On Writing a (Performance) Poem - Part II

In Part One of this blog, I gave you the thrilling back story of the writing of my narrative poem, The Tragic Story of the Ill-Fated Lovers, Romy and Julian, Aged Seven. This part deals with the technicalities of writing the poem, is ridiculously long, and will probably be of interest to 0.7 of you. ;-) But if you indulge me and read it anyway, your reward will meet you in heaven. Probably. 

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I had started out on my poem by writing little sketches of my two leading characters, and a planned verse-by-verse account of the plot, such as it was. I had a million ideas for things that didn’t make it into the final cut – Julian was going to wear red wellington boots at all times, I was going to juxtapose the slight Victorian feel of the poem with much talk of Twitter and iPhones and so on – but my plot was there. I was slightly daunted by the idea of the 25 verses I had to complete, but I wanted to tell a story and it seemed that it needed to be that long.

Poetry is a tricky concept, isn’t it? I write poetry occasionally, I read it somewhat less frequently, and there are aspects of it I love. However, it can be awful as well – nothing makes my heart sink lower than terrible poetry. Bad poetry? Oh noetry! I think poetry gets (and deserves!) a bad name when it’s wet. When it dribbles and trickles all over the place like a leaky tap, getting your trouser cuffs damp and making your cereal soggy. When it meanders hither and tither with no clear agenda. When the point is lost beneath a thousand flowery words and weak, misty metaphors.

In my opinion, the way to write good poetry (unless you’re very, very, very good and can break all the rules and still win) is somewhat counter-intuitive to the notion of poetry we all have in our heads as a lace-trimmed polygamist who won't be hemmed in by your bourgeois laws.

It’s all about the structure - it's about making a set of rules and not deviating from them. In my opinion, when you have a tight little cage to work in, you are forced to become more creative in order to fill it. If you, as the unwashed hippies would say, let it all hang out, then there’s no discipline and you’re never forced to re-write a line ten times until it shines like a diamond. I forget who this was, but I am paraphrasing some famous poet or other when he said that he spent the morning hard at work putting a comma in and the afternoon hard at work taking it out again. I work a lot quicker than this as slowness bugs me, but that’s the kind of painstaking attitude you have to adopt to write good poems. Not only does every word count, but so does every syllable and every punctuation mark.

This means that the first thing I always do when I write a poem (or always should do - sometimes I'm lazy and don't, always to the poem's detriment) is decide on the structure. This usually just means, for me, a rhyme scheme and a basic rhythm. I sometimes write poems that don’t rhyme – in fact, two of my favourite poems I’ve written in recent times, ‘I want to be as small as possible’ and ‘The ever decreasing circle,’ both of which feature in previous blog entries – don’t. But usually, I prefer it. What can I say? I am a product of pop lyrics and I like a nice rhyme. My favoured rhyme scheme, which you can see in ‘an old poem,’ one of the oldest blogs on this site is:

A

B

A

B

C

C

And my first instinct was to make this new poem follow that one. However, I turned to The Walrus and the Carpenter for inspiration, and realized that the Rev hadn’t rhymed as many lines as I might want to:

The sun was shining on the sea

Shining with all his might.

He did his very best to make

The billows smooth and bright.

And that was odd, because it was

The middle of the night.

As you can see, there is only one rhyme, but it occurs three times: might, bright, night. The other line ends – sea, make, was – don’t rhyme at all (this is an ABCBDB rhyme scheme, for those who care). Well, I thought, in my naivety. That’s a bit easy, isn’t it? But ok, if it’s good enough for Lewis Carroll, I guess it’s good enough for me!

Having decided I would be more painstaking than I usually am, I also counted the syllables in TWATC (hee hee, that’s quite a comical acronym, isn’t it?) (which are 8, 6, 8, 6, 8, 6 throughout the fucking thing without exception… it beggars belief, I tell you!) and decided that Romy and Julian would follow the exact same pattern – lines of 8 and 6 syllables, with every second line rhyming. This way, I thought, the poem would be my cunning little tribute to TWATC, and I could award extra smug points to anyone who noticed the similarity.

This plan, grand as it was, lasted all of about three minutes.

I sat myself down with my plot outline and my structure outline and tried to write, and instantly, it was clear that it wasn't gonna work. Without wanting to sound like a nutter, you have to write to the rhythms that are in your own head. Some rhythms will come naturally to you and some won’t, and trying to write to a rhythm you can’t really hear will always be an uphill battle. Do yourself a favour and go with what works for you. Once you've picked the rhythm, you have to stick to it, but you can create that rhythm whichever bloody way you like. 

My initial structure went like this:

Romy the Romany was a tubby ginger girl,

Who’d grown up in a Cambourne caravan

Hidden away from the world.

She made origami animals just like the real thing

And her only friends were the squirrels

Who she took under her wing.

It’s weak, but girl and world are supposed to rhyme, and then obviously so do thing and wing. This is out a little (I was going to come back and tighten it up), but the syllable structure was meant to be roughly 13 in line one, 8 in line two and 7 in line three, repeated for lines four, five and six. It’s a bit all over the shop, but it was what was working in my head, and I used that for a good 9 or 10 verses as I began to fill in my plotline, figuring I would come back and tighten it up later.

However – duh, duh, DUH! – I was finding that increasingly, what I needed to happen in each line was taking up too many syllables, and the rhythm was starting to sound different in my head. It turns out that, to tell a story, you need more syllables than I had given myself, especially when you’ve been foolish enough to give your leading man three syllables in his very name!

When I realised that the rhythm and the advancement of the plot couldn't work together, I faced a choice – to either make the plot less ambitious (a near impossibility, to be honest - it's not Inception, for heaven's sake), or to change the structure and re-write everything I’d written so far. For a while I sat staring into space, gripped with fear as both choices seemed wrong and it all seemed like way too momentous a decision to make.

This was when I remembered another of the golden rules of writing – until it’s been published (and aren’t I lucky, none of my writing has ever been burdened with that dead weight), nothing is carved in stone. You try something – it doesn’t work – so what? Scribble it out and try again! It’s always better to write something than nothing, and it’s much easier to turn a terrible something into a good something than it is to turn nothing into anything. So I tried a verse with the new structure that the poem seemed to be naturally leaning towards anyway:

The blondest girl smiled toxicly

And offered Romy a cake

Poor Romy took it trustingly,

No idea the girl’s grin was fake.

‘Is it wheat free?’ she asked, the girl said yes,

But Romy had been tricked

Her tummy started to swell and so

She didn’t see her lunch tin get nicked.

This was far from perfect – the syllables were out, still, with some lines being 8, some 9 and some 10, but at once I felt happier with this more even layout, and with eight lines per verse rather than six. So I went back and re-wrote all the verses I had so far to fit this new structure, aiming for around 8 syllables in every line... and this re-write was actually be much easier than I had feared. Letting the air out of a poem a bit – rather than having to lace it up tighter – is always going to be the easier of the two processes.

At this point (all of the actual writing had happened in one day), I started to get really down about the whole thing. I think it hadn’t helped that I had spent all day on my own, while I knew a lot of my friends were planning things, and fun things at that, the bastards. The actual process of writing is so strange. I love it – I must love it – why else do I persist, when my life is really quite busy enough already? Certainly, I love the results, but the actual process is a tricky thing.

Writing can be really hard and really tiring, and I was trying to write narrative verse, which I'd never done before… it wasn’t coming easy to me. I was tired, and lonely, and suddenly everything I’d written all day looked terrible – contrived, awkward and light years away from being funny.

Being somewhat of a slave driver, I pushed on for another four verses with the new structure, despite my misery, just telling myself that if I could get the bare bones down, I would come back to it tomorrow for another bash... I'd originally thought I could get the first draft of the whole thing done in one day (crazy arrogance, I can see now!) and was starting to panic that I was going to run out of time.

Interestingly, the four verses I wrote in that tired, protesting state, as quickly as I could so I could go downstairs and lose myself in my new Big Bang Theory boxset, were four that barely needed any editing at all:

Romy looked up from the squirrels

And her eyes met Julian’s eyes

She felt her little gypsy heart

Swell to twice its normal size.

He held out her Miffy lunchbox

And she reached her hands towards his.

Both were too shy to speak, but knew

All they wanted was a kiss.   

Before I went to bed, miserable and alone, the TV (shockingly!) not having cheered me up much, I tried to read it again, and had to stop midway through in disgust, so convinced was I that it was irredeemably terrible and that I would have to revert to my First World Problems poem, the idea of which I hated by now. I was seriously considering ringing my friend and telling her I didn’t actually have enough talent to pull this off and she’d better withdraw me. It was really only my hatred of letting people down that stopped me doing just that. I went to bed feeling utterly wretched.

The next morning, I had to go to work, and I took my notebook with me... and, as is often the way after a good night's sleep, it all started to look a little less appalling. 

My major concern had been whether it was funny enough or not. When I thought about this, I realised that what was actually driving me wasn’t so much the desire to make people laugh, although that came into it, so much as the desire to have people be engaged. I wanted to know that the audience were concentrating.

Laughter is a good sign of this, but almost any kind of reaction would be good. Plus, I know enough to realise that the more engaged and involved an audience feel with what they are hearing, the more they will be fooled into thinking that said piece is amazing. As well as making people laugh, I wanted to tug on their heart strings, make them gasp, make them root for the heroes. This was what I had in mind I wrote the ridiculously manipulative lines: ‘It must be me,’ he thought to himself/‘I’m as useless as they all say.’ And it was on writing with this in mund that I struck on the idea of adding a genuine audience participation element.

We all loved Choose Your Own Adventure books as a kid, right? I know I did... As a 14 year old, I had one that mixed riding horses in a three-day event with kissing boys, and I worked out a logorithm (not that I knew it was called that back then) for making sure I had investigated every possible story, and then read those stories again and again. As a result, those books are never far from my head, and so when it occurred to me that I could get the audience to shout out their views and then vote for an ending, I started to get properly excited again. Some feedback from the friend running the cabaret later on inspired me to add 'boo' and 'yay' cards that I would hold up, so that the audience had no choice but to get involved and feel a part of it, and that was quite the success, if I do say so myself. 

However, it did still need more laughs, and I'm afraid that here, I sunk to the lowest common denominator. Whilst I'm not totally devoid of humour, being belly-laugh-funny is not where my talents lie as a writer. I can be wry and self-deprecating, I somewhat ironically boast, and I can make people chuckle knowingly, but I'm not a natural at creating howling, fist banging laughter of the sort I wanted.

So I decided that if I wanted to make people laugh properly, it was time to climb down off the high horse of intellect and snobbishness, and put in some jokes about poo and farts. This is Not Like Me. But I managed to shoe-horn three of the fuckers in, and people laughed. I wouldn't particularly recommend this as a writing strategy, but hell, we can't do everything perfectly, right?

I finally staggered to the end of a first draft some three or four days later than I thought I would, and was then faced with a series of re-writes. After a couple of run-throughs, tweaking at the words, the sense and the style, the first major thing I did was try to make every single line in the poem 8 syllables long. I am so in awe of the iambic pentameters and tetrameters of The Walrus and the Carpenter, and I was determined to try to reach an approximation of such discipline. And I did give it a pretty good stab.

It's fascinating, actually, how many words reveal themselves to be redundant when you really sit down and take a look at them. However, there was still a constant tension between storyline and syllables, a constant questioning over which was more important - a plot point, or the rhythm? Could the plot be changed every so slightly, to fit into the beat? If not, which words could be pared down or replaced in order to stick with the original plan?

I found myself engaged in a battle after a while whereby sometimes, lines with 9 syllables or with 10 just sounded better than ones with 8. When I read it aloud, somehow, at times, the shorter or longer lines just worked better. So after a while I relaxed a bit and let a few longer or shorter lines slip in. After all, I'm not Lewis Carroll and never will be, even if I try with both hands, so I decided to bow to what appeared to work and stick with that.

All that then remained was to run it through in front of a couple of friends, and then make some final alterations based on their feedback... and finally, it was done.

I shall leave you on the edge of your collective seats. You can read the poem in part three...

To be continued. 

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!

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 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.