung fully formed out of the ground between my place and the train station complete with flats and a sainsburys – i think it was under development prior to my going to cornwall and been completed and polished while I was away. i made my way through the deserted, eerily quiet new street, glancing in the windows of the new flats as i did so (at least those on the ground floor, i’m not the bfg)….how cosy they looked, mellow lit kitchens, espresso cups on the side, in another a pair of slippers lurked beneath a table and then i realised, with something like dawning horror that they were all fake – it was like westworld except without yul brenner (pity) – and the most sinister thing i’ve ever seen. no-one is making tea, yet there’s a pot and a cup and saucer on the table, even a bowl of sugar. phantom feet have kicked off slippers underneath a table and in another cosy, spotlit-yet-empty flat i passed there was a row of three orchids lined up in order of diminishing height. the most sinister thing i’ve seen in a while (reena and finch I hope you get back in time to see it in the grey light before people actually move in) and i urge any-one with spare time on their hands to go and view a ‘show-home’- if you don’t get a shiver at the stylised ‘features’ and lived-in touches then you are either (a) ill or (b) steven seagal (i.e soulless. dead eyed. inanimate).

warm, like a pasty

2007-03-12T03:23:00.000-12:00

just back from the badlands of kernow, feeling as though I’ve had the equivalent of a mental colonic irrigation. (just read that back and that makes it sound as though cornwall was uncomfortable, undignified and ultimately pointless, which of course, i don’t mean), and came across this on someone else’s blog….

http://troubled-diva.com/labels/rednoseday.html

which is a genius idea, and without all the usual bumfoolery that usually accompanies fundraising – i gave my post about the cuntsil – now starting to think that surely uneccessary swearing has not, nor ever will make me popular, and should have left it.
not big, not clever.

all fingers and thumbs

2007-02-28T02:55:00.000-12:00

further to the post below - the coming of the apocalypse, i like to keep it light - a baby has been born with twelve fingers and eleven toes and a frog in china has been found with eight legs.
the rise of the mutants, i'm all for it.

colossal squid

2007-02-22T01:21:00.000-12:00

bejesus! the wonder of it all- teenareena tell me you’re there. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6383665.stm
in other news as anyone noticed the eerie flux of variable-limbed animals being born recently ? i’m not a religious type by any means but – unless i read this in a neil gaiman book somewhere – wasn’t an impending apocalypse meant to begin with similar portents ? two headed lambs in dorset, a four legged duckling yesterday, a pig with two heads last month, today a giant squid in new zealand - "one expert said calamari rings made from it would be like tractor tyres"…..cower in fear brief mortals….

story two# the emperor of white noise

2007-02-21T01:40:00.000-12:00

Above, a dark sky studded with stars, below, the mire of puddles. Beyond late and getting later, it was now early and the shadows curdled in muted light. They called him the Emperor of White Noise, the King of Sound. He took me to his room and showed me sonorous notes in vast, sonic booms. Seventy thousand records, and not one of them contained music.
I'd asked if they were all sound effect records and he'd replied, oh yes. Shivering through Artic Tundra 4 and crouching beneath the velvet swoop of A Plane Leaving the Tarmac he'd looked at me, eyes glittering behind the oversized lenses he wore. Asked me if I wanted to hear something really powerful. Something he'd made himself.
Before I could answer he'd pulled down a freight of equipment and smiled a raw grin. As I'd lent back on his filthy bedcovers he told me not to worry.
At first, there was nothing, and then a mooching slump through the speakers, dense sweet musk, barely noise at all. Smelting of sound, I raised my head and told him.
Vanilla ice cream. He nodded.
The next one. Slight and luminous, full of shrykull shards, scrooching and mimble, I almost put my hands to my head. He was nodding as if he understand, but the sound was furflous, a neon blue ten watt bulb strobing and straking.
It's the moon. Yes, he'd replied, a full quarter.
I'd asked him how and he'd replied that he knew sound.
We took the equipment to the garden where the moon turned our shadows to bone. The later the hour, the clearer the resonance and so we poured the night in through the filters. It oozed in black shleems and crooked murms, revealing the shape of the hours.

making hangovers my bitch

2007-02-16T04:10:00.001-12:00

a quick sweep of the eyes and once over my shoulder, i’m hungover and it makes me nervous – i’ve dispensed with the usual - the shakes, the sweats, the bleary-eyed hang dog look and gone directly to the heart of it, to the fear. how this manifests itself is sweet, heavy doses of homesickness, enough to make me consider moving back to the badlands of cornwall, almost exactly ten years after i left. the place I struggled against and fought to leave for so many of my teenage years now seems almost painfully appealing. even a picture of trago mills makes me heave an unnecessarily melodramatic sigh, although that may just be the twilight zone of my hangover.
talking of twilight zones have you ever had the uncomfortable feeling that the mother evil is not a pair of eyes in a dark window (unless they’re jim davidson’s dead, cold eyes, but if he was peering in through my window i’d imagine i was in some sort of maudlin nightmare, and slap myself awake or at least senseless) but the headline which just caught my wizened old eyes on the news website – ‘wolf loose in cornwall’ – perhaps the headline with the biggest potential for a horror comedy i’ve ever seen. pint down the slaughtered lamb, anyone ?

*i’ve just read that the wolf has been recaptured (unharmed) by armed police – tranquiliser darts one, wolf nil*

the goon squad

2007-01-31T01:33:00.000-12:00

oh god - an oversight on the part of the council means that the payments i have been making to them have somehow become lost in the convoluted network of their systems...naturally when i indicated that i had been making payments for a month or more they requested to see the bank statements as proof.
"please highlight the neccessary payments" said the automaton.
"no problem" i breeezed until realising i'd credited them on my bank statement, in a fit of pique, as "brighton & hove city cuntsil."
shit.
i'm pleading dyslexia. i hope they believe me.

story one# the pursuit of melancholy

2007-01-30T01:25:00.000-12:00

His name was Jack but we all called him Slim on account of his shape. His pores wept a sour smell of defeat, and a permanent cold hitched the back of his throat, plugging his speech, making it sound thick and laborious. Slim had once given me a necklace but I had told him it wasn’t my size and he had taken it back, swallowing it up in his clumsy hands. Slim had a hooked nose and trousers which finished an inch or so above the ankle and a scalp of tightly coiled curls.
“Talk to me.” He’d said one day in the canteen, leaning forwards.
“No.” I’d replied and felt a warm jolt of pleasure as dismay punctured his face.
But one day Slim showed me. One day Slim showed me everything.
School camp found us spending four days in a draft-speared farmhouse on the lip of a valley. Overhead, pewter clouds plundered the humidity, leaving us clammy and irritable, stung up the backs of our legs by nettles and flayed by thorns. The third day was a ramble through woods which carried us three miles along the spine of hillside and towards a giggling river, shimmering with minnow flashes. Slim had held back in the group, carefully picking his way through the ditches and around the steep mud banks lining the edges of the slurried pathways, lined with a gleaming mulch of leaves and peaty bracken. Occasionally he would incline his head towards a birdsong, writing notes in his careful, joined up hand on the back of his clipboard.
When Slim went missing on the return journey it was me who spotted him ten minutes later, standing in a small clearing almost hidden from the path, a grotto formed by the drooping branches of trees. I was tired, the light almost leeched entirely by the sky, and the insect bites on my ankles were starting to itch. That might have been why I grabbed his bony shoulder harder then I meant to, startling him into an awkward jerk backwards that nearly sent us both sprawling.
"Everyone's looking for you," I said, "and it's nearly dark."
"I know." Slim said.Slim remained where he was, knees folded, head stretching forward like a vulture.
"What you doing ?"
"Come and see."
I bent low and shuffled further into the hole. Something squelched wetly beneath my boot."See ?" His fingers indicated a bud, a folded white heart about the size of my fist attached to a thick green vine.
"Very nice, Slim."
"Wait." Slim said, and then again, "Wait."
I leant back a little, scratched my bites, peered at a fresh scratch on my wrist. Slim said nothing, Slim was waiting.
Eventually, alarmed by the thickening soup of shadows pooling around my feet I said,
"They'll be wondering where we are.""Not long now. Besides," Now he looked up at me, his smile a dark slash in the fading light. "You can't get back without me."
He showed me the back of his clipboard, where he had drawn a map.
"Sit down."I felt the first twinge of fear, the primitive fear of being alone in a creaking, darkening forest, alone with a gawky stranger who, after all that time, had me right where he wanted me. So I sat, and I waited, and as the moon rose I fell into a mild doze.
"Wake up, Daisy, wake up" Slim was saying and his face was dark hollows.
"I mumbled muzzily but Slim was dragging me upwards, voice tight with excitement.
"Look"
The floret, the tight white heart was unfurling, petals curling back with elegant speed, revealing dazzling yellow at the centre.
"It's a night bloomer." Slim was explaining, "They only bloom once a year."
As each unfolded itself, showing a pink-tinged underbelly, they drifted to the floor. I saw the sweet curl of white flutter past me, a feather, a flower feather, my thoughts were giddy and so Slim had to say it twice.
"Lean in." I did, and caught a whiff of it's perfume, spiced and mildly exotic. The sylvan flower now in full bloom, a coronet of white in the darkness, petals arching back.
"Thank you." I said, to him, and meant it. He smiled and nodded.
Above us, the black sky, and a jangle of stars.

engage your mandibles

2007-01-19T02:19:00.000-12:00

i dreamt last night that i headlined the main stage at glastonbury playing guitar with led zepplin.
that aside, i also wanted to draw attention to the fact that i have written a book - naturally, this is in itself no great feat, but for anyone who knows me, knows the slack, lackadaisical, usually half drunk manner in which i write, will know that this is some sort of miracle. not, obviously a very good miracle, with slightly less spiritual importance and special effects then most, and now i think about it there's not even a lousy smoke machine for chrissakes, whaddayagonnado ?
tell you what i'm gonnado, i'm going to get a project started called 'just once '* (with the brainlaser crew, naturally) whereby you have a 'just this once' first thing which you have never done or would concieve of doing (possibly on the grounds that it is (a) illegal or (b) moronic). on monday i'm inventing a language (i say 'inventing') which will be a mix of the elongated japanese sounds and the stutter and pulse of swedish vowels and pretend it is a legitimate language from an actual (also made-up) country....somewhere north of finland. the object is to convince someone of your bi-lingual ability. i suggest not a spouse or family member, at best they'll laugh - then get fed up and slap you. that's at best, at worst they'll haul your broken bones over a cliff.
incidentally there is no point or purpose to 'just once' '', as long as it's not something you've done before, and possibly something you can only ever do once....as inventive as it's possible to be.
mercy me.
*incidentally, if anyone can come up with a better name then 'just once' then for the love of jay-sus please let me know.....

tap-dancing death

2006-12-20T02:46:00.000-12:00

this is the death from my story, the hoary old cadaver. look at his shoes. they'll have your eye out...i'm going to be posting a few of my stories on here as soon as i'm capable of writing more than a few lines a night. check back in a decade.
in other news some friends and i have been trying to make 'bono' into a swear-word, a fetid curse curled at the edges - try "he was being a right bono last night", "now i've gone and trod bono all through the house" or "that bloke the edge is a right fucking bono, isn't he ?"
impress your friends, entertain your family, spread the word.