Arguably, I should A) fuck off back to reading about Art in the age of mechanical reproduction
and then discuss what it means to take yourself seriously/ re-classify what I think of as the appropriate forum for seriousness and B) steer clear of discussing sincerity on a blog of my own creation because dayum girl, that shit is meta and you are similarly self indulgent.

I could even, C) talk instead about the fact that the northbound Jubilee line is absolutely brimming with men who look like they have just got out of prison (it brims with crims perhaps?) and that today I was in a carriage with the following ‘characters’:

i. grim knife-wound man, eyes like a bulldog about to tear apart a delicious newborn child.
ii. sniffy fart man, who let rip upon sneezing. He did the latter every ten minutes.
iii. angry man, who could not understand why HE WAS NOT IN A SEAT.

How ever, I am nothing if not weak-willed and thus, steel yourselves, for here we go.

Sincerity and grim saccharine sweetness are apparently bedfellows. Perfectly excellent cooks can mar a recipe by deciding that, midway through instructing you to cream something, they break off and discuss deep love, the need to connect, the rustic charm of their kitchen or the universal quest for love.

The above is suitably cutesy to put you in the right mood.

I just wonder if baking really is about love? Baking is fascinating – who doesn’t love edibel science – and it calls for skills different from those employed in cooking. My sensitive palate (sneaky brag, sneaky brag, sneaky brag) is precisely bugger-all use during the baking process, whereas my risible lack of skill with scales is suddenly catastrophic.

Similarly, ‘cool’ substitutions don’t work either. Bananas will never be the same as egg, and granulated sugar has more in common with gravel than with caster sugar.

So yeah, baking is interesting. But it is also the pursuit of braggarts. Nothing is better recieved than a cake, even if the recipient is thinking ‘Oh look, you smug bitch, another dramatically iced eight-layer sponge to get through whilst I am trying to lose weight.’

Nothing is more smug making than having made something yourself. Even if nobody wants it and you have to force it down their ungrateful throats.

‘This? Oh, it was nothing – just a little something I whipped up over the last 72 hours.’

Baking is a way of saying that you are organised. Skilled. That you excel at things. That you are in touch with your coveted feminine side. That you are kind and considerate and have a sense of fun. That you could probably parent well. That you are generous and aware, Amelie-style, of life’s little pleasures. That you are wholesome and naughty. That you own cookery books and will maybe one day own an aga and a husband who works doing something vastly high-paid that does not encroach on his work-life balance and that allows him to be creative.

Forgive my cynicism. Perhaps baking is pure pleasure, golden love, and giving. For most people I am sure it is. But to co-opt the aesthetic of baking into a discourse of femininity, aspirational ownership, generosity and female achievement is weird. And rife.

I have little to know knowledge of how to radically re-possess baking, ridding it of all these connotations. Who knows if I even want to? They certainly don’t stop me baking – nor do they stop me feeling smug – nor do they even stop me using bananas instead of eggs, early grey tea instead of milk, and sometimes icing sugar instead of actual sugar.

Having rambled sufficiently, I am off to lie down. Feeling really quite grim at the moment – no idea why – and am self medicating with sleep and paracetemol.

Not bad.

See you on the other side.

This is a terrible shame. In most poetry, the sound and feel of the words is at least as important as the form or the punctuation. It is as if we are reading in black and white, rather than glorious technicolour.

So, a girl I know, who, as a translation student is hyper aware of the importance of sound, rythm and speech patterns in understanding and appreciating verse, began a website.

People Reading Poems

It is, quite simply, a collection of people (not the author) reading poems that they like. Genius.

Weird, right? Internet pictures are so odd.

It is such a rich, glorious resource. It has helped me understand poems, discover new poets, and enjoy the multiple voices of people, alive today, who also love words.

Reading a poem aloud has never been easier, even if you aren’t an actor.

You can record them straight onto your computer or, if you fancy, download the audio programme audacity, which allows for easy recording and saving in a number of easy-to-email formats.

In a blue peter style, here is one I recorded earlier, using audacity. See how easy it is?

So go on, check it out! I promise it will change your life. And if it doesn’t? Then read me a poem that adequately expresses your feelings of betrayal.

It works best, like all curious things do, by candle light. Incidentally, candle light is also best for eating, bathing, and dreaming. I like the way it warps everything out of itself and into something glamorous. A visual trick, an ocular hallucination.

Today is supposed to be the most depressing day of the year.

No. Really. London furnished us with a sunrise and a sunset of incredible majesty, and although I fell over (I slipped on a biscuit, prosaically) it has been a wonderful day.

I have spent a lot of it preoccupied with the moral implications of biography.

I do not invite you to join that meandering thought, however. These ones are more fun:

And please, come and have your tarot read. I promise to light candles, wear a silk scarf, and get you drunk afterwards.

This song makes me think of first kisses.

And then, I was chasing fifteen year old Alice through the internet and fell over this.

First kisses. I had several. What? Thats how people like me get a bad name. But mine came in categories. I bet yours did too. There was never a certain contender for first-kiss stories, the way there are for periods or cigarettes.

There is this place in Edinburgh where I seem to kiss.

Yes, really, outside here.

The corner away from the main street now has a bus stop. You can sit on the wee granite windowsills and get a cold bum until the bus comes.

That was where the first proper kiss ever was, on my first ever date, back in the days when I was still hysterically frightened of going up town alone. Fear was one of the main features of my adolescence, but this date was worth it.

His name was Camp Craig – a moniker he, too, adopted – and he was ginger, thus uniting two of my endearing ‘types’ – effeminate men and men with red hair. I met him at Saturday drama class. I don’t think we fancied each other a jot. With hindsight, and a wanky sense of my own importance, I might argue we were a delightful early queer coupling. We weren’t. We just liked each other’s cool trousers.

We dates rather chastely for about two weeks and putting me on my bus home, he pressed his lips to mine.

I actually own a print of those cherubs, because I have absolutely no taste whatsoever.

Then there was the kiss on the bus (remind me to tell you that story some time).

And then of course there are all the other ones. Oddly, I am still at least facebook friends with almost all of my important kissing friends, and thus cannot elaborate. Camp Craig, however, evaporated.

In news not to do with kissing, someone exceedingly generously gifted me BFI membership. Shit is about to become a lot more cultured, as they say.

I am overdosing on Azealia Banks, a new low being listening to her at work, bobbing my head as I cut articles out from the Daily Telegraph. Democratised culture is a wonderful thing, and juxtapositions are to be encouraged (although, if we go via LaGuardia school of performing arts and Prince William’s ‘hip-hop dancing’ then the juxtaposition slips into curious collage, shedding all false notions of polarities of authenticity) but sometimes I wonder what the snobbish god of culture thinks, looking down on me.

I imagine he weeps.

Other things I have been doing involve ambitious editing programs, egyptology, and this website here.

I am now helping to revamp, and make new, this wonderful venture.

Go and read about it and PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE read a poem aloud and send it in. Your favourite one. All you need is a book and your laptop. You can even remain anon should you so choose!

Email your poems to: jenny[at]peoplereadingpoems.org, and you can be a poetry rock star.

Before
Come in to the garden,
watch the black-beaked ships sail,
out of the harbour, out of the stone walls, out of their safety
into the sea.

Rest one hand in my hand,
whilst the storm clouds thicken,
black against the white cliffs, black against the sunset, blacker than our shadows
over the sea.

Wait a while beside me
for the twilight’s fingers,
silent on the pine trees, silent on the red house, silent on our out-breaths,
lighting on the sea.

Ew.

However. Here, as a distraction, and an homage to what I hope will be my future good health, here are several things I want to do this year.

Hesitant to ‘resolve’, but totally scornful of calling them ‘Revolutions’ of any other self improving smug bullshit.

So. A list. I have a friend who is a goddess for whom everything appears effortless. I imagine as I write this that I am her. And that these things will come to pass.

1. Learn to drive. Because frankly, this is getting beyond a joke, and my chauffeur has not yet found me in London.

2.Learn to like avocado. Baby steps, guys. I can’t promise olives, or even oysters, but surely, avocados?

3. GET MORE OF YOUR FUCKING WRITING PUBLISHED YOU TWAT etc etc. I mean, with less guilt, and more poems. But you get the idea.

AVOCADO REMINDER

4.Exercise. Everyone else does. And they look nice, often.

5.Invest in expensive shoes. Because all my shoes are shit: none fit.

6.Have more fun. Not the sort of fun that involves painting using those funny numbered kits, but the sort of fun that involves taxis, cold streets in high shoes, and not caring so much that everyone around you is a total bore.

7.Get my bloody brace fixed before I go insane and tear my teeth out.

8.Visit more places.

9. Learn to cook more things – specifically, meat. All meat.

10. Enjoy myself. Seriously. Less anxiety, more healing, more trusting and loving my silly tiny body, and for the love of god, have something amusing to tell my children when, over one of those funny painting kits I am forcing them to do, they ask me if I was ever young.

This came up when I googled 'fun'.

Recently, I was semi-chatted up at a party, and so outraged by the proceedings of this, very drunk, person, that I have been unable to contain myself any longer.

I have no idea how my chat-up stats compare with the rest of the female population. Perhaps I have been actively chatted up fewer times on average, due to the fact that, on any given dance floor or bar, I am literally below the eye-line of almost every eligible individual.

Or maybe, the blurred and distant face I present in fact works to my advantage. Who knows.

Now. I have been out with some rather lovely people. So, please, don’t take any of this to mean that I am beyond being charmed. I am in fact, easier to charm than most. Tell me a pun. Sing me something. Say I have nice hair. BAM! I am yours.

However. There is something I have observed in chat up situations which I really don’t like. There is often a moment where one of the party demands submission.

Not outright – I don’t frequent that kind of establishment – but the moment where the person you are talking to does one of the following, with a view to finally go in for the kill:

i. Tells a story in which they are the hero, and which demands immediate awe and praise.

And then, I TOTALLY SAVED HER LIFE!!!

ii. Relates a time when they got an award/were asked to perform with Kanye West/ were immortalised by Titian/ bought an art gallery or yacht for a person in need.

iii. Lets you know, in no uncertain terms, EXACTLY HOW MUCH THEY EARN. Or, if you are unfortunate enough to mix with extraordinarily wealthy Londoners, the zone, postcode and house type (‘a gorgeous little detatched townhouse) of the building lucky enough to accommodate their groaning hoard of gold.

iv. See above, but with personal endowment, physical strength, automobile, or recently promoted-to position.

Don’t get me wrong – personal details are all very well, but I have – more than once- been serenaded from the proverbial balcony of a cocktail party with the opening line: ‘Well of course, I earn (insert obscene sum)’.

Perhaps I simply look like a gold digger.

Other hilarious opening gambits include:

v.Insulting other women, or women as a gender. HOT. I wonder why you’re still single.

vi. Depending on where I am, insulting men as a gender. Also, hot. Wow. I’m not even a man. WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

vii.Insulting me. No, you read that right. Lots of men (I think perhaps primarily men who read that charming novella ‘The Game’ which is essentially a tome enabling men to pressure women into sex by reducing their self esteem) think that insulting me is a sure fire way to get me home. Whatever happened to the cliched formula of compliments? Who banned those?

viii. Charming me with tales of past violence. Fights are seductive only in a very limited set of circumstances. This probably isn’t one of those.

ix. Making sure I am aware that yes, I might be intelligent, and maybe even funny, but that you are so, so, so much cleverer than me, and probably funnier. You are almost undoubtedly smarter than me, but it would help ever so much if I confirmed it for you, verbally, by putting myself down.

Because nobody wants a clever girl, amiright? They are so boring, and high maintenance, because they might just know what they want. They might respect themselves, read around the subject of self, and understand the machinations of the world in a way that allows them to navigate it without a guiding hand. (Ironically, none of those particularly apply to me.)

Granted, this may be something to do with my most vocal (and only) fanbase being middle aged men, whom, I suppose, do want to prove that the extra twenty years they are sporting have been well spent. All credit to them, and their multiple promotions, successes on the battlefield and witty repartee.

Harsh? I probably am being. Certainly, my looks are not sufficiently Hellenic to be this choosy (a fact once pointed out to me as a chatup line.

However, lets be clear. Even if I am not any of these, people (women? that’s a can of worms) as a whole are allowed to be clever, sexy, funny, independent, and happy, and maintain their desirability.

And certainly, them being so is not a threat to anyone else’s desirability. Its ok to have a partner who is a better cook, a more efficient shopper, a peerless typist. I would like my ideal dates to be brilliant at everything, and I would be happy for them. (Hence, my current incredible luck, having found someone superlative in all things.)

Most of all, though, I would want them to have the confidence to celebrate me as I am, and themselves as they are, without either of us having to come out the worse.

And on that note, the indignation is over, the high horse put out to pasture, and I am going to clean the kitchen, because it looks as if I have bombed it with flour.

I am so tired I can barely see, and simply refuse to believe that there are four more days before I find two seats together on the train, curl into a ball for four hours, and unfold myself in Edinburgh, where I am assured the weather outside really is frightful.

In the interim, I have been doing many, many things.

Sneaky crafts, involving vast amounts of shredded paper, 14ft of silk ribbon, ample cursing and craft glue.

And sweet lord have I been eating.

Primarily, I have been eating a lot of salad.

Now, I despise lettuce, because it tastes like nothing at all.Cabbage, however, is delicious and fantastical and actually tastes of food.

This is Chinese cabbage. Mine was not.

I dressed it in all the ways possible, from ”Chinese” (5 spice, lime juice, honey, soy sauce, salt, red chilli flakes, garlic, FYI) to ”Italian” (garlic, mixed herbs, balsamic vinegar, olive oil, salt, pepper). Both, I would mix with cucumber and sometimes really sweet tiny tomatoes. And then…QUORN.

I know, I know. Quorn is weird, end-times, clinical food, designed by people without souls.

Remain unconvinced. Fine. I admit, freely, that Quorn FAKE HAM is weird, as is all of the true faux meat things. However. Quorn fillets microwave in three minutes. They are high protein, and very low fat, and guess what, fellas – they taste OF NOTHING.

Now, for many people, tastelessness is a terrible thing. For those of us over invested in seasoning, however, it is a blessing. You can make quorn taste like amazing stir fry, or amazing Italian ‘chicken’ if you will, and it takes less time than it takes most people to change outfits, hail a taxi, or cancel a subscription to  FHM.

In short, it is delicious and healthy. It also frees up calorific space, if you will pardon the women’s magazine vocabulary, for things like Jamie Oliver’s Xmas waffles.

They live here.

I was in fact made these waffles, as if the world was not luxurious enough, by my GF’s cousins. They were the most wonderful hostesses, in a weekend which involved Christmas tree purchasing, prosecco, and mythical quantities of delicious food.

Prior to that, however, I went to the national theatre to see ‘Juno and the Paycock’. I enjoyed it immensely, even more so, perhaps, for only seeing the first half.

It is an incredibly messy, lumpy play, peppered with formal set pieces. The space was perhaps too large – the cast were forced to stride across their ‘meagre flat’ as if it were a ballroom.

The acoustics contorted the accents, somehow slowing down the delivery. However, it was rather wonderful, viciously funny, and absolutely beautiful.

There was then an emergency pudding wrapping summit meeting in the Southbank Centre, a train with 1000 children on it, and all sorts of smug about spending an entire day striding around London in heels.

That, and I have advance news of the best Christmas present ever. As we speak, I am looking out my opera gloves.

So, until next time, I leave you, where we ought all always to be, with the Walrus and the Carpenter:

It is taken from my all time favourite dramatisation of the Alice stories. A truly wonderful TV version, which I still treasure on VHS.

The it visually intriguing, and suitably trippy. This is what it is like inside my head:

Also, with all due respect to those o’er the ocean, the food looks terrible. I mean, green beans in a casserole? Sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top? Grimalicious.

I am also led to believe that the thanks given is somewhat dubious.

However, let it never be said that my scorn for something stops me from profiting from it – au contraire! I thought I would fill your minds with more awful drivel!

I am grateful, thankful, for lots of things. I was going to segue into this slowly, charmingly, with a list of gratitudes.

You know what? Fuckit. All I want to do is show off the beautiful flowers I was given for our two year anniversary:

Extremely grateful for those. Have felt like a princess all day.

Far, far, far less grateful for my absolutely terrible camera skills…