Mock Duck

Anyone for Tennis?

This is exhausting. I've been tagged back by Poppy who has finally launched her one-eyed blog (which I'll add to my links in a sec) and I now have to put up 6 more random facts. Is there 6 more random facts about me? I'll start with the one I left on Poppy's blog.

1. If I'd been a boy my dad was going to name me Horace. And if my best friend from university was a boy her dad was going to call her Boris.

I think it brought us together.

He tried to call the dog Horace, but we resisted. He finally had success with a guinea-pig some years later...

2. If a film was made of my life I should be played by Jack Black.

3. When I was three I collected worms. My mother would take my clothes to the wash and find the pockets were brimming over with handfuls of the wriggling things. I once had a bad quarrel with a boy over a worm. No amount of diplomacy could resolve the issue so, in the end, I said "I know what to do" and chopped it in half. He got the dead end.

4. I was obsessed with horses as a child and desperate for a pony. So my parents found the most nasty bad-tempered animal they could find and had me look after her for a month. At the end of the trial I was bitten black and blue and fed up of picking up poo and went off the whole idea.

5. My desk isn't messy, I'm just cultivating penicillin in teacups.

6. I like geeks.

Blog-snobbery, ordinariness and what I had for breakfast.

As you know, I was recently linked to by Picador Blog (courtesy of Vulpes colleague Lisa). I was perusing it the other day and found a piece by biographer Patrick French:

I have a confession: I am a virgin blogger, and this is my first post. And one more: I don’t like blogs. Bloggers are bores; bores are bloggers...                               

Strange thing to write on a blog, you might think.

This is a subject that often crops up. People always seem to think they are the first to roll their eyes with superiority and give out about the vanity, egotism, boringness, mundanity of blogs. Oh blogs - how vulgar - anonymous people telling us what they eat for breakfast (eye-roll, eye-roll).

Last time I was confronted with these usual prejudices, I trotted out my usual schpeel: there are millions upon millions of blogs (hence there must be SOMETHING good out there), they are repositories for fanatical obsessions and amateur experts (for example, researching a recent bout of tendonitis I found more information from blogs of other people who have suffered the same thing than I have from an army of medics or physios...), they allow self-expression and disagreement in oppressive countries, they allow insight into very different lives and isolated lives: particularly those of women (the country with the most blogs per head is Iran), there are blogs on all sorts of things and all sorts of remote places that even the news can't gain access to (blogs from the front-line of Iraq for example)....

But there are also, undeniably, blogs about very ordinary people with very ordinary lives doing very ordinary things.

Apart from the fact I find it so incredible that so many writers seem so uninterested in people (surely blogs are an invaluable research tool for a writer?) the thing is, worthy schpeel aside, why is it that so many writers are so sneery about ordinariness?

I understand people moaning about lack of quality in forms and media that are limited, where you feel other, better work may be being penalised as a result: books, newspapers, films, theatres, competitions even. But noone is regulating blogs. Anyone can set up a blog. They are what they are: they are not chosen by some central establishment, which is what makes them so varied and the possibilities so endless. Why this should offend people I cannot fathom.

We seem to live in a culture that is all about pushing the dream: whether that is being extraordinarily thin, extraordinarily rich, extraordinarily famous, extraordinarily respected (especially if any or all of the above).

Watching the tail-end of a programme about Josie Russell, I was suddenly struck by how much value she had for ordinariness.  She talked of resentment of media intrusion, her love of her very small and ordinary school in Wales where she returned to recover after her mother and sister were murdered. She talked of how great it was that her boyfriend just liked her as an ordinary girl -  just like any other girl (how many of us would ever think this in the context of relationships, rather than demanding "I'm special!" "I'm special, aren't I?" and refusing to exist on a plane with anyone else.). In this culture where we are always craving to be better than somebody else, and where even being a victim can bring you attention (something discussed by her father with some honesty) it was very affecting to hear someone saying how important it was just to be like everyone else.

Don't get me wrong. Josie Russell suffered a terrible tragedy, no wonder she craves ordinariness - She must wish she had had an ordinary life in order never to have experienced what she did.

But what she was pointing out was something else. That ordinary things matter. That they are comforting. They are human. They are life. They are, when all the status and standing and prizes and admiration of other people and all that superficial stuff is stripped away, perhaps all we have left. We don't realise how important that is until it's whipped away from us.

Of course, faced with terrible or difficult or painful things, we all start valuing ordinariness again.  But, maybe that, in itself, tells us something - that ordinary things DO fundamentally matter. And if people who have faced the big things in life tell us they do - who are we to disagree with them?

I have been thinking a lot about these issues recently for other reasons. What is important. How to live the best sort of life. What makes us happy. Whether, as a society, we waste too much time feeling bad about ourselves, competing over achievements, trying to be extraordinary, trying to be "special".

So, I disagree with the writer on the Picador Blog. I like blogs BECAUSE they are ordinary. Because they are just real people doing something for fun, rather than to impress, to win prizes, gain status, get literary approbation. (Though, no doubt, with so many blogs out there there will be some trying to do that too!)

Most are just ordinary people, talking about their breakfasts.

And I like that.

(P.S   Porridge, by the way. In case you were wondering.)

Painful Past Selves

My parents are moving house.

Yesterday a car-load of stuff arrived. All my childhood things: drawings from when I was five, my first book that I wrote aged 8 - consisting of 11 chapters of pet acquisition with class lines such as: "We bought you a pony for your birthday. We got him cheap. You can keep him in the garden" - along with a Cinderella-type story of two twins, Anna and Annabell, the latter of whom, favoured by her mother, is given a diamond necklace for her birthday and a pekinese called Fluffypoo (eh?), whilst poor Anna receives a half-used crayon...

Later, the themes are more sophisticated. In "My 21st Century" the ten-year-old horror that was me predicts the demise of smoking, the banning of pubs and vast tracts of land fenced off for the use of "only certain people" (myself amongst them)...Slightly less sickeningly, future travel takes the form of one machine that can turn into car, plane or "hellycopter" at the touch of a button.

The bin-bags keep coming. Childhood marches through to adolescence and it starts to get pretty unbearable. To think of all those poor trees slaughtered to feed the excruciating ramblings of my teenage self.

The angst, the self-absorption, the *shudder* poetry.

It's all too close and too raw. You forget. Just how awful you were. But somehow - even though I can't bear to look at it - I can't bear to throw it away. For, once it is gone, so is my teenage self - forever. (Which I have to admit is tempting, but...)

Memory betrays you. Your sense of your past self becomes inextricably mixed with your present. I would never have guessed, for example, that I was such a prude. Such a disapproving decrier of all things drink and drug. (Amazing how art college gets you out of all of that.) A diatribe by a puritanical fifteen-year-old me talks of the "deception" of makeup. Oh god: Ground, swallow me now!

There are other things in amongst the debris. Letters of complaint to Children's BBC, my thoughts on politics. A will outlining (in great detail) what lucky souls should be betrothed various pieces of my artistic juvenalia. I am like the Original Teenage Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells - apart from the Tunbridge Wells bit. I am surprised I don't find letters to Feedback complaining about the pronunciation of "controversy" or the prevalence of swearing on Channel Four.

I come across a "novel" I started writing when I was 17. I reckon it is a sort-of romance. Though all the characters are struggling artists:  could-have-been-contender Van Goghs. Reading it is a strange experience, because there is a certain level of sophistication, a definite brain in operation...and yet so green and gauche it sets my teeth on edge - like unripe gooseberries. And then I turn a page and find out the main character, "me", is 34. 34! Nearly my age now. (Though - let me add, hastily, not yet. I'm a mere 33.)

It is like a letter from the past. So this was my idea of what it was to be 34 - and I had no idea at all. The difference is subtle, hard to put your finger on even, yet hits you between the eyes like a frozen haddock.

But the peculiar thing is, not that I had no real idea of life at 34, but how, at nearly 34, I still have no idea of being 17.  I swore I would never forget. But I have. Even with my past self speaking to me from the page I can no more return to my mind then, than my past self could imagine me now.

Which I should really try and link neatly to books, shouldn't I?

I wondered, briefly, if I could use any of this stuff - an authentic teenage voice - material for some future project. But it wouldn't work.

Because, when it comes to it, our view of how we were at a particular age is ALWAYS filtered through our present, no matter what we do. My real teenage self was too raw, too uncomfortable, too - shit. Yes, that's the word. Too generally shit - to be a credible teenage heroine.

Is this why we need writers - to make it better? More palatable? To bridge the gap...?

Packing away my papers, I ruminate upon this problem and as I do so, a red file falls from one of the binbags.  I feel a shudder of memory. "Programme One" it says. It is my sitcom: a six-part television series written in my last year at school.

Unable to resist, I open the file for the first time in over a decade...

And there, amongst the binbags, time suddenly concertinas, as my 17 year old self and my 34 year old self start laughing together.

Yuletide Fantasy

Mother:    So, your Grandma was asking after you again, hoping to see you soon – Christmas maybe? Auntie Pauline and Uncle Roger will be round – they were saying recently that they haven’t seen you in a while and I said, yes, I said, its very difficult for them what with his parents being so demanding but that this year is owed to us.

Daughter:    Mum, you know it’s hard for us to see everyone. The other family wants to see us too, and it means a lot of travelling now his parents are separated...

Mother:    But your dying grandmother.

Daughter:    Grandma, yes.

Mother:    She could go any moment.

Daughter:    Any moment for the last twenty years.

Mother:    Precisely - it could be your last time to see her alive. But, no pressure.

Daughter( sigh):     Alright, I tell you what - if you’re that keen you can put a bid in.

Mother:    What are you talking about?

Daugher:    Time to put your money where your mouth is: how much do you really want us for Christmas?  We're Ebaying ourselves.

Mother:        Ebay?

Daughter:    Oh everyone's doing it. The one who offers the most in the way of food, presents, entertainment and sheer hard cash will have the pleasure of our company over the Yule season. We've already been bid 3 Christmas dinners, a holiday in Barbados and a new kitchen. What can you offer? Some boring pseudo-relations and a dying granny? Sorry, but I think you’ll have to do better than that.

Mother:    How has it come to this? My own daughter – overtaken by the crass and needless commercialisation of Christmas! Don’t you realise the true message of our Lord’s birth? - I’ll raise you 3 Gucci handbags and a penthouse in Manhattan.

Daughter:    You’ve got til Mon at noon. Why don't you give Grandma a phone - see if she has any heirlooms she can let go early...See you. Or maybe not. Ta ra.

Dammit.

Great. The day I get linked to from Snowbooks for my review of Sarah Stovell's Mothernight and find my blog inundated with referrals from their website...is the day my lead post is titled "Poo in Trees." I am so ashamed. I am off to hastily add some more posts now. And hope nobody notices.

Poo in Trees

There is lovely leafy walk near where I live, where I amble occasionally. It's full of children and dogwalkers and bikes passing peacefully by, but it is marred by one thing: the extraordinary number of plastic bags tied to tree-branches. For ages I wondered what they were, until finally, curiously, I approached one.

Whilst it is all very admirable for people to pick up their dogpoo and stick it in a plastic bag: since when did people get the brilliant notion of attaching said bag to a tree?

Surely it would be better for the stuff to be left rotting peacefully on the ground than placed in a plastic shrine at eye level? Where it doesn't biodegrade. Where it remains forever. Or until someone gets fed up and phones the council about it. (Probably me).

Has anyone else noticed this sudden dogpoo-in-trees explosion?

This is the kind of complaint that makes me feel really old and grumpy.

But it is poo. In a tree. POO. In a TREE.

is it just me?

Kissing Etiquette

Ok, that is it, I thought. I'm going to say, once and for all. But how? They're quick, they're nimble, they'll dart in there before I have a chance to...Look, why should I have to subscribe to other people's rules? Why can't I just say simply and straight-forwardly -

"It's a modern thing," said Mum, in old-womanish tones. "There didn't used to be all this kissing all over the place."
"But it's your friends!"
"I blame the French."
"The French have got the right idea. They all kiss the air. Your friends kiss on the mouth!"

It's true.

For years I have tried to get out of it: I have walked into rooms backwards, feigned terrible mouth-transmitted diseases, been suddenly transported by the view out the window or stuck my head in a bag at the key moment. But it's no use. LIke heat-seaking missiles, they lock-on, they root you out: you can run, you can hide, but they will get you no matter what you do.

First time he met them, I warned the Geek. "Don't worry," he boasted. "They won't get me." He turned up, brandishing a bottle, confident that - at a good 2 foot taller than his female host - he'd be safe; if only it were that simple.

"How lovely to meet you," purred his assailant who, with a little leap, grabbed hold of the sides of his head and began slowly, inexorably, to winch herself upwards.

His head trembled with the strain, mouth disappearing into a thin lipless line - yet still she continued her ascent, a look of ruthless determination on her face. With one last gasp he tried to shake himself free, but it was no use. Like a cat glorying over its kill she paused for a second with a smirk, then attached herself, plunger-like, to her prize. For a moment, she dangled there, before hopping back to her feet and formal normality once more. "Dinner, this way."

This has been going on all my life. This day it had to stop.

What about a sign? Round my neck. "No Kissing." "I don't do kissing." "I don't care how shiny your lips are." "Wait til Bird Flu comes, then you won't be so keen."

We entered the restaurant. I could dimly see my adversaries darting to their feet. I had to be make it quick. Taking a stance I learnt from a self-defence class I braced myself, feet planted firmly in a stable triangular stance - I extended a hand palm up and yelled firmly and authoratively, "STOP!"

They stopped. Shit, what now?

"Umm," I said, less impressively. "I've decided I don't do kissing anymore."

It was an incredibly shocking thing to say. My parents stood, dumbfounded at my rudeness, whilst - to my horror - their friends seemed to collapse before my eyes like burst balloons. They looked so sad.

"It's nothing personal," I said, feebly. "Gotta be careful these days. You know, bird flu and that."

They eyeballed me suspiciously.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" I felt like rushing up and snogging the pair of them. Who was I to trample on their innocent, affectionate ways?

"Besides, it's sexist," I continued, even less convincingly. "The men kiss the women and the women kiss the women but why don't the men ever kiss each other?"

The men of the party looked round nervously. Obviously there was one thing more horrifying than my failure of etiquette: the prospect of kissing my father.

After a long pause, there was a slight, awkward laugh. Then a bit of manly back-patting and "whoaing" and "grring". The tension was broken. I sat down, relieved, virgin lips unsoiled.  Round One.

But I have a horrible feeling that that this is just the first battle and the rest of the smackeroony war is yet to come.

Fear of Latte

Yesterday I thought I was having a heart attack.

I was sitting in a chair, feeling relatively peaceful and relaxed (for me) when suddenly my heart started racing. It was beating and beating as though trying to jump out of my chest. My heart-rate leapt up so that I couldn't even count it, it was going so fast. "This is it," I thought. "I'm going to die."
"I'm dying, " I said to my mother who was looking up property on the internet.
"Oh yes?" She didn't even look round.
"There's something horribly wrong with me."
"Hang on a minute - now is this three bedrooms or two -?"
"Mum!"

The heart continued to threaten to explode through my breastplate and Mum finally turned round. Then she took some notice - I must have looked a bit more ill than I usually do when I declare another set of fatal symptoms and ask if I'm going to die. She took my pulse, looked at me in alarm and phoned the doctor.

By the time I got to the medics, it had died down. But I was faint and sick and shaken up and so tired I could hardly move.  My parents were being nice to me so they must have been worried. The doctor took my pulse and listened to my heart with a stethoscope. He stuck stickers all over me and attached some complicated-looking wires. A machine produced a graph of the electrical activity of my heart. This was serious stuff.

No abnormality there as far as he could see. So he asked a few questions.

"Any big illnesses since I last saw you in...1993?"
"No."
"Has this ever happened before?"
"No."
"You haven't done anything unusual - taken anything? Drunk a lot of coffee?"

Mum and I looked at each other.

My father's one affectation is to drink his coffee out of French-style bowls. I normally have a cup of real coffee in the morning, maybe two. That morning, absent-mindedly, I had two and a half bowls instead. Plus a cup of tea. When we worked it out it turned out to be about three quarters of a litre of coffee - maybe 4 or 5 cups...and not forgetting that tea of course.

The doctor's eyebrows shot up. "That's a lot of coffee," he said.
I shuffled about and looked at my feet. I felt dirty, ashamed. Like a secret addict who's just been rumbled.
"Perhaps you might like to try decaf instead?"

Thus, I was dismissed. Diagnosis - palpitation, very common apparently and probably harmless (I don't much like that probably bit). Otherwise known as a panic attack. A coffee-induced panic attack.

I never knew I was that frightened of coffee - but I think I just might be from now on.

On rescuing.

Kit Whitfield was talking recently about the dilemma of rescuing people. Not because of being stabbed. Or spat at. Or laughed at. But because of the risk of other people being inconvenienced. (Scroll down to post called Public Transport.)

I very much relate to Kit on this. I have an unfortunate habit of rescuing people. And not just people.

When I moved to Dublin after university I walked through a park one day and the place was littered with bodies. On the benches. On the grass. On the concrete. Apparently dead.

"Oh my God!" I cried, "we must call an ambulance immediately! There's six unconscious people! Maybe they are having heart attacks!"

"Don't be ridiculous, " said my companion. "They won't thank you." She indicated the empty bottles lying near the unconscious forms. "They'll be sleeping it off so their wives don't find out."

And just to show that it's not just Dublin, back home in Scotland, The Geek and I were just rambling up Arthur's Seat when I came across a group of teenagers gathered round a white shaking corpse-like figure moaning and shuddering.

"Don't do anything," they begged. "Please don't tell." They held up the empty vodka bottle."He polished it off himself. We didn't know he had so much. His mum'll kill us."

It was hard not to feel for them, they were a nice, incredibly naive bunch and the two girls were crying but - no - ruthless adults that we were, we called an ambulance.

"You are going to get into trouble," I said. "But don't worry about it. You did the right thing. If his mother kills you, it's the price you have to pay. But at least you did the right thing to take him to hospital."

Ah! How heroic and grown-up I sounded. But not all my rescues have been so successful. There was the time I "rescued" an old man covered in piss at a bus-stop near me.

"Ahhhhhhhhhh! Ahhhhhhhh," he wheezed indistinctly. "I need you to help me across the road."

He stank of pee but - heroically - I took him by the arm and walked him across at which point he said, "Take me to my house. I need you to take me to my house."
"Are you ill? Do you need an ambulance?"
He said, "yes."
So I called him an ambulance.While I was on the phone he started gesturing wildly.
"What?"
"No! No!" he wheezed.
"What?"
"Tell them to go away."
"I thought you wanted an ambulance?"
He shook his head.
The ambulance man insisted on speaking to him to make sure he was ok.
"Doesn't sound like he's dying to me," the ambulance man said.
"He said he was a few moments ago."
"Well, we can't force him."
I rang off, annoyed. The old man had started clutching my arm again. I was losing patience with him now.
He said, "You need to take me to my house. You have to take me into my house. I don't feel well."
I said, "You just cancelled the ambulance."
His expression changed. "Give us a kiss," he said, making a lunge.

I decided he wasn't dying after all.

Then there are the dogs.

In the area I lived in Dublin people were pretty casual about their dogs, which would be roaming freely all over the place. I just couldn't get used to this and would regularly decide they were lost and try to rescue them.

The first time I did this, the dog - a nutty Springer Spaniel - really was lost and careering madly around in the middle of busy main road doing his best to get run over. I caught him, rigged up a lead out of a shoelace and took him home.

He was lovely, but completely daft, and was determined never to be left again, even when I went to the toilet. That night he slept in my bed - head on the pillow, his legs stretched across me so that he would be able to tell if I made a quick getaway. He also - rather less endearingly - peed on my life-drawings, but let's forget about that.

You never know what the result will be of taking a dog to the Pound, but I decided I had no choice and to check up on him in a few days and, if no-one came forward, try and find him a home. It was gutting as he was shoved bodily into one of the small cages of the pound van. And the look he gave me....heartbreaking. Happily, his owner, a taxi driver (the dog had apparently leapt out of the taxi in a completely strange area miles from his home) had been madly phoning around and picked him up the very next day. I could tell he was a much loved pet from the quality of his coat and his trusting nature.

Buoyed up by this success, the next time I met a "lost" dog moping about in the street I had no hesitation in taking him home. He followed me very happily (thus demonstrating his general lostness: I was an expert by now) and wolfed down two tins of dogfood (demonstrating that he had been starving from his life on the street).

This dog was the scruffiest but also the most charming character you've even met - black, solid as a barrel, with a sassy friendliness that got him attention wherever I took him.

For three days I put signs all round the neighbourhood. Then, I decided to find him a home and gave him to a nice man at the end of the street who knew a family who wanted a dog and who would give him the love he deserved.

Job done, I sat back to bask in my own virtuousness.

Next day I got a phonecall from a very irate woman. Apparently I had dognapped her dog from outside her house, where he lived. Oh, the shame! Not only had I taken him, but I had transported him miles across town and given him to someone else entirely.

Thankfully, after a lot of phoning and negotiating I managed to get him back. But she was still horrible about it and I was mortified. (Though, I still think he is somewhat to blame for giving such a good impression of a starving stray: his rotund form should perhaps have been a clue.)

And the lesson?

In relation to Kit Whitfield's post? Well. Yes. Rescuing others is a risk. Stabbing? Violence? Acute embarrassment, more like. People, teenagers, dogs. The people who need rescuing never want to be rescued and those that want to be rescued may just be trying it on. But one thing you can be sure of: none of them will thank you.

But I still do it. Just in case. (And because of that pesky moralising core - did I mention that already? No? Another time...)

Massacre

We returned today to be greeted by this scene of carnage.

The Geek was practically weeping as he squashed the remaining few feebly-waving survivors under the ant-bait station.

From peaceful hippy vegan to slaughterer of hundreds overnight. I see it as his coming of age ceremony. Another small step along the road to our one day sitting down to a couple of nice rare steaks and a glass of fish-killing wine...sigh. Ah dreams!