The Sky is Not Blue - in conversation with Sandie Zand

For those of you who have not yet had the pleasure, let me introduce Sandie Zand.  I met Sandie on Authonomy several years ago and consider her a very good friend.  But, as you'll know, I don't recommend books just because I like the author. Sandie is, quite simply, a stunning writer.  As I read her (newly published) book The Sky is Not Blue I found myself nodding, reading bits aloud, underscoring and annotating (this shocks Sandie but, hey, I always scribble in books I love).  

Anyhow, let me introduce the book.  Here's the blurb:

The Sky is Not Blue

A dark tale of oppressive friendship and the fallibility of memory.

Photographer Chrissy returns hoem for the first time in 34 years, unsure if she caused the death of her best friend, Pat, in 1973. 

Her parents now dead, she plans to sell up quickly and leave.  But the past returns, unbidden and cloudy. Elderly neighbour Alice and childhood friend Marion seem unable or unwilling to fill in the gaps. And Spencer, the nihilistic lover she'd assumed dead, is alive and producing commercial art for tourists.  

Memories of events leading up to Pat's death must be recovered if Chrissy is to find out what it is she's been running from all those years.

And then I asked Sandie if she'd answer a few questions for me.  And she did.  And this is what I asked and what she replied. It's long...but hey, some things are worth the time, huh?  

EJ: Practicalities first.  There is a very real sense of place in the book, of this small seaside town.  Was it inspired by anywhere in particular?  I can’t help but think of St Ives in Cornwall with its wild coast and connection with art.  What is it about seaside towns for you?  I know they are a bit of a passion.

SZ: I think place can be as much a character as any person in a story. It influences how situations will pan out – put people and problems into different settings and you’ll get quite different outcomes. For me, seaside towns and their particular influence are a quiet obsession. Perhaps it’s their rhythm, how they ebb and flow seasonally, or because they seem to sit on the edge of a vast nothing. Or maybe it’s just their faded quality, the way they echo a very different past.  I don’t really know, but they do fascinate me (in fact my next book is also set in a seaside town!).

The Cornish coast influenced this story. I wrote chunks of descriptive narrative for Sky in Porthleven, on holiday one year. I’d wander down and sit at the harbour in the evening – absorbing sight, sound and smell – it was bliss. The unused Victorian lifeboat house there was a muse, and yes, there’s a bit of St Ives in the mix too, whereas the cliff-top scenes were inspired by a wonderful bramble-strewn path above Portscatho, further along the coast.

The central image that runs through the book is that of flying.  What does that mean to you?  Is it a symbol of freedom? Escape from a mundane world that is bound to disappoint?  Or does it have some other, more personal, resonance?

Flying is maybe about growth as much as escape – a stretching out to find more – but yes, here it also signifies desperation, a deluded hopelessness, an act of reckless stupidity.

I suffer from vertigo so, for me, flying is both excitement and fear. I wanted that duplicity for my characters. I wanted them to be equally possessed of hope and despair, their angst manifesting in an extreme situation – a life-changing act – with, as said above, their specific setting providing a very specific outcome.

Life is seen through filters throughout Sky – through art, music, a camera lens, and memory.  Do we filter life?  How do you filter your own life? 

I think we filter in various ways, consciously and subconsciously, both in what we give of ourselves and what we absorb of others. It’s a simultaneous two-way thing, our perceptions and filters influencing in both directions throughout life.

Artists/musicians/photographers and the like interpret what they see or feel to reflect their own individual perceptions – driven by their own filters – and we then interpret their interpretations using our own personal filters… it’s a labyrinth – a complex Hall of Mirrors.

Photography, for me, is particularly fascinating because what’s captured appears to be absolute, to be real, yet of course it’s not.

Memory is another theme of course.  Chrissy questions her memory and the events of the pivotal night when she and Pat stood facing the ocean on the top of the old lifeboat house.  But it’s not just that central memory that constantly shifts and changes, and it seems meaningful that Malc’s father has Alzheimer's; that Alice is the preserver of sacred memory – the hoarder maybe.  Where is memory held – in wallpaper and carpet, in music, in photographs?  Does it matter if we can’t remember ‘the truth’? 

If flawed memories only ever caused pain and accurate memories only ever brought joy, then finding the truth would be vital. But they don’t. They hurt and salve in equal measure, and pinpointing the truth is nigh on impossible, so maybe it’s more important to reserve the greater effort to the now than try so hard to catch and contain something as elusive as Truth.

And, of course, at heart there is no ‘truth’ and memory is fallible.  Chrissy says: ‘As any photographer can tell you, reality is a perception. The pleasure of the camera is its capacity for illusion.’  And again…‘The water is not blue.  The sky is not blue.  I’m not even sure the hills are green.’  What is reality for you?  Are you a quantum fantasist or a pragmatic ‘realist’?

Ha ha, I quite like the sound of being a “quantum fantasist”. I don’t know what I am. Benefit of being ambidextrous/equal-sided brain-wise and a Libran is, I think, a tendency to change my mind as often as my underwear. 

I’m not sure there is a definitive reality. It’s just what we imagine it to be at any given time. Trick is, I reckon, to stay flexible enough to not constrain oneself in some permanent obstinate state. Growth is all. Change is good. The sky isn’t actually blue, but as long as it looks blue then that’s okay, right? We like blue skies, so let’s have them!

At one point Chrissy says ‘…if I had to describe my teenage years in one word, it would be surreal.’  Is that the word you’d use for your own teenage years?  Sky is astute on the question of teenage friendships and feelings.  How much did you call on your own memories of your own teens?

There was something of the mousy haired girl in me as a teen, yes. I imagine there is in many people – that sense of slight inadequacy when growing up. It’s part of that process of finding your way, and so vital at that point what influences come in.

Chrissy doesn’t realise her own potential – her own validity – in the shine of her friend Pat and her lover Spencer. She’s as vital as anyone but her unhappy home life maybe leaves her more vulnerable to the awkwardness of teenage years, and thus more vulnerable to the input from these two close friends.

I wasn’t the most stable teen, but I wasn’t the most unstable either. I knew a Pat or two. I can’t say they did me any favours, but it could be argued that without them I’d not have had as much material for this book.

In many ways, Sky is a dark book, with a deep sense of futility and hopelessness running through. Spencer is the arch nihilist of course.  ‘Pointless, purposeless lives. Why do they not see it?’ he says watching the supposedly happy holidaymakers.  ‘They look like ants, they behave like ants – pre-programmed to reproduce, pre-disposed to spend their brief lives replicating the actions of millions before them.  What they call enjoyment is a social construction to justify and soothe and make it seem a valid passing of time.  They can’t see their own stupidity because they don’t want to see it.’  It’s a view that Chrissy catches, like a virus.  ‘We humans are nothing more than upright carnivores who captivate, copulate, replicate and die.  The complexities with which we pass the time, justify our presence, convince ourselves we’re different, are a delusion.’

It chimes with me but do you share a view that many would see as bleak? 

It is a bleak view but I don’t think it necessarily means life is dire. I’m not a nihilist. I subscribe more to the theory (I think it was Niezsche) that we should accept futility but perpetuate the pretence of purpose, revel in the knowledge we are advanced enough to recognise it as futile but optimistic enough to make the best of it. I’ve paraphrased madly there – don’t want to spend time looking it up as I’ll just get horribly distracted – but basically, it says accepting our futility is an academic exercise, choosing to live on in it is a spiritual one.

So, I believe we should enjoy life, futile though it may be. We are merely carnivores who captivate, copulate, replicate and die… the trick is to enjoy doing it. The other options are pointlessly dark.

There is also a cynicism that comes through about the role of Love (capitalised in the book).  Chrissy talks about Alice spending sixty years alone because her heart was broken with what seems like incredulity and even disdain.  She talks about the great illusion, the delusion of life.  ‘The only way to tolerate the delusion is to accept that without Love, whatever we perceive it to be, we have no protection from the ultimate truth – our pointlessness.’  Can love/Love life-proof us in any way?  Or is that really just another delusion, a trick Nature plays on us to make sure we reproduce?

Love is a social construction. Reproduction is a biological drive. Attracting a partner is a biological drive – we are slaves to our innate purpose here. Love, this thing we have created, is a magnificent invention, and yes it’s vital now, I think. Of all human achievements we praise, we seem to ignore how humans invented Love – what a feat!

It’s not nature’s trick though. Nature permits us to fornicate wildly. It’s evolved civilisation that’s necessitated the delusion. As civilised beings, we must temper our innate urge to fuck, constrain it within the context of ‘Love’, the subfolder “monogamy” in fact.  Would we prefer to be like other animals?? Do we collectively regret this conception of Love? No, I don’t think so… it’s sublime. It’s led to a whole raft of poetry, lyrics, fiction and everyday people living everyday lives - what would we do without it??

Animals don’t (to my knowledge!) have poetry.  That’s the real price of freedom to fuck, is it not?

‘When we take off our elegant clothes and lie on our high status beds, we fuck and grunt like all the other animals.  It’s the only purpose we have.’

Do you agree? 

Ha, yes, see last question. Of course this is our biological purpose (though nothing explains the why of it) but acceptance of this fact doesn’t mean we can’t relax and enjoy the construct of Love.

Let’s pretend. Why not?

I do wish, though, we were slightly less uptight about the whole thing. We’ve gone (as a western species) from rampant acceptance of our biological urges, to Victorian repression of them, to a supposed liberation (60s, 70s), and ultimately this hideous modern obsession with sex – for all the ‘wrong’ reasons – whereby we pretend we’re au fait with it all, very post-Victorian, and yet actually are more screwed up now than I think we probably were in 1813.

It’s a shame. Sex is glorious, our urges are glorious, our determination – as civilised citizens – to constrain our urges is glorious (if not amusing, but that’s glorious too)… so why aren’t we happy? Why are we so utterly ashamed and confused and scared, still??

None of this has anything to do with my book, of course, which is almost sex-scene free really, but perhaps that’s because I’m reluctant to explore it in fiction because it’s being done endlessly, almost an expectation, certainly a modern whim, and I don’t want to be part of that. But perhaps, too, it’s because such things are SO innate they can’t accurately be captured in text and are best left to the imagination and reality of readers, rather than foisted on them as the decade’s writerly meme.

Even art can’t hold back the tide.  ‘No matter what can be achieved – no matter how much of anything can be achieved – we are nothing in the end. Gone. No more than a good idea, a fleeting muse.  Even the mavericks. Even the creators.  It doesn’t matter what the something was when all that remains is debris – the image of a burning guitar, a smooth granite orb, words that will never be fully understood.  It’s all debris in the end.’

And yet you continue to write, to create.  Why do we bother to make art in a meaningless world? 

Ah, because anyone who’s remotely interested – in their own narrow viewpoint – would recognise that I’m talking about Morrison, Hepworth and Joyce. For as long as one person remembers the creator of a work, then Chrissy’s negative view about “debris” is wrong.

This is a very visual book.  Aside from the radio, there is little music and the one quote comes from Leonard Cohen.  J  Is the sound of sea and sky the true soundtrack of the book? 

There’s a part of me that would love to do a soundtrack – music/lyrics are hugely important in the process of inspiration and writing. But equally there’s a part of me knows how bored other folk get with others foisting their choices and favourites and opinions on the world. Maybe readers should just read a story for what it is – a thing isolated from its creator..?

But the sound of the sea is what I’d hope the reader would hear. I’d play the glorious refrain from Tristan und Isolde – a Wagnerian score which captures the repetitive beat, and orgasmic return, of the sea better than any other musical piece I know. But Tristan und Isolde is a story of its own – perhaps this is why it’s hard to find music to fit a novel? Each musical piece already has a story, an attachment. But the sound of the sea, crashing endlessly against granite, is very much the sound of my story: nothing my character, Chrissy, experienced after came close, for her, to that sound of the end… the beat of a winter tide, angry against rock, furious in its greed and purpose.

‘It’s the vastness I love,’ says Spencer.  ‘The sea, the sky, the sheer bloody space.’ ‘It’s the vastness I fear,’ says Chrissy.  Do you love or fear the vastness?

Both. One of the best things about writing is being able to justify having conflicting viewpoints.

Marion sees it differently, of course.  ‘(happiness)…is this,’ Marion pointed towards the family, waved an arm at the sky, still blue, still sunny.  ‘It’s all this.  Things that make us smile, laugh, a good wine, the chance to sit and relax.’  Are these small things, these ‘in the moment, of the moment’ things and realisations the only way to get through?  Is there any hope?

There’s always hope if a person wants it.

Marion is a conscience. She’s the adherent, loyal subject in a world where abidance by the rules prevails. She’s blindly accepting, socially vital, willing to conform and perpetuate Life’s petty purpose. At times, I wish I were more like her. I love her and hate her in equal measure, in fact, and found her hard to write, because she’s a conscience. She tries hard not to question life. Even in her darkest moments – where she feels, for a moment, regret – she battles it, vanquishes it. 

She’s almost a mantra, really. There’s no guarantee she wholly believes what she spouts. Yes, the small things are what can make a day seem worthwhile, can make a person feel happy, and yes, it can be good to be reminded of this, and yes, it gives us hope. But perhaps our failure here is in expecting happiness to be a fixed state of being. Which, even if possible, would surely be inadvisable as it’d leave a person with no measure, no contrast. We’d become incredibly complacent.

So we need the Marions of this world to remind us to pause, reflect and enjoy the simple things. And maybe we should all strive a little harder to be this person, but not worry too much if we fail, and – maybe more importantly – not let the mantra stop us living life passionately, because there’s a risk too that our conscience can act as a sedative and we end up living a bland version of happiness and thinking it all that’s possible… and if we all lived like that, where would poetry be then?

The last line is this: ‘Their fury is endless.’  Talk us through that?

Things carry on. Regardless of human ego, the world continues to turn – we are but a blip in time. The waves will pound – they don’t change – we may put things in their way, but their sole purpose remains… they are waves, they pound – it’s what they do.

In respect of this story, the waves continue to pound no matter what else has happened, how many people’s lives have changed, how many folk try to do things, how many lifeboat houses are left unused, abandoned, despite their initial aim to help man harness the sea – the sea continues to pound, against any object man may put in its way, it cares not about silly girls on a cold roof on a winter’s night.

Nature wins. And perhaps that’s the core: man’s intent on social construction cannot defeat the purpose of ‘nature’… which is just to continue to exist, to repeat, to perpetuate itself.

Even though I am sure The Sky is Not Blue would have found a mainstream publisher quite easily, you made a very definite decision to publish with Mad Bear Books, an indie publisher with which you are yourself closely involved.  Can you explain why? 

Mad Bear was originally set up by Freddie (Omm) and I was merely a sounding board at that time with no coherent thought of going the same route. But I’d already gone off the idea of mainstream publishers by then – mainly because the demands made on writers, to produce and conform, didn’t seem to necessarily be reflected in the returns most of them could expect to see for that effort.

I helped Freddie get Honour ready for publication through Mad Bear in early 2012 and found it an incredibly satisfying process. Between us we have a set of skills well-suited to publishing, have similar thoughts on the strengths independent publishers have over their counterparts in the big publishing houses, and feel equally passionate about the importance of putting out quality products. The synergy was there, we worked well together and it was fun.  

So my involvement grew. I saw how publishing through an independent, and being very much in control of that process, would be way more satisfying to me than being a puppet of some large publishing house with a commerce-focused bunch of shareholders to satisfy, and thus I did it!  

What other books will Mad Bear publish?  Tell us about your vision for the company.

We have lots on the go! The absolute beauty of being in control is the freedom to decide when and what we do, and to be able to select the sort of projects large publishing houses can’t touch for fear of no immediate financial return. We both earn a living in other ways, so what we do with Mad Bear Books is purely for the love of all things literary.

Next up is Freddie’s new thriller, The Trashman, now in the process of final edits, followed by my next novel, a dark comedy, The Town that Danced.  Freddie’s also doing the first proper translation into English of a novel by Eduard von Keyserling, Wellen (Waves), which will be published initially in instalments on the Mad Bear website. Meanwhile, I’m working on a hefty and exciting project with a local artist to create a coffee-table style book, about women’s relationships with their breasts, which will raise money for cancer research.

We plan to publish poetry – another area where the small publisher can put literary pleasure over cash – and we’re very interested in an historical novel about a gay Chinese pirate, being written by a chap called Dickie, an English tour guide in Hong Kong. It’s based on a real-life character, set during the opium wars – Victorian high politics meets low down smuggling of drugs, contraband, and humans – and is the sort of unusual and unique offering we think well-suited to the Mad Bear stable.

That’s just the start of it – lots of stuff. And that’s what non-mainstream publishing is about: doing things because we can. It’s great.

And what next from Sandie Zand? 

As above. My next book is a dark comedy – The Town that Danced – inspired by stories of dancing plagues. It’s about a town tipped into madness and how far people will go when society’s constraints are relaxed. After Sky¸ which was dark in a less fun way, it’s been a lot of fun to write barking mad characters and humorous scenes – and good to reign in my natural tendency to put heart and open veins on the page for all to see, I think.  For now, at least...

Okay, so now you know what to do, right?  The Sky is Not Blue by Sandie Zand - available from Amazon here. For more on Mad Bear Books see the website here.  

One man, three witches and a hell of a lot of sex, magic and…steak.

Remember my anti-guru?  The guy whose book Symphonic Bridges kickstarted my ‘rejuvenation’ –y’know, the whole weight loss/exercise/meditation/spirituality malarkey?  Well, he’s written another one.  The Cave.  To be fair, he wrote it a while back but, up until now, it was only available in Polish. And now – it’s been translated into English. 

Here’s what I had to say about it…but don't take my word for it - check it out yourself.  

The Cave by Marek Stefanowicz

I’ve been waiting impatiently for The Cave to be translated into English for some considerable time. It’s a novel that’s also a guidebook on how to live consciously. But it’s not remotely dour and worthy – it’s packed with sex and has lashings of humour. So, really, what’s not to like?

Maste has vanished. His wife Margarita (yes, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita inevitably comes to mind) begs her friend Natasha to help. Natasha is a psychologist and a fortune-teller but, most importantly of all, she’s a witch. Her sisters, Olga and Irene, also highly intelligent (and beautiful) witches, agree to join Natasha on a wildcap quest across the world (each part of the book is set on a different continent) to find out what happened to the missing ‘madman’. 

It’s an unusual book, quite different from Marek’s previous titles, the semi-autobiographical Symphonic Bridges and the elliptical Pro-vocation (written in ‘real time’ on the website Authonomy). 

The Cave is a Rabelaisian, almost Milesian, romp, using humour to offset the deep spiritual and philosophical deliberations of the novel. Its language veers from the pedantically anal to the rhetorically extravagant (or, as it has been described, ‘grotesquely flamboyant’), playful, humorous and sometimes joyfully crude - as wild as a broomstick ride across the skyline of Manhattan (in lieu of Moscow) by night. It enjoys the same love of language as Symphonic Bridges but is, I suspect, more accessible by dint of its strong characterisation and surprising shifts in location and pace.

What’s it about? Really? Well, everyone sees something different in a book, of course, but to my mind it’s about life, about conscious living, about the stormy search for Self. Each sister undergoes a profound personal journey in the course of the book, changing into…something else? Olga takes the slow ‘baby steps’ route to enlightenment, becoming the Mistress of Breath while Natasha metamorphoses into the miraculous Mistress of Light. But perhaps the most appealing character is the bawdy, hard-living, tough-talking, no-nonsense Irene who scoffs at her sisters’ increasing spirituality and sticks firmly to her regime of whiskey-swigging, fag-smoking, steak-eating and casual sex (with the strict proviso that one night is always enough). She’s an every(wo)man, a modern-day pilgrim navigating the world in black leather and high heels. A head-turning heartbreaker, she is undoubtedly a Mistress of Sex who may eventually become the Mistress of Love. 

Ah, love. Love. It’s the bottom line, of course. And I love (Love) that The Cave makes us ask questions. Who are we? What are our limits? Do we actually have limits? What is consciousness? How far can science or gurus provide us with answers? What is the purpose of life? What is the one question? Is Love the answer? The reason?

Then, just when your head starts spinning (or turning into a pumpkin) there’s another shift and you’re eavesdropping on Friends in New York or sharing a group hug with the cast of Lost, diving into bed with an animagus or getting high with a snorkel in the bath. 

Which (witch?) is just as it should be. For I don’t believe spirituality needs to be po-faced and dour, worthy and hairshirtish. Far from it. The Cave is a total delight, a metaphysical masterpiece. There’s even a cat – called Behemoth of course.

Marek is an extraordinary writer and, as the world latches onto the need for a spirituality grounded in everyday unreality, I strongly suspect his books will become cult classics. 

The Cave is available in paperback or as an ebook for Kindle. Click the links.  

Second thing

Second thing.  A skinny Amazon envelope. I hadn’t ordered anything.  I opened it, slowly, with a slight frown. Leonard Cohen’s new album. Old Ideas.  I didn’t even need to look at the note to know who it was from. ‘Lots of love, Horace.’  My oldest dearest friend, Jane.  Horace? Well, that’s another story.

What can I say? I love Leonard Cohen. Deeply. Passionately. Always have. Suspect I always will.

I love music, hate to be without it, but most of my musical loves wax and wane.  But Cohen has been a constant in my life since I was, what?  Eight or nine maybe?  My brother came home with Songs of Leonard Cohen one day and we all fell in love, instantly.  Well, not my father perhaps. 

There was always music in our house when I was a child. All sorts. Shedload of classical in the living room.  Meanwhile, up in our shared room, my teenage sister played singles obsessively as she shimmied from one love to another; a string of boyfriends breaking her heart (rarely) but mainly having theirs broken.  The soundtrack to all this longing: Dusty Springfield, Sandie Shaw, The Beatles, Marianne Faithfull, the Stones. Then she met a guitarist and it was all Hendrix and Clapton, Cream and Yes. And I danced behind, entranced. But throughout, Cohen’s mesmerising guitar and his poetry always plucked at our hearts.

Songs from a Room followed by Songs of Love and Hate. And I wasn’t even out of junior school. Nobody suggested it wasn’t suitable listening for a child. Was it?

Jane and I met in 1971 but we didn’t become friends until quite some years later. After the release of New Skin for the Old Ceremony for sure and in time to be appalled by the radical shift of Death of a Lady’s Man. What was he thinking?  He’d wanted a spare sparse sound for Songs of Leonard Cohen – yes, even more sparse than it already was. So how did he come to be seduced by Spector?  Apparently he (Cohen) called the end result ‘grotesque’. Yeah, right. It’s a shame as the songs themselves are beautiful – but the arrangements are overblown, barbaric. I tried listening again today – and couldn’t bear it. Had to find later arrangements on YouTube.

I took Leonard with me to college; played him in my tiny coffin-shaped attic room, letting his growl of a voice stream out over my balcony into the streets below. Listened to him as I looked across the houses into other people’s lives, the students and the prostitutes.  And went to see him live in Manchester, at the Apollo. My first ‘grown-up’ gig, the first time I’d seen people sit in their seats for a whole set. The first time I’d seen people strike matches or hold up lighters and sway to the music. The audience felt old too – middle-aged women, not students like me. I didn’t care – I still loved him.

He came back to London with me and was there, not played so often maybe, but still a friend for the dark nights of the soul, when the drink and drugs and clubbing didn’t take me far enough away from myself.

We weren’t such close companions during my time in America because, really, there were so many other, new sounds to hear and somehow he didn’t feel right in those big wide open spaces of sea and endless roads and desert and canyon and prairie. But then, every so often, I’d sit by the fire late at night and pull out an album and let his chords pull me back home.

And yes, back to London we went and by now people laughed. ‘Gloomy old Leonard Cohen’ they said. But no, no, no. Not gloomy. Not really. Just so beautiful. I didn’t buy any more albums though, not after the travesty of DoaLM.   My mother stayed faithful though – bought each and every one. But I wouldn’t listen. I stayed with the old.  Until, not so many years ago, when I heard Hallelujah and found myself in floods of tears.  Who the hell sang that, I wondered and found out it was Jeff Buckley. Raced out and bought more of his stuff only to find that, no, he hadn’t written it – the cheater – it was Leonard’s.  Well, of course it was.

I saw him live again, a few years ago, at the O2 stadium, the old Millennium Dome. Jane again. ‘Come and stay, I’ve got tickets for Leonard Cohen,’ she said.  In Manchester I’d been right near the front, close enough to watch his fingers flicker over the frets. But the only tickets left this time were pitched up so high I felt dizzy.  Incredible musicians. Amazing man.  He’d lost the lot by this point, been ripped off, gone bankrupt, had to sing for his supper once more.

Funny thing, I never knew much about his actual life. I don’t read biographies. I rarely read interviews. I don’t even really like music vids (except the most vague and atmospheric) as they colour the music for me. I like to make my own relationship with music; to weave my own stories around it.

And so here I am, all those years on, sitting in a cold room, once again, listening to Cohen. Today I have been through all his albums, one by one.  Some songs wash over me; some catch me in the throat, in the solar plexus, in the heart. Who needs words when you’ve got Cohen, eh?

Favourite album? The new one is growing on me.  Ah hell. Songs of Leonard Cohen has some of my all-time favourite songs.  It’s tight.  Between that and New Skin for the Old Ceremony. Both just plain agonisingly beautiful. Songs? We could be here a long time. Here are just two. One from the first, one from the last. Which would be my middle one? My second thing?  Ah, I wonder.  

I hate...

I don’t hate much. I’m pretty equable most of the time. But right now two things are really pissing me off. Thing One: Muppets. Sorry, don’t get them. Maybe I’ve not met the good ones but Kermit and Miss Piggy are just plain…irritating. I want to light matches to their fur. It’s not the puppet thing. Truly.  I like Mongrels. Actually I like it quite a lot. Probably more than I should. I started watching it thanks to James who,  come to think about it, probably shouldn’t be watching it at all. Anyway.

Thing Two. Valentine’s Day. I spent last VD ensconced in a spa, dodging canoodling couples in the steam room and being the only person eating solo in the candlelit and balloon-festooned dining room. Frankly I’m not sure I’ve recovered yet.  I still wince at anything red and heart-shaped.

I abhor stiff scentless red roses. I don’t eat chocolates.  I don’t drink champagne. I can’t abide balloons. Why is it that Valentine’s infantalises normally sensible adults?  I’m all for indulging one’s childlike sense of fun but that doesn’t extend to going gooey over heart-shaped balloons. Balloons?  It’s not a fecking children’s birthday party for feck’s sake!  And soft toys – that’s the other one. Big pastel-coloured teddy bears clutching hearts with ‘I WUV U’. WTF? And the baby language – snugly wuggly baby waby possum blossom?

It’s not some middle-aged cynical thing either. I dreaded it way back when I was a teenager. In fact, the one time I managed to have a sort of boyfriend when I was at school, I ditched him the week before because I couldn’t bear the thought of it.  The certainty of disappointment. Not that he wouldn’t do or buy anything for it, but that it would be…dutiful.

 

And it’s not that I’m not a romantic. Far from it. It’s just that I can’t bear the commercial, fake, anodyne bastardisation of love.  As if love can be bought with a ready-made card and a token present. Or, even worse, the need to prove love with something expensive and ‘precious’.  The eating out in restaurants bits? Garn.  Something just smug and self-satisfied or dutiful and sad. Not to mention over-priced. 

If you like it, great. Go for it. Good luck to you. But me, I don’t feel love needs one special day out of a year. I don’t feel love needs to be put on show. I feel lovers should surprise one another with spontaneous affection/passion/preferably both or with seriously thoughtful, heartful tokens (not costly, but from the gut, heart, soul).  Whenever I’ve been out on Valentine’s Day (night) it’s all felt rather…sad somehow.  So many people going through the motions; doing what is expected; proclaiming to the world ‘I’m in a couple’ like it’s a badge of honour, a sign of belonging. It’s like cats spraying or dogs pissing - marking out their territory.  Should you really need to do that? 

Anonymous declarations of tormented passion, on the other hand?  Now those I do get.  I’ve always felt that Valentine’s Day shouldn’t be for the neat cosy couples, for domestic love, but for insecure, unhitched, unbridled, unsaddled, unstirruped (any more riding adjectives?) lust and longing. Is there anything more delicious than the frisson of an unknown admirer?  My father never understood this. Bless him, he’d send me Valentine Day cards with ‘Guess who?’ written on them in his very distinctive script. I loved him for it (he knew how the girls at school would sneeringly ask, ‘And how many did you get?’) but I craved mystery, suspense, not knowing. I wanted imagination, for feck’s sake!  

Did I get it? No. Not really.  Maybe that’s why I’ve got such a downer on the whole thing. Maybe I’m lamenting a youth in which I didn’t get the hopeless gesture; the beautiful poem; the gut-wrenching love song; the hand-made card…that nobody took me on a midnight picnic or swimming in a moonlit lake or blindfolded me and…

Or maybe I’m just odd. 

‘Can we agree not to do Valentine cards this year?’ I said to Adrian this morning.  I would hasten to add that I had bought him two packs of socks from Tesco earlier in the week and presented them to him with a wry, ‘Happy Valentine’s Day, darling.’ 

‘Are you sure?’ he said, his eyes first registering alarm (that he’d clearly forgotten) and then lighting up at the realisation that he wouldn’t have to race down surreptitiously to the shop.

‘Absolutely. You know I hate it.’

‘Well yes, but that’s what men are supposed to say, not women.’

I frowned, with a slight growl. ‘Are you saying I’m a man?’

‘No way, fella,’ he replied. 

Bacchanalia

I think I may be developing a bit of an exercise addiction. Since my boot camp experience, I’ve found I become a little ‘twitchy’ if I sit still too long. I’ve discovered that getting a serious sweat on is a pretty effective way of banishing my natural tendency to gothic gloom and over-thinking.


Meditation is good, it really is – but it tends to encourage my inner dippiness. Whereas seriously tough aerobic exercise puts me into clear ‘no thought’ territory which, in my head, is a seriously good place to be.

I walk the dog, I’m a regular at the gym; I do yoga. I go to Zumba class on Friday night and shimmy and shake. Last Friday I was talking to Nicky, who really does have a hardcore exercise habit.
'If you think this is wild, you oughta come to the Wednesday class in Tiverton,’ said Nicky. She raised her eyebrows meaningfully.
I’d heard about that class: it was legendary. 80 wild women crammed into one small hall; sweat dripping down the walls; more tattoos than a ship-full of sailors; 90 minutes of wild abandon.

‘Anyhow,’ she continued. ‘There’s space in the car if you wanna come.’ Hellfire. It was a challenge.
‘Okay,’ I said with a shrug.
‘Don’t wear too much,’ she added. Oh shit.

Way-hay! The hall was heaving and, as the music started up, off we went – one huge rhythmic surge of abandoned female energy. I’m not a huge team-player; I don’t usually like being one of the crowd, but there’s something weirdly mesmeric about moving in perfect sync with the shoal. A wild whoop rose up from behind me; followed by a chorus of cat-calls and wild whistles. Bloody hell, it was turning into a Bacchanalia. Were they really only swigging water?  As the sweat started to pour between my shoulder-blades, as my feet salsaed and merengued and calypsoed all by themselves, I found myself fighting the urge to click my teeth and shout ‘Ayyyyeeeeee’ and even ‘Ole Ole!’

‘C’mon, into a large circle,’ yelled the instructor, Debbie, who has to have the most mobile hips I’ve ever seen on a skinny woman. She was going for it something mental, tugging women in to dance with her.

‘Hey girls, we have a man in the house,’ she yelled. Holy shit! One guy amidst 80 women? He had some balls. A roar of approval went up from the rank and file. Jeez, they were going to tear him limb from limb. But Debbie pulled him into the middle and, fair play, he got down and dirty with his hip thrusts to shrieks of approval.

‘Well, that was fun,’ I said, as we got back into the car and tried to clear the steam from the windows.
‘That was insane,’ said Ellie.
‘I tell ya, that’s gotta improve your sex life,’ said Nicky.
We burst out laughing and then, grinning broadly, retreated into our own private reveries for a bit.

As we spun off the valley road, Nicky broke the silence.  'Hey,' she said. 'There's a four hour charity Zumbathon coming up.  With alcohol.  Anybody game?'

Holy cow.


Why is Zumba SO good?  Cos you get to dance to stuff like this....



 

Easy-to-open gussets

So, I’m sitting at my desk literally weeping with laughter. Adrian pokes his head round the corner. ‘You okay? Are you crying?’
I take a deep breath. Except – shit – I forgot, I can’t.
‘I’m fine,’ I gasp. ‘I’m laughing at Twitter.’
‘You sound very odd.’
‘Yeah, well that’s because I can’t breathe properly.’

Let’s retrace our steps a little eh? Got an email from a PR asking if I wanted to check out the Trinny & Susannah range of 'Original Magic Knickers' Remember Trinny and Susannah? The two fashion journalists infamous for kneading women’s breasts on makeover TV? They used to rattle on about ‘Magic Knickers’ all the time.  About the need for the 'right foundation garments' - hmm.  Turns out they have a whole range of the things - if you've got a 'problem area' they have something to squeeze it into submission.

‘Oh, go on then,’ I said. I’ve lost three stone lately and am exercising like a demon but, hey, a bit of extra firming never hurt. I’d tried variations on the ‘magic knicker’ bit before and, frankly, they were a joke. The damn things just rolled down into a thick uncomfortable expensive wodge.

Anyhow, I’d forgotten the whole conversation until yesterday when they arrived. The Magic Tummy Tucker Vest (‘reduces fat rolls and smoothes out the silhouette’) and the All in One Body Shaper (‘creates a slimming effect for buttocks and tummy’).

I was chatting (um, doing business) on Twitter at the time. So, what the heck, I thought I’d try them out live.

They are tight, darn tight. It took me about four minutes to wriggle into the Vest and, once on, I had a moment of total panic. The damn thing was so snug it felt like an iron lung (or how I imagine an iron lung might feel). I was hyperventilating within minutes and going quite light-headed. But after a bit, it actually felt quite nice – sort of like being hugged on an ongoing basis. Okay, that sounds a bit sad and needy, doesn’t it? More pragmatically it was warm. Definite plus.

Onto the Body Shaper. The descriptions for this one had me weeping with laughter all over again.
• ‘Allows you to wear your own bra whilst keeping the breasts in place.’
• ‘Banishes saddlebags and lifts the bottom.’
• And, my favourite....‘Easy-to-open gusset with double flaps that close automatically’

Okay, so now it was sounding like a very strange kind of sex outfit. I told Twitter about it.

@JDRevene: Good lord, now I'm going to have to Google that.




@BigFashionista: Say WHAT!!! Sounds like a plane with bomb doors underneath

@LindaSJones – sounds like heaven
@keatsbabe – but where does all the stuff you push around actually go? It has to ooze out somewhere
@belle_lulu: You have automatic double gusset flaps? You whore! ;)
@BigFashionista: Shudder. Although could be handy with unwanted advances. Get too fresh and it cuts your hand off.
@PolFreeman: Oh the visuals
@vwallop: can you wee in it?
@ElsieAnderton: *unfollows*

I told them that the gusset is a unique concept apparently; ‘created especially for T&S’. See #3 on the image - handily highlighted in red.  They didn’t give a toss.

@JDRevene: do you have a camera?
@belle_lulu: you know what’s coming don’t you? TWITPIC
@milla64: oh come on, get the camera out.
@JDRevene That’s a no on the camera, I take it!

Got it in one, JD!

@PolFreeman: You’re serving drinks? Cool

Okay, so my attempt at serious on-line real-time journalism had descended into a spectator sport - with popcorn. 
@ShoutyDad: Gusset is the most detumescent word in the dictionary. If a woman ever wanted to cool a man's ardour, just whisper it in his ear

Detumescent? Really? I thought I looked quite hot in it actually. I wandered into the kitchen where Adrian was making coffee. ‘What you reckon?’
‘Oh My God.’
‘Oh My God in a good way?’
‘Um, no. No. Just no.’
‘Why?’
‘I dunno. It’s like girdles. Your mother’s girdles.’
‘My mother didn’t wear a girdle.’
‘No, not YOUR mother. My mother.’
‘Right.’ So not going there in my imagination. ‘So you’re not into the idea of the easy-to-open gusset with double flaps?’
He shuddered. I swear to God the man shuddered. ‘It’s....it’s.....detumescent.’
That not being a word that tinkles readily off my husband’s lips, I wrinkled my eyes in suspicion. ‘You been following my Twitter feed?’
He looked abashed. ‘Yeah, well.’

So. There you have it. The Body Shaper is not a sexy turn-on (not in this house anyway). What? What? Oh, it’s not meant to be? My bad. Okay, so the serious review.

To answer the questions, no you don’t get bits popping out. Does it ‘pull you in’? Sort of. Put it this way, my leggings are baggier than usual. Is it comfortable? Actually and surprisingly, yes. Though I wouldn’t wear it for yoga. Nor, come to think of it, for a hot date. Yes, it might smooth out your figure but, trust me, you couldn’t shimmy out of this bugger in one sultry move. And, as we’ve already ascertained, the gusset issue is a no-goer. ;)


Original Magic Knickers come in 9 different styles, in a range of colours, starting from £26.
Trinny and Susannah website is down right now but you can buy from Debenhams