waste not, want not

I pass back and forth through a small sheaf of concertinaed printer paper. First I ease off the edges - the long ribbons full of holes that were once deemed necessary to guide the paper through the printer. Now my roller welcomes one sheet at a time - although on most days the lines are a little skewed, but that suits my writing. I hold the bunched edges in my hand and note a fleeting thought - if we had a gerbil or a child they might have fun with these cast-offs.

Then I separate each sheet from the one before it and the one that follows. A swaying rhythm builds in me as I go. And I think of how we're still working our way through the stationary supplies that my father liberated from his eighties office job. A brown-jacket with a cardboard box under one arm - topped with the name of the woman in charge of such supplies. At least he never came home with her under his arm.

the fingerprints of raindrops

the place where

we touch - feeling

every gust of wind

A month before their wedding day, they break up. And I can't help blaming the weather.

We are changing. Evolving. Into squinting beasts. Half-hunched and stiff of limb. One day they will look back and say, that was where it all started.

The boom of another fallen wheelie bin. Ripped up and torn, the sound of car horns and a siren.

We make hourly trade-offs - moving away from the warmer, quieter, safer core of our home. To the edges. The windows. Our rain lashed fringes. Only two sheets of glass between us and this weather. The pain. We move there because we seek even remnants of light. To read by. To write by. To be by.

this wind

now snatching the last

scraps of daylight

paved with gold

I’ve just started a new notebook – for the foreseeable future I will be bound within Leuchtturm’s Anthracite covers.  I hope the properties of the mineral seep into my writing.  I’d like it to become more compact but with a high lustre.  Starting a new notebook always makes me look back to the first thing I wrote in the last one.  My preoccupations last June were roughly as follows.

There are some holiday snaps I’m better off not seeing.  Hong Kong pet shops or restaurants included.  The fact that I can’t tell adds to the problem.  Fish in all colours, all sizes hanging in rows in plastic bags.  My eye can’t help but be delighted by the unintentional magic of it all.  But my head bursts and my heart’s flow drips to the floor.  These fish are like our ideas, our dreams – each held somewhere too small.  Too little water, too little air – no wonder they won’t survive.

sweet dreams on stony ground

She gives me many things including the name of our creeping wood sorrel (oxalis corniculata).  We have the regular sort too – but it’s this one I really love.  And now I know its name I love it even more.  Knowing the name and a bit about the nature of something allows you to know it more - you’d hardly call someone a friend if you didn’t call them by their name?  Now I know them I feel I can visit our creeping wood sorrel and see how it is doing, how it feels each day. 

Congregating along the edges and breaks in our paths it acts like a reddish green cushion.  It softens our environment – it hides our cracks by filling them.  It wants to help us forget where we are broken, to soothe our jagged places.  And to punctuate its curves with tiny perfect flowers.  Like air holes punched in a cardboard box – a way to let us breathe in our confinement.  To offer us bright ideas on dull days.  I notice that these flowers close up when there’s no sun.  Tight pinpricks of yellow across the path – just enough colour for us to believe their promise to return. 

A little reading tells me it’s an Old World plant now mostly considered a weed.  It can be eaten and bears the flavour of lemons but can be problematic in large doses.  Low-growing, it appears delicate but is known to be explosive when trying to further its cause.  All this reinforces why we get along - and that it’s sometimes known as Sleeping Beauty is even better.  

unlikely origami

I’ve spent a few recent Mondays drinking cheap tea and making notes in a slightly sticky seafront café.  There are windows to my left and right.  I can look out to sea - and see a tide that is heaving and groaning, and like me seems to still be chewing over a recent conversation.  I can look to my right and notice one yellowed globe among all the lights.  I can look further inland and see a blue scaffolding net chopping in the wind.  I can get lost for a while in the archipelago of rust on the serviette holder and realise a phrase like that will always have far too many syllables to work in haiku!  

And then I can be surprised when a character from a haiku I wrote ten years ago walks through the door.  

you fold my face in half

and slide me under the leg

of your wobbly chair

There she is – the folded woman from my photo.  A scar stretched taut across her cheek – smoothed with flesh-coloured filler – but clear from ear to chin.  One third of her portrait tucked back on itself.  Once used to give a millimetre boost to someone who needed it.

circles in the sand

Sharing creative space has more benefits than drawbacks.  It allows for unexpected eddies of idea to flow back and forth across a table, across a room.  While I hold pen she holds hook or needle.  Sentences tangle across my page while woollen circles come to life in her hands.

I see the things she has made in ways other than she intended.  My writer’s eye turns them into creatures from beneath the sea - sponges and anemones.  Unlikely lichens crusting strange trees.  

I see pieces that draw in on themselves and others that sprawl, refusing to have a uniform outline.  I see ones that are dense and others that are wiling to let light through.  I realise that all of these accusations can be levelled at my writing.  The  company of her crocheted clouds keeps me warm.

Before too long my first word doily is taking shape on my page.  I turn the paper as I work.  My letters are stitches, my phrases chains.  I start off neater than I finish.  My written hand loses meaning – the words become mere wiggled lines of ink.  And in this form even my errors start to appeal.  A wonky letter or a word repeated where it shouldn’t be – my equivalent of a dropped stitch, a loose section. 

From a distance, like an overheard conversation, only the pattern vaguely recognisable – but as you draw closer, words and perhaps meaning start to take shape.

postcards from the edge

Approaching the end of a long winter, this seaside town creaks into life.  The promenade train is running again. 

Black-head gulls walk parallel to the ripples, all heading eastwards.  Large ladies in bulky coats squeeze onto a sheltered bench.

A gull watches pigeon shadows skim across the stones.  Amid scooters and screams a boy tells his mother he has found half a mermaid’s purse.  

still life spring

She brings them with her, and while she is here their little bundle lays on top of the fridge and shivers from time to time, as do I.  Later we put them in the perfect vase.  Each stem falls into a fold – splayed like a gentle explosion.  They lean like they would in the wind if the wind could blow in all directions at the same time.  And today, at times, it felt like it did.

* * *

The daffodils she gave us are nearly spent.  Over the last few evenings they have started to give off a floral scent.  A faint premonition of imminent decay.  As if to remind us not to forget them before they are gone.  In all that’s going on it’s easy to overlook mere daffodils.

* * *

A week after she gave them to us her daffodils died.  On the same day she met her first child.  We replaced them with a second bunch – how quickly we grow to depend on their presence.  And these ones saw us through the snow, standing firm while our one wild one fell at the first fall.  They looked like the ones we made when we were young, when painting sections of an egg box was considered fun. 

* * *

We welcome our third one-pound bunch – twenty stems bound together like yellow-tipped green pencils.  They will be ready in a day or two to draw a small picture of spring.  We stand them in the wide-necked vase and let go.  Like a game of pick-up-sticks stalled at the start.   Like this spring, repeatedly halted by winter’s freeze-frame.

life lines

rope tricks

She says ‘There are so many ways to hold the rope’ and I cannot help but agree. 

Despite the fact that we’ve never been to sea even though we live at the edge of the land and count the English Channel as one of our closest friends.  Although I do remember a time I folded a paper boat and set it to sail in our birdbath.  But that’s hardly taking to the high seas. 

We’ve never flown together either – but we have sat side by side and watched a thin twig turn into a tree – we’ve done crosswords in the shade and gazed forever upwards into her leaves and let them lift us closer to the sky.

requiem for a stationer’s dream

I’m an addict.  Post-it notes are my drug of choice (this is not the first time I’ve had to admit to a paper-based dependence).  They feather the inside covers of every notebook.  But like most intoxicants I wonder if they are finally getting the better of me.  I wonder if the thrill of usage is being undercut by the comedown.  The realisation grows that while I clearly had a great time while using I have no recollection of the high.  Instead I am left with tattered squares covered with scribbles that strive to remind me of the ride.

I make these notes to let my pen catch up with my thoughts.  But I wonder if my notation is letting me down.   I’m starting to struggle to decode myself.  I’m finding initials and scratches of phrase that mean nothing.  I knew I had a problem when the other day  I found a stern command in bold capitals to ‘WRITE ABOUT D & G’ with no idea who or what this refers to, but I’m fairly sure it’s not Dolce & Gabbana.  Maybe this is how it looks when a writer loses their mind.

And while they are of little use if they don’t remind me of what I wanted to remember at least they form a strange poetry of their own.  And if my jottings were intended to be a sprinkled line of breadcrumbs to lead me home that has clearly failed - but at least I’ve fed the birds.

snow diary two

(marking the melting more than the fall)

day one

First snow fall.  A messy affair – the snow has fallen with prejudice, favouring leaves and the narrow edges of fences and walls – avoiding large areas of tarmac and concrete.  The effect is uneven and not the completion we know this beast is capable of.  On her back windscreen the layer of snow is melting and slipping – opening like a lazy eye.

day five

Second fall.  What wasn’t there when we woke now is.  This Friday disappears, one settled centimetre after the other.  Upturned hanging baskets become snow crusted cages protecting bulb sprouts beneath.  The deep huff of snow collapsing beneath her boot steps. 

day six

There is a beach of bare path around our door.  There are footprints coming close to the house – some look long-pawed, perhaps belonging to the fox I saw in the road last night.  I have little left to say about this snow but more maybe on it’s way – the forecasts are vague – perhaps if it comes it will bring my words with it.

day seven

She retreads her track to the birdbath and back.  The snow falls in fine flakes that make me feel like I’m looking at old photographs of our garden – grown speckled and pale from the drift of memory.

day eight

A perfect dome of snow still covers our chosen marker stone.  There are other blobs and bumps of snow on the paths and I wish I could learn a frozen form of Braille – to read them and learn the story of what lies beneath.

day nine

Surrounded by the drippings of thaw as my word count grows.  The snow becomes glassy and darker at it’s base – it starts to let go, surrender this temporary state – it prepares to slide away.

day eleven

Third fall.  An unexpected visitor over night.  Cars pass with ruffling toppings – as if someone has pushed back a tablecloth once the meal is over.  The tops of fences like the edges of ripped paper – abandon another bad idea.  

friend of a friend

Every new year I struggle to throw away last year’s calendar, to abandon the colours that have kept me company each month.  So this year I truly recycled – snipping free little replicas of 18^th century birds.  These are the ones that got away – the ones that want to tell their stories before they go.

When I search online to find any details of that calendar I find nothing but dead links – to all intents and purposes those birds of 2012 are extinct.  But I remember them, larger and sharper than these clippings suggest – hung on a hook above the study radiator.  Pages lifting and falling and curling slightly in the updraught - even in two dimensions they longed to fly.

I am the bird above the blue bird.  You don’t need to know my name or anything much about me.  My feathers come in a handful of colours so I fit well in most social situations and adapt easily to everyday avian requirements.  Not so my friend below.

He is a bird of a discontented hue.  Every time he perches nearby his pips and trills are filled with how he has spent much of his morning flying cloud-high only to close his wings and free-fall, eyes closed – pretending to be a raindrop. 

He tells me too how tomorrow he plans to fly two miles out over the sea, then will his feathers to turn to scales, his wings to fins so he can dive right in.

Some birds weren’t meant to be hatched blue.

seaside gothic

I am somewhere between excitement and fear.  I can’t see where I’m going – anything might be waiting there.  Or worse, nothing.

I can’t see where I’m going, and where I’m going can’t see me.  The end of the pier neither here nor there – lost in thick mist.

there for the taking

so much poetry

in the mist

I should have brought my camera – not that there is much to see.  Crows in the mist and the view to the west slightly clearer than the east.  It kills sound as well as sight, this mist.  But what it leaves of both becomes more vital.  I cling to any sensations still available.  I don’t just hear the waves – I feel them through the structure I stand on.  The footsteps of other people speak to me through the vibrations of the boards.  I am conducting a séance – awaiting knocks and tremors – trying to reach the living rather than the dead.

something certain

the sound of the waves

in this mist

And every time I walk on two crows appear just ahead of me – as if they are here to guide me back inland.  As if they have been spat out of the mist after it has finished devouring the usual white birds.

writing between the lines

I spend a lot of time thinking about writing even when I’m not.  I picture my hand holding a pen and crawling letter by letter across a blank page.  Forming sentences is my version of counting the rosary – part comfort, part confession.  Writing self-help books say one must believe oneself to be a writer.  And I do – albeit one who doesn’t write much, or as much as I should, or want to.

I’m comforted when I encounter other writers who write about not writing, or the end of their writing, or the things they haven’t written.  There was a great piece by John Barth in a recent Granta magazine – replicated here as a podcast.  And George Steiner’s My Unwritten Books was worth every penny of it’s Poundland price.  It’s comforting to know I’m not the only one. 

There are things that I’d like to write about but likely never will - but still such pleasure to imagine what might happen if I did.

Stories about approaching St Petersburg by boat.  Of  something lost in the middle of the North Sea.  About those strange places where oceans meet seas.  Stories peopled by characters with short common names (like Mark) that have far more going on than you would suspect.  I want to cover vast distances without leaving the house, pepper my landscapes with appropriate trees and introduce ‘marram grass’ like I mean business.  I want to tell the tale of what happens when a milliner meets a collector of rare feathers.  

the spare room

[inspired by the title of a novel by Helen Garner]

If we had a spare room we’d make good use of it.  We’d throw it open and welcome allsorts to come and stay - objects rather than people.


A drawer full of post-it-notes and not just the yellow ones.  Another bulging with inner tubes in various sizes, to guard against all manner of deflation.  And one for that novel by Emma Donoghue that we have two copies of as where else better?  Nestled next to the little rice cooking ball that looks like a robot planet, that so appealed in the catalogue, shiny with potential just as any robot planet would be, but which we’ve never used.


A small shelf of books - the handful we have truly loved and can’t bear to part with.  Another with framed photos of those people we’ve parted with and can’t bear to love.  A row of jars containing nothing but air, sealed inside on memorable days.  A bundle of envelopes that once held letters in various forms, the typed and the handwritten, the cryptic, coded and downright blunt.  The letters themselves have gone but the envelopes bear witness to our first encounters with bad news in its many guises.


Coppers in a pot just in case we ever find something worth buying for just one or two pence.  A dish full of seeds collected from things grown in our garden – things we didn’t plant, but which grew from previous seeds deposited by passing creatures.  And a pill box brimful of apostrophes - the should have used, overused and those kept handy just in case.      

gold mining

In January and July this year I paddled in the River of Stones and panned for my own nuggets of daily truth.


I think it's high time I re-polished my nuggets and dangled them here to delight those who prefer truth when it sparkles and burns and buys it's way into all the most (un)desirable places.

Inevitably drawn to pale foods he was the sort of man to heap his plate with potatoes and spend the meal searching for his meat.  To drink two pints of milk straight from a summer doorstep and smile away the morning as they curdled gently within.  To think of his mother whenever he caught himself looking at a woman's breasts - remembering her force feeding him rice pudding, and withholding blancmange when he'd been bad.

I predict a riot

‘… violence is embedded in public spaces whether visible or not, because public spaces are responsive to violence even before the violence has occurred, through the physical design.’

Jen Berean & Pat Foster (PoCA magazine)

The child barely manages to post the empty crisp packet into the bin before his mother drags him onwards. He looks back hoping to catch a glimpse as it starts to crackle and smoke. He scrapes his shoe along the edge of the kerbstone, throwing out an anchor to slow their progress, but all he leaves is a slight red scuff that melts and slowly dribbles toward the gutter. A police car passes and he pictures it upside down, end over end, any way but this – much more fun than flipping triangles in maths class. His mother says he has an overactive imagination although she struggles to keep the syllables in their rightful place.

The mother drags him onwards, just another bag of shopping she can barely afford only without the handles. He bulges, he sags, he makes her arm ache, he threatens to spill his contents across the pavement at any moment. They stop by a shop, the mother staring at the screen of her mobile phone, decoding abbreviated declarations of love from the latest in a long line of abbreviated lovers. The child exhales. His breath a hazy cloud on the shop window. In this he draws – not letters or hearts or faces – but jagged lines that divide and collide to form little pieces of steamed glass. A map of how this window might come apart.

where the wild things are

spotted last sunday. baby birds times two. the collared dove not yet smooth, and darker than it will become. like brewed tea taken less milky. the sparrow still fluffed with down the colour of ash. a little phoenix. both hopeless against the wind, content to go wherever it takes them.

*****

at the corner point of the roof next door is a strip of metal that forms a curl. a roofer’s flourish it looks like it should support a hanging basket although that would float far to high for belief, watering or enjoyment. this afternoon, one foot on the tile, another on the curl, stands a crow. looking to each cardinal direction in turn. sparkling in the sun. if black can be said to sparkle.

*****

this morning. a small green beetle-bug comes through the door. perhaps wind blown, perhaps self propelled. it lands on my hand. I try to shake it off, I am reading. it weaves between my fingers, round the back and in between. it has a long body, not a round one. I flick it off and it skids across my page. I grab it and feel it rattling slightly in my fist. like a word you can’t quite remember. I cast it out the door, badly. it sails towards the little bleached fir that we plan to plant round the front to replace the one that we uprooted at the end of last year. the one that had grown too big for us and for itself. but beetle-bug falls short, and lands in a web. I hope it gets free. I am reading but I would rather it was still stuck to me than to that web.

101 ways to write about rain

Sometimes it seems like there’s a lot of it about. So, in the spirit of ‘if you can’t beat them join them’ I aim to get to know each and every drop.

the rain started like a rumour. a whisper at the back of the classroom. a secret passed on under the breath. a hastily scribbled note on folded scrap paper. she knew what was happening behind her back. she knew it was coming for her. yet again she’d be caught in a cloudburst.

*****

your eyes are like rainclouds. filling. filling the sky. no wind. no movement. some light. not much. blankety and grey. comforting in their familiarity but largely unwelcome on a summer day. all day they linger. they stay. but drop not a drop. they glower but never shower. you threaten to rain. but don’t.

*****

false alarm rain. a few spots that linger in the air but don’t drop. that hang there to create the impression of rain. like a raindrop mobile above a baby that never breathes. enough to get you up off the sofa, out of your book. to bring you to the window. out the back door to bring in the washing. while the drops hang still.