A Lust for the Coolth

Today I am coiled and maleficent, squatting in the corner eating meat off the bone. Slimy dreams and sweat-sopped sheets have conspired to clog up something within me. I can see fingers underneath all the furniture, double-jointed and mucky-knuckled, undulating implausibly and stretching towards my toes. The future is circling, a clacking, scabrous raven, calling carrion to its bone-beaked brethren. I blame the sarcastic summer, raising her skirts of nimbus and mist and pissing on us while St Swithin watches and wanks himself sick.

Curse this can’t-be-arsed pseudo-summer, clinging to us like wet blankets, muggy and claggy and no good to anyone. I want the winter back, crabbed and skinning, cauled with hoar-frost, ghastly, grinning, walking backwards like the dead. The winter that strips the trees to whips that slit my skin and let me back inside again. I want the winter moon, a cold mother in a cap of bone, I want the frigid air that shoves its fist deep down your throat and steals away your breath and I want the snow that comes slow, not falling, just ambling through the air like a billion drunken white bees, then falls faster, niveous, insidious, to coat the world like ash. A cold Pompeii.

Fuck You, Thursday

Today my brain is a bastard cunt of a snorting, rearing horse, steaming and shitting and spitting its bit and point blank refusing to jump any of the quite reasonably low fences I have put before it. I’ve got deadlines coming out of my arse and all I can do is stare at the screen wearing the same uncomprehending gape that I normally reserve for watching Hollyoaks (for our overseas buddies, Hollyoaks is a witless and torturously long-running teen soap about a troupe of lacquered moon-calves running amok in a pretend town near Chester). There are lots of things I could be doing – I have curtains to sew and a bookshelf to fix after it collapsed under the weight of tacky thrillers and Fanny Cradock, and then there’s this filthy squat of a house that could do with either decontaminating or razing to the ground. Instead I am writing this, drawing succour as though from a last cigarette, before I lapse into the only state possible today, one of lying prone beneath the bed muttering “They shoot horses, don’t they?”

All Alone in Idle

Very early tomorrow morning, my Snout is going away. A whole week down South with his family, leaving me with even less supervision than normal. I will be busy dry-humping my murderer for the most part, but I might venture into the garden to offer up my hairy legs to the sun.

There is a football match on tonight. I call it ‘fuckball’, because it’s more economical than saying ‘fucking football’ every time. They say the season will be over soon but they are lying, there’s always football on. Or IPL. Or GTA. It’s a good job I am a misanthropic, anti-social bookworm, or I’d feel very left out.

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.