The Incident.
Lodged in the M56 tailbacked dead lane, I was playing the usual games. Guessing whether the driver in front of me was a man or a woman from the silhouetted clues. Trying to hit on the cerebral driver in the next lane. Letting cars in, letting cars out with double wink of the headlights. Making words out of the registration plates within eyeshot. Leaving a gap between my car and the car in front so I wouldn't have to go through the gears in the idiot take-up space. Weaving.
The motorway parade was getting to the lurching phase at roughly five miles per hour. Drivers were distracting themselves. Making mobile calls. Reading texts and peering into Sat-Navs like they were mirrors. Adjusting ear-slugs. Half-turning to amuse the heads of tots swivelling round anarchically . Morging Subway sandwiches like there was no tomorrow.
I was contemplating the hinged arm of a driver behind me and the whumping of local radio news on someone's car stereo when a black and chrome S.U.V. which had been fast-tracking on the outside lane swept in behind me. Dark-red-faced, its driver began to push forward on my tail in an attempt to force me out of lane. In the rear-view mirror, I caught a soundless stream of open-mouthed vitriol from the squared face that was growing out of a dark suit.
Tramelled on both sides by moving vehicles, the gleaming horns of the S.U.V. bullied me down the M56.
Eventually, a gap wide enough for me to escape into opened up in the 'slow' lane. Over-revving, the S.U.V. driver lurched into the space that had been my vehicle, jabbing an 'up yours' finger from behind the smoked windscreen and glaring down from his bumped up height.
It seemed that, of all the drivers that made up the endless stream of fag-emnds that made up the M56 at 6p.m., he had singled me out as the object of some personal vendetta. I scraped around my mind for some transgression I had committed but the kitty was empty. Was there something that emanated from the back of my mind, my vehicle that this psycho had picked up on?
He reminded me of the unleashed Staffordshire Bull terrier that once hurled its compacted weight at my lower leg, inducing that queasy sensation as its jaws had closed magnetically over my calf muscle. The dog, it seemed, had already sensed my horror and I had accepted the inevitability of the slavering jaws with a kind of 'condemned man' mix of frenzy and resentment. This was to be the first of several dog attacks.
The S.U.V. driver's fury was gathering momentum as fast as his oversized Nissan. I did not dare to lock my gaze with his, especially in the crushing period of his obscene gesture. A dog attack might have ensued. I rummaged instead in the glove compartment for something imaginary. Other drivers were now falling within the orbit of his fury as they drew alongside him or he passed them like a slow ache.
The distance between me and the S.U.V. man lengthened, thankfully. So did the passage of time. I tried not to think about the episode, unsuccessfully. The image of his dark-red face kept imprinting itself on that imaginary plane between the forehead and the world in front of it.
Forty minutes, four miles down the M56, the upturned, cramped Stag Beetle of a car, surrounded by high-viz vest Support Officers and green-doublooned ambulance staff hove into the view of my lower-left windscreen.
In between the seething bodies, I could just make out a dark-suited man. He was crouched over a thin, white twisted body, ministering a stream of anguish. I thought his dark, red face looked familiar.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Seeing Stars.
Seeing Stars; Simon Armitage's new poetry collection, published by Faber& Faber, 2010.
As usual in Simon Armitage's work, tradition clashes against modernity, sometimes making day-glo borders. In this collection, persons and places, pieces of history are thrown together into latterday, sometimes horror-style fairy tales using a prose style. These are not exactly cautionary tales, though their author is no doubt familiar with the work of Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Hilaire Belloc and Aesop. They are twisted, surreal tales, edgy fantasies.
There are resentments, revenges and crimes, some petty, some as serious as murder. There are one or two murders in Seeing Stars, just as there have been in earlier collections where, for example a hitch-hiker picked up in Leeds has been bludgeoned to death with a Krooklok by the narrator or a man living off a family is eventually drowned in their bath and dumped in the countryside ( Selected Poems, Faber and Faber, 2002).
There are failed relationships. In 'An Accomodation', there is the net curtain that the narrator's wife has draped between their rooms, their lives, because they had agreeed that 'something had to change.'
'There it remains to this day...this ravaged lace/ suspended between our lives, keeping us/ inseperable and betrothed.'
Actual people, alive or dead make their entrances. Well-known people whose Christian names were all Dennis pop up. Armitage has the Lord Mayor of Leeds in one poem and Richard Dawkins as a graverobber in another.
'Do you believe in God,' Dawkins asks the narrator. These are, perhaps, postmodern fables. 'Knowing what we know now' is the nearest we come to caution. A man approaching middle age, the age of uncertainty( 'the tipping point' as Armitage has it) is made a 'special offer' of being able to reverse his age by an elf. At first tempted, he then pulls himself up short. Such an act would surely be morally indefensible, to regain his youth whilst his wife Annie is propelled into old age and infirmity. Then the awful image pops up of his baby self suckling her as she ages. Thus he declines the Faustian deal. The elf, it is then revealed, has already granted Annie the reversal wish and has, we assume, made off with her!
In 'Michael' we start out by being told the (Armitage?) theory that 'the first thing we ever steal , when we're young is a symbol of what we become later/ in life. In the poem, the narrator talks about his young son catching a fish and 'stealing' it by 'slapping it dead on a / flat stone.' Later, as they prepare for bed, he asks his son 'So what d'you think you'll be, when you grow up?' His son answers 'I'm going to be an executioner.' His father's consternation is met with the rebuff 'Now go to sleep, dad.'
There is a feeling , reading each of the stories in this collection with their bizarre twists and turns that they could have gone on for longer, that their author had to bring each one of them, reluctantly, to a close. They fizz along with a youthful exuberance and a sometimes devilish laddishness. Slapstick and frankly absurd, unashamed elements are always creeping into the scripts. Stunts are always taking place.
'Damien likes to roll up a ginormous snowball then store it in the chest freezer in/ the pantry for one of his little stunts.' ( 'Upon opening the Chest-Freezer'). His wife disapproves and there is often marital disapproval in the unravelling of the prose-poems.
There are stories embedded within stories, like Russian Dolls. There are dizzying diversions at every turn. Just when you think you are being invited to share a joke, a situation, albeit an unreal one, the tale veers off somewhere else so that you might start off by reading an absurdist script rather like the beginning of an Armstrong and Miller sketch only to find it embedded in a larger absurdity in which a distinctly British and dark humour may be discerned.
'Last Words' is a theatrical example. The subject has been bitten by a tiny spider hiding in a packet of courgettes. As paralysis takes hold, she manages to reach the phone and calls (for help, she hopes) her brother, who is always unavailable (playing golf), then her mother, who's only interested in chiding her for failing to return petty household items such as a pastry brush. In desperation, she phones a random number and speaks to a man who, coincidentally, is also dying an absurd death.
'They chatted for a while, not caring a hoot about the cost of premium-rate international calls during peak periods' In a cartoon-like sequence, they chat each other up and are overtaken by death. The story then cuts to an audience 'watching' this action, we presume, on a stage.
' There was a horrible pause, as we sat there wondering whether to applaud.'
In the first half of 'The Accident', we have the comedic situation of a man whose district nurse, called to treat his burns injury, suspects him of having sustained the burns injury via an act of retaliation by a wife who he's been beating up.
In 'Collaborators' a barber has to pretend to 'shave' a man who, though under the illusion of having an abundance of hair, is completely bald, in order to humour him. The man pays the barber in pretend money.
'The Personal Touch.' has an exasperated girlfriend telling her her boyfriend ( 'cohabitee' as Armitage has him ) ''Paul, space is what I want and space is what I need. Do I have to SPELL it out?" The cohabitee buys the 'space' in a Halford's-type store after viewing a slection of types of 'space', drops it on her doorstep then zooms off in the unwanted Mercedes Roadster he had given her for Christmas. It's tempting to see something autobiographical in this scenario.
In the title piece, 'Seeing Stars', the narrator, here a pharmacist, embarrasses a young couple who want a pregnancy testing kit with his nudge-nudge remarks. He is upbraided by the husband of the couple and tries to smooth over his embarassment by offering something free from the pharmacy. When the couple demand speed and heroin "And you can throw in a syringe while you're at it", the hapless pharmacist overreaches himself "but think of the baby". For this indiscretion, he is knocked to the floor.
'When people have received a blow to the head they often talk about 'seeing stars', and as a man of science I have always been careful to avoid the casual use of metaphor and hyperbole.But I saw stars that day. Whole galaxies of stars, and planets orbiting around them, each one capable of sustaining life as we know it.'
This is Armitage at his familiar, well-loved craft.
His work is always threaded through with Northern touches. There are appearances by Councillor Bill Hyde, 'The Right Worshipful Mayor of the City of Leeds', the Pennines 'The Great Divide', Roundhay Park,and The Calls Hotel( the 'Knightsbridge of the North'). Leeds, population 715,403, the M621 and the Yorkshire Evening Post all make their appearance.
Armitage even memorialises himself, albeit with self-deprecation in 'Bringing it all back home'.
'But the event which really caught my eye was the Simon/ Armitage Trail, a guided tour which promised to take in 'every nook and cranny of the poet's youth.'
This 46 year-old poet is diffident. In 'Selected Poems' he has the narrator say 'No convictions-that's my one major fault. Nothing to tempt me to scream and shout, nothing/...a man like me could be a real handful...but no cause, no cause.'
He's been around for about twenty years and has published eleven volumes of poetry.
This is his first excursion into a prose style, though he insists that Seeing Stars is poetry,art rather than prose, protest art at that. "By definition" Armitage tells Alan Franks in an interview (The Times 24.04.2010.) in consideration of the function of poetry "The fact that you aren't willing to have a right-hand margin or even go to the bottom of a page is a protest in its own right. Whatever you are , you are not a prose writer. Stubbornly not. Even though they ( the poets) might go as far as they dare to engage or entertain or whatever, they are a dissenting voice because they aren't going to appeal to everybody. And if they do appeal to everybody, then they are not doing their job."
There's no sign of form or tradition. Armitage is adamant that "they are poems because I say they are."
He enjoys wordplay and tinkering around at the edges "'I've still some messing around to do."
Here is a writer who enjoys fantasy for its own sake. Who likes unrestrained experimentation. Who balks at the idea of poetry and writing as a 'day job' but likes to splash on a canvas randomly when he pleases.
As he himself says "it would be impossible, financially and in any other way to do it full-time."
The poet, this poet, likes to tinker with the creative engine as befits his curiosity. In the Alan Franks interview he talks about 'the dream which poets have of being able to do exactly what you want' and then adds ' if you start hitting obligations and obstacles, then the dream is not alive as it might be.' A dream then.
We gain an insight into where his train of thought often leads him in 'Beyond Huddersfield.'
'I thought a lot about that bear. With every recollection he became more wretched and/ undignified in my mind, and I couldn't suppress the/ escalation of inglorious imagery'.
There's a glimpse too into his own attitude towards writing, specifically poetry writing. In 'The Knack', a third person Boris is trying to write.
'Boris was sitting in a field of bullocks...trying to be a writer. There were many wild flowers waiting/ patiently to be described. But every time his pen/ made contact with the paper his hand skidded and/ jumped.
He succumbs to a loss of muscle control which prevents him from writing and rather likes it.
'and/ after a time he gave up fighting it and let the pen/ wander at will.. And although arbitrary, the peaks/ and troughs it produced had a confidence about/ them, something you couldn't argue with, like a / cross-section of the Alps' Eventually Boris/ found himself quite detached from his notepad... The flowers were still waiting.'
The flowers will have to wait.
As usual in Simon Armitage's work, tradition clashes against modernity, sometimes making day-glo borders. In this collection, persons and places, pieces of history are thrown together into latterday, sometimes horror-style fairy tales using a prose style. These are not exactly cautionary tales, though their author is no doubt familiar with the work of Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Hilaire Belloc and Aesop. They are twisted, surreal tales, edgy fantasies.
There are resentments, revenges and crimes, some petty, some as serious as murder. There are one or two murders in Seeing Stars, just as there have been in earlier collections where, for example a hitch-hiker picked up in Leeds has been bludgeoned to death with a Krooklok by the narrator or a man living off a family is eventually drowned in their bath and dumped in the countryside ( Selected Poems, Faber and Faber, 2002).
There are failed relationships. In 'An Accomodation', there is the net curtain that the narrator's wife has draped between their rooms, their lives, because they had agreeed that 'something had to change.'
'There it remains to this day...this ravaged lace/ suspended between our lives, keeping us/ inseperable and betrothed.'
Actual people, alive or dead make their entrances. Well-known people whose Christian names were all Dennis pop up. Armitage has the Lord Mayor of Leeds in one poem and Richard Dawkins as a graverobber in another.
'Do you believe in God,' Dawkins asks the narrator. These are, perhaps, postmodern fables. 'Knowing what we know now' is the nearest we come to caution. A man approaching middle age, the age of uncertainty( 'the tipping point' as Armitage has it) is made a 'special offer' of being able to reverse his age by an elf. At first tempted, he then pulls himself up short. Such an act would surely be morally indefensible, to regain his youth whilst his wife Annie is propelled into old age and infirmity. Then the awful image pops up of his baby self suckling her as she ages. Thus he declines the Faustian deal. The elf, it is then revealed, has already granted Annie the reversal wish and has, we assume, made off with her!
In 'Michael' we start out by being told the (Armitage?) theory that 'the first thing we ever steal , when we're young is a symbol of what we become later/ in life. In the poem, the narrator talks about his young son catching a fish and 'stealing' it by 'slapping it dead on a / flat stone.' Later, as they prepare for bed, he asks his son 'So what d'you think you'll be, when you grow up?' His son answers 'I'm going to be an executioner.' His father's consternation is met with the rebuff 'Now go to sleep, dad.'
There is a feeling , reading each of the stories in this collection with their bizarre twists and turns that they could have gone on for longer, that their author had to bring each one of them, reluctantly, to a close. They fizz along with a youthful exuberance and a sometimes devilish laddishness. Slapstick and frankly absurd, unashamed elements are always creeping into the scripts. Stunts are always taking place.
'Damien likes to roll up a ginormous snowball then store it in the chest freezer in/ the pantry for one of his little stunts.' ( 'Upon opening the Chest-Freezer'). His wife disapproves and there is often marital disapproval in the unravelling of the prose-poems.
There are stories embedded within stories, like Russian Dolls. There are dizzying diversions at every turn. Just when you think you are being invited to share a joke, a situation, albeit an unreal one, the tale veers off somewhere else so that you might start off by reading an absurdist script rather like the beginning of an Armstrong and Miller sketch only to find it embedded in a larger absurdity in which a distinctly British and dark humour may be discerned.
'Last Words' is a theatrical example. The subject has been bitten by a tiny spider hiding in a packet of courgettes. As paralysis takes hold, she manages to reach the phone and calls (for help, she hopes) her brother, who is always unavailable (playing golf), then her mother, who's only interested in chiding her for failing to return petty household items such as a pastry brush. In desperation, she phones a random number and speaks to a man who, coincidentally, is also dying an absurd death.
'They chatted for a while, not caring a hoot about the cost of premium-rate international calls during peak periods' In a cartoon-like sequence, they chat each other up and are overtaken by death. The story then cuts to an audience 'watching' this action, we presume, on a stage.
' There was a horrible pause, as we sat there wondering whether to applaud.'
In the first half of 'The Accident', we have the comedic situation of a man whose district nurse, called to treat his burns injury, suspects him of having sustained the burns injury via an act of retaliation by a wife who he's been beating up.
In 'Collaborators' a barber has to pretend to 'shave' a man who, though under the illusion of having an abundance of hair, is completely bald, in order to humour him. The man pays the barber in pretend money.
'The Personal Touch.' has an exasperated girlfriend telling her her boyfriend ( 'cohabitee' as Armitage has him ) ''Paul, space is what I want and space is what I need. Do I have to SPELL it out?" The cohabitee buys the 'space' in a Halford's-type store after viewing a slection of types of 'space', drops it on her doorstep then zooms off in the unwanted Mercedes Roadster he had given her for Christmas. It's tempting to see something autobiographical in this scenario.
In the title piece, 'Seeing Stars', the narrator, here a pharmacist, embarrasses a young couple who want a pregnancy testing kit with his nudge-nudge remarks. He is upbraided by the husband of the couple and tries to smooth over his embarassment by offering something free from the pharmacy. When the couple demand speed and heroin "And you can throw in a syringe while you're at it", the hapless pharmacist overreaches himself "but think of the baby". For this indiscretion, he is knocked to the floor.
'When people have received a blow to the head they often talk about 'seeing stars', and as a man of science I have always been careful to avoid the casual use of metaphor and hyperbole.But I saw stars that day. Whole galaxies of stars, and planets orbiting around them, each one capable of sustaining life as we know it.'
This is Armitage at his familiar, well-loved craft.
His work is always threaded through with Northern touches. There are appearances by Councillor Bill Hyde, 'The Right Worshipful Mayor of the City of Leeds', the Pennines 'The Great Divide', Roundhay Park,and The Calls Hotel( the 'Knightsbridge of the North'). Leeds, population 715,403, the M621 and the Yorkshire Evening Post all make their appearance.
Armitage even memorialises himself, albeit with self-deprecation in 'Bringing it all back home'.
'But the event which really caught my eye was the Simon/ Armitage Trail, a guided tour which promised to take in 'every nook and cranny of the poet's youth.'
This 46 year-old poet is diffident. In 'Selected Poems' he has the narrator say 'No convictions-that's my one major fault. Nothing to tempt me to scream and shout, nothing/...a man like me could be a real handful...but no cause, no cause.'
He's been around for about twenty years and has published eleven volumes of poetry.
This is his first excursion into a prose style, though he insists that Seeing Stars is poetry,art rather than prose, protest art at that. "By definition" Armitage tells Alan Franks in an interview (The Times 24.04.2010.) in consideration of the function of poetry "The fact that you aren't willing to have a right-hand margin or even go to the bottom of a page is a protest in its own right. Whatever you are , you are not a prose writer. Stubbornly not. Even though they ( the poets) might go as far as they dare to engage or entertain or whatever, they are a dissenting voice because they aren't going to appeal to everybody. And if they do appeal to everybody, then they are not doing their job."
There's no sign of form or tradition. Armitage is adamant that "they are poems because I say they are."
He enjoys wordplay and tinkering around at the edges "'I've still some messing around to do."
Here is a writer who enjoys fantasy for its own sake. Who likes unrestrained experimentation. Who balks at the idea of poetry and writing as a 'day job' but likes to splash on a canvas randomly when he pleases.
As he himself says "it would be impossible, financially and in any other way to do it full-time."
The poet, this poet, likes to tinker with the creative engine as befits his curiosity. In the Alan Franks interview he talks about 'the dream which poets have of being able to do exactly what you want' and then adds ' if you start hitting obligations and obstacles, then the dream is not alive as it might be.' A dream then.
We gain an insight into where his train of thought often leads him in 'Beyond Huddersfield.'
'I thought a lot about that bear. With every recollection he became more wretched and/ undignified in my mind, and I couldn't suppress the/ escalation of inglorious imagery'.
There's a glimpse too into his own attitude towards writing, specifically poetry writing. In 'The Knack', a third person Boris is trying to write.
'Boris was sitting in a field of bullocks...trying to be a writer. There were many wild flowers waiting/ patiently to be described. But every time his pen/ made contact with the paper his hand skidded and/ jumped.
He succumbs to a loss of muscle control which prevents him from writing and rather likes it.
'and/ after a time he gave up fighting it and let the pen/ wander at will.. And although arbitrary, the peaks/ and troughs it produced had a confidence about/ them, something you couldn't argue with, like a / cross-section of the Alps' Eventually Boris/ found himself quite detached from his notepad... The flowers were still waiting.'
The flowers will have to wait.
An Anorexic's morning
An anorexic describes her morning (A monologue).
Stage directions:
A bare wooden chair, the sort that could be described as rather uncomfortable sits, centre-stage. It is lit from above by a central stage spotlight.
An anorexic girl walks from the wings onto the stage and as she sits down gingerly on the chair the central spotlight is joined by other side stage lights in flooding the area where she sits, now bathed in bright, white, revealing light. There are no shadows, as the convergence of lights does not permit this. The figure of the girl is one of a kind of white silhouette.
She's wearing a calico brown smock over dark denim jeans but it's obvious that she's anorexic, though not quite at first glance, since her choice of clothing creates a semblance of the normal. The smock billows, and the jeans are turned up at the ankles, cuff-style. These are the tricks of the trade, the anorexic's trade. She's wearing a pair of desert boots which she plants squarely on the floor in a masculine sitting posture.
She rocks from one side to the other on the hard chair she usually sits on to read, or write, or watch television, or eat, or refrain from eating. One of the reasons she is rocking from side to side is that her 'seat bones' can feel the hardness of the chair, for she has so little 'padding'.
This feeling is one she finds reassuring.
She billows out the smock as she sits down, as she always does. It's another 'trick of the weight' as she likes to call it.
She tucks her hands, with their coarse, brittle fingernails under her thighs, subconsciously, consciously feeling the gauge of her limbs.
She pauses, collecting her thoughts, then speaks in a clear voice, a voice which has become
a little husky on account of the flood of male hormone triggered by her anorexia.
She begins to talk, uncomfortably at first.' So what's a typical morning like then, for me?
W-e-e-ll, the careful calibration begins more or less when I wake up. It's something I endure as well as relishing, bittersweet, like dark chocolate, dark thoughts.
One of the first things I think about when I wake up is that there are three hours to kill (give or take an extra period of abstinence) before the first allowance, before I can eat. It's marking time in bite-size chunks, to coin a phrase! It's, kind of, an unfortunate game. I tend to visualise the allowance as I'm lying there.. To make things easier, it's nearly always the same menu'.
She extends her arms in front of her as though in an act of supplication, cupping her hands to describe a small bowl shape.
' I take a dessert spoonful of cottage cheese and fluff it out on a bed of lettuce leaves, arranged in concentric circles that give the illusion of a full plate. It's a question of fooling the mind, this diet business.' (She refers here, and elsewhere to her anorexia as 'dieting').
' I normally scatter some flaked almonds or a few cherry tomatoes generously onto the lettuce bed. That way, I get the vitamins and a bit of protein. And a bit of colour. And shape. That's important. It's not as daft as it looks or sounds, and there's iron too, in the lettuce. Oh, and laudanum, apparently. So maybe it's something I should be having at night instead of morning to help me sleep!'
She laughs, then strokes her chin with the bony fingers of her right hand. Her cheeks are downy but here and there a hirsuteness has produced one or two bristly chin hairs.Her face is sculpted and she has once possesssed a rare beauty. Her head seems too big for the rest of her frame(something of a giveaway, she often thinks).
She shifts on her chair uncomfortably.
'There must be, I feel, some order to the kind of ideas that I seem to possess. The regularity of cottage cheese and lettuce bed IS that order.
The pleasure of tiny satisfactions, those that measuring the weight of things can give is definitely not lost on me, though, even though you must think I lead a miserable existence!'
(She laughs, and the laughter turns into a slight clearing of the throat, as if in embarassment).
'Then there is the dressing game, a thing which is also part of the daily calculus, that is part of the fabric of those three hours, the preparation for going out, for the walk.
The walk is one of the most important parts of the morning. Well, it's all important, actually.
I have to check the mirror first, admire the clean lines, the svelte body (I'm being sarcastic, obviously!), see how athletic it looks, how athletic it IS. I know, you've got to laugh, though! To keep myself in the manner to which I am accustomed' ( she laughs) 'I always have to do press-ups, star-jumps and various aerobic movements. These are to top up the output, the exercise. They're... like, the icing on the cake, so to speak.
I pull on my heavy, floaty, linen black dress. It's a bit shapeless, but that's the point. I have thick, non-stretch jeans as well. They help your legs not to look too obvious, not to look like the licorice sticks they actually are! I like to make an impression when I go out so I have these suede desert-boots, the kind with the tab so I can pull them on. (I need a tab... they're so damn heavy!) They've got castellated soles, they make a mark, I can tell you. Boots like that carry authority. And, for all my complexities, I DO actually have authority.
You probably think I'm expending a lot of effort for what is, after all a bit of vanity. Yet somehow I've learned to expend the minimum effort for the maxinum result.
I have a kind of curtain coat, you know. They used to call them swagger coats, didn't they. Or was it duster? One of the two. Anyway, this coat adds another layer of... I suppose you could call it deception. Then I'm ready to float out into town. I say float because that's what it feels like. The term 'airhead' should really be applied to me, as most of the time I'm as light-headed a someone on top of Everest. And that's without the oxygen!' (She laughs loudly, recklessly).
There's a good joke about Everest...I can tell you the gist. I'll probably mess it up, I usually do. A guy labours all the way up Everest, passing all the usual debris you see on the streets. Crisp packets, juice bottles, Kendal Mint Cake, dead climbers,bla-di-blah.Actually, did you know there are about three hundred of them...and that's just the ones they've found. Not funny is it, though? He's nearly at the summit when a Scouser pops out from behind a rock and says 'Big Issue, mate?
Yeah, I know.'
She is sitting more comfortably now, getting into her stride.
'I always take a packet of these diet crackers with me. Don't worry, I DO put the wrappers in the bin! Anyway, I feel kind of voluptuous as I slowly take one out of the packet while I'm walking along. Each of these crackers is wrapped in its own envelope, and there are always eight to a packet, four in each compartment. So that's one for every quarter mile completed. I did have a pedometer but the trouble with them is that they clock up the distance with every movement of your hips, giving false readings, so they're not a true measurement, are they?
Anyway, I'm very aware of the boniness of my hand as I unwrap the crackers, and also the set of my pale, angular face. Actually, I rather admire it. I allow myself an extra cracker sometimes, just for the hell of it. I know I'll have to pay somewhere else.
Sometimes, I drift round M&S, to have a look at the tiny bras I'm hoping to fit. As if.They're for teenaged girls, actually. It seems wrong that children are being sexualised with these bloody things, and those awful chat magazines... there's no childhood, really, is there?
I deliberately go through the food department. I suppose I'm a bit of a masochist really.'
(She laughs).
' I stay out as long as possible. The highlight of all this dieting, this regime is going to Waterstone's to read the paper and have a huge Latte.'
She clears her throat.
'Yes, whooooh. You must be thinking 'what's the point? All that effort and she goes and has a Latte. Not even a skinny Latte!' Well, you've got to live dangerously sometimes!
I supose that's what this whole dieting thing is about...the danger of things.
'Anyway, that's once a week. I have a blackberry muffin too, but in actual fact I only have about a third of it. I wrap the rest in those lovely napkins you get in there with the crenellated edges, then I take it home to nibble at surreptitiously in weak moments. I ration the one-third muffin out into three pieces while I'm reading. Funny how I do things in threes and quarters. It seems to make sense. But I make it look random.
Anyway of course the grease of the muffin, those bloody transfats leave me feeling rather heavy and dull. The dullness is more to do with the failure, though than the calorific value of the muffin and Latte even though, as everyone knows, it's huge.
Finally, I'll go into Home and Bargain, buy bleach for my scrubbing sessions, for the bathroom.
Scrubbing takes a bit of effort and you're cleansing things at the same time, so that kind of makes sense.
A semblance of normality, I suppose'.
She looks whistfully at her audience.
Stage directions:
The overhead stage lights dim and narrow, revealing a stark figure, then close down gradually, leaving both her and the stage in complete darkness.
Stage directions:
A bare wooden chair, the sort that could be described as rather uncomfortable sits, centre-stage. It is lit from above by a central stage spotlight.
An anorexic girl walks from the wings onto the stage and as she sits down gingerly on the chair the central spotlight is joined by other side stage lights in flooding the area where she sits, now bathed in bright, white, revealing light. There are no shadows, as the convergence of lights does not permit this. The figure of the girl is one of a kind of white silhouette.
She's wearing a calico brown smock over dark denim jeans but it's obvious that she's anorexic, though not quite at first glance, since her choice of clothing creates a semblance of the normal. The smock billows, and the jeans are turned up at the ankles, cuff-style. These are the tricks of the trade, the anorexic's trade. She's wearing a pair of desert boots which she plants squarely on the floor in a masculine sitting posture.
She rocks from one side to the other on the hard chair she usually sits on to read, or write, or watch television, or eat, or refrain from eating. One of the reasons she is rocking from side to side is that her 'seat bones' can feel the hardness of the chair, for she has so little 'padding'.
This feeling is one she finds reassuring.
She billows out the smock as she sits down, as she always does. It's another 'trick of the weight' as she likes to call it.
She tucks her hands, with their coarse, brittle fingernails under her thighs, subconsciously, consciously feeling the gauge of her limbs.
She pauses, collecting her thoughts, then speaks in a clear voice, a voice which has become
a little husky on account of the flood of male hormone triggered by her anorexia.
She begins to talk, uncomfortably at first.' So what's a typical morning like then, for me?
W-e-e-ll, the careful calibration begins more or less when I wake up. It's something I endure as well as relishing, bittersweet, like dark chocolate, dark thoughts.
One of the first things I think about when I wake up is that there are three hours to kill (give or take an extra period of abstinence) before the first allowance, before I can eat. It's marking time in bite-size chunks, to coin a phrase! It's, kind of, an unfortunate game. I tend to visualise the allowance as I'm lying there.. To make things easier, it's nearly always the same menu'.
She extends her arms in front of her as though in an act of supplication, cupping her hands to describe a small bowl shape.
' I take a dessert spoonful of cottage cheese and fluff it out on a bed of lettuce leaves, arranged in concentric circles that give the illusion of a full plate. It's a question of fooling the mind, this diet business.' (She refers here, and elsewhere to her anorexia as 'dieting').
' I normally scatter some flaked almonds or a few cherry tomatoes generously onto the lettuce bed. That way, I get the vitamins and a bit of protein. And a bit of colour. And shape. That's important. It's not as daft as it looks or sounds, and there's iron too, in the lettuce. Oh, and laudanum, apparently. So maybe it's something I should be having at night instead of morning to help me sleep!'
She laughs, then strokes her chin with the bony fingers of her right hand. Her cheeks are downy but here and there a hirsuteness has produced one or two bristly chin hairs.Her face is sculpted and she has once possesssed a rare beauty. Her head seems too big for the rest of her frame(something of a giveaway, she often thinks).
She shifts on her chair uncomfortably.
'There must be, I feel, some order to the kind of ideas that I seem to possess. The regularity of cottage cheese and lettuce bed IS that order.
The pleasure of tiny satisfactions, those that measuring the weight of things can give is definitely not lost on me, though, even though you must think I lead a miserable existence!'
(She laughs, and the laughter turns into a slight clearing of the throat, as if in embarassment).
'Then there is the dressing game, a thing which is also part of the daily calculus, that is part of the fabric of those three hours, the preparation for going out, for the walk.
The walk is one of the most important parts of the morning. Well, it's all important, actually.
I have to check the mirror first, admire the clean lines, the svelte body (I'm being sarcastic, obviously!), see how athletic it looks, how athletic it IS. I know, you've got to laugh, though! To keep myself in the manner to which I am accustomed' ( she laughs) 'I always have to do press-ups, star-jumps and various aerobic movements. These are to top up the output, the exercise. They're... like, the icing on the cake, so to speak.
I pull on my heavy, floaty, linen black dress. It's a bit shapeless, but that's the point. I have thick, non-stretch jeans as well. They help your legs not to look too obvious, not to look like the licorice sticks they actually are! I like to make an impression when I go out so I have these suede desert-boots, the kind with the tab so I can pull them on. (I need a tab... they're so damn heavy!) They've got castellated soles, they make a mark, I can tell you. Boots like that carry authority. And, for all my complexities, I DO actually have authority.
You probably think I'm expending a lot of effort for what is, after all a bit of vanity. Yet somehow I've learned to expend the minimum effort for the maxinum result.
I have a kind of curtain coat, you know. They used to call them swagger coats, didn't they. Or was it duster? One of the two. Anyway, this coat adds another layer of... I suppose you could call it deception. Then I'm ready to float out into town. I say float because that's what it feels like. The term 'airhead' should really be applied to me, as most of the time I'm as light-headed a someone on top of Everest. And that's without the oxygen!' (She laughs loudly, recklessly).
There's a good joke about Everest...I can tell you the gist. I'll probably mess it up, I usually do. A guy labours all the way up Everest, passing all the usual debris you see on the streets. Crisp packets, juice bottles, Kendal Mint Cake, dead climbers,bla-di-blah.Actually, did you know there are about three hundred of them...and that's just the ones they've found. Not funny is it, though? He's nearly at the summit when a Scouser pops out from behind a rock and says 'Big Issue, mate?
Yeah, I know.'
She is sitting more comfortably now, getting into her stride.
'I always take a packet of these diet crackers with me. Don't worry, I DO put the wrappers in the bin! Anyway, I feel kind of voluptuous as I slowly take one out of the packet while I'm walking along. Each of these crackers is wrapped in its own envelope, and there are always eight to a packet, four in each compartment. So that's one for every quarter mile completed. I did have a pedometer but the trouble with them is that they clock up the distance with every movement of your hips, giving false readings, so they're not a true measurement, are they?
Anyway, I'm very aware of the boniness of my hand as I unwrap the crackers, and also the set of my pale, angular face. Actually, I rather admire it. I allow myself an extra cracker sometimes, just for the hell of it. I know I'll have to pay somewhere else.
Sometimes, I drift round M&S, to have a look at the tiny bras I'm hoping to fit. As if.They're for teenaged girls, actually. It seems wrong that children are being sexualised with these bloody things, and those awful chat magazines... there's no childhood, really, is there?
I deliberately go through the food department. I suppose I'm a bit of a masochist really.'
(She laughs).
' I stay out as long as possible. The highlight of all this dieting, this regime is going to Waterstone's to read the paper and have a huge Latte.'
She clears her throat.
'Yes, whooooh. You must be thinking 'what's the point? All that effort and she goes and has a Latte. Not even a skinny Latte!' Well, you've got to live dangerously sometimes!
I supose that's what this whole dieting thing is about...the danger of things.
'Anyway, that's once a week. I have a blackberry muffin too, but in actual fact I only have about a third of it. I wrap the rest in those lovely napkins you get in there with the crenellated edges, then I take it home to nibble at surreptitiously in weak moments. I ration the one-third muffin out into three pieces while I'm reading. Funny how I do things in threes and quarters. It seems to make sense. But I make it look random.
Anyway of course the grease of the muffin, those bloody transfats leave me feeling rather heavy and dull. The dullness is more to do with the failure, though than the calorific value of the muffin and Latte even though, as everyone knows, it's huge.
Finally, I'll go into Home and Bargain, buy bleach for my scrubbing sessions, for the bathroom.
Scrubbing takes a bit of effort and you're cleansing things at the same time, so that kind of makes sense.
A semblance of normality, I suppose'.
She looks whistfully at her audience.
Stage directions:
The overhead stage lights dim and narrow, revealing a stark figure, then close down gradually, leaving both her and the stage in complete darkness.
We could Trump him 29.06.2010.
29.06.2010.
Campaigners of the pressure group 38 Degrees have bought a piece of land slap bang in the middle of the Balmeanie Estate, an SSSI, which the self-aggrandising popinjay billionaire Donald Trump is buying from Aberedeenshire Council. Under a CPO, those living there are to be evicted from their own houses and land. I have signed up to the ownership of the patch of land, known as 'The Bunker' (for obvious reasons) and ANYONE READING THIS CAN DO IT TOO.
The idea of buying a piece of land technically owned by a very large number of people is that it makes the business of selling the land technically(legally) very expensive. This was the reasoning behind the initial purchase by a few buyers, followed by additional purchase by hundreds of other people of a piece of land inside the proposed siting of the Third Runway. Greenpeace and Plane Stupid were the architects of this idea. Et Voila ! BAA have cancelled. But watch out, they could just be lying low in an aircraft hangar somewhere.
Tee-ed off with Meanie
Council's Trumpery? Let's hole
both in one bunker!
Campaigners of the pressure group 38 Degrees have bought a piece of land slap bang in the middle of the Balmeanie Estate, an SSSI, which the self-aggrandising popinjay billionaire Donald Trump is buying from Aberedeenshire Council. Under a CPO, those living there are to be evicted from their own houses and land. I have signed up to the ownership of the patch of land, known as 'The Bunker' (for obvious reasons) and ANYONE READING THIS CAN DO IT TOO.
The idea of buying a piece of land technically owned by a very large number of people is that it makes the business of selling the land technically(legally) very expensive. This was the reasoning behind the initial purchase by a few buyers, followed by additional purchase by hundreds of other people of a piece of land inside the proposed siting of the Third Runway. Greenpeace and Plane Stupid were the architects of this idea. Et Voila ! BAA have cancelled. But watch out, they could just be lying low in an aircraft hangar somewhere.
Tee-ed off with Meanie
Council's Trumpery? Let's hole
both in one bunker!
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Deep Bilge Promulgators 27.06.2010.
More than five weeks since the Deep Water Horizon rig collapsed and oil started spewing at a rate of 2.4 million gallons a day B.P, (that's BRITISH Petroleum) have been busy poisoning the whole of our waters, the waters of coral, of plankton, of porpoise, of turtle, of seaweed, of fish , of seabird and of mammal.
BP are still unrepentant. In fact they're trying to buy off anyone with a mouth, a fishing permit and a Gulf of Mexico address. They've got money to burn you see as well as to poison. May their consciences take them to a watery grave.The consciences of all who consume the stuff and demand it must be shamed also.
Water will never
be deep enough to damn those
Deep Bilge Poisoners.
BP are still unrepentant. In fact they're trying to buy off anyone with a mouth, a fishing permit and a Gulf of Mexico address. They've got money to burn you see as well as to poison. May their consciences take them to a watery grave.The consciences of all who consume the stuff and demand it must be shamed also.
Water will never
be deep enough to damn those
Deep Bilge Poisoners.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Liam Fox sneers at Afghanistan 24.06.2010.
24.06.2010.
Liam Fox, the new Conservative Defence Secretary accused Afghanistan during a Times interview of being a broken 13th century country (during a meeting at which Hamid Karzai, the Afghan President was present).
A broken, ancient
country? That's rich coming from
broken old YUK.
Liam Fox, the new Conservative Defence Secretary accused Afghanistan during a Times interview of being a broken 13th century country (during a meeting at which Hamid Karzai, the Afghan President was present).
A broken, ancient
country? That's rich coming from
broken old YUK.
Korean standoff. 24.06.2010.
25.06.2010.
South Korea acuses north Korea of having torpedoed one of its gunboats, killing 46 sailors on board. Military experts are divided as to whether this is true or whether it had been caused by U.S. or South Korean 'friendly fire'.
South Korea has suspended its 'sunshine policy' aimed at a gradual thawing of hostilities sustained originally during the Korean war of 1950-53. North Korea has responded by severing ties with South Korea.
Temperature rises;
'Sunshine policy' clouded by
Korean fire claim.
South Korea acuses north Korea of having torpedoed one of its gunboats, killing 46 sailors on board. Military experts are divided as to whether this is true or whether it had been caused by U.S. or South Korean 'friendly fire'.
South Korea has suspended its 'sunshine policy' aimed at a gradual thawing of hostilities sustained originally during the Korean war of 1950-53. North Korea has responded by severing ties with South Korea.
Temperature rises;
'Sunshine policy' clouded by
Korean fire claim.
More BP's Bullshit Promotion. 24.06.2010.
BP keeps having to revise its estimates of the amount of bilge its oil well in the Gulf Of Mexico is spewing out. They started off reckoning it was 42,000 gallons a day. Then it became 210,000.gallons. Now that amount seems to have rocketed to 2.9 million gallons a day. What is worse, they've been using a highly toxic dispersant (under the sea, so no-one will notice) to 'neutralise' the oil. Double the poison then.
Every media outlet, even the most responsible and scientific ones, talks about the dangers ONLY if and when the slick reaches the shores as if it didn't matter that the oceans and all the life in them and which make up most of the planet were being killed, as if the sea were some sort of heroic, inert carrier which saved the oil from doing any damage.
Media outlets
pour water on troubled oils,
misinformation.
Every media outlet, even the most responsible and scientific ones, talks about the dangers ONLY if and when the slick reaches the shores as if it didn't matter that the oceans and all the life in them and which make up most of the planet were being killed, as if the sea were some sort of heroic, inert carrier which saved the oil from doing any damage.
Media outlets
pour water on troubled oils,
misinformation.
Sunday, May 23, 2010
What matters. 20.06.2010.
20.06.2010. Physicians using an atom-smasher have found evidence that more matter than anti-matter is created by high-energy particle collision and this explains the predominance of matter ( which will have been necessary for the formation of the Universe.)
The matter of how
Earth materialised is
no laughing matter.
The matter of how
Earth materialised is
no laughing matter.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
