Let us say we have two cups and a bucket. Let us also say we are the world’s dorkiest waitress and that we have such a raging passion for a particular tea-tray that we always wish to carry it with us. Let us say the bucket and the cups are all exceedingly full. Let us further say that we, dorkily, have got ourselves stuck with the tea-tray under one arm, a cup in each hand and the bucket balanced on our head.

Now, ideally, the bucket should be safely locked in the broom closet and the cups should be on the tray. So, given that we are in position A, Dorkage Central, how do we get to position B, Graceful Accomplishment, given that we can’t actually put anything down for even so much as a second and the bucket seems to be overbalancing?

[What in God’s name is going on in here? - Ed]

Oh very well, we’ll back up a few steps.

1. The left-hand cup is my job. I can carry it perfectly comfortably in my left hand, indeed, to facilitate cup-multiplicity, the left hand cup has kindly been made smaller by The Management. It has not, however, had less tea poured into it, and the saucer is swimming with overflow and so, to be frank, is my left shoe.
2. The right-hand cup is my degree. Now this is a very large cup, filled, I suppose, to a sensibly generous level, in that all things being equal I needn’t spill any, but I am trying to walk with a wet left shoe, a tea-tray-in-oxter and a bucket, so spilling is a distinct and very unwelcome possibility, as I won’t get a chance to refill this cup, as that’s the last of the Jamaica Blue Mountain.
3. The bucket is more complicated. The bucket contains my health and Matters Arising. It was a disgustingly full and horrid bucket, but the surgery over the summer ladled part of it down the sink and then kindly took it from where I had it clamped to my chest with my right hand (as I needed the right hand for the degree mug) and balanced it on my head. Now, the bucket still contains The Long-Term Issue That May Have Caused One Of The Surgical Issues, the Interestingly Misshapen Innards Issue, and the Issue Of The Ticking Clock. (Ooh, obscurantism is fun!). They loom, these issues. And in a few weeks time, the NHS will drop the exceedingly large brick of A Course of Treatment into my bucket, and the bucket will topple into my arms, and I will have to catch it while somehow manouvering so the fountains leaping from the cups on impact land back in the cups.
4. Oh, yes, the tea-tray. Well, that’s the writing.

So, if I had sorted out the writing so it was an automatic, smoothly integrated part of my life, that I could do in stolen moments and while on the bus, I could let it carry on through everything. I could have rested the degree and the job on it. I could have avoided getting a shoe full of tea and I could have avoided a great deal of caffeine-induced insomnia. If I could have had my health dealt with in a timely fashion, the bucket wouldn’t have got nearly so full and the NHS wouldn’t be reduced to dropping great bricks in it from a height in an effort to slosh some of the issues out of it.

As for the brick-dropping, yes, I could put it off, but it has taken me nearly two years to get this deep into the labyrinths of clinical assessment and referral and if I drop out, I have to start from scratch with the ol’ nagging the GP until he’s so sick of the sight of you he refers you (a whole year, according to the latest guidelines) and you wait 5 months for a preliminary visit and then another three for an assortment of scans and tests and three months after that for a visit to confirm that yes, hoo boy, your innards are indeed screwed and here is the waiting list for the Brick. Yes, it does look rather like it says three years. Yes, you will be too old to have a brick dropped on you by then. Sorry.

Because I agree. Submitting to the brick treatment NOW, I mean, NOW, with the job and the essays and the tea-tray thing, is insane.

You had better hope that armpit is comfortable.

The Capacious Hold-All, University | No Comments »

January Daylight

Is cold one day in five, is wet,
Is kept awake by gales,
Is astonishingly still by dawn.

Is grey as a tupperware box, is clear,
Is an arctic glass-cold summer,
Is thick with salty water,

Is shrunken, swallowed in dark, is brief,
Is seen through windows only,
Is gone, with an escort of street-lamps.

That’s your lot for today. Like I said, still busy.

Damn those Management essays.

Poetry | No Comments »

I can either post here regularly, or, I can do my course-work.

Course-work wins.

Arse.

The Capacious Hold-All, University | No Comments »

(Photo courtesy of Ramson)

At dawn of day the apple-thief
Comes dancing in her leitmotif,

Slotting each foot in a previous slot
Made yesterday in the orchard plot,

Returns again to where left off she -
The leafless, branch-bent apple-tree -

And among the windfalls idly browses
Safe from guns so near the houses.

So dainty-legged, her sister-beast,
Reducing apples was reduced to feast,

And seeing her pause, I think in pain,
Oh, she the apples, we the gain

Poetry | No Comments »

The redoubtable Litlove has actually been reading The Times, and lookie here, but they listed a top 50 of British Writers since 1945. Litlove has some very good points along the lines of ‘who chose these and where the hell is everyone else who should be in here?’, and I am far too, well, frankly, intellectually feeble [Aha! The truth at last! - Ed] to make any such points myself, and so shan’t even try. But as Litlove was sanguine enough to ‘cheerfully state her ignorance’ I saw no reason at all why I shouldn’t cheerfully state mine, so any comments follow each author in brackets.

50. Michael Moorcock (Ah. Well, I have read every single thing of Moorcock’s except that Dancers at the End of Time book everyone else thinks it cool to like.)

49. Rosemary Sutcliff (Yep. Read Eagle of the Ninth. And so should you. Even if it is out of print.)

48. Benjamin Zephaniah (Deeply cool etc., but not really my type of poetry. I got bored. My bad.)

47. Alice Oswald (Errr…)

46. Bruce Chatwin (Have - oh shaming - read him in handfuls while sitting on my mother’s loo, for she keeps The Songlines next to Schott’s Miscellany. )

45. Colin Thubron (At a guess, I could tell you he’s a writer.)

44. Julian Barnes (What the hell is he doing all the way down here?)

43. Philip Pullman (And what in Christ is he doing below Rowling?)

42. J. K. Rowling (Yes, yes, yes, I have read all seven.)

41. Isaiah Berlin (Haven’t touched him since I was an undergrad.)

40. A. J. P. Taylor (At 40? Am I the only one who used to read his books for the sheer pleasure of annoying my History A-Level teachers by quoting him? [Good God yes, you lunatic].)

39. George Mackay Brown (I’m sure I’ve read some of his poetry. Possibly.)

38. Iain Banks (Now, his SF is at least as twice as good as his ‘mainstream’ stuff, so if Iain Banks is here, Iain M. Banks ought to be rather further up. Have read and indeed own a great deal of Banks.)

37. Hanif Kureshi (Yes, tick, done some, good.)

36. Godfrey Hill (even Amazon hasn’t heard of him. Poor bastard.)

35. Ian McEwan (Yes, done, tick, was merely whelmed.)

34. A. S. Byatt (I know she’s not to everyone’s taste, but she’s in my top ten and has been for years, chiefly for Possession, which is wonderful)

33. Anita Brookner (I’ve read Hotel du Lac. I remember very little about it.)

32. Kazuo Ishiguro (Only 32? Yes, well, he’s uneven, but The Remains of the Day really is that good.)

31. Derek Walcott (On my list of People To Read. And. Err. Has been for years.)

30. John Fowles (The Magus, appalling. The French Lieutenant’s Woman, brilliant.)

29. Alasdair Gray (Ah. See Derek Walcott.)

28. Alan Garner (Nod, shrug, indeed, have read, did like.)

27. J. G. Ballard (Well. Too good to rubbish, to unlikeable to re-read.)

26. Beryl Bainbridge (Have only read An Awfully Big Adventure, awfully jolly good.)

25. Barbara Pym (Philip Larkin was a fan. That’s all I know. Very bad.)

24. Philippa Pearce (Have somehow avoided reading any. Very mysterious. There’s even a copy of Tom’s Midnight Garden on the shelf over there.)

23. Penelope Fitzgerald (Read The Blue Flower. Wept. Loved it. Haven’t read anything else, possibly in case it isn’t The Blue Flower.)

22. John le Carré (Yes, done; no, wait, saw on telly. That doesn’t count, does it?)

21. Alan Sillitoe (I haven’t read a single word.)

20. Anthony Powell (Now, I have tried to read Powell.)

19. Martin Amis (Pisses me off.)

18. Mervyn Peake (Duly Gormentghasted. Incidentally, have you seen his illustrations to the Ancient Mariner? Blood so thicked with cold it’d be footling to call them anything short of awe-inspiring. )

17. Anthony Burgess (On my list of ‘Things To Avoid Because People Keep Ordering Me To Read It (or be sneered at thereafter).)

16. Roald Dahl (I think I’ve read most of his children’s books. Very excellent good subversive fun. But why all the way up here?)

15. Jan Morris (On list of people to read properly, damn it, and preferably before the end of the century.)

14. Ian Fleming ([What the fuck?] Yes, have read, and therefore, even louder and more vehemently than the Editor, what the fuck? Who compiled this cockamamy list anyway?)

13. Salman Rushdie (Loved Midnight’s Children. Was mildly impressed, mildly diverted by, and eventually mildly bored by the redux rest. Haroun and the Sea of Stories, utterly fantastic and much adored. Also, is he, technically, British, or are The Times being patronising colonialist bastards?)

12. Iris Murdoch (Always manages to leave me feeling flustered and dissatisfied, and haunted by the characters for weeks afterwards.)

11. C. S. Lewis (While I’d put him very high on my own personal list, it wouldn’t necessarily be because I think he’s that good. He’s, well, that special, like a irascible, ranting uncle who is wonderful with children but who one wouldn’t want to let loose on the dinner guests.)

10. Angela Carter (Fantabulous.)

9. Kingsley Amis (Oh for… No. Look, sorry, jolly good fun and all that, and I’m sure made a deep impression on the sort of clever young man of the 50’s who Wasn’t Getting Any, but no.)

8. Muriel Spark (Have not read, can not say.)

7. V. S. Naipaul (Not my sort of thing. Possibly because everyone keeps telling me how bloody marvelous he is all the time.)

6. J. R. R. Tolkien (I cannot possibly talk about Tolkien, I lack the cool distance from which to judge clearly much in the same way a trout lacks the ability to spot hooks and fishing-lines.)

5. Doris Lessing (Have not read. Keep buying, in order to read. Agh. )

4. Ted Hughes (Ah, now, there’s a man who can write the most intense, living poetry, and also disappear up his own arse on the next page. Must eventually discuss this at more length [if not necessarily depth].)

3. William Golding (Lord of the Flies made me sick to the marrow, anxious, ashamed somehow of being so disturbed by a ‘mere book’, and then I had bad dreams. Somehow inextricably linked in my mind with The Island of Doctor Moreau. Who the hell was letting me read this stuff at the age of eleven? Sadistic bastard.)

2. George Orwell (Fair enough. Very fond of Orwell.)

1. Philip Larkin (What the? Really? Why? I mean, I personally like his poetry very much indeed, but it rather sours it if so does everyone else. I preferred feeling slightly perverse.)

And now I am completely exhausted, and I have to get up at six tomorrow if I want a shower before I set off to work (and yes, I do want a shower, I’m very civilized that way), as I am working, or, rather, hanging about in everyone’s way, ‘on placement’, as they say, and the Placement Place likes to have everyone in, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, a good hour before they open to the panting hordes that thirst at the door for the fountain of knowledge. Me, I always was a devout adherent of Nothing Good Comes of Early Rising.

Book reviews | 7 Comments »

Dearest Readers, all best wishes for a thoroughly charming 2008. And hello! First post of the year! Only four days late!

Posting on the first of January was naturally out of the question, as I only got home from my parent’s residence [not a typo, just the one parent at said residence - Ed] at An Hour We Shall Insist Was UnGodly and I think I went as straight to bed as possibly consistent with eating dinner, faffing about and pretending to do laundry. The second, I had a migraine. The third, I went to work. Which was, as ever after a prolonged season of lie-ins, bloody knackering. And anyway, I was sleep-deprived, as the husband was unwell and therefore uninclined to lie still and breathe quietly, and I had migraine hangover, which consists of deep, persistent dorkishness, inability to spell, and tendency to walk into door-posts. Today, husband still tiresomely not in charge of his own respiratory passages, but I’ve got the hang of this coherent thought thing again [hah!].

And so, to prove it, here is a little New Year poem for you all. Lucky you.

Arbitrary

The date, the hour of sunset, midnight.
Weather. Floods. All arbitrary.
The right-now so-dark well of the year
Rises high above and out of sight

And yet begins afresh. It’s here
At the starting-gate, so arbitrary,
We each eyeing the climb ahead,
Denying or feeling or succumbing to fear,

Here, that we believe, and it is said,
Is our redemption, arbitrary,
While the endless sunlit year spreads out
Chance after chance we could take instead.

I assure you, despite the extreme obviousness of above title, that it arrived well before the rest of the poem. And then the first two lines. You could say it is the poem that is obvious, in turning its own title into a motet like that.

I was temporarily uninspired to continue, and left the two lines lying about on a jotter somewhere. And then, of course, yesterday I was still awake considerably after midnight [see above] so I tried to bore myself to sleep by considering my two lines, and ended up setting myself a little technical exercise – a strict rhyme scheme, the repeating use of the word arbitrary. And it says a lot about my general keenness at work at the moment that I spent over an hour the next afternoon polishing and fiddling with the results. So there you have it.

On comparing this poem to the nameless one about Christmas in the previous entry, I note that am clearly Mistress Grouchy-Pants these days. [Heigh ho].

Poetry | 2 Comments »

It is, indeed, Christmas Eve. I have been watching A Christmas Carol (Patrick Stewart!) on the telly this evening, and to my increasing horror, weeping helplessly as it all got more and more sentimental and, by the time Tiny Tim died [Or, did not die. Or is going to would have died - Ed], downright revolting. I dare say the enormous gin and tonic I brought along to help jolly me through the dinner-cooking process was having much the larger say in the matter.

I daresay I have absolutely no business pontificating about Christmas, being a diamond-hard atheist of the Dawkins flavour (if, I do so very hope, somewhat better manners). But there has always been a Solstice festival of some sort, a time to eat up all the bacon before it goes off, kill any calves that we can’t afford to feed over the winter, coddle gramps a bit, because that cough is Not Reassuring; a time, around the arse-end of the year, to look up at the darkening sky, and hope, and pray, that next Solstice we will also have enough spare food to feast on, and beloved people to feast with.

All utterly meaningless to a woman who lives ten minutes walk from Waitrose, has organic smoked salmon in the fridge, and has voluntarily elected to stay the hell away from family until well after Boxing Day this time.

Nevertheless, there I was, sobbing pitifully at Dickens, at reconciliation and charity and dancing with your family after dinner.

You see, it has been a particularly bloody year chez Reed. You may have observed the general paucity of blogging, the ominous weeks-long silences, mentions of surgery, that sort of hintingness. In the grand scheme of things, it is as nothing, mere wisps of unpleasantness that will dissipate the second I cease to exist and/ or get over myself. Please don’t try to hold my hand, I’ll only start bawling again and embarrass the lot of us. My friends have been perfectly sweet (I keep thinking, one day I shall indeed have a big Dickensian Christmas, and have it solely for friends and familial honourable exceptions, and then I shan’t answer the telephone until March, so the dishonourable majority can’t say a word to me about it). My family have been a pain, bless them, even when they most earnestly did not mean to be, and really, it’s Christmas, and I should have been more charitable and spent it with them. As it is, S and I are spending tomorrow barricaded into our little flat, eating ourselves silly, preferably in pyjamas, and generally being bah-humbuggy little Scrooge-bags all by our selves.

And wondering if the three Spirits of Christmas are going to break in and give me hell for it.

The Capacious Hold-All | 7 Comments »

[Written at work today, while waiting for Microsoft Word to stop crashing and let Reed actually do some, funnily enough, work, and after a morning completely wasted on Christmas shopping - Ed.]

No snow, no frost, again this year,
No ice nor sleet nor hail;
The south-west wind brings in the rain,
The rain brings in a gale,

And twinkling Santas, reindeer, stars,
Strain against their ropes -
Not dreams of warmth and food and light,
No need for self-same hopes,

No dark, no cold, no starving night,
And this not one bright jewel,
No candle held for sun’s return,
No hopes to dash - oh, cruel -

[Methinks she has inhaled hard in the vicinity of Emily Dickinson.]

Poetry | 5 Comments »

I seem to have spent a week with my head up my bottom with regards to this blog. This is not good for the neck.

The Capacious Hold-All | 3 Comments »

Three coursework deadlines all at once. Which is mean.

Nothing a coffee-fuelled all-nighter, or two, can’t solve. It’s not like I have to be coherent and speakable and at work the next morning or anything.

No, wait, that was when I was 20.

Damn it.

University | 1 Comment »