truly madly useless

Well, as one of my resolutions is about doing admin and paying bills and buying the right kinds of light bulbs and generally trying to become a more practical person around the home, I thought I would report that I have just carried out an irksome authorial task I should have carried out months ago, but didn't, largely because of A) my uselessness, and B) all the interruptions re my dad's death and having to go away and then Christmas etc: I have written to all the necessary agents and rights departments to request permissions to use various quotes from other writers, without which my own work will appear as dust in a disused parking lot when my book finally comes out.

(How's that for a run-on sentence?)

Having done that, and felt pretty darn good about myself for a minute there, I feel I must also report that when I went to buy new printer ink the other day - after needing new ink for a couple of months - I forgot to check the number of my printer and guessed. Of course I had to take it back. Who really knows the model number of their printer, I ask you. The guy in the art shop was rather unimpressed, there in his woolly jumper and sensible glasses, to the extent of being almost not prepared to let me have another one at all, because the sad truth is that in my haste (I was on several errands at once, not least the purchase of a badly-needed large cappuccino - I felt feeble enough to think the milk protein might help me - from Giraffe, and no it wasn't giraffe milk, though that could be fun, who knows) - in my haste, I had forgotten to check again the number of the printer. Sigh. I thought I remembered it as C3190 and managed to look convincing for long enough to get the guy to give me another ink cartridge. Having fended off some light mockery on this score earlier today, I now go to continue my streak of admin brilliance and discover that my printer is a C4180.

Damn it.

But that was in 2007. To bed, now.

new year, new start?

Sorry folks. January 2nd and not a peep even to say Happy New Year! Well, your correspondent has been busy and is now feeling as jaded as - as - well, as a piece of jade. The pale kind. I've just thrown away an entire carrier bag of old, inedible food includingh loads of stuff I bought just so we would have leftovers to eat. Key word there: "we." Ah well: teenagers, eh.

Work tomorrow morning, with a big meeting at 11am, which I have to prepare for. AND the Victoria Line isn't stopping at, er, Victoria until Monday (that would be asking a bit much of them, apparently). (However, I've just been talking to a 13-year-old who has to go to school tomorrow - five days before the pampered young of N16 - in a bottle-green uniform, complete with blazer. That would take even more gearing up to, I think...)

This time last year I was writing about resolutions. Some of them are the same, which is both good - these are things one should always resolve to do - and bad, as some of them I signally failed to achieve last time round. Little did one know, writing these resolutions, why the detox diet had failed - to wit, that one was sick with something no detox diet could cure - but this year, working only on the basis of what I know, which is all one can do, I resolve most of these things again. The "spending less" one is really the important one. Whatever else happens.

Last year someone - the Political Umpire - invited me to list my seven successes of 2006. This task reminds me of something I was advised to do in the deepest, darkest days of my divorce, which was to write a list of things I was grateful for. No matter how small. I used to list things like "the scrambled eggs on toast I had for breakfast" and "I'm alive." The idea, because you had to fill a side of A4 with your list, was to show that there are always things to be grateful for, no matter how small... It's a salutary exercise at any time when things don't seem to be going right, and I think any given New Year is easily that kind of time. Someone once asked me, at a New Year's Even party, "what's your biggest fear for the coming year?" It was only hard to think which was the biggest.

Now, 2007 has turned out to be utter crap. I know several people who have had that experience, and several who say that almost everyone they know has had that experience. It looks as if we're all glad to put 2007 behind us. The inevitable finale, the crashing crescendo, and one remembers only too clearly one's hopes for that terrible year at its beginning. But wait! Was it all bad?

So, on to the task. The seven things I'm glad to take with me from 2007 into 2008. The year wasn't a complete dead loss. I also challenge you, dear readers, to post a list of your seven things in the comments.

1. My manuscript was accepted by Salt, hurrah, and yes! I am going to send it in this week. It's slated for June publication. (I hope.) There have already been changes for the good as a result of this, friendships and links forged, and other things. Salt was the first publisher I ever sent a manuscript to, so sure was I that they were the outfit I wanted to be with. I think it's a really exciting place to be.

On a smaller poetry note, I was invited to read in St Albans in the autumn, for Oxfam, and it turned out to be the Saturday after my father, le Duc de Baroque, died. I was never in two minds about doing the reading, but I was kind of wondering how I would do it - and in the event it was good, and great, and the church we were in bucked me up immeasurably, and it was a beautiful evening.

2. Well, I hated it, and was sick, and it was awful, but at least I found out what had been causing those stomach-aches and all that faintness and illness, and got it sorted out. So now I'm released from the constant effort of trying to figure out why I don't feel well, and am in fact feeling better. So it's good.

And I learned a lot about hospitals. Which isn't good but it is interesting, in an annoying way. I'm more scared of being old now. And I feel more mature from my experiences, which at my age (156) is only tantamout to saying you feel old, so we'll just leave that one there, shall we.

Also, I didn't go blind.

3. I saw a lot of great films on DVD and telly. Not that I was reading much, or would normally have not been watching nice things, but due to circumstances it was lots more than usual and it was, so far as one was capable of at the time, fun, and some of the things I saw have changed my life in some small way. Eg, I finally saw Taxi Driver. (Yes it did. Are you kidding?? Go watch it!)

4. My blog took off a bit, thanks to you lot, dear readers, so thank you each and every one! I've met interesting people and made friends through this little enterprise, and have loved some of the comments, and been surprised by some of the links, and generally been enriched by it. It's been mentioned and praised in both Time Out and The Bookaholic's Guide to Book Blogs. It's all good, even though I sometimes wonder why I write it or what it's for, or what it's even all about, Alfie.

5. The circumstances may not have been great but it was both novel and good to go home to the States twice in three months. I'm very glad I went for three whole weeks and got to spend some quality time with my father, and am equally glad that I was in a position to be able to go home for his funeral. It was wonderful to spend some time with my neices. It was wonderful to spend quite a bit of time with my Sis. It was wonderful to be in Woodstock for a precious couple of days and it was wonderful to be home in the winter. I really do think I prefer it.

6. I'm behind with almost every piece of writing I'm supposed to be doing for anyone else, but I found the other day that I've got more poems from 2007 than I thought I had, and some of them aren't bad. This is great news! I was thinking I hadn't... Twice this year - and I think this shows something of what it was all like - I've gone to look at poems on the computer and do revisions, and found a poem I have no memory of writing, and no idea what was in my head when writing it. In both cases I quite liked them, and eventually remembered the writing, but both times I only remembered after the revision. That's kind of good, if weird.

Now I must do the other writing and also send out some of the new poems.

7. This one I'm not telling.

Bonus track: Of course I am also grateful for my kids. Always. I wasn't there for them very much this year, what with being ill and feeble and ineffectual (I was about to write "and intellectual" - is it the same thing?) and then away, and I think it is telling a bit. So I guess they're my big resolution for the coming year. That, and not spending money.

I realise that most of these gratitudes come with either a "to do" list attached or a "despite everything" rider. Life, eh.

recycling update: and can we get a spin-off?

News for any fellow Hackney residents who may have empathised with my Lucille Ball moment last week: apparently the council does these reusable recycling bags, which might be easier to store and to carry down the stairs. Who knew!

Anyway, I've sent the officer in question my address, along with a sincere hope that she at least got a laugh out of the post.

Once I've got the bags, who can I be? WC Fields, maybe. I like it...

I was Lucille Ball

The other day I had to take my recycling out before work. I'm too knackered in the evenings at the moment to have done it the night before, and anyway I am naturally reluctant* to leave rubbish outside for the rats and foxes. (I heard a rustling in the bushes beside a railing the other day. Looked over and there was a sleek little rat about five inches long.)

Hackney has this new food-recycling scheme, involving a blue bucket-with-a-lid, and then there are the green boxes for other recycling. But I don't have a green box, and anyway they're wide, and I don't have room for one. I live on the third floor on a small landing. (I mean, in a flat on a small landing. Duh!) And there are green boxes in a pile next to the big bins at the end of the block.

So I consolidated my recycling, to carry it down the stairs and find a green box to put it in. What could be easier? Im really a very civic and responsible person, and slightly tired of carrying all my old containers down to the recyclig bins outside Morrisons on a Saturday. I put the tins and plastic bottles in one paper (recyclable: get it?) bag; the paper in another (I get these bags from the bakery); and the bottles in another. Clever me!

In my three-inch wedge heels and pencil skirt, and my white trench coat and orange chiffon scarf, and with my handbag (I say handbag: a list of its contents would stun a builder) over my shoulder, and my 'shoulder bag' (containing assorted papers, reading matter, poems under construction, an umbrella, my lunch) also over my shoulder, and having double-locked my door, and having wrapped a Somerfields flyer around the rather disgusting handle of the blue bucket (somehow the condensation inside it had dripped onto the handle when I was putting that morning's coffee grounds in it, making my hand smell like a garbage dump - not ideal for the Victoria Line), I worked out how to carry the other three bags.

Right shoulder: bags. Right hand: blue bucket and, put there with my left hand, the bag of paper: the flattest, you see. Bending over leftways, so as not to let the shoulder bags fall, I pick up first the bottles bag, then the tins and plastic bag, with one hand. I am now wider than the stairwell - but by going crabwise, holding the left hand aloft over the banister, I can sort of lever myself down one landing at a time.

One landing. I'm clanking a lot. My neighbours, who can't even dispose of their black bags properly, might think Marley's ghost has come early this year. But I'm doing fine. I'm trying to hold the blue bucket away from my body, as I am wearing a white coat and work clothes and it has been dripping, and I don't want to smell like a garbage truck all day. If I hold it away from my body the bags will fall off my shoulder. It's a balancing act. The bgs are almost falling, and I'll probably almost smell.

Another landing. I round the corner and suddenly the handle breaks off the glass bottle bag, which falls to the floor, ripped from top to bottom, and at that moment my shoulder bags lurch to my elbow. I readjust the bags, leave the left-hand bags on the landing, and carry on. I'll have to find another way of doing it. At the bottom I squeeze through the front door, and deposit blue bucket and the papers. The Somerfield flyer, gross now, goes in the papers bag to be disinfected and recycled. It is drizzling.

As I walk the entire length of the block of flat to the bins, I think: "Must I do all this? If I did a runner and just kept going, and went to work right now, if I just kept going and walked off into the drizzle, who would even notice?" It's a moral conundrum, but no: I must see this thing out. I get to the bins. There are no green boxes there. (Nor is there a single green box anywhere in sight on the pavement.) Okay, I can improvise!

The only other person out there is a lone man in his late fifties or so, Orthodox but not Hassidic, talking on his mobile on the pavement, exactly in the middle of the space I must traverse. I approach, cross the path of, and walk past him, back to my doorway, go halfway up the stairs, and pick up the two remaining bags. With my right shoulder sort of hunched, to keep its shoulder-bag burden in place, I can cradle the bottles - their broken bag wrapped around them - in the crook of my arm. I arrange them carefully, one at a time, securely. If I hold them tight they don't move too much - but it's hard, because I'm holding a big olive oil bottle separately in my hand, around its narrow little neck.** I hand myself the other bag, and then wrap that arm round too, with the tins in front of me, and proceed down the stairs for the second time. Down in the street my blue bucket is sitting there with the papers bag on top of it: there is just no way I can place a piece of ripped brown paper and a pile of bottles on the sidewalk!

The bottles are slipping. My glasses are slipping. I'm sweating now in the rain. My hair feels as if it is falling down slightly. I am walking more and more like a hunchback, and really, who knows what has leaked onto my clothes. The man is still out there, but off the phone: he now has nothing to do but idly watch me. He's a smallish man, in a dark suit, of course, with greying hair and a black hat. In the presence of an audience I suddenly also become my own audience, so that I am now not only trying to avoid the clattering, ringing fall of these bottles to the ground, and the dashing of the tins to the pavement, but am having to watch myself do it. I try not to see it, but I simply can, there is nothing I can do about it. I have become Lucy Ricardo.

I head for a pile of builder's rubble outside a ground-floor flat, which seems to have a cardboard box on top of it. The man is still there. I get to it and, by levering myself to the right, so that I'm sort of leaning over the box but am still clutching the bottles tightly, I am able to position myself so I can just - let go. The bottles fall into the box - olive oil bottle first, then the others. I heave a sigh of relief. My coat is still fairly white. I put the bag of tins and plastic into the cardboard box, pick the whole thing up with two hands, and carry it (past the man) to my own doorway, where I place it neatly next to my blue bucket - out of the doorway area and clearly on the pavement, so they will collect it, but not (I hope) in the way. I arrange the broken bag, the unbroken bag, and the bag of papers neatly in the box, so they are clearly recycling and a civic act, not just a box of old slops sitting next to my neighbour's broken bin liners.

I've done it! I stand up, adjust my hairpins, adjust my shoulder bags, adjust my skirt, adjust my top, adjust my scarf, wrap my coat around me - I can't face the umbrella now - and go to the bus stop.

I am late for work.***


* Ahem! Unlike my ground-floor neighbours, if any of them read this! They delight in leaving large black bin liners out on the front doorway of the building, for days on end! Why they can't carry it to the bins art the end of the block like everybody else I have no clue. Last Saturday there was one split open right in front of our steps, with tons of old food and a nappy in it, and the pavement up and down the whole street was still strewn with some kind of grain or other on Tuesday, the morning in question.

** This reminds me of an incident several years ago, when a friend of mine appeared, hobbling, saying he had hurt his toe. "Oh no!" we all said. "What did you do to your poor toe?" It was a kitchen accident: he had dropped a full bottle of olive oil on his foot while wearing sandals. He was like, magine how tragic that would sound in the Guardian: "Sandal-wearing poet drops extra-virgin olive oil in Islington."

*** (As on all mornings when one is late for work, the tube is then also completely up the spout: but that is another story.)

the Friday resolution: recap

Well, maybe not so much Friday as Robinson Crusoe.

This week's resolution is, very simply, to consume less. That is, to consume less in a simple fashion, simply. If you consume more in a non-simple, that is in a fancy, luxury, Marylebone High Street way, you undo all the good work of consuming less. No Aveda for me. Just at the moment.

This decision has been brought to you by, I mean was sparked by, many small realisations and catalysts. Money. The rubbish. The warmest winter in history. My clothes keep shrinking. My bank account keeps shrinking. The rent, I mean the sea level, keeps rising, and I'm tired of feeling tired all the time. Restaurant food palls, and restaurants also seem to be answerable to no one for their waste. I mean, recycling? And I saw a guy parking the Yum Yum's van outside the new Mexican place and then he got out and gobbed a great big gob of spit onto their newly refurbished flowerpot area. Ew! People who consume less don't have to worry about that kind of stuff! Nothing to do with them, mate.

I do love the lovely cheeses from Fresh & Wild, and we can continue to have nice bread, but I must resolve to eat less of it. And the spiced plum pickle. I resolve to buy less wine for the house, as by definition I'm drinking it alone if I'm here. It's 900 calories a bottle. (Mind you that's not so much compared to those little truffles they sell... but let's not talk about those.)

And I further resolve to knock all the restaurants on the head. Did I say that? Last night I met up with some adorable old friends, and it set me back £23. I can't keep doing that, however adorable they may be or however delicious the kofte.

I resolve to buy fresh, seasonal food - meaning we eat spring greens rather than baby Kenyan green beans. Leeks. Carrots. Potatoes. Good old English grub. Shepherd's pie. All these things cost less and consume less food miles. (Except I will have to still buy aubergines. I already don't buy courgettes out of season, anyway don't really fancy them after the summer. But aubergines. Dear me.)

I resolve to try and remember to carry a spare shopping bag with me at all times, so I won't need plastic bags in the supermarket. I can't promise to remove all packaging at the checkout, much as I like the idea: agitprop isn't really an essential part of my busy working day. Though maybe it should be.

I resolve to walk to Seven Sisters station at least a couple of times a week, which means I also resolve to get up earlier.

On my way to the station I can drop off the recycling. Of course, living in a flat and having to take the recycling to the bins means I can't be given discounts for the more I recycle, and may well end up - this is Hackney - being charged a penalty because the council isn't picking any up here. But even that isn't a reason not to take the recycling up to the bins on my way to work!

I've been turning the heating off a lot. Partly because it's not that cold. Partly because of the huge bills you get slapped with from British Gas if you so much as think about turning the heating on. Partly because I've been reading about the ice caps.

Oh where is the LO-OVE?!?

Simplifying is really complicated, isn't it? And every time I decide to stop buying things, something comes along that I need: like right now I need some new tights. And a new foundation (in oh how many ways! but no, just some make up will do for now: Maybelline). And my day-to-day boots are going. They are three years old. But I'm skint. And fat. And I owe council tax, which I'm sure I said already, so by consuming less I mean I must pay the council tax, which is like consuming more. Once I've done that I won't be able to consume anything.

So, to recap:
eat less
drink less
walk more
recycle
pay council tax
no new clothes - shrink to fit old ones
seasonal local food
heating off (saves money and re-caps, or at least less de-cap)

Oh, and by the way - if you leave chargers, i.e., phone chargers, in the socket between charging, they really do leak out electricity all over the house, costing you money AND shrinking that polar ice cap!

Looks like I'm going to be having fun fun fun! (Daddy took the T-Bird away.)

resolution: a form of concentration

Oh yes it is.

I resolve in the coming year - and, dear readers, please assume that anything Ms B resolves to do in this series of resolutions has already entered her activity stream - to concentrate, across the spectrum of meaning for that word.

Last night I directed someone I don't really know to my blog and then suffered all the pangs of knowing it was being read. (Normally I only hope it's being read; there's a difference.) Naturally I went on too and read it, to try and imagine the experience. And what did I find? Verbiage. I resolve to concentrate that verbiage by remembering my editorial skills, and by being one flipping heck of a lot less self-indulgent! I resolve to try and eliminate the following mannerisms:
Well,
actually
However,
dependent clauses necessitating endless strings of commas
and all the other little qualifiers and intensifiers that you don't need if your words are doing their job properly. I'm all for Mannerism, but not all the time.

I further resolve to concentrate by having actual (see, I'm doing it again) content. You can't concentrate what you ain't got.

Furthermore, I resolve to concentrate by paying attention. I seem to have lost the ability to do more than skate over the surface of everything, and this is not making your correspondent happy.

I'd say I might resolve to concentrate my efforts, maybe attempt less, but I'm not sure that's possible. See below.

I will concentrate on poetry by starting an occasional series featuring the work of contemporary poets. Starting soon. How frequent this will be depends on how many contemporary poets I feel like asking, and whether they say yes.

I will concentrate on the other stuff by beginning another series which I intend to launch in a few weeks, called My Life in 99 Books. If I do one a week it will take me nearly two years.

I will concentrate more at work; the trials must be nearly over, I can hear the flutes warming up. There is no Sarastro (though there is still Sarastro); if I want spiritual inspiration I will have to do it myself.

And finally I resolve not to do everything by myself! To re-constitute the dramatis personae.

the baroque resolutions, part 2: Pru's frock

On Christmas I spoke to my dad, le Comte de Baroque (pictured above, on a Christmas some years back). I think we can call him that. We hardly ever call him anything much, in fact, because we don't speak to him very much at all: maybe a couple of times a year. This is the pace at which he himself set our relationship back in the day when I myself was little Mlle B, and with a few rantings and ravings thrown in from time to time I have respected that pace.

Anyway, I asked him how he was, and he said: "Well - I'm wearing my trousers rolled."

The great thing about my dad, aside from the fact that he is the reason I knew what he meant, is that he knew I would know, and never felt the need to explain his allusion, which is a conversational tic that destroys conversations.

Also, it's true. Thanks to his emphysema, the payback from 50 years as a politically agressive smoker (like, he started a smoking club at work when they banned it in the staff room), the last time I saw him he was sitting in a chair, with his feet encased in black support socks and propped up on another chair. That was in summer; he wore shorts. If it were winter, you might need to roll your trousers. Still, it was better to see him looking like that than the way he'd looked before he started getting the treatment. Then, he used to fall asleep all the time and everyone was saying: "dad's getting old..." Scary. And not that old in the scheme of things.

So it's nice being able to talk to him again, and it's also nice - when on site, that is - not to have to breathe the fumes. He used to have these parties where he'd invite all his friends from work. Well, his friends from work were the smoking club. Three weeks later you'd meet some guy in the mall, and Daddy would say, "You remember Dan? You met him at the party." You'd be going, "Dad, I couldn't SEE him at the party."

Le Comte was also the one who set the impossibly high standards for Christmas (read: everything) which have practically destroyed my relationship with my kids (hold on: that's not right! Well, whatever). He's the one who made me Baroque. He was the one who reassured me when I was four (flying in the face of anything you ever heard in the Catskills) that, yes, pink and red could go together - if you were in Mexico... It was his amateur dramatics company that gave me my chance to be a little Siamese Princess (no lines) (or was it the Crown Prince, and I had one line? Yes, I think that's it: a line to make up for being a boy), and ruined my childhood (read: strengthened my character) with seemingly endless productions of "Kiss Me, Kate!" I know all the Cole Porter songs. He gave me Klemperer's 1964 recording of the Magic Flute (still the best, if you don't count the Beecham of 1937) for my fifteenth birthday (and I still have it), and he's the reason I care about which recording. Oh, and he taught me to make meat loaf. He said he had no idea how he made it, he just did it, and if I wanted to learn I had to watch him do it. So I did.

He also, some years ago now, gave me his facsimile manuscript edition of The Waste Land, showing Pound's edits - handed me the baton, as it were (I loved twirling a baton when I was six; I could make it go pretty damn fast). So, with my necklace rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin, with my pink pashmina and my red shawl-collared cardigan with its glittery brooch, I shall enter 2007 modestly with resolutions sticking out of every pocket.

In a minute there is time
for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

the baroque resolutions: part one

Like most people, I find the New Year painful, as the (read: our) mistakes and failures of the last year stand in bold relief against the seasonal memory of all the aspirations we had for it (read: ourselves). Autumn is a flabby season in many ways, all about comfort and compensation, and December's just a big fat excuse for all the excesses that will come to haunt us at, oh, about 9am on January 1st. By the time we get down to the serious business of thinking ahead we are a veritable soup of floating irresolution. All we know is that something must be done! But what?

Well, I have thought about it, and I have made some simple resolutions. They follow the SMART formula: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, timely.

I resolve firstly to post one New Year's resolution each Friday for the month of January. This way I will not be able to post them all in one mad, gluttonously well-intentioned hit and then forget all about it. You can expect the first one tomorrow.

In the meantime, here are some of the many things I will NOT be resolving to do:

join a gym (they reckon £200m in wasted fees a year)
give up smoking (I don't smoke)
give up alcohol (but see Week 2, next Friday)
hypnotise myself for any reason
have therapy
go on a diet (that detox thing made me sick as a dog and I was as fat as ever)
take up a language
meet a nice man (not SMART as out of one's control, see?)
advance my writing career (not very SMART either)
go out more
stay in more (except my stomach)
make more money (not possible)
join an evening class
get a pet

Join me tomorrow for my Zenlike first resolution. (Actually, each one is more like a heading. As Captain Barbossa might say, it's more like guidelines...)

seven pillars of... 2007

Political Umpire has set me a challenge. It's a challenge I rather need to undertake anyway, sitting here in Baroque Mansions like a latter-day Miss Havisham mouldering among the crumbling artefacts of previous... (that's enough - ed.)

He challenges me to list my seven successes of 2006 - a year in which I lost my job, had one poem accepted for publication, got bumped off a major poetry project, only wrote about five decent poems, & stopped sending them out; turned an age I will not name, got circles under my eyes, & suffered much from a syndrome we can't even call empty-nest because the kids haven't officially reached any milestones,* they just never come home any more; failed (again! - my pathological hatred of Hackney Council) to keep up with my council tax, had misunderstandings with two friends, lost others in the undertow; fell over (in Somerfields, of all places), got some awful flu,** put on half a stone,*** had huge scary trouble (continuing) with my eyes, fell down some stripped-pine stairs (the Baroque knee is really bruised, six weeks in - I know - no pity), was tired the whole time,**** and did not meet a single nice man. Or a nice single man. There's been a lot of time at home by myself, which is not a great idea for Ms Baroque.

But hey! I just had a fab lunch in Upper Street and a major triumph at Phase 8 - everything half price - including a VERY flattering houndstooth-check (tiny, tiny checks, okay) suit jacket which will do a treat for my credibility at work (see below). (Actually, that jacket can be success #8.) Let these things be the fire from which my phoenix will spring in 2007.

So. MY SEVEN SUCCESSES

1. Starting this blog - like Political Umpire's #1. Getting it noticed (thanks). Discovering a World of Blogs, which is just as fascinating as other worlds and doesn't, unlike the "mainstream press"- as has been noted - confer an automatic aura of acceptability on febrile dross like this torrent of malice by Richard Littejohn in the Daily Mail. I've "met" wonderful new people through Baroque, established new connections, & had a laugh!

2. Writing criticism for Contemporary Poetry Review. I love it. When my article on Wendy Cope was published she said it was one of the best pieces on her work she'd ever read. I have a review up there now - for the next few days anyway - and a close reading of a Joseph Brodsky poem forthcoming, as well as two items in the pipeline. I'm interviewing Ruth Fainlight in the new year and am mighty pleased about it.

3. Getting the first job I interviewed for after being redundant. The job is a bit chaotic and feels hard, and I have yet to make what feels like a success of it, which pains me mightily; but the success of getting it still counts. The job itself can be a success in 2007.

4. Getting my niece over here for the first time ever last April, a feat which will be repeated this Easter. It's hard, living 3,000 miles from the family - especially as we are, for some reason, a non-travelling family. This was the first visit from home in about 13 years (yes!), & it was my idea.

5. Getting my hair the right colour. (I'm allowed this: it is a success. It's a great colour.)

6. Reading for Oxfam in November. This may sound like a small thing, but look: after months of all the above-mentioned ills, observe how our attention-starved egotist - I mean writer - crawls, grateful and blinking, out of the garret (okay, Mansion) and into the arena of an actual audience... I actually had to go and remind myself what poems I had and re-learn them. Some of the poems in the set had never been seen by anyone but me.

And, readers - I knocked 'em dead. It was a great line-up, I was reading with writers I admire, and their various positive responses to my work (read: the adulation of the crowd) bucked me up in a way I can't really even describe. Ms B is not a fraud! It really is poetry! Yay!

7. Giving my kids a wonderful, extra-Christmassy Christmas. We had the Urban Warrior's girlfriend here, whose parents oddly seemed not to be doing anything special, and even with no notice Santa gave that girl just as good a stocking as what les enfants Baroque got. And she had a present under the tree.

We had the Stollen and panettone and satsumas, and the giant clove-studded ham and the pumpkin pie, and candles all over the place and boughs of holly draped everywhere. It's still quite beautiful in here. Nana Baroque did not send the usual box of presents but instead, in the names of these and all the other family kids, donated to a charity called Heifer International an amount commensurate with an entire water buffalo and five flocks of chickens and ducks. The Baroque children were very amused & it was all a big success.

Their non-baroque Grandma died last year on Christmas Eve (which is the one we celebrate here, as they go to their dad on XMas Day) so this was a hard one. The ritual of it and our family traditions really did buoy the kids up along the anniversary. And I think joy despite sadness really is what Christmas is about. They've all said they had a really good one. That's a success!

This tagging thing drives me nuts. I write all these earnest lists only to read much funnier ones by other people who have avoided giving themselves away nearly so much. Well I'll just have to live with that. La comedie humaine, c'est moi. So I tag: Dave Hill (if not already tagged), Non-Working Monkey, my sis Leigh (you can just write in the comment box), Noosa Lee, Mark Granier, Ros Barber (as she shared one of my successes - and she was a knock-out), and Madame Arcati.

* note from future: see fact below, which had I known it I might not have said "stones"...

** note from future: gall stones!

*** see above

**** see above