bee feast

Warm and not sunny and humid today, like breathing into your pillow, and I've just been sitting in the garden like a tired old person. Watching the dog conduct studious investigation of the garden. I love his professorial seriousness just as much as I love his manic leaping idiocy.

Pleased to see paeony coming out again. Presently the flower is a perfect green ping-pong-sized ball with just a sliver of red showing through. I know from last year that it'll unfurl as a positively pornographic thing in the kind of red you can hardly stand to look at, it's so red. Very Georgia O'Keeffe. Last year I would look at it every day and note with great pleasure its slow progress, and I didn't know what it was going to look like either so I was quite excited, as it looked promising. Then one morning I looked out of the window, and it was not there. Just a headless green stalk. I was bemused. It was too big for a bird to have dispatched it, even if a bird had any reason to. Then I was out of ideas.

I took K for a walk, and in the cobbled alley behind the main road's houses I found some of the local kids I knew, two sisters and their mate the only black boy for some miles. All eight to ten and intensely annoying and ubiquitous, always outside and pestering me when I was attempting gardening. Great to see that children still play outside, of course, but I did wonder if this was more apathy on the part of their parents than any desire to help their development. So there they were surrounded by little pots and green things and bits. The eldest sister greeted me in her disquieting unsmiling way. I greeted her with a great lack of enthusiasm.

"Would you like to buy a flower?"

There was the paeony, all sprawled out, sitting in a beaker of water on the ground. I was furious that they got to see it finally open, and I didn't. "That's mine! You nicked that from my garden!" I said, refraining from adding "you grubby little bastards". They proceeded to lie through their baby teeth ("no, it's from his gran's garden", accompanied by wide-eyed Betty Boop stare) and then accuse each other. I was appalled in the way that people's grandmothers are appalled by Kids Today. I got it back (without having to pay for it, or do anything violent) and kept it in my kitchen until it wilted. This year I should be able to enjoy what I missed last time.

The Pagan has just been round. She can talk, that woman. I don't agree with her on everything and she can be fantastically air-headed but she is very likeable, and very admirable. She's maybe a year or two older than me, with two children and a cat and a dog and before she managed to get the house she was more or less homeless. She has a certain indomitable spirit. She was telling me how her dispute with the college is ongoing - they've cut down one of the trees that was blocking out all her light, but she's still trying to get them to get rid of one whose roots are threatening her garden wall. It doesn't look too steady, I have to say. There's this strip of land between her garden and the college grounds which may belong to either, no one seems sure. So two blokes from the college came round to do some measuring and messing about, and she asked one of them to go away because she'd felt he'd been "very rude" the last time, and she'd asked the college not to send him again. I would have just swallowed that, being forced to speak to someone I didn't like, and sat there feeling sick on it and on my inability to stand up for myself.

She tackles things and she isn't an idiot about it, she is cheerful and what they used to call 'plucky'. She gots Da Pluck.

A friend of hers has just come back from Egypt raving about the generous spirit of the people. Apparently they have a phrase they often repeat which I couldn't hope to spell here but it means: all movement is a blessing. I'd go along with that, I said. Well, it's true, because you have to use your life up, and the less afraid you are of doing it the more you have the chance to experience, and all of it is good as long as something is happening and not just nothing.

One of the ways that being grown-up slowly reveals itself to be at least a little different from being young and emotionally gangly and unco-ordinated, is that you start to see that there is no finish, no goal. I want to publish some books and I think I have a decent enough shot at that once I actually write the fuckers, but a few months ago I realised that after the initial jubilation at getting into print it will just become Normal, and I will start to look for the next reason to throw my arms in the air in glee. Achievements will fade rapidly and will need replacing with new ones. I tried to come to terms with the idea that just getting an OK from a publisher, or just seeing something of mine on a shelf, if it happens, will not put me onto some new level of fulfilment on its own. It'll just be another thing, after a while. And I'm not complaining, not by any stretch, and I know how to wring the good stuff out of everything because I always tried to do that to offset the bad stuff, and so I will appreciate it maybe more than the next person would. But the fact has to be assimilated - there is no Ultimate Thing. I mean, there is progression, just not a point at which everything will even out into Great. And it will all end with a comma. Or maybe an ellipsis. I like those. I think reading The Little Prince (mind which translation, though, there's a crappy one floating around HMV at the moment with all the poetry surgically sucked out of it) at the age of about ten engendered that. . .

It's sort of sad to think that; it would be simpler to imagine that one thing would happen that would make your life pop up like perfectly done toast, and this is the idea that has been sold particularly to women (find a good husband, have a baby, have another, have a nice house that is a credit to you). But it's great to have freedom from that, and just think of everything on its own terms instead of how long it's going to last or how good it is for you or how it fits into some larger pattern that doesn't actually exist.

Blah, blah de blah. I'm alright. I could make myself sick whittling everything into a nice palatable glurgey shape the way I do, but if I'm honest with myself I don't regret any of it. I don't think that's the point. People waste so much of life in the dismissing of things, like kicking a pot of emulsion back across the nice painting they spent months or years on. What use is that? I like myself too much now to want to punish myself with that sort of crap.

Fuck, though. I have to allow myself at least one "fuck, though".

One runs the risk of weeping a little, if one lets himself be tamed dot dot dot

Apparently Marilyn Monroe gave Joe DiMaggio a watch engraved with that bit that the fox says about what is essential being seen only by the heart, and asked her what the fuck did that mean. The obtuse ball-thwacking dullard. He was the most distraught when she died, though, and visited her grave for years afterwards. I wonder if he finally got it. There's another Marilyn thing, someone (and it wasn't that cunt Sinatra) saying "Marilyn hangs like a bat in the heads of men who have known her". Seems as good a legacy as any.