five of the best

Regular readers may recall that tomorrow, Thursday, is the day slated for the excavation of the Baroque gall quarry. The baroque flat has been cleaned, the chicken soup made; the baroceries are in the fridge (at least they had bloody well better be; I'm actually writing this on Tuesday morning); and I am busy psyching myself up to hand my mobile over to the sis tomorrow when I'm under the - under - hmm, under the laparascope.

The joyous news is that the hospital says they will send me home the same day! So I can recuperate right here on my white couch, rather than having another tiresome and traumatising experience with those rude ward nurses. It was going to come to blows.

And the even more joyous news is that I do not need to spare even one worry for Baroque mansions! For the next two weeks I have five, count 'em, five top-notch house-sitters all set to mind the lights and curtains and water my prize roses.* They have been sent their keys and told what kind of food the cat likes. I am beyond thrilled to have such a glittering line-up of funny, sharp, and (mostly) grammatical writers who are all happy to blog for Baroque.**

Over the next two weeks you will be able to read guest-posts by:










Chip Dale
I hope Chippy needs little introduction. He is Wales' top stripper: a man who bears an unfortunately marked reemblance to a certain prominent Welsh Liberal Democrat; a man whose very mercurial and eclectic Romanian girlfriend fills his life with potato vodka, knives, chickens and high-pitched pop music. He is president of the British Thong Society ("Between Buttocks Clenched"., est. 1912), and a sensitive man whose love of the higher truths of art must struggle to survive the vicissitudes of life in a thong. Chip's influential Diary ("Chip Dale is nearly as great as me!" - Norman Mailer) first attracted my attention when I noticed his looks; not for nothing is he known as Bangor's finest. Chippy is also one of the few people I have ever met who understands the effect it can have when a close relative decides to raise poultry. And when I witnessed his dismay at Gabby's mishandling of his Faber volume of Auden, I knew I had found a blog I could trust.

Chip Dale's Diary












Non-Working Monkey
Non-Working Monkey was once indeed non-working, living in a flat in Brixton which she shared only with an enormous malevolent cat. She has since raised "non-working" to a state of being which must struggle to co-exist with... working. Her new life on a seemingly endless contract in Amsterdam has made her blog very picturesque, with constant references to canals, cheese, and international European types; and her accounts of trying to maintain her true non-working state are sometimes heartrending. She is wonderful in a temper and wonderful when she is sitting in a cafe taking photographs of her coffee. Oh, yes. It's a life of connoisseureship and I am delighted she has agreed to share it with you. I should mention, she also has a thing for a Canadian pathologist who cuts his own hair.

Non-Working Monkey











Erin O'Brien
What can I say? Erin O'Brien is a phenomenon, a small whirlwind in Ohio. She writes a bi-weekly column in the Cleveland Free Times as well as her blog. Her novel Harvey & Eck was published last year. She finished two novels left unfinished by her brother when he died, and she has written fearlessly about his tragic death. She writes pretty much fearlessly about lots of stuff most people would find a bit too exposing - she recently posted a picture of her vibrator lying in bed with a face drawn on it - but of course, the great secret Erin knows is that we are all just people, and that what might look unbearably personal is in fact universal. She is a very human and screamingly funny writer.

The Erin O'Brien Owner's Manual for Human Beings











Jura Watchmaker
Francis Sedgemore is an ex-scientist and now science writer. His coruscating common sense enlightens not one but two blogs: his own, and now the anarchic Drink-Soaked Troskyite Popinjays for War. His blog name references the watchmakers of Jura, whose federation influenced the anarchist movement (Kroptkin wrote:*** "the egalitarian relations which I found in the Jura Mountains, the independence of thought and expression which I saw developing in the workers, and their unlimited devotion to the cause appealed far more strongly to my feelings; and when I came away from the mountains, after a week's stay with the watchmakers, my views upon socialism were settled. I was an anarchist"). So, as well as of science****, Francis is a deep well of political and cultural reason. He is of a type all too rare these days: a writer who can leap the almost unbridgeable chasm between modern culture and the facts.

Francis Sedgemore
Drink-Soaked Trotskyite Popinjays for War











Jane Holland
Jane Holland has a thing for knives almost equal to that of Chippy's Romanian girlfriend, Gabby. But where Gabby screams "Hiiiii-YAA!" and makes people worry about the curtains, Jane calmly sits and pens**** poetry reviews. Oh, yes. Jane is a superhuman writer with five blogs, five kids (plus a home-schooling habit), two poetry collections, a novel, a lease on a house that expires in July, and a dark past. (Well, she used to be a professional snooker player.) Our tastes in poetry sometimes seem almost diametrically opposite, but Jane writes extremely sound reviews, and her poetry's not so bad either (I have to say this, but it is true. Buy her book). Her latest collection is Boudicca & Co, published by Salt (I knew her before), and she has recently had an idea for a new blog. Is there no stopping this woman??

Raw Light
Poets on Fire

* that's you, readers. You are my prize roses.

** Note to self: next time anyone asks me what was my best-ever blogging experience, it'll be my five wonderful guest-bloggers all saying yes.

*** I love playing six degrees of separation. We're at a low number of degrees here: after the 1905 revolution the Graf (or count) Buneyev escaped from Siberia, where he had been sent for his anarchist activities. (He hid in a barrel.) Managing to get to London, he went to see the only person he knew: his old geography teacher, Peter Kropotkin. Kropotkin helped him, and he ended up on a farm in Pennsylvania, where his house was the hub of the Russian anarchist emigre circle. His son, Dimitri Petrov, grew up to be my Uncle Pete. So I owe Kropotkin - indeed, the Jura Watchmakers - a family debt.

**** You like the technical way I bandy about the word "science"? I have a whole category in my labels called science. I think it has two posts in it - and, if memory serves, one of them was about an amoeba in lipstick. Francis, on the other hand, has been a research specialist in space and atmospheric physics. He was Denmark's lead scientist with ESA's Cluster mission to the earth's magnetosphere.

***** This is an archaic word. Can you see "keyboards" taking up where "pens" leaves off? "Jane keyboards poetry reviews." Neither can I.