Bag Lady

Walking

2012-01-23T22:00:00.004Z

I’m not in the habit of walking but checking the length of the route to work on a map and regarding the spare tyres that sit sulkily round my waist means it’s worth a try. Friday was the first time.

Instead of walking out of the back of the building to my waiting car I stepped out the front, something normally only reserved for the weekend. I pulled my beret down to eyebrow level to save my hair from the winter winds, pulled on my cashmere wrist warmers that look a lot like cheap fingerless mittens and set off.

It’s not a very picturesque walk, I confess. I could have taken the towpath but I didn’t fancy dirtying my trainers in the corresponding mud so I stuck to the streets. The one way streets of Reading swirl around my home like they’re sucking the roads into a tarmac plughole but on foot this couldn’t trouble me. I made a point of keeping my eyes peeled, enjoying the fact that I didn’t need to brake, accelerate, brake and steer, eyes always on the road. Walking gives me the freedom to take in my surroundings in a way that would normally be dangerous.

Across the rooftops I could see the freshly cleaned steeple of the Polish Roman Church, with its vaguely Spanish red archways. It looks like the scaffolding is being peeled away layer by layer, slowly revealing the almost too fresh stonemasonry.

I passed the beautifully symmetrical Albion Terrace, as fine-looking a Georgian terrace as any Bath has to offer, with its picture perfect railings and neat, matching brass signs. The ground floor windows are perfectly arched, like gently raised eyebrows looking out onto the street. I walked along peering casually into basement windows, wondering about lives lived below street level.

On the opposite site of the road the glorious Royal Berkshire Hospital frontage stands back from the street as if to say “here I am. What are you going to do about it?” Its stunning facade, all golden stone steps and vast ionic columns, has a grandeur that deserves to be in large landscape gardens, where peacocks strut and stuttering gentlemen make embarrassing passes as bonneted girls. Instead it squats in a scruffy car park, protected from the world outside only by the distance this affords.

Further out of Reading I passed cars idly queuing, waiting for the lights to change while the ancient and massive trees tried to wrench their roots out of their tarmac prisons, the pavement twisted and buckling against their efforts. The path rises and falls with their exertions and in some places the trees are winning, as new shoots and old roots break the surface.

The closed down Indian restaurant, with its massive coloured glass roof hidden away inside since the doors were shut, looks forlorn as I pass. Above my head a pair of grey-white trainers hangs by its laces over a telephone wire; an image that reminds me of Nowheresville, USA, though I don’t really know why. I pulled off my hat and gloves, feeling the energy I’ve generated making my skin flush. I roledl my gloves into a neat ball, folded my hat and tucked them all into my messenger bag for the return journey.

I spied on the drivers that I pass wondering if they noticed me, six feet tall and in a red coat, my funny knock-kneed walk which makes me look like I'm new to this one-foot-in-front-of-the-other thing. I like to think I would remember me but I am not so sure of it; that steel and glass bubble is all encompassing like a comfort blanket that allows us to blot out the rest of the world until we are ready for it or until we reach our destination, whichever comes first.

I turned up my music and walked on.

Frost

2012-01-16T21:31:00.001Z

The frost on the windscreen comes off in one easy step as I remove the thin plastic sheet that I had attached to the car while the sun was still shining yesterday. I’m not normally this foresighted but I was annoyed at Mr Manbag for some long since forgotten slight while out shopping and so I wanted to send him unpacking. The rest of the car is winter-scene perfect, the pale blue-green paint like a Christmas album cover. The side windows are crusted with crystals which stream into the air as the scraper dislodges them from the glass. My fingerless gloves don’t seem so toasty now, though the dusting of ice seems to suit their green tone. The website said they were “spruce” which is both accurate and apt.

Inside the car the unheated leather seats are unforgiving; their cold penetrates my clothes and my bones. I pull my faux fur coat and faux wool scarf up around my neck in an attempt to keep the over-fresh air away from my skin. The once-clear windscreen is now covered in a mist-fine layer of ice as the moisture in the air touches it and freezes. I battle onwards with my vision barely impaired - sitting in a queue of traffic is the perfect defroster. We collectively edge forward like inchworms made metal, our exhaust fumes pluming in the air behind us.

I hope it snows.

Good vibrations

2012-01-10T12:26:00.001Z

They’re raising a building next door. In no time at all a giant warehouse has risen from the ashes of a 70s office block, the ugliest phoenix ever seen.

I’m on the opposite side of the building to the diggers and men in reflective jackets but still I feel the earth move. The floor beneath me hums as if I am in the same room as a not-quite-level washing machine and the blinds in the window shimmer slightly with the vibrations.

I wait for the earth to open and swallow us whole, filing cabinets and engineers falling together.

Learning curve

2012-01-06T18:04:00.004Z

It’s now three weeks since I started working a New Place Ltd. I like it here. The people are fun, we’ve got a Simpson’s pinball machine and I can set the temperature for my own office instead of being at the mercy of central air conditioning. These are all Good Things.

Since I’ve been working here I’ve learned that

- People from Finland are quite reserved and perhaps don't quite "get" English humour. Making a little joke about Scotland when visiting the head office (“no, we’ve not had any snow. Except in Scotland. Which doesn’t count because no-one lives there. Ha ha ha”) means you could easily be mistaken for a Scot-hater.

- Ordering milk on room service in a hotel in Helsinki can unwittingly cost you ten euros. Even if it’s only a Holiday Inn. Yes, it really was just a glass of milk before you try and suggest otherwise.

- Having your own office is officially No Fun. It’s true that I can pop a CD on to give me a bit of background noise. And if I wanted to let slip a little parp the chances are I could get away with that too (I never, would, of course. What do you take me for?). But it can get lonely here. I have company one or two days a week but when I’m on my tod I spend a lot of time popping over to the girls in HR across the corridor on the merest hint of need just so I can talk to someone.

- Living just 2 miles away from work is cool. Although if the traffic is bad (yes, I will walk when it's nicer) there is almost no margin of error and I will be late for work. Not that anyone here would notice, me being in an office on my own and all.

- Working in an office where everyone dresses down requires a lot of new clothes and disposal of lots of old suit-based outfits. I’ve done the fun half of this so far.

- All the people I used to work with that made me all sad when I left have carried on their lives without me. I don’t know if they’ve thought about me (or cursed my name over work I’ve left behind) but I’ve thought about them. I miss them. I miss the in-jokes and the piss-taking and the fact that I knew who to go to for anything. I think the relationships forged in adversity are stronger than those built in good times. I'm pleased to say I am still in touch with a lot of them but it's not the same as sitting in amongst the team.

- There are still companies out there that mean new laptop when they say new laptop. In almost 20 years of office work I don't think I've ever, not never, had a new laptop. For someone who can get a little OCD about the cleanliness of their hands my new laptop makes me terribly excited.

- Working in a small and male dominated office means that it is possible to go to loo at 11am and the toilet to still have the blue down it from the night before. Despite this lack of women it is also possible to find a pube on the seat of the loo in my favoured cubicle approximately 53.6% of the time. It is quickly becoming not my favourite cubicle.

- If you don’t grab a banana from the fruit delivery early on they’ll all be gone. Then the pears go. Then the apples. Then all that’s left are the kiwis which no one can be bothered to peel.

But the most important thing I've learned? I know that I've learned almost nothing. My job description tells me everything about what my job encompasses but nothing about what I have to do. I'm still working out what every day should hold and where the boundaries lie between me and my assistant. There's a long road ahead. Luckily I don't mind travelling without a map.

100 words: First day

2012-01-03T20:21:00.001Z

We lie tangled together all knees and elbows, uncomfortable but comfortable, like two shipwrecked souls clinging to a single piece of flotsam. Outside the wind is tearing up trees but here we stay cocooned in feather and cotton for as long as possible.

I suggest that we stay as we are, rising only for a cup of tea mid-morning; he says that makes it worse. Of course he’s right.

His beard is soft against my neck and as my limbs get hotter and hotter we drift apart, ready to face the day.

We slowly stand and walk to the shore.

100 Words: Lust

2011-12-10T18:38:00.000Z

I simply cannot help myself. Have you seen her? She is irresistible.

I know she toyed with me at first, twirling my tie and leaning just a fraction too close; close enough to smell her scent. She intoxicates me and I will buy her anything she wants just to get what I want.

Every time I see her I take everything from her so I can really see her; no silk or satin or lace, just skin. Then I take my time, trying to make the pleasure last. I’d see her every day if I could. Just to do that.

100 Words: Greed

2011-12-09T18:38:00.000Z

It started with the little things; a bottle of perfume or a piece of jewellery or a fancy meal. After a while those things just weren’t enough for me anymore and I moved up the scale.

Designer shoes became designer dresses became a week in Cannes. Before I knew it I was having my own little sports car to run around in and then my own apartment. I always want more.

In return he takes what he wants. I’m okay with that. I understand the transaction.

And I know I’ll never get what I really want from him; his time.

100 Words: Wrath

2011-12-08T18:38:00.001Z

He doesn’t do anything. Twenty years I’ve looked after him and still it goes on; food wrappers, cigarette butts and dirty cups at a time when I should be relaxing.

I told him that yesterday and he just looked at me like I was a piece of shit on his shoe.

I know I’ll have to call someone to sort it out but right now I need five minutes to compose myself.

I cried at first. Then I screamed; screamed at myself when I realised what I’d done.

I’ve left the pillow over his face. I can’t bear to look.

100 Words: Sloth

2011-12-07T18:38:00.000Z

I don’t see why I should do anything. Mum nags and says I should get out of bed; I don’t see the point. I stay out of her way, nipping downstairs to get a cup of coffee and power through four or five ciggies, smoking on the back porch, when she pops out.

I grab a microwave meal and eat it standing in the kitchen. She wouldn’t know I’d been there if I didn’t leave out the packaging, my calling card, just so she knows I’ve eaten. I wouldn’t want her to worry.

That’s quite enough activity for the day.

100 Words:Envy

2011-12-01T17:45:00.001Z

Everyone sees me, they cannot help themselves. I am the perfect embodiment of female beauty, Venus De Milo made flesh. Golden hair and perfect curves are mine and I cannot help that.

But you? You with your frizzy hair and doughy flesh? No one notices you and the way you stand on the edges of the group, invisible. No one but him. For him you light up the room the way I do for others.

I keep smiling but inside I wither. He is the only one I want and you have him. My heart turns to the deepest black.

100 Words: Gluttony

2011-11-30T15:33:00.000Z

I excuse the first doughnut by telling myself (and anyone who will listen) that I didn’t have breakfast. I sneakily eat another when nobody is in the room, wiping away the telltale sugar crystals with a tissue and stuffing in the bin, under some scrunched up paper.

I stop myself at two, knowing there’s a pub lunch in the offing and there won’t be room for my fish and chips if I eat any more. I don’t want people to look down their noses at my appetite.

In my handbag the “buy one get one free” box is well hidden.

100 Words: Pride

2011-11-29T14:20:00.001Z

There’s no satisfaction to be gained from having the upper hand if no one knows it. Like the tree that falls noiselessly in the unseen forest my clever ripostes and mental parries have no value if they go unnoticed amongst the verbal traffic in the office.

Unfortunately it seems they also have no worth when I stand on the chair and shout them, my voice rising over the wave of conversations about contracts, meetings and spreadsheets.

I sit back down and return to my computer and my mug of tea and try to ignore the deafening silence in the room.

First day

2011-11-24T18:17:00.007Z

The first 24 hours of any holiday is always an important marker. It feels like an indicator of how the rest of the trip will go. If the first day is bad then the rest of the time will be spent trying to make up for the wasted opportunity, for the bad choices and the mistakes made. Today has been no exception.

When we arrived yesterday we stepped out of Gare Du Nord full of excitement and anticipation. The queue for taxis was a mile long so we walked across Paris, pulling our cases behind us, their wheels picking up golden leaves and detritus as we walked. And walked. We walked past boulangeries, patisseries and old ladies. We passed over cobbles, cement and tarmac. We sidestepped potholes and steered round dog shit. After 30 minutes we were in the familiar territory of the Marais. After another 15 minutes we were outside our apartment shaking hands with the rental guide.

The wooden stairs to the apartment curled round and upwards, each centuries old step a slightly different shape to its predecessor, the wood with a sheen that only a million footsteps can bring. We carried our cases up, treading carefully and wishing we had packed more lightly. Once inside the flat Anatole, our guide, showed us round, opened cupboards and checked the hob. We signed the paperwork and he left us alone to explore.

It wasn’t long before we headed out to our favourite bar – Au Petit Fer A Cheval. It’s become something of a cliché now, the seats outside under the heaters generally full of American tourists rather than local French. But it’s still one of the best spots in Paris to watch people go by. David, an older American who now lives in Paris, was sat beside me and fully intended to have me as his wingman while he watched the pretty girls, asking me if I preferred legs or asses. Through his white wine haze he told me repeatedly that he had never cheated on his wife of 21 years. She lives in Marrakech while he stays in Paris but he’s never cheated. No. Never. We talked and drank and I helped him light his cigarettes, his hands too shaky for the lighter. He told me about the time he had slept with a girl; he was 57 and she was 21 and he thought it was bad, that men that age shouldn’t sleep with young girls. He didn’t mention his wife, the one he had never been unfaithful to, and I didn’t press him, deciding instead to let him ramble. When he tried to pierce an olive with a cocktail stick but simply couldn’t he seemed to decide he’d had enough to drink. We had finished our pichet too so Mr Manbag and I headed on to eat.

The restaurant is a favourite of ours, discovered many years ago and getting a visit every time we come to Paris. It’s a small dining room which does a few foods very well, though the low light is not conducive to parting a roasted chicken from its bones; this Mr Manbag knows from a previous occasion. I won’t go into the food in detail; I’m not a food writer and so I don’t think I could do the seared sesame tuna or the salmon with beurre blanc justice. We ate, we drank, we listened into the conversations from the adjacent tables. To my right an elderly American couple (from Ohio but now with a house in the south of France) and a middle aged American couple (where he was loud and slightly shrill and she didn’t say a word) talked about the dangers of paragliding. To our left the French table talked about English actors, or rather listed English actors that they liked; “Albert Finney! Michael Caine! Alec Guinness! John Giegud” causing Mr Manbag to mutter “terrible ham” before they moved on to “Bob ‘Oskins”. This for us is entertainment, an extension of people watching.

When we walked out we headed to the Seine instead of straight home. The lights on the bridges do not make for great photos but they make a very pretty sight for us tourists. We weren’t sure where we were, having come out without a map, but still we crossed over to one of the islands, walked along and crossed back over another bridge and headed north, back to the apartment. We photographed signs and old doorways with their gods and monsters carved in stone. We walked hand in hand and dawdled in the lamplit streets, a fug of wine upon our tired brains. We stood on street corners and kissed gently, in love in the city of love. And we made it back to our apartment, to climb into bed and fall into a drunken slumber.

With this as a first day I have high hopes for the rest of the holiday.

Leaving

2011-11-20T12:14:00.001Z

I can’t bring myself to say goodbye to everybody properly, like it should be done. It’s selfish, I know, but every hug or friendly word brings the hot red flush to my cheeks and fills my eyes with tears. I’ve had too many sprints to the confines of the loo today as it is. Instead I tell people not to be too nice and they seem to understand.

The goodbye speech from my boss is mercifully short although the crowd round my desk is big. They applaud and leave and I slip back to the bathroom, walking fast, head down, playing with my hair to cover my face.

I leave the building for the last time with my boss. I struggle into the lift with my boxes and bags, he with his laptop ready for a weekend of fighting spreadsheets, no doubt. We half embrace in the car park, my arms filled with gifts and the thick leaves of the orchid that didn’t flower this year. We wish each other well and I head to my car. I’m just inside as he passes in his, tooting his horn and waving goodbye.

The tears come before I’ve even started the ignition. I just ignore them, let them trickle down my cheeks knowing that no-one can see me now. The drive home is salty and occasionally punctuated by those small sobs that end with an intake of breath, a gasp for air. I wipe my face when it starts to tickle and itch from the flow, seeing the mascara stains on my fingers. I’m not even sure what I’m crying for. I know I’ll miss so many people but I know it’s the right time for me to leave so the sadness that engulfs and overwhelms me feels somehow insincere. By the end of it I am sure that I cry for crying’s sake, enjoying the rush of emotion in the privacy of the car.

Back at home the flat is empty. I put down the contents of my desk, change my clothes, take off my make up ready to put on a new face, a brave one, ready for the party.

Nanny

2011-11-13T12:05:00.001Z

When she came home after 2 days she couldn’t understand why everyone was so quiet around her. Eggshells were being carefully tiptoed on and Sarah just couldn’t fathom why. Even Mrs Fleming from next door was being nice, leaning on the garden gate and asking how she was doing, calling her love, instead of pulling back the net curtain just enough to make sure Sarah didn’t step into her garden.

The accident had been wiped from Sarah’s memory the very moment the car left the road. The blur of twisted metal and sirens was completely gone, taken from her hippocampus as a way of blocking out the images. When she woke up in the stiff white sheets of the hospital bed mum and dad stood over her, regarding the beeping machines and array of tubes dolefully as if their presence was harmful rather than life saving. She was a resilient child – she had always been something of a tom boy – and after two days of observations and a plaster cast on her fractured left arm she was sent home to stay with Nanny Bridgeman.

Nanny Bridgeman sat at her bedside when she was falling asleep and pushed her untidy fringe back from the bruises on her face. She made her tea with two sugars in it and let her sleep in every morning if Sarah wanted to. She shook her head when she thought Sarah wasn’t looking and sighed when Sarah talked to her mum and dad about the accident, seeking something to fill in the gaps left by her stolen memory.

Staying with Nanny was strange, especially when her own house was just round the corner, but she enjoyed being fussed over. Sunday lunch turned into a feast of stew and dumplings and she was even allowed ice cream; a treat she wouldn’t have been allowed at home. Mum and dad accepted this was part of her healing process and didn’t say anything about all that sugar and cream for a change. Sarah could get used to being spoiled like this. At least she could if she wasn’t looking forward to going home so much.

After a week with Nanny Sarah started to ask more questions, putting into words those thoughts that had been trampling around in her head for so long. She still felt like a fish out of water, sleeping in this creaky house with its patterned bedspread and draughty windows. It wasn’t where she belonged. It felt rude to ask her grandma when she’d be going home; an insult to her warm welcome and even warmer cooking. Nanny Bridgeman just looked at her, the colour draining from her soft skinned face. Sarah felt ashamed that she’d upset Nanny by suggesting that she had felt anything but loved staying here with her. But she knew she should be at home with mum and dad. Nanny took Sarah’s smooth unlined hand in hers and said “but Sarah. You can’t go back. Mummy and daddy aren’t there, remember. They died in the accident”.

Sarah’s world folded inwards upon itself, a kaleidoscope of colours making her head hurt for a second as she played back the images she had collected since she had woken up in that starchy bed. In all those memories of her mum and dad watching over her they never said a word.

100 words: Morse

2011-11-11T13:32:00.005Z

I sit in the cold empty meeting room waiting for the phone to ring; agents never seem to call straight back. I fiddle with my mobile phone, delete emails, waste time.

The air conditioning vent rattles quietly above the window making a sound like distant Morse code. In wartime movies I've seen women with glossy curled hair tapping away at lightning speed, headsets on. I wonder if they’d be able to translate the message for me.

The phone is still quiet.

On the tracks on the other side of the building a train whooshes by, stirring the chill autumn air.

100 words: Electric

2011-11-08T20:30:00.000Z

I like the moment when I first open my eyes.

He’s there and even though he’s not awake I feel we’re connected. The sunlight seeping through the curtains is just enough to make out his figure, the bristles on his chin and that scar on his forehead. Without me he would be nothing, that I know.

He looks peaceful, like a figure from a dream I’ve had a million times – only this time he’s real.

Tonight will be electric, I just know it. And if I can just capture that moment, that strike, maybe I can bring him to life.

100 words: Plans

2011-11-07T22:10:00.000Z

I’m getting some time off, soon. I don’t know how long for but I have started making plans.

There are housework type plans – catching up on the laundry, getting a plumber in, dusting. Little plans.

Then there are Big Plans. I want to start writing, more than the scribbles that I put up here. I want to start on The Book, the one I keep saying I can write. I tell myself that if I am out of work, time on my hands, energy to spare, that it will be easy.

Now all I need is a story to tell.

Nutshell

2011-11-01T22:01:00.009Z

How can I capture a holiday like Egypt - a holiday with no typical day, no typical sight and where the wonder of it all is so very visual?

Well, I can start by saying that the days in Egypt are long. Typically they start with an early wake up call, just when you start to think that the alarm was wrong. We meet the other guests at breakfast like zombies, dishing out croissants and pancakes while other boats pass by our windows, the waiters serving tea all too slowly for our bleary heads. Perhaps we meet in the hotel reception, a rag-tag mixture of travellers from all different ages and all different parts of the UK. We wear walking sandals and carry hats and bottles of water. Every single person is equipped with a camera, the only difference is the size of the equipment and the relative skills of the photographer.

Next we all head out to the waiting coach, modern and air conditioned albeit with the most ghastly green and yellow interior. We journey for 30 minutes, across Luxor with its lush palms and wide tarmacked roads. Or we take the pink minibus across Cairo, fighting through the crazy, dusty, beeping traffic, six lanes of traffic squeezed into three lanes. We pass along streets lined with umbrella sheltered barrow-stalls selling bright red fresh dates and artfully stacked pears next to others selling fresh breads.

When we disembark, parked among a small group of other similar tourist buses our guide reminds us not to speak to or make eye contact with the hawkers. We cross the car pack to somewhere amazing and diligently follow the guide around as interesting things are pointed out to us. We take photos. Lots of photos.

Mum and I at the pyramids, Giza

The Temple of Queen Hatshepsut, Luxor

Also at Hatshepsut's Temple

Kom Ombo by night

Philae Temple

Hieroglyphics at Philae

Ram headed sphinxes, Karnak Temple, Luxor

After the day in the sun, our minds filled with stories and images we return to the cool comfort of the bus and return to the hotel or the boat. On the boat the staff wait for us with hot flannels and hot drinks to refresh us after the long day. At the hotel we hop on the back of the waiting golf buggy and return to our room across the garden. We wash up and prepare for dinner and start to relax after our exertions. After all, tomorrow is another day.

Trading Places

2011-10-27T20:40:00.003+01:00

As we pull up to the lock at Esna the sun is setting. We join a patient queue, Nile cruisers lined up like ducks as they wait for their turn through the lock. When the tourist season is in full swing it can take hours to make it through but since the revolution tourist traffic has declined hugely and so we’re soon moving forward into the concrete jaws.

We’re temporarily captive, waiting for the water to pour in and the boat to rise to Upper Egypt levels. A big boat with a few rich tourists aboard is potentially rich pickings for the hawkers who wait on the edges of the lock. They shout up, offering us galabeyas as if they knew that every boat that passes will have an Egyptian night at some point in the week. Within seconds they are throwing the rolled up garments up to us as we peer over the balustrades, initially baffled by the commotion.

“Hey lady!” they call. And “You want nice galabeya? Asda price!” It’s hard to be mad at them when they make us laugh with the phrases they’ve picked up; it seems that every trader in Egypt has watched Only Fools and Horses judging by the number of times we hear mention of Del Boy or “lovely jubbly” here and on the streets by the ancient temples.

I get hit in the chest with a rolled up galabeya and jokingly threaten to drop it overboard, depriving them of what must be an especially precious income in this time of so few tourists. They shout “noooo!” and laugh, enjoying the challenge of someone who doesn’t want to buy. More galabeyas are thrown up to and at us, some wrapped in plastic to save them from the tiny plunge pool on the deck. They have an apparently unlimited supply down on the shore; red, blue, black, plain, striped or adorned with a thousand cheap jewels with pictures of Nefertiti and Tutenhkamun. The other passengers try them on over their clothes and exchange sizes or make deals.

We bargain and jostle, pushing the prices down while the water flows in. As time runs out and the lock gate opens we make the best trades, getting knock down prices and throwing the notes down to the waiting hands, wrapped in unwanted garments.

Our boat withdraws and another one swiftly takes our place. It would be mean not to wish the hawkers luck.

100 words: Homeward bound

2011-10-21T17:41:00.000+01:00

The moon is low and creamy-yellow tonight, suspended over the road like a golden bauble. As I drive up and down the long, darkened road I search for any signs of where I am; these big houses don’t invite visitors with their thick hedges and forbidding fences.

Eventually I deposit my car with the roof mender and head for the station, missing the train by moments. As I stand out by the road looking for omni-absent cabs a friend passes by on his bike and stops for a chat before heading home.

I return to the station and wait impatiently.

100 Words: Leaving Mr Manbag

2011-10-17T17:43:00.000+01:00

We sit silently side by side, devouring a box of mini cheese biscuits. We hoover them quietly pausing only when we reach the end of the box to ensure absolute fairness.

I was late home and it dawns on me that the time spent struggling with spreadsheets in the office or looking for the roof menders for my car is time that has eaten away into our evening.

I haven’t packed or done any of my chores and tomorrow he will leave for work and I will leave for Egypt and those wasted moment will seem all the more precious.

100 Words: Valley of the Queens

2011-10-13T20:51:00.001+01:00

I don’t even remember now how our trip to Egypt came about, how the conversation started. Tomorrow we fly, something we’ve never done together before. Mum isn’t used to travelling so I arranged everything – the hotel, the boat, the excursions.

It’s the trip of a lifetime, although I know she won’t be excited about it yet – I think we’re the same in that the holiday won’t begin until we’re on the plane.

I don’t think she’s ever been outside Europe so the chance is that we’ll be completely outside of her comfort zone. I’m so proud to be her companion.

Mrs Tarragon

2011-10-10T21:53:00.001+01:00

She’s a dragon on days like this, wings spread wide and nostrils flaring as she swoops up and down the corridors. She has no scales or claws but many a knight has fallen, wounded, in her classroom. Fifty years of teaching have taught her how to parry every type of blow an insolent thirteen year old can throw towards her. Her armour now is impenetrable, stronger than steel or stone or diamonds.

The kids don’t know that she breathes fire at the weekend, brandy and cigars to help her wind down from the stresses of the week. She blows perfect smoke rings from her gilded throne - a golden armchair festooned with silk cushions, a humidor on the coffee table concealing her golden brown treasures, brought from Cuba on a silver flying machine.

She wrinkles her nose up at another badly written piece of homework, exercise books stacked at her feet like stepping stones to another world, the cursive script that flows from a teenager’s lazy hand barely passing for legible these days. She takes another nip of brandy, this from a bottle older than most of her pupils, draws in on the cigar and tries not to exhale on the paper or the kids might know her secret.

At her elbow, on the red lacquered side table where her brandy glass rests, there’s a small photo in a frame. The frame was beautiful once, silver with curlicues and a lace-like pattern but now it’s tarnished and old, the photo faded slightly from the sunlight it used to sit in. The picture shows two girls, arms around each others’ waists. The girl on the left, dark curly hair tucked into a neat pill-box hat, looks directly at the camera and smiles broadly. The one on the right is mid sentence, most of her face hidden by the hand that reaches up to tuck a stray strand into a butterfly hair clasp. Her face is tilted towards her companion, almost as if the camera wasn’t there.

Daphne doesn’t even look at the photo anymore. She remembers the day all too clearly; spring sunshine and summer dresses even though it wasn’t warm enough. Two girls who were inseparable turned out to be not as close as one of them thought. There was a declaration and then a cold shoulder. Even after all this time Daphne can play the images back as if they were caught on film. She wonders if she isn’t the only one left with vivid images of a missed kiss and an argument full of heat and derision.

These days it wouldn’t have mattered but times weren’t that liberal then and being “one of those” was definitely taboo. Daphne still feels angry about that day and how it ruined what was the perfect friendship. Now she has become the typical widower-teacher. No one was ever able to fill her space so she never found a new partner for life’s games. Instead she is married to the school, to its clocks and its desks and its funny municipal smell. Perhaps if she had accepted Phyllida’s advances things would have been different. But no, she wrinkles her nose at the thought of it, opens another exercise book and lets out a small snort of fire. Here be dragons.

Haiku day

2011-10-06T18:56:00.007+01:00

10:00
Made tea for the team
I forgot mine; it went cold
This doesn't bode well.

12:20
Paella for lunch
This is a bit bland. Chilli
Would have improved it

14:00
Rain clouds overhead
Looks like a tropical storm
But it isn’t. Brrrr.

14:15
Yuck. Ibuprofen
Stuck in my throat. Tastes horrid.
Quick! Eat a sweetie.

14:30
There’s a rainbow! Look!
We stand at the window and stare
Sit down again; gone.

16:00
Green and yellow cells
On my spreadsheet. Used to be
Cheese and onion, once.

18:45
Off to the flicks soon.
Dinner isn't ready yet.
We'll be late. Fucksticks.

21:45
Back from the showing.
Kind Hearts and Coronets - ace,
And we were not late.

21:55
Time to edit blog
These haikus aren't very good
Stick to prose next time.

Seasons in the sun

2011-09-30T22:47:00.002+01:00

It’s not supposed to be this nice in September. Not even just September, but the very end of it; on the cusp with October, which is supposed to be a wintry month. We sit in the sunshine, blinking at the glorious golden light that dries the grass and warms our backs and has taken us unawares. In the pub garden dozens of office escapees blink likewise, the packed away summer clothes pulled out from the backs of drawers sticking to hot backs as we collectively refuse to take shelter from the last rays of the summer. The autumn solstice has been and gone and yet here we are.

We drag patio chairs across the uneven paving. The chairs are so big they deserve to have two people each sat on them which just means we can’t fit round the tables and end up sitting uncomfortably far away from our food instead. There are fancy wicker chairs which would fit much better but they are chained down to protect them against people like us who would reorganise the whole garden just to sit together. Only a few of those that have escaped their wiry shackles make it over to our huddle of tables where we sit jumbled in odd groups, the furniture thwarting our plans to lunch as a team.

Under the parasol we eat chips and spoon ketchup onto our plates, chattering all the while about weekend plans and Dave’s fancy new car. In awkward moments we work out who owes what on the bill and brace ourselves against the noise from a barking dog, the stilted conversation a testament to how rarely we make continuous conversation like this; normally it’s just snatched moments of comedy banter that stand in for a work relationship. Beads of sweat form on my nose and I wonder if it’s time to go back to our air conditioned glass box overlooking the motorway and the railway line.

When we return to our cars I put the roof down and drive back with Lisa beside me. On the way out it was exhilarating, the sun on our glasses and the wind in our hair. On the return journey I feel deflated and my hair frizzes into a brown halo around my head. An afternoon like this calls for a park, a book, a lounger, ice cream. Anything but spreadsheets and emails.

Back in the office the PA who has the voice of an actress, over-the-top cheerful like I imagine school prefects are, has left a note on my desk with her share of money for lunch. “Thank you for organising lunch and thank you for including me”. I smooth down the frizz and return to my computer. Three and a half hours to go.

Envy

2011-09-26T21:53:00.002+01:00

He’s writing again. Tap, tap, tap, click, click.

I look over his shoulder and see the black squiggles appear on the page, every single stroke with its own meaning, especially as he carves them into shapes and images, a hundred words at a time.

He passes each section to me to read, waits for my comments, my compliments. With each one I smile, take in the phrases and then re-read to make sure I haven’t missed anything. It’s easy to be an editor with writing that good but hard to be an editor for someone you love knowing that any point of constructive criticism will be seen as the latter rather than the former. Still he types on, his aching wrists hovering over the keyboard with an energy I just can’t imitate.

Over on my laptop the screen stays blank, no tapping from me. No hieroglyphs or pictures with words on my Word. The cursor flashes at me, a lazy electronic winking that serves only to measure the amount of time that I don’t spend writing. Like the red colon on a bedside clock while my creativity slumbers, the discreet blinking marks the quiet spells and lack of spelling.

I pretend not to be envious of his skill and literary fruitfulness and wait for my time to come. I pretend that I can be a writer too, with the right inspiration and inclination. I tuck my feet under the red, woollen cushion and pretend to write.

100 words: 69 Love Songs

2011-09-22T23:01:00.007+01:00

He plays me the tracks one by one, a tiny snippet of each song to identify the ones I know. Perversely the tunes I don’t recognise and instantly love need a longer listen before I make them out and know they’re not good enough to make the impromptu “best of”.

I only pick sixteen and I know he thinks I am cold because I don’t choose his favourites. My problem is that I search for perfection; I expect the song writer’s image of love to measure up to mine and often it falls far short.

And I prefer female singers.

100 words: Singing

2011-09-19T18:01:00.002+01:00

Underneath the window I can hear a man singing.

I can’t make out the words, slurred and half forgotten as they are. He has the voice of a thousand bottles and a million cigarettes and I wonder what he looks like, out there in the rain.

In my mind he is a mixture of a hundred homeless drunkards, can in hand, stains on his clothes and a scab under one eye from a fight last night. I can hear his unsteady feet as he heads up the hill, shuffling and tripping.

I hope he’s heading home. Albeit to another drink.

100 words: Fall

2011-09-17T17:07:00.001+01:00

Autumn pushes into the edges of the day with mixed success; the light changes from blue and yellow to the grey browns of fall and back like a song on repeat. Showers come and go but the heat of the day remains, even as people shelter in doorways and under awnings.

Back home, looking out, the tree outside my window has leaves edged with orange, like rust eating into ancient metal. This transition from season to season seems so slow but there is a resignation that summer may already be over.

I settle in, woollen and warm, ready for fall.

Meme: Seven Links

2011-09-06T21:43:00.007+01:00

First a piece of news. Yay! I have had a piece of writing published over at the very lovely Pygmy Giant. It has been posted up here before but it was a wee while ago so please pop over and read it and maybe even comment, if you're in that sort of mood.

I don’t often do memes because they’re usually a bit on the inconsequential side and who out there really cares what my favourite colour is? But when Mr London Street gave me this one it made me start to think about all the stuff I’ve put up here over the past couple of years. My writing has changed quite a lot during that time so I like idea of a meme that gives me chance to pull some stuff out of my back catalogue which might jog the memory of long term readers (you’d get less time for stealing money from the government, so thanks for hanging in there) and give my newer readers a bit more of an idea of what I am about.

The idea is simple – seven headings against which to pick seven blog posts, then at the end of it five bloggers to pass the baton onto. Not sure why it isn’t seven (but then I suppose the whole of the internet would be done in about 2 weeks and everyone would be bored). If you fancy seeing what my close personal friend Mr London Street wrote click here.

For me this is a little bit of a challenge as I have the recall of a slightly geriatric goldfish. If you think I have missed the opportunity to showcase one of my old posts feel free to comment telling me. At which point I will go “oh yeah!” and kick myself for not picking more cleverly (and be terribly proud that you remembered something I have written). In the meantime, this is my list.

One. Your most beautiful post
My writing, and the writing I most like to read, tends to be on the visual side. This piece is one I wrote in my head on a drive home, the words and phrases forming themselves in my mind when I probably should have been concentrating on the traffic. The title of the post, The Gymnast High Above the Ground, comes from a track by indie band The Decemberists, back from a time when I loved their stuff. Times change and so do musicians, unfortunately, though I hear their stuff these days is critically acclaimed, so they’re doing better than I am.

Two. Your Most Popular Post
Well, this has to be the one I put up after I won Blog of Note. I rather daftly said I’d visit everyone’s blogs. I did this, followed loads and have only just started trimming my list of follows down to a reasonable number. But I did read a lot along the way, made some new blog-friends and realised, after a while, that there are people who comment on every single blog of note in an attempt to get followers, whether they’re any good or not. The post itself is not exactly scintillating, so I won’t worry if you don’t rush over to read it.

Three. Your most controversial post
I don’t really write anything that could be considered controversial. My writing tends to be observational but when I put up the piece called Linking in it was meant as an observation that some people are outside of the groups we move in. A couple of commenters thought that people/I should be making more of an effort to bring people in (when in fact my post was saying exactly why I don’t do that). Of course everyone is entitled to their opinion and I endeavour not to delete any comments I get even if I don’t like them (though I do take exception at the poor quality spam that gets through the filters. I have no interest in buying facebook likes; I have plenty of more interesting ways to spend my money, thank you).

Four. Your most helpful post
Well, I guess the obvious one here has got to be Well read where I, an old hand at this blogging jig and one with billions of readers, offer sage advice to new bloggers (and some old bloggers that do annoying things without realising but that I am too polite to comment on). Nothing fancier than that, though I will admit looking back at it that there are some things I ought to remember myself.

Five. A post whose success surprised you
This has to be The Proposal. This was a throwaway blog post written about a rather lovely piece of spam email I received. It’s funny how I can pour thought, time and effort into writing a blog post and it goes nowhere and yet this, whipped up in no time at all, got a great response from my readers. It goes to show you never can tell (but it helps if there are photos included). I’m grateful to Martins Fred for inspiring this piece and I hope that he managed to find that special lady.

Six. A post you feel didn’t get the attention it deserved
This is a tricky one for me. I tend to measure the success of my writing by the number of comments it gets but I know that people will only leave comments if they really like a piece and if it’s easy to do so (take that, Wordpress!). Now that people read so much on their phones I think comment numbers have fallen. Of course it may just be that I am writing less popular stuff but I feel that there’s definitely fewer comments these days than there used to be. So the piece I’ve picked because I wanted it to elicit more of a reaction is Sand. It’s a short piece about an accident. I really liked it, I felt it was something I had to write and the comments I did get were really lovely (and strong, if you know what I mean). But I was hoping for more.

Seven. The post that you are most proud of
I scrolled up and down my blog for a while looking at pieces I’d written in the past and lots of “maybes” came up. But when I saw this I knew that it was the one. It’s a piece of writing about my mum. I think if you read it you can see why I am proud – not because of what is written but because of what I am trying to say. My mum is truly inspirational and sometimes she doesn’t realise quite how amazing she is. I like to think I convey something of that in this piece.

So, now that baton passes on to five more people. Even if you don’t click around to read all my waffling I’d recommend checking them out.

Sharon of Resistant But Persistent is a wonderful writer – she has a beautiful way with words and a great feeling for realistic writing. One of her recent pieces in particular (you can read it here) struck a chord with me (and lots of her readers) having done a few late night drives on too little sleep.

Anthony writes over at My Thoughts are not Always Crazy. His work is a mixture of opinion and essays about life in general. He has a bit of an obsession with football (Dagenham and Redbridge FC in particular) but don’t hold that against him; we all have our flaws.

Alyson at Calling People Names needs no introduction. So I won’t give her one. You know who she is by now, I am sure.

Spence is an Emergency Medical Technician posting about his blue light life over at Siren Voices. I know it’s extremely unlikely that he’ll do the meme but I wanted to send some traffic his way if at all possible. His writing is incredibly vivid (and sometimes not for the squeamish) but he manages to find something beautiful in every low down, blood stained, confined to a chair piece that he writes.

Last but not least by any means, Jenna at Here’s to the Golden Days posts a mixture of light pieces (photos, songs etc) and more writerly pieces, such as this piece about the sometimes zombie state of students. She’s only a young whippersnapper but she has a real talent for writing so do pop over and take a look.

Okay, I think that just about covers it. Go, read, comment and tell me if you agree with my choices.

100 words: Natalie

2011-08-31T21:54:00.001+01:00

When he listens to that track I know he’s thinking of her. I can hear him now, singing along in the bedroom; “since you laid my burdens down”. He has a beautiful voice, a secret he keeps locked away inside himself, too shy to share.

We walked home from town, a pint of rough cider swirling in each of our tummies as we headed back. A feather dropped from the sky in front of us, white and downy. We pulled together as we headed across the road, both thinking the same thing. I’m sad that he misses her so much.

Practice

2011-08-30T12:01:00.002+01:00

I’m early for a cinema trip with one of the girls. It’s a rare treat to be in town with no immediate plans and no one to influence my decisions. At first I stop and listen to the steel band playing outside the shopping mall but the band leader is a perfectionist. As 100 people stand round and listen he takes the band through parts of the music time and again until the serried ranks of steel drums are in perfect harmony. Over his shoulder a cameraman tapes every move, every beat, every chord, even every wrong step. We get to see the work that goes into making a performance flawless without ever hearing the flawless performance. It’s strangely dissatisfying.

I wander off to the corner where all the cafés are, small independents competing against the chains for custom. They're all empty as the workers are hurrying home and the yummy mummies have long since retreated, so I order a tea and pull up a folding chair under the awning. As I start to write someone I used to know passes by so I keep my head down, scribbling away; a confrontation is the last thing I would want right now.

My tea arrives so I turn onto the ritual of making it just right – a few swishes of the bag, a small paper cylinder of sugar (the torn end folded in half and tucked back into the empty tube), the amber liquid stirred clockwise with the tiny teaspoon and then the milk slowly poured in. The white cyclone turns under the surface and my tiny biscuit is gone in two bites. I tuck the wrapper under the saucer to keep it from catching in the wind.

My notebook is starting to look tatty with bent corners and scribbled words. I flick back through the pages; cribbage scores, Desert Island lists, shopping planning, Cairo tips and hastily written blog notes. I sip my tea, reach for my pen and make more notes.

Slow motion

2011-08-22T21:52:00.002+01:00

When I look back on my past there are some events that have, in retrospect, happened in slow motion. For example, the first day I spent with Mr Manbag in Oxford, drinking gin and tonic and wondering why no one had noticed how we were with each other is the most obvious one. The day now resides in my memory as a series of sketches, like the moment when we met at the pub we used to drink in as students. And the moment when we said goodbye at the bus stop, the double decker behind me with its engine running ready to take me away, home. We kissed goodbye briefly and chastely with me wondering why he didn’t make a move on me and wondering when I would see him again.

Then there was the evening, soon after that bus journey home, that I told my then boyfriend that I was splitting up with him. I remember sitting on the blue leather chair in the window waiting for The Moment. It came when he asked me what was up and then I said, in my drama queen way “I’m leaving you”. We’d been together for fifteen years so it was rather like ending a marriage. Time paused for a moment while those words were out there. They hung in the air between leaving my mouth and entering his brain; the phrase was released into the wild and the end was coming but it wasn’t happening quite yet. For that millisecond, before words became fact and before the realisation of what was happening hit both of us time almost stood still.

There are fragments of events where a single moment distills down into a slo-mo montage, like the day I learned to ride a bike and promptly rolled down the hill into a fence, somehow unable to turn away or brake, and the time I was at a party about to kiss the boy I had fancied at school for years and was interrupted by a friend telling my why I shouldn’t. These images probably aren’t real but the emotions that they have become concentrated into are so strong that the memories themselves feel truly three dimensional rather than the cartoons that I know they are.

If I am being honest with myself I know these flashes of memory weren’t in slow motion at the time; I can appreciate the sheen that the distance of time puts on them enough to appreciate the difference. I also know that they feel very different to what happened on Friday night.

On Friday night we were at the pub. This is how Fridays go: Mr Manbag will email me as he leaves the office telling me he is going to the only pub in the centre of Reading with a decent beer garden. I will say I am not going, usually because I am in a bad mood from a week in the office. I will then drive home in the sunshine with the roof of my car down and the back of my hair turning into ridiculously frizzy brown candyfloss which whips into my face, my eyes protected by the enormous and daft leopard print sunglasses that I keep in the glove box for occasions such as this. When I arrive home I will be full of energy and vim, despite that punishing week at work, and ready to step out for a weekend of fun. I will slap on a bit of make-up and head to the pub to be the only +1 at the table (a fact which does not faze Mr Manbag at all but which always makes me feel a little awkward). We will then drink a couple of pints, talk bollocks, put some music on the jukebox and exchange trivia, then Mr Manbag and I will go somewhere for food. This is the normal run of things. This is much how everything went on Friday night with one exception.

In the usual British beer garden the seating is provided by long tables with benches affixed to the sides. To sit at the head of the table one needs a stool or chair that will usually have to be half-inched from inside the pub. And so it was: Mr Manbag was ensconced on the bench and I was sitting next to another Friday night pub regular on a chair, there was gesticulating, there was laughter and there were some crisps (got to have some crisps, or "pub tapas" as Mr M calls them. Often repeatedly). I stood to get a round of drinks, threw some money away putting music on that no-one could actually hear and I returned to my seat.

I inched my seat closer to the table in order to join the conversation that was going on at that point (which is likely to have been about a film about robot boxing or the name of the character Roy Kinnear played in the 1973 film “The Three Musketeers”). I inched a bit more and then suddenly I was going down. It was like the leg on my chair was slowly deflating and I was tipping diagonally backwards and could do nothing to save myself, lest I smash a pint or two to reach for the table. This was truly slow motion, not like hitting a fence on my bike or missing that longed for teenage kiss. As my chair crumbled I tried to stop myself from looking an idiot. I rolled off the seat onto the floor like a ninja and inspected the chair: the leg was perfectly intact but was sinking into a drain, the plastic cover on the top cracked and broken from many years of similar chair-leg based abuse.

Next to me Mr Manbag didn’t help me or try to cover for me. Not because he didn’t care but because he was involved in some other moment, some conversation that I was not part of, what with being on the floor. He was averting his eyes, perhaps, from the disaster that was unfolding next to him. Averting his eyes from the woman on the floor who had caught his heart then, at the bus stop, and her chair leg, down a hole, now.

Time then began to run as normal, as if God had taken his finger off the remote control, and so I pulled the chair leg out of the drain and tried to get up without anyone noticing my fall from grace. I pretended to not be hurt, because that is how we Brits deal with falling over, brushed the debris from my jeans and sat back down, four legs and two feet carefully on the ground. Next time I’ll try and stick to moments that are only slow motion in retrospect. They hurt less.

Slippery little suckers

2011-08-16T18:10:00.002+01:00

I press the Wikipedia random article button half a dozen times, looking for something to write about. I don’t even recognise most of the things it generates; a Korean film, a road in New York State, some war general, an ex cricketer and two articles about snails. Twice. Snails.

What is this trying to tell me?

I suppose I always have had sympathy for snails. If one seem to be lost and I think they’ll get crushed on a pathway or road I’ll pick it up and throw it into the nearest greenery. Maybe in doing that I’ve just set it back two days on a pilgrimage to wherever snails might make a pilgrimage to (snailourdes?) or maybe I’ve saved it from certain death at the sharp end of a bird. I can’t imagine being that vulnerable, my only protection a shell that I think is rock hard but in actual fact can easily be broken by a clever crow with a stone. What do they think about as they slime their way across the path, breaking free of the grassy cover and heading for the nearest open space, like Snail McQueen taking his motorbike to the barbed wire fences, looking for a way out?

I remember as a child that snails seemed to be more rampant with two distinct types that filled our gardens and lay crushed on our paths. There were the yellow and brown ones, their swirled shells looking like a particularly tasty banana toffees. Their shells were thin, almost translucent and their bodies a pale grey as if they were somehow younger, prettier. These snails were small and neat and almost jewel like with their bright colours. The other snails were the big brown snails; their shells looked like they were properly hard - the rugby players of the snail world with their coarse spirals and rough exterior. We’d collect snails in old plant pots for no reason at all except that they were there - that is good enough reason for any ten year old to collect something. At the end of the day the pots would be left outside and the snails would gradually return to normal life, probably muttering under their breath about those irritating kids at number 12 who have no right to collect snails.

In science lessons we would collect them in buckets and paint them with nail varnish to see how far they travelled, whether they went to faraway hedges or migrated to Spain for the winter like some of the rich kids’ grandparents did. The nail varnish experiment took the shine off the pointlessness of snail collecting; education can sometimes take the pleasure out of things altogether because purposelessness is an end in itself. I don’t remember the precise results but I think our little test revealed that snails don’t travel far; they have their own turf and they like it that way. And that if a blue varnished snail ends up creeping across into red varnish territory the red varnish snails were pretty likely to pop a cap in their ass, should the blue tribe snail be spotted on their patch. Fo’ shizzle, my snizzle.

As a grown up the closest I have come to snails en masse, aside from the dead ones on a garden path after a storm, is in a French restaurant. Out with another couple for dinner we found out that they wanted to try snails because they never had done. Good for them. A small dish of garlicky, parsleyfied molluscs were brought to us, the risk reduced by ordering a handful of starters to share. There were no Pretty Woman moments and I confess I decided not to partake of this experience (for I have had a similar experience in Barcelona where I ordered something snail like by accident I did not want to repeat it) but they were declared to be delicious. And not at all like garlic flavoured snot, which is a triumph of taste over expectation.

These days I stay away from snails, except the odd stray at work that forlornly heads off on a Hajj without realising that I am there to send it back to the undergrowth. I have no garden to speak of (just a parking space which is currently over-run with ladybird larvae) and no interest in trying escargot. Except maybe as a writing exercise.

100 words: Mob

2011-08-10T22:33:00.002+01:00

I’m not one to riot. I can’t imagine breaking in or setting fires, it’s just not in my nature. I shut my door and hope that Reading doesn’t erupt into revolt. I drink rose flavoured tea and listen for the sound of the mob, breaking glass, sirens and shouts, but here in our ivory tower everything is peaceful, at least after the news is turned off.

Tomorrow I am off to a spa for the afternoon with the girls from the office. I imagine the only turbulence will be the bubbles from the Jacuzzi. That and some absolutely scandalous gossip.

Sand

2011-08-04T19:55:00.003+01:00

There’s almost no sign of it now. Where the tarmac meets the scrubby grass and the crash barriers there is a patch of orange sand and that is all that marks the spot. There are no flowers, no roughly constructed wooden cross and no plastic wrapped epithets. Yesterday a man died there, at that loveless spot at about 12.30 as the lunchtime rush was building to a peak and in the glorious summer sun that we were enjoying.

I don’t know what happened or to whom. I just know that we looked out of our office window across the motorway and the traffic had stopped. At first it just seemed like one of those everyday hold ups, momentary jams that happen but then disappear with no sign of what caused them. Then, after what must have been five minutes but felt like fifteen, a stream of blue lights ran along the hard shoulder, past the queues of lorries, vans and cars, past the frustrated drivers and their annoyed passengers to the scene at the front.

In the office we watched, hands on hips, as more emergency vehicles headed towards the site, and speculated on what it meant to us; our delayed journeys home and our alternative routes, our cancelled lunchtime journeys and our gridlocked estate. People on the motorway stopped their engines and walked along to see what was happening or where they could go. The internet told us that an accident involving a car and a lorry had shut the motorway and that there was serious congestion. What it didn’t say is that a man had died or was dying. There. Out of sight but before our eyes.

Watching from my glass box, safe from danger, I wondered how the people at the front would cope with seeing what they might witness, what blood and twisted metal might be there before them. Perhaps there was nothing to see, a body trapped inside a car on that space beside the motorway, out of the sightlines of the drivers now parked there. I wonder if they saw it happen and if it truly did feel like time slowed down as the crash reached its awful conclusion. I wondered where they were supposed to be going; missed meetings and cancelled shopping trips are one thing but there were sure to be flights leaving the airport that day short of passengers. And somewhere there is a family with an absent brother or an empty space where a boyfriend should be. Scales all seem to shrink compared to the ultimate loss.

For the next few days we will all drive that bit more carefully, indicate a little earlier, keep our speed down a touch. And maybe we’ve saved a dozen lives by doing that, these tiny adjustments that change our fate and the fate of those around us. We simply don’t know. So for now I thank my lucky stars that I was safely seated at my desk, not out there on the tarmac where the sand is.

100 words: we take tea

2011-07-31T17:03:00.000+01:00

Mr Manbag likes his tea just above blood warmth. I like mine hot, ideally when it can only just be drunk without scalding my lips or burning my tongue. While my cup is empty his is full, the Moomins on the outside poised; ready for him to take his first sip.

Every time we take tea together he forgets he has a cup waiting for him, so engrossed does he get in whatever he is doing.

Every time we take tea together I say don’t forget your tea. I’d hate it to go to waste. That would be a crime.

Snap

2011-07-28T22:12:00.003+01:00

Susan loves those neat plastic tubs with their neat little clips. SNAP. Those leftovers can go in the freezer for another day. SNAP. These home-made biscuits are going to last all week – no more than one a day because they’re not going to go off. SNAP. This half tin of beans will be useful for something later in the week. She takes off her rubber gloves, tucks a stray hair behind her ear and smiles at the orderly array of boxes.

Roger sits on the comfy chair in the lounge and he hears her snapping away in the kitchen. He knows he can’t have more than one biscuit without getting into trouble for his expanding waistline and he fears that those beans will be whipped up into a simply delicious dinner later in the week. Oh joy. He snaps back the ring on his third can of beer and takes a big mouthful, feeling it fizz in the back of his tongue and knock off another couple of those hard edges.

Susan’s heels click across the kitchen tiles and she sighs at Roger with his feet up and the empty cans sitting on the table without coasters underneath. She really can’t remember now why she married him. Roger still has all his hair but that seems to be the only part of him that is still like the young man that she married. She sits down and tries to catch his eye; she knows he won’t want to talk but enough is enough; something has to change.

***

Roger doesn’t normally spend any time in the kitchen but today is different. He wipes up as he goes; he knows it’s what she’d like. It’s nice to know that she won’t be going on at him later and it’s probably the first time ever he’s felt like this.

There’s a lightness in his step as he clicks down the clips on the plastic tubs. SNAP. It’s silly that it’s taken all this time to see how easy it could have been to get some peace. As he dries up the utensils and clicks another tub firmly shut he lets out a quiet contented sigh. There’s no way Susan is going to complain about the mess in the kitchen tonight; he’s done a proper job of cleaning up after himself. When it’s all done, clean and tidy, he rewards himself with a nice cold beer, settles down in his comfy chair and flicks on the telly.

When night falls he’ll need to throw the first set of airtight containers away. It’s a good job Susan was so skinny; fewer tubs means she’ll be gone quicker.

Downhill

2011-07-25T22:22:00.002+01:00

The train into Paddington is a lowly one; it snakes in through the west side of London, belly close to the dark ground. It’s hedged in by dark brick walls, covered in graffiti tags, which separate the dirty rails from the elegant Georgian houses and the ugly low rise flats that border the tracks. The cast iron bridges with their enormous bolt heads are grey and sooty as if to tell us passengers that we’re entering the industrial side of the city.

We cross London, fighting our way across the part closed underground, filled to the brim with lost looking tourists. At Charing Cross the scene is evocative of another era of travel; it feels like we’ve stepped onto the set of black and white movie where the world is full of steam trains and hat boxes and mysterious strangers. There’s no Bogart here, though, so we trundle our tiny case along the platform and board a southbound train.

This other direction is a very different experience to the journey in. The track sits above the city and crosses the river on a pastel coloured bridge affording a view over the London Eye and golden Westminster almost twinkles in the summer sun. We head further out past jumbled Victorian buildings, glass skyscrapers and an ancient rose window, incongruous in the cityscape. Across the horizon the chimney pots sit six abreast atop the workers’ cottages and a bus depot lies quiet for the weekend.

The sky lowers as we head towards Kent, grey Turneresque clouds hide the blue sky and highlight the planes as they head out and in. As we travel further south there is more green and sky than towers and even the brick bridges are swathed in ivy like froth on a cappuccino drinker’s top lip. The jumble of old and new structures cover the map like a tiny model of England’s muddled towns with their bomb sites and building sites, growth and death.

Further still and the train leans forward as we begin to head downhill as surely as Kent tilts towards the sea. We click-clack-click-clack towards sunshine and sand and two friends waiting on the platform.

100 words: Question

2011-07-20T19:12:00.003+01:00

Your day is just beginning and mine is ending, the sky turning to indigo as the earth revolves to make your day bright and mine dark. I think about what you’re doing, how you felt when you woke up and whether you’re groggy from the night before.

I wonder if you remember our conversation fully, that cheap red wine from the hotel swishing round your head because you felt duty bound to drink it. You’ve always been like that with freebies. Tomorrow when we speak I will ask you again in case you missed it; why don't you kill him?

Takeaway

2011-07-17T18:27:00.001+01:00

I wander up to the takeaway; it’s only a few yards from our flat so it’s not much of a trek. We haven’t eaten there in recent memory, the restaurant itself being small and rather dated, with indoor straw awnings and fake flowers on every table.

I am met by a woman who takes my name and then disappears off to the kitchen to collect my order. She is replaced by a small, dark man who goes behind the counter and greets me with a wide, crooked smile. I can’t tell how old he is – he could be anything from 20 to 40 – but he is smartly dressed in a black waistcoat and trousers and white shirt, his hair swept back with gel or pomade, though this doesn’t conceal his thick, black waves.

He takes the payment for our food and then he says to me “your height is very generous”. I am not sure what to say to this. I jokingly bend my knees, saying I can be shorter if it’s easier. We laugh a little awkwardly and direct our attention out of the window which is directly opposite the Indian banqueting hall across the road where a wedding is underway. Then he starts talking about weddings and saying that sometimes they have drummers outside and describes how in Sikh weddings the bride and groom will walk around a flame. He explains that Asian weddings are very important because you will be together forever. I tell him I understand and that I have been to an Indian wedding, just once, and how amazing it was. We talk about the outfits and jewellery and how nice it is to see the women walk up the street in their many colours. Across the road a gorgeous girl in an indigo sari tries to tame the loose end of it as the wind whips it up above her head.

He asks me if I have even been to Asia and tells me I should go to Nepal because it is beautiful but that if I do I should go to the country not the city. The country is where real people are. He smiles that wide, white smile at me again and as he talks I think I really would like to go there if everyone there is like him.

Then the woman comes out with my bag of tin foil trays and paper wrapped naan. She hands over the feast with a smile. In the restaurant there is just one couple, eating poppadoms under the straw awnings. I feel guilty for getting takeaway now, so warm has the welcome been. I turn to leave and bid them both goodbye and get a last flash of those pearly whites. Next time we’ll eat in.

100 words: spider

2011-07-07T09:50:00.001+01:00

It’s raining and puddles pockmark the road surface. My wipers squeak as they drive the water from the windscreen so I play an on/off game with them, hoping for quiet.

From my rear view mirror hangs a money spider. Small and golden brown, texture like spider, he dangles in the air swinging gently from side to side as I drive. I try to anchor him by grabbing his thread and looping it around the mirror but he resists, dropping into the footwell like a tiny bungee jumper. I continue towards work, feeling the invisible silk wrapped round my fingers.

100 words: ornaments

2011-07-04T22:04:00.002+01:00

There are still traces of you around the flat; a mug, a side table, an ornament on the mantelpiece. To throw them out would be churlish, to keep them means that echoes of what once was can still be heard.

Some pieces have gone, like the theatre vouchers we didn’t spend and the piece of glasswork that attracted dust. We were too polite to throw them out before, now we don’t need to make up an excuse for their disappearance.

Instead there are two small packages in the hall; Christmas gifts ungiven, unwanted. I suppose their days are numbered, too.

Homeward

2011-06-30T23:16:00.002+01:00

I walk away from the table football, leaving my younger colleagues playing and drinking and laughing. I feel old amongst them, the two grey hairs I spotted in the lift mirror this morning ratifying my emotions.

Out on the street it’s finally getting dark and people spill onto the pavement with beers and cigarettes, the rumblings of a Friday night echoing back into the Thursday. I slip through the groups across the churchyard and its crumbling tombs, heading home on this not-really-weekend night.

I pass a pair of young French girls; their chatter marks them out as exotic here in this market town. They have shorts on and long, lithe legs that are slim but curvy. They puff on cigarettes, blowing white plumes into the air, and somehow make it look cool instead of dirty and furtive like the native smokers.

I overtake a trio of security guards as I pass through the shopping centre, their yellow reflective jackets jarring against the marble and glass. One of them has a squeaky shoe, the rhythm of his step marked out by this impertinent noise, unfitting for so serious a job. I round the teeth whitening cubicle, its white shutters pulled round like a hundred neat gnashers, and head down the stairs. My preferred descent would be by escalator but it’s getting late for a school night and it’s turned off.

I keep to the side on the stairs as the flow of upwards moving pedestrians passes by me. Only one person makes eye contact; a woman with a broad, friendly grin which says to me thank you for stepping aside. I smile back and head out through the automatic doors into the pale blue night, onwards past the restaurants where weary waiters wipe tables and stack chairs.

Up the hill the last of the traffic passes through the lights, amber and green, and climbs the hill beside me. I peer through the windows at sofas and filing cabinets standing sentry in cramped , low ceilinged offices. These buildings weren’t made for us twenty-first century folk with our balanced diets and workhouse free lives. It’s quiet here, the centre of town but at the same time the very edge.

The lights are on upstairs, the blinds still lifted as the object of my final sketch waits for me. He has toothache but a straight, wide smile and he tells me about his evening as I lock the door behind me.

Adapting

2011-06-27T19:57:00.004+01:00

By day two of our Greek holiday we realise that we don’t have enough European plug adaptors; two phones, one camera but only one adaptor is not enough. I check the supermarkets where they sell all sorts of knick knacks – hair clips, sun glasses, cotton wool, soap bars, flippers and bottle openers – but I can’t find anything vaguely electrical. Even the camera shop doesn’t stock them (or 35mm film, as it turns out). I ask in the last supermarket on the way to the hotel and get directed to an electrical shop – it’s up the hill next to the post office.

I wander upwards, past pot holes and bars, motorcycles and hairdressers and a cafe called Deja Vu that I am sure I have seen before. Mr Manbag is diverted by a small supermarket (all the stores are “supermarkets”, despite being only the size of corner shops) in search of honey rum, a treat from our last Greek holiday that we don’t seem to be able to find here. I head on into the electrical store.

It reminds me of something from the seventies, the shelves are stocked with hairdryers, glasses, tea lights and toasters, a seemingly random selection of items, and at the back behind a desk is an old lady who I greet with a kali spera, two of the ten words of Greek I have in my holiday vocabulary. I lap the shop once or twice looking for something that looks like an adaptor but I can’t find anything, not even something similar. The game is up at the end of my second circuit – she knows I cannot find what I want. So I ask her in my simplest English; do you have plugs, adaptors, sockets? trying to think of all the synonyms for “adaptor”. There aren’t many. I make my fingers into the shape of three pins then the shape of two pins and say three pins and two pins. A metaphorical light bulb appears above her head (powered by a two pin plug, no doubt) and she beckons me into the store room behind her desk. It’s the size of a garden shed, low ceilinged and cramped and is filled with boxes arranged on shelves; a place for everything and everything in its place. She points at a row of boxes and starts pulling out cellophane wrapped pieces of plastic. She starts to talk to me, long rambling Greek sentences that are probably very meaningful and are along the lines of I’m sure they’re here somewhere but her breath is wasted on me and my limited Greek. She continues to chatter as we rifle through boxes and unwrap more plastic. There are switches and light fittings and some adaptors for I don’t know what. There are two pins to two pins and thingamajigs. But there are no UK adaptors.

She carries on talking and leads me back into the storeroom. Then she picks up the phone and makes a call to a son or a daughter, to solve this puzzle. The conversation goes on for a minute or two, with lots of hand waving and more fast Greek patter, words that I can’t even imagine the shape of let alone remember. She gesticulates with one hand and then asks me Italiano? This I understand. No, Ingles I say in my best Spanish accent hoping that will be closer to the Greek than the English. There is more telephone chatter and then she hangs up and calls me back into the storeroom.

Her unending dialogue continues apace as she opens one of the white cardboard boxes on the shelf (one I am sure we have already searched) and inside the box are three or four black adaptors. I was expecting them to be bigger and white and maybe she was too. I clap my hands to demonstrate my utter delight while she continues to speak, a clockwork doll that has yet to run down. We return to the desk and she types a “4” into the till. I hand over a five euro note and wave away the change trying to show my appreciation for her searching and unyielding hope. I have no idea if she knows I didn’t understand what she said but I throw one of my ten words to her - efharisto - and leave, clutching my prize.

Mr Manbag meets me outside with no honey rum.

100 words: an Ode to Barry

2011-06-24T22:00:00.001+01:00

Your face doesn’t look real any more.

I remember how you used to look with your large nose and blue eyes. But now your skin looks like plasticine that has got warm and gone shiny, topped off with brown coloured hair that wouldn’t look real on a man half your age. And your teeth look like neat rows of tic-tacs, too perfectly aligned.

What’s wrong with growing old gracefully, Barry? Would it hurt to have a few wrinkles and laughter lines? A sign of where you’ve been and what fun you’ve had.

Remember to ask yourself: What would Mandy think?

Father's day

2011-06-19T21:16:00.002+01:00

We would never have realised, back then, what we had. Kids never do.

Our summer days were punctuated with games on the Green; a thousand rounds of hide and seek and British Bulldog with the array of similar kids that lived on our estate. Those days would start early and end late with Rachel and I laying flat on our backs on the grassy verge looking up into the purple sky as the streetlights came on and the stars came out to give us their 1980s twinkling best. I don’t remember what we said or what we talked about, just that those days were only disturbed by my mother’s mealtime calls from the front door.

All four of us had names that could be hollered loud and clear across the 100 yard expanse in front of the house, each time prefixed by the occasion that we were being called to. Dinner! Heidi! Bag Lady!* Tammy! Cassy! Mum would shout from the front doorstep. We were good children, Rose’s Girls all four of us, and we would return for our feed before heading back out to another game, another cycle ride, another trip out.

We didn’t realise back then how lucky we were to live in this semi-rural town with its streams and horses and meadows. We would spend all day out with our neighbours without a single care in the world other than the nettles on the narrow path to the meadow and that time when Beverley Alexander got kicked in the chest by a horse that she got too close to, the pain not stopping her from revealing the purple horse-shoe-shaped bruise on her bony, white chest.

Now a return visit to my mum is more like the childhood I remember than the one that was real. The 4 foot cherry tree in the garden is now a fruit laden monster, attracting birds from miles around to feed on its golden-crimson globes. And there’s a greenhouse with tomatoes and cucumbers and, if you believe my mum, figs to come. I stand under the cherry tree now, jumping for high branches and plucking fecund fruits from their stems as if having an orchard is second nature to me. The Enid Blyton childhood that I never had is nowhere near as much fun as the one I did, of course.

And when I drive my mum around in my small and ancient car I can see her feet in the passenger footwell pressing against invisible pedals as I drive too fast, too close and don’t brake within three hundred yards of the red lights. We both know what the other is thinking on these journeys as I try to reassure her that I am not going as quickly as she thinks and attempt to explain how old I am and how rare it is for me to have an accident of any kind.

She gives me space to breathe now; the comfort me being grown up is that we know our limits within each other’s company. We are adults and we treat each other as such. I tell her when she is repeating herself and I offer to be her companion for hospital visits or to dig up unwanted tree stumps in another sister’s gardens. It has reached a time when we look after each other. After almost 30 years of her caring for me, watching out for me and making sure I have everything I need I get chance to do the same for her. At least I do when she’ll let me.

The Father’s Day card that I sent this year had a signature in it from Mr Manbag. After those thirty years of taking care of me she has graciously relinquished her hold on me and passed me on to him. There was a period of her getting used to him; change is always difficult and his predecessor had been around for a long time. Now when he answers the phone they talk for an age about his ailments and hers, about the weather, about plans, about nothing. I have become the gooseberry in this relationship, the one who isn’t needed in the conversation. And when the call is over they always say love you, bye! with an undimmed enthusiasm.

I had thought that no-one could understand the relationship between me and my mum, until Mr Manbag came along; she is my rock and, through those years under her wing, taught me so much, made me so much. I feel so proud of what she has achieved and how little she had to work with. When this annual celebration of fathers comes around I get to feel doubly proud of this woman who was mother and father to four wonderful girls at a time when that wasn’t easy to do.

Happy father’s day, mum.

*not my real name. In case you were wondering.

I don't want to work

2011-06-14T15:45:00.000+01:00

I don’t want to work. I appreciate this is not unusual. I know I am lucky to have a job in a nice safe office earning more than the minimum wage. But still.

I don’t want to work, instead I like making plans. I plan how I will spend my lottery win (£67M tonight) and where I will travel to first. I plan paying off the mortgage and buying a second home (as an investment). I plan some serious bag shopping (and you know I mean that. Ye gods, the Ralph Lauren section of Net A Porter is a sight to behold). I plan a landscape gardener for my mum and a flat in Paris for us. I think about what I will do when the excitement wears off and my new normal life begins.

I don’t want to work. I cruise the office, pulling up chairs and “touching base” with colleagues, trying to tempt people to join me for coffee breaks to sustain the absence from my desk and my laptop. I buy tea from the canteen because it takes longer than making my own and I make conversations about the weather and the terrible state of the nation / my hair / the world with the girls from the canteen. I chat to the PA about her car accident and mine and the hassle of insurers, about body shops and loan cars and dents.

I don’t want to work. I read every single tweet of every single person I follow on Twitter (although I make an exception for blindly retweeted links which are another form of work). I chat to people at work about Twitter and we talk about what Twitter is for and why Facebook is dead. I tell them I am a writer and that is one of the reasons I use Twitter and they don’t even ask.

I don’t want to work. It’s sunny outside and after our weekend of drizzle and rain and grey it feels unfair to be stuck inside this office with its enormous windows and view of the motorway and the hills beyond. I stare at the cars that pass and look into the cabs of the brightly coloured lorries wondering where they’re going and if the drivers enjoy being on the road.

I don’t want to work. Lisa is arranging a hen do so instead I try to come up with suggestions for things to do for her and the hens. I google for ideas and pass them on, reformatted and tidy instead of the gobbledygook that was on the screen. I’m happy to spend the extra time.

I don’t want to work. I pull out my CV and tweak it slightly without anyone being able to see the words curriculum vitae over my shoulder. Just in case they find out that I don’t want to work here.

I don’t want to work. I eke out my important jobs. Luckily they are deadline free so no one will know that today I don’t want to work. Even the lazy intern who sits next to me surfing and staring is working more than I am. The amount of effort he puts into making conversation with me is directly proportional to the amount of work I have to do and how urgent it is; today he has barely spoken to me.

It’s only half three in the afternoon and already I am watching the clock, waiting for the moment when I can sling my bright yellow satchel over my shoulder and head for the car. This is because I don’t want to work.

Drip II

2011-06-12T22:05:00.003+01:00

It’s raining. It’s June and it’s raining. The car roof is leaking, a wodge of kitchen towel lodged in the seam between the metal and the plastic to soak up the drips and keep them off of Mr Manbag’s head. We’re driving through the dreary-grey industrial estates of Bracknell on a mission to retrieve Mr Manbag’s notebook ahead of a London meeting tomorrow. To make up for the disappointing work trip we decide to do lunch in a local fish restaurant. The food is average and the service decidedly perfunctory but it still feels like a treat to have a proper lunch out instead of a grabbed sandwich and cup of tea in town.

We head home via the supermarket – a trip marked out by the befuddling layout and an almost accidental purchase of spirits which send the bill soaring yet somehow make up for the below-par lunch. The roads are shiny and wet and the pavements pocked with puddles, with pedestrian routes marked out like an Indiana Jones type challenge – a leap here, a hop there and a manoeuvre to jump that especially big puddle requiring a whip and a cavalier attitude.

When we’re back at home we make a conscious decision not to go out again. The flat is warm and comfy and the large windows show us all we need to see of the rain as it bats the leaves on the tree outside and makes people carry bright umbrellas. We relax with the papers, do laundry and drink tea, as is proper for a Sunday.

It’s dark outside from the rain but the sun still sets late as if it’s summer time. Someone needs to have a word with god/the clouds/ the met office. Because this summer so far has been as second-rate as my lunch. No one wants to be let down like that.

Flight

2011-06-08T22:41:00.001+01:00

I hit the “confirm” button and almost can’t believe it myself. In four hours time I shall be on a plane. In thirteen hours I shall be across the other side of the world. And no one will know until Monday morning when I don’t come into the office. I wonder how late it will be before someone starts to wonder where I am and starts asking around, trying to find out if I’ve got a dentist’s appointment or if the traffic was bad on the motorway.

Instead for me it will still be the middle of Sunday night. I’d like to think that I’ll be wide awake at the beachfront bar with a ridiculously over-the-top cocktail in my hand and maybe, just maybe, some dark haired barman will be chatting me up, asking all about me. Because by then I’ll have shed my inhibitions (thanks to those cocktails) and will be one of those people who is comfortable talking to complete strangers.

I’ve got to go; my taxi will be at my flat soon and I still need to throw some things into a bag. My passport is already in my handbag because I’ve been planning for this for longer than I can remember. I got some currency in my lunch break, just enough to tide me over until I get to a bank there. And I bought one of those little inflatable pillows that fits round your neck for the flight. I don’t really know why; I just saw it on the little revolving stand and bought it because that’s what people do. Even though I’m going to be too excited to sleep so I probably won’t use it.

I’d like to learn to snorkel. To put my face under the water and watch the fish in their electric colours swim beneath me. I wonder if they have that there, those fish that I can picture. But what does it matter? It’s not here. It’s going to be so utterly different. Warm and blue and yellow and sand and ocean. I’ve never seen the ocean. I’ve never held somebody’s hand. I’ve never had an inflatable pillow. I’ve never flown first class either. There are lots of changes coming in my life and it starts now. Time to go and pack my bag. I reckon I’ve got about 70 hours before they find out that all the money is gone and where it’s gone to.

The Walking Saint

2011-06-05T22:08:00.001+01:00

Saint Spyridon’s body lies in a silver casket in a darkened room at the back of the church. The walls are painted with relic style images in deep reds and green and suspended on chains above the sarcophagus are a myriad of silver lights and censers. A few candles flicker in their holders but there is little illumination. The casket is ornate and enamelled and seems to draw any remaining heat out of the room. I daren’t touch it; to me it seems creepy, eerie. I feel slightly scared to be alone with it, knowing that inside the magnificent antique is a dead body. I leave the tiny dark room sooner than I had intended, shrugging off the pashmina that I had used to cover my warm but inappropriately bare arms and return to sitting in one of the elaborately carved pews, enjoying the cool church interior.

The bright dusty sunshine throws golden shapes through the heavy wooden doorway and a hundred narrow yellow candles wait in their boxes for visitors to push their lit bodies into the gilded trays of sand.

I watch the mixture of people – locals and tourists like me – enter the room where the saint’s body lies. The locals touch the casket, cross themselves and then kiss the feet on his picture outside in the church. The stories go that he wanders the streets at night and so his silk slippers are replaced every year on his feast day. As the pious leave they nod to the usher who sits in one of the darkened corner of the church, a silent goodbye or a polite thank you.

Mr Manbag attempts to take discreet photos of the interior, his lens sucking in any traces of light that filter into the tiny dark church. The golden paintings on the ceiling defy his attempts at photography and Saint Spyridon does his holy works uncaptured by modern technology. At the back of the church a group of tourists listen to a guide who talks in fast French, her hands raised to the gilded ceiling as she points out the saint and explains the artworks.

We head out of the cool, dark temple into the streets of Corfu. Outside the heat is searing and the enormous candles hanging from the shop canopies seem pointless in such bright daylight.

100 words: Drip

2011-06-02T22:37:00.002+01:00

The tap is dripping even more. It started as a little drip, drip but gradually it got worse and worse and needed a Herculean effort to tighten it enough to stop. Now it whispers to me even when the handle won’t budge, water trickling away.

This week I’ve taken it to the next level; a screwdriver sits next to the bleach and the spare shampoo. Every morning I turn the water supply on under the sink, brush my teeth and turn it back off.

At some point I’m going to have to admit defeat and get a plumber in.

Drip.

Guest post 5: In Foreign Fields by Kim

2011-05-27T14:00:00.002+01:00

My fifth and final guest post is by Kim who writes over at One Day At a Time.

In foreign fields they lie for all eternity; a tribute to the courage of man and a testament to man’s savagery.

‘Who were they?’ a young child asks as we stand and stare out over the rows of crosses. ‘Had they done something bad?’
The mother shushes her, leading her away from our group and back to the coach, talking softly to her. Two of the middle aged women in our party exchange looks that clearly cast aspersions on the woman’s child rearing skills but the rest of us don’t react. I dismiss the little girl’s words and concentrate on what our guide is saying about Ypres. I manage for a while until he tells us that first major battle fought here took place just three months into the war, when they still thought it would be all over by Christmas. I tune out then, his words making me think of the timescales the modern day “Allies” spoke of when we first went into Iraq and Afghanistan. Nothing much changes, does it? I shake my head and try to pick up what he’s saying but now the little girl’s voice is echoing through my head, refusing to be ignored.

So I too leave the group, but I don’t follow them back to the coach. Instead I walk down to the nearest cross and crouch in front of it, reading out the inscription.
‘Private Burke,’ I say softly, tracing the words with my finger tips. ‘Killed in action 13th October 1914.’
I try to say something appropriate to this man I don’t know, to somehow try and explain that I’ve come here because I am grateful for the sacrifice he and all those surrounding him made. I can’t though, every sentence that presents itself for my attention sounds trite or false.

I don’t know how long I’ve been crouched here but can’t move yet, despite the fact that my legs are protesting vehemently. I still haven’t answered her other question - had they done something bad? Of course not, I think, they were all good men. I shake my head, immediately disagreeing with myself. They can’t all have been good, these thousands upon thousands who died for our freedom. Just like they can’t all have been bad. She didn’t mean that, I realise, remembering that she could have been no more than five. She was asking if they deserved to die.
‘No, they didn’t,’ I say, uncaring if anyone else is listening. ‘Not like that.’

I don’t want to think about the manner of their deaths so instead I wonder what this soldier was like. My brain pulls up random facts from history lessons long ago, documentaries I’ve watched and books I’ve read. Slowly a picture begins to form in my mind of a man, no, a boy - probably one of the ones who lied about their age to join up - unprepared for life let alone war. I know I’m romanticising but I can’t help it. I’ve seen too many grainy black and white photos of happy, smiling lads at the recruitment offices not to give him one of their faces. I see him standing in the mud sodden trenches clutching a gun he’s only just learnt how to use and trying to convince himself that God will protect him. After all, they are doing Gods work here, aren’t they? Just like Sarge said. I wonder if he prayed before he went over the top.

I stand up abruptly, trying to dispel the images that follow, of guns and shells and shrapnel, blood and pain and then nothing, nothing for ever more.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say inadequately, resting my hand on the top of the cross. ‘I’m sorry we haven’t learnt our lesson yet.’

I thought this piece by Kim was beautifully touching. I can completely empathise with the romantic images of the soldiers, black and white and so very young, captured in a piece of paper with their uniforms new and unsullied. I wish it weren't true but the comparison to modern day wars is very poignant. A fantastic finale to the week.

Thanks to all my guest writers this week. As hard as it's been to pick the pieces to post I have absolutely loved it. If the feedback is good I will consider doing this again in future. I return from holiday shortly but I am sure you will agree that the writing this week has been fabulous. I think I need to up my game!

Guest post 4 : Foreign Friends by Alyson

2011-05-26T14:00:00.002+01:00

My third guest blog is from Alyson who can be found writing at Calling People Names.

Mary was your typical white-haired, stooped old lady, but with a remarkably gruff voice. There was a no nonsense air about her that always put me on my best behavior, though I know she knew I was anything but well behaved by the twinkle in her eyes.

Her house was gloomy and utilitarian in every area save the living room. She was a talented knitter and doll maker – glass cases and blanket racks crowded the room, displaying years of hard work. Each item had a story. Some I knew and some I made up, but it was the things that left in packing boxes that I wondered about the most. Who opened them and held them? Who bought them as gifts and who bought them to display in their own glass cases? I don’t remember ever asking.

She made me a beautiful set of Raggedy Anne and Andy dolls when I was a little girl. I loved their crisp white and red outfits, gangly bodies and carefully stitched facial features. I kept them in a wooden rocking cradle and though I was rough with the majority of my things, I was always careful with them.

When I had my daughter I thought I would pass the dolls down to her, but Mary surprised me with another set. Her eyesight was failing and her hands were knotted and shaking, but she took the time to make a larger, more modern version for Hannah and they were just as lovely as the two from twenty years ago.

The last time I saw her was when Hannah was about two – Grandma sent me to her door with a plate from Sunday dinner and when she opened it, she thought I was my mother.

“Karen, you look so beautiful”, she’d said, smiling.

It was with slight irritation that I corrected her. “It’s Alyson, Mary.”

She flapped her hand and laughed, “Of course it is! Come in and see what I’m sending away.”

“I can’t today; we’ve got to get back.”

I was the first time she’d asked me to come sit with her in years. Certainly the first time that she’d offered to show me the outgoing mail I’d been so curious about as a child.

“Maybe next time then”, she said, patting my hand and taking the plate.

She died several months later, leaving her house to the church and most of her belongings to goodwill. But she left grandma a few odds and ends. They’d been neighbors and close friends for more than 60 years and I was surprised that I’d never once thought to ask about her family. Didn’t she have any?

We went, grandma and I, to collect the few things from her house late one afternoon. It was in the process of being cleaned out and there were dust covers over the majority of the furniture. She told me, as I peered under sheets and into cabinets, that the church was leaving the basics for a family of refugees from Burma. I was surprised and wondered what Mary would’ve thought about that.

As I straightened up and closed a cabinet, I noticed a colorful stack sitting next to packages of bubble wrap and tape, boxes and ribbons. I picked up the one on top and it said, “Aloha friend!” Postcards from all over the world were piled one atop the other, all filled with various scribbling on the back, some in English and some not, some with colorful pictures and some plain.

“What is this?” I asked grandma, holding up a card.

“Oh, those are from the people Mary gave her dolls to. She never wanted payment, just a postcard from wherever the doll was going.” Grandma laughed. “She always wanted to travel, but couldn’t...said she’d bring the foreigners to her.”

There were so many things about this woman that I never bothered to find out, things that I assumed to be true or false. I felt sad that, as I got older, I stopped coming by and missed out on a chance to get to know her the way my grandmother did. The way these people on the cards obviously did.

There were replies from the same people, proof of continued correspondence. “I hope you’re feeling better, Mary.” “Take care.” “How are your flowers this year? Still thriving?”

I pushed the cards back together neatly and turned to lift a box for grandma.

“What will happen to the rest of the dolls?”

“I don’t know.”

I couldn’t stop thinking about it over the next few days – about how lonely she must have been and how wonderful it was that she managed to make friends thousands of miles away, even when everyone nearby was simply too busy. It felt rather familiar.

And so I bought a postcard from the drugstore in my tiny hometown, addressed it to Mary and slipped it through the letter slot she’d never open.

Dear Mary,

I want you to know that my Raggedy Ann and Andy are well and sitting happily on my shelves, as are Hannah’s. I wish I would have asked you more, told you more, visited more. There’s a refugee family moving into your house soon and I didn’t know it then, but I’m now sure you would love that more than anything in the world. I’ve made sure that your closest postcard friends receive one last note, letting them know that you’ve passed on – they would appreciate that.

I know because we have more in common than I think either of us realized.

I'm not sure what to write here. Alyson's post left me totally floored, a little tearful and slightly breathless. Those of you who already read her writing will already have noticed how very visual and visceral it is - I know few people who can take me with them so fully with their writing. I'm so pleased to be able to publish this piece here.

Guest post 3: A Fish Out Of Context by Amy Willis

2011-05-25T14:00:00.001+01:00

My third guest post is from Amy Willis who you can find writing over at Willy Nilly Blog

You never realise you’re foreign until you’re out of context, I’ve come to realise. No-one notices an accent if they have it too. Your shell suit isn’t out of place if everyone’s wearing one. Food isn’t too spicy if you’ve grown up with it your whole life. And, you’re not an ‘alternative family’ if you’re in one.

I’m not foreign in the strictest sense of the word. At least, not when I’m shuffling around Reading. I am a lesbian, though. And while that’s not the most controversial identity one could adopt any more (again, at least not while you’re shuffling around Reading), it gets slightly more tricky when it comes to starting a family.

Since context is king, let me outline mine. I’m your bog standard 29 year-old. I moved to Reading in 2000 when I came to university and I never left. I met my partner 9 years ago and last year we had a civil partnership. We celebrated with our friends and family; our dads united over Sambuca shots and my cousin was the obligatory family drunk-dancer. I own a house. I work in marketing. I’ve always said I’d love to travel but, deep down, I know I would only realistically do so in at least 4-star luxury. Pretty normal so far.

But now, I’m moving on to the next stage of a bog-standard life plan; I want to have children. One day I’d like to adopt but right now, since my partner would like to carry a child, we’re looking into having one through IVF and egg sharing. Essentially, if all goes to plan, this means putting my egg into her, for her to pop out when fully cooked. This is the part that seems to BLOW YOUR MIND. Not you personally, I’m sure you’re totally right on, dude. But some people. To some people, this is the part where I’ve become foreign.

It’s like I’ve taken the figurative rug, and pulled it out from under them. “Where is the man?” “Do you not think you need men?” “But we have so many men!” “What will they do??” “For the love of god, WHAT WILL WE DO WITH ALL THE MEN???!” Chillax, people. I like men. I need men in my life. So will my child. I just happen to love a girl and reckon it’s better if I raise a child with her.

We’re not so different you and me; we speak the same language, we eat the same food (provided you’re a vegetarian) and we wear the same clothes (provided you only wear dresses on special occasions). So, I reckon, my family will be just as dysfunctional as yours. Here’s hoping...

I liked that this piece took the theme of foreign and thought about it differently. I can't imagine what it feels like to want something that the world thinks you're not supposed to have but reading this makes me want to cheer Amy and her partner on (and I hope you will, too). I like the myth dispelled in the lines "I need men in my life. So will my child. I just happen to love a girl". Simple. Perfect.

Guest post 2: Ambassadors of Smiles by Danger Boy

2011-05-24T14:00:00.002+01:00

My second guest post is from the very charming Danger Boy who writes over at Dangerous Leanings.

Some years ago, I found myself in Oxford for a family wedding. I learned that there is something about an American in England that screams “tourist” as surely as a Japanese fellow with a camera around his neck. I have yet to identify that intangible something, but I suspect it has to do with looking the wrong way first when crossing streets.

I’d been warned before our trip that we would meet “a high Anti-American sentiment” and that we should perhaps claim to be Canadian. Fortunately, this turned out to be as close to truth as the Flat World theory. I have seldom gone to any place far from home where I felt more welcomed, in fact. It was a great trip, a grand time of connection with far away family. We celebrated its conclusion with that most wonderful of bad ideas, a Pub Crawl. You can be foreign all day long, but when you make your way pub-to-pub sampling the best of the offerings on tap, you speak a universal language indeed. That of booze.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, the day wasn’t meant to be a drunkfest. There was no intent to engage in “Winning” as defined by Casa de Sheen. It just turned out that way. I blame Michael, the barman at the Hobgoblin in Oxford. His was our 4th stop, and the selection of Wychwood brews on tap made Dangerboy a very, very happy man.

And so it came to pass that our crawl stalled, Wifefish, her father, brother and I having a raucous good time with our host. By then we’d learned some local tips that differ from American bar etiquette. We asked for the "local" price, as if we were entitled to it. We didn’t tip in cash, we tipped in pints. Michael was certainly a man who could keep his pace in pints, downing draughts with us in a war against our livers. (Nobody wins that war, by the way.)

We spoke of regional colloquialisms, he from a British perspective, we from the American. We parroted regional accents at each other…a drawl was met with a brogue, letters were added and subtracted from words, and phrases were butchered in a vocal virtual tour of all the places we knew. Laughter has no accent, we decided with authority. It just is.

At the 3rd round, my dear father-in-law felt nature’s call keenly. He looked at the steep staircase to the men’s room with some hesitation, and Michael invited him to use the ladies’ instead. He declined. By the 4th round, though, Dad’s eyeballs were doing the “pee-pee pirouette”, and he looked longingly at the ladies’ room door, just a few feet from our table.

“Have you guys seen anybody go in there?”

A chorus of “no” answered him. In he went, his sigh of relief only softly heard through the oaken door. In just a pair of minutes, out he came, polishing off the last of his pint.

Just then, a very well-dressed lady, hat perched just so, exited the ladies room. We’d all failed to notice her entrance, but none of us missed her exit. Her eyes never wavered from the floor as she walked past us, no hint of emotion on her face. Out the door she went. We all looked at each other, faces grim. Michael saluted us with two fingers, and the eruption of laughter was both loud and immediate.

After just one more round, we bid Michael a farewell, but not before he’d gifted us with a signed Hobgoblin Dark Ale poster, which still hangs in my bar at the house. We travelled on, just one more stop remaining on our way to the house we’d rented.

We headed toward the Bear, a little pub with a complete absence of right angles remaining in its construction. We had become more than a little inebriated, and at one point I actually fell off the sidewalk. That is a rare state for me; I believe in moderation in all things. That includes moderation itself: some rare days a bender is exactly the thing you need.

We crowded into a small booth near the hearth, a round of Strongbows quickly ordered and quickly arriving. We drank and talked, and I endured several insults about my lack of being able to stay on something so tricky as a sidewalk.

I didn’t notice that Wifefish and the others had gone quiet, until I noticed them staring at my cider. I had found, naturally placed at the perfect height, a small hole in the wall into which my elbow fit perfectly and held my drinkin’ hand at perfect relaxation. I hadn’t even noticed. “Genius!” I shouted. We kept laughing.

We chattered on, slightly less noisy than a pack of crazed badgers. And yet, cheerful smiles greeted us, and the ever-present question “Where, in America, do you live?” Answers were given freely, and stories shared.

There was no denying the truth, we were foreign. Alien. Other. But in smiling, laughing, and meeting fellow ambassadors of drunken goodwill, we had found perhaps perfect common ground.

Who can resist the idea of a bunch of drunken Americans falling off the pavement in Oxford? Danger Boy hit a soft spot here for me as Oxford is my home city, if you like, so I know very well the bars he talks about if not the landlord. I just hope the lady with the hat has recovered from the intrusion!

Guest post 1: Foreign by Rikke

2011-05-23T14:00:00.002+01:00

I am away on holiday this week so asked readers to submit pieces of writing on the theme of "Foreign". The standard of writing was very high as I hope to demonstrate over the week.

My first guest post is from Rikke who can be found writing in her native Danish at R og D i Kina.

I can feel the heads turn as I walk into the bus.

A father points me out to his son – and the son glances at me. He has never seen anyone like me before. I can feel people talking about me, but can not understand what they are saying. I smile politely back, no need to make a fuss about it. I know I am different.

It happens all the time. By now I am used to it.

The first couple of months I hid behind my sunglasses, but as it became winter, it seemed a bit odd continuing to wear them. Now the sun is shining again, and it feels good to be back hiding behind them. It somehow gives you the opportunity to stare back. I can relate to famous people wearing sunglasses all the time, you feel protected behind them.

In the supermarket people stare into my cart – sometimes they even take up some of my groceries, just to see what someone like me buys. Sometimes I just want to yell and scream at everybody and tell them I am no different then them; I buy milk and vegetables, fruit and meat – but no matter how much I pretend, I know I am not like them.

I am different. All people here have black hair and brown eyes – I have red hair and blue eyes. I am foreign.

Living in a small Chinese town 2 1/2 hours drive from Shanghai, is some times very frustrating, and at the same time new experiences and adventures are waiting just around the corner. The Chinese have no inhibitions; if they see something strange walking around – like me – they stare, come very close to you to stare even more and they point their fingers at you.

When my husband and I are out sightseeing, I very often become the sightseeing event for the Chinese, and have been asked numerous times to pose in their pictures.

One day in a department store talking to some friends of mine – also foreigners – the cleaning lady kept coming closer and closer, and swept right in front of our feet.

My friends looked surprised and both asked out; what is she doing?

I looked surprised, not because of the behavior of the cleaning lady, but because of them questioning her behavior.

And replied; this is normal in China, is it not?

They then looked surprised at me. And I had to explain that for me this behaviour was very normal. When I am in supermarkets, department stores or other places with these types of cleaning personnel, they are always in front of me, sweeping the floor as if I am the dirtiest person they have ever seen, and that my feet make black footprints where ever I step. At first this annoyed me, but I eventually found out it was a way to get really close to me, and an excuse to follow me. It actually still irritates me, but now I am just used to it.

Next stop is mine. The little boy’s father tells him to say hello. The boy smiles shyly but at the same time is curious; and whispers: Hello. I answer hello, and wave to him, as I get off the bus.

As I walk the way home, I feel the stare from people. But I am protected behind my sunglasses. I know I am different, I am foreign.

This piece grabbed me right from the opening lines because of the way she captures that feeling of being an outsider so brilliantly and in a language that is not her own. I like the way her use of English makes her voice sound all the more at odds with her surroundings. Please leave a comment for Rikke here or over at her blog.

Packing

2011-05-21T19:40:00.005+01:00

We’re apart, working separately to get things done. He stands over a pile of ironing – short sleeved shirts and freshly washed shorts – while I give myself a quick pedicure after refusing to splash out £25 on getting one done for me. We move around each other like planets orbiting, reaching for what we need then moving on. I fold clothes from the airer in the spare bedroom. He folds his newly ironed shirts into shop quality shapes and lays them on the bed.

There’s a new case, small and shiny, waiting to be filled. The old one waits patiently on top of the wardrobe in the spare room. We’ll fill both with clothes and shoes and books. We’re only away for a week but when we discuss how many books to take and both settle for four each we know it will probably be too many. But then it’s like book insurance as at least one will be a dud and that won’t do for a holiday read.

We switch around again. This time I am ironing new shorts and floaty tops, linen trousers and t-shirts while he sorts out birthday flowers and timed tweets for when we are away. The pile on the bed grows higher.

We’ve got a list of sorts but it’s starting to get late in the day and dinner needs to be made. Once it’s bubbling away enthusiastically on the hob we decide we’ll do the real packing after dinner. The bit with underwear and toiletries and actually putting clothes in the suitcases. It’s important that Mr Manbag has as little enthusiasm for the act of packing as I do but that he has as much for the actual being away as me. Perfect holiday partners.

I'm away on holiday next week. Please keep your eyes peeled (metaphorically) for five brilliant guest posts from five very different writers, one each weekday. It's never easy guesting on someone else's blog so I hope you'll leave lots of comments to make them feel extra welcome and to say "yay" or "well done" or similar. See you in a week.

Glasses

2011-05-16T22:09:00.005+01:00

When I first starting ticking the box that said “35-44” instead of “25-34” I felt disappointed to have changed pigeon-hole, especially when the new one was so much less appealing. Each progressive tick box has certain connotations, whether they should or not. Like garden kneelers, corn plasters or trousers with that bit of elastic at the waist getting old isn’t cool. I know I’ve written about this before but this weekend I had another bad ageing experience; an eye test.

I know this shouldn’t be a big deal; I don’t wear glasses. But I am long sighted. When I asked how long it will be before I start needing reading glasses the optician said that I’ve got about 3 years. 3 years until I have a pair of those little glasses with wire frames balanced on the end of my nose. 3 years until I start squinting at restaurant menus and holding them at arm’s length. 3 years until my nasty little glasses spend more time sitting on my head instead of on my nose as I try to deny that I need them.

I work with a colleague who has this problem. She’s only been in our office for 2 months but she’s already told me on three separate occasions about the time her and a friend visited Jamie’s Italian but never made it past the menu outside the door. Neither of them had their glasses on them so they simply couldn’t read it. Couple this with her 70’s hair, 70’s eyeliner, 70s outfits and her penchant for gurning (we thought false teeth for a while but I think it’s just an odd habit) and sucking her hair and it all starts to symbolise something I really don’t want to become.

I’m hoping she’s just an incredibly bad example of someone who wants to hold onto her youth for as long as possible. And there are lots of equally guilty men and women who don’t know when to let go of that black mascara, that Bonnie Tyler blow dry or that 80’s mullet with the unfortunate bald spot on top. It seems one can't walk 100 yards through town without spotting someone who can't move on from the look they had in their heyday.

This will not be my fate, I won't let myself become mutton dressed as Jennifer Rush. Instead I am planning to go straight from funky thirty-something to full on petunia blue coat dress with matching hat, handbag and hair. Now I just need to find me a country to run and half a dozen corgis.

Silence

2011-05-10T18:11:00.003+01:00

The couple across the train aisle from us seem to be together but apart. I assume they are a couple, of course, but perhaps I am pre-judging them based on their similar age.

In his seventies he wears cream slacks, cream polo short, a cream cable knit cardigan that has seen better years (judging by the bobbles) and a once smart cream suit jacket. He has a small brown stain on his knee from some chocolate crumbs or a drop of gravy, maybe. His face and hands are marked with liver spots and that soft, loose skin that older people sometimes get. His grey hair is swept back with a Brylcreem like pomade, slick and neat. He looks to me like an ex-soldier, sitting upright in his chair, but that might just be another assumption because of his age – he comes from what I think of as a generation of warriors, reluctant or not, and survivors. He has gravitas.

Opposite him sits an old lady in a cream calf length skirt, rose pink buttoned up top with a floaty blouse of the sort seen in the back of a Sunday supplement. She looks like she’d smell of roses or violets, clean and sweet. The sun beats down upon the carriage making her thick, rose-pink cardigan and blush coloured mac look superfluous albeit it perfectly coordinated. She reads one of those magazines made from super-thin paper with stories of romance and friendship, recipes for cakes to make on an Aga and adverts for kneelers and bunion friendly shoes. Her hair is immaculate and her handbag rests, properly, on her knee and I can just about see a sticker on it given out by some tin shaking charity worker.

We travel through fields and cities, a blur of green and grey and bricks and mud. The carriage is free of chatter and noise and the old couple don’t even make eye contact. They just are.

A small blonde, curly haired toddler is being coaxed along the carriage by her mum, back to the seat from which she must have wandered. She stops between our chairs and looks around. Only then do I see the connection between the old couple. They both beam down at this smiling, epitome of childhood and then smile at each other. I can’t see the memories that they share of children and grandchildren but I know that they are there.

The child is lead away by her mother and the comfortable silence resumes.

Don't forget that I am still open for entries for my holiday post blog spot. More details can be found just here

Tornado

2011-05-08T20:49:00.000+01:00

Today we sat outside for lunch in the centre of town, holding down our napkins against wind that whipped round the trees and ignored our attempts to gracefully eat our lunch; lunging for a wrapper or a piece of plastic takes the elegance out of any mealtime. The sun was bright but still I needed to swap seats with Mr Manbag to make sure the wind tunnel kept my hair out of my face instead of into it. It seems the turbulent weather is lined up perfectly with my working life, where the sun shines weakly but is ineffective against the tornadoes that pass across my desk. My energies at the moment are all needed for my work lately. I am not best pleased about this; there is nothing to write when I have no time to think for myself.

The skies are cloudy now; the best of the day is behind us. The wind is in the trees, rustling the leaves and shaking the branches. The sun is setting late but still it feels like the day is over. We’ll draw the blinds and shut the world out soon, switching on the lamps and preparing for the end of the weekend.

Now the streetlights have come on and the countdown to Friday has started.

Guest post challenge: Foreign

2011-05-04T13:21:00.000+01:00

I have two pieces of news.

Firstly I am proud to say that a piece of my writing has been published in the new and very exciting Hippocampus Magazine. Please swing by, read, comment and subscribe if you like what you see. I'm also very pleased to say that my close personal friend Mr London Street also has a piece in the first issue.

Secondly I have booked a holiday. Yes. A holiday. Hardly noteworthy, I know. But going on holiday means I will be away from the blog for a whole week.

I have a challenge for you, dear readers. A challenge and an opportunity, if you will.

I would like to have some guest writing up on my blog while I am away and I would like it to include writing by you. Assuming I get enough interest I would like to publish 4 or 5 pieces in the week that I am off of writing that fits the following general guidelines:

Fiction or non fiction, I don't mind.

Pieces should be between 500 and 2000 words.

It must be on the theme of foreign. You can interpret this as you wish.

I need to receive it on or before Thursday 19th May. Sorry if this is not long enough for you but I am going on holiday on the 23rd so need time to pull the posts together before I go.

It doesn't have to be original - if you have something already published that would be suitable that's fine.

I reserve the right to edit for grammar and spelling.

Submit by emailing your pieces via the red typewriter over there in my sidebar

I will publish what I think are the best pieces and include a link to your blog if you have one. If you don't have one I would still love to see what you can do - don't be shy - it would be fabulous if there were some new faces amongst the old hands.

I think that covers everything but if you have any questions about the challenge stick a question in the comment field and I will answer it asap as chances are someone else will want to know the same thing.

Thanks. And don't forget to visit Hippocampus!

Mayflies

2011-05-02T23:13:00.002+01:00

The mayflies were early, I think, swarming round the bridges and waterfront before April was out. They looked like pieces of translucent confetti from a distance but up close their bodies gave the game away, dirtying the illusion. Reading is built on two rivers – the Thames and the Kennet – so it shouldn’t be a surprise that the skies are filled with flying flotsam, though I am sure I have never noticed them before. Never noticed them clinging to the pavement, their acetate wings swaying in the breeze. Never noticed the number of their squashed brethren who have already breathed their last naturally or not. Never noticed that itchy feeling in my hair as I swear I can feel them crawling in my curls.

For a creature with such a brief adulthood they seem to travel well, clouding the air and looking for love for those fleeting moments. Maybe we are exactly the same, just with a longer day. We are naturally programmed to pair off, to find or attempt to find a suitable partner. Our biological makeup means this is likely to be someone that we could produce healthy children with (even if the person we choose is not very nice, the genes are probably right).

Shopping today in the town centre I saw a woman of (shall we say) a certain age, smartly dressed with blonde highlights and sunglasses pushed back into her hair. She doesn’t stand out on her own, just one of those respectable ladies who has a job in law or finance or the like. What set her apart from the everyday career women was the pram she had with two tiny babies in it – small and new enough that their mother wouldn’t let them out of her sight. She was bottle-feeding one while her husband cradled another. My assumption might of course have been wrong but I took it that they were her babies and that they were conceived with a touch of medical assistance, twins being relatively rare.

Perhaps the only difference between us and the mayflies is that we often choose not to produce offspring. Instead we choose selfishly to have fun, go on holidays, drink, eat, make merry, and have protected sex. Either that or we decide to wait until we are past our childbearing best before procreating – our brains are big enough for us to control what our bodies cannot.

I wonder, if the mayflies could stop time for themselves, could make their moment in the sun last longer than just a day would they? If they had the brains and the science to be aware of and delay their death so they could enjoy their adulthood and still pass on their gene pool do you think they would? Or maybe we would just see a new generation of mayflies that are only interested in cocktails and holidays and spray-tans and who don’t want larva until they’re too old to have them. Maybe.

As I return home across the river I crush a mayfly under my sandal and I do not know or care if it is living or already dead, the pathway littered with crisp little spray-tanned bodies. I hope they’re not all virgins.

Let me know what you think of the new layout. I am not sure if the background is too noisy but I like the pattern...

Indie Ink and Boozy Bank Holidays

2011-04-29T11:39:00.003+01:00

One of my posts is up this week on the brilliant Indie Ink. Please swing by and have a read and subscribe for some excellent writing and art.

***

I shall not be watching The Wedding today. Not because I am a staunch republican or because I am anti royal. More because it's the annual Reading Beer Festival (mentioned in this blog post from 2009) so I will be in a field getting slowly sozzled and sunburnt (or in a marquee if the weather is bad) drinking cider with chums.

See you on the other side!

Ogres

2011-04-26T20:51:00.002+01:00

I don’t speak if I can help it. At school the teachers barely see me anyway so it doesn’t matter if I never raise my hand or ask any questions. Besides, I know that exams and certificates don’t matter in the real world. In the real world I’ll end up working for dad at the yard, fetching and carrying and keeping my mouth shut. No need for clever ideas or backchat there. Dad has made that quite clear. And I don’t fancy another clip round the ear for saying the wrong thing.

Instead I write stories in my head. Fantastic tales of unicorns and tigers and ogres and fair princesses with long brown hair, just like mum’s. I can do magic and fly carpets and rescue the maidens (especially the one that looks like Sally Thomas from 11C with her freckles and her tight shirt that makes me feel all funny down there). I do battle with giants on a daily basis, in my head, sword fighting techniques that a knight from a film would be proud of, jumping over tables and swinging from chandeliers.

Last time I swung from the light fitting at home dad belted me one. Told me off for damaging the cable and what was I doing, pulling on the light like that? I had a pink hand print on my face for twenty minutes after that one and a bruise that I had to brush my hair over or else teacher would have asked me how I got it. So instead I keep the chandeliers in my head and keep my adventures to myself.

These days it’s harder to remember what mum looks like. I can remember the smell of her, fresh and clean and warm like sheets from the line on my bed when it's just been made. And I remember the way it felt to hold her hand, all soft and safe. But dad took down the photos, said he didn’t want to be reminded what she looked like. He called her “that bitch” again. I didn’t get chance to take one of the pictures and put it under my chest of drawers before dad put them on a bonfire in the back garden. It was the middle of the day and one of the neighbours got mad with dad for making her laundry smell. She complained to the council about it and dad got a visit from a man in a suit. He didn’t like that, not one little bit. Her yappy little dog went missing and now the lady next door is afraid to come out into her garden. I’m not sure why. It’ll stop the dog from trying to dig that spot in our garden all the time, though.

It’s GCSEs next month but dad says I needn’t go. Waste of time he says. I’ll be starting full time down the yard with him instead. I’m looking forward to it; out of the way of all the teachers and away from Sally with her eyelashes and her tight clothes. Just me and dad and nobody else in yard of broken cars to climb on. And I can kill all the ogres I like.

Four days

2011-04-21T19:04:00.005+01:00

When making a round of tea in our office it’s only polite to offer a brew to other people in one’s department. This I do two or three times a day because I drink a fair amount of tea. If I don’t get enough I get a bit edgy and a fresh cuppa is the perfect excuse to step away from work and spreadsheets and instant messenger for a few precious minutes. The offer of tea is frequent from other people so asking if anyone wants a cup is a quick and not very arduous task.

Today was slightly different. The Easter weekend stretches out before us like my mental image of an American style tarmac road, smooth and straight and with no traffic. Everyone in the office has plans and standing with my empty cup in hand, tea bag in my pocket (Twining’s Lady Grey is my normal brew, though I do like the odd Earl Grey on occasion – mostly because they have proper boiling water in the office canteen and the fanciest bags they have are Earl Grey) I make more of an effort to talk to my colleagues than I normally would. It’s easier to chat when you have a shared interest. The prospect of four continuous free of charge days off in a row seemed to make everyone just a little bit giddy.

The Accounts Payable girls smilingly shared their plans with me and we laughed and joked. Sana was having a late Mother’s Day celebration arranged by one of her aunties for her mum. Being Kuwaiti she’d never celebrated it before so was intrigued as to how it would go. Laura was off to Portugal to a place she couldn’t pronounce but that Nicola could as her Nan lives very near there. Nicola was lucky enough to spend every summer in her Nan’s swimming pool when she was little (I was literally a mermaid when I was about seven she said to me. You don’t mean literally do you? I asked and she agreed that this was not entirely true). Her Easter weekend, though, was going to be spent on a beach somewhere which seemed very appropriate considering*. Becky was planning an Easter egg hunt for her nieces and nephews. The oldest is only four so she was going to make picture clues to help them track down the chocolate treasure. Even Keith, who is strictly speaking part of Accounts Payable but who sits on the very periphery, quiet and lightly bearded, had plans, mainly revolving around him and a crate of beer. You have to respect a plan like that – properly indulgent and relaxing.

And me? Well it’s very much a weekend of two halves. One hectic half filled with days and nights out followed by a currently calm an unplanned half with nothing scheduled except some time with Mr Manbag and perhaps a bit of washing. This I like. A yin-yang weekend with a bit of everything and all the hectic stuff up front so I can kick back and recover afterwards.

Interestingly no one I spoke to had any plans to visit a church. At least they didn’t tell me if they did (which wouldn’t be very evangelical, would it?). Easter now feels like it fits more with its original pagan celebration of the spring equinox, the planting and sprouting of crops and the eating of vast amounts of pagan chocolate.

For my Easter celebration I have a Lindt chocolate bunny chilling, as it were, in my fridge – a gift from Lady Sarah – and I will dutifully save it until Sunday. That’s when Easter chocolate is officially allowed to be opened (unless you’re Christina Warwick, my childhood friend who used to receive a dozen massive Easter eggs and would still have them left weeks later when I would have scoffed the lot in a day. Not that I bear grudges). I may not be religious but I do have some restraint. Though I will bite its little ears off before breakfast.

Happy Easter everyone.

*On second thoughts I think she might have been going to Manchester. Which is not at all fitting for a mermaid. Unless you count swimming up the Manchester Ship Canal.

The Pygmy Giant

2011-04-19T09:19:00.000+01:00

I am very excited to tell you that I have a piece of work published (my first!) today over at The Pygmy Giant. Do swing by and read it, comment and sign up to read more of the same from lots of other writers.

Thanks for your support!

A love note

2011-04-14T22:13:00.003+01:00

Apologies for another short blog post. Work is really rather busy and so I am a little brain fried at the moment.

I can’t believe it took so long to find you. There are so many things about you I love; your smooth soft skin, the way I felt instantly relaxed with you, the way I wanted you in my life and how I couldn’t wait to get you home.

Having you there with me changes everything. I love coming home to you, to your enveloping embrace. I love the nights we spend watching telly together or just staring out the window or listening to music, not talking but still feeling, well, comfortable. The Sunday papers feel like a real treat when I read them with you.

You’re so much bigger than your predecessor, too. I like that an awful lot, even though I know I shouldn’t be so shallow. I love the way you feel against my bottom when we snuggle and the way you support me. I haven’t done it yet but I think I could cry and you wouldn’t judge me for letting my emotions spill out like that. These things are important to me.

I honestly never thought I’d find a sofa I liked as much as you.

Him

2011-04-11T15:12:00.000+01:00

I sit on the edge of the bed; the sheets are clean and crisp because we have just changed them. The counterpane is folded back and there’s a slight breeze from the bedroom window. Despite the fact that it is the very worst time of the week – Sunday night, before another testing week at work – I feel calm and peaceful.

It’s because of him.

The en-suite door is open as he brushes his teeth. He is naked and the shallow dents caused by his socks are still visible at his ankles. He is constantly on the move, shifting his weight from foot to foot as if there is something urgent he needs to get to once he’s finished brushing but that is his way, the pacing tiger. He’s had his hair cut this weekend so the back of his neck looks smooth and bare and the curve of his hairline over his ears is at once artificial and completely natural. His bottom is downy and peachy and there is not an ounce of fat too much upon his frame, regardless of the number of times he stands in front of the mirror stroking his firm but slightly pot belly.

Just having him there, naked at the bathroom sink, makes me smile and count my blessings.

There are times when he frustrates me, when he irritates the hell out of me with his tendency to initiate projects at or after midnight or his repetitive little phrases that can switch from being a shared joke to an infuriating habit depending on my fickle mood. But there are times like this when I find it especially easy to admit that I am completely in love.

I type on my netbook sitting in bed with the sheets furled around my legs and he asks if I am writing something short or long (short) and if he’s in it (yes). Then he asks me if it is affectionate. It most definitely is.

Quarter end

2011-04-07T14:11:00.001+01:00

I drive to work with the roof of the car down, the sunlight warming my whole body for what feels like the first time ever. I wrap a scarf hastily around my hair when I stop at traffic lights before hitting the motorway and spend the rest of the journey tugging it back with my hand to look over my shoulder as I manoeuvre. It’s annoying but a small price to pay to try and stop the wind whipped frizz. In the office the first topic of conversation is the sunshine; our habit of talking about the weather is fed by the golden light.

I pop out at lunchtime to grab some lunch and a few bits and bobs from the supermarket, those little odds and sods that were forgotten on our bank breaking Big Shop at the weekend. The car is warm and welcoming and even those little squeaks and knocks don’t seem so bad in the heat. On days like this I wish the supermarket was further from the office so I could wind the windows down and enjoy a drive along winding countryside roads; instead I drive a mile or so across a motorway junction, with lorries and trucks for company.

After a day in the office spent gazing wistfully out of the window I drive home along the tree lined Bath Road. The sun dappled pavements are peppered with pedestrians with their coats draped across their arms, as if they didn’t hear or didn’t believe the forecast before they left the house. Even the ugly high rise blocks seem jolly in this weather, their normally forbidding facades somehow brighter.

It feels like the first three months of the year have flown past, those grey, damp days all behind us now. I’m sure that’s an allegory for something but I’m not quite sure what. With the sun in my hair I'm not sure I care.

100 words: sleepless

2011-04-04T14:31:00.001+01:00

I wake up screaming, my hair plastered to my head with cold sweat. I feel completely alone and abandoned and wonder if anyone heard my screams. I lie there for a second or two, listening for footsteps of someone to comfort me in my terror.

I hold my breath for a moment then I start to cry, the brackish tears soaking my pillow in no time. I cry for the pain, for the feeling of being so helpless, for this sense of being forsaken. I can’t bear these sensations and the ache in my head.

Teething is such a bitch.

100 words: Spiderman

2011-03-30T13:42:00.001+01:00

I drive past him on the corner, an unlikely figure in a Spiderman costume. He’s given up with the mask so his face sits incongruously above the outsize pizza box he’s wearing. He’s advertising something to do with stuffed crust, I think.

It started raining about an hour ago but he shows no sign of leaving, his face unemotional despite the looks of derision he must be getting as we drive past him. Every car that uses the roundabout sees him there.

My first instinct is to pity him. But then I return to the glass cage of the office.

100 words: Million to one

2011-03-28T21:30:00.003+01:00

Mr Manbag bought me a CD whilst we were away in beautiful Bristol last weekend; Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds, two thin silver slices of childhood memories.

In the car this morning I wanted my journey to last that little bit longer as the martians’ heat rays swept across Horsfall Common and Richard Burton’s booming voice similarly swept across the interior of my car. On the way home the terrifying “ulla!” made my spine tingle and the hairs on my arms stand up. Tomorrow I think Thunderchild will falls beneath waves. So many evocative tracks. And still they come.

Sunday

2011-03-25T16:15:00.001Z

Post currently removed as it is due to be published elsewhere

Rear window

2011-03-22T20:53:00.003Z

The building that runs alongside our back garden had been empty for some time. The previous owners had given up running a hostel for single women some time before and we hadn’t missed the tenants. There’s something about waking up to find a cooked breakfast, frying pan and all, in one’s back yard that can’t quite be forgotten. Or there was the time that the weird chap from the ground floor bedsit had girls hanging out the windows and whooping at him before throwing an empty bottle of Jack Daniels at his head. And of course nothing quite matches the sound of Mariah Carey being played with the volume knob up to eleven at two o’clock on a summer’s morning, our windows, open to the warm air, drawing in the full ululating effect.

So when it was empty for a while it was kind of nice. Peaceful. Even when squatters moved in they were better neighbours than the rough and ready girls. They may have been lousy at playing the guitar but at least they kept reasonable hours and the lawn mowed. The only loud noise was the clatter of the metal shutters as they climbed in and out of the sealed up windows, sneaking in and out and staying under the radar. I liked them. I was less a fan of the rats that came with them but a hefty dose of poison and they were quiet, too.

Then after a year of complete serenity things changed. The building got sold to new owners and requests for planning permission came in. For a while I dreaded that we’d get students and that the late night noise would be back, albeit Go! Team and Arctic Monkeys instead of Mariah Carey. But actually the new owners seemed to be a different class. They fitted new windows, ripped out the nasty communal kitchens and built a bike shed. They chatted to us over the wall, where our bits of abandoned tree had been thrown the year before. They put in security lights and cameras and came to tell us when they saw suspicious activity in our back garden. It felt, well, different.

As the new tenants moved in I braced myself for sleepless nights that never came. Such a relief. When the rooms became full again I thought how wrong I’d been about the empty building and how nice it was that it was being put to good use, homes for “good” people.

I hadn’t banked on the free show, though. Going through to bed one night I went to close the blinds and my eye was caught by the light in one of the windows. I was trying not to look but there is something hypnotic about the skin and the movement and the way they moved in time together, just two torsos framed by the window’s edge. I couldn’t see their faces and I dropped the blind pretty quickly, guilty about what I had chanced upon. I peek round the blind again and it was definitely real, the heave of buttocks and the clasping hands still there, still moving. I walked away feeling slightly seedy, like a peeping Tom caught in the act.

The next night their curtains were closed.

Now I check the window every night as I close the blinds, an unintentional act as my eyes are lured towards the sprinkle of glowing squares along the side of the building next door like golden confetti on the flat red bricks. Their curtains have never been open again. Maybe they just don’t make love any more. I feel sad for them; sad that I caught them, flesh on flesh, sad that might have I ruined what was probably the first time together in their new home.

At the same time I think that they should have shut the windows to start with, filthy exhibitionists.

Safety blanket

2011-03-18T18:54:00.003Z

There are some things that never change. The familiarity of the call and response conversations gives a cosiness to the daily routine. It makes those otherwise potentially uneasy exchanges into something snug and relaxing like an old comfort blanket – it might be a bit old and maybe it smells a little funky but it’s still reassuring to clutch it in your tired little hand.

At work we have many of these. There’s the Monday conversation:
How are you? Oh you know how it is. Yeah, Mondays, eh? That must have been the shortest weekend ever. Yep, and no sign of a lottery win.

Then there’s the Wednesday conversation:
How are you? Oh you know how it is, busy busy. Yeah, it never seems to change. Well, at least we’re halfway there. It’s all downhill from here, right? Yep, roll on Friday.

And then there’s the Friday conversation:
How are you? Oh you know how it is. Thank god it’s Friday. Yeah, makes all the difference. Can’t wait for five o’clock. This week has gone on forever/gone so fast. So glad it’s almost over. What are you up to this weekend? That sounds like fun/ so nice to have a quiet weekend in!

I like these routines we fall into; the way everyone knows the script and the right time to raise an eyebrow or turn away and make a cuppa as if there were stage directions; [exit stage left followed by a cuppa].

Sometimes the conversation turns a bit meta: instead of falling into the normal patter we slip into the alternate mode of talking about what we always talk about. Occasionally I will say I have this same conversation every week! Isn’t it funny that we all say the same thing on Mondays/Wednesdays/Fridays? and somehow that level of self awareness makes the “normal” conversation ironic and therefore acceptable.

Deep down it feels like there could be something more to this. We don’t really talk to each other. It almost feels like a waste to talk when it's so utterly superficial. I mean I know that Bob in the office has a new grandson, his first, and he’s not a fan of its name (Rupert) and I know that Sarah was in a play and she’s not sure whether to sign up for the next one because rehearsals start a week after performances of the last one. And I know that Mike is having a joint first birthday / mother’s day party for his wife and son in a couple of weeks. But I don’t know much more about them. It’s like seeing a building but with net curtains at all the windows.

I wonder if in Japan they have these same conversations in the office every day. If they talk absentmindedly about the weather and the sports results from the weekend. I wonder if they tell stories about their children and make jokes about the bad coffee. And I wonder if they ever thought that there would be a time that they wished that they had scratched the surface a little more, dug a little deeper, made a proper connection. Time is the one thing we all think we have plenty of but actually we only borrow.

I challenge you, next week, to take a break with a colleague. Maybe sit down and have a cup of tea and find out how they’re doing. Take your time and have a biscuit with that cuppa. Make eye contact. See if it feels good. And I will try it too.

100 words: Mother in law

2011-03-16T23:43:00.002Z

The phone rings and Mr Manbag answers. It’s my mum, I can tell from the way his voice changes; it lightens and he adopts a Witney accent. They talk for fifteen minutes or so exchanging news on illnesses, doctor’s appointments and treatment.

He hands the phone to me and she instructs me to give him a hug. Then we chat a little longer, making plans for Egypt. “I’ll let you go and sort your dinner out” she says. I tell her that there’s time. But no, she says she rang to speak to Mr Manbag. I am redundant. But happy.

Protection

2011-03-14T22:51:00.000Z

I don’t plan to have kids. I can see the attraction and I understand why people make that choice but it’s just not for me. I met Mr Manbag at what feels like late in my life and I have no desire to share him with anyone else, regardless of how adorable they might be. On top of this I don’t really have that maternal instinct. Years of training mean I can dandle a baby on my knee as well as anyone but I have no inclination to not hand it back at the end. But there is something about being married and being in love that is like having kids.

I have a strong protective urge. I can’t help it.

Mr Manbag is perfectly capable of looking after himself. But every time I see him in pain it cuts me up inside like it was my own. When he’s in hospital having an investigation and the tube down his throat is making him retch and curl up into the foetal position I can’t do anything but sit at the bottom of the bed holding onto his dusty Dr Martens. When he has to go through it all over again but under sedation they take him away and I can do nothing for him but wait for his return. All I can do is sit in another room on a gaudy sofa with thin cushions, eking out a magazine that I am not really reading waiting for him to come back to me. When he had some bad news recently and came home absolutely needing to cry the only thing I wanted to do was to wrap him in my arms and let the tears drop onto my shoulder and then, somehow, make it go away. And it kills me that I can’t do that.

Cruise

2011-03-12T16:19:00.002Z

It’s been several months since I wrote anything. The cramps in my hands are so bad that even typing this opening sentence has had me reeling from the agony. The pains are almost constant now, even the sunshine that warms my shoulders doesn’t ease the spikes of pain that push through my flesh with every movement. I shall stop to take some painkillers so bear with me. I doubt that they’ll help but I will try them anyway. I feel like it is time to share this with someone. Anyone.

***

I always assumed that a normal, average girl like me would fall in love, marry, have kids, breed chickens and grow old somewhere in the countryside with a brood of grandchildren and a husband who liked to potter round the garden. I was nothing special to look at, plain to a fault if I am honest, but like any other girl I had fantasies of white weddings, summer holidays, parents evenings, chequered blankets, wiped noses, short haircuts and shared beds. I had even picked out the names that my children would have when they were brought kicking and screaming into the world. In the end none of this is true. I am only twenty-six and yet to look at me you would think I was eighty. My skin is gossamer thin and lays over my bones like thin sheets of paper, the green and blue veins resemble an underground map. I paint my nails every week to bring some colour back to my once beautiful hands. Red is my favourite, it looks young and vibrant and less out of place than the girlish pinks I once wore.

My feet are forever sore and I tread lightly first thing in the morning, when they are not awake, and last thing at night when the day’s rigours have been too much. The daily walks that I take are part necessity part punishment; I need to stretch my legs to keep my joints mobile but I push myself too far. I think I deserve the agony that my poor feet will inflict on me - I guess this harks back to my catholic childhood. Back then I honestly thought that absolution would come with a few words and a wafer until I realised that words are only that and some recompense is needed to atone. Listen to me! I didn’t realise that I would be so pious in my old age. For this is what it is for me now, my end years are these and though I feel like I have lived a lifetime in this score and four I must acknowledge the fact that it has been so very fleeting.

You wonder now how I came to be like this; this bony frame, this tiny walking skeleton. I worked as a special delivery agent, recruited when I had just finished university, the ink on my degree still wet. The idea of being a spy is so much more romantic than the real thing. It is nothing like James Bond would have you believe; there were no guns, no champagne, no fabulous cocktail dresses and definitely no late night rendezvous with suave assassins. Instead I was essentially just a trader, passing information from place to place as if it were any other commodity. I could have been a courier or a drugs mule for all the thrill that this held for me. I slept in inconspicuous hotels and dined in my room alone, staying out of sight.

I got used to spending time alone, the melancholy of a single girl in a foreign city can be quite affecting and as time went on I began to prefer being alone. I became almost mute, my only conversations with ticket agents and waiters. I wouldn’t even speak to my contacts, I would just acknowledge them with a gentle nod, hand over the brown envelopes or buff folders and leave without even looking back. It was easy work in retrospect. Lonely but easy.

My last package is the one I regret. I should have realised that something was wrong because the money was so good. Of course, it is how I end up here, somewhere so luxurious for my end of days. I live my life on this cruise ship - while the people around me go from port to port experiencing new and exotic locations I stay on deck in the sunshine, warming these old bones and watching the horizon shift between the brightest cloudless blues and the deep purple of a tropical night.

I had a small package to deliver. I found out afterwards that it contained a sample of a new chemical agent but I didn’t care about that at the time. It was just a job, another in a long line of work that I had been assigned. I didn’t twig that there was something wrong until I met up with my contact at the other end. The weather was bitter – you can see why the babushkas wear those thick furry hats when it’s cold enough to freeze the breath when it’s still in one’s lungs – and we met in a small underground bar, the booths tucked into dark corners with mock communist posters pasted onto the table tops. I handed over the package and my contact picked it up and placed it straight into a thick metal case then wiped his hands down with a disinfectant cloth. I left the bar quickly and returned to my tiny drab hotel room wishing that I had someone who cared for me to tell me it would be okay. And now you know it wasn’t.

For the past two years I have officially been retired. Signed off as sick by a government who thought it they were responsible for my decline when in fact I had been selling its secrets. So I lie here on a smart white lounger, hiding my aged face under a sunhat and glasses, on a cruise ship that is floating somewhere on the Caribbean Sea. Dying with betrayal.

Up the down ramps

2011-03-07T19:59:00.005Z

The two buildings across from me are empty. They have never been used, built at the wrong time to be wanted by a constricted market. It seems such a shame. The setting sun floods them with light, making them glow a serene yellow-green, their white painted concrete exteriors bounce the light off making the spring sunshine seem even bolder, forcing me to lower my blind against the invasive brightness. Even their helix shaped fire escapes look lovely in this light, gracefully curving round like the wrists of a dancer, twisting and turning in perfect rotational symmetry.

If these were my buildings I would come here at night when the sun is set and the bats whirl around the trees and dive over the lake to catch the last flies of the evening. I would dance and roller skate and play basketball along the shiny tiled floors with only a million drivers on the motorway to see me. No one would hear me sing at the top of my voice, making the most of what must be fantastic acoustics in the empty echoing chambers.

I would step rhythmically along the vast expanses of space and watch the motion sensitive lights come on one by one like a cheap upside-down impersonation of the Billy Jean video, the only noise my shoes on the floor as I twist and turn and fail to moonwalk. I would play in the lifts and impersonate the voice of the woman who says “first floor”, “second floor” then race down the stairs with a level of gay abandon that I’d never manage in my work clothes, swinging off the banister as I skip, hop, jump.

But then perhaps the owner already does this. Maybe he comes at night when even the most over zealous office workers have gone and drives round the multi storey car park the wrong way, up the down ramps and down the up ramps. Maybe he rides his bicycle round the pillars, squeaking his brakes as he corners too close to them and ringing his bell for no-one to get out of his way. Or ballet dances in his suit, en pointe in his loafers, elegantly bending his arm over his body like the swan that he is inside.

Or maybe he doesn't. And what a wasted opportunity that is.

The phone call

2011-03-02T16:54:00.003Z

I only hear from him when he’s on the oil rig, wherever that might be. He does a few weeks on, a few weeks off, seeing the world from the platform, and spends his time at home with someone who I suppose I should call my stepmother. I have only met her once, at a funeral. I don't think we were introduced.

My mother is anxious. She hasn’t heard from him in a while and although she doesn’t care for him she doesn’t wish him ill and is worried that a minor, symptomless illness he had been suffering from has escalated. She thinks him hospitalised and that the stepmother would not think to contact any of his daughters. I am not sure she’d know how to, anyway.

When my mum first asks me to ring I say yes, as I usually do to things my mum asks me, a reflex reaction from years of training. But then I start to worry and play scenarios out in my head. What if the stepmother asks why I am ringing? Does she know that he emails and calls us from the rig? Will I get him in trouble by calling? What if he is in hospital? Or worse? So I put off calling for as long as I can. Until my mum starts running scenarios of her own and worries that we could be properly, officially fatherless and not know it. Of course we have nearly always been fatherless, his absence marked by no void that my mother couldn’t fill.

So I relent and call him. Strangely the phone doesn’t ring; there is no whirring sound or pips or clicks. Just a silence at the end of the line. I call my mum and tell her I can’t connect (the irony is only apparent to me now that I write this). Then I get the phone company to check the line, just in case there’s something wrong. There isn’t. So I try another phone, check it isn’t just me.

It rings. The stepmother answers. I ask for him by his first name and she asks me to hang on. She calls out to him, abbreviating his name in a way that, to my ears, sounds unnatural. I wonder what he’s doing, what his house is like, what he's watching on TV, who he thinks I might be. We speak briefly; he’s off the rig for a longer break, he’s fine, he’ll be back one day next week. He asks how I am but it feels like he doesn’t want to talk, his life with her is so very separate to mine and he doesn’t feel comfortable when the two overlap. He'll call me when he's back on the rig.

I hang up.

100 words: Explosion

2011-02-28T19:26:00.002Z

It started as an email – a fire on the estate had shut the road. We couldn’t drive off the estate for lunch from our dead end road. From the windows we saw only reflective jackets; no smoke, no fire.

Then it escalated; there was a gas canister on fire and others near it. They can take 48 hours to cool down. We’d have to stay overnight or get shuttled home by coaches from across the lake.

Then it was all over. They’d put out the fire, the canisters were safe.

I was disappointed. I’d already picked songs for the coach.

Pyjamas

2011-02-24T16:50:00.004Z

He’s been ill all week, an as yet unknown illness which makes him weak and sick and fearful for the future. It’s hard to cope with him feeling down without being dismissive but we manage day by day. It gets easier, somehow, when there are steps to be taken, appointments to be made.

I leave the warmth and comfort of the bed in the morning reluctantly and step into the shower as he wriggles across onto my side of bed, as if to mark the finality of my rest. I dress without putting the light on, the only brightness coming from the bathroom, a narrow arc of yellow across the room. I put on my make up in the lounge and dry my hair by the blackboard, photos of him still there from his birthday almost a year ago. As I blow the strands this way and that I can only feel if they’re right or not, my hand touching the surface to try and guess the shape like a very bad impersonation of the video for “Hello”. I go back and forth between the lounge and the bedroom with each thing I’ve forgotten; hair spray, watch, jewellery.

As I lean over the bed to kiss him goodbye he only rouses briefly, just enough time to know who I am and where I am going, before being pulled back down by the duvet and blanket. I am very envious of this, though not of his illness.

Returning home from work he is in the lounge but still in his pyjamas, a day or two of stubble on his handsome face. He still pulls the little half-smile that I know is a smile on the outside only. We hug hello, marking my return with a scratch of his chin upon my neck as he nestles into me as each embrace becomes more important.

In the bedroom he’s folded my pink pyjamas and neatly put them under the pillow. The counterpane is properly folded under the duvet and the blanket put on the foot of the bed just the way I would do it were I home. I know he only makes the bed because I expect him to so it’s lovely that he’s done this, gone the extra mile.

It’s nice to be missed.

Music school

2011-02-22T22:12:00.000Z

I was never a “proper” musical child. I never learned to play the violin or the oboe or those “proper” classical instruments. These days I wish I’d learned to play the piano; I have long fingers and a natural ear for a tune so I think I would have been good at it. Of course we didn’t have a piano at home so practising would have been difficult (or possibly just a very good excuse for a child as lazy as I was). I was so envious of those posher kids at school who had music rooms but I am sure had I been that lucky I wouldn’t have appreciated it.

In my class of 20 or 30 six year olds it was the norm to learn to play the recorder. Everyone I know had this as their first instrument, even if they never continued with it. The recorders at school were kept upended in a bucket of weak bleach solution in a dark cupboard so every lesson would begin with the recorders being shaken out. The real prize was that the recorder wasn’t just bleachy and scratched by years of milk teeth but it would have an earwig (or "pincher" as we used to call them) nestled somewhere in the mouthpiece. I still shudder now at the thought of one of those beasties crawling out, accompanied by a shrill scream and possibly some spitting as its presence was revealed. This did not deter us, though, and most kids in the class would struggle through the classics – Baa Baa Black Sheep, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and Three Blind Mice. Those were rock and roll days.

When I reached the grand old age of, erm, eight, I started to get a new string to my bow. I started to play the guitar. Mr Rogers, my class teacher, was terribly cool to eight year old me. He wore Chelsea boots, rode a blue and white moped and played a steel stringed guitar like an old bluesman. We thought he was cool. Well, I did. He would play old songs like “Your Baby Has Gone Down the Plughole” with full on mockney accent and some song about whitewashing which included words which sounded remarkably like “round the fucking 'orners”. Unlikely, I confess, but how we were to know? I remember very little about guitar lessons with Mr Rogers but I do remember getting my first guitar, a nylon stringed Spanish style guitar from the local music shop. Mum used a whole week’s child benefit to buy it for me for my birthday and I know how much I loved the patina of the back, a rich red-brown colour and so shiny I could see my pony-tailed face in it. I loved the symbolism of carrying it to school – lighter than a ‘cello so I could sling it across my back. I think I even practised on it until the tips of my fingers hardened enough to play without making me sore.

When I moved onto secondary school (that place with the bottle green uniform) the guitar soon fell by the wayside, much to my mum’s chagrin. I would occasionally whip it out at the weekends to show willing but my heart wasn’t in it and there was no teacher to keep a check on my progress. Instead I turned to a new love; shiny, with a dozen or so bold bright buttons, a velvet lined case and a stick with a bit of cloth to clean it out. Yes, it was time to move on to a proper instrument, one that might even be in an orchestra. The flute.

I already knew my flute teacher Jill from Sunday School (don’t judge me. Friday night games club at church was bonkers fun) and I think this might have influenced me to learn it – surely she’d be a bit easier on me, help me along? Besides, my older sister Heidi had learned flute at school only a few years before me, we had a history of this, a family tradition if you will. I started to learn on a “county flute”, one of Jill's own supply of instruments to give students a try at learning without needing to invest. It was gorgeous – super shiny and easy to play on. Even the high notes weren’t a struggle with this beauty. I wanted so much to have natural talent (I remember auditioning to get the lessons and one of my schoolmates being most indignant that she didn’t get to learn – her hair lip made it difficult for her to get a note out) so that I didn’t need to practise. But other than managing to get a note out easily there was no easy way to learn. Practise would be limited by my laziness and as much as I thought I could get away with it I was getting used to a weekly telling off as Jill would purse her lips and look down her nose at me as it became obvious I hadn’t practised. Still we continued with me scraping by with minimal hours spent flauting in my bedroom. It wasn’t fun.

The final straw was when my beautiful shiny county flute was taken away from me. My time as an amateur was over; I had to get my own flute. Unfortunately for me we already had a family flute. I inherited Heidi’s old flute like a hand-me-down pair of dungarees; I knew I had no real reason to say no but my heart wasn’t in it. It wasn’t shiny, it wasn’t nearly as new and, worst of all, it didn’t play as well. Those top notes suddenly became elusive, so my inadequate practising became all the more obvious to Jill. I don’t remember how long I lasted after “the change” but I doubt that it was long, a couple of months maybe. Then it was all over. No more dented flute, no more missed top notes, no more raised eyebrows from Jill.

Wind on *cough cough* years and nothing has changed. I haven’t picked up a musical instrument intending to properly learn it since. Mr Manbag and I bought his and hers ukuleles as a wedding present recently but other than that I’ve not had call to go into Hickies, the Reading music shop. My old guitar is in my mum’s loft, the strings are either broken and stretched or the neck is cracked from them being over-tightened or maybe she’s given it away by now to a charity shop or some other eager child. If not I imagine the flute keeps it company, up in the dark with the spiders and fibreglass. Now instead I play the only musical instrument that I can practise freely, the only one where I don’t need sheet music or a teacher or my hands to be unencumbered. And sometimes when I have had a long day, or I have had a hard day or I have had a bad night and I am in my car or riding the elevator at work or waiting for the kettle to boil this is the only instrument that can bring a smile to my face and let the stress fall from my shoulders. And best of all it’s free.

Visit

2011-02-17T17:24:00.002Z

The drive to my mum’s house in Oxfordshire takes you north out of Reading through Caversham onto the A4074 – one of those roads that the UK is littered with that is winding, scenic and naturally gets the nickname The Seven Bends of Death such is its twisting nature. The very moment you leave semi urban Caversham you cross over the border into Oxfordshire and the Chiltern Valley with its sweeping vistas, apparently motionless kites and its innumerable potholes.

The drive is an hour and takes in some beautiful views; Didcot Power Station (I am not being ironic, I think it’s truly beautiful with its hourglass columns and steamy plumes), the vast green-ness of the Chilterns, the skyline of Oxford and its dreaming spires and then into Witney, land of the Prime Minister (at least officially).

As I come along the top of the green that my mum lives at the foot of I can see her car in the driveway. This is a very good sign. Whilst my visit was pre-arranged this does not necessarily mean my mum will be in. She is always busy doing something and is almost always late so it’s a bonus that she’s home. She watches me park and holds the door open commenting that I’ve lost weight. I don’t think I have, I think she’s just being nice. We hug tightly with my frame enveloping hers, the very opposite of how it used to be all those years ago, and both shed our coats and boots before she goes to change out of her uniform and I put the kettle on. It’s only a brief visit but it feels just right. I settle in quickly and we chat for a few hours, conversation returning repeatedly to the gift she gave me- something so apt and so very me that I can’t quite believe it. It’s perfect. We talk about Egypt and she gets excited about our plans, hoping it can all go ahead as going to Borneo, the alternative, is so much more complicated and expensive; Egypt was always our first choice.

As the clocks tick on it becomes time for me to leave. She is tired from her early morning of work and I want to be on the road so that I hit Reading before the traffic, so I gather up my things, zip on my boots and head for the door. She walks me out, always there, and we chat about my car before she hugs me goodbye. We hold on for a long time, these embraces we get are too few and far between. We laugh about something and then laugh about how we laughed about it and I feel warm and fuzzy inside. She kisses me through the open car window and tells me to drive safely, like she always does. I tell her I will, like I always do. Our exchange is no less important because it’s a routine.

The drive back is even more beautiful than the one out; the sun is shining and it warms my bones as my little old car bumps along the roads, swerving round the potholes and roadkill. As I pass a bus I catch the remainder of the driver’s wave to the bus in front of me, like the dying embers of the greeting still glowing on his hands. It seems every interaction today is extra warm, be it the bus driver’s wave or the squeeze hello in my mum’s hallway. Happy birthday to me.

Anne

2011-02-15T18:50:00.001Z

I've known Anne for almost two years now, ever since I started working here. She's been a staple in my work life, her desk has never moved and her role never changed despite the way our organisation seems to be in a constant state of flux. It's a relatively small firm where personality counts for a lot and when one person changes job the effect ripples through the company as if a pebble were dropped onto a lake.

Anne is above all of this, though. She has been PA to a very senior person for a fair few years, her term of office somehow seemingly at odds with her age. She's only a couple of years older than me but she's mum to one handsome little boy and she comes across as supremely confident, a woman very much in charge of her domain. She manages to be glamorous and chic every day, something which very few people in our dressed down atmosphere manage.

As time has gone by we have moved from saying hello and making tea to hugged greetings and shared lunches. Once a month or so we lunch out with an ex-colleague who used to be my boss but, since she went on maternity leave, is now more of a confidante and co-conspirator. Most lunches involve a pub trip and are always accompanied by a single glass of wine each, perhaps stretched out into a spritzer. These little shared indulgences bond us together for the hour and a half when we are out of the office, out of sight, chatting, gossiping and laughing as if we were on a night out instead of a stolen ninety minutes. Anne is always easy company with a story for every occasion and a positive attitude that is hard not to be drawn into and these chances to be ourselves without the clanging of telephones and chirping of emails are a treasure.

But now another pebble has dropped into the pool and Anne is leaving, her paper boat rocked by the ever expanding concentric circles. Changes in her home life mean that not only is she leaving our company but she is moving away. Today was her last day.

It was a shock if not a complete surprise; the changes that had happened the week before had made it seem like she could be leaving but still the email that came round today making it all rather real and all rather definite was a bolt out of the blue. I am not used to short goodbyes at work. Normally a month or two of notice is worked and in that time I can get used to the impending absence, like preparing for a holiday or a trip to the dentist - with some planning and adjusting you know it will be just fine.

She made plans for a lunch out and I changed my diary to accompany her as she walked out of the building for the last real time. She scooted round saying hurried goodbyes and returning her laptop and door pass before we headed out onto the road. There were only three of us at lunch, the short notice making life difficult for those who would have liked to come, but still Anne, Pretty Lisa and I chatted and gossiped and laughed like always. We made plans for future lunches and visits to her new house and sketched out a new future for her in a new place.

As we left the pub and hugged goodbye I think I held onto her for just a moment too long, not wanting to release her slim body from my bear hug. I told her I was going to miss her and squeezed just a little bit tighter than normal, my face in her mane of blonde hair. I am proud to say that I really meant it. Work friendships are precious things, shaped by adversity or struggle instead of alcohol and chance.

Tomorrow there will be an Anne shaped void in the office.

Stew

2011-02-13T18:29:00.004Z

We’re making stew for dinner. This feels like a significant step in our relationship. Seven years of happy marriage and we’ve never made stew together the way it should be – by handfuls and guessing and tasting and remembering.

Stew is one of those quintessential dinners where almost everyone says - and truly believes - that their mum makes the best. In our house it meant coming home from school around half three and knowing from the smell alone what was for dinner – nothing else would be cooked this far in advance. The pot that it was cooked in was one of those icons of 70s Pyrex – white with orange and brown flowers and a clear brown lid. Under that lid would be diced swede, slices of carrot and chopped onions but of course the best bit was the beef. Big chunks of braising beef that had been cooked for so long that it was falling apart, meltingly tender and utterly delicious. The stew would be served with mashed potatoes and at the end the remains of the gravy (made with good old Oxo with a hefty helping of salt and white pepper) would be soaked up with sliced cheap white bread which was always cut into squares for the purpose.

Even as I write this I can picture mum serving it up and us fighting over the dumplings that had only moments before been nestling on top of the stew, pressed up against the smoked glass like greedy schoolkids outside a sweetshop. I can see the dining room as it used to be before mum did up my childhood home. I can even picture the two beautiful Afghan hounds on their armchairs looking mournfully at our full plates knowing that their dinner would mostly be tinned “Chappie” but if they were lucky they’d get some leftovers too. We’d eat this at our big old round dining table with chairs reupholstered with corduroy, five happy girls swinging their legs and tucking into a feast of a dinner. Happy days indeed.

Many years later I was introduced to Mr Manbag’s equivalent stew, made by his mum. It was delicious with the potatoes cooked in the stew and a touch of curry powder in the sauce. If my memory serves it was dished up on Denby rustic styled plates and was probably accompanied by a bottle of red wine, back in the days when not only did we all get on but we all enjoyed a drink with dinner. It was nice to be in the bosom of another family, eating at a dinner table and making idle chit chat and laughing and joking.

But still this second stew wasn’t as good as my own mum’s. The gravy was not quite to my taste and there was no white bread for the leftover juices anyway. It was good but it wasn’t quite the same. Of course the main missing ingredients were a sprinkling of nostalgia and a dash of unconditional love; they simply can’t be found in any other kitchen, at least not for me.

Cut forward to today and we’re making our own stew and creating our own recipe with the ingredients we both bring to the marital pot. It has lots and lots of swede and a teaspoon of curry powder and a good glug of red wine. The pot that it is cooked in is a black, enamelled cast iron casserole that was made by a firm I used to work for. Mr Manbag browned off the beef while I chopped the vegetables then I made up the stock while he sprinkled in the Worcestershire sauce. We add bay leaves even though we don’t think they make any difference and we sprinkle on an extra Oxo cube because somehow it seems like it needs it. This recipe is being written one ingredient at a time by mixing our shared memories and adding in our own joint cooking experiences to make this purely ours.

Whilst we’ll never be able to hand down our recipe to our children or grand children I feel proud of the stew we’re making together, of how it reflects our individual and shared history and of how it is a handful of me and a handful of him. And maybe, just maybe, when the next seven years has passed instead of making stew in a flat in Reading we’ll be making bourguignon in Paris or casserole in a country house near Oxford. I can’t wait to see what dishes tomorrow brings.

That shallot

2011-02-09T22:31:00.002Z

I’ve got lettuce on the window-ledge. Well, strictly speaking it’s not the window ledge, it’s a little fold up table by the window, the ledge being not quite wide enough for the plastic trays that the lettuces rest their roots in.

It’s such a good idea – instead of buying a packet of pre-plucked, pre-washed lettuce washed in spring water we decided to pick up two trays of leaves, still living and breathing and in an inch or two of soil. It’s properly in tune with modern society, the move to greener living, to the way urbanites are seeking new lives on pig farms in Dorset or to people having little patches of potatoes and onions at the foot of the city gardens.

We don’t have any garden. Nothing. Even our neighbours who have garden don’t really have gardens – they have paving and cement and wooden fencing with a couple of loungers and a barbecue instead of lawns and beds and flowers and trees. What we have instead is a parking space. A piece of tarmac about 10 foot by about 8 foot with a few cracks and a couple of weeds and right next to a car that hasn’t moved in so long it’s covered in moss. But for us it’s all important – home to the Baglady-mobile and a moderately valuable piece of tarmac due to our location – but it’s no good for growing shallots or tomatoes.

So last night we had the unusual pleasure of some salad leaves fresh from the soil and then sprinkled the trays and remaining leaves with water, popped them into the light and hey presto! Free salad!

Of course I know deep down that it’s not that simple. When the supermarket has run out of thyme (and we have finished making all the associated jokes) we’ll pick up a potted thyme instead of the little packet of leafy stalks. We’ll use it in a recipe (chicken cassoulet made with lemon, asparagus and haricot. Delicious) and then the pot will sit on the side, half raped for its astonishingly fiddly leaves and then left to dry out.

I’ll water it, an inch or two of tap water splashed onto the soil, then put it on the draining board in case that little plastic bag that says “FRAGRANT THYME” in big letter leaks.

A week later I will look at this sad, dishevelled, dried out plant and water it again. Drench the soil and leave it to drain for five minutes. Then it’s back to the beautiful plastic bag, ready to sit on the windowsill.

After a week of the poorly thyme sitting on the windowsill in the sunshine I will finally give up and throw the damn thing away; the soil has dried out, the leaves look like they are only fit for a misguided 16 year old to attempt to smoke them and even the once regal plastic bag looks careworn.

So now I look at the little fold up table with the two little trays of little leaves, their barren patches showing what we’ve already taken from them and I wonder how long it will be before they, too, are in the bin. Please pray for their little leafy souls.

100 words: sympathy

2011-02-06T21:40:00.002Z

I’ve run out of sympathy.

When he asks me now about his symptoms or suggests that he might have something serious I tell him that maybe he does. Maybe it’s something bad. Because I’ve spent long enough saying it isn’t and that he’ll be okay. I’ve spent an age saying that he’s fine and that he just needs to forget about it. It makes no difference to how he is.

When he asks me why I am being “nasty” by agreeing with his over-blown self-diagnosis I try to explain my logic. That doesn’t work either; now he’s ailing and angry.

Watching

2011-02-03T23:15:00.001Z

I feel like I could have spent the whole day without speaking were it not for the mid-afternoon phone call with one of my team. I spent the working day sequestered away in the flat, working away with my laptop, appropriately, on my lap. My sore back much prefers an arm chair to an office chair so I sit tucked up in the Lady chair by the window.

But this is no ordinary window. This window is roughly 8 foot by 4 foot, a proper Georgian 6 up 6 down sash with a wooden frame and perfectly imperfect glass that can make the world look very slightly distorted.

Outside this window is all of the world.

Across the street is a language school. A small gang of students loiters on the corner, all woolly hats and awkwardly handled cigarettes. The look exceptionally fidgety, the cold of the day accentuating their triangular postures of hunched shoulders and closed, crossed arms. They kick at the ground with their trainers before heading back in to lessons.

There’s an old man walking up the hill. He looks like someone should be looking after him; short trousers and knee high grey socks give him the look of a time travelled schoolboy, trapped in his uniform but spat out in the wrong time at the wrong age. He looks disorientated, checking over his shoulder for who knows what or whom. I worry for him but still I stay where I am and watch him pass.

I watch the traffic come and go. There seems to be a glut of delivery drivers at about 10am, like they all schedule the same route for their cardboard boxes and plastic packages as if their minds have been trained in the same way to follow the roads south first.

On the pavement a young girl in leggings and over the knee boots tries to get a light for her single cigarette. Her coat has a fake fur hood and two enormous furry pom poms which swing slightly comically as she walks. They stop as she stops and asks for a match then swing again as she heads further down the hill, into town.

There’s a moment of weird symmetry as a young, cool, black man crosses the road opposite an old, smart white man. Both are wearing flat caps but other than that couldn’t be more different, at least to the naked eye.

Then I wonder what they would think of me as they look up. Who am I, sat in this window in an old, tired, cream chair, with my laptop and my mug of tea, no make-up and crazy, curly untamed hair. Do they think this is my office? It wouldn’t be a bad assumption on this street of solicitors, language schools and recruitment agencies. Or do they think I am out of work, maybe searching the internet for jobs?

Or maybe they just think I am a nosey bitch looking down on the street making judgements. Maybe.

Sliding

2011-01-31T22:18:00.002Z

It starts as it always does with a profit and loss. Three short Powerpoint slides to show the status of the company. I can see that there are another thirty or forty slides after this. These meetings always seem so long, probably because no one wants to cut down their presentations, just in case they miss something; some nugget of truth that will make it all fall into place.

The first slide is a comparison to last year with a percentage figure showing the reduction in sales and an increase in costs. Clearly this is not a good start to the meeting. This leads to the first of the day’s rabbit holes. Fingers are pointed, excuses made and decisions deftly avoided. It’s a good job the chief exec is not in here or our ears would have been hurting as he shrilly complains about how we make small issues seem difficult. After all, what the company does is just like plugging in a washing machine. How much effort can it take? Today we face another executive, his shirt stretched round his middle so tight that I can see his belly button between the gaps when he twists to the side. This is going to be a fun day. We talk round the numbers at great length. It seems like we’re never going to move on, like we’re tied to this presentation and no amount of sighing will release us.

An hour of discussion passes before we move onto the second slide. Jane takes us through the headcount for her section, complaining that she can’t deliver what we need with the people she has. The CFO disagrees. He clearly thinks she isn’t doing her job properly. Thinks she’s a madam who shifts the blame to other people. We discuss future improvements and ways of doing things better. We do this every meeting. He shares his suggestions with us and we look at each other sideways, acknowledging the work to be done but also sharing in the disdain for his approach, the way he likes to keep secrets, tucked away in the plastic safe of his laptop casing.

Next up slide three; the plan for the savings. This is difficult. We need to make significant cuts to meet the budget. We go through the list – there are some big names and some big numbers on this slide. It’s going to be difficult to cope without these people but the figures don’t lie. And no one will want to take responsibility for the gaps when they’re gone. We all agree it has to happen, though we’re not sure how. We talk about the HR approach and whether these people are to be managed out or given a package. And if they get a package how big it needs to be and whether we can afford it. No one likes to make these sort of choices. Every slide is turning out to be a battle and no one likes it.

We take a break for tea. What is euphemistically called a “comfort break” in offices up and down the country. Yes, we’ve been talking for a while and all need to pee. We have a ten minute gap before we resume. There’s a shuffling of papers and an en masse checking of emails before we kick off.

The first slide is a profit and loss. It shows how we’re doing against last year. The numbers don’t look good. But then... I have a sense of déjà vu about the whole thing. The decrease in revenue and the increase in costs looks kind of... familiar. This is not a good start. It diverts us quickly with a spectacular blame-shifting exercise. Fingers are pointed and excuses made and... hang on. This has definitely happened before. And recently. Very recently.

I stop talking. Around me everyone else continues with their discussions, with fault being ascribed almost randomly to people absent and present. More excuses about why the numbers are so bad. More side stepping and ducking of responsibility. I stand up and circle the board room. No one even notices that I’ve moved out of my seat.

The second slide comes up on the screen. Jane complains about her headcount. Again. I walk to the window and start to lift the blinds which were lowered against the bright sunlight, making it impossible to read from the projector. But it’s not bright sunshine out there, it’s dark. I cup my hands against the glass to try and see beyond our reflections. Inside the room the CFO is getting angry about Jane’s excuses. He doesn’t like her, that much is clear.

Outside, with my hands blocking out the light behind me I can see past the mirror images of the people in the room, past the suits and the slides and the laptops, past the excuses and the shifting blame. There’s nothing there. No car park, no view of the lake, no trees beyond the train track. Nothing. But then I see it’s not quite nothing. It’s nothing except another me, with her hands cupped around her face to block out the reflections of the people behind her.

Falling

2011-01-25T21:18:00.003Z

I’m not and have never been suicidal. I am fortunate enough to never have felt that down in my life that escape seems the only answer. On top of this I simply couldn’t endure the physical pain that suicide would involve. I’m a chicken of the worst degree. I don’t take risks, don’t like hurting. I bruise easily.

But still there are times when I imagine what it would be like to fall. I have a vivid image of how it would look. When at the top of a flight of stairs I imagine my crumpled form at the bottom, I work out what bones I might break and who would be the first to help me. Sometimes I try to imagine who would gather the contents of my handbag as I lay there prone, my mobile phone with its broken glass, my mirror cracked and my loose change rolling across the floor. I can see the gash on my forehead and the bruise on my elbow. And then, after this fleeting picture, it is gone and I have descended the stairs, safe again.

When on holiday I peer over hotel balconies to the city streets below and see my body on the foreign street. Or I am on the roof terrace of a beautiful building and below again I lie, unmoving on the flagstones. I wonder how long it would take to fall half a dozen storeys, whether I’d be facing the sky or the ground, what would go through my mind as I dropped like a stone to the waiting embrace of the pavement. Or I imagine leaping off bridges into the inky water below. I wonder whether the impact would hurt and the water be cold and would I go far below the surface or touch the stony riverbed. But then I step back from the edge and my body is up here, with me. The moment passes and is forgotten about as quickly as it started.

My imagination is strongest, though, in familiar places. My “favourite”, if such a thing exists, is the centre of John Lewis in Reading. It has a large central well around which the glass lifts and escalators operate. At the bottom of this are displays of crockery and glass; beautiful tea sets and vases, all displayed to appeal to the average shopper. As I am gently swept up by the escalator or rising in the lift with my forehead against the glass, I always look over the edge, down and down to the cups and plates below. If I leaned over the edge and let myself tumble would I land on a stand of china, bringing it crashing to the ground, or would I fall between the displays and lay there waiting for a green badged employee to come and attend my living or lifeless body? Would it be a twisted neck or just a twisted ankle? I don’t know how far I could fall without really, really hurting myself. I don’t know if the plates and tumblers would break my fall or make it worse as the glass shatters around me. These thoughts take only a minute or two to go through my head, as long as the escalator trip, and then I am back among the cushions and towels and my middle class life. And the spectre of my broken frame is gone until the next time.

Watching for spring

2011-01-22T17:56:00.004Z

One of my followers, the lovely Gayle who lives in Texas, mailed telling me about her spring preparations (making kites) and about the bright, cold weather they're having. It inspired me to write this.

The days are brighter now. We pull down the blinds in the office to blot out the low afternoon sun. They're not fully opaque so the sun still streams in making everything on my laptop screen tend towards white. The colours seep away so that emails cannot be read and work can’t be done without moving around the desk out of the penetrating rays.

We measure the change by checking the way sunset time moves across the week. The light lasts a little longer every day, making us aware that our waking hours are less in the dark as we edge towards the spring. Pam remarks that she’s seen the first snowdrops of the year, shaded under a tree in her garden. We debate if this means that spring is on the way. But maybe the snowdrops like the camouflage that the frosty cold weather gives their creamy white petals, hiding them away from the less observant passer-by; a reward to the watchful walker.

Personally I think it starts with the daffodils and their luscious green spikes breaking through the hardened ground. How do they do it? How do they know it’s time each year to force their way up towards the new light? I wonder if it is instinct or biology that teaches them to sprout upwards with their greedy green fingers, feeling for the warmth and air.

There’s no warmth yet, though. The daffodils will have to wait - it’s still cold in this sunshine. There’s no fog of breath in the air but the wind whips around throwing my hair into my eyes and searching my clothes for any breach so as to lay its icy hands upon my skin. As the sun sets the wind and the chill intensifies, numbing my face and making me feel as if my speech is slurred. I tuck my hands up under my poncho wishing I was more suitably dressed. Tomorrow I will be.

Bottle green

2011-01-19T23:19:00.001Z

I grew like a weed when I was a child. All knock knees and too-short socks I outstripped my primary school friends and some of the teachers, especially little Miss Martin in her boho Indian cloth dresses and wedge heels. I don’t think I quite grasped back then how tall I was; I knew I was towering over the other kids but that was just something that got in the way of playing games. I was never any good at running so any games or sports that involved chasing or being chased was no fun for me. Even the imaginatively titled “pull down knicker chase” was no fun – no little boys were going to run after a girl taller than them, were they?

Going onto secondary school at age 11 was more of a challenge. Plump but not fat I found the school uniform something of a trial. The other girls would be in neat little skirts and jumpers in the perfect school colours while I was wearing ladies’ clothes from the shops my mum shopped in. As you can probably imagine, my ankle length bottle green jersey skirt was one of the highlights. Pair that with a white and green striped shirt - not officially school uniform, but somehow I got away with it - and a slightly raggedy bottle green jumper and you can see why the kids called me the Jolly Green Giant.

To top off this magnificent ensemble I had unmanageable frizzy hair. I realise now this is because it was curly and attempts, failed attempts, were made to brush it straight. Every morning my mum would stand behind me, my hair in one hand and a wide paddle brush in the other. She would then drag the brush through my hair, yanking my head back with each hasty stroke until it was straight before wrapping a hair band round the unruly ponytail it had created. Even now when visiting a hairdresser I find it strange to have my hair combed gently, as the junior hair washer and floor sweeper tries not to pull at the knots.

But the definitively worst thing about school was PE. Physical Education. It turned out it wasn’t just running that I was bad at. I couldn’t hurdle, despite having a 34” inside leg. I couldn’t throw, despite weighing roughly twice that of my school friends. And I was not much of a swimmer considering I could always touch the bottom and by that stage was naturally buoyant. Although saying that we never swam that much – our school had an outside pool which was always freezing and also open to the boys. I think I must have had “my period, Miss” about three weeks in every four just to try and avoid the peril of being in a swimming costume in front of boys. Though I suppose it was an improvement on the pool we had at primary school, housed in something resembling a mouldy fibre glass greenhouse with cement floors and a large and varied selection of arachnids and soiled plasters floating on the surface of the water.

In PE our bottle green uniform struck again. PE skirts were short wrap around affairs which in theory sat halfway between the knee and thigh and had dainty pleats around the back so it didn’t stick out but clung to the curves of your adolescent bum. Except not for me; I couldn’t fit into the standard off the shelf skirts so my mum bought a length of heavy bottle green fabric and made mine for me. And while I can see from this distance that I should be grateful to my mum for running up a skirt on her trusty sewing machine I know that I wasn’t. I just wanted to fit in like any girl does, to fit in and be liked.

I had a spare pair of PE knickers. For those not familiar with this article of clothing, PE knickers are magnificent. A trusty pair of (in this case) bottle green bloomers designed to cover one’s own knickers and avoid the chance of anything getting flashed which is probably why they were big enough to go all the way up to the ribcage. I had two pairs of PE knickers. I remember one day in particular that Clare Hofmann had forgotten her PE knickers and knew that I had a spare pair and could she borrow them? Well of course. Clare was my desk neighbour in maths. I, like the swot I was, would do my work then help her with hers, like a little bit of on the side tutoring. I liked this. She was a good person to know because she was in with the right crowd and had had (gasp!) a few boyfriends. So of course I loaned her my extra pair of bottle green bum huggers. This was my chance to be appreciated, to fit in. Clare was cool and this was my chance to earn some Brownie points, albeit some bottle green ones.

We went out. We ran around. We probably played hockey whilst wearing horrendously bright yellow socks and those terribly uncomfortable hockey shoes that are meant to prevent your ankle shattering should you get hooked round the ankles. We might have done a couple of miles of cross country running, the PE teacher chasing after us on her bike to try and stop us walking all the way round. And when we returned Clare said she would wash the PE knickers. This is where it went wrong. I tried too hard. I said that it didn’t matter and that my mum washed all my kit so she needn’t worry. She said that her mum would wash them and then I would get them back next week. I said no not to bother and Clare capitulated sensing that I would not relent in my helpfulness and that she should give me the knickers.

When I got home and unpacked my gym kit I discovered why Clare had been so reluctant to hand back the offending undercrackers. Poor Clare had her period. And she had had a little accident.

My mum washed the knickers without even noticing and I never mentioned the pants to Clare. I never loaned them out again to Clare or anyone else. But I still feel a bit guilty that I virtually forced Clare to give the pants back to me for washing, failing to help by trying to help too much. I wonder if she remembers. I wonder if she wakes in the night bathed in sweat thinking about those bottle green Bridget Joneses and my knowledge of her womanly secret.

Mind you, she did get a B in her maths GCSE which I hope might be some recompense.

100 words: Butter wouldn't melt

2011-01-17T21:55:00.003Z

The crust is always the best bit. My training tells me to leave it in the bag to try and keep the loaf fresh but it tastes so good with a layer of butter. No low fat olive spread would suffice; only proper butter will do, spread thickly and with a certain amount of abandon.

I eat it standing in the kitchen; no need for a plate because it simply won’t be around for long enough. It takes but a moment to eat, a moment to savour.

I sweep up the crumbs and put the lid back on the butter.

[You can find more of my 100 words posts here. With thanks to Mr London Street for the original 100 words idea]

Here in my car

2011-01-15T12:14:00.001Z

I learned to drive in a Nissan Micra. A red car that was not too dissimilar to those boxes on wheels we used to draw as kids. Neville, my instructor, was like a suburban version of Leslie Philips – I could picture him behind the wheel of a vintage sports car with leather driving gloves and a young filly on the seat beside him. Instead he was taking Witney’s 17 year old schoolkids out and about on the roads, chewing his nails as they steered too close to the parked cars and grabbing the wheel when we were about to hit the curb. The lessons used to make me sweat with the effort of concentration until I got the hang of doing several things at once.

Some of the kids I went to school with were rewarded for passing their driving test or for their 18th birthday with a car – usually a bit of an old banger but I remember one in particular got a brand new Volkswagen Golf. Other kids invested in a scooter just so they had some transport of their own even though they never passed their motorbike test, instead forever driving with plastic L plates flapping from the front and back. Not for me. Aside from one hair raising pre-test drive in my mum’s enormous and ancient Vauxhall Astra Estate, where I learned that not all cars have effective brakes, I didn’t drive once I passed my test until I left home.

My first car was a pillar box red Rover Metro. I bought it at the age of twenty-one with my then boyfriend from a small dealer in a small village on a dark evening. Not a sensible way to choose a car, I’ll admit, but we got lucky. By my standards back then it was a fabulous car; two years old with a radio AND cassette player, dark grey cloth interior and, get this, an automatic choke. My mum was properly impressed. It was the perfect first car – nice and new but a bit slow and safe. Mind you, the first time I took my sisters out for a drive I hit the wing mirror of another car trying to drive through a gap just a few inch too small. No physical damage was done (at least not that I could see in my rear view mirror as I drove off*) though it did make me jump, rather. I had a lot to learn.

We kept the Metro for four years but then the 1.1 litre engine began to feel like not nearly enough power. It wasn’t great for long journeys – a little cramped perhaps and if you wanted to get up a hill at any speed you had to approach the hill with the same. Trips to Cornwall were enlivened by buzzing around the incredibly narrow lanes, my boyfriend at the wheel and me averting my eyes as we got really rather close to the hedges. Hedges that, as is the norm in Cornwall, are covering brick walls. Fortunately Joe was a man’s man and not frightened of walls or corners or oncoming traffic and quite happy to drive for the whole holiday. Back then that was what I wanted.

When the time came to chop the Metro in we went for quite a considerable upgrade. Times had been good and we had both moved up in our jobs. Shop work was ancient history for me – I had graduated to the giddy heights of an office job. The new car was exactly that; brand new. This was so exciting. We bought a shiny blue Mazda 323 with a CD player and airbags and sports seats and wooden bits on the dashboard and everything. It was fabulous. I felt like I’d really made it.

This time Joe and I fought over the driving – we both wanted to get behind the wheel all the time. He wasn’t a bad driver but when I was passenger there were some things that always annoyed me. He’d leave the wipers running long after the rain had stopped and for him the heating was either full on (and I’d be sweating) or completely off (and I’d be freezing). I’m rather bossy but this is one arena where I knew that it was best to bite my tongue – instead I’d sit and quietly seethe that he wasn’t doing things “my way”.

When Joe and I broke up I took the car. We divided our things up in quite a civilised manner and I needed it to work and he didn’t so it was a no brainer. I drove away from our house to my own rented place in one of my favourite vehicles – the Transit van.

The Transit van has always, appropriately, been a vehicle of transition. From Joe to my own place then from my own place to my first rented place with Mr Manbag and then from our rented place to our own home. Each time I’ve been in a Transit van, sat high at the wheel trying not to corner too fiercely lest my possessions shake themselves free from the confines of the van. I enjoy the chugging idle noise of the diesel engine, the massive gear stick that requires massively long arms to reach and move and the step up and down from the cabin that places the driver high above the cars on the road. In my head the music for “Long Distance Clara” from Pigeon Street plays as I climb up to the driver’s seat.

And now I drive a Nissan Figaro. This is a car I first fell in love with when out for a walk. There were four of them parked in the drive way of a dealer’s home and I was smitten with their looks. Forget the fact that they’re old (21st birthday this year) and that they have a one litre automatic engine – the moment I climbed inside for a test ride, even before I had started the engine, I knew I had to have one. Now I am on my second one, the first having had an unfortunate encounter with some teenage joyriders and the Thames. The second one is even better than the first – from a better source, with lower miles and more reliable (though Mr Manbag would beg to differ on that point). I love the summer where every day is bookended by a topless ride in the sunshine with the CD player blaring some terrible pop tunes and my sunglasses perched on my nose. It makes the day seem so much better.

I always wanted a silly car, something impractical and a bit daft. Something for summer days and cruising but with a back seat so small it’s only for the shopping. Something with personality rather than practicality. When I was with Joe this was vetoed because he needed a car to take garden waste to the dump in (never a priority for me). But Mr Manbag can’t/won’t drive and therefore doesn’t mind what I drive and we have no garden so there’s no garden waste and I think he too fell a little bit in love with the silly car. Even though I know I will someday I can’t imagine driving anything else. This car is all about me. And about somebody letting me be me.

*No, really. No damage was done. It was a wing mirror to wing mirror thing.

The girl can't help it

2011-01-12T22:12:00.002Z

I’ve got no energy.

There’s nothing wrong with me per se. I just feel sluggish and weak. I could have slept on returning home from work given half a chance and not woken until morning. Dinner is not enough – I need sugar. Two spoons in my milky tea, brewed to wash down some squares of chocolate.

I sit on the sofa with a half written blog post tucked away in my netbook, all ones and zeros somewhere inside the plastic casing. It will stay half written tonight and maybe tomorrow night too. Tomorrow we’re out meeting a holidaying blogger and her husband visiting the UK from way over in Tennessee. As if by magic a new crop of spots has bloomed on my face – I do like to make a good first impression. I pick at them all the time, aware of my fingers scratching and worsening them but unable to stop.

That’s the crux of the problem, I think. The inability to stop myself, to pick myself up and recover my drive. When I was a kid my mum had a name for this syndrome – we used to call it “the can’t help its”. Mum would ask what’s wrong and we would reply “I don’t know! I can’t help it” with a sad voice and forlorn face. This would elicit a hug or a cup of tea – the panacea to all of life’s ills.

I don’t get like this often; I have a generally sunny disposition borne of a happy childhood and a lack of self awareness. Happy suits me. I am Yin to Mr Manbag’s grouchy Yang, silver lining to his cloud. When he asks me what’s wrong and I try to explain my lethargy he’s concerned; it’s not like me, not right.

But I know tomorrow will be better. Thursday is on the downhill slope of the week, sliding towards the weekend and the freedom that brings. I dream of the sleep and the cups of tea that aren’t in my work mug. I dream of nights out and nights in and feet up. For now I admit that I don’t know what’s wrong. I can’t help it.

100 words : Nob

2011-01-10T21:18:00.005Z

Fuck says Debi. I can’t even remember why, just the conversation that it started. I’ve decided that my New Year’s resolution is to swear less she says. Not to try and stop altogether, that would be too hard. Just to cut back.

My resolution is to masturbate less pipes up Rob.

There’s silence for a few seconds before Tom asks is that at work or at home?

We respond with “ewws” and screwed up faces.

That must be why I got fired from so many jobs says Rob.

Conversations like this are the reason we call him Rob the Nob.

100 words: community

2011-01-08T18:51:00.000Z

When I started out it was a small thing; posts about my day that were just a creative outlet for me.

Then it grew. I started to write things I was proud of – not all the time but every now and then. The thing that marked these posts out was the response from other people. I knew they were better posts and they proved that by saying nice things. Encouraging things.

Now I’m part of a community of supportive writers – people who have been writing fabulous stuff for a while and newer writers just finding their voice. I love it.