Sack Posset

The Power and The Glory

2012-01-29T05:13:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-23T06:27:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-13T05:51:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-02T07:04:00.000-07:00

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

2011-11-02T04:12:00.001-07:00

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

Huddersfield Factfile #1 - Emley Moor Mast

2011-10-23T04:32:00.000-07:00

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.

It's That Mumps Again

2011-08-19T11:17:00.000-07:00

Baby Mumps has got his mates round, some lads called Trev off the estate. The air is fizzy with shell-suit static and the smell of teen semen. They’re off out later on so they’re getting loaded on cherry 20/20 and Broon. Mumps has his mixed in his Thomas sippy cup.

He holds court on a Trev’s knee, tapping fags and taking the piss, showing off his beatbox skills. Women are the night’s priority. Mumps cracks mucky jokes about wet nurses and fingers his ‘tache. God help them down the roller disco.

They get a Chinese for their tea and Mumps sucks the batter off a bag of pork balls. He fists the insides into the Trevs’ hair and chortles ‘til he tumbles over. When the taxi comes he hops into his car seat and buckles himself in, kicking his little DMs in glee.

That Mumps is no son of mine. The little shit gets through five pounds of mince a week and downs more Calpol than Soft Mick. He mixes it with the gin he nicks from my knicker drawer.

When they’ve gone I crawl out of the cupboard and start to clear up. The house is a wreck - bottles everywhere, tab ends in the cheese plant, 70s porn splayed open on the rug. In the kitchen the fridge hangs open, everything edible gone. Milk pools on the lino. A tiny bootprint mars the butter.

Squeeze Me Slow

2011-08-13T06:13:00.000-07:00

I am not a traveller. I'm not a taker of trips. I'll make an exception for Blackpool, of course, my deep-fried neon holyland. Last time I went to Blackpool, the first thing I saw when I got off the train was a pregnant woman dragging on a Lambert while her shaven-headed toddlers gobbed at the gulls. When I die I will go back to Blackpool and suck suggestive confectionary with the one-armed angels in an infinite Penny Arcade.

But sometimes you just need to get away from it all, so the other day I packed some sandwiches and a salacious paperback and wriggled off on holiday underneath my bed. It was the holiday of a lifetime - no sun, so sand and no sea, although after one too many pina coladas I had an uncomfortable encounter with an imaginary cocktail waiter and before I knew it, I was up the duff.

After a brief gestation period, during which I almost did a wordsearch in Chat, my jaw sagged and my gall rose and I hawked up an infant all over the clues. We regarded each other with some mistrust until he slid down the magazine in a log-flume of afterbirth and swaggered off downstairs with my fags under his arm.

And that's how Baby Mumps came to live in the cupboard under the kitchen sink. Baby Mumps with his bumfluff 'tache and Color Me Badd on his boombox, a flick-knife down his Chelsea boot and a stash of Razzles behind the bleach. I've decided to adopt a rather laissez-faire approach to parenting.

In Which Boggarts Become a Recurring Theme

2011-08-04T06:21:00.000-07:00

I took a shine to a fat man on the 302 today. He was carrying a tub of luxury ice cream and sporting a panama hat. Clearly a terrible pervert. I got off two stops early to give chase but he got away from me in the ginnels, which annoyed me because I wanted to see where he lived. In the patrician villas with their steep, clipped lawns, where bored doctors' wives stick pins in their poppets? In the honeysuckled cottages with their bowed-out bellies and boggart tracks in the begonias? Or down in the toast-rack terraces with the likes of me? The only thing we can be sure of is that the ice cream met a sticky end.

Turned Out Nice Again

2011-08-02T08:56:00.000-07:00

I have taken a holiday, ostensibly to commence my masterwork. This involves a lot of egg poaching (in both senses of the word), impromptu Formby recitals, housework shirking, Mast-Watch, the contemplation of boggarts, Absolute 80s Radio, standing at the upstairs window in my werewolf mask, cups of tea, drunk sewing, sausage-fancying and staring open-gobbed at the wall, but these are as all much writing as anything else.

Writing is like a poached egg. Liquid into liquid, flailing hentai tentacles, the impossibility of coalescence. And then. And then it's this, a tiny morsel on hot buttered toast. Perhaps I am not cut out to be a lady novelist. Perhaps I will just perch here like an addled old owl and hack up little pellets of spine and fur.

I can't think of any ways in which writing is like George Formby.

Since You've Been Gone

2011-08-01T06:32:00.000-07:00

We have moved. Me and the Snout, a small brother and sundry cats have upped sticks and run to the hills. Now we live on a road so steep it has a banister, in a village mentioned in the Domesday Book, and if I crane my neck from my bedroom window I can see Fancy Engine pirouetting on top of the mast at Emley Moor, my favourite thing in the whole wide world.

I am at home up here, where the hills roll like breaching beasts and the W.I. hosts jam sales in the churchyard. The local butcher wears a shirt and tie and sings 'I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles' as he's sharpening his knives. Everywhere is up a ginnel. This is my gods' own country and it's in me like the inside of my mouth.

So now I'm rendering bones in my subterranean kitchen and making cunning plans. The old house was killing me - the damp and the detritus, the woodchip and the cold, the tiny handprints in the secret cellar and the children calling carrion outside. Here I can hatch myself again, spring back fully-formed from between my toes. Now I can get the sack back in my posset.

Armageddon Weary

2011-05-21T04:33:00.000-07:00

The monkey and I are preparing for the Rapture, which is apparently due this afternoon. I've tucked my trousers into my socks and the monkey's set the video to tape BGT. I read that it will be some kind of storm but the monkey says that's just code and the vicars will come for us in blood-steeped chasubles and beat us all to death with acoustic guitars.

It's every other day now, the end of the world. I would greatly resent dying in someone else's apocalypse. I don't like to believe in anything I didn't invent myself, which is probably why I'm so bad at maths. I'm pretty sure I'll be safe, anyway. My end of days will come wearing coordinated cruisewear and a tight rubber cap, chin slick with Lurpak and mouth wide as the sea. Butterface will be my Ragnarok. Unless I get to her first.

The Royal Wee

2011-05-02T10:40:00.000-07:00

There we were at eight in the morning, perched on the sofa in our matching Wedding fezzes, Buck's Fizzes fizzing in our Fergs 'n' Andy mugs, swan baps held patriotically aloft. Fancy dress had been mooted but I couldn't find a corgi suit in time and the monkey looks a bit like Princess Margaret anyway.

Of course we were absolutely trolleyed even before the Beckhams arrived and the last thing we saw as we lapsed into unconsciousness was the grinning maw of Beatrice as she loomed like a peach Cthulhu out of the regal crowd. We missed the dress, the kisses and the car but I had an interesting dream about Mohammed Al Fayed and so it all worked out about even in the end.

Later we got out the Formal Axe and did some parading along the garden wall but the children were massing and so we came back inside and started on the Pimms. We were out of cucumber so we ad libbed with liver and we think it gave it quite an interesting tang.

After the highlights and something approximating Eton Mess we suffered the inevitable post-Wedding slump and had to take an early bath. We retired bilious but happy and the monkey fell asleep in my fez, still clutching a sticky picture of Pippa. I do love a good Royal Wedding.

PDP

2011-04-28T09:27:00.000-07:00

When I was a little dot I wanted to be a clown, blue faced for bad luck with wire in my plaits. I slack-roped between the turbines up on the moors and pulled extravagant strings of sausages from unexpected spots. Over time the clown turned inwards and I still live somewhere between Pierrot and Auguste, but I'll never forget the feel of greasepaint in my eyebrows or the happy calm of knowing what I wanted to be.

They say the secret to a happy career is getting paid to do what you love. I love staring and hiding food, drawing troupes of small dogs in the margins of my diary and pretending I live on an island somewhere with the Very Reverend William Buckland and four and a half of the Mitford girls. The world of work has always been hard for me. And yet I must earn enough money to keep me in the needfuls, at least to keep stocked up on Cheestrings and weed.

My skills are many and varied and I'm a personable sort, at least to your face. I can make any animal you like out of cloth, although they always turn out looking somehow like me. I can cross my ring finger over my middle one without moving the others. I have a wide repertoire of untoward recipes. I can write the odd sentence. I have my own dog suit. I am eminently employable.

I think I'd be ideally suited to a career as a familiar, or an Executive Imaginary Friend. I'd make an excellent protagonist - or antagonist - and would be a perfect fit for the position of muse. I could find success as a skeleton in a closet or a madwoman in an attic or some kind of half-forgotten god slumbering away at the bottom of the sea. I could be your nemesis and my rates are more than fair.

Which is all fine and dandy, but it doesn't go down well at the Job Centre.

Happy Birthday, Gin Bag

2011-04-16T10:00:00.000-07:00

My Best Girl's a party in a pencil skirt, a leopard-print lifeline with matching ballet shoes. She's the brolly in my cocktail, the bud in my bong, she's Cava in pyjamas, my sunshine and my muse. Without her, senoras wouldn't shake and monsters wouldn't mash, they'd call off Eurovision and all the bunting in the land would fall.

The monkey and I raise a toast to you, clink our glasses of egg white and gin. To ladypints and date nights, to the terrible things we say! To butchers and barmen and tossing Twilight, to the money shot and the change! To you, B, for being my bestie and for always giving me something to look forward to. To you, to you, to you.

Horses Cont.

2011-04-05T11:20:00.000-07:00

Slab-backed, sweating, all nostrils and steam and teeth like slices of bread, clanking and stamping and champing at the bit, gilded hooves and oil on hot leather, flexing straps and straining buckles and the stirrups, the stirrups, the stirrups and nosebags full of liver and chamfrons stuck with rubies and unblinkered eyes, o lente, lente currite, mossflanked and tangletailed, burrs and fingers in their manes, screaming and screaming and climbing carefully up the stairs.

Fancy Engine

2011-02-23T08:36:00.000-08:00

So I made myself a goddess out of stockinette and sinew and she is badly-stuffed and gamey with prehensile hair. I made her because I was bored one night and nothing felt like glee, not toads or meat or Romans or the shorelife of Little Sark, not coddled eggs or kittens or How Clean Is Your House. I didn't make her because I was scared, I didn't I didn't I didn't, but it's nice to have something to pray to when Butterface is near.

I spat in her mouth to bring her to life and up she stood like a shandied lamb, fully poseable on her pipecleaner pins. She moved into my secret mole and subsists entirely on clams, she talks backwards with her mouth full and she doesn't wash her hands. She isn't kind but she's free with her kisses and she always has plasters in her bag. I've sewn her glyphs in all my gussets and strewn penny sweets outside the Pink Ribbon, but she doesn't ask for much in the worshipping way. She appreciates my indolence and she prefers me fast asleep.

So now when I catch a glimpse of Butterface, with her crisp cruise wear and her snowman eyes, I don't feel so terribly bad. Not that I'm afraid of her. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not.

A poem

2011-01-23T09:50:00.001-08:00

Red hands hanging in the willow tree and
those pesky foxes.
All women are cats when you turn them inside out.

Everything Is Going To Be Alright

2011-01-11T10:26:00.000-08:00

I'm sure I saw a sloth last night, under the laurel in my garden, dragging its belly through the scrag-ends of the snow. I predict sloths will be big in 2011. As will tubular bandages, Beetle Drives and Pierrot chic.

It will be a year of austerity, we know that for sure. I have taken measures - the dormice plumping in the jars beneath my bed, the snail farm in the shower. Butterface is saving on stamps by hand-delivering her letters straight into my lunchbox. Even the monkey's giving up online bingo.

It will be a year of clarity and pamphlets, the year I finally win a competition in Take a Break. It's the year of the Royal Wedding and I am planning my party already. You should never miss an opportunity for high camp. It will be a gala year, you can take my word for it - a juicy, wriggling piglet of a year.

I have left out a trail of chicken nuggets for the sloth. It leads right to my front door.

We All Like Figgy Pudding

2010-12-30T10:38:00.000-08:00

'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even the monkey, 'cause we'd had a little contretemps over the proper way to make a brandy butter daiquiri and I'd locked it in the downstairs lav.

I sat before the fire, reindeer resplendent on my jumper and the Christmas tree seeming to sparkle as the saveloys caught the light. Everything was ready. I'd put the sprouts on when the hawthorn bloomed and they would be perfect, served in champagne flutes with little festive hats of prawns. On the table by the hearth Santa's sherry waited, even though I am old enough to know better. I always leave a carrot out for Rudolph, too, and a little wrap of ket for Blitzen.

I let the monkey out to watch Fanny degrade a turkey. When she brandished the secateurs I felt a hot paw slide into mine and I made a silent toast to Our Lady of Culinary Derangement. God bless you, Fanny Cradock. Gob less everyone.

At midnight the monkey downed its eggnog and pulled on its balaclava. The snow had stayed, buffed lethal by the cold. The monkey left no prints as it swaggered to the shed. I poured myself a Snowball and pulled my chair up to the window just in time to see the shed doors open and the laden sleigh slide out and snicker away over the spangled drifts, off, up into the sky, the cat that pulled it turning and smiling at me with a mouth just like my own before it disappeared behind the moon.

Later on I sewed my stocking shut, just to be on the safe side.

Butterface

2010-12-06T06:08:00.000-08:00

I am worried. Letters from Butterface grow increasingly strange. I thought having a penpal would be all sweetness and stationery but I am beginning to think I was wrong. At first her letters were wonderful. Epic poems about implausible kittens, recipes for treacle gin, her next-door neighbour's bank account details and little doves and orchids of folded Parma ham pressed between the pastel pages.

Recently, however, they have taken on a more menacing tone. Photos of me fall out of grubby Jiffy bags. Pages from my diary. She sends me shopping lists with untoward overtones. Cockles, root ginger, Mulligatawny soup. She has started to use inferior quality writing paper. I would go round and have a word, but the only address I have for her is mine.

Last night I peeked out between the curtains and she was there, standing under the streetlamp over the road, the orange light tinting her swimming cap and her mouth as round as the moon. I slept with a hand whisk beneath my pillow. I should have known. The people I invent never turn out to be personable.

On the Mortality of Seals

2010-11-02T11:18:00.000-07:00

What is it that rends the seals, casts them corkscrewed ashore? The Scientists say it's some sort of propeller, but I will have no truck with that, with an answer so human and true. I would rather it were Skalugsuak, the sleeper shark, full fathom five with its wormridden eyes, centuries old and reeking of piss, biting bone-deep into the bias-cut blubber and nosing the corpses ashore. Or maybe the mermaids, holding their black-eyed lovers just a little too tight in their tooth-lined arms, their beaks fast in flesh as they spiral down to the ecstatic depths. Or is it me? Is that where I go at night, eeling through the abyss with my knife between my teeth? Is that why I wake up so salty and cold?

In Which Horses Are Indeed Mentioned

2010-10-16T06:52:00.000-07:00

I've decided inside now that I live on an island, a cold rock hunkered down somewhere in the north. I make my liquor out of samphire and my boots out of the seals, hunt soft, sweet crabs in the rock pools and rabbits in the scrub. I eat my fish in waist-deep waves, slicing them to sashimi with my knife of flint and licking out the roe.

My boat is small but he is brave and sometimes I sleep beneath him just to listen to the rain. There are goats on the island but I don't trust them and the foul-tasting puffins nest fat and useless on the cliffs. Down by the dark pool the horses stand, piebald with lichen and unsettlingly still. The dark pool has a skin on it so thick you could walk across it, if you dared.

At night I sit in my implausible caravan as the wind butts and mutters outside. I carve little scrimshaw kittens and read my murderbooks at the table, picking the faux-walnut vinyl off its top. Whales pass by from time to time and once a year the squid come, their lights dancing in the water like drowning stars.

Here on the outside I have another cup of tea. I have spent the morning corralling cats and sewing outlandish trousers and the rest of the day stretches ahead of me in a tangle of wool and hair, paper and smoke, Strictly Come Dancing and softboiled eggs. Later, though, I'll sit shivering in a salted bath and with my fingers in my ears I'll be able to hear the gulls.

New Term

2010-09-20T11:50:00.001-07:00

I am better in the winter, when it all goes moss and bone, when the fiddling drizzle comes and nobody tries to make me play with balls. I am better jumpered. The summer makes me feel hungover, lightly greased with shame. I am not a one for T-shirts and team sports, but nor am I strong enough to resist the nagging notion that I am wasting a lovely day, cooped up indoors like that. When my breath is visible I can breathe again, get fat and grow my winter coat.

Now it is September, though, the smell of stationery on the air. In September I am compelled to corral my papers, pick the knickers off the piano and pull my socks up good and high. In September, I resolve. And then when the first snow comes, I fill my belly full of pine needles and go to sleep behind the stove.

This winter I resolve to think more about horses. I don't think I can do anything more than that.

Gala Day

2010-07-21T10:42:00.000-07:00

The gala stank of suncream and sweat, sawdust and hot rubber. On the hook-a-duck stall, the goldfish boiled in their bags. With my lips sugar-crusted from hot doughnuts I haemorrhaged pounds at the tombola stalls, trying my luck for degraded bears and Elizabeth Arden talc as children wove around my feet like cats, jacked-up on candyfloss and dangerous with the heat. They queued up for the rickety rides, pawing and squalling in their little England kits, clambering into carriages shaped like helicopters with tigers' mouths and shit-brown, leering carp. The Gala Queen was a pity vote and the clowns unsavoury. It was the best of days.

It's All Spunk and Brine to Me

2010-07-01T11:25:00.000-07:00

What am I crying for when I scream out my god? It is the indifferent mischief of eternal Heath Robinson machines and the first glimpse of the house-sized fin above the becalmed sea. It is vultures and haberdashers, manholes and the last page of every book there's ever been. It is what Spatchcock is looking at when she stares at nothing on the wall. It's the forgotten toy beneath my bed, dust-cauled and mumbling through spiders, the peeling birches at the back of things, what happens in the pavilions at dusk. It is what I'm dreaming about when I dream about home.

Springtime for Posset

2010-04-17T08:08:00.000-07:00

The girl next door calls herself Puppy and didn't make it as a stripper. She punches the boys and runs away. She poses for alternative erotica, all gas masks and kitchen knives, and she passes the photos round at parties. She is my spring sweetheart, although she doesn't know it yet. I like to have a fresh obsession in April, and the more irritating the object, the greater the frisson.

In fact, I feel the need for a full set of new pastimes this year. Handicrafts and recreational drugs are so 2009. I'll start with canal paths, and the haunting of them. I am drawn to canal paths. Nothing good ever happens there, among the jaundiced willows and the bones of prams. They are shortcuts to horror and filth, nyxy snickets to the silted heart of rupture.

I'll write about the canal paths to my new Imaginary Penpal. Her name will be Butterface Tupps and we'll swap charcuterie in hand-painted jiffy bags. It'll cost a fortune in stamps, but I never begrudge an investment in fun.

I might try and invent a new type of porn. I grow weary of holes. I might make Gormenghast out of toilet roll tubes, and I will definitely switch allegiance to sloe gin, but what I would like to do most of all this spring if find the thing, the meta-idea, the one true story that will bind all my past endeavours together. I have been collecting curiosities for too long now. I need to find a cabinet big enough for all the monkeys and monsters, the odd gods and unsavoury vittles, the human-faced cats and rutting clowns.

It's a tough one. I wonder what Butterface thinks.

Ruptures

2010-03-21T06:56:00.000-07:00

The sweet foam teeth spilled beneath the catkins. The Valentine's bear that moulders by the train tracks, stubbornly clutching its sodden satin heart. The empty house with the lush monstera at the bedroom window. The half-glimpse through the carriage window of the Alsatian on the balcony, sprawled dead or sleeping on a single sheet of card. Two shoes among the roadside crocuses, an immaculate white trainer and an oyster silk stiletto. These are the ruptures, the moments when some secret world forgets to fasten its flies and we are flashed by the hinterland where magic and madness root.

I think of these moments on this pretty, coy Sunday as I breathe in sandalwood and skunk and listen to the children chant their antic rhymes. Snout is in the music room conjuring booming natal grooves and Spatchcock limbers up in her velour tracksuit, ready to get out in the tentative sun and start some shit. I am eating Easter eggs and drinking advocaat on ice. There is still some time to go before the Season starts with Eurovision and I need something to keep me in trouble.

An empty nappy on the baby swings. A trail of moths from the neighbour's door. Bacon on the coping stones of the playground wall. Flesh-coloured tights in the willow tree. My own little ruptures. I'll have to wait until it's dark. The monkey can't stand the sight of spring.

Post the Hundredth

2010-03-05T12:20:00.000-08:00

Here at Sack Posset Hall we are celebrating an auspicious occasion. The monkey and I sport jaunty glittered caps and clink umbrella-laden glasses. I'm on gin and Mogadon, the monkey favours stout. We've trimmed the place up proper pretty, with pig-ear bunting and strings of bees, vases of ape-horn and glow-worms in jars. The monkey plays its bone-whistle as I type.

Because I knew you were coming, I have baked a cake, a special, extra-yummy cake made of all the things I love. It's mostly meat and adjectives, but there's some salt in there as well, and icing from unspeakable sources. I might have left it in the oven a spot too long, though, and I don't think we'll be seeing Burlesque Belinda tonight.

There are no candles on the cake because I used them all inside it, but the monkey and I blow out the pilot light and toast our absent foes. If there is one thing I have learned in these hundred toothsome moments, one splendid thing I can pass on to you, my ethereal brethren, it is this: cosset your darlings.

Fingered: Green

2010-02-25T11:52:00.000-08:00

We must turn our minds to the garden now, to rude bulbs and strewn seeds, the steaming compost and the friendly worms. Gardening is good for you. It is relaxing and, although it is hard on my knees, it doesn't get me as dirty as what I usually do on them.

In the spring I will have watersong on the kitchen roof, and I'll climb up to stroke the silver fur of its succulent leaves, to squint at the thousand tiny flowers that only open when it rains and to distil their cold perfume. Watersong is good for calming down men. I'll have to steal muck from the churchyard to grow my pastors' blight. It's a scrappy perennial with lewd pink blooms that exude an adhesive sap and it must be regularly treated to keep at bay the smutty fungus maidenstongue that sneaks in and stains the skin and spreads like billy-o.

Croneswort is a darling of mine, a beautiful plant despite its ugly name. Its elaborate lilac and cream blossoms smell of chocolate and hash and its miniscule leaves are the shape of perfect hearts. I grow it in hanging baskets in the music room, and it seems to like Bartok the best. My favourite plant of all, though, grows twisted around the roots of the rookwood tree and I have to crawl beneath the swooning boughs to fill my punnet with plump paeanberries, the only fruit that grows fermented on the vine.

And the rest: the bright sprays of gentrian and medicinal germolina, the beds alive with succourling, pianist's fingers, castor root and hex, gay pots trailing tallowfax entwined with fronds of festris, the herbacious borders with their serried ranks of bless-me-not and how-soon, the looming blackwatch with their crowns of owls and in the corners, where it's dark, the feculent mounds of meat alice.

I will grow it all in soil enriched with my personal leakings, and then, in the autumn, I will watch it all die.

A Small Puddle

2010-02-14T13:40:00.000-08:00

I think I need a new look. For too long I have languished in longjohns and bootees, an attenuated toddler with uncombable hair. I wear Snout's underwear and ramshackle trousers and I smell like an old man, of tobacco and wool. Every day I see the college students, poreless and fauny, loping off for another day of i-pods and meow-meow and nubile frottage and I think it's time to get some glamour back into my life, somewhere between the smoke and the snooze.

So I dictate this to my handmaiden from a bath of gin and olive brine, my shellacked lips fellating a pink cocktail cigarette, my talons lacquered carapace green. A clingfilm-clad dreamboat feeds me anchovies and tongue and when I rise queen-like from my salty mire he rubs me down with kittens. Herons dress me in a gown of baby locks and little skin slippers with curled up toes and my suitors' sighs dry my hair, my hair that falls starfish-studded right down to the ground.

Spangled piglets carry my train as I slink from dressing room to boudoir, where I am met by my hooded butler and a flagon of eggnog and ambergris. I sink into the cat-belly cushions of my solid sugar chaise longue and look lazily at the cabinets and the boys and girls inside. I point to the one I like the look of least and run a comb through my hair.

Hot Lesbian Action

2010-01-26T10:56:00.000-08:00

At the top of the back staircase in the east wing of my mind, there is a secret attic where I keep a pretty girl. She lives among the furniture that doesn't fit elsewhere, the rusting wrought iron daybed and the mahogany commode, the elephant's foot umbrella stand and the spavined rocking horse.

I pop up there from time to time to tease the ribbons from her hair, to lie her down on the candlewick covers of her musty single bed. She is the paper ghosts of peonies, a scentless potpourri. We share moth wine and macaroons and kiss like kittens beneath a dusty bust of me. When I am gone she sleeps again, barely breathing on a drift of shredded lace.

The Weather Inside is Frightful

2010-01-13T10:27:00.000-08:00

And so the snow came, whiting it all out, Tippexing us a tabula rasa for the spanking new year, then smearing it all with late-train, grit-stained, blue-knuckled chaos. I thought about making resolutions, considered self-improvement by denial, cutting out the fags, the booze, the fried food and pointless cruelty. Then I shook myself, said don't be silly, sweetie, and came up with the perfect, catch-all resolution: increase my dominion.

Be Afraid, Be Mildly Afraid

2009-12-07T09:05:00.000-08:00

When I was a little girl, wind-up teeth gave me nightmares. I was terrified of the theme tune to Birds of a Feather. Haybales, bundled in black plastic and just waiting in the fields, made me nauseous. I was frightened of Radio Assembly as well, but that was because Gareth Minhall used to kick me in the back. I was afraid that my father would somehow get lost in space like Major Tom, or that my toy animals were sentient and sad with no way to tell me. I was scared that I would forget the words to Grace and get told off by the dinnerladies, and for some reason I was convinced that Ben O’ Brian was plotting to put me in a big jelly. I had an eye for the uncanny and an almost constant sense of unease and it was thrilling.

Now I am a big girl I’m afraid of bigger things, like money and responsibility and the cat-litter tray. I’m afraid I’ll be crushed to death on the 8.30 to Dewsbury, that I will die with my nose shoved in a fat man’s armpit. I’m scared of my potential, in both directions. I miss being frightened of monstrous trifles. Tonight my Snout and I are venturing out to the cinema, to see a scary film, and I intend to get very frightened indeed. When we come home I’m going to fuse the lights on purpose and sleep with one foot out of the duvet.

More Local Goodness

2009-12-02T05:52:00.000-08:00

Dear Sharon and Mary

I love daft phrases, one of my favourites is cherchez la femme’ which is a belief that a woman is at the back of every mischief. This comes from the pen of Alexander Dumas in his novel The Mohicans of Paris, about the Paris underworld, He went on to write there is a woman in every case as soon as they bring me a report I say cherchez la femme’ – look for the woman. Dumas as we all know wrote the Three Musketeers who rescued many damsels in distress.

Colin

Dear Sharon and Mary

I have always liked to look at a sunset and see a big red ball in the sky which is called the sun. The sun is a nuclear furnace without which all life on earth would be impossible.

Ian

Gone Fishin'

2009-10-28T13:08:00.000-07:00

I am fallow. I need to take a break for a month or so. Best fishes to you all xxx

On being sexually harassed by poetry

2009-10-21T06:03:00.000-07:00

OK then yes
I said
Reading the auguries
In my gusset
Watching white wine
Turn to red
In my glass
OK then yes
I will let you in

I’ll take off my tracksuit
Unlace my trainers
And put on your rings
And your shrouds

I’ll eat your damn figs
And lap the honey
And the salt
From your palm

And in the bat time
I’ll feed myself
Back slim enough
To fit between your lines

You have been patient
These afternoons

So yes, then

OK then yes

A Local Magazine for Local People

2009-10-01T06:46:00.000-07:00

Once a month the free magazine drops through the letterbox to brighten my day. It advertises hundreds of local businesses, from lawyers and psychics to dog-groomers and plumbers. There are notifications of jumble sales and art society meetings and a speech at the Methodist Church on ‘Collecting Old Documents’. There’s a reasonably challenging wordsearch. The best bits, though, are the readers’ letters. Only three people ever write to the free magazine – Colin, Ian and Marjorie. I would like to share their letters from this month’s edition, exactly as published.

Dear all

Thank goodness for the door step delivery “My Milkman”. I have always known a milkman from a child in the family home to the present day, 76 years. I always think: - “If I can’t get out and about I can rely on milk, eggs, potatoes etc.” Long may they continue.

Marjorie.

Dear Sharon and Mary

Bet the kids had fun and games in the school holidays with the duck pleasing weather. Speaking of games a strange one I recently came across is called Knur and Spell. What is it? Well it’s a game played mostly in Lancashire and West Yorkshire. The Knur is the ½ oz diameter ball the Spell is the trap fixed to the ground. The ball is then released by a trigger and is struck by a player with a wooden hammer or pommel. The longest drive on record is 314 yards.

Colin

And Ian, apropos of fuck all, has sent in a long letter all about the eruption of Krakatoa.

The Cat Crept In

2009-09-27T06:34:00.000-07:00

I dreamt about the cat with the human face again. It was eating pork scratchings at the foot of my bed and thrumming like a hot machine. It crawled up the length of my sheet-swaddled self and rested its head upon my breast. A low song it sang to me, unrhymed and sepulchral, and it tenderised my body with its kneading paws of thorns.

I’ve got to stop eating cat food before I go to sleep.

The Breakfast Man

2009-09-23T05:09:00.000-07:00

He comes on Sunday mornings
To my sleep-syrup bed
With softboiled starling eggs
Cupped in his palms.
He balms my lips
With bacon fat
And spreads me soft
Like butter
As he slides the still-warm eggs inside
And turns to sausage
In my mouth

The Passion of the Posset

2009-09-13T05:21:00.000-07:00

My passion died when I was salt, Alice-deep in tears. It was only young but it was warped, grown to the shape of its secret box, its tender bits rubbed to leather. It was wipe-clean and it frequented bars, drank pink drinks through straws and flashed its stocking-tops. It brought me out in a rash but it was hungry and it was strong. Then its batteries went flat and its sequins fell off one by one and clogged the hoover for weeks and it died runtish, bald and exposed. Oh it was cheap and oh it did not fit and it bit and it chafed but it was mine, I made it from things I found in bushes and oh I miss it so.

Now I need to grow a new one, well-fitting as fur, moulded to shape like witches’ wax. I need the taste again, the marzipan toad squatted melting on my tongue, the waves of brine and honey. I’ll have to bury clams at midnight outside the adult bookshop, eat nothing but popping candy and bathe in condensed milk. And then somewhere in the oubliettes inside, a poppet will stir, open its mouth and make a sound like herons.

Consummatum Est

2009-09-11T05:52:00.001-07:00

It is finished. My murderer crosses her hands over her chest and falls backwards into my arms. I dip her down beneath the surface of me, under my waters in an endless baptism. We are spent.

My desk is mulch, a year’s worth of toast crusts and furry cups, ashtrays and dandruff, impotent ink pens and notes-to-self, empty baggies and Lucozade bottles, unfilled-in forms and fermented fruit and teetering pagodas of splay-spined books.

I should arm myself with bin-bags and Mr Muscle and clean it all away. I should use the special nozzle on the vacuum cleaner and get into all the nooks and crannies, suck away the ash and the dust, the shed skin and the spilled words. I should scrub and swab and straighten and polish and make it all spick-and-span.

Instead I am going to take to my bed with wine and weed and bonbons and poetry and I’m not getting up until Monday.

Everything Is Going To Be Alright

2009-08-14T08:52:00.000-07:00

I have two weeks left to finish the work for my Master’s. My world is my laptop, my lovers the keys. I drink Earl Grey and I eat cheese slices and I write and smoke and write and smoke and sometimes I weep quietly underneath the desk. I have to work in the spare room because there are things in my bedroom just waiting to distract me, gurning clowns and hula girls, mermaids, squid and juggling dogs, Ophelia drowning and Wee Jimmy Krankie.

My hair is out of control again, coiling itself into dense ropes while I sleep, trying to pull itself over my eyes. It’s escaping, long strands sliding off the pillow and sidewinding along the floor, crawling up the table legs like thin red ivy. Soon we will all be swaddled and the house will be still.

Keep Calm and Carry On.

A Lust for the Coolth

2009-07-28T04:19:00.000-07:00

Today I am coiled and maleficent, squatting in the corner eating meat off the bone. Slimy dreams and sweat-sopped sheets have conspired to clog up something within me. I can see fingers underneath all the furniture, double-jointed and mucky-knuckled, undulating implausibly and stretching towards my toes. The future is circling, a clacking, scabrous raven, calling carrion to its bone-beaked brethren. I blame the sarcastic summer, raising her skirts of nimbus and mist and pissing on us while St Swithin watches and wanks himself sick.

Curse this can’t-be-arsed pseudo-summer, clinging to us like wet blankets, muggy and claggy and no good to anyone. I want the winter back, crabbed and skinning, cauled with hoar-frost, ghastly, grinning, walking backwards like the dead. The winter that strips the trees to whips that slit my skin and let me back inside again. I want the winter moon, a cold mother in a cap of bone, I want the frigid air that shoves its fist deep down your throat and steals away your breath and I want the snow that comes slow, not falling, just ambling through the air like a billion drunken white bees, then falls faster, niveous, insidious, to coat the world like ash. A cold Pompeii.

It May Be Sticky But I Never Complain

2009-07-26T06:19:00.000-07:00

Poor, poor Sack Posset. Poleaxed in pyjamas after a night of smeared lipstick and slipper-cricket, midnight chicken and caterwauling to Kate Bush. Now I’m psyching myself up to crawl upstairs for a back-to-the-womb Matey bath with Dickens and a spliff. I had four rashers in my bacon butty but it wasn’t enough to salve my maculate soul. A bohemian lifestyle is all very well and good, but I must learn to buy my Lucozade the night before the morning after.

Help

2009-07-23T11:02:00.000-07:00

Something weird has happened to this blog - I can't post comments any more - the comment box is now a big, white abyss with no 'post comment' button. Can anyone help me?

Move Over Fanny Cradock

2009-07-22T10:38:00.001-07:00

I have a new celebrity crush – the Very Reverend Dr William Buckland, the 19th century palaeontologist, zoophagist and general eccentric. He ate the mummified heart of King Louis XIV. That’s the kind of thing that really gets a girl going.

On the Buses

2009-07-18T03:11:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it pleases me to take the bus to nowhere special. I sit on the top deck, at the back. The seat you choose on the bus is a clear indicator of your position on the snakes and ladders board of morality. When you are on the bus there is nothing you can do about it. It’s another place, suspended animation, and all you can do is sit back and wait for your stop. People can’t help but nod off, morning and night, against their will. Sleeping on the bus is like lapsing into a series of short comas. I like to watch them as their heads loll until the bus jolts and clunks their skulls against the window or they snort awake of their own accord and slyly wipe away their drool. Some winter nights when the heaters are working, the natal throb of the engine lulls us all to sleep, the whole top deck enchanted in our scarves and rain-damp coats. The bus is best in the winter. In the summer it smells of corned beef and testicle sweat.

I sit up there on the top deck and I look in through people’s windows, catch glimpses of the Other through half-drawn curtains. I like to see where they sleep. Sometimes, though, there are girls behind me talking about ISAs and weddings and what they are going to have for their tea, or gobshite chavs spread-eagled one to a seat listening to tinny trance on their mobile phones, and I can’t concentrate on my spying for thinking about standing up and turning round and exposing myself to them, pulling my trousers right down to my knees and showing them everything.

The Pink Ribbon

2009-07-16T07:40:00.000-07:00

Seven heads sit in the window of The Pink Ribbon, the best shop in the world. Four of them wear dated wigs and all of them bear lesions. Beneath them ponytails hang on hooks, fifty pence a piece, and a plastic fern in a plastic pot mourns beneath a pall of dust. In an advertisement for a forgotten scent a blue-bleached woman smiles at Paris. Three combs still cling to their cardboard stand. Next to the till sits an Arsenal FC annual from 1982. The sign displays a five-digit phone number. I have lived in this neck of the woods for five years or so, and The Pink Ribbon has never been open, but one night when I was wending my squiffy way home I stopped as usual to gaze at the insectoid heads of the 50s hairdryers and the endless tubs of redundant unguents and when my eyes adapted to the gloom I saw a man behind the till, staring back at me.

Come Dine With Me

2009-07-14T07:42:00.000-07:00

As I sit here, waiting for an ornery window-fitter with a shocking case of Short Man Syndrome, my mind turns inexorably to dinner. I have never thrown a dinner party – we don’t have a dining table, for a start – but I have planned my Dream Meal, the soiree to end all soirees.

Six is the best number of guests, I think, and there would be me and Fanny Cradock, Trimachio and de Sade, the ginger one from Girls Aloud and a man dressed as a dog. We would eat in a soundproofed room, the walls hung with black curtains. Every course would come with homemade Christmas crackers, each one containing a hat, a motto and something the guests thought they had lost forever. We would be served by gorgeous, greasy boys and we would eat only off Princess Diana memorial plates ordered especially from the Daily Express weekend supplement. As the plates were cleared between courses, there would be entertainment, songs and clowns and performing dogs, tumbling eunuchs and bears.

To start with, as an amuse bouche, we would have snails fattened on milk and ecstasy, served curled on kidney pillows, hamsters stuffed with insect forcemeat and crusted with breadcrumbs and tears, kitten tongues in fromage fraise, coxcombs, a Lucky Dip of assorted offal wrapped in skin and served in a tub of bran, cheese and pineapple echidna and delicate roses of tripe.

We would feast on The Monster Egg - a giant made from a hundred goose eggs and dyed the brightest blue, roasted mandrake roots dressed in darling bacon bonnets and hagfish fattened on virgins’ blood. In homage to Fanny we would have vaginas with mayonnaise, then progress to pig bags stuffed with marshmallows and hooves. A Spatchcocked Aviary – thrush, heron, owl, robin, tit, gull, jay, magpie, canary, parakeet – would be brought to the table in gilded sugar cages, only to be outdone by the elaborate and upsetting Meat Garden.

I am not a sweet-toothed person, but you must always serve dessert, and I have decided on sugar sculptures representing The Greatest Murders of the 20th Century, a chocolate cake with a stripper baked inside and thick, warming Sack Posset.

And nobody is allowed to leave the table until every last bite is gone.

Halcyon Days

2009-07-07T08:11:00.000-07:00

At the weekend we went gang-handed to the Monkeyfest and drank suggestively-named real ales in the fortuitous sun. Monkeyfest is an annual beer festival held at the excellently-named Monkey Club, a pub near Best Girl’s house. Best Girl got bitten by a horse and I got wee on my dress (both due to circumventing the loo-queue by pissing in the bushes) and later on our friend JP decided it was necessary to wave his willy about, but otherwise, a good time was had by all. I have just about recovered from the resultant hangover and the accompanying sense of sweaty, free-floating shame.

I bought a book from a charity shop in town. The book is called Talking with Serial Killers and is by a man called Christopher Berry-Dee. When I opened the book to read it, I found that the previous owner had written the following things on the title page: Rookbeare Farm Ice Cream. Scattegories Game. Follow Your Heart by Andrew Matthews published by Seashell. Being Happy by Andrew Matthews published by Media Masters. Serial killers, self-help books, board games and ice cream. Sounds like a heck of a party.

This Week at Sack Posset Hall

2009-07-07T08:10:00.000-07:00

We are making toadstools out of clay and leaving them in unexpected places. We are salivating over very rare lamb. We are waiting for the floods. We are watching MVP: Most Valuable Primate, a wonderful film about an ice-hockey playing chimp. We are re-reading Adrian Mole, for comfort. We have shaved our legs for the first time in over a year. We are already hotly anticipating M. Jackson’s kid’s autobiographies. We have become guiltily addicted to The Daily Mail website. It’s our dirty little secret, as though we were masturbating on the bus.

Summertime, and the Living is Queasy

2009-07-01T08:14:00.000-07:00

It is hot. The heat is like a living thing, something old and ill that has crawled on top of us to die. They sky is grey and the grass is burning. In England it is so rarely hot that when it is, we go to pieces. We throng the pubs in our shorts and our socks and we broil ourselves to the colour of ham. I am trapped inside, this searing hot laptop burning my bare legs, listening to the children, who appear to be solar powered. This weekend I went away and when I returned there was a plastic squirrel in the garden. The children had thrown it at the window, the one that is already cracked and stained with egg. The squirrel now sits in the living room, another offering from the street.

In weather like this I dream of streams, the whispering water insidious as women. I want to lie by a river and have a lightly-oiled young lovely feed me greengages and figs as I watch lions get fucked by lambs and read strange poetry to the bees and later, under lanterns and a grinning moon, slide naked into the water and overpower the pike. As it is, I will have to make do with a Lemonade Sparkler and a cold bath.

The Ballad of the Wild Girl

2009-06-24T14:08:00.000-07:00

When they came to save her she went for them hackles up, teeth bared, spittle strings swinging. She almost outran them, even on all fours. They shot her father and her brothers fled, tails between legs. When the men overpowered her they stabbed a needle in her flank and even as her eyes closed she bayed her wrath at the moon.

She wakes to white and is surrounded. They gather, upright and bald, to look at her, and they communicate in something sung, like birds. When she attacks they splay and bind her on the padded platform and make winter-sleep come. She dreams of hot breath, rough tongues and blood-clogged fur.

The sun here is a lie, sisterless and bright too long. A female rubs cream into her paws and smiles, which means something different now. The cream softens her skin so that when she walks she feels the floor and it is smooth, cool, unknown. They cut off her claws.

They put her in pelts like theirs and her skin burns. They strap about her shiny icy bones that bend her back so she cannot run and must sit straight. For hours they move their mouths at her with their hidden tongues.

When they can they tell her how she was found, and when she knows how she curses them. They say they do not know who her real parents were or why they left her but she says they killed her father and she shows them her teeth.

They give her to a family but at night she leaves and walks for hours, her choking howl diminished and unanswered. The family find her beneath her bed in the mornings, red-snouted, grimed and growling in her sleep.

With time she learns to trick them, to ape their ways and pass. She reads machines, watches buildings and draws pages of numbers with her new hands. She keeps her tongue inside but her voice retains a coarse sibilance, a forest burr.

When she is too old for them to keep she goes rigid-backed on hind legs into their world.For such long years they pass so fast. She does a job cooking their food and at times she strokes the meat first, holds her fingers to her muzzle and lets one or two slip in. She takes the bones home.

She has read about love and thinks that she might try. As he climbs the stairs in front of her, she fights the urge to sniff. Naked he has almost-fur and after the coupling she grooms it, lapping, hiding her inhales. He says she has such big eyes and in a while he marries her.

Another white room and the white-coated men again, only this time they encourage her to pant. Her husband holds her hand until the first one is born, snuffling, its purblind eyes cauled pink. When the whelping is over she gathers her cubs to her breast and smiles at them, which means something different now.

Monday, Bloody Monday

2009-06-22T04:35:00.000-07:00

For the last couple of weeks I have been stalking the barren plains where the exegeses roam, trying to lasso myself a plumptious one. Seldom have I been out of my pyjamas and my once-white slipper-boots and I have drunk more cups of tea than there are teenage mothers in the north of England. Yesterday I helped LoH sew a tiny felt mouse, and that is the closest I have come to normality. I feel like a fly buzzing around my own head.

I have been working on my MRes for ten months now, only two more to go. The next fortnight sees a return to fiction, to my sweet little killer, reeking and glowering in her scabby old Parka. She’s hiding somewhere in the dank cellars of my mind, breathing through her mouth and picking her teeth with a carving knife. I stand at the top of the mossy and treacherous stairs, clutching a single, guttering tea light, and take a deep, deep breath.

The best thing at the moment is the music that my beloved Snout is making and trapping inside his new magic box (a ‘digital eight-track recorder’, if you’ll believe that kind of talk). It’s music that sounds like what you see in the sky on smudged and hallowed mornings when you’ve been up all night carousing under the communion-cup moon. It sounds like our love.

But, to quote Captain Spalding, I must be going. There is a killer at large in my cellar and something must be done.

2009-06-20T07:51:00.000-07:00

Fuck You, Thursday

2009-06-11T05:18:00.000-07:00

Today my brain is a bastard cunt of a snorting, rearing horse, steaming and shitting and spitting its bit and point blank refusing to jump any of the quite reasonably low fences I have put before it. I’ve got deadlines coming out of my arse and all I can do is stare at the screen wearing the same uncomprehending gape that I normally reserve for watching Hollyoaks (for our overseas buddies, Hollyoaks is a witless and torturously long-running teen soap about a troupe of lacquered moon-calves running amok in a pretend town near Chester). There are lots of things I could be doing – I have curtains to sew and a bookshelf to fix after it collapsed under the weight of tacky thrillers and Fanny Cradock, and then there’s this filthy squat of a house that could do with either decontaminating or razing to the ground. Instead I am writing this, drawing succour as though from a last cigarette, before I lapse into the only state possible today, one of lying prone beneath the bed muttering “They shoot horses, don’t they?”

Look Back in Envy

2009-06-09T09:10:00.000-07:00

Here I sit, beneath the ‘Crabs & Lobsters’ wall-chart that I got free with the Guardian, toking on a fat one and pondering the future of the female serial killer. Today I read three books about murderous women and shelled a pound of peas straight into my mouth. I lunched on Ritz crackers smeared with Gentleman’s Relish and Danish Blue and I had a soft-boiled egg for breakfast. Why does violence make me so hungry?

Last night I dreamt I went to Junior School again, back to the spire and the hills surrounding. Junior School was a wonderful place. I might not have learnt my times tables, but I did learn how to sew a guinea pig from brown velvet curtains and how to make chocolate mint creams. Sometimes the man who lived as a Roundhead came to give us a history lesson, and once the Great Jam Sandwich Machine rolled in, operated by men riding ostriches, and with much clanking and juddering and eruptions of glitter it produced a perfect sandwich for every last child.

Halcyon days. I still like to sew funny animals and draw lopsided pictures, but these days I try and intersperse my daydreaming and playing with more grown-up activities like washing pants and growing herbs and taking the cat for her jabs and, of course, reading my Children’s Encyclopaedia, because education should never stop. Although if I ever see that Great Jam Sandwich Machine again I will jump up on it and I will ride it to the ends of the Earth.

Come Back Michael Fish, All is Forgiven

2009-06-05T05:41:00.000-07:00

It’s been a long, hard week at Sack Posset Hall. I’ve been up to my knickers in serial killers. Today that Friday Feeling is upon me, nudging me in the small of the back like a fella’s early-morning lob-on. I’m in the mood for mischief. It has been so warm this week that I finally divested myself of my long-johns, but today, England being England, it’s snowing not far from here. Mother Nature gives us this weather so that there’s always something to talk about with the little old ladies on the bus.

I watched the Big Brother Launch last night, because I am a top postmodern-socio-analyst and not because I am a voyeur who likes a good freak show. Of course. I think it would be a good jape if they put them all in there and then turned off all the cameras and slowly walked away. The woman whose job it was to open the car door for each gaudily daubed abortion was clearly concerned about a zombie attack.

For tea I want a songbird no bigger than my thumb, drowned in a glass of cognac and placed roasted and whole on my tongue. I will cover my head with a hood to hide my sins from the gods and in the seamy dark I will savour the fat dribbling down my throat. Slowly I will bear down on the bird. I will lick away its breast and crack its back and it will surrender its secret sweet meats. I will not face the light until the bones of it are gone. Then I’ll have a cuppa and a fag.

Bank Holiday and Beyond

2009-05-27T07:24:00.000-07:00

Returning home on Sunday from a day out in the Big City, I crested the hill and saw my garden full of my beautiful friends. All the neighbours were out with their beers and their barbeques and their big bellies broiling in the un-English sun. I changed into my Dalmatian suit and sprawled on the grass, drinking applecrisp wine and munching on the foetus-shaped biscuits that Best Girl had made. We stayed out until dusk soothed the sunburnt sky and then I had some fish fingers of inferior quality and the evening was ruined.

There’s a special fuckball game on tonight – Manchester United versus Barcelona. It’s a carnival atmosphere and to celebrate I am cooking my speciality. I will place a bumblebee inside a dormouse inside a kitten inside a cat inside a dog inside a monkey inside a big fat man and then I will spit-roast it in the garden, a process I normally save for premiership soccer stars. Then I will serve it with lashings of melted butter and no cutlery at all.

Twenty past three is too early to start drinking on an overcast day. Or is it.......?

The B-road Less Travelled

2009-05-23T09:06:00.000-07:00

There are many things you can do if you are ever feeling glum. When I was a little girl, if I was in the doldrums I would put on the paper mache cow’s head that my parents and I had made, hop up on my stilts and go striding and lowing off down the road in search of walkers to startle. Now that I am a grown up I eat Quavers in my pants and drink wine from the bottle through a straw. I am thinking of writing a self-help manual. I am also thinking of changing the ‘in’ in the last sentence to a ‘from’.

If I wrote a self-help manual I would tell my readers that it was imperative that they get a pet. Pets are very important. I have Spatchcock, and despite her waking me at dawn with science fiction noises, I love her dearly. You don’t have to have a cat, though. I have always fancied a fist-sized, somnolent scarab that I could tether to a lapel-pin with a length of golden chain. It would roam about my jacket and upset people like the bag-faced old bitches in the bus station shop. Or a little wheeled squid I could drag around on a lead. Having certain types of pets, well-muscled and ferocious dogs for example, can make you feel safe and protected. I think it would be better to have a flock of birds, seagulls and eagles and herons and owls, their beaks curved like Bowie knives and their eyes impenetrable black.

The best way to be happy is to have easily achievable dreams. It is my goal in life to have a wine-rack with more than one bottle of wine on it, although admittedly this is so far proving impossible. Another ambition is to have someone answer one of the letters I leave in library books. I would like Snout’s mushroom farm to prosper. I’d like to finish a cryptic crossword (I don’t think the one in the Daily Mirror counts). Today I would like a man to come on Britain’s Got Talent. Literally. Easily achievable dreams. The key to happiness.

Suffer the Little Children

2009-05-22T08:25:00.001-07:00

Yesterday afternoon, due to a slight meltdown on my part, LoH and I were drinking wine in an impromptu picnic area we had erected behind the bins. The magpies were clattering like football rattles from the chimneys all around, Spatchcock was eating the coriander and the sweet breeze tempered the mugging sun. We sat and smoked and soaked and supped and smiled with our eyes shut until we heard the voices of the local children, one screaming gleefully “Who’s had sex?” and the others hollering “Me! Meeee!”

Today my brain is being a little bastard, walking up the walls and scratching at the ceiling, picking and flicking and faffing with its socks. It wants to go outside and stuff its pockets with crab apples and toads, but it has to stay inside and sit quietly with its hands on its head. Later I will reward it with a stroll to the shop to buy tobacco and cheese and Hundreds and Thousands, but there are many words to go before we can rest.

This Week at Sack Posset Hall

2009-05-21T16:12:00.000-07:00

We are planting mandrakes in the garden, in order that we might marry the roots. We are eating too many Wagon Wheels. We are claiming them on our MP’s expenses. We are cursing our confounded sewing machine to the ends of the sodding Earth. We are trying to coax the monkey out of the cistern. We are sporting a darling playsuit over the top of our long-johns. We are reading Consuming Passions: A History of English Food and Appetite by Phillipa Pullar, and it is one of the best books we have ever read. Our new hero is Trimalchio.

The Most Important Meal of the Day

2009-05-19T03:34:00.001-07:00

The dormice, from the jars in the back bedroom, were done to perfection, their little bacon blankets crisping up nicely. The eggs were resting so that the hot fowl broth could seep back into the bodies of the baby birds and soften up their filigree bones. The bright paint on the eggshells looked so cheery in the dirty light, the red and the gold and the deep beetle green, and the fact that they were served in shot glasses rather than proper eggcups only added to their charm. The toast was translucent and in each perfect triangle a woman’s face was branded in a cameo of darker brown crumbs. In the plain white porcelain teapot that was only slightly chipped but quite badly stained there was enough fortified wine to wash the feast down, and in the matching sugar bowl there was another kind of white powder for pudding. It was the perfect breakfast and there was a place laid for the monkey too, even though the monkey only eats hair.

A Pleasure Postponed is a Pleasure Increased

2009-05-17T05:18:00.000-07:00

When I grow up I am going to be a Life Coach. People are going to pay me to make their lives better. I will rid them of all the qualities that stop them enjoying life; ambition, aspiration, a work ethic, reliance on others, fear of consequences, high standards of hygiene etc. I will teach them how to love their sofa and forage for scraps. I will make my clients come and live in my house and I will drag them down to my level, down here in the gutter, looking up the skirts of passers-by. I also think that I might start farming dormice for food, in hundreds of tiny jars.

The Eurovision party was postponed. Best Girl had double-booked. We taped it and are going to watch it next week. The gowns remain in their scented boxes, the greasepaint in its tubs, the bridles and bits in the kitchen cupboard. I know who won, but that’s beside the point. Instead of watching Eurovision I spent the evening doing drunken patchwork and watching Snout kick the arses of cocky online Street Fighters.

Someone has written ‘Zoe bum dad’ on our wheelie bin.

Moonlight and Music and Love and Romance

2009-05-15T05:34:00.000-07:00

A mysterious car has appeared over the road. Just a normal small car (I think; it could be a pus-powered Rolls Royce hatchback for all I know), but painted yellow with black stripes and with the Transformers logo on the hubcaps and the bonnet. The funny thing is, round the corner near Jimmy’s shop there is an A-Team van. Perhaps I am not the only fictional character who lives on this street. The sign outside Jimmy’s shop reads JIMMY,S. Punctuation-a-go-go.

For tea last night I made Luxury Pie. You could tell it was Luxury Pie because I wrote Luxury Pie on the top in pastry. I filled it with hagfish and Werther’s Originals, durians, hen’s teeth and kelp. The gravy was made of lube. We ate that pie up as though it were a little book, and it made our bellies sing like boys.

Yesterday I tidied my Snout’s music room and lined up all the instruments – two keyboards, four violins, five guitars, a ukulele, a flute and a kazoo. I want some instruments of my own, I think, like a Cat Piano or a Bone Trumpet. I have my own secret music that I hear when the house is still, translucent melodies, musical fetches, half-dreamt ghosts of song. And I’m learning to play Psycho Killer on the ukulele.

When I Was Just a Little Girl

2009-05-15T04:02:00.000-07:00

As a girl I was godhungry, I collected them like stamps. Many-armed and jackal-headed, blue-hued and cloven-hoofed, playing the pipes, the harp, the fool, fickle, flawed and fictional. Boy-gods naked, thumb-sucking, silent; bare-breasted girl-gods of sex and the sewers. A god for everything and every god in its place, like so many insects in my killing-jar. The monkey indulged my avarice, bringing me them like a cat brings a corpse. I mounted my gods in scrapbooks and on cork, cataloguing and curating and all the time incredulous that it should be them instead of me.

Tiring of gods like colouring books I began to paint my own. I went to the seaside and found a god at night beneath the waves. I saw the whales hanging, heads-down in the lambent blue, like bombs falling in aspic. I saw the squid slide, their petticoats rippling, their beaks bared for a kiss. I saw seasponges like sweetbreads and the umbilical eels. That wet god sent me jellyfish and prophecies in the flotsam, wood bleached to bone and salt-licked pebbles of glass. I caught birds and carved them, sending them off to sea in paper boats with sails made from hankies. With my worship, the beach grew smaller, the tide sidling higher, the water closing in.

Half-Day Closing

2009-05-09T07:54:00.000-07:00

I am a lazy monster. My motto is: If You Can’t Do It In Bed, It’s Not Worth Doing. This morning I put my jumper on inside out and I still haven’t remedied that. The others are in the living room, returned triumphant from the cinema, gnawing on chickens and watching Street Crime. I did not go, I was good, I stayed at home and ate murderer pie and posset for pudding. The killer’s the binge, this is the purge.

Now I have reached Critical Glaze, the point in a day when I am doing more staring than writing, and I think it may be time for me to go. I should be outside, gambolling in the sun, but I am an indoor girl, queen of the curtains and the sixty watt sun. My bed is my meadow and I have never been a lamb.

2009-05-09T05:13:00.000-07:00

Down With Bread

2009-05-08T04:13:00.000-07:00

I am reunited with my glorious Snout and I have realised that I do not like bagels. I wish that we did not have breads of any kind, just extra helpings of fillings served in jam jars or spread out over the bodies of the luscious young. Bread is filler, ballast, stodge. I wish we could be free from it. In heaven there are no baps.

My Mum once went into a bakery that sold Tiger Baps and asked for a Leopard Bun.

It’s raining today and I don’t want to get up. I am become bed. I want to be behind a boiler, the kind that wears a red-and-white Puffa jacket, where there is always a dead wasp and the smell of dry heat and hot dust. It is a day for hiding, for nesting, for making dens. It is cold as well. I am wearing my fur coat inside out, the pelt against my skin. This summer I will make a dress from bumblebee skins, and I will be the toast of high society.

Best Fishes

2009-05-08T04:12:00.000-07:00

Squatinus is a fisshe in the se, of fiue cubites longe: his tayle is a fote brode, & he hideth him in the slimy mudde of the se, & marreth al other fisshes that come nigh him: it hath so sharpe a skinne that in som places they shaue wode with it, and bone also: on his skinne is blacke short here. The nature hathe made him so harde that he can nat almoste be persed with nouther yron nor stole.

Mo mo mo mo Monkey

2009-05-04T12:24:00.000-07:00

I lean out of the window and watch the children ply their trades in the street below. Some of them have baboons on chains, others are half-hauled along by leashed hyenas. A few idly copulate among the bodies of the fallen. I pick my teeth as the monkey aims its catapult and the ballbearing is loosed right straight dead in the eye of a monstrous baboon. The beast freaks, its scream incongruous to its lethal bulk. It turns on its child-mistress, tearing her like bread, howling and gibbering with strands of spit and viscera flinging from its bloody maw. The other children try to flee but their beasts are aroused by the carnage, and all are devoured. The monkey must have its sport.

Dilemma

2009-05-04T12:23:00.000-07:00

You start off looking at a Slow Loris and before you know it you have spent half an hour watching videos of ghosts and of demons that claim to have the body of a pig. Blinkin’ YouTube. Now I am dead scared, alone in the house for at least an hour and desperate for a wee. Do I go to the downstairs loo, past the door to the cellar, the cellar with the blocked-off room where the floor level is a foot higher than everywhere else? Or do I go upstairs, past the attic trapdoor that opens itself from time to time? Or do I just stay in my room and piss in the teapot again?

Recently I have been thinking about the inside of other people’s mouths. The mouth is by far the busiest orifice. I love the inside of mine, the pink crannies, the sweet and tender craters. My tongue is supple and acrobatic, it noses about like a curious animal. It reaches up to trace the ridges on the roof of its den, it dips into the bowl of each molar, it slips between teeth and lip to slide about counting, taking stock. Sometimes, if I don’t like who I am talking to, my tongue spells out rude words on the roof of my mouth. If it gets overexcited I have to bite it, and then it lies flat and docile, and I can concentrate. I wish I could see people’s tongues all the time.

This Week at Sack Posset Hall

2009-04-29T07:41:00.000-07:00

We have sworn off poppers, for good this time. We are getting up in the dead of night to eat Bernard Matthews’ Golden Drummers. We find they taste better when you are squatting. We are gearing up for Eurovision. We are unnerved by the way a coat hung up in the window of the door of the house over the road looks like a man-sized dolphin, staring at us. We are dreaming of jelly.

True Fact

2009-04-29T07:37:00.000-07:00

The man who sings with the modern beat combo ‘Nickelback’ is, in actual fact, the eldest of the brothers from cheery pop trio ‘Hanson’. He’s had a hard life.

All Alone in Idle

2009-04-29T07:36:00.000-07:00

Very early tomorrow morning, my Snout is going away. A whole week down South with his family, leaving me with even less supervision than normal. I will be busy dry-humping my murderer for the most part, but I might venture into the garden to offer up my hairy legs to the sun.

There is a football match on tonight. I call it ‘fuckball’, because it’s more economical than saying ‘fucking football’ every time. They say the season will be over soon but they are lying, there’s always football on. Or IPL. Or GTA. It’s a good job I am a misanthropic, anti-social bookworm, or I’d feel very left out.

Spilt Salt

2009-04-28T10:39:00.000-07:00

I am not afraid of mess, I think there is magic in it. Unlike many of my sex I lack the will to cleanliness. I can function in any kind of shambles because my eyes are inside-out. However, even I admit that the pile of festering rubbish we had cultivated in the concreted area at the side of the house was a bit over-the-top. You miss the bins once or twice and it all builds up, supplemented with cardboard boxes, oddments of excess furniture and the bottles. Oh, all those bottles. Strangely enough, there were never any flies, just hundreds of worms underneath.

Now the landlord has taken it all away my thoughts turn to patio furniture. Or at least taking the wheelchair outside. We found the wheelchair in the garden one morning. It was in a bad state, but we took it in and it proved very comfortable. We have found quite a few things in the garden. I found a laminated wooden plank that was perfect for propping across the top of the bath so I can do my puzzles while I soak. We found a painted, totemic stick. One afternoon shortly after we moved in I was in my bedroom up to no good when I heard a chorus of children expressing high disgust. When I went outside there was a snow-white cat lying dead at the door. There is only one explanation. They are offerings. The neighbours have decided to worship me as a god.

End of the Month

2009-04-26T07:27:00.001-07:00

Whiskey + Hobnobs + Poppers = Sunday

Mental Phlegm

2009-04-25T06:44:00.000-07:00

It’s a light blue Saturday with all the accompaniments. The general knowledge crossword is completed, the concise crossword is completed, the cryptic crossword is buried in the garden lest it remind me of my inadequacies. Best Girl and EP came over last night and much cricket was played. I don’t much care for games that don’t involve either a board or nudity, but I make a necessary exception for cricket.

I am about to go and commune with my killer. She’s waiting in the spare room with the tip of her tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth, her black thatch of hair hacked into a wonky pageboy, her Parka zipped all the way up. Her hands hang like crabs on lines. My endless love.

I might start pretending to be my own twin. I will sneak away from social gatherings and put on a jaunty hat, then come back and speak only in binary code. I will knock on the front door carrying a suitcase of satsumas and claiming I have just come back from Croydon. I will be my own opposite. What is the opposite of Sack Posset? Probably a manicurist.

The Insertion Smile

2009-04-25T05:59:00.000-07:00

After the first beating resolved formed like baby in my belly and with words hurled like monster I swished my tail. Very well swelled in me and if they say here be monsters then here they be. In a toothlick I was gone and crawling backwards I came out here with this smile where my mouth should be. Now I am the inside of skin and some girls just sing to me, man, they’re begging for it. Just a lump at first, my tail, a root to the spine tree, but now it hangs pink to my knee or rudder-like and proud behind if I tense it, smooth and hard to grip, like wet glass all over. Sometimes it sounds like men are arguing in my stomach and I have thought about putting girls in there to keep them quiet. Girls, like violin strings and lambent. They love the tail. A door ajar is an invite in, just gentle at first, they smoothly snoozing, a sliding breath finger of mine, the down rising charmed. I like to touch them where their tails should be. I wrap their hair around my fist like bellringer or like the boxer binding his hands. The tail can flick and whip and pin and gag and make their eyes go heaven wide as it slides inside them. With the slackening I am gone, away across the rooftops I cavort and am legend.

True Fact

2009-04-25T05:54:00.000-07:00

Every time I have a wank, a fairy dies.

Last Things First

2009-04-24T04:57:00.000-07:00

This post has disappeared. It is a mystery.

Pinta

2009-04-24T03:08:00.000-07:00

The Milkman comes at dawn, his cart drawn by steaming cows with curlicue horns, their lowing soft as blankets. Sometimes milk in the shit-caked bottles, milk for the lucky ones, raw and thick as spunk, the cream yellow and spreadable. Sometimes he brings eggs, each blue shelled with the virgin in its yolk, delivered in the nest, or pungent, weeping cheeses wrapped in hide. Capricious Milkman doesn’t always deliver and from time-to-time does worse, depositing on doorsteps pints of slurry, pigs’ ears or piteous two-headed calves which whimper and flail and have to be dealt with.

It Will Be Told In Reverse

2009-04-24T02:37:00.000-07:00

When I walk down the street I see a parade of snaggletoothed mummers with yellow mucus dripping from their lips, and it seems like on every bench and on the top of every war memorial and in all the alleyways full of shoe shops and coffee houses there are eleven year old girls trussed up like sluts fingering their open cunts. The supermarkets sell dildos and spreader bars, and the people who run the place are all hobgoblins with glass eyes and wooden tails. The streets are crawling with them, the mummers, and they move like they're on caterpillar tracks and their eyes are eggs with broken yolks, and they try to pinch me sometimes.

Gainful Employment

2009-04-22T13:28:00.000-07:00

My bedroom smells of daffodils and I am wearing the furry blue dressing-gown that makes Spatchcock think I am her mother. Earlier this evening I somehow contrived to get stuck underneath the double mattress of our bed. I always thought that living in a house with four men would mean I was relatively well-protected, but I roared myself hoarse and they didn’t stir from Fifa ’08. They thought I was one of the children, playing their little screaming games.

I have been looking at the search queries that bring up this wad of words. My favourites are:

Ultimate bionic catfish
Dead hedgehog
The lonely sock sack
Amanda Holden armpit
The killer inside me

And most of all:

Pied Piper to the girl with the naughty knickers.

Quote of the Week

2009-04-20T09:13:00.001-07:00

“Oh, those women! They nurse and cuddle their presentiments, and make darlings of their ugliest thoughts, as they do of their deformed children.”

-William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair

Exeunt, Pursued by Bears

2009-04-18T11:19:00.000-07:00

Britain’s Got Talent is on in an hour. Although it was a great deal of fun watching a man eat four chocolates in a minute, this week I am hoping for bigger and better things. Cats acting out the Trojan War, a man who can uncork bottles with his eyes, a fat priest performing Lady Hamilton’s Attitudes in a nappy, a woman suckling a pangolin, twelve bejewelled and shit-flinging eunuchs, a magician who vanishes the moral compasses of everyone in the room, a small boy who eats his own feet, The Great De-gloving Machine, a pelican circling the room with a baby in its beak or even a child singer who shouldn’t be shot on sight.

Don't Sit Under the Lilac Tree

2009-04-18T07:54:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I get sad because I don’t know any other monsters, and then I cry, steady tears of condensed milk. I sleep with one foot out of the blankets at night but nothing ever bites. I have walked a thousand miles on my hands and slept in graves both empty and full, but every time I thought I met a monster it was the shadow of a lilac tree. If I met another monster we could be penpals, and I could send it illuminated manuscripts about the state of my bowels and little sachets of silverfish. I wish more things came in sachets.

Snout and his brother are playing some kind of computer game in the living room and so I am trapped in here, listening to The Andrews Sisters and eating my finger-skin. I should be tending to my book, the slime-cauled goblin-child I birthed in the bathroom, but I think I have postnatal depression. It doesn’t work if you drink the gin after the fact.

Sadness

2009-04-16T03:06:00.000-07:00

Clement Freud has died.

Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except For Me And My Monkey

2009-04-15T16:11:00.001-07:00

Every time I open them, these pain-blue eyes I've got, that monkey is there, staring sideways with eyes like bags of death. Lobster Monkey, claws for thumbs, slides its tail into my armpit. In and out. I had wellington boots like frogs when I was young, and the monkey dipped its fez in blood, the tassel braided from my baby-hair. Before that, in lux perpetua, it sat amongst the scabby stars like a heron, its tail wrapped about in ribbons. Some trees have cages inside them, rhododendrons and the grabbing hollies. The monkey pinches me with feet that move like hands, black leather like killer’s gloves. Mantailed monkey sews seeds in my sweat so I wake every morning crawling with moss, and crying like the rain.

Bone Appetite

2009-04-15T09:01:00.000-07:00

There is now no corner of my mind free of murderous women and culinary sadism. I might be able to spend all day in nothing but long-johns and a smile, but I am shackled to the keyboard and oscillating between world-raping arrogance and depression as thick as Swarfega. Therein lies the fun of being a research student.

Last night Snout made a Vindaloo as hot as guilt, with bread and butter instead of rice. Tonight we will have something in garlic. I am thinking of changing my diet. People use food to change themselves, they eat health-food to imbibe virtue and purity, they eat their fellow men to absorb their strength, they eat Christ for similar effects. What you eat contributes to what you are, and so food can make me more monstrous.

From now on I will eat other people's personal documentation. I’ll feast on meat I find in bins and things that die in gutters. I’ll eat star anise and bay leaves like sweets and I’ll pick my teeth with wishbones. Tomorrow I am going to take a picnic to the park, and all the starveling chavs with their tracky-bs tucked into their socks will watch and drool like orphans outside a sweetshop as I tuck in. There will be pebbles in the champagne and frogspawn in the punch and all the edible knickers a girl could want.

You Couldn't Make It Up

2009-04-15T00:39:00.000-07:00

They have been finding chunks of a man all over the countryside. The torso, complete with one and a half arms, was discovered by a member of the public in a place called GORE LANE.

Self-improvement or Bust

2009-04-14T06:21:00.000-07:00

Amusingly, the horoscope on my homepage has got stuck, and for the last five days has read “A wave of emotion hits you quite suddenly. Prepare to do some damage control”, which could be the horoscope for every single day of my life.

Outside it is overcast, but I am making a nest in my own innards to keep me safe if it rains. I had a wonderful weekend but now I am polluted, grimy on the inside. I want to feel like apples and linen, to wear a white dress and whiter knickers and sit unstained in the tender grass. This week I will be a good Sack Posset, the opposite of smoke.

Sometimes I would like to be tidier but I don’t think I can. I sit perfectly still for eleven minutes and around me appears a fairy-ring of filth. I am the Pied Piper, leading a merry procession of half-full coffee cups, piles of orange peel, screwed up Rizlas, paper-back books, broken biros, wads of tissue and lonely socks. From my person falls a constant rain of tobacco and hair, for where I am is mess, and where mess is, must I ever be.

Not Long Now

2009-04-11T06:25:00.000-07:00

Britain’s Got Talent is my favourite thing. Oh, to live in a world where everyone wears sequins and all dogs jump backwards through hoops. I especially like the magicians with their glamorous assistants. There is something seedy and deranged about amateur magicians. I like to speculate on their sex lives – I bet they keep their assistants in cages. I think that next year I will audition myself, as a clown called Forcemeat. Underneath my grimy tailcoat I’ll wear a suit of ham and I’ll make people put their hands in my bumbag, even if they really, really don’t want to. My routine will involve mixing together a hundred horrible ingredients in a giant teacup and force-feeding Amanda Holden the resultant slop until something inside her ruptures. Then I will spit-roast all the precocious child-dancers with their Vaseline smiles and leg-warmers and alarming eye-shadow and I will eat them all up. Straight through to the second round. I am also available for children’s parties.

Let's Start a War

2009-04-11T03:17:00.000-07:00

I am my own imaginary friend. When I do something naughty I blame myself and I feed on salt and pepper. I draw on the walls in green ink and I leave footprints in the butter. At night I sweep the hearth with a besom made of eyelashes and I come in shape no bigger than a cubic zirconia on the forefinger of a stripogram. I smoke thyme in an acorn-cup pipe and sometimes I solve crimes.

I am contemplating a campaign against The Observer, specifically against their Woman magazine. The last issue of this monthly menstrual clot included an interview with Scarlett Johansson about clothes, an article about the rise of ‘slapper shoes’, another about male models and how they are more muscular this season, many, many pictures of handbags and lipstick and in general a load of shite about frocks and feelings. I am (more or less) a woman, and I am interested in clockwork toys, toads and Roman dining habits. I am going to petition them for a monthly Man magazine full of tits and tanks, in which every article is written by Jeremy Clarkson.

Last night I ate cheese that was as meat. I wore the Dog Dress, patterned with pugs, and I sported a luxuriant moustache. This morning I am desirous of a return to the womb. I am jealous because the Best Girl and her man have gone to the zoo. I am going to make my own zoo. I will construct enclosures from books; one for the werewolf (who has swapped his fez in favour of a curly black wig), one for all the clowns, one for Spatchcock and one for the boys, who I will hunt down one by one with a butterfly net and a harpoon. Then I will spend the afternoon throwing bread rolls at them.

This Week at Sack Posset Hall

2009-04-07T10:20:00.000-07:00

We are reading a medieval catalogue of fishes; among the pike and bream lurk mermaids, and dolphins who cry piteously when caught. We are about to eat an impractical amount of mince. We are falling ever more in love with Fanny Cradock. We are waiting with baited breath to learn how to use an industrial floor-polisher and we are sick with excitement about the new series of Britain’s Got Talent. We are contemplating summer outfits, or at least the rolling up of trouser legs. We are regretting not sneaking out in the dead of night to claim the zombie hedgehog, as we have always quite fancied teaching ourselves taxidermy.

Quote of the Week

2009-04-07T10:09:00.000-07:00

"There is nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight"

-Lon Chaney Jnr

On Disgust and Other Things

2009-04-07T03:26:00.000-07:00

Squids are the Angels of Disgust, waving tentacles like phalluses covered in toothy, sucking holes. Disgust fascinates me. I am sure that if we could overcome it, we could be unstoppable. Disgust comes from the fear of invasion, the fear that the disgusting thing will get on your skin, inside you, in your mouth and up your nose, and yet the disgusting is often a mere half-inch from the sexual. If we all made ourselves do one disgusting thing before breakfast I am sure that we could take over the world.

I won about three pounds on the Grand National. War of Attrition did not run. I drank a vast amount of Mother’s Ruin with the Best Girl and noticed that the dead hedgehog has moved several feet down the road. Clearly a zombie. Best Girl and I made a Book of Glory for an absent friend, stuck full of tasty pictures and headlines from Take a Break and Chat, like “Thank God for My Bionic Girdle” and the world’s worst Daniel Craig lookalike. Then we wrote drunken nonsense in it and I drew a picture of a small dog. A good time was had by all. I watched us as we played out in the garden: LoH in his cowboy shirt, cardigan and shorts, his shaven hair growing back fluffy; Brother Mine all in cream like Jesus; Snout in his Thundercats T-shirt with his hair a homage to Slash; Best Girl’s boy, who I like to call Extended Play (because it has the same initials and because of his consumption of energy drinks) sporting skinny tee and yellow Wayfarers and Best Girl, her new jeans immaculately accessorised, standing next to me as we giggled ourselves silly. I love them. I was rocking my ancient dungarees. Here’s some advice – never get drunk wearing dungarees. It ends badly.

Now I am back in the spare room scrumping for words, trying to keep my mind out of the sea and inside the killer. Outside the Rag & Bone Man is cruising the street, looking for damaged and discarded things, just like me. Spatchcock is sitting on my shoulder, which I suppose she thinks is funny. Time is getting on, I must away.

Just Say No To Alcohol

2009-03-31T15:54:00.000-07:00

Most days I like to spend horizontal, belly-down and dreaming, haloed in skunk-smoke with my pen in my mouth. Today, however, was a day of action. I went to the library in my super neon Bat-Man trainers and came home with treasure including Taste: A Story of Britain Through Its Cooking by Kate Colquhoun, A Book of Nonsense by Mervyn Peake and Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection by Julia Kristeva. I am going to have dead funny dreams. On my way home I looked at all the rubbish I could see. Then we cleaned the house, more or less. When I emptied the toaster, out fell six toothpicks. That was a terrible fire hazard. Nobody admitted responsibility, but I don’t think I need to say who I suspect. Or what.....

I think the sentence “But who? Or what.......?” is one of the scariest in the world. I am proper squiffy. I have had the cheapest wine known to humanity, I have had it here, and I have had lots of it. And olives stuffed with whole cloves of garlic, the ultimate misanthropic snack. I will sign off with my thoughts on spring.

Underneath the eiderdown
Of prepubescent leaves
The purblind roots snout
And wean to green

Job Centre

2009-03-30T14:05:00.000-07:00

I read a story in the newspapers about a couple of malcontents who were befriending vulnerable and unstable people, talking their way into their victims' flats and setting up home, forcing the real tenants to move out and, in some cases, live rough. This would make either a good story or an excellent career choice.