The Power and The Glory

Happy New Year, etherkin. It’s going to be a strange one. Ructions are afoot - I have read the auguries in my laundry. 2012 is seals in the eelgrass. Something cold and bobbing.

Seals will be big this year, and sisters, and doggish things dancing on their hind legs through the trees. We’re on the edge of the strange times. On the plus side, the matador look will be in, and I look adorable in those trousers. Swings and roundabouts.

Anyway, here I sit, baht ape, watching out of the window as the headlights climb the hill opposite to the unreasonable black of the moors, picking my teeth with a wishbone and pondering what’s to come.

When looking forwards, it’s always best to start with a quick glance behind you. Last year was one of yearning, for penpals and monsters and muses and gods. Yearning makes me bilious. Perhaps it’s time I turned to Christ. Or to Christopher at least, patron saint of my dog-head daydreams, hot-breathed, slobbering force of faith. St Christopher was a definite sort.

In the meantime, there is work to be done. The Olympics are coming and I am Team GB’s only hope.

Apres le Singe

So now I’m in the market for a brand new muse. Butterface won’t do, of course – I wouldn’t trust her references – and that bastard Baby Mumps is out. It won’t be Michael, who came to stay on Mischief Night and hasn’t left his chair, Michael with his face like a sagging balaclava and his crinkling woolly hands, his hair slipping off at the back of his head and oh my god those thighs. And it can’t be any of my sundry cats – nobody wants a muse that’s always licking its arse and can’t kill anything bigger than a vole.

Nope, it’s an employers’ market out there. I’ve put a card in the Post Office window and am waiting for the phone to ring. I could be my own muse, I suppose, but I’d be an unreliable worker. I’d be tardy and churlish and smuggle stationery out in my hair, I’d clock-watch and time-waste and gob in the guvnor’s tea. I’d end up giving me the sack, for sure, and I’m pretty litigious when riled.

Essential attributes in a potential candidate will include a 2:1 or above in Applied Monstrousness, the ability to mix a perfect Benylin Sunrise, an unapproachable demeanour and unprofessional appearance, advanced skills in burglary, Beggar My Neighbour and Microsoft Excel, experience in dealing with difficult customers and at least five years in the position of muse, familiar or personal demi-god. An HGV license is desirable, as are a shotgun license and an elementary swimming certificate. Unsettlingly suggestive tails an advantage. I will be accepting bribes.

No

There’s something I haven’t been telling you. Something is different, something has changed. Something dreadful has happened.

It’s the monkey. It’s got lost.

It somehow didn’t make it in the move. I kept telling myself that it would turn up, that it would come swaggering in through the catflap or surprise me in the shower, that I would see a stirring in my sock drawer and a stiffly rising tail, but no, it is gone. It is gone.

How I managed to pack a Yellow Pages from 2006, the reeking duvet of a former housemate, a tin of pease pudding and a small pouch of hair and yet not the monkey, I will never know. The only conclusion I can draw is that it did not want to come and remains in the cellar of my former slum, gibbering softly to itself and making little sooty thumbprints on the walls. My prayers go out to the new tenants.

It was my muse, my god, my disciple and my lover, with its maleficent tail and its jaunty old fez. We had weathered so much together, skipping through my hinterlands paw in paw, prancing through the places it’s unsafe to go alone. Without my monkey, I am bereft. Who will mix my sild martinis and pinch me gently to sleep? Who will chase the Children from my door? Whose little leather fingers will sneak into mine when it’s 3am in my heart and all my glee is gone?

What am I going to do?

Further Information Concerning the Bus

I’m always seeing important people on the bus. I see the Sleazy Cavalier with his slicked-back hair and oxblood boots, the hint of a twizzle to his ‘tache. Now there’s a man with something afoot in his cellar. The Virgin Mare gets on at the Co-op, pushing Little Baby Bluebird in his Silver Cross pram and cooing all the way to town. Poor Sad Satchel, getting the bus to school with her mum, the two of them sitting at the front like a pair of pepperpots with matching choppy bobs. The one I call Rosie, all bulging pink Kappa and ginger-grey roots, who I like to think of naked on her leather-look sofa, watching CBeebies and binging on fudge.

Do they think of me? Do they notice me every day and wonder? Do they say to themselves, there she goes again – why doesn’t she do something about that hair? What is she hiding under her coat? Why does she only have one eye open? And what is that smell? Maybe they have little daydreams like I do, imaginary cataclysms that leave The People of The 302 clamouring for survival in a post-apocalyptic Paddock. I can spend the whole twenty minutes debating which one I’d eat first.

Hints From The Universe #764

Last week at work, a spider crawled out of my hair.

Huddersfield Factfile #1 - Emley Moor Mast

Sometimes I dream that the mast is my lover or that it is falling with me in its crown. It gets me every morning over the hills, elegant and terrifying as maths. It did fall down once, in the blue chapped March of ’69, and when they rebuilt it, the beetles came. Over land and through the air, thousands upon thousands, darkling, jewel, false clown and skin, long-lipped and ironclad, mud-loving, blister and snout, and to this day there’s a team of coleopterologists up there 24-7. More than three hundred new species of beetle have been discovered at Emley Moor, seventeen of which are named after Roy Castle.

They light it up at night in case of low-flying craft but it doesn’t stop the odd accident, like the stricken kestrel that fell from the sky, causing everyone for miles around to miss Bullseye. Or the incident with the ape. I can see it from here if I stretch but I only sometimes think about licking it. It tastes like a Lemonade Sparkler and if it ever falls down again, I will be riding it.