An Anorexic's morning

Louise Stothard.






'The icing on the cake'.



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 carefully 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.



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 normalcy. 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, by turns subconsciously then 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. Really! I tend to visualise the allowance as I'm lying there. To make things easier, and don't get me wrong, I'm all for an easier life, 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 thrown in. 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! Woooh. There are drugs in all these natural things, aren't there! So maybe it's something I should be having at night instead of first thing in the morning ! Really!'





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, waxy. 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 life, to the way of doing things. No, really. Some sort of regularity. Like cottage cheese and lettuce. The pleasure of small things 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, really.

Really is one of her favourite words.



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! Really! 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.To discharge the batteies. 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, really, but that's the whole 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.Yeah, I thought that was kind of a cool thing to say, too.

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. Really. 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! Really.' (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. Dead climbers, I mean. No, really! Not actually funny, though, is it? Anyway, he's nearly at the summit when a Scouser pops out from behind a rock and says 'Big Issue, mate?'

The warm gust of laughter from the audience sweeps through her too. She is clearly elated.

'Yeah, I know.' she adds.

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.They're kind of like an emergency store. 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,so 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. Really!'

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. Yeah, I know, 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. It's useful exercise rather than just exercise for the sake of it!

A semblance of normality, I suppose you could call it.

So there you go, that's me, in a nutshell!.'



She looks wistfully 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.

Abortion fury! 20.06.2010.

source: The Observer

Marie Stopes International, an abortion charity, is putting an ad. on Channel 4 soon with the strap line'Are You Late?' The Pro-life Alliance is furious.

Pro-Life lobby wants

advert terminated, to

be 'The Late' ad.



Alliance fosters

hate for 'Are You Late' advert,

abortion 'Pro-mo.'

On Antony Gormless..iron men in the Alps

On Antony Gormley's piece in The Grauniad Review. 07 08 2010.






'Why I put 100 iron men in the Alps' by A.Gormless.



Not content with spreading replicas of himself all over Britain (the real one is bad enough!) the postmodernist A. Gormless, has decided to despoliate bits of Austria, the more unspoilt the better!



'In the summer of 2005' he writes, 'my wife and I went to wander in the mountains of Vorarlberg to see if it was possible to install a multiple-body work there.'



Describing the charm, the solitude, the pastoral beauty of the region, Gormley goes on

'There was something euphoric about the silence and clear air of those days spent walking.'



A shame, then that he had to come along and spoil it all!



'Horizon Field' he gargoyles 'comprises 100 iron body forms spread over seven valleys, creating a field that makes its own horizon, the latest of my attempts to ask a simple question in material terms: " Where does the human being fit in the scheme of things?"



In his scheme of things, the human being known as Antony Gormless fits in anywhere he plants it and a good few other places besides. Crosby, Cuxhaven, London, New York have been overrun with lifesize and irremoveable Antony Gormlesses and the Austrian Alps, he is determined, will be no exception. At this very moment, the gritty Gormless is believed to be preparing a single asbestos 20,000 ft.'Gormless of the Desert' to dwarf the Sahara it will stand upon.

And that's not all! He will soon be unveiling 100 stainless steel Gormlesses, currently housed in an Asda superwarehouse which will withstand the lowest temperatures known to 'iron man' Gormless. They will be hauled by a team of 20,000 huskies backed up by snowskis and planted at the North and South Poles, sunk deep into the ice-cap. Gormless himself will be there to open the ceremony.

And there's more... several hundred titanium models are to be launched to the Moon and then Mars from Cape Canaveral in December. They are due to touch down in the next few months. The sculptures will be known as 'Yet Another Place.'

He's also planning a Satgorm made up of a cluster of Gormlesses welded together to orbit planet Earth in perpetuity.



'People may well ask' he rumbles, surveying the Gormlesses peppering the Austrian Alps, "What the hell is this thing doing here?" and the work returns that question and it responds reflexively "What the hell are you doing here?"'



He has a little reflection himself: 'Michi Manhart, the local hunter, farmer, landowner and ski-lift owner' he writes' decided that 100 iron men was just what the mountains...needed. So long as the helicopters installing them did not disturb the deer he intended to shoot.'





Operation cast

iron only shows Gormley's

self love and brass neck.

Bono's slipped disk x 2 haikus 29.05.2010.

Source The Daily Mirror

U2's lead singer, Bono, who was admitted to hospital with a slipped disk, will, according to doctors, require eight weeks of recovery from surgery, thereby missing an appearance at the Glastonbury Festival's Pyramid Stage. Fans, and Bono himself, are said to be heartbroken.


Broken Bonio

leaves Bono's heart broken. Ur's

will be broken 2.



Bono and disk have

slipped off-stage; show must go on

With or Without them.

30.06.2010.




Sir Hugh Orde, President of ACPO (Association of Chief Police Officers) and a former Police Chief was commented on the Home Sectretary's address to the annual ACPO conference in Manchester yesterday.

Theresa May revealed that cuts across the crime-fighting spectrum meant that public satisfaction targetting would be scrapped. Police needed to just fight crime rather than be seen to be fighting crime, she inferred. Sir Hugh suggested mainstreaming and sharing police resources and scrapping specialist units. 'We just don't have the numbers' he said.





We can't say 'we've got

your number' any more. We

don't have the numbers.

BP Hayward's $10m 'sorry'

07.06.2010.




Doug Inkley, a senior scientist with the National Wildlife Federation is rightly infuriated and heartbroken by the B.P. continuing planetary damage and what B.P. has proclaimed as transparency in their press releases and their oleaginous statements.

They've just spent a cool $10m on a 'sorry' advert in which Tony Hayward, the British C.E,. who only yesterday, after three months of continuous massive oil gushing told the world that he was British and that he was therefore made of sterner stuff, (unlike the spineless crustaceans who have succumbed to the oil) wouldn't have his bones broken by sticks and stones (we can think of more fitting ways but would these be just like water off his back rather than oil off a duck's) and is now appearing to gush, to spill about how sorry he is.



You'll B.e P.aying for

my gush too. Oil on duck's backs

is water off mine.



Transparency by

B.P.'s even more glutinous

than their obscene oil.