Wow!!! through some internet trawling, I have just found some pictures painted by Sylvia Plath, and a link to an exhibition which took place, of her visual works. I knew Plath painted and drew from the pen and ink sketches which have appeared in some biographies, and the referenes to doing them in the Journals, but this is the first time I have actually seen any others. See what you think.....

Just a little word about Frida Kahlo.....another one of my heroes, probably because of the silly hair!!! I am trying to create a Frida Kahlo themed back garden, weather permitting, and I found this fantastic link, with a dress-your-own Frida doll on it! Just thought I'd add a couple of pics of the woman herself to add some colour to this grey day. The woman had passion, and a fierce individuality.....as well as immense personal courage in adversity. Without any religious overtones, an example to us all. Viva la Frida, and I hope my garden will be a fitting a colourful tribute.

Work is mad, life is mad, and I'm struggling to get time to blog as usual......nothing changed there then! Doing another voiceover tonight...life is strange. Loved this picture because although it is a vampire pic, has a pagan-earth-magic quality to it......

Just felt like adding a little elegy, or eulogy even, to Angela Carter, whose brand of magical sur/realism some of you may be aware of. I love her books, but this has to be my favourite. Wise Children is the story of two illegitimate music hall stars, Nora and Dora Chance, and their mis/adventures through a century of legitimate and illegitimate theatre and family. The book gives London itself that grimy fairy-dust surreal quality that Angela Carter does so well, the city itself has a personality. However bad things get in life, Dora and Nora Chance have made me smile through. Not because this is a facile smiley-feel-good book, but by their sheer audacity and perversity. They triumph in the face of adversity, and spit in the face of good taste. By now, they are old friends. When I am 75 I want to be like that. Or Jenny Joseph's purple-haired railing tapping deviant!

Whatever happened to passion? Passion of any kind, I mean, not only the romantic. We are living in a seriously beige kind of world these days. Neutral music, neutral fashion, neutral politics, neutral sexual politics, neutral religion, neutral literature, neutral movies. Life has become like the endless hell of a visit to IKEA. It's all far too well behaved and co-ordinated. What has happened? Once upon a time, you could almost guarantee that the young were passionate about at least one of the above, if not all at once. We divided our lives between wild fashion, eccentric music, reading groudbreaking literature and watching mindblowing movies, whilst marching in the streets for what we believed. Our lives were a whirlwind of extremes and difference. We didn't want to look like anyone else, behave like anyone else, or watch what anyone else was watching.......... Look at fashion. To this day I would die rather than wear beige. (If it ever happens, just knife me, it would be a mercy killing). When I was a student, the average SU was a multicoloured rainbow of styles, from Goth to Rasta witheverything in between. The starnger the better, the more unusual was the usual. Hair was a well-known form of self-expression, mine went from black to red, to pink, to purple, to orange (but that was a bit of an accident). It was up, down, shaved, long, in dreads, spiky, in fact any way except that which nature intended. Normal was boring. In those days the last thing you would have wanted was a hair-straightener. A hair-weirdener maybe. None of this glossy flicky stuff. The aim was to have big brash hair with the consistency of candy floss. Now even hair is tame and well-behaved. I give up with the clothes. Identikit tracksuits, trainers, jeans. In nice pastel colours. Or with labels on. Well hello Chav Central. Accssorised with tons of gold bling, an orange face and sticky pink lipgloss. Lovely. I would rather be run over by a bus than go out in a pair of hipsters with a fat bottom and flab hanging out over the top. Just avoid them if you are any wider than the average stick insect, they don't work. Was England suddenly blasted by a giant ray of Chavtonite? Did it suudenly suffer a giant infectious taste bug? Have Reebok and Nike suddenly begun subliminal advertising direct to our brains? I want to wear a puffy ballgown to work, wear pearls on a wet Wednesday afternoon, and look different to everyone else, not exactly the same. I buy it because I want to be individual, not an identikit clone from a middle-eastern factory outlet. The SU bar is now full of suits and ties, and well-pressed polo-shirts. If these people are boring aged 18, god knows what they'll be like in their 40s! They won't live longer, it will just seem that way. I prefer my men with make-up, interesting hair, and opinions. If I wanted to date chavs I'd just stand near the local football club. Music was trying to move on, constantly exploring, reiventing itself, with fissions and fusions. Music was loud, brash, melodic, with people playing guitars and writing their own songs. Songs had messages, political, romantic, teenage, bittersweet. Bands were not interchangeable permatanned bimbos who have won dodgy TV 'talent' shows. Hell, anyone can croon 'Ooh love you Baby' over a repetitive drum beat, and prance around like a baboon. I want committment in my music, a message, the summing up of a campaign, a time, an era, an angst-ridden teenage affair. To be honest Jennifer Lopez doesn't interest me. Neither the bottom nor the 'music'. Bring back those 3 chord one hit specials, the switchblade saccharine 3 minute wonders of my teenage years. I want to be able to launch myself around the dancefloor to those brief perfect moments of musical bliss. Its got to the point where I don't even want to dance these days. Not because I'm told old to dance, but simply because there's nothing left I want to dance to. In fact we might as well say I've given up going out. Unless it's to dinner with likeminded friends, what's the point? Where am I going to go? I used to love going to the cinema, and boy was my taste eclectic. Through Jeunet and Caro to Russ Meyer, Alien and back again. Life was new and different, film was new and different. It reflected changing times, lives and attitudes, the way we thought about things and reacted to them. Now it's all 'Brother of the Bride 43', the sequel of the remake of the sequel of the film made in 1943. Nothing new, nothing innovative, nothing too scary or sexy, god forbid.....It's all throwback feelgood cinema. Anyone would think there was a war on..... I want challenging cinema, not marshmallow mushiness. Literature and poetry seem as bad. I want my perceptions challenged, I don't want my reading to fit into neat little pigeonholes of 'chick lit', 'mystery', etc. I want to explore new lives, new thoughts, feeling, theories. We are now into the sequel menatality in fiction, with the annual Harry Potter, the annual Joanna Trollope. Literaure is a form of exploration, or should be, not a form of reiteration, and to be honest, intellectual, w***ing. It appears to be going nowhere. Endlessly regurgitated genres, with the intelligensia so anally retentive that they still firmly place things such as sci-fi or fantasy in the 'trash' bin. If literaure is going to move on in the way it did previously, that will be by merging and mutation, not by sitting in a purist hole of their own making.

To be honest, I want to go on a date with a man with interesting clothes, hair, and opinions. Maybe to watch a different and inventive movie, even if it is subtitled. Then on to a club, where we can dance to some wild, new music. We could discuss fascinating new books and films, fashion, art........... But I think I'm living in dream world. We are in the grey era, where mediocrity and predictability are king. We are in the world of the mundane, the everyday, the normal. Where the cult of the ersatz so -called celebrity says it all. You can be famous for absolutely nothing.

I say - Passion is dead- Long live passion!

I was twenty one years when I wrote this song I'm twenty two now, but I won't be for long People ask when will you grow up to be a man But all the girls I loved at school are already pushing prams I loved you then as I love you still Tho I put you on a pedestal,They put you on the pill I don't feel bad about letting you go I just feel sad about letting you know I don't want to change the world I'm not looking for a new England I'm just looking for another girl I don't want to change the world I'm not looking for a new England I'm just looking for another girl I loved the words you wrote to me But that was bloody yesterday I can't survive on what you send Every time you need a friend I saw two shooting stars last night I wished on them but they were only satellites Is it wrong to wish on space hardware I wish, I wish, I wish you'd care I don't want to change the world I'm not looking for a new England I'm just looking for another girl This song, which I was listening to, (and even attempting to play on the guitar, must have been drunk), has meant a lot to me over the years. I wasn't even 21 when I heard this song, I was sixteen. Full of ideals, and beliefs that change was possible. Now it's over 21 years since I first heard it, and not much has changed. I've been away and come back, yet England is still the same in many ways. It's still a beautiful song, but now it has quite a bittersweet quality given to it by time......

This is one from Vampires Rock, the other week.......

Breaking Glass is immensely corny, but it's also an immensely good movie. I love it! Hazel O'Connor's music makes the film for me, and I still love it, even outside the movie.

I have just seen it again, after about fifteen years...thank you TradionalGoth!!!! For those of you who haven't seen it, here is the potted history.....

BREAKING GLASS is a group, trying to slice through the hassles and the hype of the music business and make themselves heard.

DANNY is their manager, dazzled by the rock & roll rebel dream - trying not to get suckered by the record moguls' system.

KATE is the singer, ambitious and visionary - but the rock & roll machine could burn her out before it makes her a star...

BREAKING GLASS - the ultimate rock movie.

Cheesy blurb I know, but an amazing film, especially Hazel O'Connor's performance, which still makes me cry to this day. That very satisfying crying a la Muriel's Wedding or Beaches......cathartic even!

So alittle of what I have been watching and listening to there.......

I rather liked this one.....it has an eerie oriental quality to it. Have been a bit quiet as I have been writing a short story, and no, you can't read it because I haven't finished it yet........ It's another vampy tale, and was inspired by an image I saw the other day. This weeks MA was underwhelming. No tutor showed up. We didn't get a message either, so the class adjourned to the pub. Apart from that, have to finish my spooky little tale.........

This just gave me an idea......... She slipped down the steps from Metro Bir-Hakeim, and followed him under the shadowy arches along the Quai de Grenelle. She did not let her gaze slip for a moment. He stopped at the beginning of the steps. His emormous tartan shorts flapped round his equally enormous knees, fighting with the even more furious tartan of his short sleeved shirt. The energetic breeze whipping along the Seine buffeted his pudgy arms, and jiggled the entire contents of a small camera store that were slung around his pink, yet non-existent neck. His wife struggled up the steps behind him. Possibly even larger, she was determined to make her mark in clinging cerise shorts, and what may have purported to be an orange boob tube, but in reality would have clothed several people several times over. These clashed perilously with her puce cheeks, and the lime-green plastic earrings. "Not very big, Loubelle. Ain't what I thought at all. We got bigger water towers in Texas." "Elmer, it ain't supposed to be big. It's supposed to be old, and full o' culture." "Loubelle, old it is, look at it, ain't nothing but a pile of rust." Maelle kept well back behind the shaddow of the latticed column, observing them carefully. As they edged towards the lift, she camouflaged herself in and amongst the flow of people. She slipped between the crowd like a black mist, slim, wraithlike, almost transparent. As Loubelle and Elmer reached the next column, and the queue for the lift, Maelle was there again, listening, watching, waiting. She rather wished she wasn't. These people would have done well to keep their opinions to themselves. "What makes it culture then, Loubelle? Just some pile of rusty girders made by some French guy with some fancy name and some fancy ideas. What kind of a name is Eyefell anyhow?" "Because it's French. Because it's in Paris. That makes it art. The French do art." "Do art? I ain't seen nothin' but junk since I been here. I told you we should have gone to Florida. Least we would've had fun and no junk." As she listened from her hideaway, Maelle became more and more repulsed. Did these people have no idea of what they were like. She began to feel less and less for them, their humanity was lost under a morass of animality. They stood there, side by side like two fat pink pigs in a pen, supine, porcine. Even their voices had the quality of oinking inanities. She just needed to wait her time. They were careless. "When's this darn lift gonna get down here, Lou? We ain't got all day, y'know." "Elmer, this is a holiday. You ain't at the feed store now. It'll come when it comes." "If it ain't here in two darn minutes, I'm gonna go back to that hotel and have me a burger. This French muck don't agree with my insides." Maelle began to edge closer. Any moment now, the lift attendants would begin to announce the last trips of the day. The sky above the Seine was now pale on the horizon, and darkening blue above. She began to feel the pangs, they were getting ever stronger, convulsing her frail body with their inner movement. Soon, it had to be soon. "Well, finally, I was getting to think they were on strike." "Just five minutes more, honey, and I'll get you the biggest burger you ever saw." Loubelle and Elmer were now almost at the front of the queue. Maelle slid forward imperceptibly, until she was standing just behind them. She could smell them now, their corn-fed scent. The hunger was becoming overwhelming. She needed to make it happen and now. The lift attendant was stopping Loubelle and Elmer now. "No, I regret Monsieur, we have too many persons on this lift. I will come back for you" The lift moved onwards and upwards as Maelle stifled a smile. "Darn French. Was he sayin' I was too big for his damn tiny French lift?" "No Elmer honey, you're lovely just the way you are. I don't like no scrawny guys." As Maelle watched the vast and rippling mass of Loubelle's cerise-encased behind and wobbling thighs, balanced precariously on her pin-like silver heels, and reflected that Elmer probably didn't like 'scrawny girls' either. The prey was getting closer. All to do now was watch and wait. The lift came sliding down the inside of the column. It juddered to a noisy halt and opened to admit Elmer and Loubelle. Maelle noiselessly slid in behind them. With their vast bulk filling the tiny cabin, she was invisible to the lift attendant. It was all becoming almost unbearabale for her, unless the lift moved soon, it would be too late, the game would be over for her. The ride to the top seemed like eternity for Maelle, edging, edging ever higher and nearer her goal. The little capsule appeared to have gone into slow motion as it inched up the inside of the curved column. The moon was slowly emerging, and Maelle could feel it all beginning. the sensation was shooting along her spine, down to the tips of her fingers, to the very tips of her toes. In a moment it would be too late, too obvious, too dangerous. "Loubelle honey, this darn lift ain't strong enough to carry a kitten. How much longer it gonna take?" "Elmer, you just be patient." Patient, patient, thought Maelle, trying desparately to control herself. The clunk of the lift told her that they had finally arrived at the summit. She looked around, more anxious by the second. It was deserted. The clunk of lift doors told her that the other was on its way down, and they were alone. Perfect. Maelle's head shot back as the moon emerged full and bright from behind the cloud. She felt the rush as her very bones shifted within her body. She felt the claws tear through her flesh, sleek, powerful. The teeth were pushing forward, long, sharp, deadly. Her clothes lay on the floor, she no longer had need for them with the rough grey fur that clothed her from head to toe.Her breathing was deep, and her body shook in a final juddering arc as she took her final vulpine form. She was ready. Stealthily now, she padded delicately on vicious velvet paws, closer, closer. The urge was getting pleasurably stronger and stronger. Now she could smell Elmer and Loubelle and they were irresistable. Irresistable in that they had absolutely no idea what what was about to happen to them. She paced round the central cupola, nearer, nearer. They were leaning on the balustrade. She pounced, feeling the rush that always came with the thrill of the kill, slicing, slashing, frenzied now. She was a whirlwind of teeth, claws, and fury. The blood flew as the screams rang out over the still dark waters of the Seine, for there was no-one there to hear them. Then there was silence. Jacques Chirac stared lamely across his croissant at Bernadette. After what he had just heard he no longer had the heart to eat it. First the Mairie de Paris on the telephone, informing him of an outrage at the Eiffel Tower. Someone had reported seeing two large pink balloons attached to the radio mast at the top, from an early morning train on Line 6 . The cleaners had however found something rather more gruesome. The completely savaged and hoisted bodies of Mr and Mrs Elmer Hackensack, of Waco,Texas, U.S.A. They had been hauled up like animal carcasses from the abbatoir for all the world to see. Then the call from the CIA, regarding possible Al-Quaeda involvement in the outrage. Then an hour with George Bush, who had taken this as personally as if Jacques and Bernadette had spent the night arranging it for his personal displeasure. As if nightly car-burning and riots weren't enough for a man to cope with. Now some idiot had even reported that there were wol paw-prints at the cene. Whatever next? He left the room as he slowly felt even his coffee ride up his throat. The next morning as she sipped her coffee in the Cafe Bir-Hakeim, Maelle read the scandalous headlines on the front of Liberation. Le Monde was similarly outraged, though with a slightly different political argument. There were conspiracy-theory links playing on TF1 to the most tenuous of organisations. People had even tried to link them to the riots in the suburbs. The Quai de Grenelle was closed from the Rue du Docteur Finlay, by the Cafe Bir-Hakeim through to the Pont de l'Iena. There was standstill on the other side of the river, and the police had taken over the Trocadero as emergency headquarters. Maelle had a healthy appetite. The more she had to eat, the better, and unlike most of her kind, she liked a varied diet. Her latest decision had been to sample international cuisine. With her special gifts, no need for tedious cookbooks either. Just grab yourself a human take-away. What better place than Paris for this? Here you could find hors d'oeuvres of any taste- or colour, or nationality. The tourist capital of the world. Maelle smiled at the enormous young German stuffing andouilette after andouilette at the bar. His belt would have been large enough to encircle a shire horse, yet it struggled to hold his sail-like trousers somewhere around his enormous stomach. He was stuggling already against his many chins to get the sausage in his mouth. He looked at Maelle, folded his copy of Die Welt and shyly came to sit across from her, speaking in his halting heavily-accented French. Some sightsee their way around the world, some eat their way round the world. But some are eaten.

Ho ho bloody ho, the season of good cheer is upon us again, and I can truthfully say that there is no worse time of the year to be absolutely and completely skint. It's bad enough facing all the tinsel and glitter when you are single and poverty-stricken, but when you have a child it is like the definition of hell, having tempting luxuries you can't afford dangled in your face, and that of your child...... In a way, as an adult, even though you may not like it, you can at least stomp away screaming about rampant consumerism. For a child though, they are bombarded at school, at home, in the street. How can you tell a six-year old that Christmas is completely cancelled? For here we are not talking about a quiet Christmas, we are talking about no Christmas at all. We are talking if we pay the rent there will be zero presents under the tree, and that's IF we manage to pay the rent. When you can't even afford a Christmas tree. Children need Christmas, it is part of their life-experience. Grim reality enters their lives all too soon, and they deserve a little of the fairytale in their lives before it does. Childhood passes too quickly, and unfortunately we cannot step into the past to make it up a few years down the line. It's too late. I just find it hard to believe that this can happen now, in the 21st century. Even Bob Cratchit got his tree in the end. The Little Women got their lunch. And here in this Glorious Western Democracy in the year 2005, we can't even manage it. Food for thought.

Well, another deliriously exciting week at Social Services is over..... It would be Vive le Weekend, but that has been cancelled along with Christmas.........

I know it sounds cliched, but I really find that the MA is spurring me on to write. Now before those of you who know me become worried that I am becoming a girly swot, I don't mean the things that happen in class, neccessarily. What usually starts an idea is the mad conversations that we have in the pub after the class. We are a smaller group there, and the conversation seems to be much more no-holds-barred, with everyone chipping ideas of each other. Maybe it is the informality of the stuation, maybe it's the beer, who can tell. But it's not unusual that one of us comes the next week with something written from an idea that started in the pub. Maybe the beer should just be a compulsory part of the course, and all lectures should be held in the pub to allow free access to smoking and drinking, therefore provoking intellectual and literary discussion...... Of course, there may be dissenters, who claim that all this would mean is that we would sit in the pub talking complete rubbish the whole time.....that all we are spouting is our usual maudlin drunken crap......that we'll probably start singing any minute. I say- true, but at least we talk literary crap, a better class than football crap any day of the week....... So what was I saying about Sacher-Masoch and the Violent Femmes? Mine's a pint of lager.