From Odile et Pierre Hamelin

Odile and Pierre have sent this lovely photo of the concert in the garden at Rochefort last year.

Projects

Ah, projects, the spice of life!

The University of the East has given me a little development grant to develop a proposal for later this year. I will have to get organised. I will go to buy some coloured card files (I like those) this avo, and then fill them up with papers covered in scrawled ideas and dreams.

The Chefs CD- just you try getting in touch with the BBC! They take ages to get through to on the blower, and then put you through to the wrong department that sends you the wrong form addressed to the wrong person. Very Gormenghast, actually, and freaktastic fun in a dark and negative way.

In the summer, I will put a little web shop here on the blog as I have tons of pantings, drawings, etchings and so on that I should sell- in two fat, bursting black leather-look portfolios concealed behind the curtains. Some of the stuff goes back to when I was 15 and I was a better artist than I am now.

Flowers- I shall spend as much as I can afford on spring flowers to celebrate life and regeneration!

Songs: well, I am writing away as always; the song writing group starts up again next Monday after Katy's exciting visit to Memphis. I write lots of songs, all the time, but only want to put the best on my next album. Hamilton Square is still in the pipeline. we even have artwork for that almost complete. It needs one last burst of energy and it will be finished. Both Martin and myself have had tough winters, but we'll get there.

Looks like I need to take more Suburban Pastoral CDs down to Rough Trade sometime soon as well.

I need to buy ink. I need to draw. I need to fill all the gaps in life with drawing and music!

William's 78

William (from 2 postings ago) invited me for tea when he lived in London.
He had an old 78 country record, and he put it on the gramophone.
'Oh a woman is a ..., and a woman is a ...' (I can't remember the exact words)
A whiney man's country voice complained for three minutes and fifty-five seconds, blaming all the ills of the world on 'a woman'.
At the end of the record, the man said, 'Now turn this record over to find out what the woman has to say'.
William turned the record over, and to the same melody, a woman's voice complained; 'Oh a man is a ... and a man is a ...'.
And of course, at the end of the song, the woman advised us, 'Now turn this record over to find out what the man has to say'.
I thought about that record for ages afterwards.
What if you never stopped playing it?

Helen and the Horns

There will be a Helen and the Horns gig at the Borderline on Charing Cross Road on the 18th of September.
The Daintees have very kindly asked us to support them that night.

Clothes'n'things; an odd segue

When I was a little girl I bought Many Eccentric Things from jumble sales in the Institute in Wylam, where I was brought up. For sixpence I could buy a stack of used 7-inch vinyl singles (I've still got some of them). This was like acquiring a mysterious radio programme- somebody else's taste, worn and crackly. I suppose these days, I would've been 'diggin', except I was the wrong gender and the wrong location for that because you're supposed to be a young urban male. I also acquired strange books: 'Scouting For Boys' (yes Mr B-P, that's you, sir, in all your weirdness) which had fantastic concepts- the bucket up a tree with holes in it and a little boy pouring what must have been cold water on to another little boy beneath to make a makeshift shower. I know I have blogged about it before. Unforchly, McMum had a massive clearout when I left home and that, and my copy of 'Thoroughly Modern Millie', which McMum thoroughly modernly disapproved of, went probably back to another village jumble sale, along with 'Gert and Daisy's Wartime Cookery Book'. In a fit o nostalgia several months ago I put out a search on eBay, and hole and below, as my French manager Claudine used to say, it turned up and I now have a very soft and worn copy of the book with its sad recipes for wartime Britain, and the stylish black and white cartoon Gerts and Daisys, with their huge heads and tiny bodies, discussing things with sly smiles and crisp pinnies over their frugal clothing, at the beginning of each chapter.
Once, I bought a huge and beautiful pale green ankle-length coat with bell sleeves and a lovely slippery satin lining. I drifted hither and thither up and down the village with my head in the clouds until my friend Debbie, who was very down to earth and practical, refused to go anywhere with me until I abandoned the pale green coat.
So that one went back to the jumble sale, to be replaced by a matted black jumper that was solid with being washed too much, and a hairstyle made by plaiting my hair while it was wet and unplaiting it when it was dry. 'You look like a sheep', said McDad. So I started ironing my hair on the ironing board to make it straight (I'd seen Barbra Streisand say she had her hair ironed in some film or other).
I made a blouse out of the kitchen curtains that McMum was throwing away (red and white checked cotton). Big Bruv grew bigger than me and I inherited his Levis, and wore them with my shirt and a pair of Stars and Stripes clogs that I bought mail-order from Sounds. I know I looked ridiculous because I was painfully thin in spite of eating half a loaf of bread a day, but I did not care. Clothes were part of getting out of the village and having adventures and even at the age of thirteen, when I bought my first ever lipstick (Rimmel, gold), I didn't care a fig for what everybody else thought you were supposed to do. I didn't like being different, but people had made fun of me even when I wore ordinary things like them. In doing that, people liberate you from even trying to blend into the herd, which is both a blessing and a curse. It forces you to go off and have adventures, to find other people like you; I found them at Sunderland Polytechnic, where I did my Art Foundation course. Dennis, from Jarrow, who could buy tabs of LSD for sixpence as a child and who told us the natural fluoride in the water in Jarrow meant you never had to brush your teeth if you came from there. He broke his tooth on a chip one lunchtime.
There was William, with his loud voice. 'William strode into the canteen: everyone looked round', he would bellow as he strode into the canteen and everyone looked round.
There was Tom, brother of one of the Kane Gang (B-B-Byker... GROVE!), who collected the clay ginger-beer stoppers that you found on the beach at Ryhope (they had been dumped into the river Wear when the factory closed down) and made a mysterious game that not even he could play.
There was Sheena, who had a laugh like Muttley, and who once dropped a ping-pong ball on the top step of the lecture theatre which bounced loudly down each step in slow motion during an excruciatingly intense and boring lecture.
There was Fiona, who wore boy's clothes and shoes, Trevor who liked rainbows, Owen who had been a gas man but changed his mind and decided to be an artist instead. Susan who, in a state of cold fear, hoovered up spiders every day with her mother's vacuum cleaner.
Our teacher Brian had been at Newcastle University with Brian Ferry. Imagine that!
And that's just half of 'em. Three cheers for art colleges! Brilliant places where madness is nurtured and cherished, where vulnerable people collide with extraordinary people, where you can be fat, thin or in-between and where you are barricaded from the rest of the world with a mountain of weird projects and activities invented by senior, madder versions of yourself.

Gordon the Gopher

Remember Gordon? He used to have his own little slot on children's TV with Andy somethingorother and he used to squeak annoyingly and once really wound Des Lynam up by appearing in a hinged toupee, flicking to one side with a flourish and challenging Des to do the same!
I was writing songs for a theatre group, Count of Three, and we had a drummer in the little band who lived in Stamford Hill.
He was riding along on his bicycle one morning and he found a package at the side of the road. It was Gordon the Gopher's Olympic costume, all wrapped up ready to be tried on. He phoned the BBC and they were deeply grateful and relieved to have such a valuable asset returned to them; it had fallen off the back of the despatch bike as it was hurried along to Television Centre for the evening's show.

Cars

One broken car in London, to be driven to Newcastle on Saturday; 5 minutes out of the garage, an almighty clanging ensued, and I had to take it back to be fixed again. Meanwhile, my own car in Newcastle had broken down, and had to be fixed. The London-broken-down car broke down again this morning, but was fixed again this afternoon.
I have returned from a breeze of a drive back in my mended car, only disturbed on the journey by watching flocks of starlings through the windscreen scribbling on the milky clouds, and listening to Toots and the Maytals.
I have learned to articulate my philosophy.
Tomorrow, it will be tomorrow, and it won't be today any more.

Courgettes and Ducks

Thank you to all who have sent sweet messages about McDad, email, text, messages here and Myspace, it is kind and helps the sadness.
It has been a crazy week, going back to work feeling like a different person- sensitive to everything, almost as though I can read people's minds, but also impatient when I see people wasting their lives or being rude to one another. I was thinking how awful the emotional bruises must be at wartime- past and present. People must feel permanently stunned, without any gaps to recover before the next bereavement. How can people kill each other?
Today, the sun shone with spring warmth in its rays. There is ;probably still more winter weather to come but at least the sunshine is fighting back. I imagined bringing armfuls of Arum Lily plants back to the house, perching them on every windowsill and ipretending that I lived in a massive field full of lilies and green foliage. Practicality kicked in and I imagined carrot plants and courgettes, one ferny and the other overblown and growing at a frightening rate.
Bargain Buys had packs of seeds in a rack outside it yesterday; there was no room in the shop for anything else- the ceiling is festooned with shopping trolleys and cat carry boxes, the walls piled head-high with pots'n'pans, paint tins, spoons of every shape and size, old-fashioned things like creosote, tea towels, nails, adhesive hooks, white crockery, and millions of tubes of different types of glue. The floor is crammed with brooms, shovels, more paint, big serving dishes, boxes of bits, plant display devices, trolleys, trays, a crowded counter covered in Stanley knives and blades, screws and scissors, and behind it the man with the yellow hair and beard and nicotine-stained fingers, but no more dog lying on a huge pile of door-mats; poor Chip didn't survive the winter either.
I walked to the duck pond and sat in the sun admiring the funny little waddling gentlemen in their smart uniforms, looking clean and dapper in spite of the murky pondwater. Later, Diana came round and we drank coffee and she told me about her adventures in India, She brought me a sparkly Indian dress and ear-rings, and her guitar to be tuned up. Her dogs wolfed down the cat-food that the cats had been tunring their noses up at all day (funny how they missed it with an affronted glare once somebody else had eaten it!).
Tomorrow, I drive one car to Newcastle and another one back. Sometimes I feel like I am living someone else's mad life instead of my own, like wearing borrowed clothes for a while. I want my own ones back now, please!

Early Primrose

I was walking up a traffic-clogged hill this morning, feeling thoroughly grim; there seemed to be a black rim around the world and in spite of many happy things in my life, the morning was refusing to be a Good Morning and trying hard to be a Bad Day. I was staring at the pavement and trying to kick-start a bit of positive thinking in my head.
If I had not been staring at the pavement I would not have seen the most perfect little twin-flowered primrose with translucent yellow petals beaming above bright green curled leaves, peeping out from a crack between the concrete paving slabs and a garden wall and defying the morning cold, the dull gloom, the leaden air, the howling traffic, the recession, the long winter, the arid urban soil, the traffic wardens with their spiteful notebooks, just defying everything that was stacked against its existence.
Beautiful, beautiful.

INQUIRY

I received this this morning, possibly because of a recent posting about towels:
Hi Sir / Madam ,
I wish to purchase an order of (towels) first of all i'll like to inquire if you do stock them if yes email me back with the maximum amount which can be ordered and the information you need to proceed with my order.Kindly confirm this units can shipped to Philippines whiles i am out of the States on an urgent business trip .I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Best of regards
John

Max Bygraves: a Faux Pas

Imagine my mortified embarrassment as I realised, midway through a rendition of When You Come to the End of a Lollipop to a group of four-year-olds, that it was a song stuffed with doubles entendres and not a cute song about sweeties as I had previously assumed.
The fearsome vibes emanating from their Montessori teacher were what did it.

Perfume Query

Why don't they make perfume that smells like Pledge Classic?

Pancake Day

I know I've written about this before, many moons ago, but it's apt, given the time of year, and a better thing to write about than the funeral, which of course is private, and this is probably the last thing I'll write about McDad for a while.

We had scoffed all the pancakes and disappeared to different rooms to avoid clearing up: four kids plus a foster-sibling at the time, most of us doing Big Exams and supposed to be revising, therefore excused from some household duties.
McDad was in the kitchen by himself scrubbing the sink with a little ratty plastic brush on a stick, not realising that I was in the living room listening, and struggling with my maths homework as always.
I could hear him scrubbing, humming, sighing, stopping... then I heard him musing distractedly.. about pancakes.
'A better bit of batter on a flatter platter', he said to himself,
and started scrubbing again with added vigour.

Blotting Paper

Cats are like blotting paper. They don't have that doggy loyalty or enthusiasm, but when people feel out of sorts, they hover around tactfully for a while before landing on your lap and absorbing whatever sadness or anger the lapee is feeling.
They make themselves deliberately heavy so you don't get up and move on to useless activities, and they purr quietly and huskily from time to time to remind you that they are there.

McDad

The Song of the Landsman's Soul is for you, McDad. It's a bit shaky in places. Thank you to Martin for adding some lovely guitars.
It helped me to write some words down during the days of pacing around and waiting and feeling helpless in London.

McDad was perfectly in tune with nature in many ways. He worked in industrial medicine, treating people who had been made sick with working person's diseases in the coal, asbestos and diving industries.
He once asked the Coal Board to let us go down a mine when we were teenagers so we could see what horrible jobs people had to do to earn a living (the Coal Board refused). He didn't think it was at all romantic to have to wreck and ruin your body and mind as a member of the working class, doing vicious, dirty and repetitive jobs to serve society and make a living.
In the evenings and at weekends he would dig the garden and plant seeds, growing fruit, vegetables and flowers. So he spent his daytimes nurturing humans and the rest of his time nurturing plants.
I remember as a very young child sitting on his lap and sniffing the bonfire smoke on his gardening shirt on Sunday evenings as he sat with a cup of tea in the kitchen. He understood about the temporariness and vulnerability of nature, and that nothing material is permanent no matter how beautiful it is.

Thanks to the wonderful loving and caring nurses who made his last few days as comfortable and gentle as possible, and who cared for McMum and Sis at the same time.

I love you Dad.