Musical Recommendation of the Week:
Who's Going To My Soul? - Gnarls Barkley
Thursday 22 October 2009
Is It A Bird? Is It A Plane? No, It's A Rant
On October 13th I was went to The Literary Review lunch in Fitzroy Square for their annual lunch to award for a poem that ‘scans & rhymes & makes sense’.The Review lunch attracts the literary and the eccentric in equal numbers.
One woman told me how mother’s friend had just introduced her to someone ‘training to be a psychopath’.
A Canadian man wearing a facemask then joined us and got onto the subject of his obsession with of impending Swine flu.
He shed some light when he described how, as a child his mother would wrap his birthday cakes with cling-film so no germ-clogged breath fumes could contaminate the icing as he blew the candles.
I was very amused by this, but he looked as me in dismay and wailed quietly, ‘But it’s a good idea!’
The highlights of Frieze week for me were Museum of Everything [more of which another time] and the Age of Marvelous in Holy Trinity Marylebone, the beautiful neo-classical church designed by John Soane.
Curated by Joe La Placa, the show was a modern day take on the Victorian Cabinet of Curiosities and was showing one of my favorite artists, Alastair Mackie who makes perfect spheres out of mouse skulls. [pictured]It also featured Polly Morgan who has breathed life back into the defunct art of taxidermy and Kate MacGwire who has managed to create truly strange objects out of bird feathers. Her spooky serpentine knots that fill up antique mahogany cabinets remind us that birds were once reptiles whose scales grew more and more delicate until the could defy gravity.
Particularly arresting was the black Pieta a beautifully executed figure of Christ sitting in an electric chair by Paul Fryer.
Fryer [pictured] was wondering around the show, startlingly handsome, in a long coat, wild hair & beard making Jane Eyre’s Mr Rochester look 
like a simpering beta male. He made the point that if Christ had been killed in the States, Christians would be walking round with little electric chair necklaces rather than crucifixes. The ape nailed to a cross is even bolder. His motivation was to highlight the plight of the Western Lowland gorillas, but with the replacement of man for a monkey, it manages to speak of man’s cruelty to man, that sophistication is wafer thin & inventing ornate ways to kill each other doesn’t put a murder on a higher plane.
[Interestingly, Holy Trinity, built not to commemorate the higher planes of consciousness, but to celebrate the defeat of Napoleon.]
The show triggers my visceral loathing for organised religion. They dress themselves up as spiritual, but are so blatantly about governance and male hierarchy as to make a lady snort.
I can’t understand how any woman could want to be a part of a church – or mosque - that considers female service unworthy of inclusion. I'm all for the sacred and the importance of ceremony, I just can't stand the intimidating sexually-twisted bullies in maxi dresses who claim to be in a conference call with a supreme being.
I love the fact that the current Uncle Fester look-alike Pope has just issued an open invitation to all the misogynist Protestants to swap to Catholicism.
We look across at Iran and see a religious state that reveals it's murky political intent by rigging an election to keep its puppet in power & wields a huge ‘morality’ policeforce that menaces the public for tiny infringements of dress code & displays of ordinary affection.Now, in the aftermath of the rigged election, we hear there is systematic rape of imprisoned protestors; state sanctioned by the ‘holy’ men who so disapprove of sex.
At the beginning of the month my friend Neil, who goes to about five plays a week, took me to see The Mysteries, an adaptation of the medieval plays of biblical stories performed by a South African troupe at the Garrick Theatre.
[Lucifer pictured. Cast as a woman]
As the interval curtain came down, I headed straight for the nearest exit.I just can’t buy into those ghastly old chestnuts of all the angels being blokes, of woman being taken from Adam’s rib and Mary’s premarital sex being retrospectively dressed up as a virgin birth; it’s obnoxious sexist bullshit….the etymological root of Papal bull……..
I think I might be all ranted out. Oh, one last postscript rantlet.....
While he was alive there must have been hundreds of yards worth of column inches written about what a freak Michael Jackson was and how his attempts to look white were a neon sign pointing to his rampant madness and self-loathing. Reports on his post-mortem have only bothered to write a couple of words about about the fact that he was suffering from the pigmentation leaching skin disorder that he always claimed he suffered.
Friday 9 October 2009
Prestat Chocolate Review No.9
Organic Dark Chocolate Mint Wafers.......
Sophistication is drinking espressos rather than lattes, eating one's meat rare, eggs soft boiled, enjoying brandy & prefering dark chocolate to milk.
I like my meat like the bottom of an old shoe, my eggs like bullets & my chocolate pale...so I approach the Dark Chocolate Mint Wafer like a neolithic tribeswoman approaching a Braun juicer....
When I went to visit the gothic mansion that is the Prestat factory, they explained to me
that such is the power of mint to permeate other ingredients that it is not only kept in separate boxes & cupboards, but completely segregated store rooms. Powerful, dangerous, mint can escape & invade unless put under draconian controls. It is the Hanibal Lector of the sweet world.
When I took the lid off the the deep pink and green box the smell was overpowering. Luckily the thin wafers didn't look too aggressively dark. It's chocolatey and less minty tasting than initial smells indicate.
Thinking about it's Lector-like powers I was reminded of the time I bit quite a chunk out of Jody Foster's shoulder while helping her adjust a shoulder strap after squeezing through the trapdoor into her Panic Room. [Her girlfriend was at a White Snake concert at the time.]
Sophistication is drinking espressos rather than lattes, eating one's meat rare, eggs soft boiled, enjoying brandy & prefering dark chocolate to milk.
I like my meat like the bottom of an old shoe, my eggs like bullets & my chocolate pale...so I approach the Dark Chocolate Mint Wafer like a neolithic tribeswoman approaching a Braun juicer....
When I went to visit the gothic mansion that is the Prestat factory, they explained to me
that such is the power of mint to permeate other ingredients that it is not only kept in separate boxes & cupboards, but completely segregated store rooms. Powerful, dangerous, mint can escape & invade unless put under draconian controls. It is the Hanibal Lector of the sweet world. When I took the lid off the the deep pink and green box the smell was overpowering. Luckily the thin wafers didn't look too aggressively dark. It's chocolatey and less minty tasting than initial smells indicate.
Thinking about it's Lector-like powers I was reminded of the time I bit quite a chunk out of Jody Foster's shoulder while helping her adjust a shoulder strap after squeezing through the trapdoor into her Panic Room. [Her girlfriend was at a White Snake concert at the time.]
Deja Voodoo
The difference between coincidence & serendipity, according to me...& how they can lead to crime.The word 'serendipity' is a beauty coined in 1754 by Horace Walpole, [pictured] after the fairytale The Three Princes of Serendip, in which the heroes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.” More than this, I thi
nk serendipity depends on our mood being elevated & at one with the universe. [While we are on the subject of words, my favorite is Space and another one of great beauty is Sublime, but the other day, it suddenly struck me as quite a strange word. While it sounds lovely & means soaring, transcendent, uplifting - but when you deconstruct the word there's a sub in there, 'sub -lime' meaning under the limit, rather than over & beyond it.
Sometimes it's not a good idea to think too hard about these things.]
But back to serendipity...my feeling is that when we are up we are more receptive to making
connections & seeing the joy in how random events effect one - joyfully irrational evidence that all is not chaos & that a thread of magic weaves through the plot of our lives.When we are blue we miss these things: our hearts tilt towards the pavement, we see the hole in our shoes rather than the comet in the sky.
Coincidences, unlike serendipity, arrive whatever our mood and don't necessarily good things.
Take for example a recent news item about Man A, whose hat was blew into the road.
Being safety conscious he checked the road was completely clear in both directions, before stepping out...if he had looked up, he might have spotted the mini bar-sized fridge flying of a third floor window where morbidly obese Man B had decided to kick start a diet with drastic action. Being a good-ish citizen he had also waited for a gap in the traffic before taking out his troubles on his white goods. The fridge landed on Man A at the exact moment he reached the hat. So, a coincidence, but not a happy one.
Coincidences swirl round us like a thousand leaves in an autumn gale. We only notice the ones that actually blow into our open mouths. It's as if they are constantly straying into our lives from across the porous membrane of a parallel universe, a universe where normal rules of odds & likelihood have no foothold... like when you squeeze a lemon & a stray squirt - that could have taken frankly any trajectory - heads straight to the bullseye of a tiny target:your eye.
A few weeks ago I wrote in my blog [16/8/09] about the coincidence of when my ex-husband
& war reporter Nick della Casa were arrested in the wilds of Northern Kenya & the young army commander who interrogated them turned out to have studied Nick for his political science degree at university, because Nick had previously been held as a hostage in Mozambique for eighteen months & Kenyan diplomats had assisted in his release. While this was good news because they suddenly had a personal connection with the army commander it was trouble too, because their story that they were 'just there on safari', no longer had any credibility & they were slung in jail. An example of a contradictory coincidence.
Two weeks ago on my birthday - actually, because of my birthday - it felt like I'd got caught up in a threshing machine of coincidences...I met up for birthday lunch with my girlfriend Mad, who was paying a rare visit from Spain. After we had eaten, I headed back to my studio and we kissed goodbye on the corner of Ledbury Road & Westbourne Grove. As I set off down Ledbury, [incident happened a few feet from shop pictured] she called after me with one last 'Happy Birthday'. A woman, who had just overtaken me,
turned back & said, 'It's my birthday too.'I said in a stage whisper that I was turning fifty. [Dont. Say. Anything.]
She stopped & said. 'Me too.' So we hugged and congratulated each other. She asked my name, I told her & she said, 'I've heard of you, aren't you a writer?' I said, yes. 'I am too' she said, 'I'm mostly a journalist but I'm trying to write a memoir.'
'Well I'm the same: journalism as bread and butter - although doesn't seem to be any butter at the moment & my book is a memoir.''Where d'you come in your family?' she asked.
'Second.' I said.
'Me too. Where do you live?'
'Knsal Rise'
'Me too.' It turned out we live two streets apart.
'Have you got children?' she asked.
'Two' I said.
'Me too' she said.
'Which makes us average, but maybe they're birthday twins too.' While not being exact, they turned out to be close enough to stay within the vibe of weirdness; with 365 to choose from, one is only 5 days after my daughter, the other 9 after my son.
We exchanged numbers & week later she rang & asked me round to her house.
Sitting in her study, I noticed a painting on her wall. It was by my great friend, the painter
Sarah Stitt, who I shared a studio with until three years ago, before she cruelly abandoned me for LA.It turned out Birthday Twin was not only a collector of Sarah's art [pictured] , but considered her a friend & had just emailed her, as I had too, just before leaving my house.
When I replied to her question of who I had been married to, she shrieked. It turns out that she is my ex's eldest brother's wife's estranged stepsister.
Maybe the only odd thing is that we've lived for fifty years & never met before, but I started feeling distinctly weird.
I'm not superstitious, I don't think walking under a ladder is unlucky, nor passing black cat; I don't believe in going back to bed on seeing a magpie. I can say the word Macbeth in a theatre & often do. I don't believe in horoscopes: I cannot believe constellations that make up a rubbish picture of a crab or a goat, (but in reality are stars billions of light years apart) can effect your personality, I really don't.
I don't believe in fairies, elves, ghosts or witches, or any sort of gods, the afterlife,
reincarnation or the evil vested in the number 13 but....I didn't dare be asked, or ask Birthday Twin any more questions. One more coincidence & I was going to become hysterical. I made my excuses & returned home feeling...well...call it a failure of imagination, but to be honest... the feeling was that I might have to kill her.I made a cup of tea, kicked off my shoes, checked in the mirror to see if it reflected my face or hers and then coolapsed on the sofa & turned on the tv. It was CSI Miami, now that is serendipity.
Wednesday 30 September 2009
Apocablog
I read a review in the Sunday papers that described the film Big River Man ‘as if Werner Herzog had made Borat’ and went straight out to see it. The documentary follows Martin Strel, a huge Slovenian who swam the entire length of the Amazon - from Peru to the Brazilian coast: 3,375 miles in 66 days - that’s longer than the width of the Atlantic - & he goes completely stark, raving psycho in the process.
In the headwaters terrifies some of the riverine tribes , who won't let Strel stay with them, fearing he is an evil pistachio - and this before his son Borat [really]
makes him a hideous white mask to protect him from sunburn, which makes him look like the The Elephant Man doing the crawl. The incredibly honest, loving, exasperated commentary is voiced by Borat who acts as his father’s manager, publicist & nanny-minder. We lean that the Amazon is not the first river Martin Strel has swum; he has already done the Danube, the Yangtze & the Mississippi. His vague motive for the Amazon swim was, in Strel’s words, " for peace, friendship & clean waters." although the film also reveals that lurking below the water level there is a deep psychological drive, as swimming was the only effective way Strel as a boy, had to escape his violent, drunken father.
In the headwaters terrifies some of the riverine tribes , who won't let Strel stay with them, fearing he is an evil pistachio - and this before his son Borat [really]
makes him a hideous white mask to protect him from sunburn, which makes him look like the The Elephant Man doing the crawl. The incredibly honest, loving, exasperated commentary is voiced by Borat who acts as his father’s manager, publicist & nanny-minder. We lean that the Amazon is not the first river Martin Strel has swum; he has already done the Danube, the Yangtze & the Mississippi. His vague motive for the Amazon swim was, in Strel’s words, " for peace, friendship & clean waters." although the film also reveals that lurking below the water level there is a deep psychological drive, as swimming was the only effective way Strel as a boy, had to escape his violent, drunken father.What’s also revealed is that Martin Strel is himself a drunk; tortured by his inability to swim away from himself, exhausted by the miles of river, but unable to cope with life back on land, he ends up putting electric clamps on his goose-larded head, unable to speak.
Big River Man is funny, sad & without saying much about ecology, paints a horrifying pictur
e our destruction of the Amazon with shots of vast swathes of burning jungle as loggers seek out a single mahogany tree to satisfy our craving for chic dining room furniture.
Martin Strel ends up a mess and the adventure is a personal disaster for him, he ends up a mess, but the incredible accomplishment makes one thrilled witness and also succeeds in making one think long and hard about the larger mess the
Big River Man is funny, sad & without saying much about ecology, paints a horrifying pictur
e our destruction of the Amazon with shots of vast swathes of burning jungle as loggers seek out a single mahogany tree to satisfy our craving for chic dining room furniture.Martin Strel ends up a mess and the adventure is a personal disaster for him, he ends up a mess, but the incredible accomplishment makes one thrilled witness and also succeeds in making one think long and hard about the larger mess the
planet is in.
It strikes me that really, the only way any of it is going to stop is with the death of a large majority of the human race. Here we are, at the beginning
of the end of a civilization that we hasten by storing all our information on machines that will no longer be accessible when electricity grids grind to a halt. Such critical times and yet nothing at all seems to happen on a civic level & therefore I am steeping up & taking over. Someone has to do it.
In London, just for starters, anyone with a paved-over drive
should immediately dig it up & turf or gravel it to allow rain to enter the soil. We all need to limit our meat eating to once a week, and bicycles should be compulsorily if our work is within five miles of our homes…
It strikes me that really, the only way any of it is going to stop is with the death of a large majority of the human race. Here we are, at the beginning
of the end of a civilization that we hasten by storing all our information on machines that will no longer be accessible when electricity grids grind to a halt. Such critical times and yet nothing at all seems to happen on a civic level & therefore I am steeping up & taking over. Someone has to do it.In London, just for starters, anyone with a paved-over drive
should immediately dig it up & turf or gravel it to allow rain to enter the soil. We all need to limit our meat eating to once a week, and bicycles should be compulsorily if our work is within five miles of our homes…The talking heads in the press are constantly coming a
t it from the wrong angle.A typical example: in a recent article in The Times, brainbox Marcus du Sautoy, Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford writing about a possible interplantary trainwreck, concluded by saying, ‘but before we abandon ship, the simulations show that it will take several billion years before Mercury might start to misbehave. For the time being, human interaction and not Mercury poses the most serious threat to the planet’s survival.'
[pictured above right, Prof Marcus Du Sautoy. Much to admire, aside from his wardrobe]
[pictured above right, Prof Marcus Du Sautoy. Much to admire, aside from his wardrobe]
What the hell is he on about? 'The Planet’s survival'?
Why do people keep saying the planet is in danger?
The planet is inert, it doesn’t give a shit, it’ll just adjust to no ozone, more carbon or whatever.
Why do people keep saying the planet is in danger?
The planet is inert, it doesn’t give a shit, it’ll just adjust to no ozone, more carbon or whatever. It is not in danger [unless Mercury comes at it like a billiard ball} it is man who is in danger. We are facing the end of humanity & frankly we probably deserve to go.
Give moss a chance, I say.
I think I’m in this apocalyptic mood because I have RSI in my thumb from the way I use my computer & yet, guess what, I cannot goddamn well stop myself from using it. If I can't even control my thumb, what hope is there for the rest of my behaviour?
Also...it was my birthday last week, a significant birthday, the anticipation of which had the occasional power to bring me (absurdly) to the brink of tears. It felt like I was strapped into a plunging funfair ride, hair streaming out behind, mouth open in a silent scream, heading for the hell of decrepitude.
In moments of calm - when my the G-force of my dread briefly stopped squishing my brain against the back of my skull like a sherry trifle - I assessed my life to date and found a minute scattering of achievements, victories - mostly Pyrrhic; the mistakes calamitous. In all this existential gloom the only things I feel remotely proud of are my two children. Having succumbed to my genetic pre-programming to procreate,
I think I’m in this apocalyptic mood because I have RSI in my thumb from the way I use my computer & yet, guess what, I cannot goddamn well stop myself from using it. If I can't even control my thumb, what hope is there for the rest of my behaviour?
Also...it was my birthday last week, a significant birthday, the anticipation of which had the occasional power to bring me (absurdly) to the brink of tears. It felt like I was strapped into a plunging funfair ride, hair streaming out behind, mouth open in a silent scream, heading for the hell of decrepitude.
In moments of calm - when my the G-force of my dread briefly stopped squishing my brain against the back of my skull like a sherry trifle - I assessed my life to date and found a minute scattering of achievements, victories - mostly Pyrrhic; the mistakes calamitous. In all this existential gloom the only things I feel remotely proud of are my two children. Having succumbed to my genetic pre-programming to procreate,
these poor darlings have reached young adulthood in a world of filth, poverty, corruption, Ricky Gervaise as a bone fide Hollywood movie star and the threat of another world war fought between two opposing ideologies based on identical superstitions. While waiting for the end of life as we know it, I will lard my head with goose fat, attach electrical clamps & distract myself by heading to the Intelligence Squared interview with Werner Herzog at the Royal Festival Hall this weekend, where we are promised he will
‘explain why a real man should know how to milk cows & why chickens are such hateful animals’. One of Big River Man's many highlights is Martin Strel explaining that Slovenia is shaped like a chicken..... Poor chickens, we've bred them so they can't do what birds are designed to do & we keep them in gulags where they stand in so much of their own shit that the ammonia burns their feet and now we hate them for it...
‘explain why a real man should know how to milk cows & why chickens are such hateful animals’. One of Big River Man's many highlights is Martin Strel explaining that Slovenia is shaped like a chicken..... Poor chickens, we've bred them so they can't do what birds are designed to do & we keep them in gulags where they stand in so much of their own shit that the ammonia burns their feet and now we hate them for it... Oh pass me the happy pills someone.....
[http://www.bigriverman.com/BigRiverMan.html]
http://www.vimeo.com/5070575
Tuesday 29 September 2009
Prestat Chocolate Review No. 8
The Mint Box gave Prestat the royal warrant of the Queen Mother when she commissioned it for her 100th birthday. Gorging on mints from this elegant (mint) green box was an exciting departure for a woman who had spent the previous 84 years on an exclusive diet of gin & Dubonnet.
The box contains Mint Crunches: gleaming brown diamonds, Bitter Mints, that have the sharpness of snorting toothpaste, but no real bitterness, thankfully. The Mint Fondants:
topped with a violet & angelica that I accidentally finished without my analytical faculties to the fore, but probably means they are delicious… I left the Coffee Mints to last as they are white chocolate & I’m not a huge fan, but wait up! The Coffee Mints turn out to be the secret queens of the selection. It reminded me of the time, lying on the deck of Dado Ruspoli’s yacht in Monaco - and blinded by sunshine - I took what I thought was a bite of sorbet, and only when the giggles reached a crescendo of excitement did I realize it was Grace Kelly’s left breast in my mouth.
The Mint Box gave Prestat the royal warrant of the Queen Mother when she commissioned it for her 100th birthday. Gorging on mints from this elegant (mint) green box was an exciting departure for a woman who had spent the previous 84 years on an exclusive diet of gin & Dubonnet.
The box contains Mint Crunches: gleaming brown diamonds, Bitter Mints, that have the sharpness of snorting toothpaste, but no real bitterness, thankfully. The Mint Fondants:
topped with a violet & angelica that I accidentally finished without my analytical faculties to the fore, but probably means they are delicious… I left the Coffee Mints to last as they are white chocolate & I’m not a huge fan, but wait up! The Coffee Mints turn out to be the secret queens of the selection. It reminded me of the time, lying on the deck of Dado Ruspoli’s yacht in Monaco - and blinded by sunshine - I took what I thought was a bite of sorbet, and only when the giggles reached a crescendo of excitement did I realize it was Grace Kelly’s left breast in my mouth.
Wednesday 23 September 2009
Rumpelstiltskin, Strange Twins, Woodland Creatures & Nightcrawlers......My Life In Snapshot. It's A Goddamn Fairytale
FridayTo the Charles Ledray show in a disused fire station in Chiltern Street, Marylebone. It’s a strange little area, full of tailors, wedding shops and a Long Tall Sally shop selling Amazonian clothes & shoes large enough to accommodate a Viking raiding party. The surrounding shops compliment the Ledray show, which consists of just 3 pieces: the first, a tailor shop with a dummy displaying a gentleman’s jacket and on a nearby table, a fan of ties. Everything is handmade, doll-sized & under ceilings that are 2 foot off the ground, so you have to crouch down to see the charming, Rumpelstiltskin madness below.
The second piece is like a charity shop, with a circular rack of Hawaiian shirt on tiny hangers & tables of old t-shirts & jumpers. 
The last, is what it might look like in the backroom of that charity shop, with tiny, bulging dustbin bags in shopping trolleys beside an ironing board piled with jumble.
The last, is what it might look like in the backroom of that charity shop, with tiny, bulging dustbin bags in shopping trolleys beside an ironing board piled with jumble. Everything is exquisitely made and has a weird poignancy. We seem so big beside these things & yet they manage to remind us that we are by any reckoning, very small. When it comes to how far we stick out from earth, even the tallest basketball players aren’t even as prominent as peach fuzz.
I took my daughter, who is about to start her first term at London College of Fashion and we spent ages peering at these scenes in their three pools of light in an otherwise shadowy, empty room. Empty that is, until John Waters walked in wearing his marvelous coal black Errol Flynn moustache & then we had four things to inspect.
[Show ends Sept 30th]
Saturday
Wanting to clear some life clutter, I decided to hire a stall at Portobello for the first time.
I took my daughter, who is about to start her first term at London College of Fashion and we spent ages peering at these scenes in their three pools of light in an otherwise shadowy, empty room. Empty that is, until John Waters walked in wearing his marvelous coal black Errol Flynn moustache & then we had four things to inspect.
[Show ends Sept 30th]
Saturday
Wanting to clear some life clutter, I decided to hire a stall at Portobello for the first time.
I got there at 5am, to find that I was an hour early, so I sat in my car watching the dawn break and the market team build the metal frames that, by 9am, are all shops. The upside of arriving too early was a prime spot, but all the regulars were muttering it was going to be a bad day because of Fashion Week. It was indeed a bad day and I only sold a few things, spending the rest of my time people-watching. The only fashionista to break ranks 
with the round of shows and come our way was Barbara Hulanicki of Biba fame. I had a Biba shirt hanging at the front of my stall & for one excited moment thought she might stop buy it – I mean, fashion designers can’t possibly remember everything they’ve ever made, but presumably they 
admire their own taste.... The highlight of my day was a double twin spotting. One identical pair walked by wearing the same striped shirts, although one was red/white & the other blue/white. Two minutes later, another pair passed, this time one had cut her hair short. I wanted
to yell, ‘Have you see the other pair yet!?’ Are twins as interested by other twins as I am? Do they acknowledge each other when they meet - or are other twins just the norm & their fascination lies in us the single egg folk? Twins have been a gentle obsession for most of my life, but things got stoked in my teens by two court cases that made it into the national press. The first was a set of teenage twins from Cardiff who were done for arson. They spoke their own private language & insisted on being in the witness box together. One twin spoke of how claustrophobic their lives were & not long after, the dominant twin said she thought it was better if she died, which she then did.
The other court case was of twins stalking a hapless neighbour they felt they loved, but soon began to hate. They were exactly like how you would expect Clara & Clarice of Gormenghast to look. They spoke as one, in a strange droning harmony. In order to dress identically every day, if outfits differed in anyway - for example different buttons - they would cut off them all off & share them out again so they both had them alternating. Even if someone gave them a gift of two different coloured soaps they
would hack them in half and cram the opposing halves together to satisfy their hysteria for parity. Riveting stuff.
Doing the maths at the end of the day at Portobello, I worked out that after expenses, in a twelve hour day I had made a sum total of £3, which even by my capacity for low earning was going it some. I tried to work out what that meant as an hourly rate & then fell into bed at 9.
Sunday
Tom, our choirmaster had booked us to sing at a miniature festival called Summer Sunset in Berkshire. Set in a beautiful woodland glade at Wasing Park,
we arrived to find a mass of green-faced revelers dressed as woodland creatures, lying in heaps of day-after-the-night-before unwellness.
Our choir is not remotely professional – we do it for fun, & very
occasionally, we don’t even have fun; motly we do. It is made up of artists, actors, a doctor, a chef and a nutritionist. There was slight disquiet among the sopranos when we discovered Sinead, a lawyer [& unbeknownst to her] our lead soprano, was stuck in bed with flu. Luckily though, handsome Rupert our [unbeknownst to him] choir mascot was in attendance, but everything was in the balance. As singers we are very up and down & so today it was possible we were going to make grown men, weep, but it was equally possible they were going to throw their shoes at us.
Before we went onstage, Tom took us off to run through the two songs we struggle with: Lovecats & Bare Necessities. We failed to nail either & an attempt by one of the sopranos [me] to get them knocked off our setlist was dismissed. Ten minutes later, we lined up & sung our hearts out to an audience of seventy hung-over people. Life On Mars - not always a good one - worked fantastically, as did Hallelujah & I’ll Fly Away; then we massacred Lovecats & Bare Necessities.
Monday
A distinctly odd day.
To fully explain it, let the scene go blurry as I
guide you back through time to 1986…when I flew to Spain for the weekend to join my brother who was staying at the house of a well known Catalan sculptor. It was the 50th anniversary of the Civil War and I arrived thinking, very foolishly, there were going to be merry public celebrations. The sculptor's home, in a suburb of Barcelona, consisted of half a dozen small farm buildings that had been converted to bedrooms, living spaces and art studios.
There were various other guests, but it was hard to tell who or how many, although my brother had a few friends there including, one of his old schoolfriends, who I had never liked, but the living spaces were so scattered, it was easy to avoid people.
My room was at the far end of a huge studio containing lines of plan chests and scupting scaffolds. The bed was behind a glass wall, up a few steps on a raised platform at the far end of the room, all quite 60s.
In describing this room I realise the layout is very similiar to where I work now, on a little platform hived off the back of a photographer’s studio, - although the proportions are smaller & the wall is solid not glass.
On the last night of the weekend the weather broke and the wind started to howl in from the sea. I lay in bed reading Tough Guys Don’t Dance by Norman Mailer, a murder mystery in which the protaganist wakes up after a night of boozing to find his Porsche blood-soaked & a decapitated head nearby.
I turned out the light feeling spooked and listened to the branches of a tree being dashed against the courtyard wall outside the bedroom.
Then I thought I heard a tiny noise inside the studio, at the far end. I peered into the dark. Was there a denser bit of darkness in the general darkness? I stared harder, but could hear nothing over for the wind. I kept staring into the studio thinking something was there. I wanted to turn the light on the but the lamp was a good stretch from the bed & I started freaking myself out that a decapitater's axe would crash down on my outstretched arm. I went on staring and listening, until I realised I had spent the better part of 20 minutes like this & it was getting ridiculous. I really had to get over this Mailer-induced dread & sleep . I leaned out of the bed, switched
the light on & there on the steps at the edge of the platform was a naked man.
There had been a denser black in the blackness. It was the schoolfriend. I had been staring at him creeping incrementally across the studio towards me.
‘Whatthefuckareyoudoing?’ I shrieked.
‘I’ve come to join you.' he said, now crouching down against the steps to hide himself. ' Getthefuck out of my room’ 'GettheFUCK out of my room’
‘Getthefuck OUT of my room’ Thankfully he slunk away. What kind of guy tries it on with a girl - who has shown absolutely no interest - by taking off all his clothes edging silently towards them in the dark?
Afterwards I wondered what would have happened if I hadn’t been reading Mailer and had fallen asleep: he would have made it to my bed. Would he have raped me? If I had screamed for help would anyone have heard me? Had he raped anyone else?
When I got home to my bonsai flat in London, it had ceased to my haven; it felt like a wallpapered trap. I no longer slept in my bed, but on the sofa with all the lights on. I was wakeful most nights, listening. Sometimes I’d drink half a bottle of vodka before I could get my eyes to close. Weeks, turned into months and by the end of the year I put the flat up for sale & moved somewhere I could afford more than bedroom; I was a wreck living alone.
Years went by and I saw the schoolfriend on maybe three occasions: once across a crowded seminar, once at a party and once most oddly, deep in the Oxfordshire county.
I was driving along a narrow lane when another car appeared from the opposite direction, we slowed down to pass one another & as we drew level, I saw that it was him. On no occasion did we speak.
On Monday I drove to work, opened the door to the photographer’s studio and there was the schoolfriend, sitting in a chair. We recognised each other instantly. I passed him without speaking and went
to my studio. All day long I could hear him talking to the photographer. All day long I wondered what to do.
Three sightings across 20 years & and nothing ever said.
In the afternoon, I could hear them discussing what they were going to do the following day & realised that this fouth time, I finally had to do something. I told myself that courage lies solely in the hands of the alarmed & then stepped out of my studio and said as calmly as I could, ‘By the way, what you did to me had a massive impact on my life that went on
for years and years, all of it entirely negative. The thought of breathing the same air as you again tomorrow fills me revulsion.’
He sat there staring at me, saying nothing and then I left.
I walked down the corridor feeling very emotional, my hands were shaking, but by the time I reached my car, I felt goooood.
Tuesday
The photographer rang me late last night, saying the schoolfriend had told him he couldn’t come back in. Annoyingly, I had to stay away from the studio today because the photographer can't be the fall guy & lose the job over something that has nothing to do with him.
With an enforced day off I decided to wash that sleazeball outta my hair & take up the offer
of M&M Management to experience hairdresser Paul Edmond's new UPR protein treatment brought here from Iran where, 
beneath their veils they have great glossy mains. I read somewhere that absolutely every adult Iranian, male & female wax their entire bodies. Whenever I look at Ahmedinajad fulminating on the news about the West, I can't help thinking that below that hairy chin of his he's as hairless as a spoon.
I then took my newly glossy mane to the first screening of my friend Bernard’s biopic Mr Nice, about drug dealer Howard Marks who is acted by Rhys Ifans.
I have sworn omerta until it is released.......& that's yr average four day in the life of a writer, artist, insomniac single mother: Brent brigade [militant wing]
Stop Press. Word is that twins are joining the choir tomorrow; tenors apparently [& unbeknowst to them, our lab specimens for minute study].
with the round of shows and come our way was Barbara Hulanicki of Biba fame. I had a Biba shirt hanging at the front of my stall & for one excited moment thought she might stop buy it – I mean, fashion designers can’t possibly remember everything they’ve ever made, but presumably they 
admire their own taste.... The highlight of my day was a double twin spotting. One identical pair walked by wearing the same striped shirts, although one was red/white & the other blue/white. Two minutes later, another pair passed, this time one had cut her hair short. I wanted
to yell, ‘Have you see the other pair yet!?’ Are twins as interested by other twins as I am? Do they acknowledge each other when they meet - or are other twins just the norm & their fascination lies in us the single egg folk? Twins have been a gentle obsession for most of my life, but things got stoked in my teens by two court cases that made it into the national press. The first was a set of teenage twins from Cardiff who were done for arson. They spoke their own private language & insisted on being in the witness box together. One twin spoke of how claustrophobic their lives were & not long after, the dominant twin said she thought it was better if she died, which she then did.
The other court case was of twins stalking a hapless neighbour they felt they loved, but soon began to hate. They were exactly like how you would expect Clara & Clarice of Gormenghast to look. They spoke as one, in a strange droning harmony. In order to dress identically every day, if outfits differed in anyway - for example different buttons - they would cut off them all off & share them out again so they both had them alternating. Even if someone gave them a gift of two different coloured soaps they
would hack them in half and cram the opposing halves together to satisfy their hysteria for parity. Riveting stuff.Doing the maths at the end of the day at Portobello, I worked out that after expenses, in a twelve hour day I had made a sum total of £3, which even by my capacity for low earning was going it some. I tried to work out what that meant as an hourly rate & then fell into bed at 9.
Sunday
Tom, our choirmaster had booked us to sing at a miniature festival called Summer Sunset in Berkshire. Set in a beautiful woodland glade at Wasing Park,
we arrived to find a mass of green-faced revelers dressed as woodland creatures, lying in heaps of day-after-the-night-before unwellness. Our choir is not remotely professional – we do it for fun, & very
occasionally, we don’t even have fun; motly we do. It is made up of artists, actors, a doctor, a chef and a nutritionist. There was slight disquiet among the sopranos when we discovered Sinead, a lawyer [& unbeknownst to her] our lead soprano, was stuck in bed with flu. Luckily though, handsome Rupert our [unbeknownst to him] choir mascot was in attendance, but everything was in the balance. As singers we are very up and down & so today it was possible we were going to make grown men, weep, but it was equally possible they were going to throw their shoes at us.
Before we went onstage, Tom took us off to run through the two songs we struggle with: Lovecats & Bare Necessities. We failed to nail either & an attempt by one of the sopranos [me] to get them knocked off our setlist was dismissed. Ten minutes later, we lined up & sung our hearts out to an audience of seventy hung-over people. Life On Mars - not always a good one - worked fantastically, as did Hallelujah & I’ll Fly Away; then we massacred Lovecats & Bare Necessities.Monday
A distinctly odd day.
To fully explain it, let the scene go blurry as I
guide you back through time to 1986…when I flew to Spain for the weekend to join my brother who was staying at the house of a well known Catalan sculptor. It was the 50th anniversary of the Civil War and I arrived thinking, very foolishly, there were going to be merry public celebrations. The sculptor's home, in a suburb of Barcelona, consisted of half a dozen small farm buildings that had been converted to bedrooms, living spaces and art studios.
There were various other guests, but it was hard to tell who or how many, although my brother had a few friends there including, one of his old schoolfriends, who I had never liked, but the living spaces were so scattered, it was easy to avoid people.
My room was at the far end of a huge studio containing lines of plan chests and scupting scaffolds. The bed was behind a glass wall, up a few steps on a raised platform at the far end of the room, all quite 60s.
In describing this room I realise the layout is very similiar to where I work now, on a little platform hived off the back of a photographer’s studio, - although the proportions are smaller & the wall is solid not glass.
On the last night of the weekend the weather broke and the wind started to howl in from the sea. I lay in bed reading Tough Guys Don’t Dance by Norman Mailer, a murder mystery in which the protaganist wakes up after a night of boozing to find his Porsche blood-soaked & a decapitated head nearby.I turned out the light feeling spooked and listened to the branches of a tree being dashed against the courtyard wall outside the bedroom.
Then I thought I heard a tiny noise inside the studio, at the far end. I peered into the dark. Was there a denser bit of darkness in the general darkness? I stared harder, but could hear nothing over for the wind. I kept staring into the studio thinking something was there. I wanted to turn the light on the but the lamp was a good stretch from the bed & I started freaking myself out that a decapitater's axe would crash down on my outstretched arm. I went on staring and listening, until I realised I had spent the better part of 20 minutes like this & it was getting ridiculous. I really had to get over this Mailer-induced dread & sleep . I leaned out of the bed, switched
the light on & there on the steps at the edge of the platform was a naked man.There had been a denser black in the blackness. It was the schoolfriend. I had been staring at him creeping incrementally across the studio towards me.
‘Whatthefuckareyoudoing?’ I shrieked.
‘I’ve come to join you.' he said, now crouching down against the steps to hide himself. ' Getthefuck out of my room’ 'GettheFUCK out of my room’
‘Getthefuck OUT of my room’ Thankfully he slunk away. What kind of guy tries it on with a girl - who has shown absolutely no interest - by taking off all his clothes edging silently towards them in the dark?
Afterwards I wondered what would have happened if I hadn’t been reading Mailer and had fallen asleep: he would have made it to my bed. Would he have raped me? If I had screamed for help would anyone have heard me? Had he raped anyone else?When I got home to my bonsai flat in London, it had ceased to my haven; it felt like a wallpapered trap. I no longer slept in my bed, but on the sofa with all the lights on. I was wakeful most nights, listening. Sometimes I’d drink half a bottle of vodka before I could get my eyes to close. Weeks, turned into months and by the end of the year I put the flat up for sale & moved somewhere I could afford more than bedroom; I was a wreck living alone.
Years went by and I saw the schoolfriend on maybe three occasions: once across a crowded seminar, once at a party and once most oddly, deep in the Oxfordshire county.
I was driving along a narrow lane when another car appeared from the opposite direction, we slowed down to pass one another & as we drew level, I saw that it was him. On no occasion did we speak.
On Monday I drove to work, opened the door to the photographer’s studio and there was the schoolfriend, sitting in a chair. We recognised each other instantly. I passed him without speaking and went
to my studio. All day long I could hear him talking to the photographer. All day long I wondered what to do.Three sightings across 20 years & and nothing ever said.
In the afternoon, I could hear them discussing what they were going to do the following day & realised that this fouth time, I finally had to do something. I told myself that courage lies solely in the hands of the alarmed & then stepped out of my studio and said as calmly as I could, ‘By the way, what you did to me had a massive impact on my life that went on
for years and years, all of it entirely negative. The thought of breathing the same air as you again tomorrow fills me revulsion.’He sat there staring at me, saying nothing and then I left.
I walked down the corridor feeling very emotional, my hands were shaking, but by the time I reached my car, I felt goooood.
Tuesday
The photographer rang me late last night, saying the schoolfriend had told him he couldn’t come back in. Annoyingly, I had to stay away from the studio today because the photographer can't be the fall guy & lose the job over something that has nothing to do with him.
With an enforced day off I decided to wash that sleazeball outta my hair & take up the offer
of M&M Management to experience hairdresser Paul Edmond's new UPR protein treatment brought here from Iran where, 
beneath their veils they have great glossy mains. I read somewhere that absolutely every adult Iranian, male & female wax their entire bodies. Whenever I look at Ahmedinajad fulminating on the news about the West, I can't help thinking that below that hairy chin of his he's as hairless as a spoon.I then took my newly glossy mane to the first screening of my friend Bernard’s biopic Mr Nice, about drug dealer Howard Marks who is acted by Rhys Ifans.
I have sworn omerta until it is released.......& that's yr average four day in the life of a writer, artist, insomniac single mother: Brent brigade [militant wing]
Stop Press. Word is that twins are joining the choir tomorrow; tenors apparently [& unbeknowst to them, our lab specimens for minute study].
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