On Writing a (Performance) Poem - Part I

This is a different sort of post to my usual ramblings, blog readers, as I'm going to talk about the process I recently went through of writing a narrative poem, which I've never done before, for a cabaret. It turns out I have a lot to say about this, so I'm breaking it into three parts in the hopes that that way, it might still get read. Enjoy!

******

 When a very talented and particularly awesome friend of mine announced that she was putting on a cabaret I, with my usual blind enthusiasm, leapt in with both feet, asking if I could be a part of it and perform a poem. Of course, I hadn’t written said poem yet, but why would that stop me? The cabaret was at LEAST three weeks away and thus, as Russell Brand so cunningly observes in Booky Wook 2, did not exist. I believe in Russell’s example, he agrees to neuter a pig with his teeth next February, since the existence of February has never been categorically proved. At the time of agreeing – nay, volunteering – to take part in the cabaret, I believed that the existence of Friday the 13^th  (the date of said event) had never been proven, and I was free to perform a poem the equal of Eliot and Larkin in this mythical cabaret of my mind. The fact that I would actually have to write a poem, and it would actually have to be good, was beyond the bounds of my understanding at that point in time.

 I think this may have been partly to do with the fact that I volunteered before Christmas, and the cabaret itself was in January. The metaphorical divide between the end of one year and the beginning of the next is scores wide and storeys high. Of course, it’s literally only a matter of minutes, but I am a poet! I don’t deal in logic and literalness! Don’t offend me with your facts!

 Of course, my airy fairy ways of whimsy all came crashing down around my ears around January 4^th when I looked in my diary and realised the cabaret was next week. And I had only the very vaguest idea in my mind of what I wanted to say and not one word actually committed to paper. I’m just glad I woke up and smelt the summer fruits squash at that point and not on the night of Thursday the 12th.

This idea that I’d had to perform a poem at my friend’s cabaret wasn’t as entirely based on nothing as some of my madcap schemes are (viz – my idea that all my DJ life partner and I needed to make Twisted Kitten complete was to learn body popping), as I have performed my poetry on three (three!) occasions in the past year or so. Twice at cabarets entirely organised and populated by close friends of mine who know me very well and were drunk enough to clap even if they didn’t know me, and once (somewhat more frighteningly) at a conference I went to that had an open mic night… although as it turned out, that was also an incredibly friendly and somewhat drunk crowd, so it couldn’t possibly have gone wrong.

 However, at the conference, two of the poems I read were the ones I consider to be my serious poetry, of which I am reasonably proud and have a decent amount of confidence about. Misery, I can write. Cabarets, however, are not a place for misery. The song does not go, ‘What good is sitting alone in your room, come hear poems about self harm and failure and cry into your gin,’ does it? No – clearly, what was needed in this instance was to make people laugh.

 At this point in my (ahem) esteemed writerly career, I had written a total of three so-called ‘funny’ poems, all of which have made it into this blog, I do believe. One was a Christmas poem written especially for my friends, in each verse was built around Christmas’ appeal to each of the five senses and concluded with a rhyming couplet matching the names of two friends with another word, eg ‘bright green, rich red of something holly/happy Christmas, Kaye and Olly’ and so on. The second was written about all the things I’m scared of or have had to give up, and the third was another Christmas effort in the form of a letter to Santa about my struggle to be good and unselfish by asking for world peace, but in fact being crushed by my over-whelming need for possessions.

 All very jolly in their ways, but here’s the thing – none of them are actually very good. They rely too much on the audience knowing me and getting in jokes, which aren’t even very funny anyway, and they’re just a bit obvious. They’re doggerel, basically. Reasonably accomplished doggerel, but nothing more. The current situation – reading to a paying audience who don’t know me, amongst a cast of proper entertainers – required something bigger and better. Something that was actually any good.

 My first idea was, as it turns out, a total non-starter. Being on Friday the 13^th, the theme of the cabaret was bad luck. I had the idea that I could write a poem called First World Problems, which is the new phrase de jour amongst my friends and a concept which tickles me greatly. The idea of the poem would have been that the poet (a slightly OTT version of me, natch) thinks she is greatly unlucky and her life is cursed, when in fact she has an embarrassment of riches and is getting upset over broken nails when her driveway is full of brand new Jaguars.

 It’s something that maybe could work and could be funny, but I couldn’t really work up much enthusiasm for it, and after a bit of thought, I realised that my reasons for this were two-fold: one, like the others poems I’d written specifically for other cabarets, it relied on the audience knowing me quite a bit to make it funny, and two, what a loathsome protagonist! People aren’t going to laugh and sympathise if they hate you, not unless you’re a tremendously clever and funny writer, which I am not.

No, I realised, if I wanted this audience who I didn't know on my side (and I really, really did – I’m totally into self-flagellation, but even the mere thought of being flagellated by others (via the medium of, say, rotten tomatos) makes me mute with indignation and rage, one of my less pleasant traits) then I had to write about characters whom the audience would be 100% behind. They had to be the total opposite of the self-pitying, non-self-aware and spoilt character of my First World Problems poem; they had to be likability personified. And for a British audience, that means polite, well-meaning underdogs.

That was when Romy and Julian were born in my mind. They came to me in a bit of a flash, although I can’t deny that if I wasn’t such a big fan of the Lemony Snicket books, they probably would never have happened – the Baudelaire children would definitely find Romy and Julian to be kindred spirits, I think. That aside, though, when my brain asked itself who are the most likable people on earth, it replied that a tubby ginger gypsy who has no friends and talks to squirrels, and an asthmatic, overly clever boy who gets bullied and sports an overly large afro were the clear choice. For a while, Romy was going to be called Romany, after her people, but that name just never flowed right in my head. Of course, for anybody who didn’t spot it, the two are named after Romeo and Juliet, but with the sexes swapped around, a dazzling clever plot device of which the Bard himself would no doubt be proud, the little gender bender that he was.

 There was something about the idea of a doomed love affair between two seven year olds that I found innately pure and heart-warming and lovable, and I hoped that, when twinned with the misfortunes that would plague the poem, in order to stop things being cloying and sickly sweet, other people would think that way too.

 So, not content with setting myself the goal of trying to emulate the genius that is Lemony Snicket (if you haven’t read the Series of Unfortunate Events, do so at once!), I decided I would try to base my poem on the structure and feel of Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece The Walrus and the Carpenter, one of my favourite poems. I taught myself that poem word for word when I was a teenager – I used to recite it to myself during my paper round to pass the times when my walkman batteries had died. I love how easy it sounds, the way it trips off the tongue, how it combines the absurd and a clear storyline in such a smooth brush stroke. Narrative set to rhyme has always impressed me, whether it be poetry, a musical score or hip hop – moving a story on inside a syllable count and a rhyme scheme is not an easy skill. I knew the Rev Dodgson had made The Walrus and the Carpenter look easier than it was, but I had no idea just how much easier he’d made it look. 

So that was my challenge… to write a Lemony Snicket-esque Walrus and the Carpenter. In an afternoon. A doddle, I thought, licking my pen nib and settling myself on my chaise longue. Why would it take any longer?

To be continued...

The F Word

I have, oh constant blog reader, designed a little test for you. It goes something like this.

1. Do you think that men and women deserve the same rights?

2. Do you think that men and women are the same?

3. Do you think that men and women are as good as each other at everything?

3. Do you think that women are better than men?

4. Do you think that men are all bastards?

5. Do you think that all penetration is rape?


If you answered yes to question number one - congratulations, you are a feminist. The rest, I hope you will have spotted, are trick questions.

So very many of my well-read, liberal, clever and independent female friends don't think that they are feminists, and this makes me so sad. It makes me sadder than if it turned out Madonna was actually drowning baby horses at night in order to preserve her talents, and anyone who knows me will realise that would be a pretty damn bad day for me right there.

(NB - I have said female there because I've only really had this conversation with women, but everything I'm saying here applies to men too. Men - do you believe women deserve the same respect as you? Then congratulations, you're a feminist - now go and get that tattooed across your forearm, cos godDAMN will it help you get laid!)

Feminism is the simple concept that men and women deserve equal amounts of respect in this world. It is not about thinking that women are better then men, it's not about hating men, it's not about trying to get by without them. I would be lying if I didn't say that men frustrate the hell out of me a lot of the time and confuse my poor pretty little brain with their strange lumpish ones. But that doesn't mean I want to live in a world without them! Hell no! That's a world that would get tiring very quickly. We'd have, true, probably a lot less wars and a lot more chocolate, but there would also be a lot more passive aggression and paranoia and flat tyres. If you'll allow me to just generalise wildly for a moment.

Why has feminism got such a bad rap that women who I KNOW believe we should all be respected equally are scared of the word and don't want to be associated with it? It seems like it's as scary a word as paedo or Tory or racist for some people. Hell yeah, none of us want to be those things, and for very good reasons. But feminism? Why are so many bright people so scared of it? This is 2011... aren't we past that yet??

The popular answer given to this question is that the extreme feminists came along and ruined it for us all... that Andrea Dworkin said that all penetration is rape, and that's what feminism became about. Of course, we all know that that's nonsense - some penetration can even be rather fun at times, or so I've heard - so it makes sense that people don't want to align themselves with that.

But there are several things wrong with this argument. The first is that the most minor of Google searches reveals that she didn't actually say that at all, any more than Humphrey Bogart actually said “Play it again, Sam" in Casablanca. I've not read enough to know exactly what she WAS on about, bless her, but, in a shock turn of events, the meeeja picked up on something that they knew would shock us, and twisted it so that it shocked us a little bit more, and scared people away from some liberal views which might actually start to even out the balance between the men who write the newspapers and the women who clean their offices.

Which leads me on to my next point. Yes, there probably are some feminists out there who are crazy. Is this really a big shock to you? If so, you might want to sit down to read this next sentence, because I'm afraid I've got some bad news for you... there are also dentists out there who are crazy. And socialists. And researchers. And sales assistants. And pop stars. And next door neighbours. And Christians. And Muslims. There are crazy people everywhere, readers! Wake up and smell the lithium! If we believed that the few crazy people who make it into the press represent everyone they claim to speak for, then we'd believe that all Muslims are suicide bombers who are just itching to start a Jihad, and I KNOW my beloved blog readers have more sense than that.

I would really like to hope that we, as a generation, have grown past being so obviously lead away from what we know is right by the Right and being able to see the glaringly obvious for ourselves... ie that men and women deserve the same amount of respect.

How you want to interpret that is, to a certain extent, up to you. I hear people say that Sex and the City is misogynistic. I hear people saying that wearing high heels makes you a tool of the patriarchy. I hear people saying that changing your surname if you get married means you're giving yourself away as a possession. I love Sex and the City. I love high heels. If any fool ever wants to marry me, I won't have an issue with taking his name. However, I am still a feminist.

Let me take these points one at a time. A friend of mine (I don't know if she considers herself a feminist or not) recently said to me that she thinks Sex and the City is misogynistic because (I think I'm quoting her correctly here) it's all about women as sex objects. I outright disagree with that, although of course she's allowed to think whatever she likes. To me, Sex and the City is a feminist show because it shows that we like sex too! That sex isn't only a man's domain... but that we don't have to become mini-men in pinstripe suits and with dulled down emotions when we do go out and sleep with people. We can continue to be complicated, emotional, pain-in-the-ass women when we sleep around, and it can still be fun. I approve of this! However, I do also think that Sir Mixalot's Baby Got Back is a feminist anthem because of the lines 'Cosmo thinks you're fat - well I ain't down with that,' so you don't necessarily want to listen to me about everything.

High heels - yeah, I can see the argument more there. They make your legs and your arse look nicer and they hurt. So I can see why feminists would take issue with them. I don't, because they bring me great joy, and to me, they are more about comparisons and, hell why not, a little healthy competition with other women than they are about hooking men. In fact, most of the men I know hate high heels. I don't understand why men want to play squash - men don't understand why I want to beat my friend's heels by that extra inch. This is one of the mysteries of the universe, but as far as I'm concerned (unless I've been so brainwashed I can't even see it myself) high heels don't make me respect myself less than I respect men, so I have no feminist issue with them.

The marriage/name change thing... oh of course, I can certainly see why some feminists take issue with them. And in the past, when women did, in a much stronger sense than today, become men's property, I would have railed against it a whole hell of a lot more. But I do think that if you're going to be in a family, it's nice to all have the same name. And I also think that it would take more than me taking a man's name to make me his property. If he was doing anything else that suggested he thought that, I wouldn't be marrying him in the first place, I hope to god, so I think as long as we're sharing the washing up and opening doors for each other and taking it in turns to kiss it and make it better, whose name we have is a little immaterial. Of course, if he were to want to take my name, that would also be just dandy.

My point here is that feminism is what you make it to be. There is no list of scary rules about wearing dungarees and sensible shoes, eschewing make-up and sex, becoming humourless about every tiny issue... of course, if you want to wear dungarees and stop laughing, then I salute you sister, because that's your goddamn choice and more power to you! But seriously... the only thing you need to believe in order to be a feminist is that men and women deserve equal amounts of respect - something that in itself has so many implications in this sad and fucked up world we live in - and so if you believe that, please do me a favour and stop being so scared of the F word. Thank you.

On drinking and not drinking and drinking again

So, oh faithful blog readers, the more attentive of you (and I shall reward you in heaven, believe me) may have remembered that I haven't been drinking this year.

Of course, that's a bold faced lie if ever there was one. I've drunk plenty... but an awful lot less than in the previous 10 years of my life. I've probably drunk alcohol once a month this year, which compared to three nights every weekend and a couple of weeknights too for the previous few years is quite the difference.

I made this change for one reason and one reason alone - the same reason I've given my life the massive overhaul it's had in the past almost two years, in total now - insomnia. I was so sick of not sleeping and of the knock-on effect that was having on my ability to not cry every time I looked at a squirrel who I thought might have been being bullied by other squirrels, never mind deal with any serious shit like my library books being overdue that I was ready to try pretty much anything to sleep better.

I would say that the most helpful things I've done in my quest to sleep like the dead (ah, that's the dream) are: only using my bed for sleeping (rather than using my bed also as a cinema or dining table, you understand, I don't mean I used to sleep on the bathroom rug); getting black-out curtains; getting rid of the TV in my room and - undoubtedly - quitting the booze. On the rare occasion I have drunk in 2011, I've been awake from 3am onwards hating myself, hating the world, hating the inside of mouth that feels like I've slept with a sheet of Bounty in there (not a Bounty bar, that would be much better) and remembering why I Don't Do This Any More.

Not that I've been cross with myself on those occasions. I've got one rule with alcohol, and that's that when I want a drink, I'll have a drink. I'm not an alcoholic. I don't think I've got a problem with the demon drink - but then again, who does - so it's not like I need to never drink again. It's the lack of sleep that turns me into a mental, not the delicious gin. So I've drunk at weddings, on holiday, whilst trying to pluck up the courage to kiss boys (always a good plan when you don't drink much any more and the smallest drop turns you into a puking wreck... mmmm, yeah, I know what the boys like) and so on. I've also NOT drunk at weddings, at birthday parties and meals out this year, so I'm quite proud of myself for doing that.

The advantages to not drinking, as well as the oh-so-plush sleep, are numerous. No hangovers, of course. No hideous, sinking drinkers' remorse, where you are just so sure that you mortally offended someone or disgraced yourself in some way, and yet no-one will tell you how because the incident was so shameful that everyone you know - no, everyone in the world - has taken a solemn oath to never speak of it again. No throwing up in your friends' garden so that the puppy has to eat it (this is a True Fact From My Life - how you like me now?). Being able to drive everywhere! This is a great bonus of not drinking, especially when it's teamed with my lovely sat nav which means I no longer get lost and panic and start screaming and bashing the steering wheel like an escaped lunatic wherever I go. Yeah - driving is a good one. Cars are, in case you're wondering, definitely better than the night bus. Oh, and you save money.

And you know what? It's not actually been that hard. I think knowing that I won't sleep and I will be a quivering wreck if I do drink helps immensely because now that I am sleeping properly, I can see how very very fragile I was when I wasn't, and I'm pretty keen not to go back there. Plus, as wanky as this sounds, when you're around a bunch of drunk people anyway, you do start to feel sort of... well, giddy and silly and giggly just from being around them and their intoxication anyway. Ok, I tried to dress that sentence up, but if you're thinking I just said 'hey man, I don't need alcohol cos I'm high on life,' you would be correct and you must feel free to line me up in the crosshairs of your shotgun right away.

But it's true. I've found myself at numerous times thinking I must have been dead drunk on such and such an occasion and then looking back a bit more carefully in my memory and remembering I'd had nothing stronger than sugar-free squash all night. There was one evening when, on the actual night in question, not remembering it later, I wished I had a trashy magazine to read on the tube home as I felt sure I'd be far too drunk to concentrate on the dull PhD book I had with me - but then realised that was tosh and I'd been sipping So-de-lime-ful (yes, I'm THAT cool!) all night long. I think I still let myself off the boring reading. ;-)

However - having said all that - it's December now, which is the month of festivities. And in the spirit of 'I'll have a drink when I want one,' it turns out I want to drink this whole month long. I've had a drink every day since deciding this last Wednesday, and damn it's good. As surprisingly easy as it's been to (pretty much) stop, it's surprisingly even easier to slip back into it, isn't it? My sleep's been a bit messed up in the past few weeks before this anyway, so I've sort of used that as an excuse to get up to all kinds of silly japes, but I'm getting away with it so far. We'll see what becomes of me in a few weeks, if I'm sober enough to type an update. Meanwhile - cheers!

Ever decreasing circle

I wanted to write this morning. But there isn’t anything very positive in my head right now. Work, my PhD, many things are snarling me up at the moment, and I couldn’t think of a way to make that witty and urbane so that you guys would be interested in reading about it. So here, instead, is a poem. Happy Hallowe'en, everyone.


The Ever-Decreasing Circle

If, during a lapse of concentration, a snake starts to chew on its own tail, there is no way to back out.
The jaws of the snake can only go forward.
This foie gras feeding will never be finished.
The tip of the tail tunnels to throat, forcing forward into the belly.
From that very first moment, the snake is lost.
An ever decreasing circle.

The brighter you rage, the tighter the knot, burning acid into your stomach.
As you choke and retch on what should have sustained you,
you can panic, sweet panic, and fight to feel free. But
the knot will only close closer and
your teeth will only tear sharper and
your words will only be silenced and
the circle will never end.

When I'm (not) takin' pictures

(Please sing the title of this blog to the tune of When I’m Cleaning Windows. This has been stuck in my head intermittently since I first started thinking about writing this blog, many months ago, and I wanted to share the love. My little gift to you.)

I’ve been taking photos since I can remember. I first started wanting to take really good photos about three years ago, mostly because I had a friend who took really good photos and I wanted to be like her. I got my first good camera two years ago, and my first SLR for my birthday last year. Taking photographs has become a huge part of my life, so much so that I often dream in photos – my sleeping senses see life through a lens, and I’m often disappointed to wake up and realize that the fabulous photos I thought I’d taken were only subconscious snapshots and not reality.

This blog is also a big part of my life, and so I’ve wanted for months now to write a blog about photography… but I’ve never quite managed to get the right angle on it and to know what, exactly, to say. However, I had an experience on a weekend just gone which really bought it home to me how much my camera is now an extension of my hands and my eyes, and gave me a way in to waffling about it in an engaging and delightful manner to you guys. Aren’t you lucky?

Last weekend was the Hottest October Weekend Evar – like actually, officially, records of October temperatures were broken. And, as luck would have it, myself and two of my best friends had a trip down to Brighton planned, to celebrate one of their birthdays. What perfect timing!

The run up to the trip – including preparation time – was less perfect. I had a really busy week, and got home on the Friday night much later than I had planned to due to the bloody trains, another whole rant I could (but won’t) go into. I was dog tired – the kind of tired that makes you want to cry, the kind of tired where you feel like you have to pick your legs up with your hands to make them move. The idea of starting to pack for Brighton was making me want to self harm, but I managed to get a pile of clothes together, wrap my friend’s presents and put both my phone and my camera battery on to charge.

I then fell into bed, and got up early the next day to go swimming (yes, outdoors, I’m still doing that and it’s awesome!).

I had thought I’d have half an hour or so between getting home from swimming and heading off to Brighton in which to get my bag out of the loft and finish the packing off… and the irony is, I probably would have done, as I actually ended up getting to Victoria way early. However, I had to get petrol on the way to the pool, then I got stuck behind a slow van, then it took a while to get away from the pool, etc etc, so in the end I only got home 5 minutes before I had planned to leave for the station.

I got the bag out the loft and chucked everything in it. I picked up my camera and even thought, have I put the battery back in? And for some unknown reason, the answer my brain gave me was ‘yes.’ I don’t know why, as I hadn’t, and I am cursing myself for not checking, but there we go. Off I set to Brighton, and it was only as I was walking past some beautiful graffiti, 10 minutes out of the station, that I realized the battery was still in the charger back in London. What a tool!

I was a bit annoyed with myself, and felt bad that I’d told the birthday girl I’d be official photographer for the weekend and now couldn’t be, but I hadn’t been prepared for how much the loss of my camera would sting. Of course, this amazing, best ever sunshine didn’t help in this situation! Here are some things that would have made amazing photos from the weekend:

• The graffiti that plastered some buildings on a back street from the station to the beach; if graffiti is the right word, which I’m not sure it is. These bold, bright and beautiful murals covered walls and breathed life into an otherwise grubby looking street.

• The carousel we sat beside for hours; children and grown-ups delighting in the horses, the golds and pinks and Romany look of the façade around the top, so busy and bright and like the promise of summer.

• The seagulls that swooped overhead and perched on a metal box that housed deckchairs, courting and fighting, bigger than I expected, and greyer – quite ominous and majestic against the cloudless blue sky.

• The sea, the sea, the sea. During the day and into the night. Ripples and glints and reflections, brightly coloured sails turning black under the sun, pirate boats and windsurfs and jetskis.

• The sun, the sun, the sun. My favourite thing at the best of times, boy was he in his element this weekend. Especially at sunset, as I watched him through the pier – the oranges and golds and purples and blues that turned the pier and the people on it into black stick figures. These are the photos it most ached to miss.

• The circle of bikes that my friend’s friends made, wheels aloft, that we sat inside – the spokes divided what we saw outside them into neat segments. I could have played tricks through those spokes, so that when you looked at the photos, you didn’t know what you were seeing.   

• The view from our window, especially as it got dark and the different colours from the pier reflected in the water like God’s own oil slick.

• The dodgems – although I guess if I had wanted to take photos, I might not have been able to join in… and that was awesome fun. So maybe we’ll let that one slide.

• The red, yellow and pink balloons I saw floating across the bluest sky I’ve ever seen on Sunday morning.

• The delight in a tiny child’s face as she bounced impossibly high with toes ballerina pointed on those trampolines that are assisted by bungee cords – the wonder, dash of fear, and total curiosity in her face.

See, this is the thing about taking photographs all the time – it teaches you to look at things differently. Taking photos makes me feel somewhat like a pushy mother, for whom every conversation is a networking opportunity for my precocious daughter. Everything is a photo opportunity. Everything could be framed and cropped and snapped. It makes me very tedious to take anywhere, as I will stop 100 times a minute to take pictures, and having it taken away from me, especially in such beautiful circumstances, was so much more painful than I ever would have imagined.

Mice, mice baby

To all intents and purposes, I think I come across as a fairly confident person. Inwardly, people fill me with terror, but outwardly, I know I’m generally fairly good at dealing with them. Anyone watching me DJ and observing that I cannot stop lepping around like an eejit showing off and trying to make the world and her toy boy look at me might fairly assume that in fact I traverse the line from confident to cocky. And it’s true that there are some things I’m very confident about – counselling, wearing high heels, and manhandling spiders from ceilings to the great outdoors via a pint glass. However, there are also many, many, many things that terrify me to my core. I’ve already regaled you all with tales of my motorway phobia. I shall now hold forth on my deeply ingrained fear of mice-in-my-house. Fasten your seatbelts, it’s gonna be a bumpy emotional ride.

You will have noticed, being the intelligent, keen-eyed and tasteful reader that you are, that I am scared of mice-in-my-house. I am not scared of mice per se. Mice as pets? Adorable! Mice on the tube? Couldn’t be cuter! Mice at work? I’ll probably try to feed them and make them a nest under my desk. Mice in my house? Cue standing on a chair shrieking EEK at the top of my little lungs and ringing my daddy for help. I know it’s pathetic. I wish I could rein it in. But sadly, as is the way with those pesky irrational fears, there’s no talking me out of it with mere logic.

I am of course crazy about animals. I haven’t eaten one since the summer of 1986 and my dream is to one day run a sanctuary for horses that have been knocked about a bit. I am the kind of crazy lady who even thinks that stick insects are cute, and I have a special passion for rodents, having owned, loved and cried rivers of tears over the deaths of more hamsters and guinea pigs than you could shake a sesame seed treat at.

Given this last fact, it really makes no sense that I am so terrified of mice-in-my-house - or mice, as I shall call them from now on, for ease of my poor typing fingers. If I found a stray hamster dashing across the bedroom, I would squeal with delight and start anthropomorphosising the fuck outta him before you could say boo. Why is it different for poor wee mice?

I think it's at least partly because of a student house I frequented during my first degree, which was rented by 5 friends of mine, one of whom was my then-boyfriend's brother, so I was there a lot. This house was, quite literally, over-run by mice. They weren't scared any more. They had little parties in the hallway, gossiping over Tesco value crisps crumbs and thimbles full of K cider. They had chewed holes in the all the cupboards and clearly thought that the bags of rice and bowls of apples were socialist snacks. One on memorable occasion, a member of this household woke up to find one on his pillow, staring him in the eye. Looking back on it now, it's a wonder my friends didn't all die of some hideous mouse-borne virus... or of being mistaken for a wedge of cheese and nibbled in the night.

This was my first introduce to house-mice, and I assumed that this was the way it would always be if you had mice in your house. I didn't understand that there was a middle ground.

However, I still wasn't scared by these mice. The reason for this is, I think, two-fold. Firstly, the mice weren't scared of us, so ambled around... they didn't do that scuttering, dashing, sprinting thing that mice and spiders do, and which make our primeval limbic systems seize up in terror. They were chilled, and so was I. I seem to remember trying to feed them chocolate on several occasions. Helpful, huh? Secondly, I didn't live in this house. Despite being a frequent visitor, I never stayed the night. So it was a problem removed, which everyone knows is a problem halved, if not quartered. It was, to be honest, a novelty to me, not something to stress about. However, it did, as I said, plant this idea in me that where there was one mouse, there would be 500 of his closest chums, just waiting to start a karaoke party in your chutney cupboard.

The first time I saw a mouse in my house, I was living with my brother in Manor House. He had gone out for the night, and I was in my room, working on a not-very-good novel that never got finished. In those days, I could write, listen to music and sing loudly all at the same time. Don't ask me how I could do this... these days I need silence to write properly. I was very into what I was writing, but also had the music on very loud, and was having a marvellous time alone and lost in myself.

I spun round on my chair to head towards the kitchen and get a drink, and standing there, cool as a cucumber, was a mouse, several foot away from me, clear in the middle of the room, staring at me as if transfixed.

My reaction - which was like something out of a cartoon - surprised me. If someone had asked me three seconds before seeing the little critter, if I was scared of mice, I would doubtless have scoffed NO very loudly and carried on typing. However, I would have been wrong - and cue the standing on a chair, screaming my head off, total panic that ensued.

Oh, the shame, dear blog readers... I must confess that I hopped across pieces of furniture to the bedroom door, ran down the corridor, jumped on the sofa, picked up the phone and rang my dad to come and save me. Which, god bless him, he did, searching the house for the mouse and (I seem to remember) taking me back to sleep as his and mum's as I was too scared to sleep in my room.

Ridiculous? Yes. Laughable? Oh, I know. I'm not proud. But I only need to think about it for about 3 minutes before I start freaking out that much again. I can kinda tease my brain with it, the way you might after seeing a scary movie, and then laughing with your fella in bed in a dark bedroom afterwards about how funny it would be if you were really scared - and then you start talking about it and before you know it, you're jumping at shadows and bashing the cat across the nose with a frying pan because you mistook him for a knife-wielding serial killer. I start thinking about how stupid I would be if I were to imagine 5, 20, 100 mice, all under my bed, teeming over one another in a black, writhing mass that I might accidentally plunge my hand into when looking under the bed for something else... it starts out as a joke, but before I know it, I'm back on the nearest piece of furniture with my heart in my mouth.

I've had many more mice incidents since that first one - incidents that have necessitated running to boyfriends' houses, back to daddy, even just to high-pitched phone calls at the crack of dawn - but I won't go on. Keen followers of my Facebook statuses will realise that there has been a recent plague of the little buggers in my house, waking myself and my DJ life partner/best friend/tenant up in the dead of night. The first time this happened, I was woken up by a scratching noise under my bed which chased me over to the chaise longue... I couldn't work out if it was a mouse or a monster, and I think I would genuinely have preferred the latter option. On that occasion, I had to be talked out of my room by a lovely, understanding boy... who possibly could have laughed at me a wee bit less. ;-)

I have - with the help of the same understanding boy, god bless him - now taken everything out of my room in an effort to de-mouse it, and I think the little feckers have fecked off. Please keep your fingers crossed for me. More updates as and when.

Dream a Little Dream of Me...

I live in monochrome. I dream in multicolour.

This is obviously a ridiculously overblown statement which I’m mostly saying for effect and to make you read this blog. However, there is some element of truth to it. My life is not all monochrome, not by any many of means – I’m far too much of a drama queen to allow that. However, my depression, such as it is, when it manifests itself, is definitely grey. I’ve read about other people describing depression as being black – was it Winston Churchill who talked about his black dog? – but mine is grey. Sepia. Like black and white TV. It is the exact nothing colour of the sky when that vast emptiness above us is bleached out with clouds and looks hollow and bleak. When I look at the sky and it is that blank, I always think of a Sylvia Plath quote – I talk to God, but the sky is empty. How can anyone be happy under a sky like that? I don’t understand it. And when I’m depressed and it’s bad enough to seep into even sunny days, I feel like I’m carrying that grey sky in a big, dense, heavy lump in my chest, a lump that drags me down and makes it hard for me to lift my head to look at the blue skies anyway.

(Now there’s a cheerful opening statement for you!)

My dreams, however, are a totally different matter. I never dream in tones of grey – or if I do, it’s a cine camera, stop motion, Film Noir kind of grey, like at the beginning of Moulin Rouge, not the hopeless void of colour that fills the sky and sucks out my soul on down days. Let me put it this way – I’ve just come back from a wonderful psytrance festival in Hungary, full of sunshine and crazy hippies floating about with face paint smeared all over their happy little fizzogs, and yet the most colourful thing I’ve seen in a month is the lion that mauled my parents’ next door neighbour a few nights ago.

My parents live in Southgate, north London, not in the African bush. This was, natch, part of my dream some nights ago. I was watching the lion from my old bedroom in my parents’ house, with them, out of the window. We were amazed at first, as we’d never seen a lion up close, and one doesn’t expect to see such a creature strolling down a suburban Southgate street – especially one so dazzlingly golden, with such a bright, flowing mane. It walked very calmly and confidently down the road, and we were more than a little thrilled. I assumed it had escaped from a zoo – you read these stories sometimes, don’t you, about big cats living in the most unexpected locations, having escaped from this place or that place – and felt lucky to be looking at him. It didn’t feel so lucky when he tore down Rita (the next door neighbour’s) door and started mauling someone he had found in there, flaying the skin from this poor man’s back as he screamed and cried, still alive even as he was swiftly being torn, quite literally, in two.

I woke up from this dream needing a drink – water, not the stiff gin one might assume, I hasten to add. Generally, I’ve been sleeping so much better lately, but some of my good habits are starting to slip a little bit, and the occasion of this dream, some nights ago, was one of those times that I woke up during the night. The dream (I won’t bore you with all the details) (or maybe, as it turns out, I will) had already transmuted into my brother having been taken over by another being and being about to kill me… and yet I still found myself trying to get back inside the dream as I got back into bed, mouthing the words I’d been saying when I’d awoken, trying to get back to the scene I had just left.

All the signs would point to that having been a nightmare, right? I mean, seeing the lion in the street was pretty damn cool, but then the flaying alive, and the eerie creepiness of someone else in my brother’s body (I knew it wasn’t him because he had an upside down tattoo of some script across his shoulder blades, and my brother would NEVER get a tattoo, let alone a creepy upside down, Satan-ish looking number) accusing me of killing the neighbour, when I could see in his eyes that this was part of his elaborate plan to kill me – this shouldn’t be something I want to get back to, right? And yet, and yet… the simple truth of the matter is that sleep is so prized to me, so cherished, so tied up with my mental health in ways both good and bad that I would almost always rather be asleep than awake.

Sleep is good for me because when I don’t get enough of it, I lose a layer of skin – things affect me way too much and I cry and crumble way too easily. If I’ve not had enough sleep, a broken nail seems like front page news, and the actual front page news (lying politicians, house fires, murder victims, starving children, orphaned baby tigers) is enough to completely dissolve me. The ups and downs of relationships (romantic and other) that most people seem to take in their stride completely confound me when I’m not sleeping well. I dwell and dwell and dwell on slights and rows and treatment that has made me feel small, and something within the sleep-starved version of my soul is a greenhouse for these things, making them grow rich and lush and all-entangling, like a creeper weed choking a rose. This is why I mustn’t lose too much sleep.

Sleep is bad for me because when I have too much of it, it’s all I want. Not that I would know, but it’s like heroin. It’s all I want – to return to the world of my dreams, where I swim with crocodiles (last night) or talk to ponies (the night before) or perform onstage with Madonna (over and over and over again). When I wake up from too much sleep, I feel drugged. My mouth is fuzzy and dry, my head is thick and suety, I can’t think anything through or get anything done. It’s the same thing that happens to me when I watch too much television, but if anything, it’s even more addictive.

In fact, my most deadly entrapment of all is a combination of these two things – sleeping with the television on. There’s something about the recorded voices of people talking, with the occasional laughter track or incidental music thrown in, that is a totally soporific lullaby for me. A DVD would get me to sleep better than a valium – until it finished, at which point I’d be spewed back into the real world, which mostly consisted of that black and red screen in all the different languages telling you not to show this DVD on oil rigs. Hence why I always slept with one hand clutched tightly around the remote control, so that I could press play and sink back into my paddling pool shallow sleep once again. I can’t really do this any more since getting rid of the television from my room so that I would sleep better.

As a brief aside – I was SO confident that, although it was painful doing it, I wouldn’t miss the television from my room at all, and that I would become one of those annoying people who say they would never dream of having a TV in their room in the first place, and who point out what a lowly slacker anyone who does harbour such a filthy secret must be. Turns out, I was wrong. I know it was the right thing to do, as I do sleep better, but godDAMN I miss my bedroom TV. I use audio books now instead, but it’s like switching heroin for methadone. It does the same job, but it’s nowhere near as good.

The sensible thing, one would think, on waking up from too much sleep and finding oneself in this impaired state, would be to go swimming or do some yoga, or at the very least some star jumps – anything that’s going to wake myself up so that I can come home to my fully operational brain and get on with my day. Right? Wrong! That’s the problem with impaired states after all… you don’t think right. At the time that this is going on for me, the only thing I can think of that will solve the lopsided hardship of being alive is going back for some more of that delicious sleep. It’s like a mini-suicide to which you don’t have to commit, is sleep. And what could be more tempting than that? Left to my own devices, it’s possible that I would spend the rest of my days slumbering to old episodes of Gilmore Girls, only waking up to change DVDs and eat the occasional bit of cheese.

I don’t suppose I’m unique in these feelings. After all, who doesn’t love a good slumber party? The party where, ultimately, you’re the only guest and your dreams are your own personal cinema. What could be better? My dreams are bigger, and fuller, and bolder, more colourful and linear and complex than those of anyone else I’ve ever met, with the possible exceptions of my friends Rosch and Adam. I don’t know if my dreams really are as linear and novel-esque as they so often seem, or if it’s the writer monkey in my head editing story lines together as I wake up, but it doesn’t really matter – they keep me entertained either way.

The one downside of having made my sleep so much healthier (apart from having to get rid of the TV) is that I don’t remember my dreams as much. For the first month or so that I was sleeping right, I don’t think I remembered more than a wisp of a dream for the entire four weeks, something that had never happened to me before in my life. I was bereft! This was something that was so puzzling about my insomnia days. I was convinced I hadn’t slept for more than, say, seven minutes the entire night, spread out over several hours, and yet my dreams had seemed to go on for millennia. Of course, this is because the dreams we remember are the ones we have as we’re coming up to the surface of sleep – as we’re about to wake up. So I was asleep, but never very well.

I’ve started to remember my dreams more again. I know this is because I’ve stopped doing everything Paul McKenna tells me… I never leave three hours between food and sleep any more, I sometimes sit on my bed to fold my washing, I sometimes try to sleep before I’m tired. But like a manic depressive skipping out on my medication, hoping to tempt just a tiny bit of the temptress of mania back into my life, I’m not doing anything about it just yet. Stop dreaming? People who say that are blaspheming, as Mike Skinner once said. I don’t think he meant the literal dreams that I do, but still. If I can twist someone else’s clever words and use them as my defence, you can’t stop me. Even if you try it with both hands (Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, Lewis Carroll).