Hectic times

Apologies for not posting anything original in ages, things are pretty hectic for me at the moment, and I don't think posting Psychology, English or Education Studies essays would be of much interest to anyone. Hopefully when I finish college in June I will have some more time to start writing again. Also hoping to get a new camera just as soon as I can afford it, so more photos and stories to come.


In the mean time my friend Seiriol of the most wonderful Underbling and Vow, has turned his hand at DJing and I reckon this little remix of his is actually rather tasty. Give it a listen and then vote for it if you like it.


Cheers 

Inspirational Humanist and Feminist Imagery

Basium Mortis

 Antsy. Like ice cream in my pants(y). I feel like I am zinging and buzzing. Full of hyperactive energy. Pop. POP. Bubble. Whizz. I want to "Scream at the top of my lungs what’s going o-ON?" Too buzzing to read the paper, and this airless, soulless hospital waiting room feels like there is stiffing me. It literally feels like there is not enough oxygen in the air, or air the atmosphere.

To my left are three large windows looking out on to a scene of urban regeneration. Lush green trees; thick, dense with myriad shades of green foliage. The rich, varied shades of green set against the sheer, stark dark glass façade of the modern minimalist, industrial architecture. Behind the reflective, repetitious panels, one can just about make out the glare of florescent office lighting. The far left of the scene is more interesting in many ways. It is a scene under construction. A towering red crane working on -one presumes- a building that looks startled and naked with bare grey breezeblocks exposed to the elements. Vulnerable. On closer inspection each floor is numbered in big blue figures,

2

 

3

 

4

 

5

Gazing quite intently out of the 3 large windows, which so happen to be above a row of seats in the stagnant waiting room that contains me. In one of these seats, sits a woman who seems to find it profoundly strange that I should be looking above her head and out the window. She keeps giving me strange looks.

Abruptly awakened from my urban daydream by, “45… number 45?”

“Oh that’s me!” I say snapping into consciousness; revealing the sweaty ticket concealed, crumpled in my palm.

“This was please…” I am lead into one of the many cubicles separated by curtains and sat down by plump, friendly nurse. A young girl in a pink shirt, blue polyethylene apron, and cream slacks sits next to me. She has long black, thick wavy hair reaching down her back, the tips brushing against her rump. She looks about 15. Anxiety levels within start to climb; my heart starts to hammer a little faster in my chest:

Da-dum

Da-dum

Da-dum

“Hi, I am a volunteering here today, would you mind my doing your blood test for you?” I alarmed, this person looks like a child, and she does not even work here!

“Umm… are you qualified?” The girl laughs,

“I am trained, don’t worry.” I am worried.

“But are you a qualified phlebotomist?”

“Yes, I am qualified. I am just volunteering as a phlebotomist in this hospital.” I feel reassured. The nurse in the next cubicle chuckles,

“She is qualified, it’s Okay” she chortles.

“Yeah, Okay then, that’s fine, as long as you’re qualified. It is nice of you to volunteer.” I hand this cherubic faced pillar of the community my bloody test form, she looks at it and glances up at me trepidation clouding her angelic expression. She gets up and goes over to the nursing station to ask them something about my test. Anxiety rises again. She really does look very young. What if she knows? Perhaps she thinks me a monster.

Angel-faced-child phlebotenist

“Just one” I read from the lips of the nurse she is speaking to. She returns to me, any dread wiped clean from her face and replaced with a virtuous smile. It is now that I notice the specially designed blood-test-seat is set up for the (volunteer) phlebotomist to draw blood from your left arm. There goes the anxiety again, stronger this time, bubbling up like sulphuric acid, wearing away at my resolve. I hate having blood taken from my left arm. It is impossible not to notice the plethora of scars adorning the soft, pale inner surface of my for-arm. All pale pink or white now, and mostly faded with age but visible none-the-less and remarkable in their multitude and evidence of self-injury. I detest when strangers ask me about them, and I have received comments from phlebotomists before.

Da-dum

Da-dum

Da-dum

Then as she is fiddling with the tourniquet and getting out the cylinders with which to store the blood fresh from my veins, I notice that she has similar scars to mine, not as many but in the same place and almost certainly inflicted in the same way. I immediately feel calmer. I release my breath, long and deep, which I had not realised I had been, waiting for the dreaded uncomfortable don’t-know-how-to-answer question. It is strange that I should feel so reassured by the evidence of some one’s once emotional suffering. But it does, I know that she won’t say anything, as she will have lived with the same shame, the same disturbed looks, invasive questions and awkward moments. I have had hundreds of blood tests, and hundred of these awkward moments, and not once have I felt such an affinity to the person testing my blood. It feels like we are in some way connected by our troubled histories.

Judgement

As usual, it takes ages to find my veins, which are irritatingly small and deep below the surface. Once she finds a vein, I look away, not wishing to see the needle puncture my skin, and the thick, viscous, crimson substance passing through the plastic cannula into the clear Perspex cylinders, labelled with my personal details. As I look away, I notice how surreal it is to have boxes upon boxes of people’s blood, each packed with neat rows, fit snugly against each other, deep red with the contents of other people’s veins. The DNA of hundreds of people stacked like tinned food on supermarket shelves.

The needle hurts more than usual, it feels thicker, I am definitely going to get a bruise. “Are you all right?” The unnervingly fresh-faced woman emptying my veins asks.

“Yeah it just hurts quite a lot.”

“Almost done” and sure enough, soon it is over and I am holding a tiny ball of sterile cotton wool against my bleeding perforation, stemming the flow. It still hurts; I feel mildly sick and feint but I am relieved it is over.

*

Salvation

Just as I was imagining my stunning, expansive view as I sailed out of the window, an Olympic diver shrouded with shards of glass, as droplets of chlorinated water, I was brought back to reality with a thud. Or rather a crash, it felt like I had just hit the curb of Euston Road in a violent and bloody collision, when I opened my eyes and my phlebotomist was standing, ahead of me, looking both morose and terrified, clutching a gas mask over her mouth and nose. I noticed that the waiting room that had been bustling with life at the ellipse of my suicidal daydream was now starkly empty and devoid of movement.

Her apologetic eyes did nothing to stop the scene around me melting away. Tunnel vision narrowing into only whiteness, pain and a distant a humming, like a wasp trapped in the case of a florescent light bulb, tempted to doom by the luminescent tube, trapped never to find a way out of their plastic tomb, searching frantically, destined to eventually cook alive.

I vomited.

When things came into focus, again I was on a hospital trolley in restraints. I looked desperately around me and sighted ahead an isolation room, sterile, devoid of natural air and light. Surrounded by brave, stoic doctors, cloaked in protective clothing.

Too late to escape

“KILL ME” I screamed, “Kill me, PLEASE? Don’t do this to me. I know now it was me, and that I am too dangerous to near you, or any one. But don’t keep me here, alive, like a laboratory rat, caged. Please?” I was suddenly consumed, overwhelmed with guilt for the people who had died. The people I had killed. The poor soul under my train, my mum, my dear old mum, Michael, good strong, sweet Michael, my Mickey, I always knew I would end up hurting him, but I never, ever thought it would be like this. And Rory, my little Rory. I started whaling, sobbing, screaming, it was carnal, base, incontrollable, immutable all consuming misery, grief and guilt. It swept over me, like an icy wave, smothering me, choking me. I was drowning. This would kill me, surely this hideous; suffocating pain, the pain of knowing it was me. I had killed them, killed them all, not Rory not my little Rory, it was unbearable. How could you destroy something you loved so much? I willed, hoped, prayed, wished, with every molecule of my being to die there, then, on that trolley. I did not.

*



 Pills, tasteless hospital mush, more pills, blood test, more “food”, more pills. That was my day, occasionally a nurse would come and ask me how I was doing, but I didn’t want to speak to them, or anyone, I just wanted to cease existing.

*

As the medication began to take effect, my certainty dwindled. I was less and less sure of how I had wound up there, I knew that they were dead, sadly, that remained true, but how they had died became unclear. I was so sure that it had been me, my fault. I had deduced it must have been my kiss of death, my curse, that killed them. But it made less and less sense to me, how could I have killed them? They had not died at my hands, or even of a common cause. The ward seemed to change before my eyes also. My isolation room, shifted form until it because simply a private room in ward full of other female patients. The nurses attending to me wore less and less protective clothing, until they appeared in regular nursing uniforms. Eventually my desire for answers outweighed the feeling that my body was made of concrete and I ventured out onto the ward, through a living-room-type-space with a few listless women, staring vacant, eyes clouded with medication. I wondered if I looked like they did. There was also I tall woman, covered in tattoos, wearing surgeon’s scrubs and lurid pink high-heels, her peroxide hair scraped back in a messy pony tale, shaved off at the sides. She craned around to look at me; she appeared gripped my mania, various metal studs protruding from her face. She could have been pretty.

“What are you looking at?” She crowed across the room.

“N-nothing” I stammered, my voice horse and foreign sounding in mouth, it had been so long since I had spoken to anyone. I found my way to the nursing station and asked to speak to the person who was in-charge of my care. A corpulent, beaming black woman, with cobalt blue nurses uniform straining against her expansive middle responded kindly,

“Follow me, this way, in here precious,” she said pushing open the door to a small room with two big, plastic coated easy chairs and a desk. “Take a seat then.” I perched on the edge of the one furthest from the door, unsure of what I was here to ask her. “What can I do for you?” I sat there in silence. Nothing made sense, and my head felt clouded, like it was full of dense fog.

Talking Therapy

Over time the fog cleared and the stark reality of what had actually happened in over the last few months became more and more visible, as haze of my mania thinned and eventually subsided all together. Now the truth, my truth, the truth that I had been so certain of, seemed to more and more absurd, in clarity that the lithium bought. Talking helped me to make sense of things, and boy did I talk, once I started, I just couldn’t stop, there was so much darkness inside me which I need to let out, so that it would not consume me again. Every day I would talk to Trudy, my kindly cobalt-blue nurse. She helped me to understand that the truth, the actual truth; that had been too horrible for my brain to handle, so it had fractured and constructed an alternate reality to take refuge in. A reality, in which I had killed my loved ones, killed them by kissing them, by loving them. I had convinced myself I had some mystery virus in order to explain away things too horrible comprehend. I had not killed them, of course, I hadn’t, there was no virus, no kiss of death. Just tragedy. They were still gone, and though I did not know how I would function with out them, I had no choice but rebuild my life, alone, brick by brick.



Brick by Brick

~*~



The very few of you that read my blog regularly may notice that this is a continuation of a previous post. I turned a descriptive passge into a short story for my English cours, I hope that you like it and I welcome any feedback.



*

 

Photo

My Album Cover

Life looks better by candle-light

Ride to No Where

Island Revelry 

The ecstacies of youth and beauty

The Ravages of Time

Autumn's false promise

Photos

It was a perfect Autumnal day, the sun's rays breaking through the fine wisps of clouds that were strewn across the bright-white-blue sky. Bright icy rays permeating their peaks and gently warmed the back of my neck in the crisp cold. Warm enough that you can still enjoy being outside but cool enough to wear your woolly coat, hat,scarf and gloves. Walking through the reds, golds and yellowing greens of the park; admiring fallen conkers still partially in-utero, in their prickly casing. Surface like polished mahogany, perfect with marbled detail and lustre. The trees gifts to the children whom collect and play with them. Each step producing a crackle and crunch as the dead leaves of summer disintegrate underfoot, the last remains of a long summer, crumbling to dust. 

Courtesy

Autumn is filled with promise, i's rick colours, bounteous seeds, nuts and catkins cascading to the earth, sparking the imagination of the young. The smells of the earth as the leaves wither and die, decompose and become again part of the earth, feeding, fertilising the solid of their matriarchs roots. The smells of burning wood and gun powder that fill the air once Autumn has truly taken hold, grasps us in it's long spindly icy fingers. The tastes of sulphur that occupy the back of your tongue with the sharp intake of breath that follows the explosions of colour and light.

Of My

The cravings for warm, stodgy, comforting foods and the reluctance to venture out of doors in the dark, frosty evenings. Autumns ellipse is a deceptive promise of richness and warmth to come, when really what follows if moths of bleak cold blackness. Months of consumerism gone crazy, screaming spoilt children and luminescent decorations. Followed by a deep slump of darkest depression when the months of cold, dark isolation destitute having spent all your holiday pay-check on cheap plastic frivolity that will only be disregarded a couple of weeks after being unwrapped. The only spark in the distance, the patron saint of smugness, who sold his soul to Clinton's Cards a long time ago. A holiday so remarkable exclusive that everyone not in the throws of copulation feels like throwing them self out of the nearest window. 

Old

But that is still to come, and today is perfect. A brisk, amalgamation of all things bright, fresh, rich and in glorious shades of decay. Today is filled with the effervescence of what is to come. So for today I can forget that I know what comes next, pretend I am still new to this planet and enjoy the fluttering leaves, the gleaming chess-nuts, the glistening damp on the sharp green grass and revel in the foe-naivety of it all. For today is a perfect Autumnal day.

Dad

I love it here, it is paradise.

I love the ladies ponds, for me, they are a haven, a sanctuary from the rest of London and it's madness. The humming is like sweet music. The melody of nature. The ladies pond itself set amongst the other Highgate ponds is by far the most beautiful. It's deep oval expanse lines with aged trees, the edges interspersed with irises and floating lilly pads. The water is a deep shade of green and feels like icy velvet against your skin as your naked body glides through its expanses. You could be anywhere. 360* degrees and there are no visible signs you are in London, just towering trees and grassy meadows. The scattering of floating rings ofter become floating islands for fucks and p-hens to nest upon, so that in spring and early summer you get to swim alongside little ducklings. Utter bliss.

Then there are the two meadows, one on a gently sloping grassy verge frames with tall trees, overlooking the ladies swimming pong. The other on a slightly steeper slope, but with the most perfect pastoral view over the duck ponds, the fishing ponds and the men's pond, a landscape filled with green, the lush green of the trees, gently dancing in the brease The comforting bright green of the grassy planes surrounding the ponds and the deep dark green of the ponds themselves, enveloped by the bright blue-white of the summer sky, reflected in places in the still darkness of the water.

As I am writing this I glance up and a dragonfly is resting on the calf of a woman sun bathing ahead of me . What a treat to have the most elegant insects grace your person with it's landing. I wonder if that is the same dragon fly I watched dart and dance about whilst I was perched upon a float, resting after swimming some lengths in the icy depths. I watch it dart about the floating lilly pads, amongst the low hanging branches of the trees, and wind about the tall stems of the irises, diving down low enough to just ski the surface of the water then up up again towards the heavens and out of sight. I love it here it is paradise.

"When I Am An Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple*"

This woman looks fabulous. Her existence epitomises everything that can be wonderful about old age, and not an ounce of melancholy and slow decline that lingers around some of the older generation was about her.

She was perched partially astraddle a chunky bicycle complete with pack storage box strapped to the back. Immersed in conversation with another older lady her attire set her apart from her companion entirely. She was a vision in varying shades of plum, purple, violet and mauve. Her outfit was definitely not designed gfor cycling agility and swiftness of movement however cycling she was. I marvelled at how elegant she was in her purple high heels, plum tights, full pleat A-line skirt in a deep shade of indigo, and juicy-plum blouse all shades completing each other perfectly like a slow matured vintage reserve botte of the finest, most delicate bottle of vino with flavours of ripe summer berries and a robust finish.

I was not the only person to notice her in her purple splendour. Many we craning around to gave at her awe struck. Admiring. She seemed totally unperturbed by the attention she was receiving. continuing her holly conversation with her friend; completely unremarkable by comparison. Not unpleasant to look at, just plain and ordinary. One wonders if she marvels at her resplendent, elegant friend the same way we do, or if she sees past her glamorous attire to a dignified old lady with the same interests and ideals as herself.

This woman entered my life, from a distance for a few moments, but the way she presented herself and held herself whist in such bold finery left a lasting impression on me and perhaps others on the bus. Anyone fearing getting old need only to look at her, in her purple glory and realise that life is what you make of it.

Warning

by

Jenny Joseph

When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple

with a red hat that doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.

And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves

and satin candles, and say we've no money for butter.

I shall sit down on the pavement when I am tired

and gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells

and run my stick along the public railings

and make up for the sobriety of my youth.

I shall go out in my slippers in the rain

and pick the flowers in other people's gardens

and learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat

and eat three pounds of sausages at a go

or only bread and pickles for a week

and hoard pens and pencils and beer nuts and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry

and pay our rent and not swear in the street

and set a good example for the children.

We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practice a little now?

So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised

When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.