bee feast

My stepsister used to pronounce it 'demin'. Someone overheard and named their sproglet Demin, cos they thought "it were dead original". Only that's not true.

London was fairly good to me this time, except for when it concealed a pub from me for an hour and a bloody quarter, which I'm sure was calculated to make me experience a total implosion of the self. (If I'd taken one more wrong turn, all that would have been found of me in the morning would have been a virginal A-Z and a couple of blister plasters.) It paraded past me an astonishing conga-line of lecherous yet gentlemanly men. It fed me just enough to counteract the effects of all the alkyhol it tipped down my vulnerably exposed lily-white throat. And it was fucking hot. Hallelu.

I came back without one particular piece of jewellery which died in the valiant cause of drinky humour on Friday, but did find myself lugging home a variety of promotional jetsam, the bulk of which came from the Cliterati bash. This involved some inept champagne-induced poledancing on my part, meeting smashing new people, some of the most (and the least) oblique conversation imaginable, and subsequently a little light harrassment of some bemused (yet later aroused, probably) men in hard hats. And I did opt for the dubious embrace of The Garment, in the end - she did a bang-up job and, to my knowledge, kept everything appropriately covered throughout. Result.

Oh yes, and prior to all that I paid my first visit in about three years to my Little German Woman, which was actually lovely. After all the energy expended and the money spent before, all the muck dug over and spread about into a manageable layer, it seems unfair to find a whole fleet of crap-trucks still queueing. It seems like it'll go on forever, in some kind of race between available funds and teetering psyche - but you can't think like that. It's too easy to feel swamped by the convoluted stuff that persists down the decades, henceforth to be dismissed as That Old Shite (TOS). Although of course you have to take it seriously to a degree; flippancy is about as effective as booze as a long-term answer to a boringly perennial problem. Writing about it seems not the thing to do at present - I'm not in a crisis which requires an outlet, and I don't want to give it any more headspace than I have to. I feel hamstrung, but most of the time I don't feel like I have to hobble. Anxiety and apathy underpin a lot, but not everything, every waking nanosecond. So let us turn from TOS to the joys of the inconsequential. (Turn, not flinch. I am not a flincher. I was in bed when they did the lecture on Flinching: History and Practical Application. Uh huh.)

Prior to dropping in on the fragrant LGW I sat about on some grass in the sun, in that way you do when you breathe in and go "yep, really ain't that bad at all". I took photographs of a worm. And of a peaceful, inert, snoozing man.



When I went past over an hour later, he was still there.



I hope he wasn't dead.

To follow:

Publiness is next to loveliness

What the fuck was that? Something on a boat, apparently

In praise of trains

(and September)

(and that film which really was surprisingly good)

And I detest Zadie Smith and should like to slap her smug disingenuous over-privileged face with a massive Canadian salmon. (Nothing to add on that one, but it needed to be said.)