JOY

JOY

Friday, December 22nd, 2006



Friday 22nd December



cool, grey and still



Tis the season not to go to official events. Watched Crash the other night with

Gabriel, Peter out at the Governors’ dinner, both of us two feeling a bit down on our

luck; another one I missed when it was new. A gentle, blowsy, slightly crass movie

with its heart in the right place, but it’s a funny thing, in the USA they think this is all

about the RACE problem, whereas to anyone outside that peculiar territory it’s

blatantly a movie about the GUN problem. I tell you, if guns could be had over the

counter in the UK, I know a few relatives of mine who’d be doing life by now. (And

others who would be dead, of course). Listening, Low and Cockburn. Drinking, a

James Bond. Shopping, cleaning floors, peeling the chestnuts we scrumped with

Maude in Patcham Woods in October, putting up streamers, frightening the cats,

Sunday the ham and Lulu’s party; tomorrow to the magic wood, but right now it’s

time for the final episode of Rainbow Bridge.



What did you expect, at the end of Bold As Love? A happy ending?



Yes. JOY



Have a totally random Christmas and a confabulating New Year. Signing off.



Proof-reading

Tuesday, December 19th, 2006



19th December



weather same as it was an hour ago



Proof-reading, the fragility of outside links, ah, now I remember why I gave up on

them, but then the pages get so cluttered with behaviours, which my nanny treats like

suspect popups, annoyingly. Anyway, dommage, Running-Dog, famed irreverent

chinawatch blog, from inside the belly of the dragon or is it phoenix, is gone,

(unsurprisingly),hope they are okay, can find no news of them later than August.

Replaced the link with a profile interview of the editors. That quirky french blogspot,

the reason why I used it as my Green Day link is gone with the wind. Never mind, it

can stay. Mulan and Empress Wu links replaced with (I hope) more stable material…

The bitch about scafell landscaping retrieved from where it had fallen down a virtual

radiator, and i decided to keep the grebes tho’ I can’t find their link. Replaced it with

rspb.



Anyway, that’s one ready to upload.



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Follow the bouncing ball

Tuesday, December 19th, 2006



19th December, Tuesday



“Cold snap” continues…



Last night I finished Gravity’s Rainbow again, sixth time of reading; the first is

unrecorded, the second was in 1978, in Singapore. Passed the anachronistic helicopter

joke (which I’ve never thought very funny), through the Raketen Stadt, which I used

to like because it’s so like an (anachronistic) video game, with its collapsing buildings

and arbitrary location shifts; or like a T Mobile ad. But it goes on a bit. Past Geli

Tripping’s lyrical green summoning, and there go the I Ching feet, and finally the

00000 launch flashback, with all its lascivious, guilt/s**t orgasm detail (this book was

not written to be read by me, I read it inspite of every sign that says DO NOT

ENTER). And so goodbye. I’ll be a different person next time.



have you ever waited for it? wondering whether it will come from outside or inside,

finally past the futile guesses as what might happen…

The fourth time I read GR I started it in Feb 99 (yes, it is a bit obsessive, isn’t it?), the

beginning of a great year. I wonder how long before I pick it up again, and what will

have happened to me by then?



Next time I pick up one of the big three, (probably after a festive break) it will be for

a long time I used to go to bed early…



I’ve just realised that the above constitutes a rare, normal use of the internet and a

blogspot. I’ll be downloading ebaum videos and catloguing my books on here yet.



No! No!



hope not fear tour

Sunday, December 17th, 2006



17th December



Clear night, starlight, almost chilly

The dark red page with the “crucible of change” text is up again on Bold As Love the

website, it was always my favourite. This means that it’s all over, put to bed (tho’ I

still have to finish proof-reading). And it’s the last waltz for the Triumvirate, although

not quite the end of the story, one more episode to go.



There is no armour against dumb luck.



You get what you need.



The freedom of the rose tree is the rose.

That milkman of human kindness is a hard working lad.True, there was a fair amount

of talking between the songs, but a three hour show, and the hope not fear tour

consists of Billy Bragg, with. . . Billy Bragg and his stage crew. How his voice

survives I do not know. Cracking rhythm guitar. Poor man is one of those people the

mejafolk never noticed is a terrific musician because duh, he does politics doesn’t he?

But never say die, eh? No paseran.*



*I found a bitching anti-European anti-leftwing website by that name, just now.

Attacking Women’s Hour for its wingey radical opinions, for heaven’s sake. BUT, he

won a prize for his blog last year. Who from, I wonder?



(all the romantic defeats, all the misused slogans, corpses in the mouths of the stupid,

and all the inchworm victories. A bnp councillor in Dagenham is going to look like

crumpled rose leaves, if the Long Emergency really gets its teeth.)



Oh no! My supply of Siberia hardbacks turns out to be the Italian edition.This is

dreadful.Turn loft upside down and inside out. Antique video cameras, boxes of old

toys, bodyboards, whyonearth are we still keeping Gabriel’s pushchair, what are these

random pieces of timber about? Siberia refuses to turn up, ooh dear.



The traveller, Excellence

Saturday, December 16th, 2006



15th December



Bright and faintly chilly



Christmas, ouch, and Bibi isn’t moving very fast, oh dear. Back to usual long daft

hours after the break, that’s the problem with R&R, the work just sits and waits for

you. The script for Siberia the movie arrives… shall I read it? Maybe not. Maybe I’ll

read it at a later stage, if movie really going to happen



What are we going to do for New Year’s PG?



(former plans involving my parents having been scuppered)



Partner mutters something about can’t we just stay in, next thing I know he’s booked

us into Pinxo People’s NY Eve upstairs party. Excellent news! Hm, wonder what the

centre of Brighton and Hove will be like? Sodom and Gommorah, most probably.

Party on.



London To Brighton

Wednesday, December 13th, 2006



13th December



Same as it was ten minutes ago

Went to see London to Brighton, it is very good. I’m going to give up going to see

harsh movies. No more guns, no more abject grit, I’ve had enough for a while.



Think I’ll stick to Studio Ghibli over Christmas



I wonder what Milo has against New Scientist. He’s opened my cuttings folder and is

shredding the contents…



Map End Dagger Show

Wednesday, December 13th, 2006



13th December,



grey and mild, surprise surprise



The Feast of St Lucy, (13th Dec 88) one of Gabriel’s major artworks, is still on the

basement wall. It has something astronomical about it, I think, and a real feeling for

balance and colour. Happy birthday Lucy, hope you got the card.



The Chinese proverb “Map End Dagger Show” refers to a botched assassination

attempt on the man who was on his way to becoming Shi Huangdi, the implication is

that you often only find out who your enemies are at the last moment of your dealings

with them (compare, you always find something the last place you look, duh).

Chinese sayings rely a lot on shared cultural context, just as ours do, which doesn’t

mean people remember. The connection between the words and the meaning may

have become totally opaque, long before the expression is abandoned. Who’s Jesus?

What five thousand? Anyway, coincidentally, the ante-penultimate episode of

Rainbow Bridge is up: it’s not over til it’s over



Women and animals, hmm…

Sunday, December 10th, 2006



10th December



Dark skies. Is it almost chilly? Relatively, with a lot of imagination, is it a wintery

day?

The daphne, inspite of having been ripped in half by a large person falling on it in the

dark at a summer party, is rich in bud, my Lulu Belle has one dishevelled flower and

several nearly open. By the end of the week I’ll have a winter bouquet by my bed, I’ll

be La Dame Aux Camellias coff coff. But as I was saying, fur and gold, women and

animals… It was never horses, not for me, not really. When I was a little child my

alter ego was a grey swan, she was called Greyey, the grey swan (original, huh?).

Fiorinda, very, attentive Bold As Love readers might have noticed, is a horse,

according to Chinese horoscopes; and it suits her. But her totem animal must be a red

deer, for here she is, drifting into snowy ambush, all unaware.

The serial will be finished by the time the Bold As Love site gets its classic front page

back (reconstucted for the whole five books), ie before Xmas. But it won’t disappear,

I have plans for it and meanwhile it’ll still be reachable from this blog.



Bats in St George’s

Friday, December 8th, 2006



8th December



thick grey sky in the valley, palewashed bowl over the sea, tough beech leaves bright

on the swampy mulch of sycamore and lime. A dog fox running ahead of me along

the green path to the funeral chapel, grass full of beads of rain



Think I’ll turn out to see this gothicky sounding thing at St George’s…



Oh really? Okay, text me, I’m not sure where St George’s is, are you?



St George’s is a beautiful building up in the far east end of Kemptown, elegant

galleried interior, on the cusp between 18thC grace and neo-goth. I walked so I

wouldn’t miss it, a long way in the blustery dark, luckily monsoon type rain was

taking a break. Full house, well, naturally, having snagged “Gig of the week” in the

Independent, clever girls. Strange support act, which I spent illicitly trying to text PG,

blind as a bat in the dark as I’d been obliged to remove my contact lenses, I can

usually do more than twelve hours, but not this time… Natasha Khan is (says here) a

scion of the Khan squash clan. She has a very good voice, insouciant charm, good

hands, good musicians in her band. They’ve got the look, they’ve got the style, they

seem like another race, elfin and incorruptible.



St George’s is a live Christian church, C of E, full of invitations to dogged goodwill

activities, what an intriguing place for a Christmas rock gig in bleak times, eh. There

was a huge Christmas tree propped against the back wall of the sanctuary, waiting in

the wings for its turn, a king from the crib made a guest appearence for one number.

I’m glad I made the effort. I’d leave the house for these people again, any time.

Which is saying something.



My eyes are still sore. Tomorrow, the AI Greetings Card vigil at the Friend’s Meeting

Place. See you there.



When you see

Wednesday, December 6th, 2006



6th December



Sunny and warm. St Nicolas left chocolate in the shoes, as always. Milo has eaten

more parlour palm, bad kitten.

When you see spam business opportunities wearing flowers in their hair, you know

it’s time to revert to chaste white backgrounds and a conservative font. I’m getting

tempted to edit the Castles Made Of Sand pages, pull out all those lurid Heavy Metal

colours, which seemed so appropriate at the time, when I put the Bold As Love site to

bed forever, real soon now. Would that be grave-robbing?



What I’m really looking for. . .

Thursday, November 30th, 2006



30th Nov



breezy and cooler, matte grey skies



What I’m looking for is A Door Into Ocean, Joan Slonczewski, so’s I can continue my

review of the ancients. Unfortunately my loft has reached the point in its cycle when

recataloguing has to be undertaken, just to clear floor space. I can see the Women’s

Press cover in my mind’s eye… It’s here, but I haven’t a chance. The light from the

single bulb only makes shadows wherever I look, and the wind sounds like the

ocean… Red Carpet books, huh. Black hole, more like, and this is another.

Curses! Gabriel told me not to trust Amazon Used&New, & I wouldn’t listen.



Poshlaia

Wednesday, November 29th, 2006



Weds 29th November



Sunny, warm



One bust (head and shoulders) of a boy, in unglazed clay, ears are like two small half

moons stuck on the sides of his head, hands (at least, the one pressed to his breast in a

salute of some kind) like bunched squid tentacles. Circa 1994-97. Small dark “amber”

cat (like hell) that I bought in Kracow, spending my per diem slotys. Fluffy rabbit,

formerly white, possibly originally an Easter decoration. Chinese porcelain rabbit,

also white, formerly v.pretty; minus ears. I gave it to Peter for his birthday when he

was twenty one. Carved wooden rabbit. Pewter cat, sleeping, very pretty, a present

from Ruth, my sister in law. Thai Cloisonne enamal covered urn, and offering tray;

miniature, about the same vintage as the cat. Plecs, various. A stalk of withered

heather, from Ashdown. Section of birch bark, without a seam, about 10cm high;

ditto. Small painted duck, provenance unknown. Portugese cockerel bought by

Gabriel in Lisbon, 1998: think it must be cast iron, enamelled in black, red, blue,

white. One minute china flagon, with a pattern of pink roses, picked up on the beach

after the big storm in 1990. Two handled striped vase, glazed. It does not hold water.

Three pay slips. Framed photograph of Gabriel as a toddler, wearing his helicopter

hat. . .



I’m restoring the painted fireplace in the basement (devotees of this blog will recall,

I’m sure, that Gabriel and I had a fire-lighting accident involving this paintwork,

some time ago. All right, it was January, Mozart’s Birthday). And playing Kim’s

game with the refugees. I have long thought I had a word for tiny household gods and

the scum of less-than-nothing that gathers around them: poshlaia, the lint that collects

in society’s navel. I’ve treasured the term since I met it in Jack Womack’s “Let’s Put

The Future Behind Us” (I’m not alone: when I put the word in a search engine, the

first reference that came up was that very book). But now I find I remembered it

wrong. poshlost/poshlaia is derogatory, “made up of banality, vulgarity and sham. .

.spurious beauty, spurious cleverness”. Nah, the china rabbit with no ears is not

spurious, beautiful or clever. It’s just something that lives on the mantelpiece. It’s just

a kind of meerschaum tram.



Conflict Gems

Tuesday, November 28th, 2006



28th November



Rain, but it’s stopped now; settled low cloud. Big Band are playing Lewes tonight, at

All Saints. We’ll be there, of course, but tho’ I don’t really get on with Jazz, Swing is

fine, so it’s not a chore.

The homepage update is done, and it’s posted: that went very smoothly. At least,

phase one is done. Of course there’s a phase two, but it’ll wait for a while. And

another episode of Rainbow Bridge, getting close to the goal now: this is the

Sydenham Strong Box Raid.



Strange, since Richard moved me to this new server, I get spam comments on the old

posts, just one or two; although they’re supposed to be closed. If I can’t stop the leak,

may have to delete the offending articles. No bad thing.



Pan’s Labyrinth

Monday, November 27th, 2006



Monday 27th Nov



Day started dark, clearing to sunshine. Gales over the weekend didn’t really

materialise for us, unless I was asleep… Still evilly, ominously warm, like “Winter”

in South Australia.



Finished the rough of my homepage update, that should go up this week. Including a

taster of Big Cat, a Bold As Love story, which Andy Cox & co are going to publish in

IZ’s 25th anniversary issue. Did I mention, Farah’s Glorifying Terrorism proofs

reached me last week? With a Voltairean intro by Andrew MacKie, even. I wonder

where this is going? Should I prepare to be arrested? Nah, they’ll go after the real

criminals, of whom there seem to be plenty. I got away with the child abuse, inspite of

citizen’s arrest. Think I’ll get away with a little s*** .



Gabriel off to London before dawn for his first two Music College auditions. As it

were the boss fight of this level, but he’s well built up. Good luck, Gabriel. We saw

Pan’s Labyrinth on Saturday, good movie, reminded me v. much of Spirit of the

Beehive; which I think far superior, but it was so long ago.. I liked the special effects

esp the praying mantis fairies. I like praying mantises. Had to be a downbeat ending,

as of course the Guerillas didn’t win, but also rather creepy. Altessa Ofelia

(representing “Spain” I surmise) having remained seduced by fascism, (spot the

monarchism, also the unquestioning obedience to a leader, I just noticed), gets a very

spooky heavenly reward. Ah, but her little brother will live, and be free, and never

know his father’s name.



I could be making up the subtext, but you bring fauns, you bring allegory, sorry.



Safe As Milk*

Friday, November 24th, 2006



24th November



dark day, wet and blustery.



What happened to Labour/New Labour’s vision for this country, since 1945? When

did the dream of making people better, of civilisation for all, become a dream of

greedy appetites, and giving the people any poisonous thing they cry for?Answers on

a postcard, but for the sake of romantic drama I think I’d have the bodies buried the

same place Edge Of Darkness put them. Safe as milk, anyone?



*if you never heard of Captain Beefheart and you don’t know what this means, try

these key terms in the search engine of your choice; it was only a little thing, storm in

a teacup: Windscale. 1957



Casino Royale

Tuesday, November 21st, 2006



Tues 21st, weather unchanged in the last ten minutes.



Went to see the new Casino Royale last night. Superb, right from the credits (tho’ not

the song). Ah, but it should have been the Riviera, the way it was when I was a little

girl. Should have been a carpet-beater too, only I suppose the filmmakers couldn’t

figure out where le Chiffre would have found such a thing in 2006. Ah, Mr Bond, I

have a surprise for you from my quirky collection of antique cleaning utensils…



Other updates didn’t worry me. Baccarat or poker, all same to me.



I think they’ll do the rest of the Ian Flemings over again, now that they’ve found

Daniel Craig, and an idiom, and a time so like the original times. And a plump, tasty

looking Leiter. Is this stuff the enemy of all I hold dear? Certainly it is, but what do

you suggest I do? Not admire or enjoy anything? Nah, boring.



Can you see Bond as our holy pictures, our repertoire of iconography? Our Nativity

Scenes, our Pietas, our Entombments, our Road to Emmeas, painted over and over by

generations of popular yet revered artists? This saviour, who has no agenda of his

own; who carries out, resistant but always in the end obedient, the commands of an

omniscient, a stern and loving mother. Who is not good, because we cannot perceive

ourselves as good, but whose intrinsically bad actions -superficial, ignorant and

heartless- somehow, mysteriously, “save lives”. Which is just what we wish for

ourselves, for our own greedy luxurious appetites and our own mindless violence…



Hm, been reading too much Gravity’s Rainbow. And here’s the next episode of the

other Rainbow. Eskdale Moor and Scafell, and just to please one of my critics (can’t

please everyone!), an RSPB disclaimer for the invisible wind-turbines. The rockstars

getting restive, like the Beatles in 1966. Taking the harder drugs they vowed they’d

never take. Trying things they maybe should not try...



Three Red Berries

Tuesday, November 21st, 2006



Tues 21st, light cloud, slight chill.



Three red berries on the holly tree, how old is it now? Maybe eight, ten years old?

We’ll be eighty before we’re decking the halls at this rate, but they’ve grown bright, I

feared they were going to be murky orange, as some holly berries naturally are,

looking like the organic, doesn’t-taste-so-nice version.



Did I mention we finally saw The Devil Wears Prada last week? Meryl Streep was

tremendous, the clothes v. nice, the indispensible “Nigel” character indispensible, & I

was not allowed to miss a single Audrey Hepburn ref. Didn’t like the ending. So, ol’

doe-eyes is to renounce cut-throat office politics and do something meaningful that

she can believe in, by becoming a New York journalist???? That’s a Fifties reference

too far. And she’s sacrificing her career for love, whereas her lover is a sous-chef,

those well-known home-bodies, just about to take an obsessive job in another city?

How romantic of her. Not helped by fact that ol’ doe-eyes love interest played by the

same lad as plays that starlet in Entourage, who is paid good money to look insincere,

vapid and fickle. . .



She’s going to get divorced a time or two anyway: she should have stuck with Meryl

Streep & at least set the world on fire.



But he can’t switch it off

Thursday, November 16th, 2006



16th Nov, grey and blustery. Enticing autumn weather, I want to get outdoors but am

chained to my desk



Death’s head mask link from Boing Boing, forwarded to me by an Aoxomoxoa fan.

Check it out.



The Lanternbearers

Wednesday, November 15th, 2006



15th Nov

Big chunk of Rainbow Bridge this time. The Lanternbearers is a Rosemary Sutcliff ref

btw. No crypto-political-memoir roman fleuve about English Dreamers would be

complete without a swift round-up of the regrettable but nostalgic Right Wing: check

the list, John Ruskin, William Wordsworth, Arthur Ransome, Eddison (you knew, of

course, that The Worm Ouroboros is set in Wasdale, with excursions to Mercury?).



Morris dancers and a duckrace...



Byron the Bulb

Wednesday, November 15th, 2006



15th November



grey weather, like November only much warmer



Byron the bulb! Old pal! I’ve reached the story of Byron the Bulb at last, I’d

completely forgotten it was so near the end.



For the record, Slothrop doesn’t turn into a tree, that was Bob Peck in Edge of

Darkness (and the actor refused to do it…) He becomes a crossroads.



Of course, I knew that.



David Hartwell sends me Kathleen Ann Goonan’s “IN WAR TIMES”. A treat. I’ve

only just started but it’s shaping up to be some kind of Gravity’s Rainbow

neurophysics story, set in December 1941 (so guess what the main event might be).

But not quite the 1941 I know…



Samhain

Tuesday, October 31st, 2006



Oct 31st



Light, colourless sky, cloud, blustery wind

Back in business, just in time for the New Year. Samhain always seems a dismal time

to mark as the turning point, and more so in the slightly threatening warmth of this

October. Maybe that’s the point, or maybe it means something vigorous in old

temperate zone agricultural calendar. On the other hand Eid ul Fitr I was in

Manchester, stunningly beautiful evening, the giant crescent of the new moon in a

peachbloom sky over Harpurhey, sparrow fest in the thorn trees by the pharmacy.



On re-reading Native Tongue (Suzette Haden Elgin) No, it’s no use, I thought it was

dull then, I found it dull again. Not even a period-piece. Allowing for my childish

taste for bright colours, sharp and sour flavours, still can’t see where this book is

going. The linguistics aspect seems anoraky, only the Middle America band of the

USA exists, and Women, by the end of it, have achieved the huge victory of being

sectioned off into all-female ghettos by their grumpy menfolk. Huh?

But must not judge. Strange the way I run into really angry 21st century male sf fan

reactions to femsf classics, as I research this chapter, like future echoes of the reason

why… Get a grip, chaps, it’s been over for twenty years. And you won! (Not only did

you win, but arguably you also got to reconstruct our territory on more acceptable

lines, as magnanimous victors tend to do…) Not entirely changing the subject, thank

you to the blogger (forget name and URL) who spotted that the writer of “The

Fulcrum” (Best SF 23, The Very Best of Sf 2005) was “channelling M. John

Harrison”. Yes, yes, that’s exactly what I was doing. With a touch of Richard

Morgan. Not entirely changing the subject #2, here’s another episode from Rainbow

Bridge. The people whose lives we touch, and we never felt a thing. The way you

suddenly find out something new about things you thought long buried, long burned-

out… Diamonds and Rust.



On Re-reading Sheri Tepper

Sunday, October 1st, 2006



Ist October, thunderstorm



Ginger is out in it, sitting unde a patio chair, watching lightning. She loves storms



On Re-reading Sheri Tepper:



Women’s Liberation is good for the planet. In the so-called Developing World, the

most effective way of reducing the number of children each woman bears is female

literacy. No other contraceptive works so well. In the so-called Developed World,

women’s (economic and civil) liberation is a trojan horse in the heart of capitalism. It

increases the labour pool and more than doubles the consumer appetite, but it sends

the birthrate plummeting. Indeed, women’s liberation seems to indicate that ifall

women only had children if & when they really liked the idea, we’d have a net

problem replacing ourselves, and no worries about paving the world with our teeming

masses.



Feminism is on much shakier ground vis a vis saving the world, because feminism

desires the social and cultural change that makes men less “masculine” and makes

women who are economically independent more likely to stay married and get

pregnant (more than once). An epidemic of caring sharing fathers, and what would

happen to the rosy die-back graph in the Russian Fed, Poland, Italy???



Discuss.



On re-reading Mary Gentle



Golden Witchbreed, what a magnificent fantasy; and in 1983 surely groundbreaking

for the tacit, taken-for-granted sexual equality of the humanoid Ortheans. Without a

single comment from the human envoy, tho’ there are hints life on earth is not like so.

What a shame there was never an award for feminist sf. The Tiptree? Nope, that’s for

books about gender: “Exploring and expanding gender roles” . Arguably, ironically,

the kind of book female fans of adventure fantasy and scifi would most prefer to

avoid. Augh! We came to genre, as to the foreign legion, to forget…

Ghosts: Ginger and Milo

Friday, September 29th, 2006



29th September



Clammy, rainclouds.



I bet I know why there’s an “insomnia epidemic”. One reason anyway. It’s a wrinkle

in our share of the net rise that was talked about a while ago, and then forgotten. No

egg-frying daylight temperatures, it’s more that the differential between night and day

has collapsed. We’re used to cool nights for sleeping, and we don’t get them.



Ginger and Milo: Tuesday 26th, outside Gabriel’s room. She knows there’s another

cat in the house, she’s being allowed to see him for the first time. Ginger sees a tiny,

skinny-built tabby kitten with huge ears. She stares in troubled amazement.



What???



I’m sure that’s not mine. Can’t be anything to do with me.

They’re messing with my head!



The kitten takes a run at her, they touch noses.



Session closed, quit when you are winning.



Thursday 28th, we progress. Kitten allowed out in the basement, where he races about

while Ginger sits and stares. He eats, she watches carefully. I remember how she used

to love to sit and watch Frank eat. Again, we close the session when the kitten gets

too bold. His idea of a conversational gambit is leaping at the older cat, tiny claws and

fangs outspread.



Hey! Mrs! Want to play murder???

Ginger is showing no signs of stress. Sleeping in her usual spot by my bed, begging

for cheese, sitting in my jigsaw pieces, all the usual noises. I wish us luck.



Speeding up the pace with the Rainbow Bridge serial now. Two episodes up on my

homepage. One more big chapt222222222222222222222 (that’s Milo, hs mark) after

this, and we’re on the home straight. There’s only one moment really. One point on

which this five-volume story turns, or maybe two. Always coming back, round again.

Ghosts



Did I ever mention that the serial is the director’s cut? I’m re-editing as I go, just a

little bit. All the Bold As Love books except the first were such a race against time,

whole thing such a tour de force. . . The last state of a book can be worse than the

first, writers find it hard to leave well enough alone. But in this case, I know I’m

getting it closer to the bone, sharper at the edge. Every word a wanted word.

Posted in Uncategorized | Edit | Comments Off



monsoon weather

Monday, September 25th, 2006



Monday, 25th September



Monsoon weather, clammy between downpours



Diana Hutchison, who wrote asking did I have any more copies of Seven Tales for

sale (the answer is yes I do. I mean to put my “rare” books back up on Amazon used

and new real soon now, but you’re welcome to apply to me direct), reports that she

found an internet article saying how the Bold As Love characters are based on “well-

known people in the real world”. Which real world? Maybe they’re all secretly sf

mavens, disguised as heroic musicians… What an intriguing idea, wish I’d thought of

it. Sadly, she never found the article again, ah well. Joan Haran writes asking do I

have any Deconstructing The Starships. Same answer as above, yes I do have copies

of the paperback, very reasonably priced, apply to the usual email address.



Life begins anew, again. Soon I’ll be updating my homepage, which I have not had

the heart to touch for months, except to refresh the Rainbow Bridge serial, because it

would have meant taking Frank’s name down. But now I will, because Milo joined

the household yesterday. He’s a Bengal/Siamese cross, bit of Ragdoll too, apparently,

making him technically a “Serengeti”, a fantasy breed in the process of being

invented. The Cat Fancy disapproves of the wild animals in the living room idea, and

quite right too. But no actual Savannah cats were used in creating this product, no no.

At the moment he’s just tiny, ticked pale rabbit brown with faint stripes, an alarming

propensity for climbing things and very big ears. Hope we can convince Ginger this is

a good idea…



“Because we don’t know, we get to think of life as limitless…” I’ve been looking at

old diaries (tracing Gabriel’s cv for him, for the monumental task of filling in music

college applications; from which Milo is distracting him). It’s startling to see how

little has changed, through all the changes that seemed momentous, in the tracks that

my life runs on. But however often you keep coming back, round and round the helix,

there will be a time that’s the last time, and so it is with the Few, after Rainbow

Bridge: Weak Become Heroes. The quotation is from The Sheltering Sky, btw, Paul

Bowles.



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Blood and Oil

Sunday, September 24th, 2006



Saturday 23rd September

Clear blue, very warm

here I am in Manchester for the stopthewar demonstration, milling around in Albert

Square in a crowd of the usual suspects, all by myself, vaguely looking for the

Brighton contingent, but there are just too many banners, too many placards,

drummers, dancers: feeling a little disoriented, tell you the truth, because I just went

to see my parents, who have finally moved in with my sister, and I was hoping also to

pay a short visit to the old homestead, which is to be sold. Nah, too late, it’s all over,

the locks have been changed. I saw the pictures from the front room (old prints of

Coniston Old Man, Derwentwater, Brixham Harbour) stacked in my sister’s hall: and

that’s the end of that.



Never mind, some time had to be the last time.

it’s a big crowd, the numbers harder to assess than they would be in London, where

one has a feel for it, but the police are saying 25k and it’s probably at least that. Trust

my fair city, everyone seems mighty pleased with this fact. Even the police look

chuffed. Of course, we know how to do this. We’re having a BIG demo, big as

London, not one of your little wimpy things. A shoulder to shoulder cordon of yellow

jackets and a phalanx of horses guards the fancy hotels; presumably there are some

conference-goers already installed, peeping from behind their net curtains. Tony Tony

Tony, Out Out Out… They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but even Tony

Blair must be beginning to wonder. I neglect to join in. Talk about flogging a dead

horse. Any idea who we might want to be In, In In? I don’t recall seeing Gordon

Brown on the stage at that Hyde Park rally three years ago, nor John Reid, nor

whatisname. Much less trudging down the Mall wiv his little placard on a stick. We

have no friends in the leadership race. How could we? Who let the bombs out? Bush

and Blair, Bush and Blair! I’ll chant to that. Oh, we’re off. Here we go, treading a

circuit around the cordoned-off centre of the city, thousands upon thousands, in this

hallowed ritual. I think of the Whit Walks, which used to be a big deal when I was a

child. Uncles scouted for orange boxes to sit on, the pavements were packed, parents

bought us paper streamers to wave. Today pleasure shoppers flaneuses and flaneurs

(yep, Manchester has flaneurs these days) take a break from foraging in Harvey

Nicks: 21st C affluent cafe society idly watches our progress. And remember,

everyone. At two thirty we’re all going to die…



I died by GMEX, it happened without fuss. Black balloons rose into the blue, like

butterflies escaping this mortal coil. Stewards had to go round coaxing people to get

up again: it was a hot day and we were tired. Troops Out? Okay, I’ll chant to that.

Don’t attack Iran. No replacement for Trident. I’ll chant to both of those. What is the

logic in replacing Trident, pray? Aren’t Weapons of Mass Destruction wrong?



As usual, I’m wishing I felt more comfortable, more at peace with the peace

movement. I don’t like the hard left any better than I ever did, (the people’s right to

plunder the earth and drown it in 4×4s); and I have major trouble with Islam’s global

human rights record (don’t get me started). I think of Fascism and Communism,

squaring up to each other in the thirties, and I get a very miserable feeling. Different

but the same… Will I end up having to support a war that’s rotten at the roots,

because the underdogs have grown fangs and turned into almost supernatural

monsters? A plague upon both your houses (I may have said that before). i don’t want

to be here at all, this whole business is a stupid distraction & the woods are still

burning.

But in September 2001 something really terrible happened to the world. The day the

suicide bombers took out the World Trade Towers, I was shocked at the death toll, but

I wasn’t exactlly surprised. It was US foreign policy coming home to roost, weapons

trade policy coming home to roost. Why should the Islamists play nicely? They are

neither dumb nor docile, you know. And despite what you preach, in real life you

have given them every encouragement for these tactics…



Five years on, we all have to take our hats of to those Al Queeda people. The plan to

destroy Western Civilisation is succeeding admirably, oh, they really did a job on

Western Civilisation that day. But those crazy no-good Ragheads had help, cousins.

They’ve had eager, eager assistance, a marriage of true minds, or they’d never have

succeeded. The happy pact was signed without delay, and we’re all going to hell for

it.

I’m one of Amnesty International’s Urgent Action volunteers. That means we write

letters, faxes, emails not to prisoners but to the people who do the locking up. There is

a window (a few days, a few weeks) when you can sometimes save someone’s life.

Stop an illegal detention from turning into another “disappearence”. That’s when I

really feel the difference that the last five years have made. I’m quoting chapter and

verse from the Declaration of Human Rights at the presidents, prime ministers,

foreign ministers, governors. I’m supposed to say, torture is outlawed in all civilised

countries… My own government has never been exactly blameless, througout my AI

career. No one expects “blameless”. “Blameless” is unrealistic. It’s okay, has to be,

for revered principles to be flouted on the quiet. But there’s a tipping point, where

“revered principles” just can’t survive. The whole torture thing, the whole illegal

detention thing, has gone so mass market, so normal, I feel an idiot claiming it is out

of fashion.



The drums can get oppressive, the hip hop star on the weird bicycle was good. Very

few police on the march route, just that phalanx of horses protecting the hotels, and a

more modest cordon around GMEX. Around four thirty, back at Albert Square, I quit

half way through the speeches; before the rush. I know I’ll keep on coming to these

demonstrations, tho’ who the hell we are demonstrating to, and what they are

learning, is a mystery. Did we snag any column inches, any footage on the news? I

dunno, I was on the train home.



Silence is shame. More later.



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Turning the Compost

Monday, September 18th, 2006



18th September



warm and clear



More seasonal tasks, we are experts at this one, we are veterans, we’ve tried

everything, inc the one by the back door that used to get raided by the dog next door:

rotten pickled chinese vegetables made it very, very sick, and the time we ambushed a

young rat in the wormery, with a baseball bat… We just generate too much waste. We

will drown in our own midden one of these days, the scraps of mouldy bread and

festering salad will pile higher than the house. The only solution that worked was the

heap at Hartington Terrace, in its old wooden pen. We have no room for such a thing!

The only solution that REALLY works (cf also slugs and snails) is have a bigger

garden. Still, the Green Cone wasn’t too bad, real warmth inside, hardly smelly at all.

Memo to selves, eggshells are banned.



I see the Environmental Melt Down Issue is coming up fast in the media. It might

almost be ahead of Permanent Warfare soon, which will help those who aren’t

actually suffering to forget the warzones. Ah well, at least fewer people, reading the

fairytale version of the global ephiphany years in Bold As Love, should find the story

“unrelievedly dark” or “pessimistic”. Anyway, here’s the latest episode. Render unto

Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and look for the best outcome you can get



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Japanese Siberia, January in Suffolk

Wednesday, September 13th, 2006



Wednesday 13th September



Cooler, overcast



In Rainbow Bridge it’s the tipping point, the reaction begins to change pace.



The Japanese edition of “Siberia” arrived yesterday. What a very pretty & stylish

book, lovely cover. Tthe illustrations of the kits are like Studio Ghibli creatures. Must

write & thank the people who did this.

I like the hedgehog best, but Nivvy is good, looks like he’s dancing.



Snakehead proofs done, tactical bio-politics to finish up, & back to the unbloggable.

AI says email Margaret Beckett about the Control Arms Treaty, and I will although

it’s hopeless as long as USA interests remain intransigent, as they were when refusing

to countenance the regulation of the trade in “small arms” (that includes rocket

launchers btw: coming soon to an urban ghetto near you).



“The most effective help that western Countries could offer Africa, rather than

massive aid programmes, would be to ban the sale of arms to the continent”, says the

report of Dennis McNamara of the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR. Arms are the heart

of the problem. The street children in Nairobi, Jatum, Monrovia, have pistols in their

pockets, bandoliers on their shoulders. And we of the rich north are the ones who

supplied them, we, the so-called G8…”

Mr MacNamara rebukes me for using the supine term “hopeless”. Never argue your

opponent’s case for them. Be unreasonable! Refuse to accept what’s evidently true,

fly into a tantrum if anyone calls you intransigent. It’s messy, but it seems to work…

Why should the devil have all the best tunes?

If I’m blinded by enthusiasm I’m okay, when I’m cool enough to see that I’ve lost

eight or ten moves ahead, I tend to fold. A poor state of mind for a fighter of the long

defeat. I’d never make a poker player either.



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What the young people are up to #n

Sunday, September 10th, 2006



10th September



Warm and clear



Drenching the citrus, debating the compost system, grubbing rotten plums out of the

“lawn”… Seasonal chores, what would we do without them? Slightly less predictably,

we went down to the Gloucester this afternoon to meet the manager of Aylsbury band

Mirno, fan of the Bold As Love books, ended up being extras in a pop video. Thanks

for inviting us, Melissa.



And I feel another flashback coming on.

Monday 14th August: Souvenir buying and “Gourmet” lunch with a stork’s nest, in

Eguisheim, pink-cuteness capital of Alsace; I probably preferred it in the cold and

rain. Colmar, the warmest driest city in France, Unterlinden Museum in the freezing

rain, the hallucinatory Issenheim Retable & more mediaeval masters. I don’t really go

for mediaeval pictures, all those stunted bodies, twisted faces, death agonies,

deprivation and grotesques. It’s like being expected to admire Lowry. But they make

me think of Banksy railing against the art galleries. Actually, these intense,fantastic

images were available to the people. Rich folk paid for them, but they were written in

the the Bible in stone, they were in the churches, and ON the churches. Coincidentally

reading Sheri Tepper’s “Beauty” at this time, feel bound to remark the depraved

decadent Stephen King wd have been right at home in the middle ages, tho’ he’d have

needed different technical skills. Unterlinden a fantastic place, but best bit in whole

museum, Blaschka glass diatoms and jellyfish from 1860, incredible creations. It turns

out the Natural History Museum has some of them, must go and see. A dash to the

Rhine in a cracking thunderstorm. There are no ancient cities on this river, it’s

changed its course too often. These days it’s in a canal at this point, but running fast

as a giant storm drain under purple and magenta cloud. Got lost in the labyrinths of

corn and mini-canals on the way back, lurid colours of green and water.



It’s agreed, we’re quitting Alsace. It’s too cold, too wet. Drive: see how far west we

can get, chasing a patch of blue sky. In Renaucourt, Franche-Comte, at the Fontaine

des Fees, Peter cooked the perfect wild mushroom pasta. In the Loire valley, under

the shadow of the Developed North West, we ate a dreadful takeaway pizza in a

gentle chestnut wood, & were kept awake by the quacking of wild ducks.



Rohan, we walked beside the Brest-Nantes canal.



Carnac, on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Hordes of seaside holiday-makers stare at the

fields upon fields sown with rows of stones, now fenced off by UNESCO); lick their

ices, return to the beach. A little further, and you can easily find yourself creeping

alone into a dolmen still buried in its mound, staring up a 7m menhir in a silent grove

of thorns. You think you’ve seen mysterious megaliths in Wiltshire? Carnac is on a

different scale. What the hell was going on here, six thousand years ago? They left no

writing, and no pictures. A military cemetery complex? It’s easy to see why that was a

favoured explanation. But what kind of global war? About the most anyone can say, it

seems, is that there’s no sign of any neolithic community on the same level as the rich

tombs; just ordinary workaday huts. This was a sacred plain. Makes you think of the

workers’ village excavated beside the Valley of the Kings; of Delos. There’s been a

lot of Violet-le-Ducery apparently, alignments helpfully straightened out etc.

Probably doing as much damage as the grave-robbers and the quarry work of the

millenia when nobody cared. But still!



Next day, the rain caught up.



In Finistere the trees and hedges have only a gentle embonpoint toward the east, they

are not driven as they are in our SW. But the “Pays d’Iroise” is pure Craggy Island.

You would swear to God you were in County Cork, except for the names which are

pure Cornwall. Prospeder, St Renan, Tregorff, Lampaul



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Moving day

Friday, September 8th, 2006



Friady 8th Sept



Warm and clear, but it feels like autumn



The Yamaha C3 is installed, 6′1″ of much piano, cased in ebony poly; it looks very

handsome. It arrived 11.30 or so yesterday. Labour was short. Only took an hour, lot

of horse-blankets, a little more dismantling and three or four trials to get it into our

front room. Damage to paintwork minimal, damage to Mr Peter Shooter’s nerves

rather more. He had sworn to get it into the house for us by taking out the windows

and employing a crane, if this failed. Then I handed over the money, a simple

transaction: slightly amazed that he accepted a cheque of such size, from this raggy-

trousered Bohemian woman. Oh well, he knows where we live. He can always come

round and drop a piano on our heads.



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Valmy

Thursday, September 7th, 2006



Holdiay snaps #2: Wednesday 9th August, on the road

Temperature is still dropping. Subathing, ha!

Gave both Sedan and Verdun a miss. I warned Peter it would be nothing but

battlefields this itinerary. Empy, empty prairie roads & then suddenly, just as I was

thinking it must be around here somewhere, Valmy! The windmill on the low ridge

has just been rebuilt again, after the storm of 1990; there’s more information about

that feat, than about the day in 1792 when Kellerman turned back the

Austrian/Prussian army; and confirmed the revolution as a political reality. But there’s

his monument, flanked by period guns from Whitworths, Manchester, and approached

by an avenue of spruces, rather sad looking job-lot of little Christmas trees. And

there’s the quotation from Goethe.



We don’t lose all the battles, just nearly all of them. We are the party of the

opposition, tempering the rule of the princes of this world (who can never be

dislodged). We should be content with that. Does the revolution gain anything by

being “confirmed in political reality?” I think not. Being in power is not for us. But

still…



Here began a new epoch of the world

Damn right.



blue butterflies, cornfield stubble, late summer flowers. A swarm of housemartins

spinning and diving around the mill’s naked arms. Thunder at Valmy, Geoffery

Trease. I think I came to history the right way. First the stories (including the Gallic

Wars), then the textbooks; when I was innoculated and knew that there’s always

another version.



Down the lane, a huge BP bio-fuels silo



Late in the afternoon we reached Mandre les Quatre Tours. There aren’t any towers,

they were destroyed when the Swedish army came through here, 1631, in the Thirty

Years War. There’s not much of anything really. Meres and water meadows, coppiced

forest. We’re moving through one of the least populated areas of Europe, in the zone

where the memorials say “For the Victims” of the Great War, not “For the children of

France”… The campsite, under the eaves of a forest, seemed spooky at first, but the

swallows in the sanitaires decided us. What delightful company!



the year of 00

Thursday, September 7th, 2006



In August, we came to a decision. The mood of this “global epiphany” has changed.

You see great masses of people -not on the tv, which is controlled, but on webcasts

we pretty much trust- slashing and burning for Gaia, with the same avidity that they

used to follow Big Brother. New housing was being torn down all over our county, by

the official, moderate revolutionaries. How could we justify hanging onto our big,

underused urban property? We put Gabriel’s pianos in store, packed everything of

sentimental value into the loft; and handed our keys to the Council. We took Ginger

with us, and left Frank behind; a hard decision. Three weeks later we were in the

Ardennes. We’d taken advice and skirted around the Developed North West, and

Paris. We’d had difficulty finding fuel, “carte etrangere” doesn’t work at the pumps;

but never been quite stranded.

We knew what we were looking for. Somewhere off the map. When I signed in, the

gardienne of the campsite asked me how long we were staying. I don’t know, I said.

A day or two, maybe more? She was a young woman of about thirty, crop-haired,

coloured tattoos on her arms and shoulders, she somehow looked like an off-duty

soldier. She surveyed me, as if she knew what I was planning. Then let us take it a

night at a time, she said, dryly.



We talk to our son in Barsa, when we can get through. He seems to have taken up

with a Brazilian girl, journalist. That’s good. I hate to think of losing touch, but he’d

be safer in South America. What are you doing?, he asked. How long are you going to

keep this up? I explained that when we’re camping we live very low. Our power

consumption is negligible, compared to the demands of a prosperous light-green

couple in a big old house. When we want two mugs of tea we measure the water, that

sort of thing. And we’ll be getting some compensation for the house. He doesn’t

understand. Maybe I’m glad he doesn’t.The three walls of our bay are trees, ash and

beech and pine: arum berries glowing in the undergrowth, where the robins and the

blackbirds hop. Our roof is the sky. In the barnlike sanitaires swallows are bringing

up their children, we meet them when we go to clean our teeth in the morning,

hunched on the waterpipes. It’s always raining, and chilly already. Occasionally one

of their little cups of clay succumbs to gravity and damp: what a disaster that must be.



I was wrong about the gardienne. We had a meeting, and she told us that the

commune (which employs her) won’t be turning off the water on 15th Sept; and we’ll

still have a power supply, although it will be intermittent, the same as it is for

everyone. Most of us are going to try and stick it out through the winter; and after that

who knows? A step at a time, a step at a time, we move towards a committment we

can’t envisage all at once, a surrender I don’t want to think about just now. Tread

lightly, become a small reduction in the weight the living world can no longer carry.

Beyond the borders of Europe our global allies and our enemies watch us, but nothing

happens. Something wicked has been overthrown: so far that’s all we know. The

Dutch people in the next bay talk about going to Strasbourg. We think they’ll just be

jumping around, helpless on the edge of a dangerously volatile crowd.Same in France

as in England, you’re allowed to keep a car if you have no other dwelling place. At

night the Toyota, parked across our doorless threshold, seems like a silver lion,

couchant; on guard. The air smells of earth and water and crushed bracken. I’m afraid

of what’s going to happen next, but I feel a terrible, terrible burden lifted from me. I

lie and watch the rain streaming, the moon rising; blunt owl wings crossing the stars.



Wrap the football around us #n

Wednesday, September 6th, 2006



Wednesday 6th September,warm and clear, the garden full of gosammer, humming

bird moths, dropping plums



A new year begins. 06-07. Gabriel’s birthday safely passed, too much sticky

chocolate cake in the fridge (Sainsbury’s I’m afraid but give us a break, there was

Pete and Marly’s wedding, there was the Yamaha expo, there was post-camping-

holiday fatigue, there was Lumb Bank)

I’ll watch for the sake of Giggsy, but only if you can promise me that Wales wins,

after a surprisingly lack lustre performance from the Brazilians, same like in the

World Cup. Or at least gets a goal in.

Nasty laughter.



Obviously I watched the game anyway, mildly wondering at this random event. Why

are Wales playing Brazil at White Hart Lane? Wrap the boy-traditions around me, a

refugee in a safe but alien haven, but it’s not a bad doss really. Snakehead proofs,

Tactical Bio-politics, but first some holiday notes. I plan to upload some pictures, but

don’t know if I can be arsed. It’s not a keystroke.







So much catching up

Wednesday, August 30th, 2006



30th August



fair and calm, light cloud



So much catching up to do, and a train to catch… I think I’ll start with the next

episode of Rainbow Bridge, a neat, contained little job: and here it is



I don’t believe that anyone is ever going to pay me

I don’t believe in anything except the cold and the equations



Home from the wars, more Rainbow Bridge

Friday, August 4th, 2006



Aug 4th



A clear night, stars



1am, Gatwick,in the echoing arrivals hall bug-eyed midnight relatives squeal and run

to hug & here’s Gabriel, back from Benecassim and an extra week in Barsa. He had

an amazing, amazing time, he got sunburned at a waterpark, wrecked his feet moshing

barefoot to Babyshambles. There was Gaudi’s cathedral, there was the zoo, there was

Razzamatazz, there was a fantastic sheet music shop, and a grand piano showroom

where he convinced them to let him practice… No obvious depradations. Did you lose

anything? No, er, except all my socks.



Oh, and I lost my wallet, but I got it back with just the money gone.



Oh, and I lost my watch.



The tent’s okay. I left the sleeping bag behind, it was covered in ketchup.



Oh, and I ditched the airbed, it was useless.

Er, (this in a minor key). And I’m not, er, sure about my money. You couldn’t check

your balance on the ATMs, you see…



You could, however, have written down the sums you extracted, on a piece of paper,

and occasionally added them up, Gabriel. But there you go, he is of his generation,

child of hedonists. And not entirely coincidentally here’s the next episode of Rainbow

Bridge They’ve arrived where all the chickens of our polymorphous unrestraint, our

eternal partytime, have come home to roost…



I have a pretty painted fan. Peter has a Gaudi beer mug. We are well content. It’s cool,

looks like more of that annoying drizzle, and we’re off to Brussels for my niece’s

birthday. Farah Mendlesohn writes inviting me to a symposium on sf criticism next

June (hm!) Lynne Jamneck sends me an interesting post, it’s on her July 26th blog

entry, about Kim Westwood



and I have the latest paradoxa, featuring a conversation with U.K.LeGuin & a stack of

essays on genre which you really ought to get hold of, dear readers; which I think I’ll

take with me to Waterloo









Cloudbathing

Monday, July 31st, 2006



30th July



Cooler, fresher, sadly no real thunderstorms for us, heatwave just fading out.

Saturday night I drank too much coffee, worked until 1am. Last night the last ever

Top of the Pops, for old sakes’ sake. The first time in quite a while that I’ve watched

that nostalgic old countdown, how strange to see 2006 band names on it, and how

nice to get Shakira & Wycliffe (what a great mover she is), as the final number one of

all time. And finished my jigsaw of Brueghel the Elder’s La Vista (collaboration with

Rubens, one of the Five Senses series). What a fantastic picture, how full of meaning

in its bursting compendium. I see it’s in La Prada and I need to go and see it there

soon.



Ha. How long is “soon”?



Just one swift, tossing around very high up in the veils of grey. The sun a white pearl

through scudding spindrift, the sycamore branches tossing, Val and Dave’s sumac

rather gaunt (they’ve been pruning, sigh). Sunbathing is uncomfortable and tiring,

besides being allegedly bad for your health. I lie on my back in the garden, bathed in

cool air and flouting custom, wonder why more people don’t do this instead?



The Water Margin

Wednesday, July 26th, 2006

26th July



Still warm, bit of an overcast



The next episode of Rainbow Bridge is up on infinityplus, and many thanks to Keith

Brooke for hosting The Water Margin.



Hazy July days, pervasive warmth, down to the sea for a dip at five, quiet meals on

the patio at moth-time, and the feeling grows that this how summer ought to be. Silver

linings: if you’ve been convinced, for a long time, that the human world is frying

itself alive, you’re not overly alarmed by a little heatwave.



Stopped for bobbins*, at four I give up pretending to work and we take the train to

Glynde, to stroll back over Mount Caburn to Lewes. Dusty chalk path through the

mown hay-stubble, dotted with shorn sheep, an exhausted third generation of flowers

meagrely struggling back after being scythed (not really, a machine does it), larks

singing, dusty brambles and glimmering enchanter’s nightshade, already in fruit. Off

the pasture, through the gate to the hill fort site, the flowers are still rampant: clovers

and wild marjoram, viper’s bugloss, melilot, forests of wild parsley and fennel, field

scabious, rampion (ha! and complete with bumblebees, is that still normal?, have to

keep reminding selves, we are a protected enclave*) fizzing with butterflies. Painted

ladies, wood browns, marble whites, cinnabar moths, a charcoal-winged peacock with

that arrogant upturned snout. Para-gliders on the rounded headland, patiently trying to

catch a breeze, and there’s the winding Ouse, the last toasted rampart, the silver sea.

Could stay here forever, never get tired of gazing into the blue vault of air and over

the golden downs, as if nothing had ever gone wrong, as if our country wasn’t

shamefully complicit in a massacre, in a fxxing cascade of bloody, useless, hateful

massacres now, and nothing, nothing we can do…



But we walk on, down into the bottom up to the golfcourse and down the banked lane

(tiny late July harebells, everything’s shrinking in the heat).To Harvey’s brewery tap,

by the docks of the Ouse, and Olympia Gold. There’s that cat belonging to a friend of

Peter’s out of the water. He’s a proper sailor, takes it to France and back alone, now

he’s selling it, don’t know why. And thence to the station, where due to a succession

of unfortunate incidents, carefully enumerated over the PA every five minutes, we

have to wait three quarters of an hour for a train. Which is not the end of the world.

Ah well, summer.



*Also, mediafolk don’t necessarily let the truth get in the way of a good scare story.

As in, quite a few English trees, such as oak and beech, keep hold of their dead leaves

until midwinter, unless a storm strips them. That’s not global warming, they’ve been

doing it forever.



*stopped for bobbins? Lancashire expression, meaning I can’t do any more until I get

more parts sent down the line



The Internet

Wednesday, July 19th, 2006

July 19th



Too darn hot. No rainwater left, topped up the pool with tapwater, for the first time

“keying any transmitter is an invitation to instant paranoia. There springs into

existence an antenna pattern, thousands of square kilometres full of enemies out in

their own night encampments in the Zone,faceless,monitoring...”



Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, Ch 3 p 328 (Picador)



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Lovely Weather For Swifts

Tuesday, July 18th, 2006



July 18th



Hot and clear, heatwave for us tempered a little by the seabreeze



One, two, three four…



fivesixseveneight…damn.Onetonineteneleventwelve



KEEP STILL!



WHY CAn’T You???



thirteenfourteen, er, ziptotwenty, er…



The highest count I’ve managed to reach is twenty, but they keep zipping around so

much. Strangely (not) the slight of herring gulls spiralling on the updrafts is not at all

so charming. Last week I was in the Jubilee library when a mottled, flatfoot young ‘un

wandered into the cool foyer: it’s that time of year, they are nearly fledged. Tourists

burst into cooing, and flurries of protective gestures. Locals, to protect the reputation

of our city, restrained themselves from beating the brute to death like a roach…



Time out, lunchbreak, to stare at the sky (sky-gazing yoga, my favourite summer

occupation) and back to my currently non-bloggable activities. The next episode of

Rainbow Bridge is going up on infinityplus, I’ll tell you when it’s there. Meanwhile,

in the middle distance, there beckons an Aleutian schooner called The Spirit Of Eighty

Nine; carrying a hopeful but ill-omened embassy to the planet codenamed Diyu.



Seven Tales And A Fable

Friday, July 7th, 2006



7th July



cool, misty conditions persisting but feels as if it will burn off

Rare opportunity, massively undervalued stock, immediately I thought of you… Steve

Pasechnik’s just sent me a shipment of Seven Tales And A Fable, (two world fantasy

awards 1996 remember) I’ve put some on sale, likewise some signed copies of the

Midnight Lamp paperback. They’ll be up there until 1st August. Of course you can

also apply to me direct, in which case I’ll deliver internationally. I’ll accept dollar

checks, euros, BPS, sorry no credit cards.

Last night, the leaver’s concert at BHASVIC, & the last time I’ll be in that panelled

hall, with the rather fine inspiring C20 murals of war and work (Armada fails,

Parliamentarians meet Sussex gunfounders, Battle of Britain…) And the gilded lists

of the dead. Gabriel and James played four-hand ragtime, Gabriel played his scherzo,

the Tamla Motown tribute singer had a proper belter of a voice. Today he’s off to

Montreux.



There, he’s gone, and in a sense he’s never coming back.

With the beanflowers boon



And the blackbirds tune



And May, and June



Squirrel face-off, Russian offensive

Thursday, July 6th, 2006



6th July



Cool, sea wrack still hanging on at mid-morning

Hot sun, steady rain (the good sort of rain, none of your useless runoff downpours)

and now the mist again. A squirrel climbed the trellis, watched by Cosmic, next-

door’s rather strange cat, popped through and suddenly noticed me, quietly leaning on

the wooden rail surveying the rambling poppies and the swelling plums, inches from

his cocky little face. Augh, some crappy hulking wildlife between me and the

catfood… Indignant exclamation, squirrel takes himself off crossly down the steps.

Cosmic offers no threat: he’s been bitten by a squirrel before now, and nor does any

human. I could have the squirrels eating out of my hand, I know. I think they eat

enough already. Russians attack blogs! It seems there’s a lot of very dedicated

spammers over there among the feds, actually keying in user registrations. So now it’s

going to be even harder for decent folk to comment on this blog, and no harm to me

as I’m not bothered about being interactive, but a real pain to real bloggers. What if I

emailed them, saying Look, idiots, I have comment moderation, who the hell doesn’t?

You are NEVER going to get anywhere with this? But what would I know? Maybe

the internet is swimming with happy bloggers who do not mind being used as a link

platform, or even think its a compliment. There are, legend has it, people who

welcome cold calls…



Laura Thomas writes apologising for not announcing “Imagining Albion”, the radio

show. Don’t worry Laura. I do not like the sound of my own voice, an’ I don’t

remember what I said in the interview. I wish your prog well, but what I did was

Radio 4 property, to do with as you people willed… Sophie Masson writes that she’s

coming over from Oz in October to promote her new kiddies fantasy (the Thomas

Trew series), and she’s just finished her first graphic novel, a childhood dream

fulfilled. Must get more details of that. Peter Wong asks if Bryan Talbot is ever going

to do a Bold As Love graphic novel (don’t think so!), Nick Breeze Wood writes from

West Wales, offering Shamanic greetings; Keef says he’ll do an extract and Jeff

Vandermeer invites me to walk the plank. Yes, I’ve been announcing my web

handicraft, I’ll finish the rounds today. It’s like Christmas cards, a chance to say hi



And here’s the next Rainbow Bridge episode. Don’t know what gaspipes are, exactly,

in this context? That’s because you are too young. Think of what rifle barrels might

resemble. I know it sounds strange, but gun runners used to have to lie about it, see.



The previous episodes are still available by the way, links scattered artistically

through this blog. A proper free download will be available when I get round to it.

The next installment might appear on infinity plus, but I’ll link it… and that’s

probably going to be RB signed off for the summer, we’ll see.







Cat fight

Monday, June 26th, 2006



26th June



Cool, heavy cloud



I don’t think it’s going to rain. It looks to me like one of those sullen, dry, grey skies.

In the early morning, Ginger comes and sneaks under my hand by the pool (which I

topped up yesterday, dutifully using a bucket, from the rainwater butt). She’s after the

floating fishfood pellets (you’d better not DARE touch my fish, Ginger), which she

scoops out with a paw, having failed to scarf them up with mouth alone. Cat version

of cheating at bobbing for apples… There’s a large quantity of ticked, mousey and

chocolate coloured cat hair in a trail up the garden, I suddenly notice. It has the fluffy

Tonkinese undercoat, has to be Ginger’s. I wonder what happened. I think Lyra must

have beaten her up. No blood, which is fortunate: to match this amount of flown fur,

Ginge would be needing a transfusion. But it’s probably like babysick, looks more

than it is.



Favourable comment on Bold As Love from the USA (thank you kindly, sir) leads me

to investigate the availability over there. My goodness, how expensive my book is! A

thing of beauty, but how’s that going to look, when punters compare the

“secondhand” prices for the UK paperback on amazon used & new? I wonder if I can

do anything about this… But it would be immoral, I know, to interfere with that

invisible hand. No need to worry, the public will always, instinctively turn their backs

on unfair practice. Hallelujah.

Reading: The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold. I liked this a lot, a real lot to start with.

It’s not dark or spiky enough for David Lynch or Judy Blume (cited on back cover),

reminded me more of Sam Mendes’ American Beauty: same suburbia-grows-its-

ownbrand-spirituality thing. But it’s a book of one idea, and the last conceit, which

involves dead girl temporarily borrowing body of lesbian friend, struck me as a bit

sickly. Gravity’s Rainbow, over-ripe as ever, much better in large chunks; and

Chateaubriand. I’m in no hurry to finish the last volume of his memoirs; this has been

a long friendship. He’s in Carlsbad now, 1833, trying and failing to get her family to

recognise the poor Duchesse de Berry’s clandestine marriage to an Italian prince

(They couldn’t make it up #n: how very much like an episode in the Count of Monte

Cristo!) Must reread Attala. Also Sheri Tepper, for an essay Mark may commission.

Interesting retrospective. I really like The Enigma Score, which I never heard of

before. The latest The Companions, is typical entertaining late-Tepper, but caveat,

you may need to really like dogs.

Watching: Finished the first series of “LOST” last night, which we’d missed, fearing

it was stupid. We love it, even Peter loves it. It’s a Mystery Play for our times. What a

great invention tv on demand is. Will Gabriel & I ever finish watching Desperate

Housewives 2 ? Only for completism. The baby-farming is plain nasty, Susan just

gets more and more annoying, etc. A one-series success. And the football, perforce.

What’s wrong with the English? They don’t even get into any good punch-ups,tho’

that Russian ref was to blame in the fun fest last night. It’s always the teacher’s fault.

Kicking a ball in the right direction is not enough. There can be fire, spirit poetry.

There’s Joe Cole, there’s little flurries of life, but basically the English are leaden.



Amnesty International has achieved its million faces, but the hate mail the UN is

getting from the US gun lobby is, I fear, a more telling prediction for the treaty to

control illegal small arms trade… Little rescued Parade roses are covered in blood red

blossom, my one success. Vegetable patch is dead as a duck, Peter’s refurbished room

is looking very elegant indeed & here’s the latest episode of Rainbow Bridge: the dark

foetid rivers beckon, it’s Coppola time.



Publication Night

Monday, June 19th, 2006



June 19th



The weather remains changeable, yesterday warm (23-25C) and gently humid, today a

sea wrack and a chill, restless breeze. Just drove Gabriel to his Maths FP1 paper, as

his bike is dead until we can find the pump adapter.



We went walking, over in the west, where the great estates are, the Downs are still

thickly wooded, and beautiful horses graze in velvet fields. Stubbs group of polo-pony

mares and foals, chestnut and bay; spreading meres in damp woods, yellow waterlilies

putting up periscopes of flower buds, scolding wrens, ragged robins, two kinds of

woodpecker. Dog rose tumbling in the branches of a massive oak, violet flowering

rhododendron thickets, pine trees on the heath…

OOh! Look Look A pine marten has leapt from a log!



No, Gwyneth, that was a squirrel.



Drat, he’s right.



This is the perfection of English summer, and the rain, the water in the air, is the

secret of it. They say this April and May was the sweetest spring for years, I missed it.

Anyway, the Rainbow Bridge Build is up, as of about 10.30pm last night. There are a

couple of hitches (which I’ve just spotted) but it’s finished.



Now to choose a new domain name. What shall it be? There are three ways you can

go, assuming you’re not constrained by business purposes to look for a Google-

ranking type word for “Paper Company In Slough” that hasn’t been taken yet. You

can make something up, (like, er, gorbrostithat); you can choose a quirky phrase or

expression from the public domain, (like, er, bodhisattva) that means something to

you. Or you can use something uniquely personal; if you have one of those. I don’t

like getting personal, and I have a very common name. I favour the second route, but

it’s more difficult now. When I was starting out I had no company, and indeed I

“bought” a whole rack of boldaslove names, the rest of which I allowed to lapse once

we’d picked on co.uk. Silly of me, it didn’t cross my mind they might be worth

money… Nowadays it’s rather unlikely that you’ll think of a stylish, interesting

common property pd title that hasn’t already appealed to plenty of other people. So

then you have to decide whether you like the rest of the cadre… Hm. Needs thought,

not to mention idle surfing.



The Tale of Genji finished, one more time. Gravity’s Rainbow returns to my bedside.

For years I’ve been saying that all modern sf ideas, certainly all my ideas, come from

this book, and for years I’ve been wondering, is that really true? At all? (it’s a hazard:

once I’ve expressed an opinion or made a statement, I immediately start thinking of

that statement as fiction). But here I am again (last time I read it was 1999-2000),

having waded through the bananas and the first episode of sh*t, have already groaned

at the versicals and the lubricous child-sex, I’m coming to the ideas that leap out at

me, startled recognition, oh yes, I do know you. Yes, this meant so much to me, and it

still does.



Imipolex, Mba Kayere, Oneirine…

(tho’ in fact the Pynchon derived dream drug is in White Queen, not Bold As Love)



Ochiba? Akikonomu?

Lukundoo, what about Lukundoo? Surprisingly, there’s nobody using Lukundoo for

anything, far as I can see the only hits are to the E.L.White story itself. Nah, I’m not

really a horror writer, and I’m not really a Pynchon or a Genji buff either. It would be

misrepresentation.



Getting there

Thursday, June 15th, 2006



June 15th.



Humid, cloudy and warm



Aha, so that’s what all this annoying “Blocked content” nonsense is about, on the

other browser. Microsoft is fighting a patent battle with some chancers who’ve

decided to claim they invented embedded content. And why not, they’ll snag billions

of dollars. They also stand to destroy the browser concept and maybe the world wide

web (US), but that’s the profit principle for you. What’s the quote about the engineer

hoist with his own petard?



The Rainbow Bridge serial has moved, current episode is on the boldaslove site, here



But it’s going back to my homepage, reason being, publishing there is a keystroke,

whereas getting onto ruled.org is very secure and cunning.



Have eaten giant cookie (sugar content bad for teeth, good for dental injections); am

about to get the root canal punished.



The freedom of the rose

Tuesday, June 13th, 2006



June 13th



Heavy rain in the early hours, hot and clear day beginning



Spent HOURS last night trying to source a rose tree. Scouring fairytale books, nursery

catalogues, old photo albums. The arch of crimson rambler I snapped in Washington

DC, just around this time five years ago, looks good but WON’T take shape in

photoshop, it’s just intrinsically wrong for the cameo appearence I have planned… I’ll

use the dogrose bush in Flora Britannica, two birds with one stone, the book deserves

a ref anyway. The rain is good, love the rain, but we go out of the back door in the

morning, and the carnage is awful, awful. Can’t look. Now if only snails and slugs

were edible, so we could pick them like blackberries. That would be a useful gene-

mod. Either that, or why can’t I breed hedgehogs? I would make a good hedgehog

breeder.



Rainbow Bridge Site Up

Monday, June 12th, 2006



June 12th



grey morning quickly clearing, very warm



I spent most of yesterday in the garden, lying on Peter’s Greek linen throw, reading

Furet’s “Revolutionary France”; pulling out sheaves of grey and dusty exhausted

forgetmenots, killing snails; watering painstakingly, plant by plant, the seedlings that

yet survive from my broadcast annuals. Bemoaning the state of my potatoes and

beans, all gnawed to bits. Listening to the constant cheery racket of a gang of

sparrows. They probably drive the other, more reticent, garden birds nuts.



Go back to the pavements where you belong, street-urchins!

Later, at night, I’m wandering through the dark house, which seems all echoey and

cavernous just because one room is stripped. Gabriel’s in the basement muttering

about energy packets, photons, electron shells. Peter’s in the empty cave, searching

for his latest version of “sluice gate”, misplaced in the flash files. The yellow full

moon rises, looking very beautiful. I’m supposed to rest but can’t settle.



Reading about Ann Coulter (spread for paint drips) makes me think, liberating women

is a mug’s game. It’s like sending aid to Africa. The cause is just, the need is great,

but practically everything you struggled to give to the poor and brave goes straight

into the pockets of the ruthless gangsters who have risen, inevitably, to the top rungs

of the deprived world…



But anyway, last night, last thing, the Rainbow Bridge site went up, bugs and all. The

usual link will take you to the rough cut front end, this one leads to the chapter pages.

It’ll all be finished, fixed, polished as far as we are able, hopefully during this week.



One More Indestructible Rose

Sunday, June 4th, 2006



Pentecost, 4th June



Weather yesterday, beautiful. Fine haul of big juicy field mushrooms from the hill

above Southease Bridge. We sat for a while to watch the Ouse, discussing how to

capture that effect of light, the incoming tide. Blue layer over brown, bars of light,

and a little pied wagtail chick came out from a nest concealed in the swing bridge

timbers to be fed. It stayed out there when the parent flew off, cheeping, scurrying

about perilously above the water, and madly wagging its little rump as if it already

had a grown up tail. Don’t you dare fall in, little bird, or I know I’m going to have to

go in after you… White egrets, herons, innumerable swans.



Didn’t notice the weather today, too busy sanding, scrubbing, painting Peter’s room,

white like before. And what on earth do they do to those Hay Festival roses? I think I

probably wouldn’t like to know, but you have to respect a flower that can take such

punishment…my journey home in tatters after one cancelled train, up stairs, over

bridges, me in my vintage Laura Ashley and sheer tights (!), ridiculously burdened,

books, bags, free case of cava in an improvised sarong sling; the rose between my

teeth. On the slow train from Worcester to Oxford I crouched among my bundles,

imagining scenarios for this dissolute hooray I was impersonating…chicklit! I bet I

could do chicklit!, and the queen of English landscapes drifted gently by, buttercups

and sorrel in the meadows, all the may in abundant flower, clotted shoals of purest

white.



And that rose is sitting up and taking notice now, amazing.







Women in Science: “Life” at the Book Fest

Wednesday, May 31st, 2006



31st May, cool and sunny

To Hay on Wye today, for the panel on Women In Science tomorrow (4pm 1st June,

Review Studio). Just realised the prep I’ve done has been on the “women in science”

aspect, augh, sod’s law, I’ll get asked something about the book & I’ll have forgotten

the important thing that happened in chapter seven, or mislaid a character’s name…

Must check it over on the train.



haha, our invitation to the great Kilworth bbq! Bollywood, what a good idea, sf

grandees formation dancing in gold dhotis, can’t wait.



Dear Reader,

Tuesday, May 30th, 2006



30th May



cool, with glimpses of warm sun, doomy dark clouds



Eight holly berries have set



No pears at all



Plums beyond counting



Ginger has come to fetch me twice this afternoon, she leads me around Peter’s room,

meowing, distressed at all the puzzling changes in her life, grand piano preparations

and the temporary turmoil left by a Bank Holiday semi-outdoor bbq. Two floors

down, Gabriel plays Debussy. Gabriel! Knock that off a minute and move the

furniture back in place, Ginger’s having a nervous breakdown. And thousands of

miles away Yogya is in tatters, the plain of Prambanan littered with carved fallen

stone again. It’s more than twenty years since I was there last, Mama and her warung

must have been long, long gone; and the ice cream parlour beyond the railway tracks,

and the silversmiths who dreamed of coming to Brighton, and the smiling staff of the

Hotel Indonesia, and the kind man who bought us banana pancakes one night, which

we ate on a doorstep in the paraffin-lamp dark. It still felt connected, like this was an

earthquake hurting me & mine. But this is irrational, even rather creepy. Not my

earthquake. Earthquake belong to people crying, people sleeping under cardboard,

people dead.

Swift reply from Gardner and Jonathan approving Tiamaat; that’s good. Saw Brick

last Thursday: Gabriel thought it was fantastic. P& I thought it was good, very true to

the conventions, we like to see the young people respecting tradition (though a little

voice deep inside kept whispering, Harry Potter and the S**g Brick of Doom). Dear

Reader, (or even readers, but I don’t count on it) you are probably wondering by now

why the Rainbow Bridge extracts aren’t going up on the BoldAsLove site. This is

because we have ftp problems. They will be solved, however, before I’ve fought my

scrapbook items into order. Peter’s sorted out my position visavis Dreamweaver, but

the mess remains. Anyway, here’s the latest clip: Christmas Eve



Google sent me here. . .

Friday, May 26th, 2006

May 26th, rain, cool and misty



Rainbow Bridge Site bites back. Google sent me here when I tabbed “God must be a

Muscovite”, looking for serendipitous references for the Chopin feature, I haven’t an

idea why. Oddblogb’god I’m flailing at random, I am in such a knot with

Dreamweaver, it’s just overloaded and refusing to play, I’m not going to get anything

done, my room is floored with papers, open books, memorabilia waiting to be

scanned, proofs, diagrams, all going nowhere.



However, my gumboil is much better.



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When Good Root Canals Go Bad

Wednesday, May 24th, 2006



May 24th



Breezy, sun between clouds, still cold.



They tell me the Ice Saints effect is caused by something called the North Atlantic

Index, part of that thermohaline circulation you have heard about. Kind of an English

Bank Holiday El Nino sort of thing. It’s rather strong this year.



I started whining about my gumboil the night we went to see The Last Ballade. I’ve

been hoping it would go away. Looks like a mouth ulcer, left upper premolars, if

you’re interested. But I know it isn’t, it’s that root canal done by previous dentist (on

whom be peace), which didn’t quite work. Last time it flared up Mr Manoochehiriad

almost got me to agree to let him see to it. Can you save the tooth? I whimpered,

trembling. There’s a fifty fifty chance, he said. Visions of shell exploding under the

drill, him digging out shards from bloody pit. . . Couldn’t stand the heckling from

Gabriel and Peter anymore, got myself an appointment on 5th June. I’ll feed myself

on ibuprofen. Maybe it’ll go away.



A levels start today. GOOD LUCK in your exams Gabriel!

& all the rest of you kids, too.



I see the little fuss about the Tiptree longlist has lead to some discussion of that

award. I’m with Jeff Vandermeer, it’s become an embarrassment. Trouble is, the

number of c.21 sf folk, including the Wiscon hordes, interested the tough thinking of

sexual politics is really tiny. Their eyes glaze over. (My eyes glaze over too, different

reason) Whereas, on the other hand kinky sex! Inner Fandom and kinky sex, need I

say more? Hey, hey, looking for some sleeze? Try the Tip! It’s a shame. But I don’t

see any way around the problem, really. Free speech & all that.



Winter Wind

Sunday, May 21st, 2006

May 21st



Cold and stormy



Here’s the latest extract from Rainbow Bridge. Ax meets the Chinese



Dismantling Peter’s room. A trip to good old B&Q, Peter’s favourite store. Why no

grey gloss? Why is grey gloss a special rare choice you have to ask the computer to

invent for you? Surely it used to be a normal colour. Buy a stepladder, (to replace the

rotty old wooden one, finally chopped up for kindling after near-disaster incident)

empty the bookcases, sort through the contents of the ugly filing cabinet which is

definitely on its way to the YMCA. Strange choice of things to keep, things to

discard. Old photographs, crumpled and lost for twenty years. A tiny fake-fur covered

address book, in which one eight year old boy has written another eight year old boy’s

address, and no more. A pack of playing cards, worn and greasy from hours of

playing gin rummy at West African bus stations. A slit-eyed mask made of mud and

set with cowries and german coins… I wonder why c.21 scientists reason that the

Neanderthals “believed in an after life” because they buried the touching little

treasures of a life with the dead; like putting a favourite soft toy in the bed with the

sleeping child? They aren’t using their common sense. Our rituals were never

imposed from above by some priestly caste, religion was not invented by some clever-

clogs to serve the needs of a more complex society. These things are the needs of

society, these behaviours rise from within, natural as sleeping, eating, seeking shelter.

I’ll bet sixth order intentionality, reflective consciousness itself, came later, and all the

cloud-capped towers of metaphysics followed. You don’t have to be conscious to

suffer remorse, or regret, or to mourn.

This week in May has been typically, not reliably but typically, cold and stormy since

1752 (since we last updated our calendar here ie). I wonder what does that tell us?

(Nothing about relative temperature, mind, only weather systems). Even stranger if

“the ice saints” date back to mediaeval times, but I don’t know about that.







The Football*

Wednesday, May 17th, 2006



May 17th



Cold and Mist



I might have to move my citrus tree back to the bathroom, or it will die of gloom in

the basement, antechamber of its summer home outdoors. But bring on the rain, bring

on the rain. The house is in flux, Peter’s room all over the place, on its way to

becoming the grand piano practice room. Ginger wanders, refinding old toys. The

Gardner Dozois story, on revision, comes apart in my hands. I have to relate these

people to something, or I can’t think. Damn it, I’m going to have to work out a time

line, a Silmarillion, how absurd.

In a comfortless Maytime we pin our hopes on seven pm, get the beers in, pull the

bunker blankets around us. Where is our chronicler?, the one who knew how we live.

Mike Skinner where are you now?



*Ah well.



It would have been more fun if Barca had lost, but there you go, it’s the ritual that

counts. As long as we can win something, sometimes, please. Not even often, not

asking for the moon, but now and then. . . Please?



Slight Return

Monday, May 15th, 2006



15th May, cold and grey



The serial of Rainbow Bridge continues: slight return



The prologue and catch-up can be found on this blog, March 12th, March 23rd, April

7th

Apologies: my spam filter became too clogged, comments will now require log in.

To London last week, up at dawn to get the bus: to lobby parliament over the

International Arms Trade Treaty… The arms dealing industry is out of control, small

arms (a generous category) trade in particular, and it isn’t just arming six year old

boys in Central Africa, the guns END UP HERE. On our streets, in our cities. If you

want to be counted as feeling this is a bad idea, sign up here.



And passed through the security baffles and the portakabin search facility at St

Stephen’s entrance for the first time. How easily we get used to these downward

tumbles. Once I was so privileged, now I’m poor and often insulted: we have joined

the majority. Ah well, I can’t really remember being rich anyway. Joining Amnesty

International for one of these actions is a little like visiting fairyland. We don’t

mention the elephants in the room. (Eg, IRAQ. Eg, the whole thing is useless without

China and Russia and the US, and how are you going to get China and Russia to sign

up for an International Arms Control Treaty (that’s even sign, never mind enforce any

regulations), if the USA won’t do it. Which of course they won’t. Never, nohow). ..

But you have to like the good people who keep trying, even if the gold they give you

turns to dry leaves in your pocket by the time you get home.



Then it was our Brighton Festival weekend, five events in three days (not forgetting

the Brighton and Hove Big Band busking outside the Haha! Bar. Dashing young

keyboard player rather indignant that we sat and had a beer on the terasse, instead of

standing up front…) I think the best was the Chopin, The Last Ballade, Michael Lunts

one man show in the Buddhist Centre garret. We take our hats off to someone who

can play Chopin and talk (no, more than talk, can act), at the same time. Great music,

very sad story, even if you know the other side… But I don’t know, the Budapest

Symphony Orchestra were cracking, the Bartok,(Miraculous Mandarin) worth the

price of admission alone. Groupe F, “The Lightplayers” in Preston Park, was not as

majestic as the free show they did two years ago, but it was pretty amazing. We were

right up front, a company sparsely scattered on picnic rugs when darkness fell.

Absorbed by the sheer spectacle (This is the stuff Leonardo da Vinci really cared

about, you know), we didn’t notice what was going on around us. At length, when it

was time to go, good grief what a SEA of people. On and on, forever, in the dark,

quietly moving, under the trees, over the lawns.



Yesterday we went into King Death’s Garden, and snipped a spray of male holly

flowers. A touch of in vivo fertilisation, dusting pollen grains onto the female flowers

on Siang’s little tree, blunt green matchhead ovaries. Maybe we’ll get berries.



Lying awake, I listen to birdsong in the early morning. The thrush north of the

Crescent isn’t singing this year, but at 4.30 on Friday, is that by any chance a

nightingale?







Easter Sunday

Monday, April 17th, 2006



Sunday 16th April, low cloud, all the spring flowers





Death is heartwood

the dense centre of the soul

where no laughing blood leaps

and no nerves thrill



The people we love are joined to it

one by one

And fill its silence with joy remembered

And help us to stand tall

And make us strong



There’ll be no blogging for a while, I’m too sad. Doria, Paul, I’ll email you



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Paris Babylon

Friday, April 7th, 2006



April 7th, grey and mild



Further to my last: just about this time of year in 1871, or a little earlier, the French

government forces surrendered. The Franco-Prussian War had been an utter disaster,

and it served the French right. Everyone in Europe had told them they would get

pasted, everyone had told them, that Bismark feller is NOT kidding, Prussia is an

armed camp and where’s your famous army right now? Dancing the cancan, eh? But

they wouldn’t listen. So, anyway, defeat came and the Parisians were incensed.

They’d just endured a 200 days siege, and for what? For nothing? Over their dead

bodies.



They refused to surrender, the Reds took over, and this became the Paris Commune.

Rimbaud, aged sixteen, ran away from home to join them (sort of, the dates don’t

really fit). Patti Smith wrote a song about it. And eventually (from the sublime to the

ridiculous, you may say) I wrote about Crisis Europe and a desperate attempt to build

Utopia in the middle of a nation-sized car crash, called “Bold As Love”



Everyone at the time thought they were insane and disgusting and atavistic, a bunch

of mediaeval insurgents, eating cats and inventing mad concepts like “from each

according to their capacities, to each according to their needs”*. Except Matthew

Arnold, who said “the Paris convulsion is an explosion of that fixed resolve of the

working class to count for something and live, which is destined to make itself felt in

the coming time…” In their own eyes they were a verloren hoop, as the Dutch say, a

lost troop, a hat on a stick for International Socialism. Nobody came to their aid. Karl

Marx fumed about the mistakes they were making (their proud financial probity in

dealing with the great banker Lafitte, makes heartbreaking reading). But he stayed in

London. . . In short, the Commune was a disaster. Bismark and Prussia had a field day

with the issue, and in the end the French government forces came in and slaughtered

them all. Men women and children, thousands and thousands of their own citizens.

And for no reason. The battle was won, the resistance was over. Makes you think,

doesn’t it, looking at Paris now.

Makes you think. Makes you think twice about taking up verloren hoop politics. And

then maybe do it all the same.

Anyway, where was I. My week: 13:Tzameti, excellent film. The Three Burials of

whatsisname, on the other hand, I found rather crass. Finished Big Cat, went to a great

concert, London Philharmonic at the Dome. And here’s Ashdown continued: the third

episode of Rainbow Bridge. Warning, it’s long, because I haven’t time to make it

shorter.



reflections on the Commune from: Paris Babylon, Rupert Christansen.



*I do think this is nuts, by the way. Jennifer Aniston has needs. Big Brother

celebrities have needs, where do we draw the line? Hedonism is a difficult creed.



Ovingdean Tea Ceremony

Wednesday, April 5th, 2006



2nd April



April weather, blue sky, bright wind, transparent indigo cloud



A Sunday walk: up to the Racecourse, across the green turf, down through the

suburban fields, pony stables, to Ovingdean, where we couldn’t get into eleventh

century St Wulfstans, so sat on a bench in the pretty (kept that way by ferocious

churchwarden notices) graveyard like bookends, old friends. Watched a pair of

kestrels playing in the filigree of bare branches, swelling buds subtly changing the

profile against the sky, beech and lime. Discussed what we’re going to do about

identity cards.



1. Renew passports before the cutoff date, obviously



2. Resist, of course. But how far will we go? Get arrested, go to jail, resign ourselves

to losing all social services? No doctor, no vote etc?



We don’t know. But long-haul travel is over (finally killed for us by aviation fuel

issue), dance culture is over, we’re too old for clubbing. Got to do something with our

time. Maybe verloren hoop politics is the next adventure.



It won’t happen, says Peter. It’ll be like Poll Tax, it just won’t work. Ah, but Poll Tax

was a long time ago, so much has changed since then, so many tipping points passed.



Back from Rottingdean by the undercliff walk, wonderful seas. At the point break, the

waves hit the undercurve of the new seawall and race along it, shooting up in white,

brilliant, travelling fountains, showering thrilled strollers with glitter and dazzle. Salt

on our faces, tea and cake at the Ovingdean kiosk, what a great institution.



I have hyacinths by my bed now, fugitive scent, many-coloured stars, shell pink, pale

yellow, white, intense rose; intense turquoise blue.













Women in Iraq

Friday, March 31st, 2006



31st March, early



Are worse off than they were under Saddam, interpress report gives chapter and verse.

Did you doubt it?



Such a feeling of impotence these days,on every issue, impotence.







PMQT

Thursday, March 30th, 2006



March 30th



rain in the night, mild gloomy morning.

there’s no murder on the dancefloor this year so far. Frog-slapping must be passe.

I work at my jigsaw, (Partie de Tennis a Vechiville, lovely women, beautiful falls of

hair, tiny waists, my God it must have been mortifying if one of those shackled,

hobbled girls ever beat a young man) while the House bays and yammers behind me.

Prescott says something laborious about the Tories recycling their leaders, they’re

FOF, kicking legs in air (that’s what it sounds like, I didn’t look round). The

schoolmaster’s voice cries “Order! Order! This roaring must stop!”. I think of

Francois Chateaubriand’s long sonorous, thrilling periods. Fake and lies of course, at

that famous Tribune, politics is politics. But so rich in music, rich in CONTENT. If an

actual orator should get up in Westminster today, would they notice? Would they

appreciate? Nah. They might sulk a bit, and demand their chicken nuggets back. The

media lads, afterwards, spoke solemnly of Prescott’s personal-best performance. His

triumphs of off-the-cuff wit. Augh. But it was the same in that green room a hundred

years ago, two hundred years ago, is that reassuring? And I see the Russian Feds are

thinking of invading Georgia, how Great Game of them. I think I’m in a backwards-

flying time machine here.

The Visitor put to bed. The Voyage Out put to bed. Correct a ref on the Cho paper on

gwynethann (a gynoid explains herself) that’s been annoying me since I noticed it. It

was not James Blish who wrote “The Quest For Saint Aquin”. It just seems as if he

should have. It was Anthony Boucher. Work on “Big Cat”, can’t get started. I always

fantasise I’ll write short stories, freely and easily, between books. It never works.

Gabriel’s iPod is lost. Drat, now we realise it is dumb to buy cheap household

insurance with a youth around… Gabriel’s iPod is NOT lost! It’s been walking

around with Louie, or maybe Frank, or perhaps Jake. I’ll wait until I see it to rejoice.



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So, Maybe it’s goodbye

Wednesday, March 29th, 2006



Weds 28th March, grey skies



Mild weather continues



So maybe it’s goodbye Black Holes (I’m catching up on my pop-science news again).

If their evaporation from the astrophysics bestiary is confirmed, I won’t miss them…

Well, all right, I’ll miss them a bit. They were interesting to know when they first

made their bow, very useful characters: from the Interstellar Highway Hazard to

Romantic Appalling Death By Event Horizon, to Tiny Black Holes Eat Us From The

Inside, through the fine metaphysical byways of We Are All Living Inside A Black

Hole And We Never Knew It. I liked them, but it all started to seem old. They’d

begun to have that glassy eyed look of folk at a social gathering, who have forgotten

their way out of a sentence in small talk. Also, I fretted pointlessly over the way the

general public, and sf readers (and writers too, sad to say) lost sight of the fact that the

beasts were still imaginary… Doesn’t matter how ingeniously the wizards have

established exactly how such a creature can fly, or how it does that fire-breathing

trick. A dragon is a dragon, is a dragon.



Nah, who can tell, maybe Black Holes still have legs.The new story is shaky. I speak

as one with a purely aesthetic, business interest, not as one who can make head nor

tail of Dark Energy, but I’ve read a lot of these articles & I can see a touch of sonic

fusion in this. Maybe more important, it doesn’t have that fat, satisfying feel.



If anyone in the Roundhill/Ditchling Road area of Brighton, UK, reads this and would

like some frogspawn please, please get in touch. We deliver!



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Audio link and Comments policy…

Saturday, March 25th, 2006



25th March



It’s raining! A soft, persistent rain, and the temperature has risen and the wind has

dropped. Must be Spring. I’d planned to dig the slough today (temporary shelter for

frogspawn), and maybe I’ll do it anyway. Dig myself a hole in the rain, that sounds

like fun.

And many thanks to Yvonne Hewett, who sent me the URL for the Scott Fitzgerald

reading “On Beauty” audio link.

Someone asked about my comments policy. Well, shorn of the poetic musings (see

the first entry in MT2004 “Wearing Brocades in the Dark”) I’m not really a blogger,

this is just a diary in an unlocked drawer, replacing my rather haphazard news column

on gwynethann. In MT spam filters are cumbersome but blocking all comments

wholesale is a keystroke, so that’s what I did. It’s the other way round in WP so I’m

on a moderator plug-in, this could change if the spam tide rises…



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On Beauty (you have to try this)

Thursday, March 23rd, 2006



23rd March



Bright sun, blue sky, chill and dry. The little daffodils are out on Siang’s grave at last.

Another chill, dry Spring begins.

Wish it would rain.



You have to try this, I found it when I was doing my Masefield page (which took me

all of ten minutes, oh okay maybe twenty, should I be doing something slicker that

takes proper time and coding? Nah). It’s Scott Fitzgerald reading John Masefield’s

elegaic “On Beauty” aloud. Tell the absolute truth, SFG reading Masefield on antique

recording device sounds not much different from TSELiot reading Ash Wednesday

(which we still have in our archives). But it is eerie, touching, chilling, strange.

Beauty of fire, from the beauty of embers…



Also, the second episode of Rainbow Bridge is now up, and here it is, coincidentally

titled: One Rainy Wish

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Last of the gynoids

Monday, March 13th, 2006



13th March,



The sharp end of winter still, very cold in my room all day. I’ve rediscovered my

salvaged MT blogs (which I had filed as “WT” in my stories folder), and posted them

as links here, minus pictures, pictures gone. I was tempted as I tucked it all up to

make a few cosmetic enhancements, but I resisted… I edit the recent posts in my live

blog all the time, but when something is finished, it is finished. So, now I know all I

need to know about Wordpress, for my simple purposes. Watch out for the 2005 file,

it’s big.



Gynoids? Thanks to Mari Kotani I used to be famous (so to speak) as the originator of

that term. Glistening pneumatic Japanese cyber-babe sites, Maxim-oriented scifi web-

cyclopedias would dutifully record my name.It became depressing… Difficult to

explain why, as the difference between Cho and the post-Divine Endurance use of

“gynoid” is dead as a duck these days, can’t even be discussed. But times change, and

some wild kind of justice has been at work. The female android ref is now soundly

out-googled by one of the two major variants of obesity= a C21 gynoid is most likely

a bloke with a lardy arse.



Thank God for that!

Editing the record, another view: Francois Chateaubriand made copies of his personal

letters, frugally intending them for later commercial use. Natuarally when he dug

them up to embellish his memoirs he would fix them, with the varnish of hindsight.

But his letters to Juliette, Mme Recamier, remain untouched, exactly the same as

when he wrote for her. Aaah. That’s true love.



NB: Rainbow Bridge, the first episode is up on my homepage, here’s the link again

Golden Abalone



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Golden Abalone

Sunday, March 12th, 2006



March 12th



Cold and dry, bitter wind



First amphib/cat action of the season, Ginger eating glistening tight fresh frogspawn

this morning. So we put it in a bucket, she and Lyra then played at knocking over the

bucket…

A cold walk around Coombes and Steep Down, snowdrops in the churchyard at the

Saxon church at Coombes (closed for refurbishment, hope that doesn’t mean what

that often means), cold parents and cold little children getting a tractor ride around the

lambing fields. I found a rabbit’s skull on the bostal path, that’s good luck. Such a

sweep of coast, all the way to the Seven Sisters, scoured by a bright sky and an icy

wind.



I’ve updated my homepage at last,* plus (as you can see) there are now two active

links here, and that’s enough for now. Zen activities: I’m going to serialise Rainbow

Bridge on gwynethann, and here’s a link: Golden Abalone .



Speak friend and enter, I spent most of Friday afternoon trying to figure out how to

put links into Wordpress posts, tried the code, no luck, how did I make that little

button on the toolbar active, checked the forums, so what’s the big secret??? Peter

(tuh!) spotted the simple, idiotproof route at once. Ah well, there’s always one super-

idiot.



*not really, have barely started the John Masefield feature.



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My Library Books

Thursday, March 9th, 2006



March 9th, mild and grey



Yesterday the mist turned into rain, but now it’s gone. My Lulu Belle is a mass of

heavy-headed buds, one amazing full-blown flower. Has the wheel of the seasons

finally shifted? Maybe.

I don’t really like the new Jubilee Library (first birthday today, or thereabouts). It’s a

handsome building all right, and a paragon of environmentally sound architecture (it

says here…); maybe that’s the problem. Like a huge fancy Victorian church, superbly

endowed, trying to convince me this means Christianity is in terrific shape. Or maybe

it’s just that architecture needs time, and no one will get fond of this place until it’s a

little worn down, a little seedy, wishful thinking and grandiose pretension become

touching.

I don’t like the way all the non-fiction, (or “Information”) has been hived off on the

top floor, either. I’m often looking for “information”, and I liked to see it on equal

terms with the anti-information, a vast sea of which otherwise looks very bland. Ah

well, never mind, I like library books, the comfort food aspect and the randomness of

them: and here’s the pick of my season’s hunter-gathering:



Black Juice, Margo Lanagan Not really a library book, Jon Weir gave me this.

Fantastic, he said. Stunning, incredible. Margo Lanagan, I thought. Margo Lanagan,

and an Ozer, why does that sound so familiar? Went home and googled her, and yep,

it’s my student Margo from Clarion West 1999 (What a cracking class that was).

Turns out she was sort-of posing as an amateur, having already made her first big

sale; though not yet published. I remember she seemed more grown-up that the rest,

not in her writing so much (in which grown-upness is no great advantage and hey,

those Mole Rats!) as in her attitude to the whole thing. I put it down, shame on me, to

cultural difference. . . Sorry, other cousins. I endorse Jon’s opinion, these are great

stories. Folktales, not fairytales, an important and interesting distinction (discuss!) Jon

raved about Singing My Sister Down, the one that won the single story WFA, but my

soft heart preferred best the Rite of Spring, which I read aloud to my 95yrold father,

in the sunlounge of that cottage on the Llyn, and he loved it too. And the last one, the

Point of Roses, more difficult, more demanding in construction, but it made me think,

it lingers in my mind.

The Book of Loss, Julith Jedamus I read the author’s note first (disgusting habit)

and got wary, because the author was accusing herself of taking liberties with Heian

Japan Court life, but this is no “Memoirs of a Geisha”. It’s quite harrowing, a

claustrophobic, absorbing tale of beauty and talent corrupted, and the cruelty of

women in competition with each other. Oh, that mirror, with the characters for Beauty

hacked into the bronze… True, the great “Tale of Genji” had an effect. I kept feeling

scandalised by these ladies being seen standing, having been trained by Murasaki

Shikibu to consider that very infra-dig. Not so worried by the kissing, tho’ I feel a) If

Heians kissed on the mouth as a sexual expression, Sei Shonagon would have made a

list about it, b) dunno, this is just me, but it doesn’t seem to go with blackened teeth.



Was Murasaki right to leave out all the details of those cruelties, just casually noting

that some princess or other was having a hard time at court? I think maybe she was:

certainly it was her triumph over Sei, heheh you can do your worst, you’ll be GONE

from my lasting record… Best bit: Julith Jedamus uncovers convincing mechanism

for political upheaval entirely caused by the malice of one minor court lady towards

another. Added bonus: the Amazon.com reviewer who ran a comparison between

Seidensticker (the translation I have of the Tale of Genji) and this other bloke with all

the footnotes, Royall Tyler. Convinced me, finally, that as I’m no scholar, I don’t

need to buy the advanced class version.



Caravaggio, Christopher Preachment. The artist as Sex-Pistol, with vital difference

that Michelangelo Merisi, (Caravaggio) a genius and his anarchy genuine. Time for

some superlatives, or I’ll be rambling on here all day. Best book about being a violent,

driven, mad lout of a modern artist I have ever read, and brilliant technique. It got a

bit touristy in the middle, when “Caravaggio” goes to Sicily and waxes sentimental

about the C17 version of the Mafia, but I really liked the deliberate continuity flaws,

as when, on one occasion, our Sex Pistol drops into a bar for an expresso and a ciggy.

Don’t place too much credence on the death scene.



The Terracotta Dog, Andrea Camilleri Another of those foreign roman policier

series of which we never tire. This one is Sicilian (not at all sentimental about the

Mafia, more blackly humorous). It has all the features: the all-important food and

drink, the local colour, the political asides, the cast of misfit policemen/women, the

likeable, doom-prone hero/ine. Excellent writing, excellent translator. No need for me

to tell you anything about the plot, you know how it goes, suffice to say this variation

is new. Total find, a real treat. Why do I like roman policiers, whereas a lot of other

fiction bores me? Why do I call them by their french name? This is down to a book by

Paul Bleton, called Ca se lit comme un roman policier, which investigates the

question in great detail. In short, I don’t live the way mainstream fiction characters

live, absorbed in my own soapsuds. I live as if I’m in a policier: with an ongoing

puzzle, an idea that I’m working out, and my daily life happens around it, sweetened

and sharpened by the nagging presence. My puzzle is the book I’m writing of course.

To other ideas people it might be the bridge they are designing, the class they are

teaching, or the role of innexin gap junctions in cell-cell communication. Whatever,

it’s something you ‘ll either understand or you won’t…



She Walks These Hills, Sharyn McCrumb As recommended by Greil Marcus in

The Invisible Republic. So now I know that should I ever be in Tennessee, I better talk

about Apa-latch-ian not Apa-laych-ian folk music, (hm…maybe I’ll just keep my

mouth shut). Rather slow paced, rather self-congratulatory and not at all pop-

intellectual, prose style more like that big rocking chair that don’t go nowhere. But the

mood darkens, and the tale grips as shadows gather.



The Athenian Murders Jose Carlos Somoza Usually I don’t know why people rave

about these tricksy Iberian fictions about the strange relationship between writer, text,

characters, reader (Iberian? Somoza is an expat Cuban living in Madrid, apparently,

but it isn’t just the Americas branch, they’ve been at it since at least C16th). Seems to

me they’re belabouring the obvious (cf Cubism). But there’s a point to it and anyway

I could not resist a foreign roman policier with a short, fat, pernickety Athenian

detective called Heracles Planor, which promised to be also an exposition of Plato’s

Theory of Forms. It got slow in the middle, but Plato’s Athens is very real and it picks

up for an absolutely serious, genuinely thrilling finale, plus a joke on the reader saved

for the last page.



Oh, oh, oh, what a long post. Enough, enough, and I didn’t even get to Kazuo

Ishiguro, never mind… I went to the library again yesterday, in the rain, on my way to

swim, and found A White Darkness, Geraldine McCaughrean straight away, as

recommended by Sarah Singleton, (hi Sarah). So then I knew I was on a roll, zoomed

over to C in the grown-ups’ stacks and found Andrea Camilleri’s The Shape of Water.

Don’t you just hate it when the library has six copies of the smashing new writer’s

second, plastered with mad praise for the previous book, the one that’s never there…

Also picked up Philip Mansel on Paris 1814-1852. Finally got sick of not knowing

what to trust in Francois’s highly idiosyncratic reports. And equally not knowing how

much to trust of the chorus of friends and admirers, trashing Chateaubriand’s

memoirs. I have friends and admirers like that myself.



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Has it come to this?

Wednesday, March 8th, 2006



Wednesday 8th March



White mist to the eaves outside my window. It was raining yesterday, this morning

there must be warm air coming off the sea. Spring bulbs in the garden about five and a

half weeks, maybe six, behind where they were last year. Amphibs barely getting

started; my camellias, pining for their chill, damp cloud forest, should be happier

today, but I doubt if the red one’s flowers will recover from the drought they suffered

last August and September. I’m working on recovering my health, a mere cold can

fell you when your reserves are depleted, and on promotional material for Jon Weir.

My musical moments: Dead Kennedys at the Manchester Apollo, me all alone, still

dressed for camping in the Pacific North West, red braid down to my bum, befriended

by those punks I’m sure purely on the grounds of my utterly bizarre appearence, (Sex

Pistols to the contrary, punks were generally kindly folk) Eeeh, we were that poor, we

shared cigarettes with nothing but tobacco in them… Grateful Dead at the Ally Pally,

right up against the stage, staring into the monster boxes of those days, the feedback

was DISGUSTING, after about four and a half hours I insisted hysterically on

walking out, Peter just couldn’t understand it. The Buzzcocks in that bunker, me

getting photographed by the man from Honey (my brief career as hip columnist). Nick

Cave at Xtreems screeching I AM A FIGURE OF FUN and stage-diving, ouch, ouch,

wham. You used to know about it when you got stage dived in that dive…Â The time

we took Peter’s bridge partner to see Jesus and Mary Chain at the Pavilion Theatre,

ooh dear, maybe we should have warned him not to wear his glasses. The time we

took Bruce Sterling… Where did we take him? It was the Zap, but what was the gig? I

have no idea, completely gone. Ah, these mad scraps, I’m the bag lady of UK sf. I

think of the real writers, with their matching Gucci luggage, where did I go wrong?



Ah well, perfection in the life or in the work.

Has it come to this? A house which is actually supernally clean and tidy (I know how

we spent the weekend) looks proper mashed after an evening in with the football. Me,

I was in bed, caring for neither Barcelona nor Chelsea. I wonder what it would have

been like to live in girl-world. Hm… They probably would have made me live in a

kennel in the yard.



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Lent

Friday, March 3rd, 2006



3rd March



Cold, grey afternoon; but no frost



My, my, that trip to North Wales was a tour de force. The price I pay for keeping

(more or less) clear of my feuding sisters is that I follow orders blindly. . . often not a

good idea. Thus, this dumb grunt ends up alone with two fragile elderly charges in the

most isolated cottage on the Llyn, with no network coverage and the nearest

phonebox three quarters of a mile away; no human habitation closer except holiday

cottages mainly empty at the unforgiving end of winter. The north wind never gave

up, the beach walk was out of their reach. The 150 yards (I’m sorry, under stress I

revert to imperial measure) down to the slipway among the rocks was an epic journey,

but we managed it nearly every day. And there were blue periwinkles scattered like

blessings under the naked blackthorn hedge. There were shells for me to bring back,

and best of all there was the sky at night, Orion, blazing above the back yard; the

Plough, Andromeda and Pegasus. Blew their minds. How long since they had seen the

tattered scarf of the Milky Way? Too long.



Now I’m waiting for the call that says I have to hurry back to Manchester. Maybe it

won’t come, maybe life will be calm again for a while.

The days lengthening mercilessly, the ground still hard as stone, it’ll be April before

we have any daffodils. Next week, if I’m here, I must get onto that homepage, and

add the links to make this new blog a bit more seaworthy.



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









Since Mozart’s Birthday

Friday, February 17th, 2006



17th February, mild. Dark low rainy sky



So much has happened since Mozart’s birthday. I finished the revision of Snakehead,

which proved a tussle in the end; my father had another stroke; Gabriel’s run through

at Christopher and Vivienne Liu’s house went well, and thank you so much to the Liu

family, how 18th century we felt, what delicious cakes. . and the recital at the Chapel

Royal, North St, on the 14th got a full house. What a great institution that place is,

lunchtime concerts which I may now attend, hey hey, as I have finished my seven

year burn. (Still got to do the author’s note for Snakehead, and the site for Rainbow

Bridge nb). Talked to Steve O’Hagan and his director from BBC4 about Catastrophes,

as I’m in that cadre apparently (Utopias are for the young turks), at Pause on Preston

Circus: what friendly people & Laura’s bear-stories worth the morning for me all by

themselves. Apparently if you sing to bears they are mollified.They think you are

Native American persons, worshiping them as is proper. But why the theme tune to

“The Archers” should work on a black bear remains a mystery. I’m afraid of bears, as

some may remember from Midnight Lamp. And not just because they signify the

awesome might of California. Catastrophes, mm. Makes sense to me, as I’m living in

one.

And what else? Can’t remember. A trip to see Jon at Fortress Orion, opportunity to

apologise to Design Dept for my scabby “colophons” which they had to clean up. . .Â

birds in the bushes, first amphibs in the pool (my poor fish, the traditional house-

invasion has started, the yobs are going to pour in, graffiti on the walls, fornication

in the living room, excreta all over, and in the end they’ll just wander off, leaving

mounds of foundling children. And they’re protected, fish: sorry. You are not.) I have

sweet daphne by my bed, but this year no daffodils in the garden yet.



Now I’m off to the Llyn for a week, slightly hair-raising prospect, but my father

wants to go back to Wales, for what may well be the last time. Taking the Vaio for

homework, and Margo Lanagan’s Black Juice, of which more later.









St Bartholemew’s

Sunday, January 29th, 2006



27th January, Friday



Mozart’s birthday: to St Bartholemew’s to hear the Hanover Band’s Prague 1791

concert. Driving snow, or frozen sleet, illuminated by rare headlights on the black,

night-flying Upper Lewes Road. And and Peter walk ahead, Gabriel and I huddle

behind. The highest nave in England and the worst acoustic in Brighton, why does

this church get all the gigs? It must be admitted the place looks good, very Russian or

Polish, all that seasoned, solemn nakedness of red brick, glittery mosaic, shimmering

lamps and soaring blind arches; and about fifteen differently marbled kinds of fancy

marble. Maybe it works if you pay your £25 to shiver in the front rows, we shivered

in the £15 and though it was interesting to see the basset horns and strange

trombones, the two hundred and fifty year old pianoforte and all, I have still no idea

what the Hanover Band sounds like. Etiolated strings, whining around like sad bats.

By listening with painful concentration I did manage to appreciate the piano concerto

(No27). Nikolai Demidenko gets thumbs up from Gabriel, we repair to the primary

school hall up the road and join the immense, shivering queue without even asking

what’s at the other end. Two onions? Bread? We send out scouts who discover tea,

coffee & not so much as a chocolate biscuit else. Spend the rest of the time admiring

glued things in wall displays.



Back for the second half. The Requiem was pretty good. Hanover Chorus triumphs

over the vasty deeps of dead air above them, that’s a magnificent piece of music, no

matter where or when. Still sleeting out there, and a nasty wind. And and Peter

decided to go on to the Greys, but I went home, chilled to the bone & my back

hurting. So then Gabriel and I decided to light a fire. No fuel in the hod! Out in the

basement area, sleet pelting on the back of my neck, I struggle to upend a monstrously

heavy, slithery, freezing plastic bag of smokeless over the mouth of the hod-



Keepthethingstill! PUT it down on the ground, I can’t-

DON’T tilt it!



It’s like milking a cow-

We have to make the hole bigger-



Fire catches. Oh, no it doesn’t. Fire going out. I decide to show Gabriel an old

northern trick, for drawing a fire with newspaper. Unfortunately the trick really needs

a broadsheet newspaper and a shovel. I improvise with the tabloid Independent. Fire

escapes from grate, leaps about, nearly a nasty accident. It’s all right, I was planning

to retouch the enamel anyway*.



Meanwhile someone on BBC4 is saying (I paraphrase) that Mozart’s music is a

message from God (aka, for those of us who don’t believe in anything but the cold

and the equations, the whole fifteen dimensional kaleidoscope), saying it may not

look like it, but all is well. . . I’m moved to agree with him.

(*Yes, it was a chaste, elegant, acanthusy Art Deco cast-iron fireplace, I painted it in

bright enamels, me Vanessa Bell)



I love it. This is what winter ought to be like.

New Riders Of The Purple Sage at the Greys on 26th Feb. (Not really, but one of

them) My God! Got to be there!



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White roofs

Wednesday, January 25th, 2006



25th January



It’s cold, the roofs are white, the dark morning makes me think of Paris in the the

springtime, in Band of Gypsys. The hot water has switched itself off. I twist and hold

the reset button, clunk, thunk, and think of sixty million or so other people doing the

same thing, more or less. . . Turn back the dial on global warming? I don’t think so!

Look at the size of the thing, just for a moment. Change gonna come, no matter how

many wind turbines Arnie plants, to boost the Californian economy (it’s like a colour-

blindness test: can you spot the error in logic, or is it invisible to you). Pull out of this

tailspin with our lean-burning SUVs and our organic green beans from Kenya intact?

Depends which colours you can see.

Survive the death of the natural world with our schools and roads, public health, clean

water and civil liberties intact? Oh, sorry: I meant, what’s left of those strange,

fanciful, utopian amenities. I wonder how long before we find out?



My son’s eighteen, sometimes I think about that. But I’m just a scaremonger (I hope).

Yay! The vegetable box. Usual staples, plus two fat tomatoes, a head of fennel, a bag

of rocket, two large and lumpy beetroots. Should I pickle them, or make borcht (sp?)

Or boil them for a macedonie, with that walnut and garlic dressing I learned on

Naxos? And my Maurois biography of Chateaubriand has arrived. And I’d better get

back to work.



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Arundhati Roy, landmarks

Wednesday, January 18th, 2006



18th January, wet and mild



I see Arundhati Roy has refused the Sahitya Akademi Award, and done it gracefully

too, good for her. There’s no use in being nasty when you turn down an honour, it

ruins the gesture and you don’t make your point. Finished and delivered The Voyage

Out yesterday, another landmark (a ‘Buonarotti’ story, at last: reminding me of the

time I sat at the 2001 SFF conference bar in Liverpool, listening to Liz Sourbut tell

me about her genuine hypnagogic experience (sp?) a real world “alien abduction”

event, and could discuss the physiology of the brain about it, no need to smile and

nod, that was a treat.) I think I’m sailing up the Channel, watching them go by. By

Beachy, by Fairlight, by Dungeness. As someone so rightly pointed out, if you have a

fair wind you do not count them off like that. . . But I like January, there’s no other

month like it. I like the way it goes on, and on. I get things done.

Department of seeing what the young people are up to: Augh, no tickets left for Arctic

Monkeys in the Dome, serves us right for being slackers. And we have tickets for The

Streets at the Astoria, but we can’t go.



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Is it raining?

Monday, January 16th, 2006



16th January wet and mild, grey low skies.

Is it actually raining? Oh, yes it is. Rain is good. (Frost is better). Scuttle down to the

green cone to empty the compost bin. Lovely weather for slugs! Rinse bin under the

outside tap, and fit the gutter pipe to the rain water butt, must remember to undo that

bfour anyone has a shower. My Lulu Belle’s fat buds are getting bruised for lack of

light, should I cut them? Peter thinks that would be vandalism. But soon I’ll bring in

some sprigs of the scented daphne, and that’ll be the end of gracefully decaying

winter by my bed, berries crumpled on a twig of holly, the orange and pink

spindleberries turned to rust, whitebeam berries withered but still glistening scarlet,

only the sprigs of pine (actually Norway Spruce, from my overgrown rockery bonsai)

full of life.

We took Ginger in the cemetery yesterday, which she liked very much (she’s more

secure with two people). Sad state of affairs by the Engineer’s Tomb, where there’s

been a party, sodden ashes, trampled earth; too many places where the turf has been

allowed to grow out, rank and plantain, that’s eutrophication (sp?) bad thing that

happens all over. But a winter silence confirmed by the rustle of sheaves of rust and

ash-blond leaves on the walks, so I’m glad for some kinds of neglect. Lots of activity

at the badgers’ set, one tiny patch of snowdrops in a very sheltered hollow. A child’s

soft toy, a small bear that was once white, lies mouldering on the grass beside a grave

where something or someone has been digging (but sometimes graves fall in of their

own accord, leaving draggled eerie gaps into darkness at the root of a stone), oooh,

and here’s another, a severed head of a soft toy cat, equally muddied.. What do these

signs mean? Ginger, get away from there! Do not get spooked little cat, hurry by, it’s

nothing.



I see Jeff VanderMeer’s written the screaming frog story at last. Hi Jeff… that’s nice

to know. Must ask him where, I’d like to read it.



I’m reading December/January New Scientists in quick succession, like Alice eating

all those dinners but with more relish. But the 7th January issue, inaugurating their

fiftieth year, had me gasping for the wrong reasons. Maybe they were tired after the

festive double, which is often lightweight but this year a real cracker. Huge coverage

for scaremongering about Bird Flu (if you decide to barricade yourself into your

house during the pandemic… etc, etc), without a single mention of what Bird Flu

actually does, which is kill birds. A paper on hyperdrive space travel written entirely

in Gernsback Continuumese; an interview with an archaeologist who reveals meaty

scientific details about his craft: “sometimes people who think outside the box don’t

make the best team players…“. Ah, it’s not a new disease. The idols of the market

place have always ruled, as the editors so rightly point out, even in Popular Science

magazines. (Safe as milk, anyone?)

Poliakoff’s Friends and Crocodiles, what was that about? Shallow, stunningly

predictable repetitive pap for mediafolk (or maybe archaeologists) who get teary-eyed

over augh, those “low-hanging fruit” days, and grandiose decor makeovers at the

office? I’ll stick with Life on Mars, me teary-eyed for white dogs**t. I got more fun

out of Invasion, (and I bet it was Meriel’s skeleton in the boot). Ha! Bring on the

Bodysnatchers, it’s the nineteen fifties again. But I’ll never know about the skeleton

because life is too short for so much tv, even for a writer convalescent between burns.



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The Blackcaps

Wednesday, January 11th, 2006



11th January, wind and rain, dark skies



I work fast, it’s my nature, and the more I have to do the faster I work. It’s no problem

to me to hammer out fifty thousand words in six weeks, and that includes constant

revision (I don’t do much else, minor matters like eating and sleeping take back seat

& I don’t miss ‘em). Then, having produced my raw material, I can begin to carve it

into shape, which is slower but equally obsessive. But now I’m slow. Rainbow Bridge

is put to bed, gone to production (after a wild flurry of final crises yesterday), Voyage

Out and Snakehead revision a blissfully, (relatively) peaceful prospect… I need to

recharge my batteries, I need to breathe. Just wasted some time collecting the

Moveable Type blog from Google caches, back to July 2004 = my own archive got

lost in the shuffle. It reads nicer than any diary I’d write NOT for publication, I can

tell you… Ran across an ancient review of the original Bold As Love in my hunting

and gathering ‘finished this book on champagne and tequila’, says mr sfnal man

(biased and superficial sf reviews), goes into reminiscences about a magical visit to

Reading festival, tent planted over a ditch, dealings with kindly police (DON’T try

that now!), and concludes ‘don’t remember a thing about the book, but it was good…’

That’s the style, and thank you whoever you are.



This is a great day for my birdwatching, the Crescent’s flock of greenfinches blown

from tree to tree, feathers ruffled. The wren on the wall. A female chaffinch alone and

oooh, hey, both the blackcaps, foraging together, male with his sober black cap,

female with her russet bonnet. I’ve often seen him, and heard him sing of course, but

never, ever seen her before. One pair. Do they rear nestlings, that’s the question. With

all these squirrels around, and bad cats…



Coloured picture heading, keystroke formating, sigh, I miss the austerity of Moveable

Type, but there, the great thing about working on the internet is that if you stay still,

whatever you do becomes naked simplicity in a short while. In time I must set up

housekeeping here, add the tagline, links, upload the archive I gleaned, add a few

photos, but it’ll wait. I need to watch tv, swim, take Ginger into King Death’s Garden,

mist my houseplants, listen to Gabriel play the piano, listen to Peter telling me what

he’s doing with the new interactive code he’s learning. Must find that Ezra Pound

poem about the eyes, rest master, for we be a weary, weary…

News department, Justina Robson has two books on the PK Dick list. I shouldn’t say

this, not having read any of the others, but I bet Natural History wins. That book has

real class. See yourself as others see you department. Nah, not drinking, I’m back to

work tomorrow, says I to Farah Mendlesohn. Oh, says she, you have a job now?



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The Three Guineas

Tuesday, January 10th, 2006



Tuesday 10th January, damp and grey. Finally the leaves have fallen in the Crescent’s

sheltered enclave. The little birds -vanished from my stage for so long- are visible

again. Strange how Christmas, just an incident in the old-style winters I dimly

remember from the eighties, has become the hinge-point. As soon as the leaves are

gone Spring is on its way, although it’ll be a long time coming. When I use my

binoculars, to watch the finches flocking on the sycamore in Pete and Alison’s

garden, I see new buds gleaming, bright as paint.



Yesterday I got out to the University at Falmer, to get Stan’s Olaf Stapledon letter

copied for him. The Special Collections dept doesn’t do distance-aquisition, I have to

go there in person, sit at a table with the box the archivist brings to me, identify my

letter with a paperclip and a pink slip, put everything back where I found it, leave the

box on the table and go and pay my 25p (per photocopy page). Plus inland postage. I

may make a paraphrase or copy the letter by hand, if I like, but I may only use pencil.

I must leave my coat, phone, any non-see-through folders, etc, at the front desk.

Journeying back in time like so, into the silence of unseen archivists and the pleasant

smell of old photocopy paper, I could have lingered all day reading the

correspondence: letters from Vita Sackville-West, from the Sitwells, from Mica Spira,

an Austrian refugee trying to rescue her husband from internment (in 1939). Agnes

Smith, unemployed textile worker, of Huddersfield, writes crying out against The

Three Guineas, reproaching Virginia Woolf for the way she sees only the plight of the

daughters of ‘educated men’. The Grande Dame evidently replied, unrepentant, ‘I

have needs too…’ Rather crass of her, (imagine the Bloomsbury Group as the cast of

‘Friends’) considering the woman writing from Huddersfield was unquesitonably an

intellectual, talented, political activist and thinker, and actually starving; staying in

bed to ’save a meal’, feeling pangs of hunger over a penny bun shared with her little

nephew, describing ‘the sick hopelessness of finding myself doomed to start work as a

half-timer at twelve…’ But give her credit, VW pursued the correspondence, even

though Agnes (inevitably) proved to be a hopeful writer, hoping the woman who had

made it up the slippery slope would get her published, argh. Later in the same box, a

pamphlet authored by Agnes Smith, on the Wool Textle Industry and how it fared in

wartime: a worker’s view. ‘Somehow we have to get that common interest and desire

to serve the community into all our industries…’ What an aspiration. Strange meeting,

for a moment. That’s where I came from: that trapped voice, that era, that region gave

me birth.



What else? Edith Sitwell being precious about Wombats, the poet May Sarton getting

emotional (and a bit grovelly) about her failed novel. Ethel Smith, different caste

entirely from Agnes, telegraphs (presumably about The Years) “Final paragraph

almost smashes the machine of Life with its terrible duty”. Hm. That’s a big almost.

Charming vision of telegrams as the email of their time, except very much more

expensive. The women, except Vita S-W and Sitwell, all address VW as ‘Dear

Virginia Woolf’, which looks very daft, and is bad manners. But a lot of the box was

handwritten and illegible, or nearly illegible, and I wasn’t committed enough for that.

How quiet the library seemed as I made my way out; maybe it was early.

I wonder will anyone who reads Rainbow Bridge notice that problematic Three

Guineas connection, that station bar, still a haven of publiness in the Carling Festival

days, and even now, tho’ so much changed since I sat there one rainy night, on my

way back from some touching Workers’ Writer event, (my whole milieu, from VW’s

perspective) supping Pride alone and thinking about a long, complex fantasy novel.



Brokeback Mountain, ah, Brokeback Mountain, a little disappointing from the

moment the one who wears blue (Jack) gets out of his pickup and poses, pink calendar

boy. No mystery there, then. No surprises, and nothing whatever transgressive; just a

period piece. So that’s why it’s getting all the attention! Postcards, postcards, the

vanished silences of those days… I get the feeling the drama probably works better in

the story, whereas with The Shipping News it’s the other way round. But it was good

to look at, and the spectacle of the Duke Of Yorks dealing with a phenomenon worth

the price of admission, (always supposing you’d booked your tickets, and had not

been dumb enough to repair to the bar, or to kiosk for snacks, before trying to find a

seat). How to make three hundred people feel as if they’re crushing and struggling to

see the event of the year!



So far.



But I were right about those hats, mind.



Are my full stops and commas and spelling obsessively correct in this entry? They

bloody well ought to be, after the intensive week I’ve had with my editor. Nah,

incorrigible, me.



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Brokeback Mountain

Friday, January 6th, 2006



Feast of the Epiphany, 6th January, cold raw-feeling day, low cloud. I didn’t get out,

waiting for files, working on Snakehead and drafting The Voyage Out.



Memo to selves: What is Brighton? Arguably the gay capital of the UK. What is

Brokeback Mountain? Cowboys, with hats, making out. Cowboys, having hot sex by

the campfire. Probably wearing the hats… What is this? Friday night, and the one at

the bottom of our hill is the funky cinema. Of course it is sold out. We are such idiots.

Back to Gardener’s World it is then.



I have no coat, my coat is at the menders having new pockets fitted. I’m going to find

some chocolate money. And it’s the end of Christmas, which means we have to do

housework again (streamers up = no housework). And we seem to have eaten all the

fancy food, except the strange-tasting chocolate money and a quince. Life is hard.

And this is my first post on word press, my webmeister having moved me here for

sound financial reasons I do believe, plus Word Press being sublime.



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