my weak

On, was it Wednesday? I was moaning to someone on the phone* about how boring it is being sick, and how tired I am, and how my life is for nought, and they said: "You sound pretty busy for someone who's not doing anything."

Nothing is very hard to achieve, and it is hard to sustain.

Anyway, I had a social engagement this week. Two. I met my Turkish friend Cora Murphy for a coffee on Wednesday. She is doing the unthinkable, and moving to Cork, of all places. So it was like a farewell coffee, but it didn't feel like it, and I will go to Cork. I love Ireland and I'm already yearning to go visit her there. When she finally arrived in the coffee shop - forty minutes late! - I was on the phone, so she had to sit down and get a menu without recourse to my encouragements; it felt just like the old me. That was when my other friend said...

Because right after that coffee I had to get in to town for the launch of the new issue of Poetry London at 6.30pm. I had to, because they had Jamie McKendrick and Ciaran Carson reading.

(The Belfast poet Ciaran Carson is a genius rare, and the author of one of the strangest books I own: The Twelfth of Never - a sequence of sonnets written in alexandrines, drawing on Irish and Japanese imagery and lore. My favourite poem in it:

The Rising Sun

As I was driven into smoky Tokyo
The yen declined again. It had been going down
All day against the buoyant Hibernian Pound.
Black rain descended like a harp arpeggio.

The Professor took me to a bonsai garden
To imbibe some thinblefuls of Japanese poteen.
We wandered through the forest of the books of Arden.
The number of their syllables was seventeen.

I met a maiden of Hiroshima who played
The hammer dulcimer like psychedelic rain.
The rising sun was hid behind a cloud of jade.

She sang to me of Fujiyama and of Zen,
Of yin and yang, and politics, and crack cocaine,
And Plato's caverns, which are measureless to men.

It gives me the shivers every time, which so many poets will tell you is the only sure test of whether something is really working or not. To hell with critical theory. Needless to say, The Twelfth of Never is one of my all-time favourite books. And I love so much in his others, too. "Delft."** Anyway, as he crooned menacingly into the mic, he has been trying to write love poems now they have peace in Northern Ireland. But somehow half the poems he read had Stasi men in tham. They were brillliant, too.)

I had to get a cab to Foyles in the end. I just wasn't going to be late. Needless to say, the whole launch was great, Jamie McK included (hje has a new colleciton out in the autumn), and my friend Kathryn Maris read some smashing new poems about God - I really loved 'em - and had a lovely chat with Tim Dooley, who is also about to be published by Salt. Do buy his book when it comes out.

The dinner after was fun, it was wonderful, but of course all I could have was a bit of white rice. And some of the cucumber matchsticks from the crispy duck. I felt drunk on three glasses of white wine.

Dear readers, can you imagine? The next day I hoiked myself out of bed and went to the good old Homerton, where they told me:

a) I am fine for my operation.
b) 8-12 glasses of wine a week is, like, nothing! (I knew that; but this was a doctor speaking.)
c) I will most likely be sent home the same day! It's keyhole surgery! So the whole thing has now been reduced virtually to the level of having, say, an extremely troublesome tooth out in mid-Hackney.

From there, as it was a beautiful day, I went down to Goldsmiths Row to Little Georgia - the new one, and I should say right here that they no longer do the piroshki, not that I could eat them now anyway. They did me a nice chicken breast and salad. And black coffee. My heart leapt when I reached the canal, I hadn't realised how much I miss it. When I worked along it I was always writing poems about it.

Then up to Highbury for an eye exam. It is far too complicated to explain, but suffice to say that Ms B will need a new pic for the top there. Not only will I be half the width of that pic (my cheekbones are already back), I will be two pairs of glasses away from it - for yes, those are already not the ones I'm wearing now! (The things you never knew...) I will have three: distance, reading, and screen. That may seem excessive, but I have decided the time to fuck around with my eyes is over. The screen ones will be my current reading ones; the reading ones will be my ancient trusty sunglasses frames (don't worry; they're small) all fitted out with new lenses; and the distance ones. Well. They will be ineffably wonderful. Tortoise shell.** Rectangular. Every time I tried them on in the shop they did that thing, and made me laugh! I love them. You'll see.

Let's not think about the money.

So that was Thursday. Yesterday I barely remember, but I know it involved taking the old frames up to the opticians. (It doesn't really hurt that the optician's cute; he's been moving his boiler at home, had to go get some parts, was attractively covered in dust; said if the specs come in after Wednesday he can drop them at my house!) Today I slept in a bit better, but have felt as if I'd been hit with a mallet all day. Poor MacNeice has had to go jump in the river yet again.

See, it sounds action-packed, but in reality, no.

I'm living on plain bread and prawns, and a bit of broccoli. Everything else makes me feel sick. I had white fish and rice last night, but it was a devoir. Meringues are like dust. Not the attractive kind that covers the optician, either. I have to cook Sunday lunch tomorrow. I can go through the motions, but even if it seems nice - squash, rice, roasted garlic - it will be oil-free and therefore can't give me the one thing my entire system is craving.***

My lips are permanently dried up; my hands, my mouth, the skin under my eyes. I get in bed at night and my skin is sort of burning up with dryness, & I have to get up and go put cream on so I can sleep. Girls, we really do moisturise from within! You are what you eat. Well - you are what you eat; I'm only as good as my face cream. Still we're getting there, only a few days to go, and soon... soon... soon...


* Not Mama Baroque. She doesn't even answer the phone any more. She knows what it'll be like.

** Carson is the mastrer of the incredibly long line. His lines are typically long enough to requre two lines in printed text, and yet they remain cohesive lines, units of sound and meaning. Even in his sonnets as above he stretches it to a foot longer than the traditional English sonnet form allows. Received wisdom says the alexandrine can't work in English, that the line falls apart; I say in Carson's work it is a plangent, very watertight and yet supple, thing.

*** Fake, of course. What do you take me for?

**** No; the boys will be here. And my aunt was going to bring her new little dog, but the dog has a sore bottom or something, so best not to go visiting right now, I say!

I was talking to the Urban Warrior on the phone as I walked down the road yesterday. He gave me a gleeful real-time tour of his and his friends' graffiti exploits up and down the high street. I can't obviously divulge them here, but I'm not exactly impressed. Years of art training that boy's had, from the best - the best! - and this is what he has to show for it? "Well," he says," there's a lot of subtlety in it, you have no idea." Most of the subtlety I discerned was "how did you get up there?"

The good news is that, although he got thrown out of his music technology BTEC course, he somehow sat the City & Guilds sound engineering exam - ahd has apparently passed it. He was crowing and chortling with smugness, about that and about how high up he got with his paint. Anyway, as I said to him, he is a very bright guy and will succeed at whatever he decides to do. That was never really the issue!