Ah, Saturday

It was so tense yesterday afternoon: if contracts on the houses weren't exchanged by 3.30 we'd have to wait  until Monday.
Unbearable!
The central heating broke down.
At 3.25 my solicitor called to tell me it had been done.
I hung up, burst into tears and then phoned the removal company as soon as I'd composed myself again.

I sat yesterday evening, dazed, with the fan heater purring away and the cats trying unsuccessfully to find the warm bit in the room.
Poirot solved mysteries silently in the background; Nadya called and told me she'd recorded a Russian dub song with Adrian Sherwood.
I can't wait to hear that! Nadya's music has an early Bowie/early Kinks sound with a very gritty grip on lyrics.

Just before midnight I got a text from Sherika, the songwriter who has entered the song competition. She got through to the final, and I'm absolutely delighted. Wouldn't it be nice if she won?

So, Saturday.

I wait for the plumber, the delivery of boxes to pack in, the ex-husband who hasn't told me what time he's coming to pick up the rest of his stuff.
I will roll up the rugs in a sheet later, and I've already vacuumed Offsprog One's room. She's coming to take more stuff tomorrow morning, which she will probably lose out of a hole in her bag, like her phone yesterday and her keys a month ago. Different bags, different holes.
I have suggested that she gets a bag without holes in it.

The washing machine is on its second wash of the morning before it gets taken away, the clothes dryer is stuck at £32 on eBay but has to go for more if I'm to get a decent washer/dryer, and this is a very domestic post indeed!

Oddly, although I woke at 4 a.m. and couldn't get back to sleep again, the relief is making me contented. There have been two years of tension, more than 50 people shown round the house, countless housework-blighted Fridays and a fear of being stuck here forever.
This is a beautiful, beautiful house, with stained glass and old fireplaces, but it has always felt like someone else's house.
Often when I've been alone here I have felt like the real owners have popped out for an hour and left me to look after it, and they'll be back soon and I'll be on my way.

Will I feel like I belong in the tiny new house?
I hope so, for a while at least.

Tedhead

Pills

'You see, we all have to do it when we get old', I tell Old Ladycat as I pop an Evening Primrose.
I have just chucked the very poisonous tablet down her throat (she's disturbingly passive about it).
I wondered last night: does this make her breath poisonous?
As her purrs thunder out of her nostrils, is she gassing me gradually, evening by evening?
Will her fur become toxic as it builds up in little airy piles on the wooden floors, and will I find upended spiders next to the skirting boards, their twiggy legs clutched to their chests in pain?
The vet told me her poo will be poisonous, but that's outside, in the middle of the lawn... probably poisoning the last of the sparrows.
Oh dear!
So much to worry about!

Fishing

A mildly racist electrician came round to change the light pendants, taking down ours and putting plain ones up.
Every so often, he baited a line and held it over me to see if I took a bite.
'Of course, I lost my job to three Polish men...'
'Now, of course, in Kent, well, it's getting very full, with people moving in from Europe...'
'The Indian people, of course...'

Of course.... he's not the only work person I have come across who thinks these fishings are part of a value-added service.
I am constantly shocked by the way that these nasty views are seen as respectability.
The woman across the road mentions 'asylum seekers' (formerly known as refugees) in every second sentence, so regularly that I've developed a knack of keeping conversations short so we don't even get there.
The oddest thing is that they all have a friend who is working in Canada, or Dubai, or France: something isn't computing, somewhere.
Of course.

Sqjrbndktocnlehst!!!

What a bizarre day!
I have fallen asleep and woken in the land of the mad with March Hares bounding all over normality and Martians peeking into the windows and sniggering at me through snaggly teeth.

The morning started with feeding oldcat a poisonous tablet, so heinous that I had to use specially-purchased non-latex gloves from Boots to do so.
Soon afterwards, the date-of-moving panic began, which throbbed throughout the day like a sore tooth and is still here now.
The removal company weren't sure whether they could do the new date and I had to find another removal company, who are coming round tomorrow. Meanwhile, the original removal company discovered that they could do the new date after all. But it's not a definite new date yet anyway...

Ex-partner went sailing past the house in a huge van at 10.30 and didn't reappear till an hour later. How mysterious! Was it him? Yes, it was!

Diana came round with a pair of opal earrings and  a broccoli quiche for me, Offsprog Two screamed as the fridge disappeared along with frozen contents for Ex-partner's sister whose son was there to help, and we get on so he had coffee and Ex-partner didn't.

The British Heart Foundation phoned: they were to collect a bed from here on Friday to sell in one of their shops.
Diana went upstairs to look at the bed and spent the rest of the afternoon trying to hire a van so that she could have the bed upstairs, and give the British Heart Foundation her old bed instead. She then had to divert them to her house to pick up her bed on a different day, and the woman on the phone couldn't understand her postcode, what was happening, the day of the week to pick up the bed or Diana's name.

Meanwhile I was frantically trying to check my computer for emails to see when we might be moving.

The house insurance people sent the insurance forms to the house I will be moving to instead of to here: except the first time, they got the house number wrong. The second time, they got the house number right, but they should have sent the forms here, shouldn't they?
So I was trying to remedy this too today, when their computer went down and lost all my details.

A large and non-functioning TV sits looking embarrassed in the front room. It has been half dismantled, its outboard video and DVD players packed uncomfortably in a box that is too small for them. A skip will be arriving tomorrow, and a man to dismantle all the light fittings. Lots of the lightbulbs have given up in disgust and the remaining ones are popping at a rate of knots.

There are frantic pencil scribbles on a sheet of paper next to me, totally indecipherable, just like today.

More

I've just scraped several handfuls of snails out of a plant pot before getting that shuddery thing and having to stop!
Supposedly my ex-partner is arriving today to take away his stuff and I'm running the washing machine frantically to get all that done before he takes it away, and I've cleared paths through the piled up boxes so he can take his furniture and books. He is a linguist as well as a legal practitioner and lots of his books are in ancient French.
I will be so glad when this process is finished for once and for all. I haven't been able to finish any songs for a month (although I have started them) but I have done a bit of drawing.
Diana is coming over today and Gina sent a nice message; there is support from the north of Scotland and the south of London.
Now I just need a moving date...

That's the Way to Do It!

One day the Offsprogs' childminder turned up with an ominously large gladstone bag stuffed with something lumpy and heavy.
She opened it and turned it upside down: a host of second-hand Barbies tumbled on the the floor.
'They belonged to my daughter,' she told us, 'And they were up in the loft and I thought the Offsprogs would like them'.
The Offsprogs were curious; they had built up a mini-stock themselves that nestled in its pink nylon-ness in a discarded pile on the bedroom floor.
And I was furious, as I felt that I was being used as a skip to throw away unwanted loft contents, but I gradually came round to the generosity of spirit rather than the desire-to-dump of the gesture.

Soon, the Barbies had become punk rockers, with cropped hair coloured green by the felt pen set; they spoke a language called Argety Bargle that only they and the Offsprogs could understand, which was based on parodying the L'Oreal 'Because I'm Worth It' ads.
They acquired facial tattoos and some rather nasty red felt-tip injuries. Gradually, I wafted them towards the bin, one by one, as they became so disfigured that I started to feel physically uncomfortable every time I chanced upon one of them propped against the wall.

One day as I sat drinking tea in the kitchen I heard a steady thump-thump-thump-thump coming from upstairs where Offsprog Two was playing on her own. I went up to investigate, and she was holding a poor Barbie by the trotters and whacking its enhanced plastic breasts flat as pancakes against the bedroom wall; there was a pile of future victims beside her.

Next day, I rescued the lot by throwing them away.

A Gig 4 U

X-Factor: My Musical Response

BTW, I wrote a song about/for all the women I know who do great things and never get famous for them.
It's called Unsung Heroine and is at  http://www.myspace.com/helenmccookerybook

Sitting

Ah yes! I'll offer my services to everyone with a no-name office. Operation Doorscream, here I come!

Yesterday evening I did an interview with a woman called Caroline Blase that will be published in an e-zine called the F-Word, which looks g-reat!
She asked some very pertinent questions and had interviewed Gina Birch in the morning, and is interviewing Caroline Coon today. I enjoyed it, even though I was tired after work. She knows the background to it all really well and I think it will be a very interesting article.

And this morning, I woke up with the feeling that I'd swallowed a cactus with large and terrifying spines. So I decided to travel to Scotland by train tomorrow, although I will not be able to get a seat on the train. Perhaps I should carry a flowery cushion like an old lady and wedge myself in a smelly corner for the duration of the journey.
I was supposed to be doing more packing today but have mostly been doing Sitting Staring Into Space instead.

Later, I'm drawing some flyers, for Martin and for Acton Bell, which puts Sitting into a different context: Productive Sitting.
Meanwhile, this Writing Sitting has knackered me.
I'm off to Just Sit.

Princesses

At the University of the East, they have taken everyone's names of their office door (if they share an office), saying that people change offices a lot and it costs too much to give them individual name labels on their doors.
All the shared offices say 'Academic Office' now.
So students can't find us by looking for our names on the doors, and we feel like neutral objects rather than people.
Me and Julia, who I share an office with, were grumbling about this.
So now our office has a notice next to our door with yellow crowns and pink writing and patterns round the edge.
We are 'Princess Julia and Princess Helen'
That'll teach 'em to force anonymity on us!

Mist

Oh how beautiful! As I rounded a dowdy corner past the industrial estate this morning on my way to work, I came upon a small park that was filled with mist, thick as milk close to the ground and wispy and delicate as it dissolved into the warmer air higher up. A series of small trees punctured it evenly in dark green spikes, just beginning to take colour from the rising red sun. The mist was fenced in severely by the walls around the park and it dribbled slowly over the edges, overflowing its constraints.
It was like a secret that only early risers could see.

Soup

The house has become a sort of soup. I am sitting at the kitchen table surrounded by bananas, a pair of earrings, an Elvis Presley CD, a child's painting of a green witch, a French centime coin, the coffee in a flask I made this morning and forgot to take to work, a toothbrush and three screwdrivers.
Everything has slid about on a slide rule principle: the plastic dinosaurs are still in the bathroom, the rope lights are on the stairs, three empty guitar cases lean lopsidedly on a chair and a pile of duvet covers wait patiently on the landing, where we are trying to ignore them.
If I sneezed forcefully enough, everything would blow into the air and return to a more logical resting place.

Gina called this morning, full of the joys of being in the States with the Raincoats and Viv Albertine. She had a very funny rock'n'roll story about being caught in the hotel lift by the manager with a sofabed that she and Viv were trying to move from one room to another. They pretended that Viv had had a row with her husband and needed to move the sofabed out of his room and into Gina's.
Actually, she'd borrowed the sofabed from some guy they knew so she could sleep in Gina's room because a very born-again Christian Palmolive had come to stay too and it was getting rather crowded in there.
Apparently the hotel manager was really sympathetic to the guy they'd borrowed the sofabed from when he checked out, and told him he hoped they'd get over their quarrel!

There was another funny thing but I'm going to disguise that a bit like the Weasel and the Stoat story, and tell you another time!

I'm supposed to be writing tomorrow's lecture but I am unbelievably tired. I have the powerpoint from last year and I remember it leading to a lot of discussion, so let's hope that happens tomorrow too.
Goodnight!

Shouting at Mummy

Come on- everybody knows it but nobody says- Rap music is all about Shouting at Mummy.
All those diamonds, all that bling, the twitchy dancing, the F-F-F-word (yes, Eminem, that's you!).
Why isn't Mummy paying any attention?

Blasting Woes to Smithereens

I took a huge pile of 12" singles in to the University of the West for Jim, who collects oddball vinyl. He wasn't there, and the other sound engineers oohed and ahed, making me feel guilty that I hadn't offered them to them first! Jim's a fair chap and I am sure he'll share.

I  parked my ass in the boiling hot little office where the thesis students come for a weekly yak; three were missing, two ill and one on holiday in Boston where he's pretending to do research.
Ho hum, somebody does this every year, turning up at the last minute all excited and writing Not The Right Sort Of Thing. They are usually extremely affronted by the fact that I have identified their 'field trip' as a holiday.
Ho hum.

I had a nice chat with that Steve Beresford, fresh from playing melodica with The Slits on Friday night. He had really enjoyed it and we agreed that Ari is a fantastic live performer.

A young student has won the internal song writing competition and I spent a couple of hours helping her with her application. She had a streaming cold and I had to give her a paper hanky. Bless!

Out to the car park, where a parking ticket awaited me. I had misread the £5.50 fee as £5.00 and now I have to pay £60 fine. The rotters sell parking in three hour lots, the length of our lectures, so you have to pay for a day as you don't have time to get to or from the teaching rooms.
 I thought I'd paid for the whole day, and they are not going to show me any mercy.
This sort of thing often happens at this time of year: it's the sheer stress of the beginning of term. You take your eye off the ball and end up in the poo.
Grrr!

There's a hot curry in the fridge, a ready meal. I don't normally have these things but I'm too tired to cook and I have a lecture to write for Friday. I will heat it up and blast my woes to smithereens!