Once there was a happy little blog that was often enough updated. Not daily, it’s true, but twice or thrice a week…then one day there was no tip-tapping on the keyboard, no jiggle of the USB port. Poor blaglady. Bereft. Left. Alone. What would she do? Gambling in Vegas. Prostrate moments at the feet of Sai Baba? (I always hesitate between prostrate and prostate, don’t you?) In any case, it’s been more a case of lost and found. Lost battery to the phone. Had to get new phone. Had to master new phone. Which is also a radio. It has small white headphones which hurt because one’s ears are so delicate and tiny and small. Wrote car off. Have had to spend all the beloved blogging time on Autotrader and flicking through Loot. Last night I dreamed I found a brand new car for £599. But I didn’t like the steering wheel. Lost the will to live because worried my poems are no good. Found the will to live, because, well because, I’ve nothing better to do. Helped friend find a lost plot. Thought about pomegranates, a lot. And am considering what the effects of colour deprivation really are. I need bombastic fuschia, and parrot blue, and brilliant rare koi orange, and octopus pink, green like exploding limes not park benches all irridescent sequin scatter flying fish scales and yellow mango flesh everywhere …So, this is not a story, it doesn’t really have a beginning, middle and end, and that is a structural must can do. Toodlepip. Fear not sweet blog. Cos I will always love you-ou-ou…

Zed Bed wrote off the trusty Renault Clio yesterday as we journeyed back from Bognor after a double see-grandparents-get-driving-practice mission. We had taken them for a traditional pub lunch at their local The Lamb. Grandad had tiramisu, even though it’s bad for his blood sugar and he’s got diabetes and needs to lose weight so his belly doesn’t pressurize his diaphragm and restrict his (very healthy) heart and lungs. Nanny is frail now: her right arm was bruised a deep shade of purple because she tore a muscle in a bizarre sneezing accident standing at the sink in her kitchen. Over lunch she got a terrible cramp in her legs and had to walk outside until it subsided. We all looked at pictures of the red hexagons she sees dancing across our faces – a result of the degenerative ocular condition characterised by her ‘winky eye’, that is now immobilized by botox injections, which incidentally are apparently an excellent treatment for the migraines she suffers from. The ailments are beginning to stack up now they’re in their eighties, a bit like the house of cards Grandad used to build when I was little that reminded me of the pagoda at Kew. His hands were so steady he could erect the whole pack and I liked nothing better than to blow the whole lot down just for the hell of it. Nobody had a grandad that could do that. The whole pack. But I don’t want to blow the tower down now, I want to stick each layer together secretly with SuperGlue, secure the whole thing to the table top so it doesn’t even tremble in a gale force wind.

We leave before dusk and swap drivers as we approach Horsham. The steering locks as Zed Bed tries to turn off into a layby, we crash in to the kerb, thankfully stoppping a few yards short of the riverbank. The car’s a write off, the free recovery with Greenflag only covers the first 10 miles, and there’s no cabs available for the next two hours. It gets dark, rains, we wave a hopeful au revoir to my Clio Campus even though my gut says it’s adieu, hitch a lift to Dorking station and catch the train home to Balham.

Turnmills have got a micro-econmy going on down Farringdon way. I’ve never seen more security personnel gathered in such cosy proximity: they even have different colour clothing to denote function and hierarchy. Still, red jacket, yellow waistcoat, orange tank-top, no matter: one thing they all share is an abject fear that ‘the management’ might spot them easing up on the punters over the CCTV. There were so many folk in saucy little red jackets on my way in I thought it was a human red carpet laid on specially for me that would roll out like I was in a Madonna video as I made my way to the dancefloor. Wavey Davey, whose birthday we were out to celebrate, thought he’d died and gone to Butlins.

As it turned out, they were all very friendly and helpful.

Even the Italian stallions were most unassuming.

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Freeky Karl passed muster as the obligatory mad Swede.

Dirt Crew did things on the decks.
I danced myself dizzy.

And so, despite the fact I thought Turnmills was gonna be utter-shite-hell-on-earth-club-agony and so so so boring,
I’m happy to report that I was ‘Twas a top night.

I started this blog back in July last year and we had the London tube bombings. It was weird, watching London morph into this strange, unknown creature, where everyone was twitchy, jumpy, nervous, and suddenly the lines were blurred, redrawn and evaporated all at once. After the second round of bombs, it all depended on whether people thought you ‘looked like’ a suicide bomber. So white City bloke twiddling knobs on some weird looking short wave radio that could have been a detonator on top of the 159 was reckoned (presumably quite rightly – the bus did not blow up) to be tuning in to the cricket and ignored in the usual steadfast fashion. Whereas certain Hackney carriage drivers refused to pick up any ’suspicious’ looking bomber types such as myself as I walked home from Kennington to Brixton because Jean Charles Menendez had been gunned down at Stockwell tube. Two days ago travelling south on the Victoria line the train driver announced that the train would not be stopping at Stockwell due to ’station overcrowding’. As we trundled past an empty platform, hoping for the best not the worst, the ghost of that surreal and ugly day flitted through my mind, and somewhere too, the ghost of Jean Charles, as everybody in the carriage tried not to think about him and the possibility of the same thing happening all over again. God rest his soul.

See http://www.justice4jean.com/ .

Blag Lady is feeling serious today.

A debate on the radio about whether we have the right to blasphemy as a tenet of free speech prompted me to consider a poem I’ve been working on about pomegranates. It was Christmas, they were in season, and I brought one home in my hands. Inexplicably it felt precious, even sacred, for no particular reason I was conscious of knowing. I sliced it, photographed it, posted it here, enjoyed eating it and seeing the star revealed. Later I learnt that slicing them simply isn’t done, not only do you split the seeds, but you slice through aeons of symbolism, and stories. Pomegranates gave the grenade its name, and Grenada, its 613 seeds are the Torah’s holy commandments to the Jews, Mohammed said that eating them cleansed the body and the soul, Persephone was pipped by Hades, she ate six and so came the seasons, they are the womb, they are Carthage, and they are an anti-oxidant fruit.

When I was innocent of all this meaning, I was happy with my heathen ways, although, it wasn’t really the most practical or satisfying way to eat them. Though they do look gorgeous when dissected. But as I crafted the poem, I realised that it was hard to know all this and still slice. This made me think about intent – and the difference it makes. I ate a pomegranate last night and I peeled it. I have not sliced since. But I hope I will again. The point is though, that I can, even though it represents the book and the blood of the people, I can slice and I can write and I can publish pictures of sliced pomegranates. The intent of a joke is a fine line, and a good joke often crosses it, but the intent needs to be right from the outset. I suppose that is the balance of the law: intent. Manslaughter, I did not mean to kill them. Murder, yes you did. We must all answer to the truth of our own intent.