Luna

A poem based on the dream of a friend, October 2009.

I.

The man in the moon came down to me
In a silent silver night;
He whispered wisdom in my ear,
'What you seek you will find here,'
In the garden by the love-tree,
Wrapped in pearly light.

II.

The dawn crept faintly over hills,
It kissed the leaves with red;
Staring at a pallid sky,
Laying in the stillness I,
In the garden by the love-tree,
Doubted what he'd said.

III.

The day, magnificently clothed,
The sun as garment wore;
Softly drooped a leaf and fell
Into my lap, a crimson shell;
In the garden by the love-tree
I slept a fitful spell.

IV.

When with the starlight I awoke
The garden was aglow;
Roseate the shadows danced
And I unto the heavens glanced,
In the garden by the love-tree
My very soul entranced.

V.

The moon had lost its tenant old,
But it his place it came -
Luminescent, perfect, round,
Spilling glory on the ground;
In the garden by the love-tree
Amor perennis found.

Defiance

It is autumn outside my window,
But in here, it is spring.
Painfully buds push their way through the crust
And gasp, shocked at the wide open space,
The air full of longing
And the scent of rain.

Beneath my chest is drumming,
Insistent, threatening a break-out
In defiance of the slowing pace of nature,
As the trees shed their defences
And prepare for silent hibernation.

Cotton-wool-clad sprouts are my thoughts,
Cosseted against the coming cold -
In here, my nursery defies the law of seasons,
Pushing forth anxious, ambitious,
Premature children, clad in the hope
Only worn by spring.

Sticky, Colour-Ridden, Drawn-Out Ends

Do you ever have one of those days when the best self-expression you can come up with feels like a cheap microwaved version of something much better? I have them periodically - usually somewhere between a slow day at work and a hot, wakeful night, when all my former aspirations pop into my head and disappear like bubbles when I go to catch them. I guess an almost constant re-assessment of our goals and abilities in life is completely normal, really, given that we cannot control so many of our circumstances as we would like, and we are by nature adaptive creatures.

Today I found something I had written from this exact mood, with these exact feelings, and despite the fact that it was a bit of a first-year-at-uni essay-avoidance activity, it resonated strangely with today's malaise. Even more surprisingly, I actually felt better for having read it - I recognised that some degree of originality can spring from imitation.

Virginia Woolf has been one of my favourite writers for a few years, and while the convoluted sentence structures rival Dickens in places, and the characters are almost hopelessly introspective, I couldn't stay away... so here's my over-long, similarly convoluted, but hopefully entertaining and to some degree encouraging parody/homage.

****************

Amber said she would write the essay herself. For everyone else had so much work of their own to do – and really, when it was expected of her, she thought, how could she palm off a thing of such importance to another? Peering over the top of her laptop screen she was instantly and irrationally frustrated by the irregular angle at which the lurid-yellow jacketed workman, all rough hands and dark crusted boots and his earnest but absurd expression of intense concentration on the carrying of sandbags, had left it, in a hole in the ground outside her window. She had mistaken that clod of dirt for a dead bird, but a few moments ago, peering out over the defiled and soon-to-be-trampled patch of grass. That it was not, she felt relieved. She did not like dead things. She felt a pity for them which could not be relieved, was impotent, and probably (she mused to herself, in the case of animals only?) unimportant. What was important was this essay, and she, with an immense effort as of a bedraggled and exhausted sparrow hauling itself out of the leafy shelter of a tree to resume the arduous yet necessary flight home, (there was that dead bird again, its one glassy eye staring up at her – but no, it really was only a clump of earth), returned a determined gaze to the screen before her. She noted with satisfaction that the workman, with his younger colleague (the colleagues are always younger, aren’t they? she thought), was setting the stake straight in the ground. This satisfied her. Things were straight; good, she thought; she could get on with her work.

At the precise moment that she began marshalling her thoughts, arranging her books around her (she had only read two of the five; the introduction to that one was remarkably dense and confusing; was there no simple explanation of postmodernism to be found?); just at that moment her phone made a sound, a tinkling sound as of a child running a toy car up a glockenspiel, and try as she might she could not ignore it. A message! She was thought of, she was wanted for something, she was – faced with a tiny photograph of Stanley, wearing an oversized dinner suit and white socks; the caption ran thus: I look like a penguin. Yes, thought Amber, smiling a wry smile, yes you most certainly do, and the socks, I must say, she typed into the phone, make it so. And she felt a pang of pride (was it possible to feel such a thing, a pang? Was that the right word?) seeing him dressed so, knowing it was for her that he had borrowed it, for her and for the ball they would be going to. She wore the dress, the one he had brought up to replace the one she had chosen which was the wrong size – oh to be a 10 again! – and came out of the dressing room to show him, apprehensive, hoping to be admired. She was not disappointed; she remembered the open mouth, and roving eyes, and the insistence with which he had taken it from the rack on which she had hung it and said, you must have it, you cannot wait until you are paid, you have looked after me – and there it was, hanging in her wardrobe. Her sister’s party at the weekend; everyone had loved it, said she looked divine. Why did she value this praise so highly? Here she was, supposed to be improving her mind, supposed to be making an attempt on fathoming the depths of Virginia Woolf and her style and her subjectivity; the focus of her mind was so often in too many places to fathom anything, it was more geared to brush the surface and then peel away the layers gradually; there was no help for it, here everything was a rush, nothing was gradual. There are more important things! she cried internally, recalling hillside walks and painting and beaches, recalling late night talks over her cakes (she always made cake, it was therapeutic) with girls whose lives were confused, and knowing her own life to be confused at times she listened and talked and tried to be helpful; she remembered those recent events, dessert party and a brief film and an earnest speaker, and how her heart had resonated with all he had said and she wanted people to see it, to know it, to know what she knew, whom she knew. And not for myself, she added. For them. To come from that, and all its accompanying stresses – indeed it had been far more work than she had ever anticipated, and her books had been neglected though she had wanted desperately to read them – but also its joys, its wonders, its truths; she felt she was coming back down to something of far less significance.

Virginia Woolf. What could one say, what write? That she knew and portrayed something of man’s inner state, demonstrating the individual isolation from corporate humanity which we at once need, desire and lament? That her characters, from Mr and Mrs Ramsay to Hugh, ‘the admirable Hugh!’, to Peter Walsh, Mrs Dalloway, Sally Seton, Septimus Warren Smith… they are all afraid of and drawn to darkness, they feel a sense of failure, they are unhappy, they push against the limits of their mental capacity, they fail to know themselves, they are constantly in a state of conflict? We all know people like this, Amber thought, her eye flickering over her dense and disordered notes and the photograph on the front of one book of a pale, gaunt old woman, ink-stained fingers grasping her pen, sharp features outlined in and yet softened by the black and white, old and gaunt yes, but retaining an air of underlying vivacity, tenacity, vision – she knew not what.

Virginia Woolf, she wrote. Well, was it about the woman or the works? Surely both, she reasoned; but an essay is not to be a biography, even one referring heavily to the works. ‘The works’ – I’ve read only two, she reflected, I know little. Ah yes, came in that other, less gloomy side of her, but ‘little’ or ‘a little’? It is all in one’s perspective. Oh! She grasped it. Perspective. Subjectivity, perspective, the outside in, the inside out, the shaping of narrative by means of introspection and projection, the author’s thoughts in the unconsciousness (or consciousness) of the characters, the things which are implied but not named, the pervasive sense of feelings, states of being, thoughts, which cannot be pinned down, what else…? Conrad, she recalled, it reminded her of Conrad; Mrs Ramsay’s talk (or was it thought?) about a ‘core of darkness’, a ‘wedge of darkness’, to which one is reduced when out of company and entirely alone, and yet one even then attaches oneself to the light, to inanimate but constant things; one desires constancy, unity, perhaps above all. Well, she could talk about all that, she could write that. It was the critics that bothered her; if only her own readings and opinions had been needed, Amber thought, glancing at that postmodernist book and thinking what humbug it had all been last night when she got in, tired, and tried fruitlessly to glean something from it; if only it was her own feelings and thoughts, it would have been enough. Egotistic? She thought not. It’s not, she said to herself, as if I value my own opinions above those of others, especially on a subject with which I am not at all familiar, but, and she pursed her lips and frowned slightly, under the circumstances it would simply be easier. Was that what it had come down to? The aspirations, the desire for learning, the resonance of thoughts she read with awakening ones in her head; had it come to this, ‘it would simply be easier’? No! I don’t do things because they are easy, I do things because they are good, for me, for others, for my mind, because they enlarge me, change me, challenge me, inform me – I want to write an essay that means something to me!

Outside under the dull white sky a man in a grey jumper walked to and fro, talking on his phone, before the navy blue of a big metal box – what was that for? – and somewhere off to the right, out of view, Amber heard the irregular echo and thud of someone, some people, hammering stakes into the ground. At least, that was what she supposed it was. Right now she had not the curiosity to find out, though most times she would be fascinated by life outside her window; fireworks, for example, all those months ago when she had climbed onto her desk and, laughing and shooing Stanley from around her knees, pulled open the window to let in the chill breeze and the bang and the crackle and the vibrant sprays of glorious colour and light pouring over the tower block like cascades of molten metal. Or when the fire engine had come (it had been dark, she was sure) right between her and that tree, that majestic and enduring tree whose leaves she loved to watch, and Stanley had pulled her away from the window as they were so close they might crash – Stanley was always there, wasn’t he? Perhaps, if he had been now…but no, he would have distracted her. She had to write this essay. What was she thinking about again? The thud and echo continued, closer this time she felt, and a small yellow and green digger sat across the mud-spattered stone surface with its scattered bricks, right by a heap of mud, as if to say, look! Look what I have created, this heap of mud, this mound, this pile, fresh and eternally replenished earth which I have mown, and shovelled, and heaped – look! Amber looked; the mound was where a building had been, perhaps where another soon would be, the orange mesh fence told her that, and she allowed her eyes to travel up and to the right, taking in the tower block beyond the mound. The mound suddenly seemed rather insignificant – keep digging, little digger, she wanted to say. You have a way to go yet. How absurd, she thought, catching herself, to talk to a digger! I am not a child. And what good is a mound beside a building, tell me that? You too have a way to go, returned the digger – your mound needs to be a tower block. My what? Oh, my essay.

Amber withdrew further into the room and blocked out the digger with its mound and its aspirations and the towering block of rooms, showers, kitchens, people, in and out, in and out, life going on with creation and destruction, the repetitive insistence of that thudding, hammering, harsh striking coming closer and closer…

Essay! Why had she not the tenacity, the dedication, vision, whatever it was she could see in that picture? Poor Mr Ramsay, she thought; his fear made it impossible to move on:

‘In that flash of darkness he heard people saying – he was a failure – that R was beyond him. He would never reach R. On to R, once more. R---’

Do I have an R to reach? Amber ponders the question, thinks of Mr Ramsay’s life, how ‘the father of eight children has no choice’, how his family has disrupted his career however little he may want to admit it, how he needs constant reassurance that what he has given the world already is of some value, how he is determined and yet unable to attain the next letter. She already has G, and L; I have an F, she thinks, if only I can do this essay and then the next one and the next one and so on at a good enough standard… and I probably almost have an M, she thinks next (if things must be sequential, but in reality she would rather have the M though it isn’t meant to come first) as Stanley in his oversized tuxedo once more comes into her mind and she smiles, smiles and plays with her ring. Oh, and then I suppose C, the big C which all women are supposed to be after these days, and B, what most of us instinctively want even thought it disrupts C, and goodness knows what else – must I have it all in mind now? Can’t I let G, which after all came first, determine the rest? And right now – right now, she ponders, as the room grows steadily darker though it’s only 3 in the afternoon (and the essay due at 11 tomorrow!); right now, she puts her little finger in her mouth, turns her head and reads, ‘vanity and self-sacrifice’, ‘marriage pressure’, ‘unity, absorption’; right now, this is what I need. I need E. I need E! On to E, once more. E…

************

One paragraph, and several more pages of notes. Outside the thudding had ended and been replaced by a steady buzz, as of a lawnmower traversing grounds in the heat of a summer day, when the haze picks up and carries, thick and tremulous, all sounds and sights, depositing them heavy, delightful, almost overwhelming on the wanderer out-of-doors. Amber felt that nagging in her back, just between the shoulder blades slightly to the right; she’d slept awkwardly, again, despite piling up the cushions underneath her, keeping straight – why must we be so easily put out, she asked, why, with only nineteen years to her name, must she feel she was creaking about like an old woman? Youth would pass in the majestic swell and sway of a hot summer month, and its days with sticky, colour-ridden, drawn-out ends. She looked out; the sky was pale. It was not summer yet. The little digger was sitting complacent and still upon its heap; moments before the buzzing had ceased, and the truck containing part of that mound had slowly and quietly lumbered out of the yard. One paragraph. It was past four o’ clock. Three blue-attired, squinting middle-aged men, one with close-cut receding hair, one tall and ungainly, one small and spectacled, surveyed the ground, peering up at Amber’s tree – for it was hers, in a way; she had written about it, she had gazed at it. They surveyed the land. How many more truck loads would finish that pile? She returned to the essay.

Read All About It #2

More arrests, more allegations, more resignations... we would have been naive to expect that this was an issue which would blow out in a matter of weeks, but as the casualty list grows, the long-term effects of the phone hacking scandal are perhaps only just being guessed at.

When news first broke, optimists (or pessimists, depending on your viewpoint) were saying there would be a six-week furore of frenzied media speculation, a few resignations, and then all would subside into dull, elongated legal investigation with the occasional snippet of information being gravely intoned on Radio Four. How wrong they were.

Rebekah Brooks finally gave in to what may well be seen as the inevitable, and resigned a few days ago. The anti-Brooks contingent took to Twitter rejoicing, and there may well have been private relief in Number Ten that at least something the PM had recommended was being acted upon, rather than written off as a lame attempt to extricate himself from the mess. The Lib Dem's persistent cries of "Andy Coulson!" faded into the background for a few short hours, as Brooks, James Murdoch and Rupert Murdoch arrived in Westminster to give evidence before a Select Committee.

Heads continue to roll. Both Sir Paul Stephenson, who was until Sunday the head of the metropolitan police, and his assistant commissioner John Yates, have stepped down. The taint of corruption touching Yates is understandable, as London Mayor Boris Johnson pointed out on Radio 4 on Monday morning - Yates was in charge of the initial phone hacking inquiry back in 2009, and has been accused of 'hushing up' or blocking further investigation in favour of focusing on dealing with terror threats and other significant issues at that time. Before Yates' resignation was announced, Boris intimated that the assistant commisioner was likely to be investigated, and news of the resignation came shortly after that. In a public statement, Yates insisted that his conscience was clear, and that his resignation was due to the desire to quash the potential effects of 'malicious gossip' on the Met as it prepares for the 2012 Olympics. Sir Paul's reasoning was similar, but his resignation is rather more puzzling; as someone who had no involvement in the 2009 investigation, and was not in office when former NotW employee and hacking suspect Neil Wallis was employed by the Met, the necessity of his departure is questionable. In fact, it begs the question, do we expect our leaders to fall on their swords at the arrival of trouble or the admission of failure? Isn't this a rather medieval view of authority's responsibilities? And who will be left to clear up if they all leave?

In the midst of this upheaval, whispers are increasing in the ether that PM Cameron could be the next 'victim' - will the scandal extend its deadly tendrils so far into his administration as to topple it? Personally, I think much of this is wishful thinking on the part of those who have always felt that Cameron was a bit of a squib, and have been waiting for something big enough to squash him. However, it can't be denied that a lack of government pressure on the Met back in 2009 may have contribued to the now-evident inadequacy of their investigations, and the break of so much larger an issue two years later. But as Cameron so readly admitted, and as so many others have echoed, this is a far broader problem - a collusion of state, media, police and public complacency in the matter has led us to this stormy port. And at the heart of it all are the newspaper bosses who swore that all corruption had been eradicated from their midst.

It therefore astounds me that reports are coming through of both Ladbrokes and William Hill offering odds on the PM's departure from office as a direct result of this whole mess. Really? Betting against the government in a time when we need more faith than ever in its ability to clean Britain up? I don't care what your political affiliations are, whether you'd rather have voted in a martian than Cameron or not - this is not an appropriate response to the circumstances in which we find ourselves. All governments, and all statesmen, have failings, whether they be cowardice, over-zealousness, too great a degree of dependency or too high a value placed on their independence, but backing them to fail is far from an adequate answer. If anything, this is Cameron's opportunity to engineer the recovery of a nation whose economy and reputation have been fragile for quite some time, and are growing ever weaker. I do not view him as a saviour, by any means, but I hold out hope for his potential as a steady mind and hand within a body which, for better or worse, makes the decisions which steer our future. At present, I don't think that politically we can do much better than that - but we can do much worse.

Read All About It

After 168 years in print, The News of the World is set to publish its final edition on Sunday. While no doubt many devoted readers will mourn its passing, the shock of James Murdoch’s decision to close down the paper for good has by no means diminished the enormity of the scandal which has led to this eventuality. 

When Andy Coulson stepped down as editor over allegations of phone hacking in 2007, his resignation seemed to be taken as a carte blanche guarantee that all such actions had come to an end. Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire served jail sentences, and order appeared to have been restored as the Mirror’s former editor, Colin Myler, took Coulson’s place. Granted, Coulson himself was subsequently hounded by the press in relation to the affair, but this was more due to David Cameron’s decision to employ him as communications director for the new administration. While no evidence had been brought against Coulson personally in the matter, the public seemed to think him an unwise choice for the role, which he abruptly resigned early this year.

It has therefore been with disbelief and a degree of incredulity that the British public has watched the unfolding of this most recent saga. Like one of the ‘shock factor’ headlines of which The News of the World is so fond, it’s caused many of us to do a double-take – is it really possible that so much corruption has been going undetected until this week? The heads of various interested parties have been doing a double-take themselves, desperate to acknowledge or apportion blame and assure us of their outrage and subsequent good intentions. I think we can all be forgiven for taking these with a pinch of salt, however genuine some (or even all) of them may be. When it comes to the press, we have learned to be wary.

The donation of the final edition’s entire circulation revenue to ‘good causes’, for example, has drawn far less sympathy than James Murdoch perhaps would have hoped. Some are saying that it merely proves the Murdoch empire can function perfectly well without the paper’s takings, while the Prime Minister was heard to say that he wouldn’t be surprised if it were replaced with a Sunday edition of The Sun. Of course, there are no available facts at present to confirm this, and it should be noted that in another fit of generosity, the ‘paywall’ on the paper’s website has been taken down, making its content free to the public, subscribers and non-subscribers alike. Having never read The News of the World in any kind of voluntary capacity, I was pleased to see I could now have gratis access to information on Prince Harry’s sex life, Apprentice losers finding love, and all the puns you could fit onto one web page. Apart from a grave-looking James Murdoch staring out from a box on the home page, you wouldn’t know anything bad had happened.

News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks seems to have vastly understated the situation when she said that the company was having ‘a very bad moment’ – News Corp’s market value has dropped by about £1.2 billion since the scandal broke, and the poor guys and girls at BSkyB must be wringing their hands as their share price plummets to a similar tune. Interestingly, the Brooks quote has come from a ‘secret recording’ of the meeting amongst NotW staff, obtained by Sky. Either Sky are really not learning from this, or they figure that their questionable sourcing techniques will be the speck to NotW’s plank. Either way, I wouldn’t be surprised if Ms. Brooks becomes public enemy number one within the newspaper’s community, as the majority of them, unlike her, will inevitably be left without a job come next week.

Back to politics, and while the PM has doggedly stood by his decision to employ Andy Coulson, he has by no means trodden gently when it comes to condemning the breaches of privacy which have occurred and those who have perpetrated them. Nor is he convinced of News International’s good intentions when it comes to the closure of the NotW – he was quoted as saying that it was a purely commercial decision. “It's nothing to do with contrition, it's absolutely self interest,” said Cameron, in a press conference on Friday.

Mr. Cameron also stated that, had he been her boss, he would have accepted Rebekah Brooks’ resignation offer. Reports have been circulating that it was offered, but this has yet to be confirmed – it looks as though the former Sun editor will be staying. However, Cameron does seem to have over-reached himself somewhat in his zeal for justice. In announcing that the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) had ‘failed’ in its role, he also declared that it would be subsequently shut down. As one of the Commissioners rather gleefully pointed out on Radio Four yesterday afternoon, it can’t be. The independent body would only shut if it went into some form of administration, and the Commission replied on its website that it refused to be a ‘convenient scalp’ for the government’s inquiries.

It seems ironic that a paper known for its exposure of scandal has become the centre of one of the largest media furores in years. Some of us may turn up our noses at the ‘red-tops’, preferring headlines that don’t periodically scream ‘Nazi Orgy’ or similar, but there can be no denying that the paper has had a significant influence on a vast section of the British public, and in some cases on noteworthy legal developments. After the murder of the schoolgirl Sarah Payne, The News of the World ran a huge campaign for what has become known as ‘Sarah’s Law’, which allows concerned parents to ask police for background checks on any adult who has unsupervised contact with their children.

Now the crime-fighting ethic upheld by James Murdoch in his statement on Thursday, looks to have turned on the paper. The exposure of wrongdoing doesn’t bring so much kudos, it seems, when it’s in your own backyard. It remains to be seen whether the excavation of that backyard will yield sufficient evidence to bring justice to a very messy and ignoble situation.

Pursuing Domesticity (Part One)

"Spring Cleaning" - the two words that sent a thrill of terror through me every time my Mum spoke them, which was, without fail, every Easter break. Spring cleaning meant absurdly long-handled dusters with parrot-coloured tops, confronting spiders under beds, endless boxes of last year's summer clothes which need cleaning and folding, scrubbing floors, other things which I've blocked out involving an outdoor toilet and caterpillars...It's not cleaning per se that bothers me; I do plenty of it, and I find it hard to sleep if I've left the kitchen a mess. But there's something about adding the word 'spring' to it that creates a sudden need to clean all the things we never usually do, and to an impossible standard. Doors which were perfectly functional suddenly need oiling; fences with minimal wear and tear need a new coat of paint, and before you know it, you're spending half the school holiday in B&Q. I'm pretty certain, looking back, that there must have been some kind of ulterior motive - what was my mum up to while the five of us scrubbed like crazy at bathroom walls and reinvented our wardrobe-packing system? My parents could have thrown a wild party every night without us knowing, we slept so well afterwards.

So I was trying to explain to myself why, ten years later, I was voluntarily on my hands and knees on the bathroom floor, scrubbing at mould. My inner anti-ick was screaming, but the clean-freak had triumphed, partly due to a serious damp problem. Seeing as I don't know how to install an extractor fan, and every shower turns our tiny bathroom into a sauna, I'm clearly going to have to deal with the results until some more able fan-installer comes along. There's no time like the present, to beat an old cliché over the head, so there I was, my whole Thursday given over to the dreaded spring clean.

Mould-scrubbing is not fun, or glamorous, but as we all have to do things which are neither fun nor glamorous every day, we might as well have a bit of fun while we're at it, no? This is why I came up with an ingenious plan: to create a mood-lifting side-activity for each of my cleaning jobs. That way, I could come out with a lovely fresh home and a smile on my face; I wasn't going to be one of those women who swapped one for the other.

The plan got off to a happy start. As I scrubbed the bath, I tried to mentally list all the bath toys I'd had when I was younger. This was quite good, although it did leave me wishing that a grown adult could go out and purchase a Winnie-the-Pooh model house with working slide and bubble-blowing chimney without having a child to give it to. Next, as I went for the floor, I went over all the bits of Mozart's Requiem that I could remember from when I was in a choir three years ago. This was supposed to be a fairly quiet activity, but it's difficult to hit the top notes of 'Rex Tremendae Majestatis' at anything less than 80 decibels. It was a bit late, by the time I realised I had the window wide open, to warn the neighbours.

I decided that if I was going to sing anymore I should at least have someone decent to accompany me, so as I moved to tackle the kitchen, I brought out one of my guilty pleasures: a Roxette Hits CD. The hubby is not a massive fan, but he was out playing golf (I know, I know, I might as well don the fluffy pinny and house shoes and have done with it). Suddenly the washing up and recycling-sorting didn't seem so overwhelming, and if the aforementioned neighour had been putting out her washing, she would probably have been confused/bemused by an unseen voice repeating enthusiastically, 'Hello, you fool, I love you!'.

As I still have the vacuuming and more dusting to do, I'd better go, but if I have any more domestic adventures I'll be sure to share them. Someone out there must be finding it funny (she crosses her fingers)...

Four of Seven - Little Women

So my 200-word book-a-day challenge has been a little harder to stick to than I anticipated. I guess that's often the way with spontaneous resolutions; they seem like a great idea at the time, but we haven't thought through how we're going to keep them. Well, that's how it works for me anyway. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) I can't afford to get too slack on my resolutions, or come summer I'll still be unemployed and embarrassed to wear a swimsuit which, let's face it, wouldn't be fun. So if I seem a bit too persistent with this book week challenge, please forgive me -I'm using it to remind myself to be persistent in my other endeavours.

Speaking of persistence, today's book contains one of my favourite every characters: Jo, whose dream to write a book requires all her staying power for several years. When I first read this book (and the others in the series) Jo was my heroine, because unlike so many other 'artistic' characters I had come across, she had genuine flaws and struggles that I could relate to, and she inspired me to work hard at the things I loved, especially writing. It's amazing how much you can be influenced by a fictional character, and the ones I read about time and time again as a child are the ones who have stayed with me the strongest.

Today, I thought I'd try my hand at some acrostic jibber jabber (fool!) (Sorry about that)...

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Louisa May Alcott's story of the March family
Is set in New England during the Civil War.
Their father is away as a chaplain in the army, and they have very little money, but
The girls, Meg, Beth, Jo, and Amy, are raised by their mother to be charitable and
Live in contentment. They stage home theatricals, look after neighbours, and
Even give their Christmas meal away to a sick family.

When Beth contracts smallpox from a dying baby she is looking after, her
Own life is in danger as she is so weak. The sisters nurse her to health, and
Meg becomes engaged to the neighbour Laurie's tutor, John Brooke. Laurie, in turn,
Eventually realises he is in love with Jo, but she is too busy planning her novel to
Notice. Their father comes home from war, and the stage is set for the next book...

Three of Seven - Reviewing Sabotage

Happy Thursday, everyone. I don't know about you, but I've become something of a fan of Thursdays lately; they're far enough into the week for the weekend to be within view, but not so far that I have to panic about getting everything else done before it arrives. This has come in particularly handy today, as due to technical difficulties (i.e. a laptop in bad need of a complete overhaul) I was unable to write yesterday, and now I'm bound to do two of my 'challenges' in a row! So here's the first; a review of Joshua Furst's novel The Sabotage Cafe, which I read at university.

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'These things are hard to say. I'm not sure what's true and what isn't,' opens The Sabotage Cafe, Joshua Furst's tale of a dysfunctional family relationship born of painful memories and mental illness. Welcome to Dinkytown, Minneapolis, scene of the 1980s punk rebellion from which Julia has escaped, and home still to an underground world of narcotics, anarchy, and tempestuous youth. Into this melee runs Cheryl, Julia's 16-year-old daughter, escaping the confines of suburbia and her mother's oppressive presence.

As we are drawn into Cheryl's world of drugs, sex, and squalor, mixed with hashed-up ideals about the demise of 'the establishment', we also journey into Julia's past, picking up the pieces of a life diverted and damaged. How much of Cheryl's experience is real, and how much is imagined by the fearful and delusional Julia, remains unclear, as Julia's disturbed mind produces illusions which are increasingly difficult to distinguish from reality.

Furst brilliantly portrays through projected emotion and internalised argument the lonely struggle of each character to find or to deny meaning in their situation. The bravado of the boys Cheryl ends up with is nothing more than a front for their insecurities, the outcome of youth burdened by their parents' blunders as well as their own. Furst's blunt and epithetic manner shocks rather than drawing sympathy, but his vivid style vividly creates the hopelessness in which his characters dwell, empty and needy, clawing into each other's lives as if some solace can be found by living vicariously. His compassionate exploration of life in the grimy fallout of a failed revolution and the desire to obliterate the self is a first novel to be proud of, and to provoke.

Two of Seven - a Little Precis

Day Two of my book week challenge, and already I'm reverting to childhood. It's been a strange morning - I woke up to a Jedi looming over me (it turned out to be the hubby in his new dressing gown), holding a teddy bear which I really didn't remember taking to bed. I then ate coco pops while watching a Pokemon episode. I think it's fair to say that my adult sensibilities didn't kick in until midday, when I found myself on the laptop contemplating today's challenge. Given the morning's activities, I thought it was only fitting to go back to an old favourite, and - you can pat me on the back if you wish - this time I kept it to under 200 words! So here is my brief re-working of Chicken Little.

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A newly-hatched member of the poultry family, having been Isaac Newton-ed by a nut of the genus Quercus, becomes convinced of the imminent collapse of the atmospheric barrier that protects earth from outer space. On a madcap dash to inform the head of monarchical feudatory in which he lives, he finds and attached to his party numerous other creatures with heavily contrived rhyming names. These creatures display a distinct lack of curiosity as to the evidence for the youngster's claim, and, rather than conducting any scientific research, rush headlong down the road toward their stated destination, which one presumes is a palatial dwelling of sorts. When the party, consisting entirely of edible fowl, nears its goal, who should come across their path but an omnivorous mammal with a long snout and bushy tail? At this point, discerning readers of Aesop's Fables and other cautionary tales featuring members of the animal kingdom will become aware of the imminent tragedy as the proverbial wolf in sheep's clothing leads the aforementioned fowl to its den. When the feathers have settled, one is supposedly reminded of the necessity for deductive reasoning and investigation. Alternatively, one could simply ignore the claims of talking chickens.

One of Seven: a Loving Parody

Hi y'all! I'm watching an American programme, hence the expression "y'all" - there are some Texans in it. Anyway, a little birdy told me it was National Book Week, and while I have as yet been unable to verify whether it is indeed this week or I've missed it by a couple, I made a rash promise on facebook that I have come here to fulfil. And that rash promise was as follows: I intend to review, parody, or precis, in 200 words or less, seven books over the week.

Now, I may have bitten off more than I can chew. Goodness knows it's hard enough for me to keep anything to 200 words or less, even a birthday card message. But, a promise is a promise, so here we go: my first effort. This is a loving parody of the work of one of my very favourite authors, and I'm cheating slightly by taking it from something I wrote during my time at uni; however, I promise everything else will be original! You might enjoy guessing who it is and what book is specifically referenced (I'll give you a clue: VW), but please don't tell on me if I go over my word limit...

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Do I have an R to reach? Amber ponders the questions, thinks of Mr. Ramsay's life, how 'the father of eight children has no choice,' how his family has disrupted his career, how he needs constant reassurance that what he has given the world already is of some value, how he is determined and yet unable to attain the next letter. She already has G, and L: I have an F, she thinks, if only I can do this essay and the next one and the next one and so on at a good enough standard... and I probably almost have an M, she thinks next (if things must be sequential, but in reality she would rather have the M though it isn't meant to come first) as Stanley in his oversized tuxedo once more comes into her mind and she smiles, smiles and plays with her ring. Oh, and then I suppose C, the big C which all women are supposed to be after these days, and B, what most of us instinctively want even though it disrupts C, and goodness knows what else - must I have it all in mind now? Can't I let G, which after all came first, determine the rest? And right now - right now, she ponders, as the room grows steadily darker though it's only three in the afternon (and the essay due at eleven tomorrow!); right now, she puts her little finger in her mouth, turns her head and reads, 'vanity and self-sacrifice'; 'marriage pressure'; 'unity, absorption; right now, this is what I need. I need E. I need E! On to E, once more. E...

Things I Have Learned From Making Marmalade

There's no help for it - this is destined to be one of those posts full of clichéd and clueless pseudo-moralistic phrases based on trivial observations which I have scraped from the barrel of recent experience. Because, in my quest for housewifely perfection a la the 1940s (I'm in the market for a frilly apron), and to stave off boredom between job-hunting sessions, I've been making marmalade. Well, trying to. Thirty-two jars, four nets of Seville oranges, and way too much sugar later, I have laboured through burnt fingers to bring you these observations. Berate me for unoriginality if you will - just finish reading first?

1. Preparation is boring but necessary

Pity the girl who has no slicer-dicer-peeler-blender appliance - she will have to do it all by hand. Now I know what you're thinking: how hard can it be? Trying to find ways to make slicing, dicing, squeezing, juicing, and de-pulping oranges less tedious was my first challenge, and after a few aborted attempts at amusing myself with Disney songs (it turns out I don't remember enough of the words), I hit upon - radio!

As I see it, radio is the perfect accompaniment to any solitary about-the-house task. Radio doesn't judge me if I can't remember the lyrics and instead babble mindlessly over the music. Nor will it complain that I sing along too loudly. Nor will it judge my orange-slicing skills, or point out that I've "accidentally" binned half the orange peel in a desperate bid to stop the preparation process from dragging on any longer. Radio is my new best friend; so much so that when the Ipsos Mori man appeared at my door, I didn't hesitate to accept his invitation to keep a radio-listening diary for a week. Now I have a confusing mess of marmalade AND a minutely detailed radio flow-chart to deal with. And it still takes me just as long to cut the oranges up.

2. You can't rush something if you want it to work

This is an old staple our grandmothers/grandfathers/teachers came out with on a regular basis, but however many times we hear it, we still believe in short-cuts. Why else would it be possible to buy ready-chopped vegetables at the supermarket? Or spray paint for garden fences? However, in marmalade world, the rule of short-cut does not apply. Otherwise the stuff never sets. Two and a half hours is a long time to have to stay indoors waiting for your marmalade (at this stage just chopped rind and water, with a muslin bag full of pith and pulp in it) to boil down sufficiently. Trying to cut the time, however, I ended up with a first batch that was more syrup than anything else - a thin syrup with appetising bits of orange peel floating in it. It was back to the drawing (or chopping) board for me, then. It seems that when it comes to things like marmalade, grandma knows best.

3. One little simmering pan makes the whole house smell of oranges

Did you ever watch the Australian 80s classic, Strictly Ballroom? Apart from the histrionic mother, stereotyped Spanish family and outrageously garish dance costumes, I loved it for the President Fife character, who was the king of mixed metaphor. Did you know that one bad egg can rot the whole barrel? Exactly... Anyway, I think it's only fair that I inform you: the smell of oranges has almost the same linger-ability as your average fish pie. Long after the muslin bag was squeezed and the jars were sealed, the whole house smelled like an orangery in the heat of a Mediterranean summer. I won't insult your intelligence by pursuing the obvious corollaries of this imagery, so, moving on...

4. Sugar is very sticky

Now you might be thinking that I may as well return to primary school if this fact has come as a surprise to me, and I have to be honest, I'm ashamed of my ignorance. Somehow, despite years of baking and the kind of mucky-pup childhood only four younger siblings can give you, I embarked on the perfect-marmalade quest blissfully unaware that I might as well have given up my home as a molasses factory. It wasn't long before the kitchen was as sticky as an over-indulged three-year-old's face on Easter morning, and my long-suffering husband was staring bemused at his syrup-clad cereal bowl. Half a bottle of Dettol has still not eradicated the plague.

5. Some things need constant supervision

Four words: molten sugar, ravaged saucepan. Wii Fit Plus is all well and good, but for goodness' sake don't leave things on a hob unattended, even if the recipe says you can. It's just not a good idea.

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So, en conclusion, I will not be making any more marmalade any time soon. The sense of achievement is wonderful, and the end product does taste good, but frankly, I'm not sure the clean-up operation is worth it. Besides, I had almost as much fun decorating the labels. And if I have to drag any more moral clichés out of my kitchen experiences, I may give up on cooking altogether. But then again, that last one was my own fault. Some people never learn...

Harlech Castle

In Wales two weekends ago, the misty days broken with sun and the streaming river currents were almost exactly what I had expected, but better. There were fewer sheep droppings, more mountains, and an air inspired by something I couldn't put my finger on - something between recklessness and freedom.

We visited the ancient fortification of Harlech Castle, on the west coast, and it made me write this.

Harlech Castle

On the high wall
Salt wind pulls hair across my face
And jumps down my throat,
Forcing the taste of the sea past my tongue -
I open wide to let it in.

Snowdon tugs at the blanket cloud,
Pushing a hole which tears slowly
Revealing the distant peak, proud, and dark,
A lord standing over the valley he owns.

Gulls are rising from the ramparts,
Cries lost over the winding town
Drowned in the rush of waves on the sand beneath

And I am a speck -
A tiny thing, with arms, a heartbeat,
And muddy shoes, balanced on a rock.

When You're Not Looking #4

By the time this post is published, the working week will be officially over for most of you - welcome to the weekend! Got any plans? I've become a bit hermit-like lately, so it's nice to have been invited out this evening (even if it is for a dinner/planning meeting), and I intend to make yet more cupcakes in honour of the occasion. Seriously, I think I may have a baking addiction, which is rapidly expanding into an any-food-making-activity addiction. There are fourteen jars of marmalade on my kitchen table, half a lemon cake in the tin, and ingredients for several experimental party foods in the fridge - I tried some out on the hubby for a Valentine's feast :) So if anyone ever needs a party planner/chef, give me a call and I'll be there in a flash!

Food aside, tonight's final When You're Not Looking comes courtesy of my terrible history with plants, and the sneaking suspicion that they die just to spite me. I love gardening; as kids, my siblings and I had a patch each of the garden, and I spent hours drawing painstaking plans, buying bamboo arches for the sweetpeas and laying black plastic over the weeds. The strawberry plants ate up space voraciously and sprouted delicious berries, although I never quite mastered the art of keeping them safe from the birds. I dug tiny ditches for the flower bed edging, and bought several bags of woodchips which remained unused, as we ended up moving house before I could complete my landscaping masterpiece.

The one thing I didn't do, however, was talk to my plants. I thought about it once or twice, but as much as the idea appealed to me, it seemed too ridiculous (although even as a 'mature' 22-year-old, I still talk to my teddies). Thus I continue to struggle along, trying to keep my plants alive without any verbal communication. Who knows, maybe that's where I've been going wrong all along! What do you think - have these guys got it right?

When You're Not Looking...

...politicians tell The Truth. But only to their plants. I believe we have Prince Charles to thank for that one.

I personally own two plants - a very sad Christmas tree seedling, which grew when neglected and now won't grow when cared for, and a small cactus named Clint. Clint lives in a similarly small teracotta pot full of blue gravel, with his gold gift-ribbon still tied around him and the name tag my brother put on it for me.

I can understand the urge to confide in plants, especially for politicians. After all, your peonies can't call the local press to refer to your fellow MPs as 'rabid monkeys', can they? And even if you do have a half-hour rant at your desktop spider plant about the inefficiencies of such-and-such a minister's department, it can hardly be expected to be secretly wielding a tape recorder.

In my opinion, it's only trees you have to be wary of. In case they're Ents. Everything else you can prune or tie to a trellis and it won't bother you. An Ent could quite feasibly perform a citizen's arrest - that is, if it's sorted out its immigration papers from Middle Earth and can be considered a citizen.

When You're Not Looking #3

Mystic Force? Trinity Warriors? Nah, I think I'll give it a miss... and I promptly change the channel. One of the joys of having Sky is that I now have so much to choose from, but then again, there's more rubbish to sift through - and even the programmes which seem promising can be off-puttingly badly made (Got To Dance. referenced above, is a pet hate right now). I'm beginning to see why my parents left the TV in the loft for much of my childhood. Entertainingly, we had three visits from the TV licensing people during that time to check that we weren't cheating on our payments, because they couldn't believe that anyone in their right mind wouldn't want television.

Personally, I don't feel like I missed out at all. I spent my summers out in the garden pretending to be a medicine woman in a Red Indian tribe, building teepees and creating disgusting-smelling concoctions involving dandelion petals and warm water. My siblings and I floated down imaginary rivers in a canoe made of old wooden school chairs, and swam in lakes that closely resembled a 6 by 4 paddling pool. In the evenings we read books and made up stories and songs, and the girls took it in turns to use the top bunk of the bunk bed as a stage for absurd performances (which included on one occasion a rendition of the baggy trousers song). Some days after school, the bunk bed doubled as a pirate ship. Moving on to my third 'When You're Not Looking', I can't help thinking that all this imagination play has fed into my adult life - why else would I be thinking of such stupid things on a train ride? You be the judge, of course.

When You're Not Looking...

...your reflection in the window waves at people. Sometimes it gets really cheeky and pulls faces. Of course if you're on a train, then most people are doing their best to studiously ignore their fellow passengers. You may have become used to this, but your reflection is fed up, and will employ whatever means necessary to gain someone's attention. Unfortunately it's not very smart, so it spends much of its time waving and gurning at trees, cows, and the odd squirrel.

It's when you fall asleep that the trouble really begins. Your reflection, noting your semi-recumbent position and dozy appearance, will begin to gesture frantically at the person in the seat opposite, and when, in awe and wonder, that individual recognises who he is being hailed by, your reflection will point at your silently snoring self, and laugh. Reflections also specialise is sticking their tongues out at small children (so if you ever find a small child with their tongue glued to the window, you know why).

Particularly adventurous reflections have been known to perform the ultimate freak-out - swapping places with somebody else's. This is most effective on drunks, as your average sober Brit will merely put the apparent illusion down to an overdue eye test. The moral of the story for the rest of you? DON'T fall asleep on trains. Or, do a Peter Pan and glue your reflection* to yourself with soap.

*Yes, I am aware that with Peter Pan it was his shadow. For insights on shadows, see a later episode...

When You're Not Looking #2

Happy Wednesday! This comes to you from my sofa, and a headachey me who's managed to rally enough to break out the laptop - you'd better appreciate my dedication! Only joking... (but really, flowers would be nice. Having said that, there's a rather lovely bunch of red roses on my coffee table, courtesy of the hubby).

When You're Not Looking episode two was inspired by the ever-changing aspect of the British skies, and several rainy train journeys. I may have stolen an idea or two from a favourite childhood story and its Disney film adaptation; does anyone remember A. A. Milne's Heffalump? I just loved that image of him floating through the air, spurting water everywhere...

When You're Not Looking...

...large grey elephants ride roughshod across the cobalt skies. Or skies which would be cobalt if you were near the equator, but I am referring strictly to English skies, for which description I have never found a particular shade of blue suitable. Anyway, these elephants parade triumphantly across the blue (whatever shade it might be), ears flapping and trunks curled, celebrating the freedom of their ethereal savannah.

When you are looking, the elephants cleverly shroud themselves in a dispersive fog, known to us as "cloud", which most definitely bears their distinctive grey colour. If these disguise mechanisms appear white, you can be certain that the elephant in question bathed that day, and is floating in a heady mix of cloud and talcum powder. Most often, however, the elephant-fog closely resembles its animal counterpart - large, grey, and heavy. Behind these mysterious veils, the elephants take great delight in racing one another, particularly over moors and large hill ranges where there are obvious markers for the track. They also engage in water fights on a frequent basis, having filled up their trunks over rivers, lakes, or the sea. The most popular air space for this activity seems to be Wales, which is unfortunate for the Welsh people who are frequently the victims of the elephants' over-enthusiasm.

In Autumn and Winter when the young elephants are restless, their parents send them off to battle camp, where they learn to fight against other elephant groups. The armoury consists mainly of water, a weapon for which childhood water fights have prepared them, and cannons which fire scatterings of hard ice crystals. Battles are often accompanied by loud and fierce trumpeting, a phenomenon known to the unsuspecting human as "thunder". When the King of the Sky Elephants (an ancient of the Heffalumpia tribe) considers things to be getting out of hand, he unleashes his pet dragon, Lumine Rex - a few flashes of fire seem to calm everyone down rapidly. After the excitement, the young elephants are flown high up into the Lake District nurseries to sleep, and the grown-ups continue their stately parade through the blue.

A Valentine

Hello, young lovers, wherever you are, to borrow a phrase from Frank - but this is for everyone, so being young and/or a lover is not really a requirement. I know I promised a series, and I will hold to it, but in honour of today, I thought a Valentine for you all would be more appropriate. I wrote the following poem and sketch-style prologue back in 2008, when out of sheer curiosity I decided to research the origins of St. Valentine's Day celebrations. While I always thought the sketch would be best performed, I've never had the occasion or opportunity - maybe you'd like to do it? All you need is a lyre, some bandages, and a pub...

A (Late) Valentine (I wrote it on Feb 20th!)

Prologue

A saint, an emperor, a young Roman woman and Geoffrey Chaucer walk into a bar. The saint spots the emperor and immediately goes and cowers in a corner. The emperor spots the saint and turns a deep shade of crimson. Chaucer and the woman regard the situation with interest.

"What are you doing here?" sputters Claudius II (for that man the emperor is).

"I could ask you the same question," replies the saint, his courage returning at seeing the emperor unarmed and rather ancient-looking.

At this point, Chaucer steps in. "Ekskews me if I be inne the wronge," he supplicates, "but maye it nat be that ye two be - dead?"

There is a long pause. The young woman notices that the saint has cuts all over his body, and his garments are smoky and charred. The emperor is no longer crimson but ashen, and his arms and legs are heavily bandaged.

"Why, my man," beams the saint, "you are right!"

He offers his hand to Chaucer.

"Valentine, late of the year 270, martyr to love."

"To love!" interjects the young woman. "How, indeed!" she scoffs, regarding his decrepit body with disdain.

"Not mine," the saint explains, "other people's."

"And I had you executed for it!" exclaims Claudius.

"Valentine..." muses Chaucer. "But, forre sure, I did ryte aboot ye!"

Chaucer strums a lyre he happens to have in his hand (he has taken it from the young woman) and sings:

"For this was on seynt valantynys day
When euery bryd comyth there to chese his mate."

The young woman puts her hands over her ears and adopts a pained expression, for, though Chaucer writes well, he cannot sing.

"Did you say 'Saint' Valentine?" queries the saint, scratching his head.

"But of corse!" exclaims Chaucer. "Why, euery febreury the fourteenth, we do celebrayte yore daye with feestyng and songes of love!"

Claudius sinks into a chair, his hands clasping his head, muttering, "Ye Gods, what have I done? Made a saint of him! Stupid man with his stupid insistence on performing marriages. All I wanted were single men for my army..."

Chaucer puts a sympathetic arm around the emperor and indicates for the young woman to fetch him a pint. She, however, is growing pinker, and refuses to do Chaucer's bidding.

"Why should I fetch a pint for you," she addressed the emperor, "when you never put a stop to our absurd February customs?"

The emperor looks up, confused.

"The festival of Lupercalia...?" she adds.

A dim light of recognition enters Claudius' face.

"Ah, yes! The ancient pagan custom! February 15th, when the dancing maidens were drawn at random by the bachelors. Fabulous custom; every man got a girl for a year, but didn't actually have to marry her. Ah, I only wish I..."

Claudius trails off as he sees the young woman again suffused pink.

"I didn't think it was quite so fabulous," she forces through compressed lips. "I ended up with - "

Chaucer sees this as the perfect time to cut in. He turns to the woman, gallantly declaring, "Lady! Come withe me, and be ye introdysed unto the Frenche coort, wither theye do go whom true loue seeke, and where since ay while ago they do holde the Cour Amoreuse, in which ye laydies judge poesie of loue, and golden crownes do gif unto the bolde man who writeth it beste."

The woman's face lights up. Chaucer gives her his arm, and the two walk out of the bar. Claudius is left with Valentine.

"Oh well," the emperor says, lifting his head. "Couldn't stop it. Probably shouldn't have tried. No one can really, it seems."

He offers his hand to Valentine.

"No hard feelings then?"

The saint hesitates, and then grasps Claudius' hand firmly.

"No hard feelings," he replies. "After all, what's a little martyrdom in the face of the enduring power of love?"

He breaks off, starry-eyed. Claudius groans.

"If you're going to carry on like that, at least fetch me a pint first."

"Sorry, emperor, I can't. I've got a meeting with Hallmark, and then a personal appearance to make - I'm chocolate-signing at Thornton's."

Valentine exits the bar, leaving Claudius II to get his own beer.

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Martyrs though we may forget
(Of death we've not bethought us yet)
And Emperors in robes of gold
Remain to us mere tales of old,
And France's court of lovers gay
Are flick'ring remnants in a day
Of chocolates fine and roses tall,
Mass manufactured Cards of Hall -
Forget not, love; love won't forget,
Amid the tales of Capulet,
Fair dancing maidens picked by boys
And teddies holding gimmick toys:
There's faith enough in Valentine
For me to smile and name you mine.

When You're Not Looking

Greetings, all! The second week of February is upon us, and every day I get more excited about the progress made by the tiny crocus plant sitting on my kitchen table. Stan doesn't really understand why I find it necessary to come bouncing in, clutching the purple tissue-papered pot in my hand, exclaiming 'Look! Look!' as he battles the forces of evil in the DC Universe... but he good-naturedly obliges, and peers at the growing yellow bulb. Okay, so it's not exactly a unique miracle; there are hundreds of the things up and down our road, hiding in the unmown grass of people's front lawns and sneaking up on kerbside patches of grass. But for some reason I can't explain, every Spring takes me delightfully by surprise, which is why when I went for a walk with my friend Anne last week, we ended up kicking leaves and giggling like a pair of schoolgirls because we found snowdrops in Jephson Gardens.

All this Spring, well, springing, got me thinking about the unexpected expected - the things we know will happen but which we fail to anticipate, and the things which we hope for or imagine which sometimes, just sometimes, fall into our laps. It's such a strange part of the human experience, that shock of recognition when the unexpected expected comes and hits us in the face and we don't know what to do with it. Usually I have a little crazy dance all by myself (this generally worked well when I was at university and had a room of my own, but on one occasion I was caught mid-leap by the friend who lived across the corridor, and it was a bit difficult to explain...). Lately I don't have so much space for dancing - it endangers the surrounding cables, bookcase, and marmalade jars - so if I have to bounce I do so in a strictly vertical direction, and add some singing if necessary. I know it's weird, but there has to be an outlet, and I'm not much for running... though I'm trying my hand (or legs) at it again. But I digress.

About this time two years ago I was spending a lot of my time on trains, visiting Stan (who had only attained boyfriend status at the time) and my family, so I observed a lot of the Spring landscape from the inside of a rapidly-moving metal tube. The swiftly-passing fields of sheep and marshy floodlands seemed like a metaphor for the stage of life I was in - nothing was static, and as each week opened new buds and blooms I was running to keep up to the standard set for me. I felt like if I closed my eyes for even a moment I would miss something crucial and get knocked over by it the next second, but it never happened. Instead, the forced movement opened parts of my mind I'd barely had time to explore, and on those long train journeys I created whole worlds to play with - worlds in which anything could take me by surprise, and the delightfully frivolous unknown was hiding just under the surface. Which is why, sat by my crocus and among the many cupcakes I baked this afternoon, I want to tell you a short story, and one story every day next week. I call them the When You're Not Looking series, and each one was written on a train in the spring on 2009. Hope you enjoy.

When You're Not Looking...

...PIGS do a mud-dance - their own equivalent of some tribal rain dances. The little ones spring in the air, enthusiastically shaking their floppy ears and wrinkling their speckled snouts, spattering mud about them with carefree abandonment. The older pigs march around them solemnly, proud porky heads held high, but occasionally dipping to fling clods with their noses. They plod in firm and stately manner, kicking every four steps with the right front trotter, creating a work of modern art in the pig-in-front's behind. When all are suitably bespattered, the great pigs take to rolling from side to side, while the little pigs continue their springing, leaping, frenzied dance, uttering high-pitched oinks to the grumbling undertones of the great pigs' grunts and snorts.

Eventually, when there is no inch of pink pig to be seen amidst all the mud, the now-disguised glooping creatures group in V formation, and begin their skulking approach to the farmhouse. Intent on silent ambush, they move as one squelching brown body, low to the ground, great pigs flanking little pigs who run with a mixture of youthful bravado and sheer terror in and out of their legs. Just as it appears there is no hope for the besieged farmhouse, one small pig, overcome, gives a loud squeal - the farmer appears, and in a confused and dripping rabble the would-be commando pigs tumble instead toward the feed trough.

Amber Barker Versus The World

January 11th, 2011. It's 11.41am, my husband is still sleeping, and having looked back through the last two years' worth of writing I am trying to grasp some degree of inspiration on a grey morning. Suddenly my life is smaller, contained within the walls of our flat and the roads of the town, a bare three miles from end to end, and lacking any adventure to pursue.

It's a strange thing, independence. In three years of university I was never truly 'free' - I had essay deadlines and library fines and places to be and people to be friends with, and the pace of life was intense to the point of blurring days into one another. But, to draw reluctantly on a cliché, I'd also never felt so alive. The city was my playground, the college my canvas, every breath and sight and sound a splash of ink to my pen, as if amidst the work and insanity my mind was over-producing and all these colourful ideas were bursting out. Since leaving university I have not written a single poem, or story, or even a letter. Independence meant a job, which I have since lost and as yet have been unable to replace, and bills, and monotony, and struggling to fit into a new home where I know so few people.

You may think I sound ungrateful, and that I would have been naive to expect anything spectacular (you'd be right, and I didn't) - I always knew it would be hard, and what is life without its hard times? We need them to put our blessings into perspective. I suppose I did make some assumptions which have not served me well - that a job for which one is not trained is easy to keep; that an Oxford degree (or any degree) guarantees employment; that marriage itself would provide enough of an adventure. I love Stan, and finally being his wife is wonderful, but as I'm sure anyone who's married will tell me, it's hard to be a good partner when you lack goals and personal fulfilment. Every step of my life has been spent in pursuit of something, and now my goal seems so far beyond my reach that I have no clue what to focus my energies on.

However, there is always hope. Our value does not come from what we do, after all - or from what we earn, our social status, our friendships, our charity donations. When I remember that I have value beyond all these things, I am re-energised; I have the courage to explore my heart and all that I long for, not materially but as a joyful fulfilment of the abilities and passions that have been placed there. A job is a job - we can't all be paid for the thing we love. But we can see the return of investing time and energy in it, of bringing it to others as a gift, of revelling in the fullness of who we were made to be. I refuse to be disheartened. With a little help, I will yet emerge victorious. After all, it's a new year - when better to take on the world?