Daisy-chain

I've piled some more books in corners and eaten rice pudding. The birdoole has climbed about on toppled fantasy-novel shale and I have made walnut and rocket pesto. I forgot things, and kicked against things, and lifted the corner of the rug and put it down again in a hurry.


It's still windy.

Nope

Gifs have taught us that there are so many kinds of nope! 

God's own nope octopus. Which is like omg you must be kidding get that away from me no way oh god I can never unclench kind of nope. 

Beyoncé nope! Which is like oh man I can't believe you actually said that you're gonna find battery acid is eating your curtains someday when you least expect it kind of nope. 

Steve Carrell nope! Which is like yeah I am so extremely not getting involved in whatever this is, bring on the heat death of the universe kind of nope.

Andrew Scott IS Moriarty nope! Which is like I'm just saying dude that if you go there things are going to end very badly for you kind of nope.  

Jon Snow nope! Which is like seriously man what is this world of shit kind of nope.

What does this have to do with anything? Well you may ask. ALL THE NOPE. 

Tale as old as time

In 1992 I went to see Strictly Ballroom with an exchange student called Owen who lived on my hall. Owen had round, interrogative eyes, brown curls like wooden five-cent pieces cut close to his head and the kind of soft, mid-tenor New York accent that's almost a brogue. 

It was Baz Luhrmann's first feature. 

Afterwards Owen said, 'So what would you say was particularly Australian about that movie?'

In one way, I suppose, I was perfectly fitted to answer that question. My colonial life had been limned by the cultural products of other anglophones: TinyXtin's Sesame Street, The Famous Five,  dozens of the cheesy 50s musical films beloved by my mother, strange English-Hollywood mashups like Mary Poppins and The Secret Garden whose weird sensibility collisions I would only see many years later. Top Gun, Gremlins, Three Men and a Baby. 

But I didn't even know where to start. I had no idea how to convey the Australianness of Strictly Ballroom. There was nothing narratively distinctive about it. Ugly duckling, boy-meets-girl, Cinderella, follow-your-dreams. Nothing you wouldn't have seen in Disney. Dashing hero, corrupt big man of the town who'd have had a gold watch in his pocket in a western, the catty lady-competition, the henpecked husband. Even a Mystical Negro in the form of our heroine's Spanish father, the one who really knows how to dance, donchaknow, because immigrants have it in their hearts not their heads. They live in a little house by the train tracks. The literal wrong side. 

The accents, then? The sense of life in an Australian suburb? The colours, the makeup? The distinctively Australian interiors, corrugated iron roofs? The smell of hot weather on the pavement ...

Perhaps the shop. Her family lives out the back of their shop. Shops are only from the place the shop is. An Australian shop isn't like a bodega, or a village shop, or a shop from anywhere except there. A shop is where all the things are together. But it's not all the same things. It's the things the people there expect to find, tiny dry-good microcosms of shared understanding .

I held up my hands helplessly. Everything, I said. Everything about it. 

Australians tell the same stories as everyone else. Of course they do. 

Prosody

My friend Sophie's family always seemed properly English-flavoured. Her grandfather was English, and many, many years later we would exchange whispers about the mythological straitness of his laces. His daughter -- Sophie's mother -- had a mane of glossy black hair and the kind of expression that got her cast as the romantic interest in our seaside musical productions. My mother played the bombshell. Not just because she looked the part, for lo, did she ever, but for a certain glinting side-eye entirely absent from Sophie's dear mater.

Sophie and her brother and sister had breakfast at a set table, with milk in a jug. And they went to Sunday school.

We ate raisin bran standing up in the kitchen. My parents were known for saying fuck and being naked. And boy howdy was there no religion. Except in our sedately Anglican schools, tame little Thursday eucharists and all. But that's another story.

Sophie's father was a rheumatologist and they spent a year in England when she and her sister were little. My mother would tell the story of their return. Oh! she would exclaim, clasping her musician's hands to her chest, they had such sweet accents, you couldn't believe it. Hello Miranda! she would lisp plummily, apostrophising the tiny ones in their little blue garbardines. Sigh, said my mother. You wouldn't believe how quickly that disappeared. A few weeks and then ... oh well.

The tragic relapse to our sad, vulgar tongue. Oh well.

I wondered about this place where everyone talked in this way that made my mother clasp her hands to her chest. Fantastic Mr Fox talks like that, I thought. And Ratty and Moley! Perhaps everyone in books talks like that. Well, except the Muddle-headed Wombat. He's a wombat.

Well, that's something, I thought. That's something.

Nine things soundtrack

Hem, Pacific Street

The Weepies, Little Bird

Jim Croce, I've Got A Name

Josh Rouse, His Majesty Rides

Paul Kelly, Dumb Things

The Eels, I Like Birds 

Nine things

Ethel the glitter Stegosaur, by @Pictmatrix

I keep rubbing my hands together, because they seem sticky from wondering if I know what I am saying. I wash them with the tiny fragrant puck of soap I brought home from the hotel in Melbourne, and dry them and pound out more words, and look at them, and my hands feel sticky again.  

So, a letter to my hands. Dear hands. Here are some things I am trying to say. 

(1) Carving out the place that feels like home to us is hard. It is a series of traps and pipe dreams and false dawns and botched escapes and we amass the most extraordinary arsenal of tools and weapons to build it and sometimes we cut ourselves with them and lock ourselves behind the wrong doors.

(2) It is very, very important to look at other things that are alive. For a long time. Quietly. To see what they do. To see that they are there. 

(3) This is harder than it sounds. 

(4) It is very, very important to know their names.

(5) Sometimes people say this is not important, but they are wrong.

(6) Books sometimes say what is real. Sometimes they make what is real. Sometimes what is in a book isn't real at all. 

(7) This is less obvious than it looks.

(8) We are always asked where we are from as if there is only one answer. That isn't true.

(9) Sometimes all that connects you with the world are some hooded crows and a wooden spoon and those times are actually no different from the other times. It just seems as if they are.

Seven

Well, so much for the first week. Another windy night, another drab not-so-cold day. Crumpets and cheap chocolate and cups of tea and all the lights on all day because I can't see a damn thing.

Trashy novel in bits that last as long as my frozen hands can stand being out from under the duvet, the sense of waking up in a small, warm Xtin-sized pile of leaves in a forest far, far away that slowly makes itself back into percale and magnolia on the walls. Mothers and bales of towels on sale and running the washing machine empty with some baking soda because renewal and, um something. Kitten gifs and the day before yesterday's coffee cup hiding behind the box of good baubles which ought to be under that other box you put away this morning. A tape measure because always, a Christmas tealight never lit, quilting pins, a book about housekeeping, a book about leopards, a book about wizards, a book about walking, a book about nests and the box of marzipan I thought I'd lost.
  

 

Cough

I cleaned black mould off the bathroom tile. And ceiling and floor. I breathed lots of bleach. I committed the sin of too much Christmas pudding, because the brandy cream is about to be past its best.

Pray for my soul, is what I'm saying.

Who comes this night

Twelfth night. Spruce punctures in my shins, needles winding gleaming astroturfily out the back door, twiddling on cobwebs, under the rugs, baubles stacked like bubbles of dish-detergent in the sink corners. Scotch broth with the last of the Christmas roast lamb shredded from the knuckle.

Pluvialis on the line, eyes hurt from weird reflected flashes of herself. Books teetering in odd places, caught on seasonal tidelines with the bars of gift soap and bits of festive Australian kitsch. The handkerchief is never in the right place and I have eaten too many butter biscuits.

At Linton Zoo the lions are hugging ex-Tannenbaums with as much love as ever I festooned mine.  

Four

Eleven pipers piping. I'm on the sofa warm in the last of the Christmas-liveried little house, all winking baubles and felt, folded paper and resinous Norway spruce bottom notes. I might leave the fairy lights I put in the grate.

Hard frost this morning, small boot-shaped holes in the each puddle's ice-cover by the time I venture out into the fog well on into the afternoon on food-truck thoughts intent. I drink a too-sweet hot chocolate while the boys make my burger. Hello, I'm Xtin, I say to the nice smile salting my fries. Your reputation precedes you, he says. I hope it's 'mouthy broad', I think.

Black bare limes on the Piece's edge raining slushy drops of once-was-frost, crows arranging their feathers in the tops'ls, hoods and umbrellas, slish slosh, slish slosh.

Around the corner and back to the little house, apple tree chirruping like it's made of sparrows, blackbirds patrolling the edges of the little garden, for mine is a tiny land of plenty; braeburns and sunflower hearts, bits of cheddar and the odd bit bacon rind, leaped about like miniature pagan rites by overexcited robins if the magpies don't get it first.    

I dream of upside-down kittens pawing the air into little parcels of growly-purr, cockatoos and lorikeets tweedledeet! Tweedledoot. Tweedledeet! Tweedledoot, forests papery underfoot and the smell of salt.

I hope it snows this year.

Boot

The days come around so quickly, no? Bringing their weather with them. A bit of yesterday stuck to their shoe.

It rained and rained and I was happily out of sorts. Pluvialis and I went to the garden centre and said hello to the parrots. A yellow-fronted amazon who puffed his head like a soft green pinecone for scratches. The weird African grey and his thoughtful tiny-dinosaur-mastermind face. I stroked his white face with my ring-fingertip, silk-fuzz and fine-dusty like mulberry paper. He closed his eyes, opened them. Closed again. White rabbits reclining implacably. Cyclamen in free Christmas pots. Orchid repotting kits, air plants, azaleas, little boys with their faces refracted through six layers of aquarium.

When I got home a lunar-footprint lapel pin had arrived in the mail. Contains Command Module metal flown to the moon. A present from my friends in Switzerland, because no reason at all but themselves and their great and chocolatey goodness.

Dead air

These strange dead days between festival and typical, watching the world's odometers click over to 000 000 because something-or-other.

You drop your resolutions into the silence, a silver teaspoon to see how deep it is, ear turned to the distant ping as it hits, one cat-and-dog, two cat-and-dog but it never comes, of course, because the year is coming at you with both ends of the wind-tunnel wide open, leap for the quotidian roar in your ears, tax, your mother, piles made of all the wrong paper, bag for the charity shop in the hall.

Why are you doing that, asks Pluvialis, because there are Other Things to be doing and she has half-an-eye cocked to my proven tendency to sand the edges off my ambitions until all that's left is a Hummel figurine of a little boy in a blue overall feeding a chicken.

I put on a grown-up voice but she doesn't buy it. Hummel, smash.

*This wonderful portrait of a tumbleweed considering its existence by Ed Deas. 

Hoverboard

One, one, one five, the future please operator. I slept under my Christmas quilt, finished at ten to midnight on Christmas Eve. Two years, stitched and abandoned, stitched and abandoned, the sewing calluses drifting in and out on my fingertips like a miniature keratinous tide of commitment.  We ate National Trust and agreed New Year's had always been awful, mortality, entropy, so-what-have-you-done, the party you're not at, Jools not even live for heaven's sake but at least we have better wine now. One of us was too quiet, I thought later, but by then it was over.

Today it is windy and a thrush is working out its next move in the maple and I'm eating crumpets for lunch and toast for dinner washed down with Les Dauphins and a pointed sense of nothing in particular. The Dark is Rising under my pillow, lousy with portents, oh for the merest scraping of its ancient predestination for myself.

Marmalade and butter by the light of the porcelain cockatoo in the living room, plugged in next to the modem, would-have-been-sulphur crest cocked thoughtfully with points of LED peeping through its carven feathers. Aark, aark I say to it quietly. Happy new year.    

The two things

I lived in Australia, once. For a long time. All the time that I was small, and a properly fat slice of being a small grown-up, too.

Now I live in England. For many years now, really, although it doesn't seem like that.

These two things are terribly important -- they're The Two Things, the stories of everything that has ever happened to me. I keep trying to make them fit together, like a magic ring trick or a tessellation of two piles of coloured tiles. But it is not like that. It is like reaching for lens flare. The things I know about England aren't the same things that I knew about in Australia and when I think of the English things, I feel like I don't know anything about Australia at all. Perhaps I really don't. Perhaps I lived there when I didn't know anything about anything. I was small.

Maybe I am still small.

Shreds

Today I took things I'd made and tore them into pieces, tore off things I'd stuck to them, put them back together crazy-paved and squinted to see if something emerged. Shuffle, shuffle. Shuffle, shuffle, squint.

I was pretending a little because many shreds are already in focus but they scare the stuffing out of me, scare the very vowels out of the words they're made of. Look a little to the right, and the star reappears.

It rained. The bird ground oatcakes into powder with soft and causal fascination. I read poetry and squished my hands delightedly into the wonderful wet mud of its doneness, its writtenness, its words glued into place with the perfect confidence of the obsessive or what-the-fuck.

I do not like the presentation-folder bits of things.

Louis

Avocado on toast and a head full of pollen. Sleep, solitaire. Water the cranesbill, broccoli for the parrot, sign for the parcels. MacNeice like clean old handkerchiefs, a fuchsia Muldoon someone threw about a bit. Tickets to a show, ho ho. Spitter-spatter of rain, warm air, an LP for baby brother, wrap it up, brown paper, striped string, red tape, kraftwerk twice over.

All the lost interpretations,
All the unconsummated consummations,
All the birds that flew and left the big sky empty
Come back throwing shadows on our patience

from 'The Return' (1940)

Cannibal

I stopped writing on my blog because I had something else to write, something else to make. I thought that writing here was cannibalising that work somehow, eating up its crucial middle while I noodled away here in the never-never. Zero sum canapés. 

But it didn't work, did it. Of course it didn't. The noodle is what makes the whole thing twirl around the fork and make a mouthful. There are always more things to talk about, other things I could tell you, things that are for here and things that are for there.

But are there really? I am terrible at this. To me it seems like there is only ever one thing, one thought, one prickle-branching trajectory. No nice joints to angle your cleaver into, everything together, everything a metaphor for something else, whatever else, anything else; everything the same story, everything an allegory about the thing that you happen to be saying today. How can I be saying more than one thing? How can I be doing two things? I don't even understand what that means.  

Wall

I'm sorry for my silence. I'm working on Something. I'm not talking about it here, not because it's a big secret or anything, but because talking about things that I am doing and pretending that is the same as actually doing them is the number-one most-fucking-annoying character trait I have to endure in myself.

Yesterday I sat at my desk trying to think about The Something in the broadest way I've so far managed, stepped-back and fact-matterish, not matter-of-factish, and paper and books and fragments of envelope and plates with toast crumbs and parts of maps and photographs pooled outward, ripple ripple like one of those cheesy hotel posters with the high-speed photograph of the droplet hitting the water. I spread things out on the floor. Piles accumulated around the edges of my postage-stamp desk, seaweed on the tideline, until they got dumped off the edges and replaced by new piles. I shoved at the things that had come off the desk to get at the first-generation things on the floor until I was shoving at the tenth-generation seaweed to get at the fourth-generation stuff from ten minutes ago and also where the hell is my pencil no not that one the other one and then it hit me that I needed A Wall.

You know The Wall. Like Sherlock has, or like all the cop shows have, or like any conspiracy theorist or obsessed my-parents/wife/children-were-murdered shut-in ever committed to film ever, with index cards and mugshots and photographs and newspaper clippings and maps and pins and notes on yellow legal pad paper and red felt-tip circles around things or possibly faces in photographs with big black Xs on them and some important question marks on sticky notes and the all-important pink string connecting all the dots.

I want one of those walls. I need one. It shall be mine. The living room wall has a date with destiny.

I have a shopping list. Rolls of poster paper. Pastel index cards. String. Postcards with the right pictures on them. Eight kinds of washi tape with stripes and spots, because reasons.

I possibly need a mugshot for texture. Also, I found out that there is a tumblr for the crazy wall. Because of course there is. Good job, internet.

Remembrance

Seven years ago today, Pluvialis' father died. I wrote this.

In the summer, that wriggling, nipping, supernaturally alert handful of puppies in her mind is made a book.

You have no idea how lucky you all are. But you will.

Handful

Sometimes the trouble is that the words don't come, or they stand wide-eyed in the headlights of intention as though they might be run over if they dare to express something. Sometimes you sit and you sit and you sit and the words look at you complacently from under the couch. Sometimes words pour out of you like a little lion-faced fountain with a circulating pump and later you look at them and go buh?

But actually that's not the problem right now. Or it might be, if I bothered to find out, and I could wear the weary-but-charming face of The Writer Who Cannot but instead I am throwing a tantrum of world-crushing proportions. STOMP STOMP STOMP, XtinKaiju.

The One True Tantrum. The koan of I-don't-wanna. The laser-beam eyes of fuck-you that you turn on the unopened mail, the unanswered text, the dinner that's supposed to be organised by now, the trip that's powering anxiety nightmares that awaken you with the taste of metal behind your teeth.

I thumb the pages of my passport, dog-eared in spite of itself, with a kink in the top where I clip the UK residence permit to the back cover. There is a slightly glittery smudge on it from some eyeshadow it got tangled with once in my handbag in Germany. A photo of me from nearly ten years ago. A teeny-tiny rendition of my signature. I turn it over in my hands and try to make it into the small booklet of micro-printed paper that it really is. But no. I cannot defeat it, gently thrumming emblem of my elsewhereness. I put it back where it goes.

I had meant to tell you about my walk to Logan's Meadow on Saturday, a scant muddy handful of nature reserve on the Cam riverbank, opposite the Cambridge Museum of Technology, which used to be Cambridge's sewage pumping station. There's a flat grassy bit with joggers and this bonkers swift nesting tower which is inspired by the African sun. The Ombre Roundel. I made that up. Not the part about the African sun. That part is totally true. Anyway, behind the featureless jogger-dog-turdy bit, there is a wonderful tangle of dead trees and ponds and birches and small soft new cow parsley at your ankles like salad leaves and baby nettles and celandine and its greeny-grey hearts creeping about the twiggy bits and and moor hens skrawking in the mud and an enormous, lusty choir of tits and robins and chaffinches, nonchalant city ones, not like the shy rustics at Bradfield Wood who followed us like an FBI tail, covert and yelling alarm calls into their cuffs. Three robins are singing for their invisible fences, throats as wide as if to swallow their opponents whole, ear-splitting riffs right into my face, for heaven knows, perhaps I've designs on this tree too. Blue tits bounce in the still-bare trees, tee-CHAR, spare me half a glance, perhaps the slightest tilt of the cap. Squashed catkins in the paths like discarded bits of Nutkin.

Two boys drink and bicker on the farthest fishing platform, knees crooked proprietorially over their fallen cycles as if they might rope them like calves at a rodeo. Well, that's what you said to me, says the one in the yellow hoodie with matching baseball cap, lacing everything with eighteen more inflections than seems possible. Eyeroll, says the one in red with the matching baseball cap. They are like cards lost from a UNO deck. I don't suppose either of them have ever seen a UNO deck.

I walk home by the riverside path with mud on my boots and my binoculars magnifying the lint in my pocket, past the runners and the buggies and the families wearing ironed shirts, past the postbox wearing a spiked hat like a bit of iron-maiden salvage, past the toddlers feeding swans and the narrow boats with for sale signs and the crackle of coxboxes, past the picnics on the common. Back at the little house there is bread for toast.