Dave and Phyl were having sex in her cottage outside Chipping Ongar

Sorry, that was a spoiler - but it's a sentence I may never now forget, a classic of its kind, and now it's in a place where I can always find it again.

Over at Fisking Central they're taking quite the interest in this year's Bad Sex Awards - the prize bestowed by the Literary Review on the worst (ahem) purple passage... I'm sure you get the drift. Nominees included the gnomelike Irving Welsh; amusingly, the list of past winners seems to include no women. Do we write about it better? Or do we just know when to stop?

Anyway, the prize has gone to Iain Hollingshead, for his novel Twentysomething, but the guys at Fisking reckon Will Self was robbed. Take a look.

STOP PRESS

Further research (why do I not simply remember these things from one year to the next?) reveals that Wendy Perriam won the 2002 award for, among other bits, this:

"She closed her eyes, saw his dark-as-treacle-toffee eyes gazing down at her. Weirdly, he was clad in pin-stripes at the same time as being naked. Pin-stripes were erotic, the uniform of fathers, two-dimensional fathers."

elegant and inspiring

As part of my celebration of Knowledge Week on Glaucoma (National Health Library), I give you Percy Lavon Julian. He was born on April 11 (my birthday, if not my actual day of birth), 1899, and died on my brother's birthday (again, not his actual...), April 19, 1975.

Percy Julian was a research chemist who found affordable ways to synthesise cortisone, vitamins and other things from soybeans - sort of like a George Washington Carver of medicine. He was awarded 150 patents in his lifetime, and one of them was undoubtedly for his work on the synthesis of physostigmine - aka my very own 'poison eye drops', Pilocarpine! He is honoured now not only as a scientist but also as a man who overcame amazing obstacles - born the grandson of a slave, in Alabama - to a life of real and lasting achievement.

I've seen several pictures of him and I can say he seems to have been pretty damn elegant pretty much of the time. Even in his lab coat, frankly.

The Negro scientist now need neither to starve nor be condemned to a frustrating intellectual ghetto if he chooses pure science as a career, and one can see a promising future for his fresh and uninhibited imaginative power.

- Percy Julian

I spy, with my 85-year-old eye

Over at the National Library for Health, this week is National Knowledge Week on Glaucoma (it seems the National Health Librarians are as puzzled by prespositions as everyone else is) in which new research on glaucoma is made easily vailable to health care professionals, at great benefit to the community at large. This is not to be confused with Glaucoma Awareness Week, which was in June.

The first thing to know is that there is more than one kind of glaucoma. "Angle closure" - acute, as opposed to chronic - glaucoma is not covered by the National Library for Health's Knowledge Week. I suppose, because it is less common and more specific - that is, less of a 'public health' issue in the way that chronic, common, open angle glaucoma is.

Well, I'm a bit hurt. A bit miffed. I'm sure that making some up-to-date research more available to health care practitioners might help some young angle-closure glaucoma patient who otherwise runs the risk of being told she has migraine; but maybe they'll be doing that another time.

Come to that, I could have done with knowing a few things before I did (e.g., "acute angle-closure can become asymptomatic as it progresses over years"; "in fact, it can become sub-acute, as the angles narrow and the eyes become less able to maintain a healthy pressure in between 'acute attacks'"; and "nerve damage isn't the only kind of damage to the eye, so don't imagine, just because they say the nerve looks fine, that your eye has sustained no damage").

Other things I have learned, presented here as a public service:
1. If you are young, present with episodic pain in one eye, and that pain includes halos around lights & darkness of vision, and they diagnose migraines - ask to be tested for glaucoma just in case!

2. Classic acute glaucoma comes on at night, when the pupils are dilated in the poor light. If you have an attack and have no eye drops, or can't get to a hospital, go to bed. The eyes go into a resting position when you sleep which should allow them to normalise.

3. If you have glaucoma, read a lot and suffer from eyestrain, it is important - get reading glasses! Apparently it can raise the pressure (I've been asking doctors about eyestrain since - get this - 1987, and only just got a consultant to engage on the subject)

4. If you do yoga, headstands are out if you have glaucoma

5. If you have glaucoma and you are young, you will be an anomaly, possibly even being asked to sign autographs for trainee doctors, and you will have to ask for every scrap of information. Moat of the care is based on patients upwards of age fifty. Never stop asking.

6. Decongestant flu remedies, like DayNurse, NightNurse, etc, can raise the pressure in the eyes - who knew? Read the info in over-the-counter drugs.

7. Over-the-counter eye drops like Optrex are also out of the question

8. Acute, angle-closure glaucoma is more common in women than men - so where are all the women on the list below??

famous sufferers include:
Elvis Presley
Gore Vidal
James Joyce
Wild Bill Hickock
Claude Monet
Woody Harrelson
Alec Guinness
Astronaut John Glenn
Bill Cosby
Jilly Cooper
apparently, Galileo
Ray Charles
Jose Feliciano

See this week's Elegantly Dressed Wednesday post (coming up in, ahem, two days) for yet more on the glittering carousel that is Glaucoma Knowledge.

we ken't stend it

I read some cheering news the other day. Apparently, following last week's announcement that the London Olympics are expected to cost another £900m on top of their already infinite budget, 41% of Londoners (50%, according to the BBC's ad hoc reader poll) think we should just pull out now. and they haven't even asked me. A heartening 80% are seeing clearly enough to realise that the actual cost will be far more than even the newly-announced sum, and only 50% (I think it was) (still a worrying half, though) thought London stood to gain anything from the whole thing. (Mind you, I think a lot of those were the East London schoolchildren Tessa Jowell had been visiting, most of whom, she confidently assured reporters, fully expect to be personally taking part in the games - & I don't think 'ticket-collector on Gate Ten' is what they have in mind.)

Jowell says all this pessimism is ridiculous. Scarily, she predicts the Olympics will leave a legacy "for ever" in London. Duh. That's exactly what we're afraid of.

Ken Livingstone, meanwhile - our 'Mayor', remember? - the man who says he wants London to be a good place to live in? - is to be seen beaming merrily in the Guardian as he announces his intention to seek four terms in office. Strangely, he is quoted as saying: "When people get sick of me they will get rid of me." Erm -

But not to worry! He continues: "But I am sure that if I was not in post in 2012, I would be an honoured guest of the new mayor."

Well, discussing all this over the Sunday lunch, I said to Aunt Baroque (who is, handily, actually called Aunt B), "I think Ken's totally lost it, you know. He's lost the plot. He thinks he's omnipotent."

She's talking about upping sticks to Walton-on-Thames to escape the crippling costs of her Hounslow council tax. She shook her head sadly and replied: "He's certainly not the Ken we knew. He'll be going to work in a car, next."

cool, mum

Little Mlle Baroque is so fiendishly impressed that I am reading in the same line-up as Michael Rosen on Tuesday (Oxfam Bookshop, Marylebone High Street, 7.30pm, see previous post in Shameless Puffs section in sidebar) that she's told her friends, and they're impressed too. In fact, they're more than impressed. They're in awe.

We had a little melodrama earlier in the year. One of her friends (call her Miss P) announced (secretly, of course, to one girl who had to promise not to tell) that she was cutting herself. A few days later she announced (also secretly and to a different friend) that she was vomiting several times a day. One evening in my kitchen one of the girls (not mine) came in, shut the door, and said she had to talk to me. She was followed by another: "me too." And then by Mss B: "Me too!" The phone wires buzzed with mums weighing up thises and thats, and next day the girls took Little Miss P to their very kind and sympathetic Head of Year, who referred her to a school counsellor.

The situation seemed to be in hand until the day she handed yet another friend a pile of letters, each addressed to a different member of their little set, and said: "Don't give these out until I tell you to." That friend turned to Mlle B for support and the two of them took the letters to the park and read them. I heard all about it at dinnertime. Of course - you know, you've guessed it - they were long, carefully-written, individual, deeply imagined and categorical suicide notes.

It's a week later - the evening before the meeting that's been set up between Miss P's mum and the Head of Year. I had, in my role as Mother Hen N16, rung Little Miss P the weekend before, told her I expected her to ring my daughter and her friend every couple of hours to assure them she was still all right, given her a few home truths ("nothing goes on forever - nothing, do you hear me, and especially not the way you feel right now"), made her promise not to do anything rash, and said I fully expected to see her in Baroque Mansions within the following week.

It's fortuitous timing. She is literally shaking with the fear of telling her mother. I sit her down on the pink velvet couch (I found it on the pavement one time in E8), and the other girls sit on the floor around us with their arms around their knees, and we all have a chat about feelings, and mothers and schools and statutory duty of care, and how to solve problems that seem insoluble. In the end, with all the girls either crying or nearly crying (in their 12-year-old way), I say to Miss P - "well, honey, it's like the book said. You can't go over it. You can't go under it..."

At which the other two chime in unison: "Oh, NO!"

"That's right," I say. "You've got to go THROUGH it."

Miss P jumps a little with recognition, looks at me alertly, goes: "wha- what?"

In the end, all four of us were dancing around the living room, laughing, reciting the entire text of Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen at the tops of our voices; then the girls had something to eat, and Miss P went home.

The meeting went well. Of course her mum didn't kill her, and she is a much happier girl now. Next weekend they're all going shopping for party dresses.

Little Mlle B says her friends think I'm really cool. And they all want to know if I'm actually going to get to talk to him.

you love fashion! admit it, we know you do

My friend Sinead's wonderful sister, Roisin Wilson - one of the fabulous Wilsons of Battersea - has announced her newest venture, which is about to become the de rigeur website for all clothes-horse questers after The Knowledge. The Fashion knowledge, that is.

www.youlovefashion.com will bring all the latest insider news of local fashion sales, Factory Outlet events, vintage opportunities and of all kinds of bargain ideas to these dreary winter months and beyond. I for one know I need as much sparkle as I can get.

The site is up for registration now, and goes live and kicking on December 5th. According to Roisin, if she gets 500 registrations before launch date she will be so happy she will do a bit of shouting and then go to the 500th person's house/flat/shed and personally deliver to them the fashionista's fave, a bottle of Moet.

I blew my only chance - I registered too soon. But there is still hope for you.

ten things I would never, ever, ever do

On command of Dave Hill:

1. grow my hair long & flat, go without make up and wear Birkenstocks, like I did when I was 16 (but I had an excuse then: it was either that or look like Abba)

2. let other people set my agenda (kids aren't really people, right?)

3. take almost anything for granted - seems an unbelievable luxury

4. (probably) own my own home again - & don't even talk to me about the goddamn housing crisis in London, which the government would have us believe affects only young and "low income" people - there are "affordable housing" schemes you have to earn £50K to get on, & just don't get me started! Teachers in "key worker" housing with outgoings of £1,200 a month - & I'm just a "non-key" worker - that is, not very important - only trying to provide a home for three kids - one of whom never comes here any more because the flat's too small. Thanks, guys! I just hope I end up in the same old age home as one of my friends. Oh, and I can NEVER RETIRE.

5. want to be single (notwithstanding Noosa Lee's eulogy on breakfast in bed; I can't tell you how much I hate crumbs in the sheets; & now I've said that she'll never even come stay with me once she's moved back to the tropics, as she so quaintly calls it)

6. not write (again; see 2)

7. wear those sort of humorous earrings that look like things, eg Christmas puddings

8. countenance intolerance, righteousness, bigotry, small thinking, prejudice, the Bush administration or America's Next Top Model

9. stop believing in the power of love, education, literacy, and the efficacy of sitting quietly in a very beautiful, old church

10. give up

To be honest, in the course of a very busy life I have actually done most of the things I once swore never to do! I have little faith in grandiose claims. I've learned that in the right circumstances - or at least under certain conditions - almost anything can happen. So here, as a bonus, are:

ten things I once swore I would never do

1. nod politely when I really, really, really disagree with someone

2. watch EastEnders

3. bottle-feed (turns out it makes a difference how close together you have them!)

3. work for a council (never again, mind)

4. get divorced

5. be ungrateful - or, as Ms Rational Self-Determination calls it, "just plain dissatisfied"; like her, I seem to be just plain dissatisfied every single day of my life, no matter how much I swear I mustn't be

6. hit someone (or indeed throw a large hardback copy of The Corrections at their nose)

7. eat squid

8. be single for nine years

9. listen to country music out of choice

10. be played by Jennifer Saunders in the film of my life (but alas, it seems I must)








"You know, I think she'd be a great catch for someone..."

Tag ten people? Lord.

the struggle for knowledge - I mean sausages

For Thanksgiving weekend, some more American food. I mean 'American', of course; in America they call these 'Italian sausages' and we used to have them in chunks in our spaghetti sauce. They were my favourite, after meat loaf & scalloped potatoes.

Now, there is a big difference anyway between every American sausage and every English one; and there is also a difference between the various 'ethnic' foods - Italian, Chinese, Mexican, Thai, etc - as served up in the States and in Britain. So the fact that 'Italian sausages' in this country are nothing like the ones I loved as a child has never surprised me. They seem to be basically English sausages with peppers, chili, tomatoes in them.

I don't have very many 'ex-pat moments', but those I do have are usually about food. Over the years I've tried with little success to replicate the classic American 'link or patty'. A sachet of "sausage seasoning" for intrepid home-sausage-makers, sent untold years ago by a friend, was too salty to work very well - but I did extrapolate some principles from it. Sage, fennel - but what is the classic recipe? I know someone, somewhere, knows it.

Fennel also turned out to be a key to the Italian ones. (How we struggle for knowledge in this life!) Since I worked that out I put fennel in my sauces. It has helped, especially where the recipe may say "use the best Italian sausages you can afford". But it's still never quite right.

So! Yesterday, dawdling home from the Angel, I stopped - peckish - in the little Italian deli in Cross Street. (What is it called?) And then it happened. There - sitting right where they have been for probably the past twenty years, and almost certainly for the fifteen I have been living in N16 - they were. In a pack. Fat, clearly Italian, fennel sausages. Even their label was in Italian. I tell you, I bought them so fast I still don't know how much they were - and I don't care. And how lovely were they? That solidity, that authoritative texture! They so didn't turn to mush in the pan. And they were divinely delicious.

Here's what I did with them:

onion, sliced, cooked gently with garlic in olive oil while the sausages brown. Two bay leaves, some marjoram, some thyme. Chop sausages into four pieces each when they're done enough to not fall apart (but anyway, they won't!). Add a tin of borlotti beans and one of chopped tomatoes. Let cook for some time and then have on your pasta.

Give thanks!

not what the pilgrims imagined

Staying with clothes for a moment, - and anyway I feel I did all this a bit backwards, with yesterday's Thanksgiving scene - I am very pleased to say that I have discovered the wondrous Manolo's Shoe Blog (click the link in the sidebar). It's not the blog of Manolo Blahnik, who must be far too busy designing shoes that look like insects, and being filthy rich, for that sort of thing; rather, it is the blog of a kind man called Manolo who simply wants everyone to be happy, and not wear Birkenstocks.

And I love Manolo, because (via the ever-bounteous Erin at A Dress A Day) he has brought us this gem-encrusted gem:

"However, the Manolo he only mentions the blog of the Harriet Miers in the passing, because today the Harriet she has brought this website of fashion atrocity to the attention of the Manolo. (This page of the fashion atrocity website, it almost sent the Manolo into the convulsions, as if he were the small Japanese child watching the frenetic episode of the Pokemon.)"

Oddly, it had almost the same effect on the Ms Baroque.

And be sure to check out Manolo's shoe disasters.

elegantly dressed turkey

Maybe elegantly isn't really the word: look at that celery! But this picture is a masterful piece of propaganda, in the most favourable sense of that word. Everyone looks so rosy, and the table is so crisp, it stops questions at your eyes, long before they reach the brain.

For one thing, why does that poor old woman not even get to wear her nice clothes, like everybody else? It'll be because she went, "Oh, pshaw! What, and do all that cooking? Don't worry about that, dear! My blue sprigged is fine."

I heard once that Norman Rockwell, the artist (of course) originally gave the adults around the table a glass of wine with their dinner but that the Saturday Evening Post - whose cover this was for - refused it, on the grounds that it wouldn't go down well in the Midwest; so in the end Grandma has to make do with her blue cotton dress and a glass of WATER.

By shrinking the field of vision the way he has, Rockwell says: don't look around at the world, don't look at anybody else's celebration, don't look outside this room: don't look away from this table! The field is so narrow even the participants have to crowd eagerly forward just to get into it, and the viewer never even notices what isn't in the picture. (It is a beautiful composition, don't you think so?)

In short, this is a magnificently elegant paean to health, plenty (but not excess), making do, uncomplicated happiness, family, wholesomeness, prosperity, bouffant hairstyles, starched white tablecloths and all the rest of it. This was published in November 1943. It says that everything the Pilgrims came for was right, that the American way of life is worth fighting for, and that peace will prevail.

Just for tomorrow, let's believe in it.

Happy Thanksgiving!

you gotta hand it to her

Quote of the week, from Dot Branning: "Just think - people didn't used to have inside lavvies, and now we got aromatherapy! Ain't progress amazing."

flowers - a dream

Okay, so yesterday I was resting my eyes on the sofa, and drifted off for a minute. Bizarrely, as it is when you're sleeping, the doorbell rang - aggressive and jangling. By the time I'd leapt the five yards to the entryphone it rang two more times, hard, & when I picked up the handset I could hear a loud buzzing, as of a neighbour buzzing whoever-it-was in. Classic, they rang three bells - right?

So I'm saying, "hello? hello?" and a sarcastic voice says: "did you hear me say 'parcel'?" I say, "No. I heard buzzing." He retorts (honestly, how this got to be an argument I have no idea), "parcel." I'm not liking the feel of it, so I say "I haven't ordered anything." He says, "listen, do you want it or not?" I say, "I said, haven't ordered anything. What is it?" He says, "It might be a box of flowers or something." I say, "What number is it for?" He says, "the one I pressed." This is a singularly dodgy response, so I say, "Well, I haven't ordered anything," whereupon he sneers, "suit yourself," and leaves.

Now, if one of my kids had handled that exchange in the same way, and the so-called delivery guy had sounded like that, I'd have been proud of them for not letting him in! However, you, as an omniscient reader, can see what's coming.

This morning I called work to say I wasn't coming in yet, and my manager says to me: "Did you get your flowers?"

I said to her, "there are no flowers in the urban jungle."

maybe someone's trying to tell me something

I should try and relax a little more. I know I'm not an adept, though I do love a hot bath & red toenails.

As all the world (poor things) knows, I have been here on my uppers (and my back) for several days now, not reading (much - which scuppers the bath idea) and not writing. (But I had a mad moment and wrote an email in which I pitched an idea - what was I thinking!?!? And the editor loves it: that's two more books to read. It was a good idea.) I am trying very hard to keep the Baroqueness of Baroque Mansions in its usual Baroque state in relatively adverse (for me: I know some people love lazing about eating bonbons with nothing much to do, as I was chastised by a friend this very afternoon) conditions.

This is precisely the sort of situation in which one would, in the old days, have received a card (with $5 in it if lucky) or a bracing phone call from Gran Gran Baroque (though I remember once she wrote instead to my mother, lamenting that I seemed to be "wasting my life" - I'm not sure if she sent her $5). Gran Gran was a woman about whom anecdote clusters far too thick for me to try and piece it out here, but I can share a few stray facts: 1) she was a firm, and I mean firm, believer in picking yourself up and carrying on (highest praise was to be a "real trouper"); 2) when they made her retire, at 70, the first thing she did was break her arm shovelling snow, and the second thing she did was get a job; 3) she had the best legs in the family even at the age of eighty; and 4) her Phrase For All Occasions was "blessings on you." (The 5th, bonus, fact is that just yesterday I told a friend a long story all about how my grandmother used to say that.)

Thanks to Non-Working Monkey for this picture. And by the way, she recently went to see a psychic. Some coincidence, surely??? Perhaps I should ask monkeymother.

in which I let fall the windows of my mine eyes; sleeping and waking

The Shakespeare was my friend's idea in the first place. Boredom was setting in; I'd fallen asleep three times trying to listen to Nigel Slater reading Toast.

She was right: I needed something a bit more dynamic than just being read to, and some first-class voices seemed just the thing. I had described to her the Audiobook I downloaded last night, thinking it might be fun to practice how well I knew the Odes: Realms of Gold. Ah, but it was poems and letters (I love Keats' letters, as it goes, in the Oxford complete edition from I think 1950, in red cloth) with narration. So instead of congratulating oneself on one's ability to follow the middle bits from the Nightingale ("I knew that!") one has to listen to: "Those were difficult years for the Keats children, who had to learn to fend for themselves following the deaths of their parents. Then George announced his intention to sail for America, leaving Tom and John to look after Fanny. When Tom was diagnosed with consumption, a common disease in those days, no one knew that John too would die of the same..." with background music from the Romantic Period.

She suggested something funny. A Midsummer Night's Dream. As You Like It. Excellent advice! I do love Twelfth Night.

So Ms Mug here goes back on the web and looks for the Best One. Won't even look at anything abridged (oddly, considering it's Shakespeare, they call it "Dramatised"). Looks for pukka cast lists and favours Caedmon audio. Plays the clips. Goes for the two with the liveliest clips. (I did leave, reluctantly, the Gielgud, as it was A Winter's Tale, but I now can't think why I did that. It seemed depressing at the time.)

So what did I choose? The Tempest. And Othello. (It's all a bit pointless. What I really, really, really want is to be happily ensconced in reading MacNeice, in preparation for the brilliant paper I want to write, and indeed am delighted to have a commission, an invitation, to write, about Autumn Journal, one of the seminal poems of the 20th century. I do need to do the reading. I need to take notes: the poem is 50 pages long. I am, or was, excited about rereading Autumn Journal in London, in the autumn, but it will soon, at this rate, be more like a winter's tale.)

So, lying on the couch with my eyes closed and the disembodied Othello on my laptop with no faces to help me keep it straight, while Little Miss B watched reality TV with earphones (what a life), I fell asleep, perchance to dream - and woke with a start just half an hour ago from a really nasty, frightening, horrible nightmare. It was HORRIBLE. The iBook was busily playing the scene between Anna Massey and Celia Johnson where they're sweetly chatting to one another about how much they love and honour their husbands etc, singing little songs while they brush each other's hair and get ready for bed. And we know what happens then. The little song was the worst part of the nightmare. In the dream I actually bit someone trying to get it to stop.

My eyes are really sore - more sore today, probably because I'm sitting here doing this. And the picture above is not quite as frightening as my dream.

not really New Year's yet

From “Autumn Journal” (Part XXIV)

Sleep serene, avoid the backward
Glance; go forward, dreams, and do not halt
(Behind you in the desert stands a token
Of doubt — a pillar of salt).
Sleep, the past, and wake, the future,
And walk out promptly through the open door;
But you, my coward doubts, may go on sleeping,
You need not wake again — not any more.
The New Year comes with bombs, it is too late
To dose the dead with honourable intentions:
If you have honour to spare, employ it on the living;
The dead are dead as Nineteen-Thirty-Eight.
Sleep to the noise of running water
To-morrow to be crossed, however deep;
This is no river of the dead or Lethe,
To-night we sleep
On the banks of Rubicon — the die is cast;
There will be time to audit
The accounts later, there will be sunlight later
And the equation will come out at last.


Louis MacNeice

the lasers are green

... and life is still okay. A short post here, with the text view enlarged to about a million, in case anyone is wondering how my rude consultant was yesterday. I'll tell you: he's lovely, now that baby's born! I think it's the first: he beamed when I asked, said he's got "a big boy" and he's called Tom, and told me: "It's wonderful." Tom Jeckyll - nice name.

I've had 20 laser burns (sorry to the squeamish) in each iris, and it was not as bad as expected. Every laser was less painful than the one laser I had in my right eye in, I think, 1993 - though some were, admittedly, awful. Apparently if they're too hot they make a bubble of gas that then pops in your eye, or something like that; it feels as if it's popping in your brain. But that was only about five of them. The consultant was very informative and pleasant, told me exactly what was going on, let me stop and rest when it popped, and kept saying things like, "okay, only six more to go".

I was the youngest person, as always, by at least 20 years. The others were all having the same laser treatment I had in my twenties - & I'm off the map. (One old guy, when I got led off for the lasers, said onimously to the group at large: "they're taking her in a different direction..." and indeed, I was in the basement.)

Crazy day, crazy experience.

Right now the usual contingent of four 13-year-old girls are babbling happily in every corner of Baroque Mansions. There's a big corn-fed chicken in the oven, ice cream in the freezer & a pound of carrots in a roasting pan.

I have some final edits (I might enlist one of the girls, sadly undereducated as they are, see previous posts, to help me) on an interview with the Scottish poet Rob Mackenzie; due, of course, sort of now, but everyone knows my eyes are like sieves.

First, however, I will continue listening to Sam Waterston reading the wonderful and unsung (really: it is amazing) Bridge of San Luis Rey, by Thornton Wilder. News that stays news! More on that when I can type for more than five minutes without sending my eyes into a tizz.

the elegant palate

One visitor to Baroque Mansions arrived via this site. I clicked on it, out of curiosity, and am now passing it on to you in the hopes that it will make you as hungry as it made me. (Seriously: it is also completely charming, and beautiful.)

languor and eye drops

Off to Moorfields in the morning for my lasers. I'm under instructions after returning home to rest, sleep, put steroid eye drops in every hour, and generally not be on the computer. My kind and wonderful friend Jan is taking me (Jan: "So babe, we still on for Thursday? I can't wait, I'm really looking forward to it!" Me: "You are? Why..?" Jan: "Cause I'll get to see you!!!") in her red two-seater convertible.

As I said to Mama Baroque: now all I have to worry about is the drive over. You haven't really learned to appreciate life till you've been in heavy traffic with my friend Jan.

To while away the hours (quite a lot of them, in fact) (& I think I might mean languor, eye drops and pain) I have purchased a complete recording of Ulysses on CD, read by some Irish bloke (not James Joyce, clearly). I wasn't messing with any CD that only plays for two hours - no use to man nor beast, frankly. Over before you've woken up from your catnap, that is. No, Ulysses is long, and it is entertaining, and I will feel I'm Doing Something.

Kind friends have offered to stop by (maybe I can do some dictating to a visitor; I imagine that must feel quite luxurious - & maybe my kind guest could also check my stats for me). The kids are chez papa, though I do expect to see la petite Mlle at some juncture, as she is usually here picking up items of apparel and having scented baths.

I shall be busy perfecting my brogue.

Yes, that's it: maybe some new shoes when it's all over...

elegant Claire

Claire McCardell. Not a name I knew, until I saw this dress. Once again, this is courtesy of A Dress A Day. I love this dress with a love that is so pure and true I can't even say what I love about it. I love everything: the line and drape of the shoulders and bust - the wonderful, and not even too girly, bows - oh yes, the blackness of it. And the fabulous heavy crepe.

This dress is so much about the person who was or is going to wear it that I don't even feel like I'm cheating showing a dress that isn't on a person. But, to assuage the need for a person, I am showing a picture of Claire herself, who was undoubtedly very elegant indeed. This comes from this website, where you can find out more. Isn't she marvellous?

Claire McCardell turns out to have been an American fashion designer, born in 1905, who studied at what later became Parsons School of Design, becoming interested in the "relationship between" fashion and comfort. I've seen some incredibly chic things by her (I admit, in the last ten minutes, but I am interested) with amazingly hidden pockets - though she was apparently also known for her large, topstitched pockets. Come on - in an American dress of the fifties this is practically like Women's Lib.







After she died (of cancer) in 1958, her husband donated this amazing red dress to the Metropolitan Museum's fashion collection in her memory. Now, look at that colour. Look at how the sections cross over on the top. Look at the pleats! This was designed in 1950. I can really imagine it on a person, with fifties hair and lipstick and shoes - isn't it a treat? But then again, tell me it would look out of place right now.

Christmas is coming...

...the geese are getting fat.
please to put a penny in the old man's hat.
If you haven't got a penny, a ha'penny will do;
if you haven't got a ha'penny, then God bless you.

Dave Hill linked to an article in the Evening Standard, about the annual anti-PC-fest which is apparently beginning. (Anyone seen the new stamps? Santa.) Anyway, Archbishop John Sentanu (York), is bewailing the much-lamented 'decline of Christmas' in this green and sceptred isle. I left a commment on that site, which I then also copied to Dave's site, as it seemed apropos. Dave has now given my comment a post of its own, for which I thank him hugely, and I link to it here. For some reason, probably (duh) the importance of the topic, as well as all the associations of the Christmas story itelf (also duh) I feel quite overwhelmed by this endorsement. And I haven't even made my Christmas lists yet! (Though I did buy some wrapping paper and lovely ribbons.)

Years ago I knew a woman I loved a lot. I was young (22) and she was old (maybe 72). She had a very cosmopolitan friend who lived in Nairobi, which was impossibly exotic to me at the time, and furthermore no one (I mean in Wimbledon, where I then lived) had any thoughts whatsoever then about Islam. One day she told me her friend's flight to London had been delayed - some would-be terrorists had come on board, but had been successfully talked down; one element of that was the Koran he carried in his baggage for just such an occasion, if you can believe that. This was a lot closer to, say, Paul Bowles' time. Joan's friend was able to demonstrate to the jihadis (or whoever they were) that he knew & respected the Koran, and they were placated. But on other occasions, she said, he had worked wonders with his knowledge of the Bible.

Later, sending my children to St Mary's C of E school in liberal, tolerant, Good Old Stoke Newington, I found it full of Sikh kids whose parents thought it better for them to be exposed daily to some religion, rather than none.

But it seems now everyone wants everyone else to toe the line of their own particular orthodoxy. We are definitely losing ground by the acre.

Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving! (Someone tell me when it is?)

important things

It's not like I don't even think about these things. I hope the spirit of them infuses my writing on the subjects I do write about. The things I haven't written about include:

the murder of Anna Politskaya
the verdict on the death of Terry Lloyd
the death sentence of Saddam Hussain
the mid-term elections (except for a funny picture of GWB with Bambi jokes)
what I think about Guy Fawkes night (especially in light of all the above)
global warming
Israel and Palestine
and the death of David Grossman's son
Madonna and that baby (let's not even go there)
America's Next Top Model and what I think of it (it is an issue in Baroque Mansions, & sends me apoplectic every time, though on the plus side those girls are at least off their butts and doing something)

To be honest, though, in the past few weeks I think I have seen the news once (Wednesday). I forgot even to get the Saturday Guardian last week (& have not yet read yesterday's). I saw one episode of The Amazing Mrs Pritchard, and have seen one recent episoide of The X Factor (I'm for Ray), & that's it: I've even missed over a week of EastEnders. I'm not interested in celebrity news & find the whole McCartney divorce scandal dispiriting. But Jude & Sienna? Brad, Angelina, Jennifer, Nicole, Jade, and the whole boring lot of 'em? At the moment I have no idea how all our cultural indicators are fitting together. I never even make it to the movies.

On the plus side, I bought a cardigan (wool! the season has officially changed) (and it has spangles) and even started (horror) the Christmas shopping (it took a cappuccino from Carluccio's to get me started, and that was at 4pm). I put away Mount Everest of clean washing yesterday (and have only Killimanjaro to go). I had a delightful, relaxing interlude in the hairdresser's having my ever-troublesome roots done, a much-needed cut, and a fun chat with the girls in there. I've also discovered that the cheap house wines from the French wine shop Nicolas, in Upper Street, not only look delightful (with their handwritten labels and clear glass bottles) - they also taste delightful at about a pound less than what 'delightful' costs in Morrisons.

Today I've got poetry to work on, work I brought home (yes: a whole report to edit, & I don't mean a quick proof), the groceries, Mt Kilimanjaro of washing, and maybe if I get it right I can do some ironing in front of the EastEnders omnibus. It's a lovely day out, too. We'll just forget that.

would you Adam and Eve it

Sunday morning... and I don't mean, "Complacencies of the peignoir, and late/ coffee and oranges in a sunny chair" - although I might. I just had tea and muesli. And I might also mean, "...But in contentment I still feel/ the need of some imperishable bliss," and possibly also, "Is there no change of death in Paradise? Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs/ Hang always heavy in that perfect sky...?"

But that is getting depressing. (Thank you, Wallace Stevens darling.)

This week, pace my earlier post about hearing vs reading poetry, I tried an experiment. It wasn't free (I recall, months ago, mentioning the possibility of money-saving tips, but am coming to realise they are an impossibility, unless anyone has any for me. And don't tell me to make my lunch at home: I never have any food in the house, and the kitchen at work is no good for so much as heating up some soup), but it didn't cost that much. What I did was, I downloaded a pay-for-it mp3 of the entirety of Paradise Lost, read by a man with a rather crisp voice, and I have been listening to it in the Tube. It's the perfect set-up for the day, and you can still hear it in the train even when it rumbles, and it means I don't have to try to read in the bad light, and I have begun being able to hear the lines, even when he scoots right over the enjambments.

I still find it hard to follow, because I am inordinately distractable by the sound in poetry - it is my downfall - even as a child, I can remember saying to Mama Baroque, "But Mommy! The form IS the substance! Don't you see?" But the other day I woke from a reverie on the bus - the 476, just heading south over Stamford Hill - to find that the reverie was, in fact, Paradise Lost. It was a beautiful and intensely literary passage about the domestic life of Adam and Eve, full of the tenderness of real domesticity, in which Eve relates to Adam a terrible dream she's had, which presages the Fall, and he reassures her that dreams are what can't happen, and that Free Will protects us from the random thoughts in our heads. It was lovely, and I stayed on top of the iambic pentameters, AND how the knit together to form this intensely beautiful chain that is Milton's blank verse, AND the story. Yes, and I did that just with my ears. The clever things.

Milton would be proud of me (well - not very; I'm sure that the merest of his daughters read a lot more Latin and Greek than I do - though not the rude bits - and could recite book after book of the Bible, not just line after line of Wallace Stevens & Dorothy Parker). Milton wrote Paradise Regained after he went blind. I have no immediate plans for actual blindness, but I am certainly regarding eyesight as a resource to be husbanded (as it were) (even if nothing else is). I may not have a houseful of classically educated daughters to use as amanuenses, but I am thinking of seeing if I can use the podcast equipment at work. Fun, eh? If not quite paradise.

never again

For Remembrance Day, my favourite poem by Isaac Rosenberg. There is something real and humbling about this poem - humbling I mean in its reality - that is also tremendously exhilarating. This is what art is for.

I have a little thing about Rosenberg, anyway. He reminds me of Keats (without the Odes): a very real person, a person born into poverty and difficulty who managed - one way and another and through the kindness of strangers - to the beginnings, and more than the beginnings, of both a painting and a writing career.

Rosenberg was an East End Jew from a cultivated family. His father had left Lithuania for Moscow, and had left Moscow - ironically, as it pans out - because of the danger of being called up for National Service. So he settled eventually (via Bristol) in London, where the family grew up seven-to-a-room in Cable Street, Stepney. Cable Street is famous now for the historic 'Battle of Cable Street' of 1936, in which the people of the East End routed the Fascists. Of course, Oswald Mosley and his crew had chosen that street for their march precisely because it was a Jewish neighbourhood - just as it is a Muslim neighbourhood nowadays. So, it's not much of a coincidence after all - just yet another reminder of the importance of remembering.

Rosenberg was a pacifist. He joined the Army because he found that the Army would send half your pay direct to your family. They needed the money.

His letters are incredibly affecting. He struggled, as you can imagine, to maintain a semblance of self at the front - corresponding on poetic matters, sending poems to magazines, maintaining, in fact, his writing career. He grew depressed, miserable, increasingly hopeless, but was determined not to let the war get in the way of his poetry. Then he was dead, at 27. The painting above is a self-portrait, and I find it vastly preferable to the equally-common photograph of him in uniform, which is merely an upsetting redord of how distressing the whole experience was. For everyone who endured it. Much better to remember vibrant, individual people than just 'soldiers'.

Craig Raine talks, in today's Telegraph, about why he doesn't like the War Poets; the main thing he charges them with, I think, is a striving for effect that renders them pallid and boring. (Ms B wonders: is this a pallid and boring statement to make on Remembrance Day?) He quotes passages from Orwell and even from Sassoon's prose which he says are far more vivid than any of their adjective-laden verse descriptions of the trenches, though Orwell's chirpy banter seems no more effective to me than Dulce et Decorum Est. Raine says that Owen's poems were written by "Outraged of Tunbridge Wells".

This poem by Rosenberg puts the rest of them out.


Break of Day in the Trenches

The darkness crumbles away.
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps in my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet's poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life,
Bent to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver - what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in man's veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe -
Just a little white with the dust.

THUMPED

Okay, I apologise for the slightly substandard picture quality here - though of course it is quality of another sort! Mama Baroque herself has sent me this, scanned in from the front page of the Hartford Courant - the main rag of the beautiful capitol city of Connecticut (just don't talk to me about Lieberman), in an email entitled Thumped.

Maybe that's why the number one threat to world peace is making that Bambi face... but remember this, Mr President: ONLY YOU CAN PREVENT FOREST FIRES.

By the way, I never thought I would have a picture of that man anywhere near my page.

baroque triumphant! (not news to us)

How could I not like the title above? And as it refers to the title of a charming blog - run by Jeffrey Smith from Toledo, Ohio - which celebrates all things Baroque with lovely pictures, how could we all not like it? The blog not only celebrates the "exuberance" of Baroque style, it seeks through it to praise the greatness of the Catholic Church "which inspired so much of it." Huzzah, I say. And a peruse of the pictures Jeffrey Smith has posted is an excellent way of getting a sense of Baroqueness - though my own personal vision of it might feature more dresses.

I think we should be twinned. But Jeffrey Smith might think I'm too frivolous - or not religious enough - or indeed too ''literary', which would be sad; however, I find that does sometimes seem to put people off.

On his other blog, the Roving Medievalist, there is a button that says "Ratzinger's Rottweilers" - you can imagine how much pleasure this gives me. Almost as much as the Priests of the Vatican calendar that hangs in my adorable friend, Ms Rational Self-Determination, 's kitchen, among a few of her many crucifixes and inspirational icons. (She has, as well as several large tattoos, hidden depths. She's very easy to buy for, and I feel certain she will very much like Triumphant Baroque.)

not pretty - elegant

Erin, at A Dress a Day, wrote, some weeks ago now:

"You Don't Have To Be Pretty. You don't owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don't owe it to your mother, you don't owe it to your children, you don't owe it to civilisation in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked 'female'."

Read the whole post, it's a tonic!

As to this picture, this is Diana Vreeland, and I've pinched her also from A Dress A Day. It's a wonderful photo. Diana Vreeland, famous for her associations with New York and fashion (editor-in-chief of Vogue, consultant to the Metropolitan Museum), actually lived in London when she was young, having an English father. And what a London! Here's a quote from Wikipedia:

"Of Waugh she later recounted "I adored his books. I mean Vile Bodies - wasn't it great? He was writing about a whole society that existed in London - wonderful looking girls and wonderful fellas, some of them grew up to be somebody, some of them just didn't, but at that particular moment they were just marvellous. They were all so crazy, they were rather wild - crazy as only the English can be. That's the London I walked into - it existed from I guess about 1927, 1928, right through to about 1935 - and then it was pretty much over."

Vreeland was born in 1906, the same year as my grandmother, and died on the day my first baby was born.

stairway to poetry heaven: two poets, several reviewers, and scientific materialism

Okay, what is it about words? I know it's late in the day to be asking that question. But as the song says: "words are all we have..." so ask we must. In last week's Independent on Sunday Jim McCue distinguished between wordplay "standing up for meaning" and "standing in for meaning," in a review - called MacNeice Knew When to Stop - of Paul Muldoon's new collection, Horse Latitudes. This is an excellent distinction, whichMcCue underlines by making most of his most cogent points by way of puns (like the one where he refers to "Horse Lassitudes"; now you don't actually have to read the review).

Elsewhere McCue says Muldoon's "extravagance has tipped into nonsense." This is an idea which would bear more unpacking than I can give it in this post, right now, and I may well come back to it. In the context in which he quotes it it may be true, but I still am not sure.

But even in this review there are enough snippets from the poems, including a conjunction of bubble wrap and bladderwrack, to make it possible that the book would, still, be the tonic one hopes for.

Thomas Sutcliffe was "enchanted" by Muldoon's use of anaphora in the Independent, for example, and James Fenton was "transported" (not to Australia) by the whole book, in the Guardian.

And then, over in the Telegraph, Don Paterson's Rilke 'versions' (published with the truncated and effective title Orpheus) are described by Jeremy Noel-Tod as "translation with poetic licence". Apparently, according to an Afterward Paterson latched onto Rilke "as a personal quest for a text of consolation after a 'painful conversion to scientific materialism'."

The review is interesting, in some ways more than the book (that is, to me), because of how it raises this very issue - the fear of it not being, in fact, Rilke. But if it's not Rilke, is it Paterson? Is it Paterson merely hanging his clothes in Rilke's closet? And if so, will they smell of mothballs?

Now, I admit I am not a big lover of Rilke; and Noel-Tod says that he thinks "even Rilke's translators, it seems, think him a bit wet." Don Paterson certainly has a more muscular way of writing than the visionary poet had, and that may be the gist of it, though it seems a bit unfair when it was the materialism he was trying to escape from in the first place. The following paragraph of the review in particular worries me:

...the reckless declarative arguments of Rilke's full rhymes tend to be dampened by Paterson's more muted half-tones. The original conclusion to Sonnet II.14 imagines how one who slept "deep among things" – specifically, flowers – might either return enlightened or stay among them, so that "they'd bloom and praise / him". But in Paterson's half-rhyme for "waken", the flowers only "weaken". Similarly, at the end of Sonnet I.11, Rilke has us "rejoice" to "believe" in a constellation called The Horseman; Paterson only that we "insist" that we "read" it.

(O Eminem, where are you now?)

Adam Philips, in the Observer, however, began his review with this paragraph, which lays the terrain boldly out:

When John Berryman wrote in his third Dream Song that 'Rilke was a jerk', a lot of readers of Rainer Maria Rilke in translation were probably relieved. The Pseuds' Corner sonorities of Rilke we could read - 'and at the same time know the condition/ of not being, the infinite ground of your deep vibration' and so on - seemed a far cry from the poet recognised 'abroad' as a great European modernist.

The translation/version debate is a bit boring, I know, & I never understand (money apart, of course) why 'versions' don't get published in parallel with the original texts the way translations do. Or alongside a literal translation. Then the reader not blessed with encyclopaedic knowledge of the original, or with time to go look everything up, or who is perhaps limited to reading on the Tube, and thus can't carry an entire library of original versions alongside, would be in a position to understand what the version is actually saying - by its rejections, as well as its inclusions.

As a side issue, or not, there are lots of poets currently writing lots of 'versions' of non-English-language poets, some alive and some dead. I know of one poet who is unable to publish what he thought were translations of his own work, because they have been co-opted as "versions" by another poet. This raises a tedious question around 'what is a poem' - be it 'a machine for remembering itself', 'the best words in the best order', or 'news that stays news'. It just, as you might say, "makes me wonder."

Ooga Booga

Over on The Elegant Variation, I discover news of a poet I've strangely never heard of before: Frederick Seidel. His new collection is called Ooga Booga, which seems a very good title to me; and a very quick trawl of the internet reveals a long and serious review by Adam Kirsch, from the New Republic (intensely interesting - basically he is saying Seidel is the poet of our Decadent Period; and Seidel seems from this article to be as creepy and as fascinating as the picture on the left might suggest, much as one might question whether one has outgrown the need for creepy fascination - and there also seems to be an indirect link with the equally obsessive collector of types, Joseph Cornell), and this paragraph from Calvin Bedient at the Boston Review:

Ogre to what used to be called (without a sneer) sentiment, grim beyond Gothic contrivance, the most frightening American poet ever—phallus-man, hangman of political barbarism—Seidel is the poet the twentieth century deserved. (But why stop there, the poet the millennium deserved.) Which is his brilliance, his grief. How he has given himself to our terribleness! Four and a half million years ago in the woodlands arose an ape, the males of which, bonding, raided and killed for the hell of it. Only human beings, their descendants, have improved on their abomination. Professor Richard Wrangham of Harvard calls the type the "demonic male," a label that stirs religion into biology. Seidel's namings are cleaner. Seidel guts our malignancy of all echoes of exalting theology. Spokesman and scourge of marauding testosterone (in These Days, he says of "my penis" that "I ought to cut if off / And feed it to itself"), he points poems like guns at his unforgivable knowledge. If he learned harshness and directness from Robert Lowell, one of his earliest admirers, he left behind Lowell's magnificence like so much dress-up clothing dumped into the trash. You can't like Seidel's poems—they're deliberately virulent; you can only gasp at their skill and daring, their sickening warp, their mercilessness.

Hmm. What he doesn't say is anything about Seidel's wonderful ear, the robustly textured and musical sound of his poetry even on the page - which I can't exemplify here because I have only a couple of extracts to go on myself, as yet. Certainly it seems that Seidel, of whom I had strangely never heard (& strangely seems to be the easiest word) is someone I wish now I had always known about. But maybe these things find us.

And his reading voice, over at his website, is strangely beautiful. Apparently he hasn't given a reading in 43 years.

And if he did, you know, he might be a bit scary.

By the way, I have separated this post out from the previous compendious book-review post, as it seemed to belong on its own. and it's more readable, poor lamb.

a poem a day...

... well, I'm not going to make any great health claims - but if you go to Poetry Daily today, you can see a poem by my friend Mark Granier, which first appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, and it might just warm the cockles of your heart for a moment or three.

It's hard to write a poem about expecting/having a baby that doesn't pall, and I think he's managed it.

not very brooding

Baroque in Hackney doesn't usually publicise, or even directly refer to, anything so prosaic as events - unless there is some issue to discuss, or Ms B is bursting with gossip, of course (and even then there's the painful necessity to be relatively discreet). But in this case we will make an exception, because the event features ME.

Life Lines: Six Poets for Oxfam
Winter reading, November 28 at 7.30pm

Oxfam Bookshop
91 Marylebone High Street
London, W1

Hosted by Todd Swift, Oxfam Poet in Residence
Admission free, suggested donation £6
Please contact the manager Martin Penny to reserve seats
Telephone: 020 7487 3570
email: oxfammarylebone@hotmail.com


The readers are:
Ros Barber (new collection from Anvil due out 2007);

Katy Evans-Bush (widely-published poet featured in The Like Of It, Baring & Rogerson, 2005);

Ruth Fainlight (winner of the Hawthornden and Cholmondeley Awards; author of Moon Wheels, Bloodaxe, 2006);

Tobias Hill (novelist and poet, author of The Cryptographer, Faber, and Nocturne In Chrome & Sunset Yellow, Salt);

Michael Rosen (broadcaster and lecturer; Selected Poems forthcoming from Penguin, February 2007);

Eva Salzman (author of Double Crossing: New & Selected Poems, Bloodaxe).


It's my first reading in months, and it is a little nerve-wracking thinking about standing up in front of a room looking the way I feel I do at the moment. And I've just seen Tobias Hill's publicity picture, & I'm afraid I'll never be able to look anything like so appropriately brooding! One can only try and make up for it with fake pearls and lipstick (and, I suppose, poems).

apocalyptic wallpaper

Check out the Independent today: they've done it again, with their brave and beautiful front page. What this image doesn't convey is the back page, onto which the painting image wraps.

So I guess you must know by now that this painting, poignantly titled Number 5, 1948, sold yesterday for $140m. Of course it's ludicrous. The owner was David Geffen, which Ms B finds even more ludicrous for some reason - the last thing he needs is $140m! But they say he may be liquidting assets with a view to buying the Los Angeles Times; in recent weeks he has done the unthinkable, and sold a Jasper Johhns, as well as a de Kooning. Clearly it's the Abstract Expressionists Geffen feels he can do without, and I'm not sure if we should take that as a sign of how he plans to run the paper. The columnists should perhaps start reading the small print in their contracts?

Meanwhile, in a bumper month at the NYC auctuon houses, they are expecting the sale in two weeks of an Andy Warhol self-portrait. Oh, to dream.

Friday round-up, I mean Roundhouse: just keep thinking about the Dresden Dolls

Work. No, that's an order.

Ms Baroque has been editing as hard as she can for ten hours a day, and the tide of documents is rising. There's no food in the house; lunch is thus costing £6 a day, to say nothing of the crucial morning coffee, to say less of the disgusting sushi-&-cheeseburger-fest in Victoria Station the other night after a (yay!) drink after work with the new pals.

On the plus side I did get the TV working again. By the time I came in and got something to eat (bowl of spinach and broad beans, with some bacon which wasn't off; a roll, taken from the freezer and put into the toaster oven; quite a large amount of Ben & Jerry's Cookie Dough ice cream) it was well past 9, and I was just, starkly, unable to:

• answer emails,
  
• type out the poem I'm working on, which exists only in one incomplete hard copy and has been untouched for days
• do anything else involving a screen
  
• speak to anyone
• make the bed that needs making for me to sleep in.

I was, on the other hand, able to:

• cut my finger badly on a brand-new and very sharp kitchen knife, trying to make carrot sticks out of a carrot from Morrisons that has absolutely no flavour left in it anyway
• ring Telewest and, as I say, get the picture back on the TV - it was something to do with the SCART leads...
• watch three episodes of EastEnders
• take Jon Stallworthy's biography of Louis MacNeice off the shelf - being in possession of a brand-new commission to write about it for a special MacNeice edition of the Contemporary Poetry Review - and look at it vaguely for about three minutes whilst thinking of all the other research I need to do
• sleep on the couch for the third night in a row

The yoga teacher says my kidney energy is very depleted. Tell me about it. He asked if I'd been feeling tired lately. Ha! I said: "Exhausted": I honestly thought I might cry.* He was giving me an acupressure back massage at the time, (see, life not all bad) and when he said, "Yeah, I can tell," I suddenly felt I might cry (this also happens in the yoga class, when you lie on the floor and they're saying, "just let the earth hold you - you don't have to do anything").

(The other thing that did the same thing to me this week was when a New Work Pal, asking all those questions, says, "and do you have a new partner?" I go, "No-oo...." and she says: "OH! Why not?? I thought you would, you're so sweet!" Well, tell me about it. I know it's not me that's not sweet.)

The other day I stumbled across this bizarre and amusing thing: Baroque in Hackney automatically-translated into French (or something very like French), which it alarms me that someone might read. My favourite part was the rendering of my friend Jen Pepper's name to "Poivre de Jen". I will try and type out the insanely long URL soon, to make a link. Mean time:

"Deux jours dans être arrières au travail, donc, et se sentir comme je « n'ai fait rien » - la signification ce qu'exactement, je ne sais pas, sauf que moi ont des piles de factures et de papiers et doivent aller voient la banque au sujet de quelque chose mais ont été trop fatigués pour courir autour en mon heure de déjeuner, et n'ont pas toujours une bonne liste de magasins pour envoyer des poésies au loin à, qui a besoin faire mal - pendant deux jours dedans, comme parole, j'ai presque édité un document entier ; J'ai eu quelques grandes grosses idées dynamiques et ai commencé à les vendre autour de l'organisation ; J'ai écrit un bon début sur un amusement (oui !) la nouvelle poésie, que je pense sortirai tout à fait ambitieux mais tombe mon stylo ; J'ai finalement trouvé ma citation de Primo Levi (j'ai dû acheter le livre, encore, et étrangement il n'était pas facile de trouver) et le mettre dans l'article, que je peux finalement envoyer outre de la finale édite au rédacteur ; J'ai lu ce grand article, concernant une force de police au Mexique tournant la marée sur le crime en enseignant leurs dirigeants à lire ; et celui-ci, qui me confirme dans ma haine de Starbucks ; J'ai été dans l'encore un autre de ces arguments au sujet des ventes de poésie contre « quels lecteurs veulent » etc. ; J'ai lu un certain Auden (ce lecteur veut Auden) ; J'ai lu une pile des poésies qu'un ami m'a envoyé ; J'ai texted Dieu de roche de 15 ans en France (aucune réponse ; il est de retour samedi nuit), et suivi les autres à la maison de leur père ; et j'ai été pour après-travaille la boisson (mon premier verre de vin en 10 jours !) dans la barre d'hôtel de chardon à la station de Victoria, qui est un endroit de fab à se réunir pour des boissons, réellement. Vous obtenez ce grand sentiment démodé d'hôtel, qui est toujours un tonique ; Je pourrais avoir été Mlle Marple, s'asseyant là. La fois prochaine je prendrai le tricotage..."

In other news, six phone calls in, I know the name of my eye consultant's secretary (Bernadette) and may be closer to getting a) a new prescription for the Poison Eye Drops, in case of emergency, and b) an appointment for the laser thing I missed when I had flu (which seems delightful, in comparison, in retrospect). They are making ominous noises about me having to go back in to the clinic again first, which I wish they wouldn't. They seem to have no idea how much it upsets me every time and just sets me back all over again.

* note from future: gall stones.

HOWEVER! In a major coup and thanks to my charming and kind friend Sarah, I had better go get dressed, and make it good: because this is where I'm going tonight.

And now I must stop typing before I get blood on this keyboard.

elegant and very simple, really

There is practically nothing Ms Baroque likes better than to curl up on the sofa with a nice cup of tea and watch Joan Hickson playing Miss Marple. The story is definitely secondary to wonderful character.

Of course she is elegantly dressed - even exotically dressed, until a couple of years ago, when 'secretary chic' flooded the high street with tweed, some of it very cheap - in her simple suits and blouses, shawls and hats and sensible shoes. Miss Marples elegance is of the kind that is out not to get noticed. And her clothes, in a brilliant stroke, mirror her personality: sensible, and even (at first glance) bland, until one takes in their high quality and general wonderfulness. For Miss Marple is expensively dressed. It makes you wonder about her means.

Miss Marple never raises her voice. She never laughs loudly or cracks stupid jokes or has to pull up her top in a vain effort at covering her bosom. She sits in wonderful hotel lobbies, knitting - and, incidentally, owning the scene. Can you imagine owning that many hotel lobbies? People are inclined, it is true, not to take Miss Marple seriously - but, to be honest, you can have that problem without being Miss Marple, and any of us could learn from her polite assertiveness techniques. I love the way the realisation slowly dawns on those police officers.

She is the hub of calm, in her calming tweed suit from the Army & Navy, or Barkers of Kensington, while chaos explodes around her; she is never in a flap, though it does upset her when she can't figure something out; oh, yes. She can be a little sharp; Ms B also. That's one thing we have in common. And we both make a great cup of tea.