This is Anonymous Thank Ford

'I thought we'd be more.....more together here - with nothing but the sea and moon. More together than in that crowd, or even in my rooms. Don't you understand that?'

'I don't understand anything,' she said with decision, determined to preserve her incomprehension intact. 'Nothing. Least of all why you don't take soma when you have these dreadful ideas of yours. You'd forget all about them. And instead of feeling miserable, you'd be jolly. So jolly,' she repeated and smiled, for all the puzzled anxiety in her eyes, what was meant to be an inviting and voluptuous cajolery.

He looked at her in silence , his face unresponsive  and very grave - looked at her intently.    ....

When Bernard spoke at last, it was in a small tired voice. 'All right, then,' he said, 'we'll go back.'

Bernard Marx and  Lenina in Brave New World  Aldous Huxley

Am reading Brave New World to my fifteen year old son at the moment- he is doing it at school. It is damned hard to get into but it is brilliant once you do.
Ford is the new God.

Today is horrible for me. Utterly horrible.

First I wake up thinking my finances are in order only to discover the new Electricity and Gas supplier I changed to in the hope of getting some free shopping have raided my bank account into the minuses and I am yet again penniless. Hilariously, I think the tariff is higher with this new supplier but I was lured in by the free shopping.......... roundabouts and swings. What a Dodo. An extinct Bird.

I have about three rolling cigarettes worth of tobacco left and am raiding the internet to find a soda bread recipe that doesn't involve buttermilk as we are out of bread for the near future.

The shoes I brought my daughter for school yesterday were actually too big this morning...these things happen. So we put faith in Ford and dashed to the supermarket before school on an empty tank of no petrol to swap to a smaller size...one success.
We are not paying rent this week. It has been a bad week.
Then I get a text from my son at school. He wants me to make a doctor's appointment now cause little shits in the shit hole called school are 'teasing' him about his hair which was plaited during the school holidays.

I want him to come home.
I hate school and all the nasty pieces of shit in it right now.
I half don't blame him if he chose to punch the whole load of cretinous 'teasers' off their chairs and resign.
School just aint the place for everyone.
It can be lonely and cruel where you have to just take shit on the nose and toughen up.
How hard is that when you have a bunch of malicious school uniformed cretins of all shapes and sizes and shades winding you up and goading you till you are fit to break.
Not to mention the teachers half of whom are virtually still in nappies, flirting with the boys who smoke and chastising the ones who are still caught between childhood and adulthood....A rock and a hard place.

Most schools are so full of shit, in face they remind me pretty much of a brave new world. They don't give a toss about the individual child, and a child that is not one of these ones that meanders through with confidence and acumen and all that damn crap, just hate it there and get shit results probably to boot.

Since my boy was small i have considered home schooling him haha, but seriously now I just think why not?
What the f did my GCSE's get me? nothing.
Perhaps it would be best to just throw in the towel and try something else. University is priced out for most kids anyway and the schools are government slave cults run by corrupt bully bureaucratic teachers.

Bad Day.
I hope it gets better.
Actually, first thing this morning I woke up to a very distant thought in the recess of my brain how time passes and erases (i need some suma) and how shit it is that i am always moaning about stuff when one day i will look back and wish i could visit my mum, or have my little ones with me (now grown...i am really old i guess in this distant thought) or all sorts of hypothetical regrets and longings.

But it just don't seem to change my mind.

I 'wake up' when I think of how I want to be............then i walk back into this giant invisible wall of survival and i still can't embrace my prison. I know if i could it might be ok. But i can't

Oh Bernard come find me in the savage garden i will talk with you all night and we can make plans.

and then the police were called

Sometimes when she walked to the shop after dark she felt momentarily free; the black sky above her, the headlights of the oncoming traffic. It seemed to her a ridiculous thought that a walk to the local off licence after-dark could denote to her a freedom, but it did somehow. She would leave her house by the front door and the opening of the gate; the lifting of the latch; the silence of the dark street... it would feel a dash to freedom as she quickly loosened the fact of what left inside.

In that short walk alone to the shop her head was cleansed and she became a body of the other bodies going about anonymously.
To the shop she went, drinking in the black sky and the charging headlights and the chicken shop and the Polish shop and the off licences and the men smoking their cigarettes in the doorway of the pub and the man fly tipping unnoticed on the corner of the busy street.

The shop itself was another matter with it's narrow doorway and garish lighting. Today it was the unfriendly one who did not speak or smile. As she gathered together her shopping in order of priority: bread, milk, four cans of lager and a packet of tobacco she decided not to make the effort of even talking or smiling as she might with a more friendly staff member, and the exchange was silent and unsmiling with no hello,  goodbye or thank yous in sight. sShe had not the effort .

Glancing in the black reinforced glass of the door she caught an impression of her reflection and saw a woman removing her alcohol and bread and milk and tobacco from the counter and putting it in the bag. She looked tired and sad. She didn't look how she felt when she stepped out through the gate and walked to a brief freedom.  

There were four knocks at the door this morning after the rage had ended. Sharp knocks. Police knocks. Like gunshot, it may not be a sound you should recognize for not hearing it regularly, but when you hear it you know it is a gun being shot, or the police knocking. It is plain and characterless knocking, not threatening like a bailiffs knock, but just cold.  She was actually glad they had been called. She had wanted to call them herself when the two were fighting entwined with desire of hatred. Step father and stepson wrestling with intent, knocking the cooker against the wall and splashing extra virgin olive oil onto the ceiling that she would have to clear up later, she couldn't help but think, whilst struggling to separate the passionate containers of sudden condensed hatred.

On the way back from the shop she felt heavier and flat approaching her house. She didn't know who had called he police, a concerned neighbour said the police man. Sorry about the noise she'd said to one earlier... Noise?I haven't heard anything she had replied...........

She had cried a bit, exasperated. He is under a lot of stress she said, he works and works to pay the bills, he is not bad. They were fighting. He was not fighting, he was shouting and my son grew angry. They fought.

My daughter was crying, it felt Victorian, she thought the police would take away her daddy.
But they left unworried about our safety but warning that next time this happened they would involve social services.

She just felt slapped hard in the face.
It was rubbish having the police come.
It was rubbish having a situation where the police had to come. She was glad they had come  it was a warning, but she was sad that she had to have a life where the police needed to be called.
What about the daisies and the daffodils and the happy things.
Fields of yellow and blue?

Everything seemed so complicated.
She wasn't sure of another way of things where she'd needent even buy the lager and the tobacco with the bread and milk, where a walk to the shop wouldn't be the pinnacle of her freedom.

She wondered how the other her was doing right now the one that got away and who didn't buy beer and tobacco with her bread and milk and who didn't have neighbours call the police because of the noise.

The other she's brother didn't become horribly unwell when she was 15 and be taken from the house sectioned and stolen from her; the other she never pretended she'd lost the key only to discover it when she saw her fate was sealed.
The other she didn't have to bear with anger from people she knew or brittle cold conversations with her son when he was angry and in a mood with her.
 The other she's sister was still alive, singing and published and happy with her little boy and giving her advice at times like this, breaking it down, ahhing and sympathizing really?ing and offering useful nuggets of wisdom about it all whilst planning a next adventure of sunny days and rose wine and children playing in the secret garden or a fine egg on toast.

The other she didn't stop dancing and pretend to lose her key.
She was out there somewhere in a parallel place doing things just how they were meant to be. All suntanned and confident and cosy with life and doing it all just right and everyone she came into contact with were well formed with no issues and she was the best mother ever imbuing everything just right for the best always.

The floor was dirty where the hurricane had broken and the salt bowl had spilled and the bowls had smashed and tomorrow she'd have to start all over again and clear it all up.
The other she lay down comfortably and happily snuggled in her bed and went to sleep.

hey flying bar :)

Hey flying Bar

 I am good

it has been an eventful Easter of chocolate, booze and the such like.

March was a crazy month of birthdays...my baby's on 24th Feb, daughters 3rd March, mine 8th March, my bro's 7th March, my dad's 16th March and my big sons 25th March.....whoa I am surprised I am still standing since each was a  celebration ..........Especially the last!

Right now I have put away quite a few bevvies and am still going strong.
Listening to River Deep Mountain High and other sixties classics and just relishing some time alone............
.............fallen out with him indoors (again) not hard to do right now!
.......and kids chocolated out and not quite in bed, though quite late.

Felt quite desperate yesterday with motherhood and it's perimeters but today has been quite peaceful for me- had a whole blog post of my miseries I could not possibly post...

Did some creative writing recently on my blog(Pleasant Valley Sunday on now) under title: Writers block... and felt I started to find a writing voice which was nice for me.

How's life there across the Atlantic do you eat chocolate...I like your cartoon images...boobs or bums....

The rippling waves in the middle of the ocean must be very cold right now. And Black.

I once had a dream where I was fleeing a dark shadow and as he (I do believe it was a he)
chased me like a swift black shadow of fearfulness, I only had a wall or the Ocean to escape to.
I ran and leaped to climb on the wall but I leaped to late and could not get a grip and could not make the leverage to climb it.

So I had no choice but to chose the Ocean, the Black Dark Ocean.

Of course I gained flight and flew,
but so did this cloaked thing behind me.
I flew and swam through the air and this cloaked shadow gained on me.
I am not sure why, but the dream me decided to turn and take the hand of the shadow cloaked thing advancing upon me.
As I took its hand

The Black Ocean
Gained Light.

We alighted Upon a sandy part in the depths
out in the Ocean where the moon shone
and shells of beautiful shell colours lay twinkling in the moonlight.
I embraced my shadow
We alighted and were able to stand in the middle of the ocean by the light of the moon and the stars with the shells reflecting their light.
The fear was gone and so was the shadow, but I still had company, I was not alone.

Pah!

I bet the Atlantic is cold and stormy tonight.
You are across its wave's
I am in New Cross
A little place in South Eat London
In the rain
In the grey
where sometimes , like today
the sun shines on the cold floor and we dream for a minute of life again.

I am ok but how are you?
xxxxx

crash

Fuck. How occasions do conspire..........................How quickly can you crash? Why is financial desperation so aligned with general desperation?
I am living on the edge.

I also have a patch of eczema on my left palm just below the little finger which is a constant source of burning. It is red raw and dries out so that when I use my hand it splits and burns some more.

I feel topped up with stuff. My elation is deflated, punctured and currently destroyed though this is probably fleeting.

I have had a dreadful day in monetary terms by mistakenly purchasing the same item twice and thus despite cancelling the item (an expensive birthday present for my son) not having access to the money till some time when I don't need it so desperately...

This is probably a blessing in disguise, but it has lead me to dread the weekend which I hate approaching penniless with hungry beaks for activity open wide.
And my spirit is low so I cannot even imagine a healthy free treat in the freezing park eating marmite sandwiches.


I want to stop today.

My eczema is a symbol direct from god telling me I chose the wrong way..........housewives hand is another name for my type of eczema. You can't just stop making sure the dishes are washed and the floors are clean, so the eczema persists.

I was so happy yesterday. Enlightened. And now I feel half drowned beneath the frothy backwash.

I am hungry and yet I cannot be bothered to eat.

Very depressed this moment.
Come tomorrow.

wow

I just finished my piece of creative writing and a letter had come through the door.
It is my son's fifteenth birthday on Monday next.
I have no money.
He has some secret expectations.

Inside the letter was a cheque for £111.13

It will take a good few weeks the energy supplier said on the phone yesterday,
that's if you don't owe us money.

His birthday is sorted.
A cheque came through the door.
I found my voice.

Writer's Block/ short story

I have just finished reading Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton. Very good.

 ... I woke up this morning.

Disappointed I no longer have George Bone to keep me company.
He is still in the book. On my sofa.

She didn't like Wednesday's but she couldn't explain why.
was it something in the word itself, the big W, the nes...
She could never remember how to spell it.
Or the middle of the week feeling.
It was all so promising on Monday.
Hangover Square.

..I felt tired and wanted to stay a slumber.
tucked up in bed warm next to my sleeping baby.

It's a good read.
You go right into the very mind  of this very funny morose and insightful observer of people
and then watch this large slightly cumbersome man semi excluded ..on the outskirts, lonely...(Bone) ... kept from the bitchy nucleus of a mediocre drinking group of twenty or thirty something year olds  in Earls Court London before the Second World War breaks out.

It is about his mental condition and about him.
It is about the detail of the very mind and the absence too of that very mind.
.......... he becomes nothing, as do his 'friends'.
Some words on a bit of paper.

This narrative moves from the intense going on's of a thoughtful man's mind to the image of him cascading through the streets in various stages of determination and desperation.................................

..like the Author, the Character becomes a Name.
Printed onto a bookcover....or etched onto a grave stone...or somewhere.

She woke up yesterday morning, Tuesday and she was going to have her hair cut.
She deleted this sentence. It was too arbitrary.

Hang on, this is all arbitrary.

She had said she felt like she had a cork in her, stopping the writing.
Then she said to him in the same room as her, half listening,

 "This is an excuse for  I cannot write".

Or ,she thought..... is the cork repressing champagne or bad wine?

I am corked.
A bad bottle of wine.
The vinegar has set in.
There is nothing to say...
I don't care about anyone enough to make them go through a series of events that can be contained
....within a story.

I can't make a character. It always turns into me.

It could be a hairy fuzzy gorilla in a cage in a zoo bumbling about in its cage and eating hay or chewing a piece of grass or whatever these poor creatures do behind the hard glass or Perspex or whatever it is that keeps them there...
....managing to remain somewhat dignified though we can see it's very arse and watch it as it changes moods, lumbering about, or cares for it's kin.

...I could, probably couldn't ...
Lets say, I could...
....write a story about a gorilla named Jack or Hilda or Arumnatumbo or something, I don't know what they actually call each other............
and it would turn into me before I get to the end of the
first paragraph.

Poor fictional Gorilla.
It will become me.
A 35 year old woman who can't relate to those numbers
when she can't remember how she got to 35 since wasn't she only five a little time ago.
Now she is thirty five and going to a hairdressers with a complimentary voucher and having a charming man called Brett cut her hair into a classic bob.
(That was yesterday. Tuesday. )

She doesn't mind Tuesdays.

Now it is Wednesday, her least favourite day and  she is awake and writing or typing very much specifically

and her hair is an unclassic tangled mop on top of her head.
It is pointing this way and that and doing just what she specified to the hairdresser named Brett that she did not want it to do.

Chic and easy she said...when you wake up in the morning. I have three children or four if you count the little one she left behind.

"A Classic Bob" he murmurs, catching his eyes in the mirror.

He like's his eyes, his face, youthful at 41 (he tells her his age),
the way his hair is cut, and when he is not cutting  he meets his eyes in the mirror and they sparkle back at him as he talks of normal and not normal and his dreams and the spirit.

"I am a creative like you he said. An artist. That is why I cut hair. I was artistic at school, I have done many things... this seems to fit..."
I made no mention of being a creative. Maybe he can see into my soul.
"is is organic" I say.
It changes.
A creative she thinks. What do they do?

Maybe it is because I forgot to polish my boots.
I remembered to paint my nails.

"Your nails and shoes are important or so I have been told" said my mum once.
"They are what people forge their first impression with".

Good nails, teeth, hair and shoes.
My boots are grubby, I hide them under the chair in case his first impression makes him do a less than better job of my hair.
In case he discovers the real me.
I am wearing my new azure blue corduroy trousers (£7 H&M) and a black sparkly jumper.
It is just my boots that give me away then.
I tuck them under the chair but they are still visible there in the mirror.
I need a new pair of boots.

"To frame my face....not middle aged hair"
she said to Brett.
She thinks that he will take this the right way.
She hadn't wanted to utter these words but out they came.
She thinks that he will take this the right way.
Not be incredulous like some hairdressers are.
Intransigent.

What does that mean? Intransigent asked my brother yesterday. Tuesday.
"Unmoving, unchanging. Unreachable, I think, wont change?". I laugh, "Look it up, I say... I can't be sure". It is very important I she thinks, to look up words, they are so precise yet so organic and delicious.

This morning.
 It is middle aged.
"Do you like it" Her little sister had asked afterwards. In a text from university in Sussex.
She is in Brighton near where Bone or George spent such desperate nights.
She had been so excited about this hair cut.

'Chic, Easy, Neat...a slash of red lipstick and you're ready to go' texted her sister... giving advice

Actually if she dies at 70, then she is actually middle aged.
But she thought he could see into her soul and make her look how she thinks it best for her to look.
Not this middle aged thing.
You know, on the turn.

He cuts and talks. Not of the weather, or holidays but of seeing things in his dreams...of the soul and the spirit. Of life going on afterwards.

"Don't ever stop believing" he said.

She couldn't help but hug him. Afterwards. She didn't get up and hug him while he was cutting her hair, standing back and meeting both their eyes in the mirror.
He was a bit sparkly.
Very Sparky.


Believing what? she sort of thinks, but perhaps it doesn't matter.
Today he is her angel.
You are an angel she tells him.
He laughs. He also thinks he is an angel.

I rely on the kindness of strangers said Blanche Dubois.
Taking the hand that reached out down to her to take her to somewhere nice at last away from the bright harsh light that she hates so much.
Away from Stanley. He is so harsh and virile.

She even hugged him before she  left.
Her hair looked so nice and he had spoke of those who go on before us.
Who are there amongst us. My sister.

I could swear she was there too. she loved getting a new hair do.
These small things are important.
She was there just for a minute.
Then I lost her.

When she left the hairdressers she half expected him to come running up the road after her.
"I saw your sister"
he shouted in my imagination.
I get to my car. He must not have seen her.

'She died last February' she tells him. That is why I am here. Her friend is a DJ and she put a night on after she died, in her memory, to raise money for Leukaemia research.

Such a pretty word she said when she was alive, but she called it Lookey Dookey.

And then it was an unsaid word. We put it aside on a shelf under some books.
We made it go away.

But it was still there on her adrenals.
This is what it was  that morning the day after I never saw her again properly.
It had gone, we had thought.

But afterwards they told us, many months afterwards, they told us, it was on her adrenals, hidden. Hiding, like a mean and conniving little dishonest schmuck. Like Netta maybe. In hangover Square. Violets in the April rain or something George said, but hard and cruel as sharpened knives. With her mediocre minions.  A creep actually
"You insufferable bore Bon"e
But I love you, come away with me Netta come away with me............

Coming back to swallow her into the ground like the screaming man sucked from his bed in Florida.
It hid till we were all satisfied she was there she was mending.
Our prayers had worked.
Then it came back like a Tsunami wiping away whole villages and children bathing or watching television, lovers having a cappuccino on the beach front.

I did not go to the fund raiser. I have children, it was too difficult that night. But my brother won this complimentary haircut in the raffle.....

I see my face in the mirror. My hair wet and face vulnerable with the honesty of wet hair fresh from the bath at home before it dries and frames the face a bit better.

"You know, solicitors, accountants. Their brains are wired differently" he says.

Oh I remember your friend he says. The DJ, her friend who died was a singer.
That was my sister I say.

George reminds me of so many people I think.
Bone.
Hullo George, said Netta from where she lay on the sofa so utterly beautiful with the heart of a cruel thing.

I am going to wash my hair now and see what happens to it.
if it looks how it looked when I left the hairdresser's yesterday.

Maybe Brett was pretending. My hair does not look chic now.
"We still have things to do" he said. That is why we are left behind.

Maybe when I left he laughed at my gullibility.
"She thought I was into spirits.
God this job is so boring I have to do something to stay sane."

I think of Virginia Woolf.

She also killed herself.

She filled her pockets with stones and walked in to a lake.
She thought too much.
She had a trillion simultaneous thoughts moving like lightening through her myriadical mind each with their own pattern and agenda.
How could she eventually contain that. or control it.
I wonder what were her last thoughts as she allowed the water  to close over her head and for her lungs to drink.


 The End.

My bath is cold now and the baby is asleep on the sofa. He is ill. I hope he gets better soon.

Inspire me Rachel. I called this morning. Rachel. I called this morning.
Ah that is shit he said after I told him, that is really bullshit.
Have you had any strange things happen since she went?

Wow, He is different I think, this hairdresser.
Brett.
I like this name.


She talks to me sometimes I say. Especially if I go out into the garden in a space like that and I lift up my face to the white sky especially if it is spitting with rain. We liked the rain, and rose wine and fairy lights and things.

I call her.
I remember her here in the garden with me.
I think of fairy lights. she was like fairy lights.
I close my eyes in the garden. The sky is being white and quiet.
I hug my self, or I feel like I am hugging myself.

I love you she says in my ear.

I have never said that so clearly to myself.
This is Rachel.
Thank you for visiting me sister I say, I will see you soon.

She will come he says when you are not afraid.
In bed, he says, when it is dark and quiet.

She inspired me.
She sent me inspiration.


The End
I go upstairs to the loo.
It is nearly noon now.
Stop now Alice
she says.
I laugh
This could go on forever.
I can't stop I say.

today

Today was a dreary day in south east London, the snow threatened to fall; the sky was grey. it was cold.
It was mothers day today. We took little bereaved nephew to the graveyard where the wind was bitter and he placed a happy mother's day plant in blue at his mummy's grave. I lit some candles. We removed old flowers. He danced off amongst the graves. My daughter slid and fell in the mud. We breathed with continued disbelief at the silent ground. A worm snaked it's way amongst our tributes.

It was my birthday Friday. I was thirty and five years old; another of the same and I will be seventy, like all the old people I've known . I hope I don't forget my tongue and say all the things in my subliminal. I try to be as honest as possible to avoid that happening.

I smelled smells today of the memory; I smelled the smells of my sister's flat / apartment and it was cruel and harsh and rudely it awakened me again to her absence.

For my birthday I have drunk copiously. My head is remarkably fine albeit.
 It was funny, I don't much do the naughty white stuff,
but on Saturday afternoon after two bottles of cava and a bottle of Bollinger I fancied a night on the tiles.
I texted my friend in the know.....

"hey ....   I hope all good with you. Really want some snow do you know the weather forecast in my area..."

wink wink nudge nudge. She never replied till the next morning


""Hi sweets sorry I fell asleep early. I think there's snow forecast in your area tomorrow for Mon although it will only be light apparently "

(ahhh)

"Sorry, u must think i'm nuts, i was cava'd out and looking for another kind of snow! Glad i didn't find any since I got a good nights sleep.

So anyway. Not really much to talk about. I didn't get the snow, I am glad of that, it is a pain in the next day's arse.

I had a good birthday. I danced, I sang. It was fun ok.

lots of love to blogger's land.
And I got ur .... message and I thought it was lovely though I am not sure my humor is that humorous as other British humors may be! xxxx