Monday 25 2003
We lived our lives in fear......
So screamed Scott Hasting's father, leading him to dance to passion with Fran, not dance for prizes with Liz. Strictly Ballroom is one of my all-time favourite films.
Scott and Fran are wowing the crowds with the flashy steps which aren't strictly ballroom. Fran is beautiful and dark in a flamenco dress while all around are decked out in sequins and fortified with hairspray. We know they'll win out: her Spanish father begins a clap, which is picked up round the audotorium at the Pan Pacific Grand Prix ... listen to the rhythm says Franny's Granny's voice in Scott's head...and they dance. Scott and Fran bring back to ballroom dance that night what all the low-cut frocks and high-waisted breeks try to emulate: passion and sex. After they've danced their last dance, surrounded by all the supporting characters, you have to wonder if they manage to pasa doble together for all their lives, or do they become jaded, like Scott's mum, betraying her husband for a dance trophy. Tarnished sequins?...I do hope not.
Sunday 24 2003
Certain people enjoy being spanked for their sexual kicks: I imagine this doesn't come cheap...so I suggest an alternative for all you spankaphiles: stand next to your cyclinder hoover when retracting the cord. If you get the right angle, you'll get a good sharp whack on your buttocks.It really hurts.
whip girl by tracy m. lee, mangled by me
Brah-ha-ha-ha!!!!! 'lights' to be banned.
When I was the heaviest smoker in the world, I preferred full-strength Marlboro's, but after a ferocious cold I downgraded to the low-fat fags (so I could continue smoking though the phlegm and pain you understand), Marlboro Lights. They seemed so weedy in comparison - like breathing through a foam pillow, where as the Red ones were more akin to breathing through the finest goose down pillow. Ahem...anyhoo..after some serious sucking, one could extract a certain amount of goodness from them, and they became my best friends. Although machines used to test cigarettes drew less tar and nicotine from low-tar brands, real smokers tended not to. They would either smoke more or inhale more deeply to get the same effect. Marc Fritsch, spokesman for Philip Morris, said: 'We have started production of the new packs already. There never has been such a thing as a safe cigarette. People should not assume that a term light, mild or low [means] they are safer for them.'
I did assume this - as a non-idiotic person, this was a rather daft move on my part. For me, smoking was always anathema: my poor mother, returning from a hard night shift at the hospital, would be made to stand outside to have a smoke, with a whiney pleep of 'you mightn't care if you die, but if you do, I'll be an orphan!!!!'. So when I took it up aged 19 I did so with gusto, trying to dissociate myself from the campaigning creep of my previous incarnation. I recall one night getting through more than 3 packets, though that 'night' had started at 3 in the afternoon. Still, nothing could convince me smoking was rather yuk.It strikes me now that being able to stop smoking is being able to realise that they do not make you feel or look good: you look ugly and dirty, and smell? you smell disgusting. When I was in crisis, I'd have a cigarette - but I would've been just as well sucking my thumb: it's an anti-placebo which you believe calms you down, but in actual fact it works against you: you believe you need it to live, when its doing the opposite. Honestly, all the 'smoking kills your unborn baby' slogans I could ignore - the health ramifications meant little to me: youth gives you an invulnerability - it won't happen to me.See that the emperor's clothes are a fabrication: I did this by smoking so much I couldn't touch another.
Saturday 23 2003
'Where's the bargin warehouse?'
So asked a gruff man in a car of bairns this hot afternoon as I strolled down Crow Road, clutching my 4th box of hair dye this weekend. I told him I didn't know, but pointed out that the retail precinct next to where he'd pulled over there was a wealth of shopping opportunities to be had.
'The clearance warehouse?'
he persisted. I asked him what kind of goods he was after - pine at Durham Pine, shoes at Barranto, scrummies at Sainsbury's, tat at Internaçional?
'I just want bargins!'
he huffed, wheeling his car around in the middle of a major road. Sigh, I sighed to myself....don't we all?
Partick last wednesday - over the other side, all was blue: bliss in the sky. It's tea time & here I am: tippitying away on my computer: Harumph. I'm listening to Kenny Rogers Gideon Tanner, where a man is looking down those who have gone to his funeral.
- Some say I was a good ma-an, some disagree-ee-ee, some folks are sad, so-ome are glad to see the last of me-ee-ee. I know I was happy ma-an most of my day-ay-ays and through it all if I had a time or two it was worth it to me.
An odd song choice for a vibrant young thing on a sultry saturday evening: it's one of my songs I return to over & over, it being the first song on one of the very first tapes I was given. My mum had donated an ancient transistor radio with a built in tape player - I needed something to listen to - so Kenny and Barbara Dickson vied for my attention. Kenny's sparkly-eyed gnome charm won. Now it's Witchita Lineman by Glenn Campbell. Oh I do like a bit of country - though you'll never catch me at a line dance. How does Glenn make driving across Kansas looking for overloaded truck sound so romantic? What a line this is -
- And I need you more than want you and I want you for all time
What a man.... Some song lyrics are just as wonderful and haunting as poems. I remember looking through my Norton Anthology of Poetry when I started University: Leonard Cohen was there, amongst the back pages. I have a loathing for Suzanne Takes You Down as in my first year I had a histrionics-fond girl in the next room, who played this over & over, singing along. What's more, she was a trained opera singer, so had that plummy warble so beloved of such types.
Here are some of my favorites...
Is that all there is? | Peggy Lee
I remember when I was a very little girl, our house caught on fire.
I'll never forget the look on my father's face as he gathered me up
in his arms and raced through the burning building out to the pavement.
I stood there shivering in my pyjamas and watched the whole world go up in flames.
And when it was all over I said to myself, "Is that all there is to a fire?"
(more...)
My sister | Tindersticks
Do you remember my sister? How many mistakes did she make with those never blinking eyes? I couldn't work it out. I swear she could read your mind, your life, the depths of your soul at one glance. Maybe she was stripping herself away, saying Here I am, this is me
I am yours and everything about me, everything you see...
If only you look hard enough
I never could.
(more...)
Monday 18 2003
This morning I rose from my love-pit at 6.30, and energised myself into my adidas yoga breeks and hair-dye stained orange simmit.
Yes, I am in cycling mode: it's the closest I'll get to flying in this incarnation.Strapped together, my mini-radio & I whirled the mean streets of Partick towards Victoria Park in time to James Naughtie on BBC Radio Four on the Today programme. Had I gone later, the soothing tones of Rabbi Lionel Blue on Thought for the Day would have salved me as my legs grated the pedals round the park.
Excepting the dog walkers and joggers, I felt quite alone, in the delicious dawn-of-time early morning way. Crisp, the air charred my cheeks with red as my calves somehow became imprinted with cogs and sooty pedals.
Hamnavoe | George Mackay Brown
My father passed with his penny letters
Through closes opening and shutting like legends
When barbarous with gulls
Hamnavoe's morning broke
On the salt and tar steps. Herring boats,
Puffing red sails, the tillers
Of cold horizons, leaned
Down the gull-gaunt tide
And threw dark nets on sudden silver harvests.
A stallion at the sweet fountain
Dredged Water, and touched
Fire from steel-kissed cobbles.
Hard on noon four bearded merchants
Past the pipe-spitting pier-head strolled,
Holy with greed, chanting
Their slow grave jargon.
A tinker keened like a tartan gull
At cuithe-hung doors. A crofter lass
Trudged through the lavish dung
In a dream of cornstalks and milk.
In "The Artie Whaler" three blue elbows fell,
Regular as waves, from beards spumy with porter,
Till the amber day ebbed out
To its black dregs.
The boats drove furrows homeward, like ploughmen
In blizzards of gulls. Gaelic fisher girls
Flashed knife and dirge
Over drifts of herring,
And boys with penny wands lured gleams
From the tangled veins of the flood. Houses went blind
Up one steep close, for a
Grief by the shrouded nets.
The kirk, in a gale of psalms, went heaving through
A tumult of roofs, freighted for heaven. And lovers
Unblessed by steeples, lay under
The buttered bannock of the moon.
He quenched his lantern, leaving the last door.
Because of his gay poverty that kept
My seapink innocence
From the worm and black wind;
And because, under equality's sun,
All things wear now to a common soiling,
In the fire of images
Gladly I put my hand
To save that day for him.
As it comes closer to time to go home to Orkney, the more acute my desire to smell, touch and breathe in all of it becomes. Reading this wonderful poem by George Mackey Brown, I walk along with him as he commemorates his father, a postman's route through the twisting streets of Stromness.
Wednesday 13 2003
Syphilis is back, screamed my Guardian the other day as I munched on cottage cheese on melba toast for my lunch.
It's like the plague and smallpox: gone - or so we think. Toulouse Lautrec may have died from it..but us, in our sterilised, rubber-wrapped world?
One of the reasons I want to go into nursing is because I feel we all need to be better educated about our sexual health. It's not just the person who puts it about a bit who has to go down the VD clinic: it could be anyone of us. One night of pleasure where you decided you could do without that condom could well lead to the establishment of a feisty colony of warts just where you don't want them. Embarrassing to ask that a condom is used? It'll be even more embarrassing when you have to tell all subsequent sexual partners that you may smit them with a dose of cauliflower bits.
As well as the 'big names' in STDs, there are the quiet ones, whose names we maybe don't recognise: chlamydia - which if left untreated may render you infertile. We think we know all about AIDs and HIV..but I believe we don't. After the first decade of fear, it seems a large proportion of us - younger generation - think HIV is only contracted if you are a sexually promiscuous gay man or a needle-sharing drug user. Pregnancy is feared, but The Morning After Pill 'cures' only unplanned pregnancy not a range diseases which may or may not kill you. It's not feared enough though to take pre-event measures.
how about one of a fetching array of STD ties?
Sunday 10 2003
On Friday we went to Largs for the day: an ice-cream run esplanade laced by a stony beach.
I do love to be beside the seaside..I grew up beside the sea in Stromness: play was focused on the stoney beaches which characterise the slipways of Stromness.
Most of our days were spent on the Watch Quay and down on Broad Noust. There we would find charcoal sticks, with which we'd draw on the orange flagstones outside the museum, much to the annoyance of Jeanie Firth, the museum lady.
High up, the beach seethed with forky tails. The slipway was 'in my day' an old ramshackle collection of stones, which I fell into, wearing my new plimsoles. We swam here without thought: raw sewerage would come tumbling out of pipes as we paddled past. What would SEPA have made of that?
Tuesday, 05 2003
Do you have bat wings? maybe you know them simply - being on familiar terms with them - as bats, or maybe as bingo wings. I'm talking here about flapping, voluminous upper arms; like a chicken breast flattened betwixt clingfilm, like jelly shuddering with the smallest movement.I am plagued with bats, and am on a quest to cure them. My ideal is simply not to have moving parts ten seconds after I've stopped walking along the pavement.
Anyhoo, my arms are now aching from heaving myself up from our carpet: with the aid of my trusty Reebok Gym Ball, I shall trim my wings.
Monday 04 2004
Tonight Stan & I, anxious to enjoy the balm of early-august Glasgow, went to Wicket's Hotel in Partickhill for a nibble of some hearty chicken goujons and a sip of salving beer.
Wicket's is a traditional-style hotel and bar - by traditional I mean no glass or steel or hot towel or bidets, and it's great. It serves good simple food (delish burgers) and has the most wonderful views from the bar over the West of Scotland cricket ground (tales say this was the spot of the very first Scotland v. England football match).
At the other side of the bar is a garden - a wonderous beer garden: the Steppes of Partick, shaded with apple trees and planted with picnic benches and umbrellas. We hear tell it may be crumbled up to make way for some more non-descript housing, the garden becoming the car park. Save our Wickets!
stan's bleeding sky
skysaw
A Still Life
Guilt greeting grief
as I kiss your clammy cheek.
You’ve wilted by the fire,
To shuffle between chair and kettle.
Slowly, Daisy,
you’ve been robbed of your petals.
Crushed young: the
sea stole your finest petal.
Now, I stand in that hollow.
Remember those daisy chains we made?
I thought they named
those flowers for
you.
Their patch is gone
now. Disappeared with your last
petal, your roots have died too.
A cut flower.
Each time, a new jar disguised only
our guilt
August is literature month...next, a discussion of themes in Virgina Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway...or more likely, an extemporisation on skincare and spot-relief.
Sunday 03 2003
De
I am a bairn.
I am de.
I am in de.
Du is a bairn. Du stands at da hert
O da settlement. Dy feet ir bare,
Dir dirty, klestered wi gutter.
Dy body is cled wi coorse cloot.
Da reek o baests is apo dy skyn.
Hit is dy smell.
Du fingers da waa of dy hame,
Near da daek quhar da sentry staands.
It's a big roon crø, biggit be haand,
Møld underfit an owrehead girss.
Du touches dy hair, hit's aggelt an lang.
Du's never seen dy face, forbye atill da
Faces o dy bridders an dy sisters; du døsna ken
If du is 'beautiful' - but du feels it.
Da kennin is in de.
Du døsna seek 'knowledge'.
Feet in da gutter, du belangs.
de=you; dy=your; bairn=child; klestered=slathered, covered in; gutter=dirt, mud; cled=clad; cloot=cloth; daek=dyke, wall; quhar=where; biggit=built;
Robert Alan Jamieson ©
Since 1995, when I bought an anthology of Scottish writing, called Nothing is Altogether Trivial I have loved this poem.
'You don't know if you're beautiful, but you feel it'.
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