being the view; and the viewed

The other day in Victoria I was standing on a traffic island waiting for the light to change. A couple of coaches went through the intersection on their way to the coach station (I could tell: they had "Victoria" emblazoned across their front ends; one of them even said, "near to London's Oxford Street!" on the back), full of tired-looking passengers. I idly watched the passengers, the girl sleeping, the guy getting his stuff together, someone looking out the window.

And with that, I suddenly became the View, not just me, with a coffee, waiting for the light. It took me straight back to the days, so long ago now, when I used to get the coach to New York City, and how the people on the streets would look to me - glamorous, native - as I watched them through the slightly tinted windows. Like characters scurrying along in a silent, air-conditioned movie.

Well, so that was fun. I don;t think many of the people on the Oxford tube were entertaining any such romance about the streets of SW1, but this kind of feeling is like a virus, isn't it: once in, never gone.

A week or two before that I had been walking through Eaton Square, in Belgravia, with its white terraces and its air of perennial calm and money. However, we all know money is not always calm. On that occasion, surprisingly, I was carrying a takeaway coffee, which had been overfilled as it happens and kept dripping on my hand. But it was too hot to drink down. There were a well-dressed couple walking too slowly, annoyingly, and a man washing a car with a hose thaty stretched across the pavement. I was late. Anyway, I got past all them and was beginning to like it there, when I noticed a policeman standing in a doorway. He wasn't going anywhere. I got closer, then closer, and he stood and then stood. As I approached, he just glanced at me and smiled, a bit sheepish. Sweet. I wonder who he was guarding. And which of us was the view, and which the viewed? The lady or the tiger?

Sunday shadow puppets

I went out for a walk in the late afternoon sunshine; it was sort of glowing all over the buildings. Avoiding the trendy bits and the nasty old (I mean good ol') High St, with its betting shops, takeaways and filth, I walked the back way to Church St, through the neighbourhood with its huge square houses. To get to the neighbourhood you go to the end of my road, down a little road with a bridge over the train tracks and a row of Hassidic shops (challah, buns, cakes, kosher wine, groceries, household items), & past a church I've never been in, and then you turn. The houses are very big, very square, made of some kind of pale stone, very unyielding. They all seem to have budleias in their front gardens - budleias and rubbish.

This was the hour when the whole street, the whole neighbourhood, smells of gefilte fish. I used to love that stuff when I was little and if I only knew someone now would would make me some I'd be very happy. I hear it's an art, but then so is chicken soup with matzo balls and I can make that.

The light was golden (as schmaltz? Or is that too schmaltzy?) when I went out, with the sun shining straight into my eyes; I walked round the churchyard of the old 1560s St Mary's church, with its moss-grown crypts and those awful memorial stones that are the size and shape of coffins or mummies, just as the light was beginning to pinken. The ground was a clutter of old sticks, broken slabs, dirst; one gravestone had a single, dark green strand of ivy growing straight up it. Most of the graves are too eroded to read, but some of them date back 200 years.

But once you're in the park you get a horizon (ignore the fact that it's Green Lanes) with a sort of castle jutting out into it (ignore the fact that it's the climbing centre); over there, and over the houses with their chimneys, the sunset went an intense, violent orange, melting upward into the usual pale blue. The trees were black cut-outs against it, and a jet trail hung motionless in the sky beside a faint white crescent moon. A duck flew up from the pond. It was exactly like this:




















I sat on a bench for a few minutes till the light went a bit more.

Except for a couple of very short, where-are-you-when-will-you-be-home conversations with Mlle B, I have not spoken to a soul all day. Well, scratch that: I spoke to the girls in the Spence, ordering coffee and telling them that Fresh & Wild is now charging £2.59 for one of their small white loaves (£1.40 in the Spence itself - they laughed and told me they even take it down there hemselves - nobody from F&W has to lift a finger!). But aside from that, I have been on my own and silent since yesterday afternoon, & life is but a dream. It's hard to believe I'm even in this scene, somehow.

Strangely, hanging all those newly-framed pictures seems to have contributed to this dream-state, as most of the pictures are things I have either had for ages, or have had all my life, or have been given by friends and relatives, or have inherited from my father le Duc. In short, they all have very personal significance, as well as being interesting to look at. But then, hanging them if I weren't in a dream state they may not have had such an effect. And no one has even seen them yet.

Coming back there were a few more people about in my road: an old man in his long black coat, stooped over a cigarette in the street; a tall, red-headed girl in her long navy blue (why must they wear navy blue?? It is simply ugly on everybody) skirt, looking impossibly grown up and impossibly young at the same time. Two tiny boys, in their yarmulkes, playing: one by the front gate, and the other running away pell-mell as fast as he could, while the first one shouted - screamed, really - Eins! (pause) Zwei! (long pause, jumping up and down, then hilarious burst) Dreeeeeiiii!! And with that he rushes into the house.

By now the pink fairy dust is settling and the blue is arriving. Sounds are sounding more normal, less enchanted, and soon it will just be plain old night, with traffic and harsh lighting. The fish smells even more delicious. I've been walking for an hour and can hardly tell the difference between life and dreaming: I've been living since Thursday almost entirely in my own internal spaces, and sleeping badly so I'm never sure if I'm awake or not. And I'm home.

good morning world

The ghostly fog of the past few days seems to have lifted; at least, I can see out the kitchen window this morning. But it's just damp and grey. Yesterday I took the Oxford Tube to Oxford (of course) and it was very beautiful then: low frosty mists rolling along grass, rolling alongside the coach - first in Hyde Park, among the black cabs and cyclists, and then again once we got further north. On the way back in the evening the Oxfordshire hills were beautiful, with a blood-orange sunset behind them that went on for ages, the sky just getting imperceptibly more mauve... and the aura of a thousand years hanging over them. Travel is all tantalus, isn't it. Smoke and mirrors, there is Roman Britain over the crest of that hill, and here you are in your seat! Even were you standing on the hill you couldn't be IN it, which is what I think we want when we go to places like that.

I didn't really have any time to myself in Oxford itself, just five minutes in which I nipped into the Oxfam Bookshop, where I bought Byron's letters, letters and essays of Wilde in a lovely old Pelican edition, and a large Collected of Yehuda Amichai for too much money. Then there was, at least, a very fast walk - I was with two tall guys - struggling to carry all these books, plus of course my laptop etc - through a golden Oxford, the air sunny but still with a trace of uncertainty round the edges, scurrying past the Bridge of Sighs, and blossoming blossom along the river, sighing as we passed, and then the bus. Too tired to stay on by mtself. I read the Amichai on the way home.

Naturally, leaving at that time, there was traffic. Then in London there was traffic. Then at Victoria there was an accident or something and we were all advised to get off at Hyde Park Corner - me with my bags of books, plus laptop, vibrating slightly all over because of the coach. Oxford Street was heaving, it was pure hell, with shrieking gangs of unbelievably stupid and unpleasant girls, and nothing could move at all: it took me an hour then to get to Warren St, where I gratefully sank into the Tube, and got home at 8pm having been travelling for four hours. The vibrating didn't stop for hours.

Today, a gantlet of meetings, and things I need to a) organise and b) edit, to say nothing of c) do, which I can't because I will be in these meetings. And I've slept five hours.

February 14th: the birthdays of my friend Sinead, and my first high school boyfriend. I might go to the Camden Head tonight, where Tim Wells and Niall O'Sullivan are reading.

it's so romantic

Overheard, two colleagues trying to identify some pub one of them had in mind for a Valentine's Day triste - I mean tryst:

"Have you ever been to that place, it's on both sides of the street, because of the arches..."

"Is it right near Heaven? I'm sure I've been to a place like that around there."

"Oh, I know the one you mean! Yes! That's it. You always see someone vaguely famous slumped against the window."

the world turned upside down

After last week's shock announcement that the Home Secretary needs a bodyguard to go for a kebab, and thinks (yes she does; she said so) that "no one would" go out and about in Hackney after dark, we now find that our new Housing Minister Caroline Flint is shocked at the number of council tenants who don't have jobs. Funny; one might be reasonably shocked by these sorts of things, but of course the big difference between her and Labour Ministers of old is that she thinks all these jobless tenants are just a bunch of lazy bastards.

The number of council tenants without jobs has risen, from 20% in 1981 to 55% now. That means of course that where most council tenants previously were trotting off of a morning with their dustcarts, chip vans and nail files, nowadays they are less cosy to look at and think about. According to Flint, that's reason enough to take these people in hand and make sure they're at least looking for a job - sinisterly, even to make sure they're "employable"* - before they're allowed to have a council home.

After all! The likes of us aren't paying perfectly good taxes to support the likes of them, are we!

"She told the Fabian Society on Monday: 'The link between social housing and worklessness is stark. I am concerned about what has been called a collapse in the number of people in council housing in work over the past 25 years.

'We need to think radically and start a national debate'."

Okay - so let's start the debate. First of all, I move that the word missing from her statement to the Fabians is "causal." There is no evidence that being given a council home has in any way encouraged these people to become, or to remain, jobless.

In 1982 the unemployment rate famously topped 3 million, or one in eight people. It was going up, at the time, not down. Remember why Thatcher was so thrilled when Argentina invaded the Falklands?? In 2007 the unemployment rate was around five per cent, or one in 20 people. Spot the difference. I'm not even sure what the population has done in that time, but the actual number of unemployed people now is around 1.5 million, or half what it was in the early eighties. Does that sound to you like a huge segment of the population has just decided not to work?

As it happens, in 1984 - three years after the date the Minister is concerned about - yours truly here was party to the purchase of a flat in Wimbledon (I know, I know - I was a child bride, I liked being near the Wombles) for £29,950. The combined salaries involved in the mortgage - from two young people both, at that time, working in shops of one sort or another - came to roughly £16,000. In other words, we were earning more than half the amount the flat cost.

Er - compare that to now. On a salary of over four times what I was earning then, I am unable to afford to buy a flat. Well - okay - I have kids, I'd need a bigger flat, and I'm only one adult in the equation, not two. However. The average price of a home in 2007 hit around £200,000. Even in nasty old Hackney you can't even buy a garage for twice the combines earnings of two shop assistants.

The Telegraph puts it this way:

"To put current house prices into perspective, the median weekly wage, according to the Office for National Statistics, is £447 – equating to £23,244 a year. Average house prices, then, have reached a remarkable 8·6 times average earnings."

Now, you may recall that many council properties have been sold off under Right to Buy. Many of those places now fetch the same prices on the open market as other properties, despite the fact that councils deprived of the rental income can't even afford to keep up the communal areas properly - such is our housing shortage - and, thus, the competition for those that remain is so fierce that there are severely overcrowded families growing up and even leaving home before they can be rehoused in larger properties. I, at one stage having not worked for nine years and finding myself with nowhere to go, spent several years in a one-bedroom privately rented flat that cost me more than a 3-bed council house would have (of course I was working; I was doing nothing bloody else). I currently, in a 'good job', spend nearly half my take-home pay on the rent of the cheapest habitable two-bed flat I was able to find (in good old Hackney). (It's very nice, actually, but that is beside the point.)

Now, in this climate it stands to reason that the few council properties that do remain will go to the most desperate people in our society, those with no jobs, those who can't raise a deposit for a rented place, those who have been made homeless (the only way to get housed in inner London), those who have no other option. The ones the council has to house.

They are the deserving poor.

Of course fewer of them are working.

Caroline, wake up! Wake up! It was all a dream!

* I wonder if that means they have to speak English, too.

the flavour of the moment

Two nights recently: foxes fighting. Were they fighting? Maybe I'm naive, but it did sound like you should find a dead animal in the morning. Terrible. The wind, still wuthering in its scary way around the windows: right now round my bedroom window, and for the rest of the day it will be around my window at work. It's been going on like that for over a month and I just want it to stop.

A headache. Cold. Loud clanks, they must be putting up scaffolding somewhere nearby, in the wind. Today I will wear my big coat, yesterday I regretted the cropped-sleeve jacket bitterly. No matter how many scarves. Will try to read more Hecht on the tube. My Millions of Strange Shadows should arrive today or tomorrow (thanks to the wonderful Munn Books), and this weekend will see my idea beginning to acquire an actual shape. It's only 2,000 words, but it is a bit daunting writing about someone so austere, so major and so - both when he was alive (I imagine) and metaphorically, now - unforgiving...

Last week in London Bridge Station I saw an Amish family! A father, a mother and a grown daughter (yes, it does seem unlikely that her name was Arietty) - all in very obviously homemade clothes, the women in that cloth cap or bonnet, and their (bad, lumpy) dresses made of cotton - thin blue checks on an anaemic white ground. They looked far less than amused - they must have been hating London Bridge Station and it is almost impossible to imagine what can have brought them there. A death, maybe.

Tired, hungover - never go for a drink with my friend Helen - always tired. But generally happy as a pig in shit. I know it's a disgusting saying but I have always loved it, for some reason, those lovely evocative pigs in their sties. The wind! Must get up and out fast so I can go get some coffee beans at the deli and of course also a coffee for me to drink. I'l be fine then. For local readers, this information: Lemon Monkey gets all their coffee from Monmouth Coffee Shop, and that is why it is the best coffee in Stoke Newington.

This is proper blogging, isn't it - just wittering on about nothing, as if you care. Well, and now, up and out. Can I do it in fifteen minutes?

ten poets and a bottle of plain water

Last night I went to the TS Eliot Prize reading, a huge annual event where the ten poets each read from their shortlisted books prior to the following night's announcement of the winner. Of course, this year's shortlistees are more familiar to the public now than they might have been, because they each read a poem on Radio 4 last week; although I didn't hear them, I know others did because they told me about it. And a couple of them were new to me.

Here is the shortlist, arranged (I hope) in the order they read in:

Matthew Sweeney for Black Moon (Jonathan Cape)
Alan Gillis for Hawks and Doves (Gallery)
Sarah Maguire for The Pomegranates of Kandahar (Chatto)
Fiona Sampson for Common Prayer (Carcanet)
Edwin Morgan for A Book of Lives (Carcanet)

Sophie Hannah for Pessimism for Beginners (Carcanet)
Ian Duhig for The Speed of Dark (Picador)
Frances Leviston for Public Dream (Picador)
Mimi Khalvati for The Meanest Flower (Carcanet)
Sean O'Brien for The Drowned Book (Picador)

Peter Porter, the chair of the judges, started the evening with a reading of Eliot's 'Death of Saint Narcissus' and then made way for the evening's compere, John Walsh. He did a creditable job, in language far more flowery than that of the poets... Then the readings, but unfortunately Edwin Morgan - a living legend - is too frail at 87 to have attended. We heard instead an absolutely riveting recording of his voice, reading three poems. It was hard to make out all the words but his cadences are so wonderful, and the words you could hear were so good, that it was pretty much my favourite reading of the evening. There was much buzz about it in the foyer.

There were several good readings, though: it's always a big treat to hear Ian Duhig, and Frances Leviston - whose book I haven't even seen yet, let alone read - read a very interesting poem about a fortune teller. The Belfast poet Alan Gillis was new to me, and also worth having a look at his book I think.

The Bloomsbury Theatre seemed more inhospitable than ever - what an awful building that is! They had double-booked a whole row of tickets, so there was mild seating chaos, and the weird, glary spotlighting in there nearly brought on a glaucoma attack. By the break my left eye was sore. (I'll use this as my excuse for accidentally dropping my water bottle cap off the balcony! Apologies herewith to whoever I blinded underneath. You can;t take me anywhere.) And there wasn't even any sparkling water at the bar - I had to drink plain water all evening! The ignominy.

But these are small prices to pay, I suppose, especially as a fellow Salt poet of my acquaintance informed me before things kicked off that he has invented a new kind of perspective - I think it might be called "antiparaconspectivity," though I might not be remembering it right - though he was quite tired from inventing it all afternoon, and hadn't written up the manifesto yet, so he couldn't tell me how it works. But he assures me it's going to be great! The New Renaissance is truly upon us. And it broke out at a poetry reading.

And then I came home through rainy Euston to a long phone call and a very patient teenager.

Who must now be awoken from her enchanted slumber.

"too beautiful and romantic to survive"

No, not me. If I were going to go under it would have happened long ago.

And in fact the beauty of Martin Jennings' statue of John Betjeman (who said those words about St Pancras Station itself) lies in its almost romantic adherence to the workaday. Like Patrick Kavanagh on the bench in Dublin. (You see: poets don't often get statues, but when they do...) This one is just lovely.

(It's also in stark contrast to Galliano's Dior dress, posted below. In this statue, writes Justin Gowers in the Guardian Arts Blog, "Jennings has skilfully captured Betjeman's shabby appearance. His shoelace and scruffy collar are undone. He has knotted string for one shoelace. His right trouser leg is lower at the back." I can't see that going down too well at Paris Fashion Week.)

I haven't been to the new St Pancras Station yet; such is the uselessness of London that I pass underneath it twice a day, and I have eagerly asked friends who've been there: "how does it look? What's it like?" as if I were a medieval villager and they were travelling minstrels.

The chalky-pale-blue ironwork is very beautiful, isn't it? And Victorian: we'd lack the imagination to do that now, with the red.

Thanks to Nicholas Murray for the tip... embarrassingly, I've missed the whole thing. You know, maybe I'll go home on the bus one day and get off in St Pancras. Would it be so hard?

the rain it raineth

... but not quite every day! There may be torrents lashing my window as I type, but yesterday I was catapulted - in that strange, overnight-flight way - into a glorious, sunny, cold day in London.

I put myself back into the right time zone, in the course of a lovely drive home from Gatwick, by climbing up the hill at Greenwich, the Epicentre of World Time, and visually recalibrating. London's panorama of east to west, and also through time, spread out in front of me like - like - like a sweet shop window, as I've written elsewhere - one of the most bracing sights. You could almost touch it. The light was sort of liquid and gold, strangely complicated after the clean, empirical white light of North America, so that the different buildings took on almost a quality of activity as they occupied their little spaces. On the film of my mind this view is superimposed on the soft caressing Catskills that cradled me as a baby,* and New York State's stark grey winter trees. The grass in Greenwich Park seemed extra green, and the Gherkin and St Paul's and Canary Wharf were poignantly foregrounded by England's naval history. In a bookshop there was a seven-volume set of Nelson's Logs and Letters: "Dysentery again..."

I'm now in my lovely bed - yes, still! - having slept for almost 11 hours and woken up at the perfectly appropriate time of 9.45. I have to be at the hairdresser in three hours, before my roots start looking like those trees.

* Go on: am I in Pseud's Corner yet?

back to earth, hopefully not with a thump

Getting real here. Tomorrow I have to go get on a plane in Newark, which means I have to lug my stuff from Woodstock to NYC, and from NYC to Newark, and then persuade the people at the check-in desk to let me check my bags in. What this means is that I have to do the packing, and I have to do it right.

Gone are the days, you know - as long as it fits in a bag it's all right - no, even hair products and body oil, all the most impractical things you can think of, now have to go in the hold, even though it's not pressurised, which means they're likely to burst open in transit, which means that today I need (in this town which lacks a supermarket) to get loads of ziplock bags. And last week at Heathrow they were trying to tell me my carry-on bag had to weigh less than six kilos! The bag itself weights four kilos. I was pretty much going to have to carry on an empty bag and check my laptop in, which I refused pointblank to do. But, because of the security, you do have to be able to get your laptop out of the bag easily - and then back in again - you know, what do they think we're like? We can't all be nomads.

Plus, there are the new sheets. They're pretty big even once you get them out of the packaging - and one of them has already been washed from where a muddy cat went and slept on it, but did it shrink? No. And the obligatory American Sweets. And just the couple of books and a Tony Hancock DVD nobody can play over here, wrong region apparently. And then there are the three framed pictures which an indefatigable aunt and uncle are even now trying to pack up in such a way that I can check them in - rather than, say, sending them to myself at vast expense and then having to pay import duty on them, can you imagine - which of course also means "in such a way that I can lug them through Port Authority." God I hate that place. And I still haven't worked out a good system for managing two suitcases, the carry-on bag and the coffee.

Then there's the kids, and then there's the cousins, and then there's Baby Bro and his wife. And one evening! Well, everyone's had a cut of me, I guess. And there are phone calls to make tonight.

I have to say, it will be lovely to be home. There are people to see there too, including of course the Baroquelings... I feel as if I've been gone a month.

Meanwhile there's the four calling birds poem, the manuscript and attendant other issues like for example permissions for quoted material, which I have not as yet addressed at all - and now it's the run-up to Christmas - and, ahem, Hecht. Oh and three books waiting for me at home to be reviewed. Oh, and work! Yes. Not only that but I have a toothache. I might go take a Nurofen.

at least they're not idoits

I'm just shamelessly stealing this post. Kris from Stoke Newington, one of my favourite bloggers and definitely someone you want inside your tent pissing out (as the saying goes), has lately taken to recording conversations she overhears. I'm jealous, I'm envious, and I'm thinking I don't spend enough time on the buses these days...*

She writes:

On the 73, approx 11:00 am today (and no, American friends, there is no Thanksgiving holiday here).

Two school-girls on the bus. Let’s call them “Little” and “Large”: -

Little to Large: “I was with Hayley and Chelsea and I floored him. I fucking floored him and he didn’t do nuffink. Ask my grandad.

Large, shouting down her mobile: “WE’RE ON THE BUS TO KING’S SQUARE, THEN WE’RE GOING OUT WEST”.

Little: “Give me that phone”. Now down phone: “You fucking wanker, next time I see you, I’m gonna scratch your face up”.

Large, taking phone back: “YEAH, OUT WEST, BUT WE’RE GOING TO KING’S SQUARE FIRST”.

Little, looking out the window: “OMG! There’s my school police officer. Tap on the window”.

But what I really love? The labels she's given it: antisocial behaviour, idiots, London.

* Edited in. Wait. You don't have to be on a bus. Mlle B is sitting here watching America's Next Top Goddamned Model. Lots of sounds of girls weeping, sounding heartbroken - they probably broke a nail - and then inspirational, or exhortational, blather from all the weird people who run it. I'm not listening. Then, from the wall of sound, emerges the sentence, spoken by a voice neither male nor female but merely vapid: "Okay girls, and we're gonna do do four sides of your personality."

oh my god, you're such a culture vulture!

(Don't you hate that expression??) Or: "the South Bank Experience - that'll be £££, please"

There is nothing cultural here to report. Ms Baroque has, this weekend, singlehandedly put together an Ikea bed (double) with only a minimum of bruising. The bit where you have to hold up footboard, headboard and side bits, and slot ends into one another was quite interesting, not to say slightly soul-destroying, but once the bed was done and I was in it my soul felt miraculously intacto.

It is eight divine inches wider than the old one. But it's not really cultural.

My reading this weekend has been confined to half the Guardian review section, of which I remember nothing except that Baroque in Hackney was once again not featured in the blogs column, and a few Pont cartoons. Pont is wonderful and I love him distractedly; but I feel I must save him for an Elegantly Dressed Wednesday. Perhaps I'll scan something in.

I tried to go to the Louis Bourgeois exhibition at Tate Modern, which would have been a major cultural experience; but upon arriving, in unexpectedly freezing winds, on the south side of the Wobbly Bridge, I was reminded of something I have written about before and thus should have remembered: the art-going middle classes. Damn their eyes. And their cagoules, and their rucksacks, and their spoiled posing toddlers and their cameras and their Museum Guides and their half-baked opinions.

Actually, looking over my old entries here, I see I have not yet in fact written about my hatred of the Tate-going millions. I can't believe it! This is a rant which, if you know me, you have surely experienced in the flesh.

Some brief highlights:

• the two suburban, middle-aged couples at the next table to me in the members' lounge last year after the Kandinsky exhibition last year - an exhibition which left me so cold it alarmed me. One man of the party was lecturing his three companions about the "code" in Kandinsky's paintings: that he colour-coded the notes of the music score, so that if you know his "code" you can tell what the music sounded like, that he "painted." I wrote at that time that I found the Kandinsky exhibition almost unbearably whimsical - and tiring in its quasi-figurativeness - but it was nothing compared to that guy.

• any two women who conduct their semi-informed conversation about the work in question loudly enough so you can't get away from them no matter where you are. Or worse yet talk about their own artworks. Or, as happened to me at the historic Picasso retrospective at MoMA in 1980, when I was a mere slip of a gel, get trapped in the line going through the entire exhibition next to you, and spend their whole outing describing in detail the movie they saw the day before: Airplane.
  

• Anyone who thinks that a slide can be art, and that you can somehow take your kids to the Tate one day and pretend you're at Alton Towers, and be somehow "doing" "Art."

• people like the two guys in front of me yesterday who, on a crowded staircase, got to the top and just - stopped dead in their tracks to decide what to do next. This also happened to me at Victoria the other day when some French woman tourist with a huge heavy suitcase did just this in the middle of the rush hour, and to be honest I was scared for a few seconds, because I was right behind her and was afraid of getting crushed - or knocked back down the stairs - by the implacable swarm of other people.

• People who take endless photos of each other standing in front of works of art

• Small children who are clearly so used to being the centre of everybody's attention that, at the first sign of a camera, they start leering unattractively into the lens in look-at-me postures, while their doting parents look self-consciously proud of having such genius offspring...

Well, my companion and I decided not even to try. The poor spider alone, which I love and had so been looking forward to seeing again, was overrun like a jungle gym at playtime.

And don't even get me started on that crack in the floor. Someone stepped in it and got hurt the day it opened.

Heading to the Royal Festival Hall we fared no better: the crowds were intense and there was some awful "inclusive" jazz being played so loudly in the foyer, accompanied by dozens of poor dancing children clothed in gigantic windsocks, that conversation was impossible. In the end I literally ran out the door of the RFH.

Straight into the RFH shop, which is now large enough to need separate premises. What is happening down there?!? They're selling welcome-mat-sized bits of carpet like the carpet in the RFH itself - admittedly an iconic design, okay, I grant you, in a kind of Modern-Design-Fascist-Heritage way. But seriously - they have notebooks with that design on. In different colourways. They have wrapping paper with it on. Go off sick for a few measly months, try going for a nice afternoon and the whole goddamn river's turned into a theme park of itself! The bust of Nelson Mandela was just looking tired and ironic, I thought.

And in the window of the RFH shop? An Ercol coffee table exactly like mine. Only the finish on mine is much more beautiful (I checked when I got home). It is my favourite coffee table in the whole world. I got mine in Past Caring last winter for £35, & was happy for a whole month. Some idiot or other down at the South Bank will pay £400.

It's enough to make you take to your bed. Which is just what I have done.

a literary haunting

This evening I got lost in Wanstead. Picture me, out there on the rim of the world, in Zone 4, overshooting my stop on the 101 bus, and left to wander by the roadside with only my mobile phone in hand. Across the road, nothing but an endless black barren waste - probably some sort of suburban playing field - and much further away, across the other side of that, Canary Wharf glinting forlornly in the distance, far to the west...

Dearie me! I did eventually get to my friend's house, but believe me, I got a cab back to Stokey. And you wouldn't believe how quick it is, once you're in a car.

In other news, I had an email from Norman Mailer today. I know, surprising, isn't it? I know it was really from him, though: it was signed, "the late Norman Mailer."

stop press! the happiness!

Sorry, I really feel I am blogging too much. I really am just about to go get some lunch. But I made the mistake of just quickly looking at the Guardian homepage, and there I learned that the lovable ruffian, or useless wastrel tosspot, who likes to think of himself as London's next mayor - yes, the strange blond tearaway himself, Boris Johnson - is a poet!

Or not. The book, published on Monday by Harper Collins, is entitled The Perils of the Pushy Parents. Lord.

Stuart Jeffries has done the hard work for us, and reports thus:

" [Ken] Livingstone will have to read the bloody thing in order to get a bead on Johnson's views on the politics of childrearing (of which more later), but you need not. This year, an estimated 170,000 books will be published and, if I suggest that this is only the 169,999th least worth reading, that is only because I am hedging my bets. A worse book might appear this year. It is a possibility.

The book concerns the Albacores, a family whose parents insist son and daughter should not watch telly. The dad, especially, is a crackpot who teaches his toddlers Zeno's paradox when they should be eating dirt and shanking each other with plastic cutlery. When Mr Albacore sees the pair watching TV, he takes action rendered thus by Johnson: "He'd zap the programme off and holler/ 'Go and read some Emile Zola.'"

As you will notice, Johnson has a gift for assonance not heard since Alexander Pope wrote the Rape of the Lock (this will be the quote they use on the paperback edition - just see if it isn't). By which I mean, there are lots of duff rhymes....

In Henry IV, part 1, Hotspur remarks: "I had rather be a kitten, and cry mew!/ Than one of these same metre ballad-mongers." If only Johnson were that kitten...

...the quality of Boris is always strained."

polite life

Okay, I know I've gone a bit quiet lately. I've been busy. Even now, at not-quite-9 on the last Saturday morning before the clocks go back, I'm dragging furniture out to the landing and practicing the exact shade of wheedle to put in my voice when I ring our long-suffering friend of the family, the one with the estate car. And that's to say nothing of - well, the things which I'll say nothing of. Just think: team awaydays... bonding drinks (and yes, we made the jokes, it turns out we're a rather puerile team)... South London...

Well, I won't tell you what happens when you try to put a Baroque south of the river. It's like being in Australia: the water doesn't go down the plug hole the wrong way round, but it was strange suddenly to realise that the big thing at the end of the road was Tate Modern, from the back. And there's virtually no view of the Post Office Tower from anywhere down there. And the trees are smaller.

Anyway, I was drinking orange-&-soda in the pub in Southwark - the hair of that dog could have killed me - except for the last two, where they put some vodka in (but you could barely taste it). The team wrote a poem, one line each, and I brought the whole thing full circle with a killing last line. As this is a decorous, perfectly judged and always exquisite blog I can't tell you what it was about, but I made sure it had a tidy little rhyme scheme, and my colleagues did their bit with a pretty consistent iambic trimeter.

So it''s been a journey. And then, in between manky outgrown socks and what to do with all the little robots, I see that someone has broached* the halls of Baroque using a Google search on "humorous earrings."**

Oh, puh-lease.

Never, again, okay? (Except that I've just repeated the phrase, so now it will happen again. Sigh.) I learned that lesson the hard way, back in the eighties when my then sister-in-law gave me a pair of Fimo Christmas puddings on earring wire. I had to wear them on Boxing Day, and I think she may have had little parcels wrapped in real wrapping paper, with infinitesimal ribbon bows, swinging from her ears. (This would have been in Chesham, which is in Zone 152 or something; strange things happen out there at the end of the tube line.) This is not the kind of thing a girl like me forgets easily.

So, and especially with the clocks going back and numerous temptations looming in the form of Jack-o-lanterns, Christmas trees, fairy lights, little skeletons that really dance, and sweet angels in real frocks, let us just establish the ground rules. (You can see I've been on an awayday.) There is no place for humorous earrings in polite life.

Sorry. That's just how it is.

* Note: not decked

** Many apologies, incidentally, for yet another mention of these blasted Google searches. I know it looks unforgivably and inanely solipsistic, not to say showy-offy. But look at it this way: even if I were that self-regarding, what would it profit me if all I had to show for it was that my main inspiration in life came from reading my stats? You see? You're feeling more superior already, aren't you.

found in translation: Moscow nights for all

Ooh, I love it when people do that google "translate this page" thing! In this instance, the bits that are still in English - presumably untranslatable into the pidgin robot-Russian this undoubtedly is - may be telling: fabulous cut & colour, Hugo Boss perfume, Waitrose food, French rosé... clearly another bad day down the mines. As I recall it all came to nothing. But it's looking pretty good now!

Пятница, 16 Июня 2006

лучших моментов в жизни бесплатно

Okay so the money-saving tips are not arriving. Хорошо это деньги экономии советы не поступают. Ms Baroque has had a fabulous cut & colour Г-жа барокко пришлось вырезать и прекрасные цвета (в Beaucatcher в Стоке Невингтон церковь, улица Торговая, а не экономии денег, но удовольствие), купленный около сладкий зеленый серьги из кнопок (Хамилтонс, церковь Св., как указано выше), купили - 140 фунтов стерлингов стоимостью бакалейные товары, черные кожаные сандалии патента, и влияние некоторых Уго Boss духи. Well, that one was an emergency. Ну, что было чрезвычайной. Поэтому я считаю, что деньги решений оконечности здесь просто не оказаться, как я. Let them eat Waitrose foodstuffs and drink French rosé. Пусть они едят Waitrose пищевых продуктов и напитков читать по-французски.

Положительная сторона, я сделаю двойной рецепт из домашней Эпилятор сегодня, что если вы, что они каждый фунт из борьбы на Caffe Nero это почти неисчислимый экономии.

elegantly dressed duvet day

This is me, about half an hour ago. My main emotion at the time was, although it doesn't show, a deep happiness at having achieved my ambition of doing nothing at all today - not even dressed yet at 5pm! Hurrah!

Yesterday, not working because still not quite well, I nevertheless and unavoidably spent much of the day running around. That is, two hours of it were spent in the optician's shop, admittedly doing nothing much, but it was still more stressful than sleeping, which was what I wanted to be doing. (There may be more on that particular, and peculiar, peccadilo anon.)

Yesterday afternoon I went into town to record four poems for a very enterprising young poet and student called Alex Pryce, who has a website of poetry podcasts. (She's only 19! And she got the funding! More impressive than my own dossy kids, I say.) We sat in a VERY plush office at NESTA, just off Fetter Lane - appropriately for podcasting, it looked like a gleaming white space-pod: two small poetry people round a giant table with orange leather swivel chairs, and I read four rather quirky poems into a posh, very officlal-looking, microphone.

Then I had an hour to kill before the shockingly penultimate poetry reading at Oxfam Books & Music - after four years of Todd Swift's seasonal events, one has bevcome accustomed to their simply happening as usual - so, finding myself very near Dr Johnson's house, I paid him a visit. Strange place, and strange to be in his house. I feel like I know him so well - and I don't think he was home. But it was lovely to be there, in his bedroom even! (Lawsie!) But, it's a shame, none of his windows look out on anything remotely like what the great man would have seen from them. The whole neighbourhood was heavily bombed in the war; his house escaped only by a miracle, and at the cost of the roof of his famous garret.

There were many pictures, including almost every portrait you've ever seen of Johnson. That was a thrill. And was struck, once again, as I always am, by how kind David Garrick (the great actor) looked. He was a lovely man, a great mimic, and had a party routine of Johnson squeezing a lemon into a punch bowl, (apparently with "uncouth gestures"), saying, "Whoosh for poonsh?" And I saw Mrs Thrale's tea service! Another, & great, thrill. But of "Dr Johnson and his friends" there was precious little sign of any women, which seems a great shame. I came to him, after all, through the wonderful Fanny Burney.

And then a rainy, Londony trudge up to Marylebone for the reading (maybe a gift from the Doctor, whom I consider in many ways to be the embodied spirit of London, even though not originally "from" the city), by way of two buses and a long walk through Fitzrovia - by then already feeling debilitatingly tired - and an excellent evening. Three Salt poets in a row - Chris McCabe, Giles Goodland, and Julia Bird (whose book will be published in autumn 2008) - were fascinating and fun, with possibly more "innovative" (is that really the word we use?) work from the first two than you mostly hear in Oxfam... I loved them, they were funny and serious and sort of questing... though I could see two older poets shaking their heads as Chris McCabe read his letter to Rimbaud. One told me afterwards, "I just don't agree with him about Rimbaud!" Love that too. But I am on a book-buying moratorium and so did not take anything home with me from any of the authors. Damn. A splendid evening, though!

In addition, Chris Beckett's poems, inspired by his Ethiopian childhood, are always wonderful to hear & he was fab last night. Fleur Adcock was lovely; she read a poem about water, and ancestors, that has stayed with me a lot today. Mario Petrucci read from his new book , and Matthew Sweeney (not Matthew Sweney), dashing about the country like a blue-arsed fly to promote his new book, Black Moon, gave a very spirited reading at the end, rousing us to a finish.

I got home late, & struggled all night to stay asleep in the midst of intensely vivid, jumbled dreams. I managed to pretty much stay asleep till about ten, & then swore to stay in bed all morning and do nothing all afternoon. Well - I was going to do wome writing. But then I watched all the last week's EastEnders episodes instead. Ahem. Stacey in that mothbally wedding dress!!

Looks like I've succeeded, then. And I do feel better for it I think. But now I have a pizza date with three girls.

















...and, as it is EDW, after all: here's Garrick for you. Another great London figure, painted by Gainsborough in this instance.

(Next week: William Blake in his filthy dressing gown, kicking Leigh Hunt out at his doorway in Poland Street.)

poetry for all?

Yesterday, as stated, I went to see a very eminent herbalist - of the Miss Marple kind, not a crystal-waving hippie - who has kindly laughed in the face of my worst fears and given me a magic potion to drink. He says it is like watching flowers grow: if I look for changes in how I feel every day I won't see them, but if I look every week, I probably will. It's hard to describe how cheered I was by his predictions.

To celebrate - and hoping to do some research to back up a book review I have to write this week - I got on a bus to Waterloo, to check out the newly-reopened Poetry Library in the Royal Festival Hall. Now, I love the Poetry Library. I don't think I can overstate the part it played in bedding me down into the poetry publishing world: many's the whole day I've spent looking at magazines there (back when I didn't know where to send to) and borrowing books and books and reading more books, and copying things down, and just being happy and in my element. It's been closed for something like two years for refurbishment, during which time it has been a sad gap, and even its much-enhanced website hasn't been able to fill its place.

So I went, excitedly; I excitedly rejoined (yay!); I ran into my friend Dean, who works there, who worried me by saying he has pictures taken of me at my friend Annie's wedding ( but he says they don't make me look fat); and I began to look around. I did find lovely things to do and to read, but my hopes of research were a bit cruelly dashed - not helped by a severe energy failure shortly after I arrived, which made me decide to take the path of least resistance, meaning I didn't engage a librarian in a huge long search on my behalf. But anyway that's not my style; I prefer to poke around and find things organically. And I do know roughly the sort of thing I'm looking for.

In the end I copied some things out, and found some books to borrow (not by any means the first ones I looked for), and went downstairs to fortify myself with coffee for the trip home. Prompted by a comment on my last post, I've listed my thoughts on the new poetry library. Because it doesn't seem as much the new-&-improved flagship establishment as I was hoping. Not so much revamped as rearranged. None of this means I don't love it, and I will certainly be going there as usual. But:

1. Why are (some - not all) books of criticism mixed in with the poetry collections?? Jesus! What's that about?!?

2. The loan collection seems not much added to - it is looking, in fact, sadly tatty. And several books I was hoping to borrow simply weren't there; can it be that so many people have been there since the reopening that everything you'd want is on loan? Paul Farley's new collection, for example, was nowhere to be seen in the whole library, unless I was missing something arcane.

The lovely spandy books at the back - acquired in the past two years - are all for reference only. I just think the loan collection is looking distinctly tired and a bit depressing... I realise this isn't the library's fault, and the space is ridiculously small, and the website looks great, but it would be so wonderful to see it looking a bit more - you know - vibrant...

3. The loan collection up to, I think, M, is in the rolly-shelf bits in the middle. It makes browsing almost impossible.

4. I wanted to look at some Rosemary Tonks - well, I really want to own some, but it's so expensive. Why will no one republish her! Her books are hard to find and, okay, there were none for loan. But there were none for reference either! Only on mentioning it later at the desk did I discover that they are in the Rare Books Section. I hadn''t even thought about there being a Rare Books Section.

On the other hand, the selected poems of Harry Fainlight - just as rare as Tonks, certainly it fetches the same price online - was right there in reference, fine in original Steadman d/w, waiting to be stolen! The librarian didn't seem to see anything in this, as I implored him to put Harry in the Rare Books Section too.

5. There do seem to be far fewer magazines on display. I was consoled by one of them being the current Poetry Salzburg Review, which has some of mine in it. Hurrah!

6. The tables are both smaller & fewer. And closer together. The reading cubicles at the back are ridiculously claustrophobic, tiny and too close - you're practically rubbing shoulders with the next person, and with your back to the room! I will never use them.

7. To be honest, I came away thinking that my lit crit section here at home is as useful, and that there are some books - some quite expensive - that I will still need to buy, unless I were to take my laptop there and spend a whole day typing out, say, a whole book. Unless a wealthy benefactor can be found.

On the plus side: the audio section looks spacious, there are some lovely typographical artworks in the front, and it was busy - lots of people were in there. Clearly it is being used, which is a great thing.

elegant extra!

The more observant among you will have noticed that I have not yet put up an elegantly Dressed Wednesday post today. Ths is partly because I have been in bed all morning, completely wrung out by the exertions of my very first trip into town in oh, two months! (Yes: armed with the common sense and potion of my newly favourite-ever herbalist, I went to the Poetry Library yesterday to sit among some books I don't own, for a change. More on that later, if I have the strength.)

The other reason is that the only thing I have done today was to write an Elegantly Dressed Wednesday post over on Non-Working Monkey! Yes!

In a development almost too exciting, NWM asked me last week if I'd be willing to help out on her blog while she's away, cycling around France with a pathologist who cuts his own hair. I could hardly believe it. At first I thought I knew what I would write, but then I couldn't think of anything. Then I had annother idea but it was rubbish. So the other day I made my first outing on her blog, disgracefully using a whole post just to tell a very silly joke. (It is the funniest joke in the world, though, so I'm hoping she won't mind.)

Today, thinking always of her high standards as well as personal happiness, etc, I have passed on my style advice for her as she ventures into her new life in a giant fruit-basket in Canada. It is the first-ever EDW post on Non-Working Monkey. (nb. Some of you may recognise the dress; I featured it last year. I just can't stay away from it.)

I will try to do another EDW here too, making it a double-scoop-extra day, but do be patient.

it was a dark and stormy night

I don't know... a tiny kitten arrives - maybe I found it in a coffee shop. (There's a coffee shop scene, complete with me trying to juggle too many things, including a cardboard box of vegetables, and some dishy guy very kindly offering to carry half of it to my seat for me. I wanted a mini-danish, but there are none; this is my breakfast, I'm off to a big wedding.)

From somewhere else, an even tinier hamster - from a child, I think. I'm in a flat with the ex-ex Mr B and he has also just bought a gigantic black Great Dane. No; it's not the ex-ex Mr B! Someone else I know, a poet, but after a rather steamy clinch he has suddenly turned into the ex-ex Mr B.

The doorbell goes, he goes to answer it. The animals get out, and I forget what - another animal, I think - he goes chases something down the middle of the black road. It's raining.

The kitten is out. The Great Dane is out, and he's huge, and he's not wearing a collar, and I try to call him back - but he's so new he doesn't even have a name! I'm going, "come here sweetie, come here puppy, come on... come on!" He's in the road with his paws tucked under him like a sphinx, looking at me. All haunch. A 4x4 full of children comes along but he doesn;t move. The car nudges him with a wheel, stops, nudges him again, but he doesn't move. I look at the driver. The driver rolls the 4x4 right over - first the front wheels, then - I'm petrified on the pavement, holding this increasingly alarmed and squirming kitten - the back wheels - over the dog. But the dog seems miraculously able to bear the weight, he is so powerful.

I turn to go inside, and then I see the dog beginning to move. As he pulls himself towards the pavement on his front paws a trail of blood stretches out behind him - his back legs are immobile - he was only mortal after all. I run inside to get a number for a 999 vet. No ex-ex Mr B, I'm not sure where I am, I don't even have a key so I keep trying to leave the door on the latch...

Get the number. The operator wants to know where I am, & I'm running up and down this anonymous London street trying to find a sign (good, isn't it?). All I can see is an estate with some hoodies hanging out & graffiti everywhere, and it is raining so hard - everything is sheets of grey, my eyebrows are streaming (thanks Chippy) - I can't read even the signs on the housing blocks. I'm going, "I can't see, it's kind of like Mayfair, but down a bit."

Run back to the flat, where I have put the kitten and hamster back in their little boxes (I narrowly missed stepping on the hamster at one point, a very fluffy thing) - the kitten is very snug with its mummy, now - and the poor dog is lying in the shrubbery now, he's so well hidden I almost think he's dead... I realise I need a canine ambulance, I can't lift him even if I knew how, or what was wrong with him, and there is no sign of anyone coming back to help me - but I can't seem to get the number again. I'm dialling, dialling. I'm coaxing the dog. I name him, so I can coax him: "Lionel! come here Lionel? Come on sweetie? Liiii-onel...! Come on!"

Lionel!

By the way, I must say that practically the only thing I did yesterday was watch La Reine Margot, a rather sensationalist French film about the Medicis, starring Isabelle Adjani and featuring a prolonged portrayal of the St Bartholemew's Day massacre of the Huguenots.

But enough of that, I have to get ready: I've got a wedding to go to! A poetry wedding! I must leave in time to get a coffee...