Musings of Khlari

Hey ho and off we go......

2006-05-31T16:22:00.000Z

Well, am off to wordpress with my blog, as have so many hiccups on here....the link is http://musingsofkhlari.wordpress.com/ See you there!

Woe is me

2006-05-12T15:20:00.000Z

Every goth's nightmare- premature sunshine. How dare it be so disgustingly cheerful, when inside, my gothick soul is weeping?????

And on a 'lighter' note (or maybe a blacker note!)

2006-05-12T15:03:00.000Z

Some utter goth nonsense to cheer you (and me) up on a Friday afternoon. I'm so goth, in preschool, the only crayon I used was black. I'm so goth my black is blacker than your black. I call it "black black." I'm so goth, I don't say "black," I say "blahhwwwkkk." I'm so goth, whenever I walk into a room, all the lights go out. goth #1: I'm so goth the people in the grocery store have refused to sell me any cereal other than Count Chocula.goth #2: I'm so goth people ask me to AUTOGRAPH boxes of Count Chocula. I'm so goth I wear sunglasses when I open the refrigerator. I'm so goth I don't paint my nails black--I bash them with a hammer. I'm so goth I died and didn't notice. I'm so goth, whenever I knock on somebody's door they give me candy. I'm so goth, I'm not only "goth," but also "gothe" "goff" "gawth" "gauwth" "gothic" "gothik" "gothique" and "gawfickk" and soon I hope to be "gauewthickueu." I'm so goth, when I stop pouting, people ask, "What are YOU so happy about?" I'm so goth, when I go outside, the sun sets. goth #1: I'm so goth the smile muscles in my face have atrophied.goth #2: I'm so goth the smile muscles in my face never GREW.goth #3: What's a smile? I'm so goth I say things like "eternally yours in darkness" and "love and darkness" and "may the eternal darkness of the abyss enrapture and enshroud you in its infernal sickly sweet embrace." I'm so goth I don't use fabric softener, because I like pain. I'm so goth I set off airport metal detectors from ten feet away with all my jewelry. I'm so goth I'm the only REAL goth. I'm so goth it takes me an hour and a half to get dressed. I'm so goth it takes me longer to get UNdressed. I'm so goth I think electrical tape is a fashion accessory. I'm so goth, in preschool, all my drawings were titled, "DEATH." I'm so goth, in high school, all my papers were titled, "DEATH." I'm so goth I slather on spf 45 before I open the refrigerator. goth #1: I'm so goth I wonder if my dog's collar would look better on me.goth #2: I'm so goth I KNOW my dog's collar looks better on me.goth #3: I'm so goth I stole my dog's collar. I'm so goth I ate a Happy Meal . . . because I like to live dangerous. I'm so goth little kids are mesmerized by my appearance. I'm so goth I don't take my medications, so I can be more goth. I'm so goth, when I was born the doctor slapped me and I didn't cry. I'm so goth I make flowers wilt. I'm so goth I like them better that way. I'm so goth, when I smile people ask me what's wrong. I'm so goth little old ladies in walkers cross the street to insult me. I'm so goth I keep getting hit on by necrophiliacs! I'm so goth I practice my blank stare in the mirror. I'm so goth I have carpal tunnel syndrome from constantly putting the back of my hand to my forehead. I'm so goth that whenever I walk into a room, you hear "Toccata and Fugue in D minor." I'm so goth I listen to The Sisters of Mercy and Bauhaus simultaneously at midnight in a graveyard sitting in a pentagram surrounded by candles . . . and oh, there's a full moon . . . and then I die. And then I come back to life. And then I die again . . . tragically. I'm so goth I have actually seriously uttered the phrase, "the darkest dark of the dark darkness." goth #1: I'm so goth, when I'm sleeping people come and check my pulse.goth #2: I'm so goth I don't have a pulse. I'm so goth I know what pvc stands for. I'm so goth the people at the suicide hotline have asked me to stop calling. I'm so goth nuns and priests resent me because I look cooler in black than them. I'm so goth tan lines are a sin. I'm so goth the dark is scared of ME. I'm so goth I know how to spell Siouxsie & The Banshees correctly. I'm so goth I became a fisherman, just so I could use fishnets. I'm so goth I sleep UNDER my bed. I'm so goth, Robert Smith asked ME for my autograph. I'm so goth I got a 12-pack of absinthe. I'm so goth I don't eat gummy bears, I eat "glummy bears." I'm so goth I spend every waking moment, every breath, in contemplation of Goth. The totality of my being is at one with the essence of Goth. I'm so goth I dot my i's with frowny faces. I'm so goth I call a smile a "concave frown." I'm so goth that when I was a toddler, I didn't cry over spilled milk, I MOURNED it. I'm so goth my skin would catch on fire if it were ever exposed to sunlight. I'm so goth I make Happy Meals cry. I'm so goth I spend hours deciding what shade of black to wear. I'm so goth I shower with bleach instead of soap. I'm so goth I have a fishnet umbrella. I'm so goth I always complain because my blacks don't match. I'm so goth that bats hang little plastic me's from their ceiling. I'm so goth that if I go out in the sunlight with bare skin showing, people have to put on shades because of the reflection off my pale skin. I'm so goth I have to wear sunglasses and sunscreen to look on the bright side. I'm so goth that lightning strikes whenever I count things. MUH-HA-HA-HA! I'm so goth that in kindergarten I sang "woe, woe, woe your boat..." I'm so goth I have crushed velvet lawn chairs. goth #1: I'm so goth I changed my name to Mystryss Darque Wintyr Nyght Rayn Ravyn.goth #2: I'm so goth I don't have a name. I'm just "goth." I'm so goth all I do is sit around and talk about how goth I am. I'm so goth I always use the word "goth" instead of "got." I'm so goth every sentence I say has the word "goth" in it. I'm so goth I'm the only person who understands what goth REALLY is, and I'm not telling you!

Stationary

2006-05-12T14:40:00.000Z

This was inspired by two things, a childhood visit to Paris and my experience later of working there...................

Stationary

2006-05-12T14:39:00.000Z

Stationary The small girl in the red velvet trouser suit smiling shyly into the sun, blonde hair shining. As the Eiffel tower shoots skywards, behind her. Faded print put carefully in battered bag Rain is falling, maybe tears, can no longer tell. Climbs the long green steps, to the clanking line 6. The photo, last thing that remains of her self. Pulls aching body up the stairs of Bir-Hakeim, heavy bag in hands, doesn’t want to go home. Tired and cold, but he will be at home by now He who shouts, he who hits, he who screams, he who....... In any case, nowhere else to go. So cold. His pastis clinks on her knees, on the platform, while the October wind whips along the long quais. The tower above cold and mocking, imperious, Memory of hopes now but a faded dream, fantasies crack, splinter, to smithereens, spiral, evaporate in freezing air by the Seine. Join the bottomless maelstrom of broken hopes, ruined lives, hovering vulture-like over Paris, promising stardust, giving but broken glass. “Le prochain train desservira ...” the voice intones. The litany, all stations to Nation, the green metro clanks laboriously into sight. Lifts the bags, struggles with the silver handle, hears the lengthy hiss, sighing as she mounts the train. Saved in one way, at a high price though, her self.

The Tears I Never Cried

2006-05-12T13:59:00.000Z

This was written as part of my MA Poetry submission. I was intrigued by the idea of where you could mourn somone who had no logical grave, like a sailor lost at sea, or a stillborn baby. This is also about the child that I lost before I had Morgane........

The Tears I never Cried

2006-05-12T13:57:00.000Z

The tears I never cried Where can I begin to cry for you? In death, as in so brief fluttering life, you have never had a place to rest. As if wiping away your presence, could have made you not exist to me. Would ever take you away from me. Eight hours, of bitter lies, and deceit, screaming unheard into that long night, where they slapped my face to shut me up, shouted whether I could understand, left me alone so it was too late. We weren’t worth the trouble, or the drugs. I tried and tried, to hold on to you, to keep you with me by pure will, wishing you to stay, safe, and alive. like holding water in my fingers slipped through, despite me holding you back. Rain of blood and recriminations When I asked if I could see you, then brought you in a white plastic bucket. I asked if I could hold you, they laughed. Took you away, put with the rubbish. Left with the milk flowing down my front, hollow, full of blood, and uncried tears, Empty-armed in the nursery, the scent of the new mothers’ flowers, waiting Whilst they prepared me the final bill.

The Naming of Parts

2006-05-12T13:40:00.000Z

This is a poem inspired partly by Henry Reed's war poem. I saw this not as the Naming of Parts of a gun, but as two lovers naming the parts of each other, both from different backgrounds, and each in their own language.

The Naming of Parts

2006-05-12T13:16:00.000Z

The Naming of Parts Tonight, we have naming of parts. Ce soir, nous avons l'appellation des pièces Your hand guiding mine to point out the details Ta main, guidant la mienne pour préciser les détails often forgotten in simple dictionaries. souvent oubliés en dictionnaires simples Your finger delicately tracing the curves Ton doigt traçant délicatement les courbes of my body, and mine those of yours. de mon corps, et le mien ceux à vous With every touch, elucidating complex vocabulary avec chaque contact, élucidant le vocabulaire complexe This curve, the breast, the next, the nipple, Cette courbe, le sein, le prochain, le mamelon, the bellybutton, the vagina, and the clitoris. le nombril, le vagin, et le clitoris. Strange in effect how all of these are male Bizarre, en effet comment tous ces derniers sont masculins. These all seem too formal with our familiarity, Ces tous semblent trop formels avec notre connaissance, As if we were vousvoying, between the sheets, Comme si nous vousvoyaient, sous les draps, or addressed each other as Mr and Miss so and so. ou s’adressaient comme M. et Mlle aintel. Our words should be as close as our warm bodies, Nos mots devraient être aussi familiers que nos corps chauds, as near and eager as our ruby lips, aussi proches et désireux que nos lèvres rouges, As wild, and willing as our wanton flesh. aussi sauvages, et voulantes que notre chair dévergondée. Our mouths do not speak the same language Nos bouches ne parlent pas la même langue and struggle with the sounds of each others’, et lutte avec les bruits l'uns de l'autre but our bodies need no Esperanto. mais nos corps n'ont besoin d'aucun espéranto. So, tonight, we have the naming of parts, Ainsi, ce soir, nous avons l'appellation des pièces, The decrypting of the body, le déchiffrage du corps, often omitted from simple dictionaries. souvent omis des dictionnaires simples. Some might call it the language of the gutter Il y certains qui peuvent l’appeler la langue des égouts I say that it’s our bodies’ own way Moi, je dis que c’est le façon de nos propres corps Their own way of naming the parts Leurs propres methodes de l’appellation des pièces I think we’ll start here with tits or boobs Je pense que nous commencerons ici par les nénés ou des lolos two little things with many synonyms deux petites choses avec beaucoup de synonymes then gradually work our way down puis graduellement travailler notre manière vers le bas in descending order, we have the ass dans l'ordre décroissant, nous avons le cul Not to be confused with the cock à ne pas confondre avec la queue Which would be a disastrous mistake qui serait une erreur désastreuse Here finishes the lesson Ici finit la leçon No Bescherelle for us today aucun Bescherelle pour nous aujourd'hui for tonight we have the naming of parts pour le ce soir que nous avons l'appellation des pièces Tonight Mr Willy and Mrs Fanny Ce soir M. Zigounette et Mme Foufounette will cross the Channel of Incomprehension vont croiser la Manche de l'incompréhension and nothing will be lost in the translation et rien ne serait perdu dans la traduction

Just a little something that amused me!

2006-05-12T13:08:00.000Z

These little beauties are the Gothic Powerpuff Girls, as sent to me by Simon.....they just made me laugh!

2006-04-26T13:19:00.000Z

Kathleen Florence Lily

2006-04-26T13:05:00.000Z

They always told me that you were a myth- product of an overactive imagination. Though fleeting I had sensed that you were real, Sitting on his knee he would tell me, how much I was like his little Kathleen. Twenty years to prove now your existence. There remain, three things which relate to you, three small things tell one small and shortened life. You all stand stiffly to attention, Father must be watching across the room. All five straight, in descending size, and gaze. Ernest, May, Ethel, Tom, finally you. In uniforms, pinafores, and sailor suits, 1902, in sepia, like amber. I can see though, you hold Tom’s hand shyly, and you look back at me with my own eyes. The next set piece, not that long afterwards, six months later, though everything has changed. Stoic, black-veiled, they stare lifelessly at the out. The letters Harris, Valletta Harbour, along the bottom of the black-bordered card. Parents remain ever outside the frame. Black armbands and hats tell the hidden tale, gap in the line where once you had your place. Youngest of Thomas and Elizabeth, “He shall gather the leaves with his arms and carry them in his being” reads the quote. White-stone inscription askew, but intact. You have lain long, among the forgotten babies, in dust-blown Kalkara’s lost lanes. I know now why Thomas cried to leave you, Small, forgotten, and far away from home. One day, my doppelganger, my twin, my semblante, I shall bring your brother’s so long-promised flowers.

2006-04-26T12:52:00.000Z

Undressing

2006-04-26T12:45:00.000Z

Ease away my many layers, you take away my fragile shells. Prising gently, so carefully, coaxing slowly further out the living Matrioska. Softly lifting the layers one by one, eventually, painstakingly, the raw tender core is revealed. You take away all the chagrin, drying my every bitter tear, Staunching the deepest of my wounds, healing the slightest fleeting hurt, Soothing all of my sorrows and allaying any preying fears. Peel the last onion skins of my cover, so lovingly away. Unwind the artifice of my cocoon, the web I hide behind, I am blinking, unexpected, uncovered, unveiled, now unmasked Yet no longer scared of the day, because you are here with me and In the searing unimagined naked daylight, we first embrace.

Upwardly Gothic

2006-03-28T15:09:00.000Z

See, all you doubting Thomases and Thomasinas out there, I always told you that Goths were nature's intellectuals. Here's the proof of the pudding, on the BBC, no less. Featuring my friend Mia Joseph from London as covergirl and Goth spokeswoman! http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/1/hi/magazine/4828230.stm

Journey's End

2006-03-20T22:57:00.000Z

Another one of my fiendishly cheerful little pieces...why do my poems always turn out so miserable, huh? I'm quite a cheerful kind of girl really, though you'd never guess it! This was a piece of work set as a narrative poem from the point of view of someone else. It was going to be a nice little rhyming ditty about a nice little old lady going to collect her pension, and kind of ended up as a black elegy for the old people trapped in the flats where I used to live in Stoke Newington....... hmmmmm Journey’s End Every week, I make my own pilgrimage, Rising carefully at the stroke of eight. Preparing the details of the voyage, Ensuring that I will never be late. Making now the ordered preparations, Grilling the toast and then brewing the tea. So I never miss my assignations, I check my handbag and look for my key. The drawers first, girdle, stockings last of all. And then the thermals and my woolly vest. Mustn’t forget my boots are in the hall. Jersey, the cardigan I save for best. The smartest skirt, and tuck my vest inside. Find my good coat, my flowery hat for show, Pick up my handbag ready for my ride. Lock the front door behind me, time to go. The lift’s not worked since nineteen eighty-two Five floors up in the sky is a long way. Bessie says though, “You’re lucky to be you, Some of the other old dears take all day.” When I get out the block it looks like rain, Can’t tell upstairs, my windows won’t open. Too far to get my umbrella again, In this place, everything seems broken. “They screw them shut deliberate”, Bessie says, “The windows, to stop us all jumping out. You can’t do bloody nothing nowadays. They’d charge us for the privilege, no doubt. In your rent book, itemised jumping fee.” “I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.” That’s what I say, to Bessie over tea. “Make the buggers pay for the distraction.” Here I am finally at my journey’s end Join the pension queue in the same old way. It’s a bit lonely without my old friend, They’ve already been to take her away. Today I’ve another destination, To the florists to find a wreath. Though it’s had to be a quick cremation, about the only thing left was her teeth. The miracle was how she managed it, Unscrewed the balcony door with a knife. The zimmer frame over the parapet, Twenty-three floors to extinguish a life. Bessie said, “They left us up there to die, It was cheaper than state euthanasia. Us paying rent, for coffins in the sky” But I still wish that I could have saved her. The tube is taking forever again, They all seem to since London Transport went. The OAP card saves on bus and train, But I have to use it to pay the rent. The council, to save some more of our cash. Moved the cemetery far out in the sticks. Fifteen changes, and I’m too old to dash. Believe me at ninety you’re not that quick. The Shenfield train, it will never arrive, No time to get to the crem at Wanstead. Make my decision, don’t want to survive, I jump, it’s what Bessie would have wanted.

2006-03-20T22:55:00.000Z

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Me, Myself and the Multiplicity of 'I's

2006-03-09T21:03:00.000Z

This is the final piece that I put on the blog earlier in draft form, which went in as my Life Writing submission on the MA............ Me, Myself, and the multiplicity of I(s). Razors pain you; Rivers are damp; Acids stain you; And drugs cause cramp. Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live. Dorothy Parker It is impossible to die of unhappiness. People in novels do it all the time; they fade away gracefully, maybe helped by a bit of galloping consumption. But in reality, however wretched and miserable you are, life goes on like an eternal curse. Morning after morning, the sun rises, you invariably wake up. You can try; you can lay in bed willing your heart to stop beating, your brain to stop thinking, wishing everything to disappear into a blissful inky nothingness, to become the darkness, to be yourself no more. Though your heart and mind are wrenched apart, though your emotional viscera are laid bare for the world to see and you can take no more, the body and mind keep on against your will. Like some god-awful divine conspiracy, a thunder-bolt ‘I told-you-so’ from up on high. So, you cannot die of inaction. Simply willing yourself to is never going to be enough, you need to pull yourself free from the whirlpool of lassitude and do something about it. But even then, your psyche conspires against you. Whatever you do, it has to be final and complete. Either that or you still wake up, hideously scarred and disfigured, or a dribbling vegetable in a wheelchair, which isn't really going to cheer you up either. No method can be 100% guaranteed. There are always those pesky ‘miracle’ rescuers you read about in the tabloids to enter into the equation as well. Dorothy Parker was right. You might as well live. Then you have the well-meaning friends. When you are curled up under the duvet for a week, wishing that it was dark all day as well, they try to 'cheer you up'. Nothing that they say or do will make you feel any better, in fact hearing them over the cacophony in your own head is bad enough. They buy you 'cheerful' clothes (which go in the bin), happy movies (ditto), and singalong CDs (ditto, but it pleases me to jump on them first). They still haven't cottoned on that miserable clothes and dark movies are what make me happy, even when I'm depressed. They are in fact the parts of my personality that I am quite attached to, thank you very much, and to take them away would be to take part of myself away, however weird that may seem to other people. How does all of this start? As Freud would ask, what was your childhood like? Nothing out of the ordinary, would be the answer, only a marginally dysfunctional family when you fit it into the general scheme of things. I've had friends with major family meltdown who've ended up much less kooky than me. I always wished that I was really stupid though. As a 'clever' child, you always stand apart, you're marked out, singled out, not enough of this, not quite like that. So you never fit in, don't have the herd mentality of the pack. I always felt that if you were really dumb you might never notice all of this, that it might all pass over your head, that you would never feel any of that unhappiness. So there you are, the too-brainy geeky loner. That morbid girl in the corner reading a book. The friends you do have are the other misfits, the flotsam and jetsam, the too-tall, too-fat, too-thin, too-foreign, too-gay, too-poor, (in single or multiple combinations), and those like yourself, the just-too-plain-weird. Get used to it. That's going to carry on for the rest of your life. The more you are alone, the more being alone seems natural, the harder it is to relate to 'normality' and 'normal' people. Left to your own devices, normality is relative. After a while observing the world from your exclusion zone, you think that you are the most eminently sane person in the world. Other people are the mad ones; your truth is the only real truth. How would you be able to tell? What do you have to compare it with? Do you care anymore? If the 'normal' world won't have you in it’s club, why would you want to be a member anyhow? The problem is that you are really not quite mad enough. You are conscious of the fact that you are losing the plot, but you walk the razor-blade edge between sanity and insanity. Nobody cares as long as you keep it to yourself. You can lie in bed for a week, lose a fortnight in desperation, but nobody really notices. If you suffer from the quiet internalised hell, no-one cares. They can’t see or feel what is going on inside your head. If you laid on the floor screaming, or announced to the social worker that you were Queen Victoria, all hell would break loose, but keep it within yourself and you become invisible. Even if you ask for help, you're told that if you're sane enough to ask for it, you really don't need it. Sometimes you're even told that it's your life that's the problem, not your head. No psychiatrist will even offer to help with that. How do you get to this point? How do you let yourself get to this point? You don’t; of course, it creeps up on you until one day it seems to sucker on to your soul and never leaves you again. Like a dark invasive fog between you and the world, colouring your vision. It comes over you in waves, each wave more overwhelming until the last one knocks you flying. You can't feel it as such, because you are becoming more and more numb and distanced as time goes on. Eventually, you can't even summon up the tears to cry at the hopelessness of it all. They don't flow any more, even they have dried up. Yet still you continue, a shell of a girl, when even a smile would crack your carapace face from side to side. The worst thing about this is nobody seems to notice that you are eaten away from the inside like a tree- or maybe they do and they just don't care. If they tapped you, you would shatter into a million tiny fragments, and be carried away on the breeze like so much ash. Eventually you descend into a numbness, a null void. Your own unhappiness winds round you like a shroud, an impermeable shroud, a winding sheet through which nothing can penetrate. Life, death, happiness, sorrow, everything just passes you by, stuck on your emotional bypass while life shuttles by. Nothing seems real, nothing can get through. It's like being buried alive in the middle of Piccadilly Circus, you can observe everything go on around you but you are no part of it and it is no part of you. Relegated to the fringes of life. As an adult, the prejudices change again subtly. You are not only too weird, but many other things on top. You can add new insults to the list. You are now seen to be 'deep', 'complex', 'complicated' to add to your sins. Just when you think that you are half-way towards a functional relationship with a member of the opposite sex, they offer this up on a platter as a ready-made excuse for finishing it there and then. Sayonara psycho. Here, you have two choices. You could of course just keep yourself to yourself, live in an attic with 93 cats, and become known as Miss So-and-so, the ‘old witch upstairs’. Never get close enough to anyone for them to remark upon your ‘otherness’. There is the other route of course. You could decide to play them at their own game. Buy into the ‘Stepford Wives’ mentality. You carefully put aside all that is ‘weird’, refute every part of yourself, deny everything that is fundamentally ‘you’. Have a ‘normal’ relationship, following this up with the expected wedding on a summer’s day with pastel shades, cute bridesmaids, and warm champagne. You can buy normal clothes and try to follow normal pursuits such as going to the gym and going camping, pretend to care about who is doing what to whom and have trivial conversations about fame. Make 16 course dinners for your mother-in-law. Go the whole hog and get yourself the ultimate ‘normal’ accessory, a baby. Coo and cuddle and dress it to the nines, burbling to it in the fashion of the mentally afflicted as everyone else does. Become the 2.4 children norm, spending your Sunday afternoons in Matalan and Ikea. Yet somehow they see through this veil of normality. Is it something you said, your attitudes towards this and that? Could it be an earring too many, or your cavalier attitude towards the sainted status of motherhood? It could be that despite all of this normality, it has still been noted that you are reading too many books of ‘the wrong kind’. They might notice that any of the friends that you choose come from the lucky dip of loonies, and not from the Women’s’ Institute. If you are unlucky, they might try to beat the weirdness from you, believing that if they hit the head that holds it for long enough, they will banish it forever. Eventually, spurred on by the comments from their friends, the ‘normal’ partner will turn around and blame you for the weirdness, accuse you of duplicitously fucking up his life, and leave for fresh fields and pastures new and normal with a secretary from Pinner who laughs at their (feeble) jokes. There you go again. Excluded from the world of the ‘normal’, nursing the internal and external bruising, alone once more.Of course you could try the drugs. They'll offer them to you at every point, and in these you have a great and glorious choice. There are the ones that turn you into a cast member from 'Return of the Living Dead'. They don't make anything any better, but as even walking is an effort, you wouldn't care anyway. There are those that make you sleep, I say sleep, but it's more like catatonia really. There are those that send you completely loco for a week or two (whereupon they decide that you might have a 'reaction' to them). Then there are those that slightly lift the veil, and fool you into thinking that this might just work. These are the most insidious of the lot. Everything's great for a few weeks, then you realise that you can't sleep. So they give you something to make you sleep. Then you can't relax without twitching, so they give you something for that. You become a walking talking pill-bottle, but as everyone cheerily says 'you look a lot better'. Then you begin to realise that you are losing yourself in all of this. You need a pill to wake up, a pill to go to bed, a pill to exist. Your personality is dying; it attacks you, not the cuckoo that has taken up permanent residence in your psyche. So you flush the lot down the lavatory, have even worse panic attacks for months, and start all over again. At this point, I'm sure that you're waiting for me to make it all better. Not for me, but for you, that is. You would love me to say that I'm all better now, that yesterday I cut the plastic starfish off the sunglasses case for the baby to play with. Or that I live in pastel pink cashmere and occupy a des-res thatched cottage in the country with my three gorgeous and gifted children and my perfect husband. Lived happily ever after. ‘Ils se marierent et eurent beaucoup d'enfants’. But it's a bit like an infection in some ways. It eats into your soul, once you’ve noticed that it’s there, you're never quite rid of it. It lurks, somewhere in a dark corner, waiting its moment to pounce. You can never exorcise yourself, no matter how deeply you wish to. At its best it adds a bittersweet quality to even the happiest of moments, at its worst, poisons even the most innocent pleasures. You can visualise it as a black cloud, a seeping cancerous mist that goes everywhere. You might, eventually, after much seeking find someone almost as strange as you. They might identify with your exclusion, sympathise with your dissociation, you can form a club of two against the world. But everyone’s little psychoses are different. There will be moments when you can identify personally, this person is the nearest you will ever come in life to a soulmate, there will be other moments when the blackness within both your souls will jar, when the blackness within your soul will be cruel, will push them away and wound them. You do not want to hurt them, it is something that rises within you from time to time, flaying all in its path, decimating even that which you hold dear in life. If you are really lucky, they might actually hang around long enough for you to explain. If you’re exceptionally lucky, they might even understand. Although some parts of your life can function quite normally, the rest seems to end in a pile of emotional debris. You have to evolve ways of coping with it. You come up with complex strategies so that no-one notices. You become the most skilled actor in the game of life. Eventually there are two 'yous'. There is the everyday 'you' that is seen by the public, and then there is the same private 'you' that hears the chaos inside your head. On one side the acceptably slightly dippy side of lunacy, the amiable though a little eccentric, smiling even when your face aches, and on the other, the internal you, screaming wordlessly into the void, crying silently and tearlessly behind the mask. They function in tandem, despite all your best efforts. You white, you black. And when you try to write it down, it complicates further. Personality as jigsaw. There are then three yous. You white, you black, and you the writer. Not so much bipolar as tripolar. Of course you could move away, change languages, cultures. The ideal solution, escape yourself, create a ‘new’ you. Believe me; they will see through it just the same. There is a weirdo radar in every culture, and you won’t pass through it unperceived. There must be some kind of secret abnormal signal you give out. Then it gets even worse. You have six of you, a black, white, writer, one in each language, in bilingual hell. Is there such a word as hexpolar? It sounds oddly appropriate. The only answer is to know thyself and love thyselves. If not love, then at least tolerate thyself a little bit. Watch for the signs, know the triggers, avoid the situations, sometimes just walk away. When all is a black maelstrom, just spend time by yourself. At least that way, nobody gets hurt except you. Learn to appreciate your self(ves). At least you'll never be bored, you can always entertain yourselves. If they think you are the weirdo in the corner? So what. No one will ever like everyone, and maybe you are an acquired taste. You should have learned that by now anyway. At least you'll never be alone, you always have yourself to fall back on. You will never lose yourself, however much pain you inflict on yourselves, they can never escape. So there you are for eternity, all of you. Smiling, smiling eternally, whilst crying into the void behind the flimsy mask of 'normality'.

Sonnet.

2006-03-09T20:59:00.000Z

This was a sonnet I compsed for the MA course, we had to write something in a traditional form....so this is my effort! Sonnet Two into one, in the absence of light, mine, the complicity of your embrace, crimson curtains, boundaries of our night, velvety guardians of our secret place. The world, its secrets, in our limbs entwined, mouth meeting skin with a balletic grace, temple of love by warm flesh enshrined encircling bodies arc precious space Thoughtless, with emotional jackboot you shatter our sanctuary, throw my bloody heart into the gutter, now I don’t matter. Blighted still-beating heart, now ripped apart . The tattered remains of your crystal night, love lies cold, bleeding, in wilderness white.

Full Circle

2006-03-03T16:38:00.000Z

This is a piece of fiction that I have just submitted for my fiction assignment on the MA........... Full Circle Liverpool, 1986 Lulu heaved her bag onto her shoulder, and looked at the A-Z in her hand. It couldn’t be that hard to find. She hoped to God it wasn’t, in any case. The wind was more Siberia than Edge Hill. It had seemed like a good idea when she’d spoken to Mags that afternoon, before British Rail had conspired against her to make a half-hour journey into a three hour hell. She walked along the main road, looking for Mags’ new des-res. Mags had already gushed about it at great length, fantastic house, wonderful and wacky housemates. She looked at the scrawled note in her hand, then at the spectacle before her. The grimy red-brick Victorian terrace did appear to be the right place, 58 Edge Hill Lane. Pity, it had sounded almost picturesque the way Mags had described it, but this grotty hulk with lorries thundering past a foot from the door must be Mags’ new abode. She knocked at the door. Several times , before anybody heard her. Then, a thundering on the staircase, and the apparition of Mags’ lanky blonde form on the doorstep. “Lou!!! You made it then! Come in, everyone’s dying to meet you” Lulu struggled over the doorstep with her bag, and into the equally prepossessing hall. It was carpeted with that particular type of carpet that only student landlords appear to have access to, one of such hideousness that no-one sane would ever purchase it knowingly, yet frighteningly common in student houses the world over. The walls were a cream that had seen better days. It was warmer outside than in. Mags led her down to the living room, covered with student posters. “You have got to meet Jane and Vicky, I’ve told them so much about you!” She enthused. Lulu winced. This was unfortunately the price to pay for being Mags’ oldest friend. Everyone knew every detail about her before they had even clapped eyes on her. Evidently, today was to be no exception. More so since they had split up to go to university, Lulu heading off to Manchester, Mags off to Liverpool, with Mal, the third member of the triumvirate, staying in London. Two girls came out from the kitchen. They must be Jane and Vicky. Why had Mags chosen to do a degree in psychology? One was tall ,pale, mousy hair, jeans, spots, the other tall, dark hair, jeans, more spots. Jane (mousy, spots) and Vicky (dark, extra spots) gushed and giggled hellos, with the now-almost-obligatory “Ooh, isn’t she wacky!” Lulu’s appearance was not exceptional on her History of Art degree, it was considered mundane and pedestrian. There were people stranger than her in every sense of the word. The guy who claimed that his hair had a separate personality had lasted a full year before anyone noticed and carted him off to the funny-farm. Mags’ scientist pals on the other hand, regarded her as a major curiosity. It made her feel like an exhibit at a Victorian freak-show, or a prize catch at the zoo. The men were the worst. The ones with Leo Sayer perms, NHS specs, lab-rat skin and fashion sense that stopped when ‘Yes’ left the charts in 1973. Having (evidently) very little experience of the opposite sex, (or any sex), they seemed to take slightly odd clothes and a penchant for dyeing your hair as an outward manifestation of inner sexual deviance. After several lagers, Lulu almost believed her own explanations that she was a resting dominatrix and whip-mistress. It was just so enjoyable watching their milk-bottle bottom specs steam up at the thought. So, another scintillating evening to look forward to. Tonight was Mags’ birthday, so even the excuse of Bubonic Plague wouldn’t have passed muster. They had spent every birthday together since the age of 11, from the jelly and ice-cream, through teenage snog-fests to ‘Echo Beach’, until now. Mal had managed to sneak out of it by being on some dubious field trip to the Ukraine. Even the Ukraine seemed a better prospect at this present moment. Probably warmer, anyhow. Still giggling, Jane and Vicky announced that they were off to “get ready for the great night ahead!” Whenever these two spoke, it was in unison, with an implied exclamation mark at the end of each sentence. Finally Mags and Lulu headed up to get ready themselves. The gorgeous Mags slipped into a racy little red number, easy when you’re 5 feet ten, blonde, and built like a beanpole. Lulu wrestled with the crimpers and the make-up for an hour, finally ending up in a bizarre purple affair from Affleck’s Palace, finished off with fishnets and big boots. It would be fine as long as she didn’t stand next to Mags, but then that was the story of their friendship, the dwarf and the beanpole. By the time they came down, the house was filling up, and Billy Bragg blasted from the stereo. Jane and Vicky were wearing exactly the same as before, just with blue eye-liner. Several beardy-weirdies were milling around with warm cider in plastic cups, discussing Dungeons and Dragons, still in anoraks. Mags suddenly dragged Lulu across the room, almost knocking her over. “Lou,” she stammered “there’s someone I want you to meet. This is Fergus.” At this point, the until-now-almost-passable guy turned round. From the back he had been promising, slightly long dark hair, the only pair of black unflared jeans in the room, black t-shirt. From the front, he appeared to hold the spot monopoly for the Liverpool metropolitan area, his hair looked like it had been dipped in olive oil, and his t-shirt revealed as having not only the red flag, but also ‘Up the Revolution’ on the front. And he was a foot shorter than Mags. “Hiya” Lulu stammered “I’m Lulu.” “Well hello,” he instantly smarmed back (who did he think he was, Kenneth Williams? Not with that Belfast accent). “Marguerite has told me so much about you.” Lulu fought off the immediate urge to kill Mags when she saw the look in Mags’ eyes. She was obviously in love with this creep. “Fergus has been telling me so much about politics, Lou, we’ve been on so many demos together, and he’s speaking at a meeting next week.” Mags simpered. “Oh, yeah babe, I invited a few of the comrades down tonight, is that alright?” said the creep. “Great, brilliant! Love to meet them all,” said the Midwich Cuckoo formerly known as her best friend. The old Mags would have lynched a lesser man for that. She had it badly. Lulu realized how many of the posters were pictures of Che Guevara, and pictures of Lenin (easy, same beard as her Dad). Mags had no conception whatsoever of her own gorgeousness, and had a bizarre fascination for dwarves, obsessives, train spotters, and politicos. This one was no different, and obeyed several rules at once.. Lulu groaned inwardly, and prayed that Mags wouldn’t attempt to set up one of her disastrous double dates. She resolved to hide her gin, and retire to bed (or floor) as early as possible. Just when it felt like it couldn’t get worse, it did. An hour later Lulu was wedged into a corner of the living room, now packed with members of the Revolutionary Communist Party (Edge Hill Branch), hearing Fergus auto-rant alternately about the oppression of the IRA by British fascist colonialists, and the self-oppression of women in wearing cosmetics and beauty products. All eyes swiveled to Lulu as if she were the living antichrist when he said this, but it didn’t stop him trying to fondle her breasts later when she tried to slip off to the loo. Most of them looked like they could do with a little soap, never mind the beauty products. She had thought Fergus was bad until she met the rest of them, but by Revolutionary Communist standards he was a stunner, which explained his ‘God’s gift to women’, attitude. Even the inmates of the psychiatric ward where she had temped all summer looked normal, indeed fairly attractive, compared to this lot. A halitosis-ridden hobbit look-alike had tried to pin her in the doorway, asphyxiating her with his efforts to “find her stance on Nicaragua”. Lulu’s geography was hazy, but if that was where he was from, she hoped he was going back soon. Someone had wrested her bottle of gin from her, going on about ‘all property is theft’. But when she reached the so-called drinks table a few minutes later, all that remained was a fluff-covered bottle of cherry brandy, and a selection of limp crisps in plastic bowls. She pinched the cherry brandy just in case. It was going to be a long night. Lulu could take no more. On the pretext of going to the loo (again), neatly sidestepping another grope from Fergus on the way, she stationed herself at the top of the stairs. At least this way, she could just finish the cherry brandy, and then crawl to either bed or the toilet, whichever was necessary. She sat contemplating the carpet for about ten minutes, then decided that the carpet was more likely to make her sick than the brandy. After another desperate five minutes trying to find patterns in the anaglypta wallpaper, she suddenly heard a voice. “Is anyone sitting here?” She could hardly say yes, it was a staircase. “Er, no, yes, no.” How to sound like a complete idiot in less than five words. She turned to look at the owner of the voice, and decided that cherry brandy must have hallucinatory qualities. He was about 6 feet tall, with dark (clean) hair, black (non-flared) jeans, and a nice smile. “Mind if I sit here?” “It’s a free staircase.” “Oh I see, property is theft?” “You’re not a Revol……” They both started before collapsing into giggles. “Oh God no! Came up here to get away from them. I’m Nick Parillaud, by the way.” “Lulu Raven.” “So what the hell are you doing here then?” Lulu explained her friendship with Mags, and Mags’ sudden lust-related ‘political awareness’. Nick explained that he was there with a friend who felt that he could get into girls’ knickers easier by being ‘politically committed’. Nick suddenly pulled a bottle of Jack Daniels out of his pocket. “Swap you?” “Oh please, they stole my gin, this is like drinking cherry drops.” “Aha, I was sneaky, I left a bottle of Thunderbird on the table, and kept this in my pocket!” They chatted like old friends, establishing that they were studying the same thing, and that they had both traveled a little. Nick suddenly squinted at the murky fanlight over the front door. “It’s snowing. Do you have a coat?” “Upstairs, I’m staying here. But won’t they miss us?” An out of tune chorus of ‘The Red Flag’ came belting up from the living room as if in response. “Let me show you Liverpool.” As they stepped out into the night, laughing at their escape, all around them was silence, the city suddenly muffled under a thick white blanket. The white snow, wheeling and eddying its way down from the black sky. The streets were eerily quiet as they walked into town. The only sound in the chill night air was their voices. They reached the noiseless Mersey, the snow dropping mutely into the immensity of the darkened waters. The sky was a whirling bluish grey, with the black night sky beyond. Even the ferries were still. They talked on, about everything and anything, their voices seeming louder on the snow- shrouded docks. They walked up to the deserted Anglican Cathedral, its’ spires and decorations frosted like a gargantuan wedding cake, dwarfed by its’ sheer bulk and size. The snow fell on their faces, melting slowly in teardrops. Lulu felt her make-up slide away with it, and the snowflakes nestling in her hair. Nick looked into her face as he talked to her, and gently brushed the snow from her hair. He held her hand firmly in his, and she felt somehow warm, safe, and special. They skirted the Botanic Gardens, where he showed her the snow slowly melting on the enormous hothouses, and how it lay bizarrely in the spiky palm trees. Walking like dreamers out of time across the white lawns, finally they were standing in front of a terrace of Georgian stucco houses, with long sash windows reflecting the snowy park. “What beautiful houses. Imagine that view in the morning.” “This is my house. You don’t have to imagine it. I can walk you back to Marguerite’s if you like, or you can come in.” Nick led her through the door with its delicate fanlight, up the curved wooden staircase, into a room. The room with the long sash windows overlooking the gardens. Everything was white, the lightly traced picture rails, fireplace, and the high ceilings. They could have been anywhere in time, the silent world outside seemed to make time stand still. The only light in the room was the bluish-white reflection from the snow-covered ground outside. There was a low table of dark wood, and he took the candelabra from the fireplace, placed it on the table, lit the red candles and the room filled with a warm glow. Lulu sat on a crimson velvet chaise-longue, looking out over the snowy trees at the calmly falling snow. Nick left the room, taking off his coat, and returned with a bottle of wine, and two glasses. The wine was the same colour as the chaise-longue, deep and red. Nick came to her gently, took off her coat. “You’re wet.” He gently took off her clothes, piece by piece, one by one. The air was heavy with anticipation. He arranged her upon the chaise-longue, like an artist’s model. “You are so beautiful, a symphony in black, red and white. Like an Ingres nude.” Lulu’s hair had escaped its crimping, and flowed, long and black, down her back. Nick approached her and kissed her tenderly on the lips. “So beautiful.” Then he picked her up, carried her gently to the bed in the corner, and tucked her in. “Thank you.” He whispered, closing the door gently as he left the room. In the morning, he brought her orange juice and croissants in bed, and walked her back to Marguerite’s house. They kissed on Mags’ doorstep, and she never saw him again. London, 1996 Lulu woke from an awkward sleep. She could hear her mother bawling something up the stairs. Not a good place to wake up when you don’t want to talk to anyone. The last two weeks had been pure hell, this was going to be the culmination of it. Lulu instantly regretted the Jack Daniels consumed in the pub last night whilst trying to explain it all to her father. She endured the family breakfast before her mother finally remembered to tell her what she had been attempting to shout to her. “Mal rang, she’s going to be late.” No news there then, that girl would be late for her own funeral. It struck home again. Funeral. How could she begin to explain to anyone except Mal what she felt at the moment? Two weeks ago, life had been fairly normal. Lulu was in a relationship, with a steady job, relationship with (reasonably) functional adult of the opposite sex, nice house. Then the thunderbolt struck. She had been for her play rehearsal, and come home from the pub to find the telephone ringing. Martin had answered it. Then passed the phone to her, ashen. “It’s your mother.” Lulu grimaced, then grabbed the phone. “Hi Mum.” “Are you sitting down?” “Stop being so cryptic, has Nana died?” Lulu’s grandmother was 93, and purported to be on her last legs for at least 10 years, so this wouldn’t, in effect, be surprising news. There had to be some reason that her mother was ringing her at 11.30 at night. She normally believed that use of the phone was illegal after 8.30 pm. “Are you sitting down?” “Yes, oh for goodness’ sake, what is it?” “I’ve got some bad news.” “I gathered, what is it?” “I don’t really know how to tell you- oh Lulu, Marguerite’s dead!” Lulu couldn’t answer her mother. The eerie high-pitched wail she emitted brought the neighbours round immediately. Martin claimed that if she hadn’t been sitting on the floor, she would have fallen there. The next thing she did was run out of the house, which wasn’t as mad is it may have seemed, she needed to talk to someone who knew Mags, then and there. By a strange co-incidence, Mags’ most normal and long-term ex Jim happened to live at the bottom of the hill, of which Lulu lived at the top, in Hebden Bridge. Anybody else who knew Mags was at the end of the country, and it seemed so important. Jim’s brother Dan got the garbled explanation, told her Jim was away, and called Martin to come and get her. It wasn’t until the next day that she had all the details, or could take them in. She had only seen Mags on Saturday night, on a flying visit to London. It was the kind of steamy late-August evening London was good at. She’d been sitting in the garden of a noisy pub on Upper Street drinking spritzers with Mags, Mal, Martin, and Peggy. They had been teasing each other about their love-lives and careers. Peggy was still a high-flying career nanny to the rich and famous, Mal, despite dropping out of uni, had a plum job at the British Council, and Lulu? Lulu was training dolies in the glamorous setting of downtown Rochdale. They’d come a long way from the giggly schoolgirls sharing one cappuccino between three on the Kings Road, smoking Gitanes and choking in an effort to look exotic. But Mags had just hit the jackpot. A brand new teaching job at Imperial College, and to top it all a free holiday in Malaysia, starting tomorrow. Dickie, A rich but inbred friend of hers from Liverpool, had a job with a merchant bank, and was bored of his own company, so he was paying for her to fly out for a month. Lots of good-natured teasing followed, until Mags said that she had better be off, she had a flight to catch in the morning. Mal and Lulu stood at the gate of the pub, teasing her across the road about sunburn until the 30 bus arrived. Mags got on it, and…. That was the last time they would ever see her. There, stuck in time, aged 29, outside Islington Town Hall on a hot August night. Smiling, and teasing, and waving, and…. Dead. It happened on the Monday; Mags’ mother said when we finally got hold of her. Mags and Dickie decided to go jetskiing together. They hired the skis and were messing about on the bay. Someone tried to come between them, Dickie swerved to avoid Mags, and hit her jetski. It broke her neck. One minute laughing, the next, dead. Nobody understood Lulu. Martin didn’t understand. Work definitely didn’t understand. Lulu spent most of the next week sitting at the top of her high terraced garden with a bottle of wine screaming “Why?” across the rooftops of Hebden to the valley below, as if someone somewhere could give her an answer. Martin gave up trying to understand. Lulu on the other hand understood that whatever she had had with Martin had been transient, if he could not understand this. It was all over. Lulu’s friendship with Mal and Mags was something special and inexplicable, a bond that could never be broken. All only children, theirs was a special sisterhood, a family of choice, one that had now so lightly been taken away. If Martin didn’t understand how precious it was, then he never had a hope in hell of understanding her. There was no point in getting up. No point in taking the ridiculous antidepressants that Martin had forced her to go to the doctor’s and get. No point in work. She saw everything through black-tinted glasses. Nothing would ever be the same again. She traveled to London under her own black cloud, on the familiar 30 bus that took her past Mags’ house to her parents’. Today was the funeral. Today Mal was back, and everything would be alright. Well, as alright as it was going to get. Mal arrived, late as usual, and Lulu bundled her out of the door to avoid her mother’s wittering. She needed to talk to Mal. “Whoa! Slow down girl, we’re not in a race you know.” “Sorry, just had to get out of the house.” “Eh, Lulu, I’ve just spotted something…” “What?” Lulu turned to face Mal, and both of them burst into hysterical laughter. They were dressed exactly the same. Dark purple trouser suits and little black hats. Not just similar, the same, from the same shop. Lulu’s from Halifax, and Mal’s from Stoke Newington, but exactly the same. Positive and negative, Mal black, Lulu white. They stood in the middle of Kingsland High Street, weeping and hugging each other. “Oh bugger, you just spoiled my make-up!” “Did you get flowers?” “From around the corner, thought we could pick them up on the way to the station.” “Me too.” Cue more hysterical giggles when the flowers for Raven and Towers were identical bunches of white arum lilies. At the train station, the comedy of errors began. One simple journey on the North London Line through to West Hampstead, not exactly rocket science. One line. Six stops. “We regret to announce that the 12.38 Richmond train is delayed.” “Damn.” “Too right, it starts at 1.45, and we’re still in Dalston.” Twenty minutes later, the train deigned to show its face. After stopping and starting all the way through Highbury and Camden, it came to a juddering halt at Gospel Oak, finally giving up the ghost. “This train terminates here.” “No it bloody well doesn’t, we’ve got a funeral to go to!” Mal and Lulu came running out of the station, two manic identically dressed twins wielding lilies with intent, panting along Hampstead High Street, desperately trying to flag down a black cab. Mal finally getting to use the classic line “West Hampstead Cemetery, as fast as you can!” Lulu and Mal were puffing up the drive to the chapel when the cortege arrived. They hurried in, and Mags’ mum motioned them to sit with her. Then they couldn’t stop. The tears flowed freely, and they all held each other as though shipwrecked, crying a friend, a sister, a daughter. The burial was worse. It seemed immoral that something so awful could take place in the brilliant unrelenting sunshine. The weather was too nice to die. It was too much to see Mags, so full of life, sliding down into that dark hole forever with the lilies, while the sun glinted off the coffin lid. The affair afterwards was a too-polite one. Tea and cakes at The University of London, where somebody gave a pompous eulogy to Mags that was totally unrecognizable to Mal and Lulu. It had been arranged by well-meaning colleagues when Mags’ mum couldn’t cope with it all. Mags had done her MSc here, and it was a tribute to the brilliant scientist and scholar, Marguerite Wharton. It was the witty friend Mags that Mal and Lulu wanted back. There were lots of people they knew there; Jim the errant ex from Hebden, even Vicky and Jane, her flatmates from Liverpool, now lecturers at Liverpool, and people that they had never liked from school. Even grimy Fergus had shown up, though he had cleaned up a bit as the prospective New Labour candidate for Edge Hill. Mal and Lulu were wondering what to do next. Joyce, Mags’ mum was in pieces, they couldn’t leave her to go back to her flat in Russell Square alone. People were fading away fast now. Vicky, who had taken a more decisive turn since Lulu had last seen her (and lost the spots), made the decision. “Let’s go for a drink.” They all felt they needed one. They knew where she would have wanted them to go, The Man in the Moon, her local, for one last one. Just the Hardcore left now, Mal, Lulu, Jim, Vicky, Jane, Mags’ mother. Lulu found a hand on her shoulder. “How strange to meet you here, Miss Raven.” She knew the voice. She also knew that it was impossible. Today had been impossible. Until, that was, she turned round to come face to face with Nick Parillaud. Still 6 feet tall, now impeccably clad in a black suit, still with a lovely smile. “We were just going for a drink. Do you want to come?” Nick explained that he had found out about the funeral too late, he had rushed down hoping to catch them. The drink led to a surreal Chinese meal, everyone competing with the jolliest stories about Mags, but they all had a hollow ring to them now. The laughter had a bitter aftertaste. Everyone knew that in a way, this was the end. Vicky and Jane had to head to Euston for the last train. Mal and Jim, getting quite friendly now, took Mrs. Wharton home, tactfully leaving Nick and Lulu alone. Lulu was burning with questions now. How had Nick found them? How had he met Mags again? What happened next? Nick just put a finger on her lips. “Shhhhh. All in time. Would you care for a walk, Miss Raven?” The searing heat of the afternoon had now become a heavy, sultry evening, no breeze stirred the trees. The air was like warm treacle. It was after midnight, and Nick held her hand as they walked through the deserted squares of Bloomsbury. The sultry London air hung like a mist over the gardens. Everything seemed slowed, as though trapped in honey, or amber. No cars, no people, a Sunday silence reigned over the city, as they turned up Mount Pleasant. Nick had met Mags again at a cheese and wine party for postgraduate students. When they had announced the names, he had realized that there weren’t many Marguerites around, and asked Mags if she had been at Liverpool. He had asked Mags about Lulu, but when Mags had said she was living with someone, he had stopped trying. He and Mags used to meet for coffee, go and see films, but there was never any spark between them. “How could it not have happened? Mags was tall, she was blonde, she was beautiful- and I’m talking about her in the past tense.” Gulped Lulu. Nick stopped, and bent down to Lulu. He took her face softly in his hands. “But she wasn’t you. I lost you with your green eyes and beautiful skin. I had tried to track Mags down at Liverpool just to find you, but I didn’t know which course she was on, couldn’t remember where she lived. By the time I found the house again, it was full of Albanians who couldn’t speak enough English to tell me anything.” Lulu was stunned. They carried on walking, and talking, up through the silent squares and streets towards the Angel. She wondered how anyone could bear so much joy and so much sorrow in one day. When she was with Nick, it was an experience out of time. Even here, now in the warm night of this darkened square, there was no-one there. It all had a magical quality to it, as though this night was there for them alone. They walked across the empty, flower-filled square to a house that Lulu could have sworn was oddly familiar. It was a tall Georgian terraced house, with long sash windows overlooking the square. Lulu suddenly knew. “This is your house” Nick nodded, and took her hand. He led her through the door, along the passage where the delicate fanlight made shadow-patterns on the tiles, up the long curving staircase, and into a room. The room was white, with high ceilings and a fireplace, and the long sash windows that looked over the night-scented gardens. There was the long low wooden table, and the crimson velvet chaise-longue. Nick took the candelabra, lit the candles, and the room filled with soft candle-light. He took Lulu’s hat, and began to take off her clothes, gently, wordlessly. “You are so beautiful.” He said Silently, she put her finger on his lips. “Shhhh.” She said She began to undress Nick softly, piece by piece, until they were both naked in the flickering light. “You are so beautiful.” She said. “Last time was too soon,” he said “it was too special a moment to be broken.” “And now?” “Now some kind of fate has given us the chance again” They drew together then, knowing that this time, the moment would last outside time and forever, and that this time, they could never lose each other again.

2006-02-23T13:02:00.000Z

Which Dracula Character are You?

2006-02-13T16:53:00.000Z

You're Dracula! You're the embodiement of evil,
based on a combination of Vlad the Impaler
and the man who may have been Bram Stoker's
gay lover. Men fear you, but women want you
and fear you. Over time, you've been
portrayed in film by Bela Lugosi, Christopher
Lee, and Gary Oldman.

Which Dracula Character Are You?
brought to you by

Open Source Poem

2006-02-13T15:16:00.000Z

This is the description posted to me from Andy of the Open Source Poem tag and explanation. Below I have written the second Stanza, and I am now tagging Jo http://purpledragonslair.blogspot.com/ for a third stanza. It can be in any form, I think, and there are no set rules, so here goes........lets see if we can make thelongest poem ever seen........ From www.spicycauldron.com ‘Open Source Poem’ is the title of the poem I am proposing starts a new ‘tag’ in the blogosphere. I came up with the idea this morning and have my partner David to thank for the title, which I think is brilliant for what I propose. And what is that? Well, when a blogger is tagged, she or he has to answer a set of questions, usually, which are then passed on. Often, you have to say who tagged you and who you’re tagging, so that anyone interested will be able to follow the path onwards. Some of these tags do the rounds continuously, sometimes getting back to you, remarkably, more than once or twice. I imagine some tags will never actually end. Now, what if we did something along those lines with a brand-new poem? Here’s the plan: I’m going to write the first stanza of the Open Source Poem. I then pass it on to someone. I’m going to pass it to my dear friend Khari1967, who then has to write the second stanza, or couplet, or whatever, before passing it on. She will, of course, on her blog have to say who tagged her and who she’s tagging. We only pass the poem on one person at a time. We choose carefully who we tag, that’s the idea. We tag, hopefully, a person who may or may not have written poetry before but nevertheless is someone we consider to have the ‘power’ as it might be called, even if they don’t know it or even usually refuse to acknowledge it. Only bloggers can take part. Sorry Luddites. The decision on who goes next in the chain is made by the current blogbard - now there’s a novel and newly invented term, eh? - and not by any of the others who came before. It is both autocratic when it comes to passing it on, but democratic and, I hope, of sufficient intrigue to catch on and sustain momentum. Of course, any poet - professional, non-professional, novice, whatever - can be tagged more than once. If they are so lucky, well done! All headers on the relevant blog posts should just read ‘Open Source Poem’ followed by a Roman numeral, for example, Open Source Poem III, Open Source Poem VII, and so on. I’ve called the post you’re reading right now ‘Open Source Poem: starts here’ so people can find what is, basically, an introduction to the concept. The place where a magickal and hopeful collaboration, a web of connection, began. This is so we can easily search for ‘Open Source Poem’ whenever we want and get the relevant pointers in the titles as to where we are in the poem’s ongoing sequence. Anybody can then follow the path, wherever it leads. And by being numbered in such a distinctive way, finding chapters in the right order should be no problem. This could go nowhere. Or it could even keep on going forever and maybe, get us all collectively, into the Guinness Book of Records one day, maybe sooner rather than later. Who knows? So, my fellow blogbards around the world, are you ready to play the game? It begins as soon as I get the first stanza on my blog. Any questions, get back to me here, to this specific post - it can become a forum through the comments section for general discussion of how the experiment is going. I love an exciting project! I hope you do too, and look forward to seeing where this goes. -->

Open Source Poem II

2006-02-13T13:10:00.000Z

If every moment has a continued existence in the mind, isn’t it kind to think that the medium,here before you, his handlebar moustache marking him out as eccentric, the tweed trousers a mistake for his years, only forty, stands some suspect chance, admittedly, of revealing to you, the seeker, some hint, a shadow of her heart? www.spicycauldron.com To even have a shadow of a heart, one must first have had a heart, Admitted the senses, the feelings of humanity to oneself, Taken a part in that human game known as life, confessed their mortality. How could I then be known to anyone else? How could he know me? For him to truly know me, I would have to have knowledge of myself And that mystery of self is hazier still to me than to he. http://musingsofkhlari.blogspot.com

Half-Told Tales

2006-02-13T12:47:00.000Z

This is a poem that I wrote about my grandmother, following on from a series of flash images discussed in class.................... There were a few untold stories in there.

Half-Told Tales

2006-02-13T11:59:00.000Z

Speech flowing in caressing cadences telling your world, the before and after, the here and there telling only half your story. Since the children ,unknowing heard your demi-Parisian twang labelling it German, stoned you and Frenchy Rose in the street. Since the zeppelins shadowed London, one side of your tongue has been silenced. Swift-like you flit around the kitchen recounting Soapy Ethel's bathwater flying from the top window drenching your only hat. Locking Meme in the lavatory, as Marie Lloyd was waiting at the church. The warm brown of the big teapot and the flour in your hair. Blue Players Navy Cut from Miserable Sid's Warm by the fire in your yellow kitchen When you died we found 42 full cans Of rusted 'Bronco' distemper, all the shade Canary Yellow With a horsehair sofa Hoarded in the cupboard Underneath the rickety bottom stairs Behind the button boxes, odd china, indian brassware and the memories The stairs fell down when we took the tins out Needing the support, as we did.

The power of four......

2006-02-07T12:46:00.000Z

I've been tagged by Andy, www.spicycauldron.com so here goes......... The power of four Four jobs I’ve had Bookshop Manager, Teacher, Receptionist, Lecturer Four films I watch over and over Razor Blade Smile, Muriel's Wedding, Subway, Bridget Jones' Diary Four places I’ve lived Sables d'Olonne, Vendee, France, Stoke Newington, London, England Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, England Marly le Roi, Yvelines, France Four TV shows I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Bagpuss, Doctor Who, Absolutely Fabulous. Four places I’ve been on holiday to Sighisoara, The Carpathians, Transylvania (Romania) Port Elizabeth, Western Cape, South Africa Liege, Belgium Riga, Latvia Four of my favourite dishes Fresh Pasta, Arrabiata Sauce and Salad Roast Lamb with Mint Sauce and Roast Potatoes Greek Yogurt with Honey and Almonds Beans on Toast Four websites I visit daily www.netgoth.co.uk www.spicycauldron.com www.bbc.co.uk www.hotmail.com Four places I’d like to visit Tokyo, Japan St Petersburg, Russia New England, The United States India Four blogs I’m tagging or trying to....... Musings of a Purple Dragon Musings of a Purple Dragon, Jo's blog www.spicycauldron.com Spicy Cauldron, Andy's blog it would be more, but my list just died and I can't seem to add any more Four dead people I’d like to meet Sylvia Plath, Frida Kahlo, Vlad the Impaler, Angela Carter I'm going to add another one.......................................... Four books I wish I had written Wise Children, by Angela Carter The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C.S.Lewis Testament of Youth, by Vera Brittain -->

Brigid, adorned with rhyme

2006-02-02T15:05:00.000Z

Flowing, her hair, braided through with sestinas floating ribbon villanelles and triolets Crowned with bright sonnet flowers and jewelled cinquains Khlari 2nd February 2005

WHEN: Anytime February 2, 2006.WHERE: Your blog.WHY: To celebrate the Feast of Brigid, otherwise known as Imbolc.HOW: Select a poem you like - by a favourite poet or one of your own - to post to your blog on February 2.If you're going to do this, go to Reya's blog and let her know.Feel free to pass this invitation on to any and all bloggers.

The Widow-Bride

2006-01-25T15:12:00.000Z

The Widow-Bride

2006-01-23T14:40:00.000Z

My tragi-joyous cortege floats along The cobweb-flowered aisle of my crypt A funeral lament my wedding march For death himself tonight will be my groom A greying shroud will make my marriage gown A tattered winding-sheet my bridal veil An iridiscent tiara webbed by spider feet A faded lily bouquet crumbles softly away All the hymns are solemn requiems Every prayer its very own last rite The solemn guests in black and veiled Wail their eerie dirge into the night To kiss the bride is the kiss of mortality The ashen confetti falls through the close air As the doomed woman's hands close around The thrown bouquet which marks her fate The wedding breakfast a funeral wake Leaden waltz danced mournful threnody The listless tango as danse macabre Giving extreme unction with blood-redwine Time now to rejoin my sombre carriage jet-black relic-adorned marriage hearse Spirit raven-plumed horses my transport My eldritch honeymoon of mourning made My bridal home a sombre sepulture a dusty casket makes my bridal bed winding sheets and shrouds my blackened trousseau welcome now within the world of the dead Widow-bride's embrace is all-consuming Lamentations cache my cunning caress Just one kiss is forever, forever fatal One look, your first and last and always mine Tonight your final fated consummation When dark rises triumphal over light Eternal promise of anticipation That first embrace will be the final knell

Me, myself and I

2006-01-23T13:43:00.000Z

Me, Myself, and I.

2006-01-23T13:25:00.000Z

This is in effect a draft. This is a piece that I have been writing for the Life Writing part of my course, to tie in with an essay which I am writing on multiple selves and multiple truths in Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Wurtzel and Jenny Diski. It still needs revision, but this is its first outing..... It is impossible to die of unhappiness. People in novels do it all the time, they fade away gracefully, maybe helped by a bit of galloping consumption. But in reality, however wretched and miserable you are, life goes on like an eternal curse. Morning after morning, the sun rises, you invariably wake up. You can try, you can lay in bed willing your heart to stop beating, your brain to stop thinking, wishing everything to disappear into a blissful inky nothingness, to become the darkness, to be yourself no more. Though your heart and mind are wrenched apart, though your emotional viscera are laid bare for the world to see and you can take no more, the body and mind keep on against your will. So, you cannot die of inaction. Simply willing yourself to is never going to be enough, you need to pull yourself free from the whirlpool of lassitude and do something about it. But even then, your psyche conspires against you. Whatever you do, it has to be final and complete. Either that or you still wake up, hideously scarred and disfigured, or a dribbling vegetable in a wheelchair, which isn't really going to cheer you up either. Dorothy Parker was right. You might as well live. Then you have the well-meaning friends. When you are curled up under the duvet for a week, wishing that it was dark all day as well, they try to 'cheer you up'. Nothing that they say or do makes you feel any better, in fact hearing them over the cacophony in your own head is bad enough. They buy you 'cheerful' clothes (which go in the bin), happy movies (ditto), and singalong CDs (ditto, but it pleases me to jump on them first). They still haven't cottoned on that miserable clothes and dark movies are what make me happy, even when I'm depressed. How does all of this start? As Freud would ask, what was your childhood like? Nothing out of the ordinary, would be the answer, only a marginally dysfunctional family when you fit it into the general scheme of things. I've had friends with major family meltdown who've ended up much less kooky than me. I always wished that I was really stupid though. As a 'clever' child, you always stand apart, you're marked out, singled out, not enough of this, not quite like that. So you never fit in, don't have the herd mentality of the pack. I always felt that if you were really dumb you might never notice all of this, that it might all pass over your head, that you would never feel any of that unhappiness. So there you are, the too-brainy geeky loner. That morbid girl in the corner reading a book. The friends you do have are the other misfits, the flotsam and jetsam, the too-tall, too-fat, too-thin, too-foreign, too-gay, too-poor, (in single or multiple combinations), and those like yourself, the just-too-plain-weird. Get used to it. That's going to carry on for the rest of your life. The more you are alone, the more being alone seems natural, the harder it is to relate to 'normality' and 'normal' people. Left to your own devices, normality is relative. After a while observing the world from your exclusion zone, you think that you are the most eminently sane person in the world. Other people are the mad ones, your truth is the only real truth. How would you be able to tell? What do you have to compare it with? Do you care anymore? If the 'normal' world won't have you in its' club, why would you want to be a member anyhow? The problem is that you are really not quite mad enough. You are conscious of the fact that you are losing the plot, but you walk the razor-blade edge between sanity and insanity. Nobody cares as long as you keep it to yourself. You can lie in bed for a week, lose a fortnight in desparation, but nobody really notices. If you suffer from the quiet internalised hell, no-one cares. If you laid on the floor screaming, or announced to the social worker that you were Queen Victoria, all hell would break loose, but keep it within yourself and you become invisible. Even if you ask for help, you're told that if you're sane enough to ask for it, you really don't need it. Sometimes you're even told that it's your life that's the problem. No psychiatrist will even offer to help with that. How do you get to this point? How do you let yourself get to this point? You don't of course, it creeps up on you until one day it seems to sucker on to your soul and never leaves you again. Like a dark invasive fog between you and the world, colouring your vision. It comes over you in waves, each wave more overwhelming until the last one knocks you flying. You can't feel it as such, because you are becoming more and more numb and distanced as time goes on. Eventually, you can't even summon up the tears to cry at the hopelessness of it all. They don't flow any more, even they have dried up. Yet still you continue, a shell of a girl, when even a smile would crack your carapace face from side to side. The worst thing about this, is nobody seems to notice that you are eaten away from the inside like a tree- or maybe they do and they just don't care. If they tapped you, you would shatter into a million tiny fragments. Eventually you descend into a numbness, a null void. Your own unhappiness winds round you like a shroud, an impermeable shroud, a winding sheet through which nothing can penetrate. Life, death, happiness, sorrow, everything just passes you by, stuck on your emotional bypass while life shuttles by. Nothing seems real, nothing can get through. It's like being buried alive in the middle of Piccadilly Circus, you can observe everything go on around you but you are no part of it and it is no part of you. Relegated to the fringes of life. As an adult ,the prejudices change again subtly. You are not only too weird, but many other things on top. You can add new insults to the list. You are now seen to be 'deep', 'complex', 'complicated' to add to your sins. Just when you think that you are half-way towards a functional relationship with a member of the opposite sex, they offer this up on a platter as a ready-made excuse for finishing it there and then. Of course you could try the drugs. They'll offer them to you at every point, and in these you have a great and glorious choice. There are the ones that turn you into a cast member from 'Return of the Living Dead'. They don't make anything any better, but as even walking is an effort, you wouldn't care anyway. There are those that make you sleep, I say sleep, but it's more like catatonia really. There are those that send you completely loco for a week or two (whereupon they decide that you might have a 'reaction' to them). Then there are those that slightly lift the veil, and fool you into thinking that this might just work. These are the most insidious of the lot. Everything's great for a few weeks, then you realise that you can't sleep. So they give you something to make you sleep. Then you can't relax without twitching, so they give you something for that. You become a walking talking pill-bottle, but as everyone cheerily says 'you look a lot better'. Then you begin to realise that you are losing yourself in all of this. you need a pill to wake up, a pill to go to bed, a pill to exist. Your personality is dying, it attacks you, not the cuckoo that has taken up permanent residence in your psyche. So you flush the lot down the lavatory, have even worse panic attacks for months, and start all over again. At this point, I'm sure that you're waiting for me to make it all better. Not for me, but for you, that is. You would love me to say that I'm all better now, that yesterday I cut the plastic starfish off the sunglasses case for the baby to play with. Or that I live in pastel pink and occupy a des-res thatched cottage in the country with my three gorgeous and gifted children and my perfect husband. Lived happily ever after. Ils se marierent et eurent beaucoup d'enfants. But it's a bit like an infection in some ways. It eats into your soul, once its there, you're never quite rid of it. It lurks, somewhere in a dark corner, waiting its moment to pounce. At its best it adds a bittersweet quality to even the happiest of moments, at its worst, poisons even the most innocent pleasures. You can visualise it as a black cloud, a seeping cancerous mist that goes everywhere. Although some parts of your life can function quite normally, the rest seems to end in a pile of emotional debris. You have to evolve ways of coping with it. You come up with complex stategies so that no-one notices. You become the most skilled actor in the game of life. Eventually there are two 'yous'. There is the everyday 'you' that is seen by the public, and then there is the same private 'you' that hears the chaos inside your head. On one side the acceptably slightly dippy side of lunacy, smiling even when your face aches, and on the other, the internal you, screaming wordlessly into the void, crying silently and tearlessly behind the mask. They function in tandem, depite all your best efforts. And when you try to write it down, it complicates further. Personality as jigsaw. There are then three yous. You white, you black, and you the writer. Not so much bipolar as tripolar. Of course you could move away, change languages, cultures. Then it gets even worse. You have six of you, a black, white, writer, one in each language in bilingual hell. Is there such a word as hexpolar?. It sounds oddly appropriate. The only answer is to know thyself and love thyselves. If not love, then at least tolerate thyself a little bit. Watch for the signs, know the triggers, avoid the situations. Learn to appreciate your self(ves). At least you'll never be bored, you can always entertain yourselves. If they think you are the weirdo in the corner? So what. No one will ever like everyone, and maybe you are an acquired taste. At least you'll never be alone, you always have yourself to fall back on. Smiling, smiling eternally, whilst crying behing the flimsy mask of 'normality'.

You do not do black shoe(s)

2006-01-23T13:10:00.000Z

This was from a ten-minute writing exercise in class last week, about a pair of shoes......this kind of came out by accident, as we had just been reading some Plath....sorry Sylvia, but it's tribute, not parody. I had the idea of an elderly woman looking at her late husband's dancing shoes........ You do not do, black shoe, You no longer have a place, Lying like some empty beetle carapace, Dusty in the corner of the hall. You do not do, anymore, black shoe, Any of the things that you used to do, The air of the waltz a distant memory, The kisses that followed faded and gone. But I see you, see you, black shoe Yellowed and sepia in a silver surround On the feet that once you knew, shoe, So smiling, full of life and proud. O, he shone you so, black shoe, Like shards of mirror upon his feet, A reflection of those moonbeams, He drew down for me to meet. You're all I have, black shoe, An echo of a fading past, My tangoes lost to infinity My happiness, dissolving fast. You do not do, black shoe, You are missing a vital part, That which has gone, black shoe, And in doing so, torn me apart.

Silent Poetry Reading

2006-01-23T10:44:00.000Z

WHEN: Anytime February 2, 2006. WHERE: Your blog. WHY: To celebrate the Feast of Brigid, otherwise known as Imbolc. HOW: Select a poem you like - by a favourite poet or one of your own - to post to your blog on February 2. If you're going to do this, go to Reya's blog and let her know.Feel free to pass this invitation on to any and all bloggers.

Sanguine Surrender- for Sally

2006-01-19T14:00:00.000Z

White porcelaineous unbroken Delicate china-hued expanse Tender, inviting, unsullied undefiled by human hand All too perfect pristine temptress taunting, teasing her defloration prostituting her blessed purity courting bloody apotheosis Silken slicing shimmering blade Silvery lines give carmine trails Welling scarlet subdue the pain With knife I crucify again Garnet gems grown on ivory Sombre sanguine flowing flowering Snowy sanctitude crimson stained Sacrifice to salve the pain bloody tramlines going nowhere bloody gashes baring soul bloody pain for bloody pain a bloody mess a bloody gain Black nullity bids me to wed Black maelstrom inside my head Black oblivion beckoning Black tendrils wreath around my heart Insidious seducer draws me downwards Raven blackness eternal embrace Starless ceiling of dark obsidian Draws me into the darkest place Alabaster smothered incarnadine Ritual of mine is blood not wine Self-flaying ceremony of mine Though Oblivion my only divine Black mist, red blood, flesh frosted white I go willingly into that starless good night

Oops!!!

2006-01-13T16:56:00.000Z

Should have added to the post below that the Pagan Moot is upstairs at The Morecambe Hotel, Lord Street Morecambe, and starts at 8pm on Saturday.

The Once and Future King?

2006-01-13T16:20:00.000Z

TraditionalGoth and I are off to see the weird and wonderful King Uther Pendragon, self-proclaimed King, who apparently once gloried in the name of Timothy, speak, at the Morecambe Pagan Moot tomorrow. When we asked Nick and Wendy, in whose pub it takes place, what he was talking about, they admitted 'they haven't got a clue, but it should be entertaining'.

Hope it is.

Here's a weblink to find out more

http://www.warband.org/introduction/king_arthur.html

baby goth

2006-01-06T15:42:00.000Z

My friend Kyriaki in Paris sent me this picture.....just thought that it was very cute.

Sivvy in Paint

2005-12-29T16:23:00.000Z

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.....

Viva la Frida.....

2005-12-29T14:38:00.000Z

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.

A nice little vampy pic to be going on with

2005-12-20T13:29:00.000Z

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......

Wise Children

2005-12-15T16:36:00.000Z

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!

The Death of Passion

2005-12-14T12:37:00.000Z

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.......and it's been too bloody long!

2005-12-11T13:31:00.000Z

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......

a couple of old vamps......

2005-12-10T12:20:00.000Z

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

2005-12-09T15:57:00.000Z

Breaking Glass......20 years on

2005-12-08T16:19:00.000Z

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.......

Some more nice vampire pictures...

2005-12-08T15:56:00.000Z

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.........

Sightseeing

2005-12-05T16:27:00.002Z

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.

A nice picture of a vampire? Why? Because I feel like it!

2005-12-05T16:24:00.000Z

Ho ho ho, the season of good cheer- food for thought........

2005-12-05T10:13:00.000Z

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.

Signing off for the weekend

2005-12-02T16:47:00.000Z

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

Talking about Writing, talking about drinking, and drinking about writing...hic!....

2005-12-01T11:52:00.000Z

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.

Zombina

2005-11-28T12:27:00.000Z

OK, what have I been up to in Goth World over the last few weeks? Well, on Friday TraditionalGoth and I went to see the fantabulous 'Zombina and the Skeletones' play at the Farmers Arms. Dirty surf-goth fities kitsch noise. Most excellent! www.zombina.com This Friday is the meeting of Sanctuary, 8.30 at the Morecambe Hotel, which I'm sure we'll be heading off to, then on Saturday the Sanctuary Christmas Party......should be fun. http://www.sanctuaryuk.org/ Check out the links to find out more!!!!

She Walks.....

2005-11-28T12:20:00.000Z

This is another piece, this time a piece of poetry, that I wrote with vampires in mind for the Sanctuary magazine. It is the first poetry I have written in ages, which is quite strange, as when I started writing I was a poet first and foremost.... It is predicatably gothic..... She Walks..... She walks in beauty through the night, Her face emits a ghostly light. The cloak, a shining carapace, Then she is gone without a trace. She walks in silence through the graves, The lovely face, that slays, not saves, The cloak, a fragile carapace, Hides her dark secret from this place. She walks in search through the town The moonlight glinting on her gown, The cloak, a deathly carapace, To cover her rapacious face. She walks in pursuit through the gate, He knows now that it is too late, Her cloak, a spider carapace, Reveals to him her preying face. She walks in victory though the wood Slowly then lets fall the hood The cloak, a tattered carapace Hides no more the bloodstained face. She walks in beauty through the night, Her face emits a ghostly light. The cloak, a shining carapace, Then she is gone without a trace.

Another crazed rambling- Night School

2005-11-28T12:15:00.000Z

This is a piece of work that came about by accident this weekend. I was chatting with some friends from Sanctuary, the Morecamber Goth/Pagan/Alternative group, and they said that they were looking for suitably vampy contributions to the Sanctuary magazine......this was the result. Night School There is no Careers Service for vampires, which is remarkably inconvenient. Given our particular problems in the employment area, not to mention the exceptional length of our careers, you would think that someone would have come up with something by now. They’ve had enough time. Be honest, what would you do in my position? Of course, you do hear on the grapevine about more or less successful vampire career paths. There is the itsy-bitsy daylight problem to deal with. This means of course that we are confined to evening posts, not necessarily the most profitable, nor those that lead to the best victims. Would you fancy spending eternity cleaning offices at night? I’d say that was purgatory rather than eternity. There have been rumours about nightclub impresarios (though I can tell you that Peter Stringfellow is definitely not among them, any decent vampire would be ashamed to look like that). Showbusiness counts many, though alas we can’t do matinées. There have of course been a few celebrated rock singers, now long ‘retired’, though occasionally spotted and splashed across the pages of the ‘National Enquirer’. We may not have much of a reflection, but we still photograph quite well. They really need to be more careful, can you imagine the effect on a mortal when they bump into Jim Morrison in Asda? I prefer a quieter life, none of this high-profile nonsense for me. Of course, when I was younger, it was good fun, but these days it’s just too tedious having to disappear for decades. It took me a while to decide, of course, but with several hundred years work experience behind you, it gets easier. I decided that the academic life was for me. University lecturers have a quiet life, and I could quite simply teach in the evenings. The twenty-first century is so convenient for the children of the night. Evening classes, for those too busy to study in the day, and online classes, where the only place my students see me is in cyberspace. The paranoia of this century also serves us well, all the allergies and intolerances are so convenient. Hence my ‘transformation’, into poor light-sensitive Miss _______. No daytime meetings for me, and employment legislation obliges them to schedule my classes after dark. A few bogus medical reports, change the century on a few of my qualifications, and there you are. It gives me wonderful opportunities for trying fresh foreign ‘dishes’ when I go to Istanbul or Athens for sabbaticals and lecture tours. Some of those European students make a refreshing change to the taste-buds from my usual fare. I do still have to move from time to time, but I have been in this quiet northern city for quite a few years now. You could say I have a captive audience of juicy prey. Students disappear so easily. Some might ‘go to India to discover themselves’, some might ‘fall’ from their accommodation, some simply vanish without trace. It’s all quite easy to achieve, if you plan it well. Teaching staff that become a little too interested in my pursuits sometimes join them. You must be wondering by now what I teach? Quite easy, Literature. It’s so much easier to talk about the motivation of the authors when you hung around with them in the 18th Century. My speciality? Gothic Literature, of course, perfect to cover any of my little eccentricites. Shelley, Mary and Byron were particular favourites of mine, we had some wild times telling ghost stories up at the Villa Diodati. But that Polidori was a real nuisance, I don’t think I need to explain to you what I was obliged to do with him. ‘The Vampyre’, indeed, telling my life to the world and his best friend. Poe was, on the other hand, an absolute gentleman. he knew enough of the truth to spin a good tale, but had manners enough to veil it in the telling. You might just recognise some of my little details though, enough to be intriguing but not enough to be too informative. He was one who I wished had stayed around a little longer. I tried to persuade him of course, but the only thing he wanted to do was resurrect his mother, which as you know is beyond even my powers. Wouldn’t let me save him. Silly Edgar. Paris at that time was much more fun. At least they had a great nightlife. I drank absinthe and danced around Montmartre with Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and you can spot me in a few of the paintings of the time. Toulouse-Lautrec had a bit of a passion for me. That’s why I had to go in the end, too much absinthe and opium in the air and Van Gogh, Lautrec and Gauguin slugging it out over me. They say I was the reason Vincent went over the edge in the end. He was never good at handling the truth, I was only trying to give him the chance to carry on painting. He had promise, such a pity. Bram Stoker, on the other hand, just wanted to know too much. That man was the reason that I had to spend the first years of the last century lying low. I don’t know why I trusted him, I really don’t. I think that it was the Irish charm really. That foolish man nearly blew it all apart, I am sure that the demise of my kind can be traced back to that awful book. His sticky end though, was honestly nothing to do with me. Not really. Luckily, I planted enough red herrings to ensure our survival. I love garlic, and can pass any number of crucifixes without a second glance. I’m not that naïve. These days, I very rarely encounter another of my kind. Those of us still around are those tactful enough to be virtually undetectable. There are far too many people writing about ‘typical vampires’ to be too flamboyant. You don’t meet many Lestats these days. I hope that Anne Rice is watching her back, New Orleans never was a good place to upset the undead. Tonight is Wednesday, and the start of the new academic year. I meet my new students tonight. Most of those who choose to study my course are sufficiently ‘alternative’ that my eccentricities are commonplace to them. Black clothes, flowing black hair and silver jewellery are the staples of my students, as they are mine. These are not people who would willingly study Wordsworth, and I don’t blame them. He was such a boring little man that I wouldn’t have offered him eternal life. His reality was tedious enough to resemble eternity already, but with none of the fun. I digress. Here they come now, my band of misfits, Gothic Literature 432, 2005-6. It’s funny how fashion turns around. The boys have hair as long as the girls again these days. They file in, in their flowing dark clothes, with their New Rocks and dyed hair. I keep abreast of fashion, of course. Have you any idea what a boon the net is to the average vampire’s wardrobe? They awkwardly shuffle into their seats, and look towards me for inspiration. Having taken the register, I begin to tell them in the usual fashion my particular programme for the year. Then the door crashes open. In walks a tall young man with flowing black hair, followed by a diminutive girl in a black cloak. Nothing unusual in here. I ask them to see me after the class. I really don’t know how I continued to teach for the next hour. I was so cross. Sometimes an hour can seem like eternity, even to a three hundred-year old vampire. Finally, I dismissed the students, and closed the door behind them. I took up my register, trying not to laugh. “So- exactly why were you late, Gary and Melanie?” I said, finally looking them in the face. “Gary? Melanie? Oh for goodness’ sake.” I couldn’t stifle my laughter any longer. “ Gary Byron and Melanie Shelley? Couldn’t you do any better than that, after three hundred years practice?” We hugged, still laughing. The joke is that history has recorded it’s suspicions about Lord George Byron and vampirism. But they got it all wrong. It was Mary Shelley, or Melanie as I suppose I must now call her. She was the founder of our little colony, she brought back her little secret from a trip to the east with Percy Shelley. Poor Percy just annoyed her that little bit too much to be saved. Polidori was just jealous that he was the only one never asked to join. Byron had to pull that stunt of pretending to be drowned in the Hellespont, as usual he was putting it about too much already that he had eternal life. Mary was never as careless as George, she covered her tracks with Frankenstein, who would suspect someone of the two sins? Creating monsters and vampirism, and from such a lady? Clever girl. I learned much from her. Though I do suppose it will be really hard to teach Frankenstein this year, with the author staring me in the face over the top of her Penguin paperback every Wednesday night. Though if ‘Gary’ Byron thinks I am studying any of his appalling poetry, he must be joking. Always too full of his own sexiness and self-importance. It might do him good to learn from someone else for a change, after three hundred years.

A bit too foreign....

2005-11-24T11:38:00.000Z

Well, back from the M.A. course......last night, among other things, my story Div C'hoarazed was discussed. Then, it was universally decided to be 'too foreign'. Some complainants were more vociferous than others. Apparently the very 'foreignness' and all the 'peculiar names' made the plot impossible to follow. even though, in the same sentence, I have explained these 'funny names', and 'funny words'. Can't win. I didn't footnote them, thought that that would be too confusing. I thought that I would make life simple by having the character repeat themselves in English. This also shows the repetitive Breton way of speaking. Hell, I can't win. I get told that my stories are too French. Now they are just plain too foreign I find it hard to write about domestic bliss. To be honest, I have known too little of it to be confident with the atmosphere. I can't set every story I write in London, Manchester or Hebden Bridge. Apart from that I know nothing about comfortable middle-England, never having managed to be a part of it. My value system is a variant, because my life has been a variant. That is not wrong, merely different. A lot of my stories are about 'the outsider', whether the Breton Le Bodeo, or just a wanderer. That's the way they come out, not by artifice and design, but just because that is the story that wishes to be told. Everyone's life experience is very different. Yes, to a lot of people, mine may be a little peculiar. It is, however, going to reflect itself in my writing. Someone else's known is obviously my 'known'. I would never attempt to write a novel set in America unless I had been there or was in the position to afford a bloody good researcher. I write where I have been and things I have seen, and the stories that weave around these. A story is unchanged, whether the lead character is called Tomiko or Jane, Erwan or John. The essential qualities of truth and tale-telling are not culture and name dependent. You just need to WANT to see those things.........

I must, I must, improve my....writing

2005-11-21T10:31:00.000Z

Well, I am finally trying to take the advice of my good friend Mr Spicy Cauldron, and use this blog as a writing diary. So, I can bare my writing soul live on the net....agh! I guess that this is my chance to reflect on myself as a writer. Where have I come from, where am I going, how am I progressing??? Goodness knows. I have written since I was a little girl, for years though I really only wrote poetry. I have begun now to move into prose as a medium of choice, skirting somewhere along the long-short-story and short-novella route. I think that's just because I'm too chicken to begin to call anything I am writing part of a novel...... I wrote from childhood really non-stop until the age of 28, including a few short creative writing courses, then the Community Arts course (Which is where Andy Spicy Cauldron and I met). Then I moved to France, and when I left, I lost most things I possessed, including the precious file full of writing, some of which dated back to when I was 11 or 12. In France between work and motherhood, and the strains of a difficult relationship, I never seemed to get time to write. It is only really since I came back to England in 2003 that I have had 'room of my own' and time of my own to start again. I find, unbeknown to myself, that my writing style has completely changed overnight. I also find that my writing seems to write itself, in a way. I am directed by it, it is not directed by me, it seems to find its own path. My writing has always been a kind of catharsis, in very simple ways as a teenager, for the chagrins of love and the troubles of stroppy adolescence. Now it is something much deeper, my way of working through all the black dogs and demons in my head, making sense of them and of myself. Obviously, a lot of people, my family included, see me as completely deranged for wishing to pursue this. They can't understand why it is important, or they think that it is something that you should have grown out of, a childish thing to be put aside when you are being a 'grown-up'. I love the look on peoples' faces when you tell them what the MA is in. Lots of lame jokes about being the next Helen Fielding, or a look of total incomprehension. This is part of me, part of who I am, like my silly clothes, my strange musical taste, or my obsession for Sylvia Plath. When it is taken away, part of me has gone, and I don't think I will ever let anyone do that to me again......

The Two Sisters

2005-11-15T10:50:00.000Z

This is another piece of work for the M.A. course. My remit was to write something purely fictional, not a piece of life writing, something that could be identified as pure fiction. I took some memories of Brittany, and also its folklore, and wound them togther to come up with the following, set in small-town Brittany............ Any resemblance between the lead character and my ex-mother-in-law, is, of course, purely incidental......... Div C’hoarazed –The Two Sisters As the bells rang out across the town square, Ninie looked up from her knitting and motioned to Néné. “That’ll be Monsieur Serandour. I said he wasn’t long for this world” Néné grunted assent, head bowed to her crochet. They sat on the worn armchairs with the crocheted cushions in the window of the house on the Place St. Sauveur. The light was fading, and they had lit the lamp that illuminated the window to the square, for the shutters were still open, and the shadowy pink geraniums were still tapping the glass outside. Ninie continued. “I said that Sévérine would be the death of him. Those old men never listen.” “But she was only five years younger than him-“ Néné began hesitantly. “Baah non, that’s what she said, Mark my words, there’ll be a new one there by All Saints Day. These flighty pieces are all the same. Another one to add to her list.” Across the square in Hubert’s café, James looked over to see the charming vision of the two ladies working by the lit window, as he had every night since his arrival in Haut-Cozenay. He felt the depth of his own loneliness, seeing this intimate scene replayed nightly until the smaller of the two women hobbled outside to bring the metal bar across the blue-painted shutters, and hide the ladies and the geraniums from his view. It emphasized his own isolation from this small community. It seemed like looking onto a lost memory, but was it a real memory, or just an idyll of a time, which for him, had never been. “Another?” Hubert called along the bar. “No thank you. I must be going. Good night. ” James fastened his overcoat against the rapidly cooling night, and ducked his tall form under the low archway of the cafe and out into the blue-tinged twilight. Behind him he could hear Hubert and the regulars calling out ‘good- nights’ as he walked across the cobbled square and up the Rue de l’Eglise on his way home. Home. Now that was a strange concept. Since when had Ar-Ty Kozh become home? He had reached his front door, low like all in Haut-Cozenay, and as he turned his key, he automatically ducked his head under the date of 1498 carved in the weathered stone. Morning dawned bright, as bright as it ever did in October in this part of Brittany. Ninie and Néné were up early, as ever, Néné furiously scrubbing the worn step in front of Div C’hoarazed, while Ninie alternately rubbed the window panes with a duster and tweaked the already perfect geraniums to within an inch of their lives. At Div C’hoarazed nothing was out of place, from the lace that hung at the windows to the freshly picked out 1698 above the door. As he crossed the square from the baker’s, James could not help but notice the form of Ninie as she scrubbed at some imaginary stain on the window. She was younger than he, and alone at that age, with no-one but Néné for company. Such a waste! She was an attractive woman still, a little severe, in the local style, but with a neat figure amplified only by that of Néné by her side, easily twice her size. He saw the Kure Guivarc’h coming out of the church. Div C’hoarazed stood two doors away from the giant edifice, garlanded with triskels, proof to the world that Brittany was once great in his own right. The Kure Guivarc’h was another. “Demat, Gwreg ar’Le Flohic, Gwreg ar Kerguelen” he said, raising his hat to the women as he passed. The Kure, part of the local Breton militia, didn’t miss an opportunity to use Breton whenever he could. Much to the amusement of the locals, who dismissed him as ‘Brezhoneg Kernevad- someone from Cornwall’, but only when he was out of earshot. He heard amusement rise from Ninie and Néné, but only when the Kure had passed safely into Hubert’s cafe. Kures still demanded a certain amount of respects in these parts, however eccentric. The weak sun made Ninie Kerguelen’s fair hair glow, and he was struck by how youthful she looked in the light of day. Later that day, he again took up his post at the window of Tempus Fugit, Hubert’s little cafe across the square. There were more cafes in Haut-Cozenay than shops, but after a careful process of elimination, he had settled on this one. He had once asked Hubert why his cafe had such a strange name. “Eh bien,” said Hubert, scratching his head, “because it’s written above the door.” It was, carved just above the date. Little changed with time in Haut-Cozenay. As night fell, the sisters lit their lamp, and began their tranquil vigil by the window. James found himself smiling as he watched them knitting and chatting in the golden light, offering him a window on their lives. He was a shy man, but he knew he had waited long enough. “Hubert,” he began, “what do you know of Madame Kerguelen and her sister?” Hubert guffawed. “That’s never her sister, Néné Le Flohic is her c’hoar-kaer, her sister by marriage only.” “So how do they come to be living together?” “That’s a very long story. Néné Le Flohic is a little simple, so maybe it is better to be living with Ninie Kerguelen than shut up at Plougernevel, gast!” Another voice came along the long wooden counter. “And maybe she’s not, Hubert Gicquel.” James recognised this as the voice of Gwenole Le Goff, the fishmonger. Hubert intervened “Leave the poor old Mamm-gozh alone, Le Goff!” But Le Goff did not want to be silenced. “Mamm-gozh ar gwall” then noticing James, translating, “an evil grandmother. You know nothing about it Hubé Gicquel, you were away at school at Quintin.” James moved, disquieted, back to his window seat. There were many disputes around here, over sheep, but sometimes over women, and he did not wish to join in. Behind him the conversation rose and fell, now in French, but peppered with the guttural sounds of swearing in Breton, he heard ‘monetg’an diaoul’, go to the devil, more than once. He preferred to sit and watch the gilded Ninie at her window, spinning her webs of delight with her sister-in law. He wove Ninie into his dream of France, the dream he had brought to Haut-Cozenay with him when Mado died so unexpectedly. When Néné hobbled out to close the shutters, his vision was clipped once more, and he picked his way back home along the Rue de l’Eglise. The next morning, he was at the baker’s when he heard Ninie Kerguelen enter the shop behind him. “Demat , Iwan Mahe” she said to the baker “Demat, Yann ar Morgan, Good morning, Mr Morgan.” How did she know his name? He felt himself blush. He struggled, with the tongue even more unfamiliar than French. “Demat, Greg a Kerguelen.” She smiled at him. “Gureg you say, gureg aar Kerguelen, but well done.” She had a nice smile. This morning, she was wearing a frock of green wool that made him notice how green her eyes were. He decided to dare a response. “I am obviously in need of some classes in Breton, Madame Kerguelen” “We will have to see what we can do,” she laughed, and the bell jangled afresh as she made her way back out into the Place. “Oh, that Ninie!” Mahé the baker was sighing. “Fifteen times I have proposed to her, and fifteen times she has said no. Never looked at another man since all the tragedy at Div C’hoarazed, never” he raised his floury palms to the heavens in mock despair. “Tragedy?” “Oh yes, bad business, bad business, some even say that the Kerguelens are cursed, daonet. But I say she is an angel.” James was getting more and more intrigued by all of this, and Ninie Kerguelen’s part in it. Saint or sinner, he had to find out. He soon got his chance. As he walked past the church, there was a poster outside inviting everyone to a Fest-Noz a few days hence. It was to be held in the square, dancing, grog, and krampouezh. He kept his evening vigil at the cafe, willing the days to pass. He was not alone in watching. Others were also watching him. At the back of the bar, big Gwenole le Goff was deep in conversation with the wizened little Konan Cairou, who still held a little farm up at Le Faöuet. “She was beautiful as a girl, that Melusine le Korrigan, when she came down from St Ygeaux, or was it St Gilles-Pligeaux?” Old Cairou began elegaically. “Ninie not from Cozenay then?” replied Le Goff, poking the fire. “Baah non, she was from the villages. From nothing, the Korrigan lived twelve to a house with the pigs. But she was something different was Melusine, soon caught the eye of young Deniel Kerguelen.” Le Goff looked puzzled. “But I thought she married Andreu? Who is this Deniel then?” “That was the elder brother. Strong boy, until one day he fell from his motor-bicycle with Ninie on the back. Never woke up the next morning. Broke Grandma Kerguelen it did. She didn’t have the heart to stop her marrying Andreu after that. Six months later she joined Deniel in the vault.” “So why is she still in Cozenay?” Le Goff had heard rumours, but never found anyone willing to confirm them. It was true that Cairou descended rarely enough into Cozenay these days. He reached into his pocket for his pipe, and settled down for a good tale. “Ah, that’s a long story and part of it Néné le Flohic’s - Erenné le Flohic is the Kerguelen sister. Never a beauty, she married old Le Flohic late with the the farm up at Le Faöuet as a sweetener, she set to having babies but they were never quite right until Erwan arrived. She loved that boy, but he spent more time at Plougernevel than at home. Some say that’s where she should have been all along …” “But what of Melusine? How does she come into this?” “Having babies too, though everyone said they were like no Kerguelen they’d ever seen. First Deniel, then Loïc, then the baby Fañnch, all the image of Ninie, the green eyes, the pale hair.” Old Cairou placed his empty beer glass on the table until Le Goff should fetch him another. Le Goff rose unwillingly, pulled into the story. As he paid the next two demis, the lights were gradually coming on across the Place St Sauveur as dusk fell. “Le Flohic and Kerguelen went off to the wars, a lot of it about, Algeria, Indochina, every time they were on leave, a new baby. The Kerguelens flourished as the Le Flohics withered.” “So what of Le Flohic? And the son?” Le Goff couldn’t understand how a family could just fade away. He had always suspected that Ninie of something, but this added a whole new depth to her depravity. “There was some argument over the farm. Next thing Le Flohic’s found down the well. Mind you, he was a drunk, that one, and no gift to Néné anyway. So Erwan takes over the farm, only fifteen and not quite right in the head. Killed all the pigs and then himself, thought he had failed his mother. Should have kept him up at Plougernevel, they say he blew his own head off in the barn.” Le Goff cut across him. “I knew about the husband, but not about all this..” Old Cairou wheezed a laugh. “Oh, you’re long from finished yet- tragedy sticks to Ninie like a crepe to a pan.” By now Hubert was listening, and all three fixed their sights on James, gazing across the square to the lights of Div C’hoarazed, and the forms of Ninie and Néné neatly framed between the darkening blue shutters. “Nothing like an old fool-“ began Hubert “There’s nothing like an English fool,” chucked Konan Cairou, now struggling to keep his beer down “With any luck, he might take her back with him. Stop him clogging up the cemetery with the rest of them” Le Goff smoothed his thick black moustache. He had always wondered at the heavy population of Le Flohics and Kerguelens by the calvaire, with their marble angels and ceramic wreaths. Now he felt a little closer to understanding. As the shutters of Div C’hoarazed closed, on the dot of nine, regular as clockwork, James too had developed that rhythm. But the cold wind that heralded James’ departure tonight signalled the arrival of a newcomer. “Joell Pouliguen?” wavered Old Cairou “Marz’an Doue, by the name of God, is it you Joell Pouliguen?” “Konannen ar Cairou? Gast, thought you’d be long dead, bumped off by Intañvez Kerguelen many a year ago!” Hubert was mystified “Pouliguen? But there’s no more Pouliguen in Cozenay, not for years.” Old Cairou laughed. “This one escaped, off to seek his fortune up in Paris, imbecile!” The newcomer butted in. “Still making the finest crepes this side of Montparnasse, Cairou!” Hubert was even more puzzled now. “But who’s this Intañvez Kerguelen? Her son?” Now it was the turn of the two old men to laugh “Intañvez du Kerguelen! The black widow Kerguelen.” Pouliguen continued. “The merry widow still playing her dance, then Cairou?” Many beers later, the shutters of the cafe closed, the fire rising high in the stone grate against the chill night, they were still ruminating the story. Le Goff could not wait any longer. He had to ask. “What happened then to old man Kerguelen?” Pouliguen took up the story. “Found him, didn’t she, hanging from the rafters at Div C’hoarazed, in his own attic.” Then Cairou followed on. “Took her an hour to ring the sapeurs-pompiers, and what a time to cut him down. Poor Andreu, knew him from a baby, and to see him so.” “She wept for weeks and drove good Doctor Guegan half-mad with her tales of depression.” Pouligan alternated “Then old Néné Le Flohic hop out of Le Faöuet, up and sold, the Grandma’s house and all, and installed in Div C’hoarazed before her brother was cold in his shroud.” “But why would he do it? It was his house was it not?” Le Goff chipped in “What could she have done to make him do such a thing?” Pouliguen and Cairou’s faces fell. They looked deeply into their dark beer, in the darkening bar. “There are some that say she knotted the rope herself-“ Pouliguen said, still staring at the table. “But I say it was words that killed him.” “The worst. She told him that they were not his. Not Deniel, his first-born, he loved and carried everywhere with him, not the bright little Loïc, not his darling baby Fañnch.” Cairou intoned. The men around the table looked solemn. Any man’s worst fear. It was Le Goff that spoke it first “So the Kerguelen are no more. They die with Néné,” Pouliguen sounded the final knell. “Yes. Bad business we said. She’d made sure that the boys gave up all rights before he died. One by one. Threatened to tell their father they were bastards. She had it all.” It was the night of the fest-noz, and the town square shone with an icy beauty. The church overlooking all, like a glacial fairy palace. As James moved across the square he could hear the plaintive call of the biniou, the Breton bagpipes, and see the women in their traditional dress describing the complex circle dance of the An Dro. And through all of this, he could see Ninie Kerguelen. Her costume embroidered black and white, the bigouden on her head starched high, white and lacy, she seemed transfigured, from another age. James stood by waiting with a warming rum grog in his hand. Across the circle, munching on their galettes, he was observed by Pouliguen, Le Goff, and Cairou. “She’s coming in for the kill” whispered Le Goff between mouthfuls of galette. James walked towards her, holding out the glass of steaming grog. “Noz vat, Gwreg ar Kerguelen, Good evening Madame Kerguelen.” “Noz vat, Yann ar Morgan, Good evening Mister Morgan.” she smiled, accepting the cup. “You really are becoming a kendervh a Berzh-Doue, a Breton cousin. They do say the Bretons and the English are closely related.” “That’s what they say, Madame Kerguelen” “Even your name, Mr Morgan – Mor for sea and gañ for born, born of the sea. You have green eyes too, very Breton” Even his guardian angels had abandoned him. “He’s old enough to know what he wants, gast!” cried Hubert, taking another cider and admiring the buttocks of the youngest Le Clec’h girl. Le Goff was inclined to agree with him on both counts. Cairou and Pouliguen were too busy talking about medical insurance and galette recipes to notice the departure of Madame Kerguelen and Mr Morgan. They passed down the Rue de l’Eglise, then as they rounded the corner of the deserted Allée du Calvaire, Ninie suddenly grabbed him and pinned him against the wall. “Do you think they’ve guessed?” “Ninie darling, don’t be so ridiculous. What is there to link the nice English gentleman and the Black Widow? When I find poor dear Néné dead in her bed tonight, it will be such a shock that they will all worry for my health.” “Rather like when I found dear sweet Mado drowned in her bathtub, poor thing.” “You have rung the boys to say we will be out in a couple of weeks?” “Just give me the time to sell up and I’m all yours.” He now pulled her into his arms, the lace of her coiffe crinkling against the tweed of his jacket. “I am the only match for you Ninie, and you for me. Now ,at long last, we get to enjoy it all.” They walked slowly back to the immaculate house on the Place St Sauveur, and turned the key slowly in the lock.

Red Silk Roses

2005-11-14T18:05:00.000Z

This is another one of my crazed ramblings from the MA course. We had to bring in an object which described us, then develop a piece of Life Writing around it.....this is what wrote itself for me......; Red Silk Roses Once a month, we used to go. I was bundled into my best scratchy woolly coat with the matching hat, and we set off to board the number 30 bus. My mother, in her ‘going-out-to-lunch’ clothes announcing to the bus conductor - “One and a half to Harley Street please”. He would then reel the purple-printed tickets from his little machine. They remained in my hot little hand for the rest of the journey. We wound up through the Angel on the top deck of our red chariot, on to the West End, finally walking down the solemn paved street, up the stone steps, to the shiny black door. Even my mother had trouble ringing Professor Ridley’s doorbell. He was like a grandfather from a Dickens novel, all white moustache, fluffy hair and heavy jollity. But that didn’t make it hurt any less. Every time he would unwind the bandages, then force my unwilling eye to do things. Then more eye drops. Left, right, concentrate, concentrate. My head was spinning with the effort, perching on the high stool with my Clarks-shod toes hanging in mid-air. More drops, more bandages, more pain. It was, however, worth it. The next part of the adventure would sustain me for weeks. We carried on along and across Wigmore Street. The stone facades were imposing, but I always disliked walking over the glass paving-stones which covered the former cellar-wells, terrified I would fall down. Mikla Modes. Even the name has a faded 1950s feel to it. The shopfront was a monument to Art Deco, the name boldly swept in black across the white marble. My mother pushed the diagonal brass rail and we entered. Past the gorgeously draped mannequins, and the red gilded chairs. Everything was red, black, and white at Miki’s. “Darlings” Mikla came running over. Even though she had been my mother’s boss for many years, she was even smaller than my mother, though as fair as my mother was dark. Tiny, bird-like, white-blonde hair with glittering blue eyes. Mikla hugged and kissed my mother and I enthusiastically. “Patrizia! Let me look at you! Ach, you are too thin, where is my little Patrizia so pretty, so round? And my little leibchen, my little Claire? Come and let Miki see you”. There was some head-shaking between the grown-ups at this point, over my head, with mutterings of doctors, hospitals and bandages. There was an unspoken rule that at this point I was allowed to play with Miki’s desk. The desk was made of scarlet Chinese lacquer, and at the time seemed as big as a house. When I was smaller I used to crawl under it, but now I loved to explore the many secret drawers nestled in-between the golden dragons and geishas on the surface. I needed to be patient while the bitter coffee was drunk with the almond biscuits and more grown-up whispering took place. After what always seemed like an eternity, Mikla would seek me out in my hideaway. “Do you vant to come downstairs and see ze girls?” I could not move fast enough at this point, over the red carpet and behind the red velvet curtains, down the winding staircase to the cellar atelier, with its faint lights from the glass paving-stones in the ceiling. The atelier was the nearest I came to fairyland, and in memory it still mingles strangely with Santa’s grotto in Selfridges. The girls, Hookie and Myffy couldn’t run to greet us. The tiniest, frailest, most bowed women that I have ever known; they must have been 80 even then. This is where the fun began. Shot silks, taffetas, organzas, silk crepes-de-chine, sumptuous velvets were lined around the walls of the cellar, each more gorgeous than the last. Next to these, sequinned fabrics, beaded satins, appliquéd diaphanous jewels. This is where ‘the girls’ really became girls. They would wind me with silks; crown me with velvets and flowing jewel-encrusted veils. They would find me silk velvet flowers for my hair, ersatz jewels to adorn me, handbags in which to carry my dreams. I would forget briefly that I was the ugly duckling. In my glorious robes it no longer mattered what anyone thought. I would catch snatches of their laughing conversations over my head. “Business? Ach, no-one has any longer style, they all dress from the British Home Stores” “The duchesses, same, no eleganz, they are in the ready-mades, and the debutantes with the big bottoms in the jeans” But for today, I was their Duchess. No customers ever spoiled our fun. But eventually, my mother would, by reminding me it was time to go and catch the bus home. From Myffy and Hookie I would receive prettily-wrapped bittersweet European chocolate. But from Miki, it was always a part of herself. Delicate embroidered little purses, with mysterious foreign writing, impractical silk scarves “Schiaperelli pink, darling, not cerise…” But my favourite of all were the flowers. Silk velvet or satin, soft, beautiful, impossible. I would cradle them in my hands like an amulet against encroaching reality on the darkening bus home. They represented the ‘leibchen’ of my dreams, not the bandaged stick-insect dismally reflected in the window of the rattling bus. Over twenty years went by before I passed Miki’s again, after her death. Gone are the marble pillars, a fast food restaurant encased in shiny bright wipe-clean plastic stands in its place. I remembered the little tears that ‘the girls’ used to shed when they stood at the door to say goodbye. After all this time I asked my mother why this all happened. The clues began to piece together. “You do know that none of the girls were married” I did. Miss Williams, Miss Hook and Miss Karzei. Though Miss Karzei had changed her name to Sloane. The stories gradually began to unravel. Miss Hook had not become bent through the close work she did at the shop, as I had presumed. She was born that way, found on a doorstep, eked out a living as a milliner, eventually making her way to London for the botched back-street abortion that nearly killed her. Finally she found her way to Miki’s. She never left London again, after that. Miss Williams had once shown me a faded photograph of her ‘beau’. What she hadn’t told me was that he had died in one war. Her parents had died in the other. Myfanwy took every penny she had and boarded a train to London. Myffy’s only family were Hookie and Miki. She never married. “Do you remember, even when it was hot, how Miki always wore long sleeves?” I began to remember, and I remembered too the arm that she would pull away. Now I began to understand the significance of the bluish numbers I had once seen on her arm, before it was pulled back. My mother continued: “Miki came from a little village in White Russia. She had a large family until the Germans came and took them from one concentration camp to the other, then another, getting less numerous as time went on. First the parents, somewhere in Russia, then her sister Shprintza, somewhere in Poland, then her sister Tzipora taken off to Belsen….” “What happened next?” “Mikla and Shoshana were taken to Auschwitz. Somehow they managed to survive until the camp was liberated” They came to England through the kindness of strangers; a Jewish relief organisation brought them both to London. I remember Shoshana very vaguely; she died when I was very small. But by then she was called Suzanna. Forgetting was an essential part of survival. I never knew what killed Suzanna. “Sadness killed Suzanna, it killed them all in the end”. Shoshana and Mikla Karzei might have survived, but not completely. The pretty blondes came to the attention of a certain Dr Mengele, who wished to avoid the ‘miscegenation’ of Nazi troops with pretty Jewesses. So anyone like Mikla and Shoshana who could ‘pass for Christian’, he made sure they could never have children. Most of them died. It killed Shoshana sooner, because she married, I think. She could never face the truth, and childlessness eventually drove her mad. Now I began to wonder. What kept these women alive? They kept each other alive. They were a ‘family’ of sorts, of flotsam and jetsam, of found pieces. They were a symphony of damaged goods, of almosts and maybes. They survived through the vicarious enjoyment of others. The beauty of the things they made and the dresses they sold, the pleasure gained by others as they lived their lives wearing them, and brought just a little back to ‘the girls’. Then I started to question how my mother fitted into all of this. How did her story thread between the complex lines of the ‘misses’? When my mother started to work there, in effect she was almost an orphan; her parents had emigrated, leaving her here. So another ‘almost’ there, the little sister, the little niece. I finally managed to get the other part of the story from my mother. I hadn’t known that before I was born, she had spent nine years childless, and had been told that she would remain so. I was beginning to see the pattern. In the pattern was revealed my part in the story. I was the ersatz granddaughter to all ‘the girls’, I was the only continuation of the line. I now saw why everything was fairylike in that world. I was the dream-child in their heads, whatever my failings in reality. I now knew why they came to our house at Christmas, and why they cried when I went home. They all died within three weeks of each other, when the shop finally closed, when elegance went out of fashion. Their story was at an end. I looked in the looking-glass at the red velvet roses in my hair. The story was not over. I spin a crown into my hair, of hopes, dreams and fears, of my story interwoven with other, secret, histories. I wanted to wear them for all of these women, and for all of their untold, fractured lives. For the love of beauty that kept them sane, and their love for others that kept them alive. Families are sometimes made, not born, and I like to think that a little of the blood of my extraordinary ersatz grandmothers runs in my veins. As Mikla once said to me ‘There are only three elegant colours in the world, liebchen, red, black, and white”. Diese roten silk Rosen sind für Sie meine Omas. These red silk roses are for you, my grandmothers.

2005-10-12T11:40:00.000Z

This one just made me laugh....... the pagan Roses are reddish Violets are blueish If it weren't for Christmas We'd all be Jewish - Get born again Like Ronald Reagan? No thanks I'd rather be a pagan LYRICS © JOHN COOPER CLARKE

What I'm listening to......

2005-10-12T11:34:00.000Z

Strangely enough, what's been inspiring me this morning is Salford's finest..... John Cooper Clarke Someone who I've listened to since I was about 14, seen live a few times (including a spectacualr no-show at Battersea last year). In fact that was another one of the things that got me back into writing. they held a performance-poetry-in-the-style-of-John-Cooper-Clarke competition instead, judged by Rosie Lugosi, and I was in the top three, despite not having written for years.......and had to perform it at the Battersea Arts Centre complete with ersatz Mancunian accent......Thanks John! I owe you one!

Something else I've been working on....

2005-10-12T09:48:00.000Z

This is one of the pieces that started through the MA course...it developed from a piece of spontaneous writing that I started in class, and developed later at home. We were asked to think of an object from our childhood, then create a narrative around it. I chose a red velvet trouser suit, that I remembered loving with a passion, trying to wear it even when I had grown out of it....this led on to a photo of my mother's of me, wearing it on a trip to Paris in 1971 This turned out to be the last family holiday abroad we had, this mingled with musings on my later time in Paris, and the bittersweet feelings that all of this evoked. The Red Velvet Trouser Suit The red velvet trouser suit shines out against the grey Parisian backdrop. The little blonde girl is smiling shyly into the camera, as the Eiffel Tower shoots skywards behind her. The photo, a faded, crinkled, memento. She puts it carefully back into her battered handbag, as rain spatters down, or it may be tears, who knows. It is almost the only thing left of herself these days. She picks up the heavy Prisunic bags, pulls her Carte Orange from her pocket, and struggles through the automatic barrier, onwards towards the many stairs of Metro Bir-Hakeim, and the overhead line 6. She mounts the stairs slowly, unwillingly dragging her aching body. She needs the rest, but does not wish to go home. He is at home. He who shouts. He who screams. He who….. She has nowhere else to go. Finally, heavy bottles of Pastis clinking against her knees, she reaches the summit, the platform. It is chilly October, and the biting wind whistles down the quais, chilling the waiting passengers on the raised platform. The ‘prochain train’ signs empty, swinging idly in the bitter wind. Then, as she looks across, there it is. The tower. Its sinuous lines glimmering darkly through the night sky. Lofty, exalted. Laughing at her. Mocking her. Always the same. She sees a hazy, diaphanous image of the smiling little girl, then it fades as quickly as it came….. “See where you are now?” “See where your dreams have got you? They meant nothing.” Silent, enormous, cold, metallic, straddling the city like a giant, crushing the romantic dreams of that eternally smiling 3 year old underfoot. The idyllic fantasies crack, break into smithereens, spiral, and evaporate in the cold winter air over the dark Seine. To join the bottomless whirlpool of broken hopes and ruined lives that hovers over Paris like a vulture, waiting its time. “Le prochain train desservira tous gares en direction de Charles de Gaulle Etoile.” As the voice dully intones the litany of all stations from there to Nation, the green and grey metro finally clanked into the platform. Lifting the bags, she struggles with the silver handle until she hears the reassuring hiss, sighing as she mounts the train. Saved in one way- lost in another.

First day at school......AGAIN

2005-10-11T17:00:00.000Z

You'd think I'd have given up by now...but alas no. This is my 'First day at school picture' First day on my MA.......

More musings of an impossibly infrequent blogger...

2005-10-11T16:53:00.000Z

This is some of the work I have been doing recently on my MA course....strange what comes out when you don't expect it......

Phoenix

2005-10-11T16:50:00.000Z

“Left to myself, what a poet I shall flay myself into” Sylvia Plath What brings me here? The question should be: what has kept me away for so long? I have always wanted to be a writer, have always written, since childhood. Why then did I come to a standstill, a ten year creative crevasse? I think that the answer lies in experience. When I was younger, it was all too easy, too facile, too glib. I had no problem in writing, but the things which I wrote were predictable and formulaic. I have given to that great oeuvre of miserable teenage woe-is-me- die-in-the-corner goth poetry over the years …..But somehow, all this seemed wrong. Where was the suffering for my art? Surely this wasn’t all there was? “And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” Sylvia Plath This is where I began to doubt myself. I had nothing to write about – well nothing anyone would wish to hear. I decided, with the clear eye of a twenty-something, that I had to go out and LIVE. Yes L-I-V-E in capital letters. I decided that life was just one great rehearsal for the great novel. Everything that I experienced in life would be archived in my head. I too would have a “white alp in my eye to show I’d visited Europe”. I drew every moment to the full. Every disastrous relationship (and there were lots of those), every major crisis, every strange situation I could observe ….storing them all up for the day that they would fly out poetically in a work of great literature….. If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days. Sylvia Plath This is what I did. Kept waiting for the moment to happen, but it never did. Then life intervened. Life, work - everything was the antithesis of what I had expected. The everyday drudgery of working to pay the rent. Getting up every morning to do the same thing until I came home at night, went to bed, and got up to do ..the same thing again…… I really joined in with the rat race, wanted my career progression along with all of them. I even joined in the marriage game, albeit later, with the rest of them. Watch me tripping down the aisle, click clack in my spindly heels and fluffy dress, along with all the other sheep….. Then pop, pop, the little baby as matching accessory. But there was something wrong. This all seemed like play-acting, artificial, gimcrack….something else kept seeping through, a carmine stain on the fresh veneer of ‘normailyt’ The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it. Sylvia Plath I still had these troublesome creative thoughts, though. The kind that would get me sideways looks at respectable dinner parties. I thought too much. Dangerous. Why did I need to read so much? Abnormal. Maybe that’s why I could never get into the domestic goddess groove… But the dangers, in some ways, were real. Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call. Sylvia Plath Rising from unconsciousness, again, examining the fresh cuts, again. Feeling where he had beaten me under the hairline, again …”so the bruises wouldn’t show”. I broke apart the sham eggshell of normality. I cracked apart the fragile carapace of my “marriage”. I took myself back, poetry, weird thoughts and all. Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air. Sylvia Plath This is where I am as a writer. I have flayed myself to the writer I wish to be, arrived at this point via a difficult path. Finally I have the confidence to be myself. Myself as a woman, and myself as a writer. I have taken myself back. Reborn, risen as the phoenix.

Ritual

2005-10-11T16:46:00.000Z

Ritual I can see her through the window, the street light is out again, and I look though the darkness to the one point of light, her window, which is slightly lower than mine, affording a perfect view. The wistful chords of ‘Transylvanian Concubine’ split the night air. She lays the cosmetics carefully on the dressing table, piece by piece. She pulls her hair carefully back, and begins the task. First the face cream, she smoothes this carefully in, neglecting no part of her face. Then, gently, she squeezes the tube of pale foundation onto the sponge, and dabs this carefully on to her face. It must cover her face completely; the flawless masque must be whole. Then, she lifts the powder-puff, tapping it delicately against its silver tin. She softly sweeps her face into porcelain perfection. Here, the real artistry begins, she takes the eye-liner and paints a careful line, skirting the top of her eyelashes, her hand holding steady. She sets this with the powdery black eye-shadow, precisely brushed over the line. Next, the red eye shadow blended into the black, then the white above. She then takes a feather-soft brush to soften them into an iridescent, flowing rainbow. Now her lips. The tiniest brush is purposefully drawn from the pot, the dark lipstick collected and the line firmly drawn to a rosebud pout. She then fills this with the scarlet, stippled in until the colours meld gently. Finally the hair. From the drawers she draws ponytails, hair of many colours. This she carefully adds to her own, combing, blending, for the seamless transition between fantasy and reality. Her ribbons next red as her lipstick, black as her hair. These she twines amongst the locks. Then, her piece de resistance. The roses. Velvety, red, they lie on the dark wood of the dressing-table. Tenderly, she twists them around her bunches, and stands back to look at the results. White face, dark eyes, carmine lips, and the blood red roses nestling in the blackest hair. She is ready.

A Woman's Right to Shoes....

2005-09-11T18:02:00.000Z

This is the first half of a story...this part by Marian Keyes, which I completed for a BBC competition..... A WOMAN’S RIGHT TO SHOES: MARIAN KEYES 1 A Woman’s Right to Shoes by Marian Keyes © Copyright Mark McCall 2003 THIN MORNING LIGHT, grey pavement, counting forty-eight seconds from the front door to the end of my road. Turn onto bigger road and start again, counting seventy-eight seconds before the traffic lights. Across the road in thirteen, then counting twenty-nine to the shops. I’ve only started this counting lark lately – just in the last few weeks. But now I do it all the time, I count everything. It’s very handy, it stops me from going mad. As I got nearer the pub, I wondered if my silver sandal would still be outside. Probably. Because who would want it? Mind you, there was no accounting for pissed people. They took big orange traffic cones home, why not a single, silver sandal? Nearer I got and nearer; there was something there alright and it was the right size for a shoe. But already I knew it wasn’t mine. Alerted by some instinct, already I knew something strange was happening. And sure enough, once I was close enough, I saw that my sandal was gone – and, as if by alchemy, shimmering in its place was a different shoe, a man’s shoe. It was astonishingly beautiful: a classic brogue shape, but in an intense purple leather. It sat on the grey pavement, looking almost like it was floating and it seemed to throb, as if it was the only thing of colour in a black and white world. Slightly mesmerised, I picked it up and turned it over. There were no scuffs on the sole, like it had never been worn. Butter-soft, biscuit-coloured leather lined the insides and it made my aching eyes feel better just to look at it. Should I bring it to the police station? It looked important enough. But it was a shoe, a single shoe. Lost by a man who’d had one alcopop too many last night. I’d be cautioned for wasting police time. Perhaps I should put up a sign saying it had been found – if it was a puppy or a kitten people would and shoes were beloved also. Next door to the pub was the newsagents with its noticeboard of ads. I could post something there: ‘Found: One magical shoe.’ Then I remembered the last time I’d placed an ad there about shoes. Look at where that had landed me. But this shoe was too beautiful to abandon. Quickly I gathered it up, wrapped it in my scarf, put it in my bag and hurried to work. The previous night. Yes, perhaps wearing a single high, silver sandal mid-November smacked a little of histrionics. But it was necessary for people to know I was making a statement, a protest, even. As I had walked to the pub I’d plumped for practicality and worn an old pair of trainers - pre - Hayley trainers that for some reason I had kept, even though I had thought those days were long gone – but just before I entered into the bright, convivial warmth, I took them off and replaced them with a single spindly sandal on my right foot. On my left foot – the shoe-free one – my tights had a hole in the toe. I regarded it steadily. So be it. I couldn’t falter now. Listing to one side, I stood just inside the door – were they here? Not yet. This was good, I could settle myself for maximum impact. There were many sofas – this was a lady-friendly pub – but I required elevation and visibility. I hopalonged to the bar and climbed up onto a stool, then I rotated so that I was facing into the room. You couldn’t have missed me or – more importantly – my uneven feet, one shod, one bare. My eyes were doing that constantly-scudding-swimming- fish thing that very dislocated people do and I counted between events (people coming in, people lighting cigarettes, people gently moving a strand of their girlfriend’s hair out of her eyes etc; I started back at zero each new time.) In between the counting, I drank steadily. The plan had been to stick to mineral water, but somehow, between the ongoing, world-dislocating shock and my proximity to strong drink, that fell apart. All evening, I sat, my back rigid with righteousness, waiting for them to appear, but they didn’t. This was very annoying. How else could I shame them? Nick, the barman, though clearly a little bit alarmed by my behaviour, was kind. Unlike Naomi, a mutual friend of mine and Steven’s who said, "Alice, please put some proper shoes on, this whole thing, it’s just so undignified." Undignified? Me? I was dignity personified, as much as anyone can be in one sandal and one betighted foot in mid-November. In an attempt to defuse me, Naomi tried subsuming me into her group of sofa-based friends, but I refused to abandon my post. Around eleven o’clock, I gave up; they weren’t coming. I hadn’t known for sure they would, the real world isn’t like Coronation Street. But they had been sighted there together. Which was very tactless, considering Steven and I used to go there. Not every night, maybe only once or twice a week and as much for food as for drink. (Salmon fishcakes, pacific-rim salads, mocha bread-and-butter pudding, etc. Like I said, a lady-friendly pub.) As I left, I see-sawed across the pub – now quite crowded, which was unfortunate because my great shoe imbalance was not as instantly visible as I would have wished. Indeed, I feared that several people simply dismissed my side-to-side swaying as the result of inebriation. I was aware of general nudgage as I limped past. I even heard someone say, "So she’s pissed, so what? After what’s happened, who’d blame her?" Only when I got through the doors and out into the street did I retrieve my trainers from my bag and take the sandal off. I was going to put the sandal back into the bag, and then I thought, But why bother? What use is it to me now? So I left it. Exactly mid-way across the two doors (well, as mid-way as I could manage after an evening of grim, heavy drinking.) I nursed a vague plan that I might do the same the next night with a different shoe. And every night thereafter, until all thirty-one of my shoes were gone. Just over a month, it would take. How I met Hayley. Most people are unbalanced. Or asymmetrical, as it’s more commonly called; my problem area is my feet: my right foot is a size four and my left a size five. I used to get round the problem by buying shoes in a size five and employing insoles, but it wasn’t always a great solution, especially if the objects of my desire were sling-backs or open-toed, minxy stuff. However, one day I was visited with a brilliant, life-changing idea: if I had a size-four right foot and a size-five left foot, could there be someone in the metropolis I lived in who had a size five right-foot and a size four left-foot. My pedi mirror image. If we could only find each other, we could buy two identical pairs, one in size four, one in size five – and divvy them up according to our needs. I considered advertising in Time Out or a national newspaper, but in the end I placed an ad on the noticeboard in the local newsagent – and got a reply! A local girl, she lived less than ten minutes walk from me and Steven. I was wild with excitement before I met her, charmed by the idea of symbiosis, and the thought that this woman would complete me. I am quite freakishly short and therefore fond of high heelage. (Sometimes when I step out of my four-inch heels, people look around in confusion and ask, "Where’s she gone?" and I am obliged to call out, "I’m down here.") Hayley, by contrast, was tall and slender. I feared she would spurn high-heelage and embrace flattage, and unfortunately, most of the time, she did. Right from the start it was a battle of wills and our shared asymmetry didn’t kick-start a friendship. From time to time we bumped into each other locally, but we only ever arranged to meet on a ‘Need to Buy’ basis. Which we did for over two years: in March, when the fresh sandals crop hit the shops and September, when the new boots arrived. There were also occasional unscheduled events – the need for glittery Christmas party shoes or just a random spotting of a beautiful pair, which it would have been criminal to pass up. Sometimes Hayley was game and agreed to the purchase of sky-scraper heels, which made me happy. Even at the best of times, though, it was never as much fun as I’d expected. In fact, it was slightly uneasy. But I pretended it wasn’t. We were girls! We were shopping for shoes! We had a special bond! The bottom line was that Hayley was horrible. An important life lesson for me, and one I’d learnt too late – just because someone loves shoes doesn’t necessarily mean she’s a good person. When Steven told me he was leaving me for her, the shock plunged me into a grey-tinged nightmare. It was then that I began counting. I even found myself doing it in my dreams, because as soon as I stopped, the panic rose steadily until it threatened to choke me. There was worse to come. Two days later I came home from work to find that all my size-five shoes had been stolen. Hayley had taken them. I was left with thirty-one single right-foot shoes. The only complete pairs I had left were the boots I stood up in and a manky pair of ancient trainers. Popular psychology has it that when a person undergoes a trauma – a mugging or perhaps an abandonment – they often respond by thinking they’re worthless. As it happened, I hadn’t got around to it yet. But Hayley had – even though the trauma was mine. In her eyes, I had become utterly insignificant; after helping herself to my husband, she felt she could take anything else she wanted. Apparently, she had decided that actually, her feet were suddenly the same size. After a lifetime of one size four and one size five, both her feet were now a size five. An unbelievable turnabout? Well, why not? Was it any more incredible than Steven’s defection, after he’d once promised that he’d always love, so much so that he’d married me. (I’d had the shoes – white satin pumps – made specially; for once both my feet were perfectly shod.) I rang them to ask for my shoes back. Hayley told me to stop harassing them. I said I just wanted the return of my shoes. Hayley said they’d get a barring order. Deflated as I was, I knew I was in the right. But all that remained to me was the moral highground. I decided I would wear a succession of single shoes to the local pub in the hope of shaming them publicly. ***** That evening, after work, when I emerged from the underground, I was expecting to see photocopied flyers stuck to the lamp-posts. Big bold type asking, Have You Seen This Shoe? Then a blurry photocopy – or an artist’s impression even – of the magical purple shoe. ‘Last seen on my foot on the 17th of November. Reward offered.’ But there was nothing. Didn’t anyone care? I would have cooked dinner, except I didn’t bother eating anymore. I counted my way through three soaps until it was time to go to the pub. Tonight I chose a brown suede boot. Then I wrapped the magic shoe in a soft old pashmina – I was glad to get some use from it, it had cost a fortune and four seconds after I’d bought it, it had plummeted out of fashion. Nick’s face fell as I hopalonged through the pub to the same stool I’d sat on the previous night. I was an embarrassment. Well, tough. I unwrapped the purple shoe, like I was revealing a valuable artefact, and asked if he had any idea who it might belong to. No, he said, but he agreed that it was a magnificent-looking shoe and he was very taken with the Cinderella overtones. "You’re like Prince Charming. When you find the bloke who owns the shoe, maybe you’ll fall in love." I looked at him scornfully. "This is no fairy-story. And why," I wanted to know, "do men always think that a new man is the solution to women’s problems." "Sorry," he said quietly, taking the shoe and placing it in a position of high visibility behind the bar. There it remained for the entire evening, but no-one claimed it. I counted my way through every man who came in, my eyes going straight to their feet, as I sought that special man in one shimmering purple shoe and one besocked foot. But nothing. Nor was there any sign of Steven and Hayley. When I was leaving, I left my brown boot in the street. Then I went home and slept with the purple shoe on my pillow. It wasn’t the first time I’d slept with a shoe, but it had never been someone else’s before. It seemed to glow in the dark, filling the room with a benign violet light. The next morning, on my way to work, I wondered if my abandoned boot would be replaced by another purple shoe, I’d half-expected it to be like the elves and the shoemakers – a new shoe every day. But this time there was nothing except an empty cigarette box and that didn’t count. Days passed and I brought the purple shoe everywhere. I felt edgy (ok, edgier) without it and sometimes, when even the counting wasn’t working, I took it out of my bag and touched it to my face and, amazingly, it calmed me down. One night I had a dreadful scare when I couldn’t find it in my bag to put on my pillow. I was deeply unsettled without it. But when I woke in the morning, it was on my bedroom carpet, twinkling at me as it always did, like a puppy happy to see me. Now, how had that happened? Magic? Or simple muddlement brought about by a surfeit of alcohol? I didn’t care, I was massively relieved and hugged the shoe to me. Mind you, now and then I caught a glimpse of my behaviour, as seen from the outside, and wondered about it. But I’d had my husband stolen and all my left-foot shoes stolen. If I was a little unhinged, who could blame me? Every night I went to the pub, sat on a stool, and watched for one-shoed men. Every night I wore one shoe and left it behind when I went home. Although I had left nine shoes on nine different nights there had been no sightings of Hayley and Steven. One night I arrived at the pub to find Nick bubbling over with excitement. "I have your Cinderella," he hissed. "He was here the night before you found the shoe. And he’s the kind of bloke who’d have a cool shoe like that." He jerked his head discreetly. "It’s him over there." I looked and immediately I knew this wasn’t our man. This one was too good-looking. Wasn’t it traditional to make approaches to the ugly sisters first? However, we went through the motions and actually, he wasn’t even nice about it. He seemed baffled when I withdrew the purple shoe from my bag, then he looked at my feet, at the shiny black stiletto on one foot and the big toe poking through the hole in the tights on the other. (Yes, all my tights had developed holes.) Fear scooted across his face; he suspected he was being set-up, that he was the subject of a big, shoe-based leg-pull and that the whole pub was in on it. "That’s not my shoe." He dropped eye-contact, then moved away as fast as anyone can in Oliver Sweeney chelsea boots. Seconds later, he left. Nick and I exchanged a look. "It was worth a try," I said, then Nick went back to polishing glasses and I resumed counting and drinking. "Give me another look at it," Nick asked later. "Remind me of the brand name again." I unfolded the pashmina and purpleness blazed around the bar-counter. Nick and I shared another meaningful look. I knew what he was thinking: normal non-magical shoes don’t behave that way. The brand name was picked out in gold-leaf on the leather insole. Merlotti. "I’ll look it up on the internet," Nick said. "No point," I said. I’d already googled the brand and got nothing… Suddenly a voice behind me cut into our conversation. "Excuse me," it said, "But that’s my shoe!"

A Woman's Right to Shoes....

2005-09-11T17:59:00.000Z

This is a story written by Marian Keyes, which I finished for a BBC competition..... Nick poked me, and motioned me to turn around with a very peculiar look on his face. Maybe he was just pissed again. I turned. Looking at me was a tall, dark thin man, with a vague accent that spoke of somewhere other than Stoke Newington. Mind you, most peoples’ accents in Stoke Newington spoke of somewhere other than Stoke Newington. Steven and I had moved there because it was the only place that was cheap and-convenient-for-the-city-,as he glibly put it. We seemed in fact to belong there as much as anybody else did, and after he had waltzed off with Cinderella-Hayley, the queen of the equal feet, and possessor of shoes in pairs, I had moved around the corner onto Foulden Road. Yet this man’s voice didn’t belong, it didn’t belong at all…….. “I think you have my shoe.” I was startled out of my trailing train of thought. “How can you be sure?” I snapped back. As I did so however, my eyes automatically traveled down his shantung-suited legs, and came to rest on the most exquisite periwinkle blue suede shoes. Then I knew. Only someone capable of these shoes was capable of those shoes, they had the same soft, enchanted, glowing qualities. And I was sure that his socks would be knitted black silk. With no holes in the toes. Idly I wondered how he had got through Dalston alive in order to arrive here. It wasn’t only his voice that didn’t fit, the rest of him obviously didn’t arrive here on the 149 bus either. And his departure point was more likely to have been Samarcand than Edmonton. “Because a kind shoe fairy left me clues” My shoes! I knew they would come in useful for something, if not my feet, their intended targets. My orphan shoes, leading the glamorous stranger across murky London and into my pub…..Nick was trying to catch my eye in a ‘wink wink nudge nudge told you so’ kind of way. I ignored him pointedly and concentrated, despite the alcohol, on sophisticated and mysterious. Hard to achieve when you’re five feet two, covered with green paint after a hard day with thirty seven-year olds, and more cuddly than curvaceous, but I tried. “Forgive me,” he said “I did not introduce myself.” I held my breath. And tried not to hug the pashmina’d shoe in a demented sort of way. Please, dear Lord, please don’t let him be called Brian Higginbottom…. “My name is Cyrian Merlotti, and I really do believe that is my shoe.. Miss….” Yes! My feeble shoe-addled brain sprang back to life, as usual, I began burbling incoherently. But that was also aided by the copious quantities of gin and tonic within. “Alice- Alice Sackerthwaite……( now you see why not Higginbottom…. I had a brainwave, maiden name- yes!!!!}- Alice Sackerthwaite Long” I thought that if I left it at that I at least couldn’t be accused of talking rubbish. Yet. “Miss Sackerthwaite Long,” he enunciated, I mean enunciated, who else could make the hated Sackerthwaite sound sexy, it was worth divorcing Steven just to lose that, though I must admit that custody of half my footwear had not featured in the decree nisi- in place of alimony perhaps pedimony? “Please may I please have my shoe back.” I looked up into his eyes, which were a very long way up, and the same glowing blue-violet as his shoes, as he looked down at my oddly-shoed feet and I grimaced inside. “Or perhaps you are a lady in need of shoes?” and he smiled. “Although with such beautiful feet I think it is a great pity for them to be covered, yes?” I was dumbfounded. Who could find my uneven and bizarrely-shod feet beautiful? Why? Was he mad? Was he some kind of kinky eurotrash-footfetishist, of the kind beloved by Antoine de Caulnes and Jean-Paul Gaultier? Would I see myself on next week’s programme? Worse, had Steven and Hayley maybe sent him to convince me that I was mad, foot-obsessed, and indeed harassing them? “You could say so…..yes, indeed” I faltered, wondering what on earth I was leading myself into. My grandmother always said that one drink too many and you would end up a white slave in Shanghai……..Shanghai! Maybe he was into foot binding!!! Or worse! Mind you, there was little that I could say, I must have looked stupendous sitting on a bar-stool cuddling his shoe in my pashmina, a very normal thing for a thirty six-year old woman to do in Bar Lorca on a wet Tuesday night……..and I was sure I could feel my mascara slowly descending my cheekbones. “Allow me to present you with my card then, and maybe you would allow me to buy you a drink to celebrate the fortuitous reuniting of my shoes.” I looked at the card. “Cyrian Merlotti, chaussures exquises faites mains, exquisite hand-made shoes London - Paris There was an almighty crash as the pub doors slammed back on their hinges, revealing a rain-drenched and somewhat the worse for wear Hayley. She’d obviously been at the babycham again. This was descending into an episode of Eastenders. “Alice!” she screamed. “You can have him back, he’s a complete bastard and I never want to see him again!” She stumbled, and fell splayed on the floor, with her feet sticking out like a rag doll, heaving with sobs. Then her right shoe fell off, or maybe I should say my right shoe, and she began wailing again, comforted by a now very agitated Nick. Five minutes ago I would have had the uncharitable thought that that was because it was her right foot that was still a size four .But not now. Cyrian put his hand on my shoulder. “And what do you say, Miss Alice my Wonderland?” he purred. The moment should have been broken. But the wailing Hayley only caused me to compare Cyrian’s honey-soft voice to Steven’s nasal scouse twang, his periwinkle blue shoes to Steven’s BHS loafers…remembered his meanness, he had even moaned about the shoes I had had made for our wedding, and I realized I didn’t care anymore. “You were made for each other.” I said to Hayley “Shall we go, then?” said Cyrian I smiled up at him. I had died and gone to heaven. The shoe-fairy had descended upon darkest Stoke Newington in full Jimmy Choo glory. “Yes please” I said. The doors swung shut behind us, as he carried me out into the softly drizzling night.

That's entertainment.....

2005-09-11T17:55:00.001Z

This is a story I wrote in response to something that really happened......unfortunately That’s Entertainment “and all we have now, are our thoughts of yesterday, la la la la, la la la la la la la” Marie grinned madly as the song finished, and David smiled back at her as he strummed the last chord on the guitar. Basil rushed up to them, in his dusty tailcoat and battered top hat with swan-feathers in the band. “Oh darlings, that was wonderful” He turned to the rest of the room “don’t you think so?” Turning back to David and Marie, he hugged them, “Such a pity you have to go now though, after such a wonderful song”. Marie hugged Basil back. “Afraid we do though, David has work tomorrow. But it’s been lovely, hope the rest of your birthday goes as well”. Marie and David walked down to Euston in the warm evening air, and ended up catching the bus back with another friend of Basil’s who they had bumped into at the bus stop. Finally all three piled off the bus, laughing, at the junction. Basil’s friend headed off towards Stoke Newington. “What’s the time” said David. “Why?” answered Marie. “Because I’m starving and the noodle bar’s still open.” “You are such a pig, you had about fifteen helpings at the party…” “But I’m soooo hungry…” “You always are….oh, go on then!” They spent half an hour there giggling, spooning noodles into each other’s mouths and drinking Chinese beer until they realized that the place was closing and that the staff were giving them distinctly frigid looks. They paid up and turned out of the door towards home. “Oh damn” muttered Marie, fishing in her handbag, “I’m going to have to get some fags, I think I left mine somewhere..” “Who’s silly now then? I know, what about getting a bottle of that fizzy Chardonnay you like at the same time?” “You’ll never get to work tomorrow….” “Hell, you only live once! It’s your fault we’ve to go to the shop anyway……” They carried on mildly bickering into the shop door, picking up their wine, and up to the till. The young guy behind the counter looked at them, amused. “Never seen you looking quite like that before…don’t teach like that do you?” Marie laughed, she had almost forgotten the outfit she was wearing. Maybe that explained the chilly looks in the noodle bar. “It was for a friend’s birthday party, we were doing a song by a band called Strawberry Switchblade, they dress up like this, and they used to be his favourite band” The guy smiled back “Don’t think that they were too big in Turkey. Like the corset though.” “Don’t think we’ll be off to work tomorrow dressed like this though,” chipped in David, “a little impractical I think”. David picked up the carrier bag with the wine, and his guitar in the other hand, Marie following behind. There was a bicycle lying right across the doorway of the shop. “Bloody silly place to put a bike” said David. With the guitar in one hand, and the wine in the other, there wasn’t a lot he could do, and Marie, he knew quite well, couldn’t bend at all with that corset on. He nudged the bike slightly to the right with his right foot, so that Marie could pass. As they came out of the door, Marie whispered “Don’t think you should have done that” “Why not? Was a silly place to put a bike” “Why not? Because a nineteen foot rasta will come round the corner and kick your head in for touching his bike” “ Ha bloody ha, very funny! Take this a minute, will you?” he passed her the carrier bag with the wine in it and fixed the strap back on the guitar so he could put it on his shoulder. “Need to find my keys, yours are probably at the bottom of your bloody handbag.” They rounded the corner into the little alleyway that was the shortcut to their house. David was still fiddling in the pockets of his leather jacket for his keys. “So you know where yours are then?” teased Marie. Suddenly Marie was thrown aside as something approached them from behind, the force of the blow pushing her into the road, and David being thrown forwards and away from her. Everything span into confusion, David was flying forwards into the brick wall at the end of the ginnel, guitar flying across the pavement. Suddenly a bicycle flew into the edge of her vision, clattering across the pavement, the rider descended upon the prone David. Marie was now running forwards, but her legs couldn’t carry her fast enough, her heels impeding her progress, everything was going too slowly, too fast for her to keep up. She saw the man’s fists raining down on David’s head, and heard the babbling stream of vitriol from his mouth. The voice was rasping and unceasing……… “Not from round ‘ere are you? Gotta learn respec’ if you wanna live ‘ere mate, respec’, man, you touch my bike man, you better go back to where you come from fuckin’ weirdo, no-one disses me an my bike man, you gotta learn, I is gonna teach you a lesson man, you gonna get out of here you freak cos I is gonna learn you…….” As the words came from his mouth the punches came from his fists, David had struggled up from the floor, but then was drowned in a sea of blows, falling, falling to the floor again…..he was trying to speak….”Look mate, I…..” but was silenced again and again by the hailing raining fists…….. “Stop it!” Screamed Marie, she had now reached David and all she could see was a sea of blood as the man came for him over and over again “Get out of it you tart your man deserve a beatin’, him have to learn respec’, if yous live in Hackney you gonna lean respec ‘…….The incessant diatribe went on and on, harsh, grating, monotone, a violent rap of senseless rubbish. He looked at Marie as he said this but the hand was on autopilot, punching, punching. His eyes were dark, dark with a crazed look, his gold front tooth shone under the streetlight as he spat his poisoned words, and his goatee gave him a diabolical air Marie could hear herself screaming, words were coming out of her mouth but she had no idea if they were making sense, the man was so big, she was so small, David wasn’t much taller, but this man was about six foot five, and on he went….and on….. She had the bottle of wine, could she swing it, would she knock him out with one blow? He was so tall, he was moving too much, would he kill both of them. If she could get her phone out of her bag? He would just destroy the phone. He was going to kill David, she was sure now, she was powerless, powerless, standing there, watching the destruction of the man she loved, she could see him almost drowning in his own blood his blue eyes looking up at the crazy raining blows on him, the crazy man smiling as he tried to kill her lover….. David was still trying to speak, the man still chanting ‘get back where you come from’, every time he heard David’s soft Lancashire accent filtering through the blood…..then she saw David falling, falling, as a boot crashed into his head…..The boot was grinding David’s head into the pavement, what could she do, how could she stop this maniac, David was going to die, the man was laughing now, laughing, frenzied, as he kicked, and ground, and kicked, and ground. Then he moved downwards to his bike, and grabbed the heavy metal D lock from it, still kicking, still grinding. Marie could take no more, David really was going to die, maybe they would both have to die, she stumbled forwards and grabbed the lock from the man as hard as she could. He turned, faced her shocked, the mouth still ranting hatred as he did so. Marie stood shocked with the lock. “He might not be from round here, but I am,” she screamed “So fuck off”. This is it she thought, he’ll kill me now. The mouth stopped moving, the lock was wrenched back. Marie shut her eyes and waited to die. Then silence. She heard the hiss of a bicycle’s wheels, and all was silence. She knelt down on the floor to David, picking up his bleeding head and laying it in her lap. He was conscious, but barely. Suddenly all was activity, a man ran forward, a flat window flew open, a girl ran to her……. Marie felt distanced from everything, the sudden buzz around her like a masquerade, people saying things and doing things while she could only gaze on as if in a bubble. Above her head drifted the one sound she could identify…… The plaintive tones of Paul Weller floating out into the night sky “ A police car and a screaming siren, a pneumatic drill and ripped up concrete, a baby wailing and stray dog howling, the screech of brakes and lamplights blinking – That’s entertainment, that’s…” Marie could feel David’s blood running over her knees as she cradled his mangled head in her hands, sea his blue blue eyes looking up at her through a carmine sea, her once-white skirt dripping scarlet. That’s entertainment…..for some people. A Saturday night punch-up for some, a life held in balance for others. Then, finally, the wail of sirens.

a bit bipolar????

2005-09-11T17:55:00.000Z

Speaking one language While I think another Language schizophrenia Orphaned phrases Still lost in the translation Struggle in the mire Am I the same in the two Or subtly different in both A split personality I am divided In cross channel confusion Belonging nowhere Half my heart in both Stuck somewhere between the two With no solution Lost my direction Vacillating endlessly Impossible choice For losing one half Is to lose half of oneself Semi sacrifice Now I have to live A bipolar disorder My divided brain Half English half French Yet belonging to no-one A foot in each camp

Musings on London......

2005-09-11T17:53:00.000Z

and a little poetry to inspire your jaded souls! Central artery Bisects the metropolis Cutting clean in two River of flotsam Your green and muddied waters Flowing through my veins London will never Abandon my consciousness Though I leave it behind Brackish tributaries Coursing within my being Eternal reminder Some things you can leave Though does residue remain Imprint on the soul?

She Sells Sanctuary......

2005-09-11T17:51:00.000Z

and another........in a different vein...lol! She Sells Sanctuary Khlari jumped from the step of the 38 bus as it pulled round from Essex Road to the stop at the Angel. As she got off, she saw the gaze of the bus conductor upon her, she noted it with approval. She pulled her long black coat around her as she walked past the building site. Even though it was a Saturday night, her look was guaranteed to attract attention, even in the relatively cosmopolitan streets of Islington. That was the way she liked it. She turned the corner of City Road, and headed down the side of the tube station towards Torrens Street and the lights of the Slimelight ahead. She breezed past the queue and headed towards the staircase up to the club. It was a dank 19th century warehouse, perfectly suited to its current purpose. ‘Khlari!’ It was Martin, the doorman. ‘Looking good!’ Khlari gave him a twirl, hair extensions flying, her corset hugging her in, her skirt flowing behind, her long fishnetted legs leading down to her pointed boots…….. They exchanged a few air kisses, their usual practice, as he waved her in to the club. She was a regular. As she climbed up the worn stone staircase to the third floor, she heard the heavy industrial beat pounding as she passed the second floor, until she reached the haven at the top of the stairs. She turned left into the room…the lighting was ultraviolet, and all you could see were shining eyes and teeth as the haunting strain of ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ filled the air. She headed for the bar. More new bar staff, they changed from week to week, people come, people go, London was a transient city. ‘Pernod and black please.’ The crowd at the bar had parted to let her through, she was well known figure around here. The man behind the bar was tall, dark, and handsome – in a Goth way. He was elegantly emaciated, with cheekbones to die for, and long slim legs encased in leather trousers, with the obligatory pointed boots….. Khlari shot him a look. ‘I don’t think I know you.’ ‘Should you?’ ‘I’m here all the time’ ‘Oh really?’ ‘What kind of an accent is that anyway? Not from round here…’ ‘No, I’m French….’ A blonde meteor suddenly hurtled towards Khlari, shrieking her name on the way…. ‘Mia!!!’ Khlari hugged her friend, who was closely followed by the other part of the triumvirate, redhead Martha….. They were legendary here at least, uber goth babes, all the baby goth girls yearned to be like them. They had been around the scene forever, since their early teens, had grown up in gothdom as they frequently teased each other. Martha went as far as to claim that these days she wouldn’t even recognize ‘normality’. They contrasted perfectly, Mia was raucous, blonde with a laugh like Sid James, Martha tall, elegant and Dutch, with flowing red hair, and Khlari smaller, quieter with long black hair. They made an unlikely group, but one that had withstood the test of time. They drifted towards the dance floor, with the sound of Siouxsie’s ‘Arabian Knights’ literally beating through their ribcages. The Slimelight was not the place for a quiet chat. They came here to bare their souls to the music. As the song switched to ‘Alice’, they threaded their way onto the floor, twisting, turning, feeling the music flow through them, losing themselves for the moment. A symphony of fishnet, black, and deathly white in front of their eyes. As the strobe lights flashed, the other dancers seemed to shatter, break, then reform before their eyes as Eldritch’s plaintive voice pleaded with Alice not to ‘give it away’…… The sound drifted on to ‘She Sells Sanctuary’…Khlari felt the drumbeat flowing through her bones as Ian Astbury’s tribal wail rose into the smoke-filled air. Suddenly she felt a light grip on her waist as she turned. She was suddenly looking into the green eyes of the barman. ‘Hello’ ‘Just dance…..’ They moved in a haze, his body perfectly aligned to hers and the rising, falling, turning, hypnotic motion of the song. She did not need to ‘dance with him’, they seemed perfectly attuned to each other. Suddenly, he was kissing her, they were against each other, swirling, flowing as one. Finally he broke away. ‘What are you called?’ ‘Khlari, and you?’ He smiled. Most Goths seemed to call themselves Thunder or Raven, though, alas, they had been christened Colin, or something equally prosaic. ‘It is your real name?’ She looked affronted. ‘Yes, I’m afraid so. What is yours?’ ‘They call me Cassian’ ‘That’s your real name?’ ‘Yes’ They both broke into hesitant smiles. ‘So why aren’t you behind the bar? Dereliction of duty?’ ‘No, I am finished.’ They carried on dancing, moving, kissing until the end of the evening. Mia and Martha had sensed that she wanted to be alone and made a tactful and tacit withdrawal. The dancefloor was emptying, the flickering lights showing the echoing spaces of empty warehouse now. ‘I must go’, Khlari said ‘Why?’ ‘I have to get home, somehow’ ‘Stay for a drink’ ‘How? The place is closing.’ ‘I live upstairs.’ ‘Here, above the club?’ ‘Yes’ She finally agreed, and he led her to the far corner of the dancefloor, behind a curtain, and up a tiny staircase she had never noticed before, until they came to a small door. He took her into a flat decorated in typically gothic style, heavy velvet and candles everywhere. ‘Wow’ ‘It is nothing’ They sat and talked, and drank red wine from tall purple goblets, for what seemed like hours, until suddenly she was lying back on the sofa, and they were kissing again. They embraced delicately, until suddenly, she heard a hissing noise. She sat bolt upright. ‘Poppysma.’ She said. He shot up. ‘Pardon?’ ‘Poppysma’ ‘This is ridiculous. What do you know about this?’ ‘Well, go on then. Hurry up.’ He stood up. ‘Hurry up? You know what I will do and you say to me to hurry up – are you mad?’ Khlari stood up herself. Even with her heels on, he was still about a foot taller than her. She looked up into his eyes. ‘Look, Cassian. I am a Goth. Of course I know what you are about to do. Just get on with it.’ He sat down on the velvet sofa, and put his head in his hands. ‘It has never happened like this’ ‘Well maybe you’ve never been to London before. I did notice you know.’ ‘But I cannot do this’ ‘But I want you to’ ‘Want me to? Ah mon Dieu, this is completely…ridicule.’ ‘Look Cassian. This is really simple. You Vampire, Me Goth. Now bite me.’ He began to pace around the room…. ‘How can I bite you if you want me to? This was never part of the deal…’ ‘Stop the existential angst and get on with it………’ Khlari jumped from the step of the 38 bus as it pulled round from Essex Road to the stop at the Angel. As she got off, she saw the gaze of the bus conductor upon her, she noted it with approval. She pulled her long black coat around her as she walked past the tube station. Even though it was a Saturday night, her look was guaranteed to attract attention, even in the relatively cosmopolitan streets of Islington. That was the way she liked it. She turned the corner of City Road, past the derelict station, and towards the lights of the Slimelight ahead. She breezed past the queue and went into the club. She wrapped her arms around Cassian. ‘Hello Cherie, good journey? Meet Raven, he is new on the bar tonight.’ It was odd how in 20 years, no-one had ever remarked how well Cassian and Khlari had aged…..nor the abnormally high turnover of bar staff. The fact they went out only at night- well, they were Goths after all. And, at the end of the day, nothing seems so strange after all at the Slimelight…….

Jigsaw Feeling......

2005-09-11T17:47:00.000Z

This is a story I wrote for my MA application....draw your own conclusions....... Jigsaw Feeling Difficulty level impossible, number of pieces infinite. Can this woman ever be put back together again? Hard to tell. Let’s look at the pieces. How is she in pieces? How can she be so fragmented? Is this a woman or a jigsaw? But I can number those pieces, I can number those breaks, I can quantify that falling apart, for I am she, your hypothetical jigsaw lady. Every piece has a story, every break has a history. Maybe it has a history that you will not wish to hear, maybe it is a saga that you will listen to with your hands over your ears. Painful to hear? Oh pity on you with your delicate ears. Do you not think in your privileged position that it was a thousand times more painful to think and to live? Let me list the breaks, let me list the multiple and many fissures which traverse me, your anonymous jigsaw lady. Break the first. It is hot, it is summer and I run into an old work colleague and we go for coffee. We laugh about our old job back in England and I invite him back to come and meet you. We were laughing as we got out of the lift. Do you remember now, can you? How you shot out of the door, and threw Nick against the wall screaming torrents of abuse? Do you remember how you dragged me into the apartment by my neck and threw me across the bedroom, how you grabbed me by the shoulders and banged, banged my head against the wall until it felt like it was going to explode. Is it coming back now, how you did this until I was unconscious? Can you remember how I screamed, how I held my hands across my stomach to save my unborn child? Then, how you went out to get even more drunk, leaving me lying across the bed, probably not even aware or caring if I was alive or dead? Break the second was a direct result of break the first, though I doubt that your alcohol-addled brain was capable of making that connection. But I’ll remember for you. I’ll remember the pain, the fear, the rush in the taxi to the hospital sitting on a towel with the blood flowing down my legs, by myself of course. I recall perfectly lying on the hospital trolley, my head still covered with the bruises that you had carefully placed under my long black hair so that no-one would know that they were there except me. I can still hear all the lies and the platitudes, the assurances in French for foreigners that everything would be fine. The rest you wouldn’t know, you weren’t there you will say. The screaming pain on the stark white bed, the vitriolic nasal mutterings of the nurse who believed that I was just another deluded little English girl, and that she knew best. The refusals to help, the pain shooting through me in waves, the pain in my head now dulled by the torrential waves of a different pain. I’ll tell you about being left for five hours like this. I’ll tell you how it felt to know that this was going to happen. I’ll tell you about the dead baby I gave birth to all alone in a hospital bed, 1000 miles away from home. I can describe perfectly the corpse in a white plastic bucket they showed to me when they finally answered the bell. How it felt to sit in a waiting room full of pregnant women the morning after waiting for an ultrasound. How, when I was walking out of the hospital by myself two days later, they presented me with a bill for six thousand francs for incompetence rendered. Because for me the memory is not fleeting, it is engraved in these chasms that cross my body and mind, the chasms I carry with me every day of my life. Which leads me to break the third. You weren’t there. Are you beginning to see now? Not all of these breaks are the physical kind you love to deliver. Some are far far deeper than that. They are breaks in the soul, breaks in the spirit and being. You probably wouldn’t even notice them. Shortly after that was break the fourth. I came home from work to find that you had gone to your brother’s wedding in Brittany without me. I spent the next four days eating stale bread and cheese and smoking cigarette butts, as you had thoughtfully taken every penny in the house. Luckily for you, I couldn’t telephone anyone, as they had already cut the telephone off. Break the fifth happens the next time I am pregnant with the baby you claimed to want so much. Though I am sure you won’t recollect any of this. You passed most of the pregnancy in an alcohol-fuelled haze. As I recall, you spent everything on Pastis and beer, while I had to beg and plead at the hospital for them to let me pay for the ultrasound next week, the blood test at the end of the month. They were worried you see, they had put down Break the Second as a miscarriage, so I was an ‘at risk mother’. In a way they were quite right, though with my stress levels they had just put me down as another hysterical foreigner, and sent me to the hospital psychiatrist. You wouldn’t remember all of this. How I carried you to bed, though I was pregnant and you weighed twice as much as me. How I cleaned up when you were sick anywhere and everywhere. How I changed the sheets when you wet the bed and were so drunk that you haven’t noticed. How I carried the shopping home on two buses, despite the fact there was I car which I had basically paid for sitting in the kerb outside. The one thing I couldn’t forget was the alcohol. The bottle of Pastis per day, plus any beer, wine, whatever you could get your hands on. Not if I valued my life. Break the sixth would be hard for you to know about, because I had to admit myself to the hospital on the other side of Paris. I travelled by train and metro to get there, with all my bags. My ‘condition’ now so worrying that I had to have extensive tests, or lose this baby. Actually, when I started giving birth they had to ring you for two hours before you answered the phone. You probably wouldn’t remember, I guess you were comatose somewhere. You did arrive finally, another two hours after that, although you did have to keep popping out for a drink from the car at regular intervals. I would call the actual birth breaks seven, eight, and nine. I had better fill you in on the details, you had just popped out for a drink, after asking me where the nearest bar to the hospital was. I had been left alone for quite a while when someone finally noticed that blood was dripping onto the floor, and your daughter was dying. You weren’t around when I was rushed into the theatre, trailing blood. It would have been hard for you to hear that I had in fact lost half of the blood in my body. Mind you, that probably explained the light-headedness, and the pains in my chest as my heart raced to keep up. Your daughter was stuck, they finally managed to extract her, but I wasn’t even aware if she was alive or dead. Actually, you turned up about 20 minutes after the whole event. The tenth break happens after we get home. I had just changed jobs. Again. It’s amazing how you in fact lose jobs when you have to keep taking days off to hide your face, or even when your partner in an alcohol-fuelled paranoia refuses to let you leave the house. It’s even more amazing when you find a new one. However, when you have borrowed money from everyone you work with, and the Creche Municipale is refusing to take your child unless you buy the nappies and baby lotion, and pay the bill, you have to move on. The crunch happens when you can’t even buy the baby food. There’s no money left after the Pastis. Break the eleventh is the holiday in England, where all the spending money goes on finding Pastis, of course at a premium price, nothing else will do. Where you spend most of the day in bed, pretend to be ill, refuse to meet my friends and oblige me to lie to my entire family. Mind you, this is not helped by your refusal to learn any English after 3 years together. Number 12 occurs whenever you feel paranoid. Then the fists fly and you accuse me of having affairs with anyone from the concierge to the hunchbacked man who puts out the vegetables in Franprix. This is probably sufficient in fact to do numbers 13 through to 25, it’s fairly frequent. I feel that Number 26 is the beginning of your unlucky streak. You force me to go and see a psychiatrist, to find out ‘what’s wrong with me’. Unfortunately, the psychiatrist actually concludes that the only thing wrong with me is you, and I’m prevented from going back. We also have Number twenty seven….which on second thought probably includes numbers 28 through 35, compound fractures. Through having to take time off of work to mind our sick child, I have lost my job again. This is where you develop a new paranoid interest, returning to Brittany, land of your fathers, and all that twaddle. So off we go on another wild goose chase. We go off to Sables d’Olonne, in the 85…but it’s still not Brittany. Guess even they wouldn’t wish to take you back. In the meantime we’re supposed to be having the holiday of our dreams in the South….. It takes us 2 days to drive there. Maybe because of all the stops on the autoroute. 2, 300 miles of hell. And then it rains, God does it rain. That’s my fault as well. We’re meeting your brother and his family for the perfect family holiday…though to be honest even they had probably suffered enough at the time with your gimcrack little charades. Crack bang here we go again……any chance for a slap…oh though you are so careful that Christophe and Sandrine don’t see…Until you finally let the curtain drop, your unguarded moment. They take me out for the evening, and when I return I have the whole no sleep where have you been what were you doing pantomime, bang, slap, what, bang, slap, where…..Christophe intervenes when you have banged my head on the wall so often that I am comatose, and your daughter is crying, ‘Maman, maman’ alone into the night. They leave in the morning, and jigsaw girl has to piece together the events from the map of contusions. In retrospect, breaks 35 through 38…one for each of the vertebrae ruined. I tell your mother. She says ‘demerde-toi’. Get yourself out of your own shit. Sensitive family…..the bruises are still fresh and purple as an aubergine. These are not the physical cracks but the mental. Your son did this. Help me. Talk to yourself. You might as well. Become mute, it would be safer. Back home. Then the move. You and your equally alcoholic friend Serge at the wheel. Safe in the hands of the man that drinks niaoul before breakfast. You like us being there, mind you. No friends at all, no-one to hear me, God that makes you happy. Because, as usual, you’re not happy and it’s all my fault. This time, I’m even supposed to be sleeping with the woman at the ANPE…the dole office. The guy at the library where I’m doing my research for the CAPES, the teaching certificate that might take us out of this…… Then I get a job in La Roche sur Yon, leaving at 5.30 am, cycling 4 miles, catching the TGV, walking for 20 minutes, catching another bus, taking another walk…….it’s the middle of winter, and this time I’m supposed to be having affairs with the 15 year old farming students…..every night it’s bang, crack, bang crack my head…..More and more, I am becoming fundamentally flawed, only the wallpaper holds me together….the smile hides a thousand wounds. Every day I play the dutiful French wife at the Catholic school, thanking God it’s winter and I can hide myself beneath layers of clothes. Every morning at 5 am it takes more and more Prozac to just get myself out of bed. Every night I have the 6 hours of recriminations and maybe 4 hours of sleep if I’m lucky. You shout through the sleeping tablets. You’ve stopped going to work. I now have to lie to your boss as well. It’s Christmas. My parents arrive. Let’s play happy families and thank the Lord no-one can understand each other. Even lost in translation you manage to spoil it for everyone. The only saving grace being that in such proximity it can only be your words that wound me. For now. They leave, I wave them off on the TGV to Nantes with tears in my eyes, they, so concerned, I nearly get on the train. Your hand restraining me like iron under the sleeve of my coat. ‘Why were you crying?’ ‘I wasn’t’ ‘I’ll give you something to cry for’ ‘I wasn’t……’ ‘Come here’ ‘No’ ‘Come here’ ‘I’m fine’ ‘Will you give me what I want? You’re my wife………’ Bang Crack Slam Silence…….Confusion Suffocating Pain. Va et vient, in and out, you’re my wife, symphony of pain, take no more, NO. Coming round, he is inside me, can take no more, no longer a person, just a possession. All is black. Try to die. Why can’t I die? Realise now that you cannot die of unhappiness as I would be dead one hundred times over. I’ve stopped counting how broken I am now. Just wish you would finally break me so I could know no more. But I keep waking up to a new hell. Hell is other people, old Jean-Paul was right. But the Jigsaw Lady Lazarus is not broken inside. Maybe the carapace is cracked and shattered into infinitesimal pieces, but something inside now rises up. This is it, breaks…..infinite. But I am beyond caring. I have arrived at calculating. You are admitted to hospital – this worried me once until I found out that the ‘epilepsy’ was caused by the alcohol. I take my chance. I make the worst telephone call of my whole life to everyone, tell them it was all a sham. I lie to your mother – she deserves no better. I get up at 4 am, take my child, my life in a suitcase, and my shattered self. I fight my way through border control with lies and smiles, and bring what remains of myself home. I have rebuilt myself. I have filled in the cracks, I have rebuilt the walls, I have rebuilt the girl that you tried so hard to destroy. Some, physical, parts of the jigsaw lady will always be broken, thanks to you. But never the spirit.

2005-05-19T00:45:00.000Z

Until tomorrow, you're just going to have to put up with another silly picture of me..........

confessions of an impossibly lazy blogger

2005-05-19T00:34:00.000Z

Alas, am a very naughty goth......I had firm resolutions to blog every single day, but then life kind of intervened.....the events of the last few months have been kind of shattering to say the least and have caused me to rethink a lot of things....................... To my faithful reader (ha!), I promise I will do my best to put up a nice long post tomorrow night, as I'm afraid I'm off out gothing agin on Friday..... Love and Gothicism Khlari xxx

more deluded memories

2005-05-17T21:32:00.000Z

This is a poem I wrote when I first lived in Manchester, c 1986-7, it was inspired by receiving a postcard from an ex, and the snow..... Smoke Arcs across the window pane Bright light, bright white, the snowy northern city and alone in my cold bed I write postcards to my past Another cigarette, and endless cups of coffee, It all seemed so long ago Another life, another era, A nicotine-tinged snapshot of a city far away

Remembered poem.....

2005-04-20T12:37:00.000Z

Well, here's a fragment of a poem I wrote in about 1990.....which Andy made me think of yesterday..... You can't judge a book by it's cover, but I wish I had known you were paperback My twenty-five pence Penguin lover A sturdy spine is what you lack.

2005-04-14T12:38:00.000Z

Oops, been vamping even....The Blood and The Shadow...a new gothic/vamp evening at the Dev in Camden, co-hosted by The London Vampyre Group

2005-04-14T12:35:00.000Z

Haven't written much for the last few days....ben out vamping.......

2005-04-11T00:29:00.000Z

Don't call me Jane...........THAT song.......

Falling Out of Love with the French - Confessions of a Fallen Francophile

2005-04-10T22:10:00.000Z

Once upon a time, I was a committed Francophile. Somewhere between the ages of 11 and 18, I metamorphosed into a garlic-loving paid up worshipper of the French nation. Everything about England was boring. Everything. Why have Stew when you can have Pot au Feu? Sunday dinner pales into insignificance against a Roti d'Agneau, Sauce a l'ail. Shopping...well , fighting tourists along Oxford Street compared to wafting down the Place Vendome......and the French art of flanerie.......flaner le long des boulevards......there isn't even a word for flaner in English......stroll? It doesn't encapsulate the full word, just walking, hanging, breathing in the ambience.........Clothes? The English just looked like ragbags tied in the middle with string compared to the visions of elegance in Dior, Saint-Laurent and Lacroix that I eagerly sought in the pages of French Vogue, Elle and Marie-Claire. The list was seemingly endless- perfume......Hmm, at the time Tweed and Charlie vying aginst L'Air du Temps and Chanel No 5? Drink? Hmmm warm Newcastle Brown or deliciously chilled Veuve Clicquot? Writers....well, in England we had a bunch of sanctimonious Victorians who took pride in the fact they never got a shag for God's sake - in France they were all rounders, drinking, shagging, partying and generally dying of unmentionable diseases at the age of 29. What about painters? Ours all died at 97 after painting scores of haywains- theirs drank absinthe, smoked opium and lived in brothels- dying of syphilis seemed to be a common feature...... By the age of 16 I was desparate to be called Colette-Cherie de Sainte Bon-Bon de la Croix, born in Montmartre, of a dubious artist father and a disreputable consumpitve opera-singer mother. I wanted to mix in the demi-mondaine world of artists and excitement that all of this offered..... There was just one catch in all of this. I had never actually BEEN to France - apart from a flying visit with my parents, aged 3, after which my father had lost all his money and the peak of holiday excitement reached the dizzy heights of Clacton on Sea. This had to be remedied. I worked on perfecting my French, so that when the fascinating painter in an opera cloak spotted me wafting along the Champs-Elysees I could be up to the task. After a series of brief visits from the ages of 16-25, I finally and irrevocably got my heart's desire......though the world of work had steered me away from the glamourous world of art and hedonism that was Paris, to the mundane life of a youth worker in West Yorkshire. European exchanges.......how apt. I was (by accident, no-one else was available) sent on a Paris conference for the weekend....... Then it happened. I met the sexy Frenchman who was blown away by my charme a l'anglaise.......and four months later, moved to France for good. A dream come true. I threw myself into the intricate task of becoming, for all intents and purposes, French. I mastered the delicate culinary tasks of Blanquette de Veau and Mayonnaise-making, and sat back to imbibe the pure and delicious air of...Frenchness....that reigned. I was here, in my spiritual home, my Englishness being a mere and insignificant accident of birth that had finally been remedied. And then......little by little....something else happened. No-one was more surprised than me. In the town where I lived, a chic quartier in the richissime Banlieue-Ouest, lived lots of English diplomats and their wives.....I shunned them for their refusal to learn French, their obstinacy in shopping in the English Delicatessen in Le Vesinet...when in Rome, and all that sort of thing.....Then I understood. The French didn't actually care, we would never belong, even if we had lived for 94 of our 97 years in France, we would still be La petite anglaise. Then it began to dawn on me that the French were actually....really boring. When you have had 8,000 helpings of Gigot d'Agneau at different houses and they all taste the same. Then you realise you can't pop out for a kebab or a curry- because there aren't any. You can actually only shop in the Place Vendome if you are as rich as Stephanie of Monaco - the other choice being out of town centres commercial, with the same chainstores, Pecca, Camaieu, Prisunic, all selling in any one 'season' exactly the same clothes. If that season's 'look' doesn't suit you - that's tough. Not to mention the bottom question. Frenchwomen do not have bottoms. God knows what they sit on. Now mine is, well, normal, not grotesque or anything, yet finding trousers was impossible. Englishwomens' bottoms just don't fit into them. My friend Catherine and I once spent a whole afternoon on the Metro cofirming this fact (I'm surprised we didn't get arrested, looking at womens' bottoms)..it's just patently unfair, as they all eat like pigs that they should have such skinny behinds.Some stores even class a size 12 at 'outsize'. Frenchwomen all look the same. They all become blonde at 40, with an identikit chignon. They go from basketball boots and jeans straight to a matriarch look, 23 going on 50, and ultra-respectable. There is no inbetween, it's black and white. They wear the same clothes all the time, and call them 'les classiques'. No one-off craziness for an evening, everything is built to last, and expensive to prove the point. And tedious to the extreme. Now, to flanerie. I thought I'd be really good at this effortless wafting around....but all you pick up is mad Algerians asking if you want to marry them....stand around for more than 30 seconds on any Parisian street and some strange man comes up to you and offers his services, and asks for your phone number. Apparently, because you look foreign.....(you can take that down to 10 seconds in the Gare St Lazare...). As a woman, in fact, anywhere you go you are fair game for every middle aged married lothario.....even my English students (generally government officials or high-ranking managers in companies such as Renault), felt that it was perfectly acceptable to suggest looking at my underwear. Then you realise. All the Frenchwomen have wedding rings. They all get married at 22 to avoid this, then their husbands go off bedhopping and so do they. In the end, I bought myself a chistmas cracker type ring as protection. French make-up and perfume is, I'm afraid to say, still excellent. I am, I'm afraid writing this wearing Clarins moisturiser and La Roche-Posay foundation. But it is the be-all and end all of Frenchwomens' life, this search to keep the man they snared at 22. They are forever dieting and prinking and preening and at the beauty parlour, beacuse it's all they have. In France, you don't have fun, you have Family. With a capital F. They have 34 children called things like Marie-Laure-Celeste and Charles-Louis-Sebastien and spend all their time working in girly jobs then go to the beauty parlour, come home and and cook a 27 course dinner for the piggy husband (who doesn't give a damn about what he looks like) and all the little piggies. Then get up and do the same again. Till they die. I just hate them because they have perfect fingernails and never ladder their tights. Now, writers have gone seriously downhill. Now they all seem to be middle aged men pontificating about their mid-life crises and appearing on late night interview programmes about their mid-life crises. Or philisophers, like Bernard-Henri Levy, who appear to spend the whole day gazing and their navels then theorizing on them, No drinking, no roistering, nada. Female witers who are any good, like Amelie Nothomb are just regarded as weirdos and/or perverts.Painters possibly even worse, so up their own bottoms it's untrue. I say it's because they took the absinthe away personally. Now I know why the word bourgeois was invented. To describe the average French person. Go to a dinner party for example. Where you are served, invariably the same thing over and over again, Gigot, Blanquette, Plateau de Fruits de Mer......and wine. Oh Goody, I see you cheering up. Don't get too excited. You'll only get one glass. 'What!!!!' I hear you cry, 'this is the land of wine and song!' Ha! You're a woman. In France women don't drink. point. You'll be sick of the 'diet and beauty parlour and isn't little Charles-Henri-Jerome a genius who'll be going to Sciences-Po (French LSE) when he's 18' conversation, closeted with the women, and desparate to get pissed to alleviate the tedium. But Odile-Cecile after one glass has put her hand over it, giggling in a puerile fashion, 'Oh no, I'll be tipsy!' Followed by Marie-Louise-Agnes, and Caroline-Beatrice.....'I'll have one!!!!!!' You say enthusiastically, and the gimlet eyes of the whole room turn on you. Might as well have ALCOHOLIC tattooed on your forehead. You've just failed membership of the velvet-hairband good-girls club. Don't mention any exs either. That will put you on the pile marked Slut. No raucous nights out with the girls for them, no hobbies, no fun. They don't get Bridget Jones. They asked me if she had always been an alcoholic. I didn't try The Rocky Horror Show, luckily. This might all be due to French Music......great, you say, Plastic Bertrand! No, he was Belgian. Too interesting to be French. The first time I heard French music, i thought honestly that it was April Fools' Day.......It sounds like something that my Mum would listen to....or rather my Grandma, even my Mum is more hip than this. Everything through from 1930 to now sounds exactly the bloody same. Edith Piaf could top the charts now. All romantic ballads and les slows (sloppy snog-songs), sung by identikit Sacha Distel lookalikes. Claude Francois, Patrick Sebastien, Serge Lama, all crooning the same drivel, or stuff that sounds like a headline vaudeville song from the Black and White Minstrel Show. Only departure from this was Serge Gainsbourg (yes, that one that wrote Je t'aime moi non plus.....) but even he has a problem. His ex-wife. She was English, Jane Birkin, has lived in France for 40 years but still speaks French like she learned it yesterday.So if you are an English girl with a French other half who happens to like SG, guess what, ha ha ha SOOOOO funny- you are La Petite Jane Birkin......You sound just like Jane Birkin! You might be making an effort, but, La Petite Jane. Don't call me Jane. The key feature in all of this is individuality. The French love to be the same as everyone else. Eccentricity is a crime, there is no margin. My ex's favourite cry was 'people will stare at you!' He could never get my reply 'Good.' They all want to be the same, in their little appartements, eating the same food , driving the same cars, wearing the same clothes, watching the same TV (now French TV is TRULY appalling). They want their bourgeois little lives and deaths without ever deviating from the norm. These people who I believed to be wild, cretive, accepting of difference, enjoying life to the full, are as repressed as 1950s England- Balai dans le cul (Broom up the bottom). They are terrified of anything that might upset the bourgeois equilibrium.they don't hink, they just want to follow. And worst of all, many of them firmly believe Jean-Marie le Pen is a nice man. They think the English are wild, and liberated (hence Frenchmen going after English girls). Smalltown French life is like Bexhill on sea c 1948. Without the excitement. Most of them have never even been to Nantes, let alone Paris. Most French people never even go abroad. Frightened it might shake their convictions, shake their opinions? On second thoughts, I wouldn't like to see Jean-Marie le Pen as a tourist. They can keep him. I only realised how much I love England after seven years in France. Here, though we don't believe it, there is a certain freedom to be yourself and live the way you want to. You can dress the way you want, and find clothes to dress in. You can think the way you like, and are sure to find at least a group of people who agree with you and your view on life. Social life is more like an urban family, a network of linked friends, not the all-encompassing French notion of blood 'Family'. Women don't get stared at going out alone, looked at like they're tarts, women have a life, not merely an existence and the beck and call of hubby. Living together- well, none of my friends are married. Children? Well, it's up to you. Nobody imposes an overwheming social more any more, there are many, which seem to co-exist quite peaceably side by side, parallel normalities........ Finally, I've realised that what I have in England is more real and tangible, more me. I have traded in the flashy and bourgeois French model for one that thinks with me not aginst me, equally eccentric, and English! Being pragmatically English, he seems to have no problems accepting the souvenir of my extended holiday, now six years old. I've never been happier in my life.That's another key point - we are just so much more laid back than the French - what they call derisively Le Phlegme Anglais....we don't make a fuss, we just accept it and get on with it. I have traded in the velvet hairband and got my goth gear out of mothballs. And I think, I am finally happy with what and who I am. Maybe the French love affair was a kind of escapism, a fundamental discontentment with my life. Maybe I wanted to be something else because I didn't like what I was or where I was from. This seemed to be a common reason for running off to France among my English friends in Paris. Wanting something they felt they didn't have. But now I've done it, and I've learned my lesson. Better the devil you know. I don't want to escape now, I 'm too happy where I am. Could go out and get a kebab.....or a curry, mind you! Vive la Difference!

2005-04-10T01:14:00.000Z

Janey Morris Being 'Abnormal'

The Perils of Persephone, the Cataclysms of Khlari......a (non) Victorian Gothic Horror Story, or How I was Born in the Wrong Century

2005-04-09T23:57:00.000Z

Well, what brings me here...as I've said it is a very long, convoluted and bizarre story, involving lots of moving around and a plot worthy of Ann Radcliffe.......... I haven't written for so long, so forgive me if I am a little out of practice, not since I did a Creative Writing course in 1991 in Manchester.....then life kind of intervened.... Until I was about 25 or 26, writing was something as essential to me as breathing, it was something I did every day, both in a diary form and also in poetry and prose, some more successful, some not. if you had told me that I couldn't write any more I think I would have preferred giving up eating rather than writing. From childhood I have always expressed myself much more easily on the page than in other ways. Sometimes if I have something difficult to say I even write it rather than say it. I was a wordy, nerdy child with my head perpetually in a book. Sport was (um, and still is,) anathema, other people were punished by being sent to the library, I used to try and be sent there, yea I begged and pleaded. If I were a character in Buffy....I'd have to be Willow...... I had catholic and eclectic taste, anything from heavy Victorian tearjerker novels through to C.S. Lewis and First World War Poetry. well after that I had to do a degree in English and Art History, natch. As a child I then imagined that I would one day use this vast and bizarre knowledge to some ultimate advantage, that I would be the Doyenne of a literary circle, painting a little, writing, having brilliant tea parties in my Bloomsbury drawing room, surrounded by like minded aesthetes.......a Virginia Woolf, a Vita Sackville-West haring across Europe on mad adventures........ But alas, as the subtitle of my piece proves, I was...Born in the Wrong Century. This one does not value the literary types......far from being an advantage it is somehow seen as symbolic of some kind of inner weirdness. Eccentricity is just not fashionable, blandness is the norm. I wanted to be some kind of dramatic beturbanned Ottoline Morrell, or Sarah Bernhardt dressed in emerald velvet, reposing on a crimson chaise longue..... I don't actually want to dress in FCUK and Gap and look just the same as everyone else....why? I wanted the looks of a Pre-Raphaelite Janey Morris, I never longed for the beach-blondeness of Farah Fawcett and her ilk. While my friends were getting suntans, I was preserving my deathly pallor with my nose in a book. But apparently I HAVE A PROBLEM. THIS IS NOT 'NORMAL'. When I left the heady and inspiring world of academia, this posed a problem to everyone I met......I don't 'go to the gym' (yeuch), I like Vampires (sure sign of inner strangeness), team games make me want to vomit. But outside, we were more interested in whether I could type than whether I had read the entire works of Zola in French, or whether I had an opinion on whether Gauguin was superior to Matisse. They just don't care......what was once seen as the sign of education and wide knowledge is now seen as at the least inconvenient, and generally as 'rather peculiar'. I say BRING IT BACK!!!! I still want to be the centre of a heady circle of artists, a Mme de Stael with her Salon, Suzanne Valadon surrounded by Impressionists. I was born in the wrong place at the wrong time. Where is the value in ordinariness? Why should I have to pretend to be ordinary when I don't feel it inside? I don't ask the ordinary ones to be me, chacun a son gout, so why can't they respect my right to be me. It's all about the way society values skills, and some of us just have skills that according to everyone else are not right for the 21st century, they don't fit into narrow societal norms.....we can't change our nature, I am not going to suddenly begin to love Arsenal and Accountancy.....But I don't see why they should be more of a cardinal value than art, and beauty......I don't want to be an identikit drone either.......I don't like the uniform any more than I like the values, I'd rather be pretty peculiar than ugly dowdy just to look the same as everyone else.....hell that's me...told you I wasn't normal! But who decided on 'normal' anyway? Nobody asked me. I can still have my fantasies though........and I still quite fancy a chaise longue......whoops...sorry, didn't mean to offend you...was I being 'abnormal' again? Hmm, will just go and get a sensible job and buy some neutral beige clothes......or maybe I would rather chop my own head of with a butter knife....it would be a mercy killing. I'm sure one of my abnormal friends would oblige. I'm not the only weirdo you know. You see I see my skills weird as they may seem, as valuable, and my individuality as an essential part of me.....so if you kill those.......well you might as well kill me. now, about that chaise longue........

2005-04-09T18:56:00.000Z

but unfortunately this was the one they meant...........not the cool one.....hmmm, was probably the way my hair went attempting valiantly to pogo to X-ray spex, come to think of it. Seriously, am having a little Lene renaissance too....bizarrely started this several days BEFORE the commet!

2005-04-09T18:54:00.000Z

Bit less deranged and a little more gothy here.......

2005-04-09T18:52:00.000Z

guess the pigtails are a little more Lene than Rose............oh, and the deranged look.....

2005-04-09T18:41:00.000Z

I just wanted to be Rose Mc Dowall..........mind you, wouldn't say no to Lene either...see what you think!

2005-04-09T18:40:00.000Z

Spot that cultural influence...it's strange as my image re-evolved gradually when I came back from France, rosebud by rosebud and ribbon by ribbon........then everyone kept remarking on my similarity to Strawberry Switchblade.....mind you the other week was told I looked like Lene Lovich............

2005-04-09T18:37:00.000Z

Whoops didn't actually mean to send that like that. Loved them in the 80s and as I've just found a brilliant site with downloads and vids (their stuff is really hard to get hold of...deleted) have been having a home-made strawberryfest! the link is simply www.strawberryswitchblade.net

2005-04-09T18:35:00.000Z

More about things I like....currently doing the blast from the past thing and listening to the wonderful STRAWBERRY SWITCHBLADE!

2005-04-09T18:20:00.000Z

Et voila.....me and mini-moi, my little froglet Morgane......I was doing a photo session and she felt obliged to join in..........

2005-04-09T18:19:00.000Z

That rare thing...a photo of me that I actually like..........

2005-04-09T17:25:00.000Z

well, afraid this is me...I did warn you........

Khlari's Musing #1

2005-04-09T16:58:00.000Z

Well, here we go, this is the moment......well, not many people, actually, have been waiting for, my first blog......this is all thanks to Andy, so here goes to his link..... http://spicycauldron.blogspot.com I suppose I should tell you something about myself then. My name is Khlari, I'm 37 years of age, sometime teacher, youth worker, lecturer, bookshop manager, and all time goth......as you'll see. I was born and currently live in North London,but over the years have lived in places as diverse as Manchester, Stockport, Todmorden, Hebden Bridge, Liege, Bradford, Marly le Roi and Sables d'Olonne...... Finally managed to upload the picture....afraid I'm still a bit of a techno bimbo sometimes......... More about myself? Well, I live with my boyfriend, herefore known as TraditionalGoth, and my daughter Morgane who is six........and I'm currently unemployed......very, very, long story involving marrying a frog, father of froglet Morgane ...who turned out to be a frog, not a prince.......he was really French, I'm not joking! then running away back to England 2 years ago after 7 years in France............. I'll tell you the story one day. Likes? mmmmm? vampyres, corsets, my beloved New Rocks, Transylvania, Sylvia Plath, Frida Kahlo, poetry, writing, painting.....in no particular order! Dislikes? Bigots, fascists, shallow people, liars, Margaret Thatcher and net curtains.....again in no particular order......... Favourite Links? www.camdengothic.com my two best friends and their clothes........ www.revamped.co.uk London Vampyre Group Motto in Life? Je ne regrette rien........ Bisous Khlari xxx