Soapstone Vase

For these few minutes, pretend
I am your daughter, you my good mother,
rough and grainy against my palm.
I could be small enough
to climb inside.

Though you are whole and perfect
and I am only human,
adopt me. Feel how you grow
warm in my hands.
We are made for each other.


***

Voodoo Lily

They are back again. Sweet neighbour came and alerted us yesterday. Well, she has an interest because one of them grows near her garden. They smell of rotting corpses, you see - not that I have ever smelled one of those, but it is apparently an established fact that this is what they smell of and I can vouch that it is probably one of the worst smells ever. Flies love them, as you would expect. They are also known as Dracuncula Vulgaris - good name, lots of appropriate resonances.

It does make you wonder, I think, what kind of a god could have conceived of such a thing. It is both ugly and ridiculous with its ostentatious black penis surrounded by faux Hawaii shirt. It is something that was cobbled together as a bad joke, like sending a really vulgar stripogrammer, unnanounced, to someone's house :

Let us fashion something flamboyant and horrible that stinketh to high heaven, saith god. And this year, let us put it right back in Signs's garden in the place from which it was painstakingly dug up last year, by the roots.

Why have you done this, god?

Because I can, s/he saith, can't you take a joke?

So anyway, someone (not me) is going to have to dig them up again before they manifest their peculiar properties. Sorry god.

It being Shrove Tuesday, one of Mr. Signs's favourite religious festivals, I have prepared batter, fabulously caramelised stewed plums, got the creme fraiche, maple syrup, lemons and caster sugar. It is all we are having for supper tonight before Mr. S watches the Arsenal match tonight and I go back to choir. I have added an extra egg - turns out better that way.

- or just imagine you are a teapot

All I can give you right now is teapots. You can take your pick from a mouse, a cupcake or a basket of fruit teapot and imagine that you are sitting somewhere near to one of them eating a toasted teacake with butter, somewhere in the middle of nowhere anyone (apart from those in the know) knows about, and you are sipping your Earl Grey tea from a china cup which has just been poured (incomprehensibly, given the circumstances) from a stainless steel pot. All the interesting teapots are just for show. Imagine you are on your own, with a notebook, writing words about teapots and toasted teacake.

If you are looking in here for the first time - hello. I do other things apart from teapots and teacakes so feel free to trawl around the labels on my sidebar and look around. But on the other hand, there are worse things to contemplate. I should tell you that in my own home I have a standard Brown Betty which does the job nicely, and a very serviceable cafetiere of the usual kind. I have always liked coffee best but tea is on the ascendant.

I am going to the Brighton Festival tomorrow, up the Smoke again on Sunday.

Back anon ere May be out, most likely.

Rose of Signs

I am going to the Smoke today, staying with my daughter who has just moved into a flat in the East End, which is where she began her life over 23 years ago. It is her first time living alone, but she is near friends and has the company of her trusty piano, which once belonged to my father – it’s essential in her life for both work and pleasure.

As usual (when there is planned activity afoot), I slept very little last night. But there is a substantial quantity of sleep in the bank from previous nights, and this may see me through. In any case, I feel stronger than I have for a while and there is a strange and fragile elevation, which belongs to the morning.

There is a red rose growing outside my house. It wasn’t there last year and I can only think that the biodynamic gardener who occasionally comes to help keep things from getting over-wild, put it there, took a cutting from the back garden. The look and scent of it is so intense I can hardly take it in all at once, but it will not last long.
The fact that from one day to the next things change sometimes seems nothing short of miraculous

The Black Stuff

It’s called salt liquorice and you love it or hate it. Mostly it seems to come from Sweden or Finland, but these are from Holland and Son recently discovered them in a traditional sweetshop nearby so he bought some for me. The shopkeeper wondered aloud how anyone could actually eat the stuff. It is salty but also sweet, and the combination of this and the liquorice is indescribably good, if that is the sort of thing you like. It is yin and yang, expansion and contraction, the fusion of opposites, good for this season.

I think I might have had a few too many of them, though. Or perhaps it is something else, a darkness pulling at my muscles, the echo of a song I would rather not hear. Free association can lead you to strange thoughts – sometimes they are signposts that you think for one split moment you recognise, or you almost might if you could only remember how to read the language. Sometimes I think I need poetry because I need something to place against the darkness. I think of some lines of Death Fugue by Paul Celan:

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night

we drink you at noon in the morning we drink you at sundown

we drink and we drink you

a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete

your ashen hair Shulamith he plays with the serpents

Tagged for Six

So, courtesy of Dr. But Why , I’ve been tagged again, and not before time seeing as it’s February and I’m running out of things to say. Of course I know that writing is not necessarily about having things to say. But sometimes it’s nice to have an agenda, especially when it says in black and white that whatever you put is to be “non-important.” Copying straight from But Why’s:

Rules on blog and links as appropriate. Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself. Tag six random people and let them know they've been tagged.

1. I like to nibble around the rim of a biscuit before eating the whole thing. This has often intrigued or annoyed people and a psychotherapist I once saw thought it was quite significant. I didn’t. We ended the relationship shortly after (not because of that) – she was too expensive and could only see me at 7.15 in the morning.

2. I am still wearing the purple shell-suit trousers and I don’t think I bought a single new item of clothing last year – or the year before that, come to think of it. Apart from Ugg boots. I am pretty happy with this state of affairs and can report that the purple trousers show absolutely no sign of wear or tear.

3. I have given up smoking (again) and can report that life without a cigarette sucks, unless my daughter is looking here, in which case life without cigarettes is wonderful in every possible way and please do as I say, not as I did. And there is always chocolate. Or sugar-free gum.

4. This is Attila the Rubbish Lady:

I made her out of waste: her body is an empty can, arms a tomato puree carton, legs a couple of empty loo rolls and hair the netting around a bag of satsumas. You will notice a few decorative features. I like her but am not sure what to do with her.

5. I have a diamond-studded diary for 2008:

This one is for writing down appointments and to-do things. I have a MsLexia diary where I keep a record of what I’ve done each day. Even on very low strength days I fill up the space. Everything counts.

6. Last summer I did 70 things – untagged. I must have been a bit out of myself, but sometimes you just begin and get on a roll; and then what happens is that all the things that seem very big and important begin to seem much less so; and all the small and seemingly insignificant things become strangely interesting – to the one who is writing them down, that is.

I’m not “officially” tagging anyone this time – but if you are looking in and drawn, consider yourself tagged let me know. And if you are looking in and repelled by the idea, consider it anyway – for the hell of it, you know.

The Lightening ?

It is a dark and stormy night and I thought it was time to put up another blog post. Why this should be I can’t quite say as nothing remarkable has happened in the world of Signs or, at any rate, nothing that I would care to properly identify, though I should perhaps mention that the poet Collin Kelley, who I invited to a Poetry Café at Lewes Library, gave a splendid reading last Friday, even though the number of people that showed up was disappointing, and this in a town so chock full of poets you can hardly move for bumping into them. But no matter – the ones that did come were glad to be there.

I have a silence in my head. I am not sure whether I want to hear something or not: on the one hand it is disconcerting to drop a stone into the deep well of the mind and find that there is no splash, no echo; on the other hand when the sound that comes back is not a splash but a strange sound that makes one back away from the edge, the silence is not necessarily such a bad thing. I am not in the vein to meet Grendel or his mother.

I have been re-reading bits of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road and find I am still carried away on the sheer energy of the writing as he (whoever) travels from east to west and from north to south, hitch hiking, scrounging petrol, drinking, smoking. It is the progenitor, I suppose, of all the road movies and strongly romantic. There is something about the beat writers and their lives that has always drawn me, a vicarious pleasure I get from the vitality that drives them – perhaps because I myself have never been what is called “robust”.

I have signed up to do a certain Process in December to see if I can bring about a change in my long-standing Condition. You will notice how coy I am being about naming anything – this is because I would rather not draw a host of desperate, hopeful or angry googlers; there has been much heated debate about the various Processes currently around that are meeting with varying degrees of success. There seems to be a belief that it may be possible to reprogramme oneself, or at any rate the hypothalamus, so as to bring about extraordinary changes in the body’s responses.

I have nothing to lose but a few hundred pounds. When I told my mother that she thought I was planning to go on some kind of crackpot diet – in which case it would have been a story of the incredible shrinking, not to say disappearing, Signs. And I have no intention of doing that – yet.

Magicians who Lunch

I lunched with a friend today in one of my favourite cafes. Anyone who looks at the photograph below and knows Lewes will guess where I was. There is an exuberance about the place, part of which is given over to selling fresh produce and was today glowing with pumpkins, and the exuberance is also on the plates of food they serve. I had a plate of mixed salad. The white cone thing is something edible and crunchy. The bread is focaccia which, as I am staying off wheat for the moment, I passed on to my friend. It was a remarkable salad, particularly in the way it defied the laws of physics: however much I ate it didn't get any less, in fact I could swear that by the time the plate was removed there was actually more of it.



For dessert I had fresh berry Pavlova. This did seem to behave normally and though there were a few berries and an orange segment at the end, the Pavlova had quite gone.


One of the things we talked about over lunch was tarot. My friend, whose latte you can see just beyond the sprig of mint sticking out of the Pavlova, has many different decks and interesting things to say about some of the variations in symbolism. I once had a tarot reading where I was told that my special card ("significator", I think it's called) was apparently the Queen of Swords. When I asked why he said, "because you just are," and for some reason this seemed a good enough answer at the time - better than if he'd said something about sun sign, colour of hair etc. I am a bit ambivalent about swords. Whenever I do a "spread" - about once every few years, there always seem to be too many of them and I'd rather trade them for a few cups, especially ones that are full and running over with good things, like the exuberant salad plate (and health?). My friend tells me that the Queen of Swords is an impressive lady whose time will come. His special card is The Magician, who is creative with the stuff of life. And only now am I wondering whether he was the one responsible for the seemingly magic plate of salad.

Eight Random Facts About Signs

I have been tagged by Cusp.

Here are the "Rules":
(Note from Signs: Please adapt or ignore as you see fit).

1. Let others know who tagged you.
2. Players start with 8 random facts about themselves.
3. Those who are tagged should post these rules and their 8 random facts.
4. Players should tag 8 other people and notify them they have been tagged.


1) My mother was chosen to present a bouquet of flowers to Hitler when she was a child at school in Germany. She had long blonde plaits and Aryan-blue eyes, they didn’t know her father was a Jew and in Buchenwald. She lived with her grandparents. Later, she was sent to England on Kindertransport.

2) My father’s skin smelled of apple pie and sandalwood. My mother says this was because, as a baby, his mother bathed him in goat’s milk. He came to England from Germany in the nick of time, with his family.

3) I have been to eleven schools and wonder if it is for this reason that I have never felt I belonged anywhere, or because I feel myself to be a diaspora Jew. My father thought that it was that it was good, not belonging too much to anywhere. He said, “My home is where I hang my hat.” I sometimes think I should get myself a hat and a nail to hang it on.

4) As a child I lived in Germany for some years. Back in England, I couldn’t get used to the food, especially school dinners. We had to finish everything on the plate, but at my table there was a hungry Greek boy who ate everyone’s leftovers, so I passed my potato lumps, cabbage and meat gristle to him when the dinner lady wasn’t looking. He nodded and smiled. His name was Gregory.

5) I know by heart all the German stories and songs I used to have on gramophone records. Whenever it snows at all I think of Frau Holle in the sky shaking her feather bed and pillows, and the children’s chorus refrain: “Frau hi ha Holle, du, schuttle immer zu!”

6) I once met Harold Pinter’s mum in the launderette near Primrose Hill (before it was posh) doing a bag wash. She looked and sounded like Terry Jones in the Monty Python Jean-Paul Sartre sketch. She told me who her son was and asked whether I’d heard of him. She said that he didn’t visit her very much.

7) My sister and I had our fortunes told by George Melly. He was sitting in a teepee dressed as Gypsy Rose Lee at a (Labour Party fund-raising) garden party down the road from where I lived. He told my sister that she would spend her life looking after an aged parent and that I would be a famous actress. I was delighted but my sister was not best pleased. As it turned out, my sister became an actress and I, though only god and the angels will bear witness to this, have vowed to look after my aged mother (in my fashion) when the time comes. She is still going strong with weekly Pilates and aqua aerobics.

8) When I was three or four my Spanish nanny, who loved me dearly and wanted to secure my place in heaven in the hereafter, had me secretly baptised in a Catholic church. I don't know how the secret was discovered. I remember the priest pouring water on my head. I haven’t seen the the nanny since I was five and she went back to Spain to look after her mother and unmarried brother, but we sometimes exchange Christmas cards. She never married or had children. She thinks of me.


I have tagged:

Anna Mr
Chipendale
Digitalesse
NMJ
Surroundings
That's So Pants
The Periodic Englishman
Moonoverwater