My Creative Process

I won another little writing award the other week. This was one I hadn't thought I had a chance of winning, knowing the nature and remit of the 'awarding party', so I'd sent my piece off without really thinking about it (but thereby obtaining the get-out clause, when I didn't win, that 'they' were a precious bunch of literary snobs who would never 'get my stuff' anyway.). Imagine my surprise when I came first...

Even more surprising was the detailed crit of my piece, compiled with a great deal of care and thought by the Chair of the judging panel, which arrived with my cheque on Monday. My face turned crimson as I read about my cunning, unsettling plot, my bold, confrontational characterisation, my sly, insistent pacing and my underlying insistence that you, the reader, should be rendered incapable of movement from the path of my devastating, but somehow inevitable, denouement. 

All I did was write a short piece that I thought was mildly entertaining. 

I never knew I was so damn clever.

Sit On My Face

I miss Linda Barker. I miss her indomitable attempts at pan-cultural home furnishing - why shouldn't your Moroccan souk dining room nestle comfortably beside your Shinto-influenced kitchen? And having enjoyed an evening meal of finest fusion foods, who says it might be a little confusing to retire to a Belle Epoque velvet boudouir after ablutions in your lovingly recreated Icelandic Hot Spring bathroom, complete with hourly-erupting geyser?

My life has been the poorer since Changing Rooms vanished from our TV screens some years ago, and without Linda's aesthetic guidance my home has fallen into a sludgy domestic pit of beige. However I'm suddenly emboldened by the range of cushions shown above, which were drawn to my attention yesterday. In dire times, we need all the inspiration we can get, and I think we can draw something valuable from this line, which as you can see includes Churchill, Bob Marley, and, er, Anne Frank. 

Yes, that's the Anne Frank Scatter Cushion. I can only assume that inside the shop (Wigmore Street, W1, since you ask), you can also obtain the Yan Palak T-towel ("non-flammable"), the Martin Luther King egg-timer ("I have a dream of the perfect boiled egg!"), and the Woody Guthrie Gardening Glove ("This land is your land, but you don't need to get it under your fingernails, no sir."). Or perhaps not. Either way, I'd be very keen indeed to know how those particular cushions are selling. And who on EARTH buys them....

Bollocks

So, on the 65th anniversary of the D-Day landings, Nazis were elected in England.

By 8am this morning I'd already heard Nick Griffin's gloating voice three times on the radio.

What the fuck....?????

I Danced Myself Out Of The Womb

I know (though osmosis because I've never actually seen it) that a dance troup were the surprise winners of 'Britain's Got Talent' (I also know that second-placed Susan Boyle has had something of a mental health crisis, which is surely less of a surprise result.).

The dancers all looked pretty young and hip from the still photos I've seen, and I felt quite impressed that the medium of dance has maintained some popularity among disaffected youth. The arrival of 'Fame' on British TV came too late, as far as I was concerned, for any Damascene conversion to the ways of Terpshicore. Some girls I knew DID don legwarmers and head off to Apples Studio in Newbury Park for a bit of 'Modern Jazz', but not me. As with so many things, I got put off 'Dance' forever at school.

As a spindly, clumsy dyspraxic, P.E was particularly purgatorial for the young me, and lessons earmarked 'Dance' quickly came to rank alongside the most miserable February cross-country run, or netball match against the gazelle-like First Team, for extra humiliation. Added to which was the lamentable selection of music to which we were encouraged to express ourselves. Our teacher Miss D had a small collection of 45s, which she kept in one of those wire racks like a toast rack, alongside the Dansette which was placed menacingly in the centre of the gym as a warning of what awaited.

We would stand shivering in our 'gym-dresses'; thick cotton, slash-necked, thigh-skimming tunics with varicose-inducing waists of double elastic (not even as attractive as it sounds), while Miss D blew fluff from the Dansette needle and barked at us to 'find your space'. We would reluctantly peel away from one another and slouch around while she lined up our 'warm-up record', which was, utterly bizarrely, Carl Orff's 'Carmina Burana'. With the first, demon-summoning choral shriek, we would have to throw ourselves ("FREE DANCE! FREE DANCE, GIRLS!") around the gym, limbs thrashing and hair flying, each in our own highly individual and dreadfully embarrassed interpretation. We must have looked like 30 little guests at an Exorcist party. Naturally, some of the more suggestible girls would get very involved in their exertions, and the frailer specimens would always get struck on the head or leg by a flailing fist or mid-jeté foot. Nuala D, a particularly stick-like creature with the most extreme overbite I have seen to this day, would often be weeping in a corner by the end of the warm-up alone.

By the time the last notes faded away, the windows would be fogged with asthmatic breath, and - though I don't remember this specifically, it must have been the case - the gym would have been thick with the sour smell of teenage sweat (although our school gym was equipped with a shower block, its use was forbidden to all but the girls of the Sixth Form. Presumably thought mature enough to resist the temptation of Sapphic lust. Couldn't have been more wrong.).

We were then ordered to the floor ("ON MATS, GIRLS! ON MATS") for the second and even more appalling section. Who remembers 'Popcorn', by Hot Butter? Well, I certainly do. What I remember most is having to try and hold the skirt of my gym dress around my bum while lying on my back with my legs in the air at a 90-degree angle, while we all did three degrading minutes' worth of choreographed scissor-kicks to that horrible, perky little tune. For Miss D, it was a two-in-one event; healthy exercise combined with an opportunity to carry out 'knicker inspection'; making sure we were all wearing the regulation navy-blue waist-huggers. Few of us were, and we had figured out that if we clutched our skirts around our arses even Miss D would baulk at striding over our prone forms demanding that we let her have a proper look.

Once 'Popcorn' had worked its magic, it was back on our feet for the dramatic finale. In a gesture which could be paralleled today by 'Teach' quoting Coldplay lyrics to a class of Stoke Newington hoodies, Miss D would put on 'I'm Free' by the Who, and encourage us to do our worst. By this time discipline and morale would both be breaking down, and we would scamper past each other making farting noises, weak with effort. For the final, descending section we would usually rally and break into a rhythmic variation on British Bulldog, in which the less robust would once more suffer.

There was a brief, brilliant breakthrough once when Catherine DeLucio, who was a bit hip, asked Miss D if she could supply the records. She ended up teaching Miss D to 'swanky' to Van McCoy's 'The Hustle', a sight which I have never forgotten. We all got a chance to get down to 'I Can't Give You Anything But My Love that day, too. But perhaps word of this moral laxity got back to the Head, because next time we convened for 'Dance', it was back to Carmina again. My inner ballerina cringed on, until I finally stopped going to P.E. altogether in the fifth year (I didn't give it up; I just stopped going.).

Looking at the pictures of 'Diversity' in the papers, you'd think they were actually enjoying themselves. I can't imagine how they were taught. Bet they'd never know what to do if you played them 'Popcorn'.