My skin is soft, apparently
unexpectedly so
(was he expecting scales?)
His hand was on my neck
when he said that
(just before my legs
- quite of their own accord -
wrapped themselves
round his waist)
Oh
(he said)
and his eyes
and his face
did that thing
that men's eyes and faces do
when you know they're lost
and can't help themselves
and you know they'd do anything
say anything
if only . . .
Saturday, 10 May 2008
Tuesday, 6 May 2008
A post inspired by a thread on Facebook
Once upon a time, I lived in a house in the country with a substantial garden. When we (as in ex-husband and I) bought the house, it came with three chickens.
They were delightful. Pecking around the garden etc, laying eggs wherever they felt like it - hedgerows, mostly. In places you'd never think to look. When it was feeding time, they'd tuck up their skirts and hurtle towards you going 'tuk tuk tuk' and make you feel utterly indispensable.
(Then they got the hang of it and started waiting just outside the back door, cr*pping everywhere . . .)
They were so delightful, we bought six more from a farmer just up the road. Ex-husband made them all a henhouse, complete with private egg-laying spaces (he had his uses). He even constructed a run for them so they could be enclosed and not eat the vegetables he was about to plant. It was a very big run, surrounded by a fence about a metre high (made of chicken wire, obviously).
The book said that, in order to get new chickens used to said henhouse, they'd have to be shut in for a couple of days. Then we could let them out to roam until, at nightfall, they'd have to be shepherded back in order to roost. Roosting is important. They do it high up, so's to be safe from foxes.
Okay.
So we have fully fitted henhouse, in which we have shut six new chickens plus food and water. In due course, we let them out.
Come the newcomers' first evening of freedom, the old chickens tuck themselves into the new henhouse without even being invited. They tuk tuk contentedly to themselves and each other when we go and check them before we go out for a drink.
(It is summertime, so we reckon it's safe to go out for a while. We will be back by when it gets dark, in good time to make sure that the newcomers are safely rounded up and shut in.)
We get back. We check the henhouse. 'Tuk tuk' go the old chickens. There is no sign of the new ones.
Ex-husband and the friend we've gone out for the drink with and I comb the hedgerows for them. This takes quite a long time as the hedges are bushy and the garden amounts to about two acres.
I tire of this after a while and decide to go back to the house and put the kettle on. The chaps refuse to be beaten by six chickens and continue to search for them.
I put the kettle on, and the outside light, and have another glass of red.
I am sitting having this glass of red when I notice that the silhouette of the age-old apple tree about three metres away from the back door has changed.
It has acquired blobs where no blobs used to be.
I creep across the patio. I discover that the blobs are the new chickens, roosting. High up.
I call the chaps who, by this time, are quite a long way away. I point out the new chickens.
Ladders become involved. Limbs are risked.
Eventually the new chickens are reintroduced to their henhouse. Ooof.
The following morning, they have their wings clipped.
They were delightful. Pecking around the garden etc, laying eggs wherever they felt like it - hedgerows, mostly. In places you'd never think to look. When it was feeding time, they'd tuck up their skirts and hurtle towards you going 'tuk tuk tuk' and make you feel utterly indispensable.
(Then they got the hang of it and started waiting just outside the back door, cr*pping everywhere . . .)
They were so delightful, we bought six more from a farmer just up the road. Ex-husband made them all a henhouse, complete with private egg-laying spaces (he had his uses). He even constructed a run for them so they could be enclosed and not eat the vegetables he was about to plant. It was a very big run, surrounded by a fence about a metre high (made of chicken wire, obviously).
The book said that, in order to get new chickens used to said henhouse, they'd have to be shut in for a couple of days. Then we could let them out to roam until, at nightfall, they'd have to be shepherded back in order to roost. Roosting is important. They do it high up, so's to be safe from foxes.
Okay.
So we have fully fitted henhouse, in which we have shut six new chickens plus food and water. In due course, we let them out.
Come the newcomers' first evening of freedom, the old chickens tuck themselves into the new henhouse without even being invited. They tuk tuk contentedly to themselves and each other when we go and check them before we go out for a drink.
(It is summertime, so we reckon it's safe to go out for a while. We will be back by when it gets dark, in good time to make sure that the newcomers are safely rounded up and shut in.)
We get back. We check the henhouse. 'Tuk tuk' go the old chickens. There is no sign of the new ones.
Ex-husband and the friend we've gone out for the drink with and I comb the hedgerows for them. This takes quite a long time as the hedges are bushy and the garden amounts to about two acres.
I tire of this after a while and decide to go back to the house and put the kettle on. The chaps refuse to be beaten by six chickens and continue to search for them.
I put the kettle on, and the outside light, and have another glass of red.
I am sitting having this glass of red when I notice that the silhouette of the age-old apple tree about three metres away from the back door has changed.
It has acquired blobs where no blobs used to be.
I creep across the patio. I discover that the blobs are the new chickens, roosting. High up.
I call the chaps who, by this time, are quite a long way away. I point out the new chickens.
Ladders become involved. Limbs are risked.
Eventually the new chickens are reintroduced to their henhouse. Ooof.
The following morning, they have their wings clipped.
Wednesday, 30 April 2008
Speech bubbles and dripping noises
I can't remember what I was listening to yesterday - oh yes I can, it was BBC Radio 4's 'Word of Mouth' - and they were talking about speech bubbles. In comics, graphic novels and the like.
Apparently there's a cultural difference between 'Aaargh!' and 'Aieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!'
Meanwhile, there is a funny (as in odd-and-mildly-disturbing rather than ha-ha) dripping noise in the corner of the room just to the right of where I'm sitting. In a corner where no dripping should be (given that the corner where the dripping noise usually is is to the left of me and then only when when it's raining) . . .
Aieeeeeeeeeee.
Apparently there's a cultural difference between 'Aaargh!' and 'Aieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!'
Meanwhile, there is a funny (as in odd-and-mildly-disturbing rather than ha-ha) dripping noise in the corner of the room just to the right of where I'm sitting. In a corner where no dripping should be (given that the corner where the dripping noise usually is is to the left of me and then only when when it's raining) . . .
Aieeeeeeeeeee.
Saturday, 26 April 2008
What I keep meaning to do
No. 1: write fewer lists. Meanwhile I must
- get down to the beach. It's only five minutes' walk away, for heaven's sake, and there have been days - today was one - when the sun shone and if I hadn't had to go to work and do some shopping on the way back so's to have something to eat in the house (and toilet paper) for the weekend and if I hadn't been hungry when I got in and had to make a ham and cheese sandwich and read the paper I'd have got there, really I would, only after I'd eaten the sandwich and drunk a couple of glasses of wine I was feeling so so tired (on account of having woken up at just gone five this morning and not been able to get back to sleep) that I had to go to bed for a couple of hours and by the time I surfaced it was just starting to rain and I had to dash to get the washing in that had been out since yesterday
- get down to the beach. Tomorrow - today now - the forecast is for warm sunshine. I've been reading Simon Gray's Smoking Diaries this week (in between Coal: a human history, Disobedience and a book about how to discover my inner artist), in which he spends a lot of time sitting watching people here and abroad and writing about who he imagines them to be and what he sees and hears and is reminded of. I could do that, I think. Except I don't know the Harold Pinters or have a past that anybody could possibly want to know about . . .
- get down to the beach. I had the whole thing planned out yesterday - down to the pencil I was going to take with me and the book I was going to write in and exactly where I was going to park the car and how the stones would feel under my bottom until I'd smoothed out a place for it to sit with my back against the sea wall and feel the sun on my face, but now I can't quite remember where yesterday went and why I didn't do it
- get down to the beach.
- get down to the beach. It's only five minutes' walk away, for heaven's sake, and there have been days - today was one - when the sun shone and if I hadn't had to go to work and do some shopping on the way back so's to have something to eat in the house (and toilet paper) for the weekend and if I hadn't been hungry when I got in and had to make a ham and cheese sandwich and read the paper I'd have got there, really I would, only after I'd eaten the sandwich and drunk a couple of glasses of wine I was feeling so so tired (on account of having woken up at just gone five this morning and not been able to get back to sleep) that I had to go to bed for a couple of hours and by the time I surfaced it was just starting to rain and I had to dash to get the washing in that had been out since yesterday
- get down to the beach. Tomorrow - today now - the forecast is for warm sunshine. I've been reading Simon Gray's Smoking Diaries this week (in between Coal: a human history, Disobedience and a book about how to discover my inner artist), in which he spends a lot of time sitting watching people here and abroad and writing about who he imagines them to be and what he sees and hears and is reminded of. I could do that, I think. Except I don't know the Harold Pinters or have a past that anybody could possibly want to know about . . .
- get down to the beach. I had the whole thing planned out yesterday - down to the pencil I was going to take with me and the book I was going to write in and exactly where I was going to park the car and how the stones would feel under my bottom until I'd smoothed out a place for it to sit with my back against the sea wall and feel the sun on my face, but now I can't quite remember where yesterday went and why I didn't do it
- get down to the beach.
Sunday, 20 April 2008
Gone midnight on a Saturday
My neck creaks when I turn my head. The sound travels up into my ears and is loud.
On the desk:
- an empty packet of Tesco potato chips
- four shiny bright pennies in a stack
- a yellow highlighter
- The Very Best of Cat Stevens
- two ashtrays (one empty, one full)
- other empty things: a Games Workshop t-shirt packet and one that used to contain Sainsbury's breadsticks (or, because it's Sainsbury's and not Tesco, grissini), a glass, a can of John Smith's Original Bitter, a blue cigarette lighter, a one-pint plastic container of full-fat milk
- a tea towel
- the end of a roll of toilet tissue
- a tiny pillow made out of a shiny gold fabric with 'ANNIE X' written on it
- a hole punch
- some money-off Tesco vouchers
- several unpaid bills (including one from the Norwich Diocesan Board of Finance. The ground rent I owe it - from 2001 at £1.25 a year - is now £10), and some unanswered letters
- a phone
- speakers attached to the computer and music coming out of them:
Days (Kirsty MacColl)
There's a CD player on top of a fridge in a torrid Nicosia kitchen. It hasn't rained for months and everything is burning and I am in tears realising that there is nowhere to go from here except away. The children must have been in bed (they were very small then)
Out of time (Rolling Stones)
I am at a concert. Chris Farlowe continues singing this when the power fails and there's only his voice and the drums until it comes back on
Sun arise (Rolf Harris)
I can harmonise with this, but am ashamed to admit it
Stir it up (Bob Marley and the Wailers)
I am a teacher working at a high school in the Jamaican bush when I buy Johnny Nash's Greatest Hits and hear this for the first time. I am in my early 20s. Along with Guava Jelly, it introduces me to the idea that music can enter you via your ears and the soles of your feet and reach the parts that nothing else does.
My students take me to parties you can only get to by walking miles and miles and miles in pitch blackness because roads don't go anywhere near there and people are all very tall and dark and handsome and whisper things in your ear and dance far too close and hold you with a hand in the small of your back while they touch your body with theirs and yours wonders how on earth it can carry on doing this for a single moment longer because surely any minute now it'll dissolve and sink to the ground or somebody will notice and word will get back and you'll be out of a job . . . oh
One day some time later I leave the Johnny Nash LP too long in the sun and it melts.
Back in the high life (Steve Winwood)
I am driving very fast along tiny Norfolk by-roads to the hotel where I'm running a week-long training course for junior civil-service managers. The hotel is being renovated and there's no hot water and the group dynamic is becoming quite interesting. It's lunchtime and I've been home to have a shower. I am now on my way back. The car windows are open and I've turned the music up loud.
Later, after the scheduled training's finished and before we all go to our separate rooms to get ready for dinner, some of us are sitting in the bar and I'm drawn into conversation by someone who looks straight through my eyes and holds my hand and tells me things.
I am captivated.
+++
My mother used to tell me that I was too easily led. Maybe she just didn't want to believe that I rarely went anywhere I didn't want to go . . .
On the desk:
- an empty packet of Tesco potato chips
- four shiny bright pennies in a stack
- a yellow highlighter
- The Very Best of Cat Stevens
- two ashtrays (one empty, one full)
- other empty things: a Games Workshop t-shirt packet and one that used to contain Sainsbury's breadsticks (or, because it's Sainsbury's and not Tesco, grissini), a glass, a can of John Smith's Original Bitter, a blue cigarette lighter, a one-pint plastic container of full-fat milk
- a tea towel
- the end of a roll of toilet tissue
- a tiny pillow made out of a shiny gold fabric with 'ANNIE X' written on it
- a hole punch
- some money-off Tesco vouchers
- several unpaid bills (including one from the Norwich Diocesan Board of Finance. The ground rent I owe it - from 2001 at £1.25 a year - is now £10), and some unanswered letters
- a phone
- speakers attached to the computer and music coming out of them:
Days (Kirsty MacColl)
There's a CD player on top of a fridge in a torrid Nicosia kitchen. It hasn't rained for months and everything is burning and I am in tears realising that there is nowhere to go from here except away. The children must have been in bed (they were very small then)
Out of time (Rolling Stones)
I am at a concert. Chris Farlowe continues singing this when the power fails and there's only his voice and the drums until it comes back on
Sun arise (Rolf Harris)
I can harmonise with this, but am ashamed to admit it
Stir it up (Bob Marley and the Wailers)
I am a teacher working at a high school in the Jamaican bush when I buy Johnny Nash's Greatest Hits and hear this for the first time. I am in my early 20s. Along with Guava Jelly, it introduces me to the idea that music can enter you via your ears and the soles of your feet and reach the parts that nothing else does.
My students take me to parties you can only get to by walking miles and miles and miles in pitch blackness because roads don't go anywhere near there and people are all very tall and dark and handsome and whisper things in your ear and dance far too close and hold you with a hand in the small of your back while they touch your body with theirs and yours wonders how on earth it can carry on doing this for a single moment longer because surely any minute now it'll dissolve and sink to the ground or somebody will notice and word will get back and you'll be out of a job . . . oh
One day some time later I leave the Johnny Nash LP too long in the sun and it melts.
Back in the high life (Steve Winwood)
I am driving very fast along tiny Norfolk by-roads to the hotel where I'm running a week-long training course for junior civil-service managers. The hotel is being renovated and there's no hot water and the group dynamic is becoming quite interesting. It's lunchtime and I've been home to have a shower. I am now on my way back. The car windows are open and I've turned the music up loud.
Later, after the scheduled training's finished and before we all go to our separate rooms to get ready for dinner, some of us are sitting in the bar and I'm drawn into conversation by someone who looks straight through my eyes and holds my hand and tells me things.
I am captivated.
+++
My mother used to tell me that I was too easily led. Maybe she just didn't want to believe that I rarely went anywhere I didn't want to go . . .
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