a September scene...

...from the past. This is about three years old, but I came across it and I think it captures a particular quality of a clear, crisp autumn day. I'm not saying it's the best ever, or even my best ever, but I love September, and it's nearly over now. And someone was just commenting the other day about how quiet everything seemed, even in the street.

It’s one of those early September mornings

When everything glows blue and yellow

And still looks freshly dew-struck at 10 o’clock.

We’re into core hours on the flexi-time, meaning I’m late,

And the main road is completely gridlocked.

There’s been some kind of accident,

The driver tells us after sitting still for fifteen minutes,

So everybody gets off and starts to walk:

Suddenly there are dozens of council workers milling futilely on the pavement

Or meandering through stalled traffic.

Our bus sits at an angle to the kerb, beached,

And the driver’s hunched over a walkie-talkie while another guy smokes.

A lone ambulance sits in the middle of the road.

The only sound that filters through the sudden glasslike serenity of the scene

Is a baby helicopter, whining above our heads.

In the September stillness everything is blue and yellow.

All other signs of the incident may have disappeared

But it’s clear the bus won’t be going anywhere for ages yet.

I ignore my colleagues on the pavement, who are not speaking, anyway:

This is clearly not the day for all that.

Instead, I turn under the bridge and into the park,

Where I see only a couple of laughing girls in hijabs

Walking arm in arm by the canal as I go past.

And all around me there are crowds of enormous shiny blue-black crows

Sitting on posts, or picking in the sprouting grass.

...cloistered in these living walls...

We are all living inside our heads - at least I've always known this about myself. As a child I used to scare myself: what if my perceptions are the only thing that's real, and the whole world is nothing but a thing my brain is telling me is there? AS Byatt now shows us, in an essay published in last week's Times Literary Supplement, how physical our mental experiences really are. (But the good news is that the brain's impulses do seem to come from external reality. I wish I'd known that when I was seven!) Read her article here.

This is, by the way, an essay from the new Cambridge Companion to John Donne; if the rest of it is anything like this, would be well worth the price, whatever that may be. Donne is the man of the moment, in any case. But in this case he is the Dean, not of St Paul's, but of a particular kind of mental function - and mental pleasure.

Early on in the essay, before most of the detail kicks in, Byatt writes:

"Donne does feel his thought. But what he feels – and makes us, his readers, feel – is the peculiar excitement and pleasure of mental activity itself. It isn’t smelling roses. It is being aware of, and delighting in, the electrical and chemical impulses that connect and reconnect the neurones in our brains. Thought is material, according to neuroscience. I think of it in terms of Sir Charles Sherrington’s description of the waking brain, the 'head-mass' as 'an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern, though never an abiding one . . .'. The pleasure Donne offers our bodies is the pleasure of extreme activity of the brain."

This is all based on a remark of Eliot's, that "Tennyson and Browning are poets and they think, but they do not feel their thoughts as immediately as the odour of the rose." Byatt asks: "what precisely does it mean, to 'feel your thought'?" She takes a particular view, for which our Dean is the perfect exemplar.

Byatt has read up on the science of neurons – well, I guess, neurology – which seems to be expanding exponentially in the same way as physics. It’s all quantum inside our heads. And the webs formed by thought patterns, and recognition patterns, form channels along which ideas spark. I know this is a crude and possibly wrong description, but I’m not a scientist. Anyway, Byatt describes vividly the physical pleasure caused by these sparks in our brains, and how they are caused by linguistic feats like, for example, a Donne poem.

This may well be the first thing I’ve ever read that described how the pleasure of poetry feels. It acts as a neat rebuttal to the slightly authoritarian idea mooted around-and-about that, for poetry to have meaning and reflect everyday life, it should somehow confine itself to some sort of empiricism and simplicity - whatever those are. So much current, anecdotally-based poetry just seems tame and pale to me. Byatt's article makes a case for what, to me, feel like the real pleasures of poetry.

elegant glaucoma

This is about as elegant as any of us would ever need to be. After a day spent at Moorfields and an escalation in my diagnosis from "acute" to "sub-acute intermittent" angle-closure glaucoma (which seems to mean I can never trust my left eye at all, now), this eye patch is looking quite the thing.

For womenswear maybe we'll skip the bow tie though, eh? And preferably the goatee.

And here's a quote. Can you tell if it's from me, or James Joyce? (Me neither.) "I write and revise and correct with one or two eyes about twelve hours a day I should say, stopping for intervals of five minutes or so when I can't see any more." (The main difference is, he was writing Ulysses.)

It seems that glaucoma is in fact what James Joyce had - though it was an early, 1920's version that they treated with leeches and so on. I think he went blind from some operation: if you can even imagine letting a 1920's surgeon anywhere near your eyeball.

relic of an idea

These china jugs are the relic of an idea. They amount almost to a collection, because I have a fondness for them and if I see a nice one sometimes I'll buy it, knowing I don't use the ones I already have. The idea they're a relic of is something shadowy to do with how people used to eat; how I used, when I was just starting out, to think food might pan out in my own home; what's expected; what's required.

I was struck forcibly by this idea tonight while doing the washing up, and even thought how nice it would be to make something on purpose to use the jugs - maybe even more than one at a time. We just don't eat so many sauces these days.

In the same category are these beautiful little Silver Jubilee mugs. They hold about 6oz. each, and when I did put coffee in one it went right through all the cracks in the glaze; next time it'll shatter the cup. And the Silver Jubilee wasn't even all that long ago, in crockery years.

What I'm not so sure about is precisely what the idea was. But it's not just the jugs. It's all relics. And it wasn't just my idea. It was all ideas.

lightening up

...and I don't mean my roots! Or maybe it is my roots. Yesterday's haul is anything but light, and weighs in at:

1. The long-coveted Letters of Robert Lowell. I love being a regular, I walk into the Church Street Bookshop and Tim says, "Oh, I think I have something you want!" Lovely pink Faber spine with a beautiful b&w picture of mad Lowell, in a wonderful sixties jacket, writing a letter. I had to leave behind two hb Farrar Strauss Giroux collections (not firsts, no dw) to make way for this, and I'm a bit under-resourced in the Lowell department. But anyway I'm way into Charles Lamb at the moment, and he is the sort of antithesis of Lowell, bless them both.

2. Further Requirements by Philip Larkin, whose reviews combine breezy readability with acerbic remarks. Not a man to try and put one over on. It'll be great bedside reading.

3. Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled: I got into an argument about this, having never cracked a copy, based purely on the reviews I'd read plus my own prejudices. (Baroque I may well be - and it wasn't my decision {it seems the little gold angels are a bit of a giveaway, which is odd as I don't even have any} - but fogeyism is just tiresome, don't we think? There's no excuse for it.) Fry's famous "arse-dribble" remark went down spectacularly badly in Baroque Private Conveniences. Why, some of my best friends are contemporary poets. For under a fiver, though, I thought I'd inform myself - if only to hone the argument. Also, people I love and admire have raved about the book's examples of metre and form, etc. I still expect to come out on the Fenton side of the fence. (Yes, I'm building the fence as we speak.)

4. Auden's Table Talk: someone called Alan Ansen apparently used to go home from Auden's lectures/dinner parties/readings and scribble down in a notebook everything he could remember that Auden had said! It's hard to imagine doing that (I mean the talk of people other than Auden; clearly I never went to dinner with Auden, I was maybe 10 when he died), but there are occasions when I wish I had. So here's the great man holding forth effervescently and camply on his opinions, never imagining OUR ghostly presence... and I was going to leave that in the shop? I don't think so! Here's a review from Peter Forbes; the book came out in 1991. I love this: "The great paradox about Auden is this: how can the writer of the sanest, most liberal and chaste poetry in English of the twentieth century also be the crotchety opinionated old fossicker of the Table Talk?" He goes on to say that Auden's pronouncements "flatly contradict" his poetry, which is what I've, frankly, always found in Auden's essays anyway. Maybe I'm wrong.

But who doesn't love opinionated, crotchety old fossickers? One day they'll be saying that about me, and when they do, I'll say: "Be quiet! Fetch me that lap shawl!"

5. Eliot, Collected Prose, replaces my motheaten illegible old marginless Pelican.

6. The KGB's Literary Archives. This is such a momentously interesting volume that I'm almost scared to read it. Contains the files in Bulgakov, Gorky, Pasternak, Mandelstam and others. Many pictures. God, Bulgakov was handsome. But I already knew that.

the morning after - that jaded feeling

Okay, now that I know where my middle son is, I'll share the Hackneyest - or else just most hackneyed - part of last night's story.

At the time that giant 14-year-old was getting beaten up and concussed outside my window, I had no idea where my 15-year-old was. Well - I'd rung his friend Scott, who said he'd seen my kid in the park with a bunch of friends I don't have phone numbers for - and have never met, the usual story - and I guessed he was still with them. They were with a kid I have met - who, ever since his family moved to Bristol this summer, just comes back to London and stays itinerantly at his friends' houses, dossing here and there for up to a week without making much of a fuss of where he is, & then goes back to Bristol so his mum can, presumably, do his washing and see if he's eaten anything.

So I uneasily decided not to worry, though of course the point is that my kid should have rung me. This morning his dad, my ex (unreachable last night) gave me a mobile number for Itinerant Boy. I rang; Itinerant Boy told me there'd been some "mass mugging" in Clissold Park yesterday,"loads of kids were getting beaten up". As if that has anything to do with it. My son came on the phone next and tried on the one hand to tell me his friend has exaggerated the story vis-a-vis violence, and on the other to say he couldn't possibly ring me because his friends have all lost their phones. And we're talking on Itinerant Boy's phone? And he's in a house, you know, those things with phones in them?

The next thing is that I'm overreacting, that I'm somehow saying I don't "trust" him, whihc would be definition be WRONG of me, and that it shouldn't be a problem if he doesn't call me for one night. Anyway, everybody does it. Nobody's parents ever know where they are.

I'm famous for ringing parents of these vague, spacey kids. The parents I've spoken to, with one or two stellar examples (like my phone friend Barbara), have been pretty vague and spacey too. Most give at least lip service to the concept of knowing where your own kid is, but they fail utterly to connect that concept to the parents of kids who are at their houses. Forget 'all kids belong to the whole society'. I grew up in a neighbourhood where any mother in the street had a right to tell you off, or indeed to give you some homemade oatmeal cookies. These parents I speak to can't even take responsibility for kids sleeping under their own roof.

One of the parents in my life is a TV personality, from a reality programme which I won't describe here because it would be obvious who she is. Let's just say she clearly thinks she can tell other people how to run their lives. Anyway, at the time I spoke to her, her kid was 13, had a 16-year-old girlfriend, & had recently disappeared in the middle of the night and come back home at 3am having had his phone stolen. But she's laughingly sanguine about it, saying "Oh, my husband sounds a bit more like you, I'm sure I'm one of these 'permissive' Stoke Newington parents' (tinkle tinkle)! She has an "absolutely marvellous" male Swedish au pair. She gives me a helpline number 'Because it sounds like there's a problem in my relationship with my child', and goes off to make homemade Danish pastries (I swear this is all true) for the five or so kids dossed at her 4-storey gaffe. She says, "Do feel free to call again! It'll be my husband, though, as I'm going to be mostly in LA for the next three months..."

Back to last night. Kid Number One, well, I don't even know what he looks like any more. I put a new duvet cover on his bed in September 4th and it hasn't been slept in yet.

What is it with all these kids? They're wonderful kids. They look after each other in the park, they listen to roots music, they're sweet and gentle and so, so drifty. They have NO responsibilities. My kid refuses to wash a dish. If I ask for a lightbulb changing there's a huge row. Itinerant Boy carries his writings around in a cigar box, and sneaks furtive glances at my poetry shelves when he's here, asks if he can have a bath, and doesn't wash a dish either. Their schools seem to require nothing of them, and they pass their GCSE's without having ever done any systematic work in the two years. Then, having been told to specialise since the age of 13, they're set loose with no general knowledge and no work habits in a system where 'A' Levels are optional - which means it's also an option for the school not to have you there if you're an angry, rebellious, underperforming teen. There are hardly any jobs. Thus Kid Number One, kicked out before Christmas in his first term, lay on his bed for six months and has been "out" for four. Talk about angry. Talk about intractable! Anyway, he'd dropped all his academic subjects. Missing the induction week of his new course so he could go to Amsterdam instead, he said (over the phone): "I don't know why you're getting so stressed out! No one cares. It's FINE! "

There seems to be no role for you if you're 16, unless you are someone who suits a particular kind of academic routine. And we, the so-called grown-ups, are failing them badly. Grown-ups make the world, right? We should be providing our kids with a structure in which they can be teenagers without fucking up totally, or I mean being fucked up. And what do we do instead? We're helping them.

So, let's talk about this recent media shenanigans about "childhood being poisoned." There was a letter written by several major writers for young people, including most of my kids' favourite authors (back in the days when they used to read). You can read about it at Dave Hill's blog, here. I agree with the authors of that letter, I really do. And I know who I blame.

poetry

I was going to try and go to bed, but there's just been another fracas.

Sitting in living room; heard shouting and yelling; looked out just in time to see four or five guys chasing and punching another, who was very large, and hunched over as he ran, ducking the blows. Lovely, n'est-ce pas? Then several things seemed to happen at once: I shouted - they landed lots more extra punches - the guy stumbled, hit head on a lamppost, lay on the ground - and the others ran off into the shitehole they call an estate, next to our road, same one as the people last week and the week before that and the guy who did the shooting in July.

Called 999; the guy started trying to move; I ran down the three flights, opened the door, told him to stay still, ambulance on way. Etc. Get it? No, no, no. He stands up, weaving & lurching, finds he can't walk, and leans against the wall. The 999 lady tells me an ambulance is on the way, then asks me so many questions, how do you spell this and that, can you describe the people you saw, whjat's the victim's name - as if I've had a chance to ask him! - that I'm far too busy to attend to the guy, who is really not standing up very well and is furthermore showing signs of wanting to leave. He's a kid: 14, apparently, but huge. A lady comes along, an older black church lady; she's telling him to stay put, in between remarking to me how fat he is. At least she's not on the phone.

Well, and there we are: he starts to walk off, & I'm standing out there in my pyjamas and bare feet, at 11.30pm. Of course all the Hassidic guys are coming to the doors and asking questions but when I ask for a bloke to go get the kid back, will they? Like fun. I'm trying to call him back, the 999 lady tells me that "although an ambulance has been booked" there "isn't a unit available for deployment" and, asked for an ETA, says "the ambulances don't do that." Am I supposed to run down to the main road after a 250-lb kid and keep him talking for what, an hour? A kid who doesn't want to stay? With my kid sleeping upstairs & the flat door open?

My next-door neighbour Gavin spills, at this moment, out of a cab with two friends, all drunk and one on serious crutches - they're no use. Up the stairs with them. The young Hassidic wife, in doorway, baby on hip: "Ohh, they're so drunk."

So, in the end, off went the kid, shambling crookedly down our road. His name was Carl Rabey, of Manor House.

You know another thing I was going to do? I was going to write in here about poetry.

We-ell...

serious things

I do know they still exist! News items flash by like lampposts out of a speeding - well - bus, but faster. I wanted to write about the Pope's impossible speech/es, the saga of Tyrrells crisps and evil supermarket barons Tesco ("a victory of David over Goliath"), that letter last week about the state of childhood today, and oh I forget what. I'm reading the essays and letters of Charles Lamb, and there was a longish passage I wanted to quote, about Work. I just finished writing a review of the poet Dorothy Molloy's second, posthumous collection (Gesthemene Day, Faber), and I am pleased because I think I managed to say what I think about the book. But now I must to bed. I promise, when awake, not to write about clothes for a little.

elegant shmelegant

Okay, it's That Day Of The Week again; and, as my entire life is being taken over and thrown in the sink by teenagers and adolescents of all ages, shapes and sizes, I thought I'd just document it so I can get some sympathy. Here's evidence.

why are pirates called pirates?

Because they arrrrre..!

Today, me mateys, is International Talk Like a Pirate Day - a fine tradition, and one we on Baroque Island are proud to honour, by the leg of Long John Silver and pieces of eight! Any dirty lubbers among ye who don't like the idea can walk the plank, and may the barrrrrnacles stick to yer eyes and nestle in yer nose, ye rum dogs!

It's off to locate the buried doubloons we arrre, and when we find 'em we'll be forsaking the halls of Barrroque to parrrrade in our finery at the Marrrrrie Antoinette -


that's enough - ed.

we might have known

... by the way, it appears that the shoes for the new Sofia Coppola film "Marie Antoinette" were all designed by Manolo Blahnik. He will sell the designs in his shops - one pair of each of five designs, one pair in each of five sizes.

The queue starts...

... ... ...

... ...

...
HERE! (but wear trainers and carry a stick)

PS - no pics on web. If I can, I'll scan it. It is too, too funny.

PPS - On second thought, no, I'm not quite interested enough. Though as I remarked, the fever is building, and it is going to be interesting to observe the jostling for place of the New Utilitarian and the New Excess. I forgot to mention the other day the amount of metallic leather around at the moment.

And my colleague remarks, this little wheeze does take movie merchandising to a new height (well, about 2 inches).

I did love the part in The Observer where Manolo himself was gushing something like, "Marie Antoinette has always been such an inspiration to me in all my work! It is wonderful to see her getting the adulation she deserves at last!" or words to that effect. The sad, sad sack.

science - now that's poetry!

Quarry workers in Mexico seem to have discovered the New World's first known poetry in a pile of road-building rubble. The writing is on, not the wall, but a stone which is nearly 3,000 years old: a relic of the Olmec civilisation, the oldest known in the Americas, long before the Mayan. There's been lots of interest in the press - I've seen this cited in a few places - after the information was published in Science magazine last week, though the stone was found in 1999. Of course, all through the seven years since it was found the quarry has been in use, so as an archaeological site it's now about useless.

The slab of stone is 5 inches thick and weighs 26 pounds (the same as my middle baby when he was 8 months old; but he was off the scales), which is prompting archaeologists to refer to it as 'portable' - I say if this is portable then it's more like the first known TV.

Interestingly, though, and more to our purposes here in the beautified halls of - well - (one hesitates to say 'Hackney', though the fact that beauty can exist even here is surely the whole raison-d'être of beauty?) - the archaeologists have perceived patterns that looks like paired lines, with paired repetitions. In other words, they feel that the oldest known writing on the whole American continents could quite probably be something like rhymed couplets.

I don't know about you, but I'm pleased about that.

Also, if you look at the signs in the key above, you will see that it was a nice, happy poem, about going out for ice cream after eating corn on the cob... I think it may even have a pineapple in it.

A few years ago there was a fantastically interesting series about the Ancient Egyptians which the kids and I were all riveted by, in which the presenter showed these small - c4in - stone tablets used by builders as notepads. They were full of shopping lists and to-do lists, and little snippets of gossip, like, "I saw him yesterday with so-&-so's wife" (and if more than one wife: what a to-do!). That was just as gratifying as the poetry find. Human beings are just endlessly endearing creatures.

I couldn't find the article online, which is why I haven't linked to it. I was pleased, though, to see in another headline that "The Galápagos Islands Kiss Their Goat Problem Goodbye".

all at sea

the Owl and the Pussycat went to sea
in a beautiful pea-green boat.

the elephant in the living room eats its words

First thoughts: I saw parts of two things on telly this evening, one being the film Spellbound, about the contestants in a National Spelling Bee in the USA, and the other being a documentary about the famous photograph of the man falling out of the World Trade Center on September 11. (Should I say September 11, 2001?) The programme was based on an article from Esquire by Tom Junod, who tried to identify the man in the photograph, with an idea that if he could tell the man's story he might somehow make something okay.

All week I've been ignoring the anniversary of that day. I find that people have been - even though the legacies of it are what forms the very shape of our world. We just want to stay in the present: we certainly don't want to go back there. But it is sitting in the living room. This programme I saw pretty much showed that, even though it focused on people who were in the Trade Center, and who are now dead, and thus did not explore the attendant paradigm shift.

One thing you almost sort of forget, just looking at the pictures which are getting more and more familiar, is how big the buildings were. They were HUGE. I remember my first reaction when I heard the first tower had collapsed was disbelief, because it was so big and heavy and solid. (Oh, and full of people, and let's not go there.)

So, this new paradigm has brought with it new language - new meanings of words, and also new words themselves. Bush and his henchmen are doing to the English language what the Nazis did to German. It took two generations of poets half a century to reclaim that language, and people my age are still hard at it. Now, because Bush isn't oppressing poets (as such) they seem to think he's leaving them alone. But what he is doing is making the public arena in the US a place of such crude expression that the nation is forgetting how to perceive nuance, and without nuance poetry is useless. It's like a car on cinderblocks outside a house where no one has a driving licence.

This quality is the reason I had to stop watching Spellbound: 'heartwarming' as it may well be, the film depressed me. All those little egghead kids, studying obsessively for up to ten hours a day even in the summer holidays - sometimes with tutors cramming them every weekend, hired by their get-ahead parents - and not one of them expresses any interest whatever in what those words can do.

Above, I used a name we never use any more; when discussing 'the events of September 11' we say "the Twin Towers." And in the programme I watched there was much debate over the term 'jumpers,' which the newspapers were using to denote the people who fell out of the burning towers on that day. The New York City coroners office outraged Tom Junot by saying no one "jumped" out of the Trade Center; they "fell," they "were blown out." Junot was determined to put the record straight, to salvage the humanity of the poor souls (sods; blokes; chicks; sweethearts - they were very specific people you might see in the street any day & indeed whom many had seen that very morning, clutching their Starbucks cups or whatever) who may have jumped out. He wanted the nation to recognise them, not erase their memory by silencing the word.

Of course, this way of using language protects from other layers of meaning. The family of Norberto Hernandez, who was first identified as possibly the man in the picture, felt it couldn't him, because of their Catholic faith. To say he was that man was to say he was burning in Hell. It meant he had broken a pact of love.

The coroners were playing a slightly different card. By ruling accidental death on those people they allowed relatives the privacy of their own belief and interpretation of whatever evidence there was - and they kept insurance policies intact (though some night say an open verdict would have accompliushed the same thing).

The sister of Jonathan Briley, the most likely candidate for 'Falling Man', says that as she sees it the significance of the picture is not that he can be identified; it's that he can't. She says he stands for something more than one man. And that also, though she didn't say this, means she gets to 'keep' her brother. She doesn't have to turn him into a universal symbol.

So sometimes choosing not to use the words (especially if they're abstract nouns) is the best way to keep their meanings safe.

Those spelling-obsessed kids are right: we do need to know as many words as possible. But rather than learning their dead characteristics by rote, they need to start using them, keeping the shades of meaning and the historical nuances alive, setting the words loose among their families and friends.

We're all, well at least some of us are, and I guess part of me is, still stuck in that wordless day five years ago. We need to remember that, what it as like to have no words. It wasn't nice. And I'm not sure America's got them back yet.

Rambling. And I may be the only person who could ever see a connection between this little spelling bee movie and 9/11. But there it is. The most depressing thing, no, one of the most depressing things - among the many depressing things in that film - was the mother who was touted as loving words, and what they could do, and playing with them - and her idea of what words can do' turned out to be a fridge magnet that said "Bee happy!" with a picture of a bumblebee on it.

Great news for the future poetry/fascism ratio.

elegantly dressed and joyful too

I know this week’s Baroque contribution to Elegantly Dressed Wednesday looks a bit like a cheat, but I feel I have more than kept the side up so far (and even between-times). Today’s offering is a tribute to two friends of mine.

One is the person who originally sent me the link. He died two years ago this weekend, so this is a good time to remember the joy, which was considerable and included many emails full of silly web links (the Angora show rabbit site should win a special prize).

Second is the very-much-alive Catwoman, who reminded me of this site the other day, suggesting it for my next Wednesday offering. To this extent it isn’t even a cheat! To the Catwoman this really is as elegant as it gets. Her two fluffy balls of love are called Mitzi and Mabel and they are better dressed (though no fluffier) than her children.

Without more ado, here is the Anne of Green Gables outfit from the wonderful, Japanese Catprin tailor for cats. The outfit is described like this: "The country-tone blouse are made of the same material as the hood, presenting a consistency in the appearance. The yellow flower in the center of the collar is very impressive as well! All ornaments are velcrod and can be attached or detached easily."

The site also gives easy-to-follow instructions for use:

1. Dress her up. Cheer or yell, do whatever you like to enjoy the moment with your family.
2. After you are enough with your joy, take a photo! Take some poses and leave her some cute photos!
3. Remove her clothes and give her a hub, say "Thank you!"

While you're at it, say it to all your friends too.

princess and pea, bashed my knee, free bottle of Corbieres, you can't get me!

It's been quiet here in Baroque Villas the past few days: we've had a bit of melodrama, which sort of kept me away from the desk, & which could even have been witnessed by my fellow N16 blogger Quink as he made the rounds of his local supermarket, the inestimable (no, really, I couldn't) Somerfields on Stamford Hill.

It was approximately 12.45 pm on Saturday when I slipped - oh yes I did - on about a third of a squished pea pod as I crossed the Somerfields produce section on my way to the bread aisle, to tell my daughter I'd remembered we already had some tomatoes.

That may not sound like much of a story.

At first I had no idea what I'd slipped on because it was so flipping small it was practically invisible. And another customer kicked it under a stand in disgust when she saw what it had done to me (a shop assistant later had to retrieve it for evidence). Then I couldn't stand up, but had to remain doubled over, balanced on one foot, clutching my left kneecap, while some particularly sheeplike shoppers stared at me as if I were an intriguingly artificial-looking statue of a woman in pain. Then, after I had snapped in my best voice, "and I suppose no one will even find a member of staff so I can get some help???" several large young supermarket assistants gathered round me and stood there for four or five minutes, clucking sympathetically as they looked on with their sweet brown caring eyes.

Eventually I managed to straighten my spine. Someone said, vaguely, but with a dawning sense of purpose, "shall we go find Steve? He's had first aid training..." My knee was swelling this whole time like a little fast-growing puffball mushroom in the midst of a fairy circle. (Don't eat the food, you'll never get back to your own world.) Then someone said they'd get me a chair, which I sat in, right there by the salad section, with my left foot propped up on my daughter's (perched on the edge of the fridge, poor thing) healthy young knee.

Then a boy in a pink tie comes with a clipboard and I have to answer questions. "Where were you when you fell?" "Do you want us to call you an ambulance?" ("I have to ask you that," he said, embarrassed: "it says here, was medical care offered.") He goes, "maybe someone could get some frozen peas for your knee? Someone go get some frozen peas!" Why not, I say - it was their sodding evil pod that did this to me. He adds, "I'm just going to go and input this into the pc upstairs. They'll send you a report" (goodie!), and is gone. A girl arrives, looks at my knee, remarks the redness, feels around it with some spectacular home-french-polished nails, and takes charge of the boys. They get me another chair for my foot.

Then someone said the manager had decided I could have my shopping for free - incidentally, the smallest grocery shop in the history of my life - less than £15-worth. Why couldn't this have happened on a normal day, when I go in for two things and come out £45 lighter? Eh? So of course I suddenly remembered the milk. And I also realised I wasn't going to be spending the whole afternoon blissfully grilling courgettes, so I took some mangetout, 2 for £2 - which don't need coooking. Practical, see. And there had been a promise of some gum.

Well, it's getting boring, isn't it. Then the big one - his name is Jeremy - says, "I wish we could give you a nice big bunch of roses or something but we don't even have any!" (Remember it's Somerfields.) I can see he's thinking about his own mother. He's a nice boy. In the end he and his colleagues offer me a bottle of wine, and when I say, "Thanks, I will - I can at least drink myself into a stupor while I'm lying on the couch. But it has to be really dry", they look at me mournfully. "I - I don't really know much about wine," says Jeremy. So I hobble over to the wine section, where I peruse the France shelf. Nothing there costs more than six pounds. And I can barely stand up. However, there is one unusual-looking bottle, a Corbieres for I think £4.99 - a snip among the Jacobs Creek - with the look of something good about it. Mine. Pink tie boy wraps it for me, & I hobble back to the exit where Jeremy is waiting to give me a lift home.

We pass the newspaper stand. "I could really do with a Guardian..." I say, "as I'm going to be laid up all afternoon." Daisy's head is in her hands and she's groaning in chagrin. "Well it's all right for you!" snaps Mamma. "You're going to the park!"

We get in Jeremy's car. Of course this is all rather embarrassing, but the sad truth is that Ms Baroque a) does not even own a car and b) cannot in fact walk. So I gush to Jeremy, "This is so nice of you!"

"I feel responsible," he says, "It's my section."

"And you know what?" I hear myself saying to him, "I did actually notice now spotless it was. All except the bit I slipped on."

(The disclaimer runs like this: and I didn't open the bottle of wine till last night, and it is indeed very pleasant. Mont Tauch Corbieres, 2005. On the couch on Saturday afternoon I watched a DVD of "The Constant Gardener," but that is another story. I spent so long with the peas on my knee that it was still frozen as solid as one of Lord Franklin's men an hour after I took them off. It worked: the knee is mending a treat. I never did meet Steve.)

the Queen of Hearts and the curse of the milkmaid: or, may you live in interesting times

She "rocked the world", according to US Vogue* (this makes sense: Queen: "we will rock you"); here is their wonderful over-the-top cover.

Of course, true to my name, I had to buy the magazine, and carry it home, all 754 fashion-packed pages of it. If I'd been Marie Antoinette I'd have had a mule to strap it onto, but as it was I had to lug it on the Tube in the bag with my new back-to-school, I mean back-to-work-now-it's-autumn, shoes. (They're a bit drop-dead, in a good way I mean, with ankle straps that buckle in the front, but with sensible crepe wedge heels. M.A. never had those.)

Of course this is a Zeitgeist Moment. It's all about Sofia Coppola's film, starring Kirsten Dunst: a sort of Virgin Suicides with brocade draperies. (I wonder. I'm sure I'll comnent once I've seen it.) Years ago I did try to read Antonia Fraser's biography, which is also Coppola's source. I went along for a few hundred pages (it's almost as long as Vogue) until it cloyed, like sweetened milk left in a milk can for fun - and I never did finish it. Ultimately it was just too much apologia, which of course began to have almost the same effect on me - it's a matter of degree, I find - as it had on Robespierre back in the day. Eventually the book went to the charity shop, but it did get me thinking. Marie Antoinette was a victim of the system, just like the rest of us - if slightly better housed - but I'm still not seeing her as a Queen of the People. Not precisely.

Now they're marketing her as the Princess Diana of her day and it does make you wonder if there's a curse, like the Curse of Superman, or the Curse of Blue Peter... Think: they were both married off young to rather inbred princes who, for one reason or the other, couldn't have cared less; they both suffered in their self-esteem as a result of this sexual rejection, and made up for it later on with increasingly glamorous and powerful lovers; they were both (erroneously, in poor Diana's case) famous for their fashion sense; they both learned, after a bad start, to cultivate their personal 'brand' (if you like) to recoup positions of power, relying on intrigue and denying doing so; they died within a year of each other's ages, both violently, both in Paris.

Apparently now Paris has gone Marie Antoinette mad, which would be something to see. I think it's the guilt. And the relief that suddenly it's okay to like nice dresses again.

Most of us, of course, are not in Paris. Speaking of the Zeitgeist, let's look at the World Situation surrounding this - again, something M.A. herself could have done with doing. Social flux; changing means of production and even crises about what to produce; widening gaps between rich and poor - both people and countries - with increasing anger from the powerless; new, cheap, universally available means of disseminating information and opinion; increasing religious intolerance even in mundane places; random, violent reprisals in the street, against innocent people, for alleged philosophical and religious 'offences'; Government justification for 'any means necessary' to repress those whom they perceive as the troublemakers; loss of democratic rights; fears for the future of our civilisation; fear. The shops are all full of grey clothes. Narrow, grey skirts. Jackets are "playing with volume" but they are cropped and the sleeves are cropped, and the buttons are so big that when you wear the clothes you look a bit like a Borrower. It's not clothing of power. The placement of this Beautiful craze is interesting, n'est-ce pas? Remember that the pundits are saying the Enlightmentment is over.

After reading the book, I have to say, the famous drawing of Marie Antoinette on her way to the guillotine becomes very powerful. It is a tragedy, and that is what comes out. What struck me, after about ten minutes looking at it, was how sad to have this drawing made as you go to your death, by someone who doesn't love you - who hates you. But the person who drew it was in fact unable to take away the small but all-important fact that you are a person. I now rather regret having given the biography away, though one can't keep everything. Perhaps if I had a little summer house for the books.

*okay - "rocked Versailles", I see now, having finally managed to upload something bigger than a thumbnail. So much for Blogger beta. Anway, Versailles, the world, same diff.

if you really loved me you'd check this out

The Emotional Blackmailers Handbook

This guy makes me think if I really loved myself I'd be getting up a hell of a lot earlier, carrying a camera with me everywhere, and really looking around the place... Also, it's clear that everyone should be spending more time in English seaside towns.

Note his picture for today. Those white roses look slightly Antoinettish, don't they?

elegantly dressed, witty, perceptive & determined

That's Clare Booth Luce, to you!

The glamorous playwright, editor and socialite was once horribly ill with arsenic poisoning - according to Wikipedia, from the paint flaking off her stucco bedroom ceiling, which I suppose is exotic enough; but in the antedeluvian days of my extreme youth I'm sure I heard it was from someone or other's eighteenth-century dining room wallpaper.

Anyway, she is on the left here and I do beg you to check out both women's breathakingly groovy shoes... (mind you, look at her trouser suit. The pockets alone! you have to love her. But you know, I used to have a jacket a bit like that in my teens - thrift shop, from the forties - and my uncle Pete said I looked like a movie usherette. The philistine.)

the crying girl

A month and a week into my new job, I'm beginning to move to the rhythm of the Tube, rather in the manner of an underwater plant swaying gently in the current. In August there were seats; not so much now. On a few days the journey (all the way across London! It's amazing!) took exactly 30 minutes. Last Wednesday, I won't go into the details, I finally got to work at 10.55. AM, at least. Stoppages in the tunnel, I just sway gently.

Today an older man across from me kept nodding off - almost literally; the guy beside him would nudge him back into place, he'd almost open his eyes and then not, and the guy would be nudging him again. The nudging guy was just getting REALLY irritated when the older man suddenly woke up properly and apologised so amusedly and kindly, that soon all three of us were nodding and smiling and exchanging conspiratorial glances till the cows came home!

Yesterday evening there was a young woman in the last seat before the little doors, in a T shirt and jeans, holding a little black bag, crying. Her eyes were as red as her Pucca top, poor thing; and, while she wasn't loud or in any way (except on humanitarian grounds) obtrusive, she was clearly unable to stop. Every so often her face would just crumple up.

I thought about her all the way up the Victoria Line. We've all been there - we've been that crying girl in the Tube. No amount of scrutiny yielded up, from external clues, why she was crying. It was probable that no one had died; but how can you tell? The crying a few months after someone has died may not be so different from, say, when your boyfriend gets a job in Japan. Something had happened, and her life was going to change, and the loss had a physical manifestation. She wasn't embarrassed in the least. Discreet and mannerly but quite clearly crying. I'd say openly, except that the rest of us weren't quite real to her. Her entire world was inside her. She was fine.

Somewhere around Kings Cross the woman sitting opposite her got up to get off the train, and handed her a fistful of tissues. The woman smiled; the crying girl smiled; it was quite cheerful really, and so sweet! There was no hint of alarmist concern, or that the girl shouldn't be crying on the tube, or that she might not "be all right, love?". It was just good old-fashioned solidarity and much more supportive than sympathy.

After that the girl was definitely still crying, but she smiled to herself a few times, in that tearful way, between crumples. At Finsbury Park she got off.

…like an Egyptian

Okay. I’m usually too baroque to mention spam – but recently I’ve been overrun with the stuff. It’s like the little boy in that old fairy tale about the magic porridge-pot. And like a sea of porridge it’s just not clever or amusing, no matter what the so-called 'spam poet' Kristin Thomas might think. The advent of those random strings of words the spammers put in to get past the filters was mildly diverting for a week or two, and can still beguile the odd vacant moment, but I’d never elevate it to the condition of – well, even found art, really.

I did like this one though. Recent spam emails are all inserting a few random letters into the word PHARMACY, which is clearly blocked. (Note this, all you who are trying to ask your elderly relatives if they want you to pick up their prescription refill on the way home!) The other day I had an email from a sender called called Akhenaten Tuckerman, or some other inane-sounding last name, and the subject heading was PHARaoMACY.