Hints From The Universe #764

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

Huddersfield Factfile #1 - Emley Moor Mast

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

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

It's That Mumps Again

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

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

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

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

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.