Category Archives: birthdays

June 1, 2011 · 8:31 pm

Five years ago today…

BIRTHDAYS ON THIS DAY
Marilyn Monroe
My nephew Ivan
my maternal grandmother
my paternal grandfather
my ex-husband
Bob Monkhouse
Alanis Morrisette

and

Baroque in Hackney!

Yes, for it was five years ago on this very day – having just been made redundant for what I had no idea then was only the first time, thinking there was great novelty in the experience – that I sat with my then-new laptop outside the Dervish in Stoke Newington Church Street right in the middle of the afternoon and, with a glass of dry white and a little dish of imam bayildi, started this here blog. I must have had some innate sense of shape (or maybe it was that, having thought of one title, I couldn’t muster another), because I called my first post Baroque in Hackney.

My second post was a slightly unpadded, but characteristic, review of two films: Caché, and The Squid and the Whale. (Note how the typographical style has changed, with much-better italics; those double quotations marks for titles now just look typewritery, which is like code for doddery. Why it’s like the – the – the past…)

 I gave up on EastEnders years ago, and you’ll see why. The third post I ever wrote on here was a mad Walford rant.

Fun, eh? Phew! A relief to find it wasn’t so bad after all, even before I had any idea what I was doing here. And I was definitely more relaxed than 2011 will allow anyone to be. it’s all – or it’s partly, because back then I had some money and wasn’t particularly worried about things in the short term – about the commodity of which I then had so conspicuously much more: TIME. Everything’s speeded up now, the days whirl by like – well, dervishes – and, you know,  pflphrw.

What there wasn’t, at least for the first month or more, was any poetry. Not sure why that is, but I seemed to be very busy reading featherweight novels and watching crap television, so maybe that was it.

So let’s have some poetry now. Well, a link to some. Because today is the very publication date of Egg Printing Explained, which launches (like a ship) tomorrow (but preferably not like the Titanic) (though they did have three days of very pleasant sailing), and the endlessly tireless Michelle McGrane has put up a very generous and rather awe-inspiring post on her poetry blog, Peony Moon.  So, to get you in the mood, without further ado, here (along with some quotes and poems and pictures of the book, and an alarmingly big one of me) are some poems from Egg Printing Explained.

And there’s a BIRTHDAY PRIZE. The first person to spot the hidden Oscar Wilde reference will get an Ernest Dowson badge. Answers in the comments here, please.

12 Comments

Filed under baroqueness, birthdays

Tagged as , , ,

April 14, 2011 · 7:57 pm

“It’s the dogs that count”: a tale of the New Austerity

vintage birthday card with two dogs on it

Well, I promised you dogs. The sad truth is that this picture was scanned in yesterday morning and has been sitting since then, waiting for a post. It has taken that long to find a few minutes.

I have a friend whose mother was a doughty woman from Bristol, who knitted and sewed and made do and mended, and who recycled absolutely everything. A good, solid, practical, no-nonsense woman, in the old  mould. She died about ten years ago, if  not maybe even more, I can’t quite remember.

One thing she used to do concerned greeting cards. Someone didn’t know this the other day, but perhaps my other readers remember know, in the old days, greeting cards used to be made of thinner paper, which was then folded down from the top to create an inner and an outer layer to the card. The outer layer had the picture on it, obvs, and the inner had the greeting, and that was where you wrote, obvs. Well, my friend’s doughty frugal mother used to recycle her greeting cards thus: she used to cut along the top edge and remove the folded-over inner layer, and then give the outer layer as a card, in an improvised envelope.

This is the kind of thing they used to do back then, when it was the thought that counted.

Well, on Sunday we were sitting over a coffee or two and my friend handed me a funny-looking envelope with my name on it, saying: “Happy birthday! I hope you don’t mind… you are the only person I could give this card to.”

“Really?” I said. What could it possibly be? Not more dancing girls…

“You’ll see what I mean,” she said. “You’re the only one.”

Well, I opened the envelope in a rising sweat of anticipation, expecting some little jolt of self-recognition – self-definition, even. I ripped the end, and put my hand in, and pulled out… well… you can see it.

Isn’t it GREAT?

“I love it!” I cried. Honoured, really. To be the one person she could give this card to.

There are little bits of glitter sprinkled over the bit of the card where the grey joins the white, where the dogs join the flowers; they don’t show in the scan, and it’s a shame. The glitter is one of the most pleasingly random things about this sweet, lovely card.

Wonderful things about this card:

  1. my friend’s mother carefully cutting the inside layer out
  2. me being the only person my friend knows to whom she cold possibly give it
  3. the way it looks on my sideboard, on the vintage fabric runner that sits on it; they were made to go together
  4. last but not least, the fact that my friend still had this card. It tells you everything you need to know.

4 Comments

Filed under birthdays, dogs

Tagged as , , ,

April 11, 2011 · 11:32 am

It was ten years ago today

Well, I’ve found something to put up here that isn’t about cuts or war or tsunamis – but it is about death… (Don’t worry, there will be some dogs later.)

I can never help feeling a bit guilty that one of the people I’m closest to lost his dad on my birthday, and it does cast a bit of a shadow of reality on the day, as with Christmas, that the imperative for celebration coexists with family upheavals and real sadness. And this one’s a difficult anniversary. But I assuage my guilt by reminding myself that it’s his sister’s birthday too. So it wasn’t my fault…

And this programme, which was recently on TV, makes today a great opportunity to take in a bit of that infectious humour, generosity of spirit and great zest for life that we could all do with a lot MORE of. Frankly. So here’s to Harry.

(Now – if I ruled the world…)

And then there’s this.

And this, a classic in my own family:

(You’ve got to absolutely love the fact that the Ying Tong Song has 20 ‘dislikes’! Classic.)

3 Comments

Filed under birthdays, death, happy

Tagged as , ,

April 10, 2011 · 10:33 pm

…and the birthday celebrations begin…

Note to self: be more like this

Oh, God, birthdays. Why do they even exist? Invented by the guy who invented calendars, like the app everyone has to get for their new phone.

So the weekend was a write-off. Given over to the annual pre-anniversary paroxysm of self-reflection, life review and despair, with a few actual ructions thrown in (so with any luck I’ll have ruined the coming year before it’s even begun). I did manage to get out in the sun a bit, I even managed to catch up with two separate friends, with a walk in the park (and a present, which I haven’t been allowed to open yet) thrown in, and it was much better than Saturday. But the thing doesn’t really bear thinking about. And the list of things I can’t quite seem to sort out is large and growing, ranging from curtain rails to tax returns, via items like standing orders, a loose button and a broken window. The episode with the boiler and the electrics really took it out of me the other week – I think that never made it to the annals of Baroque, but suffice to say it took five days over the most high-pressure week in living memory (the Day of the Cuts, among several other things), and I was a nervous wreck.

Well, there you go. It’s probably less to do with getting OLD than with just being tired, and wrung out. Like an old rag. Like everyone else in the country, I’m now LIVING FOR those two long weekends that are coming up, even though everyone I know will no doubt be abroad or in the countryside. I for one hope merely to do nothing. (And prep ten poetry classes.) (And edit the remaining material for Horizon Review.) (And sort out Baroque Mansions, do some money stuff, and maybe find someone to see?) (And look for a new job, as my contract ends in June, hello out there! Ace comms pro here…)

In related news, while I was sunk in my annual morass of confusion, grief and self-castigation – and indeed giving myself more things to self-castigate about – Vivienne Westwood was busy turning 70. Now SHE is absolutely fabulous, is still the epitome of cool (as defined partly by not giving a damn what anyone thinks), and is not living hand-to-mouth trading only her increasingly cheap labour. This from the Independent gets right to the heart of the Baroque angst:

In a climate where financial independence and creative control are as precious as they are rare, this designer has both in spades.

See?? The article continues,

As profoundly anarchic as she is inspirational [n.b., and rich – Ms B], Dame Vivienne consistently challenges protocol and refuses to compromise – and all while creating fashion which is as proudly individual as it is lovely. “Clothes for heroes” indeed.

As it happens, one of the many things I can’t quite sort out involves Vivienne Westwood. I bought one of her handbags, secondhand of course, a lovely dark green leather bowling bag. The catch is that it’s scratched in a few places: even scuffed. It will be fine if only I can get some dark green polish, which is what I thought I’d do when I bought it, but my enquiries, internet searches, and fruitless real-world searches all show up precisely… nothing. I don’t think dark green shoe polish exists. She’s made a very expensive bag that you can’t take care of.

Dear Vivienne, happy birthday. Please fix my bag. Thank you. Ms Baroque.

In other news, though, I am reading Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth, and it’s really, really funny. Why has no one ever made it into a film?

And apologies, while we’re on the subject, for increasingly sporadic blog posts recently. Aside from anything else, I’m waiting for something to write about that isn’t about cuts or in some other way upsetting. That may, thinking about it, be one reason why I keep writing things about handbags. I love them; they exist only for good. I could vary it a little, and write about earrings, I suppose.  What I need to do is find a way to love the future.

And tomorrow’s the big day. Yippee. But on the plus side, Mlle B is here at the mo, so for the first time in ages I’ll wake up in the morning with a kid here on the big day. There’s a nice evening planned – on a strictly last-minute basis – and the idea is to go for tea and cakes with the kids first,  if we can find a tea-&-cake  shop that’s open on a Monday. And the weather’s wonderful.

Maybe I’ll scan in the birthday card I was given today. You’ll love it.

12 Comments

Filed under birthdays, the end of the worr-uld

Tagged as , , ,

March 24, 2011 · 7:36 pm

Harry Houdini: still escaping, so we don’t have to

Harry Houdini: reminder of a more unfettered era...

Happy birthday Harry Houdini! (Even his name is good. and he made it himself.) Today Erik Weicz would have been 137, which is even older than yours truly is going to be in three weeks. It’s nonsense, of course; even the great Houdini couldn’t manage that one.

However, he is a moral story for our own rather ploddingly circumspect day – and by that I mean YOU, readers of literature, little magazines and reviews pages! So, it’s not on to allow friends to review each others’ books? Oh, you mean even people who know each other mustn’t review one another’s work? Hang on – even if you don’t know the poet it’s now regarded as bad form to give a “negative” review? And then we complain because all the reviews are too positive, too anodyne, too nice?

Well, I’m just thinking about taking up in hommage the nom de plume N. Osey. For such is the name  – in fact, the nom de plume of a stage name – used by Harry Houdini when he wrote dispatches for the magic magazine Mahatma. Yes: with this name he even escaped from the tyranny of literary politeness!  And naturally, while complaining bitterly about the dreariness of everyone else he raved ecstatically about the prowess of THE GREAT HOUDINI, told stories about his exploits, and generally created a fog of mystery and charisma from which we have yet to emerge. The message boards are still seething with controversy over which apocryphal stories are true and whether he made them up.

Well, and here’s one I prepared earlier: it’s in Me and the Dead.

The Escape Artists

Houdini never told. You asked and asked,
convinced there was some secret. And yet
when he came dripping out of that glass box,
a pile of broken chains on the floor by his feet,
was it not death he’d bit his thumb at?
How you all cheered. You were reborn en masse
in the power-surge of what he’d demonstrated.

But hadn’t you spent whole afternoons
helping your children tie up handkerchiefs,
remove jokers, hammer false bottoms –
later looking down, or sideways rather
than at their familiar baby hands only half-concealing
full-sized coins? Ignoring rabbits
poking out of hats, and visible strings?
And what about the tin of sardines
brought from behind an ear? Wasn’t that you,
mendacious conjurer? Wasn’t that magic?

You don’t need a tour of the whale,
its pink sitting rooms and corridors drizzling with damp,
to show you someone lived there
and what they made of it. You’ve seen the sword
in the umbrella stand, furled, incognito.
And that metallic plate hanging over your fireplace:
wasn’t that once a dragon’s scale?

3 Comments

Filed under birthdays, Living With Words, poetry

Tagged as , , ,