A Parody of Sonnet x

I was sorting through my old computer files today and found this version of John Donne's 'Death Be Not Proud' in an A-level English essay I wrote when I was 17 – as you might imagine, the rest of the essay was pretty cringeworthy, but this made me smile...

Fish be not proud, though some have called thee
Smelly and scaly, for, thou art not soe,
For, those whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow,
Smell not, poore fish, nor yet canst I smell thee.
From troute and bass, which in stille waters bee,
To salmone, then which to the sea must flow,
And soonest our best men defy cod’s roe,
Breathe deeply and await deliverie.
Thou art slave to tide, winde, raine and fishermen,
Who do with maggots, flies and tackle dwell,
And lemons, herbes, and tartar sauce as well,
And batter thee with chips; why swell’st thou then?
One short held breath, wee breathe eternally,
And fish shall be no more; fish thou shalt fry.

A Conversation

Sitting on a low wall outside at a recent wedding, I was approached by a young and rather serious boy, a relative of the bride's cousin, I believe.

Young boy to me – Have you ever burst a balloon.

Me, indicating the balloon in his hand – Yes I have. Why are you going to burst that balloon?

Boy, with half a shrug and no readable facial expression – Maybe...

Some seconds later, when I was looking the other way, the boy managed to burst the balloon by inserting his thumb into it, and then held it up, semi-proudly for my perusal when I turned back to him.

Minutes passed and the boy returned, minus balloon, still serious and with an enigmatic smile.

Boy – I think I'm going to die.

Me, a little uncertain how to take this – Oh, why's that? Do you have a horrible rash or something?

Boy – No, I have asthma. I can't breathe.

Me – Well you seem to be able to talk alright.

Boy, waving at the door – I went inside and took my inhaler.

Me, trying to think of something responsible to say – Oh good, well hopefully that will make you feel better. If you can feel any worse then make sure you tell an adult straight away.

And that was that.

The boy, still surprisingly calm at the thought of his imminent demise, left to join his peers some metres away and, for those who may be concerned for his safety, was later seen running around quite happily. With no evidence to the contrary, it seems reasonable to assume he survived the evening unscathed.

Songs

When I started this blog I intended to post quite regularly, but you may notice I missed out a couple of months.

This is because I spent a long time recording some of my songs and putting them on myspace (which is rubbish by the way - but don't sue me, Rupert Murdoch). Not the best recordings in the world ever, but they do give an idea of what I've been doing with my life since I was 16...

Take a listen and let me know what you think.

I'm walking by the river in the dark hours

I'm walking by the river in the dark hours:
The water – coursing roughly round my mind –
A metaphor, a vision flanked by dream flowers.
The pathway overgrown and rarely signed.

I'm racing on ahead, not quite alone, but out of sight
Where the snow upon the mountains gives a glow of lunar light
That reaches through the gloom into the corners of the night
And settles of the shadowed landscape, tinging it with white.

What happens next is something of a mystery,
A dream undreamt, a story still untold.
I might yet join the circus, or tour history,
Or stumble on that stolen pot of gold.

Whatever will take place is not decided.
As yet no plot, no characters, no themes.
Instead I wake and find myself divided
One half in life, the other in my dreams.

All in a Name

His first reaction is shock morphing quickly into happiness, but before that, somewhere in the mix, a hint of despair. He dismisses it as inappropriate, files it away for later review and loses himself in jubilation. She laughs as he kisses her over and over again.

Then he pulls back and pauses as if coming to a conclusion, "I suppose we'll have to get married now."

She laughs again, "Ever the romantic, darling, but it really isn't necessary. Everything can go on just as before. Well, maybe not everything, but there's no need to be conventional all of a sudden."

Later, when she is dozing against him, he rests his hand on her stomach. It can't be true, but he imagines her belly has swollen a little already. His mind wanders far into a contented future, but is arrested once again by that nagging feeling, tight in his chest. He was wrong about it before, not despair, but fear. Fear leading quickly onto memory.

It must have been fifteen years ago. More. He had a flat above a launderette and was eking a living as a full-time writer and a part-time barman. He was walking to the corner shop when he saw her. It was her eyes that got to him. She can't have been more than ten or eleven, but her eyes were brimming with a weary sadness, and blooming on her cheek was a day-old bruise. He was about to overcome his initial wariness and ask her if she was okay, when a sour-faced woman stormed up and cuffed the girl around the head before dragging her into a nearby house.

He might have let it pass, might have dismissed the scene as an angry mother berating her runaway child, but the bruise and something in the older woman's manner left a sour taste in his throat. When he got home he found the phone book and reported the incident to the local social services office.

Having done his civic duty, he thought nothing further of it until a Sunday morning some months later. The sun was burning through the early morning cloud as he browsed the papers over breakfast when an address jumped out at him - the very same house he had seen the girl bundled into. His eyes scanned the story, picking out the details. Fascinated, he read it again, more carefully this time.

It appeared that the police had raided the house after an anonymous tip off to find... Well what didn't they find? Pretty much every kind of illegal activity was going on there, up to and including the trafficking of children. That is, the trafficking of one child, presumably the girl he had seen, referred to here as Child A.

It seemed the girl had been brought from her country of origin at a very young age, barely a toddler. Sent, it might be conjectured, by desperate parents, hoping for a better life for their offspring in a promised land across the sea. That better life did not materialise when she arrived in the UK. Instead she ended up ten years later, bruised and broken in the street, cuffed around the ear for escaping yet again.

Perhaps the most shocking of all the shocking indignities the girl's captors placed upon her was the fact that they denied her a name. She was too young or too traumatised to remember the name she was given at home, and they simply didn't bother to assign her a new one. It struck him as about the worst thing they could have done to her. For to deny someone a name is to deny them any relationship with the outside world. To do so was to denigrate her totally and utterly. To remove her very identity.

So it is this memory that, fifteen years later (or more), arrests his happiness at the new knowledge of his own successful procreation. This fear for a nameless child that he transfers to his own unborn infant. His body stiffens with distress and something - his unconscious movement, or the emotion in the air - stirs her from sleep. She sees his face and asks him what is wrong. He doesn't want to tell her, but he can't hide anything from her - he never could. As the sorry tale spills out of him, so do tears, the first he has cried in a very long time.

"I suppose it's part of it," she says, stroking his hair, "the fear. Before we could do as we wanted, because we weren't beholden to anyone or anything, apart from each other. But now... Well, we'll never be entirely unafraid again."

It is his turn to laugh. "Thanks ever so much for cheering me up, darling. You always know the right thing to say." Soon they are both laughing uncontrollably at the black humour of it all, and then the phone rings and it is her mother, and there are more tears - happy ones this time - as the day's news spreads a little further.

A not especially fictionalised account of my last trip to give blood

"Hey", I texted, "Remember we're going to see the nhs vampires this afternoon to give blood..."

My sister was coming with me. It was her first time. As we walked to the church hall where the blood service generally set up, she peppered me with questions, mostly along the lines of "Will it hurt?"

I decided not to tell her about the time when they put the needle too close to my nerve and it made my whole arm go fizzy, so that they had to abort the donation.

When we got there, we witnessed an extraordinary demonstration of bureacracy. In the last couple of years, the blood service has introduced an appointment system. Before I'd always forgotten to make an appointment, but this time, feeling virtuous, I rang up a week before the day in question and tried to make appointments for the two of us. I was told there weren't any left, but I could go along anyway and they would fit us in.

Having got there at 5.50pm, we were informed that they now like people to have appointments, so we should make one and come back (goodness knows why I couldn't do this in advance over the phone). The next two slots in a row were at 7.10 and 7.15. Luckily, our friends live round the corner from the church so we holed up there for an hour and came back.

I sat for a while in one row of seats, while my sister (because it was her first time) sat in a different row.

Then I was called up and had the usual test for anaemia before the nurse asked me about my the months I spent travelling last year. Not just out of friendliness (though friendly she was) but to try and establish when I had last been in a malarial area. I moved onto yet another row of seats and was followed there by a different nurse who asked me to tell her where exactly I'd been in China. I tried to explain and she tried to write it down, but unsurprisingly got stuck on a couple of names. It's hard to say "Would you like me to spell that for you?" without sounding patronising, I find. Eventually she got a map and I'd only been to the light pink areas, not the dark pink areas, so I passed whatever test it was.

The next test came when I was lying down, having the blood drained from my arm. They've made a new addition to the machines that slowly rock the bags of blood backwards and forwards; a red light on a white stick at about eye level when you're lying down. I didn't notice this until it started blinking - a vaguely alarming thing to happen when you have a needle in your arm. Eventually a nurse informed me that it was blinking because I wasn't squeezing and releasing my hand hard enough.

Basically, I was bleeding too slowly - a tendency one might be grateful for in different circumstances. I squeezed and released with gusto and the light duly stopped blinking. A few minutes later, the nurse returned and told me, "Well done, you're really doing well now," without a trace of irony. I struggled to find a sense of achievement in my rate of haemorrhaging.

About five minutes after that, the light started up again, so I renewed my squeezing and releasing efforts only to be told by another nurse (there were a lot of them about, it's a military operation) that this time the light meant I was finished.

There then followed lemon squash and a packet of salt and vinegar crisps - the cheap kind that taste like industrial cleaner and monosodium glutomate. Just as I was finishing, the woman next to me at the refreshments table felt faint and had to be laid down on a bed with her legs up in the air. The poor woman was still having feeling woozy twenty minutes later when my sister finished her donation.

Luckily we got away without incident and I even managed to make an appointment for next time (not until July), so assuming I don't forget between now and then, the whole process should take slightly less than the two and a half hours it took this time round.

When did my name become an old woman's name?

When did my name become an old woman's name?
From the mouth of my mother it soothed me
From the lips of my lover it proved he was true
And for me and my peers who all shared the name too
It was something alive, full of youth and romance
It was taking our arm and asking to dance

So when did my name become an old woman's name?
When did it start to sound awkward and plain?
When did it cease to be used as it was?
To be cared for and nurtured and whispered, because
I don't want to be known as a feeble old dear
I don't want you to wonder if I can still hear
And to shout like a demon my name in my ear
So I end up quite startled and bristling with fear

After I'm gone, when my name is in fashion
You'll hear it once more said with feeling and passion
But until that day, won't you please give it a rest
And just call me Grandma – I think that's for the best

Piano Practise

An insect lies dead stiff upon the piano
The music spread forgotten on the stand
I want there to be meaning in the tableau
But somehow meaning is not close at hand

The insect's death a hackneyed demonstration
An uninventive protest to the end
No web of winding sheets no weeping nation
No funeral for grieving insect friends

I brush its lifeless body from the keyboard
And take my place upon the piano stool
And sitting rest my fingers on the first chord
And play and sing of nothing much at all

Another Time Than This

There is a glass on a ledge. A curved glass with the dregs of cheap white wine pooling at the bottom. It sits forgotten, framed asymmetrically by the recess in the bare, cellar wall, and to its left a winter coat curled, sprawling, clinging to the ledge. The coat might fall, might descend to the ground to be trampled beneath the dancing feet, might float downwards to lie with sweat-sprinkled dust. It might fall, but it won't; it hasn't yet.

A pattern of light is projected onto the wall, the projector itself hidden, unseen. The projection catches the glass just so and sends out fingers of light into the room. At the same moment, someone's jumping hand sets the mirror ball spinning, throwing out points of white that mingle indecorously with the projected pattern and the light from the glass. Fragments of colour and life in the darkness.

It is a perfect moment - the laughter and the light and the music combining to produce a cascade of feeling. A free, unguarded happiness. Rarely found and impossible to create.

Abandon. Almost.

For though the first self is given up to the moment, is stretched so thin and transparent that it seems to blend with the world around it. Although the first self feels the harmony of oblivion, the second self stands back, as ever. Recording, documenting, filing away for later review and analysis.

The second self knows the moment has and is will always be lived twice through different eyes, different selves overlaying each other so closely that they seem as one, and yet so separate that they can hardly be thought of as a whole.

To be strictly accurate there is a third self in the mix. The self that defines the relationship between the aware and the unaware, the observed and the observer. But that is another story for different moment, another time than this.

A Tube Journey

An American man is talking on his mobile - should I say cellphone? - outside the station. He shifts his weight from foot to foot, "Well I was saying we should wait for Merill Lynch. I said they won't keep their jobs for long."

I walk past him and past the woman selling the evening papers, stiff in her multiple layers of clothing, and the free paper vendors decked out in opposing purple and yellow.

A group of Italians are talking on the platform. I try to interpret their conversation, but only snatch the odd word here and there. From "domani mattina" I deduce they are making plans for the next morning, but I gather no more tidbits because the train arrives.

The doors shunt open and now I'm trying to squeeze on next to a bleach-blonde, middle-aged woman standing with her sister; at least I assume they must be sisters. There is plenty of space behind her if she would just move back, but she doesn't - doesn't even look round - and I am forced to bend awkwardly to prevent the door shutting on my coat the way I saw it happening a few weeks ago.

At the time, the man - a commuter - stood there oblivious, and a member of staff - the guy with the paddle - had to signal to the driver to open the doors once, twice, three times to free the coat before the train could move on.

The self-important blonde - with makeup-packed wrinkles deep around her eyes serving as an ugly contrast to her suspiciously flat forehead - steamrollers her sister with inane chatter, seemingly loathe to take a breath or come to the end of a sentence, "And I mean I don't know, I just wouldn't do anything like that, but she, well she said it might not be his sort of thing, and I don't know, but I just can't imagine a situation where I would do that, I don't know anyone who would, but she said he might not want to, so I said but I'm not sure you should do something like that..."

The woman's voice drones on, almost as hackle-raising as her elbow in my face. Luckily she, and a few other people get off at the next stop and I take the opportunity to move into the heart of the carriage, holding onto the central pole, and finding a seat at the stop after.

I settle down and let my eyes take in the row of shoes opposite me. Blue, knitted boots (yes footwear made of wool, who knew?); black, patent-leather shoes, crissed-crossed with a pattern of punched holes; overlong toes cramped into slip on, cardboard thin, ballet shoes; steel toecapped (I'm guessing) boots encrusted with plaster and speckled drops of paint.

A pair of high heels gets up to be replaced by unlaced sneakers, the tongue hanging forwards like a hungry dog. Next to those a pair of silver trainers looking down upon their blingless counterparts; and finally a man in flipflops, presumably of lower than average intelligence, at any rate courting frostbite in these winter months.

Passengers - and their shoes - come and go. The wash of voices swells and subsides. A man in dark jeans with a sheen of designer stubble gets out two mobile phones the moment we leave the tunnel and speaks loudly into one while fiddling with the other. It's hard to imagine a reason why he would need to use two mobile phones at once, unless he is a drug dealer, a serial philanderer or otherwise an idiot. But perhaps I'm being unfair.

My stop draws near and I get up, squeezing past a woman with a suitcase to go and stand by the doors. Then I'm out on the platform, down the stairs, through the barriers, the tunnel and the suburban streets and home.

This Product Contains Absolutely No Chemicals

It is a universal law that when you set out to look you will find something - even if what you find is not what you were looking for.

Laura Thomas is not contemplating this as she walks beside her new friend. Neither does she notice the seagulls circling above, chasing the tail of a passing plane, or the low winter light glancing off the city skyline. Observation isn't her strong point. Nor is self awareness. In all truth, if asked, Laura would prove unable to point to a single thing about her that could be called a talent. She had, once, been good at history. Not outstanding, but good enough to study it, until she got to a point where her abilities seemed to fall away, outpaced by the level of her tutors' expectations.

It seemed to happen overnight. One day she was passable, and the next left behind. There wasn't much to be gained by carrying on, so she abandoned academia in search of something else and ended up here, walking towards the river with a shiny new companion - a young woman with earnest facial piercings and inexpertly-dreadlocked hair. The woman's name is Femi and the pair met just hours ago, but Femi talks so enthusiastically and acts so decisively that already Laura finds herself following in her wake, adjusting to accommodate her every whim.

Femi is rather inadequately dressed, her only nod to the temperature a blue and silver woven scarf thrown wildly around her shoulders and neck. In her right hand she holds a cigarette; her left she uses solely for gesticulation. Next to Femi, Laura feels awkward and dull, her own scarf neatly wrapped around her throat, her hair fuzzily framing her ill-formed, features. But Laura doesn't mind the unfavourable comparison - Femi's energy is of the kind that a lost person can feed on. In a very real sense, Laura feels saved by her.

They are walking to a restaurant, a vegetarian, whole-foods, hippy-middle-class-organic kind of place, somehow still open despite exorbitant inner-city rents. And Femi is talking, extolling, lecturing hypnotically about chi and karma and a whole mixed bag of half-remembered, exotic-sounding notions. For her, it seems, the words don't matter, only the prefix 'alternative'. Laura's core of common sense raises frequent objections, but she silences them and lets the power Femi's voice invigorate her.

As they walk, Laura's mind drifts back to the distant world of this morning - the feel of her skin against the cold handle of the bathroom door, the soft blush of her breath on the mirror, the emptiness she had registered when she gazed into her pale eyes. This morning there had seemed so little point to anything, so little purpose, and yesterday morning and countless mornings before, but this morning was different. This morning she had run out of shampoo.

A man in a thick, navy overcoat fumbled past her as she negotiated the heavy door to the shop. His breath acrid, he hissed frustration and bundled his bags of shopping around her and out, leaving her inwardly broken and close to giving up. Somehow she made it to the correct shelf - a monumental effort - and was about to place the bottle of own-brand shampoo in her basket when a voice rang out. Femi's voice.

"Oh no, don't get that one."

"Sorry?" Laura replied, half a question, half an apology for existing. Her hand faltered between the basket and the shelf.

"You don't want to buy that brand, it's full of chemicals. They're bad for your hair, and you've got such nice hair."

A giddy nausea rose in Laura. She was noticed, she was someone. She had nice hair. Curling a lock of it around her fingers, she firmly placed the shampoo back on the shelf.

"This one is better." Femi proffered an alternative and Laura took it reverently from her.

"See," Femi continued insistently, indicating the label, "'This product contains absolutely no chemicals'. It's much better for you. Have you heard of reiki?"

That was Laura's new beginning, a rebirth of sorts, and now they are here, a few hours later, walking through the city, united in their movements, framed by the warm glow of their skin smarting in the cold air. As they walk, a rare unbidden thought comes to Laura, transitory, replaced in an instant by the drowning buzz of contentment - when you are looking you will always find something, even if what you find is not what you were looking for.

Christmas

The fatted man sits lumpishly and contemplates his navel –
Incidentally much closer to him than it was some days before.
Around his head fly queasy thoughts of chocolates, wine and turkey.
Consequentially, he turns away and groans and pleads for nothing more.

His mind is crammed with Christmas tunes, with caroling and panto –
Am-dramatically the best he's seen, at least since 1998
When Widow Twanky ran away with Cinderella's husband,
But emphatically declined to give the matinee a miss. A great

Uneasy bloatedness consumes the man's attention
Indigestibly berating him for weaknesses he should condemn.
So, filled with sudden strength of mind, he hoists his body upright,
Optimistically declaring that he'll never want to eat again.

His eyes roam wildly round the room along the paths of tinsel
Accidentally alighting on a solitary macaroon
Just one will do no harm, he thinks, and stoops to claim the biscuit
Unconvincingly proclaiming that he'll stop this overeating soon.