A FEW PEBBLES

1

This Lilly is a long-boned woman with legs like skewers and empty breasts lying on the furrows of ribs. Her smile comes from an old heart, strong beyond reason. She smiles at laughing visitors who kiss, kiss, kiss, planting babies in her lap and presents on the bed. She tells them that she’s had lunch, but the menu escapes her; food appears like magic - chicken is fish, porridge is soup and everything is beautiful.

2

Accents arch and murmur through the carriage.

Hills, studded with pylons clamber

over us and craggy Huddersfield snuggles

into this lost Thursday. Manchester recalls

dead people from my past and the child

conceived there on a living room carpet.

3

In Madrid, I stood

Alive, before Guernika

A LITTLE CULTURE ON THE WEEKEND

Isn't it wonderful that you can just whip out your phone and snap away when the whim takes you? Sylvia and I wandered around The Art Galleries at Kelvinhall on Monday but this is all that impressed me to photograph. These are our feet in an installation.


She is just beautiful and in the perfect setting. And the ship is actually silver but I love the gold sheen here.


The masks are too scary for Sylvia but I love them.

WEEKENDING

Ooooh, it’s great to get back to normal; I’ve had visitors for the weekend so that means no TV and not much of the horizontal on my sofa – quite the opposite in fact. There were FOUR days of walking, tramping around and now I’m knackered. How lovely is today? Today has been all horizontal in front of the goggle-box; it was raining all morning anyway so not the kind of day to stretch legs or anything physical.

Visitors also meant preparation; I didn’t go at it with the same vitality as most people – I only did what was absolutely necessary. I purposely didn’t dust the top of the cabinet in the living room and have photographic evidence – there are still no carpets down so it is dusty here…well that’s my excuse:

I had a brilliant time and we laughed till we were sick! All those stories from schooldays and childhood; ex-husbands and lovers; drunken sprees, events and traumas; we didn’t need entertainment; there was no background music, no movies, no comedy except what burst from our mouths. Isn’t life grand?

But it’s so great to be alone again, back in hermit mode though I have made myself a few promises to leave the flat sometimes and walk a little, but I needed today to rest.

SEASONAL MAYHEM

Across George Square bare

skin sizzling: not drowning

in high factors.

Here, summer lands

like a sledgehammer.

SURPRISE!

Drop everything, Glaswegians

desperately seeking brown

burn red.

Hospitals prepare

people swear – Never again.

How many degrees?

Blisters glisten

skin dries and peels

to squeals of pain.

Bra-less and free

goose-bumps, fever

just in time for autumn.

DREAMS

Big cats settled down beside me, tame but still frightening, smacking their lips and jostling for position; they were my pets, companions since kitten-hood, loyal and enormous playthings with terrible teeth. The dreams were compelling; I slipped in and out of them and couldn’t escape, through wakings, turnings and tossing, there they were - waiting, calling me back, pinning me down.

I was comfortable, felt safe, secure and happy with them in my life but there was tension and the knowledge that they could turn into big-bad-adults and eat me at any time; I was completely aware that humans can’t always know their companions and what they’re capable of, completely.

A feminine aspect. Cats attacking you represent the enemies; if you succeed banishing them you will overcome great obstacles and rise in fortune and fame.

A dream about lions is associated with nobility, strength and pride. Your success depends upon your ability to cope with opposition. Will have a valuable friendship.

Tigers are associated with power, wild beauty and intense sexual force. You will overcome opposition and rise to a high position in your way to enjoy luxuries with ease and pleasure.

Panthers: wild beauty and grace. Enemies will fail in attempts to injure you

Leopards: enemies seek to cause injury but will fail. You will be embarrassed in business or love, but by persistent efforts you will overcome difficulties.

I think there was a mixture of these animals in my dream, but definitely lion and tiger. Of course I will lean towards the positive meanings seeing as I felt safe and aware of the dangers; so success is what I take away from this.

MUSING

Oooh, just thinking about a ham and pease-pudding sandwich; I haven’t had that Geordie delicacy for years! When I first moved to the north east of England my Glaswegian nose turned up at the very thought of it and it was several years until I actually tasted it – instant love. The idea of it entered my head as I watched a character in a movie spread peanut butter on bread. Don’t know if I can get it up here.

STOP thinking about nice food. OK then. Just EAT to live – don’t LIVE to eat.

I still haven’t managed to make myself get up and out of here early and WALK into Balloch. I’ve been trying to tempt myself with the idea of looking at the boats on the river, writing in the sun (what sun?) and enjoying a coffee – I can’t even do it in the car…and it’s only about quarter of a mile! THINK of all that pleasant fresh air and a tramp through the woods or saunter along the river path.

Oh but my sofa is so lovely and the warm feeling I get from the laptop as it burns my knees…and now I’ve got stuff for sale on Ebay I can spend loads of time CHECKING for watchers!

But now I need to go get dressed and out of here for work. It’s pay-day again (not that I’ll see much of it these next two weeks) and that time of the month has come around when money is demanded with menaces so all of my excitement will come from the auctions and writing – so maybe I’d better just get right to it then.

DUMBARTON

I drove over to Dumbarton with TocToc and GrubbyAngel; it's amazing what's on my doorstep. I haven't really gone anywhere out of the ordinary shopping and granny-duties since I moved here. This was perfect for testing the little camera I bought on Ebay for Amazon's birthday - not great weather but interesting. According to TocToc there used to be loads of boats docked here, now there's only the ruins of the docks.


What a fabulous setting for a bowling green; if I was playing there I wouldn't be able to keep my attention on the game. I took the photo from the first level of the castle on Dumbarton Rock; apparently there's over 300 steps to the top so I wasn't going any further - maybe next year if I can lose some weight and get fit.

EXCUSES

You might wonder why all the snipes at teenagers – even my daughter tells me to get over it, that I can’t tar them all with the same brush and all that cliché, but I still think of them as stupid, dumb and dangerous-to-know. The thought that my beautiful grandchildren will be going there fills me with dread.

Number one son was the teenager from hell, so he started it. We lived in an area of Newcastle that was taken over by underclass hoodlums; these dregs of society had received disturbance money to leave their council properties during renovations. Their revolting offspring tormented and burgled the hell out of us; I think I had six burglaries in three years.

It got to the stage that before I went out I’d separate the computer: the screen went in the bath with towels and dressing gown draped over it; the keyboard in my knicker drawer; and printer behind the sofa. The little brats would be hanging around in the street so I’d slip out the back door and bash round the shops in a sweat, desperate to get home. They actually kicked doors in, in broad daylight; they’d belt through the houses and be out with arms full of electrical goods within minutes. If no-one had seen them they’d return for more…and if all was still quiet they’d send in the smaller kids for the smaller stuff!

And then there were the friends of my teenager, who wanted him to come out to play in the street riots. I told them to go away, that he was grounded. They sat on the wall outside and didn’t move. Of course I was incensed – the crazy woman who probably made the situation worse; I chucked my son’s clothes out of the window, hoping that this would stop him from running off with the rabble: it didn’t. His friends picked them up for him.

What do you do when your child seems to be taken-over by a cult? You’re helpless; left with insane choices. I had fantasies of murdering them; I had this image in my head of a brightly washed Sunday morning, quiet streets littered with the dead bodies of these teenagers, the silk of their Shell-suits flashing in the sun – I had poisoned their drugs or household food or doorstep milk…there were several scenarios.

I was a wreck for years then when my son was seventeen one of the older gangsters tried to kill him. They wrecked my flat, but that’s a whole other story.

So am I excused?

DEAR DIARY

You do realise that I didn’t go to the dentist, don’t you? I stuffed my face with Paracetamol and the pain eventually disappeared but there is an echo every now and then. Oh I’m feeling old.

When is it that you actually step over the threshold between middle-age to old-age? Oh God, I’ve just realised that at 55 I’ve already gone past middle-age! So that’s answered my question I suppose…but I don’t get my old-age pension till I’m 65 – this must be limbo.

Technically I’ll be invisible for the next decade then; I am nothing; there is no label attached; is this where I go mad? I think I’m still too young for that; too young for spitting at teenagers, whacking them with my walking stick (which I haven’t got yet) or pushing them off buses…hey wait a minute, I’ve got a car, I don’t use buses. I could run them over.

Okay, maybe I have reached the mad stage but I think I arrived there twenty years ago, so what’s new? What’s new is the fact that after this imminent birthday I will be on the very WRONG side of fifty…heading for sixty faaassssssst!

F-F-F-FOURTEEN

When my daughter was fourteen I tried to kill her with an umbrella but my sisters-in-law stopped me. I had a good excuse - murder was definitely called for…if I’d had a blog then I wouldn’t have given her the name Amazon: I hated her for the best part of ten months!

That morning my sister-in-law called me; her daughter, Lindy, was staying over,

‘Where’s Amazon?’ she said.

‘In bed. They haven’t surfaced yet,’ I told her. It was about 9am.

‘Oh I think you should check on them.’ She said she would wait while I did. So I put the phone down and went to sneak a peak at them. EMPTY! They must’ve climbed out of the window. I rushed back into the living room and picked up the phone.

‘How did you know?’

‘Because Lindy was brought home by the police at five in the morning. She’d been caught talking to some boys in a stolen car.’

‘Where’s Amazon?’

‘No idea.’

So that’s why the umbrella. We searched all day and didn’t see her till after seven. As she walked into the flat her aunts had to create a circle around her to keep me from killing her; she hadn’t listened to me for months.

I wouldn’t have dared do anything like that when I was her age; the only thing that went out of our windows was ice skates; my brother and I dropped them out so that we could LIE to our mother, saying that we were going to a friend’s house. The final destination was ice skating on Queen’s Park pond.

Of course we got caught. An aunt, who lived miles away in Cumbernauld, had decided on that very day to visit. There she was, sitting on the bus that passed the park, staring out of the window, looking at us circling the bumpy ice in full view of anyone from the main road – which was miles from our house. What are the chances of that eh?

Grounded: not murdered, obviously.

My oldest grandson is fourteen and is still lovely but I don’t live with him so maybe he isn’t so lovely to his parents. There was some dissension a while ago; I pray that these little members of my family can communicate properly when the mad time arrives – I wouldn’t want to go through that again…even though I’m removed from responsibility by being grand.

POETRY

OFF MY SOFA

This was the walk up the old military road into the hills above Helensburgh. Number-one-son wanted to show me a tiny loch but there wasn't time to go that far - not sure I'm fit to go that far!

All the way along the path this burn wore its way through the rocks, destoying the path here.

It was a day of tremendous showers; driving up, the hills were blanketed with clouds of rain, and then we were in it and it was like nothing you've ever seen - the power of those rain pellets was astounding...and then we were out of it, in a flash.


The skies were brilliant for camera-work but I only had my phone - it did pretty well I think.


According to TocToc, we were approaching a dam; he suddenly caught sight of a bright green patch in the landscape ahead of us (not so obvious here) and shouted, 'A dam, it's a dam!'


Look at all this walking I did!


I turned to see where I'd come from - I walked all the way up this path; you can't even see the car, sitting at the gate!