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