intimations of life

a leaf-covered boulder by Andy Goldsworthy

It's nearly five o'clock of a mostly dull February day. The light's beginning to fade a little, and the house is empty. Lord knows where the Rock God and the Urban Warrior have got to, and Mlle B is at the cinema in the Angel with all her friends, watching that thing with Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore in it. The food is in, because when I went out to get the cash for the movie I forced myself into Morrisons where I bought - among other things - a beautiful chicken, mushrooms, two lemons and a Savoy cabbage. I'll cook it all up in some form or another with some garlic and white wine, I think. And cream.

I'm sitting here on the couch with the laptop, because the iMac has a strange cord going into it, with a digital dictaphone at the other end - it has identical earphone plugs at both ends. I didn't even know you could get these! Up till the other day I had no idea you could even get a tapeless dictaphone. Durrr. But it has no instructions or anything for transferring data, and the sheet even said if you wanted to back it up, you had to record it onto another external device! What, like another tape player??? Lord no. The Urban Warrior says, get one of these cables. And he's downloaded me some freeware audio recording kit that works off the sound card, so it can read whatever the strange data type is that my recording is. I feel very high-tech.*

But not that high-tech! I'm so paranoid about backing this up that I've been carrying the dictaphone around with me since Thursday as if it were an egg.

I'm turning my fabulous interview with Ruth Fainlight into a sound file, back-up-able, before seriously buckling down to the job of transcribing it. (It took me about 35 minutes yesterday to type out 12 minutes of conversation. I have about two and a half hours of recorded conversation.) All I can say is, dear readers, watch this space! In several months (probably; I am turning into molasses in January) I will have written up a sparkling, funny, affecting, erudite, affectionate and witty account of our conversation, which ranged over a whole landscape of poetic and general-interest topics.

I can't give you any previews yet, of course, because it all exists in my head and (I hope, shortly) in my other computer. And who knows how it'll all play out when it's edited. So fun!

And the fun doesn't end there. On Monday morning before work I finally got my act together to send some poems out to a magazine for the first time since May. I emailed them to the Poetry Salzburg Review, which takes email submissions - hurrah! (They all should.) It wasn't too scary because they had published a poem of mine before. I sent eight files and forgot about it because it always takes months. So, imagine my joy this morning when the post came and in plopped a letter containing proofs - yes, proofs, after five days! - of three poems, to go in their Spring issue!

I'm very happy because these are poems I love. One of them (Imitating Life) is about looking at a book about the installation artist Andy Goldsworthy. The other two (The Brass Doorknob and A Crack in the Feeling) were written for my friend Michael in the months after he died in 2004. A Crack in the Feeling is one of my favourite poems I think I've ever written. It's all about eggs, and I didn't realise for ages that it was about Michael. I hadn't even realised that eggs were a metaphor for grief. But it is - and it seems they are. The poem even has a rubber chicken in it. Michael would've loved that.

Anyway, this is great news. It's a great little magazine, and it's only £10 a year to subscribe. It's clearly time for me to wake up and stop hibernating. And go check the other computer and see how that monster file's going. And see about the dinner...


* edited in months later: it never worked. Low-tech after all.