The Fate of My Hair - In Your Hands.

This comes up every once in a while. I don't like my hair which currently falls to my waist, but I am nervous of having anything done to it. So instead of pondering on it for weeks, buying hairstyle magazines and boring [...] with these questions only to do nothing about it, I shall put the fate of my hair in your hands. I have added a poll to the side bar (on your right). Please let me know what I should do.
Please note: I do not guarantee that I shall act on the results of this poll. Instead I may ponder on the decision for weeks, buy hairstyle magazines and bore [...] with such questions.

Flashbacks to Uranus

My new pills are great. They make me feel funny in the first half hour or so after I take them. Ha ha funny. We watched the 1954 version of War of The Worlds the other night and when at the beginning the narrator was explaining why the Martians decided to come to Earth as opposed to any other planet, and he said, “Uranus was totally uninhabitable.” I was rolling on the floor with tears in my eyes...

However crucially, they don’t knock me out at all. Unless my taking them has coincided with an upturn in my health, I didn't know how well I was. It’s wonderful – I have been writing, writing, writing all weekend, getting completely distracted and contributing essays to the discussions on the Ouch Messageboard, but still making loads of progress with my novel. Having a lot of trouble with flash backing. I need to tell quite a lot of back-story on account of an important character being dead at the beginning of the book (don’t ask) but it is a thriller so I don’t want to distract or bore the reader with things that happened in the past. It is a difficult balance to strike...

The axe-wielding maniac walked slowly towards her. In desperation Suzanne picked up the heaviest book from the shelf - the photo album - and hurled it at the man. It merely bounced off his hulking form, landing on the floor and falling open at a picture of the holiday she had taken with Keith five years ago. They had gone to Majorca and lying on the beach at midnight, the stars above them, the cool waves gently lapping at their toes, he had asked her to marry him.

The axe-wielding maniac paused, distracted by something. Suzanne followed his gaze to the ornaments on the mantelpiece which included the plastic bride and groom from Keith and Suzanne’s wedding cake. They had been married in the early spring, when the snowdrops were in flower. The cake had been a three tier affair trimmed with candy pink ribbons to match the bridesmaid’s dresses.

The axe-wielding maniac turned back to Suzanne and stepped forward. He was almost so close now that he could take her head off with one swing of his silvery axe. Suzanne found that she had retreated to the edge of the rug, the rug upon which she and Keith had made hot sticky love so often throughout their first summer together. If only he was here now! she thought as dark figure of the maniac loomed over her, though on this occasion she would prefer Keith to have his clothes on.

You can see the sort of thing. You’ll be relieved to learn that there are absolutely no characters called Suzanne or Keith or indeed any axe-wielding maniacs in my novel - no way, José! Nor do I write this badly. Honest!

But it is hard working out how much information to include and at what point and how. I know everything there is to know about these characters and events, so I have loss any sense of the minimum a person would need to know in order to believe and understand it all.

Anyway, if I carry on as I have in the last few days, I'm going to be done soon.

It's only words

Apart from continued nausea, I am feeling pretty bright; I have a new TENS machine as the wires in the old one were knackered. The new gadget is a Flip-Tens (right) which means that all the controls are protected and I don't nudge the nobs and give myself electric shocks. And when closed up it actually looks a little bit like an iPod. The shop I bought this from on-line is excellent, the most inexpensive I have found so far for electrodes etc and the guy really helped me out with what I was looking for, so highly recommended. For those who don't know what TENS is here is an explanation in rhyme.

I have also started on my new pain-killer regime. I was worried that they were going to knock me out completely, but in fact so far they're only making me a little high. Unfortunately, they're not keeping me going through the night just yet, but I know I'm on a lowish dose and have room to manoeuvre with that. Thing is just now I am a damnsite more comfortable than I have been lately - I didn't realise how had it had become and how miserable I was getting with it.

Manoeuvre is the one word that I cannot spell. I had to go find the correct spelling for it there. I cannot fix this in my head. O E U. O E U.

On the subject of words, yesterday I was editing (or perhaps rewriting) some work about the Social and Medical Models of Disability and I managed to produce this fantastic sentence which I simply must share. The piece spoke about how the Medical Model judges disabled people according to degrees of 'normality' and...

"Because such an approach judges a person’s quality of life according to their comparative resemblance to a hypothetical standard, it is bound to see disability as a wholly negative thing, a curse to be eliminated, a cause of suffering to be relieved or an obstacle to be overcome. "

It just arrived on the page like this and to be perfectly honest, I cannot find a more concise way of saying what I want to say. Does that make sense at all?

Music To Watch Patients By

Yesterday I went to the doctors. Our practice covers the entire population of the town and is in a large modern building. They play music in the waiting room, usually inoffensive pap – “The Pan-pipers of the Eastern Andes play… Songs from The Musicals.” type stuff. It was mid afternoon on a weekday and my fellow patients were mostly elderly or exhausted-looking mothers with children, everyone slumped and looking miserable, some dribbling a little in the heat.

And suddenly they’re playing Manamana (a.k.a Phenomenon) by the Muppets!

Nobody responds. Nobody looks up. I had been beginning to drift off before that point and wondered whether it was just me with the Muppets playing inside my head.

Then Manamana finished and on came The Theme from Hawaii 5-O. You know the one. Still everybody sat slumped, gradually sliding off their chairs at a rate of an inch every minute or so such that you thought they were moving but you couldn’t be quite sure.

A boy who looked about eleven or twelve, attending with his mother got up to have a cigarette outside. His mother complied with this, agreeing to knock on the window if they were called in. The kid then stood smoking right outside the open doors so we all got to inhale anyway.

The local muscle-man came in and sat right next to me. I have never spoken to the chap but you can’t help but notice him around. He is really extremely muscular, like Vin Diesel or someone - way too much for my tastes - but he always wears skin-tight jeans and t-shirts tucked into them, the fabric stretching across his chest such that you can see his nipples. I imagine it is very hard work looking like that and good luck to him, but when the guy plants himself next you to, you don’t really know where to look. Fortunately I was then called in.

Doctor put me onto a yet stronger lot of painkillers and I requested to see a physiotherapist, just to talk about ways in which I might be able to keep my muscles working without making them worse. The doctor called me “Young Lady” which amused me. I guess he was a bit worried about the state I had been in last week. He asked me whether the dizziness had improved and I had to tell him that dizziness is par for the course.

When I came out into the waiting room they were playing The Theme From Shaft and still no signs of life from my fellow patients. I do wonder sometimes whether there is a zombie plague taking over the world and most people have already sucumbed.

The Curious Incident of the Seagull In The Daytime

Or The Seagull Has Landed.

You develop a complicated relationship to seagulls when you live on the coast. The seagulls in Whitby are a cause for great annoyance. They are most hated by the drivers and the goths. Anybody who has a car knows what it is like to get guano off the paintwork – our friend H’s car which we use was once brown but is currently a kind of mottled beige such is the amount of poop on the roof. The goths get it the worse perhaps; black velvet, daubed with white seagull plop - well, you can imagine. I guess the nuns up at the convent must have similar troubles but you never hear them swear about it.

And the gulls are cheeky. If you leave food anywhere that they can get to it, even if it means entering an open window, they will. If you leave leftovers of your Chinese meal from the Good Luck takeaway in a rubbish bag outside, they will eviscerate it, leaving a mess of noodles, like entrails, all over the yard.

However, they have their advantages. Like they attack the tourists.Bram Stoker,Lewis Carroll, Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell (Dickens as well but Dickens visited everywhere). You have the philosophical/ historical set who come here because this is the birthplace of English literature (Caedmon, the first person to write poems in English), Roman Christianity in England and Lucky Ducks. Then you have the railway people and the Austrailians come to visit the home of Captain Cook. You have the people who are into Jet jewellery and early photography. There’s the goths for Whitby Gothic Weekend and then there’s the beardy sandal-wearers at Folk Week and the new Abbeygael Festival. All of these people are very welcome here.

But mostly you get the scally day-trippers from Teeside. Not everyone from Teeside or indeed every day-tripper is the same of course, but there is a certain type. This type keep their custom exclusive to those shops which they have branches of in their native towns, i.e Woolworths and the cheap shoe-shops, thus contributing little or no money to the local population. Their children seem at first undisciplined, but then you see them being subject to corporal punishment in public places.

And strangely enough it is always these people who get attacked by the gulls. We all get shat on, but these folks sit there eating their fish’n’chips and getting gradually drunk on some sickly fizzy concoction they have purchased in two litre bottles from the Co-op, teasing the gulls by pretending to throw their chips but then not letting go and bursting out into slack-jawed laughter. Then they complain to the local council when some great hefty herring gull swoops down and pinches their dinner.

Anyway, on the whole locals live side-by-side with the gulls and you don’t notice them anymore. When you’re on the phone, the landlubbers on the other end comment on the noise they make although you don't hear them. People staying over have their sleep disturbed by them but you wouldn't even know you were there.

Until someone tries to hurt them.

We went to York today and when we came back there was a seagull sat in our yard. Seagulls do venture into our yard, but there’s not a lot of space and they certainly don’t stay in our yard when there are people about. And they don’t then hide behind the dustbin as opposed to flying away when you approach them.

Our seagull could not fly away, but he wasn’t obviously injured and there were no feathers about. Suddenly we were filled with suspicion and rage. There are three possible explanations of how our (now beloved) seagull came to harm;

We keep finding BB gun pellets in the yard. Has someone been shooting at the seagulls? Almost certainly. Did they actually hit the seagull? Perhaps.

Our landlords use the flat above ours as a holiday flat, perhaps five weekends in the year. They have roses up there and they put slug pellets down on our steps this weekend. It just so happens that all the slugs live directly opposite our flat and today there were about two dozen shrivelled slugs outside our flat. Could poisoned slugs harm the birds that digest them?

Are the seagulls themselves being poisoned?It is hard to kill animals as big as seagulls with poison without endangering other animals. So they get sick. A few years ago a mass culling exercise resulted in 'drunken' seagulls flying headlong into buildings and people, causing a greater hazard and nuisance than they ever were before.

Whatever happened, the chances are that foul play was involved.

Most conflicts between man and nature are entirely man-made. The reason seagulls are pests is because people feed the seagulls or leave their kitchen windows wide open with plates of food on display. Reduce their food source and their numbers reduce. Simple.

On a positive note, we phoned the local RSPCA for advice, convinced that they would have no interest in a mere seagull but a lady did come out and rescue it (tiny woman picked this rotten great gull up in one hand and gave it her other hand to peck on). So hopefully our seagull will live happily ever after.

Propaganda

The news coverage of the attacks in London is just getting silly and so am I...

Public Information On The Terrorist Threat.

London maintains her stiff upper lip this morning after the good old British Bobby thwarts terrorist attacks on the London Transport System. Those Islamic Extremists have picked the wrong city to terrorise. Here, it is business as usual: those plucky Londoners are having none of it.

Suicide bombers? Maybe two weeks ago, but this week they were Mild-Concussion Bombers. This red-faced would-be martyr hands himself over to an obliging officer. There’ll be no seventy-two virgins for this cheeky chappy in his police cell tonight. By jingo, there aren’t seventy-two virgins to be found within the Borough of Hackney.

So, you may ask, what is Islam? And what has Mr Mohammed got against the London Underground?

Well Islam is a jolly decent religion which is rather like the Church of England except without Her Majesty The Queen in charge. Mr and Mrs Mohammed may not participate in the raffle at the Church fete, but Mr Mohammed plays a mean left-field for the local cricket team. We have nothing to fear from him.

Unfortunately, some young followers of Islam not only reject the raffle, but the warm and watery beer which made Great Britain great and indeed the very game of cricket itself. Without the understanding of a googly or a ferret, these unruly hotheads are without wholesome use for their boyish energies and are ripe for the plucking when those dastardly extremists come scrumping for martyrs in our back yard.

What about the International Situation?

In recent years, The British Armed Forces have leant a hand to Johnny Foreigner when he has got himself in a pickle. Some caddish Islamic types have the rather girlish idea that Johnny Foreigner should be allowed to get himself out of any pickle he has had the foolishness to get himself into without our help.

You may well laugh at this. Or if you are a woman reading your husband’s newspaper, you may say, “But what is wrong with allowing autonomy to developing countries, so long as they are supported by the international community and allowed to trade freely and fairly with everyone?” To this we have a simple rebuttal: Don’t worry your pretty little head about it. If you can’t understand the rules of cricket, then it is most unlikely that you should comprehend the workings of International Politics.

So is the International Situation in some way related to the atrocities in London in recent weeks? Of course not! It is nothing but lilly-livered nancy-talk to suggest that the actions of the British Government, either at home or abroad, could have any undesirable consequences for the British people.

What can you do to stop the terrorists?

When using public transport, try singing the national anthem, Rule Britannia and Land of Hope And Glory. Your fellow commuters are bound to join in. Roused by this patriotic display, not only will you have eliminated any nervousness on the bus or tube train, you shall also have greatly lessened the resolve of any of those rascal terrorists within the proximity.

Keep an eye out for for suspicious people or anything out of the ordinary. Are the trains running on time? Something must be up. Has anybody made eye-contact with you? Observe if any of your fellow passengers stand up in order to let the frail, crippled or pregnant take their seat (not including when standing for the national anthem of course).

Tommy Terrorist may be a master of disguise, but he is no match for little Timothy (above left), who runs straight home to tell his father what he has seen.

Most of all in this War On Terror, we need make as much tea as our kettles can muster. This not only helps keep our spirits high and our upper lip stiff but in an emergency, tea doubles up as a handy antiseptic (when diluted with neat alcohol), an effective analgesic (when mixed with morphine hydrochloride), and a local anaesthetic (when applied to an open wound in combination with cocaine).

So brew up Britain and chin up London! In our great history, we have faced and defeated foes such as Bonapart, Hitler and... Philip II of Spain. A handful of ideological Yorkshiremen are no match for us.

Music To Write Novels By

I seem to be listening to the same three albums all the time when I am writing just now. This isn’t terribly representative of the music I love, but these are three albums among the music I love, which it is actually possible to listen to at the same time as writing.

This music helps me concentrate. If I write in silence, my mind tends to drift onto others things like checking my e-mail, reading the news or messageboards. The moment I change windows, I am likely to become thoroughly distracted. The music gives me a place where my mind can wander to and from without embarking on some other project.

1.Suzanne Vega – Suzanne Vega

And I tried so hard to resist
When you held me in your handsome fist
And reminded me of the night we kissed
And of why I should be leaving

I think Suzanne Vega is one of the best lyricists of all time. She ought to have been bigger than Dylan but she is a woman whose peak was in the nineteen-eighties. Plus her voice is so soft that it sometimes trickles over you without registering. She is a mistress of poetry, knowing when to stick rigidly to rules and when to bend and break them, how to express the message of a song succinctly, hidden amongst the flowers. And she writes a jolly good tune as well. It’s all very beautiful.

2.Tea For The Tillerman – Cat Stevens

How can I tell you that I love you? I love you
But I can’t think of right words to say
I long to tell you that I’m always thinking of you
I’m always thinking of you, but my words just blow away.

How many times have I mentioned this album on my blog? How many times have I discussed the matter of whether it is this or Teaser and the Firecat which is the best Cat Stevens album? At the moment I am firmly in the Tillerman camp. I don’t need to justify this - if you haven’t got this album, buy it now. You need it. Everybody does.

3.Astral Weeks – Van Morrison

Then we sat on our own star and dreamed of the way that we were and the way that we weren’t meant to be
Then we sat on our own star and dreamed of the way that I was for you and the way that you were for me.

I heard that when Jonathon Franzen wrote The Corrections this was the only album he listened to the whole time. This would be quite a recommendation if I actually believed it to be true – it’s a good book, some of the prose is rich bordering indulgent but it often pays off. Anyway, Van Morrison. He wails a lot but with feeling. His lyrics vary from being highly poetic to profoundly banal, but he always sounds like he means every word from the bottom of his heart. Astral Weeks is a bit like one long song, but if it is, I’m not really sure what the heck it is about.

.............................

In other news, Damon will be pleased to know that I watched Oragazmo, the other film by the South Park boys which he mentioned after I saw Team America. Orgazmo is about a young Mormon who winds up being offered a job to star in an adult movie as super-hero Orgazmo. It was bad, really bad, but I did laugh a lot. Lots of visual humour involving sex toys and martial arts which might be pivotal, I don’t know. Our conclusion was that you had to be ever so slightly drunk to get the most out of it, but if you were (as we were) it was great. Another candidate for my list of Best Bad Movies.

Oh and I rarely do these things, "What fruit are you?" or "What sort of underpants are you?" but spotted this one on Kezzykat's blog and had to have a go;


Which File Extension are You?

I don't know what to make of that.