Pansgalliard

It's sometimes a shame that status threads on Facebook can't be shared. This one manifested itself yesterday and cheered up my day. Names of humans have been removed, to save .. not face, but editing time!

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Victim - female house sparrow on the carpet. Estimated time of death- the early hours of this morning. Entry wound trauma to the back of the head. Prime suspect - cat with a gun.

Fantastic - wish I'd seen it !

Very "CSI Cassiobury" ...

The suspect is currently on the lam, but I believe she will return to the scene of the crime in due course.

Can I join in the interrogation of the subject - pleleeasseeese????????

By all means. When I apprehend her, she will be confined to the laundry basket to ponder her heinous crimes and consider her plea. Then she will be invited to find legal representation. I would offer her one phone call, but she has no opposable thumbs.

Have the next of kin been informed?

The sparrow's family are currently assembled outside, brandishing placards and demanding justice.

According to Reuters, Cock Robin has been arrested but there's a strong suspicion that he's just a patsy.

Bloody gang war.

Makes a mockery of the legal system doesn't it?

I'm trying to liaise with her lawyer now, but he is a squirrel and hanging upside down from the bird feeder

Lunch will still count as billable hours - mark my words !

He's not getting anything! He wants to put in a plea of guilty with diminished responsibility, and suggests she is sentenced to community service, assisting in the rehabilitation of the newly-hatched tadpoles. Which, if you ask me, is just an invitation to genocide. About what you'd expect from a rodent with a big flashy tail.

I think she may have been associating with my little terror only he seems to have down graded to worms!

Maybe they're in a gang?

Ahh yes thenotorious knife-wielding Cassiobury Estate Chav- Cats Gang .....

Mmmmm......Rascal's very friendly with Casper so he might be in on it too......

Does she have form? Remember, that's not admissible in court.

Jon - there's previously been several unproved cases of non-fatal assault on a dormouse, and eye witness accounts of frogs being tortured. Siob - I'm losing track of all the ASBOs. Sally - Round them up!

Rascal and Casper certainly do!

Charge her with the attempted murder of the dormouse too. Something'll stick.

I will if I can find her. She's probably heading for Switzerland. On a motorbike.

Funniest thread ever! But you guys all need to get out more :-)

Actually, I think the other spudgies did it for the insurance. Check this out: http://www.birdis.com/main.html. Round up the entire family.

Excellent detective work!! Let's call in the fraud squad. Just to keep you updated - the defendant has been called and asked for her plea. I can't be certain of this, but i think she said "Biscuits"

Was she high on catnip? I blame the parents.

You think she might be a junkie?? I'd better check to see if she's been selling my stuff

We had a victim too this morning, left by the cat feeding area. Wonder if she has wheels and has been dealing round my way??

You do realise by discussing the case in a public arena may prejudice the trial therefore making the verdict worthless. Also, never trust squirrel briefs. I've learned that lesson too many times the hard way.

It makes no difference as a jury of her peers has already been bought off with large amounts of Felix and Whiskas.

So now it's homicide, drug addiction, theft, fraud, dealing, gang warfare and bribery? !
I don't know what to do! I was just going to let her off with a caution and advise her that her karma's knackered.

I think she will do life times nine for those offences.

Don't forget possession of a fire arm - we all seem to be ignoring that bit .... what is this ... America ??

What's that NFA saying ...... guns don't kill people, Cats do ...

And as Eddie Izzard says...but i think the gun helps..!

I had wanted to go to Andalusia for years. My love affair with Spain commenced with Barcelona when I was a child, but I have always been drawn to the concentrated range of religious and artistic emotion expressed to so much excess in the South. I am a passionate person and passion is an expansive and dangerous state. It encompasses heights of ecstasy or depths of despair, anger, pain, lust, and little in between. There are no shades of grey in passion, only the ochres and yellows of buildings, landscapes and fruits, underscored by a violet sky.

Having finally achieved my dream of visiting the land of Flamenco, I hoped to encounter this particular condensed elixir of passion – the music of the soul. I know very little about the intricacies of its form, the compás, malagueñas and sevillanas, nor can I recognise the difference between a seguiriya and a bulería. But I do know that the hairs on the back of my neck stand up when I hear it and that its heartbeat is embedded into the geographical and social fabric of the area.

Its shadows are as sharp as its salt plains are flat. In the towns, enticing vestibules of ornate mosaics and tiles, as forbidden as a harem, emphasise the reverberation of children’s voices. The crescendo and finale slam of solid wooden doors delineate the firm boundary between the inner sanctum of family life and the outer bustle of the streets. Its capriccio roads resound with staccato carhorns, segueing into the pulsating of the cicadas at every dusk.

It is insuppressible. Old men sit on doorsteps, clapping their veined hands in the afternoon siesta sun. A drowsy melody drifts down from a balcony, a private tutorial is given in a cool, shadowed corner of a palace courtyard, and long-haired youths pluck their guitars on a promenade while lovers sing to each other on the beach. If you are lucky, you may find a bar where the great, the good and the pedestrian hone their skills amid clouds of hashish and glassfuls of cold, crisp Fina.

One hot afternoon, just before siesta, I drifted into the Convento de Jesús Nazareno in Chiclana, just in time to hear the enclosed Augustinian nuns, hidden behind a grille, commence their service with a Gregorian chant. I have heard such chants before, in Northern and Central Europe, where the voices were stripped down to an asexual tonal purity, regular as a species of angel.

Here, though, there was no doubt that the sensual love offered to deity belonged to earthbound women. Smokey, husky bass notes rose to an illicit vibrato, its sonorous timbre as honey sweet as the taste of Moscatel. It seduced. It celebrated. It had its feet in the dust and its hands clutching its own breasts. Its art of relating to the Divine required no fundamental transformation, no destruction of native talents or memory and its cadence was served up raw, ill-disciplined and true.

I would like to go back to this land to live for while. Its irregular, passionate music teaches that you should never debase your own voice, for the song that flows through your nervous system is the authentic sound of your spirit. Its measure is love and its vibration is the gift of life itself.

Photos Galore

The wonderful thing about Tangier is that you arrive before you’ve left. Morocco is two hours behind Tarifa, a punctuation mark in time that emphasises the fact that you are travelling from Europe’s southernmost point to another continent. The crossing is advertised as 35 minutes. It isn’t, but it’s still a short and surprising hop between cultures.

We knew what to expect upon arrival. I’ve been to Egypt and there’s a North African tradition of haranguing visitors into buying unwanted tours, taxis or tat. Some hustlers are so charming and well-spoken, I can see how difficult it must be to resist. In fact, it’s almost tempting to pay them for the entertainment value. Parrying some of the more sophisticated blandishments turned into a game of wits. French is useful in Tangier, and for some reason I found it much easier to assert my rights in faulty Gallic vernacular, particularly when a last-ditch hard-sell by one prospective guide tried to use that regular media weapon, fear.

“Special bargain. There are four of you. Fifteen Euros for a tour. That’s for all of you.”

“Non monsieur.”

“The Medina is huge. Very complicated. You will get lost.”

“Non. Monsieur. Nous sommes très indépendante.”

“You may be independent. But you are not safe. It is very dangerous. There are many immigrants. Many problems.”

“Dangereuse? J’habite en Hackney. I spit on your dangereuse.”

And with the concept of famous last words swimming through my thirsty head, three mad dogs and an Englishwoman headed off to the souk.

The male stomachs were desperate for fuel and after a heated ten-minute argument about choice of restaurants, we found ourselves coerced into a perfectly respectable eatery where the service was indifferent but the couscous was good, and the band included a gurning Jack Lemmon playing an oud.

Mint tea was served. Phil gazed into the layer of green leaves floating on water and declared. “I think I can see a fish in there.”

Against a backdrop of global financial apocalypse, it is worth remembering that street markets are the economic equivalent of the cockroach. It gave me comfort to be part of the hustle, humour and sheer energy that coursed through the winding alleys of the souk, its shabby fortifications housing braid, cottons, buttons, soft leather slippers and fly-encrusted dates. The shops presented a kaleidoscopic montage of a bygone age: a barber wielding his cut-throat razor, a row of patisseries behind dirty glass or an alcove selling second hand TVs, their flickering blue lights bathing a group of mesmerised children. Motorbikes with trailers careered up the narrow streets, kids dangling precariously off the back while afternoon prayers boomed through loudspeakers embedded in crumbling walls.

Hassle was a constant factor. “You English?” would precipitate lengthy negotiations for escape. I began to feign incomprehension and John resorted to shouting “Polski” whenever approached. It worked. My physical space was occasionally invaded, mostly through carelessness rather than design, but a sharp look invoked abject apologies and immediate retreat. I must be acquiring a matriarchal mien.

Being offered drugs in Morocco is de rigeur. We had already sussed out the day trippers (in every sense) on the boat over. Don’t buy them. If the authorities catch you, you will spend time in a prison that will make Midnight Express look like a Travelodge. On second thoughts ...

My ears suddenly tuned in to what sounded scarily like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins.

“Lovely jubbly. Best price. Lovely jubbly.”

He caught my eye.

“Come in and have a shuftie. Have a shuftie. Lovely jubbly. Asda price.”

Phil wanted a fez. I took him to one side and asked him how much was wanted for it.

“Ten”

“Ten what?”

“Er, ten – I don’t know.”

“Well, haggle.”

“I don’t really know how to.”

“Right. I’ll start you off. Monsieur. Combien?”

“Dix”.

Pretending to be completely astounded.

“Dix?! (Looking aghast). Dix?! Trop cher. À cet endroit (pointing), c’est plus – er – cheaper – sur le corner - er - c’est cinque.”

“OK. Seize. “

“Seize?! (With appropriate tragic looks.) Seize?! For a fez? J’ai six enfants pour manger (sic)! Non. Cinque. Right, Phil. Take over.”

He got his fez for five. Euros or Dirham, I have no idea. But hey, result. Haggling is the most fun you can have with your clothes on. If you’re not sure how to do it, just nick bits of script from The Life of Brian and practise your fake exits.

Phil soon got so much into the swing of it, that an hour later when he rounded the corner with three children in tow, we could only stare in amazement and ask him how much he had paid for them. He also managed to acquire a fake Rolex, which he threw away later that evening because he didn’t like the clockface.

Rather perturbingly, he also decided to wear his fez for the rest of the day. It was like being accompanied by a tall, red beacon (no chance of blending into the background for our spying activities) and made for much merriment locally. A cyclist chuckled “Ali Baba” as he wheeled past. “Ali Baba. Allemand!” shouted another. Thank God for that. What shame would be brought upon the empire if they actually believed we were British?

We headed for the Kasbah, humming the obligatory Clash soundtrack in unison. We passed two schoolgirls in leggings and lace hijabs, beating up their younger brother in the street. A boy approached us and offered to show us around. We declined, cynicism weighing into our innocent interactions with the thoughts of having to pay for the privilege. Despite our protestations, he stuck to us like a limpet as we explored the beautiful, deserted alleys at the top of the hill. He explained that the Kasbah was now mostly inhabited by foreigners, with rents to match. They own the art galleries and riads, all accommodating luxurious furnishings or secret rooftop gardens within their cool, stone walls.

“Have you got any Black Sabbath? Paranoid?”

Sadly, we’d failed to bring our CD collections with us.

He looked at me quizzically. “Which one is your husband?” Jer retorted: “She’s too expensive for any of us.” After discussions about my potential monetary value, they worked out that I’m worth about $150. The lads did threaten to sell me for a couple of camels, which I’d say would be a fair exchange.

The boy showed me to the ladies’ mosque, a small, charming building in a quiet, empty quarter. I had brought my scarf and a long sleeved cardigan, and asked a man sweeping the floor in the lobby whether I could visit. He declined and turned his back on me. No admittance for the infidel. After his tour duty, our little friend refused to accept money, shattering the stereotype we had come to expect. Thus does fractured travel expand the mind.


Walking back down the hill to the souks, a trek punctuated with more mint tea,
I noticed a doorway, leading to a descent of steps into an indoor area that looked like a mosque. Women huddled in a corner, deep in conversation, their heads uncovered, shoes on their feet. Not a mosque, then. A woman exited onto the street, caught my look of curiosity, smiled enigmatically and moved on.

A part of me desperately wanted to know what was going on in there, and I suppose information is useful up to a point. Sometimes, though, the unexplained is far more interesting. The imagination can conjecture mysterious and exciting scenarios within the safe citadel of its darkest secrets.

I then started a conversation with a local woman who had been visiting her mother in the Medina. Farsia was a Berber and she told me about her traditions, how life has changed for women in modern times, her job as a teacher and how she named her children.

She looked at me. “Which one is your husband?”

“They’re my brothers.”

“Do you have children?”

I shook my head.

“Here, if a woman cannot have children, her husband finds someone else.”

I wanted to proclaim my shock, but paused for a moment as I remembered that such action is not entirely unknown in England either.

She led us to the modern part of Tangier, past the Catholic cathedral and Italian villas, to the Grand Mosque, explaining en route about the ritual of the women’s weekly ablutions and how holy day was spent cooking good things and choosing something lovely to wear before spending quality time with the family.

After discovering that we would be leaving on the evening boat, she sighed. “That is a shame. I would take you home for dinner and give you couscous.” I believed her.

I only had a taste of Tangier. I didn’t have time to explore the old haunts of the great writers and artists who have been inspired to stay in this place. Actually, I didn’t really think about them. It’s one degree of separation too many. Sometimes when I travel, I prefer to kick back and watch the rich diversity of humanity swarming before me, and let my inner eye watch myself watching. I find myself wondering what it would be like to be born elsewhere, within a different culture, with a different language, reference points and expectations, and I marvel at the accident of DNA that has dictated the fundamentals of my life. To absorb the existence of those people is to absorb the richness of the world itself. It lifts my spirits to know that every single life is precious.

Even the hagglers.

I have been back down to my beloved Bankside for a weekend of packing and goodbyes.

After thirteen years in the old Coffee Warehouse at Bear Gardens, the Lions part has moved out and moved on. There are always casualties during any process of gentrification and the building that had been home to the theatre company for so long has been deemed uninhabitable and will be redeveloped. There will be no room for Lions in its future, shiny incarnation.

It’s odd to think that in just over a decade, we have watched the complete transformation of the area. We were there way before The Globe and the Tate Modern. We performed our alchemical George and Dragon in the pouring rain at the Bankside Power Station just before it closed permanently for refurbishment. When the Globe consisted of just a few beams of oak, many actors associated with the Lions part staged a series of Shakespeare excerpts as part of its Rough But Nearly Ready season.

It is ironic that such extraordinary artistic riches have spawned nothing but homogenous architectural and commercial sentinels. The back of the Tate Modern could now be a high street in Croydon, or anywhere else for that matter.

Bear Gardens was ballast to this progress. It was an unreconstructed mess, with exposed brickwork, cracked toilets and a bewildering maze of passages and staircases that could flummox even old-timers. We used to rehearse in the Star Chamber, a glamorous name for a miserable, badly lit space with inadequate heating and an unfinished grey concrete ceiling. At the top of the building was the hub of the Lions part empire, The Horrid Room, so named because it always had a strange atmosphere. The small windows faced a building, the light was poor – but more – the sense of a soft something against the skin that felt slightly damp and unhappy.

At the back of the Horrid Room was a door. When it was unlocked and opened, it revealed the balcony of a small theatre, through which was a large space containing racks and shelves of costumes. This was named, appropriately, Narnia. During productions, it was the norm to hear people shout out, “Where’s so-and-so got to?” “Oh, he’s in Narnia.”

It was fitting. We were already in our own world of magic and fantasy, a world that could be, for a short time, a salve to life’s troubles. So many of those Lions (and their cubs) have passed through the company, working with courage and laughter during the cancers, divorces, family traumas and secret human sorrows, to become part of the warp and weft of the rich fabric of Bankside rogues and vagabonds.

We loved each other, this unique band of talented people. We held a knowledge of each other’s foibles that provoked in equal measure exasperated tension and affectionate shorthand. Sharp words and kind gestures survived together in a cooperative paradox, while we, children all, relished the joy of climbing two flights of dusty stairs to dig out velvet treasures in which to dress up and show off.

And now those treasures have been packed away. We humped boxes of shifts, mummers’ rags, velvet Venetians, medieval hoods and the makings of a white bear down those stairs and into a van. The dismantled maypole will be taken to Kent, the rest will go into storage until the Lions can find a new home.

We should have felt sad. There was poignancy, yes, but with it the sense of excitement that throwing things out and moving on can engender. We talked a lot about stuff while we were working. We all carry so much unnecessary stuff in our lives. I recently had tea with some people from the Lebanon and Iran who had been forced by war or revolution to abandon all that they owned and leave the country. They took with them only intelligence, knowledge and their love for each other. They continued to live and they lived well.

To crown the finality of our departure, we decided to buy supper at Borough Market, and attempted to drink beer on a grassy patch in the sunshine, at which point an aggressive, badly-trained Community Police Officer moved us on. Apparently drinking alcohol in public is now an offence in Southwark. Good Gods, the puritans are winning the war. Soon there will be no more cakes and ale. It is now high time that yellow stockings became standard issue for all law enforcement personnel.

We drank our beer in the Horrid Room. We wept a little.

Those who have spent the night there have heard the workings of the winches as they haul sacks of coffee across the gantry. In a hundred years, perhaps others will hear the faint sounds of a squeezebox, drumming, singing and the stomp of feet up and down the stairs.

The Star Chamber is quiet now. Narnia is empty, save for a few wire coat hangers and dead boxes. In the stripped-out Horrid Room I picked up a feather and put it in my back pocket. Water was thrown over the carpet in ceremonial valediction. Then we closed the front door.

We left little to show for our presence, except for some graffiti and beer bottles. A building can never usurp the love that we feel for flesh and blood, yet its very walls soak up human energy and hold it, emitting a subtle signal to anyone willing to pay attention to its supranatural music.

Listen carefully. Those walls whisper: “We woz ’ere.”

At the weekend, I returned to the place I grew up. I don’t go there very often and I’m reluctant to call it my hometown, even though I was born and lived there for nineteen years. It never felt completely like home and I have yet to find the place that does.

The flat-roofed Kebble houses still stand, little boxes on the hillside, a swarm of social ambition, where a new car in the drive and a child in the Grammar school were the pinnacle of achievement.

These cubes are an abstraction, alienation. They reek of safety, the 2.1 children, the nine to five, the christenings, graduate photographs on the walls, shag-pile carpet, woodchip wallpaper, parquet flooring, teak furniture, turquoise glass, brushed nylon sheets, fake fires, fishponds and lilac satin bridesmaids dresses.

The houses were built alongside the canal, when barges still worked its commercial routes and water gypsies moored for the night. Children fished for tadpoles and crayfish, fed the moorhens and water voles, and hung around the locks with hope of helping to swing them open and sudden dread at the drop of water beyond.

The common moor behind the locks was a strip of land embedded with a paper mill, to where I would flee the stresses of family life. In the summer, I kicked off my shoes and ran like the wind along the river path, oblivious to the brambles and thorns that stuck in the thickened soles of my feet, to be picked out with tweezers later. The river was polluted but I swam in it anyway. But my real joy was to walk along the old railway line.

I still dream about trains, mostly those that are stranded in sidings, those that await action upon tracks running into the distance. Where do they lead, those tracks? I sense a redolence that is not my own. The demanding memory can dredge up any number of scenarios that belong to others, from a dusty terminus in the panhandle to the gates of Auschwitz. Abandoned tracks have neither owners nor answers.

The mill, the river and the railway played out some Untold Want in that desperate creature who used to pen poems entitled “Death to the biological factor that keeps me enslaved”. Where did she go? Nowhere, perhaps. Our natures are not partitioned and sometimes I feel I can touch her fingertips with mine.  

Travelling back to London over the bridge by the moor, I noticed that the river was diminished. The mill had been torn down some time ago and replaced with a housing estate. The railway no longer exists. It is all very neat and tidy.

I dug out some old photos, which I had taken when I was about fifteen, and began to ponder my love of the functional beauty and loneliness of gasworks, factories, railways. And I understood, at last. They are honest.

You see, I remember what went on beyond those neat verges and spotless net curtains: the infidelities, abuses, addictions and violence. I know now that I feel fear because it was integral to my process of growing up. The loss is for those moments when I didn’t know any better.

Suburbia is liminality, a hybrid, hypocritical in its adherence to appearances. I did not realise the impact this physical space and mindset had made upon my love of the margin, or how I may have fooled myself into believing I was too colourful for my environment, when what was really required for escape was black and white.  

I had a wonderful day yesterday, initiating a Friend into the joys of Bankside.

We started with Borough Market.

If you have never visited London’s oldest food market, then you’re missing a sensual experience of the highest order. Even if you have no money, you can spend a salacious hour or two basking in the aromatic and picturesque delights of gastronomic produce, magnificently and lovingly raised and displayed. Caress, fondle, sniff, taste, dribble, sip, salivate, lick, stroke, rub, savour, swallow, and let your vocal cords murmur with pleasure at the joys of truffle oil, ceps and lokum. Asparagus has just come into season. Take home a bunch, sauté in butter for two minutes, add a drop of lemon, and relish every mouthful.

Oohh, yes.

I’m delighted that Friend has ditched the idea of doing the ghastly rapid weight-loss LighterLife diet (all sachets, no fun). The abounding satisfactions of life cannot be associated with powdered food.

There are five elements: earth, air, fire, water and garlic.
- Louis Diat


Round the corner from the market is Redcross Way, where we paid homage to the Cross Bones Graveyard, an unconsecrated burial ground for the outcast dead: the prostitutes and paupers who have lived in the Borough since medieval times.

Writer, John Constable, channelled the spirit of The Goose in 1996, and it was she who revealed to him the graveyard and helped him to create his incredibly powerful poems and visionary plays, The Southwark Mysteries.

The iron gate guarding the land is festooned with gifts and dedications to those who lie within: a bottle of Bombay Sapphire, toy poodle, mirrorball, mascara, candles, ribbons, beads, keys, masks, corn dollies, chupa chups, holy pictures, dancing skeletons, holly, charm bags, flowers, fruit, bones.

A vigil will be held here this Wednesday 23 April, St George’s Day.  Bring flowers or mementoes to tie to the gates, and a poem or song or something else of yourself to share.

Assemble (promptly) by 7pm at the Memorial Gates in Redcross Way, just north of the junction with Union Street.

Here lay your hearts, your flowers
Your Book of Hours
Your fingers, your thumbs
Your ‘Miss you Mums”

Here hang your hopes, your dreams
Your Might Have Beens
Your locks, your keys
Your Mysteries
- John Constable

Kerry is swiftly becoming a soul home, and in particular, the Dingle Peninsula. I seem destined to keep returning to it and each visit deepens my intimate relationship with its hills and seas.

( Read more... )

OK – so this one has been building up for some time now. I’d almost forgotten about it until I went to a party last month and it was shoved under my nose again. The Secret. We’ve all either had a good laugh about it or agree with some of its principles. Or both at the same time if we’re feeling really quantum.

At this party, someone started gushing about The Secret, stating that everyone she’d been meeting recently had bought the book or seen the film and like, wow wasn’t that amazing, like, and synchronous. It meant there was something in it. Another party pal picked up on the conversation to brag about how she’d Feng Shui’d her premises after reading a book, followed by the statement that she now only liked to surround herself with ‘spiritual’ people.

I was very well behaved that evening and kept my mouth shut.


 

 

Words cannot always be extracted from vision, and even if I tried, they would be a poor substitute for those still being spoken from beyond the grave, so I will keep this brief.

The Serpentine Gallery is currently showing a selection of work by Derek Jarman, including a rare view of some of his astonishing artwork.

Derek Jarman lived and died with passion, courage, honesty and love. By resigning himself to fate, he permitted his physical disintegration and pain to become a conduit for profound beauty. When the term 'spiritual' is so often self-referenced as a veneer for the disingenuous and insipid, his life and art stand as testament to a muscular and vivid expression of the creative divine.

This exhibition compelled me to step outside, gasping for both fresh air and a cigarette. I urge you to go, if only to dare to weep with the recognition of how frail we are and how wonderful we could be.

On until 13 April.
www.serpentinegallery.org 

Kiss me 
On the lips 
On the eyes 
Our name will be forgotten 
In time 
No one will remember our work 
Our life will pass like the traces of a cloud 
And be scattered like 
Mist that is chased by the  
Rays of the sun 
For our time is the passing of a shadow 
And our lives will run like 
Sparks through the stubble. 

Book Review:

The Bitch the Crone and the Harlot - Reclaiming the Magical Feminine in Midlife by Susan Schachterle

Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy blog!

First lesson. Never order an unknown book off the internet before physically handling it. If I’d known that each chapter in this tome would be headed up by a bad ink drawing of hearts, flowers, spirals, stars and affirmations such as “you were born complete”, I’d have run a mile. It sets the tone for the rest of it, and it’s treacle.

Schachterle starts hopefully enough. She divides elements of a woman’s mid-life into three archetypes. It’s a common conceit, but one which has potential as a model for a deeper exploration of what happens to women during a time of profound physical and psychological change. Having established her chapters, though, she fails to develop the individual themes to any extent. In fact, by page 30, I was bored of Bitch, did a speed read through Crone and Harlot and didn’t bother with the rest.

The chapters are verbose, repetitive and, worst of all, homogenous. There’s nothing to delineate the three different states of womanhood. Each defaults to vague notions of compassion and serving others – traditional female standards.

Schachterle’s main crime is etymological murder. “A new definition is required”, she states, before dictating that the real meaning of a Bitch is a woman who is unselfish, kind and has the best interests of everyone at heart.

It gets worse.

“Entering into Bitchhood does not give us license to be rude, hostile, or abusive.”

Now where’s the fun in that?

Fools were once licensed to play just such havoc for the sake of truth and entertainment, and a real bitch undermines the sneaking hypocrite with an excruciating put-down. She may bristle with insecurities, but what you see is what you get.

For one sentence only, we get back on the etymological straight and narrow. She refers to the earliest definition of “Crone” and discovers that it meant “cantankerous or mischievous woman”. Schachterle quickly ditches the word “cantankerous” and replaces it with “feisty”, which is much more acceptable to her agenda for women who don’t cause too much trouble. The chapter then continues with a treatise on the wisdom of the Crone as a nurturing and welcoming spirit, with no further mention of mayhem or mischief.

She urges again and again that women be of service to others. Anecdotes about her therapeutic theories abound with examples of women who have tamed their tempers, spoken up in Church, learned to dress appropriately or lost weight. So there we are, rammed into the selfsame stereotypes that the Crone, Bitch and Harlot, in all their cantankerousness and rebellion, have always tried to escape.

Nothing focuses this point more than the section on the Harlot, where Schachterle declares “we aren’t exploring sexuality here”. For her, bringing out a woman’s true Harlot involves looking at the clouds and stroking velvet, not pursuing pleasure for its own sake.

A middle-aged woman who has just come out of a long-term marriage (and statistics suggest that this is a growing trend) does not need instructions on how to smell the flowers. She needs to become reacquainted with her clitoris and she needs no-nonsense advice about sexual experimentation and health. Telling her that pleasure should be focused outside of the sex act will not help a woman who has a raging desire to throw off her clothes and screw the first man she sees. After years of dull monogamy, her sense of freedom and exploration may be coupled with a naivety that is potentially dangerous. STDs in middle-aged women have increased by about 200% in the last ten years. It’s frankly irresponsible of any therapist to skip over these issues.

This book caters for those women who have never ventured beyond their mental or sexual white picket fence. It dabbles a toe in one paragraph of transgressive behaviour (a coy reference to the use of strawberries in sex), but quickly pulls back before breaching the boundaries of American middle-class decency.

I hunted in vain to find any definition of what it meant to reclaim the magical feminine. There is one paragraph that mentions Agape, and elsewhere is the predictable brief namecheck for Gaia. What does run through the book is the continuous mantra about learning to be an expression of an amorphous Divine. Which one? My Divine exacts blood and temper on a regular basis. It’s the same woolly spiritual thinking that describes “The Universe” as though it’s some benign grand-parent with a generous credit card rating.

The book is riddled with bad or missing science. She claims that the hormones GSH and LSH, which elevate at menopause, increase intuition and points out that as women get older, most are no longer concerned about popular opinion. “I’m not entirely certain how this happens”, she says, in which case Schachterle needs a crash course in basic endocrinology.

Other vague theories incorporate hazy references to “shamanic cultures”, smatterings of Jung, a section on finances lifted straight from Louise Hay, and positive life quotes by Jim Morrison and Virginia Woolf, the irony of which seems to have escaped her. She claims that intuition is always 100% correct and her retort to individuals who state that they have followed their intuition and it has been wrong is that such people had unclean motivations. Oh, and there it is, half way through, the prizewinning phrase in self-help Wankword Bingo - “negative emotion”. It’s like black tar, apparently.

This is the pick ‘n’ choose school of psychology. All it does is serve as a narcissistic vehicle for a therapist to give frequently inappropriate examples of her successful practice, rather than offer any genuine insights or solutions to women's changing hormones and attitudes.

I had thought that such regularisation was a vestige of the Victorians. Where is the exhortation to embrace our fury, wit and wantonness, to explore it and use it to create art and magic? At the back of the book are some fine examples of women who have climbed mountains and overcome physical disability. This is all very noble. But where are the examples of cantankerous old bags taking a walking stick to muggers, or the Joan Collins’s of this world who cock a snook at sexual convention and get the boy?

Essentially, this is a book for doormats who want to learn basic assertiveness. It’s not for those of us who want to look at the deeper meanings and opportunities offered up by the adolescent furies that revisit us during this extraordinary time of change.

Hugely disappointing. Avoid.




Celeste Holm spoke about her experience with Bette Davis on the first day of shooting [All About Eve]: "I walked onto the set . . . on the first day and said, 'Good morning,' and do you know her reply? She said, 'Oh shit, good manners.' I never spoke to her again - ever."

How does the body absorb a particular day in the calendar? Some feast days and tragedies are imprinted onto the public psyche, other more private records lie dormant in the unconscious. But we sometimes react, nevertheless. Just as many a mathematician will state that numbers were not invented but discovered, many a mystic will state that numbers are the language of God.

Over Christmas, I was working hard on a film shoot. For the first time in our twenty year relationship, I had a nasty little altercation with my close friend, Steve. I was ill, but I was also edgy, angry and tearful and did my usual trick of becoming “arsey” when I feel under par. I wasn’t proud of my behaviour and having got home and licked a few wounds (and dosed myself with various over-the-counter drugs), I sat down and asked myself what had happened. Then it clicked. Ten years since my wedding day. In psychological circles, the phenomenon is called the Anniversary Effect, an effect amplified, I think, by the public investment into this particular rite of passage. Don’t get me wrong, I no longer grieve over it or him but it takes a long time to clear the debris of a life with someone, inside and out. It was only recently that I buried my bouquet, a faded, dusty bundle long forgotten behind the sofa.

There should be a word for the stage of life that goes beyond regret. I don’t regret anything that has brought me to this fascinating place, nor will I regret any future pains. It’s more than acceptance. It’s the joy of absorption. But some past experiences still have their triggers.

The same thing happened today, an unaccountable feeling of disenchantment and sadness. I pondered my age and wondered why I felt so immature, why the child was gazing out of my eyes so brazenly. I walked around the park, sobbing quietly. I couldn’t settle. I talked to myself, tried music, meditation, a shower. Only when I looked in my diary did I realise. On this day, eighteen years ago, my father died. That’s why I’m sitting here in the early hours, reading his pencil-scratched memoirs and writing my own.

I was backstage at the King’s Theatre in Glasgow, anticipating a call from my Dad to confirm a visit the following week. I took a very different ’phone call. His heart had finally broken and he was dead before he hit the ground - “like he’d been polaxed”, I was told. Only two weeks earlier, the man who lived in the house where I was renting a room had dropped dead of a heart-attack in the middle of the night. It had prompted me to call my Dad and tell him I loved him.

On the day of my father's funeral, once privately behind closed doors, my mother listed all the reasons why (she said) he was disappointed in me, an unbelievable act of callousness that sabotaged my grieving process for many years.

How could a man like that be disappointed in anything? His love of, and curiosity about, life was infectious. A true Dad in every sense of the word, he rejoiced in those small acts of love – telling me stories at bedtime, buying me a pretty dress, taking me to see the bluebells, or playing sharks and mermaids in the local pool. Together, we watched the first man step onto the moon, and over the years, he would take me into the garden to point out the constellations, passing meteors or Kohoutek on its long overdue visit to our solar system. He would traipse off over fields with his dog by his side, in search of local history and geology. He and I explored the limestone cliffs and crags of North Yorkshire, the chalk hills of the Chilterns and the eroding shoreline of the East Coast. He took me sailing in former Yugoslavia, and on a hovercraft to Paris to show me the Eiffel Tower and buy me a doll. He tried to teach me the basics of French, Morse Code and parking.

I don’t think I ever heard him raise his voice. His weapon was his dry humour, which he used to cut through the onslaught of female hormones and temperament that littered the house like shrapnel.

He pickled his own onions, made his own Yorkshire puds and liked to dig up the garden. He painted the front of the house bright yellow, laughed uproariously over the Goodies and the Goons and was fascinated by Tudor religious politics. He was always going to write a book and he would sit in his summerhouse on balmy evenings, sipping Glenfiddich and scribbling away. His pure Oxford vowels belied his working-class background and habits; his love of pease puddin’ and faggots, Benny Hill, rugby ballads, a game of cribbage and a pint, his habit of using cockney rhyming slang, doing his annual striptease down to his string vest and Y-fronts on New Year’s Eve, running around the house naked and calling bad drivers “cunts”. He and his best friend, (Uncle Biraj - RIP) used to go on serious benders and end up driving the car into a ditch.

All my friends adored him. Most ended up calling him “Dad” or “D.A.D.”

He wasn’t perfect. None of us is. He worshipped Thatcher, he could be pompous and ill-informed, and he had a tendency to infantilise me with embarrassing over-protection. But I loved him and I know he loved me.

A week after the funeral, we scattered his ashes on the cliffs at Ravenscar, among the jet and ammonites that he loved to collect.

I learned later that the only person he was disappointed in was himself. He never wrote his book, but I recently discovered the loose pages of notes that he had compiled for his memoirs, wonderful one-sentence phantoms of a life well lived but never to be fleshed out on paper. I’m sure I was a puzzle to him, an idealistic, arty Green to his cutting-edge Tory. Only years later did I find copies of letters he had sent to friends telling them how proud he was of me. He never understood the theatre but this tall, blond, chain-smoker who had flown bombers as a teenager during the War liked my rebellion. We were pals. I wish he could have stuck around a little longer, just so that I could have shared some of my adventures with him. Just so he could have seen that everything turned out OK really.

I miss you Dad.

Giri, the Japanese concept of duty. I have been a casualty of giri by proxy, the tacit fallout from nameless others’ sense of failure without admission or expression. For to admit or express is taboo. Silence is strength, a dumbshow of dignity shrouded in anger. Such unresolved inner rage manifests itself as subverted, but culturally-licensed emotional suicide. Oh there are many ways to kill the self, and others, and not all involve death. The most effective methods create a species of love as a burden of obligation, the purest form of giri. In the wider world of causal relationships, the consequence of conflict between giri and human feeling wreaks its insidious havoc upon those who have been permitted to slip inside the secure perimeter.

There is a world of difference between forbearance and denial. Regulation of overwrought feeling has its value, but the purpose of many a tight-lipped, solemn vow is to provide a fixed refuge from the calamity of change. Such a world becomes bound by shoulds and shall nots, fifth commandments and the shallow-end of karmic retribution.

Love sometimes passes discretely between humans, a close golden filament that simply exists, born of nothing other than itself. Why is it never enough to inhabit fully this private, internal world where little is expected in return? After all, to owe someone implies ownership. Giri, as complex as cobweb-fine wedding lace, exerts its force.

Love becomes a quantifiable reciprocation as we count the number of ‘phone calls and gifts – how much, how deep, how often. In statis. In eterna. This private behaviour, driven by the need to maintain a public image, seeks external acknowledgement of the act. Our social structure supports this quantifiable dependency and we, who do not live out of context, are subject to our own expectations of mutual benefit.

Many of us dream of breathing in the bluff, breezy air of unconditional love, but giri can grind us into submission with its semblance of righteousness as it insinuates one vital question into our best intentions - at what point does the unconditional become the abused?

Do I have the strength to rise above that?

The constraints of the city, my work, my travels have become defined by immobility, a physical inertia punctuated in its percussive underbelly by a pounding heartbeat.

Metatarsals can’t help but rebel against rawhide, and muscles tighten for flight against so much metal and humanity, captured within queues, suits and defective elevators. I’m running on empty, the friction of footfall and the hammering of hands divulging a delicate notation transmuted into a busy neuromuscular junction. Gelsey Kirkland spoke about turning out from the heart and my energy spirals away, a trembling inner Mazurka, a silent glossolalia, the orgasm and ashes of a hundred love letters drawn into the vortex and tapped out in cellular rhythm.

For a star danced and under that was I born. And if I ask you to kill on my behalf, the only apposite prey laid before my twitching feet will be that which gives me a wide berth to leap and a strong arm to catch.

At the point of crossing the abyss, there will be no summerland meadow or tortuous birth canal for me. Only a plush velvet cushion upon which is presented a finely honed, hand-made pair of eternal red shoes.

When all else fails, there is music. It is my salve, my spur, and substitute for many earthly delights. To lose it is to lose my critical self.

Something crucial in me has been blocked. Tension, grief and the friction between dreams and reality have choked the stream of energy in the area between my abdomen and throat. To have no authentic voice is to have no power. Equally, shallow breathing begets shallow inspiration. I had wondered if I would ever again experience the magic of being actively involved in creating music, and although my process was requested at the end of October, I pessimistically believed that my newly grounded and rounded musical expression would evaporate as soon as the corn husks were buried in the land.

Until today.

Today I began to feel passion and excitement, because, after too long an absence, I have become involved in the professional process of making music. Mind, larynx and hands can once again synchronise in the challenge of learning new skills and freeing the truths from the body in order to produce joyous vibration. A timely renaissance.

How did I let myself get in the way? Ah, yes. I was holding my breath. Fool.

Exhalation and exhilaration are the only tools of liberty. Breathe. Laugh.

In October, I paid a visit to the new guerrilla art space at 20 Hoxton Square. Fabulous, unpretentious, stripped-out warehouse where exhibitions are not scheduled in advance but are booked on the basis of a fluid and current requirement.

The title says it all. Jaap de Vries’s paintings and sculptures seek to capture the conflict between anatomical decay and our interior recognition of that process, thus creating the kind of visceral and uncomfortable experience to which I am most responsive.

The human body is pared back, entrails exposed. Mutation becomes not just biology in rebellion, but a creative flux, reinvention. His statues, harnessed or tied, hang dispassionately from the ceiling, the discomfort not critical enough to warrant attempted escape.

Landscapes are a Siberian explosion of metallic sky and fallen trees, silver birches rising lacerated but alive from the layers of mulch. Polluted water reflects sunsets and verdure.

Standing there with my own scars, both visible and invisible, I asked myself the age-old questions of whether such reflection can be considered real and, if not, what worth there is in developing the inner courtyard. Ultimately, does absolute truth consist of absolute submission to biological impulse? If dualism is discarded, what is left but the organism? Does the soul indeed nestle in the neurosystem?

Lovers, skulls and vertebrae stripped away from their outer coating, transmit spontaneous joy, yet we are reminded that, “love does not feed you.” Perhaps love is simply a bonus of an affluent society where daily bread is accorded precedence over trespass. Yet therein lies the tension between the intellectual and spiritual pursuit of love and the biological wail of passion, which, if we have a mind to, may be articulated as art.

Inconvenient beauty steers a cybernetic course between base knowledge and divine aspiration, crowned by the overriding recognition that Life is not just a tendency, but a fierce choice.

I'm gradually consolidating all my blogs, which have their own diaspora all over the internet. Here's an old one.

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After living in a (relative) self-imposed cultural desert for some time, I have recently indulged in an orgy of theatre. Two productions stand out.

First, off to a condemned five-storey warehouse in Wapping to see Punchdrunk's Faust, which I can only describe as installation mated with capoeira inside an Edward Hopper painting. The "audience" ("participants" would be a better word) are compulsorily masked, anonymity allowing for greater freedom of movement, intimate gazing and a heightened impulse for naughtiness. The play is a mosaic of moments that can never be fully grasped as the actors disappear, fleet-footed, into the shadows. Our own choices, our muscularity, stamina or passivity, our dreams, our fears, all determined the quality of artistic feedback. We lurked in murky hotel rooms where sexual liaisons were being danced out, made our own obeisance at the discrete voudou shrine and scurried along candle-lit corridors like the shades of the damned. Three hours later, we unmasked ourselves to enter the illusive haven of the blues bar, where the devil's own music played until our final expulsion. This production has now finished, but I await the next one keenly.

Next up Attempts on Her Life at The National Theatre. A huge TV studio is inhabited by a group of "creatives" who, through a two-hour live broadcast, act out snippets and sound-bites of life at the tail-end of the 20th Century. What is so disarming and powerful is the juxtaposition between the prosaic and tricksy theatrical staging and the resultant dream image on screen. Both brutal and funny, it proves that "the camera never lies" is a koan for the development of media spin as an artform during the '90s. On until the 10th May. Don't miss it.