I don’t wan’ tae appear ungrateful
but I wish you’d all just sod off
You don’t need to tell me I’m ill
– I mean: Look at the state o’me!
dragging my sorry seln’ around
roped to this machine
like an old goat to a tyre
everyone too sentimental
or squeamish – or busy, no doubt
to break out the shotgun shells
and put one in tha’ back o’me heed
I mean – come on, son!
Who’re we kiddin’ here?
The thing is – it’s bad enough
losing ma’ freedom like this
getting dragged off to hospital
at a moment’s notice
hanging around on a trolley
while some fifteen year old doctor
hums and harrs and scratches
the fake wee beard he got fer christmas
lookin’ everywhere but straight in ma’ face
don’ bother, sunshine
I know what day o’ the week it is
I know what my lungs are like
C’mon in, number eight, your time’s up
No – what’s worse is a hundred people
I’ve never seen before in my life
traipsing through the house
like there’s no front door
saying ‘Hello Janet How are you Janet’
when I’ve never clapped eyes on them in me life
It’s like I don’t live here na’ more
I feel like sayin’ ta them:
‘Janet’s gone, mate.
She fucked off back to Glasgow
circa nineteen sixty-six
you’ll have to deal with me instead.’
Author: jim clayton
cat scene investigation
I took Solly to the vet’s for his vaccination and worming pill yesterday. Which is how I came to step barefoot on glass when I came down this morning.
You see, yesterday I’d taken the cooker extractor fan apart. It had started to make noises and drip gloop on the hob – a noxious, sticky substance that would’ve poisoned the whole family had it fallen into the soup (or improved it, one of the two). De-glooping the extractor fan is my least favourite chore. It doesn’t matter how much kitchen cleaner I spray on it, or how many times I flush it with boiling water, the two panels carry on oozing this stuff like it’s coming from a whole other dimension, like chef’s ectoplasm. Anyway, I did my best. I set the panels on some kitchen towel to drain as much of the gloop as possible. Whilst the panels were off, it seemed like a good time to change the bulb that had blown some time ago (shorted out by gloop, no doubt). We didn’t have a spare, so I put it to one side so I could take it in to get another.
Meanwhile, Solly had to go to the vets. He knew he was in trouble when he saw us bring the cat carrier down from the attic. But we’d thought ahead. We’d closed all connecting doors, shut the cat-flap and turned on all the lights. All that was left for him was to hide under the sofa, but we played the classic pincer-movement and made a grab when he ran for the chimney. Getting him into the cat carrier was tough. It always is. He sprouts extra legs, each one bristling with claws. It’s like trying to wrestle a bale of barbed wire through a letterbox. By the time we’d stuffed him into the cat carrier we looked like we’d been beaten up and thrown in a bramble patch.
‘Good luck at the vet’s’ Kath said, dabbing her arms.
As I took him outside, Solly began to wail. He’s a black and white cat, by the way – appropriate, given that this wail of his sounds exactly like the siren of a black and white cop car in an old noir movie, pulling up at the scene of a dreadful murder.
At the vets he was completely different, though. When the vet opened the carrier door and reached inside, he slunk out onto the examination table, looking straight ahead.
‘Wow! You’re like the cat whisperer!’ I said to her.
‘I wish I could take the credit’ she said. ‘But the plain fact is, he’s terrified.’
‘Poor Solly!’ I said, feeling guilty. I ruffled the top of his head, and that’s when he gave me the look. The look that said: Don’t think it ends here, my friend.
The vet began checking him over. Teeth, abdomen, ears. Stethoscope to chest.
‘How’s he looking?’ I said.
She sighed and took the stethoscope out of her ears.
‘Sorry. Carry on,’ I said.
She put the stethoscope back in.
And that’s when Solly gave her a look. See what I have to put up with?
Of course, when we got back home, Solly disappeared into the garden for hours. When he finally made it back in to eat, he was his usual, darkly mysterious self again, gnarling and chomping through his meat and biscuits with the noisy relish of an old sea captain back in the snug of The Neptune after a particularly harrowing whaling adventure. (Although I might be reading too much into it.) And that seemed to be that.
Except, of course, it wasn’t.
As Solly well knows, I tend to walk around barefoot. Certainly in the summer. In winter, it’s mostly socks, but I did get a pair of slippers, because the tiles in the kitchen are freezing. The only trouble is, I’ll often leave the slippers by the back door, so first thing in the morning, I’ll blunder downstairs, through the sitting room and into the kitchen to get them, not bothering to put on any lights.
That’s what happened this morning. Just as Solly knew it would.
I heard the crunch of glass before I felt the pain in my foot. I gasped and staggered backwards to put the light on, which showed me in an instant all I needed to know, like the flash of a CSI camera: Solly on the counter by the hob, smiling at me. Solly with one paw still extended – from having gently swiped the spent extractor fan bulb onto the floor. Solly leaping clear of the mess, and stalking away into the sitting room, his tail straight up, like an antenna, transmitting to all the other neighbourhood cats: Operation Vet Vengeance: Executed.
drag me to hell, traffic warden
We watched the Sam Raimi film Drag me to Hell last night. It was great. Plenty of outrageous set-ups, plenty of gloop (although nothing as horrible as the stuff from the extractor fan). One thing that did strike me, though – how convenient it is that the demons and evil spirits in these films always look so goddamn awful. They’ve all got terrible teeth and skin, weird eyes, ghastly nails. A demon is basically someone who pays no heed whatsoever to the basics of personal hygiene. Which is handy, in a way, because it makes them easier to spot.
Not like real life at all, then.
I mean, I was given a parking ticket the other day by a traffic warden, even though I wasn’t causing an obstruction, and even though I was attending to a very poorly patient.
‘Double yellows, yes. Loading bays, no,’ he said. ‘You should know that.’
‘But it’s Christmas’
He shrugged.
‘So let’s get this straight,’ I said, struggling to hold it together. ‘If I was unloading frozen chips to this chintzy fucking tea room, that would’ve been okay?’
‘Yes.’
‘So it’s chips and not sick people, is it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t even bother,’ said a painter and decorator, passing by, stopping just long enough to give the traffic warden a stare that was worryingly like a curse. ‘He just better hope his family never needs help sometime.’
Looking back on it, setting aside all personal feelings about the matter, I have to say – the traffic warden looked as nice and friendly as anyone else. He certainly didn’t look like a demon, with yellow eyes and sharp teeth. And he had very nice hair, what I could see of it, round his cap.
the skull on the rock
Leonie, professor of anthropology (ret’d),
sits in her Riser-Recliner,
a blanket of crochet squares
tucked snug on her lap,
a view of the garden,
(bird feeder, gnomes,
water-feature – two children
sheltering under an umbrella
water running like rain).
‘Justin the priest was here earlier,’ she says.
‘You just missed him.
I think he sees me as a challenge,
a bit of a project.
And I have to say – poor chap,
he does bring out the devil in me.
I told him all about this documentary I’d seen
some paleolithic cave paintings in France.
Now – the thing is, of course
we don’t know why they did these paintings.
and one must always resist the temptation
simply to ascribe to ritual
things we do not understand.
That being said, it was clear the people
had gone to extraordinary lengths
to put those horses and deer on the walls.
And then – the most marvellous detail –
they’d placed the skull of a giant bear
on a large rock, looking to the entrance.
As soon as I saw it I thought
Ah-ha! Altar!
Now. I said to Justin, I said there are two ways
you can think about this. Possibly four.
Either they were celebrating God
as best they could, in a naive way
OR they were scratching a divine itch
in a way that felt appropriate to them
using their own symbolic language
drawings, rocks and bones and so forth.
I said to Justin – I could see he was flustered –
I said that it struck me quite forcibly –
as it had done many times in the past –
that this whole God-thing
was simply an illusion, a trick of the light.
I think no sooner had we the ability to work a tool
we experienced a collateral development of consciousness.
D’you see?
Suddenly we weren’t simply spending our time
running away from lions, or running after deer,
suddenly we found ourselves with time on our hands
looking round at the world
and worrying about our place in it
and that’s when we started painting the walls,
carving flutes, and putting skulls on rocks.
‘That’s an interesting argument, Leonie.’
‘I don’t think Justin finds it interesting.
Horrifying might be closer.
Still, he’s a sweet chap. Easily shocked
but his heart’s in the right place.
He hates to think of me being confined to the flames
when I pop off. Although quite what function
that would serve, I haven’t the faintest idea.
These vengeful father figures, they’re so persistent,
don’t you think?
‘Absolutely.’
‘I wouldn’t mind betting that old bear god
wasn’t known for his easy temper.
I bet you a pound to a pinch
once his skull was on the rock
everyone dropped to their knees.’
‘I bet!’
‘Poor Justin. I wonder he keeps coming round.
Aren’t you worried about the hereafter?
he said. No I said. It’s the here and now that concerns me.
But – bless him – he’d brought a peace offering
some macaroons he’d made.
They’re really rather good
I think there’s a couple left.
Would you like one?’
so this is christmas
I was shopping in Sainsbury’s yesterday. A list in my hand of the things I was bound to forget. Ground Cinnamon. Black Treacle. Some stem ginger (Kath was doing a traybake for Jessie’s drama group Christmas party). I wandered into the milk and juice aisle. There were Christmas songs playing overhead in a stream that was only interrupted by public announcements of special offers, rounded off with a Thank you for shopping at Sainsbury’s, and I’d been drifting along, checking the list, looking around, unconsciously joining in with these songs that I’d heard a million times before and couldn’t avoid this time of year, singing along in the same way that trees bend in front of a strong wind, to let it pass as harmlessly as possible without losing too many branches. But then I realised that I was singing along to Happy Christmas (War is Over), the John Lennon song. And I wondered what John Lennon would’ve thought, if he’d been standing in the milk and juice aisle, too, hearing his song absorbed like this, made safe, neutered, by the whole corporate sales drive of Christmas. Would it have depressed him? Didn’t it jar with the message of the song?
And that made me think of a documentary film I saw of him called Imagine. There’s a scene in the film where he talks to an obsessive american fan who’d been camping in the grounds of his mansion. They’re all standing by the front door, the american in his tatty sheepskin coat and floppy hat, John and Yoko in the doorway, with some other people around. And the american is saying something about how much John’s music has influenced his life, how they spoke directly to him. John is pretty tough about the whole thing. He tells the american he was just putting words together. Some of them worked and seemed to mean something, some of them didn’t. That was it. He said all songwriters did pretty much the same thing. If he was writing a love song, he was mostly thinking about Yoko. Everything else was about John Lennon, and no-one else. And if anyone listening happened to take some meaning from it, well – that was good. If not, well, whatever. And then they all went in for some breakfast.
I remember being shocked by the tone of what he said to the american – especially when he said he was only writing about things around him, how he was feeling, whether he’d had a good shit that morning. Was his songwriting really such a functional thing? It confused me at the time and still does. Especially taken with all the other seemingly incompatible things about his life, like John singing ‘Imagine no possessions’, and then a year or so later keeping a whole apartment refrigerated in the Dakota building specifically to keep his and Yoko’s fur coats. All of which helped me overcome my moment of existential angst in the milk and juice aisle of Sainsbury’s. Because I thought – actually – John Lennon would’ve appreciated the contradiction, seen his place in it, the whole societal ‘trip’.
And who knows? Maybe he’d have written a song.
Kath’s traybake was fantastic, btw.
Happy Christmas. I hope you have a great holiday – and thanks for reading the blog this year!
wedding photo
Me and Vera used to
go dancing Saturday
One night I said to her
I’m just off to the bar,
do you want anything?
Yes, she said, bring me back
a handsome man, she said
but I went one better
and come back with a pair
That’s him in the photo
nods to the mantelpiece
a black and white picture
of a demob suit and
pattern dress, ducking out
a church door, arm in arm,
like the links of a chain
newly struck on old stones
running out to the light
larry
Mrs Waring has been diagnosed with BPPV – Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo. One of those conditions that’s as difficult to pronounce as it is to treat.
‘Her husband’s been admitted with a stroke,’ says the Coordinator, ‘so the stress of all that isn’t helping matters. I think she has a good network of friends, but she’s eighty-odd and vulnerable.’ She hands me the paperwork. ‘Retired district nurse,’ she says. ‘Watch out.’
-oOo-
If the bungalow is quiet when I walk up to the door, it changes the moment I ring the bell. A dog starts barking somewhere deep within the house, and a second later hurls itself against the door, repeatedly impacting the frosted pane like a hairy brown and white football being kicked against the glass.
Larry! Larry! says a woman’s voice, but the dog only interprets that as an instruction to try harder. He changes tactic and starts trying to rip out the letterbox, presumably to make a hole big enough to squeeze through and reach my throat.
Just come straight in! the woman calls. He’ll be alright.
It’s an act of faith to do it, but Larry’s obviously a small dog, and even though I know the smallest dogs have the biggest complexes, I’m reasonably confident I can handle anything he throws at me. Still, mindful of the sharpness of little teeth, I slide the rucksack off my back and hold it low in front of me as I slowly open the door.
‘Good boy! There’s a good boy!’
Larry backs up, adding a few apoplectic sneezes to his barks, and starts turning wild circles on the spot, like he’s winding himself up to helicopter the distance between his jaws and my throat.
Mrs Waring appears round the sitting room door on all fours.
‘Oh! Hello!’ I say, putting my bag to one side (Larry jumps on it, grabs hold of one of the straps and begins shaking it from side to side, flipping me looks between each thrashing, as if to say: You’re next). ‘Are you alright?’
‘Yes, I’m fine’ she says, in a clipped tone, as if there’s absolutely nothing in her behaviour to suggest otherwise.
‘Have you fallen? Are you hurt?’
‘Not at all,’ she says. ‘Larry! Will you stop that, please?’
Amazingly, Larry lets go of the bag, looks at Mrs Waring for a moment, then trots over to sniff around my trousers.
‘He likes you,’ she says. ‘That’s a start.’
I kneel down on the carpet.
‘So tell me how you ended up on the floor,’ I say.
‘It’s very dull,’ she says. ‘I had another dizzy episode so I lowered myself down before I fell. I’ve done it before.’
‘Are you in pain?’
‘No. Just a little woozy. Now look, could I ask you to do something for me?’
‘Of course.’
‘It’s a bit cheeky, I know, but you see – Larry needs his breakfast and I think that’s why he’s being such a pest. If he doesn’t get his breakfast he won’t leave us alone. So if you wouldn’t mind, could you give him some of the meat that’s on the top of the fridge? You’ll find a pink bowl on the draining board and a fork with a broken handle. He doesn’t need much. His stomach’s the size of a mouse.’
Larry has obviously recognised some of the keywords here, because he stops sniffing and sits on his haunches to stare up at me. He’s a funny-looking dog, a cross between a Chihuahua and a Jack Russell, with a few chromosomes of Fruit Bat sprinkled on top for good measure. He’s obviously as elderly as Mrs Waring, a wiry, lopsided sneer to his muzzle, like a grizzled old gunslinger deludedly thinking he can still outdraw anything that rings the bell.
‘He’ll be in a better mood when he’s had some breakfast,’ says Mrs Waring.
As if to demonstrate, Larry starts barking again when I stand up to go into the kitchen, and doesn’t stop until I’ve finished scraping some meat out into the bowl.
Meanwhile, Mrs Waring has crawled into the kitchen, too.
‘Show me how much you’ve given him,’ she says.
I bend down to show her the bowl.
‘Too much,’ she says. ‘He’ll be sick.’
I scrape out a portion and present the bowl to her again, acutely aware that if anyone took a photograph of this scene through the kitchen window, it wouldn’t read well in the press. (Broken Britain: Nurse treats elderly woman like a dog).
‘Still too much!’ she says. ‘Lose a third and you might be right.’
I do as she says, and finally get the go-ahead.
Larry clears the bowl in three furious snaps, then starts barking again.
‘I don’t think it’s worked,’ I say.
‘Nonsense,’ says Mrs Waring, turning round to crawl out of the kitchen and into the living room. ‘He just doesn’t like strangers watching him eat.’
it’s never too late for a nice day
[After ten minutes of knocking and waiting, Mrs Gribbins eventually comes to the door. She’s wearing a quilted blue housecoat, a red scarf round her head, her arm in a collar-and-cuff support. Her face is the same colour as her scarf.]
MrsG: What the hell do you want?
ME: Hello, Mrs Gribbins. I’m sorry to disturb you.
MrsG: No, you’re not
ME: I did ring to say I was coming, but it went to answer machine.
MrsG: You should give me longer to get to the phone. I can’t run about like you.
ME: No. Well – I’m sorry about that.
MrsG: Don’t you know it’s Sunday?
ME: Yep. But I’ve been asked to come and see you to make sure you’re okay. And unfortunately you were first on my list.
[She stares at me]
Specifically – they want me to look at the wound on your arm.
MrsG: How am I supposed to get better if you people keep bothering me?
ME: Well that’s just it, you see? The doctor’s asked us to visit and see you’re okay.
MrsG: What doctor?
ME: [hesitantly] I’ve got it written down somewhere…
MrsG: You don’t know, do you? You come round here, dragging me out into the cold all hours of the day and night. How’m I supposed to get better with you carrying on like that?
ME: I was told your dressing needed changing.
MrsG: By this doctor, I suppose? This mystery doctor no-one’s heard of?
ME: I’ve definitely got it written down somewhere. But it’s fine, Mrs Gribbins. Honestly. If you really don’t want anyone coming round, you don’t have to.
MrsG: It’s ridiculous. You can see I’m alright.
ME: Well actually – I can’t. Not from here.
MrsG: I’ve never been treated like this before. Not ever.
ME: I’m sorry you feel like that. It’s all with the best of intentions. The fact is people are worried about you and want to make sure you’re okay. But like I say – you’re perfectly entitled to say no thanks, and we’ll leave it at that.
MrsG: And you won’t knock on my door again?
ME: No. I’ll just refer you back to the care of your doctor. The doctor I’ve got written down somewhere.
MrsG: [warily, like she doesn’t quite believe it] I don’t mean to be rude.
ME: It’s okay. Don’t worry. Let’s just shake – by your good hand – and we’ll say no more about it.
MrsG: I need time to get better.
ME: Absolutely. Bye, then, Mrs Gribbins.
MrsG: Don’t take this the wrong way, but I hope I never see you again.
ME: Have a nice day.
MrsG: A nice day? [She gives the shoulder of her bad arm a tentative shrug] It’s a bit late for that.
character phones
Tony has a range of character phones. Tweety Pie, Hello Kitty, Bugs Bunny and so on. All of them bravely maintaining their expressions beneath the same grimy brown patina that covers everything in Tony’s room. It’s an astonishing thing, a dismal, bristling crust that wouldn’t look out of place on the wreck of a ship at the bottom of the Atlantic. And if this was a ship, I’d guess, through the visor of my mask, that I’d swum into the nursery, because encircling the whole room are three shelves, each of which is packed full of toys and childish souvenirs of every description: elephants, camels, teddy bears and finger drums, Chad Valley projectors and unidentifiable things in snow globes, figurines in decaying boxes from shows I’ve never heard of – the whole, mouldering cargo merging one thing into another, in one great soup of neglect.
‘Quite a collection you’ve got,’ I say as I take his blood pressure.
‘Inherited,’ he sniffs. ‘I had six relatives all die in the space of two years. I got rid of what I could. The rest just stayed.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It was a bad time that’s for sure,’ he says, rolling his sleeve down again. He coughs – such a sludgy sound it’s hard to resist the idea that his lungs are coated in the same noxious matter as the rest of the room. ‘I fell ill. And then my support worker died.’
‘How awful!’
‘He dropped dead in this room, right about where you’re standing now.’
the creative mistake
It’s as true of creative work as anything else: Use it or lose it.
For instance, every year I like to do a linocut print for the Christmas card. Nothing too fancy, just a simple pattern I can mass produce and kick out in time for the last second-class post. Linocut’s pretty straightforward. It’s soft, easy to work, and it doesn’t have the grain and splintering issues of wood. But what helps my printing more than any of this, and what I’ve come to rely on over the years, are creative mistakes.
Whenever I make something, whether it’s a piece of writing, a printing or even a song, I rely on things going wrong. As hard as I try to steer things, plans never pay off. The finished product is always different, and almost always better than I could have hoped for at the beginning. In printing, because of my lack of skill, odd patterns emerge that suggest things I would have struggled to come up with from scratch. The most productive thing I can do is look out for the mistakes and use them to guide the rest of the project.
I find that being able to use mistakes and not to be put off by them is as much a skill – if not more – than the actual business of wielding a gouge or crafting a sentence. It’s definitely something that withers if you don’t feed it with sufficient practice, and this year I was painfully aware that I’d been away from the cutting mat for too long. I was still making mistakes, of course, but none of them felt remotely productive, and the only thing that was profiting from all my cussing and swearing was the recycling bin.
Still, I stuck with it and finally managed to arrive at something I’m happy to send out. So here it is, Happy Christmas! And may all your mistakes be creative!
blinkers on / blinkers off
First thing to say: writing is hard work. But then again, it’s not actually what you might call hard work.
Top five worst jobs ever:
- Peeling onions in a pickled onion factory. By hand. At the end of the day I was paid with a token that I could redeem for cash. I threw the token in a ditch, my clothes in the trash.
- Hoovering the landings of an exclusive apartment block. Each identical. It got so I couldn’t be sure whether the lift had actually moved or not. There was a boy who came out of his flat and stood there, eating a chocolate bar, watching me pointlessly hoover the immaculate carpets. A moment of existential despair.
- Painting the outside of an apartment block (not the same apartment block). Winter.
- Painting the inside of an underground car park. Winter.
- Working in a pirate-themed adventure playground. Dressed as a pirate. Spent all day rescuing kids from the rigging, the tentacles of the inflatable octopus, the ball pit. Juggling plastic fish, cleaning up vomit. Sparring with my alcoholic co-pirate. Taking hourly turns on Captain Nemo’s submarine (the windows filled with water when we submerged, then a screen at the front showed footage of sharks and squid nicked from the telly). Rescuing kids from Captain Nemo’s submarine.
So from my own experience I know for a fact there are worst things I could be doing with my life.
One of the problems with writing is that the routine you have to get into to get the work done can be quite deadening, or disorienting. It’s like a cart horse wearing blinkers. No distractions, just focused on pulling the cart, covering the distance. The danger is, if your blinkers are too effective, you’re in danger of either wandering off track, or forgetting exactly what it is you were setting out to do. Just lately, I’ve been out of blinkers, looking around, wondering where the hell I am, and what the big idea was – the metaphorical equivalent of shying in the traces. (Is it very apparent I haven’t the faintest idea about horses?) Which is a fancy way of saying: I got the last edit of the book done, and don’t know if I’ll ever manage to write a decent book. (see previous posts).
It’s okay, though. I’m calming down. Getting other stuff written – which I like, even though it doesn’t feel as ‘substantial’ as the day to day business of writing a novel. I’ll definitely finish The Fabulous Fears (a huge thanks to everyone who’s offered to Beta read it for me), if for no other reason than I feel I owe it to the characters. I’m trying to write a radio play now, based on my experiences in the ambulance service (another hard job, but then again, not nearly as hard as teaching English in a secondary school *shudder*).
On with the blinkers…
getting into drag
RuPaul’s Drag Race is such gorgeous, funny, scurrilous, perfectly balanced entertainment. I could happily binge watch a thousand episodes back-to-backless.
Thanks for reading, and all your support!
jim clayton 