Girls v boys (warning, contains penes)

Now don’t get me wrong on this.  First things first: I adore my son. Totally, utterly adore him. But I do sometimes wish I’d had a daughter as well.  I always thought I would.  Way back, when my sister was having her fourth (or was it fifth?) child she said, very firmly, ‘I can see you with one child.  A girl. I just know it.’  Now, see, maybe this is why I’ve always been a bit wary of the psychic malarkey.   Cos while she got the one bit right, I have ended up being the only female in the house – yup, even the dogs have dicks.

But anyhow. I don’t have a daughter and, unless I become one of those ancient mothers with babies (which SO isn’t going to happen) it’s going to stay that way.

I was going to crash in front of the fire but, having successfully ignored the phone ringing, I caught a late tweet (perils of Twitter) from Charlie:

nice, innit? particularly without us being noisy

‘It’s Rachel’s birthday; you’re ignoring the phone! Just join us at the Thai. Now!’ 
What can you do?  So I whizzed down the pub to tell Adrian and James I was off out - again.  Problem with the pub is that you can’t whizz.  So, by the time I’d wriggled away and got to the restaurant, they were finishing off the noodles. 

Their youngest, G, is my godson and he’s delicious. But oh, I do love their girls so much:  The Mistress of All Evil and Princess Delicious.  The MoAE wanted to talk books and music and fashion.  The PD was keen to tell me how she’d pulled a fast one on the MoAE who now owed her a small fortune (plus interest).  I admired the PD for her business acumen but felt a stab of pity for MoAE who has as corrosive an Amazon habit as I do – books, music, shoes – we’re soul sisters.  She wanted to know about Samael – she was my first beta reader, inhaling every chapter as I wrote it.  So I told her about the rewrite: she wasn’t impressed.

‘But I loved the surfers, and the crusties.’

‘Yeah, but what the zombie beheading and the crucifixion and that unseemly tussle at the gates of Hell?’ I said with a sad shrug.

‘Oh God, yeah! You haven’t…??  You HAVEN'T???? But those were the best bits….’

I explained that editors seemed to think the book was too complex, had too many sub-plots, was too dark.

‘But we teens love horror!  We devour dark,’ she said with venom, with a firm emphasis on ‘we teens’ (when you’re thirteen that teen bit is mega important). ‘We love complex stuff.  We teens are deep.  Dumbing it down is just patronising.’

Well, couldn’t argue with that.  She did a great eyeroll (told you we were soul sisters). ‘I can’t think about it,' she said flapping her hands. 'Let's listen to this instead.’ She pulled me down and stuck an ear-bud in my ear. 

‘Are you trying to shock Jane?’ said her mother, ‘Cos it won’t work.’

‘I know, silly,’ said the MoAE. ‘She’s cool and trendy….’  See why I love this girl? 

‘You’ll love this,’ she continued. ‘It’s called….’ She dropped her voice…’I’ve Just Had Sex.’

So we listened to it together. Catchy tune so we started jigging around a bit.  And then I just howled with laughter.

‘Penis. He said penis….’ I covered my mouth with my hand. ‘Shit, sorry.’ (flapping my hands guiltily in the direction of my young godson). Rachel gave me The Look. ‘The penis bit was okay…’ she said witheringly.  ‘….the shit wasn’t.’  Damnit, bad godmother again.

‘But, but…you can’t say ‘penis’ in a song; it’s just such a ridiculous word.’
‘I know,’ said the MoAE happily.  ‘It’s hilarious.’

And it was and we just howled with laughter.  And then laughed more about hair and friends and how ridiculous boys can be.  And tried on sandals and considered doing the helium out of the birthday balloons, like we did last year. 

I left with the biggest smile on my face.  Big hugs from everyone apart from my godson who took my hand very carefully, bent over and gave it a soft, respectful kiss (he always does this – it is just edible).  When I got home, I asked James if he’d heard the Penis song. He frowned with total disdain. ‘God no. That’s disgusting. Why on earth would I listen to something like that?’

Girls and boys. Different creatures.   

But, but…just watch the video – it cracks me up.  Maybe it's a girl thing.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/lQlIhraqL7o

Internet friends and lovers



Jeez, he looks grumpy!

Adrian is perplexed.  While he’s been in Moscow, I’ve been meeting my Internet pals.  He just doesn’t *get* my love of internet ‘relationships’.  Yes, he blogs, he tweets, he FBs – but only because he feels he ‘ought to’ for work.  He frowns at tweet-ups, he doesn’t remotely understand why I keep meeting people I haven’t, er, met.

‘It’s like online dating,’ he said, sitting on the end of the bed.  ‘Except without the sex bit.’ Shaking his head.  ‘I don’t get that either.’

‘Aha,’ said I, sitting up and adjusting the SP.  ‘Now, see, if I were single, I’d do that like a shot.’

‘God no.’ He shuddered. ‘It’s not natural.’

‘Oh come on.  It’s practical.’ I put down my coffee cup so I could wave my arms around. ‘Look. Imagine I don’t exist.  Nothing nasty – I haven’t died or anything.  I’m just Not Here. In fact, let’s take James out of the equation too and make it simple.  You live here. Alone. Who you gonna date?’

‘I’d move,’ he said briskly. ‘I’d go to…hmm….Bristol. I’d go to pubs and clubs…’

I raised an eyebrow.  ‘No, you wouldn’t.’

He shrugged.  ‘Okay, I’d go to pubs and museums. I’d stalk women in military museums.’  Dear God.

‘Right.  But say you couldn’t move.  Say you worked here?’  I named names. He looked alarmed.

‘See? It’s not easy once you’re out of your twenties.’ I keep saying this to my mate who just wants a nice man with a labrador.  She doesn’t buy it, the Internet dating thing – but then she doesn’t do Twitter or FB or anything other than the odd brusque email.  Maybe the world is divided into those who click and those who don't... ;)

‘And it’s the same with friends,’ I continued.  ‘I know lovely people here but I can’t always talk about the stuff I need to – about writing, about books, about mad spiritual/mystical stuff.  They’d think I’d gone bonkers.’  His turn to raise an eyebrow.

‘Hence online friends.’

‘Okay, I get that,’ he said.  ‘But then you go and meet them.’
‘Not all of them,’ I pointed out.  ‘But yeah, why not?’

See, I’m fascinated by people online and particularly by how online personae can be so different from RL.  I was talking about this with Jake and the lovely M (his wife) yesterday – how some people are exactly the same on and offline while others are, frankly, unrecognisable. 

‘Anyhow,’ said Adrian.  ‘If you were here alone, who would you shag?’ 

Shag?  Don’t you love the way women say 'date' and men say 'shag'?  He named names.  My eyes widened. 
‘Oh, I don’t know…’ I said with an evil smirk.

He lobbed his croissant at me. The SP neatly intercepted.  I grinned and picked up my coffee cup.

But, seriously…if you wanted to meet a partner, would you consider Internet dating?  Anyone tried it and a) loved it b) loathed it?

How many of your online friends have you met in real life? Were they how you imagined?   

And, before I go.  The ila competition.  I decided, in the end, that I couldn’t just give all that gorgeousness to one person. So I talked to ila and we split the prize.  The SP was the most fragrant creature I could find so he plonked his paw on these guys:  Zenandtheartoftightropewalking, Tiger Princess, Posie and Preseli Mags

Talking to the Dead

Strange thing.  I’ve met absolutely tons of therapists, gurus and ‘spiritual’ bods over the years but I don’t think I have ever met a medium.  I’ve never really been that interested in talking to the dead – the messages always seem a bit vague; a tad hit and miss somehow. A lot of effort for not that much return.  My mother went to a spiritualist church after my father died – but I think she was hoping he’d tell her he hadn’t really drunk all the money and that there was a secret stash somewhere.  There wasn’t.

Anyhow I *met* Lorraine Holloway-White on Authonomy a couple of years ago and I liked her attitude.  She isn’t the wafty sort.  So, having lured her down to Exmoor I was pretty excited about meeting her.  Sometimes people are quite different in RL from their online personae – you never quite know what you’re going to get.  But I knew the moment I pitched up at ThreeAcres, and saw her waving through the window, that this was going be alright, more than alright. 

‘Typical country car,’ said Lorraine, brushing crumbs and dog hair off the front seat.  Ouch.  

I fed her champagne and crisps and we talked non-stop for nearly five hours.  I only let her go when she couldn’t hide the yawning anymore.  So.  What did she think of the Bonkers House? 
‘Oooh, there’s tons of energy here,’ she said, nearly skipping down the stairs to the Abyss. 
‘Good energy or bad energy?’

‘Energy.  Ooh, it’s so busy. It’s fabulous.’ Okay. So I have a sort of energetic party going on down the staircase. I reckon they’re all over from the pub.

She loved the Cellar of Despond.  She found a man who’d been gagged.   ‘Look over there – you can see his face on the plaster.’  Eh what?  Damnit, so you could – like a sort of plaster Turin shroud. ‘I’m getting two men and one gagged the other. Maybe there was some kind of fight.  Was this place a brothel?’ 

‘What?  I dunno.  It was a hotel at one point – and apparently it attracted quite a racy crew.’

Then she ‘scanned’ me – and declared my ankle fully healed – and did a bit of healing on me and then went all boss-eyed and said she could see ‘Margaret’ clear as day in front of me.
‘Margaret?’
‘Yes. Definitely.’
‘But I don’t know any dead Margarets. They have to be dead, right?’
‘Yup.’ And she put me straight on the whole mediums v psychics question. If you wondered, mediums major in dead people. It’s kind of exclusive.

At this point Adrian pitched up, back from Moscow, and helpfully suggested it might be my mother’s old next door neighbour.

‘But she’s alive and kicking in Bampton, as far as I know,’ I said. ‘And anyhow, why would she bother?  I doubt she even gives me the thought of day.’

‘Fair enough,’ he shrugged. 

‘What about Peg Wright?  She’d be a Margaret.’
‘Why on earth would your pseudo grandmother be hanging around me?’
‘I dunno.  Hey, Dead Margarets sounds like a band.  By the way, did you find anything weird in the house?’ he continued, turning to Lorraine (completely unfazed by the fact that a woman he’d never met before was standing with her hands cradling his wife’s head).

Lorraine told him about the fizzy energy party going on.  ‘So, nothing nasty then?’ he said with evident relief.

‘Oh no.’

‘I’m an atheist, okay.’
An atheist who is scared of ghosts.  Go figure.  Lorraine didn’t even bother to respond.

I dropped her reluctantly back to her hotel and drove back from Brushford, through the dark town and came up through the front door.  Said ‘excuse me’ as I brushed past the partying energy and went up to bed.  As I slid under the covers I had a weird thought.

‘Psst,’ I hissed, trying not to wake Adrian and the SP.  ‘Margaret?  Are you there?’   

Silence.  But hey, who knows?
Four in the bed?  This was getting ridiculous.

Hell - Part Two

This hell question.  I just don’t know.  I do know it isn’t in the places you might imagine.  I looked in a fair few of those.  I tried finding it in people too but each and every one, no matter how hard and tough and mean they looked on the outside, just turned nice on me.  Angels and demons eh?  Honestly, life is mirroring art – or is it the other way around? 

I suspect hell is hidden out of sight really, not down the dark alleys or in the mudflats, or in street-wise kids with sneers or big men with tattoos on their faces.  Hell is probably a flat, the warm yeasty smell of posset mingling with stale fat; and a baby that won’t stop screaming. Or a gleaming penthouse in which two beautiful people sit either end of a white leather sofa, staring into their perfect space.  Or maybe Hell is simply being trapped inside a mind where the synapses are misfiring. 

The closest I came to it on my London trip was sitting in an Internet café in Islington.  The computer was old, the keyboard sticky. The place smelled of stale cigarette smoke, Bombay mix and sweat.  I was swiftly catching up on emails, knowing I’d be offline for 24 hours (hmm, maybe Hell is being out of touch? Or is that Heaven? Do we know the difference anymore?). 

‘Oh for fuck’s sake.’  The chair behind me scraped along the scuffed vinyl floor. I kept typing – as you do.

‘No! This cannot be happening.’  Keys being crashed.  The air crackled.  A phone rang.

‘No. You don’t understand.’  Pause.  Scrape of chair.

‘No. You’re not listening.’  Pause.
‘But I’ve lost everything. Everything.’  Pause.  A strangled sob turning into anger.

‘WHY DON’T YOU LISTEN TO ME?’

Roses for Hecate by Solange Noir

She threw back her chair and stumbled out of the café, leaving her coat behind.  I went to pick it up and run after her but realised she had stopped outside, on the pavement. Even in the middle of meltdown, she was being polite.  Sheesh, us humans and our social mores.  I watched her through the glass front.  She looked stricken. 

What had she lost?  And who wouldn’t listen? 

What is worse, the losing or the not being heard?

Some music?  Wyrdly, I left my iPod behind when I was in London...but these have been playing non-stop since I returned.

Hell - Part One

So you wanna know about hell?  You wanna know about demons? Honestly, you lot…  As you may know, I’m writing a series of YA novels about a girl who falls in love with someone who is…what?  Demon? Angel? Something inbetween?  Anyhow, without giving too much away, when Book Two opens my main character is in metaphorical hell while her ex is sojourning in the actual destination: Hell with a capital H.  So, I had figured I’d go to the capital L (tell me you got that?) to get in the mood, so to speak.  And to meet a few demons.

Where do you find demons in London?  At a gathering of Chaos magicians in a backstreet occult bookshop surely?  It looked promising as I arrived.  There was a lot of black leather; plenty of facial hardware; tattoos and piercings; white faces and bloodshot eyes.  I wandered in and sniffed.  Sulphur?  Hmm, more like mandarin and floor polish really.  I browsed the bookshelves.  Necronomicon and Nocturnicon. Technomages and Pacts with the Devil. Low Magick and high risks. Getting closer.

A small woman with gimlet-bright eyes peered up at me and started to dance.  ‘Do you dance?’ she said.

‘Of course,’ I replied with a smile, following her in a bit of a cumbia. 

‘Excellent,’ she said. ‘One should always dance.’  Quite so.  She danced me down the stairs to where two tall men with long black hair were serving wine and proffering hummus and carrot sticks. 

The lecture, I have to say, was a huge disappointment.  The speaker was a PhD student who had perfected the art of obfuscation, made even more unintelligible by muttering in a transatlantic drawl.  I caught the odd word: exoskeleton, sigil, lobotomy, shame, subjugation, DNA, chimera, pack, pact, anomalous.  I started drawing sigils in my notebook and sketching faces.  I had kinda hoped to talk to people afterwards but they melted into the night…apart from an elderly woman with a face the colour and texture of a prune who thrust a small glass jar into my hand as I left. 

HEKATE of the cross-roads, keeper of the keys of the universe.  Storax, frankincense, myrrh, willow, aconite.
Hmm. 
Add 3 drops of blood to portion used in ritual, thus aligning self with intent.
Hmm

She smiled, shrugged and vanished.  In a puff of smoke?  Oh, how I wish…  But honesty impels me:  it was more like a fading away to grey... 

To be continued…in the meantime, some music...

http://youtu.be/e97isb0e5nQ

And a rather beautiful little film

http://youtu.be/2ePWK0qfisE

London calling

I arrived at Tiverton station and felt a lurch in my heart as I spotted the small figure charging over the bridge.  My boy hurtled down the platform towards me, paused and then just threw out his arms and sank into me, in our usual embrace.  How lovely that he feels he can still do that, at the grand old age of twelve.  I wonder how much longer he will fit so I can (just, with a bit of a stretch) rest my chin on the top of his tousled head?  Not that long now before our positions will switch and I will rest my head on his chest. 

Adrian ambled behind, looking surprisingly chipper given he’d spent the  weekend with the King of Extreme Alcohol Intake (aka Big Chief Sitting Birch) and we commenced the handover.  A briefing on what was going on on the home front; what was needed; what might occur.  There was I back from London, not even home, and he was going straight off to Moscow.  Modern parenting, eh? 

James hates it.  Can’t bear the way we’re always flitting off here, there and everywhere.  But, really, what can you do? 
‘Dad said we won’t eat while he’s away,’ James said, as soon as we got in the car.  
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said. ‘We’ll eat just fine.’

And, when we got back to the Bonkers House, I opened the fridge door and, lo and behold, two vast bars of chocolate and a huge box of chocolates – a present from Switzerland from BCSB, who works over there.  ‘See,’ I said to James, brandishing a bar the size of my arm. ‘We’re sorted.’
'I rest my case,’ said James.

‘Oh, that reminds me,’ I said cheerily. ‘Apparently lawyers are a dying breed, as well as journalists.  You can get a divorce online now, or so Jane says.  And there’s going to be no more Legal Aid.  You’re going to have to rethink your career choices.’
He shrugged. ‘They’ll always need private corporate lawyers.’  Ye gods.  Oh well, maybe it doesn’t matter that my pension is fecked.  My darling son can pay for my retirement grape peelers. 

But anyway.  London was fabulous.  I got massaged within an inch of passing out with pleasure. I met men with prosthetic boils on their heads and bolts through every part of their anatomy.  I walked into my past time and time again.  I had lunch with my lovely agent and I met an angel (no really, I did) in the British Museum.  I ate Japanese, and Lebanese and Greek and French.  I scribbled like a madwoman and bought more books.  I fell in love with a memory mattress.  Oh and I read Bradley Wind’s fabulous novel Bulb on my Kindle. 
‘You know what?’ I said to my agent, Judy, as we hugged goodbye on Hampstead High Street.  ‘I could just handle a pied-a-terre in London, then we could do this every week.  How about a stonking deal for the Samael series?’
She grinned.  ‘Now there’s a plan.’ 
Maybe, just maybe (if the angel was right) James won’t need to sell his soul to keep me in old age luxury…

PS – there’s still time to enter the Ila competition on the last post….just leave a comment here.  I’ll close it on Thursday.