Vampires, Bunnies, And Some Surprising Behaviours Of Domestic Silverware

I am currently reading three books at once. This is not always a good idea. Plots, ideas, and characters segue from volume to volume like phantasmagorical double agents, creating in their unauthorised juxtaposition alliances ranging from the serendipitous to the absurd, and occasionally unholy.

First up; "The Evolution Of Inanimate Objects", by Harry Karlinsky, from The Friday Project, one of the quirkier, smaller imprints of the HarperCollins behemoth. Harry Karlinsky has a distinguished backlist of non-fiction academic work, and even before we hit Chapter One, it becomes abundantly clear why the publishers have found it necessary to preface the author's name with the disambiguating legend, "A Novel By". The supposed history of the life, work, and eventual mental degeneration and incarceration, of a putative younger son of Charles Darwin, he who both defined and destroyed what we now perceive as the fundamental bases of the Victorian world-picture, knits into a seamless surface, at once reassuringly familiar and distressingly surreal, the known and the unknowable, real and imagined, the rational, and the intensely unreasonable. Having by now somewhat recovered from the unexpectedly profound special effects of Mr Karlinsky's hyper-realistic faction technique, I have begun to develop a few, cautious theories of my own in respect of the novel's several subtexts - of which, more later.

Next comes "Nine Rabbits", by the Bulgarian author Virginia Zaharieva, translated by Angela Rodel and published by the rather delightful Istros Books, a small press devoted to publishing fiction in translation, with a strong focus on South Eastern Europe. In common with the previous work is its epistolary form, tricksy way with perceptions of reality, in the very best post-modern tradition, - and the pervading obsession of the novel's central "voice" with matters of the kitchen and table, as a medium for explaining and demonstrating the workings of their personal cosmology. 

One of the great joys, for me, of reading literature from other countries and cultures than my own, is the sensation of tasting a dish unknown to me, a dish formed by other influences and other histories, only comprehensible to my animal brain in the consumption and digestion thereof. And in this aspect, "Nine Rabbits" is so far showing itself a Michelin five star, luridly synaesthetic all-round box-ticker. Opening it is itself like falling down a rabbit-hole, into a dystopian wonderland of alternately passionate, and disinterested, brutality, told, initially, with the almost magical unconcern of a child's viewpoint, looking back with minimal reinterpretation but a steadily held lens. Stylistically, Zaharieva juxtaposes memoir format, diary, fragments of  epic verse, lists of alternate endings like a "What happened next?" adventure book, and of course the recipes, each recipe marking a significant moment or stage in the narrator's psychological journey. I have tried a few of the recipes along the way, and intend at a future stage to publish the results with a few observations, and other serving suggestions. Arse-End Potatoes and Monastery Soup (complete with incense) have met with approval, both for flavour and title, in my household so far.

Furry creatures of various sorts also crop up in my third read, "The Finno-Ugrian Vampire", this time by a  Hungarian, Noemi Szecsi, published by another relatively new, and definitely enthusiastic, small imprint, Stork Press, in an English translation by Peter Sherwood, who, as will shortly become apparent, must have had his work cut out for him (more power to his ink-besmirched elbow).

The chief bunny in this burrow is Initiative, the hero of the reluctant vampire heroine's proposed series of disturbing and unsuccessful children's books. Initiative is so named in English, rather than the writer's native idiom, in an apparently perverse tribute to the Golden Age of British anthropomorphic kid-lit both obsessively researched, and sneeringly disapproved of, by Szecsi's heroine. Other not-so fluffy cameos are provided by the pets - and sometimes light impromptu snacks - of virgin vamp Jerne's grandmother, the senior - and card-carrying - Finno-Ugrian Vampire, who keeps flocks of plump, sleek rats as a home-decoration accessory, not content with knocking off the plasterwork and carving faux bullet holes into the walls of the otherwise comfortable and desirable bourgeois residences she prefers to inhabit - genuinely dilapidated properties not tending to occur in neighbourhoods with sufficient class for our heroine's wealthy and aristocratic family.

A deceptively straightforward narrative approach conceals a peeling sequence of layers in this very entertaining novel, a relatively brief, but thoroughly packed read. This is something of a palimpsest book, a book about books, about language, words, nationalities, identities and translation itself. And it leaves its own peculiar flavour in the reader's mouth - salt, warm, a little metallic... I should have finished it by tomorrow. Full review to follow.

A Day In The Life Of Miguel De Cervantes' Landlady

"Well, that's me all right. Dulcinea. "Dulcie Nada', 'e used to call me, cheeky beggar. Nada's more than I ever used to get from 'im, I can tell you. Writer, you say? All I ever saw 'im write was promissory notes. Wrote a famous book? Cooking the books'd be more 'is style, I reckon. Drank, too. Coming home at all hours, raving about Giants with great whirling arms. And it was only the old Mill down at Cartama.
What was it called, this book, did you say? 'Don Quijote, Knight of La Mancha'? Well, a Mancha's a Stain, that much I do know. And if 'is bedlinen was anything to go by, 'e'd a damn good right to be a Knight of it - when 'e'd 'ad a night of it, know what I mean, hehe! Oooh, and the sorts 'e used to knock about with! Bedbugs wouldn't bite 'em. Mind, that Sancho, 'e was a proper gentleman, 'e was. 'Ad a few laughs together, we did! 'E ad this mule, 'e did. Loved that mule like a brother, so 'e did. And who's to blame 'im? All Christian men are brothers, says the Padre, but if that makes the likes of Mr Cervantes my brother, well, I'd rather take my chances with the mule, if it's all the same to you.
So, this Quijote, 'e was in love with this woman called Dulcinea, was 'e? And you reckon that's meant to be me? Not on your life! I wouldn't 'ave 'ad 'im with a whole sack of beans, as a present! Not that 'e didn't ask, I'll 'ave you know.
But I says to 'im, 'Miguelito,' I says. 'If I take you, you'll be getting rid of all those preposterous books, for the kick-off. They're not Christian, and they're not clean.' Know what 'e says to me? 'Lovely Dulcinea,' 'e says. Lovely Dulcinea! The ratbag. 'You're a true daughter of the Soil. And, such being your parentage, you needn't kick up such a fuss when some of it finds its way into the house!'
Well, I'll tell you what I did - I chased him out with the broom, and 'is grubby old tomes with 'im!
And off 'e went down the street, laughing and singing like a Heathen.
No Sir, that wouldn't 'ave suited me - not at all!
Now then, are you wanting this room, or aren't you? Last gentleman as 'ad this bed, 'e was a Priest, a clean, holy man, and a good eater, too. Any bugs as are in there'll come with a Papal Blessing, and a full stomach.
How much? Well, it's five Duros a night, and four if you eat here. Why's that? It's just my way, that's all. Anyways, I'd rather make a loss of a Duro than see one go in 'er pockets at the Baker's across the road, and that's my business, and my Prerogative, I believe.
You'll take it? I'll send Sancho down to take up your bags. If there's anything else you want, I'll see what can be done. Nothing lawful's too much trouble, as we say here, Sir! Hope you enjoy your stay."

The Journey To The Source: Part Two

The first bit was easy, and the territory well-known. The banks of The River were wide, smooth and flat here; on the left bank was a gentle rise, leading to a hill on which grew Standing Stones (probably an old sheep-pen) and mushrooms, which, come autumn, they would gather by the carrier-bagful, gingerly testing them for toxicity with the aid of Roger Phillips' "Fungi of the British Isles" and robust, youthful constitutions. To their right were cows, miring up the shallows as they waded in for their first drink of the day, sullen, steaming, untrustworthy. Also to the right lay flood-meadows, inhabited in spring by a myriad shrill and slippery amphibians, whose teeming children would be routinely kidnapped and kept in garden, outhouse, and pails of thick green slime, until, having swallowed the tails of their infancy, they should sprout unlikely limbs with which to climb the walls of their nursery prisons, and hop away.
For several miles, the stream remained easy to track, straighter than the road occasionally carried across it on low stone bridges. Here and there, too, a little footbridge joined one bit of pasture to its brother on the opposing bank, though it was shallow enough in most places to be easily forded by a sheep, or a toddler in red wellingtons.
A little further on, things started to get harder. The banks were steeper, the stream faster and deeper, and dense thickets of bramble and hawthorn in some places touched twiggy fingers above the waterboatmen and the snapping dragonfly larvae, in an arc so stooping that the three children now had to wade single-file in the rushing centre of the current.
Now they remembered the leeches. They knew, theoretically, that one could detach them with the help of a lighted cigarette, but no-one had thought how feasible it would be to light up whilst waist deep in black, leech infested water, which was undoubtedly already seeping into the rusty tin which contained their optimistic first aid kit, and a few ready-rolled tubes. Nor did any one trust the others to apply the necessary glow so close to their skin; but a bankside inspection at the next disembarkable spot revealed no hangers-on, so they were spared the painful proof.
By this time, they were feeling hungry, and thirsty too - who brings water to a watercourse? But they knew better than to drink from the River itself - not they! Water that was fast flowing over rock, on the other hand, was believed by all the children to be safe and pure, so when they came to the place where a mountain spring - naturally named The Waterfall - spattered down towards them, they took a brief diversion, climbing to the large flat rock at the clifftop to satisfy thirst, and view as much as they could see of their remaining itinerary. Here they also ate poor, unbuttered sandwiches, and set out three cigarettes to dry in the grass that was speckled with sundews, yellow tormentil, and dried sheep-droppings, which they flicked hilariously at each other with their sandwich-free hands.
From this point, the gradient started to climb. The river itself, of course, was actually rushing downwards, but we have to remember that the children were going the other way. It wasn't deep - the tallest child could walk along the riverbed near the bank without getting wet above the top of his boots, though the other two shipped water at every step like dwarfs hauling soft-sided buckets.
But although not deep, it was much faster now, and the stones on the bottom were slimy and treacherous, so they found themselves rapidly tiring. They had loitered at The Waterfall for longer than they had intended; the sun had already fallen away behind the grey, bare mountains ahead of them, and great clouds of gnats appeared, diving en masse with joyful whines to feed on sunburned necks and arms.
Still, no-one was ready to admit that they wanted to stop; so they carried on, rather slower, and much more ill-tempered. They passed the massive crag called Ifan's Head, but didn't see the eagle. They wondered if Farmer Jones had shot it, as he had threatened to do; which, if it were so, they considered a selfish and hypocritical act. Jones left his flock out year round on the mountainside, uncounted and uncared for, to live or die as suited themselves - what was a lamb more or less to him, when Subsidies took care of the rest?
Now it was dark, and they were cold, and hungry again. They had intended to pad out the sandwiches with blackberries, and bilberries, perhaps, but those were still, at midsummer, hard, and green.
For a while they rested up against a solid clump of cottongrass, sucking cucumber-flavoured reeds to confound their hunger, and arguing. Two wanted to go back; it was after dark, and they would be in trouble. One thought they should go on; they were already in trouble, and they still hadn't reached the Source; they would be punished, and they would also have failed.
The argument was abruptly halted by a noise. Something was coming towards them through the bracken on the far bank. Something big. A sheep? A dog... a panther! There was a panther, living wild above the treeline. Everyone knew it. It had eaten three cats, and a sick ewe, and once it had chased Mog Edwards all the way home from the pub, though that probably wasn't true.
The three scrabbled up to the road as fast as waterlogged wellies would allow. The road was almost worse, gleaming dully back down the valley like the trail of a vampire snail, emptier than the coldest, loneliest lunar landscape.
Then they staggered, stumbled, and ran as hard as they could, shoving one another towards the ditch in echoing, hollow bravado, crying not to be left behind, and hearing Footsteps, padding surely and rhythmically behind them, until at last, clammy, wheezing, heart-thumping hours later, they passed the safehouse of the first orange street-lamp and dispersed to their respective homes, too late for dinner, too late for bedtime, too late for any reasonable explanation.
And the map?
They had left it behind. For all I know, it's still there.

The Journey To The Source

There were three children, and they usually played together, taking turns to bully, tease, and perform practical jokes on one another, of invariable crudity and variable inventiveness.
They built numerous "dens" in field and hedgerow, of which the overall standard of construction ranged from very-nearly creative, to execrably desultory. Sometimes these makeshift homes would be colonised by other little gangs, and ferocious battles would take place, from which many a deflated bike tyre, dead arm, and torn jacket sleeve ensued. They broke into derelict cottages, all of them Haunted, and carried away many treasures snatched from between rotting floorboards and falling ceiling plaster - abandoned fossil collections, centenarian pickles, and trunks filled with mildewed books - Anatole France, Mark Twain (illustrated), religious almanacs in Welsh (some Methodist schism, belonging to the same era as the preserves).
And they loved to make maps, sometimes elaborate and detailed surveys of imaginary lands, highly influenced by Tolkein and Co., sometimes carefully labelled charts of their real, immediate environment, all landmarks of juvenile importance being scrupulously inked in under real or - more often - assumed names, fanciful, onomatopoeic, or simply descriptive.
On these more prosaic plans appeared in addition, indicated only by complex codes, the locations of certain caves and crevices in the surrounding foothills, considered safer havens than the temporary encampments of the "dens", where could be stored all durable, damp-proof, and illicit prizes, without much fear of discovery -  unless of course an older sibling, or other Enemy Child, should come across, and decipher, the map.
In the cave stores were also kept emergency packages, tucked into tins or plastic boxes and buried in floor or wall, as convenient, containing all manner of things of which one might have need when far from home, for all three prided themselves on their knowledge of Woodcraft and Survival Skills, garnered from such disparate sources as Baden-Powell's "Scouting For Boys" (1938 edition) and a much-thumbed paperback copy of "Papillon", daringly liberated from the Mobile Library. The factual contents usually comprised half a dozen Swan Vestas, dipped in candle-wax to keep dry, an assortment of unhygienic plasters and gauze bandage, and a lump of Kendall Mint Cake. None of them liked Kendall Mint Cake, but a Guide for Hill-Walkers that they had once read had recommended it, so in it went.
One of them was afraid of spiders, but more afraid of the others knowing it. One was openly afraid of Ghosts, whereas two claimed not to be, at least when there were three of them, and it wasn't too dark. All three were afraid of farm dogs, which was a reasonable fear, as these were the usual, bite-happy welcome laid on for persistent and habitual trespassers.
They spent much time by The River, splashing and ducking each other in the shallow pool where you could swim a few strokes if you weren't too tall, hunting for the bigger boys' nightlines and stealing their hooks -  their catch, too, if there was any - tickling tiny, illegal trout, and making dams that were meant to keep the trout from escaping, but which always ended up with colossal, savage eels as sole occupiers, having eaten such fish as might not yet have slipped out between the carefully placed stones and away downstream.
So here it was, one day, that the three hit upon the idea for their most ambitious Adventure yet. They would follow the River back to its Source, making, on the way, a new map, so accurate and detailed that even the Ordnance Survey might be happy to get their hands on it. (A previous idea, to follow the River down-stream to its mouth in Cardigan bay, had been discounted; not only was it too far, but the route would take them through Tregaron, where lived several schoolfellows they were currently anxious to avoid). So the source was fixed on as a goal. They called it "The" Source, just as in their local egotism they called their little tributary stream "The" River, because it was the only one they knew.
The following morning, they set off so early that even the most vicious of dogs still lay safely sleeping. Trying to move stealthily in dawn light, army-surplus khakis and outsize rubber boots, they scaled the churchyard wall, picking out a shortcut between graves and garden spiders (on overtime repairing dew-damage), hardly pausing even to peer into cracks in the slate tombs, to see if the Bones had Moved in the night. Down the steep earth bank that separated church from stream they slid, the last tossing down to the first their once-green kit-bag, tastefully vandalised with Punkish biro hieroglyphs, and containing the usual supplies, supplemented by paper, pencils, and a makeshift measure - a school ruler and a ball of string.

                                                     END OF PART ONE.
                                                 PART TWO TO FOLLOW

Tauromachia

    The earth is baked as hard as Neolithic pottery now, curling up at the edges, golden and done. The mountainous bones of the land stick out in the terrible, sleepless light like the ribs of a starving pariah dog. Even the olive trees, which seem not to need water, maintaining their uniform silver-green year round, are muffled for the moment in a gritty layer of fine yellow dust. The soft green pelmets of wild fennel began to show short weeks ago; already the Levante wind hisses through their hollow, desiccated stalks, ghostly liquorice pan-pipes.
    How our ancestors must have feared the sun. It starts life; warms and coaxes crops from the inert, chill soil; and yet at the last, kills it. How short the cycle must have seemed to them, that takes living things from seed, sapling, and fledgling, to hay, chaff, and ant-cleaned bones. Imagine how, long, long ago, before writing or memory, maybe even before we had speech or names for each other, a group of terrified creatures made their first, clumsy attempt to slake the vengeful drought, pouring a libation onto the dead ground for the pitiless, insatiable Thing in the sky to gobble up.
    Fast-forward to today. For today, in more than a hundred miniature Coliseii across Spain - at this very instant, perhaps - a man decked in a suit as fey and fantastical as any of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes costumes will step out into the ruthless sun and the still-clean sand, to challenge a monster from a primal nightmare, with a scrap of pink cloth and a skewer.
    High summer is the season for Bullfighting. In Malaga in August, every day a death, till the season ends in Ronda in September with the authentic, splendid barbarism of the Corridas Goyescas. The ceremony opens with the procession of the Damas, rolling up in a cavalcade of picturesque, picaresque "carrozas" and meticulous, flounced and fearsomely corseted eighteenth century finery, to occupy the most expensive seats in the country. And the killing begins - and ends, for another year.
    Goya, he for whom the "Goyescas" are named, loved to draw the Toros, his cruel pen quite at home in the Plaza. Picasso, too, though as a lifelong, elective exile from the Land of Bulls, he can't actually have seen a proper "Corrida" after the age of twenty-five. It might be on its way out now; Barcelona has banned it; but the images created by Miquel Barcelo to commemorate his city's last ever five o'clock massacre have been amongst the most stolen event posters in history. It takes longer than that to convert the collective soul of a people.
    I've never been to the "Toros" en vivo. Paying a month's salary to sit in the cheap seats at a culturally sanctioned crime-scene doesn't hold much appeal. But it's hard to spend a summer here and avoid the images of carnage coming live from the ring on the tv screens of every little bar and "venta" in the Andaluz community. So I've seen hundreds of helpless, predictable brutes topple silently into the dust, following a play - which the innocent victim doesn't know is only a play - of life, death and sacrifice on the little stage that, for two or three bloody hours, stands for a world.
    I saw, once, a bull refuse to fight. It does happen. Not a Little White Bull was he, though, but a huge black beast with grey splotches, straight from a Cretan fresco.For ten minutes he stood, motionless and emotionless, a monument of Assyrian stone, immune to taunts, goads, the spirited capering of the Toreadors or the murderous looking Banderillas embedded under his hard leather, letting blood like springs on the hillside. At last, the gates to the bull-pens opened, and in came the half-dozen cows, to lead him, victoriously garlanded in his revolt, to a better life, one hopes.
    And I have seen a terrible thing.A young matador, hardly more than a Novillero, hacking away at a poor creature for some fifteen minutes without being able to finish it off. The crowd roared in disgust, they booed, they threw things. Just as it seemed the stalls were about to explode - the young man desperately attempting to maintain the correct expression of noble unconcern as he lunged for the animal's heart with the wicked curved sword, again and again failing to strike true - an old bullfighter ran into the ring.
    He wasn't an impressive figure. He strained at the seams of his Traje de Luces; his short jacket barely covered his respectable paunch. His friendly, unheroic face would have looked more at home dealing out Pints than Death.
    With an imperious gesture, that would have seemed comical from such a prosaic form as his in any other circumstances, he ordered the younger man away. He walked straight up to the exhausted bull, now standing with blue tongue protruding, panting great, heaving breaths, unwilling to fight on, unable to die, and took its colossal head between his hands. Staring back into his eyes, the animal sank slowly to its knees, and he lowered himself to the ground with it as it fell. It lay, finally, with its head in his lap, and he stroked it and spoke soft, quiet words to it. I do not know what the old matador said to the dying bull. But three hundred sangria-fuelled, riotous fans of blood and adrenalin fell silent around them, Sol y Sombra alike.
    At last, he quietly brought out a small knife with his free hand, the one that wasn't cradling the great primeval skull, and with one slight, firm movement, severed the spinal cord. The short-sighted, uncomprehending eyes went dark. The bellows movement of the vast, straining lungs gently subsided.
    When the Matador finally stood up again, the crowd also stood. They clapped, slowly and sonorously, heads bowed in respect, as he left the ring.
    Death in the afternoon.

Post Haste

Well, then. Ahem. Ahem. I've just been looking over that excerpt in my last post, and thinking it over (with a little sage advice from some trusted friends. You know, the sort of friends who aren't afraid to take the car keys from you when you've just downed six bottles of Beaujolais and are about to show everyone how you can drive like the Stig off "Top Gear".)
Basically, my heroine is starting to annoy me. Well, she is meant to be a bit of an annoying character. But rather like the great Edward Gorey's "Mr Earbrass", I find it disconcerting when a character starts to assume a fitful reality on their own account. She may not have peculiarly unpleasant nubs on her greatcoat, but she is insisting rather a lot on telling the story in her own way. And if there's one thing I haven't got the patience for, it's a fictional back-seat driver.
So what to do? I could, of course, abandon her. I could erase her files, delete the post, put my pencilled notes on the fire. I have the power! Take that, mere paper person! I don't care what it says in "The Matrix", I made you, and I can snuff you out any time I choose!
But I still have some faith in the idea behind "Writer 51". After all, they got themselves born all on their own, without the say-so of any one creator. And that's such an impressive achievement in itself for someone who isn't actually real, that I feel they should be given a fighting chance.
So, back to the drawing board. Even as I write here, I feel an Idea coming on, haha... No, not that Idea, Lobachevsky. Athough... wait a minute... do I still have those inedited sheaves filched from Italo Calvino's wastepaper basket? I do? It might just be worth a shot! (Faint cries of "It'll never work, Carruthers!", "Don't do it, you mad fool!", "You'll never get away with this!", in the background. Fades to black, dot. Dot. Dot...)

Unforthcoming Titles

Oh, all right. Go on, then.
In response to massive public demand (well, a couple of people have shown a polite interest), I have decided to go ahead and give you all a real treat. I'm going to preview the entire first chapter of my upcoming masterpiece on this blog (first draft, anyway). Now, be warned. It's heavy stuff, is this. Hermann Hesse, hold on to your hat...
Here you go.



WRITER 51

 The Prologue.

Someone once told me that publishing is like a lifeboat. I can’t remember who.

I can’t remember where or why, either.

Be that as it may, the crux of the simile, (to the best of my recollection), was that you can’t risk a lifeboat carrying, say, fifty writers, for the sake of throwing a line to a fifty-first. Writer fifty-one might well be as good as the ones in the boat; it doesn’t matter. Better that fifty make it than fifty-one don’t.

I’m Writer 51.

This is my story.

I always knew I was meant to be a writer. Even as a tiny child, I sat on my bedroom floor weaving my dolls and stuffed toys into an endless series of terrifyingly trite tales, graduating, with my first crayoned letters, to little books, lovingly and carefully stitched together out of scrap paper, (first by my mother and later by myself). These I filled with the somewhat morbid soap-style antics of woodland creatures, progressing as I grew older to even more saccharine epics concerning Elves, Goblins, and cloyingly romantic Countesses in sub-Bavarian castles. My parents praised me, preserved my efforts in their own special drawer, and told their friends that I was “So Gifted”, and would certainly, in the fullness of time, prove to be the next Iris Murdoch, or at any rate Margaret Drabble. By the time I started secondary school, and won the Junior Writing Prize – thus stimulating, perhaps a more important landmark in my early development, the first of a long, long series of Booker Prize Acceptance Speeches – I was already verging on the insufferable.

It was also the year I first met Mabel.

I say we met; in reality, Bridgington being what it was (twin town of Parochial, Alabama, and winner of Most Heterogenous Village In The South-West every year since 1868), I had worshipped her at a mute, whimpering distance since pre-school, gawping, longingly. As a fat kid on a diet mentally stalks the plastic Sundaes in the ice-cream parlour window. As a lazy-eyed cat-lover in peri-middle age presses up sweatily against the jeweller’s Spring Weddings display, drooling hopelessly at fantastical, unpossessable goods. But never, even in the most highly-dramatised flights of my fancy, dreaming that she could possibly one day be mine.

Mabel was, ( I beg your indulgence for the cliché), everything I was not. We were the same height, yet she always seemed taller, except on those occasions when she wanted to make herself cute, protectable and petite. She had dark, curling hair that was allowed to grow long; mine was limp and fine, and always cut off before it could do itself any damage. Her eyes were large, brown, and expressive. Or vacuous, depending on her mood and your perspective. Her nose was small and stereotypically dainty, whereas mine had just started with that dirty adolescent trick that makes it grow faster than any other part of your body, excluding puppy fat and feet. She looked pretty in things like ra-ra skirts and pedal pushers; I looked like I’d eaten the previous occupant. Puberty changed nothing. Mabel remained the golden-limbed beloved; I was Job in the pit, scratching at my acne with a pot-sherd.

In short, I adored Mabel with blasphemous intensity, and she in her turn repaid my love by using me, mercilessly and comprehensively, throughout our entire relationship.

I don’t know what impulse first moved Mabel to sit down next to me on the bench in the school playground. It might have been some uncharacteristic surge of kindness, friendliness even – we were all starting to experience the strange and sudden hormonal urges of a looming adolescence, after all. It might equally have been the stirrings of the killer instinct for a willing victim already awakening in her prepubescent soul. In the light of later experience, I rather suspect the latter, though somehow – God knows how – I find myself still wanting to excuse her, to find some scrap of genuine affection to fawn over with my untrainable cur’s mind.

I got up straight away, thinking automatically that she wanted the bench to herself. She pulled me back down, smiling. I sat, obediently, immobilised by her regal generosity and her beneficent beam like the proverbial bunny in the headlights.

“What’s your name?”

“I’m Gloria.”

“I’m Mabel. With an E.”

I didn’t know how else you could spell it, but I didn’t say so.

“I like Duran Duran. Who do you like?”

I didn’t like Duran Duran. I said,

“I like the blond one. He’s lush.”

I didn’t even know if there was a blond one. I presumed there was. There usually was.

“Do you want to be friends?”

Did I want to be friends! Did I want to be friends with Mabel Godalming!

It wasn’t even a question.

I must have sat staring for longer than I thought. “We could sit together at lunch,” she added, maybe thinking (Impossible!) that I was going to reject her magnanimous offer.

“Yeah, that’d be nice,” I said, not wanting to seem over eager, and possibly scare her away. “I mean, I mean, that’d be Lush. Cool.”

The bell rang just as my brain fainted, saving me from the mute confession that must surely have come, that I had no more words to say.

We were an item.

Every day we sat together on the bench at playtime, writing alternately Hilarious and Deeply Tragic pieces for inclusion in the school magazine, of which I was also the new, uncontested Editor. At any rate, I wrote; Mabel just had to Be. Occasionally, I included an article under her name; as my Muse and constant companion, I felt it was only fair that she should receive some credit for her input, even if only I, she, and our English teacher, would ever see it. (Of course I also believed, semi-secretly, that back issues of the “Bridgington Comprehensive Times” from our era would, some day, fetch record-breaking prices on the collector’s market).

I was on a roll. Drawing on a spectacular overflow of confidence and creative juice, I now completed, and submitted, my very first novel. Naturally, I had written “novels” before, but they had been just stories that rambled more than usual, in bigger writing. This was the real thing; a monster with more than fifty chapters and five hundred pages, covering the whole range of teenaged emotion from grovelling self-pity to screaming hysteria, and all dressed in a plot you could have invaded Poland with. I think it was about a kind of sad Vampire girl who is thwarted in her love for a rather effeminate Knight Templar, his appearance clearly based heavily on Mabel’s performance in the school production of “Ivanhoe”.

Using only one finger, and the English department typewriter, (to which my editorial status gave me, fortunately, unlimited access) I typed out every one of the five hundred leaden pages to the correct double-spaced, A4 format, and posted it – to Penguin, if memory serves.

Two weeks later, I also received my very first Rejection Letter. I kept it for years. It was kindly phrased, and hand-written (unlike so many to come), and I cried like a great, flouncing baby.

By the following day, I had decided that Penguin books had simply made a terrible, Philistine mistake. Future generations would shake their heads over this one, I thought, and in a gesture of great trust and generosity, I gave the manuscript (which had been considerately returned to me, even though, in my egotism, I had quite consciously omitted to include a stamped addressed envelope), to Mabel for safekeeping, until such time as Future Generations should have got their act together.

She said she didn’t want it.

“It’s Not Quite the Sort of Thing I’m Looking For Just Now”, she parroted happily.

I stuck the manuscript in the top of her school bag and ran off in a deflated little cloud of  doubly rejected misery.

I got over it. Soon the Team was back on the bench, Coleridge and Wordsworth, Riding and Graves, Ezra Pound and T S Eliot (even if Ezra seemed to spend a lot more time polishing her nails than her namesake would have.).

The future beckoned, wreathed in rosy-fingered, metaphorically confused glory.

                                                          *              *             *

We’ve both got the wrong names, Mabel said. You’re not a Gloria. I mean, “Gloria” is for actresses, and pop-stars. It isn’t you at all. And I’m not a Mabel. “Mabel”s an ugly name, it’s like fatties, and speckos. There aren’t any models called “Mabel”, are there? It’s just ugly, common and ugly.

I didn’t think “Mabel” was ugly. “Mabel” was a beautiful name. Of course it was, it was Mabel’s name. “Gloria” was ugly. How could she think “Gloria” was glamorous? “Gloria” was an old-lady name. If names had a scent, “Mabel” would smell like orchard apples, and minty gum breath, and romping in hay-lofts. “Gloria” would probably smell more like pink hair-curlers, old Lycra, and stress incontinence.

Still, I felt a little hurt that Mabel didn’t think I could have a glamorous name. But she didn’t mean it. And anyway, she was right – I wasn’t glamorous, not in that sort of way. But it didn’t matter, because I wasn’t going to be a pop-star, or a telly presenter, or a vacant, empty-headed actress. I didn’t need that. I was going to be a writer, wasn’t I? A famous, wealthy writer. Gloria Lambert, author. Novelist. Booker Prize Winning Novelist. Nobel Prize. Why not?

When you’re a really rich writer, of course, you can buy couture clothes, you can have designers design you things, you can be Sophisticated, which is actually much posher than Glamorous. And people still want to sleep with you. People wanted to sleep with George Sand, even, and she wasn’t Glamorous. She wasn’t even normal-looking, and she did all right.

I felt reassured. As long as I stuck to the plan, everything was going to be fine.

A Novel Experience

I've been a bit lazy about posts lately. Other matters taking precedence, that sort of thing. I have, however, aside from working towards my much-procrastinated exhibition (which is going to be soooo impressive when it finally happens, I swear!), been whiling away my endless leisure moments by writing a Novel, following a suggestion by someone else who was commenting on a particularly alarming - or alarmist - article about self-publishing in the Guardian, that I should write about a character who had emerged unbidden from the foam of the ensuing debate, called Writer 51. (Actually the Article wasn't bad reading, but the Fun was definitely in the Forum - Up Pompous, anybody?) And so "Writer 51" started to take shape in my mind, that unfortunate wannabe author who is never quite sure whether she really isn't good enough for an established publisher to take her on, or it's just that the quota in the lifeboat has already been filled... hence the numeration.
In the excerpt that follows, my heroine, who has just started secondary school, and won her very first writing prize (naturally convincing her that she is predestined for great things) is talking to her "best friend" (who is, equally naturally, going to turn out to be selfish, shallow and exploitative, and will inevitably go on to steal boyfriends,  bursaries, and eventually the heroine's precious work...) about names.

WRITER 51- Names.

We’ve both got the wrong names, Mabel said. You’re not a Gloria. I mean, “Gloria” is for actresses, and pop-stars. It isn’t you at all. And I’m not a Mabel. “Mabel”s an ugly name, it’s like fatties, and specs. There aren’t any models called “Mabel”, are there? ‘S just ugly, ugly and common.

I didn’t think “Mabel” was ugly. “Mabel” was a beautiful name. Of course it was, because it was Mabel’s name. “Gloria” was ugly. How could she think “Gloria” was glamorous? “Gloria” was an old-lady name. If names had a scent, “Mabel” would smell like orchard apples, and minty gum breath, and romping in hay-lofts. “Gloria” would probably smell more like pink hair-curlers, old Lycra, and stress incontinence.

Still, I felt a little hurt that Mabel didn’t think I could have a glamorous name. But she didn’t mean it. And anyway, she was right – I wasn’t glamorous, not in that sort of way. But it didn’t matter, ‘cause I wasn’t going to be a pop-star, or a film-star, a vacant, empty-headed actress. Who needs that? I was going to be a writer, wasn’t I? A famous, wealthy writer. Gloria Lambert, author. Novelist. Booker Prize Winning Novelist. Nobel Prize. Why not?

When you’re a really rich writer, of course, you can buy Couture clothes, you can have Designers Design you things, you can be Sophisticated, which is actually much posher than Glamorous. And people still want to sleep with you. People wanted to sleep with George Sand, even, and she wasn’t Glamorous. She wasn’t even normal-looking, and she did all right.

I felt reassured. As long as I stuck to the plan, it was all going to be fine.

More excerpts from the (unrevised) first draft soon - I can hardly wait! Or I might get round to that fascinating excursion into Romano-British Religion that I've been planning. It's going to be more exciting than it sounds, I promise you...

Twilight of the Daubs

Oh, how we love to trample on our Fallen Gods. Now that summer is upon us, one can scarcely open a quality broadsheet (as they once were) without reading some critic's belated and shocking discovery that Damien Hirst Can't Paint, or that Tracey Emin Can't Draw ( she never said she could, did she?). The truth of the matter is, as ever, much sadder, in its own way almost poignant, pathetic. An artistic movement that was essentially and irrevocably identified by its Youth, has had the tastelessness and temerity - to grow Old. Erstwhile Naked Emperor Damien now gazes out at us sad, grey and bemused from behind his thick glasses like a Poundland Hockney. Tracey Emin chatters interminably to anyone who will listen about the effects of premature menopause, so harsh, so bewildering to one who has never resolved adolescence. We hear little of the rest. Sarah Lucas went to Rehab (Yes to Life, No, No, No to Immortality). Billy Childish still grinds out stubborn landscapes in his Mum's spare bedroom, his hostile stance now as quaint, antique - and relevant -  as that of the Pre-Raphaelites may seem to a modern art history student. In Charles Saatchi's fridge, sacrificial blood drips silently onto Ms Lawson's Meringues, ephemeral as a Chocolate Jesus. The Tents of the Philistines burn unmourned without the city gates. (How ironic that we use the name of the cultured Philistines to denote Art-Haters, when it was the austere, image-phobic Hebrew nomads who were themselves the icon-smashing Islamist Fanatics of their day). Now we jeer and defile the carcase of the murdered Winter King, as we look for something New and Young to take his place. History is rewritten to fit the cycle. True Artists die young - Mozart, Vincent, Keats and Carravaggio. No matter that Picasso was poor into his fifties, or that Kandinsky was over forty when he first turned a painting on its side, lost figuration and founded abstraction. Helen Chadwick did it right - killed by the bacilli whose forms she was attempting to coax into her images, a living but deadly Magic Lantern Show. Yet I am sadder that I shall see no more of her work than satisfied to see the circle properly squared and the myth fulfilled. Once it was the case that the artist grew old and died, but his art lived on. That was true immortality. Over the last century (and a half, more or less), thanks to the Alchemists who gave us the cruel preserving juices of the silver nitrate, we see the artist forever young, frozen and trapped in time, while his work withers and fades in the unforgiving light of the natural calendar. Poor, poor Dorian Hirst with his Botoxed shark, as fresh and lifelike now as Mr Disney's head in its cryogenic vat, emptied of the ideas which gave it purpose, a macabre relic devoid of beauty, devoid of meaning, formaldehyde tears seeping from the seams of the glass coffin where Great Snow White awaits, not the life-giving kiss its puckered, decaying lips still gape open to receive, but the charity of decent burial. In the meantime, Mr Barnum steps up to the tank with a contract, and another pot of Rouge.

Summer Begins on May the Fortieth

The Municipal Swimming Pool is open for business in Algodonales, though school only broke up a few days ago. Lines have been strung up in the street outside, and rows of ancient bath-towels flap in the breeze like the flags of a particularly muddy crusade. Older children roam the street in small swarms like flip-flopped bees, to and from the miniscule pool in their bathing costumes and last year's swim-school t-shirts, their hair glittering and frizzy with the new chlorine. It's going to be the greatest summer ever (just like last year, and the year before, and the year before that...) There will be swimming, of course, and sitting in doorways at siesta time, gossiping in the shade (sleep is for Old People), cracking sackfuls of almonds with a rock on the marble step - an afternoon's work - staying up all night dancing and drinking "tinto verano", the wine punch that is nearly all lemonade anyway, and gabbing and flirting, and, for the very brave, still being the first to the pool or the river in the morning. Considered the most "Macho" are those lads who can claim that in summer time, they never go to bed at all. On midsummer's eve, in every pueblecito the fires of St John's Night burn away the Bad of the year now past (there's Mari with a hosepipe and a face of thunder, diligently watering the perimeter of the bonfire in a slow, dripping circle - a very necessary precaution in a land where a forest blaze can reduce hectares of imported Eucalyptus and native Pine to scented ashes in an hour). At the coast, at midnight, they wash their faces, hands, and feet in the sea, for luck. Once, two strangers, a mother and daughter from Granada, stranded like myself at the airport (the last buses inland leave before eight o'clock in the evening), offered to share their hotel room with me, for nobody should be alone on Noche San Juan. But before we slept, we had to file down to the shore in the still-warm dark, our way lit only by the glow off the horizon towards Morocco, and the embers from the remains of the last Sardine feasts, and solemnly wash away a year's sins and sadnesses with the cool salt water.
   And all summer long, there will be Feria - a thousand little Ferias in a thousand little villages, all different, uniquely the site of pilgrimage for the Pueblo's scattered sons, and all, inevitably, precisely, just the same. Each town hall will hire one of the same hard-working three- or four-man bands that, every summer, work their way tirelessly around the length and breadth of Andalucia, playing each night an identical repertoire with as much enthusiasm and verve as if they hadn't performed the self-same set already a hundred times this month. There will be old standards, pasadobles that everyone over thirty knows how to dance, and by the end of the evening, the Mayor's wife and the other Matrons will be tipsy enough to dance the Dance of the Little Frogs, as they do every year. There will be a new summer Pop Hit, complete with ridiculous movements, which every eight-year-old in town will know how to dance already, and they will be invited on stage with the band to perform it, one girl lugubriously incanting the words with Serious Eyebrows and a high, quavering flamenco soprano copied off the Saturday evening Talent Show on Canal Dos Andalucia. Everyone will drink "tinto" and horrible Cruzcampo beer in sticky plastic cups from a makeshift outdoor bar, and they will eat Pinchos and charred Chorizo, and quail's eggs cracked straight onto the Plancha, all served with small, hard chunks of stale, dry village bread, and pronounce it the best and finest food in the world ever, "sin duda alguna". The younger children will wander about interminably sucking the frostbite inducing tubes of "polofla" in all the colours of no earthly rainbow that ever was, consuming, it seems from the evidence of their livid green, blue, and orange cheeks and lips, very little else. Everything will be just as it always has been, just as it always will be - and just as it always should be.
    Little people of tomorrow, the summers that will come will never again be as long, as glorious as this one. The freedom you now enjoy will be a dimly remembered garden closed off behind a rusting, padlocked gate. Nevertheless, keep Summer in your hearts, that returns each year whether you want it, or need it, or notice it at all. Remember the world when it was flung wide open and full of light, and however dusty the road, it always lay ahead of you.

Don't Mention The Carbuncles

A propos of my last post, I have been tactfully informed by my architect brother that I am in imminent danger of beginning to Rant about Carbuncles. To which I say, Forsooth! Not so! It is my contention that Sir Norman Foster's Crime lacks sufficient Character for proper Carbunclehood. It is, indeed, its unremitting Blandness which offends me most. That, and its utter lack of functionality. Believe me when I say that the steadily rising piles of pigeon Guano which now top his Pseudo-Neo-Classical cornices form by far the most amusing and aesthetically pleasing notes in the whole design. Now, I am neither a Primitivist of the Carolingian sort - in fact, I love a good Carbuncle, me, and am looking forward with hand-rubbing glee to the new developments at the Royal Academy (have they plenty of smelling salts at the ready? Phalanxes of upper-class Aesthetes will be keeling over like Dominoes...) - nor am I delusional as to the general attractiveness of Victorian monuments. The British Museum is not, to put it plainly, a pretty girl. If they were making a film of her life, Meryl Streep would be a dead cert for the title role, probably in a frightening wig and a Mancunian accent. But why, Mr Foster, why so dull? I rather feel that, as we have paid for this glorified Conservatory, it might as well be made into somewhere that's slightly more pleasant to spend time in. If Sir Norman had built that article on the side of my house, he'd find himself in the Small Claims Court, sharpish. A homely lady like the BM has two choices in the manner of Dress, as it were. She can try to be self effacing and dissimulate her worst and most prominent features - which, when you are the architectural equivalent of a twenty stone redhead is perhaps a bit too much of a challenge. Or she can get theatrical. This is at least a more interesting option. It makes me think - laterally? strangely? - of some other public Monuments whose wardrobes and other refits we all have to shell out for. By which I mean Europe's Royals. As an Anthropological study, they hold some little interest. Some fulfil the role of living public sculpture better than others. To take one example, the Spanish Royal Family have not, historically speaking, ever been renowned for their great Beauty. And the Infanta Elena, the eldest daughter of the current Kings (the Spanish King and Queen are collectively referred to as "Los Reyes", "the Kings") is nothing if not a traditionalist in this respect. In fact she has very much the air of one whose Grandmother may have known Goya rather well. But in that lies her secret - she has style. Class. Panache. Not the dingy, dirgy sort of style that wears beige shoes and inoffensive headgear. No, the Infanta Elena went to her niece's christening dressed from head to foot in a bright green Matador's outfit, complete with bicorne hat. She carried it well. It made the deluge of obligatory tabloid shots in the Spanish media a touch more bearable. I would go further here - I would even say a word in defence of our own Princess Beatrice. Of the young woman's finer personal qualities, or if she has them, I know nothing. It interests me less. I only know -  although someone who as a matter of course takes very scant interest in the doings of celebs of whatever breed, and finds the prurient scrutiny of their "Toilets" a source of irritation rather than style tips - that, despite my own strong prejudices, I must confess to having really enjoyed her Hats. Youth apart, HRH Beatrice has not precisely lucked out in the matter of looks. Her rocking-horse overbite, Fanta-coloured hair, and eyes that, as Hans Christian Anderson would have said, go round and round in her head like cartwheels, (or the Round Tower at Copenhagen), make the poor kid a veritable Japanese Nightmare. It's a caricature of a face, that begs to be crowned with imaginative eccentricity. To which challenge, she has so far risen. I adored the Enchanted Looking-Glass Hat. I kept expecting it to start singing. En fin - as long as I, and my fellow-citizens, are footing the bill for the Hats, the Frocks, the Golden Coach, and the fancy Extensions and Rebuilds, I for one do not want my money spent on boring suits and Restrained Chic. From Ghosties, and Ghoulies, and Long-Legged Beasties, and Things that go Bland in the Night, good Lord deliver us. If we absolutely have to have Princesses - I don't really see why, but I fully recognise that there are other people out there who can't see why we have to have the British Library or the World Service, either - then I would rather Pass on the Duchess of Cambridge and the Princess of Asturias, with their drab clothes that send the gutter press into pointless raptures over their "style icon" status. In my view, a Princess, as she can do little else, should make the effort to dazzle and sparkle in a parodic Suit of Lights, or drift into the Royal Enclosure at Ascot with her ginger head buzzing inside a cloud of butterflies. I think this is a lesson that applies as much to the renovation of public buildings as it does to the styling of public figures. If you can't be either useful, or beautiful, be bold. At any rate, be Something. Try to be a Spotlight, and not a Dimmer Switch, even if nature didn't make you a Star.

O Rage! O Desespoir!

O horror, horror, horror, as that moody bint in the Scottish Play was wont to go about saying, when stuck for words. What - what - WHAT has Sir Norman Foster been allowed to do to the British Museum? What fresh Hell is this? (Sorry if I seem to be harping on the same theme here). I'm afraid I hadn't been inside the old place since the, er, "renovations" took place. Now I know the hideous operation was over quite some time ago, and I must be the last citizen of the civilized world to have been ignorant of it, but it was a terrible shock. (I spent the last decade trapped inside a collapsing shepherd's bivouac in Bosnia. Want to fight about it?). Anyway, during my recent sojourn in the Britannic Capital, I felt it behove me to pay at least a courtesy visit to the BM. As a student in the Metrop, I whiled away many a happy hour in its dusty rooms and gloomy corridors, surrounded by the eclectic loot of centuries, usually while I was supposed to be doing something else. I think you can probably see why I didn't have many friends. Not live ones, anyway. So it was with certain natural expectations - preconceptions if you prefer - that I mounted the steps to the familiar, stodgy, solid Neo-Classical portico, so archetypally museum-like - is Museic a word? Let it be one. The frontage of the British Museum, then, is archetypally Museic. And so I passed between its Museic columns, neatly skirting that big perspex box that wants you to put money in it, as ever I had, (briefly noticing that it seems to have grown larger and more insistent) and found myself in the largest, emptiest, most barren-looking public toilet I have ever seen. I'm not sure that I feel fully recovered even now. It was like going out to work on a perfectly ordinary day, coming home in the evening looking forward to a nice hot mug of tea and putting your feet up, to find that in your absence, someone has completely redecorated your house. In neon plush with nylon shag pile. And really nasty chintz curtains. (You know the sort I mean). And terrifying posters of big-eyed bunnies. And hidden the spoons. I looked wildly about me. Have I fallen through a hole in the earth and come out inside some sort of Californian shopping Mall, I asked myself. I may have spoken aloud. I was beyond caring. Slowly I realised that the cylindrical object in the centre of the hall, that I had at first taken for a view of the gasworks from a suburban angle, and brought back hazy memories of those constructions that children are encouraged to make from eggboxes and the inside cardboard tubes from toilet rolls in Primary school, in fact contained the mummified cadaver of the Reading Room, cruelly swaddled in synthetic, textureless, expensive concrete like a literary Chernobyl. The roof certainly lets in light - so does the awning in the Gardening section at any standard B&Q. And for the Love of whoever the Patron Saint of Industrial Design happens to be, (drat them), why, when he has done his level best to make the very heart of a great national institution look and feel like an Airport washroom, does he (ironically? Sadistically?) make it so bloody difficult to find the actual bloody toilets? Is this some sort of ghastly Post-Modern practical joke? Is it simple incompetence? Or is it, as I prefer to think, simply a crude, blatant manifestation of the architect's utter unconcern with, and disrespect for, his fellow human?  Answers on the back of a petition addressed to the RIBA and calling for Foster's blood/head on a plate/ resignation from the profession, please. (Have I overused the "blood" word? I'm seeing red...) And I'm sorry, but vast empty spaces, littered in a perfunctory fashion with miserably uncomfortable steel benches like a Texan prison governor's vision of a school canteen, and horrid little stalls selling frighteningly expensive scones and perfectly disgusting coffee in dissolving paper cups, are not, to my mind, what museums are all about. There are many ways of handling space. A large central space, such as we find in the BM, can be grandiose, it can be awe-inspiring, it can be dizzyingly light and open, or it can be overwhelmingly majestic. It should never, and particularly not in a building designed to house objects of great cultural value and aesthetic beauty, be Heathrow. Which brings me to my central point. Whilst the British Museum lacks sufficient space, overall, to display anything but a fraction of its huge collections, how can this wasteful, nasty lobby be justified? Museums - and I realise that I am perhaps a tad old-fashioned in my views here - are all about the Stuff. When we visit a museum, Stuff is what we want to see. Otherwise we'd go to Centerparcs. The BM has loads of stuff, from weird, functionless items dug up in fields and back gardens (but proven by expensive and highly technical analysis to be Very Old) to all the glorious, multifarious, wonderful Stuff Wot We Pinched Earlier. For that was, historically, the principal point of public Museums - a display of our cultural dominance over, and ownership of, the rest of the world. Oh, very well, these days it is probably a little like saying "Yeah, so she got the house, okay, but I kept the record collection. And the Le Creuset. And her mother's Capodimonte (which I never liked anyway, but it's the principle, know what I mean, yah? I could always use them to practice my golf swing on, snicker, chortle)". But it's there, and we want to see it. Just so that we can say to ourselves - that's Ours. Because, in theory, all that Stuff belongs to us. Not in the sense that one can take it out of the cabinet and go home and stick it under the bed, or flog it at a Swiss auction - that's still disapproved of, apparently. Piking should be done on the Grand scale or not at all, as any fule know. But we want to know that we can go and boggle at it any time we want to. We want American and Japanese tourists to come and boggle, too, so that we can feel just a little smug about all the Stuff we've got to be boggled at, that presumably they haven't (it may be, of course, that that's because we pinched it. Not the Americans, obviously). Look at our Stuff, we can say. Bet you've got nothing like that at home. "Item 12345, clobbered off the Fuzzy-Wuzzy, Fuziwuziland, 1871". "Item 987654, chai-iked in Johnny Foreigner Territory, Totally Fair and Justified Military campaign of 1865". "Walloping Great Statue Gratefully Donated by the People of Dagoville following their Liberation by British Forces from their own Home Grown Imperialist Despot, subsequently replaced with one of ours,Grahamgreeneistan, 1903". "Generously donated by Lord and Lady Bloated-Facetrampler in return for a whacking Chunk of Tax Relief, and never mentioning the War again, 1957". I want it all put back how it was. Please. And while you're at it, put the blasted Dinosaurs back in the Natural History Museum. When I go to the Natural History Museum, I do not want to see a bunch of other people's children screaming and squabbling over broken animatronic toys. If that's your bag, fine. Find yourself some friends or neighbours with school-aged kids, and pop round on a Saturday afternoon to gaze in wonder at their living room. Take as much time as you need. But when I go to the Natural History Museum, I want to see the Wonders Of Nature. I want to see extinct things (Stuff Wot We Killed Earlier). I want to see a hundred types of beetles in a box, and stuffed lions on strangely hued plaster savannahs. Dead stuff patiently and methodically collected by dangerous monomaniacs. Most important of all, I want to see really Big Dead Stuff. Really, really Big Dead Things. That's Nature. That's what Museums are all about. And if some day, in future times, I take my grandchildren down to South Kensington on a Bank Holiday weekend, I expect the Dinosaurs to be back. Exactly where I left them, if you don't mind. I think we understand each other.

Happy Bloomsday, or Ulysses in CalvinoLand

I have just been home. Or rather, I have recently spent a few days in Bloomsbury, where I passed an important chunk of my early adult life, a life's time ago. Now firstly, I feel it is important to point out that Bloomsbury, like Neverland and Hogwart's, does not, in fact, exist. It has no boundaries. No street or landmark shows where it begins or ends, therefore it does neither. Some Objects are definitely In Bloomsbury, and some definitely Outside, but it's an arbitrary rule, that to the foreigner can look like no rule at all, for Bloomsbury is a paradigm whose self-administered laws allow it to exist concurrently with an external reality which has, frankly, Moved On. And if Bloomsbury does not exist, still less does Fitzrovia, which doesn't even have a real name, but goes by a moniker which refers to a shadowy group of very-nearly-also-rans who were Known to Those In The Know, and who drank (and usually did little else) in a pub that was named for the illegitimate descendant of some King who got his nooky here in the days when the London Boroughs were leafy villages bristling with wholesome milkmaids (and ploughboys, if your tastes ran that way). Here Jeffrey Bernard Was Unwell, and I was too, once or twice at least. Fitzrovia is probably best understood as an imaginary annex to an Imaginary City, an extra Wing added on to house the Billiard Room, or a larger dining hall. Parts of Soho also fit this plan, as does the entirety of the Charing Cross Road. Of It, but not In It, yet somehow pertaining to the whole.
 Anyway... we stay in the Jenkins Hotel, which is somewhere Dylan Thomas should have stayed, but unfortunately never did. We arrive late, so we have to get the keys from next door, and set off to find our room. Up we go, up one creaking staircase, and another, and so up and up till we come to a set of stairs so steep and slippery that we ascend hanging on to the rope-swag bannister rail by our teeth (not really, but a rope would have been handy), and find ourselves in an attic bedroom where a housemaid in an Agatha Christie novel might have concealed pearls stolen from a wealthy, but unpleasant, guest, and plotted in her scant leisure moments her revenge against a cruel and stifling hierarchy. The room is entirely furnished in 1930's style - not as a deliberate, chic decor choice, but because the furniture was already there. And tired as we are, we go straight to sleep. In the morning the kind, possibly Eastern European, receptionist tells me that he is going to change our room - the night porter had noticed that my companion has some mobility problems, and there is a room available on the ground floor, so I move our things downstairs. The new room is decorated in a similar style to the first: none of the furnishings - a battered wardrobe with a walnut inlay, a dark wooden chest of drawers, a pair of bedside tables topped with drunken, blinking brass reading lamps which we are afraid to use - date from a period later than the 1940's, and some items, such as a large, heavy circular mirror aiming for an Arnolfini Wedding look, but with several balls from the molding missing and the gilt gone, look to be considerably older, as do the curious early nineteenth-century glass paintings hanging in the lobby opposite, where the hotel desk at which you have to leave your keys every morning seems flimsy and insubstantial in comparison to the solid Georgian drawing-room fireplace facing it. The total impression is that nothing has been added to the place since the War, and certainly nothing has ever been taken out. I must admit that I like the Jenkins Hotel very much. If we go back, we shall stay there again.
  After our room-change has been effected, we go out for coffee before commencing the business of the day. We sit down outside a caff that sells salt-beef and kebabs and huge, greasy fry-ups, and order two large, stewed cups of coffee. My partner mistakes the salt for the sugar - no matter. His cup is replaced instantly - no charge. And now, it strikes me, like a warm breath (though it is pretty cold even for English June, in truth), an air, a worn-in, slightly shabby, (but never replaced because nothing else would ever quite fit or be right for the place) kind of an air, neither pleasant, nor, because of its familiarity, precisely unpleasant, (the steam rising from the basement kitchen of a friendly local restaurant where you keep coming back, even though the food isn't really all that good) - I am back. And nothing has changed, as nothing ever does here. A rickshaw hurtles by, bell ringing cheerfully, between two black cabs. Nobody turns a hair. A middle-aged man in a bright yellow suit strides down the street, lapels flapping in the breeze, glowing in the london grey like the Sun King, incongruously imagined by Frank Auerbach, and a small, unobtrusive Vicar sidles like a bi-curious mouse into the Lesbian and Gay bookshop. A party of exchange students are lost, and always will be. Louise Bourgeois and Gertrude Stein share a tisane between the pot plants (probably they are Geraniums, but don't tell Alice!) in the window of the Vegetarian Wholefood Bistro, and Virginia Woolf and Amy Winehouse stroll arm-in-arm across Russell Square towards the Tube station. Sssssshhhh! Quiet now. Nobody has told them that they're dead.

Llareggub Again

It was enjoyable to hear an excerpt from "Under Milk Wood", as read by the late (and therefore probably quite cheap these days) Richard Burton, on Radio 4's "Poetry Please" this weekend (I count myself as one of their most undeceased listeners). Sadder, though, to think that the whole caboodle would stand little chance at air-time now, in this era of short attention spans and tight schedules, on account of its length. Whilst musing on this sorry state of affairs, I found myself inspired to pen a little tribute, a precis which I think conveys the Essence of what Dylan was Trying To Get At, (with a wink and a nod to a few of his Chums thrown in, how's that for value, Mrs Protheroe?)  in a today-radio friendly format of not more than five minutes or I'm switching over to listen to Steve Wright In The Afternoon. So here it is;

"LLAREGGUB AGAIN"

"It was Samuel Taylor Coleridge Sunday in a remote village in West Wales - Water, Water everywhere, nor any Drop to Drink. Mr R S Dylan Thomas shambled down Chapel Hill, nursing his spiritual decay like an old goat's rotting molar. Suddenly from the hedgerow in front of him burst Ted Edward Thomas Hughes, as it were the stink of a three-days-dead ferret. 'Lend us a fiver, R S Dylan, or I shall drive your Missus to suicide by shagging her and reading aloud from the collected works of Philip Larkin. And then I shall go back in time and lie tits up in some Flanders field.' 'Bugger off, Ted, I 'aven't got any. I just been to Aber and spent the lot on booze and tarts.' 'Right you are then.' Silence. Ahead of them in the Tregaron-grey fog loomed the impressive figure of Caitlin O'Brien Plath, the love of both their lives, half-naked with a bottle of Milk Stout clutched to each bare breast. She called out to them with the age-old cry of seduction of every true Welshwoman. 'What the bloody 'ell time do you call this, Boyo, it'd be bloody closing time if it wasn't bloody Sunday, R S Dylan, fach!' Her hair blazed fierily in the weak afternoon sunlight. 'Diw, you've never been at putting your head in the Aga again, have you, Caitlin love? Oh, she's been a Martyr to bad hair days since we switched from gas, Ted, and that's the truth.' Briefly, R S Dylan considered extinguishing her with the Stout. Then he drank the Stout. 'And put something on, woman, you look like you've been modelling for Augustus John.' 'Sooner or later, we all model for Augustus John,' she muttered darkly, in a voice pregnant with meaning (and probably Augustus John). Then, together, they fell into The Sailor's Arms, which was, and were, always open, although it was Sunday, and a Sin."

Just the ticket for a Sound-Bite, I thought, and how cleverly have I interwoven passing (but box-ticking) references to a good half-dozen of our modern Bards, Celtic and otherwise, thus potentially freeing up weeks of programming (and let's face it, they do go on a bit, your Poets). Let me know what you think, BBC.

[Footnote: the title of this piece was to have been "Llareggub Revisited", but then I thought, No, Evelyn, no. You stay out of this. I can't see Anthony Andrews in a leading role anywhere here.]

Eurovicious

So, meinen Europaischen friends, the ghastly Spectre of a Pantomime Dinosaur that is Eurovision has staggered, squawking and gasping, to its pitiable, undignified end for another year, like a battery-farmed Phoenix. Now, some might think that Eurovision is neither a worthy nor a relevant subject for criticism when set against the backdrop of far more Important and Urgent matters that press on us now from every side. But let us not forget, comrades, that in these days of swingeing, cruel cuts to arts budgets across the Continent, even from the most liberal and enlightened of regimes, that an awful lot of money is sunk annually in this hideous cardboard-and-paste travesty, something we all pretend not to take notice of, yet for some reason feel obliged to carry on with, as one continues to invite an embarrassing Auntie to family events, even though she is guaranteed to drink the punch-bowl, offend a significant proportion of the other guests, and have to be carried out insensible at the height of the festivities. So, having, as it were, shelled out for its dinner, and drinks, and probably a taxi home, couldn't we do a bit more with it? Yes, I know, I know that looking for a platform for the serious, living musical arts in the Eurovision Song Contest is a little like comparing Monica Bellucci with Les Dawson in a frock. It's just a different kind of animal. And yet - if we must, if we HAVE to have this raddled, desperate old Dame mincing horridly across our screens every year, couldn't we at least beg her to reach down and grab hold of even a small fold of her strapped-up Balls, and give us some (whisper it!) Entertainment? If we were looking for a role-model, wouldn't Quentin Crisp be more the thing than David Walliams' Emily Howard? I mean to say - this year,  Britain had an absolute Gift in the palm of its very hand, and fluffed it worse than ever pudding-faced, overgrown ten-year-old made a hash of the part of the Virgin Mary in the school Nativity Play. For Chrissakes, we had ENGELBERT HUMPERDINCK. And what did we do with him, with a veritable God of queasy, cheesy, verging-on-full-blown-camp anachronism? It could have been outstanding. What an opportunity for something hugely, outrageously, louchely Post-Modern. Joe Orton remade by Aki Kaurismaki. Missed. I have just heard a guest on some sort of Radio 4 Arts round-up saying, ( ironically, no doubt, for we can only speak of Mainstream Pop Culture Ironically), "At least we avoided the dreaded 'Nul Points'." What is THAT to take pride, or comfort, in? A revindication of our mediocrity as an Artistic nation, even in the context of a defining celebration of the Mediocre. Not even notable enough to be the Worst. To quote my daughter at the age of nine, placed sixth in a regional chess tournament that had five prize places - Not even a ****** Medal. Next year, I appeal to the French - they are supposed to be good at this sort of thing - or possibly the Belgians (I'm British, I couldn't possibly admit to being able to tell them apart) - to wheel out Johnny Hallyday, in all his Phantom of The Opera grotesquery, have him mime some "de trop" Rhum Baba of a faux Rock Opera number, and give Eurovision the opportunity to embrace once more its true and rightful heritage as the crowning jewel on the public brow of the Theatre of the Absurd. And leave mercifully behind it the memory of the washed-out stain from the stage-fright sick of a Californian Baby Beauty Queen that it has, of late, become.

About Me

My name is Anastasia Kashian. I am an artist and sometime writer, living in the twin states of Limbo and Penury, somewhere within the bounds of the European Economic Disaster. I like Turkish coffee and Russian tea, and in the field of gastronomy, I love to devour both the Raw (in terms of charcuterie and pungent, plague-ridden unpasteurised cheeses) and the Cooked (in terms of the catholic variety of Slimy Things that once Crawled With Legs Upon a Slimy Sea - bring me your Molluscs and Crustaceans, Mud-Dwellers and Bottom-Feeders, that I may saute them with garlic in olive oil, and a good slug - how appropriate - of cheap white plonk. Had I mentioned that Mediterranean cooks love tentacles more, even, than do Japanese Manga pornographers?) And of course - read carefully the Subtext - you spotted it already, didn't you? the title of my blog is an arch, wry, pretentious sidewards nod to my distant roots as an Anthropology graduate, back in the heady and ground-breaking days of Post-Post-Something or Other. Note, if you will, my precise, wide-ranging vocabulary. See, Jane, see, Peter, see my Vocabulary. My Vocabulary is Wide-Ranging. That is a Low-Brow Popular Culture Reference. (And sufficiently out-dated to show how really Au Fait I am with what's Moving in the World Today). Look, Jane, look at the Low-Brow Popular Culture References. I have a Wide-Ranging Vocabulary and I can make Low-Brow Popular Culture References. I could carry on in this vein for pages, because I am intellectually moribund, but I shan't, because I am also very, very lazy, and have the attention span of a cartoon animal. (You're thinking about that one now, aren't you? The capacity of the human mind to find meaning in vacant trivia continues to grow unabated. It's one of the things that keeps me going.) I am writing a blog primarily to find storage space for the numerous opinionated rants to which I am prone, on a variety of subjects about which I know little to nothing, and on which my aforementioned opinion is rarely, if ever, sought, making me as qualified to Discourse as the majority of writers who get Paid for doing it, my wider purpose being to release overcrowded space in my brain (it seeming impossible to re-allocate this material to the empty, whistling prairies within that organ which nature must have intended, before abandoning the project, to fill with useful skills and practical information), and also, (possibly a matter of more immediate importance) the file space on my hard drive. Art being my Day Job, when I want a creative leisure outlet more active than hunching over a dying laptop trying to watch subtitled Cine D'Auteur or listening to obscure music, I cook. That's about it, really.