This is a useless security announcement. Please do not do anything which could lead to useless security announcements. If you do anything, you may hear a useless security announcement which will sound like this: "This is a useless security announcement. Please do not do anything which could lead to a useless security announcement."
These announcements are made for your safety. Cameras are watching everything you do, for your safety. If being watched by unseen strangers doesn't make you feel safe, you're obviously up to something, which we knew already. We watched the thought cross your mind. That's the kind of thing that leads to useless security announcements, innit? Are you even listening? No? You can't even hear these announcements anymore, can you? Just like you don't notice the cameras. Hmm... Well, a placid citizen is a safe citizen. Safe for me.
Keep calm and and carry on.
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Monday, December 19, 2011
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Overheard in Hampstead Heath today
"I just want to live somewhere nicer."
- A woman in an expensive coat, walking along toward Swain's lane and talking on her mobile.
He: "You're just standing up for yourself then, aren't you?"
She: "Yeah, I guess so. I'm just getting what I want. That's what people do, isnt't it? Just take what they need?"
He: "Yeah."
- A young couple walking back from the market.
- A woman in an expensive coat, walking along toward Swain's lane and talking on her mobile.
He: "You're just standing up for yourself then, aren't you?"
She: "Yeah, I guess so. I'm just getting what I want. That's what people do, isnt't it? Just take what they need?"
He: "Yeah."
- A young couple walking back from the market.
Friday, December 02, 2011
Monday, October 10, 2011
The recollection of perspective
The squeal of the steel gate splits my ears and concentration,
breaking my brief enjoyment of a half-petalled hydrangea's head.
How did I become this - all metal gates and distraction -
when once I was unfenced wilderness, big sky?
Was I ever that? Or did I fear it?
Is this London garden gate the dead end of my defences,
the prison to which I fled?
The sky turns, and so do I, tiny on the planet's edge.
Vast midnight waits - but here and there, a star.
breaking my brief enjoyment of a half-petalled hydrangea's head.
How did I become this - all metal gates and distraction -
when once I was unfenced wilderness, big sky?
Was I ever that? Or did I fear it?
Is this London garden gate the dead end of my defences,
the prison to which I fled?
The sky turns, and so do I, tiny on the planet's edge.
Vast midnight waits - but here and there, a star.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Monday writing group
Here’s what I wrote at our writing group on Monday. Just in case anyone who isn’t part of the group should happen to read this, we meet every few weeks to discuss writing and our various projects, and just to write. This week we tried out some exercises and games from Jamie Cat Callan’s ‘The Writer’s Toolbox’, which Chad and Michelle gave me for my birthday.
Exercise 1
First, we used randomly selected prompts from the toolbox as opening lines, non-sequitur turning points and phrases to be incorporated into endings, writing for about five minutes per section. Here are my (unedited) results – Callan’s prompts are italicised, the rest is mine:
He swore on his mother’s grave, but he swore on just about everything. Swearing was like an anchor for him – a weight he plunged into the waves of uncertainty, hoping it would reach some solid ground and still the meandering of his doubting mind. There was not, however, anything solid enough to hold such a wandering organ as was his mind – and so his oaths were scattered on the tides, as shallow as lies.
It wasn’t so much that I had been blind to the truth. It was just that I had seen the truth differently. If his lies were shallow, mine were deep – far deeper that the grave that held his mother, deeper than the seas of his doubt. Deep enough to believe; and if you believe it, a lie is the same as truth, as far as you experience it. So – true or not, sworn upon or merely accepted – our truth was that we were brothers.
The thing she did to the brakes on the Honda was what made us realise it. When I say ‘she’, I don’t mean that poor woman down in the hole in the ground. I mean our sister, of course, the woman who stood between me and my fool of a brother, trying to anchor his weakness with strong words.
“I don’t care what happened to the brakes, or what the outcome of the investigation is,” he whispered, leaning toward us with tears slipping from beneath his sunglasses. “I swear, on her grave – that you’re our family, and we’ll stand by you.”
“Of course we will,” I said, squeezing her hand from the other side.
And I believed it.
Exercise 2
For this one, we selected three ‘Sixth Sense Cards’ and wrote for a few minutes on each. They were ‘pink fuzzy lint’, ‘the sound of Marcie’s feet’ and ‘the bad-smelling microwave’. Mine ended up linking together again, though that wasn’t a requirement.
Pink fuzzy lint stuck in the filter of the dryer; the lint is there but the sweater it came from is gone, and the woman who wore it is gone, and her breasts that looked so good snuggled up in that pink fuzz, they’re gone too. Bounced right out of my life and into some smooth-talking, guitar-playing sonofabitch’s pickup truck.
The sound of Marcie’s feet startle me as she pads up behind me.
“Whatcha lookin’ at, Daddy?” she says.
“Oh, just doin’ some laundry,” I tell her without turning around.
I shove the filer back in without pulling the fuzz off. It’s about all I’ve got left of Marcie’s mother.
There had been her costume jewellery, of course. When I heard about her and the guitar-man, I put all that into the microwave and pushed the ‘Defrost – Pizza’ button. It sparked and sputtered some. Didn’t do much to the jewellery but the microwave smells like burnt plastic every time I reheat a cup of coffee now.
She never came looking for the jewellery so I almost wrecked the microwave for nothing.
Exercise 3
We all chose different things for our last exercise, and I went back to the first one, with different random choices from the opening lines, non-sequiturs, and endings. This time I set off trying to be less linear and structured, but I think there’s an implied story anyway. Callan’s lines are italicised again.
Charlotte ate green peppers all day long
long
long
long
were the days
and the peppers were sweet and wet
spraying green droplets across her palette and her tongue
as she crushed morsels between her perfect teeth.
Pale green juice poured down her bright pink gums and across her hard white teeth
and danced tango on her tongue.
We were drinking champagne
and losing our shirts –
bubbles on our tongues
nipples in the breeze
boots to our behinds
as the credit crunch crashed down
like Charlotte’s teeth shredding the wealth springing from her pepper plants.
He did
what he did
what we couldn’t do
with all our expensive effervescence
frothing round our lips…
He made a shirt from newspaper
and a hat from a magazine
Charlotte read him like an open book
but in the end
she gave him peppers from her vine…
Exercise 1
First, we used randomly selected prompts from the toolbox as opening lines, non-sequitur turning points and phrases to be incorporated into endings, writing for about five minutes per section. Here are my (unedited) results – Callan’s prompts are italicised, the rest is mine:
He swore on his mother’s grave, but he swore on just about everything. Swearing was like an anchor for him – a weight he plunged into the waves of uncertainty, hoping it would reach some solid ground and still the meandering of his doubting mind. There was not, however, anything solid enough to hold such a wandering organ as was his mind – and so his oaths were scattered on the tides, as shallow as lies.
It wasn’t so much that I had been blind to the truth. It was just that I had seen the truth differently. If his lies were shallow, mine were deep – far deeper that the grave that held his mother, deeper than the seas of his doubt. Deep enough to believe; and if you believe it, a lie is the same as truth, as far as you experience it. So – true or not, sworn upon or merely accepted – our truth was that we were brothers.
The thing she did to the brakes on the Honda was what made us realise it. When I say ‘she’, I don’t mean that poor woman down in the hole in the ground. I mean our sister, of course, the woman who stood between me and my fool of a brother, trying to anchor his weakness with strong words.
“I don’t care what happened to the brakes, or what the outcome of the investigation is,” he whispered, leaning toward us with tears slipping from beneath his sunglasses. “I swear, on her grave – that you’re our family, and we’ll stand by you.”
“Of course we will,” I said, squeezing her hand from the other side.
And I believed it.
Exercise 2
For this one, we selected three ‘Sixth Sense Cards’ and wrote for a few minutes on each. They were ‘pink fuzzy lint’, ‘the sound of Marcie’s feet’ and ‘the bad-smelling microwave’. Mine ended up linking together again, though that wasn’t a requirement.
Pink fuzzy lint stuck in the filter of the dryer; the lint is there but the sweater it came from is gone, and the woman who wore it is gone, and her breasts that looked so good snuggled up in that pink fuzz, they’re gone too. Bounced right out of my life and into some smooth-talking, guitar-playing sonofabitch’s pickup truck.
The sound of Marcie’s feet startle me as she pads up behind me.
“Whatcha lookin’ at, Daddy?” she says.
“Oh, just doin’ some laundry,” I tell her without turning around.
I shove the filer back in without pulling the fuzz off. It’s about all I’ve got left of Marcie’s mother.
There had been her costume jewellery, of course. When I heard about her and the guitar-man, I put all that into the microwave and pushed the ‘Defrost – Pizza’ button. It sparked and sputtered some. Didn’t do much to the jewellery but the microwave smells like burnt plastic every time I reheat a cup of coffee now.
She never came looking for the jewellery so I almost wrecked the microwave for nothing.
Exercise 3
We all chose different things for our last exercise, and I went back to the first one, with different random choices from the opening lines, non-sequiturs, and endings. This time I set off trying to be less linear and structured, but I think there’s an implied story anyway. Callan’s lines are italicised again.
Charlotte ate green peppers all day long
long
long
long
were the days
and the peppers were sweet and wet
spraying green droplets across her palette and her tongue
as she crushed morsels between her perfect teeth.
Pale green juice poured down her bright pink gums and across her hard white teeth
and danced tango on her tongue.
We were drinking champagne
and losing our shirts –
bubbles on our tongues
nipples in the breeze
boots to our behinds
as the credit crunch crashed down
like Charlotte’s teeth shredding the wealth springing from her pepper plants.
He did
what he did
what we couldn’t do
with all our expensive effervescence
frothing round our lips…
He made a shirt from newspaper
and a hat from a magazine
Charlotte read him like an open book
but in the end
she gave him peppers from her vine…
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Passing
Kisses change from fire to tepid water, the vigor of the body fades like fireflies at dawn, like the jewels of the city seeping into twilight grey, like a flock of birds settling into sleep in a frost-glazed tree. Every moment is quickened by its passing but nothing seems important. Possibilities become less possible, and fewer in number.
I want to love it all before I wave goodbye - I want to love what is and what has been and I want to love it fading. If I say I love it does it mean I do? Or do I just witness the changing?
I want to love it all before I wave goodbye - I want to love what is and what has been and I want to love it fading. If I say I love it does it mean I do? Or do I just witness the changing?
Tuesday, March 08, 2011
Grandma R.
When she went - suffocated, finally, by the miracle of modern medicine, she left behind: $25 unpaid credit (not late, you know, just not yet paid); a complicated lifting chair; and so much unsaid.
(Not said by her and not said to her: "I remember it differently, that time - you don't remember because you weren't there." Why did she go, what did she feel? Now no one can remind her where she was, where the children were or with whom. Not that they ever did remind her; fairly or unfairly they blamed her but outwardly held their peace. We are all English, after all.)
There was also the small matter of her body - and it was a good deal smaller by the time they finished cutting her up in surgery, looking for the tumour and all its many children. Her body ended up in a cemetary in Prince George, BC, the same place her mother lies, unmarked, unvisited, beneath the grass. We're not cemetary visitors, us - something to do with with religiously despising the material body, or just an inability to confront death.
Her children sorted through her things - her books, her clothes, the vast numbers of cheap and useful household things she could not resist buying, from the Clapper to a screwdriver with every type of head invented. I was given a book of Tennyson's poems, barely held together with plastic tape on its leather cover and inscribed to my biological Grandfather from his mother. That was how I learned his given name - Gilbert - which I had never heard before. I still don't know his mother's name and I all I know about him are contradictory stories - he's either the abandoned ex-husband of a wandering woman or the indifferent or perhaps even cruel but certainly absent husband whose involvement with his children ended with conception. I treasure the book (in storage) as a connection to the past, whatever it was. Grandma thought the book was important enough to drag over from England and keep until her death - maybe she planned to give it back some day?
She left my parents the clock they despised. They are the generation that turns the hated key, hearing in the grinding of complex innards:
The whole family came (jumpers and sweets, beano and dandy, even dampness and distrust crossed the pond) and finally buried her in a hole in Pince Goerge, B.C. next to her mother (her mother, who came but might not have known where she was) (her mother, who raised her children for a while) (her mother, who was the convert and enforcer of the family's conversion).
And what I thought at the time she died was what a pity to end up there, where I started, the place I fled, the last place I'd want to end up - but then maybe she was fleeing the mirror of the familiar, as I have.
(Not said by her and not said to her: "I remember it differently, that time - you don't remember because you weren't there." Why did she go, what did she feel? Now no one can remind her where she was, where the children were or with whom. Not that they ever did remind her; fairly or unfairly they blamed her but outwardly held their peace. We are all English, after all.)
There was also the small matter of her body - and it was a good deal smaller by the time they finished cutting her up in surgery, looking for the tumour and all its many children. Her body ended up in a cemetary in Prince George, BC, the same place her mother lies, unmarked, unvisited, beneath the grass. We're not cemetary visitors, us - something to do with with religiously despising the material body, or just an inability to confront death.
Her children sorted through her things - her books, her clothes, the vast numbers of cheap and useful household things she could not resist buying, from the Clapper to a screwdriver with every type of head invented. I was given a book of Tennyson's poems, barely held together with plastic tape on its leather cover and inscribed to my biological Grandfather from his mother. That was how I learned his given name - Gilbert - which I had never heard before. I still don't know his mother's name and I all I know about him are contradictory stories - he's either the abandoned ex-husband of a wandering woman or the indifferent or perhaps even cruel but certainly absent husband whose involvement with his children ended with conception. I treasure the book (in storage) as a connection to the past, whatever it was. Grandma thought the book was important enough to drag over from England and keep until her death - maybe she planned to give it back some day?
She left my parents the clock they despised. They are the generation that turns the hated key, hearing in the grinding of complex innards:
Ask not for whom they tollShe came from England (west midlands, small towns, birmingham, WWII, marriage, children, ballroom dance, romance, divorce court, gretna green, RAF mechanic, her father's name, her husband's name, her second husband's name - the one that stuck though he did not - parental forgiveness and a return to their religion, deaths of husbands, feuds with siblings, children moved abroad, children fervent with apocalyptic prophecy and children married young, a child divorced, a child abroad, a family abroad, a child in jail, and all the children breeding a host of grandchildren, a child fostered and adopted and a mother shrunken with age, senility turning her into a child...) to Canada, fleeing Thatcher and the winds of change in the motherland.
(those blasted chimes -
those noisome, trite, Big Ben imitations
their incessant, infernal ringing, day and night,
but particularly at night)
their ringing, it is for thee...
The whole family came (jumpers and sweets, beano and dandy, even dampness and distrust crossed the pond) and finally buried her in a hole in Pince Goerge, B.C. next to her mother (her mother, who came but might not have known where she was) (her mother, who raised her children for a while) (her mother, who was the convert and enforcer of the family's conversion).
And what I thought at the time she died was what a pity to end up there, where I started, the place I fled, the last place I'd want to end up - but then maybe she was fleeing the mirror of the familiar, as I have.
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