Introducing The Black And White Prince.

We had the good fortune to rescue a very charming and wonderful old cat a few years ago. He was black and white, walked like Clint Eastwood, dribbled when you stroked him and frequently conversed with us in squeaky little, almost-silent miaows. He had very bad arthritis when we found him yet, despite this, we enjoyed six years of human-cat joy until he became too ill to go on. Very sad. However, that's not what this is about. I just wanted to note here what a fine gent he was and that this is who I'm talking about in the hopefully funny scraps of conversations I used to make up between him, my wife and me, which I have just posted to the Prose section of the website. 

Cat Says To Me, Pt. I is here and Cat Says To Me, Pt. II is here. 

 

A Very Beautiful Poem

Not by me, then. No! This is by David Wheatley, and it has enough cats, narrow boats and riverine daughters to make me love it quite a lot.

THE LOCK-KEEPER’S DAUGHTER

Take me away from this terrible place, 
very slowly, by barge, rising through 
the frothy lock outside my window 
like an old cinema organ. 
Ours will have been the most tacit 
of courtships, the most offhand 
of consummations as I step 
aboard from the vegetable patch. 
Expressionless townsfolk will process 
from the church to the water’s edge 
and my discarded bouquet float by 
to the wheeze of an accordion waltz. 
I too have dreamed of a tattooed 
first mate and an infestation 
of cats in the saucepans and hold. 
The candour of my wedding dress 
will face down scarecrows 
and cornfields from the prow. 
Take me away from this terrible place 
two or three miles down the water, 
no more: nowhere else can I 
be happy but where the water voles 
splash and the kingfisher combusts. 
I hear the lock close behind me 
and grant the water its steely 
abolition of our having 
ever passed through. I will walk 
the length of the barge backwards 
to you and into our future.

Found here: 

http://ireland.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=17728

Another Shaggy Dog Story

This is a true story.

A friend of a friend was asked to dog-sit for her boss' beloved golden retriever. She liked her boss and, more importantly, wanted to impress him. This seemed a prime opportunity for her to showcase those qualities which bosses seem to cherish. She said yes, no problem.

He dropped the dog off at her flat on a cold Tuesday afternoon and gave her some fairly complicated instructions about what to feed it and when and how often it liked to go for walks. He obviously doted on the dog. It was a wrench to leave him for so long. He gave the dog one last tummy rub and thanked the woman once again for helping him out and then he was gone. 

Things went swimmingly for the first couple of days. The dog was very friendly. She enjoyed taking it for walks after work and throwing a stick for it in the local park. 

On the evening of the third night she gave the dog a pat and went up to bed. All was well with the world.

When she came down in the morning, all was considerably less well with the world on account of the fact that the dog was stone dead. 

Hmm. Tricky. How was this lady going to explain to her boss the demise of his beloved pooch? What if he thought it was her fault? What was she going to do?

She needed to find a way - a highly credible way - of explaining the death of the dog to her boss. After some thought, she came up with the idea of taking the dog's body to a vet. The vet would tell her what had killed the dog and she would be exonerated, thus avoiding all the awful consequences which she'd been envisaging for herself, such as unemployment, public decrial, homelessness and becoming the sex slave of a short, angry man from Warrington.

But she didn't own a car and, according to yell.com, the nearest vet was a car journey away. How was she going to get the dog there? After some more thought she put the body into a suitcase. Which was totally fine and normal behaviour on her part.

Then she wheeled the suitcase with the dead dog in it to her nearest Tube station and got on the Piccadilly line. Also normal. Taxis are expensive, and they probably charge extra for dead dogs.

When she got to Bond Street, she got off the train, because that's where the vet's surgery was. She wasn't stupid.    

However, she was finding it pretty hard going by this point. The case was extremely bulky and it turned out that the dead body of an adult golden retriever is very heavy. She'd already had a great deal of trouble getting it on and off the train and onto the escalators. 

So her heart sank when she saw the double-flight of steps leading up to the street. She paused. She lifted the case. It was so heavy that it slipped from her grip and landed on her foot. She winced and swore loudly. 

It was then that the young man approached her. 

'You look like you're having a spot of trouble there. Are you sure I can't help you, give you a hand?'

She looked at him. He had soft brown eyes and a roguish hint of stubble across a chiselled jaw. His body looked pretty good underneath a leather jacket and a navy blue jumper. He didn't smell palpably of urine. If she hadn't been carrying a dead dog at the time, this was exactly the sort of man she would have liked to come over and offer to carry something for her, and then possibly buy her a drink, and maybe accompany her to a quiet country hotel for, like, sex and stuff. 

He smiled. It was a nice smile. 

She forgot why she shouldn't let anyone but her carry the suitcase. She quite forgot that it contained the corpse of her boss' golden retriever.  

'That would be great,' she said, 'as long as you're sure it's not too much trouble.'

'No trouble at all,' he twinkled back at her as he reached down for the handle on the suitcase.

Their hands briefly touched. 

They started up the stairs together. She felt a little lightheaded. The last couple of hours had been so intense - and now this. Well, it never rains but it pours. She did wish the guy would slow down a bit, though. He was actually edging out in front of her, she was falling further and further behind, panting to keep up. 

'Whew! Slow down a bit,' she said, 'I can't keep up.'

But instead of slowing down, he turned back to look at her. She noticed that he was a lot less good-looking from this angle. His chin was weak and he looked shifty, those eyes of his darted around too much. A moment of recognition passed between them. Then he was off, running up the stairs, taking them two at a time, reaching the street and pounding flat-out across the pavement, the suitcase clutched in both arms.

The girl ran after him.

'Hey, no!' she cried. 'Please! Please stop! It's just a dog. IT'S JUST A DOG!'

But he was out of earshot by then, weaving in and out of the traffic on Oxford Street, heading up an alley, passing out of sight. 

She never did find the dog. And no one knows what she told her boss. Or what the guy said when he opened the suitcase.

One Year Here.

So, yes, we have now been in Brazil for a year. This weekend we commemorated the anniversary by welcoming a bunch of new teachers (so young, so innocent, so drunk) and wasting a day and then a very late night in a churrascaria and a bar.

What have I learned in that time? Well, I can say what I haven't learned: I haven't learned that more than two caipirinhas in an evening and I talk the most abominable shit, I haven't learned that eating my body weight in picanha makes me hate myself and I haven't learned to avoid ordering desserts which sound awful and look like a caramelised penis breaching a choux-pastry volcano.

Perhaps most annoyingly of all, I still haven't learned Portuguese well enough to prevent me from making a dick of myself in public. For example, I was recently trying to change the battery in my old back-up watch, a twenty quid Swatch which I bought from the stall at King's Cross (IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING), having recently lost my beloved, emotionally significant, thirtieth-birthday present watch doing handstands in the sea near Ubatuba. Like a grown-up.

This is what the beach looked like. 

And in the next image you can see what the watch looked like immediately before it escaped my wrist and set off for a life of adventure on the high seas. If you look closely you can see by my gormless expression and the way my body is pointing out to sea like a basset hound after a quail that I was already preparing myself psychologically for the impending loss. Good bye, watch, I am saying, thank you for the memories. 

Where is it now, I wonder? Whose wrist, if any, does it adorn? Does it comprise one-eighth of the accessories upon the arms of a fashion-conscious octopus? If so, Mr Octopus, you are no longer welcome at my birthday party. Anyway, I have written a poem about this loss, which is here. It is terribly moving. 

But I digress. I was talking about changing my watch battery, wasn't I? Well, in order to do this, I had to go back to the watch shop where I recently got a broken pin in the strap of my beautiful, now lost watch replaced. The chap at the watch repair shop remembered me from my previous visit and we discussed my horological bereavement. I then showed him my back-up watch and observed, bemused, as he gazed upon my Swatch as 'twere some precious gem. His wife joined him and they both smiled at it appreciatively. I can understand why they were behaving like that, though. You see, import duties on electronic and consumer items are 100% here in Brazil, so many foreign manufacturers simply don't bother selling stuff here. As such my old watch was a relative rarity to them. 

But not to me. Perhaps because I was still smarting over the loss of my special watch, I felt compelled to explain that really this watch wasn't all that much, especially not when compared to my old one, now buried in the bosom of the ocean deep. So I pointed at the Swatch and I said, 'Mas, este não e carro'. Which translated, I thought, as, 'but this is not expensive.'

Except the word for expensive is 'caro,' pronounced with a hard 'r' not a soft one. 'Carro,' pronounced phonetically as "ka'ho" means car.

So I was pointing at the watch and saying, well, let's be honest, shouting, 'But that's not a car.' The kindly watchmaker and his wife looked at me, polite, puzzled. 'That's not a car,' I insisted. 'Don't you understand? THAT'S NOT A CAR!'  

Jesus Christ. Was that actually the punchline? To the longest shaggy-dog story ever? Oh, lord, navigate away, quickly. Don't stay to watch! Don't see my mortification!*

* On a serious note, I have learned something this past year. I've learned that Sunday mornings are far more beautiful than the blurry swirl of lights and drunken shouting on Saturday nights; Sunday mornings are when the streets fall empty and silent and the sun reflects gold and blue off the high-rises into shady corners and you can walk out to the bakery and a café and listen to the chime of Sunday bells as you dip between the covers of your novel. Nice.

The most boring website in the world.

I am, of course, referring to this one. No, no, please don't protest. It will only make me feel worse.

I mean, look at this thing. No dynamic content, no tragic life stories, no post-operative pics of that penis enlargement operation I arranged through a nice lady on the internet. Personally, I wouldn't give it a second glance if I hadn't myself created the bloody thing. 

The worst part is, I started off with such good intentions. I was going to have a nice little site with simple, unpretentious design. Nothing tacky, nothing flashy. Something practical, sober, durable, possibly even of use from a professional perspective. What I've ended up with, however, is something which reminds me quite overpoweringly of the Watford C&A, circa 1981: grey, with hints of taupe, smelling vaguely of gravy.

It's so conservative and dreary, I'm actually a little afraid of it. It doesn't feel like it's mine, but rather the knobbly extrusion into cyberspace of some extremely boring civil service psychometric test which I have to placate with multiple choice responses and offerings of knitwear.

So, in an attempt to overcome this wariness of my own website (but is it mine? is it?), I've decided to try and be a bit more personal and 'fess up to how I think this site should work and what I would expect to appear here on a more normal basis.  

As a general rule I want this blog part of the site to be more for messy ideas ideas that don't really belong anywhere else, as was the case with that thing about advertising. But I've got the feeling that on its own, this style of entry won't really be that interesting. I mean, having some evanescent authorial goitre posting up their thoughts without any complementary insights into who that person is will surely be pretty dull. Author, author, goes up the cry, what colour are thine underpants?

However, I'm pretty opposed to life-blogging; its primary appeal is visceral and vicarious voyeurism into the vicissitudes of the venerable, the venereal and the vexed. Not little people, like me. To put it another way, if you're not famous, no one cares if your cat just puked in your slippers.

The knack, then, must surely be to strike a balance between personal revelation (e.g. I just destroyed our kitchen sink - truly, I did, by attempting to rinse a 20L water cooler in it - feeling very proud right now) and impartial commentary on, like, the universe, man.

Which is what I intend to do. As of now. Don't say I didn't warn you, fiends.