He was so close I could feel his breath on my face. He looked deep into my eyes and said, trust me – I know what I’m doing. His hands were gentle and skillful as he moved with purposeful intent. I lay back, closed my eyes, inhaled deeply and did not think of England. Oh! I said, and ah!
I am talking dentistry. I am talking restoration of chipped front teeth, and the new method of slapping on some bonding material over the originals to make them look even again. I am talking a lot of money but not as much as if I’d gone all the way and had proper “porcelains” done in the laboratory. To be honest, I did not care overly about the appearance of my front teeth, they were wonky but had been like that for so long that it was just one of those things – how I looked, and I’m English, for goodness sake, everyone knows about our teeth and orthodontics, or lack of. But my dentist maintained that this was not merely a cosmetic exercise for I was grinding them down (when? In my sleep?) to the point where my Bite (he has a thing about this) would be affected, and if your Bite is affected then all hell is let loose in the form of migraines, mandibular dysfunction, postural misalignments and I don’t know what, and my dentist is one of those who doesn’t let an idea drop. And I am dependent on him because of the precarious state of my back teeth, those that are left and have not gone the way of tooth fairy, and no other dentist will touch me with a barge pole, and those that do wear cowboy hats and do terrible things with ghastly consequences. So this one is my Main Man and in the end I do what he says, or at least enough of what he says to keep his good will. We need a few Sessions, he says, to get it right. Relax - you’ll thank me for it in the end, they all do. It’s as close to a Mills and Boon romance as I will ever get, so I should try to enjoy it, and even as I say this, my face is covered with a delicate dusting of grainy powder from the fine polishing after another Bonding session.
Tomorrow Mr. Signs and I go to the BBC Centre in White City to watch some of the finals of Last Choir Standing, in which Son of Signs will be singing with Last Minute, the group that was formed for this purpose. It won’t be shown until Saturday 26th July when there will also be some footage of him and the other lads in Oxford, acting Naturally. There will be five groups and we will apparently be in the studio for six hours. I can’t quite get my head around how I will cope with this, but Mr. Signs will be driving us, and I will be bringing my friend, co-proxamol.
Daughter of Signs has got an upper second for her degree in Performance Arts and is off to Edinburgh next week to prepare for the putting on of her show (of which more anon) for her fringe festival show.
Life, being what it is, nothing is ever as straightforwardly easy as it looks but with both kids working flat out at several projects, I cannot help but ask myself again: where did we go right?
Friday, July 18, 2008
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Not a lot to say. Or, perhaps, too much of the unsayable. One’s beloved offspring are busy, busy with creative projects (good), dealing with the slings and arrows that life inevitably throws (necessary) and fielding the rogue bastard elements that snake their way into the garden that is the sphere in which they live and have their being (ouch). Not to mention that one particular offspring’s group has got through to the next stage of a certain televised competition but the powers that be did not feature them at all, probably on account of their not providing enough televisual material in the way of weeping and hand-wringing (just as well, all considered, but disappointing for them).
I have M.E. Did I mention this? Yes, well I’ve had to mention it a couple of times recently in the context of Shrink sessions on account of him being a bit, shall we say, ignorant about it all, and following a conversation that went something like:
Signs: Do you actually believe in M.E. – you don’t do you?
Shrink: I don’t know.
Signs: Fuck.
But to his credit, he has been prepared to read stuff downloaded from the wonderful Hummingbirds site (on my sidebar) and taken it on board.
"I want to know what it means to you," says Shrink. I have given the short and the long answer. I could, I suppose, say – as some reality TV contestants are fond of doing – that it Means Everything. But strike me down with a sledgehammer if I do.
I am missing the services of the person who usually comes each week to vacuum the carpets, clean the kitchen/bathroom floors and change bed linen. She has gone away until September and it felt like too much hassle to try and find someone temporary to take her place. Lugging a vacuum cleaner up and down the steep and narrow stairs of Signs Cottage is out of the question, changing bed linen and cleaning kitchen floor are both difficult but possible if I choose the right moment. So Mr. Signs does the first and of course there is the option of allowing standards to slip a little, or a lot, here and there. It would make me happy for the house to be clean, but happier still to have written a new poem or story.
I have M.E. Did I mention this? Yes, well I’ve had to mention it a couple of times recently in the context of Shrink sessions on account of him being a bit, shall we say, ignorant about it all, and following a conversation that went something like:
Signs: Do you actually believe in M.E. – you don’t do you?
Shrink: I don’t know.
Signs: Fuck.
But to his credit, he has been prepared to read stuff downloaded from the wonderful Hummingbirds site (on my sidebar) and taken it on board.
"I want to know what it means to you," says Shrink. I have given the short and the long answer. I could, I suppose, say – as some reality TV contestants are fond of doing – that it Means Everything. But strike me down with a sledgehammer if I do.
I am missing the services of the person who usually comes each week to vacuum the carpets, clean the kitchen/bathroom floors and change bed linen. She has gone away until September and it felt like too much hassle to try and find someone temporary to take her place. Lugging a vacuum cleaner up and down the steep and narrow stairs of Signs Cottage is out of the question, changing bed linen and cleaning kitchen floor are both difficult but possible if I choose the right moment. So Mr. Signs does the first and of course there is the option of allowing standards to slip a little, or a lot, here and there. It would make me happy for the house to be clean, but happier still to have written a new poem or story.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
A Field of My Own
Rose Flint recently won first prize in the Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition for her poem The Field. It is a big £5,000 whopper of a prize, and good luck to her, for poets get little enough in the way of money for the work they do; nor would most poets say they do it for financial gain, and if they did they would, let’s face it, need their heads examined. And of course, what stands behind the one poem is years and years of practice and application to the art and craft of poetry-making. I have to say, though, that I am astonished that a poem like this was the outright winner – and delighted; because I never imagined that what is, on the face of it, a simple “List” poem, would be picked as a competition winner. I say it is a simple List poem but it works, of course, on many levels, is beautifully made, powerful in its simplicity. I met her once and we had lunch together when she came to give a reading here, and I had the unusual (for me) experience of feeling the hairs on my neck stand up as she read. Not all poets are able to deliver their work in such a way as to make the hearer feel that they stand in and by their words, or that the poem is, in a sense, in the process of being created afresh as it is uttered, but she was such a one.
So anyway – fields:
Me, with my ambivalent relationship to the natural world, I’d want the field to grow anything at all that isn’t ugly or toxic. But poisonous Nightshade will do, the birds know it for what it is and stay clear of it, and the red is pretty. Or just weeds will do, those sticky, spiky, tangled things that no-one wants in the garden, I don’t mind. Just anything at all that has the push of life in it, a dandelion or two, and grass. Yes, I want the field to have green grass and some of the feathered varieties of wild grasses; wild flowers, tame flowers, yellow flowers that grow on the gorse bush all year long and smell of sweet marzipan, the reeking white dandruff petals of cow parsley, the bastard Spanish bluebell that isn’t really blue and is to the English bluebell what the grey squirrel is to the red, but I’ll have it anyway.
So the field will be a bit on the wild side and people will say it needs weeding or ask what I’m planning to do with it. I’ll shrug and say it is as it is, my field, so long as things grow and it’s not just dry, cracked earth or a swamp of mud where people come and tip their waste and dump the old sofa with the rip down one side of it or the bed with the broken spring. I want the field to be private and by invitation only, with a small sign just visible on a post that says Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted. I do not want the field to be a free-for-all with scavengers raiding the fruit trees and breaking the heads off buttercups and celandines. I want the field to be left in peace until people have learned how to behave themselves.
I want robins and a tree where they can nest and feel safe from anything that might come in and creep on the ground because I want a fox as well, and fox cubs catching the light in their extraordinary tails, and I want a half-wild tabby cat to come, but not often enough to disturb the robins, and if there is a field mouse or shrew in the field then the cat can eat them because that is the way of things and I want the field to be a place where the way of things has place, to some extent, but what I say goes, obviously. So it won’t be entirely natural or red in tooth and claw, but it will have its own vitality.
I want the field to be a good place for me to sit with a rough woollen blanket in the grass, eating a picnic of watercress sandwiches and drinking from a bottle of fresh lemonade, or reading from a book of poems – old Scottish border ballads (O whaur hae ye been, Lord Randal my son?) or Robert Frost (for I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep).
And I beg your pardon: I never promised you a rose garden.
So anyway – fields:
Me, with my ambivalent relationship to the natural world, I’d want the field to grow anything at all that isn’t ugly or toxic. But poisonous Nightshade will do, the birds know it for what it is and stay clear of it, and the red is pretty. Or just weeds will do, those sticky, spiky, tangled things that no-one wants in the garden, I don’t mind. Just anything at all that has the push of life in it, a dandelion or two, and grass. Yes, I want the field to have green grass and some of the feathered varieties of wild grasses; wild flowers, tame flowers, yellow flowers that grow on the gorse bush all year long and smell of sweet marzipan, the reeking white dandruff petals of cow parsley, the bastard Spanish bluebell that isn’t really blue and is to the English bluebell what the grey squirrel is to the red, but I’ll have it anyway.
So the field will be a bit on the wild side and people will say it needs weeding or ask what I’m planning to do with it. I’ll shrug and say it is as it is, my field, so long as things grow and it’s not just dry, cracked earth or a swamp of mud where people come and tip their waste and dump the old sofa with the rip down one side of it or the bed with the broken spring. I want the field to be private and by invitation only, with a small sign just visible on a post that says Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted. I do not want the field to be a free-for-all with scavengers raiding the fruit trees and breaking the heads off buttercups and celandines. I want the field to be left in peace until people have learned how to behave themselves.
I want robins and a tree where they can nest and feel safe from anything that might come in and creep on the ground because I want a fox as well, and fox cubs catching the light in their extraordinary tails, and I want a half-wild tabby cat to come, but not often enough to disturb the robins, and if there is a field mouse or shrew in the field then the cat can eat them because that is the way of things and I want the field to be a place where the way of things has place, to some extent, but what I say goes, obviously. So it won’t be entirely natural or red in tooth and claw, but it will have its own vitality.
I want the field to be a good place for me to sit with a rough woollen blanket in the grass, eating a picnic of watercress sandwiches and drinking from a bottle of fresh lemonade, or reading from a book of poems – old Scottish border ballads (O whaur hae ye been, Lord Randal my son?) or Robert Frost (for I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep).
And I beg your pardon: I never promised you a rose garden.
Friday, July 4, 2008
Time Will Tell
The truth of the matter is that I am not a Tardis-flying, sonic screwdriver-wielding, Dalek-conquering Time Lordesse. I am a mother who worries about her son being in Israel (having extended his ticket) without mobile phone connection. I am many other things also, but at the moment I am primarily that. And please do not tell me that everything will be all right. I know this, but the primitive being that is my Core Belief system will have none of it.
The funny thing is I’ll be seeing him on the telly tomorrow night, just after we and the rest of the universe finds out whether The Doctor is really dying and regenerating into Robert Carlyle or whether it has all been a cynical ruse to bump up the ratings. Well the latter we should, perhaps, take as read though I don’t like to dwell on such things. Anyway, it is all over the news, for goodness sake. But as I said, Son of Signs will be on the telly* – singing with one of the (pre-recorded) groups that got through into the next round of Last Choir Standing. Not allowed to tell you which one though.
* - though as it's the first one, there's a chance that his group won't be in it yet.
The funny thing is I’ll be seeing him on the telly tomorrow night, just after we and the rest of the universe finds out whether The Doctor is really dying and regenerating into Robert Carlyle or whether it has all been a cynical ruse to bump up the ratings. Well the latter we should, perhaps, take as read though I don’t like to dwell on such things. Anyway, it is all over the news, for goodness sake. But as I said, Son of Signs will be on the telly* – singing with one of the (pre-recorded) groups that got through into the next round of Last Choir Standing. Not allowed to tell you which one though.
* - though as it's the first one, there's a chance that his group won't be in it yet.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Regeneration
I’ve been thinking about the ‘intimate other’ that you build a relationship with when writing regularly in notebooks, as one frequently does if one is a writing person, even if one has no clear idea about the what or the why of putting down words on paper. Sometimes I imagine my intimate other as a ghostly version of me, but at other times it is I who am the ghost and she is the one imagining me, living the life.
Increasingly, I have become aware of this brooding presence at other times also – alongside me as I crank up each morning, trying to earth myself into my physical body, make a cup of coffee, filling the metal espresso-maker just level with black grounds, slice open a Kiwi fruit, eat a thin oat and apple biscuit; with me as I put my foot down hard on the accelerator on the road to Brighton, trying to get to my Shrink early enough to have five minutes before it’s time to ring the bell, in the car, underneath the huge oak tree where the brown bird hops on the grass and looks at me with one keen eye (it is my bird now, I’ve seen it three times, my tree also, I park under its shade); close by me when I walk into the large, white room where the chairs are always, but never quite, in the same position and I say, It’s like a stage set, the sense that invisible hands have been in between this time and the last and moved the furniture slightly, and he says, yes, the stage is set, and then there is silence. Sometimes I picture her crawling underneath the sofa with the Moroccan scatter cushions and looking at me and him in the white armchairs. Or we switch and it’s me there, and she is the one in the big chair talking or banging the arm of the chair and pulling at her hair while I sit waiting for her to finish whatever it is she has to do so we can go on to the next place, the next activity, which may be to go home and sleep and sleep, or it may be to take the white pills that put two hours of bliss into her muscles so they don’t hurt and then she can walk around a supermarket, buy meat and vegetables, shave the peel from a carrot and finely chop herbs; and she listens out for where I might be, her intimate other who says nothing at all, is quiet as the small brown bird who stands on a thin leg and watches. I am afraid, she says, that I do not have much time left. And then, I feel hopeful
(you are hoping, he says, against hope).
I can, she says, still salvage something. She is saying these things for my benefit, but really I don’t mind the life that we already live. It feels like a life to me; but then, I was never born and living with the fact of death as she is, as one is.
Unless you are The Doctor. Sorry to change tack so suddenly, but I have just resumed this post having watched today’s episode. Is this synchronicity, or what? The Doctor is dying, but even in the throes of death he is regenerating. I think he and I have a lot in common. I’m sorry, but I really do. And so does my intimate other who, at this particular moment, is keeping remarkably quiet.
Increasingly, I have become aware of this brooding presence at other times also – alongside me as I crank up each morning, trying to earth myself into my physical body, make a cup of coffee, filling the metal espresso-maker just level with black grounds, slice open a Kiwi fruit, eat a thin oat and apple biscuit; with me as I put my foot down hard on the accelerator on the road to Brighton, trying to get to my Shrink early enough to have five minutes before it’s time to ring the bell, in the car, underneath the huge oak tree where the brown bird hops on the grass and looks at me with one keen eye (it is my bird now, I’ve seen it three times, my tree also, I park under its shade); close by me when I walk into the large, white room where the chairs are always, but never quite, in the same position and I say, It’s like a stage set, the sense that invisible hands have been in between this time and the last and moved the furniture slightly, and he says, yes, the stage is set, and then there is silence. Sometimes I picture her crawling underneath the sofa with the Moroccan scatter cushions and looking at me and him in the white armchairs. Or we switch and it’s me there, and she is the one in the big chair talking or banging the arm of the chair and pulling at her hair while I sit waiting for her to finish whatever it is she has to do so we can go on to the next place, the next activity, which may be to go home and sleep and sleep, or it may be to take the white pills that put two hours of bliss into her muscles so they don’t hurt and then she can walk around a supermarket, buy meat and vegetables, shave the peel from a carrot and finely chop herbs; and she listens out for where I might be, her intimate other who says nothing at all, is quiet as the small brown bird who stands on a thin leg and watches. I am afraid, she says, that I do not have much time left. And then, I feel hopeful
(you are hoping, he says, against hope).
I can, she says, still salvage something. She is saying these things for my benefit, but really I don’t mind the life that we already live. It feels like a life to me; but then, I was never born and living with the fact of death as she is, as one is.
Unless you are The Doctor. Sorry to change tack so suddenly, but I have just resumed this post having watched today’s episode. Is this synchronicity, or what? The Doctor is dying, but even in the throes of death he is regenerating. I think he and I have a lot in common. I’m sorry, but I really do. And so does my intimate other who, at this particular moment, is keeping remarkably quiet.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
but I didn't mean to write about the turkeys
I have been busy. A simple statement like this carries baggage, as regular readers will understand. First of all, being busy, for PWME, does not particularly look like busyness to the casual observer. And then, every item of activity is clocked up by the invisible Chief of Police and appropriate fatigue penalties imposed. I have the electricity-in-the-body thing which feels just like, well, electricity in the body, but not as in “I Sing the Body Electric.” It necessitates much lying down and taking of analgesics. Well what did I expect, bombing (well walking) up Lewes High Street on Sunday after a fine gathering of writers reading their stuff, and lunch at beautiful Bill’s?
Son of Signs touched down for a brief visit before going back to Oxford for a singing rehearsal, and today he is off to Israel for a “birthright” holiday that is offered free of charge to young people who can prove they have at least one Jewish grandparent. He has purchased a pair of Birkenstock sandals and I inwardly smirk because for years he and his sister swore that they would never be seen dead in a pair of those – understandably, I suppose, seeing as their mother lived in them. I am picturing him going to all the places I went to: Jerusalem, the Dead Sea, Masada, Galilee.
I was there for about ten months, working on a couple of kibbutzim, picking oranges and inseminating turkeys (artificially, you understand). Picking oranges was ok at first – plenty of time to talk to people or just think your thoughts as you went around clipping the fruit from their green stems and filling up the big wooden crates that waited to take them to the small factory that made canned orange juice. It did become boring though, and the turkey shifts seemed to promise a certain romance and excitement as one had to do the work at night, the turkeys being more amenable at that time. I wasn’t going to tell you about this, but now I’m here I feel it’s only right: to inseminate a turkey you first had to grab your male turkey and get the necessary substance. This involved one person holding him upside down and massaging the appropriate area while another stood at the ready with a pipette and rubber tube which had to be sucked in order to direct the substance into the pipette. When enough was gathered from the males one had then to go round all the hutches and grab the females in order to insert the stuff with a syringe, being careful to choose the correct orifice. Are you still here? No, it was not my favourite occupation. And sitting in the wooden hut at break time, brewing up the coarse black coffee we drank to keep us going, watching the sky turn from black to blue, was not enough to compensate for disrupted sleep rhythms and the sense that this was all, somehow, wrong. I couldn’t eat Christmas dinner for years after. But still, happy days.
One of the “busynesses” of my life are the various writing and workshopping activities that I engage in, and I hang onto these for dear life, so it is rare that I miss one, whatever my condition. I had to last week though, because my mother has been unusually fragile and needing my help with a number of things. But at the Sunday gathering, when a number of us spoke about the various things we did, I mentioned that I wrote a blog where I talked about M.E. and creativity. As it’s not something I have been in the habit of putting about much, I surprised myself. A writer there, someone I’ve come to know over the past year, asked me for the link to pass on to a friend of hers who has M.E. The idea that people who have it might find something in these posts that resonates touches me more than I can say.
Son of Signs touched down for a brief visit before going back to Oxford for a singing rehearsal, and today he is off to Israel for a “birthright” holiday that is offered free of charge to young people who can prove they have at least one Jewish grandparent. He has purchased a pair of Birkenstock sandals and I inwardly smirk because for years he and his sister swore that they would never be seen dead in a pair of those – understandably, I suppose, seeing as their mother lived in them. I am picturing him going to all the places I went to: Jerusalem, the Dead Sea, Masada, Galilee.
I was there for about ten months, working on a couple of kibbutzim, picking oranges and inseminating turkeys (artificially, you understand). Picking oranges was ok at first – plenty of time to talk to people or just think your thoughts as you went around clipping the fruit from their green stems and filling up the big wooden crates that waited to take them to the small factory that made canned orange juice. It did become boring though, and the turkey shifts seemed to promise a certain romance and excitement as one had to do the work at night, the turkeys being more amenable at that time. I wasn’t going to tell you about this, but now I’m here I feel it’s only right: to inseminate a turkey you first had to grab your male turkey and get the necessary substance. This involved one person holding him upside down and massaging the appropriate area while another stood at the ready with a pipette and rubber tube which had to be sucked in order to direct the substance into the pipette. When enough was gathered from the males one had then to go round all the hutches and grab the females in order to insert the stuff with a syringe, being careful to choose the correct orifice. Are you still here? No, it was not my favourite occupation. And sitting in the wooden hut at break time, brewing up the coarse black coffee we drank to keep us going, watching the sky turn from black to blue, was not enough to compensate for disrupted sleep rhythms and the sense that this was all, somehow, wrong. I couldn’t eat Christmas dinner for years after. But still, happy days.
One of the “busynesses” of my life are the various writing and workshopping activities that I engage in, and I hang onto these for dear life, so it is rare that I miss one, whatever my condition. I had to last week though, because my mother has been unusually fragile and needing my help with a number of things. But at the Sunday gathering, when a number of us spoke about the various things we did, I mentioned that I wrote a blog where I talked about M.E. and creativity. As it’s not something I have been in the habit of putting about much, I surprised myself. A writer there, someone I’ve come to know over the past year, asked me for the link to pass on to a friend of hers who has M.E. The idea that people who have it might find something in these posts that resonates touches me more than I can say.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Shrink Hydration
I make no apologies for this awful photo. I need a decent camera, my phone one seems to be getting worse, but it feels kind of appropriate to have this blurred-at-the-edges image of my recently-hydrated grow-your-own-therapist doll that I was given as an early Christmas present in December. I brought him along, still bubble-wrapped to my therapy session last week, intending for it to mark a transition between that time and this. My shrink is not one of those much given to the gratuitous merry jape and it was all rather embarrassing, especially when I said about putting him into water and watching him grow. "Lots of associations there, then," he said. What can he have been thinking about?When I came home I did put him into a jug of water and he grew puffy and pale, with distorted features that reminded me of Frankenstein's monster. I feel in some way responsible for this. He has a large, bulbous head and (as you can see) a fragile little body as though he has had trouble incarnating properly. He never stood a chance because he was only ever someone's idea of a joke. Lucky for him and me that I have faith and believe in the redemption of almost everything, including miniature rubber psychotherapists.
We celebrated the birthday of Mr. Signs with a bash at Signs Cottage on Sunday. It was lovely, but I knew the only way I could manage the day was the three-stage approach of alcohol, caffeine and drugs. It sometimes works well (and did on this occasion), but one pays afterwards and I am paying. And driving my mother and her partner to and from hospital because of an eye operation he had has quite taken the stuffing reserves out of me. The sheer awfulness of NHS hospitals in this country is something one is surely never tired of writing about or relating but I am in a similar condition to the bleached-out rubber shrink and just about as good for anything. We are keeping each other company.
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