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.

Springtime for Posset

The girl next door calls herself Puppy and didn't make it as a stripper. She punches the boys and runs away. She poses for alternative erotica, all gas masks and kitchen knives, and she passes the photos round at parties. She is my spring sweetheart, although she doesn't know it yet. I like to have a fresh obsession in April, and the more irritating the object, the greater the frisson.

In fact, I feel the need for a full set of new pastimes this year. Handicrafts and recreational drugs are so 2009. I'll start with canal paths, and the haunting of them. I am drawn to canal paths. Nothing good ever happens there, among the jaundiced willows and the bones of prams. They are shortcuts to horror and filth, nyxy snickets to the silted heart of rupture.

I'll write about the canal paths to my new Imaginary Penpal. Her name will be Butterface Tupps and we'll swap charcuterie in hand-painted jiffy bags. It'll cost a fortune in stamps, but I never begrudge an investment in fun.

I might try and invent a new type of porn. I grow weary of holes. I might make Gormenghast out of toilet roll tubes, and I will definitely switch allegiance to sloe gin, but what I would like to do most of all this spring if find the thing, the meta-idea, the one true story that will bind all my past endeavours together. I have been collecting curiosities for too long now. I need to find a cabinet big enough for all the monkeys and monsters, the odd gods and unsavoury vittles, the human-faced cats and rutting clowns.

It's a tough one. I wonder what Butterface thinks.

Fingered: Green

We must turn our minds to the garden now, to rude bulbs and strewn seeds, the steaming compost and the friendly worms. Gardening is good for you. It is relaxing and, although it is hard on my knees, it doesn't get me as dirty as what I usually do on them.

In the spring I will have watersong on the kitchen roof, and I'll climb up to stroke the silver fur of its succulent leaves, to squint at the thousand tiny flowers that only open when it rains and to distil their cold perfume. Watersong is good for calming down men. I'll have to steal muck from the churchyard to grow my pastors' blight. It's a scrappy perennial with lewd pink blooms that exude an adhesive sap and it must be regularly treated to keep at bay the smutty fungus maidenstongue that sneaks in and stains the skin and spreads like billy-o.

Croneswort is a darling of mine, a beautiful plant despite its ugly name. Its elaborate lilac and cream blossoms smell of chocolate and hash and its miniscule leaves are the shape of perfect hearts. I grow it in hanging baskets in the music room, and it seems to like Bartok the best. My favourite plant of all, though, grows twisted around the roots of the rookwood tree and I have to crawl beneath the swooning boughs to fill my punnet with plump paeanberries, the only fruit that grows fermented on the vine.

And the rest: the bright sprays of gentrian and medicinal germolina, the beds alive with succourling, pianist's fingers, castor root and hex, gay pots trailing tallowfax entwined with fronds of festris, the herbacious borders with their serried ranks of bless-me-not and how-soon, the looming blackwatch with their crowns of owls and in the corners, where it's dark, the feculent mounds of meat alice.

I will grow it all in soil enriched with my personal leakings, and then, in the autumn, I will watch it all die.

Let's Start a War

I am my own imaginary friend. When I do something naughty I blame myself and I feed on salt and pepper. I draw on the walls in green ink and I leave footprints in the butter. At night I sweep the hearth with a besom made of eyelashes and I come in shape no bigger than a cubic zirconia on the forefinger of a stripogram. I smoke thyme in an acorn-cup pipe and sometimes I solve crimes.

I am contemplating a campaign against The Observer, specifically against their Woman magazine. The last issue of this monthly menstrual clot included an interview with Scarlett Johansson about clothes, an article about the rise of ‘slapper shoes’, another about male models and how they are more muscular this season, many, many pictures of handbags and lipstick and in general a load of shite about frocks and feelings. I am (more or less) a woman, and I am interested in clockwork toys, toads and Roman dining habits. I am going to petition them for a monthly Man magazine full of tits and tanks, in which every article is written by Jeremy Clarkson.

Last night I ate cheese that was as meat. I wore the Dog Dress, patterned with pugs, and I sported a luxuriant moustache. This morning I am desirous of a return to the womb. I am jealous because the Best Girl and her man have gone to the zoo. I am going to make my own zoo. I will construct enclosures from books; one for the werewolf (who has swapped his fez in favour of a curly black wig), one for all the clowns, one for Spatchcock and one for the boys, who I will hunt down one by one with a butterfly net and a harpoon. Then I will spend the afternoon throwing bread rolls at them.

Things I Have Found on the Floor

In my Secret Book of Wonders I keep my pictures of groups of strangers. My favourites are the ones on which a single face has been circled. I keep my collections in there, my lists of curious British place-names like Catbrain, Netherthong and Pity Me, the best of all the facts I know, delicious words and revolting recipes. I draw troupes of small cavorting dogs in the margins and perfume the pages with cinnamon and sweat. My secrets I write in green ink. It is a textbook of all the things I want to know. It is my exo-brain and I keep it in the drawer of my bedside table, with my boxes of moths and embroidery silks.

I hoard things like I hoard words and I know that, were it not for Snout, I would end my days in a bedsit packed floor to ceiling with dense strata of stuff; yellow newspapers and label-less cans, crusted crockery and broken electricals, shoes and gloves and babies’ dummies that I had found on the street, the neighbours’ rubbish decanted from the bins in the dead of night, an enormous amount of cat food but no visible cat, road signs and traffic cones and eventually my own dead body, crushed while trying to worm my way through the filth. This is a thought I use to comfort myself. If everything goes wrong and I somehow lose my Snout, I can at least be assured of a happy dotage.

The collection of Things I Have Found on the Floor is already well underway. I am good at finding treasure. I have found forty pounds in notes of varying size, and ten pounds of Marks & Spencer’s vouchers. I found a bag of weed on the bus. Even better, I once found a silver goblet in a car park, and in the same place a few weeks later a pair of golden slippers. I have found false teeth and tiny plastic kangaroos and a china doll in a wedding dress that I took home and put on a shelf until I realised its bloomers were infested with beetles. One thing I won’t be bringing home is the very large, very open hedgehog that is very dead on the road outside my house. Its innards now spread far and wide, it has been there for days. I have been listening to the squeals of the passers-by as they all stop to have a good look. I wouldn’t be surprised if the responsible party turned out to be that cat with the human face.

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.