Chinese New Year, and I had planned to go to Chinatown. I like the clink of bells, dragon dancing, and all that stuff with the cabbages on Gerrard Street. Dr Blog is a dog – well, in Chinese astrological terms of course – and this means he is faithful and that his bark is worse than his bite or something like that. Missed the celebrations this year, it was too too cold, and I was busy with poems. I liked these three terriers though: mother, daughter and granny. Note how they are all looking rather disdainfully in the other direction: never work with…etc etc.

This is a poem I wrote as part of the Spread the Word Residency and it seemed fitting to post it today.

War’s Imperial Museum

Inside the old asylum, underground,
Auschwitz is shrunk to an icy cake,
pristine and architectural.
I have seen this blueprint before:
the who, how, what, where of
stuffing everybody in.
This is what scares me.
Not the emaciated corpses tipped
into mass graves like landfill.
Nor the reality of shoes.
Or the fact that Roman Halter,
who buried hope with his father,
still goes to synagogue but cannot pray.

Mercy is a muzzled dog as I meander
from Genocide – 1st Floor to Genocide –
Lower Ground, before arriving at
Crimes Against Humanity: Level 4.
Pol Pot, Kurdistan, Rwanda: touch screen
technology enables the death counts
to scroll like football scores.
Now it is the 21st Century, I wonder
if soon we will be required to dismiss
that which has happened the century before.
Who remembers Armenia now?

The name has changed but it is still Bedlam.
Departure is harder than I think,
it takes time to exit this predatory basement.
Out past jaunty fighter planes that dangle
in the atrium. Out past the thrusting
guns, two of them, long as a street.
Out into the air, grateful for frost
and buses, which glow like lamps,
luminous in the dark afternoon.

copyright Karen McCarthy 2005

I don’t do plugs but a brand new independent bookshop in the heart of London deserves one!

Crockatt & Powell are on Lower Marsh (119-120) and they’ve got a good sized shop with an interesting selection of titles. They are starting to build their poetry collection, kicking off with the TS Eliot prize shortlist, and a couple of others. We had a long and friendly chat, I recommended Bittersweet, told them about Blag Lady – they’ve got a blog too – www.crockattpowell.com, and the vast and mainly mysterious world of Blogville. I’ve not investigated these environs as yet – I wanted to write blind – but will do. They are up for running poetry and literary events, and are keen to hear from poets. They also have a Book Club.

No discounts yet…but everything in time. I am building up to getting them to work a deal with the Society of Authors.

I picked up a copy of Colette Bryce’s The Full Indian Rope Trick – because I like the title and it’s everywhere you look. Gotta finish John Burnside’s Living Nowhere first, it arrived in a brown jiffy bag by post, a Christmas gift. I am going to confess here that I’ve never bought a book from Amazon – not entirely out of principle – but because I simply don’t buy books like that. I need the browse, the tactile experience, sticking my nose between the covers. Actually I tell a lie, I’ve just remembered, I did buy one – for research purposes once, it sits, unopened next to my desk.

Half way down the road, my new poetry collection swinging in the bag in my hands I stopped. The odd couple who own the second hand bookshop over the road looked appalled as they walked by ‘How rude!’ I heard her declare. I didn’t bump into them, but they are very very strange, so I wondered what I’d done, and realised it was just the fact I was another breathing being – they are always affronted. I tried to give them some books once and was turned away rather haughitly. Got a first edition Hofnung there though, and some rather nice RHS encyclopedias, so, I visit on a needs must basis. Anyway, then I realised I had left my new bookselling friends without a penny having changed hands. Whoops! I hurried back and Mr Crockatt (I think) and I exchanged glances as he served another customer.

‘We were worried for a minute,’ he said, ‘after you left we read the name of your blog. We thought we’d been blagged.’

Of course, the blag would never be like that. A true lady blag would involve them giving me the book, willingly! And I’m working on that.

So – there you go – plug over – check out the boys down the market!

Yes, it’s like that, life and death. You’re here, you’re gone, and you’re back in five minutes or eternity, or never, depending on your views on reincarnation, life’s grand cycles, relativity and context. Yesterday lunchtime I was up on Tottenham Court Road, outside one of the electronics shops, when a huge Red Admiral butterfly fluttered by. A man on the street stared and we all reached out ghost arms to try and catch him. We were all gawking at this butterfly, and the grey dirt and concrete and cars and thinking, what the hell is it doing here, now, on the 19th of January? A life so short, and he had to spend it on Tottenham Court Road, hopelessy looking for a flower. Or another butterfly, his love, his reason. In January. Global warming, armageddon or just a silly billy butterfly?

Then, this afternoon, I was sitting in the office, when Imogen Aikido burst in with the news that a whale was swimming down the river Thames. I got my coat on – we’re not so far from the river – and then discovered he was already at Chelsea Bridge. So Sky News had to suffice. It was true. And another at Southend. Global warming, armageddon, or just a silly couple of whales whose sonar had gone haywire? Relatively speaking, even if we do all drown, our cities submerged like fairy castles in a goldfish bowl, in the grand scheme of things, time, the universe and infinity being what it is, we could all be back in five minutes.

Once upon a time, long long ago, when Blag Lady was a little girl, she used to dance around the living room shaking it for England to all sorts of funky albums from the Isley Brothers’ Summer Breeze to the more obscure elements of mum’s record collection which included a 10-inch Tom Lehrer record. Amongst the many gems, which included the fantastically wicked tale of mass murder Rickety Tickety Tin (‘Of a maid I’ll sing a song, sing rickety tickety tin, who did not keep her family long…’), was also the equally amoral ditty that told of a silly woman ‘whose baby fell down the plug hole..your baby has gawn down the plug, the poor little thing was so skinny and thin, it should ‘ave been barthed in a jug, IN A JUG!’. Oh how I loved it. Somehow, it made me feel quite the lady. I have long maintained that the greatest proponents of the monarchy are the working class and aristocracy – leave Republicanism to the middle classes and the Greeks. So, imagine Blag Lady’s delight, at having to pop to the loo (of course if one was truly posh – and what a modernist term that is – one’d say ‘lav’) and discovering that it was in fact a royal water closet. Hornchurch DSA Test Centre is not quite Buck Pal, but it is good to see that the palace still employs its venerable company of soapmakers. (Smoking a Benson’s is just not the same since they removed the Royal Appointment crest.) Here at least tradition prevails. Tax payers’ money literally gurgling down the plughole.

What if I just wrote down everything I don’t normally write down? Last night I dreamt…actually this morning I dreamt I was on holiday in birthday. Dickbert and Keith were there too. I meant to say Barbados, but birthday is a rather nice Freudian slip, if Freudian it be. So onto unedited BlagLady. What happened next? I remember lots of fannying around wondering about how to get from A to B or something like that, when this guy I haven’t even thought about for more than a decade, who used to be a trainee pilot for Bee-Wee (British West Indian Airways) turns up on this weird version of a mini-helicopter with all these guys and starts buzzing round the hotel. I’m up on my balcony (waving of course) and they are all flitting about like gnats, a swarm of them, wearing purple shell-suits and Oakley shades on these aero-scooters. I also inspected many Caribbean gardens, which were in the main long, rectangular and incorporated vegetable patches. So that woke me up. Late. Dr Blog had disappeared early for yoga, and had fed the the rather large ginger creature, so I lay in bed dreaming until I could dream no more. Don’t you find the dreams you dream in the morning are often stranger than the ones you dreamt in the middle of the night and can’t remember?

Strange when a surreal reminder of the past arrives unbidden like that. I had been feeling nostalgic, having gone ice-skating on Hampstead Heath for my nephew’s birthday, which is another whole nostalgia unto itself, too convoluted for even me to digress to right now. Ice-skating was my thing when I was eight. I had certificates, and badges sewn on to the arm of my proper little ice-skating dress. I could waltz, fox-trot and do a three-turn (still working on the three-point-turn). I can hear the strains of that Hammond organ belting out ‘Wonderful, marvelous Copenhaagen…and the instructor’s voice instructing: ‘lef-t, righ-t, lef-t, three turn, righ-t, lef-t, righ-t’ to the tune as a scraggle of nine year olds wobbled round Richmond Ice Rink. Last night was no Torvill and Dean extravaganza however: the boys bombed around in their hire skates, lobbing sharp missiles fashioned from shaved ice through the air. For The Birthday Boy every step was a miracle of survival.

That is the question. Have been grappling with an edit to a poem this morning and leaning towards the simile rather than the metaphor. I rather like similes – they are resonant of smiles – in that lost vowels as opposed to lost consonants kind of way. Of course smiles as a plural noun rather than a verb are/is somewhat verboten in poems! In my seminar group with Selima Hill we spend much time considering ways in which to slip forbidden or advanced words into poems. Abstracts such as time, love, mercy and hope. Initial caps so much the better. Or concrete nouns like dolphin and rainbow. ‘Our love is like a thousand dolphin smiles – Time’s rainbow cascading through my heart.’ That is bad, but not bad enough. I am also collecting mixed metaphors. Was that one? Cascade does imply water, so perhaps the metaphor is linked. Or is it just a humble simile? ‘Our rainbow is a thousand dolphin smiles cascading through my heart.’ Love is now rainbow, the simile has been swallowed whole by the metaphor, and spat out through the blow-hole of the poem/whale. This is what bouncing does for you it appears (see Jogger Trampette).

Nu-Look Blag Lady

A new game! I describe my activities since 2 Jan and you guess my New Year resolutions. Take yesterday: I woke early feeling full of life and exuberance. After a quick cup of fennel tea I arrived at destination only 10 minutes late. A productive and jovial day with colleagues was interrupted only by lunch: celeriac soup and smoked mackerel, followed by a brief and expedient trip to John Lewis to purchase two plate stands. By 6.30 I was in the queue at Argos, waiting for order 303, a stylish ‘jogger trampette’, an absolute steal at only £17.99. ‘Are you the one who ordered the TRAMPOLINE?’ the assistant bellowed, as I knew he would. I then hopped on to the tube at Tottenham Court Road, brandishing a huge, well 92 x 92 cm square, cardboard sign that may as well have read ‘MY NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION IS TO LOSE WEIGHT ON MY TRAMPOLINE WHICH I WILL ONLY USE 4 TIMES OVER A 2 YEAR PERIOD.’ Oh, for foresight.

In fact, I got a taste for trampolining one New Year a couple of years ago, in a large garden in Herefordshire. Madame Panda and the Abstract Crew bounced and bounced on their heads on their bums on their knees and there was something in the mindless brain jogging that brought peace to my tortured soul. Up down up down up down, you get the picture. Anyway, that January I found an abandoned trampoline on Acre Lane – well, half a trampoline. It was still a wonderful circular disc 92 x 92 cm square, but alas, was without legs. My plan to visit a sports shop and purchase said legs, or alternatively dig a pit on the lawn over which to suspend it, of course never materialised: it mouldered in the back garden for nigh on two years. So, you see, progress! Always always progress. Boing.

Progress

Are there four beeps? Having nearly overdosed on Radio 4 yesterday my life of self-imposed deprivation continues unabated. January detox time! I keep looking at that ad that says ‘just try giving up one thing at once.’ Somebody clever and good at quote once said ‘you spend half your life acquiring bad habits and the other half giving them up’. And my list is long. Which takes me to yet another resolution: leaving the house in enough time so as not to be late. The hour approaches. This may be a staggered entry …have been reading Polly Clark’s Take Me With You, which is up for the TS Eliot Prize. I like it, she has great opening lines like ‘my attempts to boil him out of you failed…’, and she writes unapologetically about her own feelings.The beeps…BBC Radio 4, the news at 9 o’clock…