Being Homer

Clatter of stabilisers, whoosh of cars:
us returning from the shops,
North on Westview Rd.
The North shore mountains clothed in snow
to the ankles, chaste,
and now a lull,
and the chattering of chickadees and you,
saying “if I keep riding my bike,
I will have legs bigger than the whole universe”.
And the whole universe quakes.

In the pub

At my own instigation, I went out for a drink after work, but after a few formalities I found myself washed away by a frothing torrent of gossip and sedition. I zoned out, and my phone rang. It was Nancy, asking me to buy turmeric on the way home. Taking this as my excuse to leave, I stood up and said “I’m off” or something to that effect, and was met by a chorus of disapproval. They didn’t want me to leave, beause the colloquy had reached a new pinnacle of infamy. Or nadir. In any case I muscled my way out of the bar, for I was thoroughly fed up with it. I was fed up with the imaginary ships bobbing across the pink imaginary reputational sea, and the imaginary u-boats with merciless kapitans holing them surgically… It’s a vile thing to talk about work in the pub.

Hawking

70. Well done. Two years to live, and so on. Black holes. Genius, loveable rogue, Simpsons, etc. Are we sure he isn’t faking it? Just think of the benefits he’s claimed! I think it’s about time he was means tested, and just saying a load of black hole equations in that voice of his isn’t going to cut it.

I say if he can weld, then he can damn well take a job as a welder. From an immigrant! Illegally.

Santorum

everywhere I look this morning. Some are calling it the santorum surge, but I would go further; I foresee a santorum tsunami. Luckily there was a dowpour of god’s honest rain to wash me clean on the way to work.

Health update and wishlist

Dull gripping intermittent pain in my left shoulder for a couple of days now. I think I slept on it awkwardly, or I’m about to die. Almost time to leave this desolate office.

Two things I hope for this Christmas:

• Chocolate orange
• Ham

Jenga

The ratings agencies strike me as ghostly, like money; pure feedback. But the problem is that because money is feedback, they really can bellyflop and smother it. Currently Belgium and France are being crushed. What a mad game of Jenga.

We’re sitting here like the last piece of chocolate on top of a quivering blancmange surrounded by rapacious office workers.

The New Life

Easter Sunday is the day I associate with you,
because that day I shambled through Battersea,
a man trapped fast between a fast-moving new
love and an old, and few men have a gait flat as he:
and that was me (the Albert Bridge frostily twinkling)
entering Chelsea, the previous unprofitable year
manacling me by the ankles. But an inkling
of better luck. And in a shadow the shop of a chocolatier

ablaze with light and luscious caramel and rose-
coloured wrapping and ribbon, and I walked in:
alone, as though on a vast steppe (plus I suppose
the artisan himself). And then I balked: in
a splendid cabinet rested an array of eggs,
dense and dark and sparkling, and muralled round
with incantations long and lovely as your legs,
and more intricately patterned and profound

than the river I’d just traversed.
I spent about a hundred quid, I think (it felt
like more at the time). As I left the shop a burst
of cold wind hit me and sunlight fell full-pelt
and I knew I was right to give up my old existence.
I walked back to your flat on Cambridge Rd.,
it was two, ten, a hundred miles, it was any distance,
it was SW11, it was Narnia, it was any postal code.

Three blog posts in one

A winter’s day in Canada. But not so fast: there are no igloos here, no bludgeoned seals, no portly mustachioed mounties. We are in suave, temperate Vancouver, where a different iconography holds sway: a blend of quasi-sixties laissez-faire, thrusting Asian, and throwback, lumberjacking, hockey-loving Canuck. Well, I suppose if you’re lucky you might see the occasional fat hairy cop. On the downtown sidewalks the people skate past each other in a deft gavotte, eyes pointed resolutely at the street, distressed sneakers and shiny clickclacking heels. And when you ask them how they feel about the reigning conservative government, they evince an array of emotions: from anger, to querulousness, perplexity, apathy, and bliss.

On two or three days out of the five I have to feed myself downtown I go to a cheap pizza place on Pender. It’s $3.75 for two dripping, oleaginous, vaguely repugnant slices, and I get a free slice for every ten I buy. The radio plays pleasant Indian airs. The proprietors welcome me warmly and sometimes we exchange pleasantries. I enjoy this interaction, because it has encrusted itself onto my daily routine over a very long period. There is usually a beggar standing outside, a mundane-looking man with a short ginger beard and a submissive posture. I give him money roughly once a fortnight.

Ever since I began reading Victorian fiction, I’ve wondered why the characters, especially the women, are so prone to fainting. I can’t believe that all of the fainting is Victorian novelists exaggerating for effect: most were intelligent and would have expected their works to be subjected to this kind of posthumous scrutiny. No, I’m convinced that women back then really did have a chronic fainting problem. So why was this? Partly of course it was the various poisons in the air and water: lead, cholera, asbestos, the blue funk, etc. There was also the weight of expectation on the 19th century woman: play piano, bear children, play piano, more children, more piano, play bear, piano, children, etc. Their life was a never-ending vortex of offspring and Haydn minuets. And they were always subject to that bodily pinging sensation that nineteenth century physicians called nerves; and the best thing about Victorian novels is the way they mention disease – polite for mental, blunt for physical.

Control

I watched as you spooned
gelid gazpacho from the mixing bowl,
and saw your lips and tongue.
The soup was the colour of a wound,
the spoon hung
lazily from your fingers. You were in total control.

Fruit fly

Every five minutes or so, when he comes close, I clap my hands at the fruit fly who is circling my wine, and he eludes me casually. What makes it so frustrating is that the fruit fly is too stupid even to appreciate his peril. He knows no fear to validate my clumsy feints and lunges. As far as he’s concerned, I either don’t exist or am just a random atmospheric disturbance.