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October 31, 2005
The year when even the kitchen worktop got in the mood.
I made a pumpkin cake this year, not a cake made out of pumpkin (as I had to explain to someone today who asked for the recipe thinking it was something akin to pumpkin pie) but a chocolate cake with an iced pumpkin decoration on top. I cannot wait until I can find the lead thingy so I can upload my photos as I’m so utterly proud of my creation. The colours are not so bright as I would have liked but that’s the problem with doing it yourself, you can see how much food colouring goes in and you can begin the panic at the thought of your kids glowing back to school in the morning. So the pumpkin looks a little washed out but I think there is no mistaking what he is supposed to be. Move over Jane Asher Purple Elephant has arrived.
The stain on my worktop that resembles dried blood and the rims of my fingernails that look worryingly similar are not intentional but hush don’t tell anyone, we can pretend it’s all part of the effect and we might just get away with it.
Our real carved pumpkin is sitting on out window sill right now. This year I’ve christened him.... wait for it .... The Elephant Pumpkin! Not because he lives in our house but because I left his purchase a little late this year and on Saturday evening I was left with all the lopsided vegetables that everyone else had rejected. One of his cheeks is a little more swollen than the other and the back of his head is actually flat but we love him all the same and won’t be sending him to perform the Cambridge Freak show for Deformed Pumpkins just yet.
What do you mean you don’t give your pumpkins names? Last year I made the fatal mistake of cutting her nose a little too close to the mouth, which sent it all caving in, like a cocaine whore. So she just had to be named Daniella Westbrook.
Well if you are going to startle the evil spirits away you might as well have a little morality about it and scare the kids from taking drugs too.
Oh yes and it just happens to be NaNoWriMo eve as well. So if you are taking part, a massive GOOD LUCK to you. If you are not, you may find this blog a little boring over the next month. So see you on the other side.
Posted by purple elephant at 07:42 PM |
October 30, 2005
Dear Santa
All I want for Christmas is a Virginia Woolf finger puppet, fridge magnet doll.
Unless you are feeling generous and then I would like, Harriet Tubman, Dorothy Parker, Jane Austen, Zora Neale Hurston, too.
Infact Santa I would be happy with anything from this person's shop. I love the 14 inch dolls. I'm already imagining the hours of fun I could have playing with these toys.
I have been good and have eaten all my greens, you can ask my husband.
Lots of love
Purple Elephant
XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Posted by purple elephant at 10:50 PM |
October 29, 2005
Things that go bump in the night...
Last night Mr PE was out late and I decided to do some research for my NaNo. Which would have been a great idea had I not been investigating the paranormal. I ended up scaring myself half to death by looking at the photos at ghoststudy.com. Some of them are faked up to the eyeballs, some of them I couldn’t even see what they were talking about but there were one or two that put the fear of God in me. Scroll down and look at the face in the car window if you dare. Still relaxed? Then scroll down to check out the murdered woman in the flagstone.
Then I stumbled across the following paragraph,
Because my Daughter doesn’t do things by halves she actually has several imaginary friends. From a very very young age she has communicated with ‘the little people’ often stooping down to pick them up from flower beds. The Little People used to un-nerve my Mum because Littleone's concentration span for this little game would last far longer than anything else she would do at two years old. Often she would start something else and ‘remember’ to put the little people down and pick them up again if she needed to use both hands for something.
Her latest ‘friend’ is a little boy called Boobsie who (and I quote) ‘sometimes lives a couple of doors down and sometimes in my top drawer’ He is a bit cheeky and she is always telling him off for being naughty, his favourite pastime is being pushed in the swing.
So as you can imagine Boobsie was freaking me out last night.
Needless to say I slept with the light on. I don't think I'm cut out for this kind of writing, next year I think I might just write a book about nice fluffy teddy bears or something.
I also didn’t realise that Mr PE had to go out again tonight.
Does anyone want to come round and hold my hand?
What was that noise?
Posted by purple elephant at 08:15 PM |
October 28, 2005
Stupid Questions
Is it something in the air today?
I went into Lush to get a small birthday gift for a friend and decided on some pink shower gel (because I liked the scent) and because I’m ever so slightly anal the bath bomb I got to go with it had to be pink too. So I’m standing there at the checkout in black boots, black combats, a black top and a purple and black hoodie and the girl serving me says,
‘Having a Pink day?’
Do I look like the sort of person who EVER has a pink day?
So then I make a trip to Robert Sayle to buy some olive green sewing thread.
I go to pay and a young lad is sorting some fabrics on the counter..
He looks me straight in the eye and carries on with what he’s doing.
I clear my throat loudly.
He looks me in the eye and carries on with what he is doing.
I pick the thread reel up and place it down on the counter with a little bang.
He looks me in the eye and carries on with what he is doing.
I won’t bore you but suffice to say this went on for a good few minutes, until finally he turns to me and asks,
‘Did you want to pay for that item?’
Could have saved myself a whole pound if only I’d realised that there was a choice.
Posted by purple elephant at 07:33 PM |
October 27, 2005
Memories and Workshops
I lived in Norwich for a while, so for more reasons than one it was weird going back for the creative writing workshop the other day. Despite the major engineering works on the line, I still arrived an hour early, so I spent the time wandering about amongst some of my old haunts. One thing I realise is that I must think and remember in brighter colours than exist in real life. I’ve always imagined where I used to live as a white building but on Tuesday it seemed dirty and grey. I wonder if it was always like that or if it has deteriorated considerably in the past 10 years. I saw the self same hideous thick brown curtains in my old window and on our old balcony sat an ugly red plastic chair, no doubt my own backside had spend many an hour eating toast and marmite sitting in that very chair.
During the entire nine months I spent in that block I looked out over a construction site the other side of the road. I thought it would be interesting to discover exactly what it was they had built there. My guess at the time was that it was some sort of multi-storey car park and I wouldn’t know because dear God, they are STILL building. I hope it is something grand and magnificent as it seems to have taken them over 10 years to complete but unfortunately it still looks to me like a multi-storey car park.
I also trekked past a club that we used to frequent on a Monday night, it was all dilapidated and boarded up and appeared as if it had been so for quite some time. I know it was only a club but my memories had been of it heaving with people spilling out onto the street and it felt eerie and slightly poignant to see it like that, as if nobody had given it a second thought for years. In my ears I could almost hear an echo of Pulp’s Common People rattling through the holes in the boarding.
The workshop was part of the New Writing Types Event that has been running all week in Norwich. At first I wanted to spend the whole week there but in the end decided to back out ever so slightly and try one of the taster ’one off’ workshops and then if I found it helpful I could always book up for the whole week next year. The fiction workshop just happened to be held by Joolz Denby who I consider as one of my favourite modern day authors. At first I thought this would be really cool but as the time approached and as I read her latest novel that I felt guilty for not having got round to reading yet I became more and more nervous. For surely I cannot write and I was silly to ever convince myself that I could and there is making a tit of ones-self and then there is making a tit of ones-self in front of someone one admires and is likely to never have the chance to meet again. I had nightmares of her going to the pub with her mates afterwards and saying ‘I had this right Tit in my class today.’
In fact if it hadn’t been for the fact that my Mum had paid for the workshop as a Christmas present for me I probably would have found some lame excuse and backed out.
As you can imagine by the time I reached the door with her name on it I was nearly hyperventilating and then I opened it and saw the white table cloth and the bottles of free mineral water on the table. My God, judging by the different coloured caps you even had a choice of sparkling or still (and there was me with my sports cap Highland spring from the station) and oh my God me and white table cloths do not mix and some of the people sitting round the table looked like GOOD writers and some of them looked like writers who were going to start talking about their Muse and ohmyGodohmyGodohmyGod I wanted to go home.
But thankfully as I stood there someone (who probably wasn’t going to talk about his Muse) caught my eye and smiled and as luck would have it he had a spare chair next to him, so I leapt upon it (and him) like a crazed woman and managed to strike up a bit of a conversation. So by the time Joolz walked in and cheerily said,
‘Hello Everyone’ like a normal person and not an Orange nominated author, I too began to feel a tad more at ease.
And as it happened I was not asked to write 500 words in 5 minutes about what I was carrying in my handbag and then made to read it out to all the good writers just so they could laugh at my lack of vision. Thank God.
What we had to do was write a list of what frightened us as writers, what held us back and would you know, we all had the same fears; time, distractions, bad backs, PCs that don’t do as they are told and of course the old chestnut REJECTION.
Joolz helped us and put us at ease with some immensely practical advice, backing work up, investing in proper chairs, putting a particular time a week aside for all the crappy boring stuff such as covering letters etc and the most important thing of all? Read every day and write every day. It really is that simple.
Within half an hour I’d relaxed sufficiently enough that I was sprawled in my chair laughing and joking with the rest (or should that be the best) of them and by the time 7pm came it didn’t feel like I had spent 2 1/2 hours in that room which made me regret that I hadn’t stayed for the whole week after all.
I walked off gushing my thanks and feeling for the first time like a budding writer.
And nobody mentioned their Muse, not even once.
Posted by purple elephant at 11:32 AM |
October 26, 2005
Rosa Parks 'Mother of the Civil rights Movement' 1913-2005
For those who lived through the unsettling 1950s and 1960s and joined the civil rights struggle, the soft-spoken Rosa Parks was more, much more than the woman who refused to give up her bus seat to a White man in Montgomery, Alabama. [Hers] was an act that forever changed White America's view of Black people, and forever changed America itself. Richette L. Haywood
Rosa Parks defiant act and consequent arrest on December 1, 1955, set about an almost universal black boycott of the Montgomery's city buses which started on December 5th and lasted 381 days. This wrecked financial havoc for the bus companies and eventually lead to integration on busses on December 21 1956.
Her involvement did not end there. After receiving threats to her family she moved to Detroit where she founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development, which offers career training and motivation to 12 to 18 year olds. She was concerned that elder African-Americans had shielded the younger generation from their suffering and so they had become complacent and were taking their rights for granted. She said;
We must double and redouble our efforts to try to say to our youth, to try to give them an inspiration, an incentive and the will to study our heritage and to know what it means to be black in America today.
The list of awards received by Rosa Parks would take all day to read. Her credits have included Martin Luther King Jr Nonviolent Peace Prize, 1980; The Eleanor Roosevelt Women of Courage Award, Wonder Women Foundation, 1984; and the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal of Honor, 1999.
In 1993 she published a children’s book entitled Rosa Parks: My Story which was then revived for an even younger audience, now called I Am Rosa Parks. It contains age appropriate definitions of concepts such as racism and segregation, so that even children as young as four can begin to grasp the struggle for Civil Rights.
Much is being said, particularly this morning, that she did not set out to change history on that fateful day 50 years ago that she simply remained seated because she was tired after a long day at work as a seamstress. In Rosa Parks; My Story she puts us right;
People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired but that wasn't true I was not tired physically I was not old. I was 42. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.
Some Links
Obituary by Sheila Rowbotham in The Guardian.
BBC Obituary
Gale Group Profile.
GreatWomen.org
Africa Within
Wikipedia
Posted by purple elephant at 10:19 AM |
October 25, 2005
Growing Up
I would say that ‘growing up’ is an ongoing process that happens in stages. You are chugging along just nicely thinking you know it all thank you and then suddenly something happens, an event, something you read or something someone says to you and it marks a turning point in your life where you look back to the time before with a kind of embarrassed shuffle at your naivety.
I remember one such turning point rather well. I had jacked in A-Levels at school and was in my first couple of weeks of sixth form college. I felt all grown up because it was all so new. Those teachers that remembered me from when I was 11 and treated me accordingly were distant memories, also I could wear jeans which we weren’t allowed to do at our school. It felt like starting afresh, as an adult. More importantly I was now studying A-Level English Literature and Language as opposed to just Literature.
Our first language assignment was to write a letter to someone who was no longer with us. Now in those days aside from a couple of cats, a dog and a hamster or two, I hadn’t experienced death, all of my grandparents (except one who died when I was so young that I had very little recollection of him) were alive and more-or-less kicking. So who did I write to? Get this, I wrote to John Lennon.
John Fucking Lennon.
You see I thought it was quite cool, I was saving up for this John Lennon t-shirt I had seen in Camden because as I mentioned I was now free to wear what I liked.
I can’t remember much about what I wrote, but no doubt I cliched on about ‘a life cut short in its prime’ and page after page of drivel about what he might be doing now, how he might actually have got around to ensuring world peace, or something. No doubt it didn’t occur to me that he might be living in some posh mansion in Richmond surrounded by his millions, leaving his abode only to collect his OBE.
So we had handed these assignments in, and a group of us had sat together in the canteen (or 'refectory' as it was now known) afterwards. We had only known each other a week and so naturally we were still struggling with the small-talk stage of our relationship. It wasn’t long before we got around to who we had written to. Someone had written to their dog (to be honest the thought had crossed my mind but c’mon John Lennon was so much more... well ... cool really) there were a couple of Grandparents in there of course and finally we got round to this woman. She was the eldest of all of us, probably in her late thirties, the archetypal bubbly overweight woman (or so we thought) who never minded speaking up in class. I can still picture her now, where she was sitting, what she was eating and more importantly the matter-of-fact lassiez-faire manner with which she said,
‘Of course, I wrote to my babies.’
These days that sentence would stop me dead, I would automatically assume the worst, but I was young. The way she said it, it was as if she was talking about a bunch of guinea pigs or something.
Yep I thought she was talking about her guinea pigs.
I think everyone else must have thought the same because I still remember how she begun her story competing to the sound of sympathetic gushes from around the table, I still remember how gradually one by one we all fell silent and gaped open mouthed until by the end, it was just her voice and the clittler clatter of plates being washed up just the other side of the hatch behind us.
There had been a fire, she had lost all three of her kids. She had tried to save them but had passed out from smoke inhalation. But the time the fire brigade had got there, it was too late.
I realise now, it was her coping mechanism, that lively exterior but at the time I couldn’t understand how she had managed to shock a table of 17-18-19 year olds into silence, how none of us could think of what to say, how after spilling this tragedy onto the table she could just stand and say,
‘Anyone for coffee?’
I think what shocked me more than anything was that this tragedy had happened a few years previously, only five miles from my own doorstep. Why hadn’t I remembered this myself? Surely it would have been all over the local papers, surely I would have been able to smell the burning flesh from my own bedroom window, why hadn’t I recognised the woman’s face? Why hadn’t I remembered?
When I got home I asked my Mum if she recalled anything. She couldn’t, she said it probably was in the papers but these things happen all the time it was six years ago after all. I think that was the first time that I realised that heartbreak exists continually, that there are hundreds of non-white non middle-class Jamie Bulgers and Sarah Paynes who don’t make the headlines because some cold-blooded hack somewhere has decided that they wouldn’t make a good story.
In the end I became quite friendly with the woman, well I say friendly what I mean is we used to work together, sometimes go out for a drink, have a laugh. She used to love hanging out with people much younger than herself, I wonder now if she envied and in some way tried to emulate our innocence.
I even went to her house a couple of times, I hate to admit it but I tried to avoid the place as much as possible. It was like a shrine, the walls were covered with photos and above the mantelpiece was an enormous painting of the three of them, it filled the whole wall. I couldn’t help staring even though it would send a chilling shiver along my spine, if you looked into their eyes they seemed empty and soulless, ghostlike. I wonder how much of this had to do with the fact that she had it painted from a photo after the event .
Once she gave me a guided tour of the walls and in that same light-hearted voice that had become so familiar to me by now, she took a little more of my innocence.
‘Of course’ she said ‘I haven’t got many photos of my babies. These are all I could salvage from friends and family. Most of our own photos were destroyed by the fire.’
For the fear of sounding like the newspaper article that I did or didn’t exist, that fire took her kids and as if that wasn’t enough it took her memories too.
A week later our letters were returned. I got an A - I should have been pleased but by that point I had come to loathe the piece. I hated the heartless teacher even more for giving me that grade, especially when I found out that the grieving mother didn’t score as well as me. I never read it again and as soon as I could, I binned it. It had come to represent a part of my life of which I was ashamed, a distant time when writing about the death of a pointless pop star would bring a tear to my eye. I had forgotten all about the t-shirt.
Even today I still have these moments where I know there will be no going back to how life was before but I think that what made this particular event stand out from the others was that it made me realise that growing up is an ongoing process, that I will never be able to know or understand everything, that when I’m eighty years old there will still be something that will come along and shock me when I’m least expecting it.
Or at least I hope so. Maybe knowing everything is not all its cracked up to be.
Pehaps the best I can do is to pray that these experiences will always be second hand, because the minute you pass out and tumble down the stairs on the way to save your kids’ lives, I guess that is the moment when you start to know it all.
Posted by purple elephant at 10:00 AM |
October 23, 2005
Sorry Virginia; You and I are going to have to differ on this one.
‘For having lived in Westminster ... one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For heaven knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it around one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.’Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
We made an unexpected trip to London for a couple of days. I always feel slightly unpatriotic knocking my own capital city, in a way that I don’t when I criticise the government or the Royal Family. It is as if , like Virginia Woolf, as a British citizen, I should find some beauty in all its grime but I’ve spent 29 years searching and never finding and finally giving up. Somehow I feel like writing this post will invite the treason police to come busting through the front door in order to accompany me on my trip to the gallows.
I loathe the place. There I said it - I loathe the place.
We usually tackle central London on foot, what other choice is there? You give your money to a miserable bus driver (and who can blame them for being so) to sit in stream after stream of traffic light systems that everyone else seems to ignore. Or you descend in an escalator down into hell , where that prickly feeling rises up your back as if you are about to burn (this would happen to me long before the bombings) and still you don’t get a seat. You have to stand, holding on to your husband because you can’t reach the bar, your nose positioned nauseatingly under some half drunk businessman’s armpit and some bitch keeps tutting because every time the train stops it launches you half way across the carriage and you end up landing on her ugly pointed shoes.
Which reminds me, heaven forbid the people who actually live there. Where else in the country can you politely say ‘excuse me’ to a group of women sprawled out over the width of the pavement and they begrudgingly, only very slightly, move out of your way, refusing point black to even look you in the eye, least of all apologise as they obviously grip the clutch of their handbags as if they suspect you of mugging them, simply because you wanted to speed your exit from the godforsaken place?
What also gets me is London’s attitude, the way it looks back on the past with rose tinted specs. It thinks it is oh-so ‘Victorian’ and another word that gets thrown about a lot is ‘Dickensian.’ Maybe I missed the point a bit but from what I’ve read Victorian London sounds almost as bad as 21st century London. Anyway was it not Dickens himself who said that the streets of London were not paved with gold but rather excrement. At least today we are being metaphorical when we say that nothing has changed.
The heartbreaking thing is that London has so much potential. Sometimes I try and treat myself to a visit to the Silver Moon bookshop (now in Foyles) but even then there is always in the back of my mind that dread that anytime soon I’m going to have to step back down tripping, staggering and dodging on that badly paved street. I love some of the stalls in Camden Market (particularly the veggie burger stall) but to get there you have to step over hundreds of teenage goths, high on poppers that they stash in their Nightmare Before Christmas bags. Yep London makes me want to kill myself too, but at least I have the maturity to not blame my poor, unsuspecting parents.
Mr PE (who grew up in London, so along with Virginia Woolf, I forgive him for his half-hearted attempts to defend the place) always says that he can walk right to the centre of Hyde Park, surrounded by the ducks and forget he is right slap bang in the middle of one of Europe’s major capital cities. I find it less easy to escape that feeling that I’m standing right on top of a multi-way junction with cars rushing all around my head with no rhyme, logic nor reason but on the rare occasion, it does happen, even to me. Sometimes I can lose myself in one of the peaceful, cool airy exhibition rooms, or drinking a strong espresso in the cafe in The British Library, (although I do wonder if this is not so much to do with the books but the fact that it is near to Kings Cross; my escape route home.) It also happened yesterday, hands pressed up against the glass, breathlessly staring deep into the eyes of one of the tigers in the zoo.
Yes. There are so many places with great potential in London but somehow they all seem to be made traumatic, dirty and hollow by their surroundings. Contrary to what those such as my husband and even Virginia Woolf would have me believe, even if you took the Fertility Goddess herself and placed her in Piccadilly Circus, by morning she would have had a tunnel built right through her womb and she would be cracked and caked in that unique sludge that I call ‘Londonness’; a mixture of smog in its borderline solid-liquid state and pigeon shit.
Posted by purple elephant at 10:55 AM |
October 20, 2005
Lazy Days
I’ve spent the past couple of days taking it easy, pottering around the house, throwing myself into domesticity trying to forget about the horror that was that exam. Yesterday was taken up with getting the house back up to a habitable standard again, yes that does say a lot for how much it had been neglected in past weeks. Today I went to Tesco’s and stocked up the bare cupboards. I tend to do this when I lose my confidence over study or writing, it is almost as if I think to myself ‘well if I’m not going to make it in my chosen area, then I can at least be a good mother/ housewife.’ But then I get bored and irritated because I wasted spent the whole day cleaning this goddamn house and no-one noticed. Also there’s nothing like missing the first bus back from the supermarket and having to kill a mind-numbing three hours until the next one to get you reaching for the pen - or in this case a ‘groovy ghoul’ mug that I’m convinced is going to help me write my NaNo*
I’ve been reading too, nearly finished the Virago Book of Ghost Stories (and still have Volume 2 and the Victorian one to read) and have started Joolz Denby’s Billie Morgan.
So I’ve had a rather lazy day or so but now I’m ready to take the bull by the horns and throw myself into things again. Tomorrow I’ve got two short stories to tidy up and a novel to plan for next month, oh and next Tuesday I’m trying out one of the fiction one-off workshops at the New Writing Types which just happens to be taught by Joolz. If I like it I might stay for the whole week next year.
So I dabbled for a while in domesticity, but it didn’t really work out. The house might get cleaned again round about the time the results get released just before Christmas.
* Background on my lucky mug obsession here.
Posted by purple elephant at 06:06 PM |
October 19, 2005
My Mother Tongue and My Critical Thinking, why hast thou forsaken me?
In the comments of my last essay I was told that I had the critical thinking for fine graduate work. Well where oh where was that critical thinking yesterday afternoon? I have come to the conclusion that it was three hours ahead of me, waiting in the Chinese Take Away comparing and contrasting the benefits of chilli bean over black bean sauce. That is the amount of good it did me.
What about my command of the English Language? Surely my mother tongue would sweep in there straight away and take control, at least giving the examiner a good read, convincing him that I could at least write about nothing very well. It seems not. I spent the whole of the first essay trying and failing to find a different word for ‘sympathy’ It wasn’t until I got to question two that I wondered if I didn’t perhaps mean ‘empathy’ after all. Thus I failed to convince the examiner that I wasn’t on day release from my Daughter’s reception class.
And what of the questions? I mean surely whoever wrote the paper would have spared it five minutes thought and taken note of their own rules. Like for instance if you are not allowed to use the same book twice then why gear nearly every question towards one book? Oh and that question on Burlesque, what was it doing there when it only related to one novel on the course and you had to use two or three in the answer?
And another thing. Why am I always seated next to the woman who writes and writes and writes and is asking for a new answer booklet before I’ve even decided which question I’m answering? And last but not least why are high-heels not banned from examination rooms? Everyone who got up to use the toilet was wearing them and however much they wiggled their arms and bottom about trying to convince me they were trying to walk quietly, somehow it just made it seem even louder. For the sake of my sanity please wear trainers for the retakes.
Now all that’s left is for me to sit back and watch my good coursework mark crumble in front of my eyes.
The take away was good though and in case you were wondering we had BOTH sauces.
Posted by purple elephant at 10:01 AM |
October 17, 2005
Are you there God? It’s me, Purple Elephant.
Dear God,
I’ve been a good girl. I visited my Mother at the weekend because she wanted some help with something, I even did some babysitting this afternoon because I was needed and I guess at the end of the day being a good citizen is rather more important than one measly exam.
OK so I did go and see New Model Army last night but come on not even Jesus himself would have passed up that gig, had he not been otherwise engaged, if you see what I mean.
If all that wasn’t enough for you My Lord then I can do more good if you like. My particular party trick is turning pennies to whiskey, I can tell you now that I shall be performing that miracle on my way home from the exam tomorrow, whatever the outcome. Your son would be proud of me, for unlike some of those funny people who worship you we know that whiskey is not a sin. You gave us the materials and the knowledge with which to make the stuff and so therefore it comes straight from you, it is in fact the Holy Water itself. (The same method does not apply to alcopops however for they are the Devil’s spawn and taste like the same liquid we have the good sense to expel from our bladders.)
Now where was I? Oh yes I was wondering O’ Divine One if perhaps you could repay my good deeds by designing (I don’t say ‘fiddling’) tomorrow's exam in my favour. I don’t want to cheat Father for that would surely book me a seat on Bus 666. You know I have done the work, I’m simply asking that there will be one or two questions that I can use to demonstrate what I know well. That’s all.
If I still owe you a couple of good deeds after this then let me know and we will settle up.
For thine is the kingdom the power and the glory blah blah blah
Amen
Purple Elephant
Posted by purple elephant at 09:25 PM |
October 16, 2005
‘You’ll feel better tomorrow, come the morning light now baby…’
Sometimes I sleep normally, the rest of the time I flit between the two extremes of acute insomnia and simply not being able to keep my eyes open. Last night I managed both in one night.
I passed out on my Mum’s sofa for about twenty minutes after she had already gone to bed. So I yanked myself up, picked my book off the floor and got into bed, I think it was picking the book up that did it because then I faced up to the fact that I’m not going to get The Woman in White re-read by Tuesday, I’m not going to finish watching Middlemarch either (I brought the videos here but would you believe it, the video player is broken) and there is still a bag load of theory I just don’t remember. In short I shouldn’t have come, not this weekend.
We are also supposed to be going to see New Model Army in Cambridge tonight, which we had booked for months, long before I knew when my exam was and I wouldn’t miss them for the world but perhaps I should.
If my anxiety had stayed with the upcoming exam then I guess that would be understandable in the circumstances but no, not I. Somewhere round about 2am things started getting irrationaly surreal. Littleone scratched her head once and so I was convinced that she had head lice, not pin prick sized ones but enormous mutant critters that were crawling across the pillow ready to gnaw into my scalp and pick at my brain. A pile of clothes in the corner looked remarkably like a chicken, a chicken with bird flu, which meant that I couldn’t get out of bed and rearrange the clothes so they didn’t look like a chicken anymore because then I would be touching the thing and I’d be sure to catch the disease.
When I’m at home and I can’t sleep then I get up and pace the floor, do some reading or surf the internet but in somebody else’s house it is different. Any slight movement would be sure to wake my Mum who would want a long and detailed account of why I can’t sleep. If I told her it was just exam nerves she would be convinced it was something much worse that I wasn’t telling her about. If I mentioned the infectious clothes chicken and the mutant head lice then she’d be sure to have me sectioned and possibly straight jacketed which would really screw me exam wise (how would I hold the pen?) and so I just lay there still as possible (sharing a bed with my daughter I couldn’t even allow myself the pleasure of tossing and turning) trying to remind myself that I’d be laughing about it all in the morning which consequently put the lyrics to ‘Don’t Cry’ by Guns ‘n’ Roses in my head, which just happened to be the theme tune to my sixth form at school. The absolutely last thing I needed to see was the chicken and the head lice playing air guitar to Guns ‘n’ freakin’ Roses.
Eventually sleep and I met in a giant head on collision which resulted in the most disturbing nightmares. I was back at school again and it was about to be parents’ evening and my sociology teacher was threatening to tell my Mum about the time we were on a trip to one of those lecture conference things in London and my friends and I sneaked out of the auditorium and went CD shopping instead. (At the time I got away with it because my friends were in the Upper Sixth and she was convinced it was them who had lead me astray when really it was just as much my idea as anyone else’s)
Am I laughing about it in the morning light? Well no not yet but I thought you probably would…
Posted by purple elephant at 10:26 AM |
October 15, 2005
I Don't Be-lieve it!
I got compared to Victor Meldrew today.
My Mum was upstairs with Littleone and I was trying to rinse out some beer cans for recycling. I began shaking one violently trying to get that last stubborn drop of water from the bottom.
'Come on' I thought 'I know you're in there hiding and however much I turn this blasted can upside down and shake from side to side, you are still going to sit there waiting until I'm carrying you to the box and then you are going to choose your moment to gush down my leg.'
Except I must have thought out loud because suddenly my Mum was there in the doorway saying,
'Y'alright Victor?'
I mean Victor Meldrew? Come on Mother I'm nothing like him. I'm female for a start and I'm (just) under 30. Anyone would think I was a cantankerous old fart or something...
Posted by purple elephant at 06:42 PM |
October 14, 2005
‘Just because...’
Is anyone else married to someone who sneaks into their e-bay account late at night and buys them three books from their watching list as a surprise present?
Just me then?
So ner!
Posted by purple elephant at 01:19 PM |
October 13, 2005
Harold, John, George & Wilkie.
1) Harold Pinter gets Nobel Prize for Literature. I should have something worthwhile to say on this but my brain has gone on mushy on me. What I found more interesting was that Joyce Carol Oates and Margaret Atwood were ‘long-range possibilities’ whatever that means. For a second I was going to look at the list of past winners and count how many were women but I’ll delegate that one. Anyone?
2) As my brain has gone into hurt mode I think any more revision (of the thinking too much kind) tonight would be completely pointless. So I’m trying to work out whether to re-read some more Woman in White (I forgot the plot - or else I lost it) or watch Middlemarch on video which I have on loan from Mr PE’s university library, if I remember rightly is about as close to the book as a TV adaptation can possibly get, which would be helpful as there is no way I’m going to get all 100squillion of those pages re-read before Tuesday, or I could just screw the lot and listen to John Peel night on Radio 1.
3) Nope I wasn’t just trying to compete with George Eliot in constructing the longest run on sentence in the world ever (I swore to God I found it last time I read Middlemarch and promptly lost it again and no I’m not going to look for it now) I just haven’t got the energy to try and work out where all those capital letters and semi colons and full stops are supposed to go. Goddammit who needs them?
4) Has anyone ever failed an exam because their grammar was so bad that the examiner couldn’t be bothered to work out what the hell was going on?
5) I have absolutely nothing worthwhile to say today, can you tell?
6) Middlemarch it is then.
Posted by purple elephant at 07:40 PM |
October 12, 2005
Purple Elephant’s Spiced Sesame Biscuits.
Or; How to satisfy that sweet tooth whilst maintaining the illusion of a healthy diet.
1 1/2 Cups FLOUR*
3 tbs SUGAR
1 tsp BAKING POWDER
1tsp CINNAMON
1tsp MIXED SPICE
1/3 cup MARGARINE
2 tsp TAHINI**
WATER
1) Put all the dry ingredients in a bowl and mix thoroughly
2) In another bowl mix the margarine and tahini together
3) Rub the margarine mixture into the dry ingredients until it resembles coarse breadcrumbs
4) Mix in a little cold water a tablespoon at a time, until it forms a dough.
5) Roll out onto a lightly floured surface and cut out interesting shapes with cookie cutters.
6) Bake at Gas mark 4 (350F 177C) for about 20 minutes.
7) When nice and golden allow to cool and sprinkle with icing sugar.
8) Eat whilst feeling only a little guilty.
9) Don’t you feel much more healthy now?
*If you were being really good you would use wholemeal . Me? I’m skint so at the moment it’s bleached refined Tesco’s cheapy brand)
** Sesame seed paste, you can get it from health food shops. Here lies the healthy bit, sesame seeds are high in calcium, protein, zinc, vitamin E and essential fatty acids. You could use whole sesame seeds but I read somewhere once that you don’t absorb the vitamins as well when the seeds are whole as they are so small hat they pass right through you. Not sure how true this is.
Posted by purple elephant at 05:10 PM |
October 11, 2005
One week to go..
This time next week I will be sitting in some dark and dreary exam room half way through a three hour exam. At the moment I’m riding the emotional roller coaster; on the one hand being quietly confident that I should do okay because I have put the time and effort in and a greater fraction of the time quivering in my boots because I know that time, effort or should don’t really come into it.
I’m also looking forward to when it’s all over, I’ve got at least a hundred piles of books that I want to read (rather than have to read) a couple of half-finished short stories oh and the minor task of NaNo novel to plan, but I can’t think of those things yet. Right now I have to deal with the fear of 101 things that can go wrong in an exam room.
Oh and as usual, due to my apparent inability to say ‘No!’ I have another busy weekend. How do I manage it?
So just a quick note to say, if you are marginally irritated by students who prattle on about exams as if they are the worst thing that could ever happen to them and are easily bored by steam of consciousness ’what if...?’ blog posts, then you may want to look away for a week or so..
S’alright for you, wish I could look away.
Oh and procrastination is great;
Check out my piggy.
Please tell me you like his bow tie.
Via Pewari
Posted by purple elephant at 04:18 PM |
October 10, 2005
Wallace, Gromit and Morph up in smoke..
I'm actually looking forward to seeing The Curse of the Were-Rabbit more than the next Harry Potter film, so I was sad to hear of the terrible fire at the Bristol warehouse this morning.
However the world has something far more catastrophic to worry about right now and Nick Park didn’t fail to point this out,
“Even though it is a precious and nostalgic collection and valuable to the company, in light of other tragedies, today isn’t a big deal.”
Donate here or somewhere.
Posted by purple elephant at 10:49 PM |
October 09, 2005
Oh my God! My child is going to go all delinquent and stuff!
I can’t help feeling that all these studies on childhood behaviour are just designed to make parents, or let’s face it usually mothers, feel guilty whatever we do. First there was the work/ stay at home debate; we are either emotionally starving our children by not being able to spend 24 hours a day in their presence, or we are ruining their future by choosing to do just that. Damned if we do and damned if we don’t. That’s why I tend to steer well clear of any studies or debates that so much as mention the words ’Mother’ or ‘work’ or the abbreviation ’SAHM’ in the same sentence.
Just in case you weren’t feeling guilty enough for your own lifestyle choice then ladies and gentlemen I bring you the latest statistics guaranteed to set us all against one another once more. Shock horror, watching too much TV is bad for our kids! Yep bet you didn’t know that already. Which means that a whole morning’s worth of cheap Sunday TV has to be set aside for the debate (spot the irony everyone.)
Now you know me I’m the first to write endless blog posts about how much I loathe children’s TV, in fact there has been many an occasion where I’ve considered throwing the whole thing out of the window and only this week I have been considering banning the advert channels while my daughter is in the room, yet I do happen to believe that the right programmes used correctly and in moderation could in fact be beneficial to our children. That is not to say that I carefully select my daughter’s viewing so that she only ever watches the most educational programmes, if I’m perfectly honest most of the time I do use the box as a cheap babysitter. Thank God Mona the Vampire is on, I can squeeze in some reading, studying, writing or something less interesting like mopping the kitchen floor. So shoot me!
We all know that we should be breastfeeding our kids until they are six months and then going back to work (or staying at home depending on who you talk to) feeding them only nourishing home cooked organic dinners with no sugar, salt, preservatives, E-numbers etc etc, banning all TV and sitting on the floor all day making endless rainbow necklaces with different shaped pasta and to top it all off we are supposed to do it all with a smile on our face, under no circumstances are we ever supposed to mutter ‘For Fuck’s sake’ under our breath. The truth is more often we fall short of our own standards and we don’t need a load of statistics or some smug perfect parent beaming off our screens reminding us to feel more guilty than we already do.
Most of us can only do our best and some of the time we don’t even do that.
Posted by purple elephant at 08:51 PM |
October 07, 2005
Where does all the time go?
This was the first week where Littleone finally went to school full time. Until last Friday she was only staying until 1:15pm, this seemed just enough time to get my work done. So as you can imagine I was looking forward to the extra two hours, I could get the house sorted, do some NaNo planning and even read for pleasure.
So can someone tell me how the same amount of work all of a sudden is now taking me six hours instead of four? Which is funny because last year when she was in nursery it only took me two...
I just hope to God I’m retaining more information or something.
The next person to cheerily speak the words ‘I bet you don’t know what to do with yourself all day,’ within my hearing may get whacked about the head with The Nineteenth Century Novel: A Critical Reader.
Posted by purple elephant at 07:05 PM |
October 06, 2005
Ignorance and Hypocrisy before breakfast. So how was your morning?
I don’t remember much about GCSE Maths but I do remember that they’d drum it into us time and time again that we MUST show every stage in our calculations. That way if we slipped an extra digit in there somewhere and ended up with the wrong answer then we’d at least get one mark for barking up the right tree. I look at the opinions of other people in pretty much the same way. I’m not one of those people who can say hand on my heart that everybody is entitled to their view and we are all right, RUBBISH! you are only right if you agree with me Godammit BUT if you demonstrate that you actually care about the issue at hand enough to give it five minutes thought and show the calculations as to how you came to your opinion, then I’ll give you a mark or two for trying. Hell I might even enjoy the debate. So for instance, I can sit and listen to some of the speeches at the Conservative Party Conference with a little pleasure. Liam my Dear, you are WRONG but bless your little heart I can see how you got there, have a D grade for effort.
What I can’t stand however is knee jerk reactions, sparked by utter ignorance and gut wrenching sweeping generalisations. This morning I got caught up in a conversation I really didn’t want to be having. Someone came up to me in the playground and said,
‘This whole Harvest Festival thing is really pissing me off.’
‘Don’t tell me they’re not having one?’
‘Oh yes they’re having one alright but all the food we bring is going to be given to The Homeless...’
‘....and....?’
‘Money’s tight enough as it is without having to give to The Homeless.’
At that moment I watched as the rest of my day fell in ruins about my feet. Call me an idealist but the only way I can get out of bed in the morning is by convincing myself of the foolhardy notion that there is not a person with a roof over their head who would begrudge a 26p tin of beans to a homeless person. I don’t like that illusion to be shattered before 9am, it does not have the makings of a good day.
‘Why should I have to feed them when all they’ve got to do is get off their arses and get a job?’
These words were spoken by someone who lives off benefits herself and only the other day was complaining because ‘they’ were trying to make her get a job now her kid is in school full time. Irony AND hypocrisy before 9am? This is going well.
Why do people have no sense of when to keep their mouths shut? There I am, standing there (in a Levellers t-shirt, hello?) going purple from all those deep breaths I’m taking and with blood gushing down my chin from biting my tongue and still it does not occur to the woman, that perhaps it might be a good idea to turn and run - FAST.
‘If they didn’t spend so much money on alcohol and drugs then they would be able to afford somewhere to live.’
And then very calmly, I asked her how she reached his conclusion,
‘I knew an alcoholic once. He beat his girlfriend up and she threw him out, so he ended up living in a shelter. They are all like that...’
This triangle must be an isosceles triangle because I once saw an triangle that was an isosceles triangle therefore all triangles are isosceles. WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! FAIL! FAIL! FAIL! Get thee to the dunce class.
After I had picked my eyeballs up off the floor, I made the mistake of opening my mouth thus allowing my opinions to be known. Ok so perhaps I euphemise, what I should say is that I spat and snarled for God knows how long about ’narrow mindedness’ and ‘Catch 22 situations’ and a better world where poverty and ignorance would be eradicated.
Poor girl suddenly remembered something she needed from Tesco’s. You don’t suppose it was something I said do you?
I also found out that the woman who lives below us (single Mum - kid few years older than Littleone) had petrol posted through her letterbox on Saturday night.
So as you can see I’m struggling with my idealism today.
I might just go back to bed and try again.
Posted by purple elephant at 12:37 PM |
October 05, 2005
Four candles - ‘andles for forks...
Yesterday when I heard of the sad death of Ronnie Barker, I decided that I was going to write a blog post about him and call it ‘And it’s goodnight from him.’ I was so proud of this title, I found it funny with a poignant resonance, just what I wanted. So because I was busy and didn’t get a chance to post straight away, those nasty people at the BBC got in before me, using it as a title to their tribute programme late last night. OK so I suppose it was obvious, I haven’t had a chance to look at the papers yet but no doubt most of them have had the same idea too. So I’ve thought again and have simply come up with the punch line of everyone’s favourite Two Ronnies sketch.
Yes I know it’s not particularly right on, or even PC to rave about the Two Ronnies but what I adored particularly about Barker (or Gerald Wiley as he liked to call himself as a writer) was not necessarily the slapstick or the bawdy innuendo for innuendo’s sake but his playful use and misuse of language (of which innuendo is only a small part), not to mention the essentially class based, almost Becket-like philosophical insight. Some of my favourite sketches were the ones where one of them stumbles over their words and the other one fills in for them, always getting it wrong. I know I should enter a quote here but I’m not one of those people who can memorise scenes off the top of my head... come on, you know what I mean.
Ronnie Barker RIP.
Posted by purple elephant at 02:48 PM |
October 04, 2005
Setting a good example....
We had a busy weekend and Sunday evening as I was getting everything together for school the next day (allow me some credit for this organisation skill) I suddenly remembered we had forgotten to do her reading homework. I took one look at the child whose eyes were drooping as she unenthusiastically shovelled the remains of her dinner into her mouth and so, to the sound of her running bath I took out the homework book and found myself scribbling ‘Littleone enjoyed reading to me this weekend’ and then because I thought one sentence didn’t sound convincing enough I added another one; ‘She is very good at recognising the given sounds.’
Yep, as if lying wasn’t irresponsible enough I had to make my daughter out so be some sort of child genius.
I keep thinking that karma is going to slap my wrists by making sure she can never read properly so that I will have to read Zigby Camps Out to her every night until she is 21. Worse still what if it went the other way and she really did become a child prodigy and I had to endure the humiliation of having a four year old correct my increasingly poor grammar.
We did double last night just in case.
Posted by purple elephant at 02:56 PM |
October 03, 2005
Spammers and shameless self promoters beware!
Has anyone else noticed the new kind of spam comment that seems to be springing up over the blogosphere? First we had the obvious left by those with such names as ‘Online Poker’ or ‘Payday Loans’ these get deleted straight away. Now it seems they are becoming a little more crafty, over the weekend I received several like those in reply to this post which began something like this;
‘Awesome blog here! I really enjoyed the topic you chose to write about.’
Nice and vague there, that should just about cover every post written on every blog in the past year and beyond.
It of course goes on to say,
‘ I have a make a money tree site. It pretty much covers make a money tree related stuff. Come and check it out if you get time :-)’(links deleted)
Ah yes, money trees! Aren’t they those nauseating schemes where you plague the desperate with tales of their last tenner in the world turning into thousands? Been there done that and lost cash in the process.
Even more insulting is the ‘Christian weight loss program’ comment to the same post. Anyone who has taken the time to read more than one and a half posts on Purple Elephant’s Corner will know exactly how I feel about anyone making money out of the insecurities of others. I strongly believe that the only healthy and effective way to lose weight is to EAT LESS and EXERCISE MORE but alas there is no money to be made from that knowledge I’m afraid. More to the point what is it exactly that makes this program ‘Christian’? Which flavour SlimFast did Jesus prefer then? Tell me, I’m dying to know.
Ditto to ‘male enhancement’ we are happy just the way we are thank you very much.
And finally I’m not so sure I fancy eating a ‘green jimmy world’ whatever that may be, even if it does help me to lose weight.
These comments will be left for your amusement for a couple of days and then they will be deleted. From now on all comments adhering to this formula will not be approved and/or deleted. Obviously it goes without saying that genuine commenters should not have any problems and I hope I haven’t scared anyone off with this post. If you have something to contribute and if you provide a link that is valid or interesting then of course it is going to stay. To avoid confusion if you are a new commenter then I will end up returning your visit and checking out your blog at some point anyway so there is no need to ask me to do so. If you still feel I have deleted or not approved your comment unfairly then feel free to email me and let me know, it will probably be a case of me having ticked the wrong boxes or something. (It has been known)
I apologise for my sudden officious arseyness, normal ranting will resume tomorrow!
Posted by purple elephant at 04:36 PM |
October 02, 2005
I’m so excited today...
Is it because I will be signing up for NaNoWriMo today, just as soon as I can get the page to load?
Or is it because I saw Su Pollard, Josie D’Arby and Tamara Beckwith perform The Vagina Monologues last night?
Nope! None of those things.
It is because today is Sunday and the considerate bosses at the BBC had the good taste to put Andrew Marr and Trevor Eve (plus beard) on my TV on the SAME DAY!
I’m still waiting for them to think of casting them both in the same programme, that’ll be the day that heaven in all its purple elephantine glory, arrives on earth.
Posted by purple elephant at 08:37 AM |