SM 101 A Realistic Introduction - Jay Wiseman

This book is pretty self-explanatory in its aims: to provide the curious with a basic (but comprehensive) introduction to sadomasochism, which we British call S&M, but the Americans simplify as SM.

The publisher qualifies it thusly:


"The highly regarded, comprehensive introduction to consensual BDSM - bondage, giving and receiving pain, role-playing, negotiation, finding partners, and more. This edition is updated and expanded, including a chapter on "SM Organizations," sections on lifestyle relationships, SM and pregnancy, and more, plus illustrations of key points."


The scope comprises all manner of practices and all ranges of extremity, from the playful slap to the arsenal of horse-whips; from getting a date in a small town to inserting a tray of ice cubes up your own anus; from lovingly paddling your partner's bare, bound buttocks to wrapping them head-to-toe in cling-film and shitting on them.

If you didn't like that sentence, you won't like a lot of the book.

To be blunt, I didn't like a lot of the book, but I'm hardly squeamish so what was my big deal?

Mr. Wiseman's introduction would surely be enough to drive most people away. I don't know (or much care) if it was part of the original text or if it's some sort of self-congratulatory addendum to this later edition. The problem is that Jay Wiseman suffers from a lot of the personality defects one might expect from an ageing leather-clad self-described 'pervert' from the bay area. He's smug and a little dull and nowhere near as intelligent or (crucially) as great a writer as he seems convinced he is, nay, professes in plain English on many occasions throughout, not least in this introductory autobiographical snooze-fest, where one is only saved from dropping off by the occasional need to gag (and not in a good or sexy way).

I don't much care about Jay Wiseman. He may consider himself some sort of sexual pioneer, but I don't reckon there's anything that pioneering about a guy who one day had an epiphany that he wanted a bunch of women to kneel down and suck him off, even if he did stick up a bunch of flyers in his hometown one weekend in the sixties anonymously advertising the fact. Nor do I like the way he refers throughout the book to women who object on principal to the dominant/submissive dynamic of SM relationships as "so-called "feminists"". In fact, the inverted comma is a dangerous tool in Jay Wiseman's authorial spice rack: dangerous in that he constantly overuses it and makes himself sound like a pompous, snidey little fuck-rag, when in reality he's probably just a pretty smug, irritating little douchebag.

In fairness to Jay, he's not some sexual megalomaniac. No doubt he would be in a society that allowed it, but as a good American Citizen, (much better than any of the so-called "Americans" that aren't perpetually committed to campaigning for localised sexual inequality), Jay doesn't break rules - he is all for the law, and he does argue lengthily (and, you'd have thought, pointlessly) that brainwashing people into being sexually or otherwise submissive (or dominant) to you is WRONG. And so is causing them a lot of physical pain if you haven't signed a very lengthy, disturbing-in-its-implications, legally-photocopiable pre-sexual agreement form he has enclosed within the pages of this very book.

When Jay argues that people should know what they are getting themselves into before they engage in any sexual or non-sexual SM activity one cannot help applaud his caution as wise, but when he presents this photocopiable form as a means to simplify the procedure, one cannot help feel he is providing a get-out clause for would-be rapists.

Certainly Jay attests to the lines of consent in SM activity being blurred more often than not - he gives personal anecdotes of women he's tortured who've decided midway through they don't like what he's doing and (citing one example) kicked him in the face.

If there's one aspect of SM activity (or "play") that really bothers me (other than being cling-filmed and shat on, obviously) it's these consent issues. Some would argue that a man or woman who insists on being physically dominated - or humiliated, or tortured, or beaten - as part of a rite, sexual or otherwise, is not of sound mind or is not capable of being declared 'happy'. For such a person to be meeting and entering into SM relationships with strangers seems pretty bloody dangerous to me, and call me a cynic, but I suspect a higher proportion of SM practitioners than casual bar-hopping one-night-stand types (who I by no means encourage in their own weekly filth-parade) are in mental states that are not conducive to entering into a whips and/or chains affair for fun.

Obviously I also believe that SM (I continue to use the American as I am discussing an American author and text) can be a part of a healthy, happy sexual relationship (and I don't mean 20% max or anything), otherwise I wouldn't be reading this book in the first place.

But when Jay starts to talk about how much "fun" it can be to have your submissive partner do all your washing and cook all your meals etc. etc. one begins to wonder

a) is there anything at all progressive about accepting SM into everyday life, free of stigma? Wiseman (ne'er was one so inaptly named) talks a lot of grade-A horse shit about how the SM community should be viewed as the next step along the line from blacks and gays as a minority group in need of liberating, and of how the idea that equality between partners has long and (this is implicit) incorrectly been seen as the epitome of the relationship in our enlightened western society. I am tempted to leave him and his friends in the closet and lock the key, but would have SM less of a taboo subject because, and I'm not joking here, I don't want someone like Jay Wiseman teaching my kids. (Or going anywhere near them, if I can help it.)

b) aren't you the same guy that, earlier in this book, boasted of how you told a submissive woman to "run" when she said her partner was insisting on being dominant in every area of her life? Are you now advocating exactly that in the spirit of "fun", despite knowing from personal experience what a hugely-traumatising affect it can have on people?

c) as part of the 60s hippie generation, when did you stop thinking and become so closed-minded and certain you're right about everything? Because it seems to me that as soon as you reached the conclusion as a teenager that you wanted girls to suck your dick, and perhaps you'd quite like them to be tied up while they did it, that you stopped thinking and joined Mensa so you could do crosswords and get sucked off till you were in the grave. He (Jay - sorry - switching from 3rd to 2nd and back here) goes on and on about the stigma of being into SM - I think you'll find, Jay, few people give a shit what you or any of their friends do in the bedroom: what's stigmatised is feeling the need to tell everyone the minutiae of it, thus boring them to nausea.

I can't imagine one could usefully address Mr. Wiseman in any other medium than the unread blog rant, by the way. He doesn't seem the type for intelligent debate; seriously - Jay Wiseman even says, in brackets, at one point (paraphrasing, can't be arsed finding the stupid quote) - "some people disagree with me on this - that's fine, they can go on being wrong".

What a dick!

Anyway, there are a few good things about this book; it is hugely practical on the whole, and certainly written by someone who is knowledgeable - to the point of being very dull - on bondage, clamping, flagellation and all manner of "erotic torture". He is also (a former Ambulance crewman, don't you know) very safety-first, in a commendable and often quite cute way: telling us to be careful, for example, of playing with fire because (you guessed it) we might get burned.

And the fact that some of his friends actually did set fire to one another after rubbing each other with alcohol fumes then playing with candles goes some way to explaining the incredibly patronising tone Wiseman employs throughout this book - he basically thinks he's talking to borderline retards, and he's super intelligent by comparison. How right he is on the whole, I have no idea.

He does raise some interesting questions too (briefly) about where our sexual desires come from, and how we should respond to impulses which make us uncomfortable. (Clue: embrace them, embrace them all.) Why do so many women have rape fantasies? Why do so many men have them too? Why do we deny it and refuse to talk about it?

Who knows? But I sure wouldn't want Jay to answer - or even raise - these questions in any public forum in any official capacity as a result of his work on this lengthy, dull, creepy but - I have to admit, begrudgingly - pretty practical and "realistic" guide.

Still, I actually wouldn't advise buying this book for (or lending this book to) anybody you are trying to convert to (or merely educate in) SM, because Jay Wiseman's voice may well dissuade them from what curiosity they have.

It's a bit dated too - it's of its time - he talks of the Internet as a caveman might have talked of strange fruits he had tasted in a neighbouring valley. He talks more often of social groups and PO boxes. This only serves to highlight what is surely apparent to all today upon reading the first few paragraphs: if you're interested in exploring SM, you can get all this information on the Internet; better still, you can get it all from many different people with differing points of view and discuss it with them.

And you don't have to plough through the life story of a fat, hairy, ex-hippie, leather-wearing, misogynist hack-twat to get there.

(But it probably helps.)

Ian Garfield Hoxley is Metatron - Gaye Bykers on Acid and Meads of Asphodel rock family tree (or something)

After years of searching the Earth for the secret identity of The Meads of Asphodel's enigmatic vocalist, Metatron, you'll be pleased to know I've come to a conclusion; he's Ian Garfield Hoxley from Gaye Bykers on Acid.

I came to this conclusion after Andrew Collins played Gaye Bykers on Acid as part of the seven inches of love section on his (excellent) 6music show where he's (unfortunately just) a stop-gap between the difficult George Lamb and the relatively-easy Lauren Laverne.

I was only aware of 'Gaye Bykers on Acid' before as being something my dad would mutter when I passed through the living room having got dressed up for a Friday night on the town. Similarly, he was probably only aware of the Meads of Asphodel as a (quite literally) unholy racket that must have emanated from the car speakers courtesy of the last mix CD I burnt for him a few years ago - I doubt it lasted too long before the skip button came out.

Though the Bykers' Ian has a name a bit like that one from Keane and has a slight American twang to his voice, the occasional rasps and grunts in there are more than a little reminiscent of Metatron's trademark cancerous howl, I'm sure you'll agree:

Exhibit A: Gaye Bykers on Acid - Git Down



Exhibit B: The Meads of Asphodel - Creed of Abraham



What's more, both bands share a penchant for weird face masks, unlikely side projects and scuzzy psychedelia.

So Ian Garfield Hoxley is Metatron - Metatron is Ian Garfield Hoxley. The picture at the top of this story will never be a resultant screen from a Google search again.

This is PROPER music journalism.

Where's my award?

I thank you.

(Pending my award, which I expect within the week.)

Your avid sleuth and sweating toiler,

A. (The) Velky

Once In A Blue Moon - Magnus Mills

Very much in the same style as 'Only When The Sun...', this second collection has four very short stories and two glaring typographical errors. (This time 'here' instead of 'hear' - page 12, and 'cat's eyes' instead of 'cats' eyes' - page 41. If anyone over at Acorn wants to give me a job proofreading, get in touch!)

Okay that second one is technically correct for a single unit, as in a bollard or a traffic cone, but if THEY are lighting up the road, then THEY can't possibly all belong to the same cat now, can they?

Anyway, the stories are good. The first - 'Once In A Blue Moon' is the weakest, or at least my own least favourite, again, being a sort of oddball mother-daughter relationship-cum-police stakeout situation. It's off-kilter and quaint but has little depth I care to explore.

The second is a daft gag well executed - 'The Good Cop' - it's called, and the premise is that staff cutbacks mean only one of the traditional partnership is available to interview a suspected crim. Hilarity ensues. I would normally be reticent to reveal the entire plot of a story, even one so short, but this one is so predictable it hardly matters. It's quite charming anyway and the humour packed into the mundane dialogue actually reminds me very much of my friend Dave Paul Nixon's short stories. Shame he doesn't tend to publish them on that blog I linked you to, and is only demanding your cash for his charitable facial hair.

'They Drive by Night' is an excellent atmospheric hitchhiking story perfectly satirising the stoic oddball relationship between late night lorry-driving types, but the real jewel in the crown here is (again - as with 'Only When The Sun...') the last of the four stories; it's a rare thing in the Mills canon: a children's story, that is, a story about children, told by one of them.

'Screwtop Thompson' mixes evocative portrayals of childhood Christmas-present comedown with one of the very finest examples of Mills' affectionate portrayal of Englishness (or perhaps just humanness) through the veneer of dark humour. It's a truly fantastic and deeply satisfying piece of writing and as good as anything he's done, which is the highest possible praise.

Incidentally, I recently searched the web for any recent news on Mills and found that the press offensive surrounding his new book (The Maintenance of Headway, 2009) all focused on the fact that he is a bus driver again; the original line of Mills being a working class, salt of the earth, bus-driving type was later played down by cynical journalists, but it turns out Mills has not only spent a few years driving a van since the publication of his debut, The Restraint of Beasts, (the inspiration, it turns out, for The Scheme For Full Employment - a good book,) but he's also back on the buses in London.

Fancy that.

More on that in a very interesting Telegraph interview, here.

Only When The Sun Shines Brightly - Magnus Mills

This tiny collection (four very short stories) is from the early period of Magnus Mills' so-far unassailably great literary career.

Value for money is one of few criticisms one could level at him - you pay 10p for every tiny, sparsely-covered page of this 1st of his 2 short story collections to date. But, as has often been observed by his fondest critics, Mills doesn't waste space: not one bit of it.

Hence why I was so shocked to spot a few glaring typographical errors in this second edition Acorn Book Company print; 'been' instead of 'being' (p 29) and 'quite' instead of 'quiet' (p 23). There are also a few Americanised spellings of words, which one could pass off as a stylistic choice, but seems clumsy and inappropriate in a collection I'm pretty sure was intended for the British market. (The price is in sterling.)

No, these few typographical errors didn't wholly ruin the stories they popped up in, but it's distinctly unprofessional and rather amazing that nobody has spotted them in such short and easy-to-read stories.

Anyway, that aside these follow the same dry, sparse, first-person narrator approach as his work is known to: character history is largely left as a mystery and the environments they find themselves in are familiar; working class urban banality (the title story), blustery rural holiday home bleakness (Hark The Herald) and parochial English oddness (The Comforter, At Your Service).

The almost unpleasant weirdness of first story, The Comforter, is unlike anything I can remember form Mills' work and actually put me off a little: it seemed a little too cheap a twist at the end at the expense of a very likable character - the sandwich-eating, stationary-enthusing Archdeacon who has trouble concentrating during meetings.

But fairness has never come into Mills' world and when one recalls the narrator of All Quiet On The Orient Express, trapped in a holiday that never begins; or the put-upon bus drivers in his recent novel, The Maintenance of Headway, always too late or early; or this collection's At Your Service's unpaid, eternal handyman to an unpredictable neighbour, working tirelessly and thanklessly just for a cup of tea; when one thinks of these poor saps, one can allow one's self a sad smile, knowing at least that these unfortunates have each other (and ourselves) for company.

The final story (Hark The Herald) is by far my favourite, being both sublime and ridiculous in the careful atmosphere of wintery isolation it evokes - one feels so sorry for the narrator - spending Christmas alone in a busy (yet weirdly always empty) guesthouse, always too late for the party - but in a way, one almost envies him his "splendid isolation" a little too. In fact, this could be the closest Mills comes to a ghost story, if you dare read anything but what's on the surface into his carefully-kept tales. But would that make our narrator the haunted or haunting?

Another narrator (in the title story) watches with equal parts interest and disinterest as a sheet of plastic gets caught on a roof by a train track opposite his house, and though annoyed by it, he actually finds he misses it when it is finally removed.

Mills' stories, even at this paltry length, deal in incredibly complex simplicities, or perhaps incredibly simple complexities? This isn't me trying to be clever, it's me being confounded and loving it.

It may only have given me minutes for my money, but what minutes!

Recent reads: Animal Farm - George Orwell, A Month in the Country - J. L. Carr, Through England on a Side-Saddle - Celia Fiennes

Animal Farm - George Orwell

I've always admired Orwell but perhaps felt I was too old for this, it being one of a great number of books almost everyone read when they were 12 and I didn't. (See also Catch 22, Brave New World and, erm... Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas?)

Something had always put me off it: the concept seemed irritating and rather obvious. I couldn't imagine how any writer, let alone Orwell, who I've always thought of as a good fiction writer, but not a great one, could stretch the point to over 100 pages.

I was so wrong. This is by far my favourite Orwell book now, leapfrogging 'Homage...', '1984' and 'Road to Wigan Pier', not to mention the many others I haven't bothered reading. This is a fantastic story told with expert control and pacing; what's more, it's tremendously sad.

Some of the characters - e.g. Boxer, the dutiful work-horse, Napoleon, the duplicitous despot and the cynical donkey, whatever he's called - are absolutely fantastic. When we see Boxer's inevitable demise approaching, it's even sadder than when Snowball was stabbed in the back; the level of treachery between these 'comrades' clearly knows no bounds.

The Manor farm beasts remind one surprisingly well of how much (or how little) one remembers of A-Level history, and the specific events, anecdotally allegorised are a thrill to spot, but that aside, as a straight story with or without the cold, metallic bones of satire that house its sinewy flesh, this novel is a quite horrible beast and a more accurate reflection of the inherent unfairness of systems of government, labour and law I have never come across. It's really very moving.

A Month in the Country - J. L. Carr

A short but incredibly-detailed story of a war-damaged London-born loner restoring a painting in a church "up north", this novel is at once very unusual in its simplicity and stark portrayal of a snapshot in history, and truly "classic" (just like it informs me on the cover - thanks Penguin).

The characters - not least our subtly-humorous, embarrassed and somewhat damaged narrator - are almost impossibly-well realised for what little space they have to flourish, and the relationships between them all are unique and special, painting pictures in myriad styles running the gamut of human emotions.

The uncertainty of the 70something-year-old "I"'s relationship to this embryonic self is galvanised by the humdrum nature of the recollection juxtaposed with the obviously huge emotional significance of this brief period in his post-war youth.

Technically, I suppose, it's little more than a very uneventful love story, but it's an eminently-fine novel and truly deserving of its reputation as "unique" in the English language.


Through England on a Side-Saddle - Celia Fiennes

I actually read this ages ago but forgot to add it to my blog-based reading record so here it is; a diary or travel writing compendium penned by a well-to-do female in the seventeenth century, this is entirely unlike anything I've read before and undoubtedly a rare enough record from such far-flung times.

Ms. Fiennes is "a remarkable woman" by all accounts, and certainly comes across as brave and industrious and utterly fascinated by the world around her. (She rode side-saddle through every county in England, accompanied only by two servants.)

Her observations on the changing landscape of the nation are the biggest surprise here. One is taught to imagine the UK as a pretty stagnant place between the dark ages and the Industrial Revolution, but the massive developments that she sees by way of trade in dyes, tin, foodstuffs &c. tell a very different story.

Her knee-jerk likes and dislikes of whole cityfuls of folk make for very amusing reading also, and show a very human face behind the detached and considered observations of an expert. Her good opinion once lost, one presumes, is never got again, and one suspects she kept - some place apart from the main body of the diary - a league table of types of bread she bought and ate around the land, basing her opinion on the character of the bakers closely on the quality of said staple baked goods.

She also has a tendency to regularly refute the claims of road signs and insist (on at least five occasions, I'm sure) that a 6 mile road is, in fact, more like a 7 or an 8 mile road.

We've all been there!

The Wicker Man - Robin Hardy & Anthony Shaffer

This may well be the first "book of the film" novel I've read, having long-maintained an elitist contempt for the very concept of the genre.

Pretentious, moi? Mais, oui! (Or something... French is a bit rusty.)

The very fact that most novels today are written filmically, with films in mind - from both a commercial and narrative perspective - regularly fills me with rage and despair and often forces my own writing into plotless cul-de-sacs of unreadable bullshit in a desperate attempt to avoid the tiresomely-familiar (if not necessarily easily-erected) aspects of the perfectly-constructed and adaptable story arcs that most forms of narrative will have in common with one another.

There was that book Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, though, wasn't there? And that was awesome. And that was a TV series first. I remember Gaiman recounting how he'd infuriated the TV folk he worked with (providing the script, of course) by regularly ending sentences with, "It's okay, I'll put that bit in the book," every time they had to cut a scene.

One wonders if Shaffer had a similar experience with his script; certainly the filmmakers were unhappy with the truncated b-movie cinema release, (though I still love it as a close 2nd to the director's cut: it was, after all, my introduction to the story).

First things first: this book is inexpertly written. It's full of superfluous bits of description and speech tags and (most heinously of all) adverbs. There was even a long sentence somewhere (too many little paper bookmarks to locate it), broken up by parentheses, that was utterly nonsensical and had somehow bypassed umpteen editors to make it to this 2000 reprint edition.

Still, the technical amateurism does not truly impede on well-paced and sometimes pleasantly-descriptive storytelling. The world os Summerisle, as in the film, is very much alive and sensually overpowering. You can almost hear the steam organ, taste the bitter, smell the pickled foreskins.

And, crucially, the scenes that are not in the film are excellent: possibly the best here. Maybe it's because they don't carry the association both ways; there's a lot of directly-filmic description taken from very memorable scenes, and it jars. And although there's more sex in the book, there's less titillation. When Sergeant Howie searches the village, for example, the woman he comes across in the bath is no Hammer Horror beauty given a few lines to get her tits out (sorry Ingrid Pitt, but it wasn't one of your best roles, was it?) but an obese, sex-crazed lunatic. And there's the three old biddies with the "priapic chair", who come across as borderline insane, very creepy and yet oddly touching. They weren't in the film and while they're a bit Terry Pratchett they do give us an insight into what the sexually-liberated pagan society is like for OAPs as well as a secondary insight into the character of Lord Summerisle's father.

The opening chapter is entirely absent from the film, too; it was replaced (in the director's cut) with a brief exchange between two (less-Christian) coppers at Howie's expense, but fell short of giving the troubled policeman's prudish persona any added depth. In the book, Howie is not just a God-botherer: he's a liberal episcopalian, a staunch (and institutionally-controversial) socialist, and sexually repressed to a point that the film can only hint at.

He also loves birdwatching.

There are numerous other characters who are either expanded upon or introduced by Hardy's novel; a particularly significant one, though a difficult one to pin down, is Beech. Beech is a miscellaneous nutjob whose mental health conditions preclude him from a normal involvement in community life: instead he guards a "sacred grove" as a self-proclaimed king. He figures in one of Howie's chief theories (side-note: the 'theories' aren't given room in the film and they add to the mystery both of the plot and of Howie himself). He also sprawls himself across the closing scenes, declaring his allegiance to Howie as the unfortunate policeman burns to death, much like some Shakespearean 'problem' character, say, Mercutio or Fortinbras, he is at once very convenient and very inconvenient. I rather like him.

The story in this form encourages the reader to be more of a participant in the tale rather than merely an observer. And for once, I found myself wanting Howie to survive; his character is much more well-rounded in Hardy's rendering, being allowed - as he couldn't possibly be onscreen - to have numerous potentially-conflicting core values that inform his idea of morality, he is questioning himself more often than he wants to be.

As a novel in its own right, it's an excellent thriller/horror/mystery. Having read it with 22+ views of the film in mind, it'll never lessen my enjoyment of the screen version of the story, but for me it serves as pretty solid evidence of the superiority of the medium, even more so than any one of the many crap cinema adaptations of favourite books I've seen.

Why I Hate Americans

On 13th September 1997 at 11:38 am PST I was urinating in a toilet in a McDonald's in San Francisco when a man of about twice my age (coincidentally, the age I am now) complemented me on the gold-rimmed sunglasses I'd bought the previous day in Safeway.

"Cool sunglasses!" he said.

They weren't "cool"; he was lying. I knew they weren't cool because I'd chosen them for that exact reason.

"Thanks," I said, my heart palpitating like a bullfrog.

"Cool shorts too!" he said.

They weren't "cool"; they were Lycra: one half black, one half multi-coloured neons with an indecipherable overlaid black pattern. He was lying.

It dawned on me before the last drop of urine escaped from my penis that I was in the presence of a paedophile.

Ever since that day I have had an extremely logical and justified hatred of Americans.

Fairy Tales From The Balkans - Joan Haslip

Apart from being a delightful physical specimen, as I enthused earlier in the week, this is a splendid little collection of very European fairy tales whose many ingredients will be familiar to anybody with even a passing familiarity (can one have one of those?) with the genre. And, let's face it, that pretty much includes everyone who has been a child at some point: so everyone except goalkeepers*.

The names and places change but the stories are similar: almost all of those included in Fairy Tales From The Balkans feature three brothers, the first two being lazy, useless bastards and the third being brave, beautiful and bloody good at completing impossible tasks with the aid of, for example, magical animals. Naturally I can empathise with this familial situ, but for the fact that I was blessed with a younger brother to upset the synchronicity.

Anyway - the places are Balkan, or at least the ones I recognise are. And the names are awesome. Check these for some story names:

'The Tzarina Loveliness Inexhaustible'
'A Pavilion Neither On Heaven Nor Earth'
'Bash Tchelik (or Real Steel)'

The first is very Monty Python, the second sounds like a song by an obscure post rock band and the third is surely a Norwegian Black Metal act. Awesome, I say again.

By far my favourite of this bunch, though, is 'The Grateful Eagle', whose titular being is a motif in many tales, but whose role in this one seems unique and all the more wonderful for it. The tale contains so many tests, trials and tribulations that it has the feel of a distilled saga: we have a hero for the first half, then his son takes over, but the eagle is there throughout and grateful throughout, except for a little while at the beginning when he drops our hero repeatedly into the ocean to punish him for what he was about to do earlier on when the tale began. (Shoot an eagle who didn't want to be shot, don't you know.)

The tale also features an angry sea god who keeps dishing out impossible tasks to our hero and threatening to chop off his head if he fails them. Dude, you're a sea god: chop off whosoever's head you want to for Pete's sake.

There are three magical helpers who enter and leave the story at the convenience of our hero's predicaments, too; Eater Up, Drinker Up and Crackling Frost (guess what their powers are?) are very reminiscent of Long, Broad, and Sharp Eyes, the X-men-style super heroes that help out a young prince in one of Božena Němcová's popular Czech tales. Oh, and did I mention it has mermaids in it? Yes, this was back when Montenegro was part of Serbia.

Actually it was shortly before Yugoslavia was formed, when this was published. But the tale no doubt dates back long before that. Still, the idea of a greater Serbia (greater than all its neighbouring countries) has existed for a while. And I'm told by a reliable source that the reason Slobodan Milošević was such a £$%& is because he subscribed to an archaic and frankly disturbing romantic ideal of Serbian nationalism as opposed to being all nice and liberal like our politicians.

If I read that Misha Glenny book past the Karađorđe bit I'd probably have some idea what I was talking about.

Anyway, the nuances are there in many of the tales, and the uniquely Serbian character, present in a few tales here, is surely best expressed through the following line, used to chastise an overly-curious wife:

"Come over here my woman, and if you really want to know the reason why I laughed, I shall give you the biggest beating of your life."

She backs away and I QUOTE: "They all lived happily ever after".

!

!!!

Anyway, what else did we learn?

* "There is nothing like whistling to keep one's spirits up."

* There are alligators in the Balkans with two heads.

* Serbian faeries are called 'feela' (singular) and in 1945 it was expected that readers would know this without having to have it explained to them.

* Japan isn't the only place lovers turn into birds to escape the wrath of their parents.


Anyway, I enjoyed this book so much that I am no longer at war with Serbia.

That's all, folks!


*"Goalkeepers aren't born until their mid-thirties." - Jimmy Hill, some time ago when I used to watch football.

"This is not a love story!"

Lost the thread of the story? Think it's difficult to read? Doesn't scan well? Pity the poor bugger that has to write it. Donate here.

And now we've all had a bit of fun, let's get on with it:

The Conversation Killer (Part 3)

An hour later we emerged – Vanessa, the doctor, and I. She was muttering about her slug and went off to see if it was okay. (It was called Abraham.)

Dr. Whittaker, who I’d thought would have relished the opportunity to meet Vanessa – who had after all been the subject of so much discussion between us – had been silent throughout; in fact, neither he nor Vanessa had acknowledged the other’s presence, which led me to believe that whatever my own physical, actual relationship to this inner-cranial jaunt, those I took with me or found there were not ‘real’ in the sense that I was used to. This was difficult for me to come to terms with because on some level I knew (as I’ve explained again and again) that Vanessa was – nay, is – real, and that the same could be said for the good doctor, although he may very well be dead by now (the now now from which I’m writing). I was not, am not, won’t be for a while I hope, dead.

And Alex?

She’d shut up since we entered the ‘Secret Control Centre’. My invisible ear-piece had betrayed nothing of what was happening to my corporeal self on my dad’s actual, studded, leather sofa in my dad’s actual study. Maybe my half/step/imaginary sister was touching me up while I lay trance-like before her? I could only hope so.

This is supposed to be the story about how she (Alex) ruined Christmas, I realise, but that will have to wait. Right now you must hear the story of how the Vanessa in my head recounted the first time we actually met, really, in the real world, and why that meant I’d imprisoned her here (there) in my head, in the Secret Control Centre, doomed for eternity (or for the moment, at least) to play the unenviable role of The Blind Leading The Blind: understudy to inevitable fuckdown. (Which is like ‘meltdown’, but with added swearing.)

This is what she said.

She said:

What She Said

She said “Jamie, I love you, but…”

“I’ve got a hell of a lot to learn about rock ‘n’ roll, I know,” I nodded, violently snatching the wine bottle from her and guzzling it down my throat hole with reckless abandon, abandoning streams and splashes about my goose-pimpled neck and unironed off-black-possibly-charcoal shirt collar.

“No”, she said, slapping me with as much affection as you can affectionately slap a stranger. “I love you, but I think you’re a total wanker!”

And we fell about laughing actual laughs out of our little young mouths in an idyllic and incomprehensibly annoying display of youthful vigour: vigour that still finds swearing in public a true thrill: vigour that cares nothing for the ways of yesterday’s lovers, wrinkled hand in wrinkled hand on Winchester High Street, beneath the bunting, circumnavigating the Christmas tree, click-clocking, tick-tocking the seconds away on a tin-thin, steel-cold winter’s afternoon outside The Works, by the Alliance and Leicester cash-point – the one that charged £1.75 until Watchdog got wind of it – right smack-bang in the middle of town, opposite that very Buttercross whence I sat whence I was but a… What does ‘whence’ mean? Is it one of those funny ones that means something very different from…

Oh.

Oh, right.

Everything changed – this is one of those films where nothing happens in the right order. God, I hate those films; at least, I hate every single one of those films I’ve seen since the first few Tarrantino ones, which, admittedly, had the slightest of influences over my style and general outlook on life.

I hate them.

Was that, though, what happened when we first met? That bit, that I’d forgotten, that happened at least a few weeks later, that suggests a prolonged acquaintance the like of which I daren’t have hinted at thus far in this here tome, lest I be met with the same fervent remonstrations that a hundred and one quack-psychiatrists and alleged-friends flung my way like so much dung over the course of the (very difficult actually) weeks months and years P.V?

Is that what happens? In that very first moment is there a split-second, blink-and-you’ll-miss, subliminal advertisement for the essence of your relationship as will be and as will be remembered and as will sink into your subconscious silt to fossilize, years later into some pretty little geriatric pattern that makes you feel a bit funny?

I don’t know! How could I? I am the audience. It usually goes over my head. That and the popcorn, and the Pepsi, and the Minstrels. I am a cinema bad boy. Shame there’s only two seats here. (Dr. Whittaker stands, and breathes just heavily enough so we know (I know) he’s alive.)

I apologise for my digression; the film continues:


She’s sitting on a bench up at the arbour, I forget which one, smoking a cigarette and watching this kid playing with his dog. It looks like fun.

“I wish I had a dog,” she said.

“Me too,” I said.

“What?”

I’d just sat down on the bench. Sure, there were other benches – but this one had a girl sitting on it. If I’d sat on any of them, I’d be gay. Even if I wasn’t yet, I’d become gay. I certainly wouldn’t lose my virginity by sitting on benches on my own in the park. Trust me, I’d tried.

She looks/looked like she needed sitting next to. And addressing. And undressing too, but not here, not there, not now, not then.

I lit a cigarette and offered her one.

By one I mean a shabby, flat packet of Cutter’s Choice with imperfectly folded Rizlas within, maybe a strip or two of cardboard, maybe a filter. Who knows? Not me…

“I said ‘me too’,” I said.

“I didn’t know you were there,” she said.

“I wasn’t. Now I am. I just sat down.”

“My mum’s dead,” she said.

I exhaled with a frown. “Mine too.”

She nodded. She looked like someone whose mum was dead. I wondered whether I did? Mine wasn’t, obviously, but she wasn’t to know that. People say things, sometimes they’re true. Nobody knows.

“My name’s Jamie,” I said.

“Vanessa,” she said, and waved uncertainly. We weren’t close enough to shake hands, and I wouldn’t have anyway, because my hands were sweaty.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Are you on drugs or something?”

“Well?”

“Fifteen,” she said, though she looked about twenty.

“Really?” I said, “I’m sixteen. You look older than me.”

She shrugged, “I moisturise.”

I laughed. It was a sneering laugh, minimally vocal and emitted begrudgingly, but a laugh nonetheless. She looked at me, without turning her head. I looked straight at her from behind my mirrored, black wrap-around sunglasses. She had no way of knowing which way I was looking. But I was looking at her. She was pretty, though she seemed keen for her face to be all but obscured behind her hair, which was a terrific mess. Her skin’s not so good, I thought. And not for the first time I reflected on the injustice of the fact that women are allowed to wear makeup.

“Have you got any weed?” I asked.

She shot me a nasty look.

“Do I look like a drug dealer?”

I shook my head, “Not really. My boyfriend’s a drug dealer and…”


“Hold on a minute,” I said.

She paused the video or whatever it was.

“Huh?”

“I never had a boyfriend.”

“Hmmm, perhaps there’s something wrong with it. This isn’t how I remember it either.”

She got up and went over to hit the side of the TV with a firm palm. Was it a TV when we started watching? I don’t know; but it was now. It was a massive, wide, long, hulking mass of a nineties TV set: the sort that removal men fear.

The picture shook and shuffled off to one side, being replaced by another, which was jerky and grainy until Vanessa adjusted the aerial, then returned, beaming, to the seat beside me, leaving a crystal-clear image of a hand-held camera displaying the inside of a school classroom.

It was my sixth form college, and the mass of bags and coats piled up on the tables suggested the mass-involvement in some kind of informal break time activity nearby.

This was last year, I thought. I remember this. I remember this happening, so how come it all looks new?

Vanessa was sitting on the desk with one black-stockinged leg flung casually over the knee of the next, tapping her foot in mid air to the beat of Muse’s ‘Muscle Museum’. That puts a year on it, but I can’t for the life of me remember which one.

She’s reading; but what is she reading? Is it a Penguin Classic, like Middlemarch or The Great Gatsby? Is it an English Literature set text like… Middlemarch or that NEAB anthology of poetry by slaves and women and women slaves and Seamus Heaney and Simon Armitage? Is it a magazine I don’t understand, like Cosmopolitan or… any other magazine that isn’t about music?

Well – that’s the thing about TV; it’s clearer than memory, so I can see it’s none of the above. It’s Rebecca. Vanessa is reading Rebecca, and chewing something. Gum, perhaps. Was Rebecca the other woman? Or was the other woman the other woman? Have I read that book or just read the Wikipedia entry? I honestly couldn’t say.

What am I doing? I can’t tell because it’s my P.O.V. that the camera’s looking from. Oh, there we go; I’m looking down at a book : a silver-covered W.H. Smith’s poetry book. It’s my poetry book, with my poems in it. I am looking at them. They are terrible. I won’t quote the lines I’m seeing scan by the screen in scrawled spacker script. But I can tell that even yesteryear Jamie isn’t happy with them, because he’s scribbling a red star with coloured pencils at the end of most. An orange star for that one though: it was shorter than some of the others.

It’s quiet for a second. I look up. Vanessa’s still reading: she draws in her lips and licks them from the inside, then dabs a finger on her tongue and turns a page. Her hair is blonder and curlier than ever, but most of it is tied back and haphazardly scrunchied in place. She looks like she’s wearing school uniform, but there is no school uniform because we’re in sixth form college. Is it costume or is that how she dressed?

It’s Hole:

“Oh make me over, I’m all I want to be…”

Looking back now it seems like a shit song: hopelessly poppy and utterly vapid; I mean, that first line – what the fuck does that even mean? It’s contradictory, for one thing, and not in a clever way.

But back then I’d just got into Hole. (And Muse.) I liked getting into Hole because I’d never got into Nirvana, so this was as close to cool as I got.

She looked up.

“I’m sorry, I hope you don’t mind me playing music.”

She smiled shyly or slyly: a bit of both I think, but which was her and which was her intention?

The music was emanating from tinny speakers wired into a Discman or some brand-nonspecific equivalent. It was pretty fancy. It was pink. I still used a cassette player at this point, and no doubt it was in the pocket of the Matrix-style, school-shooting leather trench coat I was already habitually dressed in.

“No problem,” I said, and, perhaps tautologically, definitely awkwardly: “That’s cool.”

I stopped short of enthusing about ‘Celebrity Skin’, but only just.

“You’re Jamie aren’t you?” she said, as one might say, ‘That’s a chaffinch, isn’t it?’

“Yeah,” I said, nodding in agreement. The camera was on both of us now. How did that work?

She too nodded, slowly, smiled, and returned her gaze to Rebecca.

“You’re Rebecca aren’t you?” I said.

“No!” she said, visibly amused.

“I mean Vanessa. Vanessa; you’re Vanessa.”

“Yes!” she said.

And then her friend came in, and that was that.

That was the first time I met Vanessa.


Vanessa pressed pause on the remote control and the screen fixed on her look of surprise as her friend came in, mouth open, hand outstretched, like some fancy, upper-middle class statue of the model A-Level student.

She looked like she’d been rumbled.

Most of them didn’t talk to me much. I was pretty sure it was a prejudice against my once-removed working class credentials, but with hindsight it was probably just because I was a bit difficult to talk to.

Christ, did I just say that? No I thought it - but still: Christ.

“Well?” said Vanessa. Now Vanessa. Sorry – then Vanessa. Vanessa in my head, in the TV room in the Secret Control Centre (or whatever it’s called) in my mind.

“Well what?”

“Do you see now?”

“Do I see what?”

She rolled her eyes. Behind her I sensed Dr. Whittaker rolling his eyes in unison. Poor chap didn’t even have a chair. Still, nobody invited him.

“Do you see now why I’m here? Why you put me here?”

“Not exactly,” I said, frowning. “That’s not really much to go on. Is there any more?”

“Well of course there’s more. There’s always more.”

“There’s always a next time until the last time,” I said, with a sense I was quoting somebody, but not sure who.

She picked up a video cassette case from the floor. I hadn’t noticed it there before.

A video cassette case in my Secret Control Centre. Retrospectively, this seems like some expense was spared by my imagination, or whoever else was responsible for this show of self-discovery. But the fact remains that while I am now writing from an environment of perpetual technological one-upmanship, back then in whatever year Muse happened people had Discmen, and back then in whatever year my imaginary sister Alex hypnotized me on my dad’s leather sofa in the old house at St. Cross, my head was not yet equipped with a DVD player.

The case displayed a slightly older but slightly cartoonishly-rendered Jamie J. Janakov stood back to back with an indifferent-looking Emily Dover in characteristically French attire, with a dyed-black, fringed bob and an impeccably-positioned but no-less-ridiculous-for-it, black beret. Between us was a large playing-card heart, comically cleft in two by an invisible lightning bolt, and it was in this heart-shaped box that Vanessa’s heart-shaped face was framed. She was grinning mischievously.

The title was ‘Emily’s Dreams’; the strap-line was ‘This is not a love story!’

“Oh for God’s sake, why’s it always about her?” I muttered, as I noted with equal incredulity and irritation that I was played by Ashton Kutcher, who looked nothing at all like me. Emily was Megan Fox, who I’d never heard of and was pretty sure hadn’t been invented in the year this episode occurred.

“Do you remember the party?”

“The party?”

“Yes, the bloody party!” she snapped: “At the end of Twelfth Night we all had a party up by at the music block. If I just fast-forward through this Emily stuff we’ll get to it.”

Was she annoyed with me or with Emily?

On-screen a bus fast-forwarded through Hampshire B-roads, with Emily and I play-fighting: hitting each other with satchels like schoolchildren in a silent movie.

“Was this the second time I saw you?” I asked.

“Yes, the second and last,” she said. And I swear I saw the glint of a tear forming in the corner of her eye.

The Maintenance Of Headway - Magnus Mills

Having spent a reasonable (not unreasonable) portion of my time of late bemoaning the 'destination change' chance card so oft drawn by early morning bus drivers (or indeed bus drivers at any time I might choose to travel), what better time to read The Maintenance of Headway: the most explicitly bus-driver-related novel yet written by Magnus Mills, former bus driver and celebrated author of sublimely mundane plotless novellas high on dark humour and bereft of most of the ingredients you find in a normal story?

Note the question mark at the end of that last sentence. It may have been a long, drawn-out poorly constructed sentence, but it WAS a question too.

Anyway, The Scheme For Full Employment was about van driving and had an overarching theme of an ethos or philosophy being enforced on willfully-simplistic working folk who want nothing more than to finish a little early and have more time for things they like: like not working, going home early, and cups of tea.

On the face of things this new Mills novel is pretty bloody similar to that one. Only this time the philosophy is (again titular) The Maintenance Of Headway: a fancy term for the latest interpretation of the driving force (yes, DRIVING force) behind a city bus service; the running late Vs running early issue combating the impossibility of running on time.

We are reminded at numerous times by the drivers as they sit and discuss the merits - or otherwise - of this philosophy; they talk of the bus driving thing as a 'business' and analyse it with that understanding, until one of them points out that it's actually "a service".

Indeed! This is exactly what I regularly point out in fits of rage directed against numerous media of public transport.

That aside, there are the usual tremendously subtle characters with the most normal names imaginable (first names for drivers, last names for their superiors), and the final gag that the (kind of) plot leads up to is pleasantly anticlimactic.

The content is familliar in its reference points, yet curiously evasive with regard to specifics. I cant for the life of me, from the descriptions, work out exactly which London bus route Mills is referring to - if indeed it's a real one, and it could well be - but the substitution of, for example, 'Oxford Street' with 'the bejeweled thoroughfare' is typically quaint and tongue-in-cheek.

Frankly, it's everything I love about Mills' writing. Explorers Of The New Century was excellent, (most memorably, the argument between said explorers about how to pronounce "scone") , but I prefer Mills distilled to this level of simplicity: a book you can read in a couple of bus journeys, as I did, which should soften the blow of the inevitable mid-morning announcement: "The destination of this bus has changed".

The bigger questions, which one traditionally expects to be raised by NOVELS in their £1.75 Penguin Classic, thick-as-a-brick, beauty, are all present and correct here, they just invite your input and waste no paragraphs, no sentences, in sermonising or spelling it all out for you. I'm not even sure if this is technically long enough to be classed as a novel, but it's worth its asking price.

Magnus Mills' greatest talent, and one which few other writers come close to possessing, is his economical approach to language: he can say in a few lines of dialogue what it would take lesser writers a chapter to convey.

He ought to be a household name by now.

Just Another Inch on my Beard

Just Another Inch on my Beard

My mother married for love and paid for it with cash,
She was a sucker for a man with a well-kept moustache.
He was out the door by the time I was four,
When she tried to stop him, he put her on the floor.

It didn't mean that much to me.
It didn't mean that much to me.

My daddy died in the war - not 'a' war, but 'the' -
Never took the time to tell the facts of life to me.
All he left were his debts and his diary:
Nothing much there to inspire me.

He didn't mean that much to me.
He didn't mean that much to me.

He was just another lesson I learned,
Just another bridge that I burned,
Just another figure I feared,
Just another inch on my beard.

I left for the city when I was old enough to leave,
With as much money from my mother's purse as I could thieve.
I fell in with some artists from the modern school,
They told me the cut of my coat was "cool".

It didn't mean that much to me.
It didn't mean that much to me.

I said "I've coughed up greater works of art than that.
"Your brush strokes are clumsy and your model's fat."
I got an awkward silence and a dirty look.
I put my fist through the canvas and slung my hook.

They didn't mean that much to me.
They didn't mean that much to me.

That was just another inch on my beard,
Just another inch on my beard,
Just another lolly I licked,
Just another bucket I kicked.

I set sail for the new world at the end of that fall,
In a suit that did not fit on a ship that was not tall.
I saw a sailor making love with a manatee.
He swore it was a mermaid, such is man's vanity.

It does't mean that much to me.
It does't mean that much to me.

The crew all died of a disease that I couldn't contract.
I told it to the harbour master as a matter of fact.
I found myself in a new-built, New York jail,
With no man or woman known who would pay my bail.

And that really pissed me off.

But that was just another inch on my beard,
Just another inch on my beard,
Just another thorn in my side,
Just another daydream that died.

When they couldn't convict me they sent me away
And I lived to love and laugh and leer another day,
Until the slave ship I sailed on fell to mutiny.
To walk the plank or join the ranks: the latter suited me.

It didn't mean that much to me
'Cause nothing means that much to me.

I got tribal tattoos and threw away my shoes,
I lost myself to gold and blood, gunpowder and booze.
I lost an ear in Veracruz, it hurt like a bitch.
I've finally sucumbed to a gash I can't stitch.

It does't mean that much to me.
It does't mean that much to me.

It's just another lump in my throat,
Just another stain on my coat,
Just another milestone I neared,
Just another inch on my beard.

It's just another inch on my beard,
Just a hellbound vessel I steered,
When I was wounded all the angels cheered,
Having snipped the final inch from my beard.


Picture from whitneybee's flickr stream.

Lilith's Cave: Jewish Tales Of The Supernatural - Howard Schwartz

This collection of myths and fairy tales was one of the many listed in the back of that Demon book I read in Spain earlier this year. It must be the first time I've consulted a bibliography with the express intention of expanding my collection in a specific area.

Fortunately it proved a very sound decision.

This sizeable collection retold by a Jewish American scholar - fondly described by someone I've never heard of as "an American Hans Christian Andersen" - is a wonderful insight into the values, fears, customs and superstitions of a fascinating group of people. These may have been collected with the American market in mind, but there's nothing but the English language in the way of people from every nationality enjoying these tales and learning a lot from them.

The source material comes from all around the Mediterranean, the middle east, northern Europe and even further afield, but the greater part is made up by stories taken from the oral and written tradition of the eastern European Jewish communities.

Some of the more substantial tales like 'The Speaking Head' and 'The chronicle of Ephraim' are sweeping majestic works as rich and allegorical as anything in the fairytale kingdom - they could well be watered down and spangled up to make excellent Disney (or perhaps Disney Pixar) films if anyone had the mind to do so.

Others, such as the title story, 'Lilith's Cave' (not Lilith's only appearance by a long shot) and the troubling 'Helen of Troy' are fascinating studies into the darker side of male sexuality and the line between chivalry/tradition and misogyny.

The general themes of temptation and evil come up regularly in these stories, and good versus evil is a simple and powerful undercurrent to most of the tales: however rich and fantastical they may be, they are almost all deeply religious, and must have raised many law-abiding, God-fearing Jewish children between them.

A large proportion of the tales in the middle of the book focus on the Jews of Prague and their awesomely-powerful superheroesque Rabbi Judah Loew, a.k.a. The Maharal, a real historical figure from the 16th-16th century, famous as the main character in the golem myth (written some hundred years after his death) but also included as a benign and powerful community father-figure in many of these stories. He is an awesome man and more powerful than mortals in fairy tales normally get to be; his presence is almost an inevitable calming influence: a foretold victory of good over evil. What a guy.

His tomb is in the old Jewish cemetery that (for some reason) I never visited in the six months I lived in Prague. Oh well.

Anyway - this collection is thoroughly and heartily recommended for anyone with an interest in folklore, mythology, Judaism, or even the fantasy and short story genres. One of the finest collections I've read this year.

Also, for anyone with an interest in zombies, necromancy etc: there's plenty of it about in Jewish folklore. So, yeah - have fun!

Amazon Kindle Vs. Fairy Tales From The Balkans (1945)

My 'Fairy Tales From the Balkans' book was published during WW2, reprinted in the year it ended, and (at some point) given to a young girl called Pauline who lived on Pont Street in Ashington, Northumberland - just north of Newcastle Upon Tyne.

The paper is old enough to have that grey-brown tinge. It smells decades older than me because it is. There are illustrations in colour and black and white and none of the these, or the text, have faded in the 50+ years of its existence. Having lost its dust cover, it is light tan with a dark blue image, and a previous owner's name ('Pauline') written on biro rules. It somehow found its way to an online book store in Brighton and I ordered it from them via Amazon. It arrived this morning in an unremarkable brown jiffy bag. One remaining blue stamp on the inside cover from '66 indicates it was a library book once, but not where.

It is fairly big for a book. I am happy for it to take up so much space in my life. It's meant to; it is a book. Though it can be scanned and hopefully has been, its full meaning cannot be reproduced by the honk of shit pictured above: Amazon's Kindle, which is a couple of hundred quid and looks like something you'd measure your sugar intake with.

You cannot scan the smell of it, or the feel of the pages. You cannot scan its soul.

Once you can, get back to me, and I'll scan you, then stab you to death to prove some kind of point about man's relationship with technology.

And will you thank me? No. Probably not.

The Conversation Killer (Part 2)

Picking up where we left off in March.

“Kiss me,” she said.

Step sister, half sister, whatever: it would have been rude not to.

Kissing Alex was unexpectedly memorable. It brought epic imagery to my mind: howling gales and oceans a-boil, as though rolling tongues and clashing teeth were all it took to stoke the fires of nature. She didn’t kiss how she looked. I have never known how I kiss, just as I have never known how I sound, how I smell, or even how I look, to an extent. I have created an image for myself and I certainly have a Keanu-Reevesesque mental image of myself in particular clothes, with a particular hairstyle (though I look nothing like Keanu Reeves). But when I glance myself in a mirror or a reflection of Jamie in a shop window I am never the exact same person I expect and hope to see.

“You won’t tell anyone, will you?” she said.

We went to the same sixth form college and never acknowledged one another there, but I had mentioned, once or twice, that I had a sort-of sister. I knew I’d tell everyone, but I couldn’t tell her that, so I shook my head.

She was facing away from me now, sitting on the sofa as one is meant to sit on a sofa: facing forwards. I did the same and wondered if I should say I loved her. Probably not. In my experience that was almost as bad as mentioning she who began with V.

“When I’m feeling… I don’t know, down, I suppose, I usually go inside to find out what’s wrong, and then respond accordingly.”

“What are you talking about, you mad bitch?”

She stroked her cardigan sleeves and smiled a little, mistaking my casual misogyny for affection, I suppose.

“Shall I show you?”

“Show me?” Show me inside her? That could be a sex thing, which was exciting, obviously, as I still hadn’t really done any actual sex. But the sound of it brought to mind probing medical cameras and large intestines more than anything else.

“Yes, come on, lie down.”

She got up and hoisted my legs back onto the sofa. I saw Dr. Whittaker standing in the doorway with the CD in his hand looking at me absently. Alex looked at me too with a similarly curious expression. How interesting I am, I thought.

The doctor put the CD down on the sideboard and, without acknowledging him, Alex turned around and went over there to put it in the unnecessarily stylish CD player.

Could they see each other? I couldn’t tell. She selected a track:

“I write this alone in my bed…”

I thought about Game On, because it was impossible not to, and I wondered if I’d ever surf. I supposed it depended on where I went to university. I was planning on heading towards the sea. But I hated surfers.

“Can you make me a Grey Lady?” I asked, my arms behind my back, my eyes closed behind my sunglasses. I was at ease now and had returned to referring to myself in the first person, as you’ll have noticed, but still had an idea that some narrative or some narration was taking place, and that there was an inexplicable presence in the room. I somehow knew that these events – barely qualifying at all in light of their lack of eventfulness – would one day be recounted by myself or another, though I couldn’t really imagine why or how or when.


A grey lady was placed in my open hand and I was given time to adjust, sit up and sip, still with closed eyes, before she spoke:

“We are going to go on a journey inside the mind of Jamie.”

“Really?” I pondered this, and by pondering it, wondered if the journey had already begun.

I sipped the grey lady. It was just how I would have made it. It was barely bearable.

“What does it look like?”

“Erm, a brain, I suppose.”

“No,” she said, “what does it look like inside there: when you step inside it and survey what is before you?”

I tried to step inside my brain and hit a big spongy wall of pink: it felt warm and wet, and left a translucent pinky liquid all over my leather coat, which I was wearing in my mind as well as on the sofa as well as sitting here writing this.

“How do I get in?” I asked.

“Look for a door or something,” said my slightly exasperated, would-be hypnotist, sort-of sister.

I decided to acquiesce to her orders because they amounted to a more interesting approach to self-exploration than Dr. Whittaker’s hundredth raised eyebrow could possibly have done by this point. He was in the room too, though, I could tell: he just wasn’t saying anything at the moment.

I found a door in my brain: it was a medically white fire door with weighted self-shutting device, a long, plastic easy-open handle. It was built into the huge veiny lobes and indented slightly, firmly: it was a door, so I opened it and went in.

“Oh dear,” I said.

“What does it look like?” asked the voice of Alex, as if via an invisible earpiece.

“The word… ‘dystopia’ springs to mind.”

“That’s not very descriptive, Jamie.”

“Sorry. It looks… very dark, and urban industrial. A little gothic, but not architecturally. It’s sort of like The Crow or Blade Runner or something. A lot of stuff seems to be on fire.”

“Okay. Do you feel safe?”

“No. Never.”

“Do you feel safe now?”

“No.”

“Oh. Do you want to leave?”

“Part of me wants to leave. Part of me wants to stay here forever. This is where I live, after all.”

I heard a sigh. It came from behind me. As I turned I saw his quintessentially doctorial white coat first, through the gloom, but soon recognized my good doctor walking down the steps from the knackered iron door on the gantry. That was the way out, I made a note of remembering.

“What are you doing, Jamie?” It’s not safe here.

“Who is that with you?” asked Alex. She sounded annoyed.

I didn’t really know what to do at this point. I looked up at the sky and saw that it was computer-screen black: but the black of an illuminated computer screen, not the dull grey-brown of a dusty disused monitor. There were even a few broken pixels, by way of starlight. Or starlight, by was of broken pixels. Looking up at the sky made my head hurt, so I looked back at Dr. Whittaker and answered my sort-of sister:

“It’s Dr. Whittaker.”

He folded his arms and didn’t smile.

“I’d like you to explore a bit, if you feel like you can,” she said.

I was still looking at the doctor. He half shrugged and half nodded. This wasn’t his style but he was willing to give it a go. I’d been exasperating him lately, I could tell.

“Okay, I’ll explore,” I said to the voice of Alex. “Can he come with me?”

“Yes, whatever,” said Alex.

I descended a wrought iron spiral staircase lined with strips of what looked like liver – but liver with no end. How long is a piece of liver? Forever, apparently.

Our footsteps fell with intermittent clanks or squelches, depending on the presence of liver or no liver on the particular bit of wrought iron step that greeted our boots. Down wasn’t the only way to go – there were gantries and walkways and ladders &c. – but down seemed the sensible way to go. There was a wider platform that resembled a floor not too far away, and it was here that we got off, though the staircase continued without any sings of stopping.

“Where are we going?” asked Dr. Whittaker, as we strode across an empty parade ground. The floor was meshed wire, wet with blood or sweat or tears – or all three – and the sky was no longer a screen but something forever away; a sky of web-metal and flesh and space, all piled up on top of one another forever.

Who knows where the light came from? There were, as I’ve said, things on fire here and there: bins, buildings, bodies; but in the main there was a blue-black light that dulled most everything but that which was red, which was… very red.

We came then to a huge set of double doors that looked like an air-lock to a hangar, if hangars have airlocks; above it was a strip neon sign, illuminated pink, then not at all, then pink, then not at all: fizzing and showering us with sparks. It said ‘Secret Control Centre’.

The two fat, armoured skeletons (yes: fat skeletons) that guarded this entrance were merely ornamental; they did not move their hollow sockets to watch us as we punched in the code, which was any combination of the unlabelled bottons, and they did not move their mighty electric halberds to strike us down as we stepped into the throne room, which reminded me very much of the only night club I ever went to in Prague.

The room was empty, sticky carpeted and reeking of fags. Where one would perhaps expect a stage, perhaps a podium upon which to dance, perhaps a booth from which to DJ, there was an inclining semi-circular staircase leading to a large and ornately carved wooden throne, incongruous to its surroundings, if I need stress that point.

Upon it sat Vanessa as I imagined her now/then: she was in her late teenage years or early twenties; she wore too much make-up for me to be sure, as always, and her impossibly curled powder-blonde hair had a touch of the Tim Burton about it, but that it wasn’t quite expertly done, for she had no H&M dept: not here, not anywhere.

She wore a Mrs. Haversham-style crumpled old wedding dress and stroked a huge black slug that nuzzled her polyester bosom. Its eyestalks contracted and extended and its muscular foot squidged and rippled.

“You,” I said, reaching the foot of her throne.

“You.”

“I might have known.”

“You did know.”

I looked at her then and tried to return her gaze, but it was like trying to return a 120 mph gaze that Goran Ivanisevic was serving at you, with a tennis racket: and it wasn’t a gaze, it was an ace; she’d already looked away and prepared another one before I realized she was gazing.

“If looks could kill,” I said, shaking my head in awe, “that look that you just looked at me would have… killed me.”

“Why have you come here, Jamie?” asked Vanessa, her fingers caressing the ornate carvings on the arm of her throne – her throne from which she ruled the kingdom of me.

“Why have you come here, when you know it makes things hard for me?” asked Vanessa, putting her slug down on the carpet and descending the thick, red-carpeted stairs to where I stood, waiting.

“This is my head,” I said. “What are you doing here? Why are you the queen of my head?”

She looked at me sadly then, ignoring Dr. Whittaker, just like I was:

“Queen? I am imprisoned here. I cannot leave. You keep me here.”

The slug was munching the carpet around the feet of the throne. Vanessa's dress was damp, I saw, where it had been nuzzling.

“Why do I keep you here?”

She scowled.

“You don’t know that?”

“No.”

“Do you remember the night we first met?”

“I remember how I remember it.”

She sighed and took my hand, leading me to a small door at the far end of the room; our feet made sticky sounds as they trod the carpet. Dr. Whittaker followed at a slight distance; I could feel his presence and smell his well-scrubbed skin.

“Let me show you,” she said, ushering me in to a projection room.

“Let me show you how it really was.”

This will be interesting, I thought.

But I’ve thought that before and been wrong.

Why Marry? - Sybil Neville-Rolfe

A treatise on proper behaviour amongst the young folk of the day and a speculative look at the changing face of Britain's sexual politics between the wars, this little gem of a book is both a delightful peek into a bygone era and a measurement of the progress made in the last three quarters of a century.

All this talk of dancing till 3 am and driving down to Brighton to take the water (scandalous!) paints a very pretty picture of society at the time of writing, and Sybil Neville-Rolfe uses her position as (what seems to be) some kind of them-days agony aunt to ladies of all ages to give a vivid portrayal of the hopes, fears, concerns and demands of women (and men, by association) of all ages and generations.

She speaks of changing attitudes towards young people spending time together outside of marriage, the controversial though at-the-time very popular notion of the "modern" marriage (or 'open relationship') and of the rise of "trial marriages" ('cohabiting') and how these strange practices went down amongst the more traditional parents.

At times the book reads like a guide or manual for young people - telling them what to expect on their adolescences, relationships and honeymoons: talking of nocturnal emissions, hymens, and glands: lots and lots of talk about glands.

In fact, the introduction serves to illustrate that Neville-Rolfe's chief concern with 'Why Marry?' was to bring the latest scientific (biological) research to the public, applying it to the understanding of sexual relations and the changing attitudes theretowards in the 30s.

The fairly liberal, level-headed (and unsexy) way in which Neville-Rolfe discusses sex (and at some length) is often tempered with phrases like "The need for practice, however, does not imply that the physical act should be undertaken with undue frequency". What exactly is unduly frequent is not discussed, it is, however, pointed out that women and men both expect and require different things from sex, and the specifics of this are bravely hinted at if not explicitly advised upon. Really, this does seem more like a women's magazine of the day as opposed to a scientific journal, much of the time, and that's not to its detriment.

And, crucially, Neville-Rolfe argues for a more open approach to sexual matters - more discourse between parent and child, as well as more peer-assistance in dispelling the myths of sex that - in some cases - persist to this day.

Though one hopes we're beyond trying to cure syphilis by raping a virgin. One hopes.

The only bitter taste comes from with the arrival of the subject of "friendships between women" and when they go too far.

Coming from a woman who (according to my research) wrote sympathetically on the subject of the many women deprived of male companionship as a cause of the great wars of the early 20th century (probably the 1st more than the 2nd?), she is very, very down on lesbians, and homosexuality in general.

"Those who are physically attracted to members of the same sex are abnormal... socially & racially very undesirable", is one exemplary sentence of many that are really rather shocking to the modern reader.

I had grown up thinking how far we had to go in confronting our own homophobia as a society, but I had no idea quite how far we'd come in less than 100 years - at the time of writing it seems to have been a common scientific viewpoint that homosexuality is undesirable and a biological abnormality or fault - and so, this attitude informs her writing. One can't quite blame her for that, though it's tempting.

Still, she talks much about changing morals and how it is the privilege (and responsibility) of the younger generation to form and shape the moral makeup of society marching on into the 20th century, so if we have by now (I hope we have) come to accept the spectrum of sexuality as within what is natural (or at least acceptable), perhaps this is because of a general mellowing of morals mirroring the last days of Rome (that we hear so much about), or perhaps it is down to a latter day shift of focus from the importance of "society" to the right of the "individual". Who knows? But we've regressed before - Neville-Rolfe chastises the Victorians (quite rightly) for uneducating young women in the ways of sex and generally making things hard for them (oo-er). So what happens next, as Ms. Rolfe stated at the end of 'Why Marry?', is really up to us, each and every one.

I for one think it's a shame that we've lost some of the mystery of sex with the more prim and proper approaches to sexual questions favoured perhaps by those much older than Ms. Rolfe herself, but if that's the price we pay for a more liberal society, so be it.

Ramble, bramble, itch and scratch

I've been meaning to write this for a while so the fact that it's National poetry Day seemed like a good excuse, because it's a poem:

An Interest In Cartography

When I was young I conquered all that I surveyed:
Climbed cliffs in school shoes,
Dug pits with picks and spades
In the corners of the garden where it was allowed.
Shouted out loud what I liked and listened
As the wounded hillsides
Took split seconds to agree with me,
And seconded my sentiments
With seemingly sentient glee.

Have or have-not haversack,
I'd ramble, bramble, itch and scratch.

With my mapmaker's eye
I made mincemeat of the sky
And moulded clouds to suit my moods:
I'd play with clay and plaster,
Draw colours from the sunset
With the best of my tools,
Make fools of weather forecasters
And clasp cold breezes to my chest.
Braving thunder, lightning, rain,
I came home wet-through and full of wonder,
Investing my ambition in a golden net,
In which to catch words,
With which to build a model village of my world.

What happened to that plan?
I half-forget.

But I unfurled my failures as sails
And crossed oceans of opportunity,
Still as mill-ponds,
Rowing, always rowing,
Showing no signs of flagging
Beneath ever changing colours.
Full of failure, primed with pride,
Fixed to take a lion-tamer for a bride
And woo her with my wounded paws
Upon her knees, if she should please
To pick the pricking thorns from out my side.

When I was young I could begin my sentences
Without "when I was young".

I'm no great cook, could I be Scott?
Or just a lost and lowly sot
Without a jot of jotted lines and dots
To press me a forget-me-not?

I was a bored explorer when I found you:
An amateur cartographer,
With a shaky hand and blurred vision,
I tried to scale your face
But my placement lacked precision.
I was snow-blind to your behind,
Mistook your skin, at times, for mine,
Heeded nary a warning sign,
Did my level best not to depress, but to impress,
Confused your mountains with breasts.

I stood and waited by a frozen lake,
Making out mirage mistakes,
Blanketed in yesteryears' pelt,
Trying to focus on feelings felt,
Waiting for the footprints I saw
To either thaw and melt or fill:
These paths to overgrow,
These ill inklings to kill.

I take comfort in cardigans.
"If you want me I'm your country."

But every ashen emperor,
Is forever saying sorry.

Am I a Roman?
Abusing and confusing an existing infrastructure?
Am I the quarryman? Are you the quarry?
If I straighten your communications,
Between your axes and projections,
Will I be able, then, to navigate
The surface of your skin in straight directions?
In the pools that fools call eyes
Will I see my own reflections?

Are you now my land?
Could I raise my flag on you?
Or are you always someone else's country?
Am I only passing through?
Am I Gypsy or a Jew?

Am I making light of you?
Can I do right by you?

I'd like to be complicit in your upkeep:
Patrol your borders, see your sights,
Because you keep me up all night
Even when your lights are out
Or when they're on but no one's home,
When your sacred rivers have run dry,
Or your pleasure domes are overgrown.
I'd like to feel if there's some upset
To your environmental make-up
That it's partly down to my faults
And I'm due some kind of shake-up,
And I'm learning all your ways
And your many moods amaze me.

I try not to let it phase me
But I know I've got so far to go.

When you breathe a certain way
You blow me away.
When you laugh your loudest
You shake me to my bones.
When I miss you,
When I cannot kiss you,
When you block the signal on my phone,
You're as here and gone as a midnight train.
When you cry you're a monsoon,
And when the rains have come and gone
Sometimes the floods remain
(On the plane, in the main,)
And a rot sets in to everything
And I fear what was further than far
Has now come near.

When I lament the many eyes,
Some perhaps less green than mine,
That wondered at your landscape,
Ventured through its scenes sublime,
Before our climates climbed together,
And our twin breaths intertwined:
When I curse the tardiness that echoes
In my expedition's every hollow rhyme,
I can only bring to mind,
Can just remind myself a second time,
That only measurements exist in time.
Not moments, momentous or otherwise,
Not flutters of the heart
Or hard-luck lullabies,
Only arrivals and departures –
Be they early, be they late –
Only numbers, units, digits, dates,
Not the irregular contractions of
A muscle pumping blood,
Only grudges, greed and graves.
Not love.

The Gypsies - Jean-Paul Clébert

Gypsies: you can't live with 'em...

It's rare that I finish a work of non-fiction, let alone one that was written before I was born.

Charles Duff's translation of Jean-Paul Clébert's 1961 attempt at a cultural and historical explanation of the much-mythologised Gypsy peoples of Europe is one such rare example.

Even though it took me WEEKS if not MONTHS, I am glad I read 'The Gypsies'.

Here's the opening paragraph of a much more of-the-time review, the first page of which I found online, but which is sadly uncredited. I will comment on it by way of arriving at my own opinion:

"I have found it difficult to review this book fairly. Clébert is obviously very dedicated to his subject, perhaps too deeply involved in it."1

"His researches have been painstaking and exhaustive. But the book is very badly organised and the writing obscure, sometimes to the point of incomprehensibility."2

1: Presumably the reviewer is referring to the often-brought-up concern of Clébert's regarding discrimination against the Gypsies in Europe through the ages. In recording the people and their way of life - noting the differences between their own moral code and 'ours', particularly - he often seems to be a wilful apologist for them, and while he seeks to de-mythologise, he is clearly very attracted to them as a people, not least their women, about whom he is often very complimentary.

2: I think this is unfair: the first few chapters (reasonably described in this review as "the best") are historical and chronological. What follows is a series of chapters focusing on customs, trades, practices etc. and as a study on their way of life I can't imagine a more digestible presentation outside of fictionalising the content or at the very least arranging or framing the whole with some quasi-historical exploration of the Gypsy 'journey', which would in itself imply a more accurate knowledge of the historical aspect of the question than is (or certainly was) available. Oh, and, there are a couple of whimsical sentences near the beginning of the book, but only a couple: MOST OF THIS IS SOLID FACT AFTER (SLIGHTLY LESS) SOLID FACT.

Anyway, while I always feel non-fiction books of this nature descend into monumental lists after a while, there was much of interest in this noble tome and I would recommend it to anyone who wanted to know more about the Gypsy people, who - let's face it - don't tend to get a look in as far as school history syllabi go, except for a brief cameo as the Jews' understudies in the holocaust.

Particularly worthy of note, for pub quizzes at leas, is the assertion of Clébert that gypsies fall into three main groups: Kalderash, Gitanos and Manush.

While he does tend to sweep all the spares under the Kalderash umbrella, it is worth noting that the terms 'Roma' or 'Romany' , (which are NOT related to or derived from the word 'Romanian'*), are umbrella terms above these three, so the ethnic and cultural variation between, say, an Andalucian Gitana from north-Africa and an eastern-European Hungarian Kalderash Gypsy, could well be as much as you'd expect between a Swede and a Turk.

Although they may both smell bad, eat hedgehogs, sell you a shit horse, steal your watch or piss on your cabbage patch.

(I'm not being racist - these are facts!)

Particularly of interest to myself was the section on Gypsy folklore (because that's what I'm particularly interested in), so if you ever get a chance to read up on the medical demonology of the Gypsies of Transylvania (pp183-186 in my '67 Penguin edition pictured above) do it! Do it right away!

It's full of sentences like this:

"[The demon] advised the king to cook fish in an ass's milk and then put some drops of this love potion into the sexual organ of his wife while she was asleep... Nine days after this embrace, Ana [his wife] gave birth to a female demon, Lilyi the Viscous - her body was that of a fish with a man's head, from each side of which hung nine sticky filaments."

Gross!

*As far as I've gathered it, Romania comes from Roman (Latin), meaning, well... 'Roman', and 'Roma' comes from 'Rom' (some form of Gypsy - I forget) meaning 'people'.

I've lived a peaceful life here though the winters are so bleak

Josephine Esmerelda Part 4

My mother was a gypsy. Did I mention that? Her troupe used to flow through this place seasonally, passing south in autumn and north in spring, like a flock of wild geese.

They caught bears in mountains far away, pulled their teeth and made them dance for the common folk in the villages that welcomed or at least tolerated their presence, dragged them along in their caravan trains, chained to the backs of carts, squinting in the sun.

I saw one flung into a ditch when I was a girl: it was old and its muscles were wasted; its joints jarred from dancing like a man and its jaws ached from a lack of biting. It had given up being a bear. They left it there to rot in the sun and it lay down at once, happy to do so, shutting its eyes and not lifting a paw to swat the fat flies that buzzed ever closer.

I don’t know why my father slept with her, or rather how it came to be, but it was a long winter that year – we had snow stuck to the ground for months, so I’m told; the gypsies returned in a frosty, timid spring and remained until the summer was nigh; she left me on his doorstep without so much as a name. Perhaps I wasn’t dark enough to cope with the outdoor life. Perhaps they had enough mouths to feed: too many girls that year, not enough boys: too many chiromancers not enough bear leaders. Perhaps I was a gift. Or a curse.

I liked to think I was one of twins and that my mother had raised my brother or – better still – my sister as a gypsy. Perhaps I would even meet this sibling one day. Perhaps they would read my palm and find that a horizontal line ending beneath my magpie finger was a perfect match for the one on their own hand. Perhaps they would see themselves appear as a courtier in my cards. Perhaps we would simply be identical, and both think we had met our doppelganger.

My father named me Josephine Esmerelda after a song he’d learned in his days at sea; it was a song about a gypsy girl who was murdered. There are many versions in existence across the continent and the name changes from one country to the next, but the story is more-or-less the same.

Boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, boy murders girl.

It’s a story as old as time.

As is the way in most of these songs, there seemed to be no good reason for the murder; one supposes the interest of the song lay in guessing the motive for the deed, or merely a wilful fascination with the macabre.

At least it was a fairly romantic murder ballad.

I had long hoped that if I must die at all, I would be true to my name and I would die for love.

* * *

“You are dreaming again. You are always dreaming, you lazy bitch.”

It was Rafa.

“Must I do everything?”

He shoved past me with a basket of stained cloths for the boiling pot.

“The wedding party will be arriving in two hours and you haven’t even uncorked the bottles yet,” he went on, without turning to look at me.

I never saw the point in uncorking wine until I was ready to drink it, but it was one of many fancy ways he had brought back from his very brief stay in the city some years ago.

I had no interest in the wedding; a good-for-nothing local man and a country bumpkin who he’d been rutting since she was allowed out of doors of an evening: what a fine couple they made. She was as simple and as honest and as good with conversation as the ewes that grazed the hillsides. She even had a permanently sheepish look about her as though she was constantly prepared to apologise for her very existence. She was pretty, if you go in for that sort of thing – blonde, soft, round and small – but after she’d popped out a few lambs for him to provide for she’d lose her looks and she’d make a pretty dire housewife. Her father had spoiled her.

And him? Well, he wasn’t the worst of men, but he wasn’t even in competition with the best. I knew him well enough, as did many girls about the town; he’d never come to much. He’d certainly never leave, which was one of the many reasons I was not sad to see him snatched away by this out-of-town beauty ten years his junior.

Besides, I could think of nothing but him. Since that afternoon by the pool I had thought of no other man. He was strong and gentle and beautiful and simple and honest and earnest and eager and warm. And he was mine, mine, mine.

He came to me in the town every other night now. It was not what I’d expected from one like him; in fact, he was not quite what I had thought he would be at all. I’d expected a distant but self-sufficient being in all aspects: a strong and independent man who wanted everything on his own terms – though I expected to be able to mould them to suit mine, naturally.

But he was so easily moved. He wanted to be with me whenever I would allow it. He was like a puppy; his youth astounded me. He didn’t really look it, but he was three years younger than me, and it was unheard of in our parts for women to go with boys, though it was thought nothing of the other way around.

He thought nothing of it, though, evidently, and neither did I; I’d had a few younger men before him.

He wasn’t a boy though, at least, not in age: but his world was so small and perfect that he seemed so, and I felt it a particular privilege to be allowed in. He was all that I wanted, and he wanted me. I knew the feeling wouldn’t last, it never does, but I hoped – in my pragmatic way – that in its absence would arrive a workable truce between my own ambition and his own humble expectations from life.

He was coming tonight.

We would meet in the washroom at the back of the bar, where the tablecloths hung and the empty bottles were stacked in crates to be returned to the vineyards. It smelled damp in there, but not unpleasant.

He wanted to make wine, he said.

What a strange and aimless ambition it seemed to me; there was enough wine in the world already.


* * *

My father was a typical local man. He was born here, he lived here and he died here. Somewhere along the way he sailed at least seven seas and had four different children with two local women and my own nomadic mother. I had another half-brother somewhere not too far away who was older and even less interested in my existence than Rafa, and I had a half-sister who was older still and died before I was born.

After his days in the navy were done, and his youth became a memory he would never truly share, my father worked on the market in town, but had no real trade: he bought and sold whatever people wanted to sell to him or buy from him.

He was kind on some occasions and cruel on others. For my fifth birthday he gave me a beautiful clay donkey, crafted and painted in a faraway seaside town he said he had once seen. His eyes glazed over as he traced his finger along its back, and from his mouth escaped a few words, unchecked by the prison of his mind: just enough to spark my infant curiosity, but not enough to really paint a picture of the young man he must surely once have been.

Before the year was done he’d come home drunk and kicked open the door to my room, roughly hoisting me from my bed he’d sung an unrecognisable song, punctuated by hiccups and coughs; swinging me around, he crashed into a shelf, upending it and breaking all the things I’d kept on there, but for an oversized seashell that landed in my lap as I landed in his.

I was both half-asleep and startled. And he held the shell in one hand and rocked back and forth, slowly; he cried and hugged me to his reeking chest, breathing moist, wine-soaked sobs into my thick, dark hair.

I didn’t cry; I was used to his ways and could feel no anger, only pity: pity for the poor wretch who recognised nothing of himself in the man he had become, and thought that nobody, least of all his own infant daughter, had any idea of the fact.

I could say he was a good man, I suppose, but what would that mean? Men are men. Women can be good or bad, but most men seem not to know the difference; they exist somewhere inbetween.

My father was one whom the world happened to. Despite his seemingly adventurous youth, he was dealt blows and he accepted them as they came. He was not one to do the dealing.

He had a tattoo – a single tattoo – on his forearm. I watched him staring at it in secret (my watching, his staring) many a time. He seemed not to know from whence the ever-fading image had come.

It was a mermaid, and not a very good one.

Rafa was bad though. Rafa scared me like dad had never done. Even back then, when he used to be nice to me occasionally, I always knew there was something wrong with him, and that the part that was wrong was the part he chose to pursue: that was to become him or he was to become that.

He embraced all the classically-boyish cruelties of youth: he was a bully, when he could escape being bullied; he was a snitch, when he could escape retribution; he kicked dogs when their owners weren’t looking, and cried like a baby when they bit him.

I never knew his mother. Neither did he, I suppose; perhaps that was the problem. Boys cannot do without their mothers. They shouldn’t have to. It isn’t fair.

This was my only concern about my man.

Did I tell you his name?

His name was Franco.

A good name.

Myths of Creation, # 456

"One day God decided to make a man. He took a sour lime, made a statue and took it to bake in his oven. Then he went away for a walk and ended by forgetting his work. When he returned the man was burned, quite black. This was the ancestor of the Negroes. God began again but this time he was so afraid to let time slip by that he opened the oven too soon; the man was still quite pale. This was the ancestor of the Whites. God tried a third experiment, which this time succeeded; the last man was baked to a turn, well browned, a nice tan-colour. This was the ancestor of the Gypsies."

From Jean-Paul-Clébert's The Gypsies.

My Weary Hands, They Tremble, As They Scoop The Apple Crumble Into The Same Bowl I've Been Using All These Years

Disclaimer: part 3 in its orgiginal form was LOST when my hard drive bust a couple of months ago. Finally, here is a repalcement. Do not read if you are Dave Paul Nixon because then you will get very bored during our scheduled writing group. Earlier parts in draft form ar available by clicking the relevant tags at the foot of the piece.

Josephine Esmerelda: Part 3

Dissatisfied with the notion of waiting a whole week without seeing him again, I decided I would have to go to him. After all, he rarely came to me, and only when I was at work.

It was a Tuesday; I arose earlier than usual that morning. I wasn’t to start work at the bar until the evening shift, but the sun was already up and – having left my window open all night – its light and its warmth stirred me as I’d hoped they would.

And yet when I reached the mountain path the breeze had picked up and I almost regretted that I hadn’t worn sleeves. The bees were achime and their drone was a constant gauze through which my thoughts filtered. The thickets of rosemary gave up their sweet overpowering smell and the warmth and cold together prickled my skin as though the shadows and light that flickered on my bare arms were themselves responsible for the queer sensation that flowed through me that morning.

I’d found blood on my sheets when I woke, I recall, and put them in to soak for the maid to deal with later. We has a maid, Rafa and I, though that was no rare luxury in our town, and we lived as simply as most.

Turning things over in my mind that morning, I wasn’t quite sure what I would do when I found the farmstead where my man lived. It was some miles away and I hadn’t been that far along the mountain since I was a little girl and my father was alive. I remember Rafa had come with us and he was a nice enough boy in those days, if rather aloof. He was so much older than me, so even then we were not quite friends.

I didn’t remember what the place looked like, but there’d be no mistaking it; a map I found in father’s old bureau showed it was the only building in the area, and I doubted that had changed in the last few decades.

The path ascended a steep and rocky mountainside for the first half mile but soon relaxed and became a series of inclines and level, gravely ground that skirted the peaks: narrow but well-trod and littered with droppings. This was not the way he brought his cart and goat, of course, but there were some living wild amongst the ovines and their leavings made up an equal part of the litter.

I still didn’t know his name. We hadn’t spoken for long at our first meeting.
The sun soon rose enough to overcome the highest of the rosemary and gorse bushes and when I stopped to take some water-wine and shake the stones from my walking shoes I no longer cared that I had no sleeves. He always wore sleeves, but rolled them halfway up his forearms.

It wasn’t the usual way of things for me to spend my morning off in this way. More often than not I’d be sleeping off a hangover when the maid arrived, and if the weather was clement I’d go and smoke down at the river before lunch time, then to the market – which was smaller on weekdays, but stood every day except Sunday – to buy groceries. It felt good to have what felt like a purpose to my proceedings this once; perhaps I could get used to it, I thought. Although, then it would be a routine in itself – either way, the change was welcome.

Something that anyone who has worked behind a bar will know, but is by no means a secret; there is only a narrow window between pouring wine too slowly and pouring it too quickly. That Saturday afternoon I poured his wine as slowly as I could, watching him watch the ruby waves crashing around and slowing to a swirl as the depth rose and the colours settled.

When he drank he didn’t let it dwell in his mouth at all; he dragged it back mechanically and squeezed it down the bump of his throat. I found this particularly odd as everybody drank the wine in our area. Though it was commonplace it was the favourite drink of all – and he drank like one who either didn’t enjoy it or didn’t know how to enjoy it. I wondered if he’d drunk wine at all before but soon shook the thought from my head. That was almost impossible, and anyway, it wasn’t as though it mattered.

I stopped when I spied his home, took one of my pre-rolled cigarettes from my bag and lit a match. I watched the building from afar as I smoked, as though I could somehow unravel the mysteries and answer all my questions just by examining the building he lived in and nothing more. All I could make out, though, was a typical country dwelling: a large building surrounded by a low rectangular stone wall with a paint-peeled wooden gate that stood twice as tall as the boundary.

He came out shirtless some time before noon. I’d expected him much sooner and I’d drunk all the water-wine I’d brought with me, eaten all the bread and smoked most of the cigarettes. I saw him stretch and (I am fairly sure) yawn as though he had only recently woken.

Of course my first thought was that there was somebody with him. Why else would a smallholder like himself wake at such an hour?

It took him some thirty minutes of staring into the distance, scratching his beard and pacing around his yard, in and out of the house like a cuckoo from a clock (a very slow clock), before he finally came out with pack and stick to usher his goats out of the narrow gate and up towards the mountains. He would join my path some way down: about a quarter of a mile.

I watched the glimpses of goat-white hide as the beasts passed between the gaps in the spiky fog of gorse and rosemary bushes. Soon I heard the faint tinkling of their bells inbetween the bickering of birds and the hum of the honey bees.

I hadn’t necessarily decided to follow him around on his route – but when I saw the place, nestled in that open valley as it was, I didn’t see how I could approach it unseen. Even as I imagine doing so I realised how ridiculous it was even to consider going to his house and watching him through his windows. Was that not the type of thing men did and that we mocked them for?

It was much better that we should meet up here if we must meet at all.

Though that was not part of my plan.

It was about ten minutes before I realised he was herding his goats my way. I heard the tinkling and bleating growing clearer, though I couldn’t yet see them as I’d remained short of the incline that came before the downward zigzag to his valley in case this very thing happened.

I could have run – or walked swiftly – in the other direction and outpaced him, but I wasn’t ready to be thwarted in my intentions yet. It wasn’t often that I got up before I needed to, or that I stood in wait for men on mountainside paths; I had come here for a purpose: to learn about this man – my man – and to find out if he was worthy.

What was I hoping to discover? Only that he was all that I hoped.

I sank back down into the bushes, scratching my shoulders on the low twigs. There is always somewhere to hide on a mountain, until you reach the top. That was a saying in our parts, and one of the few I remember thinking to be true.

The soil was dry but soft on that slope and the many gnarled roots gave me easy handholds to manoeuvre myself into a position from which I was sure I wouldn’t be seen. When they were safely past I’d start to follow. The breeze came across the path, sweeping up the mountain from the east, so it wouldn’t betray me as long as it remained so.

Trembling a little, I wondered what I’d say if he discovered me there. But I hadn’t thought of anything suitable before I heard his own footsteps approaching, along with the lighter clattering of his herd.

As I saw the first of his goats totter into view I could already hear him breathing. Part of me hoped he was the type to talk to himself or sing when he was alone, but he was as private with his thoughts when alone as he was in public. He swung his stick when he reached the top of the hill. He was wearing a thin band around his forehead to keep his long dark hair from his eyes – no cap today, what gesture would he make if he needed to greet me, then?

He squinted at the sun and descended the path with his goats before and around him. I counted eight.

As his big boots clomped by not far from where I crouched one of his beasts was curious enough to investigate the smell of woman that came from the undergrowth and it trotted into the bush, thrusting its snout down towards me and snorting as the prickles that bothered its bristly skin. I saw myself reflected through a shard of sunlight that hit its horizontal pupil and I blew sharply on its wet nose.

The goat sneezed and hopped backwards, half-tripping itself via the back legs and then clattering up the path and away to catch up with the convoy.

I had to stop myself from giggling, though they were probably far enough away by now I just sat still, breathing in and out through my nose and holding a hand to my mouth while the other gripped tight the twisted trunk of a rosemary bush. He hadn’t spotted me once. That was good, now I could follow from a safe distance and see where he went. I only had to worry about him – the goats obviously wouldn’t give me away.

They make fine cheese but poor spies.

The only way for him to go now was around to the path I had taken from the town. I followed at a safe distance, which was irritatingly far, given the nature of the path.

Retracing my steps I grew tired. I did not have to walk fast to keep sight of him in the distance, but I had not rested now for almost an hour, and he showed no signs yet of stopping.

We were nearing the fork in the path that descended to my quarter of the town. Surely he was not bringing all these goats to market? If he had some business in town he would no doubt have left them at home or set them to wondering nearby.

But he did not break off at the path to the town; he followed the route around the south side of the mountain, and I sped up to follow more closely, knowing that there were more hiding places on this wider and more level section of footpath. He ascended the old cart track to the abandoned quarry, his goats clip-clopping in his wake.
Ah! He is going to the pool to water the beasts, I thought.

Only a quarter of a mile up the overgrown cart track was a small branch of the old quarry that had long been abandoned when it became cheaper to import the stone from the southern countries. This part had not lasted long anyway, as they uncovered part of the underground stream and it filled up the beginnings of the pit they had dug.

The sound of the water was louder than I remembered as I made my approach. The sun was beating down upon my shoulders and the backs of my legs so I was grateful for the shade thrown down by the bushes that grew out the top of the rocks on either side of the path. He had gone down to the pool, that much was certain – none of his goats lingered around the ledge at the top, so I could – if I was careful – get a closer than usual vantage point from which to observe his actions. Although I would have to be careful not to be caught out when he began retracing his steps, for this was a dead-end route.

The rushing water grew louder still: eclipsing my thoughts and the sound of my breathing. I could no longer discern the sound of him or his goats through the slow din of the torrent. Was this the old mountain stream? It couldn’t be.
With a hand on the cold, sunless rock I leant around and peered down to the pool, and there I saw the cause of the commotion.

The river that used to trickle down through the rocks in numerous routes and wet the wall above the pool had somehow diverted itself – or been diverted – into a single steady flow that emerged from a hole some way above the basin.

There he was, stood knee-deep in the pool, watched by a few of his goats, ignored by the rest, completely naked, head back, eyes shut, taking the full force of the water on his face. His hair was plastered to the side of his head and his beard poured down onto his broad chest. He had a bit of a round stomach, which surprised me, but apart from that his body was firm and well-defined.

I descended the steep and slippy path to the pool, keeping a hand on the rock but trying not to take my eyes off his body as I went. A goat came to greet me and only then, when it bleated softly at my offered hand, did he open his eyes and see that he had a visitor. I stood beside his neatly-piled clothes and shoes and lifted my hands, removing the leather strap from around my neck I dropped my bag to the floor.

The noise of the water had become a new kind of silence. He stepped forward, but I put out my hand and he stopped.

I removed my own clothes with ease, stepping out of my shoes, finally, and slipping from the constraints of my thin undergarments. He stood and stared, his face betraying nothing, though his mouth was open just a little. It was the rest of him that gave me an indication of his mood.

He shivered slightly as I lay my hands on his arms: the water felt deliciously cool around my ankles and calves and the sun embraced my bare back and behind.

It soon became apparent that he did not know the first thing about women.

So I decided to teach him, and he was quick to learn.

Henna My Hair To Forget About You

Dyeing my hair again and - by extension - my face again, my hands again, my lungs again, my towel again, as I do every payday if I can.

I like having an unnatural colour for hair and I like that 90% of the time I forget that other people will know as soon as they meet me that this isn't my real hair and that I must dye it and therefore they'll immediately judge me and stuff.

But I don't enjoy the experience.

I enjoy the ritual I suppose; I don't have many rituals: not monthly ones, specifically, at any rate. But I hate the smell and the taste of bleach.

Controversial views, as always, here on the blog of me, Alexander Velky.

Bleach is for people who don't have time, who opt for the immediacy of the chemical world. And although it isn't very, very cheap, it is readily available and perfectly reasonable at under a tenner a month.

In Prague, during what if I was a twat (your call) and if it had lasted twelve months (as opposed to six) would be called my gap year, I used to wake up some days at 5, cake my whole head in home-mixed henna, wrap my whole head in plastic, poke some breathing holes with a screwdriver and lie back, arms crossed on my plastic-wrapped chest (yes, I dyed that hair too), reposed like some kind of religious person from somewhere East of Clacton On Sea but West of Tuvalu, and I'd daydream, then actually dream, about the wonderful postmodern novels I'd complete as soon as I got home and felt ready to distill these incomparably enlightening experiences I was having in this foreign country, so far from my comfort zone, in a near-airtight windowless cupboard on a thin mattress inside an old wardrobe beneath a rumpled gaffa-taped picnic blanket, with my Matalan lumberjack coat as a pillow.

Yes, prying onlooker, you are right to feel awestruck and insignificant. Yay, what things I've seen.

And it wasn't quite a mind-altering near-death, mescaline-orgy on a hot air balloon over the Nazca lines, but, you know - it was my extended foreign holiday, sort-of-gap-year, sort-of job thing.

And I made the least of it.

And I miss the width of time I had to do simple, pointless things like dye my hair in a comfortable manner, and not burn my skin, eyes, lungs &c.

Yours, begrudgingly, having wasted only half the time before I have to get in the shower,

A. (The) Velky.

This Week's Blog:

There is no blog this week.

It Was A Night To Remember

It only took five minutes for me to part with thirty quid in exchange for a slightly depleted looking eighth of either skunk or weed – buggered if I know the difference.

Every single time I’d made an equivalent purchase so far in my life it had cost £20 for the same amount, but I made allowances for the credit crunch, and the relative price of The Big Issue, and surmised that everything was now 50% more expensive and slightly worse than it used to be. That’s fine. That’s just what happens.

I skinned up outside a pub off Carnaby Street, pretending a half-drunk Abbot ale was mine until I was done, then necking it after a moment’s deliberation. I wandered up and down historic Carnaby Street looking at the shops I didn’t understand, or care to, and the people looking at them whom I didn’t understand, or care to. I felt the air begin to grow cooler as the weed went to my head to wrestle with the resident alcohol, and I soon detected a wave of what can only be described as happiness by somebody for whom it has come to be the closest thing they experience to the aforementioned.

I was, at the very least, content.

And stoned.

And drunk.

And close to skint.

I realised then that I’d not eaten anything, and while I’m not that bothered about eating and it’s basically for fat people, and adults, and children, and dogs, I was suddenly struck by a niggling suspicion that a complete lack of sustenance might in some way affect my sexual performance.

I mean, it wasn’t like I was on the fucking X-Factor or any hilariously convoluted sex-based show with a similar, pun-based name, and I hadn’t come to Soho with the intention of sexually satisfying a hooker, or even myself, if it came to it.

But I was terrified of premature ejaculation. And alcohol-induced impotence. And being sick. I’d never had sex but I’d thought about it, and most of the time when I was thinking about it I was thinking about all the things that could go wrong.

She couldn’t laugh at how small my penis was (if it was, which I wasn’t sure about but thought it safer to assume it was), not if I was paying her to do things to it. She couldn’t, could she? Well, she might, but I wouldn’t care because it’s not like she’d tell anyone I knew: not unless I was really delving into the realms of the fantastically masochistic. But it wouldn’t count as sex if I just turned up and spaffed myself, I was pretty sure about that. Nor would it count if I turned up and couldn’t get an erection.

So I went to a newsagent’s and bought some salt and vinegar McCoy’s and a StarBar.

Hah.

Yes, I did, didn’t I?

And I bought some more fags: more Marlboro menthols to mintify my breath after all the weed. I wasn’t sure if weed was a sexually stimulating smell but I knew that everyone but me got off on the clinical stench of mint. Stupid mint. I even got some Wrigley’s Extra. And only wankers chew gum.

And I got out the rest of my money.

And I knew that would happen.

I was armed to the teeth when I headed back toward Brewer Street and nonchalantly entered a phone box I’d passed earlier, got out my wallet, surreptitiously collected a couple of the scattered cards while lifting the receiver, checking for the inevitable absence of a dialling tone, feigning exasperation, and sauntering on with a flick of the coat tails.

I had a choice of a few: I forget the exact details, but they were all nearby, and all looked equally unpromising. I chose the one that came first in the alphabet.

* * *

Behind an entrance as lowly as any inner-city, paint-peeling street-door to flats-above-shop: up a long-ago-carpeted staircase kept dark with a disappointingly-not-red, low-wattage bulb, but not enough to hide scuffs, stains and mould: behind a second door as faceless as any undressed, faceless manikin in an undressed shop window: through a grotty, cramped lobby with smoke-blackened woodchip and scant lamplight: past a big silent man in a sort-of suit smoking a sort-of cigar or cigarillo between thick fingers beginning to wrinkle who must be Greek though I didn’t even check: by a gum-chewing receptionist with a beehive and her face recreated in the violence of violets and puces on an egg in a gallery somewhere in a building more grand: through a hall narrower than the hall through which I hauled Dyer’s Keyboard with little help from his weirdly thin fingers when first I moved to London what seems like and now is several years ago: up another flight of stairs too unremarkable now to here be remarked on what with the constant awareness of the pumping of muscles and the liquid rushing through valves, in one door, out the other: and past pictures of anything, rural scenes, black and white beaches, funnily-dressed personages possibly now deceased, and a flower, and an antique piece of spinning equipment and I don’t know if I remember this or if I dreamed this or if I’m dreaming this, but I know:

I sat on the bed and felt the shape of the springs impressing themselves through the thin and lumpen duvet.

In my hand was a glass of what I was told was champagne.

On the desk was a bottle of cava.

My girl, or lady, or whatever I was meant to call her, or think of her as, had gone to freshen up.

I couldn’t even think of the word I had used before. The word I’d used for her, or them.

“What do you do?” I’d asked, before thinking what I was asking, after she’d asked me and I’d lied.

“I’m an actress,” she said

I felt like I was existing somewhere just outside of an Al Stewart song and somewhere just inside a short story by one of those American authors I’d never got around to reading.

She was about thirty, I suppose, and didn’t necessarily look like she’d had a lot of sex with a lot of different men for money.

She was very thin, and not a bit like the Victorian wenches I’d seen in numerous films and or period dramas, and subsequently masturbated over. Not a bit like.

She was English; she had a distinctive northern accent but I couldn’t quite place it, and it bugged me whenever she spoke, which was about three times so far.

I had imagined she’d be eastern European, for some reason.

I had hoped she’d gone a step further and been Russian. I’m not sure why.

I had not seen another man leave from this room, where I had found her waiting, as I’d been instructed after handing over a sum I’d rather not disclose.

I heard somebody else with heavy footfalls descending the stairs while I sat in silence waiting for her to return from the bathroom, wherever that was.

There were many doors in this place: all of them shut, some of them, presumably, locked.

I hadn’t heard anybody having sex yet.

I could hear surprisingly little except the muffled sound of the city outside: the shouts and the sirens and the same tapestry of discomfort whose caterwaul followed the fingers of the clock.

I wanted to open a window but had been forbidden. It looked like they had been rendered unopenable by some amateur carpentry anyhow. There were only glimpses of the outside: the view itself was deliberately obscured.

I stood and felt my whole body trembling slightly. Like a dog, I thought: either excited or worried. I knew not which. Perhaps both.

Removing my long, leather coat and going to hang it on the back of the door, I felt the inside pockets and drew out the Polaroid photograph of Emily Dover sipping a tequila sunrise in what I thought must be a bar in Bournemouth.

A rush of grief assaulted my senses: from somewhere in the back of my brain it blitzkrieged my brow and battered at the walls of my skull like a hangover. My nose twitched and felt hot. My eyes itched.

And I didn’t remember lying there with her and how her skin felt about mine.

It wasn’t meant to be.

And I didn’t try to replace her body with that of this older woman who was coming to the room any time now to render services for which I'd already paid.

It had to be.

And the inevitability of it, and the impending presence of it as a moment – a point on a line – did not terrify me.

It was.

But the photograph did make me cry. I felt it physically, externally, creeping down my cheek, before I knew of it in any other way.

I choked back a laugh at my own expense and stuffed the photograph back in my coat pocket, strode back over to the desk swinging the coat back over and threading my arms through its holes, downed the champagne and refilled it with the cava and downed the champagne and refilled it with the cava and felt sick and filled it once more and went back to the door and turned to look at the depressed double bed and wondered how it looked so neglected and so abandoned and burped loudly and expecting to find it locked form outside I opened the door easily, stepping swiftly down the stairs: quick steps one at a time beneath the low-wattage bulbs and I think I heard a gasped cry of submission from behind a thin-enough wall but I didn’t stop to think because my head was full of flash-flood sobriety telling me flight, flight, flight, not fight, not fuck, not faint: just fly, Jamie, fly, and we’ll say no more about it.

Trannyshack

Given that the last two parts of this chapter ended with the word ‘brothel’ it seems positively fraudulent to continue with this recollection and not describe to you the inner workings of a Soho sex-shop. But, you know, an actual sex shop: where you exchange money for sex, as opposed to lube, handcuffs, anal beads (whatever they are) and lorry-loads of porn.

The problem is I’d be skipping a lot of the evening if I went straight to the brothel, and it’s the retelling that helps me to remember. Right now I only have flashes of dimly lit wallpaper and glimpses of unsettlingly-regular urban bustle through thick, net curtains, and the smell of so much sweat smothered by so much incense: sex smeared with scented soaps.

And the usually feeling – the exact same feeling I usually get – of being alone in close proximity with a human female and sensing that something is expected from me by way of conversation; I am not the alpha male, I cannot be silent and sexy and cold and commanding and introverted and intriguing or any combination of the above with the more human ‘qualities’ in which I already excel, such as doubt, cowardice and a blind and mischievous tendency towards self-destruction.

In the interests of the latter I managed to relieve myself of that heavy burden, my fiftysomething pounds in her majesty’s paper money.

When I got to the Piccadilly end of Brewer Street for the third time that evening and the light began to fail, I turned to the Big Issue-selling trannie on the corner for inspiration. Remember those Bounty adverts? With the two burly biker chaps dressed in drag? Who had stubble and everything? Yeah, sort of like the brunette, but much taller. But ever so nice:

“Hello, dear, can I interest you in a Big Issue this evening?”

She/he spoke like a kindly grandmother, but one who had smoked fifty a day for fifty years.

“Sure,” I said. It had La Roux or Lady Gaga or Little Boots or somebody on the cover: a girl with an impractical haircut and a keyboard. It was that half of 2009. It was only a pound, though, and I didn’t have to read it.

“By the way, you don’t know where I can get any weed do you?”

The trannie grinned toothily at me with his/her lipstick-caked maw: “If you buy another couple of magazines I might.”

This pissed me off: “Look, I’m not even going to read this one, trannie, I just want some weed. Come on – you got any weed?”

“The price has gone up – four mags. For four mags, you get your weed.”

Scowling, I handed over two two pound coins and folded my arms expectantly.

“Here you go then, dear:” she/he handed me four more magazines with the unidentified electro-chanteuse posing identically on each cover.

“I don’t want them.”

She/he scowled too: she/he was better at it, being at least fifty and having a more rubbery face. The eyebrows were drawn on, mind:

“Neither do I – you have them. If I’m seen taking money without givin’ out magazines I might lose me pitch. And I like this little pitch I do. Best in the city, it is.”

She/he scratched his/her gingery-greying permed mass of hair, or rather, the head beneath it. I had no idea whether the hair was real, but accepted the offered magazines, begrudgingly adding them to the other one, folded and held in place under my arm by the satisfying friction created by the sleeve of a leather garment.

“Thanks,” I said, with years’ worth of practiced sarcasm fed through my teeth like garlic through a press.

“Don’t mention it, dear,” said the trannie, then increased the existing feeling of being inside some kind of point and click computer game by telling me to go back the way I had come along Brewer Street and take a left before I got to Madame JoJos, loitering outside what was formerly the Soho Revue Bar (and home to Trannyshack – the trannie told me, with a hint of a tear in his/her eye – until it fell victim of the credit crunch, much the same as she/he might have done, I speculated) until I saw a Jamaican guy (not a trannie) with a black baseball cap and a predominantly white Wu Wear hoodie with a large yellow ‘W’ on it walk by.

This was Zini or Zeeny. Chances are he would call me a skunk eight times while eyeing me warily as he passed, but whether he did this or not I was to alert his attention and mention that I’d been sent his way by Sali Mali The Taffy Tranny (his/her words – not mine; I hadn’t even detected a Welsh accent emanating from that gruff cigarette-ravaged gravel pit of a voice box).

I’m not sure whether Zini/Zeeny exchanged these tip-offs for Big Issue purchases, but I somehow doubt it.

I dumped mine after two people simultaneously approached me with the intention of purchasing, and then, walking away, seeing them staring at the rolled up magazines protruding from the bin, I realised what a fool I’d been to turn down what could have been two of the easiest pounds of my life.

Sitting on the ground in the narrow passageway opposite the depressing sight of a shut-down trannie venue in which, only last year, I’d seen the hairiest singer-songwriter I’d ever admired, Mr Wojtek Godzisz, debuting live tracks from a forthcoming album that was still forthcoming, I felt pangs of sadness flow through me with the menthol-tinged tang of chemically-abetted tobacco smoke.

Then came the furtive yet instantly-audible mutter of a voice like honey with wasps swimming around in it:

“Skunk, weed, skunk, skunk, weed, skunk-weed, skunk &c.”

And I knew I was on my way.

Patrolling Brewer Street On Thursday Evening

The next I remember I’m patrolling Brewer Street: up then down, then up again, like a whore's drawers, if you will. I definitely want sex at some point this evening, but I’m pretty drunk now so I also – more immediately – want to score some weed, and possibly some crystal meth, (whatever that is), or perhaps even something glamorous that I’d normally sneer at, like coke, which isn’t a particularly exciting drug as everybody knows but might do the job of making me feel richer and sexier than I am at least for an hour or so until (as in my experience) it makes my nose start bleeding and makes me feel like I have a cold.

I have about seventy pounds left and it suddenly occurs to me that I don’t know how much sex actually is, when translated to money. Surely it depends on the quality of the sex? I’m not sure I give much of a fuck (ha ha, sort of) how good it is. I’d just like to be able to tell people I’d had sex and not be lying. (Probably best leave out the part about money exchanging hands.)

Yeah I’ve had sex, yeah. Who hasn’t? Yeah, losers, mainly. Not me, for sure. It was awesome, yeah, of course. Better than… wanking. And it only cost £9.99!!!

I had a feeling it would be at least £50 for basic sex with a disease-free woman, but this was entirely guesswork, as I had nothing to base my assumption on. One cannot compare it to, say, a taxi ride, or a round of drinks, or a weekly grocery run, without sounding crass or at the very least stupid. Even within the warm walls of one’s own skull.

I took out the seventyish pounds, at least the note part of the make-up, which revealed itself to be fifty pounds, (which was worrying), and tried to wave it about and thwack it satisfyingly into my palm. Although it turned out that two twenties and a ten don’t thwack very satisfyingly at all.

Walking up and down one of the main streets in Soho thwacking some notes into my palm, with a Marlboro menthol hanging out the side of my mouth, I assumed somebody would soon offer me drugs and/or sex in exchange for what was in my hand.

Menthol? Why, yes: not a usual choice for me; well noticed! The thing is, if I was to be in close contact with a lady, (albeit one of the ‘of the night’ variety), I didn’t want to stink of cigarettes; I thought it much more prudent and/or chivalrous to stink of mint, because mint is an herb whereas tobacco is an carcinogen. Also, I hadn’t brushed my teeth before I came out, or, now that I thought about it, for at least fourteen hours before I came out, so I hoped a good sixteen or so of these down my throat would do the job of suitably freshening me up for fresher fruiting, frottaging or any other frightful frings (no Torsten) that might happen while I was out of doors.

Being out of doors (our ‘outdoors’ for those of you who are German) is so fucking expensive. I’ve only been here a few hours and already I’m almost halfway through my allocated allocation of…

"Jamie! Dude! How the fuck are you?”

Panic – am I being attacked? Oh, no, it’s… friends, I suppose.

Gaz, and Gaz’s sunglasses, which aren’t as good as mine because they’re so very now, and Gaz’s hair, which belongs to at least twelve surfers he presumably scalped on the way from Kent. And Gaz’s friends.

What are they doing here in central London in the early evening on a Thursday?

“Dude!?” he says again.

I shrug.

“Alright.”

He guffaws, revealing a set of suspiciously American teeth.

“Dude! This dude is so hilarious,” he says, in a generic posh-boy-cum-estuary accent, to the guy next to him, who looks like he’s in the SS.

“Yeah, I know,” says the guy next to him. “He lives with my girlfriend. Hey Jamie.”

I do?

“Hey,” I mumble, reluctantly. I stuff the notes back into my coat pocket and fold my arms casually, just to show how comfortable I am with conversations and shit.

“Yeah, she thinks you’re awesome. She’s always saying,” says the SS guy, then he does a laugh that belies his status as boyfriend to anyone but another boy.

If I live with a girl why haven’t I shagged her yet?

It’s true that there are so many people scattered like shrapnel around the (ware)house I live in that I’m never quite sure which ones I know, which ones I don’t: which ones live there, which ones don’t, which ones are my lifelong friends, which ones are complete cunts who’ll steal my unopened promo CDs before I’ve had a chance to sell them on Amazon Marketplace because they suffer under some quite horrible delusion that any music that isn’t Thin Lizzy is worth listening to, and worth devaluing my bloody product for the pleasure of experiencing.

Cunts.

“So what are you up to, mate?” asks Gaz.

There’s a girl with them. Did I say that? She looks like a hooker, but I guess I’m not allowed to think that, because that makes me sexist or something, but she does look like a hooker. Maybe I’ve got hookers on the mind? She does look like a hooker.

“Jamie, dude?”

“What? Oh… you know, fucking… whatever comes my way, you know?”

SS guy nods with a sneer that says either he thinks I’m a twat and really far beneath him or he thinks everyone else but us is twats and so far beneath us. I actually hope it’s the first.

The hooker speaks:

“Wait, aren’t you the guy that came to Dreyfus’s house as a vampire last Halloween and brought all those pills?”

No, I came to Ben’s house as The Hawk Moth and stole some pills I found in the toilet, and gradually had them stolen back throughout the evening.

“Listen, Jamie…”

I am, you fuck: of course I am. I hate when people begin sentences with an order. How dare you, Gaz, you absolute fucker? Who even are you? I barely remember…

“…where Cherie’s friend Suzi’s boyfriend’s doing interpretative abstract painting to a live improvised piano instalment by this amazing Venezuelan guy. You’d love it, mate. He’s got this awesome jacket.”

“Hmm… not sure.”

“You sure?”

“Well,” I inhale and look down and realise I’ve been ashing all over myself.

I cough and spit out the stump of a Marlboro Menthol. It bounces off SS guy’s arm and I bite my lip by way of an apology.

“You sure, mate, dude?” says Gaz. Again.

“Well, no, I’m not sure: that’s why I said that.”

The hooker smiles lasciviously and SS guy purses his lips as though he’s just sat on a broom handle and is trying not to moan with pleasure.

“We’re going to this amazing new cocktail bar after where all the drinks are eco-friendly and like, totally full of vegetables and shit. And they grow their own tomatoes on the roof,” Gaz perseveres.

“Right, yeah, I just don’t have any money. That’s all.”

Gaz snorts.

“What about that wad of cash you were waving about just a moment ago?” asks SS guy.

“Yeah,” says hooker, giving a look that suggests I have more than enough left. “Looks like somebody just got paid.”

“No, that’s just…”

Gaz gives a horsey, expectant grin, like an expectant, grinning horse.

“It’s just that I’m planning to lose my virginity tonight. To a hooker. I need that money to pay the hooker. Now, I’m off to find a brothel, so if you’ll excuse me…”

I push between the two guys and hear their laughter bouncing about the narrow Soho street as I storm westward like a Russian warhead into a flock of attitudes and haircuts doing bad people impressions. A 7 foot black trannie gives me a look that suggests he/she’s a bit scared of me.

“Later, dude!” calls Gaz.

I wave, without turning.

“That guy is so _______” says SS guy.

I didn’t catch the last word.

I imagine it was something very now that was impossible to decipher as either positive or negative, but was definitely – on some level – ironic.

I trust I’ll manage to avoid any further encounters with dubious acquaintances if I reposition myself out of the out of doors.

A.K.A: Now to find the brothel.

Soho, Needless To Say

That’s me in the corner. But what am I losing?

My money, for a start off. I don’t know the name of this bar, I didn’t even check; I just didn’t want to be in a pub because there’s a lot more chance of interaction with strangers in a pub. So I’m in a bar drinking a margarita and wincing at the salt on my split lips. It cost about eight pounds, which is cheaper than the average, probably, for the area, and this bar is sufficiently characterless that it won’t be busy until much later when there are simply no alternative establishments on offer.

I’m also losing my inhibitions. I struck up a conversation of sorts with the barmaid. It went something like this:

“Hi, I’m Jamie.”

“Are you?”

“Yes, why would I lie to you?”

“Not sure. What can I get you?”

“A margarita.”

“Okay.”

The conversation is allowed to continue at this point because I am sitting at the bar, watching her gore limes.

“What’s your name, by the way?”

“Anne.”

“Anne? That’s not very barmaidy is it?”

Here she gives me a look as if to say ‘Go fuck yourself’ but goes to fetch the tequila instead of saying anything.

“I thought you looked more like a Cibelle or Estelle or Emmanuelle…”

She’s shaking the cocktail shaker now so it’s a good excuse for her to continue not saying anything at all to me.

“So, Anne, do I look like the kind of guy that has to pay for sex?”

She stops shaking and looks at me incredulously, half pissed off, half pitying, but altogether confounded.

“What?” she says.

95% of the times people say ‘What?’ they heard exactly what you said the first time, they just wish you hadn’t said it, or that you’d said something else. Because 75% of the times people say ‘What?’ you’ll repeat your sentiment, but you’ll at least change your wording, usually you’ll dilute it to taste.

The thing is, I wasn’t trying to be shocking; I just want an answer to my question. And I don’t have anybody else to ask. So I just ask it again:

“Do I look like the kind of guy that has to pay for sex?”

Anne prizes the lid off the shaker.

“You don’t look old enough.”

Now she’s liming the rim of the glass. I don’t know if she’s doing this in the right order so unfortunately I can’t fault her progress. (Faulting the progress of barpeople, particularly in cocktail-making, is a hobby of mine.)

“How old do I look?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care! About twenty-something. You act older though. Yeah maybe you are the kind of guy who has to pay for sex. Seems like you have to pay for conversation, so that follows.”

She’s grinding the rim in a tray of salt. Is a tray the most hygienic place to keep salt?

“Good points I suppose. I’m twenty-four. I’ve never had sex, Anne: never.”

She inhales sharply.

“I have a boyfriend, besides which…”

“For fuck’s sake, I’m not trying to proposition you, you arrogant bar-tart!”

Having placed the glass before me and begun pouring, she reacts pretty well to this insult, continuing with her progress, eyebrows up, mouth half-open, merely shaking her head as if to say ‘What a prick’.

“Sorry,” I say. “I’m just saying: does it seem right to you that a twenty four year old who’s as good looking and – I was going to say charming but let’s stick with ‘good looking’ – relatively functional, cognitively speaking, as I am, has to pay for sex?”

Anne finishes pouring and presents the glass. I’ve already paid.

“I don’t know,” she says, “If I’m totally honest about this I just… don’t care. At all. What you do outside of the context of exchanging money with me for drinks is…” she shrugs, “just not interesting to me.”

She’s very plain. It’s no concern of mine whether I interest her or not. I just wanted her to agree with me. I thought that was the sort of thing barmaids did if you complained to them about stuff.

“When did you first have sex?” I ask Anne, my tongue recoiling in horror at the bitterness and saltiness of the cocktail. I rather want a straw but feel too manly to ask for one.

“That’s none of your business. Not only is it none of your business, but I have other stuff to do besides talking to you, you strange little person. Why don’t you drink that, quietly if at all possible, and feel free to contact me if you want another one. I’ll be at the other side of the bar, as far away from you as possible. Okay?”

I nod morosely and Anne does exactly as promised and goes to hide out at the other end of the bar, reading a book by a foreign author whom I’ve never heard of and glaring at me every few minutes.

She obviously has a very unsatisfactory sex life, I decide, otherwise she’d be happy to talk about it. Perhaps I’m lucky, in a way.

Anyway, I’ve had a conversation with a girl tonight, which is more than I usually do. If I carry on like this I’ll have been deflowered by midnight, no trouble at all. Best have another margarita or two...

More On This Later

I clambered out of the shoe and scanned the pavements for policemen. There were none, fortunately, and most of those on the near pavement below me were polite enough not to stop while they stared. Indeed, a few of them bumped into each other and muttered words of angry apology. On the other corners people felt at liberty to stop and point and discuss my predicament. As I emerged from my watery shallow grave a gust of wind almost unbalanced me and somebody somewhere actually clapped and whooped as I steadied myself and clutched my forehead, suddenly aware of just how dehydrated I was.

The sogginess of my shell was useless to treat the alcohol-ravaged cells inside my brain and abdominal organs. I always knew osmosis was a crock of shit.

I made my way gingerly to the wall and with the unsolicited help of some fairly suity individuals I lowered myself down and dropped to the pavement. It’s amazing how altruistic people will be for the cause of the greater status quo. At least some of the assembly clearly thought I was some sort of entertainment – perhaps a performance artist or even a protester protesting about musical theatre or shoes or trannies or something.

I escaped and found a café, and found I had only seventeen pence, and escaped again, and – after some meandering – found the subterranean toilets of the National Gallery, which were not as soothing as I’d hoped they’d be. Still: ample opportunity for vomiting sans spectators, which is one of many life luxuries only revealed by privation.

After I’d vomited all the solids, liquids and gasses out of my stomach and expelled what little matter had made it further through the system via my lower orifices I tried to dry bits of my clothing using the hand-drier, and I think it’s fair to say I failed absolutely.

It was with a heavy heart that I refilled my stomach with a pint(ish) of tap-water and headed out into Trafalgar Square to sit in the mercifully fine rain on a mercilessly soaked bench and try to make sense of the pineapple-upside-down-cake left-out-in-the-rain that was my brain.

The items would help. I took out the items, and thought about the Simon Armitage poem ‘About His Person’ and about how it was a shit pun, and about how I couldn’t remember the poem (and shouldn’t) because it was just a list of things that weren’t in my pockets. I decided to address each item in turn with an uncharacteristically methodical patience. This is what I decided:

1) The seemingly unused condom: from the age of thirteen I had carried a condom in my wallet. The same condom, actually, for ten years. I never found cause to use it in that time, not even when I had a girlfriend. Nobody ever tried to rape me in a sufficiently polite way that I could offer it to them either. Since twenty three condoms had become as alien to me as all that they suggested, but I knew I had recently bought a pack of three light blue-boxed Durex that had the word ‘tingle’ on the front from the dodgy chemist’s down the road and round the corner. It was a carefully-planned purchase that fell by the wayside and became an impulse buy at the last moment; you see, I had no idea whether I really wanted my first time to tingle, I just knew I didn’t want it to burn or boil or weep or break out in hives. So I’d bought these condoms two days ago and taken three out with me, boxless, when I set out for Soho yesterday afternoon. Though there were two missing condoms and one opened packet with an unrolled condom shabbily rolled up and stuffed back into the packet, I felt confident that neither it nor the other two had been used in the way Durex intended. This item told me (and consequently you) nothing.

2) The empty skunk packet: once I’d licked it clean and chewed the remnants of a stem by way of breakfast, lunch or dinner (I still didn’t know or care to know the time) I also concluded that this item was useless in aiding my investigation. I hadn’t begun the evening with this as far as I could remember, which was about as far as the number 8 bus into town at what was probably about 16:30 p.m. But it was not impossible that in my relatively sobre state at that point in the proceedings I had successfully managed to purchase said item at a no-doubt extortionate price from a street vendor in central London. I usually came away with something counterfeit, but had gradually worked out over the years that the riskier the location of the purchase, the higher the likelihood of getting something proper and druglike became. I’d scored at least five times in Soho, and only own-goaled about seventeen times. Assuming I’d smoked it all myself, which was a reasonable assumption given that I have no friends and am very, very mean, all this told me was that I’d have great difficulty recalling any of the events that followed the first few spliffs.

3) The Cadbury’s Star Bar: a favourite of mine, certainly. Up there with the Boost Bar and the Picnic (a newcomer to my confectionary palette). I was only surprised that I hadn’t eaten it before I fell asleep in the giant shoe. I decided to eat it then, and chewed my way through its predominantly sugary insides whilst considering the following four exhibits:

4) The thirteen pence: a five, two twos and four ones. I know I left home with a hundred pounds in cash, so this was only to be expected. I had twenty six more of these 'pence' in my bank account and there was no legitimate way to pool these resources, so I’d have to guard these with my life until Tuesday.

5) The unbroken champagne glass: this was a real mystery. Where did it come from? Did it ever contain champagne? No amount of licking would answer these questions as it only contained some murky rainwater and what looked like cigarette ash. There were no markings on the base or the side. There wasn’t so much as a crack in its thin grease-marked surface. I’d have to come back to this one. I placed it beside me on the bench and shivered.

6) The Communist Manifesto: I owned one of these and presumed that this was my copy. I had never read it, though I was supposed to some years ago during my English Degree. One of many reasons I didn’t quite get to the end of that particular misadventure. It was folded in half and thin enough that it could have been in my jacket for some time – presumably I thought I’d read it on the bus some time. (As if – buses are one of my top hunting grounds for potential targets among the fairer sex. I couldn’t be seen reading, well: I could be seen to be reading, but I couldn’t be actually reading.) There were strips torn from the back cover, showing white frays beneath the red cardboard cover. Were there more or less than there had been before? I wondered. We simply couldn’t tell. I hated communism and communists, despite not knowing exactly what they were all about. I didn’t want to share. I was quite happy for others to share with me, but it wasn’t fair that I was expected to do the same. Not if I actually had anything worth sharing, anyway. (Which I didn’t.)

7) The Polaroid photograph of Emily Dover: I can barely remember when we went to Bournemouth or even if I was actually with her when this photograph was taken. Isn’t that awful? I know it’s Bournemouth though, so that’s a good sign. Unless I’m wrong. I’m not the sort of guy who carries around photographs of their ex-girlfriends in their pockets, but… well, clearly I am that sort of guy. I am that guy. I wanted to look at it either before or after I did the deed and, I don’t know, cry? Laugh? Talk to it and pretend it was talking back? I had brought it with me for some purpose. It wasn’t normally there. It was one of those bottom-of-the-drawer things. Not hidden, exactly, but rarely brought out into the present. It was the only photograph I had of her, I think. Despite being embarrassed by its presence I was glad I hadn’t lost it.

Well, that was a predictably useless exercise, I remember thinking, as I returned the items to my pockets, (except the glass, which I couldn’t imagine needing again any time soon). As I picked up the Communist Manifesto a business card fell out, and in my attempt to catch it I dropped the photograph of Emily onto the wet paving stones, where it landed face down, revealing a biro-scrawled map of some kind, with a place indicated and underlined heavily in blue ink. (Fucking blue ink – I hate blue ink.)

The place’s name was the same as that on the business card.

And as easily as that, it all came rushing back to me.

So it was true what Rob Miles, that cunt of a sort-of ex-friend of mine had said:

“Jamie, you couldn’t score in a brothel.”

Part Of What I Wrote On The Train From Truro To London Paddington Yesterday (But Only Part Of It)

I awoke curled like a human prawn inside a giant shoe.

It was the rain, as opposed to the din of central London – the constant cavalcade of bus, taxi and rickshaw – that made it impossible to remain dormant for any longer. I clambered up to peer out over the side and felt that my own footwear – my heavy, suffocating boots – were wet through, as was the bottom half of my coat: a few inches of water had collected in the hollow where I had made my bed. My feet were uncomfortably hot, but most of me was cold and wet.

Actually, all of me was wet.

It was raining like a motherfucker: right on my head and everything.

It was raining like a monsoon, and the giant stiletto (for a giant stiletto was my bed and bedchamber) was perfectly shaped to catch all this rain and have it waterfall down into the hollow where I had been sleeping. It was like a playground slide with a hollow at the bottom.

Peering over the edge of the shoe into a thoroughly horrible London morning (or afternoon – it was too concrete-grey to tell), the crowds below made my stomach lurch with misanthropy, and people soon started, gawping, glaring and pointing at me, with their stupid mouths, eyes and fingers.

I looked down and saw the tops of the illuminated letters that I knew spelled out PRISCILLA.

A journey to the heart of fabulous.

A hot wave of pain jerked up through my torso and like a squeezed frube I vomited thick, pink goo all down the side of the giant stiletto.

Oh dear.

I was on Shaftesbury Avenue. More specifically, I was on the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road, on the roof of The Palace Theatre; in a shoe, on the roof of The Palace Theatre.

I checked my pockets and was unsurprised to find neither phone nor wallet present. I checked my inside pockets and found an open but seemingly unused condom, an empty plastic packet that had contained an eighth of skunk, a Cadbury’s Star Bar, thirteen pence, an unbroken champagne glass, The Communist Manifesto and a Polaroid photograph of Emily Dover sipping a tequila sunrise in a tacky seaside bar in Bournemouth.

Ah, now I remembered: last night was the night I was going to lose my virginity.

Somehow, I doubted it had gone as planned.

The World And Other Places - Jeanette Winterson

"In the style of postmodernism" is a phrase I wouldn't readily associate with any of Winterson's work, although I guess it must be true or it (The World And Other Places) wouldn't be defined as such on The Internet.

Her work has always surpassed categorisation for me, even when wilfully non-linear or weird in terms of plot. As far as I'm concerned The Passion was as much an epic and tragic romance as it was an experiment in how one can tell a story in print. Sexing The Cherry was as much a miniature saga as it was an exercise in deconstructing fairytales with a feminist scalpel. The Powerbook was... I don't remember so well - but it was still bloody good, I recall that much.

The stuff in this collection lives in both worlds too - there are solid objects reflected in water, and it may be the reflections we read, but every story here has a base in something tangible and lovable. It's hardly Samuel Beckett.

Winterson's arsenal includes not only some of the most bountiful and beautiful language in modern English fiction, but also some of the most duplicitous. The stories are telling you things you aren't even aware of. How does one know? Trust one: one knows, one does.

You don't necessarily feel how you expect to feel at the end of each sentence. You begin to wonder if how you expected to feel was not how you were expected to feel.

Jeanette Winterson's high art take on romance can be a bit poetically exhausting at times. The narrator who is just a bit too emo to have a pet (24-Hour Dog) gets on my nerves, and the entirety of The Poetics of Sex, while intriguing and well-written (well, duh), is a bit too disjointed to stand out amongst snatches of more complete and satisfying stories.

Orion is a classic-Winterson "cover version" of a myth I have heard of but not read. But I'm sure it appeared in Lighthousekeeping, which, if it did, sort of pisses me off a bit, because even though her novels often include what are basically short stories embedded in them like minerals, one likes to think their positioning therein is as careful as her choice of words on the next level of detail, and that their contextualisation empowers them: not that they could be cut out and magnetised to the fridge, although any number of her sentences could shine in such isolation.

Ho-hum.

Both the Disappearances are truly wonderful; 1 is a romantic work of fantasy (or speculative fiction, if you must) in a world where sleep is being phased out and the narrator is swimming against the tide: 2 is a mini-gothic marvel in which an isolated aristocrat is the tour guide in his own crumbling estate and becomes a slave to his genealogy.

Psalms, another pet story, is Oranges...-era Winterson (i.e. as 'straight' as her stories get) and a great snapshot of an early genius and the early genius' short-lived turtle.

The Green Man and Newton both explore isolated dysfunctional males struggling to fit in to disturbingly-normal environments. The former, particularly, is infused with a melancholy longing for something extraordinary in an ordinary existence: places other than the world, if you will. It's my favourite, though it's one of the saddest: in its singleminded portreyal of the man in a marriage turned cold it reminds us just how lonely an existence we can carve out for ourselve if we aren't careful.

Unsurprisingly, as all her stories are shortish and I've long-admired her work, Jeanette Winterson is now my favourite writer of short stories.

Rejoice!

This compilation (?) was published ten bloody years ago, B.T.W.

The Time Traveler's Wife - Book Vs Film

It must have been a good book because my mother recommended it to me: she only gives me good books. And I bought it (2nd hand - obviously) for a brother's girlfriend for Christmas.

It was a few years ago, so I don't remember the details. But it was a greater work than its perceived status as a Richard & Judy Book Club Classic suggests. I cast no aspersions as to the taste of either Richard or Judy, but it's often suggested to me that a book with their stamp of approval (or Oprah's if you're American) is blessed with popularity and cursed with... well, popularity.

As though great fiction, like great wine, should not be consumed by the masses. As though, perhaps, the finest books should be too expensive for the common people.

It's a love story with a twist: this is how it's marketed and it's as close as you'll come to the truth in six simple words. It's a story about the love between two people and the curious (and highly unlikely) condition of he, which makes him accidentally time travel (usually backwards but later forwards), often at the most inopportune moments and often with hilarious consequences! (That last bit's not true, F.Y.I. It was a joke!)

When I read the book I remember taking away a sense of the sadness of love - as, perhaps, best distilled in the opening line of Jeanette Winterson's novel, Written On The Body: "Why is the measure of love loss?"

The saddest thing of all is (look away now if you don't want to see the results) knowing how it all ends before it all ends. He has no idea how it will begin, though she does, because he has been visiting her (via the medium of time travel) since she was a little girl.

The cynic would say it all starts out a bit paedo, but anyone with an ounce of interest in the subject matter will probably interpret this as

a) A convenient plot device employed by an adequate writer to set what would otherwise be a very standard romantic narrative apart from the myriad other titles.

b) A convenient plot device employed by an adequate writer to illustrate (or visualise) the all-encompassing desire of love.

The thing is (this is the thing): there is an aspect of love, perhaps a selfish aspect, that wishes to consume or rather contain its subject/object. Our hero (if we see him as such) is no Dr. Who, but he straddles years if not dimensions.

For the most part, he's time's bitch rather than its lord, and yet the benefits of his "condition" (other than winning the lottery, which happens, obviously*) are that he is - even unbeknownst to himself - growing up with his lover and being her "best friend" from a very early age, sharing her first kiss (though it is not his) and preparing her for their first meeting in his own chronology, where she will be prepared to save him from his crummy alcoholic life as a depressive librarian.

The wish-fulfillment aspect of this not-so-super power is sufficient that it appeals to both men and women, which is part of its charm, I suppose.

Still, being a romantic, soppy affair, it's not all idyllic cuddles shared between a stubbly fortysomething and his prepubescent love on a picnic blanket in a spring meadow. (Easy now.) There are obviously tensions between jealous (or perhaps just fatigued) friends who have to deal with Mr Time Travel and his frankly annoying habit/disability. And he ends up nude and disgruntled in enough public places for him to have to do manly stuff like kicking doors in and getting in fights for no real reason.

Incident by incident, there's nothing great here, and it relies heavily on the oft-employed modern trick of using a very standard narrative but confusing the order of events so as to blind the reader to its simplicity. Of course, what with time travel being literally impossible to fathom, Audrey Niffenegger has an added ace up her sleeve (not literally of course, ra ra) because the cheap plot device is immediately transformed into a genuinely perplexing complicity of brainmelting illogic: he goes forward in time and meets his daughter, she tells him what she's called, he goes back and so that's what they call her.

Does. Not. Compute.

What if she had a shit name (well, she does, but forget that), and wanted a different one? The more you think about it, the more the real world with its infinite range of consequence and multi-billion parallel universes ceases to exist here and everything is reduced to the absolute law of fate.

You cannot escape. You cannot save your mother from that car crash; you cannot say 'No' when he asks you to marry him; you cannot halt the passage of that sperm you issued last month.

Depending on your frame of mind this could be incredibly creepy and annoying, or very romantic and sweet.

I'll settle with interesting, because it's what makes the book (or shall I say the story) truly worthwhile for me.

It's more final than Final Destination. Not least because we don't anticipate a sequel.

(Oh wait, his £$%&ing daughter can time travel. And she's really annoying. GREAT.)

Actually, she's annoying in the film; in the book it was that relationship that bore the real emotional weight as far as I was concerned, because while we have the perspective of both lovers and get to share in their tenderness and frustration etc. all we get from the daughter is a very sad and mature (and sad because it is mature) outlook on her parents' lives and the implications on her own existence.

And did the film differ in any significant way from its source material?

Of course not - that's why I'm sort of flitting between the two accidentally; this book was a classic example of the sort of book Jeanette Winterson would condemn (correct me if I'm wrong, please, Jeanette) as being written as though it were a film. It's written as though by a camera, despite being in the first person. It's very visual, despite dealing with emotions: in fact, it deals with emotions as a camera does, by panning and swirling and shifting in and out of focus and using funny lenses to filter the raindrops or emphasise the autumn leaves (back to the actual film: autumn meadow in late film, spring meadow in early film - clever.)

Some of the locations were really good actually, well - by 'good' I also mean true to the spirit of the book, or perhaps just corresponding with my own imagination.

It was adequately played by the two annoyingly-nay-unrealistically good-looking leads. The supporting cast was sufficiently unmemorable. Etc. Etc.

I can hardly say much about the film because most of what I remember from the book was present and correct. The only difference is the inevitable loss of a few scenes here and there and that quintessential feeling of getting a bit less, proportionally to what you've given, which I find with most consumption. The plot and its simplicity are more apparent in the film, because the process of film-watching is almost entirely submissive and/or receptive, so one is less busy imagining or interacting. It's a little thin as a result.

The book was so filmable and the film so adapted that either one shrugs its shoulders at the other and offers it a place on the podium. In fact, as art and/or entertainment, both take a back seat and allow you to take them where you will. It needn't impress its own profundity, a fan might say.

I'd recommend the book or the film, but not both.

Finally, a note on classification: the notion of fiction being 'literary' or ever described as such, really pisses me off, so whether this is or isn't I don't know. Whether it's magical realism (also a wanky term) or fantasy (a mistrusted term) or science fiction (a slightly less mistrusted term) I don't much care.

One could read this in a book club, a university literature course, an airport, on holiday, or on a bus: yes, even on a bus.

And one could as easily watch this at home on a television as in the cinema, which, given the apparently lukewarm reception by critics (I can sympathise) perhaps explains the many empty seats.

Okay! Thanks! Bye!

* I can't remember it happening in the book, but I assume it did

There always has to be the same ammount of hair in the world

I can't get over how good the new Wave Pictures album is. Sorry. I just can't get over it.

On an unrelated note, here's a bitter love poem written fromt he P.O.V. of a homosexual German sommelier:

Good Companions: Rarely Blended

To have been a fly on the vine,
As the sun rose over the Rhine,
Germany, 1439.
Did the dew on the Riesling shine

As Count John counted the cuttings?
With his sommelier strutting,
Splashing out twenty two shillings,
Sure one day he'd make a killing.

Cradled in cat's elbow castle,
His foot-stool a verdant vassal,
Flicking a fine-plaited tassel,
He'd hardly thought it a hassle

To add to his grape collection
A white, which, upon inspection,
Bruised as easily as his wife,
And told by taste its early life,

For who would trace it to its source?
Divert a river from its course?
Feed mouldy hay to a gift horse?
Or take a liberty by force?

* * *

Well, I heard it through the e-mail;
Not much longer would you be male.
I can't help but think
You turned to the drink
To avert this impending fail

And you failed, failed like a gypsy:
I was the Po to your Dipsy.
The more that you drank,
The more the plan stank;
You barely even got tipsy.

Your rebel'ion was belated,
Reminded me how you hated
When cabernet franc
Met sauvignon blanc
And their love was consummated.

Looking at you sitting down there
With your girlishly cropped girls' hair,
Your challenging scowl
And your thrown-in towel
And your implausibly pert pair

Reminds me of how you tasted
Downstairs when we were both wasted
And the wine labels
Onto low tables
With wallpaper paste we both pasted.

Coin Du Vin 2 or 3 or whatever - heeeeeeeeey who's counting?

I had a bloody lovely chardonnay on Sunday you know. Bloody lovely. Really set me up for the week. I forget what it was exactly but it was one of these strong, buttery Californian ones - basically the closest thing I could find in Sainsbury's to the Cycle's Gladiator I used to buy.

In fact, I think I bought about half of their supply of that feisty little number last year.

I bought it for the nude ginger woman on the front holding on to a flying bicycle. But I bought it again for the wine. Trust.

Anyway - I'd been hankering after (or for) a fine chardonnay for ages and it was worth the wait. Helped me wash down the thin-sliced chorizzo, goat's cheese (the cheese of a single goat, I assume), French bread and summer fruits snackathon I had liberally scattered around my prostrate form on my newly made bed in my newly cleaned room.

Anyway - I already said that didn't I. Hmmm... I mean, furthermore... no, that's not it. Begin again, this paragraph's not agreeing with me. (Yes I am!) (No you're... oh £$%&.)

I still had a glass' worth of pinot noir (possibly still my favourite grape out of grapes) on the side but I was saving it for later.

The day before, the fantastic red - slightly darker and more standard hued in appearance and texture than usual, perhaps because French? - had rounded off a wonderful evening at Adam & Steve's (they're not a quintessential gay couple despite the convenient names) (in fact, they're not even homosexual). The preceding tipple - give or take (he gave I took - wait, I just want to point out again at this juncture that there is absolutely no homo in any of these sentences) a can of Carlsberg - was a lovely and intensely characterful (though not exactly intense) bottle of white, which I picked out of Oddbins' shelves because of its name:

Colon notwithstanding, I've lost the label. Bugger. It was Esmeralda, anyway - the same name as the heroine from the novella I'm writing. And it was from northeast Spain a.k.a. Catalonia, which is near as dammit to the (admittedly fictional but heavily realised) place in which my story is set.

Well, actually it's probably more Basque. And Esmeralda is her second name (and the name of her imaginary sister - have I said to much?)

And it's spelled ESMERELDA.

Perhaps it shouldn't be?

Ah! I've found it (isn't this great it's like live blogging!)

Torres Viña Esmeralda. I don't need to say anything much about it because you can read the official version up there. What I will say is BUY IT! It's excellent. Full of character and if - like me - you've mainly stuck to chardonnays and (chh pt) sauvignon blancs over the years you're sure to be struck by how much more versatile affordable whites can be that you (and I) thought.

So... yeah, then there was the Australian dry muscat the other day (or couple of days) from Victoria, Australia (perhaps subconsciously the reason I chose it... ahem). That was excellent too. It was from Tesco so look out for that one there, devoted and awestruck reader.

There have been a number of passable house whites in pubs and then the wine night in milady's local where we were offered two (bloody expensive) wines - a decent merlot (bloody better be for six quid a glass) and a white Bordeaux, which I actually think was past its best but perhaps that's just what white Bordeauxs taste like? It was drinkable but I have been informed that wines on offer - in pub or shop - are often on offer for a reason. Hmmmm.

(I like the word 'hmm' because it's adaptable.)

Oh and there was a bog standard pinot grigio blush that I can't be bothered to remember. I'd got quite into them lately through necessity rather than choice but it was no match for the muscat, which it followed. Must try harder, Italy.

That brings us up to today's straight-up Cono Sur Gewurtztraminer. I'm big on Chilean wines - as with Argentina you tend to get a lot for your money, and Cono Sur's pinot noir is my affordable pinot noir of choice. It's fine and fruity and everything a pinot noir should be, though maybe not quite so flavourful as that pricier French number I splashed out on the other day. (NB - by pricey I mean like 7 quid so it was probably only a quid more.)

So, this Cono Sur white is bloody good, particularly now I've stopped upsetting it with my Tabasco-infused cheapo """Italian""" food from Sainsbo's.

Smells pretty floral but it'sdrier than I'm led to believe these Franco-Germanic wines are normally meant to be. I'll definitely come back to it, though I'd need some advice on what to drink it with, foodwise.

Oh! And I just opened the mini-wine guide I was given (that was free with the Guardian) recently and it's the "one to drink now" choice for this particular grape!

Which was nice...

P.S. I'm not sure if there is meant to be a 'du' rather than a 'de' in this section of my blog, so it''s lucky I'm not French and therefore don't care!

Nicholas of Myra Vs Per Yngve Ohlin

So, what do you think of those current events, eh? Pretty relevant, aren't they? Here's what I think: my opinion, that's what.

Okay that opening paragraph should have increased my blog hits by about 700% so welcome all you newbies, stick around, you might find reading haphazardly constructed filler verse is actually way more fun than concerning yourself with issues and events and trends an suchlike.

So, in the absence of something you might prefer, here is a poem of sorts concerning the one-time black metal musician Per Yngve Ohlin as imagined by an equally fictional (but even deader) neighbour of his.

Sort of. If I'm being honest, I'm not sure what point there is to this exercise:

Dead by Christmas

I only came once a year
But that was once too much for you.
I’ve seen the way you unwrap presents;
Performing autopsies on pheasants
Wouldn’t strike you as so unpleasant,
Wouldn’t be as difficult a thing to do.

You couldn’t sing for croaking,
It was the fashion of your age.
Dead by name, dead by nature:
You were a pitifully morbid creature,
Painting Pierrotesque your features.
Opening arteries onstage,

You liked to watch the blood flow
Over your scrawny Swedish arms,
And the horror on the faces
Of the people in those places
Where you dealt in dead disgraces,
Vomited your vocal charms.

You left me a dead badger
In a wet bag, like a broken toy,
Where others would leave milk and biscuits.
I’ve a bucket: do you want to kick this?
Did I fuck-up your winter wish-list?
I knew you had a death-wish, boy.

If you want something doing,
Do it yourself, if you want it done right,
I always said, and, although I admit it’s a shame
That outside Oslo you blew out your brain,
That was the closest you came to sane.
I remember that one winter night,

Flying over the peninsula –
Full was the moon, high was the tide:
I was on my way to a conference in France –
I saw you chasing a cat around the garden in your pants.
I caught the glint of your kitchen knife at a second glance,
And I shook my head, and I sighed.

picture stolen from Lorenzo Mariani

At home, in forest and in ocean, worship earth and sky

Just bit all the individual little balls off a blackberry for the first time ever and found that inside is a little greenish cone of plant that tastes a little bitterer than the surrounding fruit.

This information is free from copyright.

Blood For Texas Tea

PRESS RELEASE

Ex-Goatherders ukeleleist turned Bogwoppit denies charges of idleness and insignificance

We can exclusively unveil that celebrated underground self-diagnosed artist Thesvenhunter has released the following satement via Promos For Homos, his privacy agent:


"Dear" """Fans""",

Well. How soon we forget. After all I've given you, you value my artistic contributions to the world of art so little (and/or small-ly) that you allow me to sink into perceived obscurity with out so much as a thread on my forum, an @ reply on my Twitter, or a postcard from whatever skanky club 18-30 favella-bedecked Mediterranean scuzz-pit you happen to be befouling with your uncultured flatulent selves this paltry season allegedly called summer.

Anyway, had you (any of you) been so benevolent as to tear your ears away from your translucent pink earphones long enough to miss, say, a whole chorus from your self-compiled iTunes playlist of the best of MGMT, La Roux and Raygun, then you might have heard a tiny, frail voice calling out from beneath the rubbish dump of culture something like the following:

"I am fine. This is all part of the plan."

So there.

Yes, The Goatherders thing didn't work out, No neither did the Bogwoppit thing. It wasn't so much that nobody believed that an artist called Bogwoppit had stolen and plagiarised my solo album 'Soggy Globsters On The Beach Of Dreams', it was more that nobody cared.

Said collection - both the original 12 track album and the deluxe 2cd bonus edition - has now been lost to the whims of a disjointed usb connection.

Such Thesvenhunter classics as 'Camel Riders', 'Suck The Poison From My *****', 'Who Would Win Out Of Colossal Squid Vs Estuarine Crocodile?', and of course 'My Unlucky Pants', will be seen no more. Even the heartfelt renderings of other artists' work - the lo-fi emo update on Thin Lizzy's 'Got To Give It Up' and the Honolulu-groove grafted to Nihgtwish's 'Nermo' - are all gone. Are all gone.

But it's fine though because actually I've found love, so I'm writing a whole new album all about that and it'll be out in a couple of months probably, on CD, DVD, Cassette and Wax Cylinder. Blue Ray can **** my ***.

Some tracks penned for inclusion are:

- 'I Met Her On The Internet (But She's Not A Paedo)'
- 'David Paul Nixon And The Unsuspecting French Intern'
- 'Lover, You Really Ought Not To Have Got Quite This Drunk On A School Night'
- 'Cheese'
- 'That Wasn't A Gaudy Tea Pot From The Rose Road Association, That Was My Heart'
- 'I Say Chardonnay, You Say New Rave'
- 'The Time Between Waking Up And Getting Up'
- 'Your Blood Will Colour My Antique Rug With The Colour Of Your Blood'
- 'Don't Ever Stop The Squid'

Pre-orders are available at £475 here and include somewhere between 3 and 5 CD's worth of material presented lavishly in CDR format with a cork painstakingly wedged through the hole in the middle, chucked into a shoebox and lavished with maple syrup and saffron.

I look forward to the veritable invasion of press interest.

My privacy is your Bitch.

Adios,

Thesvenhunter.




Inquiries should be directed to Thesvenhunter's management at



E-mail: jamie.janakov@googlemail.com
Mobile: 07932 452 128


Notes to editors

Thesvenhunter is a cashflow crisis. Do not approach Thesvenhunter without a good sancerre. May be flammable. Contains nuts.

-Ends-

They Seek Him Here, They Seek Him There

Full of vexation come I with complaint against both uninformed wine-snobbery and wilful slavishness to high street fashion. Two pretty-much-unrelated topics I can b$tch about in the absence of any substantial literary progress of late. Because I said so.

Yes, if I told you I was a man who wears leggings and drinks chardonnay you might assume any number of things about me: that I was a gentleman of refined tastes, perhaps: that I was both thoroughly modern and well-aware of my place in history's grand narrative, certainly: that I was at once influenced by practicality and elegance, style and substance, beauty and truth - most definitely!

I've always loved tights and anybody that knows me will attest to the fact that I have - historically - jumped at every chance to crossdress, not necessarily because I'm a massive trannie stuck in a (buff, supple and/or toned) man's body. I just like and possibly covet women's clothes. I even own a few dresses, though they don't look as good on me as they would on actual women, because they are designed for women's bodies, which are different to men's in a few subtle but significant ways. (But that's another blog post, curious reader.)

I've always loved tights and, by extension, leggings. I've always wanted my own and now I have some, thanks to my lovely girlfriend, who got me some, albeit partly for selfish reasons.

Anyway - now I have leggings (or 'meggings' as some of the worst humans ever are calling them) and I look amazing in them, like really hot. BUT, shock of shocks and horror of horrors, some simple Googling has led me to the improbable and unpalatable conclusion that they are IN FASHION. At least, they were in March, and so they might still be, possibly, because it's still summer, no?

Anyway, it won't affect my enjoyment of them as such - they are comfortable, they feel lovely, and I look hot in them. If you have fat legs or don't want everyone to see your penis, that's your problem. I suffer from neither of these maladies.

But now, not for the first time I presume, though I can't think of many, I run the risk of being perceived by strangers as a fashion victim. As somebody who is aware of (crime #1) and gives a f£$% either way about (crime #2 - punishable by death) """fashion""".

Whatever I'm wearing I tend to look a little uncomfortable in - this is because most of my clothes are 2nd-hand or hand-me-downs and ill-fitting, and because I'm rarely secure in my environment and usually suspicious of the strangers who so presumptuously inhabit what I consider to be my personal space.

So I may appear to the casual observer to be somebody who is nervously wearing leggings in an attempt to appear fashionable.

How awful that would be.

So - observe less casually, you bastards; far from mistakenly subscribing to a flitting fad I am fulfilling my dreams and ambitions.

What are you doing? Dressing like Fleet Foxes and not quite daring to grow the beard you never wanted while desperately failing to second guess the next sea change in high street tat. That's what. So sod you.

And another thing - chardonnay. Probably one of the most delicious and refreshing and warming white wines going. Definitely a top contender in the mid-to-low price range in which I am usually to be found. Amongst a load of piddly inconsequential grapes whose juices couldn't dampen a picnic I've always found chardonnay a welcoming and rewarding drink, though of course the quality varies hugely.

And yet I'm casually told in pretty much every bar I order it (or at least given a look to suggest) - by knowledgeless slatterns often of Australian extraction - that chardonnay is rubbish and inconsequential and doesn't really count as wine and that nobody in their right mind would drink chardonnay unless they were a counsel estate slag who smokes 60 sovereign a day and eats KFC out of an actual bucket.

And why? Because it's so nineties. So Bridget Jones. So unrefined.

Bollocks.

You can get a Californian chardonnay for £3.99 from your local supermarket that'll piss all over your average Riesling, Zinfandel or Pinot Grigio marked at twice the price. More character, more charm and more tickle. It's like looking into the eye of a duck, and then passionately kissing the duck while touching up its friend.

Chardonnay is (as opined in the Guardian's recent WINE supplement, the skimming of which is the source of all my wine knowledge) a victim of its own success. Like Coldplay, who are also awesome. (Now - guaranteed, they used to be a bit shit.)

I'd rather be a victim of success than a massive twat.

Not that these things are really connected but they both reveal how much our perception is transitory and steered by fashion. I say 'our' but I mean 'your' because obviously I only exist behind the mirror I am holding up to your grotesque and rotten face.

How dare you breathe the same air as me?

Anyway, glad we had this little talk,

Bye!

AV