Turned Out Nice Again

I have taken a holiday, ostensibly to commence my masterwork. This involves a lot of egg poaching (in both senses of the word), impromptu Formby recitals, housework shirking, Mast-Watch, the contemplation of boggarts, Absolute 80s Radio, standing at the upstairs window in my werewolf mask, cups of tea, drunk sewing, sausage-fancying and staring open-gobbed at the wall, but these are as all much writing as anything else.

Writing is like a poached egg. Liquid into liquid, flailing hentai tentacles, the impossibility of coalescence. And then. And then it's this, a tiny morsel on hot buttered toast. Perhaps I am not cut out to be a lady novelist. Perhaps I will just perch here like an addled old owl and hack up little pellets of spine and fur.

I can't think of any ways in which writing is like George Formby.

PDP

When I was a little dot I wanted to be a clown, blue faced for bad luck with wire in my plaits. I slack-roped between the turbines up on the moors and pulled extravagant strings of sausages from unexpected spots. Over time the clown turned inwards and I still live somewhere between Pierrot and Auguste, but I'll never forget the feel of greasepaint in my eyebrows or the happy calm of knowing what I wanted to be.

They say the secret to a happy career is getting paid to do what you love. I love staring and hiding food, drawing troupes of small dogs in the margins of my diary and pretending I live on an island somewhere with the Very Reverend William Buckland and four and a half of the Mitford girls. The world of work has always been hard for me. And yet I must earn enough money to keep me in the needfuls, at least to keep stocked up on Cheestrings and weed.

My skills are many and varied and I'm a personable sort, at least to your face. I can make any animal you like out of cloth, although they always turn out looking somehow like me. I can cross my ring finger over my middle one without moving the others. I have a wide repertoire of untoward recipes. I can write the odd sentence. I have my own dog suit. I am eminently employable.

I think I'd be ideally suited to a career as a familiar, or an Executive Imaginary Friend. I'd make an excellent protagonist - or antagonist - and would be a perfect fit for the position of muse. I could find success as a skeleton in a closet or a madwoman in an attic or some kind of half-forgotten god slumbering away at the bottom of the sea. I could be your nemesis and my rates are more than fair.

Which is all fine and dandy, but it doesn't go down well at the Job Centre.

On the Mortality of Seals

What is it that rends the seals, casts them corkscrewed ashore? The Scientists say it's some sort of propeller, but I will have no truck with that, with an answer so human and true. I would rather it were Skalugsuak, the sleeper shark, full fathom five with its wormridden eyes, centuries old and reeking of piss, biting bone-deep into the bias-cut blubber and nosing the corpses ashore. Or maybe the mermaids, holding their black-eyed lovers just a little too tight in their tooth-lined arms, their beaks fast in flesh as they spiral down to the ecstatic depths. Or is it me? Is that where I go at night, eeling through the abyss with my knife between my teeth? Is that why I wake up so salty and cold?

In Which Horses Are Indeed Mentioned

I've decided inside now that I live on an island, a cold rock hunkered down somewhere in the north. I make my liquor out of samphire and my boots out of the seals, hunt soft, sweet crabs in the rock pools and rabbits in the scrub. I eat my fish in waist-deep waves, slicing them to sashimi with my knife of flint and licking out the roe.

My boat is small but he is brave and sometimes I sleep beneath him just to listen to the rain. There are goats on the island but I don't trust them and the foul-tasting puffins nest fat and useless on the cliffs. Down by the dark pool the horses stand, piebald with lichen and unsettlingly still. The dark pool has a skin on it so thick you could walk across it, if you dared.

At night I sit in my implausible caravan as the wind butts and mutters outside. I carve little scrimshaw kittens and read my murderbooks at the table, picking the faux-walnut vinyl off its top. Whales pass by from time to time and once a year the squid come, their lights dancing in the water like drowning stars.

Here on the outside I have another cup of tea. I have spent the morning corralling cats and sewing outlandish trousers and the rest of the day stretches ahead of me in a tangle of wool and hair, paper and smoke, Strictly Come Dancing and softboiled eggs. Later, though, I'll sit shivering in a salted bath and with my fingers in my ears I'll be able to hear the gulls.

Everything Is Going To Be Alright

I have two weeks left to finish the work for my Master’s. My world is my laptop, my lovers the keys. I drink Earl Grey and I eat cheese slices and I write and smoke and write and smoke and sometimes I weep quietly underneath the desk. I have to work in the spare room because there are things in my bedroom just waiting to distract me, gurning clowns and hula girls, mermaids, squid and juggling dogs, Ophelia drowning and Wee Jimmy Krankie.

My hair is out of control again, coiling itself into dense ropes while I sleep, trying to pull itself over my eyes. It’s escaping, long strands sliding off the pillow and sidewinding along the floor, crawling up the table legs like thin red ivy. Soon we will all be swaddled and the house will be still.

Keep Calm and Carry On.

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.

Explain Yourself

Every morning before the sun comes up I stuff my silver peacock pipe with sticky, stinking skunk and crawl backwards through a cat-flap into the head of a killer. From time to time I slip out and come here to spew. This is the Vomitorium at my Roman feast.

Time was when my candle-wish, my first-star-like-a-milk-tooth-plea was to read all the diaries in the world. And what a good Sack Posset I must have been, because my wish came true. We have lost our will to secrecy, our capacity for the clandestine, we are all turned inside out and everything is exposed, and I want to play too.

I suppose it is a bit like standing naked at an upstairs window. Most people will walk on by, but some people might see, if they are the rare kind that looks up instead of down. Keeping an internet diary is akin to flashing. Discuss.

Today it is sunny and the light on my computer screen reflects my face. As I type I am confronted by myself. I am a perversion of pretty, beauty defiled. Full lips cracked and sore, nascent and blatant wrinkles, a couple of cuts on my cheeks and my poor, tired eyes, the dark circles beneath them receding into the flesh. My hair has matted into impromptu dreadlocks. The hair on my legs and under my arms is as long and thick as on a man, and between my legs it grows straight and smooth, like an animal’s pelt. I do not mind. My body is just the bag I use to carry around my malice and my glee.