The Breakfast Man

He comes on Sunday mornings
To my sleep-syrup bed
With softboiled starling eggs
Cupped in his palms.
He balms my lips
With bacon fat
And spreads me soft
Like butter
As he slides the still-warm eggs inside
And turns to sausage
In my mouth

Come Dine With Me

As I sit here, waiting for an ornery window-fitter with a shocking case of Short Man Syndrome, my mind turns inexorably to dinner. I have never thrown a dinner party – we don’t have a dining table, for a start – but I have planned my Dream Meal, the soiree to end all soirees.

Six is the best number of guests, I think, and there would be me and Fanny Cradock, Trimachio and de Sade, the ginger one from Girls Aloud and a man dressed as a dog. We would eat in a soundproofed room, the walls hung with black curtains. Every course would come with homemade Christmas crackers, each one containing a hat, a motto and something the guests thought they had lost forever. We would be served by gorgeous, greasy boys and we would eat only off Princess Diana memorial plates ordered especially from the Daily Express weekend supplement. As the plates were cleared between courses, there would be entertainment, songs and clowns and performing dogs, tumbling eunuchs and bears.

To start with, as an amuse bouche, we would have snails fattened on milk and ecstasy, served curled on kidney pillows, hamsters stuffed with insect forcemeat and crusted with breadcrumbs and tears, kitten tongues in fromage fraise, coxcombs, a Lucky Dip of assorted offal wrapped in skin and served in a tub of bran, cheese and pineapple echidna and delicate roses of tripe.

We would feast on The Monster Egg - a giant made from a hundred goose eggs and dyed the brightest blue, roasted mandrake roots dressed in darling bacon bonnets and hagfish fattened on virgins’ blood. In homage to Fanny we would have vaginas with mayonnaise, then progress to pig bags stuffed with marshmallows and hooves. A Spatchcocked Aviary – thrush, heron, owl, robin, tit, gull, jay, magpie, canary, parakeet – would be brought to the table in gilded sugar cages, only to be outdone by the elaborate and upsetting Meat Garden.

I am not a sweet-toothed person, but you must always serve dessert, and I have decided on sugar sculptures representing The Greatest Murders of the 20th Century, a chocolate cake with a stripper baked inside and thick, warming Sack Posset.

And nobody is allowed to leave the table until every last bite is gone.

Look Back in Envy

Here I sit, beneath the ‘Crabs & Lobsters’ wall-chart that I got free with the Guardian, toking on a fat one and pondering the future of the female serial killer. Today I read three books about murderous women and shelled a pound of peas straight into my mouth. I lunched on Ritz crackers smeared with Gentleman’s Relish and Danish Blue and I had a soft-boiled egg for breakfast. Why does violence make me so hungry?

Last night I dreamt I went to Junior School again, back to the spire and the hills surrounding. Junior School was a wonderful place. I might not have learnt my times tables, but I did learn how to sew a guinea pig from brown velvet curtains and how to make chocolate mint creams. Sometimes the man who lived as a Roundhead came to give us a history lesson, and once the Great Jam Sandwich Machine rolled in, operated by men riding ostriches, and with much clanking and juddering and eruptions of glitter it produced a perfect sandwich for every last child.

Halcyon days. I still like to sew funny animals and draw lopsided pictures, but these days I try and intersperse my daydreaming and playing with more grown-up activities like washing pants and growing herbs and taking the cat for her jabs and, of course, reading my Children’s Encyclopaedia, because education should never stop. Although if I ever see that Great Jam Sandwich Machine again I will jump up on it and I will ride it to the ends of the Earth.

Come Back Michael Fish, All is Forgiven

It’s been a long, hard week at Sack Posset Hall. I’ve been up to my knickers in serial killers. Today that Friday Feeling is upon me, nudging me in the small of the back like a fella’s early-morning lob-on. I’m in the mood for mischief. It has been so warm this week that I finally divested myself of my long-johns, but today, England being England, it’s snowing not far from here. Mother Nature gives us this weather so that there’s always something to talk about with the little old ladies on the bus.

I watched the Big Brother Launch last night, because I am a top postmodern-socio-analyst and not because I am a voyeur who likes a good freak show. Of course. I think it would be a good jape if they put them all in there and then turned off all the cameras and slowly walked away. The woman whose job it was to open the car door for each gaudily daubed abortion was clearly concerned about a zombie attack.

For tea I want a songbird no bigger than my thumb, drowned in a glass of cognac and placed roasted and whole on my tongue. I will cover my head with a hood to hide my sins from the gods and in the seamy dark I will savour the fat dribbling down my throat. Slowly I will bear down on the bird. I will lick away its breast and crack its back and it will surrender its secret sweet meats. I will not face the light until the bones of it are gone. Then I’ll have a cuppa and a fag.

Bank Holiday and Beyond

Returning home on Sunday from a day out in the Big City, I crested the hill and saw my garden full of my beautiful friends. All the neighbours were out with their beers and their barbeques and their big bellies broiling in the un-English sun. I changed into my Dalmatian suit and sprawled on the grass, drinking applecrisp wine and munching on the foetus-shaped biscuits that Best Girl had made. We stayed out until dusk soothed the sunburnt sky and then I had some fish fingers of inferior quality and the evening was ruined.

There’s a special fuckball game on tonight – Manchester United versus Barcelona. It’s a carnival atmosphere and to celebrate I am cooking my speciality. I will place a bumblebee inside a dormouse inside a kitten inside a cat inside a dog inside a monkey inside a big fat man and then I will spit-roast it in the garden, a process I normally save for premiership soccer stars. Then I will serve it with lashings of melted butter and no cutlery at all.

Twenty past three is too early to start drinking on an overcast day. Or is it.......?

The Most Important Meal of the Day

The dormice, from the jars in the back bedroom, were done to perfection, their little bacon blankets crisping up nicely. The eggs were resting so that the hot fowl broth could seep back into the bodies of the baby birds and soften up their filigree bones. The bright paint on the eggshells looked so cheery in the dirty light, the red and the gold and the deep beetle green, and the fact that they were served in shot glasses rather than proper eggcups only added to their charm. The toast was translucent and in each perfect triangle a woman’s face was branded in a cameo of darker brown crumbs. In the plain white porcelain teapot that was only slightly chipped but quite badly stained there was enough fortified wine to wash the feast down, and in the matching sugar bowl there was another kind of white powder for pudding. It was the perfect breakfast and there was a place laid for the monkey too, even though the monkey only eats hair.

Moonlight and Music and Love and Romance

A mysterious car has appeared over the road. Just a normal small car (I think; it could be a pus-powered Rolls Royce hatchback for all I know), but painted yellow with black stripes and with the Transformers logo on the hubcaps and the bonnet. The funny thing is, round the corner near Jimmy’s shop there is an A-Team van. Perhaps I am not the only fictional character who lives on this street. The sign outside Jimmy’s shop reads JIMMY,S. Punctuation-a-go-go.

For tea last night I made Luxury Pie. You could tell it was Luxury Pie because I wrote Luxury Pie on the top in pastry. I filled it with hagfish and Werther’s Originals, durians, hen’s teeth and kelp. The gravy was made of lube. We ate that pie up as though it were a little book, and it made our bellies sing like boys.

Yesterday I tidied my Snout’s music room and lined up all the instruments – two keyboards, four violins, five guitars, a ukulele, a flute and a kazoo. I want some instruments of my own, I think, like a Cat Piano or a Bone Trumpet. I have my own secret music that I hear when the house is still, translucent melodies, musical fetches, half-dreamt ghosts of song. And I’m learning to play Psycho Killer on the ukulele.

Down With Bread

I am reunited with my glorious Snout and I have realised that I do not like bagels. I wish that we did not have breads of any kind, just extra helpings of fillings served in jam jars or spread out over the bodies of the luscious young. Bread is filler, ballast, stodge. I wish we could be free from it. In heaven there are no baps.

My Mum once went into a bakery that sold Tiger Baps and asked for a Leopard Bun.

It’s raining today and I don’t want to get up. I am become bed. I want to be behind a boiler, the kind that wears a red-and-white Puffa jacket, where there is always a dead wasp and the smell of dry heat and hot dust. It is a day for hiding, for nesting, for making dens. It is cold as well. I am wearing my fur coat inside out, the pelt against my skin. This summer I will make a dress from bumblebee skins, and I will be the toast of high society.

Bone Appetite

There is now no corner of my mind free of murderous women and culinary sadism. I might be able to spend all day in nothing but long-johns and a smile, but I am shackled to the keyboard and oscillating between world-raping arrogance and depression as thick as Swarfega. Therein lies the fun of being a research student.

Last night Snout made a Vindaloo as hot as guilt, with bread and butter instead of rice. Tonight we will have something in garlic. I am thinking of changing my diet. People use food to change themselves, they eat health-food to imbibe virtue and purity, they eat their fellow men to absorb their strength, they eat Christ for similar effects. What you eat contributes to what you are, and so food can make me more monstrous.

From now on I will eat other people's personal documentation. I’ll feast on meat I find in bins and things that die in gutters. I’ll eat star anise and bay leaves like sweets and I’ll pick my teeth with wishbones. Tomorrow I am going to take a picnic to the park, and all the starveling chavs with their tracky-bs tucked into their socks will watch and drool like orphans outside a sweetshop as I tuck in. There will be pebbles in the champagne and frogspawn in the punch and all the edible knickers a girl could want.

Never Watch Blue Planet When You're Hungry

Someone appears to have left me on standby. All day I have managed barely more than a sustained stare. When the house is quiet I can sometimes hear tunes in the silence, musical fetches, half-dreamt ghosts of song. I am waiting for the evening to come, boys and wine and regrettable jokes. In the meantime I am picking away the unfeasible amount of hair that has fallen from my head and gathered under the arms of my jumper. If I go bald, I will compensate myself by getting brass teeth.

My thoughts are on spin cycle, the usual concerns repeating themselves over and over, sea creatures and hoarders and the outer limits of gastronomy, murderous women and cavorting clowns. They once caught a catfish that had swallowed a catfish that had swallowed a catfish. When I was a little girl I was afraid of the river that flowed through the bottom of our valley, surrounded by a pubic tangle of trees. I was afraid of sturgeons and freshwater squid and most of all I was afraid of the black, sucking mouth of the culvert. I have always felt that the sound of water is a distraction, hiding the approach of whatever is behind you. Water whispers, it hides and it lies and it erodes its own banks. Water, insidious as women.

Pie for tea, filled with chicken, or a reasonable impersonation thereof. I would rather eat miniscule fishcakes in the shape of krill, bioluminescent squids served still flashing in a darkened room, crabs covered in gold leaf, potted dolphin spread on slivers of baleen, sugared sprats coated in Hundreds and Thousands, blue whale ribs in barbeque sauce, swordfish plucked from a stone, periwinkle chowder served in nautilus shells or at the very least a fishfinger sandwich.

Mastication and Jubilation

Eggs are the food of gods and monsters. So raw that they are not yet become. Paint them up like beetles, push them still warm into your other mouth, eat them with a tiny silver spoon. I have two hardboiled eggs in my pockets, and a pinch of salt twisted up in newspaper. I will eat them later with great pomp and circumstance and I will save the shells to make boats for witches. Later still when it gets dark I will eat a fish, served curled in a blue bowl with its tail in its mouth. I am very particular about what I eat. Food has magic and it can change you. If you eat enough rabbit you will be able to see behind yourself without moving your head. Honey is immortal and so to spread it on your toast is to eat the future. Bone soup is an aphrodisiac. You should never skimp on your ingredients. Authenticity is key. Use real toad in your toad-in-the-hole, real shepherds in your shepherd’s pie and never, ever serve upside-down cake unless your guests are hanging helpless from the ceiling by their manacled ankles.

Today is a momentous day. Not only have we had the vacuum cleaner fixed, but I have finished the first draft. I will celebrate the best way I know; wine, weed and the BBC’s Blue Planet. I want to see the vampiroteuthis infernalis, I want to see the herring deposit their curds of sperm at the water’s edge, the anchovies in their bait-ball, the slow-motion desecration of the whale carcass, the sea-sponges like sweetbreads and the umbilical eels. Most of all I want to see the lake at the bottom of the sea, the briny unreality of it, lapping at its crab-infested shores. Then I will have a bath with Mrs Gaskell and come out scrubbed and shiny and smelling of coal-tar soap.

A Rainy Day Games Compendium

Do your work colleagues irritate you? Are your friends getting on your baps? Is your partner pissing you off? Why not try not washing? Just stop cleaning yourself or using deodorants or perfume or scented unguents and see what happens. An excellent revenge on many levels; friends and family may agonise for weeks over the right way to tell you that you stink. You may get sent home from work to have a bath – bonus time off! Your partner will be sexually repelled – bonus time off! Most impressively, though, every time someone smells you, they will inhale tiny particles of your sweet self; they will be colonised by you. Think of it as biological warfare.

Why not throw away all your underwear and use your knicker drawer to grow mushrooms?

Maybe men and women will never be equal because men are not scared of women. Perhaps instead of having plastic surgery to get larger knockers or smaller noses women should get scales and snouts and fangs and then they can hide down alleyways and jump out at people. We will be the vanguard, we have already written to Extreme Makeover UK. Or perhaps more women should become serial killers – a profession in which women are seriously underrepresented. Either way.

Another amusing thing to do is throw a dinner party and cook a really horrible meal. We recommend bone soup and things in aspic. If you choose your guests right, they will eat the whole thing rather than offend you.