5th & 56th

Even the media had picked up on it. "A timely return and a timely warning."
Strangely, those who thought of three risk-boosting behaviours rated their chances of getting heart disease to be higher than those who thought of eight.
No dust dancing. Put one before the other and begin.
You were real.


An activity suggested by Sina at 100 Days of Sun and Art


1.  The Snowman:  Jo Nesbo
2.  The Summer Tree:  Guy Gavriel Kay
3.  Risk (the science and Politics of Fear):  Dan Gardner
4.  Kraken: China Miéville
5.  The seven days of Peter Crumb:  Jonny Glynn
6.  Henry and June:  Anaïs Nin

sang the starting maelstrom II

She rested her elbows and breasts on the dull grey railings of the road bridge and cars swished their tyres through the damp tarmac, raising droplets as they passed. The river in spate below her, rushing swirling and tumbling over itself within its familiar boundaries, and clawing at the wet land it had covered away from its banks. Her hair hung down, narrowing the boundaries of her face as she concentrated on the dizzy water with her grey eyes.

She tried to concentrate her thoughts, but it was like the flood had swept up her mind in its mindless rising, I should not let this break me, was whisked downstream, and all the thought that was left was eddying, whirling. Now he is beyond my reach, sang the starting maelstrom. She let the bag fall from her shoulder, heard the buttons of her coat scrape against the metal separating her from the unslaked water, and discarded that too, stepping out.

Hoek

Here at the edge, waiting for the ship, looking out across the baleful night.  The lights of the industrial complex on the other side are white and orange, but only the orange ones are picked up by the overcast sky, glowering intensely.  And the water, half river, half sea, the water performs a strange trick with the light, it steals and swallows all the bright yellow tones of the sky, and reflects back a blood orange red.

The water moves constantly, rolling and roiling, a twitching throat, and the red painted barriers in front of me are contrasted sharply against the white snow covered quay, it is not an auspicious start to a journey.  The wind whips up the petrochemical flare and the whole sky flickers.  I shiver, and hope that the homecoming will be warmer than this.

2x Glühwein recipes

Recipe n° 1:
Place 1l red wine, 0.5l orange juice, 0.25l rum or cointreau into the slow cooker.  Add 75g demerara sugar and stir until dissolved.  Add cinnamon stick and grated nutmeg.  Stick 12 cloves into a small orange and add.  Turn slow cooker to auto and heat for approximately 2 hours, allowing the flavours to infuse.  Serve in heat proof glasses or beakers.


Recipe n° 2:
Place person into shower, shampoo and condition hair, wash body, drying time approximately 30 minutes (to include cleaning of ears, rubbing and combing hair, inserting contact lenses, moisturising dry skin on legs, looking in the mirror and wondering.)  Dither for 90 minutes, including drinking coffee, playing at the computer, wondering what clothes to put on.  Dress person (5 minutes after dithering is complete).  Chefs note:  extra dithering for outer layers of clothing may be required.  Add purse, gloves, scarf and leave house for Weihnachtsmarkt and walk to nearest Glühwein vendor (approximately 4 minutes.)  Serve in convivial surroundings.

Crowd surfing

He had to put his gloves back on after paying for the punch, to insulate his fingers from the cold and flake filled air as much as the hot earthenware beaker, releasing its clouds of alcoholic steam into his face. 

It felt strange, he was here again this year not so much with the expectation of seeing her, not after his unsuccessful efforts to find her again the previous year, but so that he could say to himself that he had at least tried. 

It wasn't that he had been unable to get her out of his head, only that she, and that swirling topsy-turvy night kept popping into it at irregular intervals, mainly when he was slouched at his desk feeling dully frustrated with the way things were going. 

He hadn't realised the girl was one of the players, which was odd, he should have seen her the following evenings when he looked, he would surely have seen her if she had been on the stage? 

Wandering aimlessly through the market, the heated bodies of the crowd warming him just as much as the drink, he found himself back down at the side of the stage by the transformed fountain, its bowl now full of burning logs, spitting out sparks and the wonderful woodsmoke smell. 

She wasn't on stage now, it was the kid juggler and another man, clad in red and black motley, tossing firebrands at each other; he watched her absence resignedly thinking his mind was playing tricks on him but as he turned to return the beaker to the bar, she appeared from a lifted flap at the side of the stage and their gazes snagged.

Weihnachtsmarkt

Snow falls onto the fires from the carbon paper sky, and dusk slithers down behind it to cloak the night market. 

He lifts the scarf away from his face for a moment to breathe in the redolant smells, roasting meat and onions, the exotic spice smell of the Arabian cooking tent, and a heavy dull wax smell in the back of the nostrils from the candle lanterns sputtering overhead. 

There is a new juggler this year, just a skinny kid with blond lank hair and a face turned inward as he concentrates on tossing the white balls around; from here it looks as though he is juggling snowballs.

The band behind him consists of two drummers, one of whom is beating a rhythmn on the stretched tight hide, and a three strong wind section, two youths and a girl in her mid twenties, who also plays a flute, the notes skipping around as the balls rise and fall. 

The girl, it is her, the red haired vixen from last year that he has not managed to shake from his mind. 

Her hands dance on the instrument as he pulls the scarf back across his face, and moves away to the Glühwein tent to wonder he will do now that he has seen her again.


(last year)

For Olivia

I stand on the balcony in my nightdress in the nacreous white morning sunshine, a cup of coffee steaming in my hand.  The slow warmth of the sun, even at 7am slips under the flirty breeze on my skin and grounds me, even up here on the 14th floor.  I can see the fish swimming below in the lake, shoals dispersing and coagulating around the rocks and the turtles.  The other balconies around me are mostly empty, although there is an old man gazing purposefully downwards from the next block, about two floors below me; a little too far away to see if he is a lawai like me.
Best of all, Olivia sleeps, all 7 weeks of her.
This is what peace is like.

housework

I hate it,
I hate being told what
I should do
to fit in as a good
little housewife,
but I know
what's good enough
for me isn't
good enough for other people.
Hoovering up spiders.
The dust bunnies
under my bed are
pre-mammalian,
a grey and fibrous
slime mould rearing its
head and looking
for more salubrious surroundings.
They reach their fingers
into my nose
and creep, creep,
so as not to waken
the sneeze reflex, creep
down my airways as
if seeking their
primordial swamp.
They should have hung
a left, and headed
for my brain.
Who would want to
tackle such a creature?

Wir haben Angst und sind allein

A facebook chat about the songs on my i-pod for the gym got me musing, mine doesn't include any dance tracks with high energy and bpm to keep me bobbing along on the cross-trainer. 
I'd listed several bands that I had on there and a friend suggested I should have some Prodigy  instead of the (mostly) indie rock that I picked as being suitably loud and distracting enough to keep my mind off of the monotony of turning those pedals again and again and again... 
Breathless of course once more today, but I still try to sing along with the words, and it occurred to me that I don't have much of an ear for music, but that my favourite songs are all those with (imho) fantastic lyrics that say something to me or evoke a mood. 
Sure the music is underneath, driving the song on, and the 'tunes' I like are building swelling tunes, starting with a simple melody or riff which grows and grows behind the words and the words expand with it and it swells, fills you up and hits a crescendo. 
I have to try so hard not to sing out loud too, gasping "Sweetness, sweetness I was only joking when I said I'd like to smash every tooth in your head," or "In the end all you can hope for, is the love you felt to equal the pain you've gone through," or "But I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo, what the hell am I doin' here, I don't belong here," would raise a few eyebrows from the fitness trainers and other gym-bunnies.
Still, today I guess I found the exception that proves the rule, foreign language songs, the lyrics only partially understood, and the partial understanding good enough to satisfy my lyrical urge, and it's true, "Gott weis ich will kein Engel sein."

mourning...

She was the sort of girl who showed up to a wedding in a sports car and a figure skimming black dress, and she stalked in on impossible high heels, barely managing to avoid teetering.  Her green eyes glinted under chunky layers of blonde fringe and above the foamy head of another pint of local bitter.  She laughed raucously at dirty jokes, and sprinkled innuendo around like the trampled confetti.  The wife of the man who was buying the girl drinks watched warily, wearily, without seeming to watch - years of practice at that.  She trusted that her husband would know when to withdraw, to pull away when the flirting changed from exploratory to expectant, after all, he'd had years of practice too.
No-one wondered why the girl was wearing black.

Epithelia

It is like looking at skin, if the skin was magnified and viewed through brick tinted glasses.
It is a boatskin, made of rust and flaky paint; terracotta and pannacotta paint in clotted cream splodges, thick layers on top of each other and the rust crystallising through them.
Water gets under the paint and oxygen works its magic, transmuting the steel into ruddy puff pastry.
Epidermal rust, skin deep and all of the skin, cellular rust, a ferrous bark.
The boat, once an erythrocyte caught in the tidal flow, but now moored up, scabbed and crusted.
Dead but resisting disintegration.

When was that?

I lost that girl somewhere.  She was careless and carefree and reckless and, no, wait, reckfree is not a word; but if it was, she would have been all of that too.  In retrospect yes of course I admired her, loved her even, if only she'd known that.  The turn of her neck, whisking her hair past me, across her eyes, so that I saw her face only in flickers as she smiled, on her way through to somewhere else.  Fleeting, fun and gone.
Stolid and set now, I have taken Scarlett O'Hara's "I'll think about it tomorrow" and hardened into a life of procrastination.

The green bike

Photographs of that summer showed her skinny and brown skinned with white-blonde lanky hair, her brother chubbier and darker; her on the swing and him on his green Chopper, a boys bike that she wasn't allowed.
The paddling pool, an ever present temptation that summer where the pavements scorched bare feet and the cheap plastic seats of their bicycles were too hot to touch, too hot for the pair of them to go riding and the breeze of their movement to cool them down.
Mum encouraging her outside, "You shouldn't be inside reading on a day like this!"
They did a jigsaw together, lying on the back lawn on their stomachs, a sheet of hardboard for the table, but the jigsaw was wrong for the weather; an ancient world map, the sun blindingly reflected off the silver edge pieces.
There were comparatively few photos in her mothers album, images were scarcer then, more expensive and more treasured than in this digital age. She was never so close to her brother as that summer, and the album was one of three from their shared childhood that her mother had bequeathed her, she picked up the phone to call him and call him closer.


Published (on real paper and everything!) in 6S The Green Bike anthology here

Norma Jean challenge

The Man with No Name, he once said "They say marriages are made in Heaven, but so is thunder and lightning."  Me and the wife, well, we were finally over after four and a half years together, and the first two were pretty good, but well; if you want a guarantee, buy a toaster.

She told me “I tried being reasonable, I didn't like it.” She reckoned it's what people know about themselves inside that makes 'em afraid, and she was afraid of what would happen if things kept on the way they did.  But I didn't expect her to be standing over me one sultry sticky smoky night on the edge of the woods quoting The Man back at me.  "There are two kinds of people in the world, my friend. Those who have a loaded gun and those who dig. You dig."


Inspired by Grey Johnson here

You burn like a bouncing cigarette...

Flicked or kicked out of the car, incandescent. You have been between my lips, I have sucked your essence down. I have finished with you now though, I tell myself that. Even though I see you glow behind me and I want to go back and pick you up, kindle that glow again. You turn over and around and I see little hot spots, as if you want to remind me of what I will miss. Sparks fly, you do it on purpose to call to me. All sparks will burn out in the end.


(Inspired by The Editors:  Sparks)

Bees will throb out

A new kid comes into the classroom today, kind of older than me but he could just be a September kid and I am always one of the youngest as I wasn't born until August. He is sturdy and has a blue shirt and darker blue neat shorts on but his knees are scabbed and criss-crossed with white scars underneath that. I want to see if he will be my friend but I am nervous, at the first playtime I stand in the group around him but just watch him talk to them. His hair is a bright copper. After lunch we go to the playground again and I want to introduce myself, say "Hi, I'm Barbara," but the B's will throb out as I stammer and blush so I say only "Hi." He smiles at me though, not laughs and we race to the end of the playground.

A model student

The psychiatrist told her that sex should be about intimacy, that she would find this out one day hopefully when it wasn't too late.
"It's just vanity," he said when she told him in their weekly meetings about collecting another boy, another new experience; a perversion previously unknown to her and that particular virginity taken.
"Well even if it is it makes me feel popular, I love being the centre of attention, I didn't have that when I was growing up and now I'm at college and can reinvent myself I don't want to be that shy intellectual wallflower anymore."
"Don't you want to be special to someone, to love and cherish a special someone and be loved in return?" he asked.
"But this way I'm special to lots of guys, you just want me to stop fucking them and start with you so you can be the disreputable lecturer who gets off with his prize-winning pupil and then I'll end up in a semi-detached life wondering which of the neighbours to flirt with at a dinner party."
The psychiatrist shrugged, "Well, I'll keep trying," and went to the bar to get her another double vodka and tonic.

where I live/where I love

West Yorkshire (between Keighley & Ilkley)


This part of the moor does not have its own name, it lies to the west of Rombalds Moor, the furthest reach of the famous Ilkley Moor, the last finger of it pointing towards the mill-sprung stone cities of Leeds and Bradford.
Early spring, the ground is boggy and the sky in this moment looks likely to make it more sodden, but then, looking in the other direction the hard blue colour makes jewels out of the puddles.
I walk along the old road between Keighley and Ilkley, not one of the more remote places of the world, but barely touched by feet in the scheme of things today; occasional dog walkers, hikers, and myself, come up here for the solitude.
Today the heather is browned, still burnt in places, without the purpled bloom to which it gives its name; today it is too wet to sit on and feel it bounce and spring underneath me and so I sit at the base of Cowpers Cross and look at the sky.
I come here to look at the sky and the moor and the size of the world, perched on a hill on the edge of one of the densest urban conurbations in the north of England and am mostly utterly alone in a tousled world that is harsh and starkly beautiful.
It is different almost every time, for the biggest part of the scenery is the sky and the light on the moor; and no matter what mood I take up there with me, I almost always come down more tranquil.




Note Jan 2011:  Included in the >language >place Edition #3 blog carnival

Spring morning

I open the kitchen door, the coal tit cants its head and looks up, its beak full of fluff.  Cat hair and old leaves to line its nest with; an odd symbiotic moment.
The ginger cat, seeing the door open from his vantage point on the sofa, squeezes his eyes shut as he yawns, front paws stretching out.  He jumps down from the cushion and saunters outside, brushing up against the chair and table legs, the cornered plant pots, leaving scent and hairs behind.  The coal tit has already flown away but sits on an overlooking balcony, keeping a small obsidian eye on the patio.  They watch each other for their next opportunity.

Stupid habits

Like sitting at the computer with your leg crossed underneath you; any fool knows you will end up with pins and needles but you do it all the same, you notice the strange bouncy feeling when you get up and try to walk on the numbed leg before the sudden nipping pains start.
Like picking at scabs, saying you're being careful, you're just taking away the crusty bits across tight pink healed skin until you pull too deep and the blood flows again.
Like cats and top-heavy stemmed wine glasses do NOT mix.
Like "I'll do it later"
Like re-reading your old words, hoping to see a different nuance, something to lighten the absence of hope.
Todays wine bottle, Marqués de Ballestar Reserva 2005, has a little net of gold threads around it, perhaps that will make me feel special, or at least help me forget that I am not.