The Power and The Glory

Happy New Year, etherkin. It’s going to be a strange one. Ructions are afoot - I have read the auguries in my laundry. 2012 is seals in the eelgrass. Something cold and bobbing.

Seals will be big this year, and sisters, and doggish things dancing on their hind legs through the trees. We’re on the edge of the strange times. On the plus side, the matador look will be in, and I look adorable in those trousers. Swings and roundabouts.

Anyway, here I sit, baht ape, watching out of the window as the headlights climb the hill opposite to the unreasonable black of the moors, picking my teeth with a wishbone and pondering what’s to come.

When looking forwards, it’s always best to start with a quick glance behind you. Last year was one of yearning, for penpals and monsters and muses and gods. Yearning makes me bilious. Perhaps it’s time I turned to Christ. Or to Christopher at least, patron saint of my dog-head daydreams, hot-breathed, slobbering force of faith. St Christopher was a definite sort.

In the meantime, there is work to be done. The Olympics are coming and I am Team GB’s only hope.

Apres le Singe

So now I’m in the market for a brand new muse. Butterface won’t do, of course – I wouldn’t trust her references – and that bastard Baby Mumps is out. It won’t be Michael, who came to stay on Mischief Night and hasn’t left his chair, Michael with his face like a sagging balaclava and his crinkling woolly hands, his hair slipping off at the back of his head and oh my god those thighs. And it can’t be any of my sundry cats – nobody wants a muse that’s always licking its arse and can’t kill anything bigger than a vole.

Nope, it’s an employers’ market out there. I’ve put a card in the Post Office window and am waiting for the phone to ring. I could be my own muse, I suppose, but I’d be an unreliable worker. I’d be tardy and churlish and smuggle stationery out in my hair, I’d clock-watch and time-waste and gob in the guvnor’s tea. I’d end up giving me the sack, for sure, and I’m pretty litigious when riled.

Essential attributes in a potential candidate will include a 2:1 or above in Applied Monstrousness, the ability to mix a perfect Benylin Sunrise, an unapproachable demeanour and unprofessional appearance, advanced skills in burglary, Beggar My Neighbour and Microsoft Excel, experience in dealing with difficult customers and at least five years in the position of muse, familiar or personal demi-god. An HGV license is desirable, as are a shotgun license and an elementary swimming certificate. Unsettlingly suggestive tails an advantage. I will be accepting bribes.

Fancy Engine

So I made myself a goddess out of stockinette and sinew and she is badly-stuffed and gamey with prehensile hair. I made her because I was bored one night and nothing felt like glee, not toads or meat or Romans or the shorelife of Little Sark, not coddled eggs or kittens or How Clean Is Your House. I didn't make her because I was scared, I didn't I didn't I didn't, but it's nice to have something to pray to when Butterface is near.

I spat in her mouth to bring her to life and up she stood like a shandied lamb, fully poseable on her pipecleaner pins. She moved into my secret mole and subsists entirely on clams, she talks backwards with her mouth full and she doesn't wash her hands. She isn't kind but she's free with her kisses and she always has plasters in her bag. I've sewn her glyphs in all my gussets and strewn penny sweets outside the Pink Ribbon, but she doesn't ask for much in the worshipping way. She appreciates my indolence and she prefers me fast asleep.

So now when I catch a glimpse of Butterface, with her crisp cruise wear and her snowman eyes, I don't feel so terribly bad. Not that I'm afraid of her. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not.

It's All Spunk and Brine to Me

What am I crying for when I scream out my god? It is the indifferent mischief of eternal Heath Robinson machines and the first glimpse of the house-sized fin above the becalmed sea. It is vultures and haberdashers, manholes and the last page of every book there's ever been. It is what Spatchcock is looking at when she stares at nothing on the wall. It's the forgotten toy beneath my bed, dust-cauled and mumbling through spiders, the peeling birches at the back of things, what happens in the pavilions at dusk. It is what I'm dreaming about when I dream about home.

When I Was Just a Little Girl

As a girl I was godhungry, I collected them like stamps. Many-armed and jackal-headed, blue-hued and cloven-hoofed, playing the pipes, the harp, the fool, fickle, flawed and fictional. Boy-gods naked, thumb-sucking, silent; bare-breasted girl-gods of sex and the sewers. A god for everything and every god in its place, like so many insects in my killing-jar. The monkey indulged my avarice, bringing me them like a cat brings a corpse. I mounted my gods in scrapbooks and on cork, cataloguing and curating and all the time incredulous that it should be them instead of me.

Tiring of gods like colouring books I began to paint my own. I went to the seaside and found a god at night beneath the waves. I saw the whales hanging, heads-down in the lambent blue, like bombs falling in aspic. I saw the squid slide, their petticoats rippling, their beaks bared for a kiss. I saw seasponges like sweetbreads and the umbilical eels. That wet god sent me jellyfish and prophecies in the flotsam, wood bleached to bone and salt-licked pebbles of glass. I caught birds and carved them, sending them off to sea in paper boats with sails made from hankies. With my worship, the beach grew smaller, the tide sidling higher, the water closing in.

Signs I Have Seen Outside Churches

You Don’t Need a Modem to Connect to God
Seven Days Without Prayer Make One Weak
Carpenter Requires Joiners
CH—CH Means Nothing, Unless UR In It
Kneeling Can Solve a Longstanding Problem
In a Jam? God Preserve Us!
Use God as Your Steering Wheel, Not Your Spare Tyre
We’re Son Worshippers, We’ll Never Get Burnt!

And my personal favourite, for its filthy double meaning:

It’s Hard to Stumble When You’re Down on Your Knees

A Brief History of Religion

Sometimes here it rains sluts, like elsewhere it rains sardines. They bank up in the gutters where they lie wriggling until the night comes and with it the baying men, scrumping for pussy, who catch them and bend them backwards and that is a hymn to me, my chalice and my ritual dagger. Sometimes one will leave behind a garter like a bejewelled slug and I will pick it up and take it home. Witches wear garters. I was probably a witch in another life, sucking skyclad on the devil's death-cold cock.

When I was younger I thought about making a god, and I collected toilet roll tubes and sticky-backed plastic and the pistachio nut shells that I see everywhere I go as though they have been laid out in a trail for me to follow. I cooked gods in my dingy kitchen, clambering goat-like over the mountains of filth. I whipped up a celestial smorgasbord; Hundreds and Thousands and asafoetida, cockles and offal and liquorice whips, gods scrambled or boiled down to stock, gods as the mock in my mock-turtle soup, gods salted and smoked and pickled and poached and then I licked the bowl clean.

I had gods of meat for whom I scratted in the bins, broke into butchers' shops, scarfed sausages raw and wore corsets of steak. I had deities of derelict buildings, cloaked in yellow newspapers, their eyes like boarded up windows. The winter-god came crabbed and skinning, beneath its caul of hoar frost grinning, backwards like the dead. When I worshipped winter I did it in a bath of ice, skin rucked to gooseflesh and teeth bared in a chattering rictus.

Then I decided to cut out the middle man and just worship myself. Easy peasy.

My God

My god lives in a house of salt and it has sixty-four dogs to protect it from prayer. You can offer up pork scratchings or strangers' hair but it won't do you any good. My god made the world out of sticky-back plastic and things it had found on the floor. Now it just cherry-picks the things it likes the look of and keeps them higgledy-piggledy in its massive bumbag. That is what happens to everything you lose. As far as angels go, my god has me, although I am not an angel and I don't belong to him. I just do this freelance because it looks good on my C.V.