Home, again, again

The seventh month slipping by,

me slipping in and out of my life,

half lived here, half lived there

in slipstreams mostly sliding by -

the river's course flows elsewhere.

Foolish

WEDNESDAY 1st April Start with this line: 'If it were not really foolish, I would...' Keep going.


I’d buy a farm and keep a donkey
I’d have a baby even though I’m 46
I’d have an affair with Dennis or somebody else
I’d wear more frocks
I’d just write all the time and forget other work
I’d love my life
I’d drink more or less coffee
I’d become a witch
I’d buy flowers even though I’m going away
I’d live on my farm with my donkey somewhere warm
I’d give up my car
I’d have some cats
I’d see more of my ex-husband
I’d relax
I’d write loads more letters
I’d have more fun
I’d stop worrying
I’d lighten up
I’d kiss more
I’d leave Cornwall or commit to Cornwall

The Blue Chair

TUESDAY 31st March A title for you: The Blue Chair


Her whole life has been punctuated by spells in the blue chair. For the past 10 years, she’s resisted it but now, it’s once more part of her life.

The blue chair is real enough but it belongs everywhere and nowhere. As soon she sits in the blue chair, she is no longer where she was. When she leaves the blue chair, she’s arrived.

In recent times, when she knows that she is on her way to sit in the blue chair – and it’s always for a period of some hours – she’s felt it as a kind of dying – dying to one place, being born somewhere new.

The ritual beforehand is a version of the Swiss suicide routine – the putting things in order at home, letting people know you are leaving, making sure there’s no muddle for others to deal with.

It’s also transgressive – so many people now claim to eschew the blue chair – she equates it with a fear of dying

After the frantic build-up, the long journey to the blue chair begins by train. She loves crossing the Tamar, that Lethe dividing Cornwall with its weight of memory – from new worlds where the memories are yet to be made.

All the way, the countryside is different kinds of ravishing until when the train nears another of Hades’ rivers – the beginning of the Thames with all its potential and power – she enters the unloveliness of Reading and transfers to a bus and the black river of the M4 to Staines.

It’s quick, usually, and she disembarks in front of a new temple, dedicated to the blue chair and all it represents. It is huge, a hymn to space– a wonder of fountains, glass and escalators, all dedicated to leading the pilgrim through to their own designated blue chair. And it’s uncrowded, the acolytes, polite and serene, the vergers in black, discreet but heavy with guns.

The weighing is rich in symbolism – how much and what exactly does she need to carry from this world to the next? From the past to the future?

Someone looks her up and down and checks credentials. She’s fit to pass, not a danger to herself and others. She can be released from this place and permitted a spell in the next.

The blue chair is closer. At this stage, the tension of the journey East to the temple dissipates. A last coffee? A meal? At the core of the temple, the altars to capitalism are disappointing and tired and there is only one exit, via the blue chair.

In recent years though, there’s been a trend to real food so she can sit and eat hearty vegetable soup in a world of glass and plastic.

No alcohol – that taking of the gin and tonic – the colourless blood and the melting pretzel on the tongue – is to come – part of the ritual of dying in the blue chair.

Now it’s just a question watching the clock and a last call to her mother before heading to the gate between this world and another. A final prayer before the tunnel, the door, the welcome, the checking of the cardboard slip with her name on it.

And she sits, in 14J or 7B or 33D – her blue chair for the next hours where she will be nowhere, where she will leave this life for another and maybe one day, never return.

Teeth

MONDAY 30th March Write about teeth, please!

She always had a thing about false teeth. There used to be a Saturday night horror feature in the 1970s that specialised in being creepy without any overt violence or gore. In one episode, some people had moved into a house that was haunted by the elderly couple who died there and would suddenly see on a chair in the living room, knitting and balls of wool and, worse, on the bedside table, a glass with false teeth left in it to soak. That last image has the power, almost forty years later, to turn her stomach.

Her grandparents were of a generation to get rid of their teeth and have false ones made early on in life – to get it out of the way. Not dissimilar to those women with a faulty gene who have their breasts removed in their twenties. She finds both ideas horrific but the loss of teeth marginally more so than the loss of breasts. Her own breasts have become strange to her – not having been touched for over three years now and just sort-of living in her bras and clothes in the same way unwanted ornaments sit on her shelves where they just happened to be put years ago. But her teeth in her mouth are busy, chewing, biting, being cleaned, taken to the dentist, paid for, touched by her tongue, looked at in the mirror. They are small and strong, slightly yellow and irregular, healthy, functional – much like the whole person she is.

She married a much older man and insensitively shared with him her horror of false teeth. He then had to confess that he wore ‘a plate’ – a term she didn’t know which conjured a surreal image but turned out to be a few teeth on a plastic dome with bits of wire that stayed in overnight and was rinsed under a running tap every morning.

She was always wary after that of putting her tongue in her husband’s mouth which seemed a bit ungrateful when he was so happily attentive to her breasts.

This blog is for my writing practice as part of Emma Spurgin Hussey's experimental writer's diary.