autumn brings the retrospective

Autumn brings the retrospective. Like a squirrel-woman with OCD, I clear out cupboards galore and try to hurl my unwanted baggage into distant memory. I find myself as I clear out my bureau – I find my old travelling notebooks full of poems and diary entries.

Poetry is, and always has been, my first love. But as adrian henri guiltily whispers to me:

You keep our love hidden
Like the nightdress you keep under your pillow
And never wear when I’m there

So I’ve published some poems on this site – scroll down on the left and see after ‘who the hell’. I hope you like them. And it is national poetry week, after all.

And I will be quenching my guilty thirst for the past, and will be publishing from time to time writings from that never saw air, that have been sorrowfully tucked up in damp drawers for far too long……

First up is a diary entry from udaipur in rajhastan, india.

My wife and I had been travelling together, (well mainly laying down actually, riddled with dysentery), and she had left me to my misadventures for a month. On the eve of her leaving, I sat upon a rooftop and starting endlessly scribbling away, with no blog at the time in which to plant my words. And here is what I wrote:

independence day

Start the tab.

Stop the clock.

What a difference a day makes.

Hot showers and mosquito cocktails await me.

A fresh page beckons me.

Loula has left me to return to the UK, smiling with love and joy. Mr mahuna from our overpriced hotel has curtly accepted my request for the use of his pool and dilapidated internet for the rest of my stay in udaipur, even though I am crossing to the other side to a far more fitting, crumbling haveli of an abode.

I walk over the bridge over dried-up water, singing to myself for wont of familiar culture:

‘as long as I gaze on, udaipur sunset…….’


‘welcome to the ‘otel panorama!’

This is my first of 38 days as a lone woman in a country full of confused men.. Seamstresses of men. I pop in to see one, and a pleasant mute fixes my jagged zip whilst his ageing father snores on the ground.

This is fresh inspiration:- the cool breeze in the morning, lazy days and as much uninterrupted masturbation as I can finger.

Viewing the world as beautiful, the horizons as endless, and pen and ink as my treasure trove.

No distractions, having to find my own fantasies.

Again, I go to the yoga ashram to find no yoga tonight. A quick chai saves me from certain deflation, and I head to mr mahuna’s pool for my customary sixty lengths, praying that the irksome lanky indian boy will have finished his desperate splashing and leave me alone in my watery world.

As I swim, the sky grows dark and the wind rises. If lightning strikes now…

But it doesn’t, and gaily swinging home commando under my ali ba-bas I have to reprimand a group of indian men, including my tailor and his dad, who are trying to make me bend over.

Another constant bystander ogles me,

‘look nice, like indian’.

Oh, what a shawl over the head can do for an arian.

Back at the ranch, I sit upon the roof, sipping hot milk coffee under the canopy shelter, and again the sky breaks.

The clouds swarm and the thunder roars.

Three months without relief of my beloved english rain, and the gods have answered my prayers:

on the eve of gangaur the sky breaks
the thunder comes and lightning strikes down
the lizards come to rest in my witches haven
the begrudging rain stubbornly falls upon the lake


with full but unsatisfied belly i sip my cinnamon milk
still only a thin layer of rain refuses to quench the arid wasteland
i can hope for more but settle for less.


uninterested humans stuff their holes, eyes not registering the transaction.
a mosquito declares battle with my covered body.
nearing drums and bells provide a dramatic soundtrack to the non-action.
periodically i repeat the mantra; 'do not force octopussy on me again'


and at last the rain thumps down upon the tin roof:


soothes our souls, saves our souls, cleanses our palates.

And to finish, an inspirational quote from my beloved Steinbeck, to help see you through this rainy windscreen of a week:

‘Men do change, and change comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.


Change may be announced by a small ache, so that you think you’re catching cold. Or you may feel a faint disgust for something you loved yesterday. It may even take the form of a hunger that peanuts will not satisfy. Isn’t overeating said to be one of the strongest symptoms of discontent? And isn’t discontent the lever of change?’

I think I’m getting a beret….xx

india: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVL3UzEhrIE&feature=related

or

rain: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6_7B9avI0c&ob=av3n

or

change: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pl3vxEudif8&feature=related