Phloggers

Oh dear, I've been buying URLs again. phloggers.com and 365phlogs.com mine by breakfast. Thinking an aggregate of photo blogs, like a muster of peafowl. Before you ask, phlog and phogue were taken.

Tweet

Just missing the simple things in life.

Photograph: Canaries, Autumn

The Obnoxious Indian Peafowl

I've heard he can be an unpleasant pheasant but I found him only iridescent and indifferent.

Photograph: Dublin Zoo

Nil Per Os

Strung like a puppet, it jerked along the beach. Lurched, picking mournfully around the pebbles. Some grotesque promenade. I was ashamed by a double-take at first and a tiny fizz of adrenalin. That quick coursing cocktail of fear and horror, when you think you've seen a car accident but it was only a child shrieking. Or alone in your kitchen you imagine a poltergeist. Near by me she vacantly surveyed the sea vis-à-vis noon sun.  Slowly flagged out, a leaden towel. I looked away, mortified. Mothers pulled their children close and busied them with sand-castles. Little boys did not point or stare. Teenage girls didn't whisper and giggle. Men harumphed and gruffed and rolled onto their bellies into paperbacks. She shed a light shroud and sat down. The beach stiffened.

More naked than nudity is the mind laid bare. More offensive, more shocking, a public disintegration. She ran a slick of oil over her mahogany hide to emphasise it. Chocolate black and burnt red, leathered like the bog people. Impossibly taut over a skeleton that it might tear at the hip or an elbow pop through. Every rib every tarsal accountable. Abhorrent. Where once buttocks pretty cotton triangles lashed to a pelvis and a big gaunt head balanced on top. Breasts and menses long gone. Some claim control over their life by dispensing with it off a bridge. This wretched creature cursed to scorch and starve herself to death, undoubtedly. As she disintegrated into the sand she resembled Akhenaten in repose. A nose. Ten boney toes. I blinked at the sea, at the girl, I sat upright agitated in her wake. I lost my appetite for the afternoon and left.

Before Blogging

Imagine growing up without the internet. All that exposure. All that access. You can't even begin to explain it. Three weeks on a waiting list for an authoritative tome, your dissertation depending on it. And the scribbling. Reams of secret anger biro'd in angst. My god the dog-eared spiral-bounds. Rows of skinny black and reds. Moleskines once you could. The wailing; 'my world is ending!'. 

"I burnt all mine" She says. "Sure we only ever wrote about things when we were unhappy. We never catalogued the good stuff". Oh. I know that. I can't bear to open mine either. But until I release the entire archive to a museum at least google can't crawl it.

Skills are lost. In a serious meeting, someone wraps a cleft fist around a pen as if it's only her third time. Mentally everyone in the room adds a rubber creature on top and a shock of cheap pink fur.

People I Know (i)

pol'y'math |ˈpɒlɪmaθ| {noun}
a person of wide-ranging knowledge or learning.

Some people are just brilliant at being brilliant. And some just start late. Ask Cato The Elder.

op'si'math |ˈɒpsɪmaθ| {noun}
a person who begins to learn or study only late in life.

Photograph: Phillip Gibbs. Whirling Dervish.

State of the Union

Astonished, when he told me it was over. Nho! I exhaled, genuine dismay. For the 'would you like the tour' of their Big Project at the time (she'd been away); a fat pale north Belfast detached double-aspect; he took me proudly through every lovely room. I even remember the name of the matt emulsion Milk White, up to the high ceilings and over and down again. It was the perfect white paint, I'd never encountered such a white. I envied it, admired the sheer coverage.

The wide (white) hallway, airy bayed reception rooms, a duke into bedrooms, startled by one of my Singapores framed on the first landing. I applauded a clever bolt-hole for coats and commended their dedication to cabinetry. He would ready the back by summer for barbecues but otherwise they were almost done. Quare pair this couple. In the awkward intimacy of their bathroom the sunken-tub-for-two, we just stood and stared at it. I didn't quite know what to say, embarrassed by soap, averting my eyes from a flannel. He conjured up steaming back-scrubs and cosy yabber-jabber at the end of a hard working week; getting drunk and dancing in the kitchen which sounded just grand to me. We had some tea. 

Months later, 'I've left her' (Or rather as it was his house, logistics dictated he request she leave him) -But! I protested (as if the very reason two people ought to stay together) 'what about getting drunk and dancing in the kitchen?'  Oh. We never really did it that much. That might have only happened once.

The photograph is from the milk white Raffles Hotel in Singapore. Curious, prescience. Havent seen the person who inspired this post in over two years, yet an hour after completing the first draft I was extremely startled to bump into him in the street.

A Malicious Fistful of Chillies

 "a malicious fistful of chillies" she picked up at the market. It's a great turn of phrase.
(Lionel Shriver 'The Post-Birthday World')
This photo was taken in Kota Kinabalu, Borneo. "you look like the wild man of Borneo" Mr Bennett the histrionics teacher would hurl at a particularly unkempt girl. For particularly stupid ones he reserved a phrase which in memory sounded something like 'You Aurora-Rora-Borealis' or 'Ora-Roara-Ranutan!'

Lift Not The Painted Veil

Who's that man, stop all the clocks? We forgot Auden for a minute in our gins by the fire. Both fond and afraid of the approach of a new year. Reluctant to pull the plug much in the same way I hate to end a day. Reluctant to concede nothing more might be extracted from it. It's a time to take a measure of all relationships, you know 'The Seasonals'. Recalibrate re-catagorise nurse gins and debrief. 

I like rituals on the 31st. Perhaps a trompy run along the tow or a crunch over pebbles. A novel front to back by lunch. Maugham. Amidst the debauchery of a 1920s pestilent provence in China I was inspired mostly by one scene. They stabbed at each other. Jabbing forks into choleric salads with set jaws. Perhaps I should find myself a husband set for a foreign posting. Pick out 20 cotton dresses and order whole tinned hams.

Hope he drags me into the jungle and races me to the cholera.

The brief asked for our best shot of 2011. Lazy I thought. I prefer the restrictions of a theme. I cannot supply my best shot of 2011. Perhaps the light was fortuitous; I'm pleased with this one, fond of that at one time; that worked quite well. The best I can do, is do better in 2012. Best foot forward. Pledge only to deal with well-meaning folk and avoid scoundrels. Vow not to commit a thoughtless act, have a careless or hopeless thought. Reach for the hand of him beside you and step into it together with cheerful expectation.

Bokeh Boys

They all came. Merry to see the boys marry. 

His parents would not come.

His lot came mind. One, two three, four, five huge brothers grinning from up the country in matching suits. Guffawing and happy, proud chests bursting no bother. How far they've come, I guessed. But his parents, hearts like walnuts deprived of a bride they refused to bear witness. Bereft of a blessing in spite of the shrieking, through the candle bokeh I caught a faraway look in his eyes. Still a long way to go boys. 

Brass Neck

pah oomp pah-pah oomph. Brass neck on them.

Do The Portuguese Archipelago

The Portuguese Archipelago minds me of a gay canter across a dance floor. The fat sea walls are fashioned from volcanic bricks of liquorice and piped with dapper white icing. Glistening slick in their damp skirts, acned by salt air about the battlements. Like we used to laugh about Little Montenegro over there in the Adriatic, Ponte Delgada had scant to recommend it and we would wonder why we weren't in Funchal. It was always just a half-day bunker before cutting a dash for the Windies. Wind-cheaters would lean into the howl along the jetty clamping hoods over ruddy lashed faces. I liked it. There was beer for breakfast and pastries. Stoicism in the drab battered pier and patterned plazas. Beasts with tyres taller than a man prowled the quayside moving things from here to there. Threatening to squash us or drop a container on our heads as we rushed ashore to the last shop in Europe. The bureaucrats got of hold of it in the end and halted the perilous promenade. Squeezing us into mournful damp queues for shuttle buses. No. no Bicycles, the eurocats shook their heads. We dreamed of Barbados and stayed in bed.

Porktraits?

We did everything just the way grownups would have. Why didn't it work?

Chorizo Chiaroscuro

Lucent Blue 2

Lucent Blue

He sits on the bench upright as I approach. Staring at the rose stumps pruned back hard. Expressionless in the early light and dew yet his aspect is mourning. Shoulders grieving under a tidy practical gillet, the type a man might choose for himself. A belly once-loved gone to pot heaves, hands clasped neatly. I want a barky dog to skid from under the Rhododendrons to have his head ruffled, but I fear he is alone.

Misha non-penguin

Ra Ra Girls

Haughty like flamenco dancers with tarted lips slapping gum and idle hands on ample hips. Clicking bored heels impatient for the tardy party.

The Dionysian is no picnic

If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.

Camille Paglia. Sex, Art and American Culture: Essays (1992)

Spring Pea

That was some winter tutt the walking wounded. Frost seared the ivy stares forlornly at fallen comrades, casualties of an impossible cold. Bitten hard a pretty holly stone dead in his pot. The lemon pine gave up the ghost by christmas. Some staggered as far as March too, but a bitter death rattle proved the final insult and saw them off. Short of space I decide the sweet pea can jostle with the late daffs, tickle his ankles when he's up. Last years sunflower trunks jammed in deep provide a handy climbing frame. And a good tank-trap for the cat from down the street who is wont to visit and dig.