things that get me through the day

fizzy mineral water
haloumi cheese
banana
salad dressing

but not all at once

things that make me gag

plain water
tea
coffee
smell of raw potato
anything fishy
anything perfumed
chocolate
crisps
toothpaste
even the honeysuckle by the back door is revolting.

how much does a big fat bullock weigh?

well it doesn't really matter when you feel the ground shuddering beneath you as they leap over the woefully insignificant 'fence' separating the field you are in from the one they used to be in. and you know that there is nowhere to retreat to. you are too far away from the gate at the top of the field and even if you did manage to get through the twanging wire that the beasts are leaping, what would be the damn point anyway, since they are just as likely to come charging back again.
Oh yes, leaping snorting beasts with the whites of their rolling eyes showing, mooing and bellowing and falling over each other just like the wildebeasties on the telly trying to avoid the crocs in the river.
we should have known that something was going to be not quite right when the herd of insane beasts rammed the fence where it happened to be a bit more substantial. It bowed but it didn't give. Hmm.
Top of field: wire fence with barbed wire on top sturdy posts and scattered hawthorn hedges.
Middle of field: wire fence with barbed wire and spindly posts, hardly any hedge.
Bottom of field: sagging wire fence which reaches dizzy heights of 18 - 20 inches. NO hedge. NO barbed wire. NO holding them back.
What I would like to know is what kind of idiot expects his beasts to stay put in a field with such a flimsy boundary?
Panic? Moi?
Just a little of the blind variety. Fortunately the stupid bullocks went stampeding to the other side of the field and stayed there long enough for us to get over the gate at the bottom of the field.
I think there were between 30 and 40 of them but each time I get a flashback, they divide and multiply, like one tonne germs

the winner

of the plagiarism contest has been posted. I bow down to her super duper plagiarising skills. Have a look, it's very good, I like her collection of sources.

As for me,
busy bee.
Something's cooking
inside

songster

there's a blackbird round here, that sits on the roofs and does a perfect immitation of a car alarm before falling into its more natural liquid fruity warble. It catches me out every single time, and I always wonder what the f*** is a car doing on my roof...

pilfering, lifting, stealing - plagiarising is fun

Check out the 'plagiarise' link

This was my effort, cobbled together with random books from my shelves yesterday afternoon whilst Treasure Island was on the telly. As an exercise to fathom your true interests and wants from fiction (which wasn't the original idea) it's quite revealing. I'm not sending it in by the way.


“Unbearable Disgrace In The Age of Love”


Her hair is long, black, with the density of mercury. People always say she looks proud. She doesn’t feel that way, it is only skin deep. Not everyone has the face they deserve.1 She stood up from the toilet, flushed it and went into the anteroom. She still felt on her anus the touch of the paper she had used to wipe herself.2
It was early July, but not summery. The sky bulged, pregnant with water.3 And suddenly, something unforgettable occurred: suddenly she felt a desire to go in to him and hear his voice, his words. If he spoke to her in a soft deep voice, her soul would take courage and rise to the surface of her body, and she would burst out crying.4
She runs water for him in their big, old fashioned, cast iron bath. He stretches out his pale length in the steaming water and tries to relax.5 She took his arm: he felt her against him, a warm top-heavy figure: ’And Mathieu actually desired the creature’, he thought.6 There was something studious about her appearance that made her slightly too intelligent looking to be a beauty.7 He kept warning himself not to give in to compassion, and compassion listened with bowed head and a seemingly guilty conscience.8 He is stroking her face, her neck, and she keeps her eyes closed, basking in him.9
It is the end of October, the last days of autumn. In the morning she opens the door and her car has turned white with frost. Doggedly she guns the engine. She has never much liked machines. The radio comes to life and dies in a single galvanic burst of music.10
The battery has failed and taxis, cars, minibuses, vans, motorcycles butt and challenge one another, reproach and curse her, a traffic mob mounting its own confusion. Get going. Stupid bloody woman.11
The overground is ten minutes walk through the gloom.12 She sat down, composed and gloomy.13 The engine thrums, accumulating power. Anna leans her face against the window. The glass is cold against her cheek.14 So she didn’t mean to leave him : which did not prove he was forgiven.15
Mathieu looked at his watch. ‘Twenty to eleven; she’s late.’ He did not like her to be late, he was always afraid that she might have inadvertently died. She forgot everything, she evaded herself, she forgot herself from one minute to the next, she forgot to eat, she forgot to sleep. One day she would forget to breathe and that would be the end.16 He felt his smile slide away, melt, fold over, and down on itself like a tallow skin, like the stuff of a fantastic candle burning too long and now collapsing and now blown out.17
To come at last, and more specifically, to the case of the parted lovers, who present the greatest interest and of whom the narrator is, perhaps, better qualified to speak - their minds were the prey of different emotions, notably remorse. For their present position enabled them to take stock of their feelings with a sort of feverish objectivity.18
It seemed to him that he had spent his life in a worthless and senseless manner; he retained nothing vital, nothing in any way precious or worth while. He stood alone, like a shipwrecked man on the shore.19 He trudged back up to the familiar attic. It looked very clean and very empty.20 He had sucked on his shotgun and pulled the trigger. The weapon had belonged to his father, who had put it to the same use.21

She was silent, and sat shaking her head despondently.22
‘All I can say is,’ began Anna, ‘I am his sister and I know his character, his capacity for forgetting everything,’ she made a gesture with her hand in front of her forehead, ‘that capacity for letting himself be completely carried away...’23 She walked as a somnambulist slowly down the street to its end.24

and the books I used were:

1.Tobias Hill, The Cryptographer, p8 Faber & Faber 2003
2.Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p157. Faber & Faber 1985
3.Muriel Spark, The Finishing School,p3. Viking 2004
4.Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p157. Faber & Faber 1985
5.J.M Coetzee, Disgrace, p103. Vintage 2000
6.Jean-Paul Sartre, The Reprieve, p41. Penguin 1987
7.Muriel Spark, The Finishing School, p42. Viking 2004
8.Milan Kundera, The unbearable Lightness of being, p31. Faber& Faber 1985
9.Tobias Hill, The Cryptographer, p256 Faber & Faber 2003
10.Tobias Hill, The Cryptographer, p8. Faber & Faber 2003
11.Nadine Gordimer, The Pickup, p 3.Bloomsbury 2002
12.Tobias Hill, The Cyptographer, p8. Faber & Faber 2003
13.Jean-Paul Sartre, The Age of Reason, p53 Penguin 1971
14.Tobias Hill, The Cyptographer,p9. Faber & Faber 2003
15.Jean-Paul Sartre, The Age of Reason, p74. Penguin 1971
16.Jean-Paul Sartre, The Age of Reason, p52. Penguin 1971
17.Ray Bradbury, Farenheit 451, p19. Corgi 1973
18.Albert Camus, The Plague, p63. Penguin Twentieth Century Classics
19.Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha, p66. Picador 1981
20.Jane Stevenson, Astrea, p53. Vintage 2002
21.Salman Rushdie, East, West, p125. Vintage 1995
22.Jean-Paul Sartre, The Age of Reason, p162. Penguin 1971
23.Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, p82. Everyman’s Library
24.Nadime Gordimer, The Pickup, p229. Bloomsbury 2002

curiosity...

the feeling, unbid, falls into
my lap like a fresh carcass,
glistening, not yet sticky.
certainly no bad smell.
I am one of his specimens,
a little part of his collection
cornered in wet lace. distilled
into an easy-view package -
I can only see what is inside
and peer through my own reflection.
I am a fish. I am a dead fetus. I
am a bat, gone pale in time’s keep
without blood to red my lips without
spittle to form my words.

phantoms

it's not something the electricity man left
behind in the cupboard
it's not something that crawled in
and died under the sofa,
or got stuck in the chimney, or the wall
it's not cat shit, from the stray that comes in
and it's not dog poo from someone's
shoe.
it's here, it's there, it's over there, yes
worse, much worse here, worse than
yesterday. CHRIST, what IS
that bloody awful stink?
we've spent ages on the floor with our noses to the carpet
and lifted rugs and
wait a minute
hold on
pig shit mixed with ear wax
is a
little weed, from South Africa
yellow flowers, quite pretty
really. but it's in the bin now.