Okay, time for a little confession…I have in fact been two-timing Blag Lady. What!? Another blog? Well, I decided to start a blog all about my poetic practice, because blogging takes time: there are photos to take, USB cables to find and break and fix, laptops to not lose, Macs to adapt to, passwords to forget/mislay (one of my favourites), widgets to go wow about for five minutes etc etc ad nauseum, and I needed to at least try and be efficient with the old tick tock tick tock that don’t stop but just gets faster and faster as you get slower and can barely keep up. You know what I mean?

So, if you wanna read about me and my notebooks you can take a look here, but it’s all ‘oh how I wish I knew what to do with that comma, full stop etc etc…’ Don’t expect the wit and wisdom you occasionally find on La Blag. Although it does LOOK very nice, and here I confess to being a format floosy. And it is VERY VERY easy to update. Thing is you can’t leave comments. Then again, not many of you do anyway, so perhaps it won’t matter. But you can become a follower! Which is oh so new web 2. It’s currently called ROUGH STUFF, but that, along with everything else, may change.

I’ve also been ‘agressively friending’ 1300 dogs on Facebook. This has been a day job - yup I’ve been paid by the Institute of Contemporary Arts to blog and Twitter as a French dog for the past couple of months! Now that sounds like a blag if ever there was one, but in fact it’s been a lot of hard work as well as plenty of puppy play. So eef I now and zen break into un petit Franglais with ze odd woof woeuf thrown in, now you know pasque zis ees ‘appenin, non? I have learnt a lot about how to syndicate online content to a variety of platforms via FriendFeed and discovered that while Twitter is full of ‘I invented the internet in my lunch break’ techies who take themselves just a LITTLE BIT TOO SERIOUSLY, Orkut is a social networking platform populated by gay dogs from Sao Paolo. Well, no the dogs aren’t gay, but some of the top pockets they reside in look decidely pink…

I have also been trying to finish my poetry collection Incident 263. This is ongoing and going on. Bad Cop Mentor once referred to me as some sort of tenacious terrier/dog with a bone, and it’s true. It won’t be over until I’m signing copies of my magnum opus at the Royal Festival Hall.

Sometimes all this format whoring leaves me boggle eyed: I still have to watch The Wire, keep up with Family Guy, view, believe and then forward at least one totally preposterous/very plausible conspiracy theory video from my Funwall, make my Scrabulous moves, take pictures of random strangers with cool text on their clothing or accessories, keep three status updates on the go and attend actual events in the real world from time to time. Then there has been the pen for hire activities which have involved trying to persuade clients that good, short, Anglo-Saxon words beat multi-syllabic Latinate constructions any day of the week and then changing everything from the former to the latter…(RULE 795c: the paying customer always knows best). Plus the presentations, proposals and something else beginning with P…

The thing is, it can become easy to say very little in a lot of formats. Or should I say it can become tricky and extremely time consuming to say very little in a lot of formats. What I say on Blag Lady these days has become a case in point. The odd photo? Yes please said Fan Number 1. (Why oh why won’t this one picture I’m trying to upload go on to the screen like it normally does, could the developers really have broken Wordpress in 3 short months? See, you so DON’T want to know about all the little technical issues that make one post take for-fucking ever!! Just give me the picture…I’m trying and it’s getting on my wick something chronic.) The odd, amusing little FUNNY once in a while? Can it really be THAT much of a chore, chided Fan Number 2. Even a click through will do.

Well, the thing is, I was writing the rather earnest and annoying process blog the other day, and it started to sound a little bit like Blag Lady. What happened to the rough and ready, uncensored, here’s where you get to see my heart and soul stripped bare for all its contemporary mundanity and literary philosphical angst? Could it be that the arch and how so frivolous? Blag Lady as spurned by her own creator really is me? Ah, well, I spose you can take the Lady out of the Blag but you can’t take the Blag out of the Lady. Or something to that effect.

Expect more T-shirts, more text from where I don’t know next, some whingeing and whining but no woofing, a little blagging and of course some lagging behind on the old updates. Blag Lady is nothing if not irregular.

In fact I tell a lie it was not a festival but a ‘weekender’ which is an appendix to the festival genre, where sophisticated types who are not posh enough for wigwams but too cool for tents stay in ‘chalets’ at places like Pontins Hemsby. Our accommodation, as shared with the Queen of Hearts and Lady Bling, was more in the line of ‘bunker’ as we booked too late to be allocated ‘club’ or even ‘family’ options. The boys and Cool Geek Bianca lived in ‘Pirouette Park’, with a sissy pink sign. We were down in ‘Treetops’ or Chatsworth as we liked to call it. It really is like going to stay on a council estate for your holidays. You even get an electric meter. No word of a lie.

Hemsby is the kind of place that makes Bognor look posh. We bought Bim a bumper sticker from a novelty shop that said ‘fuck you you fucking fuck’ and another one that made reference to a pump action custard rifle. He seemed rather pleased with them but ‘forgot’ them in the quaint country pub that we eventually found at the end of the rainbow. Hopefully as a ‘tip’ for the ‘well oi durno wot Adnams tastes loik do oi, oi only drinks varddka’ old bag landlady. Still the line spun sea bass was fresh as the Fresh Prince and they sold boiled sweets in the Post Office.

Anyway, back to the entertainments at the amusement park.

Ah, the exuberance of youth! Flat Eric comesout of retirement.

But the cafe floor. Was it Ceasar’s or Cleopatra’s? I forget. All I know is I’ve never seen anything like it and if I wasn’t feeling indulgent I would have posted just this one pic. Yes, this really is CARPET woven to resemble reconstituted stone flagging. Yes, it does smell of fags and vomit close up. OR even at a distance. Icing on the cake. Eat your heart out Butlins.

Also, I wonder if Scarlett J is one of the botox babes Johann Hari writes about? She seems a little young but what else accounts for that implausible stillness of being the pervades her vacant visage? Apparently Hollywood acting standards have plummeted because none of the actresses can move their faces. Really, it’s a genuine issue in Tinseltown.

Anyway, I can’t be arsed to review it, it’s that bad, but this sums it up nicely.

Readers of the blag will know why this little number caught my eye! Yes, it’s a routemaster which is an icon in its own right and a personal emblem of my life as a little Londoner climbing onto the yellow-lit bus with my mummy when all and everything was right with the world. It’s also a 28 which was the bus that shuttled me to a new universe when I went to sixth form college and discovered West London. The girls I met there had clothing allowances and went shopping on the King’s Road as an activity - like volleyball or reading. It was all terribly glamorous to my eye, which although sharp enough after years of training at St John’s Wood jumble sales back in the day when old ladies really did throw out Hardy Amies dresses, had never seen so many shiny and unaffordable things.

Anyway, back to Sunday afternoon in South London. Yemisi had come by to interview me for a podcast he’s making for the National Association of Literature Development. We spent the day geeking about blogs and blogging until our minds bloggled and it was time to catch the Victoria Line up to Tottenham to see Aoife Mannix’s excellent and gleamingly polished one-woman show Growing Up An Alien at the Bernie Arts Grant Centre (I just couldn’t seem to say it any other way and it would be rather wonderful wouldn’t it?) in which she shakes up the story of her life in a snow dome.

Yem went off to have roast chicken and rice and peas round at his sisters and after the performance I congregated with Malika Buddy and friends in the bar and spent a good twenty minutes ordering curry goat from a bemused and remarkably patient French waiter. On the way to the tube we stopped by the grocers to buy pumpkin for Miss Fast-Lane who was suffering period pain. She planned to cook it up with sauted onions and brussells sprouts, a strategy that everybody concurred was radical.

One of the things Yem said he likes about Blag Lady is the way the stories often come full circle. I like that too, so there was a wonderful sense of serendipity when sitting on the Victoria line heading south I looked up at the girl opposite me and noticed she was carrying a rather divine bag. I didn’t get a pic - tut tut - but it was oversized, a blue-grey woven leather the colour of the sea in Suffolk on a showery April afternoon, with perfect chestnut brown handles. When I asked the girl where she’d got it her eyes lit up: ‘oh this old thing…I picked it up in a charity shop.’ I should explain here for the uninitiated that there is NOTHING more satisfying to a seasoned shopper than having a stranger on the street/tube/bus enquire about the provenance of one of your best bargain buys that is also a charity shop one-off…it’s basically hitting the jackpot.

That made me feel good, in a blag-bag-lady camaraderie kind of way, a sort of My Name is Earl karma-credit in reverse. Nice.

I just read William Boyd’s Any Human Heart: an excellent fake memoir cunningly disguised as an excellent novel. Which begs the question, why bother to fake a memoir when you could write a perfectly good novel? Or even just straight non-fiction? There’s a back against the wall interview with her yakking on about providing a voice for the disenfranchised and raising the issue in the public eye. The word ‘bollocks’ springs, energetically, to mind.

Truth versus fiction comes up a lot in poetry: where the boundaries are intrinsically blurred. Bad cop [tor]mentor would always say ‘yeah, so what if it’s true? It’s the truth of the poem that counts, not whether that incident “actually happened”.’ Yes. I couldn’t agree more. Fact is often stranger than fiction, and if it doesn’t ring true then lie. On the page. But it is the betrayal of personal trust - between author and reader, author and editor, author and subject - that smarts. It hurts when people lie to us and you can tell that her editor, who worked closely with her for three years, really feels the sting.

Yet, there is something in us that likes the ‘based on a shocking true story’ factor. It is the inner desire for narrative ‘truth’ that created the urban myth: ‘it REALLY happened - no word of a lie, mate’. And perhaps the voracious public appetite for grizzled, car crash memoir a la Pelzer et al and its fairground mirror image that is the Britney/Amy/Pete media frenzy. That and the vicarious thrill of seeing someone else fuck up/get fucked.

Whatever, the fact is this stuff sells: far far more than your average non-fiction social tract where a first timer would probably count themselves lucky to see a $5000 advance rather than the infintely more palatable ‘under $100,000′ figure that the article quotes. Her bankability as a ‘marketable’ author rockets through the roof if the tales of guns and gang banging are true, far more ‘meeja fodder’ n’est pas?’ And let’s face it, would she have been able to convince an agent and editor that a middle class white girl from a ‘nice’ school on the right side of tracks could write about the ‘hood’ with any authority however clever the prose? Far easier just to go the whole hog.

Having just discovered that the ‘going rate’ for ad hoc online content is apparently two and a half pence per word there’s part of me that thinks ‘I can’t say I blame her’. These are hard times for writers hoping to bag a crust from the pen. Even Dickens was paid a penny a word! and a penny went a lot further in 1870. No ‘100 Ways to Get Good at Golf’ is hardly Great Expectations. But let’s face it, at least everybody knows that nothing you read on the internet is TRUE.

PS. do click through on that last link: it is my new favourite waste of time.

First of three dead rabbits spreadeagled on the South West Coast Path.

Then our neighbours in the opposite table seat in the coach arrived. A man in a black leather jacket with jeans, a backpack and numerous tattoos was joined by a tall bloke and boy of around 14 who had a skateboarder look going on. He swung a carrierbag over to the guy in the leather jacket with the earring. They sat down and as soon as they were settled dipped into the bag, pulled out two cans of Special Brew, two Bacardi Breezers/Smirnoff Ice (I say A, Dr Blog says B), two Costa Coffee paper cups and a plastic Jif Lemon. Then they set about preparing their cocktails which they used to wash down three yellow pills that they passed surreptitiously across the table. The boy cracked open a Fanta.

What good luck. A travelling circus to keep us amused for the duration. ‘They’ve just done three pills,’ I mouthed across the table. The train left the station and we waited for them to get rowdy, but in fact we were the noisy ones with our Guardian Quick Crossword while they flicked through the Metro quietly. Tall Bloke picked up his phone and called his ex: he was down for the weekend and could look after little Lisa. No he didn’t have any cash, only money for food. Somewhere between Exeter and St Awful an accident occured and a Costa Coffee cup full of Breezer Brew/Special Smirnoff pooled over the table.

‘God that stinks,’ muttered one of our companions, Playfair, as we helped mop up the mess with the Mirror.

‘Maybe the lemon juice will get rid of the stink,’ I suggested. Leather Jacket, who I had down as the leader, agreed and they set about sprucing up the table. In no time at all they had remixed another drink and it was as if the spillage had never happened. Leather Jacket left the carriage, returned to his seat and nodded off. Tall Bloke then set about calling a number of dealers loudly: London was dry, they couldn’t wait to get home.

Tall Bloke borrowed a pen to write down a number and dutifully returned it with thanks. Later, perhaps encouraged by our now cordial if arms length relationship, Leather Jacket looked up from the window seat where he was texting.

‘Excuse me, um can any of you guys tell me how to spell - um ball? You know -’, he added, as our faces froze, ‘as in keep your eye on the ball.’

I then failed not to laugh and laughed because the tension of not laughing was too much. No it is not nice to laugh at people who ask you how to spell ball, but it was just as much the look on our Guardian Quick Crossword faces. Playfair covered it up nicely by throwing out a quick quip so we could all titter politely while Patricia duly obliged: ‘yes, that’s b-a-l-l’.

Not long after they started getting ready to disembark. Leather Jacket was not doing well by this stage, his bag got caught in the seat and he was having trouble keeping his balance.

‘Come on mate,’ boomed Tall Bloke, supporting his friend by the elbow as he staggered down the aisle ‘don’t you worry, well soon have some drugs down ya.’

Then they got off leaving us their copy of the Daily Mail and a lengthy debate ensued. Were they junkies or simply disaffected rural dyslexics who liked to get trashed in a downmarket version of the crusty Pills-Magners-Coke-Ketamine kind of way? Were we hypocritical bourgeoisie who looked down on their Special Brew yet silently condoned celebrity Cristal and crack-fests or our own forays into what we deemed respectable recreational oblivion? Playfair, who subscribes to Radical Philosophy and was the proponent of the underprivileged-rural-dyslexic theory said she didn’t think they had those hard junkie faces and even though I found it hard to believe they weren’t junkies - what about all those trips to the loo and the nodding off? - there was something about that concept which rang true. Neither men had that ‘I haven’t evacuated my bowels in a fortnight’ walk.

Many other questions remained unanswered. Would little Lisa go down for the weekend? What drugs would they score and when? Were the trips to the loo really just fag breaks as Playfair maintained? Did they neck Es or was it sleeping pills? Was the fourteen-year-old boy Leather Jacket’s son or step-son? Why were we so interested anyway? (See pic above.) And what else did that text say apart from ball?

Went with the ladies down to Chinatown to see in the Year of the Rat. We ordered oysters and avoided snail porridge in a cafe with gen-u-eyn Chinese folk slurping noodles from big bowls. Lady Bling who also doubles as Fit Laura and Golden Swallow Feng Shui Expert in her spare time informed us it was not officially New Year but the New Moon festival. What-EVA as Fit Mel aka Lady Bonde might say.

All I know is I’m glad to see the back of Year of the Pig, which lived up to its name in more ways than one (got made redundant, had miscarriage, gave up bacon bites and beer). Still, if I think I had it bad then check out poor old Britney’s horoscope:

“After losing the custody of her children in October 2007, Britney Spears has totally lost her mind. Many people concern about her future. We are asked to study her Chinese Horoscope. The birth time is provided by her fan.”

So you see, it’s official. 2007 was NO GOOD. The Chinese are nothing if not thorough when it comes to divination - this truly informative website also includes Britney’s life-long bad luck chart. Lovely.

BIRTH CHART FOR BRITNEY SPEARS

Birth Date: 12/02/1981 (December. 2, 1981)
Birth Time: 1:30 AM CST
Birth Place: Mahon, MS

You’ll note the 20-year peak commencing in 2043: so, if you think losing your kids and your mind is about as bad as it gets, think again. It’s going to get worse. Much worse. Although for a one-time teen star turned celebrity carcrash what could be worse than being down to just the one fan?

Picture of Blag Lady when she has had her fix.

What else has been happening down my way?

Had news of an engagement and a break up followed by a get-together: both of which brought a smile to my face. It’s good when that happens. Something about January it seems. The New Year is a time of shrugging off the old skin for a sleek new shell with nary a sign of a crease or a wrinkle.

Talking of wrinkles, that reminds me: La Blag got a nomination for something prestigious only to find the digits didn’t add up right. This was gutting but I’m staying cryptic.

If you can’t be a teenager again why not hang out with one? Took my nephew young Taikings out shopping for his birthday on Saturday. He is 11 now - pre teenage, yes, but this still means he is losing the ability to pronounce consonants and thus we had to go to ‘Foola’ to buy clothes that rustle. Yes, I spent my Saturday here: where we managed to talk him out of buying a cap that did not fit and some hideous garment or other. ‘Can’t we go to Hennes?’ I whined to no avail. Let me just say one final thing on this: black, white and red all over is a children’s joke about a newspaper not a colour combination.

And finally, two fat foxes appeared in the garden this morning while I was yakking on the blower. Didn’t get a pic cos I’m just not on it with the camera right now. (Gotta fix that.) I hoped they might urinate on the old hag’s plastic table, but I made too much noise and frightened them off. Must learn that silence as well as showers can be golden.

There was a Blag Lady called Sharon

Who married a very rich Baron

He gave her his dosh

She became quite posh

And dumped all her friends christened Stacey