Monday, 28 2003
Ever since I had to inter my first rubber plant in a plastic bag last year, I have been a dedicated mother to my leafy green pets. Stan was affronted, wailing that I was so cruel, that the rotten and grey mass of leaf and stalk could be nursed back to life. I had to fling it away when he was out, to prevent his hero complex from kicking in.
We have a small flat: one bedroom, one sitting room, one kitchen, one bathroom, all joined by one hall. I have:
After years of ignoring my plants: finding them limp and sullen after weeks of no watering, I now swan around every few days, fingering the soil to see how thirsty my little ones are. I have learnt not to over water after I killed a previous dizygothica with my liquid love: I drowned it through my desperation not to let it suffer the same fate as my first Rubber Plant.All of this, inability to maintain strong & healthy plants: spoiling then starving, desiccating then drenching: what sort of mother will I make?!
care for your plants, it's not as hard as I make out.
Wednesday, 23 2003
How far are dream interpretations to be believed? We are told our dreams are attempts by our brains to process the events of our days, a pressure vent through which various scenarios can be safely channeled. We are told they are portentous: catch the symbols and find your destiny...
From an early age until I was 24, I had a cat, O'Malley. He was a ginger scamp, a freck who loved to be fed fresh bread and be scratched under his milky fur-chin. He got taken on walks with a red belt round his neck, his body and legs at dangerously different angles as I trotted in front of him, convinced he was having as good a time as I. He had a ginger sock and a white sock, with matching cheeks. The best feeling was his fur under foot on a cold morning, the worst: him rubbing his canine teeth and gums on my bare legs; I was told this is a sign of affection. We communicated with our eyes, a long held-out blink conveying love: it was always returned, unless I'd taken too long to feed him.
When he died, Mum found him stretched out by the side of the stove: a gingersnap draught excluder. He is buried by a burn near where he used to sit in the later days of his life.
...so recently I have been dreaming of O'Malley. Of reaching out and rubbing between his ears. One dream diagnosis depot advises if a young woman dreams that she is holding a cat, or kitten, she will be influenced into some impropriety through the treachery of others (...) another recommends cat dream figures as a sign to trust one's intuition.This analysis ends with of course, your own cat may simply appear in your dreams as a member of your daily life.
Who knows...but I loved having O'Malley back, reaching up to my fingers with a paw, damp from face-washing.After a day of pleeping to myself: petty whinges and silly preoccupations, I came home to find Stan already here, washing some dishes. He continued as I passed him the cabbage-clarted pot from the night before, smiling at me and asking what I'd like for my tea. The patience of a crochet-loving blind granny combined with the cooking skills of Jamie Oliver. All this with Esther William's legs...
Monday, 21 2003
This past week has seen Stan & I enter into the Great Watermelon War. The climax was reached the day we lugged two back from the supermarket, with the intention of having one each, hoping to prevent petty fighting over who had had the most centimeters of sublime watery flesh. In the end we forgot our differences, mainly because the fridge wouldn't hold the two delicious orbs. Of all fruits, watermelon for me has the ability to transport me from my surroundings: while the melting sweetness slildes down my throat, I could be standing in a tropical land, not dusky Partick. Here's Jamie Oliver's tempting vodka-watermelon recipe:
1 large ripe watermelon
1 bottle of vodka
cut a hole in the top of the melon, wide & deep enough to wedge in a funnel tightly. Pour some vodka into the melon through the funnel: leave to sit for a day, then top up. Do this for a few days, keeping the melon chilled all the while until it is saturated with drink.
slice, serve and grin.
some more watermelon recipes
Friday, 11 2003
Today I have mostly been thinking about determination.
To take my mind off my raging internal pain, I thought I'd clean my oven and its paraphenalia. So - the grill now shines with soaped-up enamel, not the pallid dinge of cheese-on-toast-gone-by. This oven was accompanied by a lovely sturdy baking tray: real quality stuff - the thing Delia reccommends we buy rather than re-purchase a £2 flexible foe from Pound Stretchers every year. I don't believe in washing up as I go: why clean a baking tray when it can sit and sit and sit? This one was black and rubbery with grease. I actually wondered whether it was a nonstick coating, but a glimpse of the real surface could be seen through the patina of aged oil.
Now, I spent an hour chipping away at the crust with a hardy Swedish cheese slice. All around me was sprayed with black shards: perhaps I was the greasy Snow Queen: the fragments piercing anyone's soul would render them eternally mine - making me oven-baked goodies for life. Alas no-one burst in on my dogged reverie...Which brings me to my point: I am fastidiously determined when matters of little significance are concerning me. Why spend so long getting a blister on one's right index finger so a baking tray is the speckled-blue of it's birth? Why why why?!
roll mouse over to witness amazing change!
Thursday, 10 2003
Today I am having one of those days - do you have them at all? - where you begin to doubt the veracity of any of your thoughts. Did I think that up? Is that really my own opinion? You begin to wonder if you are an opinion-cuckoo: flittering around thoughtless until you find a ready-made one that kinda fits: maybe a little tight here or loose there, but you can carry it off if you puff your chest out enough.
So - the Iranian cojoined twins? my first thought? - on why chancing death when they are alive, I thought they are both half alive as it is: to them not trying is to never know. Now they do, and are dead.
But I think that's so liberal, so fence-sitting. Maybe I need to find a more controversial voice. Then though, my thoughts definitely won't be my own: they'll be filtered through a React-o-scope™ and tinted to best create a stramash. Edited into subversion and pushed off the fence.
Monday, 07 2003
This past few days I have spent in a whirl of fun, surrounded by bewildering hatred. My friend Sally and I have long planned out trip: I would travel down to stay with her in Yorkshire, then we would both return to Glasgow: a city which had been her home for nearly six years as she studied for her degree. Our mini-holiday was fabulous, but studded with bizarre examples of the hatred other humans inexplicably hold proudly as a defining part of their nature.
“The annual march celebrates the victory at the Boyne, the Glorious Revolution and all the achievements and benefits of civil and religious liberties that came from these events … that is something to celebrate.” (...)
We’d stepped off the train from York in Edinburgh, and were expecting to wait 20 minutes for the connecting train to Glasgow, but as luck had it, there was a service waiting to leave that very minute – so we leapt on full on congratulations for our time-shaving talents. This train though was to stop at many small towns on its journey through Lothian to Strathclyde.
At West Calder, we stopped in front of a tide of shimmering blue nylon: a fleet of Rangers Football Club-shirted men, women and children got on the train. Many we then noticed had Union Jack flags, and inexplicably, Cross of St. George English flags wrapped around their shoulders, super-hero style, or round their waists as sarongs. Sally and I, seeing that our carriage was receiving the majority of these people, moved a few seats down so we were sitting together alone rather than at a 4-seater table. Had we not, we would have found our selves in the heart of what was to follow.
Immediately the train began to leave, our new travel companions began to gesticulate single fingers to the two police men who had co-ordinated their happy influx onto the train. They then began to jump up and down, slamming their hands off window and roof in an approximation of the drums that accompany Orange walks. A scream heralded the first smashed light, two more would follow soon after. They positioned themselves all around us and the other travellers, standing on the tables and jigging, stamping, kicking upwards to the rood, the windows. Smoking and cracking open cans of lager, they were all glaze-eyed with passion and zeal for what they sang:
‘the Pope’s a bloody bastard’
…..’we killed Bobby Sands’…. (..)
’up the UVF’….
’you Fenian bastards’….
Through all this, I saw kids singing with equal passion: glancing at the bigger boys and men, keen to catch their eye and gain their respect for displaying such wonderful enthusiasm for their ‘culture’.
I caught the eye of a girl my age, draped in a flag she had the Union Jack painted on her cheeks. On her forehead was inscribed in red, white and the legend, U.V.F.
Her mother was strutting the passage for the length of six rows of seats, singing the anti-IRA songs, denouncing the Pope, and smiling beneficently at her daughter.
Sally and I were terrified: we had though a guardian angle in a squat drunk man wearing a English-flag emblazoned plastic bowler hat: he prevented more lights being smashed – those right above our heads.
At Bellshill they got off: the journey from West Calder to there had taken 20 minutes or less – it had felt like hours. Tense from our fear, we relaxed into horror that this was allowed to go on in the name of diverse culture: that day was the culmination of the Grand Orange Order’s marchings. Between 15,000 – 20,000 had marched in Glasgow: we had encountered a smaller version at West Calder.
47% want these marches banned the Sunday Herald proclaimed yesterday – but it’s not the marches as such which inspire fear, though they are I feel, a gross display of bigotry in their own right. It’s the hangers-on, the men and women who view it as a grand day out to display their hatred towards that great unknown – the Catholic Church.
Rangers Football club has no official link with the Orange Order – though its an entirely academic distinction. The sectarian spirit in parts of Glasgow is flourishing: having something to hate so much gives identity to those who otherwise would have nothing to which to cling. Bigotry arises from a tribal need to create a community to which to belong and to create an enemy on whom to vent festering resentments. I imagine that the people on that train with us have no notion of the tenuous historical reasonings the Orange Order give for the continued validity of their parades. Their eyes were milky and blurred: hatred and passion were as intoxicating as the bottles of Buckfast tonic wine and Tennets Super they slugged down.
The girl I saw with the UVF logo on her forehead; I saw her yesterday as Sally & I wandered around the West End of Glasgow. She was dressed similar to most of the students who populate this area. It seems to me worse that she is educated and chooses to celebrate the Battle of the Boyne by venerating drug-running terrorists, rather than not knowing any different.Our other run-in with trouble was in Alton Towers, where having stood up for ourselves after having been queue-jumped by some nasty big boys, we were terrorised by them: threatening semi-whispers of 'you should never grass' over busy lines of people, menacing stares and jibes of 'nasty slag' were our prize for not being weak.
Eventually we laughed...
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