And this, I know to be true 


Elle
You are so beautiful, it makes me ache. I think that you might be starting to believe that it is true. Despite me telling you for years, you at last are beginning to realise that it is not simply a mother's biased love that makes me state this fact endlessly. You are not only beautiful, you are graceful, kind, funny and clever. You know what to do with an apostrophe, but more importantly, you do not sneer at people who don't. I actually have never heard you sneer or belittle anybody, and for this, I am immensely proud. There are many who could learn from you. You see beauty in many things, the value of people. Now look at  yourself. And thank you for my delicious and fabulous cake. You are clearly talented on top of this. Now let the rest of the world see who you are, mankind needs more people like you, shining among the grit.


Wibs
You also are beautiful. You are 14, with the face of an angel, your expression a mixture of sulk and barely concealed amusement. To you, I say this - do not strive to be what you think the world wants you to be. I have seen you from the moment you were born, raging at the world. The world, needs raging at. You are clever, so clever. Do not cry when you and your boyfriend argue, do not miss him because he made you feel special. You are special, and he is lucky to be with you. Really, you are the best girl he will ever date, and in the future, he will look in the newspapers at the scientist/politician, writer called Wibs, and rue the date that you both agreed to call it a day. 


Bonny
Don't put up with it when your friends treat you badly. You don't deserve it. You are good, and noble, and you have the craziest sense of humour. These things will carry you a long way. When your friends call you mental, tell them to fuck off, and carry on without them, it will be their loss. You appreciate that not everything has to be worthy to be appreciated, and my goodness, you appreciate life, biting off huge chunks of it. Hormones are hideous things, don't worry, being 11 doesn't last for ever, and you will emerge the other side, just as precious as you have been for the last 10 years. Think of the uncertainty of being 11,  as a blip. Carry on covering your bedroom carpet with glitter, it doesn't matter. Vacuum cleaners are over rated anyway. Incidentally, you are also beautiful, but don't stop pulling hideous faces to make people laugh.

BookFace

Wibs -  Thinks french was ridiculously hard and Miss Babineaux is a tit.

16 minutes ago · Comment · 

 Pesk - 

téton...

12 minutes ago · 

Elle -  

La bub.

10 minutes ago

Pesk - 

heh

9 minutes ago · 

Wibs -l 

I'm glad i have such a mature family...

5 minutes ago

Pesk - 

bedtime grandma.

4 minutes ago · 

Wibs -  

Nooo!!

2 minutes ago

Good Girl.


I hear her voice outside my door 
the sound creeps under, "kurva", she whispers
scared someone will hear her, most of all me.
I hear her. I think she hates herself.
In the morning she sweeps the stairs for a rent reduction
and her husband drinks burčák from 8, he fights
downstairs, outside. Sometimes she bakes bread
for the caretaker, whose wife is useless.
She walks to Delvita, comes out laden
with bags, sits to catch breath and rest her feet. I wonder
if being fucked at life gives
you fat ankles. I watch her from my balcony.
She thinks I am reading, Seifert, but I am watching
always watching.
I keep myself to myself, I smell the gulas in her kitchen
she cooks daily. Her children fight but
her husband says nothing. She raises her voice and I think, yes
she is not happy. My mouth waters. I will eat out tonight.
I love the men I sleep with, sometimes briefly, but the love is there
and it's real. She brings in clothes from the balcony line
cracks a shirt in the air. A whip for his back.
Dropping pegs into a tub on the floor she curses her life. Under her breath.
Tomorrow when she slices onions, I will cry for her.


kurva, burčák

Excitement!

Look HERE! How splendid. The Poetry Library bought my book last month. There I am, with TS Eliot Jenny Joseph and Clive James. Me! What the hell?

Get Happy.


Here's the thing. Pick up a pen. Place it between your teeth (horizontally, we don't want a Nosferatu look going on) and then let go. Bite the pen gently, and continue biting down. Feel the shape your face is making? Look in the mirror. It is using the same muscles that smiling uses. Do it for long enough, your muscles send signals to your brain. They tell it that you are smiling. Brain reacts accordingly, and cheers the hell up. 
It works.

Padel


Trying to get back into writing anything other than academic waffle and blog waffle. I don't want to spread any more gossip about Ruth Padel, but I took her into a bath with me this morning for an hour, and really enjoyed myself.
I don't read enough poetry anymore, and this has to change. I saw this, and LOVED it.

Tell Me about It. 


When they mourn you over there
the way you'd want, the way you mourn
your friends;


when they're celebrating
having loved you
in Derry, Rathmullen, wherever -


birettas, candles, Latin,
all the weavings you don't believe in
but love anyway and I'll never share


for who the hell converts to 
ex-Catholic? - no one will know
someone's missing you here


for ever. Whose arms,
printed with that absolute
man's stillness


when your breath calms
into my shoulder, and you fall asleep
inside me, open and close


in a foreign night round nothing.
Who misses the way
you pour loose change onto a bar


in a puddle of fairytale silver
and move through the night,
through everything, curious


mischevous as a mongoose
and never an unkind word.
I might dream


of coming over, touching
just one friend's sleeve
to whisper


'Talk about him. A bit.
The way he was, here' -
but never do it. Instead,


I'll say Yes in my sleep
to you. To no one. You'll put
your tongue in my mouth, deep.


the way you do, 
and my eyes will open
on a dark garden. I'll wake up


touching myself for you.
The alarm will stare
venomous digits. I'll hang on


to the fragile haze
of a wine-bar.
when you leant over the foreign formica, 


haltering my hand within your two
like the filling in a sandwich,
sashaying the skin of each finger


down to the soft web between,
over and over, a rosary of rub
and slide, as if you could solder


me to your lifeline. As if
you could take me with you.
and I'll wish you had.


Ruth Padel.

Bonny Chats.


Laying in bed with my youngest I am forced to watch Tracey Beaker on the laptop. Not my idea of a Sunday lie in really.


Bonny - Isn't it a shame that fish don't have arms?
Pesk - Why would fish need arms? 
Bonny - They could carry things if they had arms. Like bunches of flowers. They could use their gills like pockets. (pause) Except then they'd drown. (pause) Can fish drown?


Pesk - Watch your programme. 

Disco Dolly. And Derek.


Ok, so here is the deal. When I win £7,000,000 on the lottery (because I surely will, by law of karma alone) I hereby pledge that I will open the world's greatest residential home for the elderly confused. In it, will be -


1. A nightclub. Not just any nightclub, this will called Bacchus' Geriatric Gardens. It will be an outdoors but indoors and have a huge domed ceiling dotted with glittering stars, the moon will always be full and the air scented with perfume. It will have enormous egg shaped seats swinging from overhead trellises which will be festooned with passion flowers and jasmine. There will be hideaway caves for snogging. Here and there will be mini bars staffed by muscled young barmen and boobalicious young barmaids, serving sanatogen tonics as well as champagne cocktails. There will be laser shows on the hour, as well as wandering opera singers and marching bands.
2. A small fairground in the gardens, with rollercoaster, a waltzer, a helter skelter (with big puffy cushions for fragile hips), coconut shies and hook a duck stalls. A little kiosk will give away candy floss and toffee apples (denture friendly).
3. A (minimum 2) star Michelin chef will design and cook the menus. It will be eggs and salmon for breakfast, steak for lunch (unless a soft diet is required, then it will be foie gras) and whatever magnificent concoction they choose for dinner. Swan probably.  Chocolate strawberries and muffins sprinkled with golden and pink glitter will be laid out on china plates for those who are peckish throughout the day.
4. The staff will be on a 2:1 ratio, and wear a uniform of pink feather boas and hotpants. Both sexes.
5. There will be a betting shop where every bet placed is a winner.


I am fed up, with the misery the old folks of this world endure at the end of their lives. So, come on. Point the finger at ME dear lotto God.

Luggage

I find my job difficult at times, though I know for certain I could, nor would, do nothing else. In early January, the month of icy leaden skies, outrageously stroppy bills land on my doormat and wait, fuming with indignance until I get home and am forced to open them. Driving home through snowstorms and on slippy roads, I carry the spirit of my clients with me. Silent and weeping, their presence is as tangible as though they are bodily sitting in my car, looking sorrowfully back at me as I glance in the rearview mirror. My children, bouyant and giggling when I arrive, deserve more of a mother than the one that pours a glass of wine and slides into a hot bath. I have to find a way to allow those clients to leave me as they leave the consulting room... I am not equipped to give my best to anyone if I allow them to stay.

Hur hur.


My sister bought me these for Christmas . I shall be blogging their progress.

In all their glory... oh the mirth when I opened this gift in front of my daughters...

Aren't they tiny?....But give them some attention and they will grow... more hur hurring.

Potted up.

Note how Buddha can hardly contain his mirth, while David's lips (to the right) are barely disguising a sneer. Even Bonny (photo) is still giggling...

So.

I lose 11lbs on a 4 week crab, lettuce and rice cracker crash, then shock of being snowed in from 18th -22nd December when I haven't done a SNIFF of Christmas shopping sent me barging, elbows akimbo to the kitchen in a biscuit frenzy which continues unabated. So, today, I decided to apply myself again, and trotted off dutifully at lunchtime to M&S. Sushi. Low fat yogurt and a wee box of sugarfree starwberry and cream chewies. Till manfunction followed by operator ineptitude saw me standing, ravenous, while the inept shopboy kept his furious finger on the help button, to no avail. So, i flung the food down and stalked out in a hissy fit across to the bakery where I purchased a sausage roll (large, yes I do want it hot) and three giant cookies for a quid. Marks and Spencer, you have made me fat. It is your fault.

Back to work this morning after a two week break, en route I had to stop at a collapse at the bus stop outside the job centre. Maybe a job had been advertised and the wee lass had collapsed from shock I thought, as I pulled the car up to help. Actually I didnt think that, what I thought was "please don't be dead, please don't be dying, please don't be dead, please don't be dying". She wasn't bless her, the ambulance turned up and I drove off to work late, but full of Nurse Gladys virtue, bosom a bustling. Crap day at work even without the M&S hissy,  best bud was still on holiday, the new build has been pulled last minute and everyone is morose and then my water tank cracked on the car due to me forgetting about antifreeze during the Worst For One Hundred Years Winter. It's booked in at the garage Thursday morning. More cash, bah.

So, the snow is still laying all around, though less deep crisp or even. More icy and relentless. The ground is full of snow beads, they look just like the polystyrene packing balls you get when you buy something fragile.

I'm fragile today.

Hope tomorrow brings Good Karma.

So... come on, help me out.

Archie wote this...

... and it deserves its own spot here, not hidden in a comment box. Lovely.
Thank you Archie.

 

Just the boring half of me
lives in the real world
The part you see is not all
For I hide my other life

It is mine and includes
the love and fear and hope

You may share what
I choose to show yet
I will not share
The reality of my hidden life.


And Alicia Suskin Ostriker wrote this below. I love it too...

The Blessing of the Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog

To be blessed
said the old woman
is to live and work
so hard
God's love
washes right through you
like milk through a cow
To be blessed
said the dark red tulip
is to knock their eyes out
with the slug of lust
implied by
your up-ended
skirt
To be blessed
said the dog
is to have a pinch
of God
inside you
and all the other dogs
can smell it

Alicia Suskin Ostriker

 Wall Poems

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/11/08/opinion/08berlinpoems.html

Too beautiful.
Justin Sullivan, he of New Model Army.

Batteries

My dad, is a genius. I love my dad. In our family, we call him Inspector Gadget. If you need anything fixing - car, washing machine, TV, my dad is your man. He is pissed off with his mp3 player. It is old, small, and fiddly, but it works, so will not be replaced. My dad likes to fall asleep listening to the radio - he has mild tinnitus, and he has discovered that listening to something masks it while he drifts off (It used to be audio books, but he got into a flap the next morning trying to scan back to the bits he fell asleep at, so now its 5Live or Talkradio). Mum doesn't really like this habit, she wakes up in the night to tinny tsktskshhshh noises, and has to unravel the headphone wires from around dad's neck (she says) while he lies there snoring, one earphone wedged inside a nostril. So, back to the batteries. The worst thing is, they last a night only. This enrages my dad, having to recharge or do without, so, he has rigged up this which is pictured below. One hopes he doesn't attempt jogging with it in his pocket. He came into the kitchen earlier, and saw me snapping away. If this appears on the interweb... he said, threateningly.

Heh. Sorry dad. I love you.

Bewildered Befuddled and Me.

 

I had a day off yesterday. This is unusual on a weekday, and I spent the entire week anticipating it with glee. Maybe a little shopping, some cake eating whilst blog browsing, some feet up, some settee based snooze.

But no.

Instead, I get a frantic call from my daughter to say that my father, has sat on a stanley knife and gone to hospital. In an ambulance.

SAT on it? I say.

Yes! She says. It won't stop bleeding, and I can't get hold of Gran, so I called an ambulance.

I have visions of a suddenly castration fixated elderly mother, surreptiously placing a stanley knife between two sofa cushions before skipping off into the distance, spotted hanky on a stick over her shoulder.

Seems that daughter has been taking notice of my laminated sheets of the heart and its functions, which I have pinned to the wall over the kettle in an attempt to assist my revision study. (I don't revise. I don't even revise my opinions, never mind the functions of the heart.)

I think it has penetrated his femoral artery! she says, confidently.

I marvel at this for a second, then call my sister to get her to drive to the hospital and see what has happened. I am panicking a little of course.

My sister phones ten minutes later to inform that she has seen our father, clutching his arse and standing folornly in A&E reception. "They've GLUED the bugger!" he shouts. Admirably, my sister doesn't walk briskly past as though she doesn't know him, she packages him into the car and drives home.

Mother calls later, and laughs about father. Oh the duffer! she says. He left a stanley blade on his car seat and then sat on it! I was out buying one of those new mobile phones with a big screen, she says.
She can't see the other one properly. A big screen phone. This makes my heart sink a little, as I know big screen phones will have too many functions. My mother is the type that should only hold a phone which has giant black handset and a twirly cord attached to it.

Even later she calls again, to tell me that the phone is far too quiet, and although she can SEE the numbers and letters, she can't hear it ring. So, she takes it off to Phones4u, and demands her money back. Its a dysfunctional phone, she says.

Imagine this, and I swear it is true.

The young man in Phones4u unwinds the cling film that my mother has wound around the upper part of the handset (which is where the speaker is) "to protect the screen" and hands it back to her. Try this madam, he says.

Dysfunctional phone? Dysfunctional family.

I was so looking forward to my day off. Now I am consumed with questions.

Which one of them do I disown first?

How People see us...

A post pops up on my facebook homepage. A friend has taken one of those silly interview quizzes that are so damned addictive.

It has made me feel so warm.

Aly S******

SocialInterview.com asked me "If you could have any two friends as parents who would they be and why?"

I answered ''Liana as my Mum cos she has the most amazing ability to make anyone feel safe and Simon N as my dad cos he's so damn funny when he's been on the scrumpy!!''

6 minutes ago via Social Interview · Comment · Like / Unlike · Interview Me

So, me, the one out of all my friends, who veers around all over the place? I make my friend feel like this?

I must be doing something right then. 


Amazing.